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The Gatekeepers and the Connection:
Cuba and America's POWs

January-February 1997 Issue
By CDR Chip Beck, USNR (ret.)
Special to the U.S. Veteran Dispatch


"The Cubans were just English language teachers, gone awry."


That astounding analysis and one of the most ridiculous statements I ever heard in my 33-year military and intelligence career, was made in July 1996 by one of the Defense POW/MIA Office's (DPMO) old guard, Robert Destatte.

The comment was made during an unclassified e-mail exchange, after I had requested access to DPMO's files on Cuban activities with American POWs during the Vietnam War. My interest was in seeing how the Cuban connection might provide some insights into the Soviet covert operations aimed at recruiting, exploiting, manipulating POWs or transferring them to the USSR for further use. Instead of a cooperative response that the public, Congress, veterans and the POW families have a right to expect from those who are tasked with uncovering the truth about the POWs, I received an indignant, terse reply that displayed a combination of vast ignorance, incredible naivety or either intentional deception.

Instead of being provided access to the Cuban files (more on those later), I was simply told that "there was no Cuban program and no transfers of POWs to the USSR." End of discussion, finito, case closed.

In fact, there was no proof, Destatte claimed at one point (only to contradict himself later) that the Cubans were even in Vietnam. What "might" have happened was that a couple of Cubans, "sent to train the PAVN soldiers how to speak English so they could improve prison camp administration and morale," might have gotten out of hand and briefly slapped a couple of POWs about. When the nice Vietnamese found out what the naughty Cubans (and we are still not sure they are Cubans, he intoned) had done, Hanoi sent the offenders back to Havana (Why would they go there, if they weren't Cubans, I ask).

Even more astonishing than Destatte's incoherent logic, was the subsequent disclosure that his boss, Chuck Trowbridge, head of the Research and Analysis Directorate, had hidden the Cuban files in some undisclosed location under lock and key, so the rest of DPMO could not review them. The files remained secreted and lost, even after Trowbridge retired from DPMO in late June 1996. For more than a year, he had prevented the Document Librarian, the rightful custodian of all DPMO archives, from having access or even seeing the holdings.

"You have no need to see them," Trowbridge told the custodian, without further explanation. End of discussion, finito, case closed. Again.

Having spent much of my own career in the U.S. clandestine service bumping up against Cuban expeditionary forces and intelligence operatives in Indochina, Africa, Central and South America, I was not so willing to let the matter drop.

The unclassified Cuban files were subsequently requested, under threat of subpoena, by Congressman Robert Dornan, then Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel, the element having POW oversight authority. It was through Dornan's office, not DPMO, that I obtained my first and only substantive look at the Cuban files.

It took me only five minutes to realize the vast significance of the box full of declassified papers. For me, it was like holding up a mirror to my own career, training and knowledge as an intelligence officer, covert operator, war-time interrogator and "human resource exploitation" specialist.

The people I was interested in were clearly identified as Cubans. That fact was known to the general POW population at "the Zoo," where an especially brutal team of professional DGI (Cuban Intelligence) officers carried out a year-long mission. It was known to American intelligence officers who debriefed the returning POWs after Operation Homecoming. It was known to the POWs who were beaten by the Cubans. It was known to just about everyone except poor old Bob Destatte (at least until he reversed himself.)

At one point before I examined the Cuban files, Destatte admitted, under pressure from me, that his Vietnamese contacts told him directly in 1993 that the Cubans were English language teachers, but had no intelligence connections, did not interrogate the POWs and had done whatever they had done without the knowledge of the Vietnamese. The files unequivocally show all of the above to be untrue. Was Destatte merely ignorant of the facts and derelict in his duties? Or was he passing along this inaccurate nonsense on purpose? I have been advised by a wise old professor of military history, Carl Bernard, "not to underestimate dumb." One would have to be brain-dead, however, to be that dumb.

Getting back to the files, all the information needed to make a clear, concise analysis of the Cuban goals, objectives, means and methods were present. The four most notorious Cubans, nicknamed by the POWs but not definitively identified by names, were unquestionably DGI professionals at interrogation techniques. They employed a combination of sheer torture, respites, carrot-and-stick, good-cop-bad-cop techniques to extract a wealth of written and oral propaganda confessions from 20 well chosen POWs.

Destatte claimed the POWs were never interrogated for tactical or strategic intelligence. The files show that they were.

DeStatte claimed the POWs were never exploited by the "foreign" interrogators for intelligence purposes. Propaganda is an intelligence function.

Destatte claimed the "foreign" interrogators were not identified as Cubans. They were, and former POWs who were in the camp scoff at Destatte's ignorance.

Destatte claimed the Vietnamese told him the Cubans (Vietnamese admitted they were Cubans to him) operated without coordinating with the Vietnamese. The debriefs show that the lead Cuban had a briefing by the Vietnamese Camp Commander every morning.

Destatte was told the Vietnamese did not know what the Cubans were doing with the POWs. The Homecoming debriefs, plus open media sources of the time, clearly detail how the Cuban-directed "confessions" were broadcast over Radio Hanoi, sent in propaganda mailings to U.S. and world audiences and otherwise used in a massive propaganda campaign coordinated by the Soviets, Cubans and Vietnamese. (In the 17 September 1996 Dornan hearings, a former JTF-FA officer and past Destatte colleague pointed out that Hanoi had a special Vietnamese propaganda cell in Havana to coordinate materials the Cubans were obtaining in Vietnam. How did Bill Bell and the rest of the intelligence community of the time know about this and Destatte and Trowbridge claimed not to)?

Destatte claimed that the foreigners/Cubans (he kept changing his tune) were only involved in Vietnam for "a year," from August 1967 to August 1968. Then the Vietnamese "abruptly sent them home." Again, not true. The files show that the Cubans were involved in Vietnam for at least 11 years, if not longer. The Cubans showed up in Vietnam not too many years after they consolidated power on their own island in the early 1960s, and operated en masse alongside their Vietnamese brethren right up to the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace on 29 April 1975.

Cuban DGI officers (or cooptees) were active inside South Vietnam, traveling with the Viet Cong and NVA, and "interviewing" (another word for interrogation) American POWs in Tay Ninh Province in 1965. The files show that the Cubans identified themselves as Cubans to the POWs and that American intelligence was aware of this fact as early as 1967, when several of the Viet Cong-held POWs were given early releases.

Cuban interrogators were continuing to interrogate POWs as late as 1969. Mike Benge, a USAID officer held for five years, was confronted by the Cubans that year and has no doubts as to their nationality.

The two Cubans who were traveling in South Vietnam were actually a famous man/woman "journalist" team. Although they did not give their names to the POWs, they were given high profile, center-stage positions in Havana in the fall of 1968. Their names are Marta Rojas and Raul Vivo. Together they spent more than three years traveling along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, into Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam, acquiring intelligence information and propaganda footage.
One of the "journalists," Raul Vivo, eventually left Vietnam in 1975 to travel to Angola, where he interviewed 13 western mercenaries who were put on trial in another slanted propaganda coup against the U.S.

When Destatte maintains that the four Cubans at the Zoo were "abruptly sent home," he displays a total lack of comprehension about the Cuban motives, world politics and known events of the time. (Buried as he was then, and for his career since, in Vietnam, he fails to understand what was going on elsewhere in the world. That type of analytical ignorance has repercussions for the POW saga). The Cubans were not "sent home." They had completed their mission and were going back to Havana for the next, very important phase of one of the biggest propaganda extravaganzas of the Vietnam War. In fact, the "Second Symposium of U.S. Genocide Against the Vietnamese People," which took place in Havana in October 1968, was possibly the biggest anti-U.S. propaganda operation since WWII. The DGI interrogators, the Cuban Embassy in the jungles of Vietnam, and the DGI "journalistic" field teams had spent thousands of hours preparing for the event, which was financed by the Soviet Union and attended by thousands of socialist and communist sympathizers from around the world.

The DGI and KGB directed the Symposium and the "confessions" of American POWs in the Zoo and elsewhere played a significant part of the carnival side-shows.

A good friend of mine, who coincidentally is a 20 year veteran of the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), pointed out to me recently that the Soviet Union "spent more on the propaganda war against the U.S., than we did on the hardware we sent to Vietnam."

That shows the importance of propaganda in the communist drive to win a political war. We have already seen how the DGI was in charge of one of the most significant Vietnam-related operations of the war. (It came at a time when Fidel Castro was also vying for control of the Non-Aligned Movement in competition with Algeria's president Boumedienne). DPMO's official position that the Cubans (or foreigners) were English language instructors, not intelligence officers, would be laughable if not so tragic.

For the record, the files also shed light on the significance of the "English language teacher" cover thrown to Destatte by his North Vietnamese friends. The Cuban files clearly show that the POWs were terrified that the brutal Cubans were teaching English to the Vietnamese guards. Far from helping "camp morale and administration to resolve problems," the Cubans were helping the Vietnamese become better spies and interrogators on their own. Up until the arrival of the Cubans, the U.S. POW population in the Zoo had been able to partially defeat Vietnamese interrogation efforts by claiming the Vietnamese did not speak good enough English to be understood.

The Cubans turned that around. Their efforts were not benign, humanitarian teachings "gone awry," but intentional training of allies to defeat a common enemy.

Americans who fail to understand this simple reality, or the more complex realities that were in train during the Cold War and the Vietnam Era, should not be entrusted with the mission of investigating the POW mystery.

The cooperation between Moscow and other communist bloc allies in the exploitation of American POWs since WWII was extensive. Just as Moscow joined forces with Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi and allowed East German, Polish, Hungarian and Czech personnel to become involved with the covert POW programs, so too is it likely that the Cubans were "gatekeepers" to the more clandestine POW programs and secrets that need to be uncovered.

CDR Beck is a former CIA Station Chief, Navy Intelligence Officer, and POW Investigator. He retired from CIA (1993) and the Navy (1996). He is now a freelance writer in Arlington, VA.





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