7

HOW I WAS TO BECOME DEFENSE
MINISTER OF A NEW NATION

While attending Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth during the last three months of 1972 and the first three months of 1973, I became friends with a classmate who was a major in the Cambodian army. With such a contact, I decided after I graduated that it would be an interesting break from the tedium of work at Paladin Press to go to Cambodia as a sniper. I saw an opportunity for a little adventure as well as popping some bad guys. We had a long weekend break over the Easter holidays so I flew down to see my favorite rogue, Mitchell Livingston Werbell, III, who was now a self-styled Lt. General in the Free Afghan Army. How he came by this title I do not know, nor does anyone else. Nor had anyone heard of the Free Afghan Army. However, wearing the appropriate rank, it gave him another badge of importance, at least to those who didn’t know him.

You’ll recall that I first bumped into Werbell when he was mucking about during the abortive attempt to invade Haiti in 1966, and then ran into him before and during my trip to Nam. He was hanging around the army’s Advanced Marksmanship Unit promoting various weapons systems, and since I was the OIC of the XVIII Airborne Corp AMU, we crossed paths many times. Supposedly the purpose of my visit was to get the latest scoop on what would be the most appropriate sniper system to take with me. In fact, I just wanted to get the hell out of the boring environs of central Kansas.

I arrived at the “Farm,” a small mansion on 40 acres of Georgia pine, where Werbell conducted outrageously expensive personal security courses, marketed his Ingraham submachine guns and Sionics suppressors, and hosting an eclectic group of ever-changing arms dealers, rogues, veterans of various wars, law enforcement personnel, etc, etc. The usual aura of “excitement” was unusually high this time.

As the weekend wore on, I knew that some nefarious scheme was afoot. The “Farm” reeked of intrigue, guarded glances, whispered exchanges. Though I was never told what the plot was, simply by looking at numerous newspaper clippings scattered about and overhearing fragments of guarded conversations, I deduced that Werbell was heading up some cockamamie scheme to prevent the island of Abaco from becoming part of the Bahamas, which was scheduled to receive independence from Great Britain in the summer of ‘73. The majority of the inhabitants wanted to remain under the British Crown as the new black administration, led by Prime Minister Pindling, was corrupt, and the Nassau government already had a reputation for sucking out taxes from the outlying islands and giving next to nothing back. The racial mix of Abaco differed from the rest of the Bahamas, which was 90% black and 10% white. With a 55% black, 45% white racial mix and boasting the second largest land area in the Bahamas, Abaco had enormous potential for tourist development with its plentiful supplies of fresh water, sand, sea and sun. During this time period, there was a significant amount of racial unrest in the Caribbean and investors were looking for “secure” areas to develop to take advantage of growing tourism. Abaco could be the island that provided that security.

I decided it would be a worthy goal to cut Werbell out of the project, as I was convinced, for all his bluster, that he would never take any action to achieve independence for Abaco. He had huffed and puffed about bringing veterans of the United Kingdom’s “Highlanders” to fill out the ranks of the would-be independence advocates. Concurrently, the House of Lords was trying to preclude Abaco from being separated from the British Crown.

How to do this? Well, first I had to establish contact with the Abaco resistance. I decided on the perhaps foolhardy but most direct way to make contact. I flew to Miami and caught a white-knuckle flight to a dirt strip that proclaimed itself “Abaco International Airport,” which had flights to and from Miami. I guess that justified it tagging itself as “International.” I checked into a local hotel, grabbed a shower and beer, and toured the capital of Abaco, Marsh Harbor. It didn’t take much “touring” as there were only about 1,000 inhabitants.

Following the direct approach method of revolution, I simply walked into the local dispensary and asked the first nurse I saw, “Can you put me in touch with the resistance?” A cute little thing, without makeup and curly brown hair, she smiled, “Why that’s easy. The leader is my husband, Harley.” And so it started.

After being introduced to Harley I said, “I am planning to conduct a short and promising area assessment and see what can be done—if anything. The islanders have only a few sporting weapons but on the other hand, there were only three Bahamian police on the whole island, armed with obsolescent .303 bolt-action Enfield rifles. No problem there. I think the project is worth further research.”

I flew to Nassau to meet the mouthpiece for the Abaco Independence Movement (AIM) Chuck Hall, a chunky, blue-eyed, dark-haired businessman.

“I am planning to recruit a small number of Special Forces Vietnam veterans to help seize the island, repel any foray of Bahamian cops from Nassau, and train a multi-racial militia. If the Bahamian cops struggle ashore, they would be easy pickings for our snipers since they are city cops, not infantrymen. We could pick them off at long range without the survivors being aware that we’re involved. The American operators, in the best of SF tradition, would remain unseen in the background but would provide guidance, training and advice to the new provisional government and militia,” I told him.

I recruited an old friend, a former Time journalist, Jay Mallin, who had made his bones in the Cuban Sierra Maestra by following Castro’s march to victory. Mallin was going to be the PR spokesman, would control all contact with the media, and shield my team’s involvement.

But I was broke. In order to get funds to implement our coup, I first contacted an old acquaintance from my Cuba days, a Chicago attorney by the name of Constantine Kangles, who was well connected. By this, I mean I had seen him walk into Mayor Daley’s office right past the receptionist without any introduction. He was the one who was Castro’s legal counsel prior to the success of the revolution and had given me a letter of introduction to the Castro supporters in Cuba.

I was politely trying to hit Kangles up for money for my brilliant plot. He arranged a meeting with a former Illinois state insurance commissioner who had been kicked out of office for some kind of skullduggery. We were to meet for lunch in the main restaurant of the prestigious Blackstone hotel. I showed up at the appointed time in my normal cowboy boots, levis, sheepskin jacket and cowboy hat. The maitre’d in black tuxedo looked me over with a haughty demeanor. “You must have a coat and tie.”

I, with an equally affected accent, stuck my nose in the air and said, “How unfortunate. I am here to see Mr. X.”

He paused a moment and muttered in disdain, “Walk this way sir.” There must have been 200 people in coat and tie. He led me to Mr. X. I explained to him what I had in mind and what the potential rewards were as I saw them—in exchange for funding he could have casino rights. He wanted to run the whole deal and control the whole island.

Negotiations ceased and I thanked him for the meal. I went back to Kangles and explained what had happened so he set up another meeting. Keep in mind the time frame—the mafia still played a significant role in running Las Vegas. He set the meeting up with two guys in Caesar’s Palace named, believe it or not, Frankie and Johnnie.

I recruited a man whom I will call a man whose name I would rather forget, not much more than five feet with as big a pair of balls as anyone I have ever known, and who constantly lived life on the edge, to go with me to meet the contacts. We approached the information booth.

“We are here to see Frankie and Johnnie.”

In come two guys with bouffant hairdos and polyester leisure suits with two heavily made up bimbos in mini-skirts. After a brief introduction they took us up to one of the two or three penthouse suites in Caesar’s Palace. In the cheesiest of nouveau riche fashion, the décor was mainly of Italian marble and the bedspreads were mink. There we met some other individuals right out of Cosa Nostra central casting. In the room was a gnomelike accountant with Coca Cola-thick glasses, stooped shoulders and comb-over, and a couple of swarthy, obviously hoodlum types with slicked black hair, pockmarked faces, sunglasses and appropriate bulges under their jackets. Once again we went through our pitch of what it would take to accomplish the operation.

“We are looking for half a mil and your rewards will make the investment worthwhile. You can have all the casino rights in the island.” I gave them an offer they could not resist.

Frankie and Johnnie and the accountant and a couple others exited the room for a private conversation, and after fifteen minutes came back in. The meeting terminated with one of the two guys saying, “If we wanted to take over this island, we could send our own ‘soldiers’ down to do it.”

They were gracious enough to offer to put us up for the evening in Caesar’s Palace but we were not in the mood and took the next flight out.

Later I ran the plan by an old friend of mine, Lee Jurras, who had achieved no small amount of fame in the gun industry in the ‘70s by developing a profitable new brand of high-powered pistol ammunition, which became quite popular. He, with a couple of his friends from Indiana, came up with $50,000. I wasn’t sure we could pull the operation off for that much but it was a start. At the same point in time our main contact in the Bahamas was Chuck Hall.

“I don’t want you to have communication with Warbell,” I told him. “That loudmouth has no intention of going through with his boastful promises. He is doing this just for the publicity and his own ego. I am going to be able to pull this off with a dozen Vietnam Special Forces vets I recruited at summer camp and $50,000.”

Hall went straight to Warbell and told him what we were up to. War-bell promised him half a mil and 450 mercenaries. Prior to this, we had flown in a load of guns in a friend’s two engine Cessna, including a .50-caliber machine gun and a bunch of AR-i 5s. It was a dirt strip on a little island without an overly long runway. We had set up a plan to meet a reception party from the Abaco underground who came to the island with a boat to pick up the guns and transport them and hide them in a cache. We offloaded the guns and turned them over to the Abaco underground. Just about this time the owner of the island tried to get us to stop, yelling at us, “What are you doing here?” as we taxied by him, waving vigorously. We had not followed a flight plan, as our landing strip was so close to Abaco. We barely lifted off as we outran the length of the runway.

Chuck Hall, who really had no knowledge, much less experience, of any type of military operation, let alone Special Forces operations as far as we were concerned, had blown the project. He was bamboozled by War-bell’s BS. To him, 450 mercs and half a million dollars seemed a much more doable project then 12 ex-Special Forces and $50,000. I had taken $10,000 cash on my last trip to Abaco to demonstrate my sincerity. When he wouldn’t buy into my plan, I put the money back into my pocket and flew back to the States and gave the ten grand back to Jurris and his friends.

So ended my dreams of becoming the Defense Minister of Abaco, and with it my aspiration of getting a couple hundred acres of prime beach property to develop as I saw fit.

For all I know the guns are still buried in Abaco.