Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Two events occurred that same month that gave the Colombian military what it wanted. The first was a letter allegedly written by Colombian guerrillas to the already legendary Cuba-based Che Guevara. An army unit operating in Colombia’s Llanos Orientales near the Venezuelan border produced a letter it claimed to have captured. Addressed to Che Guevara in Havana, it was purportedly written by an intellectual named Ramón La Rotta, who had joined Liberal settlers who had responded to Conservative persecution by becoming guerrillas. The letter linked Che, if tenuously, to the left Liberals’ attempt to form a united National Guerrilla Command. The December 1 letter was accepted as genuine, precipitating a break in diplomatic relations with Cuba a week later. (In Ecuador, similar letters implying Cuban interference had actually been forged by the CIA.23 Those letters were believed by a gullible press and helped cause the fall of then-President Velasco Arosemena, who had already been forced to break diplomatic relations with Cuba by a bombing of the Catholic cardinal’s home, attributed falsely to communists, but actually done by CIA-financed Ecuadorians.24 This was precisely the CIA’s goal.)

  The second event boding well for the military occurred a week after Kennedy’s departure. In the town of Buga, a bomb exploded amid a Christmas procession; 51 people were killed, and more than 100 wounded. This was the pretext the Pentagon needed to send top U.S. counterinsurgency experts from Fort Bragg, led by Brigadier General William P. Yarborough, commanding general of Fort Bragg’s Special Warfare Center. (Later in the decade, as assistant chief of staff for intelligence, Yarborough would bring home his counterinsurgency skills and direct a domestic intelligence program, in collaboration with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and then Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, against American civilians identified as “dissident elements.” Yarborough specifically targeted the civil rights movement and the “anti-Vietnam/anti-draft movements,” extending the army’s intelligence gathering beyond “subversion” and “dissident groups” to “prominent persons” who were “friendly” with “leaders of the disturbance or sympathetic with their plans.”25)

  Yarborough’s team arrived in Colombia on February 2, 1962. Lleras Camargo’s press censorship worked smoothly. The chief of staff for the Colombian army turned out the entire officer corps staffing the Colombian army headquarters, but no press account appeared in Bogotá’s newspapers. Yarborough’s team next consulted U.S. Embassy consul Henry Dearborn,26 the former de facto CIA chief of station in the Dominican Republic.27

  Dearborn, a veteran operative in Latin America, was an old acquaintance of the CIA’s J. C. King; both had operated in Peronist Argentina after World War II. Recently, Dearborn had been transferred to Colombia from the Dominican Republic, where he and King engineered the CIA’s delivery of weapons that were used to assassinate dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961.28

  Now Dearborn was conferring with the commander of the Green Berets and arranging for his briefing by CIA station officers. Yarborough apparently was not persuaded that Colombia’s communists were “inept bumblers and posed no real threat to the government.”29 He wanted to see for himself. First, he flew to Medellín to inspect the Colombian IV Brigade’s antiguerrilla intelligence-gathering capabilities. Then his team moved on to the VI Brigade, which had responsibility for the southern part of the country, and to units spread out over the vast eastern plains. The focus of his attention, however, was the VII Brigade at the cattle town of Villavicencio, gateway to the southern plains that slope gradually into the tropical Amazon basin. Here, in the Department of Meta, was where the action was. Refugees from army attacks on the peasant republics had settled here and turned to guerrilla warfare when attacked.

  The VII Brigade kept most of its twenty-two outposts in this region, supplemented by many more police outposts and a paramilitary nonuniformed cavalry, modeled after the Texas Rangers and called “Rurales.” The Rurales were controlled by DAS, Colombia’s secret police and, like the Rangers, were not known for kindness to Indians. Yarborough took notice that a local battalion commander had “made a successful attempt to win the confidence of the Indians” by assisting them with problems and setting up an army-sponsored store. As a consequence, “the Indians have assisted Lt. Col. Valencia in his internal security mission.”30

  Yarborough was impressed. To help Valencia maintain control over the battalion’s “enormous area,” the general suggested airplanes.

  Specifically, Yarborough recommended Helio Couriers.

  Yarborough drafted a long, inclusive set of recommendations for the Special Group in Washington. Besides Green Beret units, he stressed the value of psychological warfare in terrorizing the countryside. Where high-tech solar-powered film projectors did not work, sodium Pentothal would. “Polygraph operators should be trained by the Army and DAS and should habitually interrogate villagers who are believed to be knowledgeable of guerrilla activities.… Exhaustive interrogation of bandits, to include sodium pentothal and polygraph, should be used to elicit every shred of information.”31

  Yarborough envisioned setting up a vast police state. “The intensive civilian registration program must be undertaken in order that every resident of Colombia be eventually registered in government files with fingerprints and photographs. Government registration personnel with cameras and fingerprint apparatus must accompany military patrols.”32

  The Inter-American Geographic Survey would be enlisted to make aerial maps of guerrilla-affected areas. “Villages and areas known to harbor bandits should be alleged by the government to be feeding information to the government. Polygraph teams should elicit such information as is needed for this operation.”

  Troops in civilian clothes would ride armored buses. “Government propaganda should allege certain groups gave evidence against others, and should fabricate evidence to include picture of gang member receiving award.… Government success against bandits should be blown up to great proportion. Bandit attacks should be universally described as amateurish, stupid, unsuccessful due to caliber of bandit leadership.”33

  Cordoning off areas; questioning every man, woman, and child twelve years or older; tracking with dogs; shooting the enemy on sight; using helicopters for highly mobile strikes—shades of Vietnam and the Philippines.

  It was all vintage Lansdale, to whom, after all, Yarborough ultimately reported at the top of the chain of counterinsurgency command.34 Lleras Camargo’s army chief of staff, General Nova Ruíz, accepted every recommendation except bringing in the Green Beret combat units.35 That was going too far.

  Yarborough was not put off by Nova Ruíz’s hesitancy. In a “secret supplement” to his report, he recommended establishing a covert apparatus that “should be charged with clandestine execution of plans developed by the United States Government toward objectives in the political, economic and military fields,” rather than depending on the Colombians to find their own solutions. Yarborough justified this summary dismissal of the inter-American principle of mutual respect for national sovereignty on the grounds of “the propensity of most of the leaders in both political and economic fields to ignore their national responsibilities and to seek personal aggrandizement instead.…

  “It is the considered opinion of the survey team,” he concluded, “that a concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombians’ internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counteragent and counterpropaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.”36

  This covert U.S.-backed civilian and military apparatus would supplement the “Army-sponsored nation building or ‘civic action’ programs.” At the same time, the Colombian air force would be urged
“to acquire a higher percentage of helicopters and light aircraft, such as the helio courier, in order to support Army anti-guerrilla operations.”37

  A few days before General Yarborough’s survey team returned to Fort Bragg, Cam was summoned to Bogotá. SIL’s contract had been approved, a smiling Hernández de Alba announced. If SIL would pledge to “respect the prerogatives of the Catholic Church according to the terms of the Concordat”38 between the Vatican and Colombia, the Conservatives who would soon succeed Lleras Camargo’s Liberal government would allow Cam’s American Protestants into the Indian tribes. Cam agreed without hesitation.

  The Colombian air force’s General Armando Urrego Bernal provided Cam with land for SIL’s base near the town of Puerto Lleras in Meta department, south of Villavicencio. The base was called Lomalinda, “Pretty Place.”*

  Shortly after Cam signed the contract and General Yarborough’s report was read at a March meeting of the Special Group in Washington, Colombians near Villavicencio watched a long column of army trucks bearing U.S. insignias pass through. The column headed south, toward the Macarena Mountains, just east of where SIL’s base would be located. No troops ever came out, they claimed. Explosions were heard rumbling from the Macarena Mountains, however. Soon afterward, the Colombian military ruled that airspace over the mountains was off-limits for all commercial airplanes. Over the years, reports would appear sporadically of planes being lost. Some pilots who strayed overhead and did come out reported seeing air runways and telecommunications antennas. In the early 1970s, the Colombian military would deny any foreign base or presence in the Macarena. Only American stockholders of the Loeb family-owned APCO Oil company and those who read APCO’s annual reports knew better. APCO entered the Macarena in 1967. In 1976, an APCO map showed that the Macarena had been honeycombed with clandestine runways.39

  By then, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, and Gulf had joined other oil companies in drilling for oil in the Llanos. JAARS’s Helio Couriers were taking off for Villavicencio from Lomalinda, the gray-misted Macarena Mountains hovering in the distance like a mirage.

  With SIL’s entry into Colombia, the final assault on the Amazon—and the Indians—had begun.

  *Celanese Corporation (of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Bogotá) would donate the first new plane; Quaker Oats would be asked by heir Henry Crowell to provide a radio; and Cam would help Robert Schneider in the advance, living with Elaine and their children in two trailers donated by Standard Oil of New Jersey.

  27

  CAMELOT VERSUS POCANTICO: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF JOHN F. KENNEDY

  FRACTURES IN THE DREAM

  On July 18, 1962, guards at the presidential palace in Lima, Peru, watched helplessly as a U.S.-supplied Sherman tank suddenly appeared out of the night and smashed through the palace’s tall iron gates. U.S.-trained Rangers poured through and quickly seized the building. Inside, President Manuel Prado y Ugarteche woke in his bed to find a Ranger officer standing over him, announcing that he was under arrest. Peru, the original showcase for both SIL- and U.S.-sponsored development in the Amazon basin, was placed under martial law.

  Informed of the coup, the Kennedy White House was worried, but not surprised. Peru in the last year had become a cauldron of conflicting ideologies, and recent elections had done nothing to resolve the internal tension that threatened to engulf the country in violence. The indefatigable leader of Peru’s Indians, Haya de la Torre, head of the reformist APRA party, had just won a plurality in a three-way presidential race. But the army had refused to accept Haya—an enemy of thirty years—as president. Desperate to hold on to the power he had sought for so long, Haya tried to cut a deal: He would give former dictator Manuel Odría the presidency if APRA were given a cabinet majority. Haya’s proposal only inflamed the generals.

  APRA’s power base was the rural and urban labor force. As a result of Peru’s large foreign debts, low wages at foreign-owned mines, and an almost feudal system of land tenure, the Andes’ huge Indian population had remained impoverished, illiterate, and unassimilated. As Indians migrated from poor mountain villages, great shantytowns began to ring Andean cities and Lima, gradually encroaching on Peru’s upper-class urban enclaves.

  Haya’s program of nationalization and “Indo-American” unity, meanwhile, threatened industrialists, the military, and the more conservative covert operatives in J. C. King’s Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA. Haya’s APRA was the only popular-based alternative to the growing influence of Marxism and Castroism, but King’s operatives did not see it that way. When the generals decided to act, the local CIA station did nothing to deter them.

  With the military coup, the immediate threat of APRA coming to power was removed. President Kennedy, however, was unhappy about the coup’s damage to the democratic image and social goals of the Alliance for Progress.

  Kennedy sensed that the Alliance’s democratic ideology was on the verge of being surrendered to the tired cynicism of Realpolitik. He could no longer sit on the sidelines. He broke diplomatic relations with Lima and suspended $80 million in credits and all military aid.

  “The declaration of the peoples of America adopted at Punta del Este,” Kennedy declared, “set forth the aim to improve and strengthen democratic institutions through the application of the principle of self determination within a framework of developing democratic institutions. In the case of Peru this great cause has suffered a severe setback.” Kennedy called for a return to civilian rule. “We feel that this hemisphere can only be secure and free with democratic governments.”1

  Such a strong statement against a ruling military junta by an American president was unprecedented. Kennedy was gambling his administration’s prestige on APRA’s ability to mobilize a popular protest against the coup. When APRA’s call for a national strike failed, so did Kennedy’s resolve.

  It was left to David’s and Nelson’s friend, J. Peter Grace of W. R. Grace & Company, to deliver the coup de grace to the Alliance’s reforms in Peru. Leading a delegation of executives from American mining companies that were doing business in Peru, Grace descended upon the White House like an avenging angel. His delegation told Kennedy that his actions might provoke the Peruvian military to expropriate their properties.2

  Kennedy listened carefully. Men like Grace were ignored only at great peril. Within a month, accepting the junta’s release of prisoners and promise to hold elections in 1963, Kennedy restored full diplomatic relations and all economic assistance to the Peruvian junta. Nine Latin American governments that had followed Kennedy’s lead had to swallow their pride and do likewise. The prestige of the United States suffered, and the influence of Marxism among frustrated young Peruvian intellectuals soon grew into plans for guerrilla war.

  If Kennedy was concerned that U.S. military aid was being used to prop up military dictatorships in Latin America, he was even more worried about communist insurgencies. In January, staff members of the National Security Council (NSC) had persuaded him to reverse his earlier decision to separate the economic programs of the Agency for International Development (AID) from the CIA’s police training programs. He quietly set up a task force to study the usefulness of the police program. The result was retrenchment: the creation of an Office of Public Safety within AID. Soon an International Police Academy sprouted in Washington, sponsored by AID but actually run by the CIA.3 In the years ahead, the academy’s students would include trainers of tribal police in Brazil. Once again, Kennedy’s desire for at least the rudiments of democracy in Latin America fell beneath the wheels of the United States’ powerful military-industrial juggernaut.

  At the same time, Rockefeller allies consolidated their hold on the new counterinsurgency infrastructure by expanding it. General Maxwell Taylor, who now chaired the Special Group-C.I., joined Roswell Gilpatric in founding a new counterinsurgency school for foreign service officers, to be operated under the auspices of the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Billed as the National Interdepartmental Seminar, the school be
gan in June 1962. Lecturers included General Edward Lansdale, then in charge of a new ultrasecret effort to assassinate Fidel Castro, code-named Operation MONGOOSE.

  Attorney General Robert Kennedy enthusiastically served as the president’s eyes and ears in the C.I. infrastructure. But as he prodded this apparatus to greater efforts against Cuba, this only prodded Cuba, in turn, to seek greater security from invasion.

  On October 15, the president was presented with U-2 photographic evidence that the Soviets, contrary to their previous pledges, were placing surface-to-surface missiles in Cuba with a 2,000-mile range. These missiles could reach the entire United States up to the Rocky Mountains.

  That afternoon, Kennedy convened the NSC Executive Committee. It would meet, with intermission, for the rest of the week.

  The ExCom, as the press called the committee, had a heavy representation of veterans of the Rockefeller network of influence. They all supported an action proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that probably would have triggered World War III: a first-strike by jets to “take out” the missile sites. Robert Kennedy was appalled. “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor,” he said.4 He and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pushed for a naval quarantine to buy time for negotiations. This proposal provided a middle ground between unacceptable acquiescence and nuclear war.

  Meanwhile, the Pentagon assembled the largest invasion force since World War II. More than 100,000 combat-ready troops gathered in Florida, an amphibious task force steamed in the area with 40,000 marines, and tactical fighters and 14,000 reservists were brought into Florida to provide airborne transfer support for the Green Berets. Only Robert Kennedy’s direct intervention prevented one of Colonel King’s CIA colleagues from sending CIA hit teams into Cuba against Castro at the height of the crisis.5