by Ted Gup
And as John Merriman was soon to find out, even the Cuban exile pilots themselves, those who had survived Castro’s murderous fire, would find steady work for the CIA. They would provide a perfect ready-made force—already trained in flying, experienced in aerial combat, only too eager to take on the Communists, and just distant enough from the professional ranks of Langley for Washington to once again deny any knowledge of them. It was some of these very pilots that John Merriman was expected to polish and prepare for covert combat missions overseas.
One of these pilots was Gus Ponzoa, the senior Cuban pilot in the Bay of Pigs operation. It was up to Merriman to test Ponzoa and to certify that he was ready to take a T-28 into combat. The first time up together, Merriman had Ponzoa do a series of acrobatic rolls. Ponzoa had trouble controlling the aircraft, the g-force got out of hand, and Ponzoa vomited in the cockpit. Within a day Merriman had him in full control.
Even among the crack fliers of Marana, Merriman was a standout. “He was one of the best pilots I ever flew with,” remembers Don Gearke. “He was a Hollywood-type pilot. I’ve never seen anybody so calm in my life. He’d always go to the end of the runway. When he was cleared for takeoff, he’d sit back in his seat, pull his gloves on one at a time, and like Smilin’ Jack, light a cigarette and say ‘Let’s go.’ That was pretty cool.”
Sometimes Merriman’s playfulness got out of hand. On one occasion he was teaching less experienced pilots how to pursue and attack a plane in flight. He noticed a small private aircraft overhead and decided to incorporate it into his gunnery lesson by dive-bombing it and hectoring it midair with his more nimble T-28. Again and again he dove on the plane. Unbeknownst to Merriman, the pilot was an air force general on his way to David Mothan Air Force Base. When the officer landed, he immediately filed a formal complaint against Merriman with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Such friskiness was a part of Marana’s culture. The timid, they said, need not apply. Even the stern Gar Thorsrude was not above the occasional hotdogging. From time to time he would fly the gauntlet below the Grand Canyon’s rim. One time, after a prolonged overseas assignment, he took the canyon route. He was flying below the rim and above the Colorado River, a twisting course, when suddenly, as he rounded a bend, there loomed in front of him, filling his windshield, a solid wall— the Glen Canyon Dam. “Oh shit!” yelled Don Gearke, a passenger in the backseat. In the time that Thorsrude had been overseas the dam had risen to its full 710-foot height. Thorsrude pulled back on the stick and barely cleared it.
On May 29, 1964, Merriman offered to fly Cuban pilot Gus Ponzoa from Marana to Las Vegas, where Ponzoa was to catch a plane back to Miami. It was a cloudless day, not even a hint of a breeze. As a send-off gift for his newfound friend, Merriman took the canyon route, flying below the rim, artfully zigzagging between the canyon walls at 170 knots. It was Ponzoa’s most memorable flight and a celebration of his having checked out in the T-28.
In a month, Ponzoa would leave for a top secret mission to the Congo. There he was to head up a cadre of fifteen Cuban pilots, all of them Bay of Pigs veterans. Recruited by the CIA, they were to pose as mercenaries working for the Congo Air Force under orders from General Joseph Mobuto. Merriman’s parting words to Ponzoa: “I would give anything to be going with you.”
One month later Merriman got his wish. He was to ready himself for the Congo, where he would oversee air operations. His was to be a supervisory role. The last thing the United States needed was to expose its hand in that faraway conflict. But nothing could have prepared Merriman for the quagmire that was the Congo.
The CIA had had a secret role in the Congo that dated back to 1960 when Belgium granted its former colony independence, one of a series of colonies that won their independence in the early sixties. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and superpower struggles, each of these young nations became yet another target of opportunity caught in the tug-of-war between East and West. The United States and its handmaiden, the CIA, were intent upon preventing the Soviets or Chinese from gaining a new foothold anywhere in the world, especially in a land as rich in minerals and as strategically located as was the Congo. Just how far the CIA was willing to go was made plain in the fall of 1960.
It was September 19, 1960, that the CIA sent a message to Lawrence Devlin, its station chief in Léopoldville (today called Kinshasa), the Congolese capital. The message, classified “Eyes Only,” was cryptic even by CIA standards. It alerted Devlin that he would soon be receiving a visit from “Joe from Paris” and that he was to take his instructions from him. Not long after, as Devlin was walking to his car near the Café de la Presse, he saw a familiar face—Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a senior scientist on the technical side of the Agency.
Gottlieb was an odd figure by any measure. Born with a clubfoot and stricken with a severe stutter, he had been a socialist in his youth and a Buddhist as an adult. A chemist by training, he put his formidable talent in the lab to exotic use, making poison darts and handkerchiefs, and overseeing a program with LSD that tested theories of mind control. His subjects were not always privy to the fact they had been dosed. A genius by many accounts, he would have been a perfect model for Dr. Strangelove. In Léopoldville he arrived with a plan for Devlin to carry out.
Devlin took Gottlieb to a safe house, where the two men huddled over a radio whose volume was cranked up high enough to obscure their voices from any eavesdroppers or listening devices. Gottlieb said it was the CIA’s directive that Gottlieb assassinate former Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba. A charismatic leftist trained in the Soviet Union, Lumumba was viewed as a threat to U.S. objectives in the region. “Jesus Christ! Isn’t this unusual?” asked Devlin, demanding to know upon whose authority such an order had been given. In-house the plan had been approved by none other than Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. CIA head Allen Dulles had branded Lumumba “a Castro, or worse.” But the scheme also, Devlin said, had the blessings of an even higher authority— President Eisenhower.
From his bag, Gottlieb produced a small kit containing a well-known brand of toothpaste. Inside was a deadly poison. The kit also contained rubber gloves, gauze, masks, and even a syringe in the event that the toothpaste could not be slipped into Lumumba’s possessions. Devlin had no intention of carrying out the directive, but in the interest of preserving his career, he decided to quietly stall for time. He slipped the kit into a drawer in the embassy safe.
Three months later Devlin’s and the Agency’s dilemma was resolved. On January 17, 1961, Lumumba was brutally murdered by a rival Congolese faction. Whether that killing was purely fortuitous or given an assist by the Agency has been a subject of debate. One week later, under cover of darkness, a much-relieved Devlin drove to the edge of town and tossed the poison into the rapids of the Congo River.
But neither Lumumba’s death nor the intervening four years had done anything to stabilize the Congo. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson had all secretly deployed the CIA in a desperate effort to shore up the Congolese government as the nation teetered on the brink of anarchy.
So it was when Merriman arrived in Léopoldville on July 17, 1964. A two-month-old revolt in the eastern province of Katanga once again threatened the country. But Merriman’s spirits were high, the weather cooler than he expected, and the Congolese ivory and wood carvings caught his eye. “Looks as if I will be able to bring you some pretty presents from here,” he wrote his wife. “Love boys for me and remember that you are the one I love most in the world.”
The letter was necessarily brief. There was much to do. His assignment was to oversee the Cuban pilots, to help prevent a breakup of the Congo, and to suppress the revolt in Katanga. Merriman spent less than two weeks in Léopoldville before taking command of the CIA’s air operations and the Cuban pilots who worked under cover of the Congo Air Force.
On July 20, 1964, he and three Cuban pilots, all veterans of the Bay of Pigs—Jack Varela, René García, and his friend Gus Ponzoa—ferried three T-28s to Kamina Air
Base in Katanga. As Merriman approached Kamina flying the lead plane, he was dumbstruck at the enormity of the base rising up in the middle of nowhere. Composed of hundreds of barracks, depots, and hangars, it was the largest air base south of the Sahara. But for a skeletal crew of mechanics and engineers from the Belgian Air Force, and the few Cuban pilots, Kamina was deserted, a ghostly expanse of runways and empty buildings stretching as far as the eye could see.
Even more haunting was its original purpose. Built at the height of the Cold War by the Belgians, it was intended to be the relocation site for the Belgian royal family, as well perhaps as the government and elements of NATO, as they rode out what appeared to be the inevitable nuclear war. Kamina was a completely self-contained redoubt, a concrete and steel colossus created to withstand the Cold War’s ultimate nightmare. Not far off was an entirely different world inhabited by zebras, antelopes, elephants, and the occasional cobra sunning itself on the road.
Merriman unpacked his gear in a barrackslike structure known as the Ops Center. He had a two-room suite complete with a private bathroom—but no running water. The base boasted an enormous mess hall, but that, too, was abandoned. Instead, Merriman and his Cuban cohorts ate mostly tins of sardines and basic rations. Merriman was embraced almost instantly by the Cubans. Devoid of pretensions and the John Wayne swagger of some of his CIA predecessors, he was immediately welcomed. For his part he soon appreciated the hazards the pilots faced in the field. The Agency had made it clear to the Cuban pilots that if anything happened to them, if they crashed or were captured, the U.S. government would disavow any knowledge of them.
Nor was there any recourse to the Geneva Convention for those who were downed. Rebel tribesmen, it was said, would eat the testicles of their foes if they thought them brave, and their hearts if wise. Cuban pilot Fausto Gómez had been found literally butchered. By such a standard, Mario Genebra was luckier. His engine failed as he was taking off from Albertville and his plane flipped over into the lake at the edge of the runway. Unable to open the cockpit, he drowned in two feet of water.
Merriman was prepared for the risks, but not the disorder. “The situation here is a real bucket of worms,” he wrote his wife the day of his arrival at Kamina. “I thought it would come more clear after I arrived here but so far it hasn’t.”
On July 25 Merriman returned for the day to Léopoldville for a doctor’s appointment. He had been having trouble with his right eye, out of which he saw only “a blank spot.” In a moment of downtime, he wrote his wife another letter. “A lot of the work so far is frustrating as the organization is still disorganized,” he wrote. “However the one worry I don’t have is the personnel. My people are a real bunch of tigers. The pilots are all veterans of the Bay of Pigs & good at their jobs. Some of them are real friends already. Some day maybe we’ll visit them in some happier place.”
The next day, July 26, 1964, Merriman returned to Kamina. That afternoon he received an intelligence report from the Belgians that a convoy of rebels known as Simba, Swahili for “lion,” had been spotted on the road from Kabalo. It was a vulnerable target and Merriman was eager for combat. He approached his friend Gus Ponzoa, hoping he would join Merriman in a strike on the convoy. But Ponzoa and the other pilots had already had a full morning of combat. Besides, Ponzoa’s energy was sapped from a lingering case of hepatitis. He tried to discourage Merriman, arguing that it was already 4:00 P.M., that the target was a good hour away, and that it would be dark by the time they returned. René García also opposed the idea. If they crashed at dusk in enemy territory, there would be no one to rescue them and, besides, the convoy was of little importance.
But Merriman could not be dissuaded. García and Varela reluctantly agreed to join him. Merriman suited up and climbed into Ponzoa’s T-38, plane number 496. The three T-28s flew wing-to-wing, at times so close they could read the names written on each other’s helmet. Finally Merriman spotted the convoy, a line of four jeeps and half a dozen trucks snaking their way across the open expanse. Jeeps often indicated someone of senior rank. Merriman pointed below, then peeled off, his twin .50-caliber machine guns blazing. Varela was close behind. The convoy was riddled with bullets, but now the T-28s themselves became a target of ground fire. García saw that there was still movement below in one of the jeeps and made a third pass, watching the gunners dropping beneath a withering fire. He came out of his strafing run and began to climb but became aware that something was wrong. As he and Varela prepared to join up with Merriman, he waved them off.
“Open up!” said Merriman over the radio, calling for them to widen the formation. “I might explode.” They could see a trail of vapor streaming from Merriman’s plane. “I am losing oil,” he said.
It had been two hours since they left Kamina. They were deep in enemy territory, and there was no ejection seat in the plane. Merriman’s only hope was to find a place to land. At the rate that he was losing oil, he would fall out of the sky like a rock long before Kamina. And still, Merriman appeared his usual calm self as he lit up a cigarette.
García remembered a four-thousand-foot landing strip in Kabongo, still an hour from Kamina, but wide and open enough that Merriman might have a chance to bring his plane down—if the oil lasted that long. García took the lead and dropped down to search for barrels or drums beside the runway, any sign of the enemy’s presence. It looked clear. He gave Merriman the go-ahead to land.
Merriman’s T-28 descended slowly. He seemed confused. He was making a teardrop approach coming into the wind, a quarter mile from the runway. There would be no time to make another approach. Now it was clear to García that he had taken a hit in the oil return line between the propeller and the tank. He was about to lose his propeller. Still Merriman was coming in perfectly level and straight when suddenly, at eight hundred to one thousand feet, he lost all power.
The plane plummeted. A huge red cloud rose into the air.
“My God,” thought García, “he’s exploded.” But it was only the red dusty earth of the fields. When it cleared, Varela and García could see Merriman’s propeller fifty yards from the rest of the plane, spinning absurdly. And they could make out the mangled remains of the plane. The wings were twisted crazily, the fuselage crumbled. They could see Merriman’s head, motionless, in the cockpit. Varela wanted to land but García talked him out of it. There was no way, he said, that Merriman could have survived such a crash. What good would it do to lose two men and two planes?
Back at Kamina, Ponzoa had begun to worry and had taken to the control tower waiting for some word. García radioed the tower. “Kamina tower, this is Tango flight. We have lost one of our airplanes.”
Ponzoa recognized García’s voice and called him by the Spanish word for “Baldy.” “Calvo, is that you?” Then García broke the news that it was Merriman who had gone down. Ponzoa shook his head in disbelief. Merriman, his mentor and ace of aces, was too good to have been shot down.
When García and Valera landed, there were few words spoken. They had lost their commander, an American whom in such short time they had come to call a friend. He was not even supposed to engage in combat. In his logbook Ponzoa scribbled in Spanish, “Tumbaron a Merriman” (They shot down Merriman).
The next morning there was a stir at the entrance to Kamina. A beat-up old truck, driven by two locals, had something in the back they wanted to unload. It was Merriman. He had somehow survived the crash and been discovered by these two men who pried him out of the crumpled cockpit. Suspecting he had come from Kamina, they were determined to return him before the rebels found him.
Passing in and out of consciousness, Merriman was carried to the base hospital. But it was a hospital in name only. There were no doctors, no nurses, only two local nurse’s aides. There was not so much as an aspirin to ease Merriman’s pain. Merriman was placed on a bed, the blood wiped off with a clean, damp cloth. His eyes were bloodshot, his face lacerated. His shoulder bone, both ankles, and three vertebrae were broken. His chest and legs were cov
ered with contusions. The force of the crash had been so great that the harness strap had cut a quarter inch into his flesh. Even the bezel of his Rolex watch had popped out on impact.
García, the son of a doctor, was deeply concerned. He remembered his father’s patients, how they could sometimes be up and about the very day they were operated on and then suddenly develop a clot and die. What García noticed was that Merriman’s skin had taken on a bluish tint. García understood that as miraculous as it was that Merriman had not died in the crash, his survival now depended on getting him back to the States or Europe where he could receive proper care. Immediately the Cuban pilots notified the embassy in Léopoldville asking someone to come and medevac Merriman.
Each time Merriman regained consciousness, he would plead with Ponzoa: “Gus, please send me home. I want to see my family. You can run the operation here yourself. I am feeling very bad. Please, Gus.” Even his flier’s pride was wounded. “You guys fly so long and nothing happens to you,” he would say to the Cuban pilots clustered around his bed. “I go on the first mission and . . .”
But Ponzoa’s appeals to Léopoldville went largely ignored. There was nothing they could do for Merriman but try to make him comfortable. Sometimes lucid, sometimes delirious, he would pass out for five or six hours. Ponzoa and the others could not understand why the Americans had not yet come for him.
But if the U.S. Embassy and CIA were concerned with Merriman’s well-being, they were at least as committed to concealing the fact that he, an American, had taken part in combat and crashed. On July 25, 1964, the day before his crash, U.S. Ambassador McMurtrie Godley had sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk advising that “we should indulge in no, repeat no, covert operations here that do not have Tshombe’s [Moise Tshombe, the Congo’s premier] and/or [Congo President Joseph] Kasavubu’s blessing.”
