14
Central America
1986
I arrived at my new station in Central America in the summer of 1986. I was initially disappointed that I would not be going to El Salvador after all; Carmen did not know any better. Soon she realized what a lucky break she’d gotten as far as living conditions. The fight against the FMLN—the Marxist insurgents ravaging the countryside—was one that I saw as a righteous cause. Instead, I was sent to support the southern front opposing the Sandinistas north of the San Juan River, which divides Nicaragua from Costa Rica.
From my years in Honduras, I’d heard a lot of chatter about the southern front. It was not well organized or coordinated, and the Sandinistas had penetrated the different Contra groups to a much greater degree than those on the northern front I knew so well. This would be virgin territory for me, and a supremely difficult assignment.
Joe Fernandez, the Chief of Station, had asked for me by name, which is what diverted me from my original posting in El Salvador. Joe was a legend within the Agency. A tough anticommunist Cold Warrior of red-Spaniard blood and temperament, Joe had been a South Florida police officer before joining the Agency. He was rugged and resourceful, a demanding officer to work for, but was loyal to those under him.
He was also an unconventional thinker. He outworked everyone in the station, and his intensity matched his commitment to the mission. When something difficult needed to be done, he was always the man for the job. Joe was the quintessential CIA man: a shadow warrior with matching rugged good looks, cigarette elegantly poised in his hand, Montblanc pen scribbling on his ever-present yellow legal pad. Killer smile, but then there were the eyes; they were killer also and you knew they could pierce through bullshit like a laser.
The fact that he had asked for me by name was a huge compliment.
When I first sat down with him to get briefed on the situation, Joe was struggling to unite the various commanders running the southern front. He gave me a blunt assessment: Sandinista spies were everywhere inside the rebel movement here. Our host nation was hostile to the Contras and actively trying to ferret them out. This meant we would have to operate clandestinely to avoid getting arrested or worse by the country’s security forces.
This wasn’t like Honduras, where the Contras could rest and reequip, then cross the border to get back into the fight. This southern front was another version of France in 1944. Joe was leading me into La Résistance.
To keep the Contras in the field inside Nicaragua required a logistical tail that didn’t exist here on the southern front. There were no supply bases in the host country, no roads and convoy routes that could be taken. They had to be sustained by airdrops. The problem was that the coordination of flights and ground crews was totally dysfunctional, and the Contras in the field were running out of ammunition and food. Ninety percent of our airdrops RTB (returned to base) with their precious cargo. If we couldn’t execute the aerial resupplies, the southern front would eventually collapse.
Joe always recapped his tutorials, and this was no exception: Fix the f’ing airdrops.
In Honduras, this would have been a moderate challenge. But in a hostile host country like Costa Rica? Totally different ball game. The Sandinista spies would frequently tip the Costa Rican police off to the location of Contra safe houses. The Contras themselves were undisciplined in the urban jungle and devoid of any tradecraft. Raids took place all the time, and many Contra subcommanders and support people were wrapped up, thrown over the border, or temporarily imprisoned. Trying to coordinate airdrops in Nicaragua while our contacts were getting raided and arrested presented an extraordinary challenge, especially since it was absolutely vital that we few gringos did not get wrapped up as collateral damage in any of these Costa Rican raids. Doing so would have created an international incident and damaged relations between the U.S. and Costa Rica.
Here, for the first time, I experienced the real-life importance of tradecraft. To help the Contras, we had to insulate ourselves from their leaks. As their safe houses were being taken down by the Costa Ricans, we had to figure out a way to meet with their support personnel in some other way.
We came up with a rolling office—a van specially equipped for such meetings. We would get word for our Contra contacts to meet us at a certain location. We’d have a car pick them up, run an SDR, then drop them at our van. While the meeting was underway, we’d have a lead car guide us through the city XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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Using these tactics, we successfully insulated ourselves from the leaks and Costa Rican security forces. That allowed us to work through the reasons for the resupply failures. We soon unraveled what was happening. The main problem stemmed from the Contra commanders and their inability to convert a drop location into eight-digit map coordinates.
We instructed the commanders to secure an area of our choosing, based on geographical features they could easily identify and triangulate. Then we provided the pilots with the accurate coordinates and related safety signals for the drops.
With the new tactics and procedures, the next ten drops had nine successful deliveries and one RTB due to inclement weather. Joe was happy—very happy!
Once we improved our security, we began to search for leaks among the Contras. For us to be able to function, we needed to plug those leaks. Here, Carmen stepped up and played a key role for us.
Through all the craziness of the past eight years, the one constant in my life was Carmen. When she signed on to be my life partner, I don’t think either of us had any idea what that journey was going to look like. Young and in love, we went into it with a faith in each other that never wavered. Looking back, that seems amazing to me now.
Before she met me, Carmen lived a sheltered life. Sheltered, but hot-blooded. In the first moments after we met, I glimpsed a sense of adventure that had long gone unfulfilled. Our life in the CIA together unlocked that, and I watched her thrive as my career took us to nearly every continent together.
She used to say that through me, she lived the life she wished she could. This, even though for most of my career I couldn’t tell her much about the things I did.
She didn’t need to live vicariously through anyone; she had plenty of adventures of her own. During my second Contra tour, Carmen worked as an interpreter for one of the Agency’s best polygraphers. “Craig,” was a six-foot-three, former XXXXXXXXXXXXX who had been a state trooper before joining the CIA. He’d been sent down to us to polygraph some of the Contras we were working with in an effort to find some of the Sandinista moles who bedeviled the southern front.
Carmen was assigned to be his interpreter. She’d already gained a clearance and had worked various positions in this current station. However, this translator gig was a little more operational. To carry out these polygraph exams, Craig and Carmen had to move around, using different hotels and a limited number of safe houses. A six-foot-three African American being seen going into hotels with a five-foot-two white woman carrying a suitcase was sure to turn heads. Oh, and did I mention Carmen was pregnant and showing the “bump” with our second child at the time?
To pull this off, I put Carmen in disguise. Hair in a bun with plenty of talcum powder to give it gray tones and make her look older. Glasses. A shapeless coat to hide her baby bump. They still got plenty of looks in hotel lobbies. But they functioned superbly as a team, and Carmen thrived. It fed her own spirit of adventure, gave her a unique purpose, and made her feel like part of our team.
While Carmen worked to discover the leaks, we set up a new series of safe houses along the border with Nicaragua with the help of local ranchers. They were conservative people, devout anticommunists and sympathetic to the Contra cause. Working with them helped get our Contras in and out of Costa Rica without detection. We used this network to provide medical assistance to wounded fighters, as well as to get them out of Costa Rica to train in other locations before returning them to the fight. This pipeline became an important component sustaining the southern front.
One of the key members of our team was another Cuban refugee named Flaco. Flaco and his mother escaped from Castro’s regime about the same time mine did. His father, like his son, was a natural charismatic leader. He originally fought on Castro’s side, but soon became disillusioned with the Marxist direction the revolution took. Castro marginalized him and sent him off to be a military attaché in a low-priority Latin American post. From there, he defected to the U.S. and began working with clandestine forces to conduct reconnaissance and naval raids against Cuba. While on an ill-fated mission, his father was captured and executed, some say in the presence of Fidel himself.
Flaco grew up and became a successful businessman in Florida, but he burned to avenge his father’s murder and the loss of his country. On his own, he sold his business in the early 1980s, traveled to a Contra camp, and joined the fight against the Sandinistas. He was the hardest of hard-core: ideologically committed, unshakable in combat, and willing to trade the good life back home for a muddy, mosquito-swarmed foxhole in a triple-canopy jungle to deal payback to the communists.
That was our kind of man. Before I arrived, he was removed from direct combat to serve as our logistical mastermind. The respect and admiration he had earned in combat made him even more effective in this new role. Plus, Flaco was the kind of businessman who developed contacts everywhere with ease. He became a vital component of the support effort in Costa Rica, thanks to his ability to find anything we needed to sustain our peasant warriors. Need a boat? Flaco would know the right guy to talk to and would know exactly how to talk to him to get what we needed.
Need a plane? Same thing. Go to Flaco. He ended up working a good ten years in support of these and other mutual efforts and developed incredible contracts all over the world. He was the best kind of warrior: loyal, a believer in our mission, and rock-solid in a crisis. If it had been up to him, he would have stayed at the pointy end, but his role became far more important running our mini-Maquis effort in Costa Rica.
As we implemented these changes, our aircraft started hitting the right drop zones. The Sandinistas couldn’t penetrate our new security measures like before, and the Costa Ricans found it much more difficult to detect their presence. The additional medicine, clothes, weapons, and ammunition made a strategic impact on the war. The Sandinistas were now beset by two well-provisioned forces to their north and south. By mid-1986, the population, tired of their depredations and war on religion, turned increasingly against the Sandinistas. The Contras found safe havens and lots of support wherever they went in the countryside. If the war had continued unabated, the Sandys were looking at a total defeat unless one of their allies intervened in some massive and destabilizing way.
As a field officer supporting the Contras’ southern front, I was a GS-12. Basically, that meant I was one of the low men on the totem pole. I had an important role getting the airdrops properly scheduled and delivered, but I was not privy to all the machinations going on far above my head that orchestrated the acquisition of the supplies and weapons. I had no idea where the aircraft came from or who owned them. In Honduras, much of what we received for the Contras came straight out of the Sears & Roebuck catalog. By 1986, the supplies were coming from anywhere and everywhere, with most of the weapons being Eastern Bloc AK-47s and their derivatives.
I would get word that a specific kind of aircraft would be available with a specific cargo. My job was to help pick a place and time to get those things to a particular Contra commander’s force inside Nicaragua. Everything else was compartmentalized. I never asked, and nobody ever told me, anything beyond that.
So what unfolded only a few months after I arrived in Costa Rica ensnared me in a much larger political battle I was totally unaware was brewing back home.
It started with a phone call on October 5, 1986, from our local clandestine communications center. A resupply drop had been scheduled for that evening for a northern front FDN force that had penetrated deep into Nicaragua. They were actually very close to some of the southern front Contras we were supporting. The voice on the other end of the phone line that day told me things had gone very wrong. The bird was missing, presumed down. The nearest friendly forces to the crash site belonged to the southern front.
Right away, we passed word for our Contras to get to the crash at all costs, secure, and destroy it. Rescue any survivors. They made a heroic effort to force march to the location, but the Sandinistas beat them to it.
The wreckage revealed a lot of things, but far worse was the fact that the first Sandinista patrols on the scene discovered the crew’s bundle kicker asleep in a hammock made from his own parachute. A bundle kicker is the person on a cargo flight who actually gets the supplies off the ramp.
In this case, the bundle kicker was Eugene Hasenfus, a Wisconsin-born former United States Marine. We later found out the aircraft, a civilian-owned C-123 that was charted from a holding company belonging to a cargo firm called Southern Air Transport, had been shot down by a shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile supplied by the Soviets. In this case, it was an SA-7, sort of the Eastern Bloc version of our Stinger missile that had cost the Red Army so many helicopters in Afghanistan.
I didn’t know any of this at the time. Nor did I know that our aircrew generally did not fly with parachutes. Hasenfus did. When I found out the details long after the event, I learned that he’d been in the doorway when the missile impacted. He was able to get clear of the burning wreckage, open his chute, and come down into the jungle relatively unharmed. Everyone else died in the crash.
The crews had been instructed to head south if they ended up going down in that part of Nicaragua. The southern front Contras would do everything possible to make contact and rescue them. For whatever reason, Hasenfus didn’t do that. Instead, he hunkered down not far from the crash site and was easily captured.
He became a case study of how crucial tradecraft can be in any clandestine operation. The crews—or Eugene, at least—had gotten sloppy with their operational security. When he boarded that C-123 that morning, he failed to empty his pockets of anything that could be useful to the Sandinistas. He turned out to be one of the biggest intelligence coups of the entire covert war. What came out of his pockets destroyed careers and embroiled the United States in a brutal political clash that ultimately tarnished the last years of the Reagan administration.
The Sandinistas quickly showcased him to the world. They produced photos and film footage of the intelligence gleaned from Hasenfus’s pockets—phone numbers of contacts, business cards, notes. Receipts. It was a catastrophic reveal of our effort to covertly support the Contras.
As the storm brewed in Washington between the Democrats in Congress and the Republican administration, further resupply flights were scrubbed. The Contras would have to carry on in some other capacity, and my role in the operation was shut down. I soon became just another case officer in the station, meeting folks and partaking in the diplomatic life.
Meanwhile, the funding for the Contra war gradually came to light in D.C. A few years before, Congress had passed legislation in 1982 and 1984 called the Boland Amendment, which banned the United States from providing any military assistance, or funds to be used for weaponry, to the Contras. The Sandinistas had become a sort of a cause célèbre to the American left, and with the Democrats in control of both houses, they attempted to hamstring the Reagan administration’s effort to depose them.
In 1984, Reagan ordered the National Security Council to “keep the Contras together, body and soul” despite what Congress had directed. At the heart of this policy conflict was which branch of the government had ultimate authority over foreign policy.
The Reagan administration believed the conduct of foreign policy lay entirely with the executive branch. The Democrats in Congress disagreed and pointed out that the authorization of funds was its responsibility. So the Contra controversy fell into a constitutional gray area of overlapping authority.
In October 1986, military aid for the Contras was reinstated with congressional assent.
After Hasenfus was captured, a Lebanese magazine reported that the United States government was trading weapons to Iran for seven hostages their terror proxy, Hezbollah, had kidnapped in the Middle East. The Iranians were in the middle of a bloody stalemated war against Iraq and were desperate for weapons. Originally, the arms exchanges were made through the Israelis, with U.S. stockpiles backfilling what the Israelis sent to Iran. Later, the NSC set up their own arms pipeline with an additional price markup that the Iranians paid. That added cash amount was subsequently funneled to support the Contras. Hasenfus’s capture and the discovery of his aircraft’s registry to Corporate Air Services (the holding company for Southern Air Transport) ultimately revealed the Contra component of the Iran arms sales.
In the moment, this was all above my pay grade. Nevertheless, I was caught up in the Washington tempest it set off. Dubbed Contragate at first by the press, then later Iran-Contra, the final years of the Cold War were dominated stateside by the many investigations the scandal spawned.
Joe Fernandez was one of the first to be ousted and destroyed by Iran-Contra. He was recalled as Chief of Station—a fact reported by The New York Times and several other sources. He was repeatedly interviewed by investigators, where he took full responsibility for orchestrating the airdrops, shielding Bill Casey and others from political blowback.
Falling on his sword like that came at a huge cost to him personally. Those who should have gone to his defense within the Agency did not. Whether that was fear for their own careers in the midst of the biggest political firestorm since the Church Committee hearings or for other reasons, I don’t know. But from my perch looking up, it sure seemed he was hung out to dry. In June 1988, he was indicted on four counts of obstruction and making false statements. It was the first time in history a CIA Chief of Station was criminally charged. The case against him was eventually dismissed in November 1989, but by then, his life and career had been reduced to a shambles. He was cashiered from the CIA and lost his pension.
As all that unfolded, I had returned from Costa Rica shortly after Carmen and I had our second child. I was working a desk at Langley. From my perspective, we had been fighting a noble effort for almost a decade to topple an illegal, brutal, and murderous regime in Nicaragua. Anyone who thought that was wrong should have seen the women and children I’d seen escaping the Sandinista reign of terror.
Years of eyewitness experience convinced me the press coverage here in the States was deliberately painting a nonsensical and false picture of what was going on in Honduras and Nicaragua. The coverage distorted the situation for the people back home, and the left rallied behind the assertions that the Contras were nothing more than “murderous right-wing death squads.”
The Contras I met in the camps were anything but that. They were Nicaraguan farmers and peasants who suffered endless privation, escaped to Honduras, and rallied to the cause because the Sandinistas had wiped out their villages, killed their priests, or raped family members. The women and children I saw fleeing those depredations across the Coco River were burned into my memory forever. They literally had nothing left—most didn’t even have shoes.
Iran-Contra was the first time I’d come in contact with the political piranha tank that is Washington, D.C. It was an ugly, despicable scene, a Democrat-versus-Republican brawl in the capital that destroyed the careers of good men and patriots who had devoted themselves to the CIA.
In the years to come, I often remembered that lesson and why I joined the Agency in the first place. I was there to make a difference, not make a career.
The Contra war ended with a cease-fire armistice and a Sandinista promise to hold free elections. They came to the negotiating table because they were in danger of losing everything, thanks to the covert effort Casey and Reagan ramped up in 1981. I just wished Bill Casey had seen the results, but he died of a brain tumor a short time after the Iran-Contra news broke.
But the greatest of our Cold Warriors had laid the foundations for the two biggest clandestine victories of the Cold War. The first came in 1989 when the mujahideen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The following year, the Sandinistas indeed held free elections. Hollywood celebrities flocked to Managua to rub shoulders with their Marxist fellow travelers. They’d supported Danny Ortega for a decade and were there to see his regime’s legitimacy finally enshrined by a vote of the people.
The opposition—spearheaded by many of the FDN’s senior leaders—was marginalized by the government at every opportunity. Ortega used every means available to his regime to promote the Sandinista ticket—and his own official reelection. Nearly every observer on the scene predicted an overwhelming Sandy victory.
The next day, the smoking ruins of Ortega’s legitimacy boiled up over Managua like a cloud. His opponent, the UNO party’s Violeta Chamorro, had crushed him nearly 55 percent to 40 percent. The Sandinista slate was demolished, and they were thrown from power.
For us who’d given so much in support of the Contra war, this victory was one of the seminal moments of our lives. We could not have asked for a better result—a revolution triggered by tyranny that succeeded in bringing the tyrant down by the power of the people’s vote.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, after all this had played out, I took my son to a local bookstore one Saturday as a treat. While we stood in line, I heard somebody say, “Heard you were back.”
I turned to see Dewey Clarridge regarding me, a wry smile on his face. He was immaculately dressed in a blue linen Brioni suit, a handkerchief carefully tucked in the breast pocket. He stepped from around a shelf of books and shook my hand. “Good to see you, Ric.”
He’d long since moved on from his position in the Latin American Division, and I was quite surprised he even remembered me, let alone remembered my name. We made small talk for a few minutes before saying our goodbyes.
As he left, he turned slightly and added, “If you need anything, let me know.”
Dewey was old-school. Such words were not idle talk. It was his way of telling me he was looking out for me. I had a legend in my corner.
As we left the shop that day, I realized XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. My work in the jungle had given me a level of visibility most GS-nothings never get. It was incidental to the cause I believed in, but knowing there were people far above in the chain of command looking out for me gave me a sense of profound reassurance. No matter what went on with the endless Washington two-step, I was on the right path with the right people quietly guiding my way.