Communist POW Camps

North Vietnam POW Camps #CIA #POW

Nov 18, 2021

The “Zoo” POW Camp - North Vietnam - Cự Lộc

https://hamptonroadsnavalmuseum.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-zoo-for-humans-during-vietnam-war.html

Introduction

There were many Prisoners of War camps in Southeast Asia (SEA) but most of them were concentrated in the North Vietnam Hanoi area.

North Vietnamese POW Camps (1964-73)

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:North_Vietnamese_POW_Camps_(1964-73)

U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._prisoners_of_war_during_the_Vietnam_War

Several of the camps became infamous, including Son Tay, the Hanoi Hilton, and the “Zoo”.

The “Zoo”

The “Zoo” is the one I will concentrate on here. (Cự Lộc)

The “Zoo” is located here, on the lower left side of the map.

Shortly after the war, ex-POW Mike McGrath annotated this detailed map of Hanoi to show the location of prisons. He did it so he would not forget where the camps were. Out of the estimated 13 prisons and camps used to detain captured personnel during the war, only Cự Lộc (the Zoo), Hỏa Lò (the Hanoi Hilton), the Plantation (used as a model showpiece for foreign visitors and the press), and Alcatraz (where the most difficult-to-control prisoners were held) were close to central Hanoi.

(Wikimedia Commons)

https://hamptonroadsnavalmuseum.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-zoo-for-humans-during-vietnam-war.html

This is the main (and oldest) part of the compound featuring the pool (which, of course, was not used for recreational swimming during the time Americans were incarcerated there) and the auditorium. If you look closely, the model makers included air raid shelter entrances, which look like manholes scattered throughout the compound. (M.C. Farrington)

https://hamptonroadsnavalmuseum.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-zoo-for-humans-during-vietnam-war.html

Description of the camp “Zoo”

Opened in September 1965 just southwest of Hanoi, the Zoo had all the windows in the cells bricked up shortly after opening. The rooms were padlocked but had a slight give that allowed prisoners to peek out. This feature also allowed guards, or livestock at the prison, to look in, a feature that earned the prison the name "Zoo."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/honor-pow-prisons-north-vietnam/

What is certain is that the Zoo itself had some unique features and a very dark history. From September of 1965 through 1972, the Zoo, located near the village of Cự Lộc in North Vietnam, periodically operated as a POW camp. However, its purpose as a prison camp was multi-functional. It was not until September of 1971 that the camp was used as a long-term holding facility for prisoners of war. Its underlining purpose in 1972 was that of a “showplace,” which is why it is so often compared to the “Plantation Camp,” located in Northeast Hanoi.

By February 1966, over 50 captives were being held there. In 1967, the Zoo held approximately 120 prisoners of war. In that same year, it too started to overflow with prisoners of war. So, in October, a section was added known as the “Annex.” As the POW camp grew in size and numbers, so did its reputation as being primitive and brutal.

Even though there were camps with more sophisticated techniques of torture, the Zoo was exceptional, with its own unique reputation for mistreatment and cruelty from when it first became operational, to the very end. Visually, the POW camp was quite menacing. The cells were old concrete buildings. The concrete floors served as prisoners' beds. One of the more infamous structures within the compound was an old movie theater turned dark torture chamber known as the “auditorium.” Former prisoners have described it as being nothing but a pitch-black room overwhelmed with rats and smelling of human feces. The North Vietnamese would go on to build a separate cell, strictly dedicated to interrogation and torture.

The yard was inhabited by farm animals and even included an old swimming pool that was used to house fish. The treatment men received there was as Spartan as the cement walls that surrounded them. POWs were hardly allowed to bathe. Most of the time, they were handed a bucket of water to perform any hygienic routines. Food was very scarce. It was during the years 1967 through 1968 that the camp was recognized by the U.S. Military as more of a torture facility than just a holding camp for prisoners. Unlike other camps, it did not matter how long a prisoner had been there. Everyone was susceptible to this type of harsh treatment. Some of the last POWs to leave Vietnam were assembled at the Zoo

https://hamptonroadsnavalmuseum.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-zoo-for-humans-during-vietnam-war.html

The Cuban Program

Cuban officials, under diplomatic cover in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, brutally tortured and killed American POWs whom they beat senseless in a research program "sanctioned by the North Vietnamese." This was dubbed the "Cuba Program" by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, and it involved 19 American POWs (some reposts state 20). Recent declassified secret CIA and DOD intelligence documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the extent of Cuba's involvement with American POWs captured in Vietnam. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report states that "The objective of the interrogators was to obtain the total submission of the prisoners..."

According to former POW Air Force Colonel Donald "Digger" Odell, "two POWs left behind in the camp were 'broken' but alive when he and other prisoners were released [1973 Operation Homecoming]. ... They were too severely tortured by Cuban interrogators" to be released. The Vietnamese didn't want the world to see what they had done to them."

POWs released during "Operation Homecoming" in 1973 "were told not to talk about third-country interrogations. .... This thing is very sensitive with all kinds of diplomatic ramifications." Hence, the torture and murder of American POWs by the Cubans was swept under the rug by the U.S. Government.

The "Cuban Program"

The "Cuban Program" was initiated around August 1967 at the Cu Loc POW camp known as "The Zoo", a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. The American POWs gave their Cuban torturers the names "Fidel," "Chico," "Pancho" and "Garcia." The Vietnamese camp commander was given the name "The Lump" because of a fatty tumor growth in the middle of his forehead.

Intelligence and debriefing reports reveal that testing "torture methods were of primary interest" of the "Cuban Program." The Cuban leader of the "Cuban Program" ["Fidel"] was described in debriefing reports as "a professional interrogator," and a second team member was described as looking like a Czech ["Chico"]. "The Cubans has (sic) the authority to order NVNS [North Vietnamese] to torture American PWs [POWs]." The Vietnamese "catered" to the Cubans.

http://vvof.org/cuba_res.htm

Fidel, Chico and Garcia, also nicknamed "Pancho," a fat, always sloppily dressed man in his mid-30s who had arrived at the camp around June, suddenly vanished in mid-August, never to be seen again by the POWs.

By the end of the Cuba Program, Fidel had tortured 18 of the 20 POWs selected for the Cuba Program. Two apparently were never beaten. All but Cobeil had "submitted."

http://autentico.org/oa09872.php

Former U. S. POWs detail torture by Cubans in Vietnam. Torturers' aim was `total surrender' Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. -- 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.

Honor Bound, a book published in April with Department of Defense assistance, devotes 13 pages to the "unusually intensive and prolonged operation that monopolized the [prison's] torture machinery for much of the year."

A two-inch-thick stack of documents declassified by the Defense Department's Prisoner of War, Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) for a string of congressional hearings in 1996 provide extensive and gruesome details on the Cuba Program.

And a DPMO official has now reported that two North Vietnamese army colonels confirmed to him in 1992 that "Fidel" was indeed Cuban and had tortured American POWs -- but without Hanoi's official approval.

http://autentico.org/oa09872.php

“Fidel” was over six feet tall, in his early 30s, muscular, ramrod-straight, with full command of English, with American slang and personal knowledge of many cities in the Southeastern United States from Miami to the Carolina's. “Fidel” has been identified by some of the POW’s in the “Cuban Program” as Fernando Vecino Alegret. Fernando Vecino Alegret lived in the United States for extensive periods of time, including Miami, and studied at the University of Alabama, until he joined the Castro’s guerrillas in 1958. Today, at 79-year-old, he is a retired brigadier general of the Cuban FAR, and veteran of Castro’s guerrillas.

https://cubanstudiesinstitute.us/international-relations/fidel-castros-crimes-against-american-pilots-pows-in-vietnam/

Former U. S. POWs detail torture by Cubans in Vietnam. Torturers' aim was `total surrender' Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'

http://autentico.org/oa09872.php

Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Cubans were heavily involved in the Vietnam War. Cuba had a very large contingent of combat engineers, the Giron Brigade, that was responsible for maintaining a large section of the "Ho Chi Minh Trail;" the supply line running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. The contingent was so large that Cuba had to establish a consulate in the jungle.

Numerous American personnel serving in both Vietnam and Laos were either captured or killed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and in all likelihood, many by the Cubans. One National Security Agency SigNet report states that 18 American POWs "are being detained at the Phom Thong Camp..." in Laos, and "...are being closely guarded by Soviet and Cuban personnel with Vietnamese soldiers outside the camp."

http://vvof.org/cuba_res.htm