by Gerard Colby
Betty Elliot, the daughter of missionaries, was passionately evangelical. In fact, she agreed to marry Jim only after she was assured it would not interfere with her own missionary work. Betty had been part of SIL’s first advance into Ecuador in 1952, when she settled among SIL’s first tribe, the Colorados. When she joined Jim’s work among the Quichua the following year, she apparently left behind any loyalty to SIL. She agreed not to mention Operation Auca to anyone, even Dr. Tidmarsh—and especially not to Nate Saint’s sister, Rachel.
Rachel had invaded Nate’s turf to study the “brown tribe in the green forest” of her vision: the Auca. Whatever Betty understood of Nate’s rivalry with his older sister or of JAARS’s rivalry with MAF over the future of missionary aviation in the Amazon was subsumed under more powerful, unseen forces that had placed her with both the Colorados and the Auca. The immediate economic issue in both cases was oil. The political forces included Nelson Rockefeller.
In 1948, the year Betty Elliot graduated from college and began her linguistic studies, Nelson Rockefeller’s close friend from CIAA days, Galo Plaza, was elected president of Ecuador. Galo Plaza took office just when Standard Oil and Shell Oil had decided to suspend exploration in Ecuador’s Oriente. Though no one would admit it, Middle Eastern oil was to take precedence. Caught between protests by his own Congress and the demands of the visiting chief of the U.S. Caribbean Command, Galo Plaza chose to tell his people, “The Oriente is a myth.” No one in Ecuador believed it. Nor did many Americans who were familiar with the Oriente. Only two years before, Colonel Leonard Clark, a U.S. Army officer with much experience in the Oriente, had revealed that Ecuador’s Amazonian oil reserves were similar to those in the Middle East.5
Despite mounting protests, Galo Plaza discouraged even agricultural colonization in the Ecuadorian Amazon, arguing “Ecuador must concentrate on the coastal lands” instead. And for good reason. His former legal client, United Fruit Company, was focusing on Ecuador’s tropical coast to replace its disease-ravaged plantations in Central America.
To help convince his people, Galo Plaza turned to an old friend and expert in psychological warfare, Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson was already in close contact with United Fruit officials,6 having consulted with them on their new agricultural techniques and accounting practices for his International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC).* One of United Fruit’s top executives had been a division chief for the CIAA.
Ecuador’s Oil and Operation Auca
Inset: “Palm Beach” site of Huaorani (Auca) Indians’ massacre of American Protestant missionaries
When Nelson got Galo Plaza’s call for help, he responded immediately, sending in an IBEC survey team. IBEC recommended intensifying export production with new technology, particularly in agriculture. Ecuador should diversify its cash products beyond cacao and coffee and expand cattle ranches in the Andean highlands. Investments, financed by foreign loans and local capital, should be made in building roads into the coastal interior and the highlands to reach resources and serve commercial interests. A food industry should be developed to help replace the Indians’ subsistence farming with a distribution system that was more appropriate to wage labor.
All these projects would be implemented by Point IV technicians who came on the heels of Galo Plaza’s triumphant June 1951 visit to Washington. The visit reached its grand finale at the Rockefellers’ Pocantico Hills estate, where Nelson, as chairman of Point IV’s International Development Advisory Board (IDAB), threw a luncheon in his honor. The initial bills and the longer-term bonded debt with Chase and other New York banks would be underwritten, of course, by the banana boom inspired by United Fruit’s massive purchases. Banana zones would spread from the southern state of El Oro up the tropical Guayas River Basin north of Guayaquil, pushing up the Daule River and toward virgin lands of the Colorado Indians.
It was not long before Galo Plaza concluded that the old-time Spanish-speaking American missionaries were not enough. The exotic-tongued Colorados, named by the Spanish for the brilliant red-orange luster in their annatto seed-dyed hair, needed a unique approach. They had never been subjugated. Looking over the Cárdenas biography Cam had sent him, Galo Plaza decided that SIL could provide the special touch. Cam signed the contract in 1952, just before Galo Plaza turned over the reins not to his designated heir, Chiriboga, but to his bitter opponent, Velasco Ibarra.
Velasco had always been sure that there was indeed oil in the Oriente. In 1953, his government had passed new petroleum laws and signed new exploration contracts with Canada’s Peruvian Oils and Minerals Company. By 1955, when Velasco’s patience with Peruvian Oils ended, SIL had dutifully shifted its focus to the Amazon and brought in Rachel Saint. The Chicago dedication of the Helio Courier for Ecuador signaled that Nate Saint’s reign over the Oriente skies was about to end.
Nate had spent the past three months flying over an Auca village he called Terminal City, showering it with candy, pots, combs, tools, machetes, and even photos of the smiling men holding the same gifts to familiarize the Indians with the faces of their suitors. He had made fourteen drops in all. If he did not occupy Auca territory soon, Rachel would. She was making rapid progress in the Auca language with Dayuma, an Auca woman who had fled the tribe’s internecine warfare for a life of peonage on a local plantation.
Nate had last seen Rachel just before he flew his expedition to “Palm Beach,” his code name for a strip of beach on the Curaray that could serve as a landing strip for his Piper. He made no mention of his plans. Nor did he ask Rachel for help, knowing that his sister “was very possessive over the Aucas,” Betty later recalled, “and was convinced that God had intended her to be the only one to work with the Aucas.”7 Nate feared that his sister would set up obstacles or “feel obligated to divulge this information to save me the risks involved.”
Now, Betty and the other wives listened in vain for some signs of life from the radio in Nate’s plane. Unable to bear the silence any longer, they broke the vow of secrecy and called for help.
The next day, after a missionary flight spotted Nate’s wrecked plane on the beach, JAARS sprang into action. Larry Montgomery contacted the U.S. Caribbean Command at the Panama Canal, which immediately dispatched an air force commando to head up a helicopter and overland rescue. In New York, Henry Luce at Time-Life dispatched photographer Cornell Capa, who captured the eerie, fog-shrouded scene for Life’s millions of readers.
The commando team, armed with carbines, landed at Palm Beach and found the five men floating in the Curaray River, Auca spears protruding from their bodies, some of which had been angrily hacked with the same machetes that had been given as gifts. The commandos managed to recover four of the bodies and hastily buried them under the driving rain of a sudden tropical storm. Early the next morning, they marched through the dawn mist down the beach to their motorized canoes and helicopter, leaving the Auca to their jungle and their oil.
Back at Shell Mera, a missionary reported the grim news to the wives. Operation Auca was over, he said.
In fact, it had just begun.
RACHEL’S MARTYRS
Two weeks later, Henry Luce published Capa’s photos, along with those the five men had taken at Palm Beach before their deaths. The photos and their diaries told a sorry tale of evangelical high hopes that were fatally flawed by linguistic ignorance.
At an initial meeting with three friendly Auca, Nate’s group had found they could not understand a word the Indians said. They tried to compensate with gifts and tried to be as polite as possible in rejecting what they believed was a reciprocal peace offering—one of the two Indian women. Nate even gave the man a flight over Terminal City; he “shouted all the way over and back,” noted Nate, who thought the Indian “thoroughly enjoyed the trip.”8 Still, when the Indians left and did not return the next day, Nate wondered if he and the other men had done something wrong. Two days later, shortly after scribbling “heart heavy that they fear us,” in his diary, he got his answer. Reconnoitering over the a
rea in his yellow Piper, Nate spotted a large group of Indians moving along the beach in the direction of the missionaries’ camp. These were the Indians he thought would join the missionaries for Sunday afternoon service when he radioed Shell Mera the good news of an expected 2:30 visit and promised to call back at 4:35. His estimate of the Indians’ arrival was not far off. Five days later, when his body was pulled from the river, his watch had stopped at 3:12.
It was assumed that the missionaries fired their rifles into the air and, when that did not work, chose death rather than kill the Indians.
Life magazine published a gripping account of Christian martyrdom, which caused a worldwide sensation. The doors of nationally known politicians, such as Vice President Nixon and former president Harry Truman, now opened to Cam’s Helio promotions.
Planes were given to the governments of Latin American and Southeast Asian nations, but they were operated by SIL. The Spirit of Kansas City, accepted formally by ex-President Galo Plaza and by Chiriboga in Truman’s presence, went to Ecuador; the Friendship of Oklahoma was given to Bolivia; and the Friendship of Orange County, dedicated by Nixon, now belonged to Peru.
President Magsaysay sent his warm endorsement of two Helios that would be operated by SIL “under the supervision of the Philippine Air Force.” He would also support Cam’s ambition to help out in the holy war in Vietnam. Magsaysay wrote letters of introduction for SIL’s Richard Pittman to take to Diem. Pittman arrived in Saigon in January 1956 just after the Auca murders hit the headlines. “I was apprehensive,” Pittman recalled of his first meeting with Diem, “but … he gave me a very friendly reception. His only caution was that we would ‘have to be careful of infiltrators.’”9
A year later, U.S. Embassy officials welcomed the first SIL team’s participation in intensive language classes at Saigon. SIL’s incorporation into Edward Lansdale’s “nation-building” for Diem had begun.
As SIL’s vistas began to expand to these tropical horizons of the Cold War, Cam was anxious to strike the anvil of publicity while it was hot. Public interest in missionaries ebbed and flowed with political tides.
He contacted Rachel Saint and told her how he prayed “that the time would come when you would be able to introduce your brother’s killer to the president of Ecuador.”10 Could she come back to the United States for a speaking tour?
Rachel was sure that she could testify that the Auca’s destiny did belong to her brother’s sacrifice. It merely confirmed her prophetic visions. The shedding of Nate’s blood atoned for the sins of the Auca (as she insisted on calling the Huaorani, even after learning their language), sanctifying her own calling to bring them out of Satan’s realm. To Rachel, the portrait of tribal life rendered by Dayuma, her informant on the Huaorani language, verified her own belief in a universe molded by the struggle between Good and Evil. Dayuma spoke in a trembling voice of her grandfather’s tales of Winae, the small vampire of the forest night. In these stories Rachel saw not the normal human fear of a jungle full of predators and rubber slavers, but the power of Satan himself. In her mind, there was no question that the tribe’s traditional shaman was a witch doctor doing Satan’s bidding. Likewise, she was sure that the Indians’ polygamy had dark metaphysical, not cultural, roots. The fact that her own brother had suffered martyrdom at the hands of at least one of Dayuma’s brothers was another intimate sign of deep Christian meaning in the Auca destiny of salvation through blood atonement.
In June 1957, Dayuma and Rachel began Cam’s whirlwind tour of twenty-seven American cities. A legend was being born.
Ralph Edwards’s television show, This Is Your Life, made Rachel Saint the most famous missionary in the United States and, next to Albert Schweitzer, probably in the world. Overnight 30 million Americans could recognize the woman with intense eyes who had dedicated her life to converting her brother’s killers. Television cameras focused on the startled Dayuma, her ears distended by wooden plugs.
A month later, on Sunday, July 7, Rachel and Dayuma stood in the spotlight before thousands of people who were packed into New York’s Madison Square Garden for the Billy Graham Crusade.
Rachel and Dayuma’s appearance at the Graham Crusade, filmed by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Corporation for sale and distribution as part of the $60,000 movie Miracle in Manhattan, netted SIL only $4,230 when the hat was passed.11 But the exposure before millions on television—and before thousands of Fundamentalists who were bused in each night from around the country to fill 7,000 reserved seats out of a 20,000-seat capacity—was worth much more. Reader’s Digest owner DeWitt Wallace, who gave a $25,000 tax-deductible donation to the crusade, wired Cam that his top editor would soon be flying down to Peru to do a story on SIL.
All was not easy, however. During the tour, Dayuma received audiotapes from Betty Elliot of greetings and news from her aunts in Ecuador. The news included a report that her older brother, Wawae, had been killed and the stunning revelation that her younger brother, Nampa, had died too—from a gunshot wound inflicted by one of the martyrs.12 But Dayuma’s rage was kept under wraps during her extended leave.
If the true account of Nampa’s death nullified at least one American candidate for sainthood, Rachel never admitted it. The possibility that it had been her brother who had done the shooting would have tainted, if not canceled out, the blood debt owed her by the Huaorani. Nate’s death would be seen as an atonement not for the tribe’s sins, but, rather, for his own. Killing an Indian was bad enough. Killing someone who believed he was only defending his land from invasion was a curious way for a missionary to demonstrate Christ’s life of love and self-sacrifice. If such failure of will to follow Christ to Calvary was admitted, much less excused as an understandable bending to the instinct for survival, then how could Rachel or any other missionary demand that the Huaorani not do likewise—against whites at Palm Beach or even each other?
The decision of the SIL board in September 1957 to name the jungle base it was building at Limoncocha just north of Huaorani territory not after Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and the other Brethren martyrs, but after Cam’s friend, Dawson Trotman, who had drowned the previous summer while saving a young swimmer, spared SIL public embarrassment in the future when doubts about Rachel’s martyrs would grow. Trotman had been a consistent and loyal backer of JAARS and SIL, serving on both boards and supplying recruits from his own evangelical organization among sailors, the Navigators.
Trotman also had been Cam’s liaison with the growing Billy Graham organization. He had worked for Graham since the early crusades and had just finished helping him with follow-up for the Oklahoma Crusade when he died. Graham, like Cam, appreciated the congruence of oil wealth and evangelism in the Bible Belt. Soon Cam would invite the evangelist to join Wycliffe’s board, and Graham would accept.
But first Cam had a JAARS board member get in touch with Ed Darling, one of Graham’s top lieutenants, to help with a problem. With all the Helios and now a DC-3 for Ecuador, the JAARS fleet was getting too big for any of the overseas jungle bases to handle. Spare parts were difficult to get in Latin America. Brazil was calling. So was Africa. Cam needed a JAARS home base in the United States for repairs and flight and mechanical training. It would also have to have international radio communications with jungle bases abroad.
Darling contacted Henderson Belk of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Billy Graham, an area resident, had just completed his latest crusade. Belk had converted from Presbyterianism to Southern Baptism and had become an arch Fundamentalist in the process. More important, he came from one of the most powerful families in the South.
The Belks had once owned slaves. Now they owned department stores, hundreds of them, all over the Southeast. They were on their way to a billion-dollar fortune, helping transform an underdeveloped, export-oriented South through internal commercial growth. The new interstate highway system being built by the Eisenhower administration would spur that growth, helping commercial and industrial development. So would the new airline link with the
Northeast and the southeastern cities provided by Laurance Rockefeller’s Eastern Airlines.
The Belks were also courting financing from Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, where they had a buying office in midtown Manhattan’s garment district, even hosting a visit by David Rockefeller in 1956. But if the Rockefellers’ money was welcome, their Yankee liberalism, with all its talk about evolution, modernizing God’s religion with science, and integrating churches, schools, and workplaces, was not. An international aviation center for Fundamentalist missionaries would complement Charlotte, North Carolina’s claim to be a growing commercial center, while reminding visitors and home folk alike that this was still God’s country.
Belk arranged for JAARS to use a warehouse at an old U.S. Army base and Charlotte’s Carpenter Airport. Eventually, in 1960, Belk donated an abandoned plantation south of Charlotte, 256 acres, complete with a columned antebellum manor house, to JAARS. JAARS’s new air base was only thirty-five minutes Helio airtime from Fort Bragg, the new headquarters of the Green Berets who were protecting SIL translators in the hills of Vietnam.
Rachel and Dayuma’s appearance at Graham’s Crusade had paid off well for Cam. And for Graham—his second largest donation ($50,000) had come from a surprising source: the Rockefellers’ Room 5600.