I Am Soldier of Fortune Read online

  Within a year, I heard that a hit team had whacked Camacho in Havana, but didn’t pay it much mind. Revolutionaries were always getting whacked in the Caribbean for one reason or another.

  It wasn’t until the early 1960s that I would, as Paul Harvey would say, get the “rest of the story.” My path crossed one or more of the more fas -cinating soldiers of fortune in Miami as I hung out with the local mercs. Robert Johnson, in his mid-forties, slim, wavy black hair and a chain smoker, had only recently bailed out from the Dominican Republic shortly after the assassination of its dictator, Generalissimo Trujillo. Somehow, Johnson had signed on with this thug and ended up as his number two in the Dominican Army’s intelligence section under the equally thuggish but certainly more dapper General Arturo Espaillat.

  Johnson and I bumped into each other occasionally in Miami, and he eventually knocked out a couple of pieces for the magazine I started in 1975, Soldier of Fortune. The tales of his intrigue in the Caribbean turned out to be some of the best journalism we ever published. One evening in the early ‘60s, when we were knocking back a few rum and cokes, he suddenly turned serious, lowered his voice, and said, “You know, Brown, your writing got somebody hit.”

  Taken aback, I replied, “Huh? What the hell are you talking about?” He swizzle-sticked his drink, grimaced and said, “Your article on the arms factory in Havana caused Trujillo to send a hit team him to assassinate Co-macho. They got him.”

  BROWN IS ON THE GENERALISSIMO’S HIT LIST

  “OK, Johnson, let’s hear the whole story,” I replied as I ordered another round.

  Johnson threw back the last of his “Cuba Libre,” settled into his chair and began his tale. “I never did like Bayo, though I admit he was a colorful character. His book, ‘150 Questions for a Guerrilla’ which you published was full of bullshit. However, the book has an enduring appeal even though it is written for a 12-year-old and seems childish. But strange things happen to bored or ambitious middle-class youths who read Bayo. He offers them power. He shows them how ridiculously simple it is. And of course, he throws in generous dollops of guerrilla mystique. Kids study Bayo and they’re transformed; they feel a sense of power in this world he reveals. It all seems so damn simple. But some of his precepts are not only oversimplified but downright dangerous. Take his famed recipe for cooking up nitroglycerine for example. It’s manically simple to produce TNT: boil dynamite and skim off the scum: presto—you’ve got yourself a powerful explosive. Much more likely: presto—you’ve got a big BOOM!”

  The second round of drinks arrived, I tipped the waitress, and Johnson continued. “Bayo was mucking about stirring up trouble wherever he could. We had to do something about him. I asked my boss, General Arturo Es-paillat, also known in trade circles as ‘the Razor’ or ‘the Yellow Cat,’ who was Trujillo’s intelligence chief, ‘How come the Old Man has never tried to eliminate Bayo? We had a perfectly good stable of hired killers sitting around doing nothing. At the time, they were merely between gigs . . . or hits.

  “‘Of course, we don’t do things like that,’ said Espaillat, a West Point graduate who was an aristocrat, suave and cosmopolitan. He could be hilariously funny but he was also the most lethal guy I’ve ever known. He moved through his world like a barracuda through sardines. ‘Why don’t you ask the Jefe?’ ‘Not me,’ I said. Palace protocol was that suggestions came from the Old Man, not to him.’ “

  “So what happened then?” I said, numbed by the cheap booze, but aware enough to know that I had entered into a web of deadly intrigue.

  “It wasn’t long until an opportunity presented itself,” Johnson continued. “I came across something about Bayo and Regino Camacho guaranteed to excite the Generalissimo. I’d been skimming through a stack of intelligence reports when an article from Guns magazine, published in the U.S., stared me in the face. The article, written by one Robert K. Brown, mentioned that an arms factory was being built in Havana.

  “I was stunned. Not a word had I heard about this from our high-priced Havana spies. Not a word! Here I’m reduced to getting top-priority intelligence out of a magazine. I tucked the clipping in my pocket. No one would ever see it. I’ll write my own report. You don’t get any points—or bonuses—in this business for intelligence coups you stumble on in public print.”

  “The Generalissimo got excited, aright. Until now, his San Cristobal arms factory had been the sole source of weapons in the Caribbean area. The factory had been built at enormous expense and operated at a heavy loss—but the Old Man was enormously proud of it. The San Cristobal plant meant that we’d have local access to arms in case of a U.S. embargo— such as one that had just helped destroy Batista’s government and was now being applied to the Dominican Republic.”

  “An arms factory in Castro’s Cuba would wipe out any margin of military superiority the Jefe had over the Cubans. The Generalissimo seemed as upset at another item I’d extracted from your article:

  “‘Those dogs are going to use our San Cristobal design to produce weapons in the Havana Plant?’ the Generalissimo asked.

  “ ‘Si, Jefe, that’s the info I’m getting. I understand from our sources, which got a full account from an American arms expert there, that Regino Camacho is using the San Cristobal design—a modified design, that is. It seems that Camacho’s prototypes were overheating.’

  “ ‘This is that same Camacho you’ve mentioned before? The Camacho who is always making revolution?’ the Generalissimo barked.

  “ ‘Yes, Jefe. He’s Bayo’s man,’ I said. ‘He’s also a genius with weapons. Camacho is the kind of technician who can take a rusty smokestack and turn it into a howitzer. He’s been with Bayo for years . . .’ “

  “The generalissimo made a short, fast chopping motion with his chubby right hand across his neck. I was familiar with the gesture. But I wasn’t quite sure who he meant. ‘Bayo, Jefe?’ I asked hopefully.

  “ ‘Comacho. Draw any extra funds needed from the Officina Particular.’ I nodded.

  “ ‘Now . . . this other arms expert. Who is he?’

  “ ‘I really don’t know, Jefe,’ I admitted. ‘He’s been in our sights for some time. He is said to represent American arms manufacturers. That may be a cover. Brown’—I was referring to you, R.K.—’is an American and has been all over Havana for some months now. He’s been seen with Bayo. . .’

  “Jefe gave another short hard chopping motion. ‘Bayo, Jefe?’ I asked hopefully.

  “‘Brown.’ I must have looked disappointed. The Jefe added: ‘Comacho and Brown only. They can have no arms factories without technicians, can they Roberto?’

  “The hit team was activated. Most of Trujillo’s agents were Cubans who had been on the payroll for years: diplomats, politicians, corrupt cops, gangsters. They were controlled either directly by the Generalissimo or by his intelligence service, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM). Most of these agents had been eliminated by Castro’s organization within a few months of his takeover.

  “However, a second network survived. One with which I was more closely associated. It was made up of a small group of Chinese-Cubans, a couple of expatriate Europeans, a defrocked priest, a Toronto mobster and an elderly Mexican pistolero who had lived in Havana for years. The network was still functional but was starting to disintegrate as pressures increased on Trujillo’s regime. But the old man still was able to have Camacho hit outside Liberty City in January 1960. And you, Brown, had fortunately run out of money and returned to Colorado. You left just in time to avoid being the last corpse chalked up by Trujillo’s once-feared ‘Network of Terror.’”

  I grasped my drink with both hands and was in semi-shock, yet fascinated by how close I had come to buying the farm. I mulled over how I felt about being indirectly responsible for the death of an individual that I had written about.” I said, “Let’s toast Bayo and Camacho for a hell of a story.”

  Johnson, who for reasons unknown, never reached his potential as an author though Paladin Press, did publish his book, H
ow to Be a Mercenary.

  THE HUNT FOR REFUGEES WHO NEEDED RESCUING

  Back to 1960, when I made my third trip to Cuba in March. Bob Berrellez, the AP’s “fireman” for Latin America for many years, and who was involved to an unknown degree in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1972 while working for ITT, graciously put me up in his apartment to save me a buck. Once again, hanging out with the AP staff I realized that the intentions of the Castro regime had drastically changed over the preceding year. The Cuban press and media in general were under the thumb of Castro, who was successfully moving to control all centers of power in the island, be it student, labor or professional organizations. Concurrently, the anti-American tone of the Cuban government spokesman over and above Castro and Che was taking on an ever more vitriolic tone as well as becoming more supportive of the Russians and Communist bloc nations.

  The writing was on the wall but the American government didn’t figure it out until October of ’60 when it finally broke relations with Cuba.

  Castro, the most exceptional caudillo in the history of Latin America, had in fact bamboozled me, but he had also duped the whole world including his own Cuban populace. Hundreds of thousands fled when Castro revealed his true colors. But you have to give the old dictator credit. He was able to confuse the opposition, both latent and active, until it was too late. The problem was that those individuals who eventually withdrew their support from Castro defected, or even went to the mountains to conduct guerrilla warfare against him, did not arise in a mass at one time but, often incrementally over a period of a year, consequently diluting their potential impact.

  After all this intrigue I had titled my Master’s thesis, “The Impact of Revolutionary Politics on the Autonomy of the Cuban Labor Movement.” Most of the former Cuban labor leaders I interviewed, who had been supporters of Castro and in many cases active in the anti-Batista underground, told me, “Ah, we knew that Che was a communist. We knew that Raul was a communist. But we were certain that Fidel would take care of the two when the time came.” Yeah, well, he took care of them but not in the way the anti-communist labor leaders had predicted.

  I kept in contact with some of the 26th of July activists who had supported Castro and then had turned against him, as I had, once it became obvious that he was a Commie in disguise. In the spring of 1962, about a year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, I headed back down to Miami to link up with the activists and interview Cuban exiles for my thesis as well as to see what a small cadre of would-be soldiers of fortune were up to.

  After the Bay of Pigs, Miami was inundated with patriotic, adventurous young male Americans, some with and some without military experience, who wanted to take a crack at Castro, not realizing that for the most part the CIA had all the action locked up. After sleeping on park benches for a couple of weeks, most got the word and headed back to Arkansas, Alabama or wherever. A straggling dozen or so hung around Miami and were involved in nearly every non-CIA plot to overthrow somebody, somewhere in the Caribbean. They were an interesting group of rogues or renegades who simply wouldn’t give in to the humdrum of everyday life. Many plans and plots were discussed, and fantasies fueled by cheap rum were concocted, but none came to fruition.

  I gave my “go directly to jail” Sten submachine gun to Ed Collins, a former Army NCO, and instructed him to see “that it was put to good use.” It was—I suppose. He sold it a few weeks later for $40 for food money. I was successful in locating and interviewing numerous Castro defectors from the Cuban labor movement who provided a wide and varied insight on the machinations Castro used to slowly take control of one of the most powerful non-communist segments of Cuban society.

  I monitored the situation in Cuba as time went on, and in the spring of 1964, after I had completed Airborne School at Ft. Benning, I decided to head out again to Miami to see what kind of adventure/ trouble the remaining soldiers-of-misfortune were getting into and with whom. I heard of plots and plans but nothing materialized.

  There I met Peder Lund, who had bumped into some of the mercs while working as a deckhand on an inter-waterway tugboat.

  “I went to pawn a .357 Magnum and was directed to Nellie’s, where I met the boys,” Peder recalled. Nellie’s was a rundown boarding house catering to anyone with $10—15 a week for a cot and two hots a day.

  In an interview before he died, Marty Casey, a former Marine who had been on the Soldier of Fortune scene in Miami for the prior three years in an abortive attempt to pull some refugees out of Fidel land, remembered meeting Peder.

  “When Peder knocked on the door at Nellie’s, Lil Joe, one of the ne’er do wells, answered. Peder was more than welcome since he carried a two-pound tin of coffee and a carton of cigarettes. A Miami Herald reporter, Don Bohning, had given him our address and told him that we were broke and craving cigarettes and coffee. The cigarettes he bought, and the coffee he found when nobody was looking on the tugboat he worked on. Peder told the boys that he was trying to find a Colorado adventurer by the name of Bob Brown. The name meant nothing to me, but the others perked up and started calling out the various handles this Brown was known for. “The Cowboy,” “the Texan,” “Uncle Bob,” etc., including a few Brown would rather forget. Within a half hour, as they sat swapping lies, there was another knock at the door. Again, Lil Joe answered and let out a loud, ‘Uncle Bob!’ A big smile on his ruggedly handsome face, “Uncle Bob” called out hello and told us he had rented the empty apartment next to ours, and he would be back in a few minutes. He returned, no longer wearing jeans, cowboy boots and shirt. Now in uniform, Captain Robert K. Brown, U.S. Army Reserve, stood in the doorway showing off his newly won paratrooper wings. He would be in town for only eight days, but that was more than ample time for ‘Uncle Bob’ to stir up enough trouble for a lifetime,” Marty said.

  150 QUESTIONS FOR A GUERRILLA

  Peder had run across a copy of “150 Questions for a Guerrilla” at a news-stand in Boulder, Colorado, and wanted to meet “Uncle Bob,” publisher of Panther Publications. “After a few hours swapping dubious tales, ‘Uncle Bob’ invited all to get some chow,” Marty said. “He wanted seafood and the seven of us stuffed ourselves into a ‘51 Dodge and ended up at the New England Oyster House, by Miami International Airport. As we chowed down the seafood delicacies we rarely had the opportunity to savor, the main topics of conversation were the CIA and Cuban exiles. At that time the exile movement was a joke and the CIA’s operations would have been hilarious if it weren’t for the tens of millions being wasted, while a few good souls were being captured and executed. Everything was a mess and very few seemed to care except those who were making big money ripping off the taxpayers.”

  “We got down to serious business when we returned to Lil Joe’s. We still had 12 days left on our boat rental and a lot of weapons. We lacked some ammo and money to buy gas and food; ‘Uncle Bob’ pledged that. When Lil Joe came home from working at a boat builder’s, he called a friend, Edy Mor, a Cuban exile activist. Edy was a member of one of the hundreds of small exile groups who trusted neither the U.S. government nor, much less, exiled politicians. A simple plan was hatched. ‘Uncle Bob,’ Peder and I would take the Toni to the dock in Black Water Sound. The boys would join us there, bringing the weapons and ammo.”

  Marty continued his tale:

  “We got a late start and I soon learned Peder had quite a bit of boat-handling experience. He took the helm and expertly guided Toni next to the tug on which he was employed. There was no one aboard, so we lib -erated a small coffee pot, coffee, sugar cubes, utensils and canned goods. We were not making very good headway and were still off Soldier Key when the sun started to set. Two hours later we were no farther south than Elliot Key and dog tired. Heading toward shore, we spied a small dock and headed for it. We finished tying up when we heard noises coming from up on the dock. A man’s voice coming from behind a flashlight called out, “Do you want to spend the night?” Peder asked if we could tie up and told the man we were headed for Key Largo and we
re too tired to go on. The man said his name was Bill and invited us to his house for coffee. At the end of the dock was a sandy beach. Thirty meters farther, now slightly illuminated by a moon peeking its nose over the eastern horizon, sat an eerie looking, large two-story wood frame house, complete with gables, one of which was loose and slowly swinging and creaking in the slight breeze.

  “The house was Spartan with a small table and chairs, a wood burning stove and a couple buckets of fresh water. We shot the breeze by the light of an oil lamp. Bill was a former medical doctor who had fallen prey to alcohol, or ‘the Irish disease’ as he called it, and was now recovering and worked for the landowner, Arthur Vining Davis. Mr. Davis would send his alcoholic friends down to the key to dry out. Bill’s job was to care for them. The house, built in 1875 of durable Dade county pine, constructed with all dowel work, without a nail, had weathered many a vicious hurricane. But it was haunted by the ghosts of various alcoholics who didn’t leave the key alive,” Marty said.

  “‘You can spend the night here,’ Bill told us as he walked us into a small room illuminated by the candle he carried. As soon as he left, Peder dove into a small cot, leaving ‘Uncle Bob’ and me to share a slightly larger bed. Small beams of moonlight filtering through cracks in the gable and the sound of the broken one added to the eeriness. In no time we were asleep,” Marty said.