Honduran Border
Late 1980
The beat-up Toyota Hilux bounced along the jungle track, its suspension getting a workout as the vehicle pitched and rolled along. We’d been driving for hours, never getting above about thirty miles an hour as the track wound its way deeper into the Honduran outback. Palms and broad-leafed Spanish cedars, balsa, rosewood, and Castilla rubber trees towered over increasingly dense scrub to make a crowded canopy of foliage so thick that it virtually blocked out the sun. We forded fast-moving streams, inching the Hilux along in the current, watching as the front wheels nearly disappeared underwater.
This was some of the most unknown terrain on earth. Poorly mapped, not well explored because of the jungle’s many dangers that ranged from pumas to dozens of insect-borne diseases not well understood by modern medical science. No wonder entire civilizations disappeared here, their cities overtaken and swallowed by the rain forest for centuries.
The border between Honduras and Nicaragua was unmarked, an endless stretch of green, punctuated by an occasional village flanked by fields still tended by hand. Slash-and-burn farming was still predominant.
We drove south, winding along, gaining altitude. As we went higher, we left the jungle behind. The terrain became arid, rugged, and hot. Craggy hilltops and sawtooth mountain ridges replaced the rainforest landscape as we topped out at 5,500 feet. Pine trees stippled the slopes around us, making the place look a little like Mexico or Southern California.
Today, our destination was one of the westernmost camps, closest to the Pacific Ocean. It finally came into view, a collection of huts and makeshift structures stretched across a hillside cleared of trees. The few men and women there were rail-thin, wearing a collage of civilian checkered shirts, olive-drab uniform pants, and caps. A few wore fatigue jackets. As we inched up the slope of the hill to its entrance, I could see the guards carrying a variety of weapons—ancient bolt-action rifles and shotguns. Soon we would replace these with Belgian-made FN-FAL 7.62mm assault rifles.
Each of the ten camps situated along the border with Nicaragua housed perhaps a couple of hundred soldiers. Those in charge ran things because the men were loyal to them somehow. Each camp’s leaders presided over a personal fiefdom and private force of loyalists. They were supposed to report to the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) senior leadership council in Tegucigalpa, on which they depended for the meager logistical support and the promise of better days to come.
We pulled into the camp and rolled to a stop. As I dismounted from the Hilux, I could see some of the men gathering to greet us did not even own shoes. They lived side by side in hellishly hot huts, lucky to have a cot to keep them off the ground, eating food that would make most humans gag. Homemade hammocks were stretched between the trees. All the camps I visited shared these commonalities. It was a crazy way to go to war. But that was what we were there to fix. And fix it we would.
While I made my rounds through the ten camps, the FDN logistics folks kept making overland resupply trips, and more and more of the USG-procured supplies were starting to trickle into the camps. Morale was improving, and so were the living conditions—albeit still Spartan by any third-world military standards.
When I again returned to the first camp I visited, I was greeted by the camp’ s leader, Commander Suicida, who was a former Nicaraguan National Guard sergeant named Pedro Pablo Ortiz Centeno. He had escaped to Honduras after the Sandinistas took over his country. He was rugged, charismatic, and led from the front, sometimes carrying an M60 machine gun as he fought alongside his men. In combat, he displayed a level of reckless courage that earned him the nickname “Commander Suicide.” His personal example and personal magnetism engendered considerable loyalty among his men. They were a dedicated, tight-knit group wanting only to strike across the border at their Sandinista enemies.
Over the years, Suicida has been painted by the media and academics as a brutal killer who, among other things, deliberately assassinated Nicaraguan and Cuban members of a literacy program designed to teach peasants to read. How such Marxist propaganda infected the history of the Contra war is beyond credulity. Suicida was a warrior who fought to reclaim his country. Would he kill? Hell yes, he would, but only his sworn enemies, the Piricuaco—“Rabid Dogs”—as the Contras called the Sandinistas.
I slung my AR-15 rifle over one shoulder and told him we’d brought him a supply of Soviet-made 82mm ammunition along with a few mortar tubes with which to fire them. He sent one of his men to start unloading the supplies. I can still remember those wiry rebels hoisting the heavy boxes of mortar rounds up that steep, muddy hill. I was in damn good shape, and I was sucking the leaves off the trees while trying to make it up that hill.
Before we’d even finished our conversation, a sudden rash of gunfire erupted from the scrub pines on the southern slope of the hilltop. Contras began running toward the gunfire, their leaders barking orders. Bullets whined and cracked. I unslung my AR-15 and rushed to join the fight.
An automatic weapon cut loose. More shouts and angry cries. The Contras began shooting back. The Sandinistas down the hill sprayed and prayed. The Contras did the same; not me—I aimed and shot. Then, as suddenly as it began, the enemy faded back into the trees and vanished. Time on target? One minute, but it felt like a lifetime.
I could see the Sandinistas didn’t have much training, nor tactical acumen. Neither did the Contras, of course. The firefight was more a battle between armed mobs than two military formations.
None of my Contras were killed on the hilltop, but the raid made me angry. The Piricuacos had crossed into Honduras and attacked the people I was supposed to help. I quickly found out this was not an uncommon harassment tactic.
This needed to stop. It would also be an opportunity to earn street cred with the Contras, who’d seen other “leaders” like the Argentines come and go with little interest in living or fighting alongside them.
That was the first thing I tried to change. I lived with them, embracing the suck equally with them. When I began to show them how to use the mortars, they realized I might be useful to them.
Those 82mm mortars made for terrific jungle- and mountain-portable artillery weapons. They consisted of three main parts—the smooth bore tube, the baseplate, and the bipod. A small sight could be installed on the side of the tube. Altogether, the pieces weighed about 120 pounds. The mortar bombs contained about 420 grams of high explosives and themselves weighed about six pounds. The crew fired the weapon by feeding the round into the tube’s muzzle. It would slide down the inside to a firing pin at the bottom that ignited the round’s propelling charge, sending it flying out in a ballistic arc to the crew’s target. They were deadly effective when employed properly.
During the day, I trained them to fight, showed them how to use the weaponry I could bring them. I taught them to push forward observers out to spot the fall of each mortar shell, and how to use radios to adjust fire.
Gradually, I got to know who these people were. They told me horrific stories of how their families had been slaughtered by the Sandinistas. They were farmers, artisans—peasants, really—who fled the oppression with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They weren’t just poor; they were destitute.
Many were religious refugees—devout Catholics purged by the Marxists, who saw religious faith as an enemy of the state. These people of faith refused to submit to a government whose central premise was that the system itself should be worshipped, not a higher being.
Their lives were defined by this struggle. They wanted to fight for and avenge what had happened to their wives, their kids, churches, and villages. They told me harrowing stories of escape, how the Sandinistas marauded towns, raping and looting the terrified villagers. They played death games—men with guns tormenting people with nothing but a few farm animals that were soon to be stolen and eaten by these communist gangsters.
Listening to these stories, I understood why they were willing to endure so much privation in the camps. They’d lost everything to the communists. Now, they pinned their hopes on the rebellion. I didn’t find anyone who was pro-Somoza, or any single unifying political ideology. To them, this was a personal war against those who stole their lives and families.
This well-earned fear and hatred for the Sandinista regime was the central rallying point that kept the Contras together. They were willing to suffer through things most Americans could never even fathom if only to get a chance to strike back at those who destroyed their world.
After some basic training on the mortars, Suicida led his men on a reprisal attack for the Sandinista raid. Our freshly minted forward observers infiltrated through the pine forest to the Sandinista camp, which was not far from the Contras’. Lax security on their part let our men creep close enough to get a good vantage point to reconnoiter their base.
I then led my Contras to launch a mortar barrage that caused total chaos and inflicted significant damage. We were lucky from the outset when our first few mortar rounds landed a bit long of target. This actually turned into an unintended benefit. With explosions going off behind their positions, the Sandinistas went to ground and we pinned them in place. After all, nobody wants to run away through a mortar barrage.
We adjusted fire and delivered a good dozen direct hits on the camp. Eventually, the Sandinista troops fled, taking only their dead and wounded. Though we suffered no losses that day, the Contras lacked the logistics to stay and occupy the territory. Reluctantly, Suicida led them back to the camp to live and raid another day. That was the best they could do with the minimal resources they had. To assault into Nicaraguan territory, hold it, and push deeper into the country in a sustained offensive required a logistical system that simply did not exist at that point. Any operation like that needed food, water, ammunition, medical support—and all with a means to deliver them through some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. There were few roads, which made the logistical situation even more difficult.
An offensive would be beyond the ability of the Contras for several years. For now, the hit-and-run raids would be the only way to strike at the Sandinistas.
In the weeks that followed that indoctrination into combat, I again traveled to all ten camps, meeting and developing strong relationships with the leaders as well as the rebel soldiers, listening to whatever they wanted to tell me. Being a native Spanish speaker, I was told a lot.
I began to get a sense of the intrigue going on between the Contra field commanders and the FDN’s leadership back in Tegucigalpa. My first briefing at our safe house mentioned this, but with a little time in country, I gained a greater appreciation of the sometimes savage internal infighting.
Layered into the intrigue was an Argentine Army contingent sent north to ostensibly train and equip the Contras. Their cadre was an eight-man team of sergeants and officers who rarely bothered to visit the camp. When they did, they never stayed overnight. They played favorites with supplies, provided little training, and stole money the Agency had allocated for the Contra field commanders and foot soldiers. For them, the assignment was a get-rich-quick scam with Uncle Sam as their mark.
Suicida in particular was furious with their behavior and made no effort to conceal it. Ultimately, that made him a target, and he knew the Argentines were machinating to get rid of him.
I heard similar things about the Argentines in the other camps I visited, including the Miskito Indian camp on the eastern end of the country. There, I got to know the Miskitos as fierce warriors who lived in the coastal lowland jungles and clung to their traditional way of life. The Miskitos were looked down on by the other Contra leaders. The Argentinians reflected that same racist sentiment and made sure the Miskitos received the barest of resupplies.
To compound matters, the Argentinians were unabashed anti-Semites. My first boss at the time was Jewish. This led to even more friction and trouble with the Argentinians. At one point, the Argentine general laughingly said to “Joel,” my then boss, “Yeah, when we were having trouble in the army, we just shot every third soldier. Just like the Nazis with the Jews!”
Needless to say, the relationship between these thugs and the rest of the Agency’s effort in Honduras was strained, to say the least. We were there to help the Contras reclaim their country and establish a new democracy. That was the last thing the Argentines were there to do.
Between my time in Tegucigalpa, I investigated the Argentines and met all of them. To a man, I found them to be useless parasites. They weren’t teaching the Contras how to fight; I never once saw any of them conduct any training at the camps. They were taking American money and using it to whore and party in Tegucigalpa. Get a few drinks in some of them, and they would openly brag about being part of death squads back home in Argentina. They were men of the basest moral character—murderers and rank opportunists who used their military positions to service their own indulgences.
It was a reprehensible situation, but one I didn’t have the authority to do anything about. All I could do was mitigate the damage their indulgences did to the Contra cause.
That damage was the severest at the Miskito camps. These men were fierce, committed anti-Sandinistas. More than any other group in the FDN, they suffered the worst depredations at the hands of the Sandinistas, who were just as racist and hate-filled as the Argentinians when it came to this small, indigenous population.
More than any other FDN faction, the Miskitos had one clear goal: retake their homeland along the coast and continue to lobby for their autonomy. Once that was done, they didn’t care who ruled Nicaragua. They just wanted to be left alone by everyone.
They needed little from outsiders in ordinary times. They hunted and grew crops in sections of the jungle they cleared, and there were several key gold mines in their territory. Two of the largest ports in Nicaragua—Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields—were in the Mosquitia, and these provided trade and work for those who wanted it. They were a proud and pure people. I liked them immediately.
That was not reciprocated, at least not at first. After eating so many shit sandwiches from friend and foe alike, they didn’t trust me much. Yet from the first moments I spent in their camp, I could tell they could be the most formidable and loyal fighters in the entire Contra movement. I would need to earn their trust and help get them better integrated into the overall FDN operation. No easy task.
The first step clearly would require getting supplies to these guys. The Argentines had a lock on that at FDN HQ. I would soon have to consult with my new boss on how to best confront that den of snakes. In the meantime, I brought them what weapons I could and showed them how to employ them. On one trip, I carried a small cache of RPG-7 rocket launchers to the Miskitos. They’d never used such weapons before, so I set up a target on a makeshift range, then put a piece of cardboard behind the launcher as I prepared to fire. I wanted them to see how dangerous the rocket’s exhaust could be. I walked my audience through arming the rocket, then kneeling and aiming it.
I fired, and the RPG obliterated the target. The Miskitos cheered. It was a good moment. They could see this particular stranger knew what he was doing. They also saw what happened to the cardboard behind the launcher. It had been peppered with back blast and singed by the blast-furnace-hot exhaust coming from the tailpipe. Lesson learned. Don’t stand behind the rocket launcher or fire it in an enclosed space. As obvious as it sounds, it was a common mistake made elsewhere that led to severe burns.
Traveling by Hilux on the pitted and rutted roads was rough on vehicles and drivers alike; the vehicles were tossed around. Tropical thunderstorms reduced the roads to rivers of mud, and frequently we bogged down. In fact, in the Mosquitia’s outermost camps, like Auasbila, we traveled on the Coco River via dugout canoes. That made us vulnerable to potential Sandinista attack. Yet in those first months, I still managed to visit two camps a week, staying with each contingent to help provide basic training and establish rapport with the men and women there.
During one of my many trips between the camps, we came to a river filled with fleeing refugees. Hundreds of them, including many women carrying babies as small children clung to them as they waded across to the Honduran side of the river and the comparative safety of one of the UN-established refugee camps there. The trauma of their experiences was stamped on their faces.
These were haunting moments for me that I dwelled on for years afterward. Americans back home would never believe the suffering we witnessed down there in such moments. It was the same suffering triggered by the same ideology that the same type of people inflicted on my homeland in Cuba twenty-two years before.
In one camp run by “Commander Benito,” I sensed the frustration of a force wanting to do something about the suffering but lacking the means to do it. The weapons they had were still inadequate for an offensive operation—plus, like every other group, they had no way to sustain a deep push into Nicaragua. Yet despite the shortcomings, the men in this camp possessed high morale and an aggressive spirit.
At one point, Benito’s radio operator pulled me aside. His nom de guerre was Mike Lima, a former National Guard junior officer who’d done a year at West Point after being accepted into the Nicaraguan military academy at age seventeen.
Mike Lima’s academy class graduated early in 1979 and was sent into a last-ditch fight to save the Somoza regime. During the fighting, he was wounded by shrapnel, captured, then escaped. He sought temporary asylum in a foreign embassy before escaping Nicaragua and joining Benito’s band of Contras.
“I want to fight,” he confided to me. “We need to go out there and get into combat.”
Talking with Mike Lima, I recognized he was a capable young man. He understood the importance of winning over the local populations. He saw them as sources of assistance, pools from which to recruit. Within them, the Contras could build a network of informants to keep track of Sandinista military movements. He saw the connection between the people and the guerillas that had, time and time again in other insurgencies, created the framework for success.
Impressed by Mike, I went and met with Benito and talked him into giving Mike a field command instead of leaving him behind, chained to the camp’s radios. Mike soon proved himself a dozen times over. He would rise to become one of the best combat leaders in the FDN on the northern front.
The days were long and exhausting, made longer since I was the only native Spanish-speaking member of the American team. In fact, I was handpicked because I could pass for a non-American, as the U.S. role in Honduras needed to be hidden. That would change in time, but for the first fourteen months of the program, I remained the only CIA officer allowed in the camps and the only soul representing the Agency’s efforts to forge an effective fighting force out of this ragtag confederacy of rebels.
Despite the hardships, I never resented my three-year-long routine of fifty-two weekly visits per year to my beloved camps.
At the end of those long and rugged days, I would retire to a hut or a tent for the night, and my mind would dwell on my future. I thought about this life and these men clinging to the hope that more help would arrive so they could defy the odds and liberate their homeland. I loved being a part of this mission.
Their crusade became my crusade. Our enemy was the communists and communism. That particular -ism sparked not the utopia it so loudly proclaimed but instead visited horrors on average people. Everywhere communists gained control, people suffered. Pol Pot in Cambodia. Stalin. The staggering bloodshed of Mao Tse-tung’s “Cultural Revolution” in China. The purges and violence in Yugoslavia and Cuba, North Korea, and now here in Nicaragua.
In Miami, I felt like I was drifting sideways. Angry and embittered, off my path. Every day I felt like Sisyphus pushing my damn rock up the muddy hill. When the chance to work with the Agency came up, I jumped at it solely to get me out of that limbo. Little did I know it was God’s way of putting me on the path to my destiny.
I realized that now, pondering these things as I did at night in the jungle. I had been born to be out here, side by side with these dedicated warriors. It made me realize that deep inside, I was a man who had always wanted to make a difference in the world. Part of that difference included striking blows at the ideology that robbed these Contras of their land and heritage—just like it had stolen those things from my own family.
I was making a difference. And the meaning I found out there with the Contras led me to the path I was meant to take. Until then, I’d had no real life plan. I’d drifted from one thing to the next. I wasn’t drifting now. The path I needed chose me. I realized my job was to stay on it no matter how difficult it became.
Among the most difficult things I would have to do in my first months out here would be to confront the Argentinians. The Miskitos needed weapons, money, and supplies. If we could get the supplies flowing, I knew I could earn the trust of all the Contras, not just the Miskitos. I thought through how I would take that next step. The Argentines were a nasty lot of gangsters. I’d have to recruit my bosses’ help if we were going to play a strong hand to slap them into place.