There he was, possibly in the midst of some Sandinista spies, and he was sitting there saying, “The Sandinistas are always sending in spies to find out my PLONS. I have no PLONS.”
I almost choked. We all got a pretty good buzz on to numb the dismay, then piled back into the truck. Pointing down a dirt road, 380 said, “By the way, there’s Nicaragua over there and we have no guns with us.” Not reassuring. However, he was the local so we hoped he knew what he was talking about.
They had assigned us an interpreter, who we all felt was also our “minder” with the mission of keeping 380 informed of what the crazy gringos were up to. With the nom de guerre of “Pecos Bill,” he showed up on a mule, wearing a mixture of cowboy and combat gear and sunglasses. Inebriated to the brim, he stepped outside the tent and ripped off a 30-round magazine. Boykin did the same thing. Why? Only the Contras knew. Or did they? We went to sleep. The training with 380 and his team, the “Tigers,” started the next day.
For the next four weeks we trained them in weapons maintenance, marksmanship, and basic small unit tactics. These people had no military training at all. Who knows what the CIA had been doing before we got there. Basic weapons training took up a lot of time. Until we got there, marksmanship consisted of spraying and praying. Aimed fire was a new concept for them. It was fortunate that the Sandinistas were no better marksman than they were.
Gonzalez spent the whole time teaching basic life-saving techniques to a number of the brighter ones: starting IVs, treating sucking chest wounds, keeping wounds clean and setting broken bones. He also had an unexpected problem to take care of as it turned out that about 95 percent of these young farmer-fighters from the mountains had some kind of VD. When discussing the training Harry recalled:
“I was up to my neck in rusted-out MGs, which consisted mainly of M-60s and Russian RPDs. The M-60s had frozen gas pistons. The overall condition of the guns was rubbish. The Tigers had not a clue about how to disassemble their weapons, let alone how to maintain them. We took care of that,” he said.
“Rusty FNFALs, Spanish CETMEs, AKs of all types and M-i4s were in no better shape.”
We were implementing our training program of small unit tactics and were finally accomplishing something, though not the mission we were initially tapped for. Until the Sandinista rocket attack slammed into our camp that is.
The first Katushka whizzed in on a Saturday morning, around 0900 hours. We had just sat down to our daily “feast” of rice and beans when suddenly the sound of Katushka rockets ripping the air apart hit about 200 yards from our tent. The next thing we knew, there were nine more missiles pounding down on us. The others dove into a deep ditch behind our tent before the next salvo landed. I sat on my cot in my underwear taking pictures of the rockets coming in.
“Get your ass down here,” Harry yelled.
“Get lost,” I told him.
We spent the night in the ditch. By this time we had replaced our rusty, worn out Swedish K submachine guns with brand spanking new Uzis. We were tempted to put them to use when six armed individuals shuffled by us at 0300 hours. Fortunately, we held our fire as we figured they might be Contras coming back from patrol, and they were. If we had lit them up, it would have been mucho embarrassing.
Harper, Gonzalez, Harry and I decided it was time to get off the bulls-eye to get a view of the action. There was a tall mountain at least one klick high to the west of us. Getting to the top was damn near as bad as when I climbed to our SOF Liberty City base in Laos in 1981.
The Contras had a relay station up on top and antiaircraft gunners. We thought, “If we are going to get attacked, let’s go to top of hill so we can see it coming.”
It took us until dark to get on top. We could see the war going on between the Contras and the Sandinistas from our panoramic view of the river, green tracers going one way and red tracers going another. Next morning we came back to camp. Nobody had told 380 where we had gone and he was in a tizzy because he thought that we were MIA. Around 450 rockets had hit in the base camp area.
He relocated us to a hospital area, such as it was, where all the commandos’ wives came to have their babies. There’s nothing like being billeted in a jungle maternity ward. We spend another week there thumb twiddling, and the biggest entertainment I had was spitting a stream of Skoal at roosters that were waking us up every fucking morning before sunup.
The next day, 380 told us we had best return to Tegucigalpa until a new training site could be located out of range of the rockets. There had been some KIAs at Camp Las Vegas and it was a bit difficult to conduct training in the midst of incoming rockets. No site was forthcoming so we packed our gear and headed home.
John Boykin and Harry went to El Salvador to pick up some mortar sights for the Contra mortars (and why hadn’t the CIA provided them?) and to get M-60 links and to bring back Jack Thompson, the team weapons specialist. Speaking of Thompson, while we were cooling our heels in Tegucigalpa, one afternoon he went into the hotel restaurant. He decided to sample something he was unfamiliar with, steak tartare, figuring it was some type of fancy Honduran hamburger. After the waiter had completed his elaborate preparations of mixing the raw meat, eggs and spices at his table, Thompson told him to take it back to the kitchen and cook it. It was probably the best hamburger ever cooked in that country.
Thompson, a rugged, good looking Viking type with a thick, light beard and steely sky blue eyes, had been operating as a security consultant for several years in Guatemala until we brought him to El Salvador. In Guatemala, he trained bodyguards and security units for large ranches, and gave shooting classes to those who could afford it. He also did some ops for the Guatemalan Army.
He recounted one incident: “I was doing some sniping . . . nothing really long range . . . maybe three or four hundred yards. I came up with a plan where I would locate a trail known to be traveled by guerrillas and then place a note, which said in Spanish, ‘Take this to your leader.’ The guerrilla point man, at the head of the column, would pick up the note and take it back to the leader at which time I would light him up. I did this a few times and the word got out because one time, the point man picked up the note, turned and walked back to give it to the leader who vigorously shook his head and thrust his palms of his hands toward the puzzled point man as he knew what was coming. And I chuckled as I whacked him too.”
Our mission could hardly be called a resounding success. On the other hand, the four weeks of basic training we provided was better than the CIA bozos had given them, and we got one hell of a lot of the Contras’ small arms up and running.
“I.W.” Harper gave a week-long basic course in espionage trade craft to a handful of Contras who would be spies. After “graduation” they returned to Managua. However, the “students” were quickly compromised and executed when they returned home. They had not been assigned “war names,” therefore they knew each other. Once one was compromised, he was interrogated and exposed the others. Their security mindset was nonexistent.
Sometime later, Singlaub had “I.W.” conduct another similar class in Tegucigalpa, using former Marine and longtime Miami soldier of fortune Marty Casey as translator. What happened to the second batch of would-be agents is unknown.
ANOTHER MISSION WITH THE CONTRAS
In 1986, four days before Easter, in the midst of Catholic Latin America’s Holy Week, Nicaragua’s Soviet-backed government kicked off a major offensive across the Honduran border, targeting the FDN’s Las Vegas base where we had operated the year before. I immediately put together a small team focusing on providing medical support. The team included retired Special Forces medic John Padgett; the SF medic who was with me in ‘85, Phil Gonzalez, along with former Marine Marty Casey.
We laid up for a couple of days in Tegucigalpa waiting for transport to the battle zone. The hotel, allegedly one of the best in the city, was unique: the top floor of eight floors had been destroyed in a mortar attack during one of the periodic coups, and the hotel never rebuilt it. The main at
traction in the central plaza was a magnificent statue of a warrior astride a rearing horse with sword drawn. Now, this type of sculpture is quite common throughout the world. However, what was amusing was how this particular statue got to Honduras. Don’t hold me to precise dates, but apparently in the late 1800’s, a politician was sent to Paris to commission and oversee the creation of a statue honoring a Honduran war hero. However, a prob-lem arose. The politician became enchanted with Parisian wine, women and maybe song, in that order, and in a few weeks there was little money left for the sculpture. Being enterprising and probably fearing for his life upon his return to Honduras, he purchased a statue of a French notable that was, for unknown reasons, surplus, and shipped it to the capital. The problem was that on the side of the base, it had the name of a Frenchman! The Honduran establishment became aware of the fraud but decided to leave it standing as it added a bit of class to an otherwise pedestrian plaza.
Our medical mission was officially sponsored by SOF’s sister organization, Refugee Relief International (RRI). We brought down 500lbs of medical supplies, much of it donated by SOF readers, which included 600 doses of badly needed tetanus vaccine and anti-toxin. There was a problem in getting our goodies and us into the FDN’s area of operation. Though the FDN was glad to see us, the Hondurans, who for diplomatic reasons could not acknowledge the presence of the FDN, were not enthusiastic about outsiders or the press visiting the area.
Our RRI credentials got us through the first Honduran checkpoints. At the third checkpoint, it was “Everybody out of the jeep!” We got through by bribing the Honduran sergeant with battle dressings and C-Rations. We arrived in a small valley, in which were located the administrative tent, hospital supply tent, sick call building and some living quarters. The FDN forward field hospital facility was well-dispersed with supply and administration in one location, outpatient, dental and student facilities in another, and surgery, X-ray (yes, X-ray!) and wards in another.
Although freedom fighter medical facilities are never long on supplies, they still helped nearby civilians in need. During our visit, hundreds of patients from both sides of the Nicaraguan-Honduran border presented themselves for treatment.
“Some of these people have been driven from their homes by the Sandinistas and have lost everything. They are the ones we are fighting for. We can’t deny them what little we have.”
When John Padget, Special Forces medic in Nam, was treating a FDN trooper’s leg wound—he had been wounded in the left leg and both arms —he told him, “You know, when I was in Vietnam, if a man got wounded three times, he got a ticket home. No more fighting.”
The wounded man responded, “You had a home to return to.”
Padgett and Gonzalez provided 20 FDN combat medics with a week of intensive training. Padgett remembered, “These guys were pulled from the field and were going right back into harm’s way. It was the only formal medical training many of them had. It mattered, and no doubt many lives were saved because of it. We researched what medical supplies were needed and sent many things after we returned to the U.S.”
“These missions,” Padgett recalled, “demonstrate that when friends of freedom are in desperate need of help, and our government will not or cannot act in a timely manner, the private sector and men of determination can make a difference. And even small efforts may be just enough to make the difference.”
The war dragged on until 1992 when the U.N. came in and brokered a truce. Elections were held and, surprisingly enough, the Communists lost in 1989. Commander 380 wanted to be a player in Nicaraguan politics and was anxious to return to Managua. Hugo Hartenstein, a Cuban exile and close friend of mine, and I repeatedly told 380 that he should not go back; that he would be assassinated. Finally, against our adamant pleadings, he returned to Managua and was shot in the head within a few days of his arrival and killed. The hit men were never found.
25
SOF TRIES BRIBERY; OR HOW I NEVER GOT RICH
Soldier of Fortune was not just involved in the physical side of the war in Nicaragua; we also had dealings with the psychological side of the war. The following article was printed by the Boulder Daily Camera on 26 July 1987:
NORTH LIKED BOULDER PUBLISHER’S IDEA
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
As a secret network of covert military units was being formed, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North displayed an impressive measure of independence within the White House.
For example, early in 1985 Robert K. Brown, publisher of the Boulder-based Soldier of Fortune magazine and a droll, tobacco-chewing former covert operator and showman, suggested a way to deal with the devastating effects of the Sandinistas’ Soviet-built HIND helicopter gunships. Brown proposed in a meeting with North to offer a $100,000 reward to any HIND pilot willing to defect with his chopper.
“We didn’t figure they’d defect,” Bicknell [Ralph Bicknell, a former Marine captain, was SOF’s Marketing Director at the time] said in a recent interview. The hope, he explained, was to inhibit use of the HINDs near Nicaragua’s borders where most Contras were operating. “Ollie thought it was a neat idea,” Bicknell said. “But he added something. He said, ‘Make the reward a million.’“ Brown, embarrassed, confessed that he couldn’t raise $1 million cash, Bicknell recalled. “‘Don’t worry,’ Ollie told us, ‘I’ll handle that.’“ Brown and Bicknell never knew where the money would come from and no HIND pilot ever defected, but in the summer of 1985, Soldier of Fortune’s reward notices, printed in Spanish, English and Russian, circulated widely inside Nicaragua. They said the $ 1 million reward would be paid by “publisher Bob Brown and several other loyal Americans.”
(Reprinted by permission of the Boulder Daily Camera.)
The headline of the Knight-Ridder story, “North Liked Boulder Publisher’s Idea” (26 July 1987) was fairly straightforward. North, of course, was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, USMC, former member of the National Security Council staff, who gained notoriety during the Iran-Contra affair. The Boulder publisher was, of course, me.
The concept was simple. We would offer a reward for the first pilot or crewman to defect to a neutral country with an intact Soviet Mi-24 “Hind” attack helicopter. SOF readers first learned of the “idea” in February 1985, when the magazine announced a $100,000 reward for the first defecting pilot or air crewman to bring out a Russian Mi-24 helicopter gunship that had been provided to the Nicaraguan Sandanistas. The concept was nothing new. During the Korean conflict, U.S. military intelligence offered $ 50,000 to any North Korean pilot who would defect with his MIG-i 5 jet fighter. The objective, however, was not to obtain a MIG-15, but to sow suspicion amongst the powers that be to the extent that they would ground all North Korean air assets while their pilots were vetted. While all the MIG-i 5’s were grounded, the American ground forces carried out a successful offensive.
Uncertain about the political reliability of their pilots, the Soviets and other communist countries had to go to extraordinary lengths to screen their squadrons for those who might be inclined to switch sides. In wartime, that meant aircraft sitting in their revetments instead of strafing friendlies. In Korea, enemy air strikes declined while the communist brass tried to find ways to keep their pilots from flying one-way missions south of the 38th parallel. Would the same concept work in Nicaragua?
Soviet-manufactured Mi-24s had arrived in Managua and were about to play hell with the Contras, who found themselves without any effective anti-aircraft defenses. I decided it was worth a try. I met North in his office in the Old Executive Building with Ralph Bicknell, in the course of attempting to sell the government Kevlar-hulled, high-speed attack boats. During the conversation, SOF’s reward for a defecting Mi-24 surfaced. Ollie chuckled and said, “Why don’t you raise it to $1,000.000?” I gulped and replied, “Because, Ollie, I don’t have a million bucks.” He chuckled again and said, “Well, I’ll make up the difference!” And who was I to argue with that?
What effect did the reward have on Sandinista air ops? Peter C
ollins, at that time a correspondent for ABC-TV in Central America, later told me that his contacts in the Sandanista military admitted the reward had the desired effects . . . the Nicaraguan crews were grounded and Cuban crews, who were deemed to be more reliable, were flown in. The death-dealing Mi-24s were kept out of action for three weeks. It was four and a half months before U.S. intelligence sources again reported hearing radio transmissions in Nicaraguan Spanish from the gunships, providing the Contras a brief respite from Sandinista air attacks.
Although no pilots defected, one high-ranking member of the Sandin-ista government did inquire if the reward was only for pilots, hoping to collect the reward himself. SOF’s efforts to encourage defections and buy time for the Contras worked as well as we could have hoped. Within the next year or two after the reward was offered, the air defense capability of the Contras improved dramatically and included ground-to-air missiles, so the Contras began taking down the Sandinista aircraft.
This would not be SOF’s only foray into psyops during the war. On Monday, 10 August 1987, the first news stories about the leaflet offering $25,000 in gold to the first Cuban or Nicaraguan security operative or intelligence agent who defected during the 10th Pan American Games appeared. Soldier of Fortune magazine’s “Freedom Now Committee” and SOF were the source of the fliers and gold.
SOF’s office became swamped by calls from the media: CBS, ABC, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, National Public Radio, Associated Press, United Press International and a host of other local and national news outlets wanted to know what was going on. Why were we offering the money? What was our purpose? A few of the reporters were sharp and they asked intelligent and concise questions. Most weren’t, and didn’t.
Why did Soldier of Fortune magazine offer $25,000 in gold for a Cuban or Russian intelligence or security defector? How did we pull the op together? It all started, as they say, when Colonel Alex McColl and I were out jogging in late July.
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 33
