12. Meeting
The next day, January 27th, we had a meeting in a conference area that had been set up at the edge of the camp, which consisted of a camouflaged cargo parachute spread like a tent above a flat clear area with a number of wooden benches. It reminded me of a woodsy area in a Baptist youth summer camp in southern Oregon where, as a kid, I remember us being gathered to sing the old hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and “That Old Rugged Cross.” Stewart, Fiske, Flaco, the four North American Indians and I were there.
The purpose of the meeting was to discuss, and presumably for our hosts to control, ground rules for what we would say and write about our trip upon returning to the States. I thought it curious that this meeting should be held at the end, rather than the beginning, of the week. Agreements about what is "off the record" are customarily made before the valued information is passed. It's standard practice, known as well by those who are experienced at being information sources as by journalists, that if a reporter gets information without having made prior agreements about whether or how it may be used, it's fair game, period. So this meeting was essentially a post facto attempt on the part of Stewart and Flaco to influence what we said about the trip, and to get us to believe that they had the authority to do so.
I listened, nodded, even asked questions and took notes about what they wanted, hoping they'd take that for agreement. I just wanted to get out of there in one piece with my film, tapes, and notebook intact. I had visions of blowing at least part of the lid off the "private" contra resupply effort which a number of journalists pretty well knew had stepped in to take over, during Boland Amendment prohibitions, from the CIA‑led supply and direction of the contras.
The first thing, of course, was that we weren't to say that we'd been in Honduras. The Honduran government was receiving increasing international pressure to investigate and stop such activities, and it was important to preserve their "deniability," however thin it might be, by using such phrases as "somewhere along the Nicaraguan border," or better yet, "somewhere in northern Nicaragua." The whole world knew otherwise, of course, but it was part of the game. Many journalists from major print and television outfits had been doing it routinely; it was the price of access to training camps, patrols, interviews, the whole nine yards. The difference was that usually that agreement was made as a condition of getting to where the action was; we'd already accompanied two illegal armed border crossings into Nicaragua and were on our way out.
Flaco said that under no circumstances were any photographs of him or the other two "security men" to be published, on the off chance that, in spite of their precautions, some of our pictures had inadvertently included them. He said that this was especially important in his case; that there was quite a high reward on his head (he was never specific about who was offering the bounty, or its amount). Stewart said he didn't want his picture published either. The affable Moses Fiske shrugged and said it didn't matter to him one way or the other.
Flaco said emphatically that "we do not violate the anti‑neutrality laws of the United States." (I would question him about this later, noting that it was against such laws for US citizens to conduct military operations against foreign governments. His response was that he and his colleagues didn't recognize the government of Nicaragua as legitimate.)
And: "The private sector picked up the gauntlet... if Congress hasn't got the good goddamn sense [to help the anti‑Sandinistas], then we're going to exercise our rights to help these people."
And: "We operate on the Costa Rican border, too." (Since Costa Rica's neutrality laws prohibited the use of its territory for military operations against any neighbors, this would appear to violate the laws of three nations.)
Flaco said pointedly, and more than once, that the Boland Amendment, which prohibited any US government agency from providing any material or military support to anti‑Sandinista groups (except for intelligence information), was about to expire on February 28.
Maco Stewart took a turn. He came "from the Democratic side," he said (meaning the Democratic Party), adding that he had "always been a civil rights activist." He said that "the people who need to know about these [Nicaraguan Indians] are the [North] American Indians.... I'm raising funds for the entire movement here, but I'm insisting that at least 25% go to the Miskitos, and I'm insisting that the two groups (FDN and MISURA) exchange liaison officers. There's never been effective liaison between them."
Flaco took the stand (in this case, the stump) again: "I make the prediction that you won't see Daniel Ortega celebrating Christmas in Managua this year."
Stewart disagreed, saying he thought it would take three or four years to get the Sandinistas out of power. He added that he would never advocate an American invasion.
The latter remark seemed intended to put some distance between himself and Flaco, who took this occasion to again bring up something he'd said aboard the Setco flight from Tegucigalpa: "The latest intelligence estimate says that it would take two and a half U.S. divisions 21 days and 4,000 casualties...." to take Nicaragua.
Sometime during all this dance in which Flaco alternately asserted and denied that his activities were connected with official US Government entities, he said something which he intended, I thought, as an evasion, but which resonated with me more than almost anything else he said that week: "We are all here for our own reasons." Whether or not he so intended, I took that to mean that Flaco, along with the other "special operations" cowboys who were flocking to Central America as they had flocked to Vietnam and Laos and every other war I'd been to or read about, had come here because of the same reason I had gone to Vietnam: because he wanted to, because it suited his idea of who he wanted to be.
The meeting adjourned and Flaco and I continued alone. I don't remember now whether he called me over, or I gravitated toward him with my unanswered questions, the indelicate ones I didn't really want to thrash out in front of the others.
I felt very strongly that I was in the middle of something which was significant, if not in its effectiveness, at least in what was being attempted. It was worth considerable risk, now that the trip was almost over, to milk it for every drop of information I could get. I felt I had a pretty good insurance policy: my wife knew I was in Honduras with Maco Stewart, what flight I'd come in on, and when to expect me to leave the country. So did the Tachi people who'd accredited me, and so did Chris DiMaio and several other friends in VFW Post 5888 (named after Bill Motto, the "Missing Man"), whom I'd told everything I knew about the trip and whom I'd asked to start raising hell with the media and Congress and to send people after me if I didn't show up on time. I also planned to trot out this insurance policy if they tried to confiscate my film or tapes.
I was ready with all that when Flaco and I started our private talk under the parachute tent. He got right to the point which I'd seen had been on his mind all week: what, he asked, was my assessment of what I'd seen? What was I going to write?
Flaco was a complicated man. When word games were being played, or when it suited him, he was all gamesman. I was afraid that if I beat around the bush, or even gave a slightly evasive answer which would have been appropriate for a journalist in my situation ‑ such as "I'm a reporter; I don't have an opinion. My job is to find out what your opinion is and report that, along with what I've seen and heard" ‑ that games was all I'd get.
I decided to be direct, hoping he would meet me at least part way. I looked into his eyes and said, "I think you're CIA."
His reply, as he returned my direct gaze, was: "I have the final say on everything that goes on down here (I understood that he meant with MISURA, not with the FDN), and I wouldn't give the CIA the time of day." Well, that was a classic dodge if I'd ever heard one. I wasn't asking him if the CIA depended on "Colonel Flaco" to find out what time it was; I was asking if he was helping the agency organize an illegal international military effort. Then, as the two of us engaged in a little skirmish with our eyes, came what I thought was the more significant part of his communication, and what I thought he intended to be so. His face changed subtly. His shoulders didn't move, but there was a slight shrug. The muscles of his face seemed intent on maintaining a poker face, yet equally intent on letting some other message through. As I watched, there played about his mouth, for a brief moment, the hint of a smile.
He turned his head away. "There are several other agencies involved down here...." He let his voice trail away. He seemed to be itching to say more, but didn't. My mind ticked off possibilities: DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency)? NSC (National Security Council)? State Department? USAID (Agency for International Development)? And what about NSA (National Security Agency)? I'd wondered about them for some time, because Congressional oversight was the biggest thorn in the side of Reagan's covert cowboys, and NSA was unique among intelligence agencies in being so secret that it was subject to no oversight, period, except for that of the people who directed its operations, which of course included the White House. There must at least be NSA radar and other equipment, along with its operators, providing surveillance and other intelligence for the use of contra "clients". What was to keep them from scooting selected other people and operations under their super‑secret umbrella? It seemed a logical choice to me. I recalled Shooter's earlier remark that "the CIA gets credit for a lot of shit it doesn't do down here."
And I recalled Flaco's comment on the plane coming out from "Tegoos", as he and his cohorts called the Honduran capital, that I could have been "detained by the FBI." People returning from Nicaragua to the US had already complained publicly about being detained and questioned upon their return by FBI agents. The FBI certainly had a sordid history of conducting paranoid investigations of its own citizens, especially during the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the McCarthy hearings, and the COINTELPRO (CounterIntelligence Program) files kept on American writers and dissidents. Did they have an activist role in the contra situation?
I pressed him to tell me more. But: "things will become known as the Administration wants them known."
There it was again. Almost in the same breath, Flaco was denying any official connection which would constitute illegal activity under either US neutrality laws or the Boland Amendment, and claiming to personally speak for the Reagan Administration.
Well then, I asked, how did he know this? Had he spoken with the President personally?
Flaco replied that he had spoken with Reagan three times, but was evasive about what the occasions had been. Another time when I pressed him to elaborate, he said that one such occasion had been before Reagan won his first Presidential election, on a campaign swing through the South. He kept mum about the other two. He seemed to want credit for being close to power, without getting his boss (if Reagan indeed was his boss) or himself in trouble. He did say that Reagan had told him that the Nicaraguan government "'...will not be allowed to survive in its present form.'"
While we were on the subject of Ronald Reagan, I asked Flaco how he thought Reagan's election had affected events in Central America. "Huh!" he exclaimed. "You wouldn't believe the parties they had down here." He went on to describe a wave of jubilation that he said had swept through the landowners and career military officers, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. And, of course, among the Nicaraguan elite who had recently been kicked out of Managua by the Sandinistas. I've often wondered to what extent the body count among suspected Central American leftists was increased by the shift from Carter's policy of making aid conditional on countries' human rights records, to Reagan's dropping of that policy in favor of increased military aid to rightist officers in El Salvador and Guatemala. To some, it seemed not coincidental that the rape and murder of the four US churchwomen in El Salvador came in December, 1980, the month after Reagan's first election; and that massacres of Guatemalan Indians at the hands of the military took place in 1981 and 1982, while it was Reagan policy to aid the Guatemalan army (in particular General-cum-President and evangelical minister José Efraín Ríos Montt) in its campaign against "subversivos". Those years are still remembered by Guatemalans as the period of la violencia.
Flaco repeated other claims he'd made during the week. One was that he and his colleagues had powerful supporters, including "the owner of Coors brewery."([1]) Another was that Edén Pastora, the former Sandinista commander operating out of Costa Rica, was getting his "last chance" to get aboard Washington's program.
I kept trying to exploit Flaco's desire for favorable press coverage, which was the game being played here. I was trying to say to him that if he wanted to be written about as a serious player, he'd have to give me evidence of serious connections.
I asked him who had made the decisions about the ranks of the MISURA officers whose insignia he'd passed out earlier.
"I did," he said. He tapped his chest with a motion of his right arm and hand that replicated with startling accuracy the motion I'd seen Special Forces Captain John Moroney make at the camp at Mangbuk sixteen years earlier. Moroney had been explaining that, though the official line was that he and his men were merely advisors to the Vietnamese, "That's bullshit. (tap) We command."
Our little tête‑a‑tête was winding down. I'd saved something special for last. I'd been thinking that the worlds of Flaco and "Mickey," my mercenary acquaintance back home in California, overlapped so thoroughly that they must know each other. If they did know each other, it was likely that they'd be highly nervous about somebody like me knowing details of their acquaintance.
So I ambushed Flaco. The two of us were standing alone, off to the side of the parachute tent. Our conversation had dwindled to small talk, and we'd both started to relax: I, because it began to seem that I really might get out of there in one piece with my film, tapes, and notes intact; and Flaco (I imagined), because his stressful dance of trying to get me to believe him without lying, and of lying without seeming to, was coming to an end. We were both looking around us and down at the ground, in the way that men often will while talking around a subject.
Maintaining an offhand tone of voice, I asked, "Do you know a guy named....?" and used Mickey's real name. I timed my question so that I was turning my face toward his just as the name left my lips, so that a second or two of eye contact wouldn't give him time to contain his reaction.
It worked. For all his control, Flaco wasn't able to smother the startled look that darted around his eyes before he pulled the emotional mask back over his face. He knew I'd caught him, so he didn't lie. "Name sounds familiar," he said, giving me a look that clearly said I'd hear nothing more on the subject.
13. Out of the Woods
Mario Córdoba and one or two other MISURA officers flew with us back to Tegucigalpa. We returned to the luxurious Honduras Maya, and there ensued in front of the registration desk a scene which at the time seemed both funny and pathetic, and which I'd have cause to remember in later years. Those Indians, who were more native to Honduras than anyone else in the room, stuck out like a man in a white dinner jacket at a Masai tribal dance. This, in a hotel named for, if not their ancestors, then for people who were at least racial relatives of their ancestors.
Flaco checked them in first, under the stares of the hotel employees, then gave me, as the only person in our group who shared a common language with them (Perico had stayed at Rus Rus), the key to their room (they, of course, being only Indians, didn't get single rooms like the rest of us who had come to help them) and curtly told me to "get these people upstairs and out of sight."
That afternoon, Stewart went on an errand. He said he'd bought several 70 horsepower Evinrude outboard motors, "at four grand a pop," plus some SCUBA gear, for use by MISURA forces to cross the Coco and conduct military operations up various tributaries in their homeland ‑ now Sandinista‑controlled territory ‑ in northern Nicaragua. He said that he'd had to ship them via the same channels as FDN materials because there was a supposedly centralized supply system for all the anti‑Sandinista groups. He said he'd given specific instructions that the outboard engines were for MISURA only, but nonetheless they appeared to have gotten sidetracked in an FDN warehouse on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. Stewart took along Shooter to emphasize his point.
That night, Stewart and Shooter showed up late for dinner. They said they'd found the engines, though it wasn't clear whether they'd actually gotten possession of them and turned them over to MISURA people.
In the hotel dining room, the relief at being back in the city was palpable among us. We ordered beer and mixed drinks generously. And it was story time. The one I especially recall came out of Larry Pino's question to Shooter. The two were sitting across from each other at the end of our table, so I listened intently.
Larry asked Shooter what was the "hairiest situation" he'd ever been in. I could see Shooter's dark eyes glitter. "Reloading face to face," he said. "Guess who won? The one with the expertise, the one who's sittin' here eatin' steak." He grinned with a satisfaction that no steak could have inspired. Someone asked him how far apart they'd been. "Ten yards," he said.
I piped up and asked, to be sure to get the record straight: "Shooter, was that in Vietnam, or here?"
"Here," he said. He of course meant Nicaragua, where the fighting was.
Another remark I heard from Shooter that evening was about Miami: "I love it when it gets cool down there ‑ when you wear a coat, you can carry a bigger gun."
As we stood in the departure lounge at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín airport, Larry Pino took off his beaded belt buckle and presented it to Shooter. Larry's admiration for the stocky gunman had become more and more visible as the week wore on. I think he genuinely believed that Shooter was there to help the Indians, though I wondered if his admiration didn't come more from what Larry felt ‑ about a man who went his own way and apparently took no shit from anyone ‑ than from what he thought. Shooter was visibly touched by the gift.
The airport scene got Shooter and Flaco talking about other times they'd passed through on their way to work. Flaco said he'd used so many aliases that at times he "had trouble remembering who I was supposed to be." Both he and Shooter said they sometimes traveled in US military uniforms, "with false ID and everything." Another mercenary-looking type said hello to Flaco in a manner suggesting that they were accustomed to meeting every few years in airports in countries where there was war. Flaco, ever the cool operator, became nearly as nervous as he had been as we left the same airport eight days earlier. He obviously didn't want us to hear the man call him by name, and we didn't.
14. Aftermath
In early February, I got a call from Jonathan Weiner, legislative aide to newly‑elected Senator John Kerry, the Vietnam vet from Massachusetts who would be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 2004. Without my knowledge, Jim Purcell, one of the vets in our VFW Post 5888, had taken it upon himself to call the senator’s office and tell Weiner about my trip, after I'd given a report in a Post meeting. Weiner wanted information about the trip, and was especially interested that we'd gone into Nicaragua. We talked a long time. It would be an easy matter to track down Maco Stewart, who was well‑known and had used his real name. But what of the mercenaries? I'd been very clear that Flaco, Shooter, and Perico had not only led an armed incursion into Nicaragua and had obviously done so before, but were themselves armed at the time. I named the weapons and their calibers, and made it clear that I was reporting from observation, not hearsay.
Weiner wanted any information that would help him identify the mercenaries. Congressional opponents of Reagan's intervention in Nicaragua had been looking for hard evidence of paramilitary activities by US citizens at least since Parker and Powell had been shot down in Nicaragua the previous September.
"Look," I finally said, "I have photographs of these people." There was a long pause, and Weiner said, with all the gravity he could put into his voice, "Dean, I need those pictures." I was working on a newspaper article about the trip, and hoped to publish photos with it. But I was also building a house, and the mechanics of writing the article and getting it published would take a while. I sent Weiner several recognizable photos of Flaco and Shooter. Perico had escaped my lens.
I believe Flaco was first publicly identified, that Spring, in an Associated Press article by Robert Parry and Brian Barger. He is Jack Terrell, a covert operator from Alabama whose background came only partially into focus over the coming months and years. Shooter is Joe Adams from St. Louis, Missouri, who made his living hunting down people who'd been charged with crimes and jumped bail, and by hiring himself and his weapons out to various other clients. He also had been a bodyguard for Adolfo Calero, one of the main FDN leaders. Joe told me at one point that he'd also dated Calero's daughter.
Probably bowing to public pressure, including pressure from legislators who opposed Reagan's intervention in Nicaragua and attempted to bump up the line the heat they were feeling from peace groups back home, the US State Department finally whispered in the ear of someone in Tegucigalpa. One morning, a few weeks after we left, Flaco and the boys in the camp at Rus Rus woke up looking down the barrels of Honduran Army M16s. They were put on planes back to the States.
Terrell laid low in Alabama for several months. The peace movement picked up steam, and press accounts more frequently exposed contra atrocities, misuse of aid funds and supplies, and the misadventures of private citizens like Stewart and Terrell who took money and weapons to Central America and presumed to conduct US foreign policy on their own hook.
Jonathan Weiner, the aide to Senator Kerry, told me later that someone from their office, acting on a tip regarding Terrell's whereabouts, confronted Terrell in an airport in one of the southern states and showed him my photographs of him in the camp at Rus Rus. Was he the guy who'd been conducting his own war down there?
Terrell switched sides. He started talking to reporters from major newspapers, and in front of TV cameras. He began talking about contras running drugs, about the US expatriate rancher John Hull using his land in northern Costa Rica as a resupply and staging area for contra raids into southern Nicaragua, about corruption and incompetence among contra commanders. He increased the heat on Oliver North, who was beginning to be named in press accounts as the White House's man who took up the slack in terms of getting assistance, legal and illegal, to the contras.
Robert White had been Jimmy Carter's ambassador to El Salvador when the four US churchwomen were raped and murdered there in December, 1980, the month following Reagan's first election as President. White had started a liberal think‑tank‑ cum‑pressure‑group in Washington called the American Institute for Development Policy. Terrell was given a job at AIDP that gave him enough to live on, and a platform for his damaging pronouncements against the Reagan Administration's methods of intervention in Nicaragua. He had a certain credibility because he continued to maintain that he was a conservative who had no use for the Sandinistas. But he also damaged that credibility by seeming attempts to manipulate the use of the information he gave out, by making claims that couldn't be checked out, and by continuing to be secretive about his own past, especially connections with US intelligence agencies. At an interview in the AIDP office in Washington in September of 1986, Terrell told me that he'd worked with "these people" for six years.
For once, something checked out. "Flako" showed up in Ollie North's notebooks, in entries that said he had worked with CIA for six years, and that North was worried that he could spill a lot of beans.
I never saw Joe Adams ‑ "Shooter" ‑ again after January, 1985. But Terrell put me in touch with him in St. Louis, and I had several long phone conversations with him, some of which he allowed me to tape.
I asked Adams about the shoulder patch I'd seen him wearing, with the horse and wing and the words "PEGASO CMA ‑ FDN". He told me that right after the supposed expiration of the Boland Amendment at the end of February, 1985 ‑ a month after we'd been in the camp ‑ he had led a Terrell‑planned military expedition into northern Nicaragua. Terrell had stayed in Honduras, ostensibly because he "had more important things to do." I suspected it was also because Terrell, whose abilities seemed to be more towards dreaming up military plans than carrying them out, simply didn't have the legs for a many‑day hump with heavy equipment through difficult terrain, and knew it.
Their primary target was a bridge at a crossroads across which the Sandinistas, he had told me, would have to bring their tanks to deploy them in opposition to a major landing on the northeast coast of Nicaragua. The plan provided one or two secondary targets for them to hit on the way back.
None of it happened. Several days into the march, Adams told me, the Americans (there were several, he said) and the Cubans and the MISURA leadership, tired and with nerves frayed, had a falling out. The group split up before ever reaching their main objective; the various groups found their own ways back across the Coco.
In one of these conversations, I asked Adams to tell me more about Perico. Terrell had already told me that his real name was Marcelino Rodriguez. I'd told Terrell that I'd had the clear impression, from the garrote incident at Rus Rus and from his general demeanor, that Perico was a "stone killer." Terrell had searched his memory for a moment, then nodded.
Adams told me that he had run into Rodriguez in Miami, and had reflexively called him "Perico." The latter had shushed him emphatically, saying "'Don't call me that here!'" Perico was a Latin American slang term for cocaine. At the time of our last phone interview, Adams said the last he'd heard about Rodriguez was that he was back in Costa Rica running cocaine.
Larry Pino's paratrooper "cousin" - the one he'd claimed had parachuted into Nicaragua as a U.S. Army Ranger - turned out to be a Mescalero Apache friend named David Michael Little. Little showed up on the roster of a US Army Ranger battalion that had been on an unpublicized "training mission," according to the Army, during December, 1984, very near the area where we traveled with Maco Stewart the following month. During the period of that "training mission," a US soldier was killed. He was a young black West Point graduate, a captain named Winburn Drew Harrington II, from Moultrie, Georgia. His death might well have been a training accident, and the Ranger battalion might indeed have been on a training mission in southern Honduras, as opposed to having parachuted into Nicaragua across the river. But we([2]) found one source, who was in a position to know the truth but whose credibility was sometimes questionable, who, unbidden, recognized a photo of Harrington and volunteered that he had seen Harrington and another Ranger officer cross the Coco into Nicaragua on a secret reconnaissance mission. This source said that the other Ranger officer, who seemed to be of equal rank, spoke fluent Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent. On that mission, he said, the two had worn black uniforms and carried night vision and special camera equipment. They were gone about three days, he said. Their target was something at La Tronquera, but our source wouldn't say what it was. He wanted money to talk. La Tronquera, or La Tronkara in the Miskito spelling, was the location, according to a very reliable retired U.S. Army source who had had access to that kind of intelligence at the time, of a new radar installation which the Sandinistas intended to use to spot and shoot down contra resupply flights. The first source also told us that he'd kept a detailed journal of events at that time, but he wouldn't show it to us without being paid, which we couldn't do.
That radar set also showed up in Ollie North's notebooks.
The Second Ranger Battalion's S‑2, or intelligence officer, at the time was a Captain who was described to me by another member of the battalion as "New York Puerto Rican." The last I knew of him, he had been promoted to Major.
By the time Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait, I had narrowed the circle of people who would have to know just how Harrington had died, and whether he and others had been on missions into Nicaragua, to three or four officers. I had found them, too: I had addresses and home phone numbers, even of one Captain who had left the Rangers and entered a unit so secret that his name had been wiped clean from all but one of the reports investigating Harrington's death, even though he was supposedly the first to reach Harrington when he fell.
By the Spring of 1991, I was about ready to begin showing up on these men's doorsteps with a series of hard questions: tell me the truth about Harrington's death and about any Ranger incursions into Nicaragua, or the story I publish, alongside the facts which I have verified, might cause your refusal to say what you know to be interpreted by the objective reader as participation in a cover‑up.
But the country was festooned with yellow ribbons in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War; suddenly there was no market for any journalism which might reflect negatively on the US military. My credential with the Los Angeles Times, which had been signed by Jack Nelson, wasn't renewed. Neither Doyle McManus nor I ever published a word of the Harrington story because we were pulled off it before we could finish our research. Hardly anything else had been published, except for brief announcements about Harrington's death in local media near Moultrie, Georgia, his hometown; and articles in the Seattle Times just after his death on December 16, 1984, and later when their reporter received a copy of the Army's initial 15‑6 investigation into the incident. Harrington’s battalion was stationed at Fort Lewis, not far from Seattle.
In late summer of 1988, I got a call from Major Garrett, a reporter for the Houston Post. He was working on a feature article about Maco Stewart. He used several quotes from me, and two photos. The piece ran on Sunday, September 18.
Garrett found out some things by talking with friends and associates of Stewart in the Houston area that I hadn't known. His report quoted people as saying that Stewart had been elected a state representative from Galveston in 1960; that he had written a book titled Sex, Money, and God, but had been unable to get it published; that he was well known for Valentine's Day parties in Aspen, Colorado, where "guests would strip naked, don heart‑shaped paper cutouts and cavort until the wee hours of the morning"; was a close friend of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, for whom Stewart had expressed admiration to me; maintained residences in France where he threw "lavish parties attended by French models, artists and lawyers. Sometimes he will take his guests on yachting tours to ports of call on the northern coast of the Mediterranean." Garrett confirmed a tidbit I'd learned from a researcher in Houston, that Stewart had for a time appended the title "Mahatma" to his name.
Garrett also reported that John Laughlin, described as a "former business associate" of Stewart's, said that Stewart was "a frequent visitor to Bohemian Grove, a male‑only retreat north of San Francisco for the nation's political and corporate elite." Garrett also said that some who knew Stewart saw him as "intellectual and generous."
In the article, Stewart's attorney, David Savitz, is quoted as saying that Stewart's motives for his excursions among Central American Indians were humanitarian: “He was trying to help poor, displaced Indians being ravaged by the communist Nicaraguan government."
About this time, I'd also had a call from Savitz. He wanted photographs I'd taken during the trip to use in his defense of Stewart against charges which had been brought in Federal court in Miami that Stewart, Terrell, Adams, and others had violated the US Neutrality Act, which forbids US private citizens from conducting military operations against foreign countries.
I refused Savitz's request, giving two reasons. The first was that it is standard professional practice for a journalist to refuse requests for unpublished material, since such material is often obtained by making certain promises about how the material will be used, what names will or will not be kept confidential, and so forth. While I'd made no such promises to the MISURA fighters or the refugees, I agreed with my colleagues who said that caving in to such pressures sets a dangerous precedent.
The second reason I refused to give Savitz the photos was because I disagreed with their intended use. I felt strongly that Stewart was in Honduras and Nicaragua playing cowboy for his own purposes, rather than trying to help the Indians. I particularly felt that because of the near‑starvation I saw in the village of Lasa Tinghni, where Stewart hadn't furnished a morsel of food, as far as I could see, while he provided supplies to the young men who carried weapons and conducted military raids into Nicaragua.
Savitz threatened to subpoena the photos and have me jailed for contempt of court if I refused to comply. I told him I'd go to jail if necessary, but either way they'd never see the photos. The calls stopped coming, and I was never subpoenaed.
Maco Stewart, Jack Terrell, and Joe Adams, along with a few other Americans, were indicted and tried in a Miami federal court for violations of the US Neutrality Act. Joe Adams had told me in a phone interview that after his testimony, the Federal judge, whose name was King, dismissed the case, stepped down from the bench, and invited him out for a beer. I could never verify that, but they were all acquitted.
For some time after I returned from that trip, I was virtually dizzy trying to remember it all, to write it down, to process it first in my own mind, then into my article for the San Jose Mercury News. As I looked at the photographs, at my notes, and at the images in my mind, one that was among the most recurrent was that of rifle muzzles: brownskinned teenage warriors, serious yet for all the world like neighborhood kids playing war, handling their AK47s and G3 automatic rifles and M16s and M1 carbines, with their limited training, as if they were toys instead of fully loaded assault weapons. They'd climb aboard the Toyota pickups, letting the muzzles point where they would, often including in my direction. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week.
A few nights after I got home, I had this dream:
Dream: Deadribs
I am dead. I'm a skeleton. Wind blows between my ribs. I can't move; can't leave the place that is death. People who aren't dead can visit me here. My wife comes, and friends. They ask what it's like. I answer that I'm sad I can't go back with them to the place of the living, but that loneliness isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being able to move. That, and being a skeleton, with the air passing freely between my ribs, not blocked by any organs or skin, the uncaring wind blowing through me and not finding any life there, no warm barrier between my bones and the wind.
[1] Shortly after returning to California from this trip, I was working with an editor named Jonathan Krim at the San Jose Mercury News on the version of this story they published in the Perspective section in the Spring of 1985. When I told him of Flaco’s remark about “the owner of Coors Brewery” being a supporter of Flaco’s group, he had me call the Coors brewery then and there from the phone on his desk. I did, and received a categorical denial that any member of the Coors family or anyone in their employ had ever given any aid to any Contra organizations. Some months later a member of the family, under oath before a Congressional committee, admitted that well, yes, he had bought them a helicopter.
[2] Doyle McManus, of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington DC Bureau, and I.
