Rus Rus

                    1. Maco Stewart's Letter

     In early January 1985, Chris DiMaio called. Chris and I knew each other through our veterans' rap group and as members of Bill Motto VFW Post 5888 in Santa Cruz. But it was the Cheyenne part of him that occasioned the call that sent me on one of the most bizarre expeditions of my life. An Indian friend of his had received a letter from a Texas lawyer offering an expenses‑paid trip to Central America to see firsthand how their Miskito Indian brothers were being killed and run off their land by the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Chris's friend was Michael Joseph. Michael's tribe, to whom the letter had been addressed, were the Tachi people of Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno, California.

     The Tachi leaders didn't know what to make of the letter; Michael had called Chris because he was a Vietnam vet. Chris didn't know what to make of it either, so he called me, since I'd done some reporting from and about Central America. I thought they had been contacted by someone who was working with the CIA‑financed (and -led) contra operations being run out of Honduras across the border into Nicaragua. It sounded like a rare window to see inside the world of covert operations. I warned that it might be risky, involving anything from inconvenience and wasted time to physical danger. I recommended that anyone they send be both an experienced journalist and a combat veteran.

     The tribal council kicked it around, and decided not to send any of their own people. They sent me instead.

     A few days later, in the Houston airport, I was standing in a circle of people I'd never met before. Sue Young, Stewart's secretary, was handing out tickets for a Tan Sahsa (the Honduran airline) flight to Tegucigalpa, leaving in just over an hour. She was a middle‑aged, well‑organized but somewhat harried‑looking woman. Maco (pronounced MAY‑ko) Stewart was an unremarkable ‑ looking man in his late fifties with a sizeable gut and thinning hair; he was dressed in khaki pants and short‑sleeved shirt. His friend Moses Fiske, who later told me he was sixty, had an even bigger gut, a pasty complexion, and a kindly demeanor like somebody's grandpa who'd just retired from something no more vigorous than the insurance business. Sure enough, he'd had major heart surgery some months before. He was to be our movie cameraman. Besides me, there were four real Indians: Gary Fife was a mixed‑blood Cherokee and Creek, a full‑time radio journalist with Migizi Communications, an Indian media cooperative in Minneapolis. Mike Hunt had come representing Hank Adams, of the Survival of the American Indians Association of Olympia, Washington. Larry Pino represented New Mexico's Zia Pueblo, and Bill Pensoneau was from the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma. (I seem also to remember a Potawatomi connection with Bill’s name.)

     I showed everyone my letter of accreditation from the Tachi people; the Indians read it much more carefully than did Maco Stewart, since Stewart had already accepted me on the trip through Michael Joseph. I told everyone that besides gathering information for the Tachi, I was a freelance journalist, and might want to do a piece about the trip. Stewart said that was okay, or at least he didn't object.

     It was midafternoon by the time we landed at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín Airport, after stops in Beliz and San Pedro Sula. As we lined up to go through immigration, Stewart instructed all of us to say that we represented "Delphi Company," and to answer no further questions about what we were doing in Honduras. We should just say that we were with him, or that we didn't know.

     That worked to get us past the kiosk and into the departure lounge. But whatever Maco had said to the officials wasn't enough to get us out the door and onto the street. The authorities apparently wanted to know what a group of two older men, four Indians, and one guy who might have been an unemployed university professor, with a pile of gear that looked like they were going to war, were doing in their country. Stewart just kept shrugging at their questions. Armed Honduran soldiers at each exit, plus two or three who mingled with us, just kept not letting us go.

     Meanwhile, Stewart and I chatted. He asked where I'd grown up; I told him Oregon and Washington. He asked if I'd heard about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the guru/cult leader who had settled with his followers in Eastern Oregon. I replied that I only knew what I'd read in the papers, since I hadn't lived in Oregon for some years. He asked what I thought of Rajneesh. I snorted derisively before I caught myself. Stewart said he had a "great deal of respect" for the man.

     Stewart told us, and presumably told the immigration officials, that we were waiting for someone who would explain everything. His name was "Colonel Flaco."

     Finally Flaco appeared, a slim man dressed in designer jeans and windbreaker. In his late forties with grey hair and moustache, he spoke with a strong Southern accent.

                      

    2. Flaco and Luque

     The senior Honduran officer spoke no English, and it quickly developed that no one in our party besides me spoke Spanish. So I became the interpreter for the interchange that followed between "Colonel Flaco" and the Honduran officer.

     The officer asked what we intended to do in Honduras. Flaco said to tell him we were going hunting. ‑ But where were our rifles? Flaco said they were coming on another plane. The officer clearly didn't believe him. ‑ What about all that camouflage gear we were carrying? It looked military. Flaco said to tell him not to worry about that; that camouflage clothing just happened to be in style at the time in the United States. The officer stood there, arms crossed, stolid, disbelieving. His attitude was accepted as a command by the sentries at the exits. They stiffened; paid less attention to anyone else in the room and focused on the loose circle of Indians and Texans, with the Honduran officer and Flaco and me at its center. Other travelers hurried past, or stood aside and gawked. Immigration officers in the kiosks we'd passed through earlier cast sidelong glances.

     Flaco leaned and spoke directly into my ear in a low voice. "Tell him ‑ quietly ‑ that we're going to the FDN camps." FDN was the acronym for Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense, the contra umbrella organization. I repeated his words ‑ and his secretive attitude ‑ to the Honduran officer in Spanish. This managed to further heighten the tension in the room, but not to convince the implacable officer to let us go. ‑ Who were we with? What were we going to do there? What authority had given us permission to go there?

     Flaco leaned to my ear again: "Ask him to call Captain Lookey of the Honduran secret police." He pronounced it "LOO‑key."

     The officer's expression changed for the first time, to one of startled surprise. He said to me, somewhat harshly, "Ask him how he knows the captain."

     Flaco gave a shrug intended to convey a patiently resigned "Okay, I see I finally have to come clean with you," and pulled from his hip pocket a small nylon wallet, flipped open a velcroed flap, and showed the officer ‑ being the translator, I was standing close enough to see it ‑ a large gold badge, consisting of an eagle atop a shield, with a blue arc on the shield and gold letters on the arc. I wanted with my whole being to read the inscription on that blue arc, but couldn't. It didn't seem wise to lean down between them far enough to read the small gold letters.

     The officer disappeared. We waited. A small, slim Honduran appeared, wearing a hip-length leather jacket and aviator's sunglasses that made him look like every intelligence or secret police agent in every movie from "Casablanca" to "Doctor Zhivago". A current zapped around the room: The Man had arrived. The Honduran army officer dropped respectfully back; I became a corner of a new triangle with Flaco and Captain Luque, translating for them. (In a phone conversation later that year with Brian Barger, an Associated Press reporter who, with his colleague Robert Parry, broke some of the early stories on the contra support network that took over for the CIA when the Boland Amendment made it illegal for any US Government entities to aid the anti-Sandinista contras, I learned that the man in the leather jacket was Captain, later Major, Leonel Luque (pronounced LOO‑kay). He was the liaison between the Honduran army and the contras, with specific responsibility for controlling flights to contra bases along the Honduras ‑ Nicaragua border from Tegucigalpa's Toncontín Airport. Luque was also identified in Christopher Dickey's book, With the Contras.)

     It turned out that the two had met before, and that Luque pretty much knew that Flaco was involved in supporting the contras, which was okay with some people in Washington but not with others. But the "others" were of little concern to him, since he himself was part of the program. So he and Flaco had a conversation, through me, that wasn't a conversation at all. Luque more or less asked some questions, but not really; Flaco more or less, but not really, answered.

     Captain Luque turned his head ever so slightly in the direction of the sentry at the exit through which we wanted to leave, gave an even slighter nod (without so much as looking at the sentry), and we were free.

                   3. Babes in James Bondland

     Outside, a yellow whale of a Detroit‑made station wagon taxi waited. Flaco swooped around us like a nervous mother duck, giving orders to us and to another man who was obviously with him, standing a few feet away, feet planted wide apart, hand darting in and out of the half-zippered front of his light blue windbreaker. Load up. Get in. Doesn't matter where or how, just get in. Hurry. There'd been too much attention, nobody was supposed to know we're here, this is a clandestine operation. Flaco said "clandestine" so it rhymed with "Palestine."

     The man in the blue windbreaker waited until the rest of us were crammed into the taxi, then jumped in the back seat beside me, slammed the door, and we sped off. He squirmed about in the seat, looking out both sides, looking back, looking forward, as if he expected us to be attacked from any direction. He also seemed to be enjoying himself; he virtually gave off sparks. After we got some distance from the airport, he relaxed enough to say "Hey, guys, welcome to Honduras," and introduce himself. He said he was known thereabouts as "Teetador," which I realized was his attempt to roll the “r” in the Spanish word tirador, or "shooter." The word also means "trigger" in Spanish. He said we could just call him Shooter.

     We got to the hotel, the Honduras Maya, which we were told was the best one in Tegucigalpa. It seemed to be. Bellhops crossed the gleaming tile floor of the entry salon, and the plush carpets of adjacent lounges, in crisp uniforms with contrasting collar trim and piping. (Those same lounges, in those days, were famous as places where spooks from every country involved in the Cold or hot wars in Central America, plus legions of "independent operators" and Soldier of Fortune types, sat around and grinned at one another over their drinks.)

     Flaco took charge of signing us in, intent on getting us, and the pile of camouflage gear, out of the lobby as quickly as possible. I looked around to see Shooter standing in a startlingly unambiguous pose, feet planted wide apart, right arm crossing his body and the hand out of sight inside his blue windbreaker. He'd picked a spot from which he could cover the door, the group of us clustered around the registration desk, and the entire room as well.

     Each of us got a private room with thick, richly colored carpeting and draperies, two double beds, private bath, television, and telephone. Maco had said it was all on him, including room service and long‑distance telephone charges. Anything we wanted. (After I returned from the trip, I checked with a travel agent and learned that the rooms were listed for US$75‑80 a night.)

     It was late evening when we gathered in the hotel's large, leather‑appointed dining room, lighted by expensive‑looking chandeliers. We settled on a large table against the back wall, with a stuffed leather seat along the wall side and ornate chairs of dark wood with velvet‑covered cushions around the other three sides. While the others were milling around and politely deciding where to sit, I instinctively grabbed a seat with my back to the wall, near one end of the table so as not to be trapped behind it. But Shooter came in, sat down beside me, and bumped me over. He wanted the same seat. He was carrying a small leather purse, which he dropped onto the table between us with a thump that said it contained something heavy, made of metal. He turned the top toward him and unzipped it.

    "Pozo," he said, using the Spanish word for what he described as the standard pouch for carrying a pistol in this part of the world. He said that it was so hot here that it often wasn't practical to wear clothing heavy enough to conceal a belt or shoulder holster. I looked down the table; Flaco sat with his back to the wall at the other end of the table, and also had a pozo on the table in front of him with the zipper open.

     Stewart invited us to order anything we wanted to eat. The four Indians and I felt, and I'm sure acted, like babes suddenly dropped, mouths agape, into some James Bond wonderland. After dinner some of us began politely prodding, wondering, Well, what's all this about. Flaco said we couldn't talk about it here. There'd be a meeting after dinner in his suite.

     When we got there, Flaco had a briefing ready. He was to be known only as "Colonel Flaco;" he re‑introduced "Teetador/ Shooter," mispronouncing the Spanish in the same way that Shooter had. (Over a year later, when I called Shooter at home in St. Louis, the message on his answering machine was in both English and Spanish, with Spanish first. By then, his Spanish pronunciation, and even his grammar, were pretty good.)

     Flaco also introduced a man we hadn't seen before, whose nombre de guerra was "Perico." Perico, Shooter, and Flaco were our three "security men," the latter explained. Perico was what he called a "free Cuban," who welcomed the chance to fight communism any way he could, and hoped to help free Cuba itself one day. Flaco said that the three of them were members of Civilian Military Assistance, or CMA. I recognized the name immediately as being that of an Alabama‑based organization of Vietnam veterans, gun enthusiasts, and other anti‑communist true believers which had been all over the news a few months earlier after two of its members, Dana Parker and James Powell, had been shot down in a Hughes 500 helicopter while conducting an air strike against a Sandinista position at Santa Clara, in northern Nicaragua. Parker, Powell, and a Nicaraguan identified in the September 3, 1984 issue of the Sandinista daily Barricada as Mario Pocillo, were all killed. (At one point, when I asked Flaco what he knew about the Parker/Powell mission, he said, "We were viewing satellite photos of that crash before Managua even knew their people had shot it down.")