Since day one, black budgets have lined the pockets of industry, whether it was Dow Chemical doing work on the Manhattan Project or Lockheed building secret bases and spy planes for the CIA. But privatizing covert actions and intelligence analysis is a problem for democracy. The corporations who provide services to the intelligence community, and by extension the people, exist to enhance their bottom line. Government service is of course a different kind of social contract.
In a different PowerPoint presentation Hillhouse unearthed, the Defense Intelligence Agency shows that it is fully aware of the potential conflicts of interest that arise in a privatized intelligence world. One slide of the unclassified briefing lays out the differences between a government employee and a contractor employee: A government employee had a “taxpayer funded salary; [a] fiduciary obligation to serve the public good; no profit motive; [and] universal and strict conduct standards,” while a contractor had a “private business salary; fiduciary duty to employer only; profit motive; employers have diverse and different [conduct] standards.” In other words, the DIA was warning that outsourcing the intelligence business meant creating a class of intelligence professionals with corporate rather than public interests at heart. That, however, wasn’t stopping the DIA from outsourcing over $1 billion in intelligence work to fulfill “operational and mission requirements,” including “Gathering and Collection, Analysis, Utilization, and Strategy and Support.”
Given the divergent interests between the intelligence community and its corporate kin, the opportunities for abuse are both predictable and legion. Intelligence community “product” is supposed to provide objective (insofar as that’s possible) information to policy makers. If there’s one thing that the CIA was supposed to do from its inception, that’s it. Replace a civic institution such as the CIA with a for-profit institution, and the results quickly diverge.
Even executives at private intelligence firms recognize the potential problems. “This is a personal view, but I happen to believe analysis is the responsibility of the government, and the government is accountable for it and you can’t delegate that and pass it off to contractors,” said former CIA deputy director for intelligence John Gannon, who went on to head BAE Systems’ Global Analysis Group. “A contractor is going to look at a government requirement and it’s going to go and find people wherever it can and get the greatest number of people at the lowest price and maximize the profit to the business to do it,” he says. “When I was in government hiring people, I was looking for the best possible people I could get against the priorities I fully understood and the mission that I had. That is not what the private sector does. I know that from personal experience because I’ve worked on both sides of the house here.”
Throughout postwar American history, the creation of the secret state and the budget that funds it has been a distinctly bipartisan project. A Republican Congress and Democratic president created the CIA back in 1947, and a Democratic Congress wrote the black budget into the books in 1949. It became law with the signature of a Democratic president. Nixon broke the rules most spectacularly, but Kennedy and Johnson had overseen the rise of covert wars in Southeast Asia and the secret infrastructures that went along with them. In the 1980s, a Democratic Congress signed off on the largest black budgets seen up until that point. When Clinton came to office in the early 1990s, he collaborated with a Republican Congress to privatize much of the secret world. Under a Democratic Congress, the black budget reached historic highs for fiscal year 2009.
Back in 1949, Congressman Marcantonio was a lone voice in his outrage over Congress’s willingness to cede its legislative prerogatives to the president and the secret state he controlled. Under subsequent administrations, that world had grown and thrived in the darkness. Congress had gone along with it. With an influx of antiwar legislators in the 1970s, Congress had held the first hearings on the secret state in decades. It passed legislation aimed at curbing its excesses and abuses. The incoming Reagan administration, however, would change the rules. It would lay the foundations of the secret state anew.
13
Plains of Death
Outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras
The pavement ended on the far side of Las Tapias, just past a collection of military ranges in the hills west of Tegucigalpa. Although Lepaterique was only another twelve miles or so to the west, it took more than an hour to get there on the winding dirt road. It was slow going: Packs of dogs ran alongside our Toyota pickup; shirtless men wearing cowboy hats led firewood-laden mules along a dirt road cutting through the thick pine forest extending from Nicaragua up to Chiapas, Mexico. A barefoot girl around seven carried a baby on her hip. On either side of the road, small peasant houses sat among makeshift cabbage fields and plantain trees cut out of the teeming deep-green forest. A truck full of Honduran Special Forces, all gripping M-16s, bounced past us from the opposite direction. The road began to climb. It was hot and humid, and the horseflies were starting to bite. The day before, two dead bodies—a man and his wife—had shown up somewhere on the side of this road. No one knew who they were or why they were killed.
Months earlier, at Berkeley, my friend and fellow geographer Joe Bryan had been mumbling something about old Contra camps and airfields he kept running into while doing fieldwork in Nicaragua and Honduras. Joe is a soft-spoken guy whose boyish looks and cheerful demeanor make him wholly disarming, but he’s got an incredibly sharp mind and works under some very difficult circumstances. Joe has spent most of his career working with indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, trying to understand what happens when traditional attitudes and ways of using land come up against territorial claims made by nation-states. He’d spent time with the Western Shoshone in Nevada mapping out traditional native lands. In Central America, Joe was working primarily with the Miskito people to negotiate land claims with national governments. It was complicated work: The problem Joe constantly faced was that traditional lands just don’t have the same kinds of borders that places on maps have, but to make a land claim, the native peoples had to draw maps. The process set off a kind of mapping arms race among the various indigenous peoples, each eager to claim as many “traditional” lands as possible. In these land struggles, drawing maps was like stockpiling strategic weapons: “Map or be mapped,” Joe explains. Then there was the whole Contra thing. Joe ran into old Contras all the time in the course of his work in the Central American hinterlands, but something was changing. It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about from the short conversations next to the water fountain in the hallway outside our adjacent offices. I finally got the story.
One day in 2004, Joe was sitting on the steps of the YATAMA party headquarters in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, when a Miskito man with a tattered T-shirt and dirty jeans came up to him and offered his hand.
“Do you have a project here?” the man asked, assuming that no gringo would be hanging out in Puerto Cabezas without some sort of angle.
With no visible association to the Peace Corps or an NGO, Joe’s presence in the town was an anomaly. Local rumor held that Joe was DEA, or maybe from an “other government agency.” He certainly didn’t look like a cocaine runner.
“No, I’m just a student,” replied Joe.
The man ignored the answer. In the cocaine-soaked Wild West atmosphere of the Miskito Coast, “grad student” was just as easily a discreet way of saying “CIA officer.” The man started telling Joe about a trip he’d once made to the United States, about the nice Spanish-speaking cook who gave him slugs of whiskey from time to time at a military base in North Carolina. It struck a chord; Joe had heard that anti-Sandinista Miskito fighters had been brought for training to Fort Bragg—the North Carolina home of the Army’s Special Forces community—after Congress repealed the Boland Amendment in the late 1980s. While the Iran-Contra scandal tore through Washington, the United States continued training Contras on U.S. soil. When Joe asked the man what he learned in North Carolina, the man rattled off a list of commando skill
s: blowing up bridges, small-party raids, training in communications, map reading. Again, the man asked for a job. Joe assured him that grad students don’t have either the money or inclination to hire old Contras, even if they did have a project for them to work on. The man didn’t give up.
“Look, I haven’t had a job since the war. . . . I can do lots of things, anything you want. I’ll find bin Laden. I’ll fight Saddam Hussein. Give me a job.”
Joe insisted he couldn’t help.
“Look, I can give you the coordinates of a place in the llano. . . . You tell me when you want to come, and I will have three hundred men waiting for you there. You can take us away in a helicopter, we’ll go to Iraq, Afghanistan, it doesn’t matter. We’ll go there and no one will have to know. Think about it, boss.”
Joe’s encounter with the broke Contra on the streets of Puerto Cabezas turned out to be a vision of what was to come. In September 2005, an advertisement appeared in El Heraldo, one of Honduras’s major daily papers. A company called Your Solutions was recruiting “security forces”; applicants had to be willing to work overseas. By Central American standards, the pay was great: between $990 a month for non-English-speakers and up to $1,500 for English-speaking contractors with military experience. The same thing was going on elsewhere in Central and South America—countries racked by years of civil war, death squads, insurrections, and disappearances. In Nicaragua, someone named David Godoy recruited for Your Solutions. The company was also hiring in Chile. Before deploying to Iraq, the men would receive training outside Tegucigalpa, at an old camp built in the 1980s at Lepaterique. I convinced Joe that we should go there together.
Our 4x4 bounced through the mountain town of Lepaterique toward the two-story cross overlooking the village, past the cemetery, and into the gate of the camp. Quonset huts and dormitories lay scattered around. A row of crashed trucks and cars lined the center divide. In black letters above the entrance to a teal shack were the words CLUB SOCIAL. On a board nailed to a tree, green letters spelled SECTOR I. Down the hill was a lake and small pier. It felt like an abandoned summer camp—the kind of place kids might spend their summers away from their parents. Cows milled around the abandoned wood shacks and buildings. As we sat in the truck looking around, a dark-skinned, shirtless, middle-aged man sauntered out from a building with a Pepsi machine outside. The caretaker. He welcomed us and asked what we were doing. When we replied that we were from U.C. Berkeley and interested in the Your Solutions story, he turned away. He either didn’t know the story (unlikely) or was unwilling to talk about it. But he invited us to look around the camp as much as we wanted.
At the far end of the camp we found the shooting range. It was little more than a piece of wire strung from wooden posts in front of a dirt berm on the base’s far end. Sheets of cardboard taped with photocopied targets of bull’s-eyes and human torsos hung from a clothesline. TARGET PISTOL, 50-FOOT, TIMED AND RAPID FIRE, STANDARD AMERICAN read the words. Some of the bullet holes were taped over with masking tape so that the targets could be reused. In the middle of the range, a piece of poster paper had a drawing of a man’s torso in blue marker, his body divvied up into regions worth different points. It was as if someone had left the camp abruptly, not even bothering to take the targets down. Littered on the ground was more evidence of what had taken place here: shotgun shells, casings from 38mm handguns, and the brass full metal jackets of spent Philippine-made M-16 ammunition. It was sloppy work—automatic weapons outside the military are illegal in Honduras, as they are most other places.
If Your Solutions’s intent was to generate controversy by seeking out relatively low-paid Central American mercenaries to complement the American “coalition” in Iraq, they couldn’t have picked a more inflammatory location to conduct their training. This place was home to a long history of covert collaborations between the darker elements in both countries. Honduras announced its withdrawal from the “coalition of the willing” on April 20, 2004. That same day, the Bush administration declared that Paul Bremer’s replacement in Iraq would be John Negroponte. It’s not clear if Negroponte’s appointment directly prompted the Honduran withdrawal, but the symbolism was nonetheless telling. Negroponte remains widely reviled in Honduras for his role as ambassador to the country in the early 1980s. During Negroponte’s ambassadorship, American aid to Honduras increased from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million in 1984. It came with serious strings attached: Honduras became a giant staging ground for the quasi-secret American war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to the south. And once Negroponte arrived, Honduran dissidents began disappearing. When their cast-off bodies showed up in the mountains around Tegucigalpa, the corpses showed signs of torture and execution-style killing. Nevertheless, at Negroponte’s confirmation hearings to become ambassador to Iraq, he repeated his longstanding assertion that there were no “death squads” operating in Honduras on his watch. In fact, there were. The most notorious of them was Battalion 316. Beginning in 1981, more than twenty-five years before Your Solutions showed up in the hills outside Tegucigalpa, Battalion 316 trained at this very same camp in Lepaterique.
Battalion 316 was the brainchild of Gustavo Alvarez. The son of a high school principal, Alvarez was obsessed with military history. He admired Nazi general Erwin Rommel so much that he named his sons Erwin and Manfred, after the German general and his son. By the early 1980s, Alvarez had graduated with honors from the Argentine Military Academy, risen to the rank of colonel, and become head of Honduras’s national police force, the Fuerza de Seguridad Pública (FUSEP). On the side, Alvarez created a secret intelligence unit that would be the basis for Battallion 316.
As Alvarez rose to power in Honduras, revolution broke out in Nicaragua. On July 17, 1979, dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled Nicaragua since 1937, ceded power. Two days later, the Sandinistas took Managua and, with assistance from Cuba, instituted a series of literacy programs, agrarian reforms, and other leftist social and economic projects. In the United States, the Carter administration took a lukewarm attitude toward the Sandinistas. Carter felt that U.S. hostility toward the Cuban revolution two decades prior had done much to radicalize the Cuban government. Carter believed that American assistance to the newly formed government would help the new state steer a more moderate course and give the United States a degree of leverage over Sandinista policies. Moreover, there was little doubt about the brutality of the deposed Somoza regime. Over strong resistance from right-wingers in Congress, Carter passed a series of moderate aid packages to the fledgling government. All of this would change with the incoming Reagan administration, with its vision of a Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua.
On Honduras’s northern border, Alvarez saw a peasant revolution in El Salvador growing into a brutal civil war. Fearful that the insurgencies in the north and south might inspire a revolution at home, Alvarez reckoned he could solve any potential political problem by emulating the Argentinean police state. On February 6, 1981, Col. Alvarez told U.S. ambassador Jack Binns (a Carter appointee whom Negroponte would replace later that year) that he admired the way that the Argentines dealt with suspected leftists and planned to emulate them.
Beginning in the early 1970s in Argentina, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (the “Triple A” death squad) undertook a campaign of assassinations against suspected leftists, killing 458 people and “disappearing” another 600. When a military junta took power in 1976, it institutionalized state terror, assassinations, torture, and disappearances against leftist “subversives”—students, trade unionists, and other critics of Argentina’s military rule. Tens of thousands of people were “disappeared” or murdered between the junta’s 1976 coup and the regime’s 1983 end.
When Binns heard about Alvarez’s plans for Honduras, the alarmed American ambassador sent a cable to Washington:
Alvarez stressed theme that democracies and West are soft, perhaps too soft to resist Communist subversion. The Argentines, he said, had met the threat effectively, identifying—and taking
care of—the subversives. Their method, he opined, is the only effective way of meeting the challenge.
Binns feared the Argentines “might be helping the Hondurans set up an extralegal countersubversion operation that would resemble and emulate that of Argentina.” His fears were well founded. A team of ten to twelve Argentine military “advisers” was already in the country training Honduran military intelligence. This was part of the Argentine government’s Operation Charly, a covert action designed to export the “Argentine method” of counterinsurgency to other countries. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Alvarez’s son Oscar would explain that “the Argentines came . . . and they taught how to disappear people.”
“This place is called the S-Turns,” said Maria, a staffer at the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH), an NGO formed by the families of Honduras’s disappeared to investigate the past and to advocate for human rights. We’d driven several miles into the mountains outside Tegucigalpa, past the last shantytowns and suburbs, onto a steep dirt road that makes sharp 180 degree turns as it winds up to a radio antenna overlooking the city. The mountain, once a pine forest before the logging industry stripped its trees, teemed with shoulder-high overgrowth. Maria pointed to a clump of thick bushes and said, “That’s where they found the first body.” One morning in November of 1981, as peasants from a hamlet atop the mountain made their long daily walk to the market at the mountain’s base, they found a human body half-buried on the roadside. A dog was making off with a piece of its flesh. The peasants buried the corpse to keep the dogs away. The body was never identified.
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