Lost History-Fidel's torturers paid a visit to The Hanoi Hilton

quote:

---

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

---

quote:

---

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

---

quote:

---

Quickly the peasants disrobed Dutton with no thought of unfastening buttons or zippers. They even cut his boots. With elbows tied behind his back, a loose blindfold over his eyes and a noose over his head, he was led barefooted down a rocky path. The civilians hit him with bamboo poles, rocks, dirt clods and fists. He had a gaping wound and one peasant woman stuffed it with a piece of cotton that had a mercurochrome like antiseptic on it. Loaded into a small truck, they bounced along and finally arrived at an empty church. Shortly thereafter Communist soldiers put unconscious Glen Cobeil in one truck and Dutton in another. They were taken to a Russian built helicopter and placed in the cargo section. Dutton's ankles were tied to a floor hook. As they flew along Dutton's blindfold was pulled up around his forehead and he saw an Oriental sitting on a packing crate holding a raised jack handle. Dutton thought he was going to smash his brains in. The Oriental shoved Dutton's head around to look at Glen. There was no wound on him. They finally arrived at the Hanoi Hilton. Cobeil was still alive.

Dutton never saw him again but only heard him. Both were tortured continuously and on the fifth day Dutton heard Glen scream his name and then he heard the sounds of them beating and clubbing Cobeil.

When George Day arrived at the Zoo on April 30, 1968, and met his interrogators, one of the Cubans had already pounded Earl Cobiel out of his senses. Interrogators, returnees said, had taken a rusty nail and carved a bloody X across his back.

Day recalls, "a young g**k, whose name escapes me, and two other beaters beat him all night. They brought him out after a fourteen or fifteen-hour session, and he obviously didn't have a clue as to what was going on. He was totally bewildered and he never came unbewildered.

"The gooks kept thinking he was putting on, so they would keep torturing him. The crowning blow came when one of the guards some people called Goose struck him across the face with a fan belt under his eye, and the eyeball popped out. The guy never flinched, and that was the first time the go*ks finally got the picture that maybe they'd scrambled his brains."

"It sounds so savage you have trouble picturing it."

---