Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  On September 26, a Bolivian combat patrol killed three guerrillas in the Vallegrande area near La Higuera. Felix Rodriguez urged Colonel Joaquin Zenteno Anaya, a Bolivian intelligence officer, to move the Ranger battalion into the area of operations. The Rangers began a series of search and destroy missions.

  On October 7, one of the battalion companies received intelligence from a farmer who reported hearing voices at a place called Quebrada del Yuro; nobody was supposed to be there. Commander Gary Prado surrounded the area with less than two hundred men.

  A firefight erupted the next morning, a Sunday, between the Ranger company and insurgents. One of the soldiers shot a revolutionary in his right leg, a flesh wound.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot me!” he cried in Spanish. “I am Che. I am worth more to you alive than dead.”

  Shortly thereafter, Felix received the news by radio. “Papa cassado.” Papa was code for a “top guerrilla commander.” Cassado meant “captured” or “wounded.”

  Back at Langley, the DCI and I were at first skeptical that such a dedicated revolutionary and combat veteran could be taken captive so easily by green troops.

  In Bolivia, Felix took off in a T-86 trainer plane for the scene. I made reservations to fly to Bolivia the next morning. On his flight to Villegrande, the nearest airport to La Higuera, Felix heard the words everyone had been waiting to hear: “Papa—el estranjero.”

  Che Guevara.

  I waited up all night with DCI Helms to see what developed.

  The next morning, early, Colonel Joaquin Zenteno Anaya and Felix caught a helicopter to La Higuera, a tiny place consisting of a few mud-brick houses and a single rutted street. Armed soldiers in combat fatigues waited in a fenced-off area between a thicket of trees and a small shack.

  They escorted Felix and Anaya to an old schoolhouse, a one-story rectangular structure whose tile roof had long ago disintegrated from weather. Che was held inside with his arms tied behind his back and his feet bound. He looked like a filthy beggar in ragged clothing, not even a pair of boots, only pieces of leather tied to his feet. Nearby lay the corpses of two other guerrillas.

  Colonel Anaya looked at his watch. “You have until two o’clock in the afternoon to interrogate him,” he informed Felix. “I want your word of honor that at two o’clock in the afternoon you will bring me back the dead body of Che, and you can kill him any way that you want, because we know how much harm he has done to your country.”

  Felix held a last conversation with Che Guevara.

  “You don’t want to talk about Africa,” Felix said, “but we were told by your own people you had ten thousand guerrillas and they were very poor soldiers.”

  “Well, if we had ten thousand guerrillas it would have been a big difference, but you’re right. They were very poor soldiers.”

  Rodriguez asked him why he chose Bolivia for his guerrilla activities.

  “One, it was far away from the United States,” Che replied. “Second, it is a very poor country and I didn’t feel the United States had that much interest. Most important, it has a boundary with five different countries, which we could use for our activities.”

  Asked if he wished any last words, Guevara said, “Well, if you can, tell Fidel he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America. … If you can, tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.”

  Just before noon a soldier came to Felix with a phone call from Vallegrande. Felix picked up the receiver. A low voice on the other end said, “You are authorized by the Senior Command to conduct Operation Five Hundred and Six Hundred.”

  Rodriguez knew what that meant. He left the room. Minutes later, a soldier named Mario Teran walked into the room with an M-2 carbine and shot Guevara in the head.

  A crowd of two thousand people waited in Vallegrande to view the notorious Cuban revolutionary when the chopper bearing his body landed and loaded it into an old gray ambulance. I arrived the next day to find his corpse covered with a sheet in a laundry room converted to a temporary morgue at the Nuestra Senora de Malta Hospital.

  I pulled the sheet off his face. My Cuban killed in Africa, Raphael Cruz, would have liked to see it. Someone had placed on his head the trademark black beret he always wore. I looked at his emaciated, unshaved face for a long time. Alive, he was a vicious bastard with little regard for human life. Still, I had to hand him one thing: he was good at what he did, and at the end he hadn’t begged for his life.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I WAS FORTY YEARS OLD, married and divorced three times, three kids on the other side of the continent. My track record did not include a finish line. And now here I had eyes for the new blonde analyst at Langley. At least her name wasn’t Mary.

  Close friendships rarely happened in the Agency. In fact, they were discouraged. Standard procedure in the operations sector required the use of pseudonyms. It was “Carl” or “Jim” or “Ron Smith.” There were perhaps more “Smiths” and “Joneses” at Langley than there were “O’Haras” in Scotland. Plus, no one talked about his job. Everything was on a “need to know” basis.

  Barbara wore no ring; neither did I, of course. Part of standard operating procedure, SOP, was to blend into the background while presenting as little as possible about private lives. Still, I made a point of stopping by her desk whenever I could.

  “I’ve never seen you around before, Barbara. Where have you been?”

  She laughed, delightfully and openly. “You mean, where have I been all your life?”

  The girl had a sense of humor. That was good. She told me she had just returned from Paris.

  “Paris? Why did you come back to headquarters?”

  She laughed. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  I laughed with her at the old joke. Then she said, half-jokingly, but in a way that let me know she was single and never married and that she might be interested in me, “I was looking for a husband. I’m thirty-five years old and my age is creeping up on me and I couldn’t find the marrying type in Europe.”

  I was nothing if not the marrying type. I fumbled for something to say. “Uh—”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh—gotta go. See you.”

  I was not going to fall into that old trap again. I didn’t need any more pretty faces left in my wake. I tried to stay away from her desk, but I kept making excuses to detour into her piece of geography.

  One of my men in Maritime was getting married on a Saturday afternoon. I telephoned Barbara at her desk and asked her to go to the wedding with me. I didn’t know her home number; that sort of information was never given out freely at Langley. To my surprise, she said yes.

  Call me a fish; I was hooked.

  I remained secretive with her, out of long habit. She naturally knew I was in SOD, head of Maritime, but I told her nothing about my experiences in Vietnam, Cuba, Europe, or any of the other hellholes in the world. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want to frighten her off. I had already lost three wives because of there always being “another side of the ocean,” as the last Mary put it.

  With me, Barbara was open and candid for someone who had worked inside the Agency since she got out of college. She was living at home with her folks in Pittsburgh, she told me, when she noticed an ad in the newspaper offering recruitment for people who would like to live and work overseas. Since Barbara always wanted to travel, she responded to the ad and soon discovered herself signed up in Washington, D.C., for an unspecified “government agency.”

  She had been all over the world since then working as an intelligence analyst for Agency offices in both primary and backwater U.S. embassies. Now she was back in the States on temporary assignment to the Directorate of Operations.

  I didn’t want another family. I fled for my life.

  Barbara accepted a temporary assignment overseas. We didn’t see each other for three months, which gave me plenty of time to think. This was an exciting, energetic, and accomplished lady. If there was ever going to be a right woman for me, this wa
s she. I was known for taking chances. Why not one more time?

  After she returned to Langley, we dated for about a year before driving to Rockville, Maryland, one Saturday afternoon, just the two of us, to get married at the Justice Building. I could almost hear Boehm growling in my ear, “You dunderhead, sir. You went and did it again.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  FOR THE PAST TWENTY years I had been involved in some form or another with the emerging development of unconventional warfare. My kids grew up and my wives left me while I went gallivanting around the globe making the world “safe for democracy” and all that. I couldn’t stand the thought of my marriage with Barbara ending like the others.

  I retained my reserve commission in the U.S. Navy with the rank of full commander, but decided to resign from the CIA and take a more conventional job. Barbara remained with the Agency in long-term station at Langley while I took several GS-rated civilian government positions. Although these jobs required some travel, we still lived, more or less, a “normal” lifestyle. Little house in the suburbs, two-car garage, postage-stamp lawn.

  I served stints with the Merchant Marine & Fisheries and the National Transportation Safety Board before being offered a post with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as its worldwide activities manager for “Manned Undersea Science and Technology.” I was considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on unconventional warfare when it came to the world’s bodies of water.

  One CIA-DOD research project had to be the epitome of clandestine warfare—the utilization of animals as warrior surrogates. The concept of training dolphins to assist in war had been on man’s mind for a thousand years. In water pens bigger than Olympic pools at Naval Station Key West, a top secret experiment tested the concept of training bottlenose dolphins for combat tasks.

  Dolphins are extremely intelligent mammals. I often donned SCUBA to roughhouse with them in the pool. They were affectionate, intelligent animals who wanted to play endlessly.

  During one test, I pretended to be drowning by relaxing my arms and floating slowly to the bottom of the pool. A female named Gloria dove to the rescue. She nosed and pushed my 225 pounds to the surface and held me above water until I indicated I was breathing again. A marvelous demonstration. I grabbed her and hugged her as we tumbled playfully across the pool.

  She “kissed” me on the face.

  “Sorry, ol’ gal, I’m already married.”

  It was good to be working in the water again. Back during my early days with UDT-21, I volunteered for a water project at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, for the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. Guinea-pig Frogs submerged ourselves in a swimming pool one degree below body temperature for eighteen hours to simulate extended weightlessness in space. At the bottom of the pool, we performed various tasks such as eating liquid food out of plastic bags, playing chess and checkers, writing notes with grease pencils on whiteboards, using underwater sign language, and even watching TV in a waterproof case. All this subsequently became part of the normal training routine for astronauts preparing for their duties in space.

  That wasn’t nearly as exhilarating as this was now with dolphins. The graceful creatures had a natural sonar ability to detect intruders from the sea. We trained them to press a buzzer to sound an alarm to a sentry on shore, then intercept. Divers failed every time to get through. A three-hundred-pound dolphin made a formidable defensive tackle.

  Dolphins could also tow or push through the water packages of explosives that weighed up to one hundred pounds and magnetically attach them to a target.

  The project remained top secret for another half-dozen years before a disgruntled civilian scientist leaked it to the news media. It was immoral and a waste of taxpayer money, he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, to train dolphins to detect and attack enemy Frogmen and place electronic monitoring devices or explosives on enemy ships.

  Actually, the sleek animals were first-rate night fighters.

  We deployed our dolphins to Vietnam to patrol Cam Ranh Bay; one dolphin attempted to recover a nuclear weapon lost near Puerto Rico. Another entered Havana Harbor and attached an electronic device to a Soviet nuclear-powered ship to measure the ship’s efficiency. Still others tracked Soviet submarines and stole mines from Chinese waters.

  My sweet Gloria attacked a Soviet Komar boat off Cuba that was chasing fleeing refugees trying to reach Florida. The explosive she carried blew off the gunboat’s stern. The refugees got away. Gloria died. I put up a marker for her on the beach at Key West.

  Dolphins were another victory in the battle against the dark forces of communism. Gloria and all our other aquatic freedom fighters should have been awarded medals.

  * * *

  The science and art of unconventional warfare followed me like shadows, even though I had left the UW business.

  Camcraft, Inc., of Marrero, Louisiana, a company that participated in the development of the Swift Boat, contracted with Washington to build a river patrol boat for use by our “Brown Water Navy” in Vietnam. Riverine Forces and SEALs along the Mekong required souped-up, heavy-duty boats for their continuing quarrel with communist guerrillas. Since I had worked on the Swift Boat, I represented the government in discussions over how these new boats, called PBRs (Patrol Boat-River), should be constructed.

  I recommended my old friend and “First SEAL” Roy Boehm for the task of training Riverine Forces in use of the PBR. Boehm, now in his late forties, was about to be medically discharged from the Navy because of a knee injury acerbated by a terrorist bombing in Saigon. He was in the hospital when he received orders to report to the Naval Amphibious School at Coronado as senior instructor for a new curriculum in counterinsurgency training on inland waterways. Commander Jerry Ashcroft from Junk Force Base TF-33 in Cat Low, and Boehm’s former combat partner, commanded the new program. I flew out to greet Boehm’s arrival since the PBR was partly my creation—and since Ashcroft confided in me how Roy’s morale needed a kick in the butt.

  The walls at the Special Operations Center were closing in on the craggy-faced old bos’n. He stood at the office window watching a class of Basic UDTR trainees jog past on the beach in their helmets and wet fatigues chanting a Jody call. UDT had not yet merged with SEALs, but there was talk of it happening soon.

  I recognized the longing on Roy’s face. How he missed the excitement, the adrenaline flow, even the frustrations of being one of these special men. Sometimes I experienced the same yearnings.

  “Instead,” Roy lamented, “I’m a teacher.”

  He turned slowly away from the window to face Ashcroft and me. “Let me off the hook?” he pleaded. “I don’t belong here.”

  Ashcroft straddled a chair backwards. “Boy-san, haven’t you always said someone needed to educate troops before we sent them off to become cannon fodder? You said they needed to know why they were going, where they were going, who they were fighting, what to expect when they got there, and how to fight.”

  “They need a teacher to teach them, not me.”

  “What the hell do you think you were doing when you were a bos’n mate on a five-inch gun in the South Pacific? How about all the years you were diving, experimenting with it, and passing that knowledge on? How about when you trained UDT Frogs? How about the SEALs? The SEALs were your creation as much as any other man’s. You trained them. You taught them. How about the Nguoi Nhai in Vietnam? Who taught them? You did. You’re a teacher, Boy-san. One of the best. Teaching is more than being able to spell ‘unconventional warfare.’ Hell, you don’t need to spell it. You lived it. Boy-san, there ain’t gonna be no walking out on this.”

  I nodded agreement. “Roy, teach these guys. Teach them how to stay alive. Now get the hell out there and do your job.”

  The first PBRs were of armored fiberglass, thirty-one feet in length, nine and a half feet across the beam, heavily armed with twin 50-caliber machine guns and M-60 machine guns, and an assortment of sma
ll arms. Operation Game Warden in Vietnam operated on brown waters in boats I helped design, with crews Roy Boehm trained. PBR warriors became both feared and famous as the process of war further tempered naval special warfare.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  THE VIETNAM WAR ENDED in 1975 with the last U.S. personnel in humiliating flight by helicopter from the roof of the American embassy to offshore ships. Ho Chi Minh’s troops enveloped Saigon and immediately began imprisoning and executing hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese. Score a victory for international communism and a defeat for the Free World.

  The American public was sick of war, wanting only to withdraw from the world and pursue life in peace isolated between the nation’s two oceans. Unfortunately, a restless and resentful world was not going to let that happen. General anxiety as residue from previous wars, from communism’s worldwide aims, and from the rise of Middle East terrorism spread gospels of terror and violence around the world: Islam against Israel and the “Great Satan”; Muslims bitter and resentful over the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I; ultra-left wings fomenting revolution; populist uprisings against imperialism and colonization; fanatics of the political left and right seeking “social justice” and willing to kill for it; communists like the late Che Guevara spreading out into Third World countries to overthrow governments. Throwing tantrums to get their way. Bombing civilians, hijacking aircraft, kidnapping people for ransom or concessions, taking hostages, committing assassinations.

  Insightful military officers realized that the United States must respond in the only way terrorism and violence understood—by force.