I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  Along with the ammo, Geer and a former British paratrooper, whom he had hooked up with in Peshawar, brought out an NBC filter from the latest-model Russian BMP-2 armored personnel carrier. Western intelligence had also not seen this before. They turned the filter over to the American Consul in Peshawar who in turn forwarded it to the Foreign Science and Technology Center (FSTC), a secret agency of the army. This item did not get the public attention that the ammo did but was of value as it was suspected that it might contain residue from some type of Russian gas.

  The same day Geer arrived in the States, he and I flew to the east coast carrying the two precious rounds of ammunition and turned it over to the FSTC. The mission of this agency was to produce technical intelligence concerning the ground forces weapons and equipment of enemies and potential enemies of the United States. Bill Askins, at the time Director of Publications for the NRA, provided contact with the FSTC. Askins, a Vietnam vet, had flown choppers for the Marine Corps and had worked for the CIA for a number of years.

  Galen was in my office when I called the FSTC. I told the voice on the other end of the line that Geer had the ammo and some other stuff. The voice replied, “Don’t you know that is against the law?” I retorted, “What the devil are you going to do . . . put him in jail?”

  There was a silence and then he said, “No.”

  The FSTC representatives met us at the airport and immediately began their “smoke and mirrors” game. They put us in a small plane and flew us somewhere. Then they put us in a Mercedes and drove us around in circles, obviously not wanting us to know where we were going. They were playing spook to the hilt. We were not overly impressed with this amateurish game.

  Finally, they took us to a motel. I walked over to the window, pulled back the curtains, looked out and saw a sign with the name of the motel and the city. So much for our not knowing where these knuckleheads had brought us. For the next couple of days they brought in spooks and a bunch of other assholes and pumped us for all the information we could give them. Fed up with their bullshit, I packed up to leave but they wanted to screw around some more.

  They were trying to pump some more information but we had no more to give them. They were trying to determine if the Soviet forces were fighting the way they thought they were. They were dying of curiosity. At one point there were four people in the room during debriefing. They bought in maps and photographs of aircraft, vehicles and various weapons. They had a couple of maps of Afghanistan they had taped together. We spent hours going over the route Galen and his guides had walked, trying to get it all pieced together. I would say they covered between 150 and 200 miles. And I was starting to get cabin fever.

  I’d had it. “I’ll fix those assholes.” On the third morning, when they came into the motel, I was sitting in a chair, stark naked, smoking a cigarette (even though I didn’t smoke I figured it would add to the intrigue), waiting for them. After about half an hour in which Galen and I were trying to stifle our laughter, getting great pleasure out of watching them squirm and stare at the walls and ceiling while I sat there buck naked, they picked up their maps and said, “Well, I guess we’ve got all we can use for now.” I stood up, still stark naked and said, “Well, when can we leave?” We were gone before noon. However, that was not the end of it.

  Later in the summer, I called Geer and told him to come to Boulder; that I had some CIA guys that I wanted to talk to him. He showed up, but the bean-counting spooks were “financial experts.” They weren’t interested in operations. All they wanted to know about was the currency that was being used in Afghanistan because they were getting ready to dump, I guess, some counterfeit money in the country. We went to our after-hours office, the Hungry Farmer, for lunch. During the very long conversation one of the two identified himself with some sort of law enforcement credentials.

  They told us that the Russians were pretty pissed off about Geer’s visit and they advised Geer to stay in the U.S. and not go anywhere. They wanted to know what coinage was used, gold or silver, Pakistani rupees, etc. They asked quite a few questions, then left and I never heard from them again.

  The NRA arranged for the bullet to be tested on the Aberdeen proving grounds. They paid Geer’s expenses and put him up in a hotel across from their headquarters. Galen was dealing with Bill Askins, the former CIA agent, and they built a barrel to test the ammo. Where they got the specs to build the barrel we never found out, but they published the story.

  I RETURN TO FSTC AND RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS

  I returned to the Foreign Science and Technology Center later that summer, before leading a team of SOF advisors to Pakistan in September of 1980, to discuss what specific items of Russian equipment the FSTC might be seeking. I met with Rodney Van Ausdall, who was in charge of the equipment procurement. He penciled out a list of items and what the Army would pay for each. A container of nerve gas would be worth $250,000; $125,000 for a container of incapacitating gas; $65,000 for an AGS-17 grenade launcher and so on.

  “Also, we want another 10,000 rounds of the AK-74 ammo. We’ll pay $1.00 per round,” Van Ausdall said. I took the list with me, but in London I got concerned that if the list was found in my possession, it could cause me serious problems. I mailed it back to my SOF office, but it never arrived. Whether it was intercepted by some government agency or went astray because of a postal mess up, I do not know.

  Running around Pakistan with a suitcase full of greenbacks also did not seem wise and I didn’t have tens of thousands in any case. So I asked Van Ausdall, “Look, will you pay me in cash or gold for each item as I turn it in? That way, I can pay for a desired item with funds from a previous sale.”

  Van Ausdall, paused and replied, “We can do that, but make sure you check in with the Defense Attache’s Office [DAO] in the American Embassy to let them know you have arrived.”

  “Furthermore,” he continued, “under no circumstances have any dealings with the State Department, as those weenies tried to take credit for obtaining the NBC filter that Geer brought out of Afghanistan.” “I have no problem with that,” I responded. Or, that’s what I thought at the time.

  19

  SOF GOES TO PAKISTAN . . .

  In 1980, the Russo-Afghan war was getting hot. So I selected a team to accompany me on an SOF mission both to aid the Afghans and obtain whatever Russian armament we could locate. Big John Donovan, with his shaved head, ham-like hands with knuckles heavily calloused from breaking bricks and board, was to be our demo man. Five foot nine and all muscle but with a brain, Big John was an explosives expert who had his own demolition company in Danvers, Illinois. I had first met him in 1973 at a Special Forces Reserve summer training camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas. Donavan was the type that you would want with you if you wanted to get mouthy in a biker bar with no windows.

  Dr. John Peters, an adventurer in his own right, who I had met while leading a 10-man team of paramedics after the devastating Peruvian earthquake in 1970, was hefty, grey-haired and the most unflappable of the team, as well as being an extremely competent general practitioner.

  Peter Kokalis, SOF’s small arms editor, was slim, balding with a mustache and a mercurial temperament, but with a fine sense of humor. We didn’t consider him crazy although he had watched the “Wild Bunch” 247 times and could quote all of the dialog by heart.

  Mike Pate, Army vet, was also a weapons and ordnance expert. We landed at the international airport in Kirachi, and “What are we doing here?” we all said almost simultaneously. As we packed our luggage into a beat-up taxi we were inundated by swarms of hustlers with hands out and their BO up. We chugged in two separate cabs to the Midnight Hotel where Geer had stayed earlier in the year because it was cheap. And I mean cheap! Pothole size fissures in the raggedy ass carpet foreshadowed unknown types of insects walking through the filth in our rooms. A blind man with no taste must have done the interior decorating.

  We had become paranoid and decided we would check in as two separate groups and pretend to be strangers. Our par
anoia level began to spike when Donovan got pulled into the Pakistani immigration office and was intensively questioned as to what he was up to. With his big frame and bad biker look, they had a hard time buying his “journalistic” cover. He had an “Omega News Service” press card, which came hot off the presses shortly before we left, but they blew it off. (We all had the same cards in our individual names. Good thing the same customs agent didn’t interrogate us all, or our “not knowing each other” ploy would have put the au-thorities on high alert or put us on a plane right back to where we came from.) They didn’t believe Donovan was a journalist any more than they would believe that I was Mother Teresa.

  We straggled into the grimy, rundown hotel, dodging the potholes in the worn carpet. As we walked up to registration, I looked back at Donovan as if I had never met him before and exclaimed, “Hey, you look like an American!”

  He played along, and replied in his gruff voice, “Well, by golly, I’m just a farmer from Danvers, Illinois.”

  I don’t know how this played with the hotel staff, but I doubted if they gave a shit. We caused a minor ruckus when we insisted they open up the “dining room” so we could load up on soft drinks.

  “Open the dining room or we’ll break the doors down,” Big John said after the staff ignored our requests. No wonder they hesitated. As we walked in to the food hall, a good portion of the hotel staff scurried off the dining room tables they had been sleeping on.

  Our first battle was against a new variety of mutant cockroaches, as big as small rats, that fought us for our beds, and the air conditioners that failed to condition because of two-inch gaps between the window frames.

  The next day we moved to the Holiday Inn, which had everything the Midnight Hotel did not have, although it boasted even bigger cockroaches. I taxied over to the U.S. Embassy and the DAO’s office where I met a young Army Lt. Colonel. Unfortunately, I do not remember his name as I would like to have been able to make him asshole-famous.

  “The FSTC told me to check in with you,” I told him.

  “I’ll have to contact the DIA first,” he said. And so the 40-second in-terview ended.

  “Whatever,” I shrugged, and headed back to the Holiday Inn.

  The next day the same Lieutenant Colonel Nincompoop showed up to officially tell me, in an authoritatively staccato voice, “We will not pay you in cash, and any payment we do make will be made in the United States. Furthermore, I have been instructed to tell you that you should not go into Afghanistan, as neither the American ambassador in Afghanistan nor the one in Pakistan will help you.”

  I then asked him, “What’s the security like on the road between Islamabad and Peshawar?”

  “The road is secure. There are no checkpoints, no roadblocks, no problems.” I flew to Peshawar where the SOF team was training Afghans and looking for items on FSTC’s “want” list in their spare time. As I mentioned, Van Ausdall had offered to pay a dollar a round for 10,000 rounds of ammo. Days turned into weeks and we were finding zip.

  Then two days before our tour in masochism was up our luck changed. We split up. Pate and Donovan hired a taxi and drove for the third time up to the “there are no rules and even less law” town of Darra, which was under tribal control and where you could buy any type of weapon short of a nuclear device, as well as hashish and French pastries. Doc and I headed up to a refugee camp that was off limits. We were going on the presumption that if it was “off limits” it must have something that would interest us.

  Unfortunately, the Pakistani military didn’t see it that way, nor did the province governor who graciously gave us an impromptu tour of the local jail. Doc and I decided they were right; that there probably wasn’t anything of interest there.

  So we headed back to our ½-star hotel, the Peshawar Intercontinental, where every day you could find something new on the menu that you would never order again. John Donovan, who had been instructing the Mujahideen how to fuse and emplace anti-tank mines, and Mike Pate, our other ordnance expert, once again roamed the gun stores in Darra looking for a large quantity of AR-74 ammo. They finally were able to buy 5,000 rounds at 70 cents a round. An outrageous price, but it was a seller’s market.

  Donovan also made his bones, or shall we say additional bones, when while instructing the Mujahideen in the use of mines and explosives, he had an exchange with one of their commanders: “Ah, Sahib Donovan. We have problem with anti-tank mines. We put in front of tank. Tank goes over. No Boom. Bad. Bad!” Donovan raised his eyebrows and said, “Show me precisely what you do.”

  When the Mujahideen showed him, Donovan, rolling his eyes back in his head, said, “Well, you need to put the fuses in the anti-tank mines or they no go boom!” How many Russian tanks were subsequently destroyed because of SOF will never be known.

  Donovan and Pate smuggled the ammo from Dara past half-a-dozen Pakistani Army checkpoints between Darra and our hotel risking serious jail time and then took off for the States. When Doc Peters and I returned to the hotel, we found the 5,000 rounds stuffed in two backpacks lying on our beds.

  The two of us were scheduled to leave shortly, so instead of driving the three-and-a-half hours to Islamabad, we decided to unload our contraband on the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, even though our orders had been to have no contact with the State Department. I kicked this around with Doc Peters and said, “Let’s dump it at the consulate. FSTC told us not to have anything to do with State, but I mean, we’re all supposed to be on the same team, right?” He chuckled and agreed.

  I called the consulate where, again posing as journalists, we had been given the standard dog and pony show briefing upon our arrival in Peshawar and told the consul, a Mr. Archard: “We have some items we think you would be interested in. Can we drop them off tonight?”

  “No problem,” he replied.

  But there was a problem. Now it was “James Bond” time as while the ammo may have been worth $5,000 to the U.S. government, it would be worth five to ten in a medieval Paki jail to us if we were caught with it. Like in a bad spy movie, we switched taxis several times, constantly checking our tail.

  My anxiety roller-coasted as the driver with the only two English phrases he knew, “No problem” and “I understand,” took us past what seemed to be every military post and police station he could find on our way to the consulate. (I later found out that in Pakistan, where English is the second language, that in fact “No problem” and “I understand,” translated to “There is a problem but I do not understand.”)

  After finally turning the rounds over to the head of the consulate, Mr. Archard, I breathed a sigh of relief and we returned to our hotel. We figured it was a case of “Mission Accomplished.” Or so we thought.

  At 0730 hours the next morning, the phone rang:

  “Mr. Brown?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Mr. Archard. I am calling from the consulate. My superior in Islamabad has informed me that we cannot accept the goods you delivered last night. You will have to come back and pick them up.”

  I was shocked; shocked, I say, and then started to morph into a state of white-hot rage. How could these State Department wusses totally disregard material that had a direct bearing on our national defense? Had they gotten their sniveling noses out of joint over the hassle they had with who got credit for the NBC filter that Geer had brought out of Afghanistan? I was sorely tempted to tell the gutless State Department puke to take the 5,000 rounds of ammo and insert them into the body orifice of his choosing. But if I did that, I’d be kissing off the $3,500 that SOF had paid for the ammo and would deny the U.S. Army the opportunity to use it for further testing.

  “Ah, what the hell,” I told Doc, “let’s throw the dice. We will hire a taxi and take it to Islamabad and the American embassy. That Lieutenant Colonel said the Peshawar-Islamabad road was clear.” Doc slid into one of his enigmatic smiles, chuckling, “Why not? We haven’t had a hell of a lot of adventure so far.”

  I hired some local guy with a run-down,
clunky, dirt-stained black Mercedes and headed south after throwing the ammo-laden back packs in his trunk. My anxiety level started creeping up again as our driver had to stop to get some type of dismal food; then had to fill up his gas tank (at our expense, of course); then had to stop and pick up a soft drink (which we paid for) and then had to stop and check his oil.

  To add more acid to my rumbling stomach, I remembered that Geer had told me that all Pakistani taxi drivers were police informants. So what would I do if I saw this bad-breathed dude in his soiled, droopy drawers mosey over to a pay phone and start babbling? And to whom might he be talking? How would I tell? Should I cold-cock him on a gut feeling or go quietly to jail? Well, fortunately for him and me I did not have to make that decision as he made no phone call.

  After all his ass scratching and dicking around we were finally on the road to Islamabad. A beautiful sunny day was made even better by the fact that we were soon to leave the land of no booze, droopy drawers, gut-wrenching food and customs that I had little tolerance for then and now. I relaxed in the cracked leather seats until I saw another checkpoint. Leaning forward, I said, “Driver, what’s that up ahead there about 200 meters?”

  “Ah, sahib, no problem, is only army roadblock checking for guns and drugs going to Islamabad.” I came out of my seat like a shot. Guns and drugs to Islamabad my ass! It’s Brown and Peters to a cold, dark dungeon in a Pakistani slammer.

  Of course, our faithful driver might have been a lot less faithful if he knew what he was transporting in the trunk of his wretched Mercedes. I muttered, “Doc, we’re sure as hell going down.”

  Doc, who I had never seen ruffled, didn’t break character. He just smiled and said, “RK, relax. We either make it or we don’t. Heck with these Bozos.”