Cuban interrogators of US POWs?
From: Matt Steinglass <mattsteinglass@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 12:38 AM
Hi,
Sorry to flood the list with questions lately, but I’m wondering whether anyone knows of any other sources, Vietnamese or American, who can confirm or deny John McCain’s claim in recent days that Cuban interrogators, including one nicknamed “Fidel”, interrogated and tortured US POWs in Vietnam, and provided instruction on interrogation techniques to Vietnamese interrogators.
Fidel Castro, obviously, challenges this claim.
Apparently McCain made the same claim in his 1999 memoirs, but it doesn’t appear in the report he initially wrote in 1973 about his captivity; the only Cuban he mentions there was a diplomatic visitor in 1971 or 1972, with whom he says he got into a verbal argument. Zalin Grant’s “Survivors” never mentions any Cubans. Unfortunately I don’t have many other sources on US POWs handy here.
Best,
Matt Steinglass
18 Ngach 1/36 Au Co
Hanoi, Vietnam
+84 4 719-4987 home/fax
+84 4 829-3695 office
+84 904 383 230 mobile
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From: Maxner, Steve <steve.maxner@ttu.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 6:02 AM
Matt:
If you conduct a search of the Virtual Vietnam Archive at TTU and enter three separate keywords – Cuban, interrogation, and POW – it will return 170 documents to include US Congressional hearings documents, interview reports from DPMO, and more.
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/redirects/vva.htm
Steve
Stephen Maxner, Ph.D.
Director
The Vietnam Center
The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University
Special Collections Library Room 108
15th and Detroit
Lubbock, TX 79409-1041
Phone: 806-742-9010
Fax: 806-742-0496
Email: steve.maxner@ttu.edu
Website: www.vietnam.ttu.edu
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From: Minh Tran <mtran@csulb.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 8:02 AM
The story of the torturer nicknamed Fidel is not only from McCain. Retired Air Force Col. Ed Hubbard also had an encounter with this Fidel. According to his story, Fidel, a Cuban government agent tortured him and some 17 other US POWs in Hanoi. Hubbard wrote that he was so brutally beaten by Fidel during a 1967 interrogation that fellow POW Jack Bomar found him unconscious on a cell floor.
Coincidently, I find another story on Fidel and Ed Hubbard at http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/5/30/160219.shtml, which is an interesting read. However, it is not an academic search.
Minh…
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From: Matt Steinglass <mattsteinglass@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 8:03 AM
Thanks Steve, just wanted to alert the list I now have reasonably voluminous documentation on the “Cuban Program”. Unfortunately no Vietnamese officials so far will confirm its existence, though it seems hard to believe that those who were high in the POW administration system at the time could have been unaware of it.
Matt
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From: Sidel, Mark <mark-sidel@uiowa.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 11:35 AM
Attachments: winmail.dat
Careful on newsmax.... Not the best source....
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From: Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 12:58 PM
Dear Matt,
I fully agree with you in that the DRV officials in charge of POW administration must have been aware of Cuban involvement in the interrogation of U.S. POWs. In fact, it was precisely the exceptionally close nature of the post-1965 Cuban-North Vietnamese relationship that helps to explain how the Cubans got involved in such practices. In the second half of the 1960s, the DRV leaders regarded Cuba and North Korea as their most reliable external supporters. While they were quite suspicious of the intentions of Moscow and Beijing, they seem to have trusted Havana and, until 1970, P'yongyang. During the war, Cuban diplomats enjoyed privileges which were denied to other Communist diplomats; among others, they were given more access to "sensitive" information than the others. In 1966-68, there was an extensive, though informal, triangular cooperation between North Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Following the post-1969 Sino-DPRK rapprochement and the resulting Cuban-DPRK and DPRK-Vietnamese disagreements, this triangle became gradually defunct, but Cuban-Vietnamese cooperation continued, affecting, among others, Cuba's relationship with Pol Pot's Kampuchea.
The Cubans had some good reasons to gather information from the American POWs. For them, a military confrontation with the neighboring U.S. appeared quite likely, particularly after the American invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. But at the same time they had absolutely no practical experience in fighting against U.S. regular troops, let alone against massive American air raids. In general, the Cuban revolution was waged by small units of guerrillas and regular troops, and Batista's air force was very insignificant if compared with the air power the U.S. deployed in Korea and Indochina. This is why Fidel Castro was so eager to ask the Vietnamese to give him some of the American military hardware that the NVA captured in 1975. The Cubans wanted to learn as much about the ways and capabilities of their main enemy as possible, and they had no scruples with regard to the methods to be used to obtain the information. BTW, the interrogation techniques which the Cubans (allegedly) used against U.S. POWs appear to me more or less in accordance with the methods the Cuban security services used at home: relatively little sophistication and an overemphasis on brutal beatings.
Best regards,
Dr. Balazs Szalontai
Mongolia International University
Matt Steinglass <mattsteinglass@gmail.com> wrote:
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From: Stephen Denney <sdenney@ocf.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Congressional hearings were held in 1999 on this issue. The full text can be found at:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=106_house_hearings&docid=f:65278.wais
There is no mention of McCain but the various witnesses say around 19 POWs were tortured under this program. There is also the book, P.O.W.: a definitive history of the American prisoner-of-war experience in Vietnam, 1964-1973, by John Hubbell, which discusses this program.
- Steve Denney
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