by Gerard Colby
Back at his institute in California’s San Bernardino Mountains, the devout Christian worked feverishly to complete a monumental work, not on the jungle’s medicines, but on the sea’s poisons—and not for God, but for the Pentagon. “Russia is exceedingly interested in nerve drugs such as this,” Halstead once told a reporter, “so I can’t disclose the name of the fish or the poison. But just think of the psychological effect it would have on a political prisoner—perhaps even on an entire population.”40
Biological and chemical warfare had reached new heights of prestige among counterinsurgency experts. Former Rockefeller aide and SIL associate William R. Kintner and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Foreign Policy Research Institute conducted a study entitled, “The Role of Biological and Chemical Weapons in the Defense Strategy of the United States.” To Cold Warriors like Kintner, local insurgencies were part of the global struggle waged by the Soviet Union, and their suppression—by any means—was necessary to prevent a nuclear war.
“The capability to engage in offensive and defensive biological and chemical operations gives a nation a much stronger position in the struggle for power and provides a powerful deterrent force to bridge the gap between continental and nuclear weapons capabilities,” Kintner and his colleagues wrote in the abstract for their army contract. “B/C weapons could provide capabilities for covert and overt strategic and tactical operations of any required intensity in any type of power struggle or warfare without imposing a logistics load beyond the capacities of many of the smaller nations.”41
Were chemical and biological weapons now being considered for inclusion in foreign-aid packages to “smaller” countries like Iraq or Israel or Peru? The Department of Defense already was conducting feasibility studies on the use of chemical and biological agents in counterinsurgency, combined with “the development of mathematical models for computation of weapons effects.”42
Schultes traveled regularly to Washington to consult with the Agricultural Research Service, which was studying the effectiveness of Agent Orange defoliation in Vietnam for the Pentagon. The project required “classification of tropical forests” in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and a report on tests of chemical defoliants in Thailand.43
King, meanwhile, continued to take boat trips down the Amazon into Brazil on ANDCO’s large houseboat, Fennewood II, named after his Virginia estate. He collected plants, but he also visited sources of intelligence in towns along the way, including a Roman Catholic bishop from the United States who was posted by the Vatican at a small city on the Amazon. It was in the middle of the night, an ANDCO plant collector recalled years later, and the secretary to the bishop who greeted King at the bishop’s residence thought it was too late.
“The Bishop cannot see anyone,” said the priest. “He is very tired.”
“Tell him J. C. King is here,” the colonel said.
“I’ll go upstairs and see what he says,” said the priest, an effeminate, thin American with dark hair. He was soon back in high spirits.
“Oh, the Bishop will see you!” said the priest. “Oh, he says you’re from the CIA!”44
Here was the first confirmation of the collector’s growing suspicions about King. And here was the collector’s Donnybrook with Colonel King. Casually repeating what had happened the next evening over dinner, she was fired the next day.*
A regular stop was Manaus, the free-port capital of Brazil’s largest state, Amazonas. Besides containing intelligence resources on Amazonian Indians and plants, the region also was host to the Brazilian junta’s new Jungle Warfare Training Center. If some Brazilian intelligence officers at first questioned its purpose in a jungle more known for Indians with blowguns than leftists with AK-47s, any skepticism melted when they learned that their training center was only one of many set up recently throughout the Amazon basin with advisers from the CIA and the U.S. Special Forces. Reports persisted of a secret antiguerrilla base and a U.S. satellite-tracking station built in the isolated Macarena Mountains of Colombia during the 1962–1964 offensive against the peasant republics; all commercial flights over the 120-kilometer-long mountain chain were prohibited and would continue to be for the next decade.
Peru, of course, had had a jungle warfare training center since the CIA’s 1965 offensive against the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in the Campa Indians’ territory. And in 1967, still another special warfare base was set up at an abandoned sugar mill north of Santa Cruz, at the foot of the jungle montaña of eastern Bolivia. Here, at La Esperanza (Spanish for “hope”), Green Berets and CIA Cuban exiles began training Rangers of the new military regime of General René Barrientos in the relentless science of hunting down guerrillas.
As the United States’ hidden war in the Amazon basin was reaching its final stages of preparation, the last deepwater port on the Amazon emerged as a clandestine central command station: Iquitos, boomtown of the Peruvian Amazon’s oil industry and home base of J. C. King.
*Curiously, despite her knowledge of King’s CIA ties and despite the well-known leftist views of her husband, she tried to get back her job with ANDCO the following year—to no avail.
33
DEATH OF A CONTINENTAL REVOLUTION
MR. PILSNER’S DEADLY FRIENDS
Two worlds vied for J. C. King’s attention when he stepped outside ANDCO’s lab in Iquitos and walked down the hill to his boat on the Amazon. One was noisy, the clamor of motorbikes mingling with the rattle of new construction to lend an air of progress and excitement. Tourists actually competed for taxis, although vultures as large as turkeys still stalked the streets.
The second world was quieter, a floating shantytown of makeshift huts built on rafts. This waterfront slum, called Belén and invariably described as “colorful” in tourist guides, was growing. And it was growing not in contradiction to the first world, but because of it: What was progress for some, was misery for others.
Every time King took his houseboat out of port, he had to pass by Belén and the sullen, sometimes bitter stares of its residents. Here were the displaced Indians of the jungle who had ended up at a watery edge of world commerce.
Oil was responsible for both worlds. The question was, Which would out-race the other: prosperity or despair in the system? In Washington, King had watched counterinsurgency theorist Walt Rostow wrestle with that question in the White House. Rostow’s economics saw both worlds ultimately as mutually contradictory, dismissing their confluence in the river of time as only a temporary aberration of development. The two worlds symbolized growing pains in a society that was passing through a necessary, albeit potentially messy, stage toward the modern new order. And the new order just happened, as history would have it, to be dominated by northern metropolitan centers of finance and trade, like the New York Stock Exchange and the oil industry.
By the time King set up shop in Iquitos, competition was hot to find oil in Peru, sometimes as hot as lead bullets whistling through the rain forest. In 1967, a Standard Oil of New Jersey mapping and exploration crew cut down twenty Amahuaca Indians northeast of the Campas’ territory.1 Sinclair Oil’s Ganso Azul oil field near Pucallpa was more secure. Peruvian colonists had replaced forest-dwelling Indians in that area, and protection of the proved oil field was a national security priority for both the Peruvian military and the CIA’s jungle warfare training center. Closer to Iquitos, AMOCO and Royal Dutch Shell were looking forward to moving into the Mayorunas’ territory once SIL translators had completed their pacification of that tribe. Texaco was still in the Marañon River basin in the north; Standard Oil of New York (Mobil) and California Fundamentalisms original oil angel, Union Oil, were spending $10 million exploring the nearby Santiago River. With war raging in Southeast Asia and OPEC’s challenge rising in the Middle East, Latin America’s oil was not to be taken for granted.
The pacified Indians, however, were. Faced with the loss of their land to settlers and road crews, along with food shortages following the introduction of firearms into
their hunting lands, they had only two options: work for the oil companies or follow newly built roads out of the jungle and into the boomtowns along the Amazon. In either case, their lives were transformed; hunters and gatherers became landless laborers. And when jobs ran short, they flooded into Iquitos, many becoming beggars and prostitutes, some even agreeing to help drug smugglers.
It was the laborers who worried the Peruvians—and the Americans—most. Lima’s press reported charges that Standard Oil of New Jersey, fearing nationalization of its Peruvian subsidiary, was overworking its crews to increase production.2 Meanwhile, Peruvian nationalists of all political stripes were getting angry over the depletion of their oil reserves. Some of their antigringo feelings spilled over to other American enterprises in the Pucallpa area, including the logging operations of William Cameron Townsend’s millionaire associate from Texas, Robert Le Tourneau.
As protests widened and the political crisis deepened for President Fernando Belaúnde Terry despite his crushing of the pro-Castro guerrillas and communists of various persuasions (pro-Stalin, pro-Mao, and pro-Trotsky currents were given the same broad brush), Peru’s generals began to give serious thought to taking matters into their own hands. The CIA worried that a military takeover might be inevitable.3
CIA officers in the U.S. Embassy in Lima monitored developments in the military. And as they did, the activities of at least one of King’s ANDCO operatives expanded beyond collecting plants and intelligence.
The arrival in Iquitos of King’s new ANDCO director was greeted with joy by some shadier circles. In temperament, Garland “Dee” Williams was quite unlike his predecessor, William Buckley. Although both men were CIA veterans from Vietnam, Buckley was reserved, almost professorial, perfect for ANDCO’s scholarly cover. Williams, on the other hand, was an extrovert. He made friends by throwing wild parties at the ANDCO compound. Alcohol and sex seemed always there for the taking. To keep Peruvian military officers happy, Williams maintained a young woman in residence, earning him the disdain of other ANDCO botanists and anthropologists who too easily dismissed him as “Mr. Pilsner.”
Behind this exterior, however, lurked a more serious nature. Williams was a top paramilitary officer with an extensive counterinsurgency background who also knew the ways of drug smugglers.
Williams soon began training Peruvian military officers in how to make parachute jumps into the jungle. These officers were serving under General Armando Artola, who had been commander of the Iquitos garrison. Artola, however, had long since moved up. His men actually were attached to Peru’s National Intelligence Service, which Artola now headed.
Beefy and bald, Artola was as fierce as he looked. Working closely with the CIA paramilitary experts, he scored Latin America’s first unqualified antiguerrilla success by wiping out the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR) in the Campa Indian region and in the Quechua highlands near Machu-Picchu in the south.
This success came hot on the heels of Artola’s visit in May 1965 to Rio de Janeiro, where the newly installed junta hosted a conference of chiefs of South American intelligence services. Brazil’s generals were now playing a major role in politicizing other Latin American military chiefs with the CIA’s Cold War ideology. They had been told of a vast conspiracy directed by Moscow and Cuba against Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela—virtually the entire continent.4 Whatever the reality of Cuba’s military threat to the vastly superior armed forces of these nations, the political threat of Fidel Castro’s example was keenly felt by these generals.
Castro and Che Guevara had shown that it was possible, given the right terrain and political circumstances, to win a guerrilla war in Latin America. By demystifying the power of a better armed and equipped regular army, they had raised the expectations of Cuba’s peasants and urban allies and inspired a coordinated popular uprising in the cities and countryside. This victory terrified traditional military leaders, who were used to having their way in plantations, mines, and villages, as well as in government palaces. But the generals did not grasp Che’s central lesson: All guerrilla actions should be aimed at swaying mass political opinion.5
Generals like Artola and many of their American military advisers mistook their task as merely one of military strategy: better police techniques, followed by arrests and the forced relocation of the local rural population, quarantine of the “infected” area, and search-and-destroy missions by elite antiguerrilla units. Civic action by the army was rarely embraced with enthusiasm. Basic reforms in government and land tenure that redistributed political power and the more fertile lands were not really on the agenda. Instead, in the face of mounting demands and growing unrest, massacres of villages and death squads roaming urban streets at night were becoming more common.
King’s operation in Iquitos was seen as so important that Artola, renowned for his fierce political ambition,6 was in constant touch with Dee Williams.7 Mistakenly dismissed by many liberal Americans and Peruvians as a political Neanderthal, Artola shrewdly positioned himself at the forefront of the right wing of the restless Peruvian army command through his collaboration with the CIA. Understandably, in Latin America, as in most of the Third World, waging war in the jungle was not as attractive to aspiring military careerists as was commanding jets or tanks. To sweeten the pot, the CIA often held out the promise of political power to those who would do the down-and-dirty job of counterinsurgency. And in Peru, as in most of Latin America, the U.S. Embassy could deliver because it controlled the military pursestrings. The U.S. Embassy was in a strong position to choose which generals would play major roles in the national government.
Artola had never had much sympathy for the current president of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the rich, Kennedy-type liberal who had joined the attack against the dictatorship of General Manuel Odría. Artola took comfort in the turmoil that had raged within Belaúnde’s party since its poor showing in the 1966 local elections. The growing split within Belaúnde’s party meant, however, that Haya de la Torre’s APRA would hold the balance of power in the scheduled 1969 elections.
APRA was an unacceptable alternative. Haya de la Torre had been hated by older, conservative officers since the 1930s and was distrusted by younger officers for having acquiesced in 1956 to the landed oligarchy’s candidates, Manuel Prado and Pedro Beltrán. The prospect of an APRA victory forged a temporary alliance among the military factions. The younger colonels were impatient with Belaúnde’s vacillations and lack of courage; and the generals were worried that spreading corruption in the army might lead them to a fate similar to Batista’s army in Cuba. As the elections approached, rumors began circulating of plans for a coup. “Plan Inca” was carried out in October 1968 following a scandal over the failure of security forces to stop smugglers from flying over the border from Bolivia, and charges that Belaúnde was compromising the nation with a secret protocol with Standard Oil. There was also a feeling that the existing constitutional structure was unable to integrate the rural peasants and urban poor into the national political and economic mainstream.
The coup put Artola in control of Peru’s national police and intelligence services as minister of the interior. Artola became the leading rightist in the new junta headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado.
Artola owed this extraordinary achievement not only to his own ambition, but also to three foreign forces that converged on Peru in the 1960s, each associated with the career of Dee Williams’s boss, J. C. King: Nazi refugees who were involved in contraband and the drug trade with Latin American military officers in the Andean countries, the CIA’s hunt for Che Guevara, and the resistance of the Rockefellers to Peru’s claim against Standard Oil of New Jersey.
RAT LINE TO THE AMAZON
Peru was the first stop in a cocaine-smuggling route that started in Bolivia, where most of the world’s supply of coca leaves were grown, and ended on the streets of the United States. Smugglers moved the coca out of the Bolivian Altiplano across
Lake Titicaca or from the Bení region into southern Peru, using trucks, boats, or, more often, airplanes. In Peru, the coca was processed into paste or sent on to processing plants in Guayaquil in southern Ecuador; from Ecuador, the paste or its dried crystallized powder was smuggled through Panama. There it was listed on freight manifests as a legal commodity and sent on to Miami or New Orleans or, less often, to Tampa, the domains of Mafia chiefs Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafficante.
An alternative route out of Peru was across the jungle east of the Andes and then down the Amazon. Iquitos was the first deepwater port for oceangoing boats heading east to the Atlantic. It was also the host of the largest airport in that part of the Amazon, thanks to the U.S. Rubber Procurement Program during World War II. Therefore, Iquitos became a favorite rendezvous for smugglers and Interpol agents, outmatched only by Leticia, Colombia’s river port farther downriver. Strategically located just where the borders of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil converge, Leticia became notorious for a while as the cocaine-smuggling capital of the world. The town’s police force was too small and its customs officers were unprepared for the influx of cocaine being shipped to points east and north by river and air.
