Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  With YELLOW FRUIT, Special Operations division chief James Longhofer (who also acted at the division’s CIA liaison) wanted “an organization that was a hidden circle within a circle within a circle. So as people pulled those onion skins away, it would take them a long time to get to the core of the onion to find out that it was really an Army unit.” As part of YELLOW FRUIT’s cover, Lieutenant Colonel Duncan “retired” from the Army to set up a “private” consulting company called Business Security International, or BSI. Working out of an office suite at 4306 Evergreen Lane, Suite 204, in Annandale, Virginia, the company claimed to help commercial firms with security and overseas operations, and to provide services such as “threat analysis, plant security, asset and executive protection . . . private communication systems and providing technical countermeasures.” On the record, BSI’s “customers” included local law enforcement and federal agencies, but in reality, BSI only had one “customer.”

  At YELLOW FRUIT’s Annandale office, black dollars gushed like a broken fire hydrant. More than $300 million disappeared into the Special Operations Divisions’ black world. Unit operators controlled $64,292,335.50 in secret checking accounts. YELLOW FRUIT personnel had expensive tastes: $600 hotel rooms, $1,200 monthly liquor bills. Its accounting files bulged with bogus receipts for tens of thousands of dollars. There were rumors of prostitutes and drugs.

  But there was something else besides the vast network of cutout companies and secret bank accounts, the lavish hotel rooms, and the covert operations. In a YELLOW FRUIT safe was a three-ring binder that Longhofer and Enders dropped off only a few weeks after the secret unit’s offices first opened. On plain white paper without a CIA letterhead was a draft for a remarkable undertaking: to fund the Contras when, as it was becoming clearer was going to happen, Congress unambiguously cut off money for the undeclared war.

  The document called for a three-point plan. First, generate money by selling weapons to other countries at inflated prices (the plan mentioned Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Argentina). Second, set up offshore bank accounts for the Contras. Third, send YELLOW FRUIT operatives to Costa Rica tasked with building clandestine airstrips, opening up a “southern front” against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

  Congress tried to definitively end the secret war in Central America in 1984. That March, a Soviet oil tanker bound for Nicaragua hit an American-laid mine. The explosion injured five crew members and caused heavy damage to the ship. Mining Nicaraguan ports had been Duane Clarridge’s idea, inspired by the efficacy of mines in the Russo-Japanese war. Using Piranha speedboats, UCLAs and Special Forces had laid the mines, although, once again, the Contras took credit. And once again, in reality, the Contras had nothing to do with it.

  Barry Goldwater, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was furious. “You get hold of Bill Casey, and find out what the fuck’s going on.” Mining another nation’s harbors was an act of war. Daniel Patrick Moynihan threatened to resign from the Intelligence Committee over the mining, while Senator David Durenberger complained that “There is no use in our meeting with Bill Casey. None of us believe him. The cavalier, almost arrogant fashion in which he has treated us as individuals has turned the whole committee against him.”

  In 1982, Congress had passed the first Boland Amendment, prohibiting the CIA from spending money “for the purposes of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” The second Boland Amendment, a bill outlawing “military or paramilitary activities in Nicaragua” came in July 1983. In the mining incident’s aftermath, Congress tried once again to shut the secret war down. On October 12, 1984, the last in a series of Boland amendments became law:

  During fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.

  Fortunately for the group of people who’d become known as “the Enterprise,” a backup plan lay in the YELLOW FRUIT vaults. And the Enterprise took over where YELLOW FRUIT left off.

  14

  Anything You Need Anywhere

  Aguacate

  The road to Aguacate runs east from Tegucigalpa on a two-lane highway that narrows and crumbles as it leaves the nation’s capital and meanders toward Honduras’s historic frontier. We’ve driven about five hours toward the mouth of the Black River, the point demarcating Honduras’s west from territory nominally controlled by the Miskito Indians in the east. “About as far from Hondurans’ imagination as northern Alaska is in the U.S.,” says fellow geographer Joe Bryan as our pickup truck lumbers on eastward.

  The highway winds over lush hills and valleys, past thick green ferns, past ubiquitous banana, jacaranda, and acacia trees, past mothers and daughters washing family clothes by hand on the sides of rivers, and past the downed palm trees where peasants brew up powerful coyol liquor (nicknamed “mule kick”). It didn’t used to be as easy to travel through the Olancho province as it is now. A checkpoint controlled all traffic between the cities in the west and the eastern hinterlands. No cameras were permitted into the area. No maps were allowed either. Even homemade sketches of the area were strictly prohibited. The Hondurans, working closely with the Reagan White House, declared that the whole region would be a blank spot on the map as a matter of national security. The reason? There were no Contras in Honduras. That was the official line of the Honduran government, anyway. One stray photograph, one wide-angle camera lens whose angle was a little bit too large, could have easily dispelled that myth.

  It was Ninoska’s idea to visit some of the farmers working in the overgrown fields around the old secret base at Aguacate. A staffer at COFADEH back in Tegucigalpa, she’d been involved in a 2000 excavation where human rights investigators unearthed a mass grave. Ninoska hadn’t been back to Aguacate for nearly a decade. We turned down a dirt road; in the distance a lone woman walked along the roadside carrying a plastic tub on her head. “Can you tell me where the home of Marcos Rivera is?” asked Ninoska. The woman pointed to a small ranch further down the road. We drove up to the makeshift gate, held together with a piece of wire from a coat hanger. A small boy played in the overgrown weeds consuming much of Marcos’s property. His father wasn’t there, said the boy. After a few minutes, a bright red truck turned down the road toward us.

  “It’s a miracle!” Marcos exclaimed when he saw Ninoska. He was wearing shorts, a black T-shirt with an American flag and the words NEW YORK on it, and a yellow baseball hat. A short, stocky man with a warm face and fingers the size of bananas, he was strong but didn’t look old or jaded. Marcos and Ninoska had met when the local man helped out with the mass grave excavation years before. After a round of Cokes on his porch, Marcos agreed to show us the base. Along the way, we picked up his friend Vicente, whose property includes a hill overlooking Aguacate.

  Now little more than a blurred-out patch of jungle on Google Earth, Aguacate had once been a logistics hub and training center in the covert war that “wasn’t happening” in Central America. Helicopters and propeller-driven aircraft had once been the soundtrack to this forgotten piece of the forest, as unmarked aircraft took off to fly clandestine reconnaissance missions over Nicaragua and swooped down to deliver pallets of small arms, cash, and supplies for Contra units based here.

  On the far side of the strip, a collection of Honduran soldiers milled around a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter. We drove up and introduced ourselves to the local colonel, who shook our hands and politely asked us to stay away from the area until his crew got the helicopter off the ground. How different a scene it was from only a few years ago, when the Contras tried to kill a journalist who slipped into the area and photographed the base. The Honduran military detachment here at Aguacate was about to conduct a surveillance flight over the adjacent national park.

>   The truck ambled further into the base and Marcos’s friend Vicente pointed to different holes in the foliage, explaining what structures used to be there. There had been a big generator, storage facilities. “Over there,” he said, pointing to an enclave off to the dirt road’s left side, “was the CIA.” They had big radio antennae, and absolutely no one was allowed in there, he explained. Aguacate had once been his land, said Vicente. The military, he explained, had forced him to sell it for pennies in the early 1980s but allowed him to continue farming parts of it. He was now trying to get the land back.

  When the helicopter took off for its reconnaissance mission over the forest, Ninoska steered our pickup down the dilapidated dirt runway, stopping near a small overgrown path that led into a thick morass of green overgrowth. Joe and I followed Ninoska, Marcos, and Vicente through ferns and bushes to a brick room the size of a big chimney. It was only a few yards away from where Vicente said the old CIA transmitter had been. The forest was slowly taking the brick room back: Its roof had fallen in; the floor was stones and rubble. This was the torture chamber, Vicente explained. They’d put people in here barefoot, he said. The floor used to be a metal slab that they’d heat up with embers. A bar across the ceiling was used to hang people up by their wrists. Prisoners had scratched their names into the brick interior: Seto Lopez, Leche, Mario . . . Vicente himself had spent some time there too, he said obliquely.

  We asked about the bodies investigators uncovered in 2000 behind the old base hospital. “Those were all Contras,” said Vicente, fighters who’d died at the base hospital and had been laid to rest outside. The other bodies, those of the rural leftists and their supporters who’d been tortured and executed at the base, lay elsewhere. “They loaded those corpses onto helicopters at night,” and took them somewhere nearby, said Vicente. “The flights took only fifteen minutes.” Those bodies are still missing.

  As we walked back to the truck, Marcos pointed out where the old hangars had been. There were always planes there, he said, coming in at all hours, “Caribous, Hercules, helicopters, push-pulls.” They were all unmarked, he said, except there was a sky-blue C-130 that would come around. If you looked really closely, Marcos explained, you could see Air Force insignia on it.

  The image of a sky-blue C-130 made me think of Tepper Aviation. A Tepper plane had crashed in the late 1980s while resupplying CIA-supported guerrillas in Angola. Another one of their C-130s had landed at the Desert Rock Airstrip in 2002 as part of the ANABASIS project. They were the only C-130s I knew of with blue paint jobs, but that’s not to say that there weren’t others. Besides, Tepper planes didn’t have Air Force markings.

  “I got to fly on it once,” Marcos offered, “to Swan Island.” I knew that Swan Island was a longstanding CIA outpost in the Caribbean north of Honduras. The agency had used it since the late 1950s, when it set up a radio station on the island to transmit propaganda into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  “What!?”

  “How’d you end up on a U.S. plane going to Swan Island?”

  “I was a mercenary!” he laughed.

  “This Aguacate has a tremendous history,” Vicente said as we walked around the remains of the once-covert airstrip. He pointed to a cul-de-sac at the far end of the runway. A collection of unmarked airplanes lay buried under the red clay dirt over there, he said. Base officials had buried the aircraft once stationed here, lest curious investigators start tracking their registration histories. Digging up aircraft parts and tracing their serial numbers back to the planes they belonged to might be the way things would turn out in a movie, but in this hot, remote land, no one cared enough. Even with the serial numbers, determining their identities would mean spending months trying to piece together a labyrinthine paper trail of front companies and false identities that were both the CIA and the Special Operations Division’s modus operandi. All this would only confirm something everyone already knew.

  There was, however, another possibility. According to the final version of the Iran-Contra report, the fleet of aircraft used by Ollie North and Richard Secord’s Enterprise was last seen at Aguacate.

  The Enterprise started unraveling October 5, 1986, when Sandinista ground forces shot down a DC-123 over Nicaraguan airspace. Inside were a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, seven grenade launchers, and seventy automatic weapons. Eugene Hasenfus was the only survivor from the four-person crew. Hasenfus, who once worked as a loadmaster for the agency in Laos, claimed he was working for the CIA. The CIA denied everything. But littered throughout the downed DC-123’s wreckage were clues to the aircraft’s true purpose.

  At the crash site, the Nicaraguans recovered flight records showing that the plane’s base was at Ilopango, El Salvador, and that it made frequent flights to Aguacate and Morocon, Honduras. Hasenfus told his captors that two Cuban-Americans based in El Salvador—“Max Gomez” and “Ramon Medina”—coordinated the operation for the CIA. In reality, “Gomez” and “Medina” were aliases for Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada Carriles. Both men had long-standing relationships with the CIA but weren’t, strictly speaking, working for the agency on this mission.

  Felix Rodriguez was a longtime CIA operative whose paramilitary work for the agency went back to the Bay of Pigs, where he’d joined David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Ted Shackley, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and others in the failed 1961 attempt to overthrow Castro. Rodriguez formally joined the CIA in the late 1960s, where he posed as a Bolivian military officer named Felix Ramos, assisting in the hunt for Che Guevara. After capturing Guevara in the Bolivian forest, Rodriguez instructed a soldier to execute their prisoner in a way that made it look like Guevara had been shot while fighting. Rodriguez took the slain guerrilla’s Rolex and strapped it on his own wrist as a trophy.

  Rodriguez’s partner at Ilopango was Luis Posada Carilles. Nicknamed “Bamby,” Posada was a former CIA agent trained at Fort Benning in demolitions and guerrilla warfare in the 1960s. In 1976, Posada was responsible for bombing Cubana Airlines flight 455, a Cuban passenger plane, and killing all seventy-three people on board. Imprisoned in Venezuela after the bombing, Posada escaped to Aruba in 1985 by bribing a prison supervisor. Rodriguez supplied Posada with a false passport and a fake identity as “Ramon Medina,” and gave him a $3,000-a-month job on the Iran-Contra staff. Upon his arrival in El Salvador Posada took charge of finances, housing, transportation, and refueling Iran-Contra flights.

  In 1998, Posada claimed responsibility for a series of bombings in Cuban nightclubs the previous year. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama with two hundred pounds of explosives, plotting the assassination of Fidel Castro. After a sudden pardon from the Panamanian government, Posada surfaced in Miami in May 2005, where he was arrested for illegally entering the country. When Venezuela and Cuba demanded his extradition, the United States refused, saying that Posada faced the threat of torture in both countries.

  Headquartered at a restricted section of the Ilopango air base, Rodriguez and Posada ran Iran-Contra’s covert airlift operations with a fleet of five aircraft and a team of about fourteen pilots and crew members. On the books, an unimaginatively named shell company called Corporate Air Service Inc. owned the aircraft. After Hasenfus’s capture, the Salvadorians immediately ordered the operation out of Ilopango. Rodriguez and Posada sent the aircraft to Aguacate.

  When Nicaraguan authorities questioned Hasenfus about Ilopango, the former CIA loadmaster gave up addresses for three San Salvador safe houses. When local investigators checked the phone records from the addresses, they found numerous calls to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

  After a seven-year investigation, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh issued a 1994 report on the Iran-Contra Affair. The Enterprise’s off-the-books activities were as labyrinthine as they were impetuous. They had solicited private funding for the Contras from a diverse network of wealthy allies, including H. Ross Perot, beer magnate Joseph Coors, the Saudi royal family, and the sultan of Brunei. Iran-Contra managers colluded with arms
merchants such Manucher Ghorbinafar, sold arms to Iran, and pocketed much of the proceeds. Continuing the CIA’s off-the-books war in Central America, the Enterprise hired British mercenary David Walker to conduct “special operations” inside Nicaragua, including blowing up an arms dump and providing helicopter pilots.

  According to Senate Iran-Contra Committee chairman Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the Enterprise was “a secret government—a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fund-raising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all the checks and balances and free from the law itself.”

  At Marcos’s dairy farm near Aguacate, we sat on the porch drinking cold water, hiding from the summer sun under the canopy of potted plants surrounding his house and talking about what happened to Honduras after the American military (and American money) left the country. Joe had heard rumors that Aguacate became a major hub of cocaine smuggling after the CIA, the SOD, and the Enterprise left. “That was nothing compared to the eighties,” said Marcos. He started rattling off the names of people he said were from the Medellín cartel who frequented the air base during the eighties. A man named Michelangelo, a pair of brothers. “Every night, there was plane after plane . . . they had some kind of arrangement with the military and with the Americans.”

  In Marcos’s estimation, things had gone to hell with the end of the Cold War. The USS Honduras was dismantled; American military dollars dried up. It was like, “Take all these guns! Go sell cocaine! Go join private security firms!” laughed Marcos about the prevailing spirit after the wars.