Kingdom of Fear (27 page)

I believe the government has not only a right but an obligation to lie to the people.

—Jody Powell,
Nightline
(ABC News), October 26, 1983

There are some interesting attitudes on the street these days, and not all of them come from strangers. Old friends call me late at night from places like Nassau and New York and Bangkok, raving angrily about suicide bombers in Lebanon. They call me from the Blue Lagoon Yacht Club on the south side of St. Vincent, offering big boats for hire to run the blockade around the war zone in Grenada, only 100 miles away. I get collect calls from Miami and from federal prison camps asking me who to vote for. The janitor at the Woody Creek Tavern wants to join the U.S. Marines and kill foreigners for a living.

“They have a buddy system,” he said. “We could join together and go to the Caribbean.”

“Or Lebanon,” I said. “Any place with a beach.”

He shrugged. The difference between Lebanon and Grenada was not clear in his mind. All he wanted was some action. He was a dope fiend, and he was bored.

Five years in a trailer court on the fringe of the jet-set life had not agreed with him. His teeth were greasy and his eyes were wet and he was too old to join the Marines. But there was excitement in his voice. In late afternoons at the Tavern, he would stand at the bar with the cowboys and watch the war news on network TV, weeping openly and cracking his knuckles as Dan Rather described combat scenes from Grenada, leathernecks hitting the beach, palm trees exploding, natives running for cover, helicopters crashing into jagged mountainsides.
I called the Blue Lagoon Yacht Club on the south side of St. Vincent the other day and asked for the manager, Mr. Kidd. Another man came on the line and said Mr. Kidd was gone to Barbados for a while, with some people from the CIA. Well, I thought, why not? We will all work for them sooner or later.

“So what?” I said. “I need a boat. Who’s in charge there?”

“I am,” he replied. “There are no boats, and Mr. Kidd is gone.”

“I need a boat tomorrow,” I said. “For seven days, to Grenada.”

“To Grenada?” he said. “To the war?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I need something fast, around forty feet, with radar and triple sidebands. I have plenty of money. Mr. Kidd knows me well.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Mr. Kidd’s gone.”

“When do you expect him back?” I asked.

“Maybe never,” he replied.

“What?” I said. “What’s happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “He went to the war. Maybe he got killed.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I was thinking.

“All hell broke loose around here,” he said finally. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that.”

“It’s big business,” he said. “Mr. Kidd even sold his own boat. They had seabags full of hundred-dollar bills. I’ve never seen so much money.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you have any planes for hire?”

There was another pause, then he laughed.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me a number and I’ll get back to you.”

Indeed, I thought, you treacherous sot. There was something odd in the man’s voice. I said I was between planes in the Dallas airport and would call him back later.

“Who is this?” he asked. “Maybe I’ll hear from Mr. Kidd.”

“Tell him Dr. Wilson called,” I said, “from Texas.”

He laughed again. “Good luck,” he said.

I hung up, feeling vaguely uneasy, and called a travel agent.

. . .

Forty hours later, I was on a plane from Barbados to Pearls Airport in Grenada. There was no need for a boat after all. LIAT Airlines was flying again, running four flights a day into the war zone, and every seat was taken. There was no such thing as a secure reservation on the Liberation Shuttle once the blockade was lifted. It was an ugly ride with a long sweaty stop in St. Vincent, and most of the passengers were edgy.

News reports from Grenada said the invasion was over and the Cuban swine had surrendered. But there were still snipers in the hills around the airport and along the road to St. George’s. The Marines, still reeling from the shock of 289 dead from a single bomb in Beirut a week earlier, were not getting much sleep on this island.

THE WRONG IS ALWAYS WRONG

—Grenadian Voice,
November 26, 1983

The pros and cons of bombing the insane—even by accident—was only one of the volatile questions raised by the invasion of Grenada. It was a massive show of force by the U.S. Military, but the chain of events leading up to it was not easy to follow. Some people said it was a heartwarming “rescue mission,” 2,000 Marines and paratroopers hitting the beach to pluck 400 or so American medical students out of the jaws of death and degradation by bloodthirsty Cubans. Others said it happened because Castro had loaned his friend Maurice Bishop $9 million to build a new airport on the island, with a runway 10,000 feet long and capable of serving as a Cuban military base on the edge of strategic sea-lanes in the south Caribbean. And still others called it a shrewd and finely planned military move, a thing that had to be done once the neighboring islands asked formally for American help. “We did the right thing for the wrong reasons,” a ranking Democratic Party official told me on the telephone just before I left for Grenada. “You know I hate to agree with Reagan on anything at all, but in this case I have to go along with him.”

Well, I thought. Maybe so. But it was hard to be sure, from a distance of 4,000 miles, so I decided to have a look at it. The trip from Woody Creek to Grand Junction to Denver to Atlanta to Miami to Barbados to Pearls Airport on the north shore of Grenada took two days, and by the time I got there I had read enough newspapers in airports
along the way to have a vague grip on the story, at least on the American side of it.

A crowd of local Stalinists had run amok in Grenada, killing everybody who stood in their way and plunging the whole island into terrorism, looting, and anarchy. The murdering swine had even killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada’s answer to JFK, and after that they’d planned to kill, capture, or at least maim hundreds of innocent American medical students who were trapped like rats on the island. A battalion of U.S. Marines, en route to Lebanon in response to the disaster two days earlier at the Beirut airport, was instead diverted to Grenada, along with a U.S. Navy battle fleet and the 82nd Airborne, to crush Communist mutiny and rescue American citizens.

This task had been quickly accomplished, without the burden of any civilian press coverage, and Defense Department film of the actual invasion showed U.S. troops in heroic postures, engaging the enemy at close quarters and taking 600 Cuban prisoners. It was a fitting response to the massacre at the U.S. Marine compound in Lebanon, except that it happened 7,000 miles away and the Arabs called it a bad joke. “It was just another cowboy movie,” a Syrian diplomat told me several weeks later in the lounge of the United Nations Plaza Hotel. “All it proved was that Americans would rather shoot than think.”

There was no shortage of conflicting opinions on the invasion of Grenada. It was called everything from “hysterical gunboat diplomacy” to a long-overdue assertion of the Monroe Doctrine, a swift and powerful warning to any other so-called revolutionaries who might try to seize turf in the American Hemisphere. “We taught those bastards a lesson,” said a businessman at the Ionosphere Club in Miami International Airport. “Fidel Castro will think twice before he tries a trick like this again, and so will the Sandinistas.”

In Grenada with Loren Jenkins, 1984 (Laura G. Thorne)

. . .

Wisdom is cheap in airport bars and expensive Third World hotels. You can hear almost anything you want, if you hang around these places long enough—but the closer you get to a war zone, the harder it is to speak with strangers about anything except the weather. By the time I got to Barbados, only an hour away from Grenada, not even my fellow passengers in the standby line at LIAT Airlines had anything to say about the invasion or what they were doing there. I did the last leg of the trip without saying a word to anybody. About half the people on the plane, a hellishly hot DC-4 that stopped for a while in St. Vincent’s, were white men of indeterminate origin. Some, carrying locked attaché cases of expensive camera equipment, wore faded T-shirts from long-lost hotels in the Orient. I recognized Al Rakov, from Saigon, but he pretended not to know me and I quickly understood.

Things got worse when the plane touched down in Grenada. The seedy little airport was a madhouse of noise and confusion, jammed with sweating immigrants and American troops carrying M16s. People with odd passports were being jerked out of line and searched thoroughly. Cobra helicopters roared overhead, coming and going like drone bees, and the whole place was surrounded by rolls of sharp concertina wire. It was very much a war zone, a bad place to break any rules. A typewritten “notice to journalists” was tacked on a plywood wall by the immigration desk, advising all those with proper credentials to check in and sign the roster at the military press center in St. George’s, on the other side of the island.

It was dark by the time I cleared Customs. A man named Randolph helped me load my bags into the back of his old Chevrolet taxi, and we took off for the St. George’s Hotel. The road went straight uphill, a series of blind S-turns with a steep drop-off on one side and wet black cliffs on the other.

It was an hour’s drive, at least, and the road was scarred every six or eight feet with deep, teeth-rattling potholes. There was no way to relax, so I thought I might as well ask Randolph how he felt about the invasion. He had not said much since we left the airport, but since we were going to be together for a while and I wanted to stop somewhere along the way for a cold beer, a bit of conversation seemed in order. I did it more out of old journalistic habit than anything else, not expecting any real information, but Randolph surprised me.

“You are asking the right person,” he said sharply. “You are talking to a man who lost his wife to the Revolution.”

Whoops, I thought. There was something in the tone of his voice that caused me to reach into my satchel for a small tape recorder. Randolph was eager to talk, and he had a story to tell. All I had to do was ask a question now and then, to keep pace with him, as we drove in low gear through the darkness.

It was a narrow country road, the main highway across the island, past Grenville and Great Bay and over the steep volcanic humps of Mt. Lebanon and Mt. Sinai, through the Grand Etang Forest. There were small houses along the way, like a back road in New England, and I settled back to listen as Randolph told his tale. At first I took him for a CIA plant; just another eloquent native taxicab driver who happened to be picking up journalists at the airport when they finally emerged from the Customs shed and looked around them to see nothing more than a cluster of wooden shacks in a palm grove on the edge of the sea. Pearls Airport looks like something that was slapped together about fifty years ago in the Philippines, with a dirt road bordering the airstrip and a few dozen native functionaries hanging around the one-room Bar & Grocery.

The population of the whole island is 110,000, about the size of Lexington, Kentucky, and population density is roughly one person per square mile—compared to one person per square foot in Hong Kong. This is clearly an undeveloped island, nothing at all like Barbados or Jamaica or Trinidad, and it is hard to imagine anything happening here that could make headlines all over the world and cause an invasion by the U.S. Marines.

But Randolph explained that things were different on the other side of the island, where the recent violence had happened. He welcomed the U.S. invasion, he said. It had freed him, at last, from the grip of a cruel situation that had been on his neck like an albatross ever since he and his wife had decided to join the Revolution, almost five years ago.

Neither one of them had been Communists, at the time, and Marxist was just another word he’d picked up in school, along with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard and the other neighborhood kids. All they knew about the U.S.A., back then, was that it was a big and powerful country where cowboys and soldiers killed Indians. They knew nothing at all about Russia, Cuba, or guns.

But things changed when Grenada became independent. Some of the boys went off to school in England, and they came back feeling ambitious. The new government was corrupt, they said; the prime minister was crazy, and the world was passing them by. Bishop and a few of his friends decided to start a political party of their own, which they called the New Jewel Movement. It was The People’s Party, they said; mainly young people, with a hazy socialist platform and reggae music at rallies. Hundreds of people joined, creating a nucleus of grassroots enthusiasm that forced Eric Gairy out of office and replaced him with Maurice Bishop.

Randolph went along with it, he explained, because he believed the New Jewel Movement was going to make a better life for all the Grenadian people. He knew most of the leadership personally, and he was, after all, a businessman. While Bishop had gone off to the London School of Economics and Coard was at the University of Dublin, Randolph was climbing the ladder of commerce as an independent trucker and saving money to buy his own home. When the New Jewel came to power, he was not without friends in high places. Among them were Hendrick Radix, the new attorney general, and Hudson Austin, soon to be appointed commanding general of The People’s Revolutionary Army. It was a heady time, for Randolph, the year of life in the fast lane. He had a home on a hill in St. George’s, a commercial trucking license, and enough personal influence to get his new wife a job at party headquarters.