Mind-bending experiments made GIs the 'Manchurian candidates' of Prague
By Gabriel Ronay
You might have seen the remake of the film The Manchurian Candidate, but real life events echoed in the original cold war thriller are far more spine chilling .
Investigations in Prague are focusing on whether Czech doctors participated in psychiatric experiments like those of the original 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate carried out on American soldiers captured in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam in the 1960s, using mind-bending drugs. The attempt to crack the last secret of the cold war is, however, a race against time.
It is now an established fact that a number of American GIs captured in the Korean and subsequent Vietnam conflicts died, mysteriously, in Soviet camps. Apparently, their trail from the battlefields to Soviet psychiatric prisons went via the former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) which has a long tradition of psychological research.
At the heart of the investigations are revelations made by former secret police general Jan Sejna, who defected to the US in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He died in 1997. On November 5, 1992, in his testimony to the US Senate committee investigating the fate of American PoWs, he stated that "Czechoslovakia had held and conducted medical/ psychiatric experiments on American PoWs captured in the Korean and Vietnam wars".
His key assertions were startling: "Doctors at a Czechoslovak military hospital in Korea tested mind-control drugs on captured American soldiers in the early 1950s."
"Tests of mind-bending drugs on American soldiers continued during the Vietnam war at a Czechoslovak psychiatric institution."
"From 1965 to 1967, numerous American PoWs were secretly transferred from Vietnam to Prague and, after medical tests, handed over to the Soviet authorities .'
In the 1990s, the Czech Office of Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism launched several investigations into Sejna¹s claims. However, access to Communist-era government and military archives was made cumbersome and many key files were mislaid, missing or deliberately destroyed.
Now Lieutenant-Colonel Michael O'Hara, a Pentagon official, is leading the US investigations. He said that the stalled inquiries got a new impetus following Texas Congressman Sam Johnson's recent meetings with top Czech officials. Johnson was a PoW in Vietnam for seven years. Earlier this year, Miroslav Kostelka, the Czech defence minister, pledged his ministry¹s full co-operation with O'Hara's team.
O'Hara said that in the past year he had come across several relevant documents in Czech archives that Czech researchers had missed.
"On many occasions I have been assured that the Czecho slovak Socialist Republic had zero interest in American PoWs, did not care to know anything about what was going on in Korea and Vietnam and yet, somehow, Prague had been receiving some information regarding the Americans captured in Vietnam."
"That does not make anybody guilty of anything, but it is information that is important to us in resolving some of our issues."
The nature of the discoveries was delicate, he hinted, and disclosure could jeopardise the ongoing investigation.
But O'Hara has to face up to the fact that the elderly doctors, communist military officers and diplomats, who could have known about the fate of American PoWs who were allegedly subject to such experiments , are dying out.
Another avenue now being explored links a run-down Prague villa with the American PoWs. According to the Czech daily newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes, General Sejna revealed that batches of American PoWs were held in a villa owned by the Czechoslovak People's Army on Prague¹s Slunna Street both during the Korean and the Vietnam wars. The villa, now the residence of President Vaclav Klaus, was linked to the alleged mind-bending experiments.
Of those who Sejna accused by name, only Professor Vladimir Dufek is still alive. "Dufek was in charge of a Czechoslovak military hospital in Korea where drugs that control the mind were tested on the Americans,² the general alleged."
However, Dufek, now 85, speaking in Prague, said that he "never served in a Czechoslovak military or civilian hospital in Korea during or after the war I had nothing to do with it."
Czech investigator Prokop Tomek, who followed up the Slunna Street villa lead, feels that the investigations are bound to be open to questions.
"Sejna's claims are difficult to break."
"They are constructed in such a way that they could have taken place. Either the paper trail to support them never existed and the people who carried them out will never talk about them, or all the relevant documents were destroyed."
"These are claims impossible to refute."
But O'Hara clearly thinks that he can nail the men behind the Manchurian candidates of Prague.
©2004 Sunday Herald Limited