11
With the Contras
1983–1984
The beginning of 1983 found me in the jungle with my beloved Contras, working hard to develop them into an offensive fighting force. Thanks to additional money and the full support of the Agency from Bill Casey through Dewey Clarridge on down to Ray, the Contras became one of the focal points of our renewed aggressive stance against the spread of Soviet-sponsored communism. From the failures of the 1970s Détente era, which only served to encourage Soviet adventurism without an American check, the Reagan administration ushered in a new era that reinvigorated our overall anti-Soviet efforts.
At the dawn of the 1980s, the Soviets seemed ascendant. They were making gains in Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America. To us in the West, it felt like a flood tide, rising to drown our allies and our interests in crucial corners of the world.
Simultaneously, the pro-Soviet movements in Western Europe and the United States continued to grow in strength, abetted by some in academia. To Cold Warriors, it felt like we were under siege from within and without simultaneously.
Supporting the Contras was my little piece of this strategic pie. Being away from the United States limited my worldview at the time, but I knew the campaign against the Sandinista regime was only one of many efforts to stop the Soviets. Years later, I learned the Cold War nearly boiled over in 1983, and the world moved closer to nuclear annihilation than at any other time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
We struck back against the Soviets not just with our clandestine wars in Central America, Angola, and Afghanistan but with the conventional military in ways that revealed major gaps in the Soviet defense network. In the late summer of 1981, for instance, the NATO navies collaborated on a massive exercise in the North Atlantic involving eighty-three ships. The armada successfully dodged Soviet detection efforts, even avoiding a spy satellite specifically launched to locate the fleet. At the same time, U.S. warplanes surprised and launched simulated attacks on Russian long-range patrol planes. The fake attack proved a total surprise and caught the Russian planes while they refueled in midair during their searches for the NATO warships. It was a huge embarrassment for the Soviet military and contributed to a feeling of growing unease in Moscow that the resurgent American military power, defense spending, and new technology were fast eclipsing Soviet superiority.
The Soviet leadership had lived through the shock and surprise of the 1941 German invasion. All of them were obsessed with never allowing such a devastating blow to happen again. Under the Kremlin’s direction, the KGB launched Operation RYAN, a full-court press to recruit assets and develop networks that could keep the pulse of the United States military and warn Moscow of any impending attack. Should news arrive that such a strike was coming, the Soviets planned to hit first.
The events of 1983 magnified Soviet unease into something bordering paranoia. In the spring, the U.S. Pacific Fleet held one of its largest exercises of the postwar years.
Three carrier battle groups surged into the Northwest Pacific and took station less than 450 miles away from the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula. While USN attack submarines surprised and chased Soviet nuclear ballistic subs under the Arctic Circle, the American carrier wings actually launched a simulated bombing raid against a remote Soviet outpost on Zelyony Island in the contested Kuril Islands.
In Europe, NATO aircraft consistently tested Soviet air defense, keeping the Warsaw Pact off balance with sudden squadron-level rushes toward their airspace. The aggressiveness netted a wealth of information on Soviet air defense systems, which we exploited. At the same time, such moves fueled the paranoia that Reagan was crazy enough to launch a nuclear first strike against them. Such fears seemed legitimate when the U.S. prepared to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Germany—weapons that could reach Moscow in minutes.
On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed Star Wars. The plan called for developing a space-based missile defense shield using laser technology the Soviets were probably decades away from developing on their own. With nukes in Western Europe that could hit the Kremlin in minutes, plus an antimissile system that could neutralize any Soviet response, the Kremlin’s leaders feared a 1941-esque surprise attack more than any other time in the Cold War.
On September 1, 1983, Soviet air defenses detected a single aircraft incursion into its airspace in the North Pacific. It turned out to be Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a civilian 747. The Soviets scrambled interceptors and shot the aircraft down, killing hundreds of innocents.
Tensions over the incident grew to a fever pitch. Recriminations echoed around the globe as Reagan called for boycotts of Soviet goods and Russian leader Yuri Andropov blamed the deaths of the 269 people aboard 007 on the United States military.
Two things happened in the weeks after that brought the world closer to nuclear war than any other time since 1962. On September 26, 1983, a new Soviet satellite-based nuclear missile warning system detected five missile launches from the United States. A Soviet Air Defence Forces lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the command center outside of Moscow when the launches were detected.
He had only minutes to decide what to do. Fortunately, he concluded this could not be an American first strike but the new system acting up. He disobeyed standing orders and procedures and did not sound the alarm. It turned out he was right; the satellites were fooled into thinking sunlight reflecting off clouds were Minuteman III launches, but that the fate of the world nearly came down to a lieutenant colonel’s judgment demonstrated how humanity lived on a knife’s edge into the twilight flare-up of the Cold War.
Two months later, a NATO exercise called Able Baker 83 set the Russians off again. This was an annual drill, but there were new features wrapped into it that caused the Soviets to fear it was a ruse masking an actual coming attack. Nuclear-armed aircraft in Eastern Europe were put on alert, and the world came within a hairbreadth of war as the Kremlin debated whether or not to strike first. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
Of course, all this was above my pay grade at the time. From my foxhole view in Honduras, I only saw the upsurge in U.S. support for the Contras and our increasingly aggressive plans to help them reclaim their country from the Marxists who took it over. That surge included more supplies, specialized weaponry, and air support that we sorely needed for offensive operations.
We also needed more personnel, which we received that year. Our effort in Honduras was soon plussed up with staff for Ray, including Big Bill C, and program staff at base that included three women—Keggy, Nancy, and Brenda. For the field, we received trainers like former SEAL Big Hal, who focused on select FDN teams to build out the Contra’s covert and commando skills. The reinforcements were most welcome and a great sign for us, the Nicas, and our loyal allies the Hondos, since it meant our campaign was being given a higher priority in Washington.
At the same time, the Sandinistas were getting equally aggressive in their efforts to counter the growing Contra threat to their regime. Soviet and Cuban arms shipments flowed in every week through Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua’s primary port in the Caribbean. Those weapons eventually included jet fighter-bombers and Mi-24 Hind D attack helicopter gunships, the same type that rained terror and death onto the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
The Sandinistas were also developing capabilities in Honduras. They trained about a hundred Honduran Marxists in Nicaragua to be the cadre of a series of pro-Sandinista communist cells. Fortunately, we got wind of this and tipped the Honduran army off as to when they were going to infiltrate across the border. The Hondurans wiped them out in an ambush.
Sandinista hit squads also operated throughout Honduras. In previous operations, they’d successfully kidnapped or killed Contra sub commanders, Honduran army officers, and even one of the Argentinians. It was one such hit squad that assassinated Somoza while he was in exile.
As the war escalated in Central America, I received word that the Sandinistas were on to me. One day back at base, Ray showed me some radio intercepts in which the Sandinistas described me quite accurately, though they thought I was a Puerto Rican because of my Caribbean accent. They even knew I had the number seventeen tattooed on my right arm. The number seventeen had long been my lucky number and was a reference to Saint Lazarus, my patron saint.
That the Sandinistas were on to my presence and role in the camps was not surprising. We knew they had agents who penetrated the camps. They also had operatives working in the shadows of Tegucigalpa and other Honduran towns. But the messages signaled a new reality for me: our enemy knew who I was and was trying to target me.
I tried to be an elusive target. I moved around, did not keep a fixed routine, and kept my head on a swivel. Even so, there are countless little choke points in life that determined assassins can detect and exploit.
For me, Puerto Lempira was one of those choke points. While visiting Stedman Fagoth, the head of the Miskito Indian Contra component—called the MISURA—we would stay in Puerto Lempira for a few days at a time. There were only a few hostels in town—best described as Motel 0s—and a couple of “restaurants,” one of which was on a barge in the harbor. During one meeting, Captain L., Stedman, a Miskito pastor, and an interpreter named Omar ate at the same restaurant three days in a row. Somebody in town was watching us and detected that pattern.
On day four, I finished up with our business and, with Captain L., flew out of town in the Huey. But that night, Stedman, the pastor, and the interpreter all returned to the same eatery. They were walking out of the restaurant when a Sandinista operative chucked a grenade in their path and opened fire. The blast slightly wounded Stedman. In the chaos after the explosion, several armed agents opened fire with handguns. Omar took a grazing wound to the neck, and the pastor was killed on the spot.
The hit team escaped unharmed.
Whether they were after me specifically, I don’t know. It may have been an attempt to assassinate Stedman Fagoth, whose aggressive leadership plus our supplies had turned the MISURA into a major threat to the Sandinistas. Either way, the attack reminded us all of the Sandinista reach inside Honduras and underscored the fact they were stalking us.
We redoubled our precautions and took great care to minimize those choke points they could exploit. In the meantime, Ray and Dewey were cooking up ways to really hit the Sandinistas hard. The hit-and-run raids continued, and some of them were growing in size. The Contras were gaining capability, but the strategic equation remained tilted far in the Sandinistas’ favor.
Ray was a product of the Second World War. So was Bill Casey. They saw the big picture, where I saw the fight in the jungle and grit of the day-to-day in the camps. It was a perfect marriage between vision and action. That year, Ray and Dewey crafted a plan to start attacking major targets that had either strategic or symbolic importance. They selected one for me that had both: the Puerto Cabezas pier.
Puerto Cabezas is the largest and most important port on the Caribbean side of Nicaragua. The docks there served as the primary means the Cubans and Soviets had to resupply the Sandinistas with weapons, ammunition, and fuel. The dock included an integrated fuel pipeline that allowed for faster transfer of oil from arriving tankers. If we could destroy this, we’d not only slow the resupply to the Sandinista forces, we’d make a big statement by blowing up the key link between the Sandinistas and their communist allies.
This would be a tricky operation, but Ray asked if it could be done. It could, with the right team. He gave me the green light, and off I went to recruit from within the Miskito ranks. I had just the guys in mind, too.
When I first started visiting Stedman Fagoth and the MISURA, one of the Miskito fighters I met noticed the SCUBA badge on my hat. He mentioned that some of the men were lobster divers. I took a great interest in this and went out of my way to meet them. They knew how to free dive without any gear and could stay underwater a hell of a lot longer than I could, but they also owned SCUBA gear and were quite good with it.
I assembled a small team from these expert divers. They were willing, eager, and very capable young men who, along with the other Miskito Contras, only wanted to see their homeland freed from the depredations of the Sandinista army. Contrary to much of the press coverage of the war back in the States, those depravations were real. The Miskito were often characterized as “right-wing rebels” by the U.S. media. In reality, they were just as anti-Somoza as the Sandinistas were. But after the 1979 revolution, the Sandinistas tried to suppress the Miskito movement for autonomy. Each wave of repression swelled the MISURA ranks in Honduras, and the Sandinistas quickly alienated the entire region with their brutal tactics.
The men I chose were the most ideologically committed to gaining independence from the Sandinistas. They were not mercenaries. They weren’t paid assassins. They were men fighting to liberate their villages and reclaim their families.
Once I selected the men, we went to work training for our operation in an abandoned shrimp factory about seventy miles northeast of Puerto Lempira. A hurricane had destroyed part of the building and ripped the roof off, but the first and second floors were largely intact, so we set up camp there. We did PT every day, and while they were already in good shape, they developed into physical specimens. After PT, we worked on compass swims using attack boards (a simple device with two handles that had a compass, depth gauge, and clock) and tactics. I taught them underwater ops like screwing together metal pipes and other underwater mental challenges. We worked through every problem we could envision and came up with contingencies. In the late afternoon, we hit the surf and went spear fishing to supplement protein for our dinner.
While we trained, one key issue remained. The MISURA lacked the type of explosives we would need to blow up the pier. Fortunately, we received exactly what we needed: a specialized underwater demolition charge that combined compactness with tremendous blast power.
Later, we trained in another location near a Honduran pier of similar design. There, we practiced moving the explosive charge through the water and emplacing it against the pier below the surface without using any lights. During one of those night rehearsals, I swam right into a Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish and got stung on the face. Let me tell you, that is not something I ever want to go through again!
To help foster a sense of esprit de corps within our new team, we called ourselves the Barracudas. And one night in late 1983, as the world moved to the brink of nuclear war, we set out to prove that a half dozen committed men could strike a blow at the heart of the communist effort against their families.
We used a hundred-foot boat to get us south along the coast in what became a hellish twelve-hour stealth voyage in seas so heavy even the boat’s crew got seasick. We pushed on despite the conditions until, finally, we navigated to a point a few miles from the target area.
I got into the water as the crew lowered a panga—a motorized Miskito canoe alongside our mother boat. The Barracudas carefully climbed aboard, then wrestled the explosive device into the panga with them.
I greatly regretted not being able to go with them. After training them for so long, this was the moment where we had to part ways. I stayed with the boat and watched through an infrared scope as the panga headed for the coast. I had outfitted my Barracudas with IR light/strobes so we could always find them if they got lost.
The wait for their return seemed to last for hours. Later, I found out they had armed the device and set the timer in the panga just before they entered the water. Their captain was another bigger-than-life character named Sam Ignacio, who stayed in the panga with his binoculars to follow the men’s flashing infrared lights. The rest of the team submerged in their SCUBA gear and swam through the underwater darkness to the pier. Sadly, a few months after this mission, Sam Ignacio drowned while on a maritime resupply mission. He was a dear friend, and I could not tolerate the sight of his bloated body recovered after some time in the sea.
We elected to make the attack at night to avoid civilian casualties, but that meant a lot of additional complications for the Barracudas. They needed to navigate underwater in near total darkness, then set the charge without using any sort of illumination. Fortunately, there were a few lights around the pier glowing above them as they made their way to the pilings and placed the explosive device. Nearby, a few guards patrolled but saw nothing.
The team escaped undetected and returned to the panga. Everyone climbed safely aboard, then headed for the rendezvous with the mother boat, which was just out of sight. We got them aboard, then turned north for Honduran waters, hoping to be clear of Nicaragua before dawn.
Two hours later, the charge exploded. The blast was so large it destroyed the fuel pipeline, splintered the pilings, and blew all the planks off the top of the pier. Later reports confirmed it was almost a total loss.
Six men had denied the Sandinistas several weeks’ worth of weaponry and ammunition aboard Eastern Bloc ships steaming across the Caribbean to Puerto Cabezas. The Sandinistas shut down all reporting on the incident, an unusual thing since usually they howled to the world in protest after every Contra attack, accusing the freedom fighters of the savagest crimes against the population. It was pure propaganda, but the Sandinistas were adept at it. This time, the blow hurt, and the strategic implications were such that they stayed quiet.
The pier remained out of service for weeks. Meanwhile, the other two large Nicaraguan ports took up the slack. The other one on the Caribbean side, Bluefields, had a huge harbor area accessed only by a river. We decided to try to sink a vessel in the river channel with a rocket-propelled grenade ambush. There was one choke point that would have been perfect. The Barracudas tried to lay an ambush from both sides of the river but could never get a decent shot on the targeted vessel due to all the Sandinista patrols. Frustrated, we had to abandon that attack.
As the Barracudas operated on the east coast, other special Contra teams carried out other attacks on strategic infrastructure targets as well. The attacks left the Sandinistas reeling. Ray and the FDN kept them off balance with swift strikes from the sea and jungle. Our team of lobster divers turned saboteurs were just one puzzle piece in that overall plan, but some at HQS felt like we could make an impact on the war effort with the right target again.
Corinto, Nicaragua’s third major port, opens on the Pacific Ocean on the country’s west coast and played host to many Eastern Bloc ships, including North Korean cargo vessels bringing in more weapons and ammunition. Unbeknownst to me, in October 1983, the Contras launched a seaborne raid against the port using speedboats armed with light cannon and .50-caliber machine guns. The lightning-quick attack focused on the fuel storage tanks. The boats raked the target area, setting fires that ultimately—according to Sandinista sources—destroyed 1 percent of the country’s yearly oil consumption. The fires spread to the port facilities and caused extensive damage, forcing the evacuation of part of the town. For good measure, the team strafed a North Korean freighter.
The port was a critical resupply point for the Sandinista military effort, and the FDN wanted to shut it down for months, if not permanently. In studying the target area, they detected a key choke point that could be exploited. A bridge spanned the harbor entrance that, if blown up, could foul the channel for the foreseeable future. Against my ardent advice—I knew that my Miskito team would not play well with the “Spaniards” on the west coast—my Barracudas received the mission. From the outset, things went very, very wrong.