CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I LOOKED OUT OVER THE African terrain from the cockpit of the C-130 Hercules as the pilots made final approach to the four-thousand-foot unsurfaced airstrip on the west shore of Lake Tanganyika near Albertville. I leaned forward in anticipation from my jump seat between the pilots. “Congo Joe” in the right seat turned his head and grinned at me.

“Welcome to the black heart of Africa,” he said.

“Heart of Darkness,” I responded. The novella by Joseph Conrad: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. … I should be loyal to the nightmare of choice.” Africa as the “Dark Continent,” a place of danger and nightmares, was the accepted popular perception of darkest Africa at the turn of the century when Conrad published his book. In many ways, the image lingered on.

Tanganyika was the longest and second-largest freshwater lake in the world, stretching 418 miles to separate the nations of Congo and Tanganyika. It was beautiful country with the narrow deep blue of the lake snugged into the remarkable emerald of forest. Albertville further down the lake presented a contrasting conglomerate of dusty mortar buildings and native thatched huts bisected by dusty roads.

The lake had 1,136 miles of shoreline and an average width of only thirty miles, and smugglers were able quickly to ferry across Soviet- and Chinese-supplied arms to be used in ground fighting by Simbas against the Congolese National Army and its Belgian and mercenary allies. The rebels’ rout at Stanleyville had not stopped them.

Acting on Khrushchev’s instructions, Castro sent in a small fleet of armed and armored high-performance boats under Defense Minister Che Guevara to dominate the lake and keep supply lines to the Simbas open. Lacking a naval capability to interdict smugglers, Congolese president Moise Tshombe appealed to President Johnson, who promised to send help.

DCI McCone passed the issue on to me. “You’re our maritime expert. How do we handle it? How do we put a navy in there?”

I had helped design Swift Boats now being used on Vietnam’s waterways. “We’ll fly them in,” I said.

Mickey Kappes in my Maritime Division was in many ways a look-alike for Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, and a man who always seemed involved in some controversy or other, such as plots to knock off Fidel Castro. I sent him to Africa as a sort of advance party to pave the way and work with mercenaries to run down Che Guevara.

Out of sheer desperation when the Simba Rebellion first began, Tshombe and Mobutu in the Central Congolese Government had called up many former mercenaries to fight the revolutionaries. More than two hundred international hired fighters arrived in September 1964 to form a unit called 5 Commando led by “Mad Mike” Hoare to serve as the spearhead of the ANC. A more appalling horde could not have been assembled, gathered as they were from waterfront bars, jails, and back streets all over Europe. Thugs and brawlers, thieves, pickpockets, and muggers—just the sort to take on the killers and thugs of communism. They were widely feared all over the Congo for unsanctioned killings, torture of prisoners, looting, and mass rape in recaptured rebel areas.

“Suit your tactics to the enemy,” was Hoare’s philosophy on unconventional warfare. “Queensberry Rules when you are fighting gentlemen; no-holds-barred when you are up against savages. They do not think any more of you if you use kid gloves and soft talk. Less, as a matter of fact, as such are the traditional signs of weakness in Africa.”

UW could be a dirty business.

From CIA’s Miami Station, I collected sixteen Cuban exile boatmen. I brought in two SEALs from Vietnam with Swift experience, Lieutenants Phil Holtz and J. Hawes. They would be my officer staff. That made us a band of twenty, counting Kappes, who had already gone ahead, plus a half-dozen self-described “coon ass” workers from the Louisiana boat factory.

We had to disassemble the Swift Boats to transport them by airplanes. That meant splitting the hulls of the two 50-foot boats down the middle, snipping seven feet off the bows, cutting off the superstructure, and removing the engines. My Swift Boat force along with workers from the factory, equipment, supplies, and logistics—everything needed to reassemble the boats—were loaded aboard two C-130s and four C-134 cargo planes and airlifted by way of Naples and Cairo to Lake Tanganyika.

Kappes was waiting at the airfield when I landed in the advance C-130. The other planes would be coming in at staggered intervals. After the heat and humidity of Vietnam, I was surprised to find, due to elevation, a temperate climate more like that of the Mediterranean than Equatorial Africa. Average temperatures ranged in the mid-seventies. No wonder European colonists settled in the area. This land could be a paradise with a proper government and the right approach to building a society.

The rest of the planes arrived the next afternoon and dumped fifty tons of boats in pieces by the side of the airstrip. Railcars on a narrow-gauge rail spur delivered the boat parts to a makeshift “marina” on the lake. The Cajun workers, using Argon-gas welders, began putting Humpty together again. Lieutenant Hawes and some of the Cubans set up armed watches to either side of the marina. I stood by the water and looked out over the lake.

“Boss, we got company,” Lieutenant Hawes yelled out suddenly from on top of a felled log.

A speck on the watery horizon approached fast. Lieutenant Holtz came up, pulling his ball cap low over his eyes. “Reception,” he guessed. “Might be the bad guys.”

It hadn’t taken long for word of the new American presence to spread across the lake to communist operating bases in Tanganyika.

“We can give ’em a surprise reception of our own,” Lieutenant Holtz suggested. He was in his early thirties, with a thick chest, muscled swimmer’s arms, and a tanned face topped by a sun-bleached crew cut. He carried an M-60 machine gun over his shoulder. “I’ll signal the Cubans to get ready.”

I recognized the boat as a Soviet Komar.

“He’s turning back,” I said.

The enemy boat kicked up a wake in a kind of salute as it swerved past. It continued up-lake. I noticed a red flag popping at the bow.

“Commandante Tutu,” Lieutenant Holt remarked drily, “has slapped us across the face with his gauntlet.”

“Commandante Tutu” was Che Guevara’s nom de guerre.