Officials searching for men who brutalized Americans in Vietnam
By H.P. Albarelli Jr. Posted: February 16, 2003 in the
WorldNetDaily.com.
A special criminal investigations unit in the U.S. Department of Justice is
pursuing reports that two notorious Cuban nationals suspected of participating
in a brutal torture program conducted against American POWs in Vietnam are
hiding somewhere in southern Florida, WorldNetDaily has learned.
A public affairs spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on
the investigation, citing policies on open cases, but former State Department
official Richard Krieger, who now directs Florida-based International
Educational Missions, which haunts foreign war criminals and human-rights
violators in the U.S., said that "Justice is aggressively pursuing the
Cuban case."
Other sources knowledgeable about the manhunt say that search efforts in the
past few months also have included areas in Georgia and South Carolina and that
federal officials are especially interested in locating a Cuban nicknamed "Cappy,"
who once took extensive military training in the U.S., including parachute
schooling in Georgia.
Commonly referred to as the "Cuban Program" by the Pentagon's
Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, which is also said to be involved in the
manhunt, the Vietnam torture program was carried out from late summer 1967 to
the last quarter of 1968 at the Cu Loc prison complex located 2 miles southwest
of Hoa Lo. A village on the outskirts of Hanoi, Hoa Lo, was the site of the
infamous POW prison known as the Hanoi Hilton. Cu Loc, commonly called the "Zoo"
by American POWs, was opened by the North Vietnamese in August 1965. Earlier,
the converted complex had served as a French film studio and arts colony.
Declassified Pentagon reports reveal that in July or August of 1967 a group
of about five Cubans appeared at the Cu Loc where they soon began brutalizing
American POWs held there. Officials in the Pentagon's Office of Missing
Personnel report that the Cubans were responsible for the murder-by-torture of
at least one American serviceman. Over a period of weeks, captured Navy pilot
Capt. Earl Cobeil was mercilessly beaten and tortured to death. Former American
POWs who were held at the Cu Loc complex report that the Cubans also may have
been responsible for the deaths of other POWs who remain unaccounted for.
Air Force Maj. James Kasler, who was tortured for days in June 1968 by a
Cuban known only as "Fidel," stated in 1971 that "at least 15 men
were either killed during torture or were not accounted for." Kasler told
Pentagon investigators that he first encountered Fidel on July 3, 1968, when the
Cuban charged into his cell and began brutally kicking him. Investigators say
that Kasler was "targeted by the Cuban because of his stoic ability to bear
up under the worst of conditions." Kasler was routinely beaten with a thick
rubber whip for days on end. Other POWs at the Zoo reported that Kasler was "flogged
until his legs, lower-back, and buttocks were shredded." It was about this
same time that the Cubans began to systematically torture Cobeil. Former POWs
report that the Cuban known as Fidel especially disliked Cobeil because he
believed the American was "faking insanity." The same POWs say that
Cobeil arrived at the Zoo "in a diminished mental state" from
treatment at another camp and that "he was faking nothing." Zoo POWs
reported that once after brutally beating Cobeil, Fidel shouted at them, "I'm
gonna break this guy in a million pieces! He's gonna do everything we say! He's
gonna surrender."
Tracking down torturers
The hunted Cubans, never identified by their actual names while in Vietnam,
were dubbed "Fidel," "Chico" and "Garcia" by
American POWS. Defense Intelligence Agency reports reveal that the lead Cuban,
Fidel, was a "professional interrogator" who also was highly skilled
in "methods of torture." Other intelligence reports reveal that the
Cubans may have been joined in their months-long program of horrors by
interrogators from Czechoslovakia as well as PLO members from the Middle East.
After the end of the war in Vietnam, CIA, FBI and Pentagon investigators
launched what has been termed "an exhaustive manhunt for the presumed
Cubans." Amazingly, in the process CIA investigators cataloged over 2,000
Cubans who were in North Vietnam during the late 1960s, but officials "were
unable to positively identify the Cuban Program" torturers at the time.
In April 1974, however, the CIA told the Pentagon that it had received
information that the Zoo camp torturer nicknamed "Chico" might be a
Cuban named Juan Veiga, although the agency was uncertain about Veiga's first
name. The CIA said that Veiga was an employee of the Cuban Department of State
Security who had been educated at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1958-59.
Other intelligence reports from the DIA reveal that the Cuban nicknamed Fidel
may be a Cuban military officer named Maj. Cacillio Moss. DIA sources say that
Moss was in Vietnam at the time of the Cuban Program. However, CIA officials
have tentatively identified Fidel as Luis Perez Jaen, a Cuban officer in the
Ministry of Interior. CIA sources also have revealed that Jaen spent time in the
U.S. in 1956-57 in Miami, Tampa and possibly Ohio, where he bought and shipped
arms to Cuba.
In 1999, former POW Michael Benge identified yet another high-ranking Cuban
as possibly being Fidel. Benge was captured by the North Vietnamese during the
Tet Offensive on Jan. 28, 1968. He was held as a POW for over five years,
spending 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a black box and one year
in a cage in Cambodia. Benge was not confined at the Zoo compound, but he was
interrogated in early 1970 "by a person who appeared to be a Latino"
and who spoke Spanish. Benge later identified the man as Maj. Fernando Vecino
Alegret. Today, Alegret is Cuba's minister of higher education. Fidel Castro has
publicly denied that Alegret was ever in Vietnam. However, Pentagon
investigators scoff at that and say that they have proof that Alegret was there.
According to a March 5, 1981, Washington Post article, Alegret was "one of
the most wanted people in Latin America by U.S. intelligence services."
Alegret, besides operating in Vietnam and Latin America, is reported to have
worked covertly in Africa.
The identification process of the Cuban torturers has not gone on without
conflicting reports and controversy. According to Robert Destatte, Chief Analyst
for the Dept. of Defense POW-Missing Personnel Office, Alegret "first came
to our attention shortly after he visited the United States in November 1978."
Destatte told other federal officials that he was doubtful that Alegret was "Fidel"
and that other evidence showed that Fidel may have been a mysterious Cuban named
Pedro Fumero. Military investigators declined to say anything about Fumero, but
one officer who declined to be identified said that former POWs "who had
been shown photos of Fumero cold not identify him as one of the Cuban Program
participants."
Congressional involvement
In 1999, the House Committee on International Relations, chaired by Rep.
Benjamin A. Gilman, R-N.Y., a noted human-rights advocate, requested that FBI
Director Louis Freeh initiate a Bureau search for the Cuban torturers, but
reportedly that request went nowhere.
In November 1999, the committee held hearings on the Cuban Program. Said
Gilman at the start of the hearings: "Those who murdered or tortured our
American servicemen are still at large somewhere, possibly in Cuba. There is no
statute of limitations on the crimes committed against these [men]. Neither
shall there be a statute of limitations on our commitment to discover the true
identities of those responsible for such crimes, so that they may be brought to
justice."
Also opening the hearing was Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. Ros-Lehtinen
was born in Cuba in 1952 and came to the United States when she was 7 years old.
Her husband, Dexter Lehtinen, served in the Special Forces in Vietnam and was
injured in combat. Ros-Lehtinen described the Cuban Program as a "psychological
experiment" whose purposes were to test "interrogation methods, to
obtain absolute compliance and submission to captor demands, and ultimately to
be used as propaganda by the international Communist effort."
Over the past several decades, there has been considerable speculation and
debate about the objectives of the Cuban Program, much of which centers on what
military intelligence officials have dubbed "the Manchurian Candidate
purpose." This term "Manchurian Candidate" originated from the
title of a best-selling book by writer Richard Condon. Published in 1959, the
novel, which was later turned into a popular film starring Frank Sinatra and
Laurence Harvey, told the story of a Communist plot to turn an American POW in
Korea into a mind-controlled assassin directed to kill the president of the
United States. Years after he wrote the work, Condon said that he had consulted
extensively with military experts while writing the book and that he was
informed by CIA scientists that some American POWs "who had come out of
North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently apparently had a blank
period of disorientation when passing through a special zone in Manchuria."
Mindful of this much-studied anomaly, many American POWs released from Southeast
Asia were secretly "debriefed" at various VA hospitals upon their
return to the U.S. so that military psychologists could ascertain that an "analogous
disorientation period" had not occurred.
Many experts believe the Cuban Program to be similar to
behavior-modification programs conducted by the North Koreans against American
POWs in the early 1950s, by the Russians against Eastern European dissidents
during the Cold War, and by the CIA under its popularly described and frequently
misunderstood "mind control" programs. Some military historians, such
as Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, authors of "Honor Bound: The
History of American POWs in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973," have written that
the Cuban Program was primarily aimed at "disrupting POW resistance and
obtaining statements that would be exploited for propaganda purposes." U.S.
Army historians note that many North Vietnamese interrogation and indoctrination
programs were modeled on Chinese psychological tactics used against French POWs
in Indochina during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Florida's criminal element
Cases of foreign human-rights violators and war criminals, not to mention
terrorists, living in the U.S. especially in Florida are not new
or unusual. Over the past four decades, numerous Nazi war criminals have been
found living in Florida. In recent years, cases involving fugitives from South
and Latin America also have become commonplace.
Last year a man accused of torturing dozens of political prisoners in Cuba
using electrical devices was arrested in Miami. Eriberto Mederos, a Cuban who
became a U.S. citizen in 1993, was arrested by INS agents after a federal grand
jury indicted him on a felony charge of illegally obtaining citizenship by lying
on his application. Mederos wrote "no" to questions asking if he ever
was a "member of the Communist Party" and if he had "ever
persecuted anyone," said Aloyma Sanchez of the U.S. Attorney's Office in
Miami.
At the November 1999 congressional hearings on the Cuban Program, Rep. Mark
Foley, R-Fla., said that he "didn't become aware of this problem of war
criminals entering the United States" until he was informed about a former
member of Haiti's brutal dictatorship who ended up living in his congressional
district. Carl Dorelien, a former colonel in the Haitian army that seized power
from Haiti's President Aristide in 1991, killing 4,000 civilians in the process,
came to Foley's attention after he won $3.2 million in the Florida lottery.
Dorelien claimed the U.S. military gave him a five-year visa after his army was
forced from power. He told reporters in 1999 that he came to Florida along with
about 15 other Haitian military officers.
INS officials in Washington declined to comment on the possibility that the
Cuban Program torturers were in the U.S. and also refused to talk about how they
may have entered the country. On Feb. 7, a Cuban Border Patrol speedboat
carrying four armed Cuban military officials docked at a popular hotel pier in
Florida's Key West. The men, dressed in full Cuban regalia, walked to a nearby
highway where they flagged down a passing police cruiser. They told the
cruiser's driver they wanted to defect because of economic conditions in Cuba.
The Cuban speedboat, flying Cuba's flag and carrying at least two fully loaded
AK-47 assault rifles, apparently arrived in Key West undetected by any American
authorities.
Last year, when WND reported on the arrest in Florida of two former foreign
military officers wanted in their home countries for human rights violations, an
INS official said, "People would be amazed at the number of human-rights
violators that live in Florida."
H.P. Albarelli Jr. is an investigative reporter and
writer who lives in Florida. His articles on the Frank Olson murder
investigation and the 9-11 anthrax attacks also appear on WorldNetDaily. |