2

CUBA . . . THE BEGINNING OF
THE ROAD (TO PERDITION?)

At Christmastime in 1957 I returned home to Highland, Indiana to visit my recently widowed mother. Bored one night, I decided . to drink my way around the north side of Chicago and find some action, whatever form it might take. The cold, windy night was so brutal that few ventured out and there was no action to be found.

I happened across a bar, called the “College of Complexes” which I gathered was a beatnik hangout but no one was hanging. The only interesting aspect of the place was a large room in the rear furnished with about 20 picnic tables and benches. At one end of the room was a podium and microphone. Two or three times a week, some character would speak, discussing various political and social issues with the audience in order to sell a lot of beer. I happened to notice a small wooden container, which held mimeographed programs of upcoming events. I noted that a few days earlier, two individuals had spoken on behalf of Cuban Revolutionaries who were determined to overthrow the then-dictator of Cuba, Fulglencio Batista. By some strange urge, I carefully folded the mimeographed program and placed it in my wallet.

“MACHINE GUNS + CUBAN REVOLUTIONARIES =
MONEY FOR BROWN.”

The program that by some impulse I placed in my wallet listed the names and addresses of Americans who supported Castro. When I got back to the University of Colorado, one of my buddies, Minor Van Arsdale, had a comment one night as we gulped down a couple of beers after busting some caps. “One of my classmates, who got off on giving the impression that he was connected to the Mafia, claimed he had some submachine guns,” he said.

My fanciful mind went into simple overdrive and came up with the equation:”Machine guns + Cuban revolutionaries = money for Brown.” It sounded like a lot of bullshit, but what the hell, it might be an interesting story.

I policed up VanArsdale, a pistol club and rodeo teammate, and what seemed appropriate for the occasion, a bottle of cheap Cuban rum. We headed over to the apartment of this would-be thug who bragged about the machine guns. His digs were in a relatively upscale motel on 28th Street a few blocks east of the University. The conversation was banal. Well in our cups after we had slugged down most of the rum, our would-be gunrunner reached under his couch and pulled out a French Mas submachine gun, a Thompson and a Sten gun.

Holy shit!

“Look my friend,” I said, “I think we all can make some money. I can get in touch with some Cuban revolutionaries who undoubtedly are in the market for firepower. Let me take the Sten gun back to Chicago and show it to them to prove my credibility.” He bought the pitch and I walked out of his apartment with an unregistered fully automatic weapon, which could have bought me some serious time in a Federal slammer had I been caught with it. It wouldn’t be the first time I stepped outside the law while supporting causes I believed in.

I waited for spring vacation in 1958 and eagerly headed back to the Windy City with the Sten. In one of my many reckless moments, I walked into the offices of one of the revolutionaries’ supporters, who, when he wasn’t dallying with the revolution, ran a translating service. On seeing the Sten, he became ecstatic, practically jumping up and down.

“You got cash?” I asked him

“No cash, but I will get it.”

“I get the money, you get the gun,” I told him.

His promises of obtaining funds never materialized. So I headed back to Boulder with the Sten gun in my trunk. Along the way, I picked up a young hitchhiker by the name of Tony, who had been working in a carnival and gave the impression of being on the lam from someone or something. Tooling along over patches of black ice from a preceding night’s storm outside of Burlington, Colorado, I lost control of my red and white ‘ 55 Chevy and started sliding sideways up a small hill. In the other lane, coming down the hill, was a ton and a half Chevy pickup. He hit me broadside and, with no seat belts in those days, I was thrown out the door. For a couple of minutes, I verged on panic as I could not see and thought I was blind. I blinked rapidly to get the blood out of my eyes and could finally see.

My next thought was, “Holy shit! If the county sheriff shows up and finds that damn Sten in my car, I will become Brown, the felon rather than Brown the budding revolutionary.”

“You talk to the pickup truck driver,” I told Tony.

I moseyed around behind my now very sick Chevy, opened the trunk and secured the Sten under the spare tire. Not to worry, as the Sheriff, when he arrived, could have given a hoot about what was in my trunk.

After this episode, I kept the Sten hidden under a bale of hay at the ranch I was living in with other vets. Some of my buddies and I decided to wake up the student body, which was totally apathetic to the dire political situation in Cuba, by launching an anti-Batista, pro-Castro movement. We didn’t have a clue who Batista or Castro were, but that was beside the point. At that time, Castro had not shown his true colors and would not until he was well on his way to consolidating power in early 1960. Most of the U.S. media reports, including flattering pieces authored by Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Andrew St. George in the now-defunct magazine Coronet, hailed Castro as a good-guy type Social Democrat who just wanted to overthrow strongman Batista. I was bamboozled, as were most Americans and Cubans.

I was going to help Castro overthrow the Latin dictator.

I FORM A BOULDER BRANCH OF THE 26TH OF JULY MOVEMENT

Cuba had a violent history, made stormier by the homicidal Batista. In 1933, Batista had launched the Revolt of the Sergeants, a coup that succeeded in overthrowing the Gerardo Machado government. Batista was the Army Chief of Staff and controlled the resource-rich island. He was elected president in 1940 until 1944. He came to the United States for eight years but went back to Cuba and staged another coup that put him in power until 1959. Basically a murderous thug, he was in bed with the Mafia and big business in the United States. As the U.S. tends to do, it supported the dictator who was impoverishing his country and lining U.S. business pockets. The excuse was that he held Communism at bay. U.S. opinion was souring against him when reports confirmed that he was openly torturing and slaughtering his opposition, including protesting students.

In comes the charismatic Fidel Castro, an attorney and the illegitimate son of a wealthy man. He attempted a failed revolution in 1953. In exile, he began building support as an anti-imperialistic savior of the common folks. Castro’s July 26 Movement built up momentum and popular support.

By 1956 he convinced a left-wing Spanish loyalist who had fled Franco’s victorious fascists, Colonel Alberto Bayo, to train an invasion force in Mexico. The United States, which had been supplying arms to Batista to fight the insurgency, cut off support for the now unpopular despot.

After six months of intensive training under an ex-Spanish Lpyalist officer who had fled Franco at the end of the civil war. Col. Bayo, Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and 80 other revolutionaries landed on the Cuban coast on 6 Dec. 1956. Ambushed by Batista’s troops, only i2 escaped to the Sierra Maestra Mountains where they launched their ulti-mately successful guerilla war. In 1958 Batista fled to the Dominican Republic with planeloads of riches. Castro and his revolutionaries moved in and took power. The rest is history.

A few other rebel classmates and I formed an ad hoc organization and named it after Castro’s 26th of July Movement. We publicized an organizational meeting inviting anyone interested. A group of brilliant social misfits, members of the only liberal group on campus, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), joined us. Like skilled, power hungry politicians, we preordained who was going to run the outfit with a devious plot.

“We will nominate each other with short, bullshit speeches and then push the nominations through with a quick vote,” I said. Castro would have been proud! Of course, so would Lenin and Hitler.

We raised funds for our cause by placing a World War II 20mm Lalhti anti-tank gun out on the university lawn with a ballot box. The sign read, “Vote with ballots, not bullets.” Try exercising that level of free speech today!

One morning, the students and professors flowed onto campus to see the “Viva Castro!” signs we sloshed on the roof of the Chemistry building that was under construction. We picketed Arthur Larson, one of Eisenhower’s advisors, who came to the campus for some function protesting the Eisenhower administration’s continuing military aid to Batista.

The next step was to go to Cuba and meet Castro, the Man. I had wrangled my way into the offices of a prominent Chicago attorney, Con-stantine Kangles, a very influential mover in Chicago politics who was serving as Castro’s legal consul in the United States. I showed him a letter of introduction from the two limp dick Castro supporters who I had shown the Sten gun to.

“My God,” he said, eyes bulging, “if you show this to Castro’s people you’ll be shot! They’re with the wrong group!” This should have been a warning that there was a hell of a lot about revolutionary politics I did not know. However, I was not to be swayed from my mission. I contacted an old Army CIC buddy who I served with in Milwaukee, Pete Jasin, and recruited him. “Pete, old buddy, how about some adventure? Let’s go see Castro.” I bamboozled the University student paper, the Colorado Daily into issuing press credentials for me by promising them an exclusive scoop. They bought it.

I BECOME A FOREIGN PARTICIPATORY CORRESPONDENT

“Let’s do it,” Pete replied. I was working for a roofing company pouring gypsum roofs for bowling alleys, super markets, etc., and decided to save up for the trip and head south in August 1958. I met up with Pete in Chicago and we drove to Miami where we contacted the Miami branch of the 26th of July Movement. The lawyer, Kangles, had given us the address and a letter of introduction. The office was located on the fourth floor of a semi-respectable office building in downtown Miami. We met with whomever, telling them, “We want to link up with Castro,” as we showed our press credentials and the letter of introduction. We got an initial run-around as the no-name we talked with said we would have to be checked out. That sounded reasonable, though we didn’t know why they would have to check out journalists or how they were going to do it.

We left the office and decided to take the stairs instead of the elevators. “Wonder if the FBI is on our trail,” we mused as we descended. We’d had some dealings with the “Eye” when we were in the CIC and were not overly impressed. As we got to where we could see the lobby, yup, there were two dudes in coats and ties and straw hats—in the stifling Miami August heat!

Pete and I smiled at each other.” Let’s walk past them and let them chase us,” I whispered. After we bolted, they finally figured out that we were their targets; that we had come down the stairs instead of the elevator.

“Hey. Hey, you two. Wait up,” one of the suits yelled. We turned and waited till they huffed and puffed up. They flashed their credentials. “Come to our office.” We shrugged. Why not? At the office, they informed us sternly, “Ok boys, we have an agent report that stated Brown was in the process of recruiting a band of college students to invade Cuba.”

Ah, a taste of fame. We laughed. No doubt that concept had been bandied about at one or more of our Cuban rum and fun parties with the YPSLs out at the ranch where I was living while in grad school.

The Feds interviewed us separately.

“We know stuff about Castro you don’t know,” one of them said in a hushed tone. But in typical FBI fashion, refused to get specific.

“You better not go, but if you insist on doing so, you better contact the FBI agent in the American Embassy in Havana who is operating under the cover of the embassy’s Legal Consul.”

How could we resist such a clandestine invitation to a Revolution? We flew into Havana and went directly to the American Embassy and contacted the FBI guy.

“Any idea where we could get a decent but cheap hotel?” we said. He was taken aback, but recommended one. We said our thanks and promptly left, leaving him somewhat perplexed. We asked a lot of questions of anyone who spoke English and found our way to the anti-Batista underground, which was giving us the necessary underground contacts. We hung around Havana, interviewing a few locals including the Bureau Chief of the Havana AP. After our funds started running out, we decided we’d best head back to Miami to somehow replenish our funds and then return to Cuba. Pete and I were unfamiliar with the Cuban culture and did not understand the “manana syndrome.” Being a private revolutionary was becoming quite expensive. We had been told that the overthrow of Batista was not imminent, so we figured we had some time.

BATISTA FALLS WITHOUT ME

On New Year’s Day, 1959, Batista and his thugs saw the writing on the wall and fled to the Dominican Republic, at that time ruled by fellow dictator Rafael Trujillo. I decided to head back to Havana and see what was happening, as well as to see if I could come up with a unique subject for my Master’s thesis in Political Science at the University of Colorado. I arrived in Havana and wrangled a few free nights at the Havana Hilton, which is all my revolutionary contacts figured my services to the revolution were worth. I moved into a small $25 a week pensione and started hanging out at the Havana bureau of the Associated Press. I had met some of the AP reporters on my previous trip and the bureau was the hotspot for journalists. I picked up a few freelance assignments—$5 here, $10 there— which supplemented my meager budget. I wrangled introductions to the revolutionary community through a number of pro-Castro Cubans I’d worked with in the United States.

After Castro took over, Havana was flooded with real or would-be revolutionaries from a dozen Latin American countries, all of whom fantasized about emulating Castro’s success in their native lands. Cuba was the exotic Land of Plots, the stomping ground for Latin Revolutionaries lusting for power, where the hypnotic, hot, rum-sodden air of intrigue intoxicated the masses. Plots were hatched, meetings were held, and proclamations were issued.

Once Castro showed his true colors, which was soon after taking power, I became an active anti-Castro advocate.

A REVOLUTION I MISSED

I was invited to join an invasion of Nicaragua, but passed it up. The poor schmucks who invaded Nicaragua ended up being lucky compared to some other dead revolutionaries. The Nicaraguan fiasco paled compared to another invitation I had to an expedition that was kicked off to overthrow the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic, General Raphael Trujillo. Trujillo’s henchmen surrounded the invasion party and greeted them with a bullet in the back of the head. It didn’t take a great deal of insight to foresee that these misguided idealists plotting to invade were doomed to failure from the beginning. So they met their executioners without me.

One of the freelance assignments that I picked up was to interview now “General” Alberto Bayo, a refugee Spanish loyalist who had fled Franco toward the end of the Spanish civil war. Bayo, along with some of his fellow loyalists, had held a press conference where he boldly proclaimed that they were going to invade Spain and overthrow General Franco. That, coupled with a few not very big bomb explosions in Madrid, prompted the AP bureau chief, Paul Sanders, to say, “Brown, go interview this turkey and see what he’s been drinking.” I did and the story ran worldwide with my byline, and I was flying high. My name was now on the list of international correspondents. The price of such fame turned out to be high later on when the military updated my top-secret security clearance before I went to Nam.

THE MYSTERIOUS MAN BEHIND THE REVOLUTIONARIES

I figured that a story about the fascinating Bayo was worth more ink than the first 750 words printed, so I went back and conducted further interviews. It was time for “the man behind the revolutionaries” to receive some deserved credit for training the two Castro’s, Fidel and Raul, as well as Che Guevara and some 80 others, in the rudiments of guerrilla warfare for six months at a secret site 40 miles outside of Mexico City. This was truly a benchmark in the history of wild-eyed revolutions. The members of this core group, in contrast to other revolutionaries who ended up in catastrophic fiascos fueled by rum, fantasies and ignorance, were well prepared.

The prep time didn’t do most of Castro’s group much good, but had it not been for Bayo’s training, the survivors, including the Castro brothers, would be merely a footnote in the history of failed revolutions.

General Bayo was shrouded with mystery. The burly man with grey, wavy hair was the first pilot in the fledgling Spanish Air Force in 1911. He flew combat ops against the Moors in Morocco in the early ‘20s, fought the last legal sword duel in Spain in 1922, and was an accomplished poet. He was also like a grinding burr under the saddle of the Spanish monarchy with his liberal diatribes. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, he threw in his lot with the Loyalists and repeatedly tried to get the government to embrace the concept of guerrilla warfare, to no avail. After losing an eye during a Franco bombing raid, he fled to Central America, where he became involved in a couple of unsuccessful efforts to overthrow the dictators of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

When Fidel approached him for assistance in overthrowing Batista, he blew him off since he was fed up with the incompetence and lack of realism of the previous would-be revolutionaries he’d worked with. Castro kept pestering him and finally Bayo said, “Come back with $20,000 and I will work with you.” Bayo didn’t expect to see him again, but Castro returned a few weeks later with the money. Bayo leased a large ranch, under the guise of raising cattle, and started his training. Six months later, Castro and his band boarded a decrepit yacht, the Granma, and sailed on to infamy.

BAYO INADVERTENTLY SETS OFF MY PUBLISHING CAREER

Little did Bayo imagine that he was to help shape the bizarre twist my career was about to take. One time when I was interviewing him, he showed me a book on guerrilla warfare that he had authored and used as an instruction manual for training Castro. This book, “150 Questions for a Guerilla,” was going to be of great value, I just knew it. I didn’t have a clue what it was at the time, but I soon saw the light. My mission became to translate this manual that revealed the techniques—primitive though they may have been—that helped Castro seize power, so it could be available to military buffs and those interested in unconventional and guerrilla warfare. I looked for a publisher. But first I needed a translator.

I fell in with a Cuban exile, Hugo Hartenstein, a Spanish instructor at the University of Colorado. With the slim build of a sprinter, raven black hair and blue eyes, Hugo had graduated from Dartmouth where he set the record for the quarter-mile in track and later ran track in a tour in the Army. Hugo was as violently anti-Castro as I had become and, in his spare time, completed the translation. I couldn’t find a publisher, so I convinced an old hunting/shooting buddy and former naval officer who was also working on a graduate degree, Bill Jones, to cough up $800 to publish 1,000 copies of a paperback version of the manual. I authored the introduction.

So we published the first book from our new basement office firm, Panther Publications. It evolved, in 1970, into Paladin Press, which is still operating in Boulder.

I was fortunate that I did not make it up to the Sierra Maestra with the Castros. Even then I knew I would not have been satisfied playing a pencil-pushing war correspondent. I would have picked up a rifle, joined the revolutionaries, and been forever branded as a communist sympathizer, just like those idealists had who joined the International Brigade in the fight against the Fascist Franco.

The trip to Cuba may have been a financial disaster, but I had picked up Bayo’s manual on guerilla warfare that was to change my life and launch my career as a publisher. I had met and worked with some of the finest professional journalists the AP had. I had managed to kiss off a couple of opportunities to get my ass shot off with some incompetent revolutionaries, and the girls were pretty, so what the hell.

JOURNALISM CAN KILL

I returned to Boulder where I played hit and miss with my schooling and socked away some money working odd jobs so I could return to Cuba the following year. In Boulder, I knocked out a couple of articles, one of which had a healthy dose of “unintended consequences.” One of the articles I had published in Guns magazine dealt with the various types of homemade guns the Cuban revolutionaries used in their fight against Batista. I profiled a certain Regino Camacho who was in charge of building a small arms factory for Castro in Havana. I wrote, “The first openly Communist-controlled arms factory in the hemisphere is to be located in a tightly guarded concrete building outside Havana’s machine gun-ringed army headquarters, Ciudad Libertad, formerly Camp Columbia. Called Industrias Mil-itares, it was begun early in 1959 by one Major Regino Camacho . . . a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the Caribbean Legion, and the Second Front of the Escambray. Camacho is a long-time associate of the famed Col. Alberto Bayo . . .” I had met Camacho through Bayo, gotten a bit of his background, his plans and a few photos. How could I have known that that article would lead to his assassination? Yes, journalism can kill.

Within a year, I heard that a hit team had whacked Camacho in Havana, but didn’t pay it much mind. Revolutionaries were always getting whacked in the Caribbean for one reason or another.

It wasn’t until the early 1960s that I would, as Paul Harvey would say, get the “rest of the story.” My path crossed one or more of the more fas -cinating soldiers of fortune in Miami as I hung out with the local mercs. Robert Johnson, in his mid-forties, slim, wavy black hair and a chain smoker, had only recently bailed out from the Dominican Republic shortly after the assassination of its dictator, Generalissimo Trujillo. Somehow, Johnson had signed on with this thug and ended up as his number two in the Dominican Army’s intelligence section under the equally thuggish but certainly more dapper General Arturo Espaillat.

Johnson and I bumped into each other occasionally in Miami, and he eventually knocked out a couple of pieces for the magazine I started in 1975, Soldier of Fortune. The tales of his intrigue in the Caribbean turned out to be some of the best journalism we ever published. One evening in the early ‘60s, when we were knocking back a few rum and cokes, he suddenly turned serious, lowered his voice, and said, “You know, Brown, your writing got somebody hit.”

Taken aback, I replied, “Huh? What the hell are you talking about?” He swizzle-sticked his drink, grimaced and said, “Your article on the arms factory in Havana caused Trujillo to send a hit team him to assassinate Co-macho. They got him.”

BROWN IS ON THE GENERALISSIMO’S HIT LIST

“OK, Johnson, let’s hear the whole story,” I replied as I ordered another round.

Johnson threw back the last of his “Cuba Libre,” settled into his chair and began his tale. “I never did like Bayo, though I admit he was a colorful character. His book, ‘150 Questions for a Guerrilla’ which you published was full of bullshit. However, the book has an enduring appeal even though it is written for a 12-year-old and seems childish. But strange things happen to bored or ambitious middle-class youths who read Bayo. He offers them power. He shows them how ridiculously simple it is. And of course, he throws in generous dollops of guerrilla mystique. Kids study Bayo and they’re transformed; they feel a sense of power in this world he reveals. It all seems so damn simple. But some of his precepts are not only oversimplified but downright dangerous. Take his famed recipe for cooking up nitroglycerine for example. It’s manically simple to produce TNT: boil dynamite and skim off the scum: presto—you’ve got yourself a powerful explosive. Much more likely: presto—you’ve got a big BOOM!”

The second round of drinks arrived, I tipped the waitress, and Johnson continued. “Bayo was mucking about stirring up trouble wherever he could. We had to do something about him. I asked my boss, General Arturo Es-paillat, also known in trade circles as ‘the Razor’ or ‘the Yellow Cat,’ who was Trujillo’s intelligence chief, ‘How come the Old Man has never tried to eliminate Bayo? We had a perfectly good stable of hired killers sitting around doing nothing. At the time, they were merely between gigs . . . or hits.

“‘Of course, we don’t do things like that,’ said Espaillat, a West Point graduate who was an aristocrat, suave and cosmopolitan. He could be hilariously funny but he was also the most lethal guy I’ve ever known. He moved through his world like a barracuda through sardines. ‘Why don’t you ask the Jefe?’ ‘Not me,’ I said. Palace protocol was that suggestions came from the Old Man, not to him.’ “

“So what happened then?” I said, numbed by the cheap booze, but aware enough to know that I had entered into a web of deadly intrigue.

“It wasn’t long until an opportunity presented itself,” Johnson continued. “I came across something about Bayo and Regino Camacho guaranteed to excite the Generalissimo. I’d been skimming through a stack of intelligence reports when an article from Guns magazine, published in the U.S., stared me in the face. The article, written by one Robert K. Brown, mentioned that an arms factory was being built in Havana.

“I was stunned. Not a word had I heard about this from our high-priced Havana spies. Not a word! Here I’m reduced to getting top-priority intelligence out of a magazine. I tucked the clipping in my pocket. No one would ever see it. I’ll write my own report. You don’t get any points—or bonuses—in this business for intelligence coups you stumble on in public print.”

“The Generalissimo got excited, aright. Until now, his San Cristobal arms factory had been the sole source of weapons in the Caribbean area. The factory had been built at enormous expense and operated at a heavy loss—but the Old Man was enormously proud of it. The San Cristobal plant meant that we’d have local access to arms in case of a U.S. embargo— such as one that had just helped destroy Batista’s government and was now being applied to the Dominican Republic.”

“An arms factory in Castro’s Cuba would wipe out any margin of military superiority the Jefe had over the Cubans. The Generalissimo seemed as upset at another item I’d extracted from your article:

“‘Those dogs are going to use our San Cristobal design to produce weapons in the Havana Plant?’ the Generalissimo asked.

“ ‘Si, Jefe, that’s the info I’m getting. I understand from our sources, which got a full account from an American arms expert there, that Regino Camacho is using the San Cristobal design—a modified design, that is. It seems that Camacho’s prototypes were overheating.’

“ ‘This is that same Camacho you’ve mentioned before? The Camacho who is always making revolution?’ the Generalissimo barked.

“ ‘Yes, Jefe. He’s Bayo’s man,’ I said. ‘He’s also a genius with weapons. Camacho is the kind of technician who can take a rusty smokestack and turn it into a howitzer. He’s been with Bayo for years . . .’ “

“The generalissimo made a short, fast chopping motion with his chubby right hand across his neck. I was familiar with the gesture. But I wasn’t quite sure who he meant. ‘Bayo, Jefe?’ I asked hopefully.

“ ‘Comacho. Draw any extra funds needed from the Officina Particular.’ I nodded.

“ ‘Now . . . this other arms expert. Who is he?’

“ ‘I really don’t know, Jefe,’ I admitted. ‘He’s been in our sights for some time. He is said to represent American arms manufacturers. That may be a cover. Brown’—I was referring to you, R.K.—’is an American and has been all over Havana for some months now. He’s been seen with Bayo. . .’

“Jefe gave another short hard chopping motion. ‘Bayo, Jefe?’ I asked hopefully.

“‘Brown.’ I must have looked disappointed. The Jefe added: ‘Comacho and Brown only. They can have no arms factories without technicians, can they Roberto?’

“The hit team was activated. Most of Trujillo’s agents were Cubans who had been on the payroll for years: diplomats, politicians, corrupt cops, gangsters. They were controlled either directly by the Generalissimo or by his intelligence service, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM). Most of these agents had been eliminated by Castro’s organization within a few months of his takeover.

“However, a second network survived. One with which I was more closely associated. It was made up of a small group of Chinese-Cubans, a couple of expatriate Europeans, a defrocked priest, a Toronto mobster and an elderly Mexican pistolero who had lived in Havana for years. The network was still functional but was starting to disintegrate as pressures increased on Trujillo’s regime. But the old man still was able to have Camacho hit outside Liberty City in January 1960. And you, Brown, had fortunately run out of money and returned to Colorado. You left just in time to avoid being the last corpse chalked up by Trujillo’s once-feared ‘Network of Terror.’”

I grasped my drink with both hands and was in semi-shock, yet fascinated by how close I had come to buying the farm. I mulled over how I felt about being indirectly responsible for the death of an individual that I had written about.” I said, “Let’s toast Bayo and Camacho for a hell of a story.”

Johnson, who for reasons unknown, never reached his potential as an author though Paladin Press, did publish his book, How to Be a Mercenary.

THE HUNT FOR REFUGEES WHO NEEDED RESCUING

Back to 1960, when I made my third trip to Cuba in March. Bob Berrellez, the AP’s “fireman” for Latin America for many years, and who was involved to an unknown degree in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1972 while working for ITT, graciously put me up in his apartment to save me a buck. Once again, hanging out with the AP staff I realized that the intentions of the Castro regime had drastically changed over the preceding year. The Cuban press and media in general were under the thumb of Castro, who was successfully moving to control all centers of power in the island, be it student, labor or professional organizations. Concurrently, the anti-American tone of the Cuban government spokesman over and above Castro and Che was taking on an ever more vitriolic tone as well as becoming more supportive of the Russians and Communist bloc nations.

The writing was on the wall but the American government didn’t figure it out until October of ’60 when it finally broke relations with Cuba.

Castro, the most exceptional caudillo in the history of Latin America, had in fact bamboozled me, but he had also duped the whole world including his own Cuban populace. Hundreds of thousands fled when Castro revealed his true colors. But you have to give the old dictator credit. He was able to confuse the opposition, both latent and active, until it was too late. The problem was that those individuals who eventually withdrew their support from Castro defected, or even went to the mountains to conduct guerrilla warfare against him, did not arise in a mass at one time but, often incrementally over a period of a year, consequently diluting their potential impact.

After all this intrigue I had titled my Master’s thesis, “The Impact of Revolutionary Politics on the Autonomy of the Cuban Labor Movement.” Most of the former Cuban labor leaders I interviewed, who had been supporters of Castro and in many cases active in the anti-Batista underground, told me, “Ah, we knew that Che was a communist. We knew that Raul was a communist. But we were certain that Fidel would take care of the two when the time came.” Yeah, well, he took care of them but not in the way the anti-communist labor leaders had predicted.

I kept in contact with some of the 26th of July activists who had supported Castro and then had turned against him, as I had, once it became obvious that he was a Commie in disguise. In the spring of 1962, about a year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, I headed back down to Miami to link up with the activists and interview Cuban exiles for my thesis as well as to see what a small cadre of would-be soldiers of fortune were up to.

After the Bay of Pigs, Miami was inundated with patriotic, adventurous young male Americans, some with and some without military experience, who wanted to take a crack at Castro, not realizing that for the most part the CIA had all the action locked up. After sleeping on park benches for a couple of weeks, most got the word and headed back to Arkansas, Alabama or wherever. A straggling dozen or so hung around Miami and were involved in nearly every non-CIA plot to overthrow somebody, somewhere in the Caribbean. They were an interesting group of rogues or renegades who simply wouldn’t give in to the humdrum of everyday life. Many plans and plots were discussed, and fantasies fueled by cheap rum were concocted, but none came to fruition.

I gave my “go directly to jail” Sten submachine gun to Ed Collins, a former Army NCO, and instructed him to see “that it was put to good use.” It was—I suppose. He sold it a few weeks later for $40 for food money. I was successful in locating and interviewing numerous Castro defectors from the Cuban labor movement who provided a wide and varied insight on the machinations Castro used to slowly take control of one of the most powerful non-communist segments of Cuban society.

I monitored the situation in Cuba as time went on, and in the spring of 1964, after I had completed Airborne School at Ft. Benning, I decided to head out again to Miami to see what kind of adventure/ trouble the remaining soldiers-of-misfortune were getting into and with whom. I heard of plots and plans but nothing materialized.

There I met Peder Lund, who had bumped into some of the mercs while working as a deckhand on an inter-waterway tugboat.

“I went to pawn a .357 Magnum and was directed to Nellie’s, where I met the boys,” Peder recalled. Nellie’s was a rundown boarding house catering to anyone with $10—15 a week for a cot and two hots a day.

In an interview before he died, Marty Casey, a former Marine who had been on the Soldier of Fortune scene in Miami for the prior three years in an abortive attempt to pull some refugees out of Fidel land, remembered meeting Peder.

“When Peder knocked on the door at Nellie’s, Lil Joe, one of the ne’er do wells, answered. Peder was more than welcome since he carried a two-pound tin of coffee and a carton of cigarettes. A Miami Herald reporter, Don Bohning, had given him our address and told him that we were broke and craving cigarettes and coffee. The cigarettes he bought, and the coffee he found when nobody was looking on the tugboat he worked on. Peder told the boys that he was trying to find a Colorado adventurer by the name of Bob Brown. The name meant nothing to me, but the others perked up and started calling out the various handles this Brown was known for. “The Cowboy,” “the Texan,” “Uncle Bob,” etc., including a few Brown would rather forget. Within a half hour, as they sat swapping lies, there was another knock at the door. Again, Lil Joe answered and let out a loud, ‘Uncle Bob!’ A big smile on his ruggedly handsome face, “Uncle Bob” called out hello and told us he had rented the empty apartment next to ours, and he would be back in a few minutes. He returned, no longer wearing jeans, cowboy boots and shirt. Now in uniform, Captain Robert K. Brown, U.S. Army Reserve, stood in the doorway showing off his newly won paratrooper wings. He would be in town for only eight days, but that was more than ample time for ‘Uncle Bob’ to stir up enough trouble for a lifetime,” Marty said.

150 QUESTIONS FOR A GUERRILLA

Peder had run across a copy of “150 Questions for a Guerrilla” at a news-stand in Boulder, Colorado, and wanted to meet “Uncle Bob,” publisher of Panther Publications. “After a few hours swapping dubious tales, ‘Uncle Bob’ invited all to get some chow,” Marty said. “He wanted seafood and the seven of us stuffed ourselves into a ‘51 Dodge and ended up at the New England Oyster House, by Miami International Airport. As we chowed down the seafood delicacies we rarely had the opportunity to savor, the main topics of conversation were the CIA and Cuban exiles. At that time the exile movement was a joke and the CIA’s operations would have been hilarious if it weren’t for the tens of millions being wasted, while a few good souls were being captured and executed. Everything was a mess and very few seemed to care except those who were making big money ripping off the taxpayers.”

“We got down to serious business when we returned to Lil Joe’s. We still had 12 days left on our boat rental and a lot of weapons. We lacked some ammo and money to buy gas and food; ‘Uncle Bob’ pledged that. When Lil Joe came home from working at a boat builder’s, he called a friend, Edy Mor, a Cuban exile activist. Edy was a member of one of the hundreds of small exile groups who trusted neither the U.S. government nor, much less, exiled politicians. A simple plan was hatched. ‘Uncle Bob,’ Peder and I would take the Toni to the dock in Black Water Sound. The boys would join us there, bringing the weapons and ammo.”

Marty continued his tale:

“We got a late start and I soon learned Peder had quite a bit of boat-handling experience. He took the helm and expertly guided Toni next to the tug on which he was employed. There was no one aboard, so we lib -erated a small coffee pot, coffee, sugar cubes, utensils and canned goods. We were not making very good headway and were still off Soldier Key when the sun started to set. Two hours later we were no farther south than Elliot Key and dog tired. Heading toward shore, we spied a small dock and headed for it. We finished tying up when we heard noises coming from up on the dock. A man’s voice coming from behind a flashlight called out, “Do you want to spend the night?” Peder asked if we could tie up and told the man we were headed for Key Largo and were too tired to go on. The man said his name was Bill and invited us to his house for coffee. At the end of the dock was a sandy beach. Thirty meters farther, now slightly illuminated by a moon peeking its nose over the eastern horizon, sat an eerie looking, large two-story wood frame house, complete with gables, one of which was loose and slowly swinging and creaking in the slight breeze.

“The house was Spartan with a small table and chairs, a wood burning stove and a couple buckets of fresh water. We shot the breeze by the light of an oil lamp. Bill was a former medical doctor who had fallen prey to alcohol, or ‘the Irish disease’ as he called it, and was now recovering and worked for the landowner, Arthur Vining Davis. Mr. Davis would send his alcoholic friends down to the key to dry out. Bill’s job was to care for them. The house, built in 1875 of durable Dade county pine, constructed with all dowel work, without a nail, had weathered many a vicious hurricane. But it was haunted by the ghosts of various alcoholics who didn’t leave the key alive,” Marty said.

“‘You can spend the night here,’ Bill told us as he walked us into a small room illuminated by the candle he carried. As soon as he left, Peder dove into a small cot, leaving ‘Uncle Bob’ and me to share a slightly larger bed. Small beams of moonlight filtering through cracks in the gable and the sound of the broken one added to the eeriness. In no time we were asleep,” Marty said.

“The following morning, with a belly full of eggs, fried corn beef hash, biscuits and hot coffee, we were on our way. It took almost five hours to get to the cut leading to Black Water Sound. Once into the sound some teenagers in a speed boat came by and started yelling, ‘Cuban exiles, Cuban exiles.’ We ignored them as we passed the Caribbean Club, once the main set for the Bogart movie, Key Largo. A few minutes later we were tied up at the small dock. I walked to the Caribbean Club and called Lil Joe, who assured me they would arrive at 9 p.m. It was pitch black. Peder stayed on the boat while ‘Uncle Bob’ and I walked the few meters to the road, more a single-lane path covered in gravel. The path ran down to the water’s edge, then hooked back to the highway. ‘They’re early,’ whispered ‘Uncle Bob’ as we heard a vehicle crackling the gravel. Slowly the car advanced, its headlights extinguished. The car stopped. I was on the passenger side, Bob on the driver’s. Bob asked, ‘Are you the Cubans?’ as he pulled the door open. The overhead light came on to reveal a pockmarked teenager performing dubious acts who dropped the gear into low and sped off showering us with gravel,” Marty recalled.

Peder’s recollection of the event was not so thrilling:

The boys’ at Nellie’s had a scheme to bring some refugees out of Cuba, film the operation, sell the film to a major TV network, and with the proceeds finance an armed raid against Cuba. As I was the only one working, I financed the rental of the Toni. ‘The boys’ were to bring weapons by road, and a Cuban captain/guide was to rendezvous. We slept on the Toni when we weren’t hanging out in Key Largo. There wasn’t much else to do except slap mosquitoes or eat refugee beans and rice, or both. RKB said he would accompany me on the boat to Key West, but would not go on the harebrained scheme to rescue refugees. We, of course, encountered foul weather, ran aground on a sandbar, ran out of food but for refugee beans and rice, caught no fish except for one small barracuda (they are virtually all bones and inedible), and waited a frustrating five days for the boys and captain. After numerous payphone calls, we were told the captain had ‘to do his laundry’ and would not be joining us.

I started feeling more and more antsy about this mission. Not only had the guns not arrived, it just didn’t feel right. My gut had kept me from getting whacked twice in Havana by not joining abortive revolutionary ex-peditions to the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. I told Peder, who was young, dumb and full of testosterone, “This is bad . . . I don’t like it. I’m not going.”

Peder finally agreed, worried anyhow about having no Cuban captain.

I left a couple of Army ponchos with Marty, who later used them to jerry rig sails when the boat’s putt-putt went kaput, which allowed them to make it back to Miami. Peder enlisted in the Army to circumvent the draft, and went on to get his commission the hard way as I did, at the Ft. Benning School for Boys.

My Cuban adventures had wound down. I was still alive because I had run out of money and patience and, dreadfully disillusioned, headed back to paradise in Colorado. I had unknowingly avoided being a corpse on the wrong end of an assassinaton. It was not the last time that I would be on someone’s hit list.