I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  Holy shit!

  “Look my friend,” I said, “I think we all can make some money. I can get in touch with some Cuban revolutionaries who undoubtedly are in the market for firepower. Let me take the Sten gun back to Chicago and show it to them to prove my credibility.” He bought the pitch and I walked out of his apartment with an unregistered fully automatic weapon, which could have bought me some serious time in a Federal slammer had I been caught with it. It wouldn’t be the first time I stepped outside the law while supporting causes I believed in.

  I waited for spring vacation in 1958 and eagerly headed back to the Windy City with the Sten. In one of my many reckless moments, I walked into the offices of one of the revolutionaries’ supporters, who, when he wasn’t dallying with the revolution, ran a translating service. On seeing the Sten, he became ecstatic, practically jumping up and down.

  “You got cash?” I asked him

  “No cash, but I will get it.”

  “I get the money, you get the gun,” I told him.

  His promises of obtaining funds never materialized. So I headed back to Boulder with the Sten gun in my trunk. Along the way, I picked up a young hitchhiker by the name of Tony, who had been working in a carnival and gave the impression of being on the lam from someone or something. Tooling along over patches of black ice from a preceding night’s storm outside of Burlington, Colorado, I lost control of my red and white ‘ 55 Chevy and started sliding sideways up a small hill. In the other lane, coming down the hill, was a ton and a half Chevy pickup. He hit me broadside and, with no seat belts in those days, I was thrown out the door. For a couple of minutes, I verged on panic as I could not see and thought I was blind. I blinked rapidly to get the blood out of my eyes and could finally see.

  My next thought was, “Holy shit! If the county sheriff shows up and finds that damn Sten in my car, I will become Brown, the felon rather than Brown the budding revolutionary.”

  “You talk to the pickup truck driver,” I told Tony.

  I moseyed around behind my now very sick Chevy, opened the trunk and secured the Sten under the spare tire. Not to worry, as the Sheriff, when he arrived, could have given a hoot about what was in my trunk.

  After this episode, I kept the Sten hidden under a bale of hay at the ranch I was living in with other vets. Some of my buddies and I decided to wake up the student body, which was totally apathetic to the dire political situation in Cuba, by launching an anti-Batista, pro-Castro movement. We didn’t have a clue who Batista or Castro were, but that was beside the point. At that time, Castro had not shown his true colors and would not until he was well on his way to consolidating power in early 1960. Most of the U.S. media reports, including flattering pieces authored by Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Andrew St. George in the now-defunct magazine Coronet, hailed Castro as a good-guy type Social Democrat who just wanted to overthrow strongman Batista. I was bamboozled, as were most Americans and Cubans.

  I was going to help Castro overthrow the Latin dictator.

  I FORM A BOULDER BRANCH OF THE 26TH OF JULY MOVEMENT

  Cuba had a violent history, made stormier by the homicidal Batista. In 1933, Batista had launched the Revolt of the Sergeants, a coup that succeeded in overthrowing the Gerardo Machado government. Batista was the Army Chief of Staff and controlled the resource-rich island. He was elected president in 1940 until 1944. He came to the United States for eight years but went back to Cuba and staged another coup that put him in power until 1959. Basically a murderous thug, he was in bed with the Mafia and big business in the United States. As the U.S. tends to do, it supported the dictator who was impoverishing his country and lining U.S. business pockets. The excuse was that he held Communism at bay. U.S. opinion was souring against him when reports confirmed that he was openly torturing and slaughtering his opposition, including protesting students.

  In comes the charismatic Fidel Castro, an attorney and the illegitimate son of a wealthy man. He attempted a failed revolution in 1953. In exile, he began building support as an anti-imperialistic savior of the common folks. Castro’s July 26 Movement built up momentum and popular support.

  By 1956 he convinced a left-wing Spanish loyalist who had fled Franco’s victorious fascists, Colonel Alberto Bayo, to train an invasion force in Mexico. The United States, which had been supplying arms to Batista to fight the insurgency, cut off support for the now unpopular despot.

  After six months of intensive training under an ex-Spanish Lpyalist officer who had fled Franco at the end of the civil war. Col. Bayo, Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and 80 other revolutionaries landed on the Cuban coast on 6 Dec. 1956. Ambushed by Batista’s troops, only i2 escaped to the Sierra Maestra Mountains where they launched their ulti-mately successful guerilla war. In 1958 Batista fled to the Dominican Republic with planeloads of riches. Castro and his revolutionaries moved in and took power. The rest is history.

  A few other rebel classmates and I formed an ad hoc organization and named it after Castro’s 26th of July Movement. We publicized an organizational meeting inviting anyone interested. A group of brilliant social misfits, members of the only liberal group on campus, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), joined us. Like skilled, power hungry politicians, we preordained who was going to run the outfit with a devious plot.

  “We will nominate each other with short, bullshit speeches and then push the nominations through with a quick vote,” I said. Castro would have been proud! Of course, so would Lenin and Hitler.

  We raised funds for our cause by placing a World War II 20mm Lalhti anti-tank gun out on the university lawn with a ballot box. The sign read, “Vote with ballots, not bullets.” Try exercising that level of free speech today!

  One morning, the students and professors flowed onto campus to see the “Viva Castro!” signs we sloshed on the roof of the Chemistry building that was under construction. We picketed Arthur Larson, one of Eisenhower’s advisors, who came to the campus for some function protesting the Eisenhower administration’s continuing military aid to Batista.

  The next step was to go to Cuba and meet Castro, the Man. I had wrangled my way into the offices of a prominent Chicago attorney, Con-stantine Kangles, a very influential mover in Chicago politics who was serving as Castro’s legal consul in the United States. I showed him a letter of introduction from the two limp dick Castro supporters who I had shown the Sten gun to.

  “My God,” he said, eyes bulging, “if you show this to Castro’s people you’ll be shot! They’re with the wrong group!” This should have been a warning that there was a hell of a lot about revolutionary politics I did not know. However, I was not to be swayed from my mission. I contacted an old Army CIC buddy who I served with in Milwaukee, Pete Jasin, and recruited him. “Pete, old buddy, how about some adventure? Let’s go see Castro.” I bamboozled the University student paper, the Colorado Daily into issuing press credentials for me by promising them an exclusive scoop. They bought it.

  I BECOME A FOREIGN PARTICIPATORY CORRESPONDENT

  “Let’s do it,” Pete replied. I was working for a roofing company pouring gypsum roofs for bowling alleys, super markets, etc., and decided to save up for the trip and head south in August 1958. I met up with Pete in Chicago and we drove to Miami where we contacted the Miami branch of the 26th of July Movement. The lawyer, Kangles, had given us the address and a letter of introduction. The office was located on the fourth floor of a semi-respectable office building in downtown Miami. We met with whomever, telling them, “We want to link up with Castro,” as we showed our press credentials and the letter of introduction. We got an initial run-around as the no-name we talked with said we would have to be checked out. That sounded reasonable, though we didn’t know why they would have to check out journalists or how they were going to do it.

  We left the office and decided to take the stairs instead of the elevators. “Wonder if the FBI is on our trail,” we mused as we descended. We’d had some dealings with the “Eye” when we were in the CIC
and were not overly impressed. As we got to where we could see the lobby, yup, there were two dudes in coats and ties and straw hats—in the stifling Miami August heat!

  Pete and I smiled at each other.” Let’s walk past them and let them chase us,” I whispered. After we bolted, they finally figured out that we were their targets; that we had come down the stairs instead of the elevator.

  “Hey. Hey, you two. Wait up,” one of the suits yelled. We turned and waited till they huffed and puffed up. They flashed their credentials. “Come to our office.” We shrugged. Why not? At the office, they informed us sternly, “Ok boys, we have an agent report that stated Brown was in the process of recruiting a band of college students to invade Cuba.”

  Ah, a taste of fame. We laughed. No doubt that concept had been bandied about at one or more of our Cuban rum and fun parties with the YPSLs out at the ranch where I was living while in grad school.

  The Feds interviewed us separately.

  “We know stuff about Castro you don’t know,” one of them said in a hushed tone. But in typical FBI fashion, refused to get specific.

  “You better not go, but if you insist on doing so, you better contact the FBI agent in the American Embassy in Havana who is operating under the cover of the embassy’s Legal Consul.”

  How could we resist such a clandestine invitation to a Revolution? We flew into Havana and went directly to the American Embassy and contacted the FBI guy.

  “Any idea where we could get a decent but cheap hotel?” we said. He was taken aback, but recommended one. We said our thanks and promptly left, leaving him somewhat perplexed. We asked a lot of questions of anyone who spoke English and found our way to the anti-Batista underground, which was giving us the necessary underground contacts. We hung around Havana, interviewing a few locals including the Bureau Chief of the Havana AP. After our funds started running out, we decided we’d best head back to Miami to somehow replenish our funds and then return to Cuba. Pete and I were unfamiliar with the Cuban culture and did not understand the “manana syndrome.” Being a private revolutionary was becoming quite expensive. We had been told that the overthrow of Batista was not imminent, so we figured we had some time.

  BATISTA FALLS WITHOUT ME

  On New Year’s Day, 1959, Batista and his thugs saw the writing on the wall and fled to the Dominican Republic, at that time ruled by fellow dictator Rafael Trujillo. I decided to head back to Havana and see what was happening, as well as to see if I could come up with a unique subject for my Master’s thesis in Political Science at the University of Colorado. I arrived in Havana and wrangled a few free nights at the Havana Hilton, which is all my revolutionary contacts figured my services to the revolution were worth. I moved into a small $25 a week pensione and started hanging out at the Havana bureau of the Associated Press. I had met some of the AP reporters on my previous trip and the bureau was the hotspot for journalists. I picked up a few freelance assignments—$5 here, $10 there— which supplemented my meager budget. I wrangled introductions to the revolutionary community through a number of pro-Castro Cubans I’d worked with in the United States.

  After Castro took over, Havana was flooded with real or would-be revolutionaries from a dozen Latin American countries, all of whom fantasized about emulating Castro’s success in their native lands. Cuba was the exotic Land of Plots, the stomping ground for Latin Revolutionaries lusting for power, where the hypnotic, hot, rum-sodden air of intrigue intoxicated the masses. Plots were hatched, meetings were held, and proclamations were issued.

  Once Castro showed his true colors, which was soon after taking power, I became an active anti-Castro advocate.

  A REVOLUTION I MISSED

  I was invited to join an invasion of Nicaragua, but passed it up. The poor schmucks who invaded Nicaragua ended up being lucky compared to some other dead revolutionaries. The Nicaraguan fiasco paled compared to another invitation I had to an expedition that was kicked off to overthrow the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic, General Raphael Trujillo. Trujillo’s henchmen surrounded the invasion party and greeted them with a bullet in the back of the head. It didn’t take a great deal of insight to foresee that these misguided idealists plotting to invade were doomed to failure from the beginning. So they met their executioners without me. One of the freelance assignments that I picked up was to interview now “General” Alberto Bayo, a refugee Spanish loyalist who had fled Franco toward the end of the Spanish civil war. Bayo, along with some of his fellow loyalists, had held a press conference where he boldly proclaimed that they were going to invade Spain and overthrow General Franco. That, coupled with a few not very big bomb explosions in Madrid, prompted the AP bureau chief, Paul Sanders, to say, “Brown, go interview this turkey and see what he’s been drinking.” I did and the story ran worldwide with my byline, and I was flying high. My name was now on the list of international correspondents. The price of such fame turned out to be high later on when the military updated my top-secret security clearance before I went to Nam.

  THE MYSTERIOUS MAN BEHIND THE REVOLUTIONARIES

  I figured that a story about the fascinating Bayo was worth more ink than the first 750 words printed, so I went back and conducted further interviews. It was time for “the man behind the revolutionaries” to receive some deserved credit for training the two Castro’s, Fidel and Raul, as well as Che Guevara and some 80 others, in the rudiments of guerrilla warfare for six months at a secret site 40 miles outside of Mexico City. This was truly a benchmark in the history of wild-eyed revolutions. The members of this core group, in contrast to other revolutionaries who ended up in catastrophic fiascos fueled by rum, fantasies and ignorance, were well prepared.

  The prep time didn’t do most of Castro’s group much good, but had it not been for Bayo’s training, the survivors, including the Castro brothers, would be merely a footnote in the history of failed revolutions.

  General Bayo was shrouded with mystery. The burly man with grey, wavy hair was the first pilot in the fledgling Spanish Air Force in 1911. He flew combat ops against the Moors in Morocco in the early ‘20s, fought the last legal sword duel in Spain in 1922, and was an accomplished poet. He was also like a grinding burr under the saddle of the Spanish monarchy with his liberal diatribes. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, he threw in his lot with the Loyalists and repeatedly tried to get the government to embrace the concept of guerrilla warfare, to no avail. After losing an eye during a Franco bombing raid, he fled to Central America, where he became involved in a couple of unsuccessful efforts to overthrow the dictators of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

  When Fidel approached him for assistance in overthrowing Batista, he blew him off since he was fed up with the incompetence and lack of realism of the previous would-be revolutionaries he’d worked with. Castro kept pestering him and finally Bayo said, “Come back with $20,000 and I will work with you.” Bayo didn’t expect to see him again, but Castro returned a few weeks later with the money. Bayo leased a large ranch, under the guise of raising cattle, and started his training. Six months later, Castro and his band boarded a decrepit yacht, the Granma, and sailed on to infamy.

  BAYO INADVERTENTLY SETS OFF MY PUBLISHING CAREER

  Little did Bayo imagine that he was to help shape the bizarre twist my career was about to take. One time when I was interviewing him, he showed me a book on guerrilla warfare that he had authored and used as an instruction manual for training Castro. This book, “150 Questions for a Guerilla,” was going to be of great value, I just knew it. I didn’t have a clue what it was at the time, but I soon saw the light. My mission became to translate this manual that revealed the techniques—primitive though they may have been—that helped Castro seize power, so it could be available to military buffs and those interested in unconventional and guerrilla warfare. I looked for a publisher. But first I needed a translator.

  I fell in with a Cuban exile, Hugo Hartenstein, a Spanish instructor at the University of Colorado. With the slim build of a sprinter,
raven black hair and blue eyes, Hugo had graduated from Dartmouth where he set the record for the quarter-mile in track and later ran track in a tour in the Army. Hugo was as violently anti-Castro as I had become and, in his spare time, completed the translation. I couldn’t find a publisher, so I convinced an old hunting/shooting buddy and former naval officer who was also working on a graduate degree, Bill Jones, to cough up $800 to publish 1,000 copies of a paperback version of the manual. I authored the introduction.

  So we published the first book from our new basement office firm, Panther Publications. It evolved, in 1970, into Paladin Press, which is still operating in Boulder.

  I was fortunate that I did not make it up to the Sierra Maestra with the Castros. Even then I knew I would not have been satisfied playing a pencil-pushing war correspondent. I would have picked up a rifle, joined the revolutionaries, and been forever branded as a communist sympathizer, just like those idealists had who joined the International Brigade in the fight against the Fascist Franco.

  The trip to Cuba may have been a financial disaster, but I had picked up Bayo’s manual on guerilla warfare that was to change my life and launch my career as a publisher. I had met and worked with some of the finest professional journalists the AP had. I had managed to kiss off a couple of opportunities to get my ass shot off with some incompetent revolutionaries, and the girls were pretty, so what the hell.

  JOURNALISM CAN KILL

  I returned to Boulder where I played hit and miss with my schooling and socked away some money working odd jobs so I could return to Cuba the following year. In Boulder, I knocked out a couple of articles, one of which had a healthy dose of “unintended consequences.” One of the articles I had published in Guns magazine dealt with the various types of homemade guns the Cuban revolutionaries used in their fight against Batista. I profiled a certain Regino Camacho who was in charge of building a small arms factory for Castro in Havana. I wrote, “The first openly Communist-controlled arms factory in the hemisphere is to be located in a tightly guarded concrete building outside Havana’s machine gun-ringed army headquarters, Ciudad Libertad, formerly Camp Columbia. Called Industrias Mil-itares, it was begun early in 1959 by one Major Regino Camacho . . . a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the Caribbean Legion, and the Second Front of the Escambray. Camacho is a long-time associate of the famed Col. Alberto Bayo . . .” I had met Camacho through Bayo, gotten a bit of his background, his plans and a few photos. How could I have known that that article would lead to his assassination? Yes, journalism can kill.