image22

GRENADA—ONE WE WON!

The United States Invaded Grenada in 1983.

“Pack up, we are going to war,” I told my then Managing Editor Jim Graves. We packed up and got on the first plane and went to find the war. Or so we thought.

“Where’s the war?” we demanded as we charged through the streets of Grenada’s capital, St. Georges. Smiling Grenadians answered in their singsong English, “The Cubans have gone to the hills. Welcome to Grenada.” By Sunday, 30 October, 1983, the liberation of Grenada was almost complete. It was no invasion, it was simply a liberation. At least that’s the way the Grenadians saw it when former Ranger, Rod Hafemeister, Graves and I arrived on the island.

At Point Salines Airport, we observed an 82nd Airborne artillery battery on the northeast end of the runway, some troops on the perimeter, some foot and vehicle patrols along the road, and numerous vehicle checkpoints, some abandoned. We didn’t see any invaders, a single body or any blown-up cars and trucks. Although rumor had it that significant numbers of Cubans were retreating into the hills to conduct guerrilla operations, we saw only three captured Cuban prisoners in two days. There were Cuban antiaircraft guns and several shot-up BTR-60s, but it was obvious that any real resistance had long since crumbled.

We had arrived at the island with the first load of about 160 press people, five days after D-Day. We were enraged that we had missed the war and even more so when the smiling Grenadians asked, “Are Americans going to stay? We want them to. It’s a good thing you didn’t wait a few more days.” No lie!

There was almost no sign of fighting in St. Georges, the Grenada capital from a press holding area at the airport in Barbados. The objectives of the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 75th Rangers, were south of town and the Marines from the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) operated on the other side of the island, north of St. Georges.

With the exception of forts Frederick and Rupert, which had taken a pounding from carrier-launched A-7s and C-130 Spectre gunships, the only signs of damage around St. Georges were caused by scavengers and looters.

The Marines, who had moved into St. Georges the previous day (it had not yet been assaulted and was theoretically still in hostile hands), were as puzzled about their reception on the island as we were. The press who arrived with us on Sunday were just as bewildered. One young Marine approached Miami Herald reporter Don Bohning (one of seven newsmen who had slipped onto the island by boat on Tuesday, 25 October, the day of the invasion) and asked: “Can you tell us what’s going on? Is the Grena-dian Army with us or against us?”

The 1,200-man People’s Revolutionary Army (PRA) had started laying down their weapons on the day of the invasion, stripping off their uniforms and putting on civilian clothes to join the crowd welcoming the 6,000 American liberators shortly after dawn. The sky over Point Salines was filled with C-l30s and parachuting Rangers. The ocean turned gray with the fleet’s U.S. Navy warships.

Cuban “construction workers,” some actual laborers and some from a military engineering unit, put up stiffer-than expected resistance around Point Salines. Some PRA elements did fight back on the first and second days at Point Salines, Frequente and Fort Frederick. However, most of the PRA, like the overwhelming majority of the population, had little love for its own commanders and none whatsoever for the Cubans.

At the time of the invasion Grenada was, in theory, under the control of General Hudson Austin and his 16-man Revolutionary Military Council. However, in fact, power was shared by Austin and Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, and coordinated with the Central Committee of the New Jewel Movement (NJM). Austin and Coard, dedicated pro-Cuban Marxists, engineered the house arrest and subsequent execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop on 19 October, which triggered the U.S.-led assault on 25 October.

Directing the NJM from behind the scenes were Soviet Ambassador Gennadiy I. Sachenev, a four-star general and expert in covert actions with ties to the KGB, and Cuban Ambassador Julian Enrique Tores Riza, a senior intelligence officer of the Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI), Cuba’s KGB surrogate.

After American forces had seized their initial objectives, they moved out into the hills to hunt down fleeing Cubans and PRA soldiers. To the GIs’ surprise, they encountered not hostile fire, but a picnic, with Grena-dians offering gifts of cold soft drinks, melons, cheers and information about the hiding places of Cubans and NJM leaders. Information from locals led USMC Captain David Karcher, on Saturday, 29 October, to a house near St. Georges where Coard, his Jamaican-born wife Phyllis (also a prime leader of the anti-Bishop forces on the Central Committee) and some other NJM leaders were hiding. Coard initially indicated he would not surrender, but changed his mind when the Marines targeted antitank weapons on the house. Captain Karcher reported that Coard came out muttering, “I’m not responsible. I’m not responsible.”

While Coard waited in the Marine compound at Queen’s Park to be heli-lifted to the USS Guam, a hostile crowd of Grenadians gathered to mock him, chanting, “C is for Coard, Cuba and Communism!”

Austin was captured in a similar fashion the next afternoon. Locals tipped off the 82nd Airborne that he was hiding in a house at Westerhall on the east side of the island.

A quick trip was made to Fort Rupert by SOF managing editor Jim Graves, Washington Times reporter Jay Mallin and Lionel “Choo Choo” Pinn, an Osage Indian who was a veteran of WWI, Korea and SOG operations in Vietnam. They revealed that no one was guarding the NJM Central Committee headquarters, the Deputy Minister of Defense’s office or the equipment stores at Fort Rupert. Pinn was going to help us crack the Prime Minster’s safe, but as the door was sprung, the money was burnt. We searched all three locations. We found a collection of new Soviet helmets, canteens, mess kits, packs, AK-47 bayonets, military manuals and the NJM flag that had flown over the fort, which we auctioned off at the 1983 SOF convention in Vegas. Proceeds went to SOF’s Refugee Relief In-ternational charity. We picked through the papers scattered around the office of Lieutenant Colonel Ewart Layne, Grenada’s deputy minister of defense. We also located documents in Fort Frederick and Butler House, the prime minister’s office.

We discovered documents and other physical evidence that had been overlooked by whatever intelligence entity got to them before we did:

  1. Cuba and the USSR were turning Grenada into a strategic military base;
  2. As in Nicaragua, more weapons than Grenada could ever use had been shipped to the island;
  3. Bishop was killed because of a power grab by Coard and because he was not as pro-Cuban as other Central Committee members thought he should have been;
  4. The NJM was losing control of the country because of its excessive pro-Cuban and pro-communist attitude; and
  5. Some well-known Americans had highly questionable dealings with the NJM.

Highlights from the documents we recovered included the following:

I won’t bore you with the other mass of documents we found. As soon as I returned to Boulder, I called Dick Duncan who at that time was the Assistant Managing Editor for Time Magazine. I described what we had discovered. He was excited and flew out a photographer and reporter to evaluate the documents the next day. They perused through the whole pile.

When a November 1983 issue of Time hit the stands, it carried an article titled “A Treasure Trove of Documents: Captured Papers Provide Insights into a Reclining Regime.” It read:

“Additional documents were shown to Time by Soldier of Fortune, a Boulder, Colorado monthly magazine that specializes in military weapons and tactics; it said the papers had been overlooked by U.S. forces. The documents indicate that Grenada also had military agreements with Vietnam, Nicaragua and at least one Soviet bloc country. A top secret paper dated 18 May 1982, records a shipment of ammunition and explosives from Czechoslovakia via Cuba. One document, signed last November by Nicaragua’s Vice Minister of Defense, provides for the establishment of a course in Grenada to teach English-language military terminology to members of the Nicaraguan Army.”

We didn’t find a war, but we did find highly valuable intelligence. Either the CIA or Army Intelligence had done a shitty job of retrieving critical documents.