Will Cuba account for missing POWs? 
By John Lowery 
Republican American
May 10, 2015

 Whatever one thinks of President Obama's overtures to Cuba and the accompanying prisoner exchange, an important consideration in need of immediate attention is an accounting of U.S. service members captured during the Vietnam War and imprisoned in Cuban-operated POW camps. Of utmost importance is an accounting of the 17 American airmen captured in North Vietnam, and then taken to Cuba for medical experiments in torture techniques.

Most Americans are unaware Cuba was deeply involved in the Vietnam War. In fact, Cuba had an engineering battalion called the "Girón Brigade," which maintained a major enemy supply line into South Vietnam called Route Nine. Cuban facilities included a POW camp and field hospital near the Demilitarized Zone, just inside North Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Cuban interrogators worked in Hanoi at a prison known as the Zoo. We know of these operations and some of what happened to our servicemen after some managed to survive and be repatriated in the winter of 1973, during Operation Homecoming.

After his release, Air Force Maj. Jack Bomar, a Zoo survivor, described the brutal beating of Capt. Earl G. Cobeil, an F-105F electronics warfare officer, by Cuban Maj. Fernando Vecino Alegret, known by the POWs as "Fidel."

Regarding Capt. Cobeil, Bomar related, "He was completely catatonic. ... His body was ripped and torn everywhere. ... Hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed his wrists. ... Slivers of bamboo were imbedded in his bloodied shins, he was bleeding from everywhere, terribly swollen, a dirty yellowish black and purple (countenance) from head to toe."

In an effort to force Cobeil to talk, "Fidel smashed a fist into the man's face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of rubber hose from a guard 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 an eye. Again and again, a dozen times, (Fidel) smashed the man's face with the hose."

Because of his grotesque physical condition, Capt. Cobeil was not repatriated but instead was listed as "died in captivity," with his remains returned in 1974 (Miami Herald, Aug. 22, 1999, and Benge, Michael D., "The Cuban Torture Program," Testimony before the House International Relations Committee, chaired by the Hon. Benjamin A. Gilman, Nov. 4, 1999). Incredibly, Fidel's torture of Maj. James Kasler is well known as he somehow managed to survive the Cuban's torture.

Much less is known about the 17 captured U.S. airmen taken to Cuba for "experimentation in torture techniques."

They were held in Havana's Los Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro's G-2 Intelligence service. A few were held in the Mazorra (Psychiatric) Hospital and served as human guinea pigs used to develop improved methods of extracting information through "torture and drugs to induce (American) prisoners to cooperate."

After being shot down in April 1972, Lt. Clemmie McKinney, a U.S. Navy F-4 pilot, was imprisoned near the Cuban compound called Work Site Five. His capture occurred while then-Cuban President Fidel Castro was visiting the nearby Cuban field hospital. Although listed as killed in the crash by the U.S. Department of Defense, Lt. McKinney's photograph standing with Castro later was published in a classified CIA document.

More than 13 years later, on Aug. 14, 1985, the North Vietnamese returned Lt. McKinney's remains, reporting he died in November 1972. However, a U.S, Army forensic anthropologist established the "time of death as not earlier than 1975 and probably several years later." The report speculated that he had been a guest at Havana's Los Maristas prison, with his remains returned to Vietnam for repatriation. (We also paid big money for the remains — delivered in stacks of green dollars to Hanoi aboard an Air Force C-141 from Travis Air Force Base, Calif.) Unfortunately, our servicemen held in the Cuban POW camp near Work Site Five (Cong Truong Five), along with those in two other Cuban-run camps, never were acknowledged nor accounted for, and the prisoners simply disappeared.

If our honor code of "Duty, Honor, Country," and our national policy of "No man left behind," are more than meaningless slogans, then before our relations with Cuba can be normalized, its murderous leadership must account for our POWs — especially the 17 airmen taken to Cuba. The civilized world and American veterans demand it.

John Lowery is a retired Air Force pilot and freelance writer who flew 120 combat missions in the F-105D into North Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War. He is the author of "Life In The Wild Blue Yonder: Jet Fighter pilot stories from the Cold War." This column originally was published on the website of Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org).

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