Tuesday, October 2, 2018

The SOF Wild Bunch -

THE SOF WILD BUNCH

December 11, 2016 

THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE WILD BUNCH 

THE RIGHT WING SALVO MILITARY AND SOF SUPPORT THE CONTRAS

By Dr. Martin Brass
From the November 2007 issue of Soldier Of Furtune. 

In the first three parts of the saga of the American Merc, Harry Claflin, Harry described his exciting nine year stint as a merc working for the Salvadorans during the decade long civil war. Harry may well be the American who played the lengthiest role in helping the Salvadoran government fight the left wing opposition supported by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

THE CONTRA FIASCO

“Spring of 1985, I get an urgent call from SOF to get back to the United States. It was an emergency, RKB told me.”

The adventure seeking Harry’s lust for intrigue and urgency were on high alert. RKB was about to implement yet another one of his schemes.

“The Salvadorians and I put some plans on hold. The other American recruits for RKB’s venture, which we shortly found out was to train the Contras, flew into Denver where RKB immediately warned us that the whole operation was to be clandestine. RKB puts us up in a hotel– the posh Brown Palace in Denver–this is all top-secret stuff.

It would take a very creative mind to imagine that a bunch of tall, muscular mean looking; scruffy, bearded guys with killer eyes would have any sort of chance to blend in with the stuffy, fat cat suit types booked into the Brown Palace Hotel.

“I’m down at the bar and I’m told that Major General John Singlaub was going to interview us for a special mission in Nicaragua. Singlaub was to be the Commander.

THE FORMIDABLE MERCs

“RKB recently recruited retired Lt. Col. John Boykin, who had been the deputy commander of the El Salvador MilGroup, had been in Special Forces in Nam, and was CO in Ranger School, to serve as team leader. “Topaz”, a superb SF Medic that RKB had met in Nam was to conduct medical training. Jack Thompson, small arms and sniper specialist, and John “IW” Harper, a legendary retired CIA demo expert, and RKB rounded out the wild bunch. I was to handle commo and small units tactics,” Harry recalled.

U.S. Major General John Singlaub, USA (Ret.) had been an OSS member during World War II. He served as Chief of Staff of the United Nations and U.S. Army Forces in South Korea in 1977. He retired that year after he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea.
“We were driven up to Fraser, Colorado where Singlaub lives. He brings us in one at a time up in his office, which was outfitted like a war room. He grilled me about Force Recon, SpecOps, how long I had been in El Salvador. We were interviewed and accepted and then found out what the big picture was.

ORDERS FROM THE GENERAL

“’Gentlemen, you will leave here and travel to Tegucigalpa with your equipment and link up with members of the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (FDN). You will then be taken to Camp Las Vegas, the main Contra base on the Nicaraguan border. There, you will set up and conduct training for select units for deep penetration operations into Nicaragua,” Gen. Singlaub was in combat mode.

“The length of training for the mission will be 90 days, starting from the time you get to Camp Las Vegas. Training sites have already been selected, and the Contra units will be there waiting for you. Each of you is an expert in your field, so you need not be told what to do. Thank you, and good luck’”, the short, scraggy, powerfully built commander said.

Little did the General know.

“We were going to train up the Contra’s elite commando unit like we had trained the GOE (Groupos Operationes Especiales) in El Salvador.

“Singlaub implied that President Reagan was behind this. Don’t forget that Singlaub had worked with Casey, the Director of the CIA during WWII, so we assumed that Casey had signed off on this,” Harry said.

JUST ANOTHER GUY IN A SUIT

Indeed, Singlaub was a zealot, and a prominent member of the World Anti-Communist League. He was going to fight the Leftist Sandinistas that had taken over Nicaragua, and along with William Casey, Richard Secord and Oliver North, was later charged with involvement in the conspiracy to provide arms to the Contras.

“I’d seen Ollie North down there in early 1985 when I was in the office of Col Renkin, the leading U.S. Air Force advisor in El Salvador’s office. As far as I was concerned, North was just another person in a suit. Lots of people came in and out of that office, where I had my desk, but I didn’t pay any attention to them since it normally had nothing to do with me. I didn’t know who North was until I saw him on television. It was two or three times I had seen him, with each visit being a few months apart.”

It wasn’t until much later that Harry realized the impact North would have on the Contra situation and on the next wild adventure he was about to embark on.

WHERE ARE THE CONTRAS?

“We get everything set up. We fly to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with two tons of gear where we were supposed to be met by a Contra delegation.

“Our SOF readers believed in the cause and donated the tons of equipment and gear,” RKB interjected proudly.

“Nobody was there,” Harry continued describing the debacle. “Singlaub must have thought he was still a general in the U.S. army and that everyone would jump to his command. Not so with the Contras.

“The customs people were looking at us funny. We were there with illegal military supplies and bomb making material. Boykin contacted Mike Lima, a prominent Contra combat leader, who had lost a hand in a mortar accident.

“He welcomed us, ‘nice to see you. What are you doing here?”

“’We have some gear here’, we said.

“’We’ll bring some trucks over’,” he said.

“He brought one little Toyota pickup, which wouldn’t put a dent in the load of medical supplies, training gear, uniforms, and a mess of other equipment.

“They go back and get some more trucks and take us over to this house. We get to this house that has no furniture and they tell us that this is a safe house. IW and I bunk up together; Boykin is in the room with Topaz. We stay there for about a week twiddling our thumbs with nothing to eat but our C rations while the Contras are trying to get their act together.

“They are contacting different people, among them the Calero brothers, Mario and Adolpho, who we had seen in Florida on our way down and were supposed to coordinate the mission in Honduras.

“Then finally RKB shows up and we move to a hotel. This is like March of 1985. RKB, enraged, calls Singlaub, who calls Mario Calero, who gets transport for us to go to Camp Vegas, the main Contra base. It had been hacked out of the jungles and the last hundred miles of road was nothing but a bulldozed trail,” Harry said.

THE BELOVED CAMP VEGAS

“Camp Vegas was right on the border with Nicaragua. One hundred yards away was bad guy country, and we were always concerned about being ambushed. It took us 14 hours bumping along in Toyota pickup trucks to get to the base. It was 100 miles of nightmarish, rocky, miserable hell and endless checkpoints that took hours to clear.” RKB recalled with distasteful clarity.

“We could see Sandinista bunkers on the hillsides maybe 300 meters away. Not a good feeling.
“We pull down this mud road and we see these huts in the middle of the night and it’s raining like a pig. We pull up to the gate and we go in. A guy meets us. They are talking. Finally we go down a very muddy lane to another bunch of huts. We drop our gear on the muddy dirt floor,” Harry chimed in.

“Gonzales and I are sitting on our rucksacks with a poncho over us and that’s where we spend the night.

“The next sound we hear is the cock a doodle do of the roosters. We ate more of C rats.

“COMMANDER 380”

“The base commander Enrique Bermudas, code named “Commander 380” comes down, ‘Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. So why are you here?’ he queried, without a clue as to what was going on.

“RKB explained to him we had come to train this commando unit to make raids into Nicaragua. But 380 had never been advised we were coming, and the Contra commando unit was doing dirty deeds deep inside of Nicaragua.

 “The major purpose was to circumvent the U.S. Congress that had cut off aid to Contras in Nicaragua,” RKB remembered his frustration at how the pea brained Congress was constantly interfering with his mission to save Western civilization.

“We wanted to conduct operations and give a morale booster to the Contras from the private sector , to make up for the U.S. government’s bailing out before the job was finished,” RKB said with disgust.\

“We moved from the leaky bamboo huts to another area. The GOE were already in Nicaragua, and we’re in Honduras,” Harry continued the tale of the great muck up.

“So we get up there and we put up our tents up by ourselves on a hill. We probably had two hundred supply kits. We thought, ‘Hell, we’re here, so we’ll train somebody. We’ll start putting together some basic programs of instruction,” Harry said.

OH THE SACRIFICE—SOF WILD BUNCH IN A DRY LAND

“The first weekend, on a Saturday afternoon,” RKB recalled,  “380 came by and took us in his pickup down to a little country store five hundred yards from the Nicaraguan border. It had a dirt floor and the goods were hanging from the walls and the ceiling. Hypothetically, there was no alcohol in the camp.

“Now there’s never been a camp in the world that doesn’t have alcohol,” RKB spoke from vast experience.
“This is where we could actually buy it. We had not known Bermudas before. We had at least a few cervezas, things started to loosen up as the alcohol made strangers into friends, as it has been known to do.
“After we became more familiar with each other, we brought up, ‘Hey, what’s the plan?

PLON, PLON? We Have No Plon

“Bermudas said ‘PLON PLON? We don’t have no PLON. We sat there in shock.”

“Here he is, possibly in the midst of some Sandanista spies, and he’s sitting here and saying,

‘The Sandinistas are always sending in spies to find out my PLONS. I have no PLONS,” even RKB, not exactly known for his smooth organizational skills, was shocked

“We all get pretty well smashed, then piled back into the trucks,” Harry continued the tale of the cheerful SOF Wild Bunch’s misadventures.

“380 says, ‘By the way, there’s Nicaragua’. We have no guns. We get back to the base and these Contras had imbibed at least as much booze. They start shooting up in the air in celebration, about what, we never figured out.

“We are up in our tent. They had assigned a spy to us, Pecos Bill, who shows up on a mule, wearing a mixture of cowboy and combat gear, sunglasses. He’s inebriated to the brim, too, and he steps outside the tent and rips off a 30 round magazine. Boykin does the same thing.

“We go to sleep. The training with 380 and his team the “Tigers” starts the next day since we are confined to the ‘camp’.

HARRY AND GOLIATH

“This Boykin guy is 6’6’. We were going to show them unarmed defense. I said, in a well choreograph way, ‘Here is how to defend yourself from a bayonet attack’.

“Boykin makes a full tilt run at me with a bayonet on a rifle.

“I’m going, ‘Son of a bitch!’ I slap the bayonet to one side and catch the stock. This big SOB ain’t cutting loose. I got him on the ground. He goes on with the bayonet. I had to put my boot in his sternum.
(Now, you’d have to know Harry as well as I do to know that Goliath didn’t have a prayer).

“’You want to play, I’ll play!’ I took the rifle and stuck the bayonet in the dirt next to his neck and he knew I was serious. I told him ‘don’t ever do this again or you’ll pay!’”

“I drove the point home–this is serious training. I could tell that the Contras were wondering, ‘do we have to do this too’?

“For the next four weeks we trained them in weapons maintenance, marksmanship, and basic small unit tactics. These people had no military training at all.

“God knows what the CIA had been doing before we got there,” RKB commented.

“Basis weapons training took up a lot of time. Aimed fire was a new concept for them. It was a good thing that the Sandinistas were no better.

“Topaz spent the whole time teaching basic life saving techniques to a number of the brighter ones: Starting IV’s, stopping sucking chest wounds, keeping wounds clean, setting broken bones.

“He also had another problem to take care of as it turned out that about 95 percent of these kids had some kind of VD.

WEAPONS FROM THE RUST BINS

“I was up to my neck in rusted-out MGs which consisted mainly of M60s and RPDs, the M60s having frozen gas pistons. The overall condition of the guns was rubbish. It was plain the Tigers had not a clue about how to disassemble their weapons, let alone how to maintain them. We took care of that,” Harry said.

“Raggedy FN FALs, Spanish CETMEs, AKs of all types and M14s were in no better shape.

“RKB took a visit to the bushes, and returned with our personal bodyguard, not much taller than his AK-47, probably 10 or 11 years old.

“He faithfully stood guard all night.

“Things are coming along pretty good.

“Then the rocket attack hit.

THE ROCKETS ARE COMING

“The Katushka came in on a Saturday morning, around 0900.

We had just sat down to a feast of rice and beans when suddenly the sound of  Katushka rockets ripping the air apart hit about 200 yards from our tent . This got our attention.

“The next thing we knew, there were nine more missiles pounding down on us. There was a deep ditch behind our position and we dove into it during the three minutes we figured we had before the next barrage, all except RKB. Looking around I saw RKB sitting on his cot in his underwear taking pictures of the rockets coming in. I hollered at him to get his ass down here and he told me to ‘get lost’.

“Oh, well. you pay your nickel and take your chance. We spent the night in the ditch. The next day 380 came by and told us we had to leave because there had been some KIAs at Camp Vegas, and it is a bit difficult to conduct training in the mist of incoming rockets, so we went to Tegucigalpa. John Boykin and I went to El Salvador to pick up some mortar sights and to get M-60 links and to pick up Thompson.

I OWE YOU A PUNCH IN THE NOSE

“We left Camp Vegas after we got rocketed,” RKB joined in. “I had it out big time for a fat smart ass Cuban exile, Mario Delamico who took away our brand new UZIs before we went back to Tegucigalpa. This guy was something else: coke bottle sunglasses, some type of black “Death from Above” T-shirt covering a belly that protruded over his belt, fat cigar and .45 auto in a fast draw holster, a “Mr. Combat—arrogant, pompous, and fat. 380 told him to provide security for us back to Tegucigalpa but he took off never to be seen again. I still owe you a punch in the nose you fat turd,” RKB has a long memory when it comes  to taking away his toys.

“In Tegucigalpa, we hunkered down in a hotel while waiting to find another training site.” Harry said.
Harry went back to Camp Vegas.

“We got rocketed again and there was a rumor we were going to get attacked. 380 had moved us to a nice compound where his compound was” RKB said

“RKB, Harper, Topaz and I decided it was time to get off the bulls eye to get a view of the action,” Harry recalled. “There was a tall mountain at least a half mile high to the west of us.

SPITTING SKOAL AT ROOSTERS

“The contras had a relay station up on top and anti-aircraft gunners. We thought, ‘if we are going to get attacked, lets go to top of hill so we can see it coming’.

“It took us to almost dark to get on top. We could see the war going on between the Contras and the Sandinistas from our panoramic view of the river, green tracers going one way, and red tracers going another. Next morning we came back to camp. Nobody had told 380 where we had gone, and he’s in a tizzy because he thought we were MIA.

“They move us from there to a hospital area, such as it was. This hospital was where all the commandos’ wives came to have their babies. Nothing like being put into the middle of a couple hundred pregnant women.

“We spend another week there at hospital thumb twiddling and RKB spends his time spitting his customary stream of Skoal at roosters because he hated them for waking us up every morning.

“ We lumber back to Tegucigalpa and I fly back to El Salvador.

“Remember, in Honduras possession of military equipment is a big no-no. I have my military gear and the little Honduran custom gal opens this bag up with military equipment. I have a beard and long hair and she asked me if I was in the military. I flash an Estado Major military El Salvador card. She looks at me, looks at ID card and says ‘OK’.

“I am back in El Salvador, I call the base and say, ‘hey, I’m back’. The Salvadorans send a helio and fly me back to Ilopongo.

THE FONZE

“In 1985, after the Iran-Contra fiasco, I was working with the Airborne Battalion when Col. Renkin, the leading U.S. Air Force advisor in El Salvador had me come over to his office. This is when I met the “Fonze”, Jerry Fontana, retired SF who had served in SOG, in Vietnam and in Delta later on. Col. Renkin asked me if I knew anything about putting up Quonset Huts. I told him from what I knew it was like putting up an erector set.

“‘Good. You have two to build and ten days to do it in’, he said, as if I had a choice.

“The “Fonze” was the point man for the Contra re-supply mission in El Salvador. The “Fonze” and I hit if off and became good friends. General Bustillo gave me about ten men from base maintenance and we were in business.

“The next CIA proprietary Southern Air Transport plane delivered components for the huts and we went to work. We were about done when the General showed up late one evening and told me the door was on the wrong side. No problem. We unbolted it and moved it to the other side. I had learned that when you lived on the General’s base you did what he said. When the Fonze showed up the next day he jumped my ass that the door was on the wrong side. I told him the General wanted it on this side and if he wanted it moved he needed to talk to the General. The door stayed.

“After the buildings were up, Col. Renkin asked me if I would stay and help with building the supply bins and packing parachutes. When the chutes came in they were a mess, wadded up and stuffed in trash sacks–all 500 of them. I went to see the Airborne Commander and asked him if I could borrow some riggers for a couple of days. He looked at me kind of funny and gave me five, never asking what I wanted them for. I stayed for a while until they could find someone to replace me. This turned out to be Eugene Husenfus.
“By this time the Airborne Battalion Commander was getting piping hot that I wasn’t working for him.

HASENFUS–DUMB HORSE’s BEHIND

“I told Col. Renkin I had to go back to work. In October, 1986 I was up in Santa Ana with the 2nd. Brigade when the Sandinistas shot down a CIA C-123 down. Eugene Husenfus, who had worked as a “kicker” in Nam for Air America, had unfortunately managed to survive, gave himself up to the first Sandanista he could find.

“What a dumb ass!

“Eugene Hasenfus jumped out, pulled his rip cord and lived. The rest got killed.

“What a scandal! Hasenfus was carrying a Salvadoran base pass to get on and off the base. All hell broke loose.

“Hasenfus squealed that the CIA was behind the operation. He exposed Cuban-Americans that were running the operation, including Felix Rodriguez, Rafael Quintero and Luis Posada.

“General Richard V. Secord, who bought a couple of caribous from a defunct Canadian airline to run supplies to the Contras, was exposed,” Harry recalled.

ITS RAINING REFRIGERATORS AND STOVES

“Secord hired Felix Rodriguez, a.k.a. Max Gomez, advisor to the Salvadoran Air Force and CIA case officer who tracked down Che Guevara to help in the Contra airlift. He loaded these planes with refrigerators, stoves and televisions.

“The Caribou’s engines were quitting on them, so they threw out televisions and refrigerators so you could see TVs and other appliances bouncing on the ground.  We finally got the planes fixed, took them to Illopongo, stripped them, painted them green, but we still couldn’t keep them in the air.

“The Salvadorans had loaned them a C-123.

“The day before the plane got shot down on national television, Bustillo had stated that the Salvadorans were not assisting the Contras. The next day he had mud on his face, plus it proved the El Salvador involvement in Nicaragua.

“After Hasenfus went down, and the re-supply operation was compromised, operations were moved from Ilopongo to Costa Rica. Secord was overseeing this whole thing.

THE DAY HARRY BECAME FAMOUS

“After my picture came out on the cover of Newsweek in November 1986, I became a real Pariah,” Harry said.

“I was there a couple weeks after the earthquake and I go back to Santa Ana to start the next training cycle. I packed my gear up and went back to San Salvador for the weekend after a training session and checked into the Sheraton Hotel. One of the MilGroup said, “‘Hey, Harry, have you seen Newsweek magazine? You’re famous’

“I said ‘yea, right’, and he showed me Newsweek.

“The Operational Planning and Assistance Training Team (OPATT) guys thought this was too neat. The Ambassador and the MilGroup commander did not think this was neat at all.

“Stan Pickering had replaced Ambassador White. Col Renkin informed me that Southern Air transport had a seat for me on a C-130 flying back from McGill air force base. I saw the article Sunday or Monday, and I was back on my way back to the States.

“They decided that I needed to take a vacation, as the top brass feared that some journalist would recognize me and the next cover of Newsweek would have the heading of ‘American Mercenaries fighting in El Salvador’. That would compromise the Mil Group since I was involved in the thick of their training. I had to go, at least for awhile till things cooled down.

“I was the only one on the plane other than the crew.


Next:  Harry and the 1989 Offensive (Can anyone get this and the third part of this series?)

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