23

A GAME OF “DOMINOS” IN EL SALVADOR

U.S. and SOF participation in the El Salvador guerrilla war was riding on the wave of fear that a “domino” effect would come into play if El Salvador, sandwiched between Guatemala and Honduras, fell to a communist guerrilla movement. Nicaragua had fallen to the leftist Sandinistas, who in turn supported the FMLN in El Salvador. Alarms were being sounded that El Salvador would go next. Honduras was seeing communist guerrilla intrusions and there was an insurgent movement in Guatemala. Mexico was wobbly and could easily fall if bordered by left-wing governments. Then, of course, the Soviet Union would be at our back door.

The 12-year civil war in El Salvador was a culmination of five decades of violence riddled with coups and revolutions and government-backed death squads that wreaked terror against their opponents.

In 1931, Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez became ruler after a successful coup. The government’s oppression of citizens during his 13-year rule was highlighted by the massacre of peasants (La Matanza) who joined a resistance led by Communist Party chief Farabundo Marti. 30,000 were killed during the civil war between Marti’s band and Martinez’s military government.

Oligarchic military dictatorships continued to rule in the coffee-rich country until 1979, when a Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG) of military officials and civilian political figures overthrew the military dictator General Humberto Romero, head of the conservative Party of National Conciliation.

The U.S. administration of President Carter backed José Napoleon Duarte Fuentes, the exiled conservative political leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Duarte returned in 1980 to El Salvador to head the military regime, which by then was facing a full-blown leftist insurgency. The United States authorized the largest economic aid package ever granted to a Latin country. Throughout the war, the U.S. poured nearly $5 billion of economic aid into the country and over $ 1 billion in military aid. The Salvadoran Air Force was the number one recipient.

Catholic Archbishop Romero had become the most outspoken opponent of the government, which continued to deploy “death squads” to assassinate political opponents. Thousands were executed. He urged the soldiers in the strongly Catholic country to defy the orders of the political elite and he objected to U.S. military aid to the corrupt government. Catholic leaders in Latin America have traditionally wielded enormous influence.

In 1980, a brutal bloodbath of a civil war erupted in the tiny, densely populated Republic of El Salvador. One hundred thousand lost their lives in the maelstrom before a truce was called. The war was triggered when Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, head of the Junta’s military intelligence, ordered Archbishop Romero’s assassination. Over 50,000 angry, grieving country folk attended the funeral of the beloved martyr. The highly charged funeral procession erupted when a bomb exploded, followed by a fierce firefight between anti-government demonstrators and military forces in San Salvador’s Plaza of the Cathedral. Forty were killed, many of them crushed against a security fence as they fled the mayhem.

Four U.S. nuns working in El Salvador, accused of treason by the government because of alleged leftist leanings, were savagely raped and murdered the same year by government-supported thugs. The Carter Administration, torn between supporting a savage military regime that snuffed out its opponents and the fear of the spread of communism, suspended military aid to the junta.

Five separate leftist guerrilla groups united, forming the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Marxist insurgents, convinced that they had popular support and that a mass insurrection would follow, launched an offensive against the government on 10 January, 1981, just before President Reagan took office.

Although the armed forces trounced the poorly armed and trained rebels, the FMLN’s offensive alarmed the Carter administration. The fear of the fall of Central American countries to communism overcame the re-vulsion at the way the military government in El Salvador tried to suppress popular opposition. Within a week’s time, the U.S. resumed aid to the military junta to the tune of $10 million.

In spite of its initial defeat, the FMLN received international recognition and retained military strongholds in Chalatenango and other rural areas, where its forces settled in for the long-drawn-out civil war. Before the end of the year, France and Mexico recognized the front as a political player.

The staunchly anti-communist Reagan administration issued a special report, “Communist Interference in El Salvador,” during its first few weeks in office. The statement warned that the Soviet Union and Cuba were supporting and equipping the FMLN in El Salvador, just as they had the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua. Central America had become another violent proxy battleground of the Cold War.

Airpower Journal summed up the balance of forces:

“El Salvador had a small armed force of approximately 10,000 military personnel and 7,000 paramilitary police in 1980 when the war began. The army, the largest part of the armed forces, had approximately 9,000 soldiers organized into four small infantry brigades, an artillery battalion, and a light armor battalion. The level of training was low. . . there was no training or preparation for fighting a counterinsurgency campaign. In short, it was an army that was not prepared for war.

“The leftist conglomerate of rebel factions fielded a force of 10,000 guerrillas, headed by the FMLN, and most were well equipped with assault rifles, machine guns and explosives. The guerrillas were inflicting heavy ca-sualties on the Salvadoran Army and even on the more proficient Air Force, which numbered 1,000. The tide began to turn in 1984, thanks to U.S. involvement and support from the Reagan administration. By then the FMLN controlled large areas of El Salvador along the Nicaragua border and throughout the provinces.”

In 1982 a hundred guerrillas overran an airbase, destroying a large portion of the Salvadoran Air Force, which was small and dilapidated to begin with. The U.S. made good the losses. But in 1983 FMLN forces overran the rural town of Berlin, destroying several companies of government troops and capturing all their weapons. Later that year the guerrillas captured other government outposts and ambushed a 2,000-man brigade, inflicting heavy casualties. On New Year’s Eve in 1984 they temporarily overran the 4th Brigade’s headquarters in an especially humiliating setback for government forces.

U.S. Military Group, meantime, trained and advised the Salvadoran Army while scores of airforce trainees were schooled in Panama and the United States to attempt to give the government an edge in air power.

SOF IN EL SALVADOR

In 1981, two SOFers, Bob Burton, a famous bounty hunter, and Bob Poos, my Executive Editor, who had been down doing the journalist bit in El Salvador covering the insurgency, charged into the office.

“Jefe, we met up with these two Special Forces senior NCOs advising the Salvador military, Tony Paniagua and Bill Frisbee. In a bar one night they whispered, ‘Think there is any way that SOF could offer any expertise?’ We are really low on manpower,” the wired duo said.

The communists were invading our southern neighborhood! I ordered a bunch of my guys to convene at a local bar, the Hungry Farmer, where many SOF meetings were held, for a skull session. As the night went on, with heightened booze-induced creativity, we decided that the communist threat in Central America was such a pressing threat to the United States that our other project—supporting the Karens in their six-decade battle against the Burmese dictatorship—should be put on the back burner.

It was again time to kick into high gear for some hardcore SOF “partic-ipatory” journalism. We would create the story, gin up a lot of action and then write about it for the glistening pages of our bad boy magazine. Thus began our dozens of treks down to El Salvador over the next eight years.

SOF ARRIVES IN COUNTRY

General Bustillo, a colonel when we first met him, was the Commander-in-Chief of both the Salvadoran Airborne battalion and the Air Force (the Airborne unit was under control of the Air Force, in contrast to the practice of the U.S. and other Western nations) throughout the entire war, from 1979 to 1989. He was an acclaimed officer and pilot who wielded lots of political clout. The General was a strong supporter of SOF efforts as he realized the value of the Vietnam and Africa combat experience of the SOF advisors. He even sent his private car driven by Special Forces SFC Tony Paniagua to pick SOFers up at the airport.

Prior to the SOF team leaving for the land of ripening coffee beans and flying bullets, we had off-the-record meetings with high ranking officials in the Pentagon regarding our planned efforts in El Salvador. No records were kept.

One of the players was Nestor Sanchez, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Latin American Affairs who had a sterling career in the U.S. Army after being ransomed from a Cuban prison who, during his three-decade career with the CIA, participated in the coup against the left-wing government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala and was involved in an attempt to assassinate Castro. Also included in the meetings were Ed Lutt-wak, a brainy Pentagon consultant, and Colonel Manny Grenado, a Bay of Pigs veteran. They condoned our Central American operation but could not offer any official sanction or assistance. However, Luttwak did say, “Brown, if you have any difficulties call me.” I said, “Sure, Ed,” having no idea I would be taking him up on his offer in a very few days.

In El Salvador, shortly after we got settled in our quarters, we heard from our Special Forces buddies that they had attended a meeting with the number two man of the U.S. Mil Group and the Salvadoran Minister of Defense.

Paniagua told us, “That leg from the Mil Group was trying to convince the Minister of Defense to declare you all persona non grata!”

This was not good. We had to act immediately. That night, I was on the phone to Luttwak. “Ed,” I said, “I’ve got a problem.” “Well, what is it?” “Very simple,” I responded, “I think we have a case of ‘territorial imperative’ and the Mil Group wants to give us the bums rush.” Without hesitation, Luttwak said emphatically, “Well, I will take care of it,” and hung up.

I was skeptical but had no choice but to wait the situation out. I didn’t have long to wait. The next day, my team and I were over at the Estado Mayor getting our press and I.D. cards, when the CO of the Mil Group, Colonel Joe Stringham, flagged me down.

“Brown, Brown, I’ve got to talk to you,” he yelled as he scurried over. Not knowing what was coming down, I responded in a low, neutral tone, “Colonel, how can I help you?” He huffed and puffed saying, “Look, I’m not going to have you guys declared persona non grata. Please get Nestor Sanchez off my back!” I smugly smiled and said, “Well, Colonel, I’ll see what I can do.” What satisfaction it gave me to stick my thumb in his bureaucratic eye.

According to one of our military contacts, “When a Colonel gets the word directly from an Assistant Secretary of Defense, he damn well better pay attention or he will end up in charge of Quartermaster Sales in the Aleutians.” We had no more problems with Stringham or any of the Mil-Group from that time on. I won’t say it was a case of “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir,” but damn near.

We were all issued Salvadoran I.D.s or “Get out of jail free cards,” as well as press credentials which allowed us to carry personal weapons on and off military bases and even arrest civilians on the street though we never did. We had our own arms room, supply room, and ate at the officer’s mess at Illapongo airbase. Imagine a bunch of foreigners, no matter what their importance or rank might be, allowed the same privileges and considerations on any U.S. military base. It would never happen.

WE GO ON COUNTER-GUERRILLA OPS

One of our many missions involved accompanying Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Adalberto Cruz, the officer in charge of guerrilla-threatened Morazon Province, and elements of the Morazan and Airborne Battalions that were in the field to observe counter-guerrilla operations. Cruz, who was 5’7” with curly black hair and raven black eyes, was one of the hottest officers in the Salvadoran Army and had received Army military training in Chile. He was among the first graduates of the controversial United States College of the Americas, a military-training school in the Panama Canal Zone that stressed low-intensity, low-level counter-guerrilla warfare tactics which was hated by the left-wing. He also later became one of the hottest faces for SOF readers when he and I posed in-country, decked out in full combat gear, well-armed for a sellout poster that had “Communism Stops Here” slapped below our in-your-face photos.

He was up to speed with, and engaged in most of, the techniques necessary to defeat guerrillas to the extent that his scarce resources allowed. He kept his troops and his officers out of the cuartel and in the bush where the bad guys were. He patrolled aggressively, moving quickly and at night. He took prisoners and supported civic-action projects. The morale of those of his troops observed by SOF appeared to be good.

On our mission with Colonel Cruz, the SOF team included Sheldon Kelly, a hard-charging Irishman journalist with a quick lip and a fast pen, who I was convinced worked for the Agency. We caught a 45-minute hop on a Salvadoran Air Force C-47 that must have made its bones dropping Allied paratroopers over “A Bridge Too Far” during WWII. We were hopping from San Salvador, EI Salvador’s capital city, to San Franciso Gotera, capital of embattled Morazan Department.

We had more than one anxious moment with pucker factors of 8 out of 10 during the white knuckle flight. When we couldn’t get the wheels down on the landing, I was sure I was going to get a belly landing to add to my “why-am-I-doing-this shit” list. Miraculously, we finally rolled to a stop near a 10x10 concrete terminal topped up with a dirty rag standing in for a windsock. This was not uptown, or even downtown.

We happily disembarked after our bumpy, will-we-get-there, flight, and noted two wounded young troopers suffering in silence, lying on their backs on the floor of a truck. Both had bandages on their chests. SOF medics Padgett and Gonzalez jumped to the occasion and as any worth-his-salt combat medic would do, rolled them over and found what they expected—bullet exit holes in their backs that meant sucking chest wounds. They quickly applied airtight compresses both front and back. If both entrance and exit holes had not been covered, the two victims would have bought the farm before they could be flown to the hospital in San Salvador. I fought my impatience after the emergency was over. “Colonel, are we going to see some action?”

He grinned and said, “Si, si, just wait.” That night we joined a company-sized patrol looking for a 1,200-man guerrilla column that was transporting a shipment of small arms and ammo from Nicaragua through western Morazan at that time. Cruz briefed us, his excitement contagious.

“My intelligence indicates they plan on attacking Gotera and other points on the road between Gotera and San Miguel. Our objective is to fix the guerrilla column in place by engaging them in a firefight they can’t break away from. Then my two other columns will smash them from the flanks.”

Cruz, later that night, told us, “The guerrilla column is composed of communist units from La Union, San Vicente, San Miguel and Usulutan Departments, as well as local units from Morazon.”

We dozed with half open eyes on alert during that night filled with the sounds of discharges from spooked troops, some friendly artillery fire and blinking lights from the guerrillas, but there was no contact.

Kelly described the long sleepless night. “The only place for us to stay was a bunker outside the wire. We laid there wondering if we were going to get hit. Every time I thought we were all asleep, someone would say, ‘Hear that?’ ‘Hear what?’ Then we’d ready up for an attack, then, finally get back to the cots. It was like this all night. I doubt if any of us slept much.” For unknown reasons, the guerrillas slipped away.

SOF MAKES IMPACT IN EL SALVADOR

From 1982 on, SOF had teams down in El Salvador nearly year round. For instance, on one of our early trips, SOF provided several thousand dollars of parachute-related supplies, equipment and spare parts, which allowed John Early, a Special Forces Nam vet and Captain in the Rhodesian Airborne, to square away the Airborne riggers’ loft. He provided training for riggers and taught a bloc instruction on rigging equipment for dropping by air. By the time of our departure, 480 complete parachute rigs were ready to go.

Jack Thompson, a husky, 6’2” former Marine Vietnam vet with thinning blonde hair and blue eyes, was one of the world’s most competent small arms/sniper instructors, with kills on several continents. He had also been a Selous Scout Sergeant Major in Rhodesia. He conducted a series of three-day classes for FAS door-gunners. He taught basic sniper techniques for the FAS Airbase Defense Battalion and advanced sniper training for the Atlacatl Battlion. The door-gunner training resulted in significant improvement in engaging targets. His previous sniper class had killed 17 guerrillas between April and August.

Weapons guru Peter Kokalis, known as “Mr. Machine Gun,” who was down there 30 times, completely overhauled the weapons inventory of the Atlacatl Battalion. He and Early conducted a three-day ambush and counter-ambush training program for selected junior officers and NCOs of the unit.

Gonzalez and Padgett, our medics who saved the lives of the two troopers at Gotera, conducted Medcaps that treated several hundred civilians, and held classes on field-health and sanitation for Salvadoran troops and civilians. They also trained FAS helicopter door-gunners in basic life-saving procedures and held classes for enlisted medics of the Atlacatl Battalion and the FAS.

At the time Congress, worried about another Vietnam, had authorized only 55 advisors at one time in El Salvador. As one SOFer, straight shooting, no bullshit Harry Claflin, who I sent down in 1984 and who stayed in El Salvador for most of the duration of the decade-long war, said during the thick of the chaos: “There was nothing the paltry group of 55 U.S. military trainers in El Salvador could do about it but bitch and get on with the task despite the frustrations of having their hands tied by political considerations. Making waves might swamp the leaky boat in which the soldiers float through their assignment in Central America.” When Harry and SOF parted ways, he worked for the El Salvador government until the war was over and “it wasn’t fun anymore.”

The bottom line was that with the 55 advisor limit that the U.S. had imposed, boots-on-the-ground training and maintenance were sadly neglected, and that’s where the private sector (us) provided back-up.

SOF MAKES A SPLASH WITH THE GOE TEAMS

I first met Harry at an SOF convention in Las Vegas in 1984. I asked him, “Harry, you game to go to El Salvador to fight the commies?”

“I would like nothing more than to finish the job that never got done in Vietnam,” he responded bitterly, remembering how we were sold out in Nam by the limp dicks in Washington.

Harry was a Marine Recon vet. He was tall, lean, scraggy, and just plain mean. He served two tours in Vietnam as a member of the 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. After leaving the Marines, he worked overseas as a private contractor for four years as a weapons consultant for the Agency for International Development (AID). He then hired on with the U.S. State Department as a security consultant, providing security protection for government VIPs traveling abroad. At that time, Harry owned and operated Starlight Training Center in Liberal, Missouri, which offered courses in outdoor survival, ranger-type operations and parachute ops. His expertise was a perfect match with El Salvador’s ill-equipped Air Force and Army who needed all the help they could get.

“The paratroopers were El Salvador’s primary special operations, quick reaction force, and a natural attraction for SOF trainers, most of whom have similar military backgrounds,” Harry discovered.

Harry was in El Salvador for two weeks the first time and stayed for a few months the second time when, in November and December, he returned to Ilopango air base as an SOF-sponsored advisor. After he got back the second time, I called him.

“You want to go back? How long can you stay?” No sense being subtle.

“How much?” Harry asked, just as delicately.

“$1,000 a month” I told him.

“Hell,” Harry recalled. “It didn’t take much to live in El Salvador and I decided to give it a try. I had been all over the world, in Vietnam, in India and other parts of Asia, in Europe, and it was time to try something new.”

El Salvador might consider using civilians with extensive military backgrounds to work as advisors without political restrictions, I decided, disgusted with Congress’ spineless restrictions on sending U.S. trainers to fight the communist insurgency in our backyard. SOF volunteer training teams had already completed several missions to help El Salvador’s Army and Air Force, from 1982 to 1984. That training included marksmanship, sniping, patrolling, small unit tactics, ambushes, demolitions, booby-traps, long-range land navigation, communications, insertion and extraction techniques and a host of other skills necessary for combat operations in the mountainous, volcanic countryside.

I heard through the old boy’s network that the 4th Brigade Commander, Col. Sigifredo Ochoa, would like to have some assistance from SOF to organize and train a small, elite special operations unit. Harry was assigned as the 4th Brigade’s Spec Ops advisor in 1984, and was hired by El Salvador’s military a couple years later.

“Everything was in a shambles when I got down there,” Harry said. “I had to help them with the military’s defunct communication equipment, then get their shabby uniforms cleaned up. From the time I went back, that’s what I did: commo, clean uniforms, then equipment then jumping once a week.”

LITTLE PARADISE, A LATIN DIEN BIEN PHU

“It was now 1985 and I was sent up to El Parisio [the Paradise]. Believe me it was anything but paradise, it was a little Latin Dien Bien Phu. It had been overrun three weeks before I got up there,” Harry said.

“A young SF captain, Ed Phillips, who had no idea why we were there, was in charge. I was with Rene Cardenas, who was a retired SF medic living in El Salvador. SOF paid Cardenas to be a translator. We went up and told Phillips what we were doing. He said we would have to get permission; he didn’t want to have anything to do with this.

“Col. Ochoa was commander of the 4th Brigade. Phillips called him and I laid down the plan—we were to train a unit as a direct action team, which means you train them to go out and find guerrillas and shoot them. He then calls Col. Steele, commander of the MilGroup who said ‘Yes, Claflin has the blessing of MilGroup, and give him all assistance.’ I was good to go, and that started my relationship with the OPACs.”

“My first assignment after I got back to El Salvador for the second time in 1984 started out real promising. Col. Ochoa, a seasoned officer, had studied with Israeli advisers in El Salvador, and later gone to Israel for training in the mid-1970s and later studied for over a year in the United States. He asked me to train teams of Special Forces for each brigade,” Harry recalled.

“I ran into Israelis all the time, who were still involved in training Mossad-type operatives, but they were limited in their numbers. The paltry group of 55 U.S. Special Forces military trainers could not accompany the El Salvador Army on combat ops. A lot of them were a hell of a lot more skilled than I was, but they were not allowed to do what I was doing. Even so, the Special Forces team was busy nation-building. They had to build an army down there. They did a wonderful job. Without these 55 advisers it wouldn’t have happened. They were responsible for changing the war and bringing it to the end. They couldn’t train much below the brigade level, so the platoon and squad levels did not have trainers at that time.”

“Col. Steele, the MilGoup commander, made it clear that the group was to give me all assistance. The CIA furnished money and equipment for our training. The CIA and MilGoup were butting heads most of the time, staking out their own claims and homesteading. But the Agency helped. I was going to teach the Salvos how to be inserted behind enemy lines, set up a base of operations, and go about hunting the guerrillas down, and capture or kill them. We organized to hit high-value targets such as guerrilla hideouts,” Harry said.

This was the beginning of the Goupos de Operationes Especiales (GOE) program in El Salvador.

“GOE teams were trained to operate clandestinely for extended periods deep in contested areas. A commander could employ the smaller GOE team without the necessity of committing larger units with their accompanying logistical requirements. A GOE team would be composed of 28 men organized into five groups—one command group and four action teams. The command group would consist of one lieutenant, one sergeant, one radio operator and one medic. Each of the four action teams would consist of a team leader, assistant team leader, a radio operator, a machine gunner, a grenadier and a sniper.”

I asked Harry whether he had trained all of the GOE units.

“I trained four units and I went back to retrain them from time-to-time. In combat, you have attrition, new people come in, people get set in their ways, and you need to recall them back to go over the training to see what they are doing wrong, what they are doing right. Most of it was just hard work. I would go out with them on the first couple operations, then turn them loose. I was in the command and control, picked units and supplied equipment. I didn’t do a lot of shooting. I couldn’t have done it without the U.S. Army Special Forces advisers, the MilGroup, and the Brigade Operational Planning and Assistance Training Team (OPATT). Col. Rankin, the top U.S. Air Force advisor and Salvo Air Force liaison, was concerned that there were no forward air controllers in the Airborne battalion that had the capability of calling in air strikes. I worked out of his office. The MilGroup was overwhelmed, involved in getting brigades organized and operating,” he responded. U.S. helicopter pilots were using helos, smoke grenades, and Zuni rockets to teach them how to call air strikes. The AC-47 gunships came down in 1985.

THE DAY HARRY BECAME FAMOUS, OR INFAMOUS

“After my picture, which was taken by RKB at the Contra base camp where an SOF team was training the Contras, came out on the cover of Newsweek in November 1986, I became a real Pariah,” Harry said.

“I was there a couple weeks in El Salvador, after the earthquake and I go back to Santa Ana to start the next training cycle. I packed my gear up and went back to San Salvador for the weekend after a training session and checked into the Sheraton Hotel. One of the MilGroup said, ‘Hey, Harry, have you seen Newsweek magazine? You’re famous’! I said ‘yea, right,’ and he showed me Newsweek. The Operational Planning and Assistance Training Team (OPATT) guys thought this was too neat. The Ambassador and the MilGroup commander did not think this was neat at all.

“Stan Pickering had replaced Ambassador White. Col. Rankin, the ranking U.S. Air force with the MilGroup, informed me that Southern Air Transport, a CIA proprietary, had a seat for me on a C-130 flying back to McGill Air Force Base. I saw the article Sunday or Monday, and I was back on my way back to the States . They decided that I needed to take a vacation, as the top brass feared that some journalist would recognize me and the next cover of Newsweek would have the heading of American Mercenaries fighting in El Salvador.’ That would compromise the MilGroup since I was involved in the thick of their training. I had to go, at least for a while till things cooled down. I was the only one on the plane other than the crew,” Harry said. Our most important contact in El Salvador was banished.

SALVADORAN TET

It was 1989, and Harry was back and working directly for the Salvadorans. No one seemed to notice that the guerrillas were amassing huge stocks of weaponry, preparing for a final roll of the dice, refusing to give up on overthrowing the ARENA (National Republican Alliance) government that had been elected in an atmosphere of violence the previous March. I asked Harry whether the Salvadorian military had any indication as to how the guerrillas were able to move all the arms positioned in the city before the offensive?

“The guerrillas positioned the arms a little at a time. They had 24 months to bring this stuff in from Nicaragua,” Harry replied. “Most of it came in through the remote areas on the Salvadoran-Honduran border. There was a large cache by the time it was all smuggled in.”

On 11 November 1989, the FMLN launched a surprise offensive against military and civilian targets across the nation, especially in San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana. This was almost a re-make of the famous “Tet” offensive, undertaken by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam, in 1968. The main similarities were the surprise factor and the real shock this large-scale attack caused. The ACIG described the offensive:

“. . . The Ilopango AB was almost overrun during the initial onslaught, the rebels threatening to destroy up to 80 percent of FAS assets. In bitter fighting, the military incurred extensive losses, but the FMLN not only failed to gain its objective, it also sustained a bitter blow from which it would never recover, including 1,773 dead and 1,717 wounded. The FAS suffered one of its most unusual losses during this period of time, when on 18 November an A-37B was hit by a Dragunov rifle round in the cockpit area: the co-pilot was killed, while the pilot ejected safely.”

Harry said, “The rebels remained active through the rest of 1989 and 1990, inflicting over 2,000 casualties on the Salvadoran armed forces and police per annum. Forty helicopters were shot down between 1988 and 1992.”

The country was exhausted after a decade of civil war in which 70,000 had died. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights focused on the brutality of the final surge in a vicious, bloody war.

“FMLN members used civilians as shields and obliged them to form corridors; on other occasions FMLN members obstructed the free movement of civilians and even obliged them to set up barricades. The Government reported that members of the FMLN took control of the Hospital Santa Teresa in the city of Zacatecoluca, using explosive to destroy one of the floors of the building and killing a sick soldier,” Harry said.

THE BAD GUYS HAVE MISSILES

Harry was back in El Salvador when the missile crisis hit.

“One of the officers said, ‘We need to go back to the base.’ We flew with Gen. Bustillo, Capt. Castro and the Air Force XO. Bustillo was flaming hot; they had been waiting for us since midnight. They had found a 122mm Katusha rocket they thought was some kind of surface-to-air missile. The Salvadoran military breathed a sigh of relief. The FMLN did not have missiles that could take down the FAS planes. Until a couple weeks later, that is. The war was still hot, we were whipped, we went back, got some sleep until sunup, and went back out with the Airborne troops again,” Harry continued.

“We had been at the base about two weeks when the Sandinistas tried to fly in a plane load of SA-7s from Nicaragua. They had hit a head wind and ran out of gas coming into El Salvador and crashed. The plane was overloaded with SA-7 missiles and four men. It just fell out of the sky. We got there just after it crashed. The bodies were still in the plane. One had lived but he ate his gun. He was busted up pretty good from the crash,” Harry said.

“They had their flight plans from Managua to El Salvador in the plane. Before that, the FAS assets, other than helicopters, were safe from ground fire. But now the situation changed as the rebels obtained a weapon that could knock down even the AC-47s. After the plane crashed, everything was set in motion. The guerrillas had surface-to-air missiles! This was serious stuff. The Salvadoran government grounded all aircraft until we could figure out what was going on. I had some knowledge of this missile, but I needed training manuals to brief the pilots on how to evade it. It had been so long since I had done any work with the SA-7 and I had forgotten a lot. The MilGroup didn’t have a copy of the manual,” Harry said.

Harry called the SOF office on Captain Castro’s phone to see if we could provide the manual. SOF shifted into quick action, rounded up a copy of the manual and faxed it to Captain Castro. (Nobody still with SOF recollects how we got a copy of this manual.) This caused some ruffled feathers with the American MilGroup because SOF was able to get a copy before they could get a copy through official channels. Without SOF, Harry and the others could not have obtained the tech manual for the Russian SA-7 surface-to-air missile.

“I’m the one that caught the heat on it. I didn’t tell them where I had gotten it. They were just furious that I had. I still never got a real answer from the Air Force Liaison Officer as to why the Air Force dragged their feet,” Harry said.

“It took SOF two hours to fax the manual. Once we got it, I wrote instructions on the SA-7 missile. Capt. Castro, the Air force Intelligence Officer and a 1977 U.S. Air Force Academy Graduate, watched as I wrote for four hours. Gen. Bustillo and every single pilot on that base went through that course, and when they came out of the class, they thoroughly understood the SA-7 missile, how it worked and how you could avoid it. After we briefed them, they started using their aircraft again. No aircraft was lost to an SA-7 until the next year.”

So the Salvadorans would have been grounded for the next three weeks had they had to rely on the bureaucrats of the U.S. military. The Salvadorans developed a “U”-shaped piece of pipe that diverted the exhaust gases into the chopper’s rotor blades to disperse the heat. Since the SA-7 was a heat-seeking missile, dispersing the heat meant that it could not lock onto the chopper. This missile system took four to six seconds for its heat-seeking mechanism to lock on, so you had to fly at ground level. That way the guy with the missile did not have time to lock on. If the chopper was at a higher altitude that gave him time to lock on and you were screwed.

The missiles didn’t come in until the first phase of the offensive was over. Even once the offensive was over, the guerrillas still had SA-7s and in 1990 they knocked down an AC-47. A Hughes 500E was shot down on 2 February 1990, followed by Hughes 500D “35” on 18 May 1990 and an O-2A on 26 September. The FAS had an especially problematic November 1990, when the FMLN—despite ongoing negotiations with the government—launched another series of attacks against targets throughout El Salvador, reported ACIG.

On 2 January 1991, the FMLN shot down a UH-iH carrying three Americans en route from Honduras to provide intel to U.S. advisors in El Salvador. CWO Daniel Scott died in the crash. Lieutenant Colonel David Pickett and Private Ernest Dawson survived, but were brutally executed.

“Two or three of the planes were shot down with surface-to-air missiles that were more sophisticated than a SA-7,” Harry said.

“The military was able to employ air assets all over the country. If SOF and RKB had not provided the SA-7 manual when they did, it would have given the guerrillas another three weeks without aircraft attacking them,” Harry said.

In March 1989, Christiani was elected president of El Salvador and with the elections SOF’s involvement in that country was terminated, with the exception of several trips that “Machine Gun” Peter Kokalis made to train the Salvadoran police.