STONE, DANA HAZEN
British TV crew found remains in 1991
Name: Dana Hazen Stone
Rank/Branch: U.S. Civilian
Unit: Free Lance Photo/journalist working for CBS
Date of Birth: 18 April 1939
Home City of Record: N. Pomfret VT
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
Refno: 1588
Source: Compiled 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 in 1998.
Other Personnel in Incident: with Stone: Sean Flynn (missing); same day at
same grid coordinates: Claude Arpin; Akira Kusaka; Yujiro Takagi (all
missing)
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.
-------------------------------------------
The Bamboo Cage, by Nigel Cawthorn
The Full Story of the American Servicemen still held hostage in South-East
Asia.
.... The most famous journalist missing in Cambodia is Sean Flynn, son of
Errol Flynn and minor film star in his own right, in pictures like The Son
of Captain Blood, before turning to journalism. He was on assignment for CBS
in Cambodia with cameraman Dana Stone who was also working for Time
magazine.
In 1970 they hired two red Honda motorbikes in Phnom Penh and set off to find
the fighting. Traveling south-east down Route 1 they were stopped at a
checkpoint near a eucalyptus plantation in Svay
Page 205
Rieng province in eastern Cambodia. Other journalists following them heard no
shots being fired.
Local villagers saw Flynn and Stone being led away by Vietnamese soldiers. An
intercepted radio message from COSVN, the Viet Cong high command, also
indicated that Flynn and Stone had been captured alive. Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese defectors reported that several weeks earlier orders had been
circulated that foreigners captured were not to be harmed and were to be
passed up the chain of command as quickly as possible.
A bizarre rescue attempt then took place. A dubious Dutch adventurer called
Johannes Duynesveld, who claimed to have been in Bolivia with the leftist
French intellectual Regis Debray and to have served a term in an Argentine
jail for smuggling, decided to take a shot at being a war correspondent in
Cambodia. Apart from being functionally illiterate, Duynesveld was also
blessed with bad luck. On an early assignment in Cambodia, in the summer of
1970, he was wounded in a firefight near Siem Reap and taken prisoner. Nine
weeks later his wounds had healed and he was released. He brought with him
information about Flynn and Stone. He had also earned his journalistic
credentials. On his release, the press heralded him as a 'Dutch student
journalist'.
Duynesveld contacted Stone's wife who was then living in Phnom Penh. She
backed him on an expedition into communist-held territory to try and make
contact with her husband. The foolhardy young man headed out of Phnom Penh by
bicycle and, on 18 September, was captured by the VC again. This time he
managed to convince them that he was sympathetic to their cause. He helped
them fix jeeps and transport weapons. They even armed him with a machine
pistol.
But his luck did not hold. On 19 December the VC unit he was with stumbled
into an ARVN ambush near Svay Rieh in Cambodia and Duynesveld was killed. A
diary was found on his body which revealed that he was on a secret mission to
discover the fate of all seventeen journalists missing at the time. Only one
entry referred to Flynn and Stone. It said that the village where they were to
meet had been razed by American bombing.
According to the official Department of Defense version, subsequent
information obtained from indigenous sources indicated that Flynn and Stone
were killed in mid-1971 in Kompong Cham province. (53) But when Time-Life
correspondent Gavin Scott looked
Page 206
into the case in the summer of 1973 he was told by a Viet Cong general that
journalists were still being held prisoner along the Vietnamese-Cambodian
border.
Twenty-two journalists were missing by this time- ten Japanese, five American,
three French, one Australian, one Austrian, one German and one Swiss. Most of
them had gone MIA in Cambodia. The Committee to Free Journalists Held in
South-East Asia has evidence that as many as ten of them had survived. After a
ten-day trek to Kratie City in north-east Cambodia, Scott had the fact that
journalists were being held confirmed by an official of the Khmer Rouge. The
official also said that among a group of journalists that the Khmer Rouge had
just handed over to the Viet Cong was an actor who was working for 'Time
magazine and CBS'. (54)
A captured North Vietnamese officer said that many of the missing journalists
were sent to Hanoi. He had seen six under guard in a jeep en route for North
Vietnam. None of them was released.
Many reports of journalists being held came out of Cambodia after the end of
the American involvement in the war. In reports from 1973-74 there was much
talk of journalists being held in the Seven Mountains border region of
Vietnam, including in the Nui Coto cave complex, and later being moved across
the border into Cambodia. (55) One Vietnamese general told an American newsman
in 1973 that the Khmer Rouge would release their prisoners after the
normalization of relations. Sixteen years later there is no sign of relations
being normalized yet....
----------------------------------------------------
[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.
[distributed through the P.O.W. NETWORK]
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