Honduras
1981
Not long after I arrived in Honduras, our base commander, Joel, rotated home. In his place, the Agency sent “Colonel Ray.” Ray had been a teenager during World War II who’d jumped with the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment onto Corregidor Island during the Philippines Campaign in 1945. I quickly learned Ray was an old-school gentleman who possessed both wit and charm. But underneath the patina of refinement was a man of great courage with a heart as tough as his World War II jump boots. He served in Vietnam and Laos, working behind the lines for the Agency. Ray’s aura, conviction, dedication, and reputation inspired me for the rest of my career. As I rose through the ranks, “What would Ray do?” remained my sanity check. Those are the giants I grew up under—more than a few of them. I do my best to emulate them to this day. It would be his vision that set the stage for the expansion of the support effort to the Contras.
Ray quickly realized the Argentines were a major problem for us. They were taking American money and doing little to nothing in return. Yet at the same time, the Argentines were the original foreign support for the Contras. They reached out to the Sandinista opposition after discovering Daniel Ortega had been funneling aid to Argentina’s own endemic pro-Soviet opposition.
Part of the way the CIA sold supporting the Contras back in the D.C. political swamp was by highlighting that we’d just be buying our way into the existing Argentinian effort. They’d lead the way; we’d support with a few training advisors and money.
It looked good on paper, but the Argentines were so corrupt and contentious, it was soon apparent we could never create an effective fighting force out of the Contras while going through these surrogates.
When Ray learned they were holding back supplies from the Miskito Indians, he saw it as an opportunity to put the Argentines in their place. He directed me to take care of that. I felt like a pit bull with a bone on this mission. I couldn’t wait to confront the Argentines and get the Miskitos better situated.
I met with the Argentine general and a colonel in one of the Tegucigalpa safe houses used by the FDN’s chief of staff. “General Villegas”—that was just his alias—was a soft, bucktoothed thug of a man in his midsixties. Imperious and arrogant, he validated our inside joke: What is the best investment you can make? Buy one of these Argentines for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth!
In the field, I was Captain Alex, which presented a problem when dealing with the Argentinians, since the rank-conscious General Villegas considered me an underling in what had been his show.
Nevertheless, I was instructed to win the hearts and minds of the Contras, not of the Argentines. To this day, just thinking about the Argentines makes my blood boil. They were a stark contrast to the Honduran officers I met, all of whom were men I would end up admiring for life.
The meeting did not start well. I sat across from Villegas and his minion—a colonel who, as best as we Americans could figure, was in charge of the general’s campaign of graft and thievery in Tegucigalpa. They were running their own nest-feathering cons together with money supposed to be used to help these Nicaraguan patriots in the camp. Given the desperate conditions I witnessed, it was hard to conceal my disgust for these rank opportunists.
There were minimal introductions and small talk. Instead, I made it clear that we knew the Miskitos were not getting their share of the available supplies and that, per Colonel Ray, would change starting now. The general pushed back, throwing his rank around. He had no defense to his bald-faced racism, so he resorted to bombast and intimidation. It didn’t work. When he pulled rank, I pulled logistics: “These are U.S. supplies, and we represent the United States’ interests here. Those supplies will go to the Miskitos.”
The general balked. This was his show, and he wasn’t going to let a mere captain tell him how to run it. We went back and forth, the conversation growing heated. Finally, I’d had enough. I told him we’d cut the money and supplies off until the Miskitos were given their share.
Villegas grew so angry that he snapped a pencil in half. Knowing he could do nothing about this—I’d unmasked how little actual authority he had now—the general sat there and silently stewed while I finalized the logistics plan they would employ on behalf of the Contras.
Message delivered. His gravy train came from the United States, and no matter the stars on his shoulder board, he was no longer in a position to deny the will of the Agency.
After the meeting, he went to our Chief of Station (COS) in Tegucigalpa and complained about me. The COS offered a warm smile and said, “Alex is my man on this.”
Translation from diplomatic speak: “Fuck you.”
Much to General Villegas’s outrage, I was then assigned to examine the Argentinian books to make sure every dime was accounted for and spent where it was supposed to go. That was arguably my first lesson about the CIA’s strict accountability. Ray explained that all special programs were approved by Congress as “fenced funds.”
This meant that any money allocated to a program—to the penny—had to be used for that particular program and nothing else. So much for the myth of “black, illegal funds.”
From then on, I questioned every nickel and became such a thorn in their side that Villegas’s senior aid, a colonel, once spat at me, “You are only a U.S. captain!”
I smiled back and replied, “Yes, but the important part is the ‘U.S.’”
They had no choice. Under the new sheriff, Ray, the Argentines did indeed start sharing the available weapons, food, and ammunition with the Miskito Indians. When I returned to their camps, the reception I received was totally different. They knew I had gone to bat for them as I had promised, and that went a long way toward building trust with them.
The Miskitos quickly employed the new supplies of weapons and ammunition in cross-border raids against Sandinista Popular Army positions. They did not disappoint. In these actions, their bravery and ferocious fighting spirit shone, and I made sure that it was well documented. They were warriors without a nation, battling to reclaim their conquered homeland. They did so like men possessed. I had no doubt that with more support and training, they would be the most effective force in the FDN.
It was here I learned lesson number two from Ray: the Miskito were popular with several U.S. political sectors. Among Native Americans and some prominent liberals, the Miskito were considered to be the oppressed, indigenous forces untainted by association to Somoza. That political viability back in the States with elements often hostile to the Agency helped us enormously. Ray’s insight on this helped GS-10 Alex to learn the bigger picture. It was also a mentoring lesson I would not forget and continue to this day to pay it forward.
While the cross-border raids on the Sandinista army’s encampments improved morale and gave the Contras combat experience and a sense that they were in the fight, they were mere pinpricks to the regime. This was not the way to win their country back. To do that, the FDN needed staying power—the ability to conduct an offensive into Nicaragua and eventually hold ground. The only way that could happen was with a solid source of supplies and a means to deliver them deep into Nicaragua. There were few roads, fewer Contra vehicles, and no logistical tail to support such an operation. The overall Contra force was still barely a thousand men, though they were recruiting more every day.
Clearly, we needed airpower. A Contra offensive could only be sustained with air-dropped resupplies, but there was nothing like that available in the early days of 1981. Ray immediately went to work on that problem while I continued training and assisting in the camps, preparing the Contras for the day they could launch a larger operation.
Ray’s next lesson to me: amateurs plan tactics, professionals plan logistics. We could assemble an enormous army, but if we couldn’t find a way to keep them in beans and bullets, it would be a hollow force.
For the time being, the cross-border raids would be the best we could do. In the camps, while morale continued to slowly improve as the weapons and supplies trickled in, the conditions in the jungle never ceased to appall me. Malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, and parasitic infections were common problems in the camps in those days. I even saw cases of mountain leprosy (leishmaniasis).
Being a trained medic, I provided what medical care I could, but just as food was scarce, medical supplies were usually also unavailable. I saw open sores, men with hollowed cheeks from weeks of minimal rations and chronic diarrhea, and malaria. They were in bad shape. Yes, the training needs were great, but they couldn’t fight if they couldn’t even walk, so much of my time was spent coordinating their crucial logistical support. Again, Ray’s lesson stuck with me as I saw the practical realities on the ground. More medical supplies were desperately needed.
Despite the harsh living, the Contra foot soldiers refused to give up. That kind of grit always inspired me. When I relayed stories highlighting their tenacity to Ray, he asked me to document as much of the reality as I could with a 35mm camera. From that point on, I took photos in every camp of the conditions and the people. At the end of my week, I would drive back to Tegucigalpa and drop the exposed rolls off at our base. They were developed in-house, and the prints were given to me. Unbeknownst to me, Ray asked for duplicate prints from those negatives, which he sent back to the task force. Little did I know, the photos ended up on the desk of CIA director William “Bill” Casey.
Bill Casey was a legend in clandestine circles. A brilliant manager, attorney, and businessman, he joined the OSS during World War II and rose to command the Secret Intelligence Branch in Europe, where he spearheaded the spy operations against Nazi Germany. With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Bill Casey became the head of the CIA. The Agency had suffered badly in the 1970s as a result of Vietnam, the Church Committee’s discovery of its excesses in the ’50s and ’60s, plus the fiasco with the Iran hostage crisis. In the months after Casey took over, he quickly set a new agenda. The CIA would be engaged, aggressive, and daring, like the OSS of World War II. Instead of reporting information to the White House, Bill took the CIA job only on the condition that he could help shape foreign policy as well. Never had the CIA had this amount of influence before, and Casey intended to use it to stem what looked like a rising tide of pro-Soviet communist power then sweeping the globe from Afghanistan to Africa and Central America.
In March, after only two months in power, Casey put together a plan to support pro-U.S. factions in communist-ruled or American-hostile nations. His list included Afghanistan, Cambodia, Grenada, Laos, Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua. That document served as the prototype for the Reagan Doctrine, which the president unveiled in his 1985 State of the Union speech.
William Casey became the architect of our late–Cold War counteroffensive against the Soviets in the developing world. After two decades of defeats from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam and Iran, we would fight back through the black ops to stop the spread of Russian influence.
At the end of my career, I looked back and thanked God that I had the honor of working for the greatest DCI since Wild Bill Donovan: Wild Bill Casey!
Developing the Contras as a legitimate threat to the Sandinistas would become a central part of that aggressive strategy, as was supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Red Army’s occupation there. These two covert operations played crucial roles in the Cold War’s final act.
To coordinate the covert war against the Sandinistas, Casey wanted a maverick CIA officer who could think unconventionally. He needed to be aggressive and willing to take risks. He found his man in Rome’s Chief of Station: Duane “Dewey” Clarridge.
Five foot ten, gray-haired, and prone to wearing exceptionally tailored Italian silk suits, Clarridge was an Ivy League–educated Cold Warrior who joined the Agency in 1955. He’d earned a reputation for being an eccentric but brilliant officer. He was glib, a hip shooter who thought on his feet and never worried about the consequences. Over his career, he’d been viewed almost with awe by those who worked under him and as a major pain in the ass by his superiors. Loved or hated—there was no in-between—Clarridge got things done.
In the spring of 1981, Casey pulled him out of Rome and made him the head of the Latin American division in the Operations Directorate. This was the first major step toward creating the infrastructure at the top that could transform the Contras into a war-winning force with our covert support.
Of course, in the moment, I knew none of this. My worldview barely extended beyond the jungle on the Honduran border. With but a few weeks total in Langley, first as a contractor, then as a quick paramilitary hire, I knew little about the inner workings of the Agency or the complicated tangle of politics back in D.C. I’d heard stories about Dewey from Ray, who was a big admirer, but it was so far above my pay grade back then, I paid little attention. My world consisted of the day-to-day mechanics of trying to teach shoeless peasants how to shoot straight. Little did I know that the machinations above my head would put me at the tip of the spear of what evolved into the Reagan Doctrine.
Shortly after Clarridge settled into his new role, he and Casey flew into Honduras on a “black visit”—a top-secret trip—in order to be briefed directly by those on the ground. As usual, I was in one of the camps when I got a radio call asking me to return to our base of operations in the capital. When I arrived, Ray introduced me to Dewey Clarridge and Bill Casey.
“Mr. Director, this is Alex, your man in the camps.”
Casey looked at me and said, “I love your photos. Keep sending them.”
I had no idea they were even being sent to Washington. That they were in the hands of the director of the CIA left me doubly surprised.
“You know why I love them?” he asked.
“No, sir, I do not.”
“I have them on my desk. I take your photos and I beat those Democrats over the head with them. These men are fighting for freedom. The photos show the Democrats what their needs are. Please keep those pictures coming.”
“Thank you, sir.”
After that, I most certainly did.
In the months ahead, Bill Casey returned to Honduras a couple of times on black visits to meet with senior Hondurans and the Contra leadership. He even met with the Argentines on occasion, and I served as his translator during those meetings—no pressure there! There I was, a GS-nothing interpreting for the DCI. His presence in Honduras signaled to everyone that the position of the United States was changing. The Contras mattered in Washington.
From the outset of the new administration, finding a way to drive the Sandinistas from power became a top priority. Not only would it curb Soviet power in the region, it would also deliver a blow to Castro’s Cuba. With military aid flowing in from the Soviet Union and Cuba, the Sandinistas were furiously trying to undermine other regimes in Central America by stoking pro-Soviet insurgencies. While we were just starting to get supplies into the Contra camps, there was another covert logistical operation running through Honduras at the same time. This one was controlled by the Sandinistas, who were using assets in country to help smuggle weapons to the communist insurgents in El Salvador. It was a dark and fluid situation, and it looked like the Soviets held the upper hand.
Much later, I learned that Reagan tried a carrot approach, offering millions of dollars in aid to the Ortega regime. For a short time, the infiltration of weapons and ammo to El Salvador stopped as the Sandinistas coveted that money. But the offer was soon withdrawn, and by June 1981, the gunrunning to the communist insurgents recommenced. From that point on, the covert war began to pick up steam.
On the other side of the border, Bulgarians, Russians, more Cubans, and other Warsaw Pact types arrived almost every week to train and equip Ortega’s conscript army. By the fall of 1981, the struggle along the Honduran border was well on its way to becoming a proxy war between the superpowers.
While the Sandinistas were unified and well supplied by their allies, the Contras were in bad shape. The FDN leadership was splintered and remained riddled with intrigue. There were growing tensions between the field commanders and the senior leadership in Tegucigalpa. The Argentines continued to be the worst possible stewards of this complicated effort.
From our view in the jungle, we faced long odds as underdogs. It made me work that much harder for the Contra fighters I’d grown to respect so much. Fortunately, Ray was able to secure a helicopter from the Honduran military for me to use to get between the camps. The hours of driving from place to place wasted so much time and was substantially riskier. Now I could get to the camps in a fraction of the time.
The Agency pilot initially assigned to me was a Cuban refugee who had fought in the Bay of Pigs disaster, dragging home a badly shot-up aircraft. “Gustavo,” as we called him, was a tough, resourceful aviator and a dedicated anticommunist, but the men lost in 1961 still haunted him at times. One evening, I found him in his room in Tegucigalpa with his sidearm out while sitting beside a mostly empty bottle of liquor. I was young and naive and bulletproof back then. Finding Gustavo like that was one of the first times I encountered how our work could scar a man’s soul. Luckily, Gustavo was a patriot and a family man; in time, he pulled himself together.
He was a great pilot, and we worked well together through many difficult operations, both over the jungle and along the coast in the years to come.
Whenever we flew into the Miskito camps, I always studied the jungle landscape with particular attention. I’d heard stories of the lost “Ciudad Blanca” (White City) of the Monkey God, rumored to be somewhere along the Mosquito Coast, and I would try to see if I could find its outlines concealed somewhere below by the rain forest’s canopy. I never did find it, but a team of scientists eventually did locate it not far from those flights I took. Most of those scientists later fell dreadfully ill from leishmaniasis, a parasitic infection that can cause massive skin ulcers and liver and spleen damage.
I knew the effects all too well. About a year after I first arrived in Honduras, I had dropped twenty pounds. Living week after week slowly took a toll on my own health. I refused to slow down, but my body finally couldn’t take it anymore. One night, Ray called for a medevac flight to come get me out of one of the camps. My fever had spiked, I had the chills, diarrhea, and stomach cramps that left me weak as a kitten. I was flown to Miami, where an Agency-cleared doctor who didn’t even ask my name drew blood and stool samples.
After running some tests, he came to me and said, “The good news is you haven’t got anything that I haven’t treated before. I just haven’t ever seen it all in one person.”
I had amoebic dysentery, giardia, and a handful of other tropical infections. To this day, I still have stomach issues as a result of that first year in Honduras. But the doctor said he could get me back on my feet. He gave me two treatment options: a slow, gentle course of antibiotics and other medication that would take a few weeks, or a more radical approach that would take half the time. “You’ll hate me for two days, but you will get better.”
I wanted to get back to my Contras, so I went with option two. He gave me the treatment, and boy, he was not kidding! For two days, I languished in his care, even more debilitated than I was when I first arrived in Miami. In fact, it was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life.
But at the end of that forty-eight-hour ordeal, I began to recover. My strength returned, and in a week, I hopped a flight back to Honduras, eager to get back to work.
When I returned to my duties, the situation between the FDN and the field commanders had grown even tenser. Then, an incident occurred that had long-term, unforeseen consequences. Comandante Suicida’s romantic partner, and camp nurse, “la Negra,” ran into a Sandinista ambush and was killed on a dirt road leading to one of Suicida’s westernmost camps. This tragedy shook the men’s morale to the core and further raised suspicion among the ranks regarding how the Sandinistas knew when and where to strike.
Whenever I visited, she would prepare gallo pinto—brown beans and rice—with fried eggs on top, just for me. She was a wonderful, devoted woman who not only materially assisted the men in the camps but kept Suicida grounded. She had a balancing effect on him. In return, he led his men with Zen-like calm and unmatched fearlessness.
One day, while driving back to the camp, La Negra’s vehicle drove into a Sandinista ambush right along the border. She was killed in a hail of gunfire. Her death plunged the camp into despair. Suicida grew increasingly unstable and came to believe her death was orchestrated by somebody at FDN headquarters, purposely leaked so the Sandinistas would do the dirty work for them. We will never know.
While I was working in a different camp, I was told that the FDN leadership removed Suicida from command and brought him back to Tegucigalpa. I never saw him again. While rumors swirled for years about his eventual fate, subsequent historians concluded the Argentinians assassinated him as retaliation for supposed crimes he’d committed while raiding into Nicaragua. In truth, Suicida’s real sin was being the most vociferous about his suspicions that the Argentines and some corrupt FDN lackies were lining their pockets with U.S. money intended for the Contras in the camps.
Without La Negra and Suicida, the western camp fell into disarray. Two of Suicida’s subordinates took over, but these two represented the worst of the Contras. During the 1980s, some parts of the American media tried to portray the Contras not as patriots but as nothing more than armed killers who plundered the countryside, committing all manners of atrocities. The entire effort has been painted with that brush by historians and writers ever since.
There was a kernel of truth there, but only a kernel. Occasionally, such atrocities did take place, but for the vast majority of the time I was there, the Contras fought for the people in the Nicaraguan countryside and tried their best to protect them from the Sandinistas. The peasants largely sided with the Contras as a result, especially after Ortega took a page from Joseph Stalin and started a forced collectivization program that stole farmland from its rightful owners.
That said, the two men who took over Suicida’s force were the poster children for Contra excesses. They degenerated into banditry. Discipline broke down. A few of Suicida’s men went all in with the new leadership, but most were disgusted by what they were seeing. Word leaked from the camp to FDN headquarters that the new leaders had gone rogue. With about three hundred men, they were raiding ranches to steal cattle and rob villagers. After a woman came forward and told the FDN senior leadership that one of the rogue leaders had raped her, it was clear they would need to be brought in to face justice. But how do you extract two thugs with a private army protecting them?
Ray asked me if I could get them out. A good plan and some support always goes a long way. Still, this would be a tricky operation for only a few men to try to execute. But I told Ray I figured we could pull it off—with a little luck and a lot of balls.