FLYNN, SEAN LESLIE
Remains returned 05/91
Name: Sean Leslie Flynn
Rank/Branch: U.S. Civilian
Unit: Free Lance Photo/journalist working for Time Magazine
Date of Birth: 31 May 1941
Home City of Record:
Date of Loss: 06 April 1970
Country of Loss: Cambodia
Loss Coordinates: 110236N 1060419E (XT171209)
Status (In 1973): Prisoner Of War
Category: 1
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: Honda motorbike
Other Personnel in Incident: with Flynn: Dana Stone (missing); same day at
same grid coordinates: Claude Arpin; Akira Kusaka; Yujiro Takagi (all
missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 March 1991 from one or more of
the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence
with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W.
NETWORK 1998.
REMARKS: DEAD/6 918 6735 74
SYNOPSIS: Photo journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone left Phnom Penh on
rented Honda motorbikes to find the front lines of fighting in Cambodia.
Traveling southeast on Route One near a eucalyptus plantation in eastern
Cambodia, the two men were stopped at a check point at grid coordinates
XT171209 in Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia, and led away by elements of the
Viet Cong Tay Ninh Armed Forces and elements of the combined North
Vietnamese-Viet Cong Ningh Division based in Cambodia.
On the same day, French journalist Claude Arpin and Japanese correspondents
Akira Kusaka and Yujiro Takagi arrived by auto at the same location on Route
1. Details are sketchy regarding these foreign nationals, but by 1988, they
were still classified as missing.
Sean Flynn is the son of actor Erroll Flynn. Although Flynn had spent much
of his life in California and New York, his mother, Lili Loomis, maintained
homes both in Palm Beach and Ft. Dodge, Iowa. Flynn was on a photo contract
to Time Magazine, and his friend Dana Stone was on contract to CBS to cover
American fighting in Cambodia. Both men were "veterans" of combat news.
Stone attended school in New Hampshire, but his home was in Vermont, where
his parents resided. He had been in the U.S. Navy at the time of the Bay of
Pigs incident. Both men frequently travelled with military units on patrol
and operations. The Marines who knew Dana Stone called him, "Mini-Grunt".
Information obtained from indigenous sources indicated that Stone and Flynn
were executed in mid-1971 in Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia.
Various sources, including an intercepted radio message from COSUN, the Viet
Cong high command, indicate that Flynn and Stone survived. One source
reported that he had seen "a group of very long haired, bearded, tall
prisoners near Minot, Cambodia" who were identified as "imperialist
journalists". Over the years, meanwhile, there has been occasional word from
isolated Cambodian villages that someone saw the "movie star" who is being
held prisoner by the Khmer Rouge.
Flynn's colleagues have said, "If anyone is equipped to survive...years of
hardship in the jungle, it's Sean Flynn...he's very much an expert at jungle
survival."
Flynn, Stone, Arpin, Kusaka and Takagi are among 22 international
journalists missing in Southeast Asia, most known to have been captured. For
several years during the war, the correspondents community rallied and
publicized the fates of fellow journalists. After a while, they tired of the
effort, and today these men are forgotten by all but families and friends.
Tragically, nearly the whole world turns its head while thousands of reports
continue to flow in that prisoners are still held in Southeast Asia.
Cambodia offered to return a substantial number of remains of men it says
are Americans missing in Cambodia (in fact the number offered exceeded the
number of those officially missing). But the U.S. has no formal diplomatic
relations with the communist government of Cambodia, and refused to directly
respond to this offer. Although several U.S. Congressmen offered to travel
to Cambodia to receive the remains, they have not been permitted to do so by
the U.S.
[FLYNN.TXT 05/20/91]
CONUNDRUM OF MIA VIETNAM NEWSMAN SOLVED
EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLTGHT
MIKE BLAIR, May 20, 1991
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Sean Flynn, son of the
late Hollywood actor, Errol Flynn, in communist Cambodia during the
Vietnam War has been solved. But the U.S. State Department has failed
to confirm it.
FIynn, working as a freelance writer for TIME magazine, and Dana
Stone, a reporter for CBS News, became missing on April 6, 1970 while
covering the war in Southeast Asia.
The SPOTLIGHT has learned from sources in Bangkok, Thailand, that the
remains of Flynn and Stone have been located in Cambodia by a team
from Britain's Grenada Television, which went to Cambodia to check
out a declassified CIA report that the two newsmen had been executed
by communist forces.
Tim Page, a veteran Indochina news photographer and friend of Flynn
and Stone, was part of the team that visited Cambodia.
Page has issued a statement that the Grenada team were able to trace
Flynn and Stone during the last year if their lives "from point of
capture to grave."
The communist Cambodian government had allowed the team to search
areas of eastern Cambodia, near the Vietnamese border, for the remains
of the Americans.
The graves of the missing newsmen were located, and remains were
recovered.
"The teeth and a filling which we obtained can never conclusively be
said to be theirs," Page said. "However, all the feelings about this
being the end of a quest bore true."
Flynn and Stone were listed as missing after renting motorcycles,
which they rode from the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon to the
Cambodian border to determine the accuracy of reports that U.S.
troops had made incursions into supposedly neutral Cambodia.
DETAINED AT BORDER According to CIA reports, they were detained at the
border of Cam- bodia by North Vietnamese or Viet Cong forces.
According to Page, the Red Vietnamese forces held Flynn and Stone
for the first six months of their captivity.
They were turned over to the brutal Cambodian Khmer Rouge in the
autumn of 1970.
It is believed that the Khmer Rouge suspected Flynn and Stone of being
CIA agents. They were reportedly executed by the Cambodian communists
in early 1971.
The Khmer Rouge, as every SPOTLIGHT reader knows, were response- for
the brutal murder of more than a million Cambodians after their
takeover of the country in April 1975. They were ousted Phnom Penh on
January 7, 1979 by Vietnamese forces, and by 1985 almost all of
Cambodia was under Vietnamese control.
Since then, the Khmer Rouge have been the nucleus of a guerrilla
coalition operating against the Vietnamese puppet government of
Cambodia from the Thai-Cambodian border. Other factions within the
coalition are anti-communist. The coalition is led by Prince Sihanouk.
Between late 1988 and 1990 a series of conferences (at which all
Cambodian factions were represented) was held to forge a political
settlement and forestall a military victory by Pol Pot (the head of
the Khmer Rouge), but they produced no concrete results.
PLAN MEMORIAL Page indicated that the remains will be placed in a
memorial stupa to be built at the l7th parallel, which separated North
and South Vietnam until the communist victory over South Vietnam in
April, 1975.
A tree was planted at the l7th parallel site by the Grenada team, and
Page hopes to return to the site this summer to work on the memorial,
which will incorporate designs from several Asian countries. It will
be dedicated to the memory of all journalists missing or killed
during the war in Southeast Asia.
Page said the number of newsmen lost by both sides during the war
totaled about 119.
Two years after the capture of Flynn and Stone UPI reporter Terry
Reynolds and Alan Hirons an Australian UPI reporter-photographer were
snatched from their automobile on April 26,l972, southwest of Phnom
Penh, along the sane route taken by Flynn and Stone Reports indicated
that they were alive in captivity.
Well-known NBC News correspondent Welles Hangen was taken from his car
by Red troops along a highway southwest of Phnom Penh on May 31, 1979.
The communists have yet to account for him.
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