STONE, DANA HAZEN
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 2001.
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.