Laughter in the Shadows (29 page)

The patrol boat came up fast and was gaining on the De
Gama
when Ernesto pulled the pin on one of the grenades and threw it off the stern. The trail of white smoke from the grenade shielded the De
Gama
temporarily from its pursuers, but a short time later the patrol boat reappeared. Ernesto then threw a second grenade, and Torrance pushed the throttle “full ahead.” The bow of the De
Gama
rose up in the air, and Ernesto grabbed onto the gunwale to keep from falling overboard.

Several minutes later they looked back. The patrol boat had given up the chase and was heading back to Lunda. Torrance eased off the throttle, and the De
Gama
resumed heading north. Two hours later, they reached the port of Katapi, The De
Gama
pulled in and docked alongside its new mother ship, the
Christina
.

Soldiers of Fortune

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling,

And took their wages, and are dead.

—A. E. HOUSMAN, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”

Bongo had once told Rebello that mercenaries had been the key to his rise to power. His stories about “Major Mike”—Mike Hoare, a famous mercenary in Africa—had not been lost on Rebello, whose forces had recently taken a beating and were being pressed hard near Ambrizio.

Former Lance Corporal Cullen, accompanied by two bodyguards, arrived at my house around midnight asking if he could “have a word.” The crew cuts and stiff bearing of the three men gave away their military background. Suspecting they were mercenaries, I asked them to leave, but Cullen wouldn’t budge. He insisted on my hearing him out and promised to be brief. Reluctantly, I relented and let the three men inside.

Inside the house, Cullen removed a .45 caliber pistol from his jacket. He laid the pistol on a table with the comment that it “it wasn’t good form” to wear a sidearm in a host’s home. I motioned for the visitors to sit down, but only Cullen took me up on the offer. The other two men remained standing.

Cullen’s slate-gray eyes matched the barrel of his pistol. They kept darting around the room until they finally locked in on his host. His ramrod posture and steely countenance made me uneasy. At the same time, he had my full attention.

Cullen said he and the others had answered an ad in a London newspaper seeking “soldiers of fortune” to fight in Africa. The ad, which I later learned had been placed by Rebello’s cousin, the FLA representative in London, guaranteed selected applicants good pay and a $10,000 recruitment bonus.

Thirteen applicants, an ominous number as it turned out, were selected and given plane tickets to Bintang, Buwana. They would receive the $10,000 bonus in Bintang from FLA president, Rebello.

When the mercenaries arrived in Buwana, no one from the FLA was at the airport to meet them. Rebello’s cousin had given Cullen, the self-appointed leader of the group, my name and address. Cullen had decided to seek me out to get directions to FLA headquarters.

I tried to keep my anger at Rebello from showing. I was furious that Rebello had given my name and address to his cousin, who in turn had given it to a mercenary. I had warned Rebello when he brought the subject up to have nothing to do with mercenaries, that using “hired guns” would taint the FLA and discredit him as its leader. I had also stressed that it was Agency policy to have nothing to do with mercenaries, and by going behind my back, he had not only made me vulnerable, but also had poisoned the well for Uhuru.

I would deal with Rebello later. The immediate problem was the mercenaries in my house. In a way, I sympathized with their plight. They had been blindsided in London by a fraudulent ad promising them high pay and a bonus they would probably never receive. They hadn’t been told anything about the operation they had signed on for that would most likely, in the end, leave them broke, maimed, and probably dead.

I told Cullen I couldn’t help him. Having any contact with mercenaries was forbidden, and I had made an exception in letting them in. However, since they were here, I would offer them some advice. I told them to go back to the airport and take the next plane for London. If they stayed and ended up in Angafula fighting for the FLA, they would probably not get paid, they would never see their bonus, and there was a good chance they would never return home.

I waited for a reaction and wasn’t surprised when there wasn’t any. Cullen merely nodded, saying they had made a commitment, which they would honor. Cullen said he himself had served in the British army and had fought more
than two years against Chinese communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaysia. Angafula couldn’t be that much different.

I asked Cullen and his bodyguards to come into my study. Unrolling a map of Angafula and spreading it out on my desk, I indicated the “unfriendly” areas, controlled by the PMFA. I then showed them the FLA forward base at Ambrizio, where Rebello would probably send them, tracing the treacherous route from FLA headquarters to the coast.

I told Cullen he and his men would get little support once they left the FLA’s base in Bintang. If they ran into trouble, the FLA wouldn’t be able to support them. Rebello would issue the group rations, arms, and some ammunition and would probably provide them with an FLA escort. But Cullen and his men would basically be on their own. Cullen should also realize that Rebello’s headquarters was penetrated by the PMFA. Their spies would immediately report the departure of Cullen and his group for Ambrizio.

On their way to Ambrizio, they would encounter PMFA patrols and ambushes. When the first shots were fired, his FLA escort would disappear, leaving Cullen and his group on their own. In addition to ambushes and firefights, they would be up against wild animals, poisonous vipers, and crocodiles, and his men would come down with dengue fever, malaria, heat exhaustion, and the green monkey disease.

Cullen’s expression didn’t change. He seemed unperturbed by my stark portrayal of the dangers facing him and his men.

When I finished the briefing, I rolled up the map and brought out three cold beers, and a half hour later they left. Cullen thanked me for the briefing and the beer and said he would not reveal having met me or been to my house.

I told my sentinel to escort them to Rebello’s headquarters.

I never saw Cullen again.

A Fatal Journey

And so, if I take the journey

I fear it might turn out an act of folly.

—DANTE ALIGHIERI,
Inferno

Cullen and his group never made it to Ambrizio. Two weeks after they had left Rebello’s headquarters, they had made it only halfway to the coast. By that time the group was down to ten from the original thirteen. Two had been killed in an ambush; one died from malaria.

Rebello’s escort, as I had warned Cullen, had deserted during the first firefight, leaving the group to fend for itself. With their rations almost gone, the remaining
mercenaries, except for Cullen, wanted to go back. When the ex-corporal ordered them to keep going, they mutinied. Cullen shot two of the mutineers and ordered the others to bury them. He then forced the remainder of his column to push on.

The group was ambushed again and this time overpowered and taken prisoner. They were force-marched to Lunda and tried as spies.

With the exception of Cullen, the mercenaries all signed confessions admitting to being “CIA spies” and were sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. Cullen remained defiant, insisting to the end that he was a soldier and not a spy. He was executed by a firing squad in Lunda’s main square.

True to his promise, Cullen, although tortured and beaten, never revealed having contacted me in Bintang.

A year after I had returned from Buwana, I was contacted by a London lawyer representing Cullen’s widow. He told me Cullen had told his wife before leaving England that he was going to Angafula “on a special mission for the CIA.” When Mrs. Cullen heard he had been executed in Lunda, she contacted the Agency about his death benefits and was advised there was no record of her husband having been employed by the Agency.

Mrs. Cullen was later visited by a former member of Cullen’s group, who had been released from prison in Angafula as part of a special amnesty. He told her about the meeting at my house in Bintang before they left on their ill-fated journey.

Reinforced in her conviction that her husband had been working for the Agency, she asked a lawyer friend if he would try to contact me and support her claim that her husband had worked for the Agency. According to the lawyer, she was desperate, having two children to support and no money.

I told the lawyer I felt sorry for Mrs. Cullen, but I reiterated that her husband had no association with the Agency. I admitted, off the record, that Cullen had come to see me and that I had warned him not to get involved with the FLA. I laid out for him the risks and dangers of going to Angafula and urged him in the strongest terms to return to England. Cullen however, believed he had a commitment to fulfill and refused to take my advice. I added that, as the lawyer was probably aware, Cullen never admitted to any association with the Agency even when tortured and threatened with execution.

The lawyer told me he realized Mrs. Cullen was not entitled to any compensation from the Agency. He wondered however if there was anything I could do “unofficially” to help Cullen’s widow.

I replied, again off the record, that I would make inquiries of a British military friend if he had any idea how to help the widow of a former soldier in Her Majesty’s service.

Several months later, the lawyer called me from London. He had heard that Mrs. Cullen had been granted a war-widow’s pension by the British government.

Mrs. Cullen, like others, will have to cling to the covert shroud surrounding her husband’s death, convinced he died in a noble cause.

Stalin’s Organs and the Cubans

Her plot hath many changes; every day speaks a new scene.

—FRANCIS QUARLES, “Epigram: Respice Fenim”

The Soviets had no intention of allowing Uhuru to upset their plans for Angafula. The MiGs had been a harbinger.

Rebello sent another urgent message asking me to come to Ambrizio. The idyllic town had frayed since our last visit. Fruit and fish vendors’ stalls were bare, the marketplace was deserted, the church boarded up. Rust was inching up the turrets of the half-track panhards in front of Rebello’s headquarters.

As for Robello, I hardly recognized the Saladin firebrand of a few weeks before, chafing to march on Lunda. His pallor was ashen, his cheeks were sunken, and the wrinkles in his forehead seemed to have deepened. The ill-fated march on Lunda had taken its toll, and for the first time I felt sorry for the FLA leader.

We rode to his forward command post, now less than five kilometers from Ambrizio. As the front receded, Colonel Piet had moved his howitzers further to the rear, and his crews were busy digging foxholes and piling sandbags around freshly dug revetments. Colonel Piet came over and handed me a piece of shrapnel. “Souvenir from a ‘Stalin’s Organ.’ Sappho now has a Russian toy in his arsenal.”

Stalin’s Organs, truck-mounted, six-tube, 122-mm rocket launchers, played a key role in the defense of Stalingrad in World War II. Their appearance in Angafula was an ominous sign. An even more ominous escalation in the form of foreign volunteers would follow.

When we returned to Ambrizio, Rebello had another surprise in store for us. Standing in front of the same map he had used to brief us on the abortive Lunda operation, the green arrows pointing from Ambrizio to the capital had been rubbed out. A new line of boat-shaped arrows on the sea pointed toward Lunda.

Rebello tapped his pointer on the line of boats. He said his agents had reported that two ships had landed in Lunda and debarked more than two thousand Cuban troops from the Fidel Castro brigade. The Cuban “volunteers” had been sent directly to the front to reinforce PMFA forces sent to repel FLA troops advancing toward Ambrizio. Rebello’s forces had suddenly come under attack from battalions of Cuban regulars supported by Soviet rocket launchers and had been forced to withdraw.

I had to hand it to the FLA leader. His vaunted march on Lunda had turned into a rout, his entire front was collapsing, and he stood there blaming it all on battalions of Cubans and Stalin’s Organs.

We already had confirmation of the Stalin’s Organs from Piet, but the Cuban intervention was too far-fetched, particularly because Rebello’s “agents” were mostly low-level informants whose reports were concoctions of rumor and gossip. If Cuban troops had been sent from Havana to Angafula, Headquarters would have alerted the Station. Holden was crying wolf to divert attention from the recent rout of his troops during their ill-fated march to Lunda.

Unfortunately for Uhuru, Rebello had not been crying wolf. When I returned to Bintang, a cable was on my desk confirming the departure from Havana of two ships carrying twenty-five hundred troops from the elite Fidel Castro brigade. The message also confirmed their arrival in Lunda.

I had to eat crow and apologize to Rebello.

Stalin’s Organs and the intervention of Cuban “volunteers.” The covert war was spinning out of control.

The Long Round

The real success . . . in frightening [the enemy was] the sound of fired cannon [which] sent every man within earshot behind cover. They thought weapons destructive in proportion to their noise [and] their moral confidence was to be restored only by having guns, useful or useless, but noisy, on their side . . . artillery, artillery, artillery.