Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  I was one of those unlucky few.

  How did my life change after I met Lillian?

  Just over a year after I innocently met and fell for the beautiful Lillian at a college party in the panhandle of Texas, I found myself thigh deep in mud on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, just across the Coco River from our base in Honduras, surrounded by dead bodies and being flanked by a Sandinista unit that wanted us all dead.

  Chapter Three

  By the time the fall semester started for me in 1985, my dreams of a college basketball career were over forever. When classes started in September, I was wearing a cast on my left arm because I’d broken my wrist, and most of the bones in my hand, when a near-riot broke out at a nightclub where I’d been drinking. Not for the first time in my life, I was somewhere I never should have been. On a whim I’d decided to take a weekend trip back to Odessa to party with some old high school friends.

  Some dumb decisions change your life forever.

  I don’t know how the “altercation” started that night, and I don’t know how I got wrapped up in it. I was there with my roommate, Jeff; he’d gone to high school with me, and for that reason we’d decided to room together in the dorm that fall. Jeff had just left to get some more drinks from the bar, and that was when the riot started.

  I was minding my own business, but as the fight escalated, it took on the feeling of a living creature, moving throughout the nightclub almost like the single mind that animates a school of fish.

  Somewhere in the midst of the melee, a man I’d never seen in my life appeared before me. He broke my hand and wrist with a barstool. It was almost as if he’d picked me out of the crowd. I’m just glad I managed to get my hand up in front of me before he swung the stool. I’m not altogether clear on what happened after that, but I know that I ended up in the emergency room. I even realized that night that my basketball days were over.

  * * *

  I met Paul Alcalde shortly after the start of the semester that fall. He was chatting with Lillian in the University Center when I stopped in to get a coffee before class. I was several hundred feet away, but even from that distance I knew it was her.

  That was the first time I’d seen Lillian since the pool party, and, although I didn’t know it then, it was the last time I’d ever see her, except for one brief glimpse through a window eight months later. A flash sighting of the girl of my dreams getting into a van outside a hotel in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

  But on that fall day in 1985, I saw her from across the student union building. She was talking to a young man I didn’t know, and I wanted to talk to her so bad I could taste it.

  She looked up, and our eyes met, and she held my gaze until I got tied up as a group of students exited one of the UC meeting rooms. I had to look around to keep from running over someone.

  The crowd was thick and there were students stacked up around the bulletin board where people would post wants/needs and things they might be buying or selling. I had to force my way through the crowd, and when I got to the other side I looked up and Lillian was gone.

  The man she’d been talking to was still seated at a table reading a newspaper, so, unable to think of any other way to find out about Lillian, I decided to talk to him.

  “Man,” I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you.”

  I call him a young man, but he was a few years older than me. Hispanic, but very light-skinned, and he spoke with no accent at all.

  “No worries, what’s up?” he said.

  “Listen… I know this’ll sound weird, and I don’t know you… who knows, maybe she’s your girlfriend or something, and if she is, I apologize and I’ll just go away, but…”

  “You asking me about Lillian?” the man said with a smile on his face.

  “Eh… well… yeah.”

  “Give it up, man,” he said. “She’s engaged.”

  My head dropped and I nodded as I took a half step away. “Yeah. I know. I met her at summer orientation. She told me she was engaged.”

  The man pushed back in his chair and gestured toward the other seat at the table with his right hand. “Have a seat, brother,” he said. “My name is Paul. Paul Alcalde.”

  I shook the hand he offered. “Matthew,” I said. “Matthew Luedecke.”

  “Well, Matthew… let me first say that your taste in women is impeccable.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “We’re acquainted.”

  “And she’s off-limits?”

  Paul laughed. “Definitely. But no one would blame you for trying.”

  “Oh well,” I said. “I was just hoping to catch up with her. Ask her if the engagement is still on.”

  “Listen,” Paul said, “there are a ton of great girls at this school. Lillian is going to graduate in the spring, and no way she’d get tied up with a freshman anyway. I’m just trying to save you the heartache, man. Besides, like I said, she’s engaged. Anyway, why don’t you come to a party with me this afternoon and I’ll show you what I mean about the… uh… advantageous male/female ratio at this school?”

  “A party? In the afternoon? During the week?”

  “It’s a rush party, man. Are you rushing?”

  Rushing is the term used to identify the time period at the beginning of each semester when fraternities and sororities recruit new members.

  I shook my head. “Nah. I’m not the ‘joining’ kind. I don’t do clubs, and I’m definitely not Greek material.”

  “Well no worries, because I’m not recruiting, man,” Paul said. It was a lie. I know that from hindsight. He was recruiting, but not for a fraternity. He lifted one of his eyebrows and winked. There was still a smile on his face. “I just asked if you wanted to meet some women.”

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Do?” Paul laughed. “Well, this campus has a dry rush policy, so there’s no alcohol at the party, but there’ll be some games, a little basketball, food… and a lot of girls.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And I’m not committing to anything?”

  “Like you said, Matthew. You’re not the joining kind.”

  * * *

  Paul picked me up outside my dorm building, Weymouth Hall, that afternoon after my 1:30 class. We downed a few shots of bourbon in his truck before we drove to the party.

  When we got to the party, that’s when I found out just what organization I would be visiting.

  It was the Pi Kappa Alpha house on Greek Circle. The Pikes were well known as the biggest party frat on campus. They also focused a lot of energy and resources on winning in sports. They heavily recruited athletes with the hopes of extending their winning ways in the intra-fraternity sports leagues. Sports, Girls, and Booze. That was what the Pikes were all about.

  I know all this because my roommate Jeff was a Pike “legacy.” His father had been a Pike, and his father before him, so Jeff would receive an automatic bid to join the Pikes after rush was over.

  “So you’re a Pike?” I asked Paul.

  “Nominally,” Paul answered with a shrug. “Let’s just say I take advantage of all the benefits they have to offer.”

  “Benefits?”

  “Yeah, they have a few.”

  “Like what?”

  Paul’s eyes lit up and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

  “Like… for example, all the beer you can drink for twenty-five bucks a month in dues. Like, at our parties there are around two hundred active members, and on any given Saturday night there will be seven hundred women in attendance.”

  “Wow. Seven hundred?”

  “Yeah. I like the odds, but I’m not recruiting, Matthew. I told you that. You asked, so I’m just answering your questions.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  * * *

  American “Greek” fraternities have long been a recruiting ground for intelligence services. The process of recruitment and the whole semester-long “pledging” system allows recruiters to see prospects in numerous and varied situations. They get
to see if you talk a lot when you’re drunk. They see what the prospect’s driving motivation is. Recruiters use a system called “MICE” to find out what causes men or women to act or become engaged in an activity.

  Almost everyone is motivated by Money, Ideology (could include religion or patriotism), Compromise (or coercion), and/or Excitement (could be Ego as well). But everyone is motivated by something. During the pledging semester, recruiters embedded in many college fraternities have the perfect test bed to look for prospects that fit their “get list.”

  And when I say that “intelligence services” recruit, don’t take that to mean they’re often harvesting recruits for official agency jobs from fraternities. They do that, but not often. It’s a mistake to think that the only thing these intelligence operatives recruit for is employees. And the official U.S. government isn’t the only entity with intelligence services that recruit on American campuses.

  I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I was at that Pike rush party in September of 1985. I just thought that having cheap beer and a ratio of one man to every 3.5 women sounded like it could lead to a fun semester.

  I played basketball at the party—even with the cast on my hand—and I played well. After a few pickup games when I scored all of my team’s points, I noticed that several of the Pike actives were watching me intently.

  That weekend Paul invited me to another party. This one was off-campus, and at that party there was plenty of alcohol available. That’s when I got to meet several of the active leaders of the frat.

  A week later, I was lying on my bunk when a group of Pike ambassadors came to our dorm room. I assumed they were there to offer the automatic bid to my roommate Jeff.

  I was wrong.

  Jeff sat silently on his bunk and was totally ignored as Paul and his Pike brothers laid out for me the case for why I should join the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

  The fact that Pike brothers who’d already graduated and entered the workforce often offered jobs to fellow Pike brothers after college was nice, but that wasn’t why I finally accepted a bid.

  My motivation was the twenty-five-dollar dues that would provide me all the beer I could drink. The guy-to-girl ratio weighed a lot in my decision too. My recruitment motivation wasn’t a mystery at that time. Not to me or probably anyone else.

  In the end, I thought the fraternity sounded fun, so I joined up as a pledge.

  I started my pledgeship in October of 1985. I couldn’t know it at the time, but I was less than a year from finding myself in the middle of a real shooting battle and discovering all kinds of other interesting bits of information… like how cocaine was flooding into the country, and how a shadow government of intelligence operatives were financing an illegal war in Nicaragua.

  Chapter Four

  The FDN, The Nicaraguan Democratic Force—known euphemistically as the Contras—was a rebel army built by the CIA from several different resistance groups who were fighting against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

  It’s technically incorrect to say that the CIA created the Contras—although they were certainly involved. In reality, the shadow CIA—the Octopus—was really behind the birth of the Contra army.

  That’s how it works. The CIA has complete deniability, even though they certainly had field agents actively involved in Central America, even in helping to move pieces around the board. But it was the shadow CIA, the entity born from the Second Halloween Massacre, that really created the Contras. A junior officer from the Joint Chiefs of Staff may have been pulling strings, but the strings led to fronts and entities created and operated by those eight hundred plus agents that Stansfield Turner fired in 1979 just as the Sandinistas were taking over in Nicaragua.

  The companies, freelance agents, security professionals, and advisors that made up one little arm of the Octopus gave birth to the Contras.

  The Communist Sandinistas had overthrown the dictator Somoza in 1979 (right about the same time as the Second Halloween Massacre of that year), and because of the Sandinistas, the Octopus had lost their main base of operations in Central America. The Reagan administration, with all of the usual suspects running things—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld—had made regaining control of Nicaragua a priority for the administration.

  Unhappily for the people in power in the U.S., the congress at that time wasn’t playing ball. They were being difficult. The Boland Amendment (the name for several amendments and laws passed between 1982 and 1984) had made direct aid to the Contras illegal.

  Enter the Octopus.

  Former CIA officials who now were part of the Octopus worked with administration officials to find other, more creative, ways to fund the Contra army.

  The easiest and most lucrative way to raise money was, of course, in the drug trade. It didn’t hurt that the Sandinistas were also selling Nicaraguan cocaine in the U.S. Taking over that supply line would hurt the government of Daniel Ortega in their pocketbook, and the money raised by selling cocaine to the gangs in American inner cities (starting with South Central Los Angeles) could be used to finance the war against the Sandinistas.

  Win/Win.

  It became Win/Win/Win when you consider that control of Central and South American cocaine production and distribution would give the Octopus a toehold in every government and intelligence agency in the western hemisphere and would weaken heroin-based operations run by governments in the east. Win/Win/Win/Win.

  But to us, the people of the United States who hated communism and loved freedom, the Contras were “freedom fighters.” And I was just the kind of guy who wouldn’t mind fighting that kind of fight.

  * * *

  Paul and I became great friends. He was a Pike active, but he helped me a lot as I went through my pledge semester. He smoothed the way with other actives so I could get the sigs (signatures) I’d need to become an active after Hell Week at the end of the semester. And Paul and I partied a lot. Too much.

  It wasn’t all partying, though. We weren’t mindless degenerates. Paul and I talked a lot too. We talked politics, religion, and he even talked to me about Lillian and why her family had been forced to flee Nicaragua after the Sandinistas took power.

  One night, Paul and I were drunk, and we climbed out a window of the frat house and lay under the stars drinking a bottle of spiced rum. Paul told me about the history of Nicaragua, of the civil war raging there, and how Daniel Ortega, financed by Fidel Castro and the communists in the Soviet Union, was wrecking the country.

  Paul claimed that he was from Honduras, and that he was only politically interested in Nicaragua, but I would find out later that Paul was Nicaraguan too, and that his father had been an officer in Somoza’s National Guard.

  Paul admitted that Somoza had been a brutal dictator. He told me how the National Guard had stolen most of the donated materials that were sent to the country after the massive earthquake that nearly destroyed the country in 1972.

  I knew something about the earthquake, because it was in the aftermath of that disaster that one of my childhood heroes—Roberto Clemente, an outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates—was killed. Clemente had been delivering clothes and food to help the earthquake victims when his plane crashed.

  Paul admitted that Somoza was a dictator and an evil man, but he said that the Sandinistas were worse. He said that if Jimmy Carter had forced Somoza to resign in the late ’70s, the Sandinistas would have never taken power, and the more democratic forces in Nicaragua could have made the country a paradise.

  So we drank and talked politics, and we became close friends.

  I didn’t know I was being recruited to work with the Contras. I wouldn’t find that out until months later, in early 1986.

  * * *

  During Hell Week, Paul stayed with me most of the time. He didn’t have to. He was helping me out.

  Hell Week was a week in early January, during the holiday break, where the pledges were held without sleep or rest in the
frat house. We were brutally hazed, fed only trace amounts of food and water, and humiliated. I, for one, was “officially” given only about one hundred calories or less to eat or drink during that full week. Unofficially, Paul snuck me in a Snickers bar. It was my only meal during the whole ordeal.

  The purpose of Hell Week is to unite the pledge class, to weed out weaklings, and to mark our passage from pledges to actives. Every university and almost all fraternities have since outlawed hazing like I went through in January of 1986, but at the time, I understood the reason and purpose behind it. It was silly and stupid, but it was not far off from how the military trained and unified recruits in boot camp. A few months later, I was glad I’d gone through Hell Week. No matter how stupid it seems decades later, I probably stayed alive in the jungles of Nicaragua because of what happened that week.

  One weird thing did enter my thoughts during Hell Week. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but in my starved, thirsty, weakened, and sleep-deprived condition toward the end of that awful week, I finally put together something that I’d noticed the previous fall.

  I realized that Paul never went to class.

  I never saw Paul Alcalde (we pledges called him “the Mayor” as a nickname, because of his last name) going to or coming from any class. Ever. He got a 3.0 GPA that semester, but I can tell you that at any time of the day, on any day of the week that fall, I could find Paul Alcalde somewhere on campus, but never in a class. And he never cracked a book. How had I not noticed that before? And why was I realizing it then, as I lay cold and awake, on a tile floor with all the doors and windows open to the winter winds, while actives drummed on the floor with pool cues and sticks?

  * * *

  Suffice it to say that my grades that fall semester were abysmal. I went to class only slightly more often than Paul did. Even though I’d entered college on a scholarship, and by every measure I was an intelligent student, I garnered a whopping 0.7 GPA that semester. That’s right. I failed every class but Bowling.