It was not uncommon for them to rig up a field telephone, and put one [wire] around a finger and the other around the scrotum and start cranking.
—D. J. Lewis, former sergeant with the U.S. Ninth Military Police Company of the Ninth Infantry Division, stationed at Dong Tam, 1968–691
Within one decade of the end of the Algerian war, magneto torture spread to Asia, Africa, South America, North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Sometimes it displaced other methods of electrotorture, and at other times, it marked the introduction of electrotorture, but in either case, it usually marked a shift in the entire torture regimen. If there was a distinctive modern style in torture, it was French modern: the field telephone magneto adapted with alligator clips, usually conjoined with water torture, either pumping (the tube, tuyau) or choking (the bathtub, baignoire). French modern was a stealthy style, one that was pioneered to avoid unwanted publicity and to create plausible deniability. In this respect, magneto torture became a marker for stealth torture wherever it went.
In the previous chapter, I showed how French forces carried magneto torture out of Vietnam to North Africa and Europe. In this chapter, I map a second route of distribution. I show how American forces carried magneto torture out of Vietnam to allied countries around the world.
As I will explain below, the South Vietnamese government tortured prisoners, and given the uniformity of techniques involved, it is not hard to conclude that this was government policy. As international attention focused on the war, South Vietnamese interrogators moved from visible techniques to stealth torture. Here they borrowed from the French colonial heritage, adapting techniques used by the French Sûreté in the 1930s and again by the French army in the 1940s and 1950s. After their arrival in Vietnam, some American interrogators also tortured and sought to leave no marks, especially as U.S. military monitoring for torture increased in the late 1960s. Interrogators adapted old techniques from American policing in the 1920s and from French colonial policing by way of the South Vietnamese. Although it is rarely mentioned in the main American histories of the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers both assisted others and employed themselves hand-cranked telephones for interrogations in Vietnam in 1960s.
Table 8.1
Main Electroture Users, 1945–1979
The American and French roads out of Vietnam were probably not the only routes of transmission for magneto torture, though unquestionably they were two important axes along which torturers came to adopt hand-cranked telephones around the world. Other routes are less certain, but I will gesture to some possibilities in this and the next chapter as clues suggest.
What is certain is that by the 1970s, electrotorture became increasingly common. In the same decade that the United States and Western Europe embraced a human rights agenda and Amnesty International began its annual global audit of torture, torturers embraced electrotorture in large numbers. As the following chapter shows, this was only the beginning of a worldwide transformation.
Table 8.1 shows the progress of electrotorture around the world at midcentury. In the 1950s, only seven countries used electrotorture, and only one country, France, favored the field telephone magneto. By the 1960s, the police or military forces of eleven countries practiced electrotorture, and most of these forces adopted magneto torture (often field telephone magnetos or their smaller cousin, the “pepper mill”) along with supplementary water tortures.
Between the 1960s and the 1970s, the number of countries using electrotorture quadrupled. Magnetos spread with this explosion, but so too did cattle prods, as I will explain. Between 1950 and 1970, torture using cattle prods is reported in only four countries, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States. In the 1970s, this number increased to twelve. Many other electrotorture devices also appeared in this decade. I explain why these devices failed to catch on in the expanding torture market while cattle prods and magnetos did.
If we look back, the crucible for modern electrotorture in the twentieth century was clearly Vietnam. In the thirties, the French Sûreté pioneered stealthy torture, combining old clean tortures with electrotorture, and it was by French colonial routes that magneto torture came to Europe, not once, but twice. Then magneto torture passed on from the French-supported South Vietnamese government to American interrogators, who in turn carried magneto torture out of Vietnam.
By 1963, no one doubted that the South Vietnamese government tortured prisoners.2 South Vietnamese torture was painful and not particularly clean.3 Torturers beat and whipped prisoners to death, particularly at Poulo Condor, a notorious prison island off the coast. Far from public scrutiny, guards crushed fingers and toes, removed teeth with pincers, stuck pins under nails and into knees, and burned flesh with lamps and cigarettes. They forced chopsticks, Coke bottles, and eels up orifices, and they exposed prisoners to ants. They suspended prisoners by the toes, testicles, or the hands (“ride in a Dakota”); then they beat and spun the victim (“slaughtering the pig” (1961), “the plane ride” (late 1960s).
Electric torture left burn marks. In 1961, a former prisoner from Poulo Condor described guards using an “electric flash” attachment from a camera that caused “severe pain and burnings.”4 In 1965, a prisoner on the mainland described how interrogators hooked wires to his appendages “and began to crank the dynamo.”5 Generally, they used “an army dynamo activated manually, in a manner so that one can augment or diminish at one’s leisure the intensity of the current.”6
From the fifties onwards, Vietnamese prisoners called water torture “ride in a submarine” or “taking the submarine,” phrases that covered pumping and choking.7 Torturers typically preferred pumping to choking.8 One prisoner, tortured in 1960, describes the Dutch style of choking: they “tied me, face upward, to a plank. A towel was used to tie my head to the plank, a rubber tube led from a 200-liter barrel fixed to a stand. The water fell drop by drop onto the towel, soon flooding my face. To breathe, I sucked in water through my nose and mouth . . . my stomach started to swell like a balloon. . . . it was as if someone was twisting my entrails.”9 The water used in these operations was often soapy, salty, or mixed with lime, pepper, and excrement. Often interrogators stomped on bloated stomachs with hobnailed boots, a method bound to leave wounds.10
The Army Intelligence Bureau specialized in a unique innovation, the chen ve, “beneath the water or mud.” Interrogators put a prisoner “into a large container with water up to his neck.” Then “the container was violently struck on the side with a mallet until the prisoner fainted and blood spurted from his mouth.”11 The beating produced “great pressure on the body of the prisoner: the heart is shocked severely, the liver and kidneys swell and the bladder bursts.”12
By the late 1960s, Vietnamese torture was stealthier. Interrogators forced prisoners to stand for hours before bright lights.13 Guards beat prisoners inside a sack, a method that leaves “fewer superficial marks, but it seriously affects the internal organs.”14 They turned to the falaka, as the French had done in the 1930s, beating the soles of the feet; the prisoner “feels pain in three places—the feet, the knees and the heart, as the blood is forced up his body.”15 In 1973, three women put to the falaka “were beaten to death without any marks being left.”16
Lastly, torturers used electrical and water torture more carefully. The chen ve, now called “the punching ball,” became more common, as it “leaves much less visible traces, but is in fact more deadly.”17 By 1969, torturers also used a smaller magneto: “The 12 volt battery that is employed looks like a pepper mill.”18 It soon replaced field telephones: “All torture rooms are equipped with the same kind of generator, a machine that looks like a square pepper grinder.”19
Magneto torture, water tortures, and falaka are familiar tortures from the French colonial period, though the chen ve appears to be a local innovation (I will discuss this technique further in chapter 13). Sources are quite clear that these techniques were favored because they were stealthy. And this concern with stealth is even more marked among accounts of American torture, and the reasons for it are spelled out somewhat more clearly. But the problem of American torture in Vietnam needs to be approached carefully. Let me begin with government records and the court martial record, and then turn to the testimonials of soldiers.
In 1965, General William Westmoreland acknowledged that news correspondents sometimes photographed American advisers standing by while Vietnamese interrogators tortured prisoners. In a letter to Major General Louis Walt, commander of the Third Marine Division, Westmoreland stated that he understood this presence was necessary to moderate the behavior of Vietnamese interrogators. “In any case,” he added, “we should attempt to avoid photographs being taken of these incidents of torture and most certainly in any case to keep Americans out of the picture.”20
On January 21, 1968, the Washington Post ran a photograph of a member of the First Air Cavalry Division “pinning a Vietnamese to the ground while two other Vietnamese placed a towel over his face and poured water into his nose.”21 This technique, what I call the Dutch style in choking in chapter 13, has a well-known history both in American policing and in East Asia. The American soldier was court-martialed on February 28, 1968.
On March 14, 1970, Lt. Gen. W. R. Peers reported to the secretary of the army the events leading to the notorious massacre at My Lai. Among other events, his report described how on March 19, 1968, “during the morning, an American assisted by an ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] interpreter interrogated detainees in the company position. A field telephone with leads attached to various parts of the body to produce electric shocks was one technique employed to obtain information.” The report also states that the ARVN interpreter severely kicked and beat detainees, while probably “the same American using the field telephone” inflicted knife wounds on the back of the hands, in which he rubbed salt. The report distinguishes this torture from beatings conducted by a soldier after taking prisoners in the heat of battle.22
The discovery of American torture in Vietnam was shocking, and it led to a broader investigation. On May 21, 1971, in a report to the White House, Maj. Gen. Kenneth J. Hodson, the army judge advocate general, confirmed that American interrogators “on occasion” used electrical devices to torture Vietnamese during intelligence operations.23 In fact, on August 13, 1971, investigators for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) had conducted an internal investigation of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment, and they reported that American and Vietnamese interrogators tortured Vietnamese detainees using “the transmission of electrical shock by means of a field telephone, a water-rag treatment which impaired breathing, hitting with sticks and boards, and beating detainees with fists.”24 Another internal inquiry by the CID identified twenty-nine members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture.25
Government reports also reveal certain deficiencies in the reporting of war crimes during the Vietnam War. Until March 25, 1966, the American commanders in Vietnam were only obliged to report war crimes of hostile forces. They were not obliged to report any war crimes, including torture, performed by U.S. forces and allies. After 1966, field commanders were obliged to report all war crimes, whether by hostile or U.S. forces. But until 1970, these new rules did not anticipate the possibility that the commander himself may have been involved, as Lieutenant William Calley was at My Lai. Commanders were responsible for reporting their own deficiencies, and there was no independent office to investigate adherence to the laws of war.26 Nor were there meaningful punishments for failing to report war crimes, a factor that may also have contributed to “an attitude of laxness and indifference to such crimes.”27
Under these circumstances, commanders could hide incidents of torture and other war crimes from their superiors with misleading bureaucratic reports and euphemisms.28 In some cases, they no doubt did, and the My Lai incident is a case in point. Within “the Americal Division, at every command level from company to division, actions were taken or omitted which together effectively concealed from higher headquarters the events which transpired” during the military operation.29 After 1970, new provisions did require immediate reports of injury or death to noncombatants by way of telephone or teletype, especially acts that “may be reasonably expected to arouse public interest or cause continuous or widespread adverse publicity.”30 But even with the changes, it is questionable whether they could prevent the cover-ups of the sort that followed My Lai.31
After My Lai, the military increased efforts to preserve documents, issued rules prohibiting destruction of records, and conducted studies of possible war crimes violations. This new concern is also reflected in the court martial record. The vast majority of war crimes allegations investigated by the military were made after September 1969, when news of the My Lai incident broke. Of the 241 allegations of war crimes between 1965 and 1975, 191 (79 percent) were made after September 1969. Most allegations were not made by officers of the units involved, but by individuals long since separated from the service. Forty-seven allegations provided grounds for disciplinary actions, though in most cases investigators could not determine whether commanding officers knew of these incidents.
Even this more vigorous legal process left a great deal undisclosed. For instance, of the twenty-nine members of the 173rd Airborne suspected in confirmed cases of torture, fifteen “admitted the acts.” Records indicate, though, that only three were punished, and they received fines or reduction in rank. None served any prison time.32
In short, the official record of war crimes, including torture, is spotty at best, especially the records before 1969. “The real impetus to preserve the Vietnam records came as a result of the tragic My Lai affair.”33 But this impetus was uneven. In 1991, C. A. Shaughnessy, a veteran staff member of the Vietnam Collection at the National Archives, concluded that the Vietnam War was far less documented even after 1969 than World War II or portions of the Civil War. He observed that many cubic feet of documents had been lost, destroyed, or misplaced, while other documents, removed for military historians, had been so jumbled their origin was unknown. Some documents that might shed light on torture in this period were still classified, especially those pertaining to the notorious CIA-managed Phoenix Program (described in chapter 21).34 Since 1991, the situation has become more constrained. For example, the Vietnam war crimes records were declassified in 1994 but have been subsequently removed from the public shelves at the National Archives.35
All this is an important caution to those who depend solely on government documents to make their case. While government reports and court martial records are a good place to start in mapping American torture during the Vietnam War, particularly after My Lai, it is equally clear that before 1969, “many such incidents escaped detection.”36 To understand the murky pre—My Lai history of American torture in Vietnam, we have to turn to the testimonial literature of Vietnam veterans.
Many American soldiers did routine duties in Vietnam and did not participate in torture. As one MP said, the American torturers in Vietnam perpetuated a perception that all American soldiers were involved in war crimes. In fact, “The vast majority of us simply did our jobs there as best we could to survive and get on with our lives.”37 But some American soldiers observed or participated in the torturing of prisoners, and some have written or spoken about these incidents.
Using testimonial literature is fraught with problems. These accounts may be fraudulent or misleading. In the case of Vietnam, some soldiers and reporters fabricated stories or staged photographs for public consumption.38 Moreover, in the wake of Senator John Kerry’s campaign for president, pro-and anti–Vietnam War veterans exchanged new accusations of fabrications, primarily centering on the famous “Winter Soldier Investigation,” which Kerry helped organize.
Despite all these concerns, there is no choice in the matter but to consider the testimonial literature. The gaps in the government record before 1969 are serious. Guenter Lewy, a historian of war crimes in Vietnam usually cited by conservative veterans, is highly critical of all testimonial literature in principle, preferring almost exclusively government documents.39 Still, in practice, Lewy accepts some testimonial literature without question, or without corroborating government documents, most notably, torture accounts of American POWs in North Vietnam.40 Moreover, he distinguishes among antiwar veterans’ testimonies, regarding some as more reliable than others based on the contradictions he could identify.
This is a starting point for considering the veterans’ testimonials. Some testimonials are less contested than others. In appendix D, I group various accounts of tortures in terms of their reliability. Here, I provide a summary report of the methods used and conclusions reached in appendix D.
Setting aside the known fabricated accounts, one must recognize that many of the remaining accounts describe American violence in the worst possible light. I have already outlined how I use testimonial literature like this in the case of Resistance stories from World War II (see chapter 4), and the procedures I follow here are no different. If one bitter narrative after another fails to mention techniques or procedures that were common elsewhere in the world, we can reasonably conclude that these techniques were probably not practiced in that region. Surely the narrators had every interest in saying everything they could to damage the U.S. government, and the absences and silences are telling. Furthermore, one has greater confidence in multiple accounts of the same torture in the same place; single reports of unique tortures are less reliable. Indeed, some well-known fabricated accounts are distinguishable by the fact that they mention unique tortures that appear in no other reports. Lastly, uniformity of practice indicates uniformity of intent, that is, some degree of planning and policy; this is the standard application of the Nuremberg rule, of course. Lewy applies this rule to North Vietnamese torture, but it applies equally to other cases. With these cautionary rules in mind, the testimonial story of American torture in Vietnam appears to be as follows.
American electrotorture in Vietnam began with some military interrogators adopting magneto torture in the Mekong region between 1963 and 1964.41 This technique, particularly the use of field telephones for interrogations, spread among American units, peaking around 1967 or 1968. It was favored because it drew few marks, and so interrogators could avoid detection from their superiors at the base or in the field. Interrogators also adopted other clean techniques, such as slapping and stress positions, and after My Lai and similar scandals that publicized magneto and water torture in Vietnam, some of these lesser-known techniques became more prominent. Torture techniques migrated stateside, appearing sometimes in military training exercises. They were also discussed informally after interrogation training or indirectly through courses training soldiers to resist torture. In short, whether one takes the government record or the veterans’ testimonials, one arrives at the same description of the American style of torture in Vietnam: electrotorture (by means of a field telephone magneto), water torture (particularly the Dutch style), and beating.
Veteran testimonials about torture rarely look upon the U.S. military and government in a favorable light. So it is surprising that no veteran mentions any figure like General Massu in Algeria, a general who knowingly allowed troops to use torture techniques for intelligence purposes. Nor do they identify any official army manuals, as in Algeria, that authorized torture techniques. None of the soldiers saw written orders to torture. One military interrogator stated flatly that the standard manual for interrogation listed no torture techniques and did not encourage torture. Thus, even if some veterans wanted to conclude that torture was U.S. government policy, the testimonial evidence as a whole does not suggest that torture was an official policy directed from Washington, DC.
Rather, the testimonial evidence suggests some commanders in Vietnam tolerated a subculture of torture among military interrogators. In this subculture, interrogators shared techniques and were highly dependent on ARVN interpreters and interrogators for advice and information. With the possible exception of the CIA, torture techniques appear to have migrated not from the top down, but laterally from unit to unit as the subculture expanded.
Midlevel officers, like Lieutenant Calley, tolerated this subculture of torture and even at times shielded it from scrutiny from headquarters. Just as it would be foolish to believe all testimonies equally, it is foolish to take the absence of official government accounts of torture before 1969 as evidence that some midlevel commanders were unaware of or did not even tacitly endorse the use of torture by interrogators. Not everything that governments do is written in records, especially in matters pertaining to torture. And the degree of uniformity in the techniques of torture suggests some level of official engagement, even if it did not involve senior commanders.
Serious flaws in American military recording of war crimes encouraged this situation. In 1964–65, for example, Donald Duncan, a Green Beret who became a prominent antiwar veteran, was outraged that his commanders participated in or failed to report torture by U.S. soldiers.42 But the military regulations at the time did not oblige commanders to do so, nor did they anticipate that commanders might be involved in war crimes themselves.43
American interrogators were aware of general prohibitions against torture, but the combination of weak and unqualified leadership, incompetent planning, poor discipline, and peer bonding in the context of counterinsurgency warfare led to the appearance of torture.44 These are classic conditions, as I explain in part V. Social psychologists have long known that divided or unclear lines of command, mixed messages about what is allowed, and lack of punishment for violations of rules are preconditions for torture in prison environments. Moreover, in counterinsurgency warfare, torturers tend to become a closed professional class, bound together by peer pressure and male bonding. Narrow professionalism drives bureaucratic devolution, as midlevel officers shield interrogators from scrutiny by superior officers while encouraging interrogators to do what is necessary to get intelligence. Interrogators torture more victims, more frequently, using a broader range of tortures while at the same time demanding more autonomy from superiors to conduct their business.
All these factors were present in Vietnam, and they allowed torture to spread, but just how widespread it was among military interrogators will be impossible to determine.45 The stories do suggest that South Vietnamese and American torture subcultures informed each other. Increasing American sensitivity to torture coincides with the narrowing of South Vietnamese torture techniques to those that leave few marks. Conversely, American interrogators, in all probability, borrowed techniques used by the South Vietnamese. Other techniques, such as continuous slapping, or the “Taps,” were not reported by prisoners of the South Vietnamese, but they were well known in American torture in the 1920s. American torturers showed little interest in other South Vietnamese techniques. These included, for the most part, scarring tortures such as whipping, but they also included customary practices such as the falaka and unusual innovations such as the chen ve.
Some stories about torture in Vietnam are probably apocryphal. For example, the most legendary “psychological” technique was the helicopter treatment. Interrogators would load two prisoners onto a helicopter, one of whom was disposable. They would threaten to throw the disposable suspect out of the helicopter if he did not talk, running toward the door and stopping short. Finally, they would throw him out. Then they would interrogate the person of real interest, who was now certain of imminent death.
The difficulty is that there is no documented incident involving this technique. In 1969, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Post ran a story and photograph on this technique, but the photograph turned out to be staged.46 The one veteran who repeatedly tells the helicopter story, K. Barton Osborn, turns out to be less than credible.47 Among all the veterans accounts of torture described here, only three mention the technique, and both appear to have heard about it secondhand. They do not describe an instance they personally observed.48
Helicopter treatment became such a Vietnam legend that even today some remember descriptions of this torture vividly and believe it must have occurred. Perhaps; it is impossible to say that it did not occur at least once. But ironically, telephone torture, far more routine and also documented, barely impinged on modern memory. Some veterans even regarded it as an “urban legend.”49 Nevertheless, the government record and veterans’ testimonials both point to a consistent American style of torture in Vietnam: electrotorture (by means of a field telephone magneto), water torture (particularly the Dutch style), and beating. This, as a French reporter recognized in 1973, is a torture style that is “most Algerian.”50
Magnetos are easy to spot in any torture narrative. They are the only electrotorture devices with distinctive cranks. They also make an inevitable grinding noise when they are cranked; even blindfolded victims can hear it. Unlike cattle prods and stun guns, torturers clamp or tie wires onto appendages.
With these markers in mind, here are the confirmed cases of magneto torture worldwide. Magneto torture occurred primarily in democratic contexts: in democracies engaged in ongoing guerrilla war (Spain, Israel, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka), in societies that had just transitioned from authoritarian to democratic government (Spain, Russia, Brazil, the Philippines), in consolidated democracies with sharp civic divisions (United States, Venezuela), and in societies with democratic governments that restricted participation to the white population (apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia-Zimbabwe). Between 1960 and 1980, magneto torture also occurred in five authoritarian contexts: Brazil (1964–87), South Korea (1964–87), Greece (1967–74), the Philippines (1972–86), and Soviet Afghanistan (1979–87). In four cases, Brazil, South Korea, Greece, and the Philippines, reports of electrotorture continued after the transition to democracy. In the 1990s, two other authoritarian governments turned to magneto torture, Turkmenistan and Yugoslavia, and electrotorture continued in Yugoslavia after the transition to democracy.
This distribution is consistent with the monitoring hypothesis, namely, that public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine procedures that evade detection by leaving few marks. Because public monitoring is greater in democracies, and because public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is not surprising that where we find democracies torturing, we also find magneto torture in conjunction usually with water torture (as I will show in the next chapter). The French style in stealth torture helps interrogators avoid public monitoring, making it less likely that they will be found out or held responsible.
However, the distribution of magneto torture also raises the puzzle of why some authoritarian states adopted it in the 1960s where domestic public monitoring was not high. One possibility is that the United States was a universal distributor, furnishing all these authoritarian states with magnetos. Another, far more persuasive in my judgment, is that authoritarian states adopted these techniques because during this period the international public monitoring of human rights also intensified and these states were increasingly concerned about the impact of reports of torture on legitimacy and aid. I will weigh the merits of these hypotheses in the next chapter, but for the moment, I shall simply describe the empirical pattern of magneto torture. Below, I order the countries chronologically, based on the earliest available report of magneto torture in each state.
The United States. In 1966, police discovered that an Arkansas prison superintendent and his staff had used telephone torture in two penal institutions. The prison doctor had devised the Tucker Telephone, “an electrical generator taken from a ring-type telephone, placed in sequence with two dry cell batteries and attached to an undressed inmate . . . a crank was turned sending an electrical charge into the body of the inmate.” Police determined that the staff “rung up” prisoners as early as June 1963.51
Chicago police investigators uncovered systematic torture in Area 2, a region comprising the south side of the city, between 1973 and 1986. Investigators grouped torture cases by technique, including electroshock (the earliest case being May 1973).52 Victims described the device as a hand-cranked black box. In 1986, prisoners alleged that Jon Burge, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and a top police commander, practiced magneto torture on detained suspects, showed his detectives how to perform various tortures, and chided them when they left marks.53
These cases suggest that war veterans brought magneto torture back from Vietnam to their civilian occupations as policemen and guards. For example, before he entered civilian policing, Burge had served two terms of duty in Vietnam, serving as a military policeman assigned with the Ninth Infantry. He studied military interrogation at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and “was familiar with electrical devices operated by a crank, saying he had used field telephones during his service in Vietnam.” He “denied having heard of any torture that might have gone there.”54 One may be justly skeptical.
South Africa. In South Africa, prisoners described magneto torture as early as 1963. The Observer, a South African newspaper, reported three detainees gave “details of torture by electric shock methods which were first used in Algeria.”55 One said, “Every time I resisted answering the questions, they turned on the dynamo.”56 Magneto torture continued until the end of apartheid in 1989, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal, where a covert police unit commonly tortured with “a dynamo taken from a telephone.”57 Officers indicated that magnetos “were available from anyone at Telkom. I can go fetch you one now. It was an old crank telephone.”58
South Korea. South Korea had the largest contingent of troops in Vietnam after the Americans, and these veterans did torture political prisoners in the 1960s.59 In 1964, To Ye Jong reported torturers attached wires to his toes and “bandaged the part of my body where electric current ran so as not to leave the marks of electric torture.”60 Electrotorture is reported for the next two decades.61 An officer of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency described using a khaki-colored telephone for night operations, including torture.62 In 1989, the device was described as a “voltage generator.”63
Brazil. Prisoners report electroshock by 1966–67.64 By the late 1960s, torture victims reported seeing U.S. AID decals on the field telephones. In one case, American advisers described to Brazilian officers “the permissible levels the human body could withstand.” One AID official was concerned enough to track orders from the police assistance program. “Electric shocks, he knew, were usually administered with military field telephones, and over those he had no control. He could try to prevent generators sent out with the U.S. AID decal if they were going to be used for torture.”65
In the late 1960s, Brazilian torturers reported that the CIA would be upgrading their field telephones. They said that the CIA Technical Services Division in Panama was “developing devices to make the pain so sharp that a prisoner would break quickly.”66 By 1969, Brazilian torturers were using a new device, the pimentinha: “a magneto that produced low voltage and high amperage electricity; that, because it was a red box, . . . was called the ‘little pepper.’ ”67 This device resembled the Vietnamese “pepper grinder” that also appeared around this date. It is hard to believe this was coincidental.
In the 1980s, after the transition to democracy, police still used “electric shock, administered either directly with wires from a plug, or from a telephone mechanism which can be wound up to increase the current (the pimentinha).” In one case, television crews burst into a room and “took pictures of the telephone mechanism of the pimentinha.” One human rights lawyer was also able to confiscate a pimentinha.68
Greece. Prisoners reported electroshock from 1967 onward.69 In May 1968, a prisoner held by Salonika Security described having cables tied to his hands and feet, and then “with a machine that one of them turned, they caused electric current to be conducted to my lower extremities.”70
Israel. Reporters described the French style in modern torture as early as 1969. “‘Alligator’ clips (electrical connections) were attached to his ears and genitals and electric current passed through them.” Prisoners also reported “a water-hose inserted into the mouth and water poured down the throat. . . . an interrogator would then stand on his stomach, forcing the water back out of his mouth.”71 In the 1980s, a prisoner described the machine “as having a crank.”72 Blindfolded torture victims “remembered the sound of a machine before and during the application of the electricity.” In 1992, military sources told a Hadashot reporter that interrogators used “a field telephone.”73
Turkey. Interrogators turned to electrotorture in 1971, and it became more frequent after 1980. Torturers used “a magnetic field telephone,” attaching it to sexual organs and the tongue, to the fingers, and to the small toe.74 In May 1980, the Democrat newspaper ran a picture of a smaller torture device, a hand-crank magneto. It resembles the Brazilian and Vietnamese pepper mills.75 In 1995, the state minister for human rights, Azimet Köylüoglu, confirmed that interrogators commonly used the “magnetic telephone.”76
Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. A former torturer confirmed interrogators used magneto torture as early as 1972. He would “pull a dynamo from his pack, attach alligator clips to the man’s ears, and turn the crank.”77
Venezuela. Electrotorture with cattle prods was routine in the 1950s, but one prisoner reported magneto torture in 1956.78 By 1973, victims described “electric shocks through the use of a field telephone.”79
The Philippines. Victims reported electrotorture starting in 1974. Torturers attached a wire to the forefinger and another to the penis. “Then followed the turning of the handle of the cranker dynamo, producing a [higher] current from low voltage.”80
Spain. Electrotorture is reported briefly in 1958.81 Subsequent accounts do not mention electrotorture in the late Franco era (General Franco died in 1975).82 In the democratic period that followed, prisoners report electric torture with “a transformer-like, or telephone-like instrument.”83 In 2001, prisoners described being given electroshock mainly by means of wires, though occasionally they mentioned stun guns or prods.84
Afghanistan. The Khad was the first Communist police to adopt the French style in electric torture. In the early 1980s, prisoners said the commonest torture device looked “like an old-fashioned telephone with wires that are attached to the victim’s body and a handle which is turned or pulled to apply the current.”85 They called it “the telephone box” and the “earphones.” Soviet and East German manufacturers made them and supplied them to the police and the Khad.86 At one headquarters, torturers used a machine the size of a typewriter with “a distinctive handle” and wires. “By turning the handle it would produce an electric current: the faster the handle was turned the stronger the electric current became.”87
India. Police used electrotorture in the Punjab during the 1980s “by means of wires attached to a hand-cranked generator.” This procedure was introduced in the Punjab in 1976 by a police captain who was afterward promoted.88 Sikh and Kashmiri militants report electric torture starting in the mid-1980s. In 1991, fifteen Sikh militants “were given electric shocks, either with a magneto or from a mains socket.”89
Sri Lanka. Tamil prisoners reported electric shock in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s. They described the device as “a small telephone like device with a handle.”90
Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian police adopted an electric “cranking machine.” In 1994, a prisoner described it as “a small machine, with a handle” and clamps for attaching the wires to the ears. “At first they turned slowly, then faster. When they turned [it] quickly, I just lost consciousness.”91
Yugoslavia. In 1998, a Kosovan clerk reported electrotorture in a Serbian prison. “They put metal bands around his wrists, and these were connected with wires to a generator with a voltmeter . . . somebody turned this generator to produce electricity.”92
Turkmenistan. In 2002, officers here tortured a man who refused to swear an oath of military allegiance. They hooded him, beat him, and administered electroshocks using “wires from a field telephone.”93
No doubt this chronology could be sharpened, but the trend toward magneto torture is unmistakable. Area specialists may also be able to clarify twenty-one other cases in the 1970s where police used wires and electrodes from an unknown source (see table 8.1).94 Six of these police forces are possible magneto torturers.
To be specific, Indonesian and Mexican reports describe electrotorture in the field against guerrillas, where mains electricity would be unavailable.95 This suggests magneto generators. Likewise, electrotorture by Belgian troops occurred during a NATO field exercise in 1971, also suggesting a magneto.96 Prisoners in Northern Ireland describe how British interrogators used a portable machine, but as the use was indoors, it is difficult to determine whether it drew power from the mains or not.97 British use of magnetos was not unknown, as British colonial police in Kenya had on occasion used magnetos in the 1950s.
Moroccan police adopted electrotorture as early as 1960 and continued using it throughout the 1970s.98 It is difficult to ignore the close proximity in time and place to the French gégéneurs in Algeria.
In Chile, Amnesty International documented cases of police electrotorture under the governments of Eduardo Frei (1964–70) and Salvador Allende (1970–73). The earliest incident dated from 1969. In 1972, in a letter from Santiago Public Jail, left-wing guerrillas described tortures that “do not leave physical marks,” notably clean beating, choking with water, and an electrical practice “detectives commonly call ‘current’ [la corriente].” Torturers wired appendages and electrified prisoners. They changed appendages frequently so as not to leave burns. Being blindfolded, prisoners were unable to describe the device.99 Under the government of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean torturers favored an electrified bed, the parilla, but it is possible that this earlier device—seemingly light and portable, unlike the parilla—was a magneto.
The reports from other countries are too vague. Wires and clamps prove the devices were not stun guns or cattle prods, but it is possible that torturers simply used wall plugs. This was Khmer Rouge practice in the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia.100
Now this rather homogenous picture of electric torture needs to be qualified. The torturer’s craft, like carpentry, painting, and other crafts, changes with times and places. There were some important national variations within the French style. These variations included the following.
Power. The Philippine magneto generated 90 volts.101 The Israeli magneto could be set at least as high as 60 volts.102 South African torturers claimed they could increase the voltage to 200 or 225 volts.103 They also conducted electrotorture by hooking up wires to a car battery and accelerating an auto engine.104 This would yield over a thousand volts. The Brazilians’ “doublers of tension” fed an electronic circuit with simple radio batteries to achieve 500 to 1,000 volts. The pimentinha yielded only 100 volts, but at an alarming 10 amperes, a potentially fatal amperage. It could also be cranked in two directions, “thereby creating a counter electromotive force that doubled the original voltage of the machine.”105
Contacts. French torturers used alligator clips or wrapped wire around the fingers. Other torturers found that clips offered too little electrical contact with the skin. They experimented with alternative contacts. For example, South African police tied each wire to a key and then placed each key on the victim’s palms. The first shock contracts the muscles, forcing the hand closed. “While you keep turning the handle, he can’t let go of it.”106 Brazilian torturers used Brillo scouring pads, inserting “a Bom Brill into a woman’s vagina, hooking a field radio wire to the metal pad, and turning on the electric current.”107 Turkish and South African police used salt water to increase conductivity.108 Argentine prisoners report that their torturers “threw water over us or washed us, ‘to cool your body down so that you’ll be sensitive again.’ ”109
Clean techniques. Some torturers hooded their victims so they could not describe their torture to others. Others used techniques to reduce burn or spark marks. Brazilians wrapped appendages in gauze, adopted wooden clothespins (“crocodiles”), and slipped fine wires between the teeth.110 South Africans wrapped wire ends with cloth.111 Many wet their victims. Turkish police recently adopted gel used for EKGs.112
Restraints. Hanging the prisoner on a bar is a method of trussing that dates from the slave trade (which I cover in part IV). Torturers bind the wrists to the ankles, pass a bar beneath crook of the knees, and then suspend the bar, with the prisoner’s head hanging downward. This technique has various names, including passer à la broche (hanging from the spit) in France, and pau de arara (the parrot’s perch) in Brazil.
In 1959, the Parsian Sûreté substituted a metal bar for the wooden one normally employed. They then electrified the bar and attached the wire to various appendages, passing current through the body.113 American trainers made a similar point to Brazilian torturers: “the parrot’s perch . . . was even more effective when combined with electric shocks.”114 Brazilians had tortured with the pau de arara since the 1940s, but it was a French innovation to combine it with electroshock.
Water supplements. Israeli and Brazilian interrogators supplemented magneto torture with pumping stomachs with a hose, while Spanish police favored choking in a tub.115 Brazilians sometimes pumped by electrification: “A hose with running water was inserted into his nostrils and into his mouth, and he involuntarily breathed in every time he received an electric shock.”116
Until the 1970s, few police employed cattle prods for intimidation and interrogation. Argentine police were the first, adopting prods in 1935 and remaining customary users for most of the twentieth century. Torture using the picana eléctrica was not an American invention, nor did the Brazilians introduce the practice to Argentina.117
In the early 1950s, the Venezuelan Guardia Nacional commonly used the picana eléctrica for torture. “Simple cables or a goad or picana of the employees in the slaughterhouses or stockyards for moving heads of cattle were connected to the most sensitive parts of the victim’s body, which provokes a painful shock.”118 By the 1970s, the Venezuelans abandoned the prod for the magneto.
The first American cases occurred during the civil rights protests in the 1960s. The earliest case occurred June 1961, when officers at the Mississippi State Penitentiary used “cattle shockers” on two Chicago Freedom Riders.119
Uruguayan police adopted the picana eléctrica from Argentine police in the mid-1960s.120 In 1971, they distributed these tools to the military. A military torturer “noticed the circulation of the appliance called the picana eléctrica (electric shock baton) in the different barracks where I happened to be. It was the novelty of the moment.”121 The prod also appeared in two other countries adjacent to Argentina, in Bolivia by 1976 and in Paraguay by 1986.122 There was, in addition, one prod case in Brazil (1977) and another in Chile (1986), although in general, torturers in these countries favored other electroshock devices.123 Outside the southern cone of Latin America, Mexican police remain the most common prod users, dubbing the device la chicharra, the buzzer.124
The prod made the greatest progress outside of the Americas. Prod torture is first reported in these countries on the following dates: Greece (1971), United Kingdom (1972), Vietnam (1972), Turkey (1977), Iran (1977), Rhodesia (1977), Afghanistan (1978), Iraq (1979), Madagascar (1981–82), China (1986), Yugoslavia (1988), South Korea (1989), and Pakistan (middle to late 1980s).125 What accounts for this rapid spread starting in the 1970s? To be sure, prods were nonlethal, portable, clean, painful, and flexible to use. They were also cheap, easy to maintain, and similar to police batons. All this does not explain the timing. The picana eléctrica had all these qualities in 1935, but it found no market.
The history of field telephones reveals one additional desirable quality in the age of human rights monitoring, what I have called linkage. As torturers came under greater scrutiny, they chose electric devices they could integrate into their regular duties. Until the 1960s, one could question what policemen were doing carrying electrified prods. In 1963, the Alabama police became the first police force to adopt cattle prods to control demonstrators.126 By the 1970s, companies marketed electrified batons to police worldwide.127 Prods became standard gear for nonlethal crowd control. Police could not be denied their legitimate use any more than soldiers could be deprived of field telephones. Police who tortured saw the advantages.
All things being equal, why did some police choose prods over portable telephones when they decided to use electrotorture? Cattle prods were hardly more “scientific” than telephones. As usual, police adopted devices based on habit, gossip, availability, and familiarity.
Uruguayan police, for example, began torturing “with a rudimentary electric needle that had come from Argentina.” They adopted what they had heard was used nearby. In the mid-1960s, an American police adviser, Dan Mitrione, reinforced this habit. He arranged “for the police to get newer electric needles of varying thickness. Some needles were so thin they could be slipped between the teeth.” The new needles were made by the CIA’s Technical Services Division in Buenos Aires and delivered through the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic pouch.128 In 1971, police replaced the Argentine prods with new ones from American manufacturers.129 About the same time, Brazilian police upgraded from field telephone magnetos to pimentinhas. In both countries, torturers favored what they knew how to use. It had become customary.
In the 1970s, torturers invented many other electrotorture devices. Like prods and magnetos, these devices were nonlethal, clean, and painful. They lacked other critical qualities, and none of them found a niche in the world’s torture markets. Some devices were not portable. Others were unfamiliar. Nor is it clear how they could be easily maintained, repaired, or replaced. They had characteristics that made them horrifying, but also easy to describe to journalists and activists. Stealth torture increasingly required stealthy devices, devices that fit into legitimate routine activities. These devices were too obvious.
The electric television. In 1972, Brazilian prisoners reported “a sort of television set in front of the chair which shoots forth electric charges which are very powerful, but which, as a result of distance, are not powerful enough to kill.”130
The grill (parilla). After the Pinochet coup in 1973, Chilean torturers abandoned corriente for the parilla. The parilla is a metal grill with brass keys and metal plates connected to terminals. It delivered what “seemed like 200 volts.” Electricity was delivered by means of metal bands or clothespins.131 In her 1976 drawing of the parilla on which she was tortured, Sheila Cassidy showed an electric cable going to a transformer on the floor and then toward the wall.132
Modified chairs. The Brazilians developed a modified electrical chair, the “dragon chair.” In 1966, Alves does not mention these chairs.133 Two famous chairs appear in the 1970s. The Dragon Chair of São Paolo (1972) was a heavy chair made of corrugated iron. A wooden bar held the legs in place. Wires in the back electrified the chair. The Dragon Chair of Rio (1977) looked like a barbershop chair with foam rubber straps to cover the body.134 The last chair on record is the Iranian Apollo Chair (1977).135 Its only unique feature was a motorcycle helmet. Like many torturers elsewhere, Iranian police were not interested in screams. The helmet contained the noise while amplifying it for victims.
Electrotorture does not require a chair format, but these were irresistible showpieces. Protesters and journalists publicized descriptions endlessly, evoking the horror of the electric chair.136 The chairs did not represent any technological advance, and Brazilians and Iranians abandoned them for other tortures by the 1980s.137
The electric skull, bag, and cap. These are South African devices. In 1957, a judge acquitted a defendant who had been given “electric shocks through a skull-shaped contraption placed on his head.”138 In 1976, in Soweto, a prisoner reported an electric cap. “They put something on my head, like a cap. I didn’t see what it was. Then they came with a wet cloth and put it inside my mouth. Then I felt electric shocks going through my body.”139 In 1976, two prisoners at Zomba Prison in Malawi were also given “electric hat” torture.140 In Johannesburg, Oshadi Phakathi reported she was “put in an electric frozen bag and suspended in the air by means of a heavy iron until I was suffocating.”141
The electric refrigerator. This was another South African innovation from 1976. The prisoner was pushed into “a room with a door that looked like a butcher’s refrigerator.” In the dark, “I felt something like fingers touch me. With every touching I felt terrible shock. I screamed. I wet my pants on the second shock. There were three shocks in all. My whole body was wet when they opened the door.”142
The Caroline and the spoon. These were Argentine inventions in the 1970s. The “Caroline” was a thick broom handle with two long wires than ran out of either end “like the antennae of a large insect.” It was invented by a camp electrician and nicknamed “the electric cat.”143 No description of the electric spoon is available, but a prisoner reports that an army doctor would insert the spoon into the vagina of pregnant prisoners, cradle their fetuses, and deliver electric charges.144
The electric piano and microphones. In 1974, Brazilian prisoners described a “keyboard operated” electroshock device, dubbed the pianola (“little piano”) and an “electric microphone” that delivered electric shocks to the prisoner, shocks “varying in intensity and duration according to sounds around him, including his own screams.”145 In 1983, an Afghan prisoner described a machine that “looked like a computer screen” with two small lamps, one yellow and one red. A device that “looked like a microphone” was wired to it. “When they pressed this microphone on my body I got strong electric shocks.”146
In the 1980s, Americans flocked to movies of Rambo, the tormented Vietnam veteran played by Sylvester Stallone. In First Blood: Part II (1985), in a graphic and often praised torture scene, Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky and Captain Vinh subjected Rambo to electrotorture in Vietnam.147 In fact, a POW history conducted for the U.S. Department of Defense identified only two cases of electrotorture conducted by the North during the entire Vietnam War, both occurring in 1969.148 Though the Vietnamese did torture after the war, there were no reports of electrotorture even then.149 Between 1950 and 1980, North Vietnamese, Soviets, indeed, most Communist societies that tortured prisoners, preferred Soviet positional tortures and sweating, often in conjunction with rope tortures, full suspension, flogging, and other disfiguring techniques.150
The irony in Rambo’s electrotorture is that it was American, French, and South Vietnamese torturers who practiced electrotorture in Vietnam and who gifted it to the world. Perhaps Hollywood should not be faulted. Most torturers were also unaware that the common techniques they used, field telephone torture with water supplements, came to them by way of Vietnam and Algeria. In the social imaginary of torturers, Vietnam was simply a land of terror. Torturers remembered only legendary horrors like the helicopter treatment, and often inaccurately.151 The Brazilians even invented an electrotorture dubbed “the Vietnam,” but one that never existed in Indochina.152
Much that should have been remembered was forgotten. In 1997, an Amnesty International researcher came across an odd description of electric torture from Sri Lanka. The torture device looked like a telephone with a crank handle. The investigator wrote, “probably not a modern stun weapon, but apparently just as potentially damaging.”153 Just forty years after the Battle of Algiers, an Amnesty International researcher could no longer remember the word magneto. For by then the world of electrotorture had changed again.