I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  Harry said, “The rebels remained active through the rest of 1989 and 1990, inflicting over 2,000 casualties on the Salvadoran armed forces and police per annum. Forty helicopters were shot down between 1988 and 1992.”

  The country was exhausted after a decade of civil war in which 70,000 had died. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights focused on the brutality of the final surge in a vicious, bloody war.

  “FMLN members used civilians as shields and obliged them to form corridors; on other occasions FMLN members obstructed the free movement of civilians and even obliged them to set up barricades. The Government reported that members of the FMLN took control of the Hospital Santa Teresa in the city of Zacatecoluca, using explosive to destroy one of the floors of the building and killing a sick soldier,” Harry said.

  THE BAD GUYS HAVE MISSILES

  Harry was back in El Salvador when the missile crisis hit.

  “One of the officers said, ‘We need to go back to the base.’ We flew with Gen. Bustillo, Capt. Castro and the Air Force XO. Bustillo was flaming hot; they had been waiting for us since midnight. They had found a 122mm Katusha rocket they thought was some kind of surface-to-air missile. The Salvadoran military breathed a sigh of relief. The FMLN did not have missiles that could take down the FAS planes. Until a couple weeks later, that is. The war was still hot, we were whipped, we went back, got some sleep until sunup, and went back out with the Airborne troops again,” Harry continued.

  “We had been at the base about two weeks when the Sandinistas tried to fly in a plane load of SA-7s from Nicaragua. They had hit a head wind and ran out of gas coming into El Salvador and crashed. The plane was overloaded with SA-7 missiles and four men. It just fell out of the sky. We got there just after it crashed. The bodies were still in the plane. One had lived but he ate his gun. He was busted up pretty good from the crash,” Harry said.

  “They had their flight plans from Managua to El Salvador in the plane. Before that, the FAS assets, other than helicopters, were safe from ground fire. But now the situation changed as the rebels obtained a weapon that could knock down even the AC-47s. After the plane crashed, everything was set in motion. The guerrillas had surface-to-air missiles! This was serious stuff. The Salvadoran government grounded all aircraft until we could figure out what was going on. I had some knowledge of this missile, but I needed training manuals to brief the pilots on how to evade it. It had been so long since I had done any work with the SA-7 and I had forgotten a lot. The MilGroup didn’t have a copy of the manual,” Harry said.

  Harry called the SOF office on Captain Castro’s phone to see if we could provide the manual. SOF shifted into quick action, rounded up a copy of the manual and faxed it to Captain Castro. (Nobody still with SOF recollects how we got a copy of this manual.) This caused some ruffled feathers with the American MilGroup because SOF was able to get a copy before they could get a copy through official channels. Without SOF, Harry and the others could not have obtained the tech manual for the Russian SA-7 surface-to-air missile.

  “I’m the one that caught the heat on it. I didn’t tell them where I had gotten it. They were just furious that I had. I still never got a real answer from the Air Force Liaison Officer as to why the Air Force dragged their feet,” Harry said.

  “It took SOF two hours to fax the manual. Once we got it, I wrote instructions on the SA-7 missile. Capt. Castro, the Air force Intelligence Officer and a 1977 U.S. Air Force Academy Graduate, watched as I wrote for four hours. Gen. Bustillo and every single pilot on that base went through that course, and when they came out of the class, they thoroughly understood the SA-7 missile, how it worked and how you could avoid it. After we briefed them, they started using their aircraft again. No aircraft was lost to an SA-7 until the next year.”

  So the Salvadorans would have been grounded for the next three weeks had they had to rely on the bureaucrats of the U.S. military. The Salvadorans developed a “U”-shaped piece of pipe that diverted the exhaust gases into the chopper’s rotor blades to disperse the heat. Since the SA-7 was a heat-seeking missile, dispersing the heat meant that it could not lock onto the chopper. This missile system took four to six seconds for its heat-seeking mechanism to lock on, so you had to fly at ground level. That way the guy with the missile did not have time to lock on. If the chopper was at a higher altitude that gave him time to lock on and you were screwed.

  The missiles didn’t come in until the first phase of the offensive was over. Even once the offensive was over, the guerrillas still had SA-7s and in 1990 they knocked down an AC-47. A Hughes 500E was shot down on 2 February 1990, followed by Hughes 500D “35” on 18 May 1990 and an O-2A on 26 September. The FAS had an especially problematic November 1990, when the FMLN—despite ongoing negotiations with the government—launched another series of attacks against targets throughout El Salvador, reported ACIG.

  On 2 January 1991, the FMLN shot down a UH-iH carrying three Americans en route from Honduras to provide intel to U.S. advisors in El Salvador. CWO Daniel Scott died in the crash. Lieutenant Colonel David Pickett and Private Ernest Dawson survived, but were brutally executed.

  “Two or three of the planes were shot down with surface-to-air missiles that were more sophisticated than a SA-7,” Harry said.

  “The military was able to employ air assets all over the country. If SOF and RKB had not provided the SA-7 manual when they did, it would have given the guerrillas another three weeks without aircraft attacking them,” Harry said.

  In March 1989, Christiani was elected president of El Salvador and with the elections SOF’s involvement in that country was terminated, with the exception of several trips that “Machine Gun” Peter Kokalis made to train the Salvadoran police.

  24

  THE SOF WILD BUNCH AND THE CONTRAS

  In 1985, my old friend and mentor, Major General Jack Singlaub, USA (Ret.), called my office.

  “Brown, I want you to recruit a small team of Vietnam veterans to go down and train and assist the Contras. Congress has cut off aid to them. They need you to take over where the CIA left off when they were abruptly withdrawn. I’m told that the CIA agents didn’t even teach the Contras how to operate the CIA-supplied communications vans which left them without commo.”

  First I called Harry Claflin, who was still advising and training in El Salvador. I contacted other SOFers who I had worked with in numerous dark, nasty, places where we often encountered hot lead and cold steel.

  “Harry can you handle commo and small units tactics with the Contras in Nicaragua, right next door to your stomping grounds?” I asked him. In his no bull manner, he said, “I’m in.”

  In addition to Harry, I recruited Lieutenant Colonel John Boykin, USA (Ret.), a strapping, tall Dennis Weaver look-alike, who could well have made some NFL team as a tight end.

  “How would you like to be the SOF A-Team leader?” I gave Boykin an offer he could not resist. He had been the Deputy Commander of the El Salvador MilGroup, had made his bones in Special Forces in Nam and was a Commanding Officer in Ranger School.

  Next, I called Phil Gonzalez, swarthy and movie-star handsome, a superb SF Medic whom I had met in Nam.

  “I want you to conduct medical training and patch up any of us who happen to run into some errant lead.” I gave him his marching orders without doubting that Gonzalez would take them. He was a dedicated profes-sional medic, who always jumped at an opportunity for action and treating the wounded, be they the SOF team or the locals.

  Jack Thompson, blue-eyed and muscular with a sturdy build and thinning hair, was a Marine embassy guard in Nam, Selous Scout Sergeant Major in Rhodesia and “small arms and sniper consultant” in Central America.

  “I need you to handle the weapons instruction,” I told him.

  To round off the team, I still needed a demo expert.

  “Can you go to Honduras and handle instruction in boom-boom?” I asked the soft-spoken, affable John “I.W.” Harper, a slim man with jovial blue eyes who was a legendary, retired
CIA demo expert. After he retired from the Agency, he got a contract with a rogue CIA agent, Ed Wilson, who was working for Qaddafi. Harper thought it was an off-the-books Agency operation, which was not the case. During his tour in Libya, a Russian helicopter blew up in the air, killing several Russian officers. Being the premier demo man, he was suspected of blowing the chopper up and was thrown in a quite unpleasant dungeon. The story goes that Harper, who had run an agent net in Libya when King Idress was in power, somehow reactivated his net and with its help escaped from the dungeon and the country! He will not confirm or deny this but it makes for a good tale.

  The members of the heavy hitting team all said, “Count me in!” I flew them into Denver and put them up at the posh Brown Palace Hotel.

  “Lay low,” I told them.

  Fat chance. The daunting group of tall, muscular, mean-looking, scruffy bearded guys with marauder eyes didn’t have much chance of blending in with the dull, fatcat, suited-types booked into the prestigious hotel. I met them at the Brown Palace Hotel bar.

  “General Singlaub is going to interview you for a special mission in Nicaragua. Not a word to anyone,” I told them.

  I arranged transport up to Singlaub’s house in Fraser, Colorado, just to humor him, knowing good and well that he would accept my private little army at no cost to him.

  “He brought us in one at a time up to his office, which was outfitted like a war room. Maps covered the walls. He grilled me about Force Recon, Spec Ops, how long I had been in El Salvador. We were interviewed and accepted and then found out what the big picture was,” Harry recalled.

  “Gentlemen,” Singlaub growled, “you will leave here and travel to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with your equipment and link up with members of the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense [FDN]. You will then be taken to Camp Las Vegas, the main Contra base on the Nicaraguan border. There you will train their elite commando unit for deep penetration operations into Nicaragua.” Singlaub, upon retiring from the Army, had become one of the most effective, active civilian sector operators to oppose the communist menace worldwide.

  “The length of training for the mission will be 90 days, starting from the time you get to Camp Las Vegas. Training sites have already been selected and the Contra units will be waiting for you. Each of you is an expert in your field, so you need not be told what to do. Thank you, and good luck,” he said.

  A CIVILIAN “GENERAL”

  “We were going to train the Contra’s elite commando unit,” Harry remembered, “like we had trained the GOE [Groupos Operationes Especiales] in El Salvador. Singlaub implied that President Reagan was behind this. Don’t forget that Singlaub had worked with CIA Director William Casey during World War II in the OSS, so we assumed that Casey had signed off on this,” Harry said.

  Singlaub had met Bill Casey while acting as an OSS member during World War II. He was involved in the formation of the CIA, had spook assignments in Manchuria after WWII and in Korea during the Korean War, and was commander of SOG, the secret, highly successful snoop-and-poop Special Forces operation which sent teams into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail and gather intelligence. He served as Chief of Staff of the United Nations and U.S. Army Forces in South Korea in 1977. He retired that year after he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea, but he made the peanut farmer back down.

  At the time, Singlaub was a freedom loving, anti-communist zealot and a prominent member of the World Anti-Communist League. He was going to fight the leftist Sandinistas that had taken over Nicaragua any way he could, and along with CIA head William Casey, Major General Richard Secord and Lt. Colonel Oliver North, was later charged with involvement in the conspiracy to provide arms to the Contras.

  We were being asked to circumvent the U.S. Congress as he and Oliver North and others in the Reagan administration did in defiance of left-wingers who had cut off aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. To some degree, we were to fill in for our CIA predecessors.

  By 1985, the Contras, composed of a sprinkling of former national guardsmen from the Somoza regime, and mostly poor peasant farmers from the highlands, were engaged in a life and death struggle with communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They violently rejected the communist practices of suppressing their religion and confiscating their land.

  For years, beginning during the Carter Administration, the U.S. had armed and supported the Contras to such an extent that the Nicaraguan military considered them an American proxy fighting force. The Reagan administration ordered the CIA to support the Contras, but the Democrats cut funding.

  Senator John Kerry had met with Sandinista Commandante Daniel Ortega. Even though the Sandinistas were known for their human rights violations, political oppression and support of the Salvadorian guerrillas, Kerry came back from Managua and pushed for ending U.S. support for the Contras. I would be lying if I said there were not abuses on both sides, including Contra atrocities, but the story was a self-serving, one-sided, pro-commie rant. The day after the House voted down a miserly $14 million aid package, Ortega boogied to Moscow and got $200 million in aid from the Soviets.

  WHERE ARE THE CONTRAS?

  The SOF team packed up gear and equipment and flew to Tegucigalpa with two tons of equipment and gear donated by anti-communist SOF advertisers. There they were to be met by a Contra reception party. Shortly after they arrived, I got a phone call from a very angry Harry.

  “Nobody was here to meet us. Singlaub must think he is still a general in the U.S. Army and that everyone would jump to his command. Not so with the Contras,” he fumed.

  “The customs people were looking at us funny. We were there with illegal military supplies and bomb-making material.”

  Harry went back to the group who brainstormed, “Now what?”

  Then Boykin contacted Mike Lima, a prominent Contra combat leader, who had lost a hand in a mortar accident.

  “He welcomed us, ‘Nice to see you. What are you doing here?’“ Boykin made the intro.

  “We have some gear here,” the team said.

  “We’ll bring some trucks over,” Lima replied.

  “He brought one little Toyota pickup, which wouldn’t put a dent in the load of medical supplies, training gear, uniforms and a mess of other equipment,” Harry said.

  “They go back and get more trucks and take us over to a ‘safe’ house which has no furniture in it. ‘I.W.’ and I bunk up together; Boykin is in the room with Gonzalez. We stay there for about a week twiddling our thumbs with nothing to eat but our C-rations, while the Contras are doing who knows what,” Harry yelled in my ear.

  Harry called me again a week later in Boulder.

  “Brown, these Calero brothers, Mario, the logistics guy, and Adolpho, supposedly leader of the Contras who we had linked up with in Florida on our way down were supposed to coordinate our mission in Honduras. They never showed up to meet us!” Harry was hot.

  I’d had it. I got down to Honduras in a few days and moved the team to a hotel. Enraged, I called Singlaub, who called Mario Calero the affable brother of the Contra political leader, Adolfo Calero and apparently chewed some ass as Calero sent someone to get us to Camp Las Vegas on the Nicaraguan border. It had been hacked out of the jungle and the last 100 miles of road was nothing but a bulldozed trail.

  One hundred yards away from the camp was bad guy country so we were on alert for ambush on the brain-jarring ride. It took us 14 hours, bumping along in Toyota pickup trucks, to get to the base. It was 100 miles of nightmarish, rocky, miserable hell and endless checkpoints that took hours to clear.

  We could see Sandinista bunkers on the hillsides maybe 300 meters away. We didn’t have a good feeling when we arrived at the Contra camp. We crashed in a bamboo hut with a mud floor and awoke to the crowing of a damn rooster. Nobody offered us breakfast so we ate C-rations.

  The commander of the Contra army, Colonel Enrique Bermudas, co-denamed “Commander 380,” came down to see us the next day.
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  “Hey how you doing? Good to see you. So why are you here?” he queried, without a clue as to what was going on. I shook my head in despair, again. The Contra logistical incompetence was overwhelming. How they did as well as they did against the Sandinistas still puzzles me.

  “We’re here to train your commando unit which was to make raids deep into Nicaragua,” I told him since he was acting as if we were aliens. But 380 (we still don’t know why he picked up the designation “380” as a nom de guerre) had never been advised we were coming! The Contra commando unit was already doing dirty deeds deep inside of Nicaragua.

  We moved from the leaky bamboo huts to another area and put our tents up by ourselves on a hill. We probably had 200 supply kits. We thought, “Hell, we’re here, so we’ll train somebody. We’ll start putting together some basic programs of instruction.” And we did just that.

  During the first weekend, on a bright clear Saturday afternoon, 380 came by and took us in his pickup down to a little country store 500 yards from the Nicaraguan border for a few hours of R&R. Cobbled together from bamboo and a roof of thatch, it had a dirt floor. Farm implements, cooking utensils and whatever one needed for subsistence farming were hanging from the walls and the ceiling. It also had beer, of questionable origin, for sale.

  As we were unacquainted with Col. Bermudas, it took a few cervezas before things started to loosen up. Someone asked him, “Commandante, what’s your plan?”

  “PLON, PLON? We don’t have no PLON,” Bermudas said. We sat

  there in shock. It was like “Badges, badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” from the Humphrey Bogart movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.