Was Patty Hearst brainwashed? A new look at an old kidnapping case misses one of the most important elements of the story.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Jeffrey Toobin, 'American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst' - Book review

Col. Frank H. Schwable was an Annapolis graduate with 23 years' service in the U.S. Marine Corps and a chest full of medals won as a combat pilot in the Pacific during World War II. His commanding officer in Korea testified that Schwable "was one of the brightest, finest, most conscientious, and, during the war, one of the bravest officers I have ever known." Sent to South Korea as a staff officer, he yearned for a combat command and volunteered to fly reconnaissance missions. On July 18, 1952, his plane mistakenly drifted over enemy lines and was shot to pieces. Schwable and his co-pilot successfully bailed out of the plane before it crashed but were captured by Chinese troops within minutes.

Schwable did his best to not give anything away to his captors. For several weeks, he insisted he was a new arrival in Korea who hadn't even been assigned a post and had little knowledge of the war or the American order of batde.The Pentagon, however, issued a press release identifying him, and soon the Chinese knew he'd been there for months, knew his exact assignment, and even knew the names of his wife and children. They made it clear his interrogation was about to take a harsh new turn.

Locked alone in a small room for hours a day, weeks at a time, Schwable had nothing to do but imagine what might be in store for him. Finally he was moved to a darkened tent, where he was questioned 11 hours a day. After several weeks of that, he was placed in a hut about the size of a large dining-room table, where he was ordered to sit stiffly at attention except during designated sleeping hours. As winter arrived, the hut grew so cold that the can into which he urinated froze over. When he contracted diarrhea, he was allowed to go to a latrine, but there was no toilet paper. He had to use frozen tree leaves instead.

Eventually his captors began demanding that Schwable falsely admit to planning a bacteriological bombing campaign against North Korea. "They say black is white and you try in every way you can to show that black isn't white, but there is no use because you end up--black is white," he would recall after the war. The interrogation escalated until the Chinese threatened to kill him if he didn't confess. "There was absolutely no reason in the world why Frank Schwable should not have believed them," wrote military historian Raymond B. Lech, who recounted Schwable's tale in his harrowing 2000 account of life in the POW camps, Broken Soldiers.

Everything Schwable had to endure--the physical discomfort, the fear, the isolation--was boring away at his brain. "I can only portray this phase of the treatment by likening it to sitting for some 10 uninterrupted weeks on the floor of a closet in a deserted house," he would say later. He was living "under such a cloud of fear, futility and make believeyet bitter realism--that confusion reigned supreme and I existed in a world of fantasy that is beyond my description." By the end of November, four weeks after his capture, Schwable was confessing to a litany of war crimes that expanded on a daily basis, most particularly his (nonexistent) role in a (nonexistent) U.S. aerial bombardment of North Korea with disease-ridden insects. As he penned his confession, he was no longer certain he was lying: "It was real to me, the conferences and how the planes would fly up there and how they would go about their missions--that was real."

For three days beginning February 22,1953, Radio Peking aired his taped confession, which had also been filmed. When his signed confession was shown to his co-pilot, whose treatment had been similar, the man immediately broke and signed his own. The two men had been separated immediately after their capture, but the co-pilot caught a glimpse of Schwable from a nearby cell about three months into his interrogation and was shocked; the colonel, he said, looked like an exhausted little mouse with sunken jowls and droopy eyes, moving as if sleepwalking.

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Schwable wouldn't be released until September 1953, a few months after the armistice that ended the Korean War. Even then,Winfred Overholser, a former head of the American Psychiatric Association who examined him, determined that Schwable was not competent "to exercise any substantial degree of judgment as to what he was about; that he was unable to judge the demands of the situation fully; that he was really, in essence, without a will."

I doubt if Patricia Hearst, the callow teenage newspaper heiress whose kidnapping and supposed conversion to gun-toting, bank-robbing urban guerrilla had a lock on the attention of a stunned America for 18 months in the mid-1970s, has ever heard of Schwable, whose ordeal was basically an asterisk to a little-remembered war that ended before she was even born.

And though Jeffrey Toobin, author of a new poison-pen account of Hearst's...