17 MARCH 1987
Guerrilla headquarters on the island was in a former Dutch administrative center for this isolated area. Admin HQ had a small dirt strip that would take a single-engine Cessna, a hospital, guest houses where the mercs were billeted, and a radio station.
A Cessna 204, taken by the guerrillas, operated on the small airfield at guerrilla headquarters. Sergeant Major Henk Van Rendwick, who was the OIC of Echo Battalion, Bouterse’s version of Special Forces, had captured it. Van Rendwick had been captured during a guerrilla ambush in which three government troops were killed and had agreed to join the guerrillas. After three months, according to Charlie, Brunswijk gave him 300,000 guilders to buy weapons in Brazil. Instead, he split for the fleshpots of Holland.
“Brunswijk figured Van Rendwick had ‘turned around,’“ Charlie noted sarcastically. “He went the wrong way and became a crook.”
At 1400 hours, we were at the airplane on the strip, photographing the mercs rigging the drogue chute with the homemade bomb. The chute was cobbled together from a shower curtain and shroud lines were made from heavy monofilament fishing line. The mercs were to kick the “bomb” out of the plane’s door which would deploy the drogue chute and stabilize the bomb in a nose-down position which, with luck, would ensure that the firing device would hit the ground.
For the practice run, they filled the LPG cylinder with water to approximate the weight of the bomb when filled with napalm. The “plan” was to make an approach between 500 and 600 feet and kick the bomb out so we could observe chute deployment and confirm the nose-down position of the bomb upon impact.
The bomb was loaded, the chute rigged, the kicker boarded and the pilot took off. As the plane approached off course, the bomb was kicked out. The chute tore away and the bomb tumbled into the jungle, lost until searchers dug it up. Fortunately, the mercs were more adept at blowing up bridges than conducting air ops.
18 MARCH 1987
The previous night Karl said, “A guerrilla-initiated action killed 16 of Bouterse’s men. Bouterse’s man was burnt alive and the others were shot. No further details.”
An anti-Bouterse Hindu businessman was very frustrated with Ronny as he had been asking for arms and uniforms for two months. The Hindu allegedly had 200 men but no weapons, near Nickerie, west of the capital of Paramaribo. This was a prosperous agricultural area where the majority of Surinam’s farming was conducted. Karl was to use explosives that had been cached at jungle camps to attack the oil refinery.
“I don’t know what happened to Ronny. He has lost all interest in the war. He is waiting for something, and we don’t know what it is,” Karl said.
About 1130 hours, we caught a canoe to a French outpost on Maroni River and spent the afternoon with the French commander talking mechanics and the finances of buying and selling gold nuggets/dust dredged from rivers. No boat to St. Laurent that day, “maybe” the next day.
20 MARCH 1987
After a 10-hour ride down the Maroni River, made interesting by our jovial boat crew, who were snorting and sniffing something, smoking pot and boozing it up the entire trip until we finally arrived in civilization. I’d take a Huey any day.
21 MARCH 1987
In St. Laurent, I interviewed Dr. Eddie Josefzoon, a political adviser, and Michel Van Rey:
Doctor Josefzoon was formerly an adviser to the Minister of Education. He was a representative of the Bush Negro groups: the largest group were the Creoles, second largest the Hindus, and third largest were the Javanese.
“Thirty-five percent of the population of Surinam was in the Netherlands, the majority of whom left in 1975 because of the uncertainty about their future once Surinam became independent,” he said. There were about 180,000 exiles in the Netherlands from Surinam. The conflict was a “civil war” rather than a revolution to overthrow the government.
“When the war started the thought was it would take two to six months. We were too optimistic,” Josefzoon stated. When it started the guerrillas were short of money and weapons, but we were convinced we were fighting for a good cause: democracy. We thought we could get help from France, the U.S., Brazil, Venezuela or Holland; Western democracies. We were obviously overly optimistic. All these countries opposed Bouterse. The Dutch government compared Bouterse with an animal. You hear that kind of statement and then you tend to believe you’ll get help from these countries,” he said.
“The Dutch say they are sympathetic and understand what is going on. They agree that we want to bring back democracy but they can’t give anything more than moral support,” he continued. After this disappointment, Van Rey said, “We decided to do things ourselves, to buy weapons; solve our own logistics problems.”
“Ronny started with 40 men in July 1986, and at this moment he needed to have 1,500 men. Lack of weapons and ammunition is the main problem, and the problem is not being solved. In the last few months the guerrillas lost between one and two million guilders that had been ripped off by unscrupulous arms dealers or people alleging to be arms dealers,” Van Rey said.
“I believe that additional pressures applied to Bouterse will cause the people to rise up against him, like in the Philippine situation where Aquino was successful. I believe they can be successful if they obtain $500,000. The government had 2,000 men but morale was bad; the troops were poorly trained. One U.S. pilot, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran [name unknown], was flying one of their choppers. Bouterse had four other pilots, all foreigners,” Van Rey said.
“There was no conflict between Ronny and the other guerrilla commanders,” Josefzoon said. This contradicted the information that Patrick Chauvel received in a letter from an acquaintance. It stated that four bush commanders had told Ronny that they were no longer going to follow his orders unless he came to the front and showed up with weapons.
“10 well-trained officers were waiting to come from the Netherlands and a lot more were standing by,” Van Rey said. “The above-mentioned individuals are not interested in fighting this type of war, whatever that meant. We apparently had a Catch-22 situation. The people in the Netherlands who were going to come had stated that they ‘must have well trained soldiers and then we will help.’“
“Bouterse is more incompetent than Ronny. Josefzoon feels that military pressure was being kept on Bouterse and that Ronny commanded the loyalty of the men. He was not in favor of using mercs but needed personnel to conduct training,” Van Rey continued.
“Foreign countries want us to get rid of the mercs but they do not provide any assistance,” Josefzoon said. “There are 60 Libyan mercs and 14 blacks from Angola working for the Bouterse government. These were mercs but nobody said anything about them,” he complained.
“One of the conditions for help from Western democracies would be unification of the various exile groups, but no similar provision or requirement is made of the Afghan rebels. It’s unfair.”
ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION
Even though the ragtag rebels were outnumbered, poorly trained, ill-equipped and led by a charismatic but mercurial leader (one merc described Brunswijk as a 25-year-old with the brain of a nine-year-old), they still managed to force Bouterse’s Marxist government into a military stalemate. Bouterse’s 2,000-man army was also poorly trained, and had neither the stomach nor the strength to conduct effective counter-guerrilla operations in Surinam’s dense jungle terrain. Government forces ceded control of the entire northeastern section of Surinam to the guerrillas, maintaining a single isolated outpost in Albina, located on the mouth of the Maroni River which borders French Guiana.
Guerrilla operations, haphazard and amateurish as they were, nonetheless almost brought the economy to a standstill. The guerrillas had forced closure of Alcoa’s bauxite mine, which provided some 80 percent of the country’s foreign exchange; cut power lines to the capital and rendered all but one of the major roads impassable. Raids on palm oil plantations, lumber operations and the aluminum industry cost Bouterse’s regime at least $150 million. However, guerrilla for
ces were too unsophisticated to capitalize on the growing discontent in Paramaribo, which was been fueled by political oppression and import shortages.
Brunswijk’s “Surinam Liberation Army” was aligned with an exile group in Holland led by Henk Chin-a-sen, who served as president under Bouterse. He met with U.S. State Department officials seeking support, but as one might expect, received no promises of assistance.
The wild card in this conflict was France, whose interests in Surinam were obvious. The French space station was located at Kourou, French Guiana, and the Libyan troublemakers who were tied into supporting an embryonic independence movement in French Guiana prompted the French to allow the Surinamese guerrillas freedom of movement in and out of St. Laurent for purposes of re-supply. Highly placed French sources suggested that if the Libyans were killed or captured in combat, the French might be willing to do more.
The tragedy of this obscure little war was that a primitive people who simply wished to return to democracy could not elicit $500,000-worth of arms and supplies from weak-willed Western democracies. Some years later, we found out from a former U.S. Army Delta Force officer that the U.S. had a contingency plan to invade Surinam after our invasion of Grenada. “Bouterse,” he said, “however was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and kicked out all his Cuban military advisors. Therefore, the invasion plan was scrapped.”
Gallagher, MacKenzie and I reviewed the Surinam situation when we returned to Boulder. We agreed that there was potential to overthrow a thuggish, pro-communist regime that was up to its ears in the dope business and counterfeiting U.S. dollars. I had MacKenzie recruit three of his buddies who were fellow veterans of the Rhodesian SAS to go back to Surinam and the bush guerrillas to determine if it was feasible to overthrow Bouterse.
Their report was positive. In short, a couple dozen mercs, all of whom would be ex-Rhodesian SAS personnel, and $500,000 for guns would get the job done. I sent Gallagher to Amsterdam to liaise with Suranamese exiles who were supporting the guerrillas. They were basically incompetent; full of promises but had squandered the funds they had raised. He returned to Boulder out of sorts and disgusted. I was in contact with one source who was seriously interested in the operation but he up and died on me.
For the want of half a million, a revolution was lost.
28
GUNS BEHIND THE GREAT WALL
SOF in communist China? What a bizarre thought. My teams and I had been to a lot of weird places prior to our invitation to China, but not one of us ever thought we would be jogging the Great Wall, firing the latest PRC small arms and eating weird, “I don’t want to know” parts of plants, fish and fowl at the invitation of the Chinese com munist government with a bunch of Chicom generals.
SOF’s weapons guru, Peter Kokalis, was approached by contacts from the PRC in 1987, before the Berlin Wall came down, to test and evaluate a number of small arms never before seen outside the Bamboo Curtain. At the time, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China ground forces were upgrading their weaponry since much of it consisted of decades-old Soviet designs. Although the communist bloc was spearheaded by the two large communist powers, and the Soviet Union was supplying arms to the Chinese when the two were not having their own Cold War, the Chinese lusted after the advanced weapons technology of the West, and still do.
Numbering some 3,625,000 regulars at the time, the PLA was the largest army in the world. Largest in numbers that is, not in military strength during most of the Cold War, but things were changing. Under-mechanized and largely equipped with outdated weaponry at all levels, the PLA was primarily a foot-mobile army that would find itself at a severe disadvantage were it to engage the Soviet Union in a major military con frontation at that time.
However, the move in the late 1980s from a previously Leninist society to “market socialism” provided the PLA with the avenues to upgrade its military potential through importation of Western technology and the de velopment of indigenous designs. Western authorities still regarded the Chinese defense industry as geared to the production of Soviet copies dat ing back to the 1950s. As we soon found out, this assessment no longer held true, at least in the area of military small arms.
SOF SCOOPS THE CIA . . . AGAIN
Adopted in 1984 by the PLA, the new Type 81 assault rifle and squad au tomatic weapon (SAW) gave Kokalis convincing proof that PRC designers were acutely tuned to the combat user’s requirements and were fully capa ble of executing designs that incorporated time-proven concepts alongside numerous innovative features.
We were soon to find out how the superficially soft-spoken, polite Chinese military officers were very cleverly sucking experts into their web.
It was no secret that SOF had never been moderate about its anti-communist position, well actually, its anti-communist stance was rabid. “COMMUNISM STOPS HERE” posters, with me as the poster boy, hung all over our offices, were in the magazine and sold like hotcakes. Every chance it got, SOFbashed the PRC’s form of government. We fought them in Korea and faced their fierce brutality at great cost. They backed the North Vietnamese and served them a perverted victory at an enormous cost to the United States. They had backed Robert Mugabe’s terrorists in Rhodesia which gave them another mark in the “dark side” book.
However, times and governments change. The Chinese, avid readers of the outspoken, commie-hating SOF, took note of the sophisticated cov erage of worldwide weapons by its experts and schemed to learn what SOF’s Peter Kokalis really knew.
SOF decided to adopt “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” concept, or at least that was the excuse for being seduced by the thought of what could prove to be a very dangerous mission. At the time the PRC was aid ing the anti-communists in Cambodia and Laos and providing large quan tities of Soviet killing items to the Afghan freedom fighters. (In April 1985, when SOF was training the Contras, we saw a half-million PRC-manufac tured 7.62x39mm rounds in a Contra base camp. How they got there? We don’t know.)
But why SOF ? Why not International Defense Review, Jane’s, Armed Forces Journal or any of a number of prestigious military trade magazines? Or, they could have invited a number of journalists from various publica tions if in fact the PRC’s main objective was to gain maximum exposure for its line of small arms for military sales. We wouldn’t get an answer to that mystery until we got to China.
I have been told that I have a superman-size ego, sometimes clouded by paranoia, which I admit to—but let those who have been on foreign leaders’ hit lists and on the CIA watch list cast the first stone. Curious as to why we were chosen for this mission, I decided to call a number of foreign affairs experts. Taking that old adage, “two brains of those in high places are better than one” seriously had saved my ass numerous times.
One source speculated that the invitation was some “Byzantine Chi nese plot” with unknown objectives. Lieutenant General Jack Singlaub, a long-time friend and accomplice, quoted an old Chinese proverb: “It is better to sit down across a table from an enemy you know than a friend you don’t know.” A well-known international defense consultant and mil itary author agreed with Singlaub: “The PRC would rather sit down with a known, hard-core anti-communist than a wishy-washy liberal. If Carter had been president, no rapprochement would have been affected with the PRC . . . [although it was in 1979 that the U.S. and Chinese relations soft ened] . The Chinese knew where Nixon stood and therefore felt comfort able in dealing with him.” So who was the common enemy for SOF and the Chinese? The Soviets were, with their nuclear weapons. The United States had played one against the other during President Reagan’s tenure. To taunt the Soviets, it sold weapons to the PLA after the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations.
At the same time, the United States was selling weapons to Taiwan, feeding the explosive tensions between that island republic and the main land. To China, with its non-negotiable “one China policy,” Taiwan was simply a breakaway non-sovereign that would be brought into the fold, probably by force.
All of this intrigue added to the mystique of the unexpected invitation to SOF. There were questions to be answered, mysteries to be solved and weapons to fire. It was time to go. The SOF team consisted of: faithful Peter Kokalis; Major Bob MacKenzie (promoted to Lieutenant Colonel before being KIA in Sierra Leone), a merc extraordinaire, Rhodesia, South Africa and had worked for various governments training their troops; and Vann, who was studying Mandarin Chinese at the university in Hong Kong, although the official language in Hong Kong was Cantonese; and me. There is nothing that the Chinese did not know about any of us since we had to present documents that identified us before we were granted visas.
Peter Kokalis, an American Greek could obsess about anything. Tall, wiry, with prominent jagged features and shooting brown eyes, Kokalis had a sharp, sarcastic wit, was quick to improvise and was such a diehard commie hater that he wanted nothing more than to join any fight against them or learn any secrets they held. MacKenzie had a seething anger un-derneath his steely exterior, but no one would guess it, as he usually com ported himself with utmost composure in dicey situations. Cold and hard as steel, to those who were weak and who became the conquered, he never gave another thought.
We had arrived at the airport in Beijing and, as usual, our signature camouflage-clad entourage drew a multitude of stares. Our hosts met us and took us to a rather splendid old hotel and assigned us rooms. Security lurked in the halls, trying to be invisible but not doing a very good job of it.
That first evening we had dinner with half-a-dozen of our hosts, in cluding a couple of Chinese generals. We were honored with all sorts of weird animal, poultry and fish parts and, thank goodness, lots of plain white rice. The waiters kept bringing on more and more courses and, with each course, more rounds of their vile alcohol.
Although we were jet-lagged and ready to pass out after the endless flight halfWay around the world, I called a strategy meeting in the room I was sharing with Kokalis. I mentioned something negative about the Chi nese military officials, calling them communist “dickheads,” or some such thing. Peter, very deep into his cups of white, tasteless Chinese moonshine, made of who knows what, that could knock an elephant off its feet, in full agreement with me, flipped the bird, “Fuck the Chinese!” We pointed to the cameras we had spotted in the room. That just got him going. This time he pointed his middle finger at the cameras and yelled even louder obscenities.
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 36