Former U. S. POWs detail torture by Cubans in Vietnam
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Former U. S. POWs detail torture by Cubans in Vietnam
Torturers' aim was `total surrender'
Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'
By JUAN O. TAMAYO, Herald Staff Writer
Published Sunday, August 22, 1999, in the Miami Herald
FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. -- Retired Air Force Col. Ed Hubbard says he
holds no hate for "Fidel, the Cuban government agent who viciously
tortured him and 17 other US prisoners of war in North Vietnam three
decades ago.
Almost daily for one year, the man the POWs nicknamed Fidel whipped
them with strips cut from rubber tires until their buttocks "hung in
shreds, and trussed them in ropes and wires to tear at limbs and cut
into flesh.
Fidel was one of three Cubans sent to North Vietnam by Havana to deal
with American POWs, in what became known as the Cuba Program.
He whipped and kicked one POW so fiercely in 1968 that the American
went into a catatonic state and later died, in what a new book on US
POWs in Vietnam calls "one of the most heinous and tragic atrocity
cases.
Hubbard himself was beaten so brutally by "Fidel" during one 1967
interrogation session that fellow POW Jack Bomar recalled finding him
afterward unconscious on a cell floor, "a bleeding, broken, bruised
mass.
Concealed for decades by official U.S. secrecy and the shadows of a war
that many simply wanted to forget, the full story of Fidel and the so-
called Cuba Program is finally becoming public.
Honor Bound, a book published in April with Department of Defense
assistance, devotes 13 pages to the "unusually intensive and prolonged
operation that monopolized the [prison's] torture machinery for much of
the year."
A two-inch-thick stack of documents declassified by the Defense
Department's Prisoner of War, Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) for a
string of congressional hearings in 1996 provide extensive and gruesome
details on the Cuba Program.
And a DPMO official has now reported that two North Vietnamese army
colonels confirmed to him in 1992 that "Fidel" was indeed Cuban and had
tortured American POWs -- but without Hanoi's official approval.
DIFFICULT TO FORGET - Some former POWs consider suing Cuba
"I've moved on with my life, said Hubbard, a motivational speaker
living in Fort Walton Beach who uses his POW experiences to celebrate
the human spirit. Then he smiles and adds: "But if I see `Fidel' again,
maybe I'd turn him over to Bomar.
He knows that Bomar has not forgotten the broken nose, broken cheek and
busted eardrum he suffered in one particularly brutal beating by
"Fidel" after he insulted Cuban-Argentine guerrilla Ernesto "Che
Guevara.
"I would kill him, said Bomar, another former Air Force colonel who,
like his fellow POWs, was handpicked by "Fidel and two Cuban "good guy
interrogators, "Chico and "Garcia, for what they dubbed the Cuba
Program.
Some former POWs angry with the DPMO's handling of the Cuba case say
they may even file suit against Havana, following the example set in
Miami by relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by
Cuban MiGs in 1996.
"I don't mind admitting it -- I want to harass the Vietnamese, said
Mike Benge, a former POW who was not part of the Cuba Program but has
long accused the DPMO of failing to properly investigate allegations
that Chinese and Soviet officers interrogated US POWs.
DPMO officials in Washington declined to comment to The Herald on
"Fidel," the Cuba Program or the many controversies surrounding the
agency's handling of the case.
Sketchy versions of the story of "Fidel" appeared in a handful of US
publications from 1973, soon after Hanoi began freeing American POWs,
until mid-1977, but the tale drew little attention. Perhaps that was
because most POWs obeyed Pentagon orders to keep quiet, to protect POWs
who might remain in Vietnam, and perhaps because Fidel's identification
as a Cuban was then only an unconfirmed allegation by the POWs.
But now the newly released DPMO documents, the book Honor Bound by
Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, and Herald interviews with
Hubbard, Bomar and three other Fidel victims provide the fullest
account yet of a significant chapter in the history of Vietnam-era
POWs.
"This marked the first and only time that non-Vietnamese were overtly
involved in the exploitation of American prisoners, said a 1975 US Air
Force analysis of the Cuba Program declassified in 1996.
When Fidel and Chico showed up around August 1967 at the POW camp known
as "The Zoo," a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of
Hanoi, it was clear to the 50 prisoners there that they were no
ordinary visitors.
While the camp's North Vietnamese commandant rode a bicycle to work,
Fidel arrived in a car chauffeured by a Hanoi army officer and always
sat to the commandant's right, a position of honor, Bomar said.
Debriefed after they returned home, POWs held at The Zoo described
Fidel as about six feet one inch tall, in his early 30s, muscular,
ramrod-straight, swarthy and handsome enough to be compared to movie
star Fernando Lamas.
They described Chico as more light-skinned, almost blond and in his
40s. He liked to play Spanish-sounding songs on the camp's organ, and
often wore a beret with a visor, the type then popular in Cuba.
Both spoke good if accented English, but while Fidel had full command
of American slang and even obscenities, Chico struggled with words like
Piper Cub, pronouncing it "peeper koob," according to excerpts from the
debriefings.
Fidel interviewed POWs and soon selected Hubbard, Bomar and eight other
Air Force and Navy pilots or navigators shot down over North Vietnam,
segregating them in a block of four cells that the POWs nicknamed
"Stable."
That, the POWs said, is when the torture began, after a few cursory
questions -- such as whether they liked Mexican food -- apparently
designed less to elicit intelligence information than to provide an
excuse for beatings.
BEATEN SENSELESS: Navy pilot Earl Cobeil died a captive.
While Chico always played the "good guy, Fidel was a savage torturer
one day and a friend the next, a man who would "hammer one POW, then
play Frank Sinatra tapes and offer chewing gum to the next.
"Under different circumstances, Fidel might have been an interesting
guy to talk to, former Zoo POW Allan Carpenter told The Herald. "But I
can't have anything but loathing for him.
Level of violence worsens
As days passed, Fidel notched up the torture. "He loved direct hits to
the face with the tire strips that the POWs came to call fan belts, one
POW told his debriefer.
Fidel placed POWs awaiting interrogation in cells next to his torture
room, to make sure they heard their predecessor's screams. He threw
POWs he had just finished torturing with new roommates, so they saw the
results.
"Fidel could get you squirming without even touching you, former Zoo
POW Robert Daughtry told The Herald. A debriefer quoted one POW as
saying, "Anticipation of beatings became more of a threat than actual
beatings. Nervous to the point of loosening of bowels when heard the
key in the lock.
One by one, the POWs gave way before Fidel.
By Christmas 1967, all but one had been tortured into "surrendering" --
which meant any sign of submission that Fidel arbitrarily set, from
bowing to a Vietnamese guard to accepting an unwanted cigarette or
making written or tape-recorded statements that could be used by the
North Vietnamese propaganda machine.
Some of the 10 were still beaten occasionally -- "just a reminder, to
keep us in line, Bomar said -- but they received better meals, more
mail and more time in the sunlight, outside their dark and bug-infested
cells.
A confident Fidel began to select a second group of 10 POWs in January
1968. One, aware of Fidel's reputation, "surrendered" swiftly. Two
others won the POWs' admiration by engaging Fidel in conversations that
averted torture.
But then Fidel ran into Jim Kasler, sent to The Zoo after withstanding
tortures at another prison, and Earl Cobeil, a Navy F-105 pilot who
acted crazy and may indeed have suffered a head injury when he was shot
down.
Fidel's monthlong beatings of Kasler were "among the worst sieges of
torture any American withstood in Hanoi, the book Honor Bound said.
Fidel flogged him "until his buttocks, lower back and legs hung in
shreds, and at the end he was in a semi-coma. He eventually recovered.
Worse still was the onslaught against Cobeil, accused by Fidel of
faking his craziness to avoid torture. Bomar recalls Fidel angrily
vowing to other POWs, "I'm going to break this guy in a million pieces.
Bomar recalled that during one all-day torture session in May 1968,
"Fidel took a length of black rubber hose ... and lashed it as hard as
he could into the man's face. The prisoner did not react. He did not
cry out or even blink.
After a month of almost daily beatings, Bomar told his debriefer,
Cobeil "was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, a dirty, yellowish
black-and-purple from head to toe.
Another POW's debriefing said Cobeil "was beaten to the point where he
was incapable of surrender. Was completely catatonic. He was later
transferred out of The Zoo and is listed as having died in captivity.
By July 1968, Fidel appeared to have grown frustrated, flying into
rages and beating POWs without apparent purpose. He was seen drunk
around the camp, and complained of worsening liver problems.
Fidel, Chico and Garcia, also nicknamed "Pancho," a fat, always
sloppily dressed man in his mid-30s who had arrived at the camp around
June, suddenly vanished in mid-August, never to be seen again by the
POWs.
By the end of the Cuba Program, Fidel had tortured 18 of the 20 POWs
selected for the Cuba Program. Two apparently were never beaten. All
but Cobeil had "submitted."
ENGLISH INSTRUCTORS? A Vietnamese version of Cubans' presence cited
Fidel left behind a crucial question: What had been the goal of the
Cuba Program?
DPMO analyst Robert Destatte, in an e-mail message written July 2,
1996, reported that he had received one answer from two Vietnamese
colonels he interviewed in 1992 as part of his research.
"According to the Vietnamese, ... the Cubans sent a team of three
English-language instructors to provide instruction in basic English to
[North Vietnamese army] personnel working with American prisoners,
Destatte wrote.
"At the working level, the three Cubans persuaded their Vietnamese
colleagues to allow them to demonstrate the effectiveness of Cuban
interrogation techniques, he added. "Information about the mistreatment
eventually filtered up to the Vietnamese decision makers and they
terminated the ... program.
"The Vietnamese explanation is plausible and fully consistent with what
we know about the conduct of the Cubans, concluded the note, leaked to
the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel as it held several
hearings on POW and missing-in-action issues in mid-1996.
Destatte presented the same argument to the committee in a closed-door
session. But the DPMO's own Cuba Program expert, former POW Chip Beck,
later told the committee in open session that it was "professionally
incompetent.
While Fidel and Chico did indeed run English classes for Vietnamese
interrogators for a few months, Beck and Fidel's POW victims insist
that the Cuba Program was clearly something more than a language class.
Goal of `total surrender'
Foremost among Fidel's goals, they say, was to break the POWs so fully
that they would always do his bidding with little need for further
torture, instead of the usual rounds of torture-surrender, torture-
surrender.
"Fidel's aim was to convince us that absolute and total surrender was
the only possible outcome. He told you that flat out in your first
meeting, said Hubbard, a 29-year-old B-66 navigator when he was
captured.
One POW debriefer wrote: "Once the prisoner surrendered, he remained
submissive, as the [torture] experience was so memorable and painful
that he did not care to repeat it.
The book Honor Bound notes that unlike Vietnamese interrogators, the
Cubans "relied on more controlled and orchestrated mingling of physical
torture and psychological pressures, suggesting that theirs was a more
conscious experimental program with an emphasis as much on assessing
the efficacy of tactics as on achieving results.
Some victims of the Cuba Program suspect it was also designed to select
candidates for "early release -- prisoners who could be counted on to
make statements favorable to North Vietnam once freed.
Still others believe Fidel was searching for POWs who would agree to
participate in a conference in Havana, which took place six weeks after
he disappeared from The Zoo, on the US "genocidal war in Vietnam.
"He wanted a few tamed POWs he could bring to this propaganda
extravaganza, former POW Benge said. Some of the "confessions signed by
POWs at The Zoo were in fact made public at the Havana conference, he
added.
WHO WERE TORTURERS? They didn't acknowledge any role as Castro agents
The other major question left unanswered when Fidel, Chico and Garcia
walked out of The Zoo in 1968 was their real identity.
FLASHBACKS: Jack Bomar can't shake the awful memories.
Long before Destatte's e-mail message confirmed they were Cubans, the
POWs who suffered at their hands had concluded that they were agents of
Fidel Castro's government, although the trio never admitted that
directly.
Bomar, who came up with the nickname Fidel, recalled that a Vietnamese
guard once referred to him as "Cuba, and that Chico had once slipped
and told a POW that "Fidel" used to pilot a small plane over Havana.
"Fidel" spoke knowledgeably about Cuba's sugar crops and Che Guevara,
and a POW once found a lapel pin in the shape of Cuba on the floor of a
prison bathroom.
More intriguing are hints that Fidel may have lived in the United
States for a significant period.
His command of American slang and swear words was almost native-born,
and his knowledge of US cars up to 1956 models, especially Fords, was
astounding, said Bomar, who raced stock cars before he was sent to
Vietnam.
Fidel seemed to have personal knowledge of many cities in the
southeastern United States, from Miami to the Carolinas, Hubbard said,
and knew enough about US paratrooper terminology and tactics to make
many POWs suspect he had attended a US Army course at Fort Benning, Ga.
No solid identification
Based on such slim evidence, US intelligence agencies launched an
intensive campaign in 1973 to try to identify Fidel and his cohorts. An
Air Force report dated June 14, 1973, lists some of the efforts:
The National Security Agency produced the names of all Cubans known to
have traveled to North Vietnam in the 1960s. POWs were shown "the
entire CIA photographic holdings of Cuban personalities. The Defense
Intelligence Agency checked the list of pre-Castro Cuban military
officers who received US military training.
But the searches proved fruitless, even after some of the POWs were
sent to police and military artists, who sketched eight portraits of
Fidel alone, based on the POWs' descriptions.
Hubbard said he and two other POW investigators spent a week in Miami
in early 1974, trolling Little Havana restaurants and bars for any
exiles who might have heard anything about Cubans in Vietnam.
An FBI agent visited Hubbard in 1979 to show him a half-dozen
surveillance photographs of a Cuban Education Ministry official who had
just toured Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
returned to Havana.
"If you replaced some hair and took 20 to 25 pounds off, it very easily
could have been this guy, Hubbard told The Herald.
Hubbard could not recall the man's name, but documents declassified by
the DPMO identified the visitor as Fernando Vecino Alegret, today
Cuba's minister of higher education. A military specialist in
antiaircraft defenses in the 1960s, he is known to have visited North
Vietnam around 1967.
DPMO documents declassified for the 1996 congressional hearings noted
that there had been several other "possible and "unconfirmed
identifications of Fidel, although none amounted to more than passing
mentions.
Speculation on names
An Air Force intelligence report in 1973 mentioned "Cacillio Moss or
"Moller. A 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency report mentioned "Luis
Perez Jaen. A congressional report in 1992 referred to "Eduardo Morejon
Estevez or "Morjon Esievez.
Benge believes it might be Raul Valdez Vivo, Cuba's ambassador to North
Vietnam in the 1960s and author of a 1990 book about Cuba's involvement
in the Vietnam War, The Great Secret: Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The book makes no mention of torturing American POWs.
"I'm not sure it's him, but if he's not, he must know who it was, said
Benge, a civilian US Agency for International Development employee
captured in South Vietnam who spent five years as a POW, including 27
months in solitary confinement.
"Some people have forgotten these atrocities. Some want to forget, said
Benge, now an AID employee in Washington still battling the CIA, DPMO
and DIA to declassify more documents on the Cuba Program. "I don't
forget.
Bomar would also like to find Fidel, if not for revenge, at least to
end his flashbacks to Hanoi, circa 1967.
"I wake up at night and I am in a situation back there," he said.
"Sometimes I am trying to bail out of my airplane, or sometimes it
might be Fidel there, waiting to hammer me.
DPMO investigator Chip Beck put it another way in an e-mail to Destatte
just days before he left the DPMO in 1996 and went public with
complaints that the agency was concealing reports of Cuban, Chinese and
Soviet involvement in POW tortures.
"The Cubans have never been adequately held to task, Beck wrote. "As
long as we remain, I hate to say it, but, smug in our opinion that we
know all that happened, we will continue to fool ourselves at the same
time as the intelligence apparatus of these countries continue to fool
us.
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