Southern Hemisphere
June 1988
While the Iran-Contra political circus ground on in Washington through 1988, I was eager to stretch my wings in a way that allowed me to continue the fight against communism while utilizing the knowledge I’d gained at George Mason University. I’d researched and written about different terrorist organizations during my time at GM, and I was particularly interested in the Marxist groups in Central and South America. There were endemic Marxist insurgencies all over the world, even as late as 1988, but the homegrown ones in the Southern Hemisphere were particularly brutal and vicious.
When a counterterrorism slot opened up in one of those countries, my then SAD Ground Branch Chief strongly suggested I apply, and I jumped at the chance. I was accepted for it immediately—turns out, I was the only person in the Agency to apply for it. That came as a surprise to me, but in the final years of the Cold War, counterterrorism (CT) was sort of a bastard stepchild within the Agency. That would change in the 1990s, of course.
I went down to my new station about a month ahead of the rest of the family to get the lay of the land, find a house, receive our HHE (household effects), and deal with a myriad of other mundane logistical details required to get a household up and running in a foreign country.
Right away, I could tell this assignment would be a challenge. The capital city was filthy, impoverished, and desperately overcrowded. The Marxist terror group operating in the country kept attacking the power transmission towers, which triggered widespread blackouts. There were times when the electricity failed for over sixteen hours at a stretch. This caused mayhem in the streets, as the stoplights would often be nonfunctional. Traffic was already the sort of Mad Max chaos I’d seen in other countries, but here, the locals took it to a new level of crazy. They ignored traffic signs and lanes, sped down sidewalks, sending pedestrians fleeing in their paths. Snarls and wrecks were common, as were road-rage brawls after fender benders. With the stoplights down, going through intersections was a wild free-for-all and not for the faint of heart.
On my first ride from the airport, I knew running surveillance detection routes in the labyrinth of streets here would be an extraordinary challenge. The city was cobbled together over centuries, with roads never designed for cars overlapping more modern, if poorly constructed, thoroughfares. It was a hodgepodge mess that sprawled for miles in every direction. Shanties and hovels stood shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of modern skyscrapers. People begged in the streets. Police were everywhere. Army tanks and soldiers armed with assault rifles stood guard in front of government buildings.
This was a country at war with itself. For eight years, the Marxist insurgency had raged, led by a cultish, almost mythical figure who’d once been a philosophy professor at a third-tier college. Let’s call him “Tomas” because his true name would be recognizable and geolocational. When the country held its first-ever democratic elections in 1980, he saw that as the moment to strike and led his fanatical ideologues in a series of attacks on polling stations. They burned ballots and declared they were the people’s army bent on establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.
They were Maoist in orientation, supposedly devoted to the plight of the country’s vast underclass, especially the rural poor. They took to the mountains to establish a base of operations, then built networks throughout the country with which they could launch attacks.
The professor’s followers were fanatically loyal to him and the cause. They recruited from villages and college campuses, creating a blend of pseudo-intellectual diehards and hardy frontline fighters. Of the latter, most were younger—teenagers and twentysomethings, with almost half being female. For some, there was an intense allure of romance to the cause of revolution.
After those first attacks in 1980, it did not take long for the Marxists to turn on their own base of support. When villages balked at supporting them, they would murder the leaders. They were known for descending on a village with a captured local farmer in tow. They’d put their prisoner on public display, announcing he was a reactionary and had spoken out against communism. They’d whip him as the villagers looked on in horror, then execute him.
Those sorts of excesses turned many peasants against the peasant revolution. At times, when members of the terror group entered a village, the people would set upon them with stones and homemade spears. In one case, six teenage Marxists were tied to a town’s “rock of justice” and slowly strangled to death by the locals.
The violence and brutality escalated and soon spun out of control. In 1983, the professor’s adherents swept into a town and hacked to pieces men, pregnant women, and children with hatchets and axes. Almost a hundred people were murdered.
While they tried to terrorize the people in the countryside into submission, other cells launched attacks on economic targets. In one case, they took over a university’s experimental farm that was being used to develop a line of cheeses that could be exported for desperately needed hard currency. To the Marxists, this was a capitalist enclave to be destroyed. They spent hours slaughtering the farm’s dairy cows with machetes—and did such a poor job of it they started a stampede. Local peasants who worked on the farm rushed to the scene to find frenzied cows fleeing blood-covered, machete-wielding Marxists. The peasants pleaded with the terrorists to stop, but in a morning of haphazard violence, most of the farm’s animals were killed.
Killing animals became one of the professor’s go-to tactics. In towns that refused to submit to their authority, the Marxists would murder dogs and hang them from light poles as a warning to anyone who tried to oppose them.
As the violence escalated, the police and army deployed to the countryside. They proved almost equally brutal. Hatred for the Marxists burned hot in the security forces, as they’d seen both family and comrades captured and murdered by them. Summary executions, rape, and torture all took place, especially in the rural areas.
This was a war without good guys.
Trapped in the middle, the peasantry suffered horribly. Eventually, over seventy thousand people would die as a result of the rebellion spawned by the professor and his Marxist revolutionaries, but that number did not tell the full story of misery and anguish visited upon this already poverty-stricken nation.
When I arrived in 1988, the cycle of violence was reaching a climax. The Marxists had overrun many of the nation’s mines in the mountains outside the capital, where they seized great stockpiles of dynamite and other explosives. The terrorists were always short of guns, but they had an abundance of bomb-making material that they used widely.
To fund the revolution and acquire more guns, the Marxists took over the drug trade, organizing the coca growers into a collective they controlled. They’d sell the coca to the drug cartels in exchange for AK-47s and cash. The Marxists became quite adept in the underground capitalist cocaine market.
The money and weapons fueled the cycle of violence. In the cities, the revolutionaries carried out bombings nearly every day. Initially, they attacked government institutions or economic targets, but by 1988, they had extended their bombing campaign to include leftist professors, intellectuals, and writers they deemed not “ideologically pure enough.” They attacked rival communist guerrilla groups for the same reason. Eventually, they started attacks on innocent civilians with no other strategic reason than to inspire terror. They bombed buses and trains and set off explosives in crowded public spaces. They pulled off assassinations and kidnappings and cowed the press by murdering reporters not aligned with their cause.
The death toll mounted daily with little end in sight.
Not long after I arrived, the Marxists hit a very symbolic target.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The terrorists surveilled that target and discovered the bus that carried the elite soldiers who defended it used the same route at the same time every day from their barracks to their assigned post.
One morning, they blocked the bus with a VW bug. The bus driver laid on his horn, distracted by the obstructed path. Meanwhile, a “teenage-looking” girl (she was actually twenty-one) who seemed to be selling fruit from a small handcart suddenly rushed the bus and shoved the cart under it. A moment later, a bomb concealed in the cart detonated, which touched off the vehicle’s gas tank in a sympathetic explosion. The bus was blown apart and consumed by flames, killing over a dozen of the elite dragoons.
A nearby policeman saw the girl fleeing the scene and rushed after her. But she had backup covering her escape route. One of the Marxists, dressed innocuously like everyone else on the street, stepped behind the cop, drew a pistol, and shot him in the back of the head. Both the shooter and the bomb planter escaped.
My job in the capital was to assist the local security forces wherever I could to thwart these attacks and take down the cells conducting them. This was very different from anything I’d ever done before, so I started from the basics.
First thing: if I was going to operate in the capital city, I needed to know its streets. Before the era of GPS and Waze, I spent hours driving through every neighborhood, map in hand, getting the lay of the land. It was a miserable place to navigate, but I slowly came up my learning curve. Later, because of this, I was asked to help out on other operations where my knowledge of the street layout was an asset.
As I learned the grid, I began meeting with the contacts my predecessors had developed. We had about a dozen. I read through their jackets and didn’t see a whole lot to work with in those pages. After meeting with them in different locations around the city, I grew convinced that most of them simply couldn’t offer us useful intelligence. In one case, a student asset sat down with me and handed a sheaf of flyers to me. They were Marxist recruiting notices left on his campus with a meeting time and place on them.
“Great,” I said to the asset. “What happened at the meeting?”
He gave me a blank stare.
“Did you go to the meeting?”
“No. I just picked these off the floor afterward.”
The Marxists were committed, dangerous and exceptionally hard to penetrate, so I understood the asset’s reluctance to have direct contact with them. New recruits were tested for their ideological purity, then put through an acid test to see if they had the chops to be a terrorist. Usually, this meant they had to go kill somebody to prove their loyalty and commitment to the cause. Not a lot of people wanted to go through that to supply information to us for a couple of hundred dollars a week.
After the first few months, I had to cut all but four or five of our assets off the payroll. We weren’t getting anything for our money, and the attacks were escalating. It did not take long to understand that the organization we were trying to penetrate was exceptionally cagey and well versed with tradecraft. They were flexible, cunning, and could tactically evolve. When the government tried to stop their attacks on the power grid by sowing the ground around the transmission towers with antipersonnel mines, the Marxists rounded up dogs and threw them over the warning fences. They would run around, panicked as their kin detonated the mines around them. With enough dogs, they could create a path to the towers, set charges, and blow them up.
The power outages continued unabated.
Finally, we caught a break. A young woman who was friendly to us tipped us that a group of Marxists routinely used her small home in the capital as a meeting point. They were tough, intimidating, and all veterans of violent actions. This was a potential gold mine of intelligence for us, but we needed to figure out a way to get it undetected.
Fortunately, we had a creative tech team at our base. They went out and bought a used table that matched the décor of the woman’s very humble home. They hollowed out one leg and installed a microphone and radio transmitter. We delivered the table and taught her how to activate the system before the cell arrived.
We established a surveillance post that overlooked her house. There, the tech guys set up recording devices connected to a radio receiver, along with other gear. Soon, we were all set; we just needed to figure out what radio frequency would give us the best reception. To do this required something called a path-loss test. It meant sending somebody over to the house with a device sending out a signal at different frequencies so the techs in the listening post could divine the clearest one. Then we’d set the transmitter to that frequency.
We couldn’t be seen around the house, of course. We could not do anything that could arouse suspicion in case the terror cell was surveilling their own safe house.
Neighbors tend to talk, too. A couple of American-looking nerds with a bunch of technology coming and going at the safe house would be what we call in the business a clue.
Instead, I dressed in rags like a poor urban cholo and concealed the transmitter in a shoulder bag. I looked like a drunken street derelict. I was dropped off a few blocks from the house by a former LA SWAT team member who had recently joined the Agency. He was a tall, tragically white American who would have stuck out in this neighborhood, so he stayed in the van, armed with a shotgun in case I needed backup.
After he dropped me off at the corner, he anxiously sat in the van where he’d have eyes on me.
I walked down the street mumbling to myself, and I held the shoulder bag’s strap with one hand. Under it lay the transmitter’s button. Within reach of my other hand was my trusty 9mm pistol with fifteen rounds of Silvertip ammo. I pressed the transmitter as I approached the house, sending the signals to the tech guys.
Just as I reached the front door, the five Marxist terrorists spilled out of it. I looked up to see them wearing shorts and T-shirts with one of them carrying a soccer ball. They literally ran right into me, then started giving me a ration of grief. I’m not used to being shoved around, but the moment you go kinetic in a situation like this, you lose the game. Finesse and acting are what see you through.
In the van, my backup man saw what was happening. He reached for the shotgun and racked it just in case things went sideways fast. I was perhaps two blocks away, but I can swear I still heard it. Fortunately, the terrorists did not.
They shoved me around for a bit, teased and mocked me, then lost interest. They headed into the street to kick the ball around. I went on my way, continuing the path-loss test. I so wanted to double-tap each of them, and have five rounds to spare. But this was a new realm, and the rules of the game demanded self-control. In clandestine operations, if you resort to firearms, your mission is already compromised.
We got the information we needed. The techs tuned the transmitter in the table leg to the best frequency, and we settled down to wait for their return. When they did, the woman of the house secretly turned the system on, and we were good to go. The information was going to pour in, I was sure of it.
Instead, we were thwarted by her chickens. They were so loud we couldn’t hear a thing beyond their incessant clucking. In terms of terrorist OPSEC, those chickens produced the best organic white noise imaginable!
So the chickens had to go. We bought them and had them removed, then gave our asset a cover story for their disappearance. When our soccer-playing cell of revolutionaries next appeared at the house, they suspected nothing.
Our recorders captured every word of that meeting. Instead of being a gold mine of intelligence, though, the tapes were filled with five young men bragging and bullshitting for much of the time. But every now and again, we scored a nugget of useful information. They spoke of different attacks they’d conducted, supplies of explosives, and other details. On subsequent occasions, they started to kick around ways to attack the U.S. embassy in the capital. They talked through ways to bomb it, then considered an armed attack on American personnel as they were leaving or returning to the embassy. It was clear they were in the very early planning stages, so there was no immediate threat to the embassy. That gave us some latitude and allowed us to listen in for weeks longer.
The local security forces made a habit of bagging such cells quickly. They’d take these frontline terrorists—the shooters and the bomb planters—and parade them on television as a sign of the government’s success against the revolutionaries. Truth was that the shooters and the bomb placers were a dime a dozen. They were the foot soldiers of the organization who were not very intelligent and were easily replaceable. Going after the small fish made no sense to us. Instead, we convinced our allies in their security forces to have some tactical patience.
We put tails on the five members of the cell to see where they went and who they spoke to. Gradually, we began to fill in a hierarchy within this cell and the links to higher levels of command and control.
We weren’t after the subcommanders, either. In any terror organization, there’s always somebody else ready to fill in for any commander who gets killed or compromised. Who we wanted were the support people: the ones providing the funding, the resources, and the logistical assistance to the cells operating in the capital. They were the weak point in a terrorist organization since the majority of them lived aboveground lives and could not be easily replaced.
We called this process swimming up the chain. Once we had our eyes on one link, we’d follow and watch, learning everything we could. That careful patience netted us another link in the organization chain, then another. We assisted our allies as they worked our way up and developed more leads, more targets to watch.
It was a remarkable process that Hollywood never gets right. Counterterrorism never yields the complete picture. You never find an asset who will give you the full scope of what a terror group is doing or planning, because any capable organization insulates its members from each other. They only know what they need to know to carry out their missions. Everything else is beyond their scope. That means our intelligence comes in dribs and drabs like disparate puzzle pieces. We never get the complete puzzle, but sometimes we get enough pieces to fill in the blanks and make some intuitive leaps. Those pieces come from a wide range of sources and methods, much of which may seem at first glance to be unrelated. There will always be considerable chaff and misdirection that needs to be weeded out. In time, with enough pieces and patient work, we can start to assemble a picture that looks like the actual situation on the ground.
The transmitter in the table leg gave us our first significant access to a chain in their network. In the months ahead, we swam up that chain and started to build the first cell of agents inside the professor’s own organization. That’s when we started doing real damage to the revolution.