Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  Further up the hill, Maria stopped the truck next to a gate leading down a road to a small school. “They found the next bodies here,” she said, “one month after the first.” Again, it was the villagers who found the half-buried corpses, and once again, the dogs had found them first. This time there were five. These bodies were also never identified.

  The trip continued like this, winding through the mountains on dirt roads, Maria stopping at landmark after landmark where the bodies showed up once the Argentines came to Honduras. Two pine trees standing next to one another far up in the mountains mark where the body of an unidentified woman wearing white pants was found. More bodies were found in a ravine where two trees cross to form an X shape. More in a dark gully off the side of the red dirt road. So many unidentified bodies had shown up here that locals took to calling it the “plains of death,” Maria explained.

  After the sun had fallen and the foliage had turned black, we arrived at a locked gate in the Amarateca Valley where a long dirt driveway leads up toward a walled hacienda, its thick concrete walls beginning to crumble. Lightning bugs glided through the dark underbrush. As we walked up the driveway hill, we saw the silhouettes of three children sitting in each other’s arms on the wall above us. They said little. Their mother had yet to come home from town. Maria knew the children. Their family had moved into the smaller of two houses on the property a few years ago. The children had watched as a team of forensic anthropologists excavated the white plaster house adjacent to their own, the former home of General Amilcar Zelaya.

  We walked through the open doorway into the cavelike concrete house. It was too dark to make out anything more than the scuffed white walls and empty window spaces. Maria pointed out how the architecture is set up so that there are independent entrances and exits to nearly every part of the concrete house, allowing rooms to be effectively cordoned off from one another. I started to take pictures. The white burst of my camera flash lit up the walls for an instant, revealing black outlines drawn with magic markers. Numbers next to each shape identified the uneven circles, oblongs, and amoebalike figures. Some covered entire walls; others were the size of silver dollars. One outline took the shape of a deformed handprint. The forensic team had drawn the marks around places where Luminol sprayed on the walls glowed bright blue as it reacted with the trace iron in human hemoglobin. Residue from bloodstains someone had tried to wash away. Zelaya’s house was a torture chamber where an unknown number of disappeared people had spent their last days. Outside the house, Maria led us into a small, square brick building with a water tank on top. Inside, the back wall was riddled with bullet holes. When the forensic team applied Luminol to the brick room, the whole interior lit up. This was where Battalion 316 carried out the final executions.

  Learning of the disappearances, Ambassador Jack Binns continued sending alarmed cables to Washington: “I am deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations . . . of political and criminal targets, which clearly indicate GOH [Government of Honduras] repression has built up a head of steam much faster than we had anticipated.” The ambassador urged the United States to “try to nip this situation in the bud,” recommending that the United States should threaten to block military aid to Honduras if the repression continued. “There was no official response to this cable or to the strategy I proposed. In fact, State and the Reagan administration continued to ignore Honduran human rights abuses . . . ,” he said.

  Washington had already warned Binns to “back off all that liberal stuff.” A few months later, Reagan replaced Binns with John Negroponte. Instead of canceling military aid to Honduras, the Reagan administration increased it dramatically. Disappearances, death squads, and torture aside, Honduras would be the staging ground for not-so-secret wars against Nicaragua.

  In the white world, military aid to Honduras rocketed from $8.9 million in fiscal year 1981 to $31.3 million in FY 1982. In FY 1983, it shot to $48.3 million, and it reached a plateau at $77.3 million in FY 1984. Other forms of aid, often indirectly intended for the Contras, came in other forms. From August 1983 until January 1984, the U.S. military staged the BIG PINE II military exercise involving four to five thousand troops, mock bombing runs by fighters based on offshore aircraft carriers, amphibious Marine landings, and large-scale “counterinsurgency operations” along the Nicaraguan and El Salvadorian borders. Nineteen warships, over two hundred jet fighters, and twenty thousand personnel were marshaled to the region.

  The BIG PINE exercises created a substantial new military infrastructure in Honduras. U.S. engineers built new roads, improved old ones, and constructed barracks, training camps, hospitals, and storage depots. Construction began on air bases at San Lorenzo, Trujillo, and Tiger Island. At Palmerola Air Base (later known as Soto Cano), north of Tegucigalpa, the military built a state-of-the-art command center to support the exercises. By 1985, the country was home to so much U.S. military basing that it earned the nickname the USS Honduras, as if the country had become a giant American aircraft carrier.

  But the USS Honduras was only the visible part of an undeclared war.

  From secret air bases and safe houses scattered throughout Central America, black Army units and CIA operatives waged very hot and very secret wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, and, above all, against Nicaragua. The black war in Central America, moreover, would become more than just a blueprint for the post-9/11 war on terror. In a very real sense, the war on terror was already in full swing twenty years before September 12, 2001.

  On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, initiating a 444-day hostage crisis and a geopolitical domino effect across the world. That event would transform geographies from Iraq to Honduras, Beirut to Washington. Facts on the ground in Iran would change the makeup of American politics and serve as a backdrop to a dramatic expansion of the secret state.

  Responding to the hostage situation, President Carter authorized Operation RICE BOWL, an ad hoc rescue attempt drawing on disparate units from all of the armed services. It failed spectacularly. When an RH-53D helicopter crashed into a fuel-filled C-130 at the Desert One staging site, the ensuing explosion killed eight servicemen, ended the mission, and left a scene of smoldering wreckage in the Iranian desert. Members of the newly formed Delta Force unit and other soldiers working with Joint Task Force 179 flew dejectedly home from Egypt on a C-141 transport.

  Within hours of the failed rescue attempt, President Carter authorized planning for a follow-on operation that would become known as SNOWBIRD. Its various components would fall under code names like CREDIBLE SPORT and HONEY BADGER. An investigation led by Admiral James Holloway found that the first operation had failed, in a nutshell, because Joint Task Force 179 was ill-prepared. The units hadn’t properly trained together; the military had no long-range, quick insertion helicopters and no aircraft designed to covertly insert Special Forces troops into a country undetected. Moreover, the CIA had been either unwilling or unable to provide tactical intelligence to the task force over the course of the mission. To remedy the situation and to prevent a repeat of the fiasco, Holloway recommended the creation of “a Counterterrorist Joint Task Force . . . as a field agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with permanently assigned staff personnel and certain assigned forces.”

  The Pentagon set to work creating a series of new units specifically designed to conduct black operations like the operation in Iran.

  To fill the need for highly trained special operations helicopter pilots, the Army created a Special Operations helicopter unit called Task Force 160, which eventually became the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). Based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the mottoes of these “Night Stalkers” were “NSDQ” (Night Stalkers Don’t Quit) and “Death Waits in the Dark” spoke to the unit’s expertise: flying low-altitude, long-range night missions in support of Special Forces operations.

  The Night Stalkers had a black counterpart in a second aviation unit called SEA
SPRAY. SEASPRAY was a joint Army-CIA unit flying Cessnas, King Airs, and Hughes MD500 helicopters. Although the unit took its funding from the Army, SEASPRAY took the CIA as its model: Its equipment was kept “off the books,” its aircraft were kept out of the official Army inventory (the “Gold Book”), and the operation was hidden from the “uncleared” Defense Department brass and congressional reviewers. Modeled on a classic CIA proprietary, SEASPRAY used a civilian cover called Aviation Tech Services to hide the aircrafts’ true ownership and purpose. The unit had its headquarters at Fort Eustis, Virginia, under the name First Rotary Wing Test, a bland name that served as an internal Army cover. SEASPRAY also operated out of a secret site in Tampa to support activities in Central America.

  The Army created other black units to fill gaps that the failed mission in the Iranian desert made so dramatically visible. One of the problems, in the Army’s estimation, was that it had no independent tactical intelligence capabilities: It had to rely on the CIA for up-to-the-minute information about the hostage situation in Iran, but the CIA hadn’t delivered. To prepare for SNOWBIRD, the Army wanted to know as much as possible about the situation at the embassy. The Army wanted to know where guards were positioned, how many rounds their weapons carried, and what kinds of locks were on the gates. The Army, in short, wanted its own clandestine boots on the ground, its own mini-CIA. In order to meet this need, the Army created an outfit called the Field Operations Group, or FOG: a collection of fifty temporary-duty personnel who would serve as an “ad hoc organization composed of selected personnel who were trained to fill critical intelligence and operational [needs].” FOG would later become one of the most secret units in the Army, the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA).

  The “go” command for operation SNOWBIRD never came. On January 19, 1981, the United States and Iran signed the Algiers Accords. Iran released the hostages the next day, just minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration to the White House.

  Although the black army units such as Task Force 160, SEASPRAY, the ISA, and Delta Force had been created in response to events unfolding in the Middle East, they quickly found themselves conducting massive operations in Central America.

  In February 1982, SEASPRAY set up shop at San Pedro Sula in northwest Honduras. Using a modified Beechcraft 100, the unit flew surveillance missions over El Salvador, monitoring the positions of guerillas and relaying the information to the Salvadorian army. Operation QUEENS HUNTER was so successful that the Special Operations Division had to fight off the Army Southern Command, who wanted to take control of the mission. When U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte sided with the Special Operations contingent in the ensuing intra-Army turf war, the Special Operations Division program not only stayed in place but started to dramatically expand. Operation QUEENS HUNTER quickly outgrew its base at San Pedro Sula as more planes and personnel arrived: SEASPRAY units, Delta Force “shooters,” and ISA signals intelligence operators. The covert operations expanded to Honduras itself and Nicaragua.

  As the black operations spread throughout Central America, so did the scale and scope of their civilian cover. Congress had prohibited the military from using proprietary companies during the 1970s as part of the post-Watergate reforms, so the Special Operations Division’s civilian fronts were slightly different than their CIA counterparts in that they weren’t financially independent, as some of the CIA proprietaries were. It was, at best, a technical distinction. One of the SEASPRAY “cutouts” was a paper company called Airamco, based in La Jolla, California, which could issue checks for services to SEASPRAY aircraft, keeping the Army’s name off the paper trail. Airamco had a subdivision called Shenandoah Aerolease, which owned and leased SEASPRAY aircraft. In the QUEENS HUNTER program, for example, Shenandoah owned the planes, while Airamco contracted with the Honduran government to fly “electromagnetic surveys.” Other front companies hid related parts of the operation. The Army was creating its own version of the CIA.

  Bill Casey, who assumed the CIA helm with the incoming Reagan administration, was determined to win back ground the agency had ceded during the Church and Pike investigations. An old OSS veteran, the new director referred to congressional intelligence committees (instituted in the aftermath of Watergate) as “those assholes on the hill.” He mumbled incomprehensibly through his briefings, when he bothered to brief the intelligence committees at all. Moreover, when he accepted the job as DCI, Casey had insisted that the post be elevated to a cabinet-level position in the Reagan administration. This would make him one of the most powerful CIA directors in history.

  Casey chose former Rome station chief Duane “Dewey” Clarridge as his new Latin America Division chief and asked for a proposal. Clarridge turned around with a simple two-point plan:1. Take the war to Nicaragua.

  2. Start killing Cubans.

  “It was exactly what Casey wanted to hear,” Clarridge recounts in his memoirs. “A smile broke across his rumpled countenance as he asked me to produce a Presidential Finding to cover and fund the operation.” Shortly thereafter, swarms of unmarked planes began filling the skies over Honduras, often intruding into Nicaraguan airspace. The CIA replaced the Argentine trainers at Lepaterique with its own people.

  The long-held fiction behind the massive covert action effort was that its purpose was nothing more than “interdicting arms” that were supposedly flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvadorian rebels. In the aisles of gun shows and in hushed tones among soldiers of fortune, word was out that there was good money to be made in Central America doing work behind Nicaragua’s borders.

  Casey first heard of the black army units in a secure room at Langley at a secret briefing on the Army’s Special Operations Division in October 1982. Casey learned about the special operations, the counterterrorism forces, and the SOD’s access to the incredible resources of the U.S. Army. He liked what he saw. The DCI understood immediately the possibilities that a close collaboration with the Army might open up. Casey requested a formal liaison between the CIA and SOD. Casey may have realized something else at the briefing: that the military wasn’t subject to the same executive and congressional oversight over its covert activities. The SOD didn’t require presidential “findings,” nor was it explicitly required to inform congressional intelligence committees of its work. For the most part, the post-Watergate rules applied to the CIA, not the military. In the words of author Steven Emerson, the secrecy afforded the Special Operations Division a huge amount of autonomy: “[The division] was building to something much greater than its present form, but at the same time, the chain of command that mattered most—the Army leadership—had little idea of what was going on . . . the Division was emerging as a parallel military organization within the Army.”

  The new black military units started becoming intertwined with the CIA as the division’s liaison to the CIA, James E. Longhofer, worked closely with Rudy Enders, head of the CIA’s Special Activities Group. Their close collaboration meant that the CIA gained access to the division’s secret army.

  The covert war against Nicaragua escalated. On March 14, 1982, a squad of CIA-trained and -equipped saboteurs bombed two bridges in northern Nicaragua: one near Somotillo and the other near Ocotal. “Who lives? Somoza!” was the battle cry before the destruction of a bridge at Rico Coco.

  September 8, 1983, saw two lightweight planes appear over Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. One dropped bombs on a residential neighborhood near the home of the foreign minister Miguel D’Escoto. That plane escaped. The second, a Cessna 404, wasn’t so lucky. After attacking the Managua airport with two 150-pound bombs, it was shot down by antiaircraft fire and crashed into a control tower. Although Eden Pastora’s faction of southern Contras claimed responsibility for the bombings, the CIA’s fingerprints were all over the wreckage. The pilot, Agustin M. Roman, was a former Sandinista who’d defected to Pastora’s ARDE group the previous year. The plane itself had been recently owned by a McLean, Virginia, outfit called the Investair Leasing Corporation, whose manager was a
man named Edgar L. Mitchell. It turned out that Mitchell had been an executive at Intermontain Aviation, which had been one of the CIA’s largest proprietary companies before it was liquidated in 1975. Investair’s marketing director, Mark L. Peterson, had a similar past with agency proprietaries: He’d been an executive at Air America. Officials in the Reagan administration acknowledged providing support to Pastora’s group.

  The same day as the Managua bombings, a Nicaraguan pipeline at Puerto Sandino exploded. Although FDN Contras took responsibility for the bombing, Contra spokesperson Edgar Chamorro would later explain that “the FDN had nothing whatsoever to do with this operation . . . we were instructed by the CIA to publicly claim responsibility in order to cover the CIA’s involvement. We did.” In reality, American covert operatives from the CIA and the Army’s Special Operations Division were working with mercenaries recruited from throughout Central America to conduct covert operations against Nicaragua and, according to one former mercenary, “make it appear that the Contras had done it.”

  One of the problems of having so many new undercover Army units had to do with operational security (OPSEC): how to keep their activities and existence secret. Although the Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence (ACSI) was nominally in charge of providing OPSEC to military units, when the SOD went to ask for help, ACSI told them to take a number. The Special Operations Division took matters into their own hands. Their solution to the OPSEC problem? Create a new black unit in charge of operational security. In June of 1982, the Army leadership approved the creation of an “operational security/counterintelligence detachment” within the Special Operations community. Run by a young officer named Lieutenant Colonel Dale E. Duncan, the new outfit took the name YELLOW FRUIT.