by Gerard Colby
SIL claimed that it had no flights and no missionaries in the area at the time, although a journalist reported that “American missionaries working in the zone reported that the Peruvian air force had bombed a number of Campa villages.”31 The army, for its part, boasted of carrying out “an intensive information and warning campaign, giving out messages in the native language through loudspeakers on warplanes and helicopters.”32
In Washington the CIA and the Special Group remained unsatisfied. The MIR had produced a Guevara, but it was Hector Cordero Guevara, principal coordinator of the MIR’s central committee. Years later, Belaúnde claimed to have met Che Guevara in 1962 at Puerto Bermúdez, a remote village just north of the Túpac Amaru column’s area of operations; he suspected that Guevara was scouting the area for guerrilla operations.33 Was Guevara leading the MIR? But the New York Times report that the Cuban ex-minister had been captured was mistaken.34
Che Guevara was, in fact, then fighting for the followers of the slain Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo, but the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division had no way of confirming the reports. And anyway, the CIA assumed that Guevara would be fighting in Latin America, his homeland.
To mount an operation against the likes of Che, the CIA needed the best counterinsurgency experts with combat experiences in the jungle. That was no problem; the CIA simply turned to its ample stock of CIA officers in Vietnam. But the Agency needed more, one of its own field generals, a master of clandestine operations, who knew the backwoods of Latin America—especially the whole Amazon—like no other American; who had protected his Agency identity from all but the most privy; who had contacts from years in business as well as spying; and, most important, who knew about assassinations and had long ago fingered Che Guevara for death.
The CIA needed Colonel J. C. King.
32
POISONS OF THE AMAZON
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
While the CIA’s war against leftist guerrillas raged in the Peruvian Amazon throughout 1965, an elderly American landed at Iquitos’s sweltering airport. His arrival in the country’s largest port on the Amazon River went unnoticed. Iquitos was by then a true small city, with buses, hotels, newspapers, and even a radio station. Foreign travelers were a common sight walking down the Malecón, the wide promenade along the river, enjoying the colorful tropical vistas. Although the guerrilla war had scared off some tourists, the nearest fighting was far to the southwest in the jungle, and Iquitos’s white-shirted merchants still hoped for a tourist boom that might rival the rubber boom of a headier past. No one had any reason to offer an American stranger anything but a welcome, especially when he asked only about where he could find another American who was herself a local tourist attraction, Nicole Maxwell.
These days Maxwell never knew who might ring her doorbell. Her book, Witch Doctor’s Apprentice, had made her a celebrity. It recounted her solo expedition to the Peruvian jungle in 1958 to gather Indian medicinal plants for a New York pharmaceutical company. That eight-month trip netted a publicity bonanza for her corporate sponsor, but only $1,000 for Maxwell. But in the course of Maxwell’s television appearances, the media warmed to her and she to them. In her late fifties, Maxwell was still a handsome woman, with brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a slight, almost petite figure that seemed exotically at odds with the image of a jungle adventurer. Her book became a mild success. More important, it brought opportunity literally knocking on her door.
The gray-haired man standing at her door introduced himself in a manner she would later remember as correct, even courtly. He had read her book and been given her address by a mutual friend. He knew the jungle, he said, having served with the Rubber Production Board during World War II. He had learned then that the power of Indian medicinal plants was more than superstition. Now that he was retired from heading the South American division of Johnson & Johnson, he was free to investigate these remedies. Would she be interested in joining in the effort if he set up a firm on a solid scientific and financial basis?1
Maxwell accepted. This man, she learned from friends in New York, was an important industrialist. She could feel confident that he would know people who might invest some risk capital.2
He, on the other hand, knew that Maxwell was a person with some savvy on South America. During World War II, she had worked in Washington as director of the Latin American Institute, an organization associated with Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA. In 1948, she launched her first expedition into the Amazon, one that coincided with Standard Oil of New Jersey’s first expedition into the Ecuadorian Amazon. Rumors that she was a spy could have proved more dangerous than the Jivaro headhunters. Despite it all, she survived her jungle adventure, but only because Standard Oil flew her out, rescuing her, she claimed, from a bad case of dysentery.
From Galo Plaza’s Ecuador, she moved to Manuel Odría’s Peru, when Odría was opening new tracts of the Amazon to American and other foreign oil companies. She updated an English-language guidebook to Peru and reported the goings-on in the Amazon for the American colony’s English daily, the Peruvian Times, a major booster of Peru’s oil sales and the Amazon’s economic potential. From Peru, she moved to La Paz at the very time that Indian miners in Bolivia successfully led that nation in overthrowing the old oligarchy. The revolution cleared the way for the government’s development of Standard Oil’s nationalized oil fields near Camirí. Maxwell worked as a correspondent for Vision magazine, since revealed as financed by a CIA conduit.3 (She would, however, always deny any ties to the Agency.) She stayed in Bolivia for the four years that were the Indians’ heyday, perfecting her writing style and reportage. By 1958, the Indian revolution was over, and Maxwell returned to New York.
It was here that she met with the executives of a pharmaceutical company who were seeking medicinal plants of the Peruvian Amazon and took the assignment that made her famous.
Therefore, when she was approached by the courtly gentleman in Iquitos, Nicole Maxwell was already known in certain circles for being more than just an explorer and aficionada of jungle remedies. To this new business associate, who traveled easily in these circles, her knowledge of South America, not just its plants, could be very useful.
Years later, whenever she wrote about him, Maxwell never revealed his identity. He was always referred to as Mr. Arthur Jones.
J. C. King had officially retired from the CIA in 1964 after the overthrow of the government of João Goulart in Brazil. Decades would pass before the myth would be dispelled that King had been forced to retire because of the Bay of Pigs or because of his age, sixty being the supposed mandatory retirement age.4 In fact, King was sixty-four when he officially retired and he remained on the CIA’s payroll thereafter as a special consultant.5
It was common knowledge that King was involved in chemical and biological warfare after he retired as chief of Clandestine Services in Latin America.
“I was pretty sure he was on a CBW [chemical and biological warfare] contract,” a former CIA official recalled. “Every year he had a project worth $100,000 to $150,000 a year. Everybody laughed, but he always got approval. I was always curious why, with King, no one wanted to take any responsibility. Not even the Director, John [Clarke, Jr.], signed off on King’s things. All this bullshit on mushrooms and flowers and herbs and gobbledlygook … I had all these visions of Hitchcock.”6
With charm unburdened by fanfare, King easily recruited Nicole Maxwell. She was flattered by his praise for her book and she needed money. Maxwell agreed to enter into a contract that required her to collect plants and to set up a field office in Iquitos.
Next, King flew to the Boston area and approached Georgia Persinos, a young botanist at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, on whom he used the same technique as he used with Nicole Maxwell: He had seen her picture in a recent book on native remedies, Margaret Kreig’s Green Medicine. He did not tell Persinos, of course, that one of the famed mycologists featured by Kreig, R. Gordon Wasson, had unwittingly he
lped the CIA’s hunt for mind-controlling drugs by taking an MKULTRA scientist, the University of Delaware’s James Moore, on a CIA-funded expedition to Oaxaca, Mexico, to learn the secrets of “God’s flesh,” the hallucinogenic mushroom the local Mazatec Indians considered sacred.7
A registered pharmacist, Persinos was then only in her twenties and naive. It was her job to analyze plants used in Indian remedies collected by Nicole Maxwell.
In March 1966, King was ready. He had lawyers register incorporation papers in New Jersey, calling his new venture the Amazon Natural Drug Company (ANDCO). ANDCO’s stated objective was to develop, manufacture, and sell drugs and to “explore the commercial uses of natural plants and chemical derivatives thereof.” King named himself president.
It all sounded quite proper to Persinos and Maxwell. King set up a lab for Persinos at Rockville, Maryland, and later opened an office in Washington. It was really only a room, but neither Persinos nor Maxwell was bothered about why it was even necessary. All Maxwell knew was that King sent her a check to cover her travel expenses to the United States. He wanted her to come immediately and to bring with her an Indian remedy that she had discovered during her 1958–1959 expedition. Called sangre de drago, “dragon’s blood,” the remedy was drawn from the sap of a tree and accelerated the healing of wounds without leaving scars. She filled five bottles with the sap and caught a flight north.
King met Maxwell at the airport and whisked her away to his estate in Oakton, Virginia. King’s family was impressed by the results of her application of sangre de drago to a cut on the foot of their family dog: The improvement was immediate. The next morning King took the remedy to his lab. Five days later he returned “in a state of excitement I would never have believed possible in such a cool, rather poker-faced individual,” she later recalled. “He positively leapt up the stairs.”
“‘It’s absolutely incredible,’ he said before even taking off his topcoat.… ‘We need a bottle of champagne for a toast. My research director suspects we may have discovered a healing principle hitherto unknown to medical science.’”8
He asked Maxwell to return to Iquitos as soon as possible and to send a steady supply of the remedy for further lab experiments. She would also have to rent a house in Iquitos to serve as ANDCO’s field headquarters. Plants would be stored and initially tested there, he explained, using animals that would be held in an air-conditioned building. Would she accept a modest salary, a $1,000 bonus for each plant found to be of value, plus a small royalty from each product sold?
Starry-eyed, she flew back to Iquitos to set up operations.
King’s interest was more than “dragon’s blood,” however; it was, as usual, counterinsurgency. King was still an adviser to the CIA, and the Agency was interested in things other than tropical ointments. Population control was becoming a major focus of the Johnson administration’s policy toward the Third World, with John D. Rockefeller 3rd pushing for the creation of a special assistant to the president to oversee birth control programs.
King saw fortune beckoning. Indian contraceptive plants had been sought since anthropologists reported more than twenty years earlier that Indian women knew plants that could control their fertility. Maxwell, in fact, had made her name promoting native contraceptives.
King asked Maxwell to grow Indian contraceptive sedges in her garden. He even provided her with a supply of eager rabbits. Through an Indian shaman’s son she hired, Maxwell also located medicines that were new to her. The drying, grinding, and pinching continued for ten months. The demands of King’s biochemists in the United States for more plants and sangre de drago seemed insatiable. Maxwell’s staff, grown to five men, could barely keep up, and Maxwell was driven to exhaustion.
King’s frequent trips to Iquitos that year did not help matters. He often brought a botanist or pharmacologist with him and always threw a large dinner party for thirty or forty people. King was obviously well connected. Sometimes he would have Maxwell organize a “river expedition” up the tributaries of the Amazon to gather plants. The expeditions included CIA officers who were veterans of jungle warfare in Vietnam.9
Armed with mortars and grenades, their assignment was obviously not to collect plants. They were to kill any Indians who judged King’s encroachments into their territory to be unfriendly and attacked.10 By 1965, “wild Indian” scouting had become a priority for the CIA in the Amazon, not just in Peru, and not just by undercover agents.
“TARGETING THE HOSTILES”
In late 1964, following the coup in Brazil, William Cameron Townsend had asked Dale Kietzman, the director of the Summer Linguistic Institute (SIL) in Brazil, to study the feasibility of setting up a series of SIL bases in southern Amazonas and Acre Territory. Acre formed the westernmost boundary of the Brazilian Amazon and jutted into Peru between Iquitos and Pucallpa.
More important (and probably unknown to Cam), Acre was reported to have the richest oil reserves in the area. As far back as 1948, the CIA had pinpointed five regions in Brazil where petroleum was believed to exist. Acre was the most promising. “The same geological formation as those found in the abundant oil fields of Peru and Bolivia extend all throughout this area.” But it was also the most remote. Transportation was required.11
By late 1964 and early 1965, SIL was ready and eager to help Brazil’s new military dictatorship solve these transportation problems. Always thinking ahead, Cam had laid the groundwork at the beginning of 1964, before the coup had even taken place. Despite the Goulart government’s widespread suspicion and resentment of growing American influence in Brazil, Cam had encouraged the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS) to shift resources from Peru to Brazil for the big push ahead into the Amazon.12
In “formal conversations” at SIL’s June 1964 board meeting, Cam and the director of SIL’s Peru branch, Eugene Loos, came to an agreement that the big Catalina (Cat) amphibian that had been donated in 1959 by Orlando, Florida, businessmen for use throughout the Amazon basin “probably was excess to the Peru program and could be transferred to Brazil as soon as a crew might be available and the need established for a plane.”13 Named Marshall Rondon in memory of the founder of Brazil’s Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI), the World War II-vintage Cat had helped SIL advance into the jungles of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Now it would supply SIL’s penetration of the Brazilian Amazon, the wings of Fundamentalist Christianity bearing home, ironically, the name of the positivist Rondon.
This agreement was a key factor in the decision of SIL’s Brazil branch to study the feasibility of establishing other SIL/JAARS bases in the Brazilian Amazon. Because the territory was so immense, Dale Kietzman suggested that the tribes north of the Amazon River should be effectively ceded to allied Fundamentalist Protestant missions (the New Tribes Mission and the Unevangelized Fields Mission) that were already there, and that SIL concentrate instead on “beginning our major aviation operation out of a point such as Pôrto Velho.”14
It turned out to be a choice location. Pôrto Velho, the biggest town on the Madeira River, was the projected terminus of Brazil’s first all-weather road in the trans-Amazonian highway system. The road was being built with $1 million worth of heavy equipment donated by the U.S. Army and $2.6 million in loans from the Agency for International Development.15 The road plowed west from Brasília through Cuiabá, Mato Grosso’s captial, and was expected to reach Pôrto Velho, the capital of Rondonia territory some 900 miles west, by 1968.
Kietzman sent Cam a copy of his report, specifying tribes and distances between proposed subbases, as well as a map of “occupied” tribes showing his strategy of using Pôrto Velho as a jumping-off point and linking SIL’s bases in Amazonas and Acre by air with the Catalina. He noted that “the heaviest concentration” of tribes not yet reached by American Fundamentalist missionaries was “west of the Madeira River,” which included much of Amazonas and all of Acre. In fact, there could be as many as 100 tribes in this vast area. But “the exact situation will be known only afte
r completion of the present CNPI survey.”16
The CNPI was the National Council for the Protection of the Indian, the official overseer of the SPI. But even before the coup, the CNPI was under the thumbs of the military officers who dominated the SPI. Following the agenda for development of the Amazon, particularly road building, just before March 1964, the CNPI ordered a survey of Indian tribes in the Brazilian Amazon. To cover the tribes of the southern Amazon valley, it turned to SIL.
“Think of it!” Kietzman exclaimed. “The small surveys we had planned, limited because of the costs of travel, had been expanded over the territory we knew least about, with travel expenses provided.
“Our teams were soon in the field, penetrating into remote river valleys.”17
SIL teams moved along the Juruá and Purus rivers, scoured the state of Goiás, crossed the state of Acre from east to west, and pushed west along the lower tributaries of the Amazon all the way to Peru. When the task was done, Kietzman compiled the data from SILers and other surveyors into a document that was remarkable for both its scope and its potential for horror.
The most striking innovation was his demarcation on maps of many Indian homelands as an “area of potentially hostile Indians.” These words, as well as “warlike” and “wild groups,”18 conveyed an image of aggressive Indians straight out of Hollywood’s version of the American West.
Kietzman pinpointed the “hostile” areas on maps that broke down the Amazon into Indian “culture areas.” The maps, in turn, were incorporated into an English-language book, entitled Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century, which seemed designated more for American readers than for Brazilians. Academic in form and content and designed specifically for “field workers,” the book appeared to be a harmless cataloguing of tribes—their location, their culture, their population size, and their acceptance of Brazilian domination. But it also offered a road map for American penetration into the Brazilian interior, much like that which occurred a century earlier in the American West, including warnings about “hostile” areas.