I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  While Coard waited in the Marine compound at Queen’s Park to be heli-lifted to the USS Guam, a hostile crowd of Grenadians gathered to mock him, chanting, “C is for Coard, Cuba and Communism!”

  Austin was captured in a similar fashion the next afternoon. Locals tipped off the 82nd Airborne that he was hiding in a house at Westerhall on the east side of the island.

  A quick trip was made to Fort Rupert by SOF managing editor Jim Graves, Washington Times reporter Jay Mallin and Lionel “Choo Choo” Pinn, an Osage Indian who was a veteran of WWI, Korea and SOG operations in Vietnam. They revealed that no one was guarding the NJM Central Committee headquarters, the Deputy Minister of Defense’s office or the equipment stores at Fort Rupert. Pinn was going to help us crack the Prime Minster’s safe, but as the door was sprung, the money was burnt. We searched all three locations. We found a collection of new Soviet helmets, canteens, mess kits, packs, AK-47 bayonets, military manuals and the NJM flag that had flown over the fort, which we auctioned off at the 1983 SOF convention in Vegas. Proceeds went to SOF’s Refugee Relief In-ternational charity. We picked through the papers scattered around the office of Lieutenant Colonel Ewart Layne, Grenada’s deputy minister of defense. We also located documents in Fort Frederick and Butler House, the prime minister’s office.

  We discovered documents and other physical evidence that had been overlooked by whatever intelligence entity got to them before we did:

  Cuba and the USSR were turning Grenada into a strategic military base;

  As in Nicaragua, more weapons than Grenada could ever use had been shipped to the island;

  Bishop was killed because of a power grab by Coard and because he was not as pro-Cuban as other Central Committee members thought he should have been;

  The NJM was losing control of the country because of its excessive pro-Cuban and pro-communist attitude; and

  Some well-known Americans had highly questionable dealings with the NJM.

  Highlights from the documents we recovered included the following:

  A USSR-Grenada treaty and three shipping manifests show that the Soviets were pouring in more arms than was reasonable for Grenada’s 1,200-man PRA. Based on the shipping manifests and examination of the arms recovered in the five major warehouses at Frequente, it appears that Russia and North Korea had shipped in enough arms to equip a division. All shipments from the Soviets and their satellites were via Cuba. Interestingly, even though there were vast quantities of military supplies in stock, the documents recorded frequent incidents of Grenadian junior officers complaining of lack of equipment for their men. It is entirely possible that Grenada served as a warehouse for arms intended for use elsewhere. (Other East Caribbean nations, including Dominica, Jamaica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent feared they might be used to aid leftist guerrillas on their islands.)

  A counter-intelligence report indicated that President Reagan’s assertion that the American students at St. Georges Medical School were endangered was well grounded. The report described one school employee’s husband, who was being “monitored” as “suspicious,” and five students who were considered “dangerous and posing as medical students, but really working for the U.S. government.”

  A number of documents revealed that Grenada had sent military students to Russia, Cuba and Vietnam. A note in one document indicated that the students in Cuba “will undergo courses for a one-year period studying up to the level of Division and possibly Army.” Why Grenada would need division and army commanders is interesting in its implications. Another document revealed Grenada had plans to send 40 comrades to Vietnam for training and that Russia would pick up the transportation costs.

  A series of reports on the combat readiness of the militia in August and September reveals why the PRA folded up so quickly when U.S. troops arrived. The 5,000-man Grenadian militia was intended as the backup to the 1,200-man army. According to the reports, turnout for drill averaged 15 percent, and transportation problems, faulty weapons and a lack of leadership turned most of the drills into political discussions or football games.

  SOF found one document outlining a proposed training program between Nicaragua and Grenada. The NJM was offering to train 15 Sandinistas in Grenada in basic English with a concentration on military terminology and the military phonetic alphabet.

  One letter addressed to the General of the Cuban Army, Raul Castro (Fidel’s brother), from Maurice Bishop indicated that the Soviet Union’s traditional equipment and resupply weaknesses continued. Bishop asked for Castro’s help because the USSR had sent a complete shipment of uniforms and other gear; however, “a vast quan-tity of boots are much too small in size.” Secondly, Bishop needed help securing spare parts and tires since 23 of Grenada’s 27 trucks and eight of ten jeeps were inoperable.

  One of the most interesting documents we found was a report from a double agent named “Mark” who was attempting to infiltrate a counter-revolutionary group of Grenadians on Barbados. In it, “Mark” and a counterintelligence officer surmised that the Grenadian exile counter-revolutionary group on Barbados was working on behalf of the CIA, which was trying to determine the size and strength of the PRA and the militia. However, the kicker was the comment that the Barbados-based counterrevolutionaries had learned “that the PRG [People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada] was paying someone at the Harvard University Radio Station.”

  I won’t bore you with the other mass of documents we found. As soon as I returned to Boulder, I called Dick Duncan who at that time was the Assistant Managing Editor for Time Magazine. I described what we had discovered. He was excited and flew out a photographer and reporter to evaluate the documents the next day. They perused through the whole pile.

  When a November 1983 issue of Time hit the stands, it carried an article titled “A Treasure Trove of Documents: Captured Papers Provide Insights into a Reclining Regime.” It read:

  “Additional documents were shown to Time by Soldier of Fortune, a Boulder, Colorado monthly magazine that specializes in military weapons and tactics; it said the papers had been overlooked by U.S. forces. The documents indicate that Grenada also had military agreements with Vietnam, Nicaragua and at least one Soviet bloc country. A top secret paper dated 18 May 1982, records a shipment of ammunition and explosives from Czechoslovakia via Cuba. One document, signed last November by Nicaragua’s Vice Minister of Defense, provides for the establishment of a course in Grenada to teach English-language military terminology to members of the Nicaraguan Army.”

  We didn’t find a war, but we did find highly valuable intelligence. Either the CIA or Army Intelligence had done a shitty job of retrieving critical documents.

  23

  A GAME OF “DOMINOS” IN EL SALVADOR

  U.S. and SOF participation in the El Salvador guerrilla war was riding on the wave of fear that a “domino” effect would come into play if El Salvador, sandwiched between Guatemala and Honduras, fell to a communist guerrilla movement. Nicaragua had fallen to the leftist Sandinistas, who in turn supported the FMLN in El Salvador. Alarms were being sounded that El Salvador would go next. Honduras was seeing communist guerrilla intrusions and there was an insurgent movement in Guatemala. Mexico was wobbly and could easily fall if bordered by left-wing governments. Then, of course, the Soviet Union would be at our back door.

  The 12-year civil war in El Salvador was a culmination of five decades of violence riddled with coups and revolutions and government-backed death squads that wreaked terror against their opponents.

  In 1931, Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez became ruler after a successful coup. The government’s oppression of citizens during his 13-year rule was highlighted by the massacre of peasants (La Matanza) who joined a resistance led by Communist Party chief Farabundo Marti. 30,000 were killed during the civil war between Marti’s band and Martinez’s military government.

  Oligarchic military dictatorships continued to rule in the coffee-rich country until 1979, when a Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG) of military officia
ls and civilian political figures overthrew the military dictator General Humberto Romero, head of the conservative Party of National Conciliation.

  The U.S. administration of President Carter backed José Napoleon Duarte Fuentes, the exiled conservative political leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Duarte returned in 1980 to El Salvador to head the military regime, which by then was facing a full-blown leftist insurgency. The United States authorized the largest economic aid package ever granted to a Latin country. Throughout the war, the U.S. poured nearly $5 billion of economic aid into the country and over $ 1 billion in military aid. The Salvadoran Air Force was the number one recipient.

  Catholic Archbishop Romero had become the most outspoken opponent of the government, which continued to deploy “death squads” to assassinate political opponents. Thousands were executed. He urged the soldiers in the strongly Catholic country to defy the orders of the political elite and he objected to U.S. military aid to the corrupt government. Catholic leaders in Latin America have traditionally wielded enormous influence.

  In 1980, a brutal bloodbath of a civil war erupted in the tiny, densely populated Republic of El Salvador. One hundred thousand lost their lives in the maelstrom before a truce was called. The war was triggered when Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, head of the Junta’s military intelligence, ordered Archbishop Romero’s assassination. Over 50,000 angry, grieving country folk attended the funeral of the beloved martyr. The highly charged funeral procession erupted when a bomb exploded, followed by a fierce firefight between anti-government demonstrators and military forces in San Salvador’s Plaza of the Cathedral. Forty were killed, many of them crushed against a security fence as they fled the mayhem.

  Four U.S. nuns working in El Salvador, accused of treason by the government because of alleged leftist leanings, were savagely raped and murdered the same year by government-supported thugs. The Carter Administration, torn between supporting a savage military regime that snuffed out its opponents and the fear of the spread of communism, suspended military aid to the junta.

  Five separate leftist guerrilla groups united, forming the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Marxist insurgents, convinced that they had popular support and that a mass insurrection would follow, launched an offensive against the government on 10 January, 1981, just before President Reagan took office.

  Although the armed forces trounced the poorly armed and trained rebels, the FMLN’s offensive alarmed the Carter administration. The fear of the fall of Central American countries to communism overcame the re-vulsion at the way the military government in El Salvador tried to suppress popular opposition. Within a week’s time, the U.S. resumed aid to the military junta to the tune of $10 million.

  In spite of its initial defeat, the FMLN received international recognition and retained military strongholds in Chalatenango and other rural areas, where its forces settled in for the long-drawn-out civil war. Before the end of the year, France and Mexico recognized the front as a political player.

  The staunchly anti-communist Reagan administration issued a special report, “Communist Interference in El Salvador,” during its first few weeks in office. The statement warned that the Soviet Union and Cuba were supporting and equipping the FMLN in El Salvador, just as they had the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua. Central America had become another violent proxy battleground of the Cold War.

  Airpower Journal summed up the balance of forces:

  “El Salvador had a small armed force of approximately 10,000 military personnel and 7,000 paramilitary police in 1980 when the war began. The army, the largest part of the armed forces, had approximately 9,000 soldiers organized into four small infantry brigades, an artillery battalion, and a light armor battalion. The level of training was low. . . there was no training or preparation for fighting a counterinsurgency campaign. In short, it was an army that was not prepared for war.

  “The leftist conglomerate of rebel factions fielded a force of 10,000 guerrillas, headed by the FMLN, and most were well equipped with assault rifles, machine guns and explosives. The guerrillas were inflicting heavy ca-sualties on the Salvadoran Army and even on the more proficient Air Force, which numbered 1,000. The tide began to turn in 1984, thanks to U.S. involvement and support from the Reagan administration. By then the FMLN controlled large areas of El Salvador along the Nicaragua border and throughout the provinces.”

  In 1982 a hundred guerrillas overran an airbase, destroying a large portion of the Salvadoran Air Force, which was small and dilapidated to begin with. The U.S. made good the losses. But in 1983 FMLN forces overran the rural town of Berlin, destroying several companies of government troops and capturing all their weapons. Later that year the guerrillas captured other government outposts and ambushed a 2,000-man brigade, inflicting heavy casualties. On New Year’s Eve in 1984 they temporarily overran the 4th Brigade’s headquarters in an especially humiliating setback for government forces.

  U.S. Military Group, meantime, trained and advised the Salvadoran Army while scores of airforce trainees were schooled in Panama and the United States to attempt to give the government an edge in air power.

  SOF IN EL SALVADOR

  In 1981, two SOFers, Bob Burton, a famous bounty hunter, and Bob Poos, my Executive Editor, who had been down doing the journalist bit in El Salvador covering the insurgency, charged into the office.

  “Jefe, we met up with these two Special Forces senior NCOs advising the Salvador military, Tony Paniagua and Bill Frisbee. In a bar one night they whispered, ‘Think there is any way that SOF could offer any expertise?’ We are really low on manpower,” the wired duo said.

  The communists were invading our southern neighborhood! I ordered a bunch of my guys to convene at a local bar, the Hungry Farmer, where many SOF meetings were held, for a skull session. As the night went on, with heightened booze-induced creativity, we decided that the communist threat in Central America was such a pressing threat to the United States that our other project—supporting the Karens in their six-decade battle against the Burmese dictatorship—should be put on the back burner.

  It was again time to kick into high gear for some hardcore SOF “partic-ipatory” journalism. We would create the story, gin up a lot of action and then write about it for the glistening pages of our bad boy magazine. Thus began our dozens of treks down to El Salvador over the next eight years.

  SOF ARRIVES IN COUNTRY

  General Bustillo, a colonel when we first met him, was the Commander-in-Chief of both the Salvadoran Airborne battalion and the Air Force (the Airborne unit was under control of the Air Force, in contrast to the practice of the U.S. and other Western nations) throughout the entire war, from 1979 to 1989. He was an acclaimed officer and pilot who wielded lots of political clout. The General was a strong supporter of SOF efforts as he realized the value of the Vietnam and Africa combat experience of the SOF advisors. He even sent his private car driven by Special Forces SFC Tony Paniagua to pick SOFers up at the airport.

  Prior to the SOF team leaving for the land of ripening coffee beans and flying bullets, we had off-the-record meetings with high ranking officials in the Pentagon regarding our planned efforts in El Salvador. No records were kept.

  One of the players was Nestor Sanchez, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Latin American Affairs who had a sterling career in the U.S. Army after being ransomed from a Cuban prison who, during his three-decade career with the CIA, participated in the coup against the left-wing government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala and was involved in an attempt to assassinate Castro. Also included in the meetings were Ed Lutt-wak, a brainy Pentagon consultant, and Colonel Manny Grenado, a Bay of Pigs veteran. They condoned our Central American operation but could not offer any official sanction or assistance. However, Luttwak did say, “Brown, if you have any difficulties call me.” I said, “Sure, Ed,” having no idea I would be taking him up on his offer in a very few days.

  In El Salvador, shortly after we got settled in our quarters
, we heard from our Special Forces buddies that they had attended a meeting with the number two man of the U.S. Mil Group and the Salvadoran Minister of Defense.

  Paniagua told us, “That leg from the Mil Group was trying to convince the Minister of Defense to declare you all persona non grata!”

  This was not good. We had to act immediately. That night, I was on the phone to Luttwak. “Ed,” I said, “I’ve got a problem.” “Well, what is it?” “Very simple,” I responded, “I think we have a case of ‘territorial imperative’ and the Mil Group wants to give us the bums rush.” Without hesitation, Luttwak said emphatically, “Well, I will take care of it,” and hung up.

  I was skeptical but had no choice but to wait the situation out. I didn’t have long to wait. The next day, my team and I were over at the Estado Mayor getting our press and I.D. cards, when the CO of the Mil Group, Colonel Joe Stringham, flagged me down.

  “Brown, Brown, I’ve got to talk to you,” he yelled as he scurried over. Not knowing what was coming down, I responded in a low, neutral tone, “Colonel, how can I help you?” He huffed and puffed saying, “Look, I’m not going to have you guys declared persona non grata. Please get Nestor Sanchez off my back!” I smugly smiled and said, “Well, Colonel, I’ll see what I can do.” What satisfaction it gave me to stick my thumb in his bureaucratic eye.