Tragedy in Iraq

Tragedy in Iraq: One Journalist Died Covering the War in the Persian Gulf, Photographer Gad Gross. This Is the Story of How it Happened.

by Frank Smyth

The Village Voice, May 14, 1991

Near the borders of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq — Small waves broke over the sides of the creaky raft that our Kurdish contacts had lashed together from old inner tubes and scraps of plywood. Though it was only about as wide as a city avenue, the river was high with the spring melt, and the water was the color of coffee as it rushed by. The far shore was Iraqi territory, where a pickup truck waited to take us to the rebel commanders. On this day — March 21 — the rebels claimed to control 90 percent of what they call Kurdistan in northern Iraq. To the south, Shi’ite-led rebels were claiming that the resistance there was also going well. Rebel leaders in Damascus had said that “the revolution” was advancing into new areas, and that there was fighting in Baghdad itself. The Americans appeared to have completely routed the Iraqi army, and Saddam Hussein’s regime was tottering — anything, even the breakup of Iraq, seemed possible.

Winning his struggle with the rivet’s current, our oarsman splashed into the shallows under the opposite bank. Photographers Gad Gross and Alain Buu, along with Wall Street Journal correspondent Geraldine Brooks and myself, had entered the country illegally. We had all met at a conference of Iraqi opposition leaders in Beirut a week earlier, where Gad and I were working various Kurdish opposition leaders incessantly, hoping that sooner or later we would be able to gain access and enter Iraq. After our Kurdish friends had arranged the trip, Gad decided to turn Alain on to our contact, even though Gad was on assignment for Newsweek and Alain was working in direct competition for Time. I told him that few photographers would be so generous.

With the uprising at its peak and Saddam’s army broken, the possibility that we might get caught barely crossed our minds. The two dozen or so members of the Kurdish resistance who greeted us certainly betrayed few doubts as we shook hands and passed cigarettes around. Every other male, it seemed, was armed with a Kalashnikov folding-stock automatic rifle, which he handled with assured nonchalance. There was no sign of the Iraqi army.

Over the next several days, the spirit of revolution was both palpable and contagious, and really not too different from the popular resistance movements I had seen in Central America. Civilians and peshmager, as the Kurdish fighters are fondly called, mingled freely; once, in front of the hospital at Dahuk, we watched a group of peshmager join hands with the nurses in a folk dance to celebrate their imminent independence, the circle of dancers growing larger and larger with every round.

But it was all new to Gad, 26, who had never before covered an armed insurgency. I met Gad in Amman, Jordan, three weeks before we crossed the river. Gad was an ethnic German born in Romania who had graduated from Harvard on a liberal arts degree a year ago. He had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall just before his graduation, but missed the Romanian revolution because he had to be in Boston for his finals; it was a nagging regret to him, and as we traveled through Kurdistan over the next week he would often say he saw similarities between the Kurdish and Romanian revolutions. The enthusiasm of the Kurds was infectious, and Gad loved that, but particularly he liked the way people seemed so glad to see us, foreign reporters, covering their struggle.

Gad was tall and good-looking, but he was missing a front tooth. “I fell asleep on a motorcycle,” Gad told me the first time I saw him take out his false tooth. He wouldn’t always wear it, and it could unnerve a subject, so I was always telling him to put the thing in. As we were preparing to leave for Kurdistan, Gad heard he’d won the Missouri Award of Excellence for a photo of a Romanian soldier sitting on a toppled statue of Lenin. He was ecstatic. He danced to his Walkman in our Damascus hotel room, singing along with M.C. Hammer, and smiling that damned smile.

Nobody in Kurdistan believed the revolt would fail. Kurds and reporters both speculated on how many days or weeks Saddam had left: most said no more than two months, one bold reporter thought two days. Our plan was to stay with the resistance all the way to Baghdad.

I could feel that his broken wrist had never properly healed when I shook his hand. We were in Zakho, a sunny mountain town near the Turkish border, to meet Dr. Kamal “Kirkuki,” the man who had personally led what the people here called the “intifada” — the liberation of most towns and villages in Iraqi-held Kurdistan. The title of “doctor” is an honorary one: Kamal had dropped out of medical school in Vienna, where he learned fluent German and some English, to become a Kurdish guerrilla leader. Somewhere here, in the Zagros Mountains, a piece of shrapnel had crippled him.

A seemingly frail man, Kamal spoke so softly we could hardly hear him. With steady eyes and a subdued expression, Kamal explained that the uprising had gone off like clockwork, almost like pushing in a door. On March 14 — a scant two weeks after the American bombing halted and President Bush urged the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam — villagers and townspeople all over Kurdistan had joined forces with more experienced peshmager and locally recruited militia to overwhelm Iraqi army outposts.

It took the rebels and townspeople little more than four hours to liberate Zakho, but it did not fall without casualties. Before they retreated, government troops indiscriminately lobbed mortar shells into the into the town’s center. At least 40 civilians were killed and dozens wounded. The guerrillas took us to see several young boys in the hospital who had burns over their faces and more than 50 percent of their bodies, but none of the laceration wounds normally associated with shrapnel or other conventional weapons-Saddam may have been using incendiary bombs, possibly, phosphorous.

“We had many friends in the military,” a smiling Kamal said. He was flanked by more than a dozen Iraqi military officers who had defected to the guerrillas. One was a former intelligence officer from Saddam’s elite Republican Guard. Another, a former aircraft gunner, was put in charge of Kamal’s air defenses. Once loyal to the regime, these officers said that Saddam had simply gone too far-first going to war with Iran and then Kuwait.

“For years and years, we have been fighting our neighbors for nothing,” said Lieutenant Colonel Akhmed, the former commander of 700 Iraqi government soldiers. Akhmed, who asked that his real name not be used to protect his family, had been a professional officer for 20 years, yet he had been recruited by Kamal’s clandestine agents. On the 14th, he switched sides. “Many officers feel the same way about Saddam. But they can’t do anything,” he said, adding to the generally accepted impression among the Kurds that the Iraqi army had lost its will to fight.

Rebel leaders claimed that more than 30,000 Iraqi troops had either been captured or defected, a number that seemed too high to believe. But there was little question that among rank-and-file Iraqi, foot soldiers, discipline and morale were visibly crumbling.

We saw 60 prisoners in green Iraqi army uniforms were squatting on the ground, casually watched over by a handful of armed guards and dozens of the ubiquitous Kurdish civilians. (Everywhere we went while the revolution was running, in the streets, near battles, we were surrounded by staring civilians, who watched over events with the intense curiosity of a people who had waited decades for a taste of liberation.) A regular soldier, who only gave his name as Hussein, demanded the floor. “God willing, he’ll be dead soon,” he said of Saddam.

“Why do we kill? Why did we go to war with Iran?” he yelled, his face taut as the blood rushed to his cheeks. The wails of this lone soldier, standing among his huddled comrades, were soon joined by others, until finally the crowd of civilians joined the chorus. When the chant of “Down with Saddam Down with Saddam!” went up, one of the prisoners grabbed at a guard’s gun — in order to brandish it over his head, for emphasis.

The scene gave vivid testimony to the collapse of the locally-deployed regular Iraqi army, which was made up of largely the same sort of poorly motivated conscripts caught in the American turkey shoot in Kuwait (though it gave no inkling of the condition of elite Army Special Forces and Republican Guard assault units then massing to the south). Nearby, Gad photographed a pair of POWs huddled together for support; as Private Hussein screamed out his grief, they began silently to cry.

Sound of boots and sneakers sucking up mud was all that could be heard through the cold rain outside of Mosul, the last major city in northern Iraq still under Baghdad’s control. Several units of about 20 fighters each were marching single file through the fields of sprouting millet. The lush landscape, punctuated by the occasional boulder, reminded me of Ireland. “We are going to war,” said one peshmager, his lips curling into a bold smile beneath his thick black moustache. Grizzled old men and young boys marched together under the weight of the munitions they had just picked up.

Behind them, other units were still clustering around the heavy burlap sacks sitting beside a white Toyota pickup parked on the main road out of Mosul. A rebel kneeling on the blacktop used both hands to distribute bullets. Other guerrillas stripped the seals off dozens of stubby, green plastic tubes and loaded rocket-propelled grenades — minifootball-shaped projectiles — onto these propellant charges. Many of the peshmager wore the dark brown one-piece jumpsuits traditionally worn by Kurdish men. Gad snapped a picture of one proud teenager who had accented his black-and- white checkered sash with two bandoliers of oversized bullets wrapped tightly around his chest, so that he looked like a chilly, wet Kurdish version of Rambo.

But Americans are not necessarily heroes to these rebels. Despite the success of Desert Storm — which after all, had made this sudden rebellion possible — they remember that the United States had supported Saddam Hussein as late as 1988, viewing the Iraqi dictator as a strategic buffer against the Islamic government of Iran. And, like many Third World militants, they remember America’s defeat in Vietnam as a victory for popular insurgencies everywhere.

One evening, after learning Alain was French-Vietnamese, a Kurdish fighter insisted on singing an old revolutionary song about Ho Chi Minh for Alain and me. Alain had fled Vietnam with the first boat people the day Saigon fell-but he appreciated the sentiment.

“We want the world not to help dictators like Saddam Hussein,” Azad, a 28-year-old civil engineer-turned-rebel, told us, explaining why the United States was at best a temporary and unreliable ally. Azad had spent 40 days in an Iraqi prison, where he was repeatedly tortured with electrical shocks to his testicles; the prison building was a target during the war, and he escaped when American bombing blew out the wall to his cell block. “The U.S.A. made [Saddam]. If the U.S.A. and Europe didn’t give him the help, he couldn’t have done this.”

Even though, like many rebel leaders and spokespersons, Azad said the Kurds were hoping to receive humanitarian and even military assistance from the United States and other member nations of the anti-Iraq coalition, he went on to complain that in its cease-fire agreement the United States had allowed Iraqi helicopters to fly “humanitarian” missions — a concession General Norman Schwarzkopf would later admit he had been “hoodwinked” into making. Just one week into their rebellion, the Kurds had heard that the Iraqis were beginning to use helicopter gunships with devastating effect on their fellow insurgents in the Shiite south. We saw our first helicopter firing over the horizon here, at rebel targets in the battle for Mosul.

But not all Kurds — then, at least — were so critical. One peshmager laughingly told me as we trudged through glutinous mud that many newborn Kurdish babies were being given “Bush” as their first name.

Neither of us suspected that many of those same infants would soon die of exposure along the Turkish and Iranian borders.

Thick black smoke billowed from a burning oil well and mortar shells echoed steadily in the distance, but Kirkuk seemed relatively undisturbed otherwise. The city, an important oil-producing center, had been in Kurdish hands for more than a week. The Kurds explained that the Iraqi army still held two primary positions, one just southeast of the city and another just northwest. Although the mortar fire was intense, for the first two days we were in the city the basic battle lines never changed, and the Kurds appeared to be in complete control of the situation.

The afternoon of March 26 was clear and cool, spring weather in the highlands. The three of us rode out to the northwest front, a series of mortar and machine gun emplacements along the rolling plain that flows to the edge of the town. In these outlying areas, clashes had continued for several days, and territory had shifted back and forth repeatedly. At the base of a hill we found a group of Kurds huddling around a big, 81-millimeter mortar, firing I over the ridge at the Iraqi army, dug in about two miles away.

As we watched, Iraqi helicopter gunships beat in over the horizon and attacked several Kurdish mortar positions around us, ignoring our own. The Kurds returned fire with machine guns and a few larger antiaircraft guns, to no apparent effect. The choppers did little damage either, choosing to fly high; they seemed to be probing the Kurds, trying to get the rebels to expose their positions, rather than engage them directly. High above the helicopters, a jet made several passes. The cease-fire agreement between the U.S.-led coalition and Iraq had grounded Saddam’s fixed-wing aircraft, supposedly without exception, but the Kurds complained that Iraqi planes were indeed flying reconnaissance. But the jet we saw was so high we couldn’t tell whether it was an Iraqi or an American observer photographing the battle.

As the sun began to set over the open plain, “Lieutenant Omar” — the zone field commander — joined us on the crest of the hill in front of the mortar emplacements.

From there, looking out over miles of open country, Omar pointed to what he said were the Iraqi troop and tank positions, adding that they had not moved for several days. Omar said his forces were preparing to attack them — maybe as early as that evening. He seemed quite sure of success.

But the helicopter gunships were a chilling reminder of the regime’s superior firepower. One peshmager admitted that, as a guerrilla army, they had never learned how to use mechanized equipment, so the helicopters and hundreds of tanks and armored; vehicles they had captured when they took Kirkuk and the other cities in Kurdistan in were, by and large, useless to the revolution. But others said they were planning to find drivers and eventually to deploy captured tanks against Saddam Shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades and mortars of all sizes were everywhere.

The Kurds showed us dozens of captured crates of American-made mortar shells, whose markings showed they had been shipped to Saddam’s army via the Jordanian military in March 1988. But the Kurds had no heavy weaponry. Even when they managed to capture an anti-aircraft gun from the fleeing Iraqis, their sights had been removed, rendering the guns largely useless. And we had seen no surface-to-air missiles, the best answer to helicopter gunships in this exposed terrain.

Guerrilla movements elsewhere in the world, especially in Vietnam and El Salvador, have demonstrated that firepower can be matched by ingenuity. Land mines, for instance, can be designed to stop ground soldiers or even advancing tanks, and homemade explosives could have been easily manufactured locally. But the Kurds did not seem to manufacture any of their own weaponry. Even more surprising, the rebels had no two-way radios to coordinate military action. To compensate, I assumed they had established a network of scouts and runners to monitor enemy movements. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

That night, the shelling was heavy, and the head of the household where we were staying decided to evacuate his family to Arbil. Bakhtiar, the young rebel who had volunteered to be our translator and guide, and the other rebels laughed, saying the man had panicked, and moved us into their own billet. They were occupying the headquarters of an oil refinery company a few hundred yards away, just outside the city. Bakhtiar didn’t really seem worried about our safety, only our comfort.

After breakfast (cooked by a former Iraqi soldier), we piled into a pickup and drove to the ruins of Iraqi helicopter base K1, just north of Kirkuk. Dozens of confident Kurdish rebels triumphantly gave us a tour. They showed us box after box of munitions — many from the Eastern Bloc, Gad noticed — they had captured with the base.

The floors in here were covered with blankets, raincoats, boots, gas masks, and the insignias ripped off by Iraqi officers in their rush to get out. The burnt-out hulls of two Iraqi helicopters squatted on the field where the Kurds had torched them, not far from the body of a dead Iraqi soldier. I believe it was the first dead body Gad had seen up close; he lingered, staring. Later, inside the base headquarters, the four of us had a talk about the risks we were taking, I and we agreed: Nobody gets killed.

The guerrillas also gleefully showed us the officers log book for the communications center at the base, which listed all the reports on soldiers that had gone AWOL, who were described as “wanted criminals.”

According to the log, hardly a day had gone by since the war began without at least one I soldier lighting out. The last entry had been made four days ago-shortly before the base was overrun by the rebels.

Despite the incessant crump of the mortars, the mood was playful. We even stopped to take a pair of group photos posing with the rebels, who brandished their AK-47s and smiled into the lens. Gad had someone take a picture of him with his arm around Bakhtiar. They were both the same age, and bumping through the war together over the past few days had already made them fast friends. Bakhtiar had been an economist, a graduate of the University of Baghdad, and he was amicable and urbane, even with his AK-47, extra clips, and high-topped military hoots. Elegant and charming, he seemed almost to be standing, like a cutout before the backdrop of his own war. “Imagine this guy in New York, but you stay away my girlfriend! ” Gad would say, laughing.

Over lunch that day, March 27, Geraldine Brooks and the remaining two journalists from an ABC TV crew decided to return to Arbil. Because she worked for a daily newspaper, Geraldine’s deadline was tight, and she had to get back to file; the ABC crew wanted to get back because they had lost their correspondent, and thought he might have returned to their base. She offered to carry a videotape I had shot for CBS News back to Arbil, where a group of reporters had arranged a system to secretly send material out of the country, and to make sure a dispatch for the Voice I’d left behind made it out as well. Gad, Alain and I were several days away from our own weekly deadlines, so we elected to stay -making us the last remaining Western journalists in Kirkuk.

After lunch, Bakhtiar offered to take us out to see a row of Kurdish homes that had been bulldozed by Saddam’s army. Fahdil, a fiftyish midlevel commander from the Kurds’ largest Marxist faction, offered to accompany us.

As we picked our way among the rubble of the block of homes, we were startled by a series of powerful explosions that shook the ground, one after another, within a hundred yards of where we stood. Bakhtiar explained it was a Katushya — a Soviet-made, truck-mounted missile launcher that fires up to 40 medium-range projectiles in succession. Even as the rockets bit, we could see a man painstakingly stacking cinder blocks amidst a pile of dust and rubble that once had been his home. Neighbors told us he had been doing this ever since the bulldozers came. He returned to find his wife and children gone, apparently dragged away by the Iraqi army, as many civilians were.

He had lost his mind. For days, he refused to leave the rubble where his loved ones had last been seen. Fahdil gave the man money for food, and others tried to persuade him to take shelter with friends or relatives. But we left him there as dusk fell, stacking his concrete blocks in the ruins.

That evening, Fahdif and Bakhtiar offered to share a bottle of white wine with us. The older and austere Fahdil began to open up, and Bakhtiar was planning a trip to visit Gad and I in New York sometime after the revolution. We discussed class struggle, perestroika, ethnic nationalism, and Kenny’s Castaways in the Village well into the night.

“Wake up ! Wake up!” said Bakhtiar. “Fahdil wants you to go.” Incoming mortar shells, which we had been hearing since we arrived, were now landing so close we could feel the walls vibrate with every hit. It was the morning of March 28. We were still sleeping in the oil refinery building a few miles outside of town. Something was definitely up: peshmager rebels, including Lieutenant Omar, had dropped back into the city from the front. Still stiff and bleary-eyed, the three of us crowded into a double cab Toyota pickup, and Fahdil’s men quickly drove us into the city center.

The shelling in outlying areas had increased, but downtown Kirkuk, for a few hours at least, was relatively quiet. Armed with still and video cameras, we wandered about the downtown square, frustrated at having been removed from the action. Then a few shells began to land nearby. One killed a young girl two blocks away; as I filmed her, a man drove by on a bicycle and shouted, “This is Saddam Hussein!” his voice cracking with emotion. “Mr. Bush must know.”

Several helicopters appeared over the city, and the blue sky was suddenly overcast with streamers of anti-aircraft fire. We were standing in front of a former Iraqi government building that was now a rebel command center; armed with their automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, truckloads of eager peshmager fighters waited impatiently for orders to the front. Two men walked out of the building in street clothes, each carrying what might have passed for an oversized fishing-rod case.

The long green tubes were heal-seeking surface-to-air SAM-7 missiles. We got them on film, and I told Gad that SAMs were a good sign, they could be quite effective in trained hands. (I didn’t learn until later that those two were the only SAM missiles in Kirkuk.)

We were still anxious to get back to the fighting, and one group of rebels invited us to accompany them in a tour bus heading for the city’s southern edge. A young boy stuck his head in the door as the bus turned a corner and said proudly, “Remember, you are peshmager. You will fight and win.” Everyone nodded in silence.

We hadn’t gone far when the shelling sounded very close, backed by the brittle staccato of machine guns. The sound was coming from two directions, both incoming and outgoing fire; the Iraqi army was nearby, where only hours before the streets were empty. The bus pulled to a halt in a Kurdish middle-class neighborhood of simple, one- and two-story concrete block homes.

The rebels poured out of the bus and began to disperse, saying they intended to form a line of defense against an Iraqi advance. We stumbled outside the bus into a clutch of crowing roosters, chickens, and dozens of peshmager, who were yelling back and forth to each other over the sound of whistling bullets and exploding tank shells. They had no formal command structure, for the first time, I saw confusion and fear on their faces. Bakhtiar saw it at the same time. “These are not [regular] peshmager,” Bakhtiar said. “They are militia from the city.”

One sobbing man wailed that a tank shell had killed his brother. He grabbed a Kalishnakov and ran out to challenge an Iraqi tank on his own. The Kurdish militia set up machine guns on top of several two-story buildings, around our position. But the shelling was becoming more accurate as the Iraqi tanks advanced. Bakhtiar, Gad, Alain and I started running across a field that spread to the east of the city center. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the rebel militiamen take up their counter battery fire from a nearby rooftop, and seconds later, the entire building wobbled from a direct hit. Within 30 minutes after the militia and we had gone pounding down the steps of the bus, the entire neighborhood was alive with shrapnel.

The field we were running through was planted with mint, and the air was thick with its sharp green scent; I remembered picking mint for the kitchen of a restaurant in Vermont where I had a summer job once. I worried about snipers and, especially, helicopters. We could see them off on our left, but for now, the choppers were engaging rebels to the west, where we had spent the night. We were near the far edge of the field now, breathing hard. Suddenly a high-pitched whistle that keyed up to a metallic scream seemed to tear the air in front of us, and a shell landed with a thud about 300 feet away, before anybody could take cover. Incredibly, it was a dud. I told Gad, “That was it, that one had our name on it. But we’re going to make it -we’re lucky.”

Once past the field and into the city streets, we felt less exposed. Here on the city’s northern edge, as far from the original Iraqi positions as you could get within the limits of Kirkuk, there was only quiet. We rested, drinking from our canteens. Bakhtiar drew a map in my hand. “This is the city,” he said drawing a circle. He drew two solid dots on the left and bottom of my palm. “This is the Iraqi army.” According to Bakhtiar, the Iraqi army was still located to the southeast and northwest of the city. To get away, all we had to do was travel straight north, up the main road to Arbil.

Refugees carrying blankets and other belongings lined each side of the road north. Both cars and fuel were scarce — many pleaded for rides from passing motorists. Men with Kalashnikov rifles, apparently separated from their units, were also fleeing — they must have been local militia, since many were with their families. As the exodus grew, the distinction between rebel and civilian was blurring.

We began to film the scene, feeling now and out of combat, trudging along the secure road north. But all three of worried about our packs, which we had left behind in the city. Bakhtiar tried to find a car to take us back into town them, thinking we still had time. But when Bakhtiar finally found us a car headed our way, we discovered Fahdil sitting in the front seat. We realized then that it was not just militia, but regular peshmager and their commanders who were retreating.

Fahdil told us calmly that it, get out of Kirkuk, and he said he would take care of the gear we’d left behind. As he drove off, a man in civilian dress — who’d been listening — offered to give us a ride to Arbil in his Toyota compact (earlier, when, we’d asked him to take us into Kirkuk, he’d said his tires were bad, and couldn’t make the trip). We drove up the hill mountain pass that marked the edge of the city. Looking out the window, I saw a helicopter overtaking us from behind.

I had learned in El Salvador that helicopter bullets can pass through car metal like papier-mâché. We got out of the car to take cover in the crevices of the granite outcroppings that littered the treeless hillsides. These rock formations seemed to continue cast for miles, toward Iran.

While tucked in the crannies, we filmed the scene overhead. More helicopters appeared, swarming like hornets over the pass ahead, strafing and firing rockets. Two smaller gunships were soon joined by four or five heavy attack helicopters. They hovered, searching out rebel positions; finding one, a chopper would deliver a swooshing volley of rockets. According to the cease-fire agreement reached in the gulf war, Iraqi helicopters are permitted to fly only for transport or humanitarian emergencies. We watched their rockets and guns pummel the surrounding hillsides for half of an hour. It is hard to believe that American reconnaissance would not have detected their deployment in combat.

Then there was a brief lull — the helicopters were still around, but there were fewer of them and there were no more rockets — and civilians who had taken cover resumed walking. “Let’s go,” Bakhtiar said. I suggested that we take advantage of the rocks and leave the city on foot. “But to where?” he said. “Don’t worry, it’ll be OK. After this, you’ll be on the way to Arbil.” The stream of refugees indicated that, at least to the north, the way was clear.

The helicopter reappeared. It hovered over our left, firing a rocket onto the road ahead. As we topped the hill, I saw for the first time what the hornets had been buzzing over, and I pleaded with Bakhtiar to stop the car and let us get out. A white pickup truck had gone off the road, and its driver was slumped over the wheel, shot. A few yards farther on, a bus sat with a gaping black hole in its side; what remained of a woman’s body was strewn about the road. The sharp crack of machine guns was incessant. We were driving into a wall of bullets. “I don’t like this either, Bakhtiar,” said Gad.

Bakhtiar, always anxious not to upset those around him, relayed our doubts to the driver. He didn’t react, and we sped further into open terrain. About 70 yards ahead, the driver saw a cluster of houses on the right side of the road, and instinctively drove off the highway in front.

We jumped out of the car and took cover behind a one-story, flat-roofed cinderblock house. The green fields roundabout were lit up by two incoming volleys of Katushya rockets that landed about a hundred yards behind us, and the helicopters continued to hover overhead, searching for fleeing peshmager rebels. Thousands of rounds of heavy caliber bullets were smacking into the house and ground all around us, fired indiscriminately from the mountains about 200 yards to the north, and tank shells were exploding nearby; the Iraqis were laying down a field of fire to seal off the road. I filmed a column of tanks — at least eight — but there were more, more tanks than thought Saddam had left, pouring through the mountain passes to our left. The Iraqi army was not only south and northwest of the city, it had circled around to the north and now had cut the rebels off from Arbil. We were trapped. Bakhtiar summed up our dilemma. “if we try to leave through the field, we’ll be shot,” he said. “And if we stay here?” I asked.

“That is just as dangerous.” Gad walked over to me. We both smiled. “He’s funny,” Gad said with a grin, trying to cut the tension. “If we go there we’ll be shot, and if we stay here it’s just as dangerous.” He laughed.

We didn’t have time to decide. “The tanks, they’re coming!” Alain shouted, and looking over my shoulder I saw two Soviet- made tanks roaring up the road beyond our shot-up Toyota, about 50 yards away, coming straight for us. “Come on!” Alain yelled, and we started running. Gad and Bakhtiar were in the lead — our driver had already melted away — and they disappeared behind the wall of a house. Alain and I glanced back at the tanks and saw a turret turning in our direction. Just a few steps ahead a pile of dirt stretched out of sight along the right side of the highway, some 10 feet high; just behind it was a short ditch, about four feet deep and twice that long. We jumped in.

The rumble of the tanks passed us on the other side of the dirt wall, sending little streams of earth into our trench. The machine gunner started firing into the standing houses and open fields, clearing out any possible enemy stragglers. The firing was relentless, sending literally thousands of bullets whistling over our heads. One ricocheting round landed on the edge of the ditch, close enough to touch. We kept our heads down and prayed.

After a time, the tanks seemed to head back for Kirkuk. But we could still hear voices in the area. We decided to wait for nightfall, hoping that Gad and Bakhtiar had survived the second onslaught of bullets and were also safely hunkered down, out of sight.

Alain and I jumped into the ditch between two and three in the afternoon. Shortly before sunset, we heard the tanks and trucks returning. One went past us. Another killed its engine literally right behind us, less than 15 feet away on the other side of the dirt wall. The Iraqi army had decided to make camp all around our hiding place.

They set up a machine-gun post atop the flat roof of the first house we had used for cover. Other soldiers established positions further up the road to the north. We could hear soldiers talking, laughing, even their footsteps as they milled about. There was a distinct popping noise anytime someone opened a can of food.

Worse yet, it was a clear night. I looked up despairingly at the Big Dipper — I could see every star in the sky, sharp and clear, and a fat full moon beamed down enough light to read by. Whispering, we talked about trying to crawl away. But the soldiers near us fired away throughout the night. They were apparently under orders to shoot at anything they thought had moved. There was no return fire.

We thought we might be able to bury ourselves in the loose earth. But we were afraid that the soldiers would hear us digging — or, if we could not cover ourselves completely, that we would be immediately shot and killed upon being discovered.

I turned. off the alarm on my watch, and tried to control my breathing. When I get nervous, I tend to take quick, short breaths. But Alain’s blood pressure dropped from the stress, and he soon fell into a fitful sleep. I had to keep him from snoring. It gets cold in Kurdistan at night, dropping from a high in the 60s to near freezing. But shivering could be a problem — the soldiers might hear our chattering teeth.

Embracing each other like lovers to stay warm, we stayed in the ditch for over 18 hours. I watched an ant colony at work below, and envied each passing bird.

Shortly after sunrise, we heard a commotion coming from the closest house, about 100 feet away, where we’d last seen Gad and Bakhtiar running. A soldier began angrily yelling, as many more came running in answer to his call. I swallowed deeply.

We heard more banging; it sounded like someone was whacking metal filing cabinets with a bat. They were searching the rest of the house. Then they found something — this time we knew it was a person. We hoped it was Kurdish civilians and not Gad and Bakhtiar.

The soldiers’ shouts seemed to grow angrier and louder. There was more commotion, and even louder shouts. I think I heard a soldier yell, “Kurdi!” Then we heard a single sustained burst from an automatic weapon.

It all happened very quickly, but it was, clear that whomever the Iraqis had seized had not resisted, but was in the soldiers’ custody — for a short time, anyway.

About a half-minute later, we heard a very strong and distinct scream. It lasted for at least a full second. There was about a five second delay, and then another long burst from an automatic rifle, followed by silence.

Alain and I both knew it had been Gad screaming.

Alain knelt In the trench to pray. A blanket of terror descended upon us. Peeking over the edge of the ditch, Alain saw a soldier carrying Gad’s camera bag from the house. I began to panic, but was quickly overcome by an overwhelming obsession to stay alive.

Whispering, we decided our only chance if caught would be to surrender, saying we were sahafi-journalists. But after what we had heard in the house, that didn’t seem to be much protection. I thought we were going to die, and soon.

The ditch was deep enough that a soldier would have to nearly walk right on top of it to see us. The waiting was becoming unbearable. About an hour after the incident at the house, a soldier climbing over the earth mound glanced into the ditch and did a double take, but kept walking. Alain said he thought the soldier was going to walk up behind the dirt mound and then lob a grenade into our trench. He jumped up, put his hands in the air, and yelled, “Sahafi!”

“What are you doing?” I said incredulously, looking up at Alain standing in the ditch, his face pale in the morning sunlight. Then I put my hands up and did the same.

We saw several soldiers approaching us with rifles raised. They ordered us to put our hands higher. One searched the pockets of the field jacket I was wearing — actually, it was Gad’s jacket, he’d lent it to me because the pockets were big enough to carry a large tape recorder. When the zipper got stuck and I couldn’t open it, the soldier pulled out a grenade and threatened to drop it inside. I pulled the jacket over my head and dropped it to the ground. I pulled my American passport out of a pouch strapped to my ankle and handed it to him. There was $800 in cash folded into the Ziploc bag, and he stuffed the money quickly into his pocket. I felt lucky to still be alive.

Another soldier searched Alain. He wore a solid green uniform, indicating that he was either an officer or a military liaison official from the ruling Baath party. His demeanor was more human, much less brutal than that of the foot soldiers. He said in his broken English, “No shoot, no shoot,” even as he ripped a gold pendant of the Virgin Mary from Alain’s neck.

Petrified, we repeated that we were Western journalists and pleaded for our lives. Some of the soldiers leading us away from the trench understood English. “Where are we going?” I asked one.

“You,” he said laughing, and looked at me as he roughly drew his index finger across the base of his neck.

Piling into the back of an army truck, I though they weren’t likely to mess it up by killing us there. We were taken to see “the captain,” whose field command was on a hill overlooking the site of our capture.

There were civilians being held prisoner there; at least they hadn’t killed them. I looked, somehow expecting to see Gad, maybe hurt but still alive. Then I saw his camera bag, with his press identity cards hanging from the outside.

“I want to take the gun and shoot you,” the young captain said, in English, as he gave us a look of distilled contempt.

“You know what happened to your friend?” he asked. “He killed himself. You know why? He had a gun.”

Another officer, whose uniform indicated he was a Special Forces commander and a paratrooper, asked, “Do you know him?” holding Gad’s press I.D. in his hand.

“No.” We didn’t want to give them a reason to kill us.

A third Iraqi soldiers said, “He had a gun. He shot himself.”

Gad and I had talked about the issue of self-defense in a war zone. He was adamant that a reporter should never carry a weapon, under any circumstances.

The officer who had taken Alain’s Virgin Mary medal then appeared, and began talking to the paratrooper commander. I don’t understand Arabic, but I understood that they were discussing our lives. The body language of the officer who’d found us was nonthreatening and open as he made his case, but the paratrooper shook his head. “Sahafi,” I heard him say. Seconds later, he gestured towards Gad’s ID. Then he held his right hand as if he were writing on his other hand. I understood he wanted to kill us for what we knew. The captain said, “See you in” — and hesitated, searching for the right English word, and the paratrooper came to his aid, saying, “another place.” Like the afterlife.

“Are you married?” the paratrooper asked me. I lied and said I had a wife and three kids. “I am sorry for you,” he said. “It is too late.”

We were blindfolded and put into the back of a Land Cruiser headed west over back roads toward the highway between Baghdad and Mosul. Alain and I held hands — we were terrified that we would be separated. With every shift of gears or bend in the road we feared we would be taken out and executed.

My blindfold was made of thin cotton cloth. I managed to spread it loosely over my eyes so I could still see somewhat. All around us, I heard the rumble of large engines. It was then that I knew that the Kurdish revolution would soon be finished.

I could make out the outlines of dozens of tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and heavy military trucks. In addition to the units that had found us and cut off the road to Arbil, whole divisions were massing for a major counteroffensive. The Kurds, it seemed, had no intelligence on the build up. I knew that — apart from their own heartfelt enthusiasm — they had nothing with which to counter the superior firepower of the Iraqi army. Saddam was clearly planning to overrun and retake the rest of Kurdistan. In fact, he took most of it in less than four days.

The truck stopped and our blindfolds were removed. We were standing on the tarmac of a military air base somewhere near Mosul.

An officer pulled out some papers that we recognized as being Gad’s — they were stained with blood. “What about this?” he said. We later realized that he genuinely didn’t know about Gad; he thought Gad’s camera bag belonged to me.

Blindfolded again, we were taken to a room at the base. “How did you get into Iraq?” said the interrogator. “From Syria,” I said, speaking into the dark. They wanted to know about the Kurds; they did not ask either of us about Gad. We later speculated that only his death, but not the way he was killed, had been reported to superior officers.

That night, Alain and I were alone in a makeshift cell in a bombed out building in Kirkuk. We tried to coordinate our stories, in an attempt to distance ourselves as much as possible from Gad. Unless they raised specific questions, we would deny knowing him.

But mulling it over in my mind, I remembered that there was considerable evidence linking us to Gad. We had already seen among Gad’s captured papers a hotel card from Damascus with both my name and Gad’s on it. I also realized that in my last radio tapes for CBS, I had reported–in case somehow the tape was found and we weren’t — that the three of us were together in Kirkuk when it came under siege.

But the tape was still in an inside pocket of Gad’s field jacket, the one that made the soldier with the grenade impatient. Keeping an eye out for the guards, that night we removed all the tape from the spool, wrapped it in several pieces of electric tape, and tossed it among the rubbish on the floor of the littered room.

“Gatewood Enginnering Ltd” read the sign on the gate. We had been driven form Kirkuk to Baghdad the day after our capture. You could see lots of evidence of the American bombing throughout Baghdad. Our escorts, military intelligence officers, removed our blindfolds and invited us into a public restaurant for lunch.

The scene in the restaurant was surprisingly normal. Men smoked cigarettes and sipped tea around a stand. Veiled women with children walked down the street. There was no unrest, let alone any sign of fighting. The larger-than-life portraits of Saddam, which had been methodically defaced and destroyed further north, now greeted us defiantly, even jubilantly.

Judging from its interior, Gatewood Engineering had been the home and office of a British businessman and his family. The little bar on one side of the living room was adorned with the red Bass Ale flags. The backside of an attractive blond woman decorated one wall; we were still too terrified to really notice.

The guards locked us up in what appeared to be the bedroom of a teenage boy. It was adorned with pictures of motorcycles and boasted a collection of Back Street Heroes, a British biker magazine.

A third interrogation began immediately. There were many men waiting, who among them spoke Arabic, English, and French. They were clearly from military intelligence, and knew very well what they were doing.

They asked us what was in our bags. I said just cameras and light meters. I answered what had become somewhat routine questions. But Achmad, my interrogator, was suspicious. He asked how many were with us. I then said that the camera bag was not mine but belonged to another reporter.

“Why did he leave it?” he asked.

I said I didn’t know, but that maybe he left it to run away.

“But a reporter would never leave his bag, his cameras,” he said. “I think you don’t tell all you know because you fear death.” I tried not to react, but my stomach tightened like a fist.

Nevertheless, our handlers still didn’t seem to have the whole picture. Alain’s interrogator accused him of using Bakhtiar’s identity card to enter Iraq. Throughout our ordeal, our interrogators were more interested in trying to prove we were spies than in finding out what we know about Gad. Perhaps that saved us.

Left alone in the room with the motorcycles, we confabulated a new story. We would tell the truth, Gad had been with us. To make it simple, the only lie would be that we became separated form him at 11 A.M. in Kirkuk, instead of 2 P.M. near the house where we had been captured. We would never admit knowing of his execution.

We stayed in relative comfort in the house, watched by military intelligence, for three days. On April 2, we were again blindfolded. After about a half hour drive, we were brought to a real prison, nearer the heart of Baghdad.

“This is a bad sign,” said Alain. “If they start torturing people and we hear it, that will be worse.”

Our cell measured 6 by 10 feet. There were no bunks or mattresses, just a concrete floor and three blankets apiece (two more than the average prisoner got, we later found out). Unlike the others, the bars of our cell door were curtained with pieces of burlap. It was unclear if that was so we couldn’t see out or so others wouldn’t see in.

Dinner was a bowl of tomato soup with a few cooked vegetables, some bread, and a bowl of water. Later that evening, a man was dragged out of his cell. We heard him making strange sounds, bleating like a sheep, “Bah, bah, bah, baaah.” That was interspersed with the sound of heavy wood meeting flesh. Even as he continued, the change in the tone of his voice indicated his pain. The soldiers were trying to make him crow like a rooster, and they laughed uncontrollably when a real rooster crowed, as if to answer his call. As all this was going on, the sound of guards playing ping pong competed for our attention. A prisoner with a rare, beautiful voice began to sing, almost to wail — he was reciting a Muslim prayer. The sounds of pain, ping pong, and prayer mixed in the air around us.

[Days later], I was blindfolded and led down a corridor where, I could tell from the voices, there were at least a half dozen men. The possibility of being beaten or severely tortured was on my mind. I was ordered to sit, and waited in the darkness.

The translator spoke English, and seemed to have some compassion. But my interrogator was another matter. He asked me what my “real job” was. I painstakingly retraced my steps, from flying into Amman in early February to my capture nearly two months later in Kirkuk. I said I had already told them that I was a reporter for the Village Voice and CBS News.

Much to my relief, he asked little about Gad, and never questioned my story about how we became separated. I could tell from his questions that he had developed both Gad’s and Alain’s film–including the group photos from the base in Kirkuk. The interrogator again asked, “Now tell us about your real job, your real purpose in coming to Iraq.” I repeated that I worked for the Voice and CBS.

They said I was lying. “Tell us,” said the interrogator, “about your relationship with the CIA.”

I denied having any relationship with the CIA or any other intelligence organization.

“We have our own information, our own proof, of your longstanding relationship with the CIA,” he said. “Don’t like to us. We know. If you tell us the truth you will go free. But if you continue to lie, you will stay here many years.”

Alain and I had already decided that unless the pain was unbearable, we would never admit to being spies. In 1990, an Iranian-born British journalist, Farhad Barzoft, was offered the same promise — if he “confessed” to working for British intelligence, he would go free. He did, and was summarily hanged.

I continued my denials. At the end I learned the interrogation was also a trial. “You are found guilty of entering Iraq without a visa, and concerning your relationship with the CIA, you remain under suspicion.” It was the best I could hope for under the circumstances. Alain timed the ordeal: I’d been gone for two hours. Then he underwent a similar experience, being accused of working for French intelligence. But his interrogation only lasted 45 minutes.

After more than two weeks in prison, Alain and I became disillusioned. We discussed the possibilities. The Iraqis might really think we were spies. Although we hadn’t yet been physically harmed, we knew that — as Western reporters — if they began to torture us, it would mean that they had already decided that we must be killed. Alain told me how to commit suicide without a rope: get a full running start and ram your own head into a brick wall. He said it was common among prisoners during the Vietnam War.

The most difficult feeling was our abject helplessness as we listened to the cries of other prisoners being abused. The guards’ instrument of choice was a heavy rubber hose. We listened and occasionally managed to watch — I could just peek out a small window that looked into the prison yard — as men were beaten. Prisoners were made to hold out their hands just like in Catholic grade school. Some were hit in the soles of the feet. If a prisoner raised his hand to defend himself, he would be savagely beaten about the head and body.

The guards also had a collection of heavy sticks, some as thick and twice as long as a baseball bats. I watched one blindfolded man beaten with these sticks in the cell block yard. About five guards surrounded him, flailing away, as the prisoner tried to remove his blindfold. One ingeniously sadistic guard playfully held a broom handle like a pool cue and repeatedly poked a crying man in the head.

One evening we heard a strange sound: Alain thought it was a welding torch. As another prisoner was dragged out of his cell, my imagination lost all self-control. The strange sound continued, but we hardly heard any screams.

The next morning, I heard the same hissing sound, and looking through our tiny cell window I saw a guard playing with a flat, gunlike device by a chain-link fence. He was placing the two white prongs on the end of the device near the fence watching the tiny blue bolts of electricity that arced between them. It was a stun gun. Some of the guards were genuinely fascinated with their “toys.”

Later I saw a black man, presumably from Sudan, hosed down and then made to stand outside on an overcast day. He was interrogated while he stood there shivering. When the answer was not up to par, a guard zapped him with the stun gun and watched as he tumbled onto the wet paving.

The abuse was systematic and routine — to the point of being institutionalized sadism. The most disturbing aspect was that most of the physical abuse did not occur in the context of extracting information, but on the whim of individual guards. We don’t know if the Ministry of Information was aware of what we were witnessing, or simply didn’t care.

The Iraqi prisoners — from young teenage boys to grandfathers — didn’t seem like hardened criminals, nor did they seem important enough to be political prisoners. They just seemed to be under suspicion: in Iraq, to be under suspicion is as good as being charged with a crime.

Clearly, such abuse serves a political purpose. To be even suspected of being against the regime can result in the nightmare of being held incommunicado and randomly abused in jail. I watched new prisoners come in. One man, about my age and wearing regular street clothes, simply covered his face with his hands, shaking his head.

In the evening the guards liked to play dominoes. The game seemed to enhance their own sense of camaraderie. Afterward, their laughter would become louder and more menacing; they would often drag an unfortunate prisoner out of his cell soon after the last domino fell.

On the night of April 9, they chose Jaffer. I had seen him a few days before, he was a boy about 16 years old.

Like a game, the guards chased him around the cell block, up and down the stairs and even into the outer yard. They beat him relentlessly with rubber hoses. His high-pitched screams echoed through the cells. Although not seriously harmed physically, he was terrorized to the point of breakdown. The guards dragged him back to his cell, laughing.

The next night they chose Jaffer again, but rather than chase him, one guard pinned him against a cell door with a chair while the other guards beat him. A prison source told me that the boy had participated in the Shiite uprising in the south, and that he had killed an entire family. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Regardless, the guards got great pleasure out of horrifying the defenseless boy. Alain and I began to hate them.

“Would you like to do a television interview?” asked Moustafa, one of our liaisons from military intelligence, when he came to check on us the next day. We had received confirmation that the Arabic-language version of Voice of America had reported us missing. We knew that if the interview ran on television, at least our families would know our status — and the Iraqis would be less likely to kill us. We agreed.

We were brought to the Ministry of Information on Thursday, April 11. We met with vice minister Sadoon Al-Janaby and the Iraqi press officer, a Mr. Oudai Al-Tahir. We later learned that just days before these same men had told reporters in Baghdad we had been killed, only to subsequently deny any knowledge of us.

The TV interview focused on negative aspects of the Kurdish revolt. In response to questions, we told our interrogators that ethnic Turkish refugees had complained that the Kurds had looted Arab shops in Kirkuk. Local sources, including one rebel, had also told us that the Kurds had executed 17 Baath party officials in a small village north of Dahuk. They explained that they did so because these officials had executed soldiers who had been caught trying to defect from the Iraqi army.

I tried to qualify my answers; it was clear they were not interested in explanations. I don’t think the tape was ever aired anyway. As we left, the vice minister said that, “God willing,” we would be freed soon. But we were returned to our cell.

As the days went by I thought more and more about Terry Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief who has been held in Beirut now for more than six years. I was determined to keep a positive attitude, and concentrated on preparing to write an account of our captivity; I wondered how long Anderson had done that. Alain, on the other hand, withdrew into himself. He spent most of his time sitting, rarely wanting to talk.

But it was difficult to hold on to even your own thoughts. In the last week of our captivity, for two nights in a row, we both heard faint cries coming from somewhere far away in the prison. At first, we both tried to ignore them. But the cries persisted. On closer listening, we were almost overcome by nausea. They were the screams neither of fear nor even sharp pain, but the steady, uncontrollable cries of a man in unbearable agony, undergoing a much more severe and systematic form of torture.

Three days after being told that our release was up to God, we began to lose hope. It had now been 17 days since our capture. We decided that on Monday we would begin a hunger strike, and maintain it even if we were separated.

But that day we were both transferred to what appeared to be a permanent cell deep[er] in the prison [cellblock]. We delayed our plans for a strike to make sense of our situation.

The night we were released without warning to fellow reporters at the Al-Rashid Hotel. The decision to release “Mister Alain and Mister Frank,” we were told, had come personally from President Saddam Hussein.

When I called New York, Gad’s photo agent said his shots of Kurdistan were now outdated; all his subjects are smiling. I laughed to myself. Although it sometimes made it hard to get a serious news photo, Gad was the kind of guy who inevitably provoked even the most severe people into a grin.

Gad identified with the Kurds and their struggle, and saw his own role in documenting it as his personal contribution. But his deep commitment was always complemented by his laughter. Gad called people, like he called regimes. Before he died we agreed on what might be the best measure for both — whether they have a sense of humor.

The Iraqi government has no sense of humor. Any legitimacy it once held is lost. It has become almost apolitical; it exists solely by its monopoly of force.

But there is little alternative. While there is now considerable dissent, even among government officials, opposing voices have few outlets for expression. Saddam’s hold on the country is genuinely weak, but his enemies are even weaker.

Much of the blame lies with U.S. policy. Having started the gulf war, the United States hoped that by terrorizing Iraq’s civilian population and destroying the country’s infrastructure it would inspire a move to oust Saddam. But the United States would never back a popular attempt to seize power — with the instability and uncertainty it might bring. Rather, American policymakers remain wedded to the concept of an anti-Saddam coup from within his own army, thinking such people might be more amenable to American aims than insurrectional Shiite and Kurdish masses.

Contrary to the hyperbolic rhetoric of three months ago, American leaders now seem prepared to accept Saddam. His survival has become the price of stability. A humiliated and defeated Saddam in power is useful to American policymakers; he has been used just like everybody else.

Since we crossed the river six weeks ago, thousands of Kurds have died of starvation, exposure, and warfare. Looking over Gad’s photos, I wonder if any of these people — who pressed tea and hearty lamb and rice dishes on us wherever we traveled in those bright spring days of the revolution — have survived to reach the “secure zone” belatedly established by the Americans.

Upon leaving prison, it was painful to learn just how disastrous had been their fall.

We had plans to cover other conflicts and countries. A poet as well as an artist, Gad’s own interests and knowledge were broad. While reporting in Kurdistan, Gad had been accepted to Yale Law School. Typically, he had posted his application from the Plaza Hotel in Amman. He never knew he was accepted.

After he ran around that house, I never saw Gad again. His body has yet to be recovered. In fact, although they had both his camera bag and passport in their possession, after Alain and I were released from prison, the Iraqi authorities acted as if he had never existed at all.

–For Gad–as well as Joe, Edith, Mauzi, Jocelyne, Alain, and all those who knew and loved him.

Who Are Those Guys? How Intelligence Agents Are Trying to Remake the Iraqi Opposition

Beirut — While Secretary of State James A. Baker III made his official visit to the Middle East, the broadest spectrum ever of Iraqi opposition forces met in the small Bristol Hotel in West Beirut. Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Kurds and other nationalists, Communists and ex-monarchists, and even former members of Saddam’s own ruling Ba’ath party and the Iraqi army were represented. After three days of talks, they — on paper, at least — formally joined forces to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

But already, serious divisions were deepening behind the scenes. A major battle for the future of a post-Saddam Iraq is underway. Although a loose coalition of Shiite, Kurdish, and independent nationalists comprised the majority camp at the Beirut conference, a smaller group, dominated largely by self-described “liberal figures” of the Western-oriented Free Iraqi Council (FIC), is trying to usurp control of the opposition movement, Islamic as well as independent nationalist sources say.

Each side accuses the other of being puppets of foreign backers. The top Shi’ite Islamic leaders from Iraq are currently based in Tehran, while leaders of the FIC admit they enjoy the backing of both Saudi Arabia and the United States.

During the conference in Beirut, an individual who identified himself as a liaison for the U.S. government approached members of existing parties and groups, according to both Islamic and independent nationalist sources. Offering promises of American backing — an offer of some importance, given the more than 100,000 U.S. troops currently occupying 15 percent of Iraqi soil — he encouraged them to form splinter, breakaway organizations and join the FIC. These various sources, who were interviewed separately and without each other’s knowledge, gave nearly identical accounts of these attempts.

The liaison also met directly with Islamic leaders to deliver a message, according to the same sources. “He said, ‘You can do want you want now, but there will be no ayatollahs in power,”‘ one Islamic source said.

The U.S. government’s liaison is an Iraqi exile based in London, according to sources present who know him, including a relative who was also at the Beirut meeting as a member of one of the Islamic opposition groups. “He’s a businessman. He made his money selling oil,” said the relative. “His brother-in-law was involved in a coup [against the regime] in 1970.”

“We know him. He’s trying to organize something here,” said one source.

Other Islamic and independent nationalist sources described the liaison as working for the CIA. But his Islamic cousin said it would be more accurate to say he maintained — a “business relationship” with the agency. “He works along with [several Western intelligence agencies],” he said. When pressed for the liaison’s name, he added, “Stay away from that, man. It could be dangerous for you.”

The liaison had come to the conference from Washington, DC, and his next destination was Riyadh, said several other sources. “He came to this conference without an invitation,” one added.

The liaison delivered his message that the United States would not tolerate Islamic clerics in power last Tuesday in the Bristol Hotel. Just over two years ago, at a smaller meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders in Tehran, the same intelligence liaison now trying to organize support for the FIC against Saddam was advocating a policy of cooperation with the very same regime, according to sources who were present at both meetings. That was shortly after the Iran-Iraq War, at a time when the United States still saw Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath party as a buffer against the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran.

The United States went to war to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But having done so, the original policy of containing Shiite fundamentalist influence in the region has reasserted itself, and the preferred means appears once again to be the manipulation of internal political disputes by secret intelligence agencies. Whether the United States will succeed in doing so in a country on the verge of insurrection — with a majority Shiite population — remains to be seen. But the same policy carried out by the same means has been tried once before, in Iran under the Shah, with disastrous results. American interests in the region have yet to recover from that effort.

“There has been a miscalculation on the part of the West that they do not trust the Iraqi opposition as a replacement for the Iraqi regime,” said Sheik Mohsen Husseini, a clerical leader from the large Islamic Action organization. “We will respect each other as long as each group shows us the same respect.”

As the liaison’s relative, who has spent the past decade in the West, put it, “This is not the way to deal with us.”

Voodoo Politics

Both Shi’ite Islamic and FIC leaders deny that their respective groups are subject to any form of foreign manipulation. “They are like scorpions,” said Dr. Saad A. Jaber, president of the FIC, of his accusers. “This is the first thing that any one of them would say that we are spies, and traitors.”

The FIC is a hastily assembled coalition formed two months ago in London. Most of its leaders have been living in exile in the West for decades. “Each representative of the Iraqi Free Council has been in opposition to the regime for about 30 years,” explained one. Many previously supported the Iraqi royal family, which was deposed in 1958.

The FIC is nonetheless confident that it stands to form the basis for a new Iraqi government after Saddam falls, even though it has no identifiable rebel forces or zones of control inside Iraq, and no seriously defined constituency among the civilian population.

Kurdish guerrillas in the north and Shiite rebel forces in the south, on the other hand, compose the largest and best-organized wings of the resistance. Having fought for greater autonomy and political rights against both Turkey and Iraq for decades, the Kurdish guerrilla movement has long awaited the opportunity provided by Baghdad’s defeat in Kuwait. But the Kurds are suspicious of the Americans, who abandoned their insurgent guerrilla movement in the 1970s when the Shah made a deal with Iraq. The Shiite lslamic movement in the south of Iraq, with long-standing ties to Iran, already has an extensive political infrastructure and is now actively organizing rebel forces.

To counter Iranian influence, nationalist party sources say that Syria and especially Saudi Arabia are actively involved with the Iraqi opposition. The Saudis in particular support the FIC, they say.

FIC president Jaber confirmed that there is fierce competition for control of the opposition movement. “We represent the most dangerous element for the other parties,” he said, arguing that the FIC is more truly representative of the Iraqi people. “Our major strength is that we are the only organization that is truly Iraqi. Sunni, Shiite. Kurdish, Christian — they are all represented.”

But when pressed to identify their resistance base inside Iraq, FIC leaders said it was a military secret. And when asked to define their political base, they produced only one name, Sheik Sami Azara Al-Majoun of the Beni ljim tribe in the south of the country.

Sheik Al-Majoun later became a major subject of controversy in Beirut. In the conference’s final session, when his tribe’s name was omitted from the final declaration, he became irate and temporarily stormed out. Other leaders said the mistake was unintentional, and that organizers had simply forgotten the Beni Ijim tribe because it is so small. “I never heard of it before today,” explained one delegate shortly after the incident.

FIC president Jaber Freeiv admits that he personally enjoys the support of both the Bush administration and the Saudi royal family. “We think King Faisal [of Saudi Arabia] can play a major role for Iraq. We the people of Iraq are calling on him.”

Jaber’s supporters like to boast that he is close personal friends with many current and former U.S. officials, including House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Lee Hamilton and former Reagan administration chief of staff Donald Regan.

“I did meet many people in the State Department,” Jaber told the Voice. But he was also aware that the association could have its down side. “People say that the State Department would like to cooperate with people like Saad Jaber.”

No Turbans in Riyadh

The formal position of all Iraqi Islamic organizations is that they support the establishment of some form of democratic government after Saddam. However, at the same time they still profess their desire that the new Iraq should be an Islamic state.

“It would be wrong to see the situation in Iraq as an exact copy of another Islamic revolution,” said Mohamed Taki Al-Moudarissi, who sits on the supreme umbrella coalition of Islamic opposition forces. Nevertheless, “the Iraqi people are a Muslim people, and they would therefore act on the basis of their values,” he added.

Both FIC and some nationalist representatives pointed out that Iran is behind Iraq’s Islamic forces. “Their leadership takes direct orders from Iran,” one source said.

FIC leaders said there was too much Islamic influence at the Beirut conference. The FIC is the driving force behind the effort to organize a second opposition conference near the end of this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Both the Beirut and the Riyadh events are being paid for by the Saudi government; but most Islamic leaders and even many nationalist leaders in Beirut said they will not go to Riyadh.

“I have received three invitations,” said one nationalist leader, who added that he would only attend if the event in Riyadh promises to be democratic.

“We are not going there,” said one Islamic delegate, reflecting the mood of nearly all Islamic organizations.

Their absence does not deter supporters of the FIC in the least.

“Look around you,” said one FIC delegate, noting the many Shiite clerics wearing long brown robes and while turbans. “The conference in Riyadh will be our conference,” he added, saying the “Iranian-backed mullahs” will not attend.

In fact, many FIC leaders already seemed to be regarding last week’s meeting as a sideshow, saying they came to Beirut on the condition that no major agreements would be reached. “We said we (would) only attend this conference if there are no major decisions voted on,” said one FIC source. If the delegates had formed “a government-in-exile here, you would have 10 turbans in it,” he added. “Right now, the leadership (of the opposition) is unbalanced.”

FIC delegates say a “secret” will be unveiled in, Riyadh. “I can’t tell you because that might destroy it,” said one. Other sources indicated the alleged secret is most likely an attempt by the FIC to form a government-in-exile, which it intends to control.

Islamic and independent nationalist leaders say they are fearful of how a Riyadh conference will be presented to the outside world. “This conference [in Beirut] definitely is more representative,” said nationalist party delegate Dr. Farka Ramadini.

“Here you have some press. There you will have a thousand reporters and [in Riyadh] they will say that everybody [of the opposition] is here,” feared one source from the large Islamic Action organization.

On Monday, opposition leaders — without the FIC — held a press conference in Damascus and said there would be no conference in Riyadh, and that a second conference would take place only when the entire opposition deems it appropriate.

The Once and Future Dictatorship

For now, the FIC’s offers of alliance do not appear to have fallen entirely on deaf ears in Beirut. “Our offer is really spreading,” the FIC’s Jaber said. “They are all coming to us.” The FIC did pick up a few new additions in Beirut. A small group of individuals associated with the powerful Islamic Dawa party are now cooperating with the FIC, according to Islamic and nationalist sources. And a small, previously unassociated liberal party is also negotiating a relationship, they said. These sources added that the liaison from Washington met directly with both before their switch.

But who will ultimately dominate the opposition remains to be seen. Independent nationalist leaders said that it would difficult for the FIC to succeed. “Even within [these breakaway] groups there are good people. We are talking to them now,” said Dr. Ramadini. “If they find out that the man in charge is with the CIA, I don’t think they will go with them.

“You can isolate him. People know,” he added.

And it remains unclear how the FIC expects to someday govern Iraq without a concrete internal base. Instead, foreign interference threatens to permanently rupture the opposition, and thereby delay the ultimate ouster of Saddam. In addition, at least 55 percent of Iraq’s population identify themselves as Shi’ite Muslims. Any attempt to exclude Islamic representation is likely to trigger a backlash, which might result in the very same radicalization of Iraq along fundamentalist and anti-Western lines that such meddling is designed to avoid.

“There is no chance [the intelligence agency meddling will work],” said the nationalist Ramadini. “I think the overwhelming majority have a consensus in trying to avoid the pitfalls of being backed by foreign powers. You can buy people. You can pay them dollars, houses — all that. But all you gain is people in whom no one believes.”

Hassan Al-Alowi, a major independent leader within the opposition said, “This is the first phase of a new dictatorship.”

Release the Jesuit Tapes

Original article can be found here.

by Thomas Long & Frank Smyth

The FBI Has Videotaped Testimony That Accuses the Salvadoran Army of Killing Six Jesuits—and Proves the U.S. Knew in Advance

SAN SALVADOR—American officials in both San Salvador and Washington claim that they have cooperated “intensely” with the investigation into the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter last November. Yet even though State Department officials finally yielded to pressure from Congress to turn over the sworn testimony of a U.S. military adviser—who said he knew of the murder plan in advance—they have continued to withhold key evidence. For 10 months the FBI has kept a videotape of the adviser’s testimony, which suggests there was a conspiracy to murder the Jesuits that included several top Salvadoran army officers, in their Washington headquarters.

Two weeks ago U.S. Embassy officials delivered to a Salvadoran judge three cursory sworn affidavits given by U.S. Army Major Eric Warren Buckland to the FBI in January. But they did not turn over the videotape or a transcript of a detailed discussion between Buckland and FBI examiner Paul Cully.

The recorded discussion is vital. Cully based his own conclusion that Buckland had prior knowledge of a plan to kill the Jesuit priests on the videotaped interview. It also contains information that Buckland recanted—with only a sketchy explanation—one week later.

“There is no way to analyze his statements and his supposed retraction without having the videotape—or at least a transcript—to know exactly what he said and what he was trying to recant,” said Antonio Cañas, a senior political analyst at the Jesuit-run University of Central America.

American officials have yet to explain why this evidence has not already been volunteered to investigating Salvadoran authorities. In fact, U.S. officials in San Salvador have received strict instructions from Washington not to comment on Buckland’s testimony at all.

Nevertheless, the videotape was entered into evidence at FBI headquarters in Washington. Logged, according to official FBI documents, under case title “Shooting of Six Jesuit Priests,” subject “Murder,” it has been “maintained” at the Polygraph Unit, section GRB, Suite 2, under the file number #00116093 PQ1X0.

“Why is the Embassy being so fucking tight-lipped?” asked a non-American Western official, who has been independently monitoring the investigation. “Somewhere somebody is lying through their back teeth within the U.S. hierarchy.”

According to Jesuit academic Michael Czerny, “The United States government from very early on has been acting in a very irregular if not criminal manner.”

Major Buckland has offered two clearly conflicting stories. First he said he had prior knowledge that senior officers were planning to murder the priests. Then he said that he only learned of the Jesuit murders after the fact.

But his recantation is less than weak. “It’s absolutely nonsensical,” said one Western diplomat. In both versions, Buckland says that some time before the Jesuits were killed he accompanied a senior Salvadoran army officer, Colonel Carlos Avilés, to the country’s military academy to “solve a problem” with the school’s director, Colonel Guillermo Benavides. Benavides was later charged with ordering the Jesuit murders.

Buckland says he shared a close working and personal relationship with Colonel Avilés, his Salvadoran counterpart in developing psychological operations for the war. He also says that Avilés was his chief source of information on the murders. According to both Buckland’s original and revised testimonies, on the day of their visit to the academy, Avilés was acting as a special envoy of then army chief of staff Colonel René Emilio Ponce.

In a sworn handwritten statement given to the FBI on January 11, Buckland says Avilés told him that Benavides, the military school’s director, and other unnamed officers were planning to kill Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of the University of Central America and the most prominent of the murdered priests. The adviser says he waited while Avilés went to talk with Benavides:

“Aviles appeared very uncomfortable about talking to Benevides. Upon returning to the vehicle Aviles called me back to the vehicle and told me that he had to work something out; ‘Colonel Benavides is from the old school, he liked to handle things in his own way, in the old style.”…

“Benevides told Aviles that Ella Coria [sic] was a problem. Aviles told me they wanted to handle it the old way by killing some of the priests. I asked what happened when you (Aviles) talked to him. Aviles told me that Benavides was old school and was still the ‘rammer.’ ”

In his January 18 retraction one week later, Buckland describes the same visit in even greater detail. He recalls, for instance, Avilés telling him “about the fine quality of the bread baked at the military school.” At the same time, however, Buckland curiously claims not to remember anything about his conversation with Avilés concerning Benavides—which was, according to the adviser’s own testimonies, the purpose of the trip:

“After we both got into the vehicle, I asked him words to the effect of what was going on and I do not remember his reply or specifically what “we talked about.” According to this revised version, the major still claims Avilés told him about Benavides’s involvement in the murders—but on another occasion, six weeks after the crime took place.

In explaining the switch, Buckland implies that his initial version was given under duress, and that he became confused during the FBI examination. But it does seem odd that Buckland could have invented the information that Benavides wanted to murder Father Ellacuria—and even write it down himself—and then recall nothing a week later. What’s more, Buckland’s first account is rich, in its particulars, with little hint of confusion under stern FBI examination. It seems unlikely, for example, that Buckland could have remembered all the details like the little-known nickname, “the rammer,” when Benavides is more commonly referred to by fellow officers as “Virgin Boots.”

U.S. officials back up Buckland’s claim that he lost control of his faculties in his initial testimony—even though the veteran Green Beret and army Special Forces Psychological Operations major was under routine questioning as a friendly witness.

Even more convincing, a lie detector test directly contradicts Buckland’s retraction. In answer to the question, “Did you have prior knowledge that the Jesuits would be killed?” Buckland said no, and the polygraph indicated “deception,” according to official FBI documents.

Based on this and the subsequent videotaped interview, FBI examiner Cully concludes: “Buckland admitted that he obtained prior knowledge that the [priests at the university] were going to be killed, specifically Ellacoria [sic], through conversations with Colonel Avilés. According to Major Buckland, Colonel Avilés told him of the intent of certain officers of the El Salvadoran Army to conduct a military operation against the University of Central America. Major Buckland became aware of this information several weeks before the Jesuits were murdered.”

But Colonel Avilés, Buckland’s main source, denies telling the adviser anything. Avilés denies even his former friendship with Buckland—a relationship of which both Salvadoran and Americans were well aware. Indeed, Avilés claims that he was not even in El Salvador when the alleged trip took place.

Buckland, in his initial statement, says the pair made the visit “approximately 10 days before the killings (circa November 6, 1989).” But in his later version, the adviser says the trip was made in late October, recalling that Avilés left for vacation at the beginning of November.

Colonel Ponce, on whose orders Avilés was allegedly sent to the military school, also denies knowing of the murders in advance. He bases his denial on a selectively narrow reading of Buckland’s testimony (Ponce has since been promoted to the military’s top post as minister of defense).

Last month Ponce sent a letter to Massachusetts congressman Joe Moakley, who chairs a special task force on the investigation. Ponce points out that Avilés passport indicates he was not in El Salvador in early November. “That should be sufficient to demonstrate with facts the falsehood of Major Buckland’s declaration,” he says in the letter.

Only Buckland’s revised testimony, which U.S. officials now claim is the truth, establishes the date of the visit in late October.

The newest revelations do not mark the first time Avilés and Buckland have given widely disparate versions of their activities together. Buckland first came forward in early January, telling his superiors that Aviles informed him in December that the military school director had ordered the killings. Avilés categorically denies revealing any information.

Both men were given lie detector tests at that time. Congressman Moakley and other officials concluded that it was the Salvadoran colonel who was lying.

Avilés would have had good reason. To be branded a snitch within the most exclusive and powerful men’s club in El Salvador—the senior officers’ corps—is akin to blowing the whistle on the Mafia. At the very least, “his career is over,” said one Western official. Not surprisingly, Avilés has since said he’s planning to retire.

“It is a very grave sin among them [to snitch],” said a chief prosecutor from the office of the Salvadoran attorney general. “But they can’t get rid of him now, because it would be too obvious.” Portions of the affidavits which Buckland does not retract reveal that both men feared for their lives because of what they knew of the murders.

The many inconsistencies between Buckland’s original and revised testimonies clearly indicate that key pieces of the puzzle are still missing. For one thing, much of the information he recants in his revised affidavit never actually appeared in his previous sworn statements.

What’s more, the FBI examiner’s report draws heavily on evidence that has never been made available to Salvadoran judicial authorities. The most complete record of what Buckland may have known and when he knew it is likely to be found in the videotaped FBI interview.

The Bush administration has never been notably openhanded about information concerning the Jesuits’ murder. The January affidavits were released only after Congressman Moakley publicly complained in mid-October. The Salvadoran judge on the case has now asked for the videotaped interview; U.S. officials refuse to comment on the matter, saying they have not yet received a formal diplomatic request.

Such behavior leads Jesuit leaders and other observers to question the administration’s true intentions. “The U.S. Embassy did not provide the evidence, and they have not yet explained why,” said Father Jose Maria Tojeira, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America. “They are either inept, or acting in bad faith.”

Sources say that Buckland’s January testimony was “discovered” by U.S. officials in San Salvador in late September. Yet they refuse to say who in the federal government might be responsible for their mysterious discovery or even which agency channeled the evidence from the FBI headquarters in Washington to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. They also fail to explain why it took nearly a month to pass the evidence to Salvadoran authorities— at the same time that they deny that Moakley’s prodding played any role.

Non-American officials and other observers say that the U.S. government’s blatant discrepancies warrant an inquiry. “There are too many agencies involved,” said one Western diplomat. “They [should] be called to testify under oath.”

Officials of the Jesuit university agree.

“There has always been passive complicity [by U.S. officials] in human rights abuses in the past; now the complicity has become active,” said the university’s Cañas. “It is not only a question of how far does this complicity reach, but where did it begin?”

The Truth Will Out

San Salvador — The official purpose given for Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson’s visit here two weeks ago was to express support for negotiations between El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government and the leftist guerrillas. But the real reason the ranking state department policymaker for Latin America traveled to El Salvador was to give a scathing lecture to the High Command of the Salvadoran Army over their suspected involvement in the murders of six Jesuit Priests last November.

Aronson gave the High Command a dressing down that differed markedly from his public comments on the U.S. ambassador’s lawn. Sources present at the meeting said Aronson lambasted the assembled officers about the Jesuit investigation, and demanded that those responsible be brought to trial.

U.S. officials here admit to being terrified at what they might find if they press the government to get to the bottom of the case. They have begun to realize that not only a few lower-ranking officers, but several members of the senior High Command may be complicit in planning the murders. U.S. officials also fear the embassy’s favorite son, armed forces chief of staff Colonel Rene Emilio Ponce, may be involved.

So far, no definitive evidence to link specific senior officers to the actual ordering of the crime has come to light — presumably because individual officers have closed ranks to protect one another. But a mounting body of evidence points increasingly to the complicity of the High Command.

Military intelligence sources as well as Catholic Church officials say that prior to the Jesuit murders, the military conceived of “Plan Djakarta” a term coined after the brutal 1965 anti-communist campaign in Indonesia that led to the wholesale slaughter of leftists and ethnic Chinese in that country. Sources say the military’s Plan Djakarta, which was developed in the midst of the major offensive by leftist guerrillas last November, targeted dozens of prominent religious, labor, and other popular leaders for assassination. The Plan Djakarta strongly suggests that the Jesuits were not killed in isolation, but as part of a broader, preconceived plan.

Under strong pressure from Congress, the [George H. W.] Bush administration has been forced to make the infamous massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women a test case for U.S. policy. But various diplomatic and other sources say the Salvadoran military High Command is actively blocking the investigation. Unless the crime is successfully prosecuted and its “intellectual authors” within the military are tried, U.S. officials admit they will have little remaining justification to defend against serious cuts in U.S. aid.

It’s now become apparent that the dilemma has frozen U.S. policy in its tracks. At the very least, even if Ponce was not involved in the killings, given his sway over the rest of the rest of the High Command, diplomats suspect the chief of staff is collaborating in a cover-up. The High Command’s failure to demand accountability in the case demonstrates that U.S. attempts to “professionalize” the Salvadoran Armed Forces have been in vain. Though it has been financed and supported by U.S. tax dollars over the past 10 years, the Salvadoran military is now thumbing its nose at its backers, and the senior officers that currently dominate the High Command have become Washington’s Frankenstein — or Noriega — in yet another Central American nation.

The High Command remained politely silent during Aronson’s address, and at the end gave him an ovation. But sources present said they doubted that his words were well heeded. One observer said, “It was like telling sharks not to eat sardines.”

Wearing a standard dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, the assistant secretary looked a little out of place before the camouflage-clad Salvadoran High Command, according to one observer present. “He was like a Dutch uncle,” he said. “But I don’t know if they got the [message].”

Aronson’s visit came in the wake of heavy pressure from U.S. officials here. Diplomats say the embassy’s military attaché, Colonel Wayne Wheeler, has lobbied the High Command almost daily to cooperate with the investigation. Frustrated with the lack of progress in the case, U.S. ambassador William Walker — conscious that his own diplomatic future may be hanging on the outcome — recently gave what officials described as the “toughest speech of his 30-year career.” But the High Command didn’t budge. Aronson was called in to up the ante.

Five soldiers and three junior officers have been charged with carrying out the murders, and Colonel Guillermo Benavides has been charged with ordering them. But diplomats and other observers here are almost unanimous that Benavidcs, who has been referred to as “Virgin Boots” could not have ordered a crime of such magnitude on his own. “I know Benavides,” said a senior U.S. official directly involved in the case. “I don’t believe he did it,” he said flatly.

For a time, U.S. officials entertained the thought that the lower-ranking officers charged in the assassination of some of El Salvador’s most prestigious Catholic clergy and respected academic critics on their own. But both the severity of the crime and the number of troops involved make that highly unlikely. Besides, the High Command’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation puts that scenario further in doubt. “Why would a lieutenant decide to do that?” said a non-American Western diplomat. “It had to come from higher up.”

Speculation revolves around two now well-known meetings. The first took place in the High Command headquarters the evening of November 15, just hours before the Jesuit murders. The second occurred in the military’s National Directorate of Intelligence (which shares facilities with the CIA) several hours after the deaths. Earlier this year, military sources told reporters that officers at the first meeting decided to use air power to put down the mounting guerrilla offensive, and to try to assassinate suspected rebel leaders in the capital. Sources also said that at the second meeting, officers clapped in approval upon hearing of the Jesuits’ deaths.

One Salvadoran Army officer present at that second meeting, Colonel Pineda Guerra, took issue with his fellow officers for applauding, according to diplomatic and military sources. Pineda argued that the Jesuit murders were a mistake, and predicted that the case would be a terrible scar on the military as an institution. Other officers, especially Colonel Guzman Aguilar, argued that the Jesuits deserved what they got. “[Pineda] made a real impression on people present,” said a U.S. official — implying that either American officials or sources were also represented.

But it still remains unclear who ordered the killings — and who knew about them, and when. On the morning the Jesuits were killed, Army soldiers raided the headquarters of the Lutheran Church and were also seen at the homes of several other antigovernment politicians and activists. All but the Jesuits had already gone into hiding. That the actions all occurred at about the same time led to speculation among Church officials and others that the military had drawn up a list, identified to the Church as “Plan Djakarta.” Several members of the High Command confirmed the existence of the Plan Djakarta, according to an individual with long-standing access to the military and official intelligence information. The purpose of the list was “to decapitate” the antigovernment movement, he said. “There were lots of religious and other people on it.” When asked how many, he said, “at least a hundred.”

El Salvador’s Catholic archbishop, Rivera y Damas, told an audience in Europe that he believes his name and that of Auxiliary Bishop Rosa Chavez were included: “Bishop Rosa Chavez and I could have died too on that night (the Jesuits were killed). Our names were on the list of Plan Djakarta, whose aim was the physical elimination of all of those of us who denounce human rights violations and the system of injustice here in El Salvador.”

“What we do know, we have from sources which the Archbishop sees as worthy of belief,” Rosa Chavez later told an American reporter. “The plan you mention did exist.” Two days after the Jesuits were killed, El Salvador Attorney General Eduardo Colorado sent a letter to Pope John Paul II, warning him that the bishops were in danger. The Salvadoran AG encouraged the Pope to temporarily withdraw the bishops for their own protection.

The Jesuits’ deaths make it inconceivable that they would not have been on the list. The testimony of one the lieutenants charged with killing them is also telling. According to the testimony recorded by El Salvador’s Fourth Penal Court, Benavides told three of his subordinates, “This is a situation where it’s them or us; we’re going to begin with the ringleaders. And within our sector, we have the university and Ellacuria [the most prominent of the murdered priests) is there.”

Nevertheless, judicial authorities have not even begun to seriously investigate the High Command. Actually, fewer than a dozen officers have provided even peripheral testimony in the case. Ponce, for example, took responsibility for ordering a search of the Jesuits’ residence less than three days before they were killed. But he has only provided a judge with prepared statements, limited largely to the search itself. Only one senior officer besides Benavides has been called before the judge. Other key senior officers whom diplomats strongly suspect, such as Vice-Minister of Defense Juan Orlando Zepeda, have yet to be even seriously questioned. El Salvador’s Fourth Penal judge, Ricardo Zamora [no relation to leftist politician Ruben Zamora] is genuinely pursuing leads. But his efforts are, predictably, limited mostly to the execution of the crime, not to who gave the order.

The investigation itself has taken a number of strange turns. “Every time they get one thing straight, they come to something else,” said a non-American diplomat. “They keep incriminating more people.” The burning of more than 7O log books from the Military Academy — which might have indicated who directed the unit that killed the Priests — is one example. Military officers said that all the books from 1989 were burned as standard routine, though the books for 1987 and 1988 are, oddly, still on file.

In another bizarre twist, Judge Zamora ordered the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Camilo Hernandez for having allegedly ordered the books to be burned. But three weeks passed before Hernandez was actually arrested, and consigned to a judge. The High Command says it was a misunderstanding; a non-American Western diplomat independently monitoring the case describes the military’s attitude toward the investigation as a “joke.”

Other diplomats say the Bush administration has wanted to get — or has needed to get in order to pacify Congress– at least one officer above Benavides to take responsibility for ordering the assassinations. But the problem is whether one senior officer can be singled out from the rest. “They were looking for one other name besides (Benavides),” said a non-American diplomat. “They (thought) someone higher up was involved, but what if they were all involved?”

Caught With Their Pants Down: Why U.S. Policy – and Intelligence – Failed in Salvador

Original story can be found here.

“I DON’T THINK THEY HAVE the capability,” said a U.S. Embassy official as he sipped coffee one Saturday morning in the tropical setting of his patio. I asked him if he thought rumors of an upcoming rebel offensive were true. “We’ve heard some things,” he said. “But ESAF’s [El Salvador Armed Forces] taken measures to prevent it.”

Seven and a half hours later, heavy gunfire had made his pleasant, suburban street impassable. He was forced to barricade his family inside his home for hours as the battle raged.

Ever since Vietnam, U.S. policymakers have underestimated Third World guerilla movements. Although the Salvadoran military twice detected concrete evidence of planned rebel attacks the week before they occurred, both the army and their U.S. advisors preferred to believe their own propaganda. For years, U.S. officials had said the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was losing this war. They never expected the FMLN to launch the most spectacular military offensive in the history of the 10-year civil war.

IN HINDSIGHT, it’s hard to see how anyone could have missed it. The grassroots guerilla activity amounted to a national conspiracy; tens of thousands of people participated in preparations for the offensive. Truckloads of rice, beans, bullets, and medicine were stockpiled in poor barrios.

The night before the offensive, U.S. Embassy personnel indulged in their annual Marine Corps ball. Most U.S. officials rarely get out of Escalon and the other affluent suburbs on the western side of the capital. Most of the staff press corps live out there as well. On the night the offensive began, the resident correspondents for Newsweek, Associated Press, and The New York Times were out of the country.

“They were caught with their pants down,” said one Western diplomat. Considering the level of U.S. commitment here–after 10 years and nearly $4 billion in aid–the failure to even remotely estimate the rebel strength amounts to the worst intelligence blunder since the fall of the Shah.

And then there’s President Alfredo Cristiani’s startled, unglued eyes after the reverberating crump of several bombs exploding outside his headquarters disrupting his press conference last week. They normally unflappable squash champion had just finished telling the cameras that the Salvadoran army had regained control of the capital.

The rebel offensive has forever changed the face of Salvadoran politics. On one hand, the FMLN has demonstrated that it can stand up to the greatest U.S.-backed counterinsurgency effort since Vietnam. On the other, the rebel drive has generated a rightist backlash of killing and repression not seen since the slaughter of the Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American nuns, and thousands of others in the early 1980s.

Thousands more are now likely to be killed. A military-impose, dusk-to-dawn curfew will provide cover for dragging targeted victims out of their homes. Trade unions, student, and other popular organizations have already become inactive or gone underground. But it’s the above-ground church activists, especially those who work with the poor, who have the most to fear.

Once more, the same old policy debate in Washington has also begun to round up the usual suspects. Critics are pointing to the slaying of six Jesuit priests by uniformed men (nearly every non-U.S. Western diplomat in town will tell you that the Salvadoran military was, at the very least, complicit in the crime) to argue against military and economic assistant. The State Department, on the other hand, is rattling its sabers after a plane loaded with sophisticated, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles was discovered apparently en route to the rebels from Managua.

The cold choice between human rights and “national security” was what both Reagan and Bush administration officials had long tried to avoid. But rather than admit that U.S. policy has run aground, American officials continue to engage in spin-control diplomacy, blaming the press and not the policy. During a press conference, Ambassador Walker tried to argue that the fighting in El Salvador is not a war. When I pointed out that was just what U.S. officials had said in Vietnam, U.S. Information Officer Barry Jacobs stepped forward, pointed his index finger and them at me as if it were a pistol, and jerked it upward in imaginary recoil.

“WE’RE ALL SCARED,” said a young heavyset Salvadoran woman, “because we’ve never seen anything like this before.” She was standing with about a dozen local residents at a recently built rebel barricade. Most said they had never seen a real guerilla before.

Like many other poor barrios around the country, popular organization in Santa Marta is a strong but mostly clandestine. Both rebel operatives and government oreja–informants–live close together here; on one street; unbeknownst to the oreja, the guerillas even live next door.

The FMLN tried to judge potential support when choosing areas to occupy. Once the offensive began, thousands of rebels too fixed positions in the east, south, and north of the capital city. When the muchachos appeared, some civilians joined the struggle. But depending on whom you talked to and when, the rebels’ presence brought a mixture of hope, resentment, and fear.

“What we’re afraid of is the plans will come and massacre everyone,” said a mother standing at a barricade of bricks and overturned cars in the street.

“A fear we have,” explained an older woman in an apron. “It’s natural. But for me, more than anything, I have hope that there will be change.”

The 28-year-old urban commando in charge of the barricade, Izabel, represents a second generation of committed guerillas. She sat cross-legged on the floor, and asked a group of journalists for identification.
Izabel looked slightly surreal in the shell-pocked barrio wearing a bright turquoise bandanna and a dark blue polo shirt, cradling her AK-47. Her red nail polish was fading, like the bruises between her cheekbones and eyes.

She explained she had been captured by the Treasury Police the week before. “But I didn’t give information– not a thing,” she said, smiling. “So they beat me.”

Izabel directed the rebel occupation from a second-story window while other rebels prepared homemade contact bombs on the floor below. Barricades were being erected on nearly every street. The guerillas had about 10 square blocks under their control. Other guerilla unites were positioned a few miles away.

In these northern sectors, the rebels moved among apartment buildings and shantytowns. Taking cover in a cement stairway during a firefight, I encountered someone I recognized from the national university. His day pack was filled with ammunition. Like hundreds of students, trade unionists, and other activists, he had abandoned his legal life for the FMLN.

In this new urban context, the revels intentionally mixed experienced fighters with new recruits. Roberto, a commander and a veteran fighter from the countryside, climbed up the stairs. Moises, a 16-year-old recruit, held a position in the corner balcony on the upper floor. The sound of the gunfire was deafening; we both took cover as bullets ricocheted off the walls. Cringing slightly with each blast, Moises told me this was his first time in combat.

The FMLN’s success in switching from rural to urban warfare surprised even themselves. They demonstrated more military capability in seven days than Nicaraguan contras had demonstrated in that many years. Their immediate objective was to take hold parts of the city in a vivid demonstration of strength: they held most urban areas for about a week.

But some guerilla commanders I talked to said their ultimate goal was to take power. “Here we are and we will defend [our position] until freedom has arrived,” predicted Izabel. She and the 40 rebels under her command successfully repelled three government advances that week.

Later that day, a photographer saw Izabel’s body among the pile of 13 dead guerillas. She still wore her bright turquoise bandanna. Her pants were ripped, leaving the business card I had given her exposed in her leg. Several years ago, a similar mistake resulted in the assassinations of four Dutch journalists. By the time I arrived to retrieve it, soldiers had doused the corpse with gasoline. Izabel and her companions were left burning in the street.

THE HELICOPTER CIRCLED slowly overhead. I was in the northern sector of Zacamil, interviewing a woman in a shantytown among several thousand mud-and-split bamboo shacks. On the third approach, the pilot fired a single rocket in my direction, exploding about a hundred yards away.

There was gunfire on two sides, but none coming from the ridge where the rocket had landed. I approached a man whose face and arm were covered in blood. “They’ve just killed my family,” he said. The rocket had hit his home; his wife and two daughters were inside.

The severe reaction of the Salvadoran military to the rebel offensive surprised even its most ardent critics. The strafing, rocketing, and later bombing of heavily populated civilian areas was more than indiscriminate. Unlike in wealthy suburbs to the west, the Salvadoran military demonstrated a total disregard for the safety and well-being of its indigent residents.

Señor periodista, señor periodista [Mr. journalist], please tell them to stop firing on our home,” said one many fleeing with about 50 others. “This isn’t the countryside. We live here.” Scores of families, carrying bundles of belongings and white flags, fled en masse from San Salvador’s poorer neighborhoods. At least a thousand people are known to have been killed since the fighting began; countless others have been wounded.

“Look at the beds,” said one elderly woman pointing to a pile of ashes. Following government airstrikes, row upon row of makeshift shacks were either demolished or burned. In Soyapango, entire blocks were destroyed. Reporters saw massive craters from what appear to have been 500-pound bombs.

“We don’t have anything left,” said a mother surveying the rubble that was once her home. “They just fired and fired.”

Military attitudes notwithstanding, the political cost to the government for the air war on the city will be tremendous. “Why don’t they negotiate” with the rebels, screamed one woman after her family in Zacamil was rocketed and killed.

They’re destroying the country,” said another woman fleeing from bombing raids in Soyapango.

“Who?” I asked.

“The same people who did that,” she said, referring to the brutal slaying of six Jesuit priests and academics.

FATHERS IGNACIO ELLACURIA, Ignacio Martin-Baro, and Segundo Montes were the country’s leading intellectuals, as well as El Salvador’s most articulate and compelling critics of both the Salvadoran government and U.S. policy. Their killings were only the beginning.

Religious activities across the country have been targeted. More than 41 church volunteers, including 20 foreigners, have been captured. U.S.-born Catholic priest Jim Barnet and Lutheran minister Bill Dexheimer received death threats and left the country.

U.S. volunteer Jennifer Casolo also received a death threat by telephone. At 10:30 Saturday night, soldiers entered her home. They claimed to have found one of the largest guerilla arms caches since the offensive began buried in her backyard.

Casolo organized visiting religious and congressional delegations. Anyone who knows her would say the accusation is preposterous. But privately U.S. officials say they expect her to be tried, convicted and send to a Salvadoran jail.

Casolo, like the Jesuits, is being made an example. Independent criticism is no longer acceptable. And meddling by foreigners in Salvadoran affairs will no longer be tolerated.

AFTER THE AIRSTRIKES here first started, Ambassador Walker said he had “no knowledge” of government bombing. But other U.S. officials had already admitted the government was bombing urban areas of the city. Once religious volunteer who lives in a targeted area was told the situation was out of the embassy’s control.

But that hardly meant that Americans were not involved in the terror bombing of San Salvador’s people. On November 15 at approximately 10:15 in the morning, a conversation between a U.S. military advisor in a “Blackhawk” observation helicopter and “retelo,” the U.S. military command center in San Salvador, was intercepted by radio. The observer told retelo the Salvadoran air force needed to “hit” an area several blocks “north of the church.”

U.S. advisors in El Salvador are prohibited from participating in or directing government raids. Shortly after this transmission, a senior U.S. military official monitoring the conversation broke in ordering all such communications to be done “on push 5”–-a scrambling system installed last February after U.S. military advisors became aware that journalists were monitoring their communications.

After years of self-deception, American policy had finally been unveiled. “That’s why they’re here” said a diplomat from a U.S.-allied country, “to keep the place in order–-to keep the place from turning commie.”

“Why would they kill Jesuits?” asked the diplomat, referring to the army. “It’s another Romero,” he said. “It’s starting again.”

Waiting for Tet: Salvadoran Rebels Have a Plan for Sunday’s Elections

SAN SALVADOR – THE BRIGHT LIGHTS of San Salvador cut the cool night air. Large spotlights beamed from military bases along the perimeter. Closer to the center, more lights glowed atop the heavily fortified walls of the U.S. embassy.

Dressed in black and armed with an M-16, one of my guerilla guides stopped along the rugged mountain trail. From the eastern slope of the San Salvador volcano, I could see the entire city below.

The overlook is less than two miles from the capital. “We are in the heart of the enemy,” says Elsa, the nom de guerre of a guerilla comandante.

In the past year, the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has moved the front line of the war to El Salvador’s central region. Along with a cameraman for West 57th of CBS News, I spent five days with the revels on the volcano, which towers several thousand feet about San Salvador.

The trip came amid a watershed in Salvador’s nine-year civil war. The FMLN made an unprecedented offer to participate in the upcoming presidential elections on the condition that they be delayed at least four months. But the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government plans to go ahead with March 19 elections as scheduled. In response, the guerillas have promised to increase attacks. “We will concentrate,” said Elsa, “on the capital city.”

The FMLN has been fighting since 1980. Many rebels and their civilian supporters say that victory is just around the corner, yet an FMLN takeover now seems doubtful. Nonetheless, a new rebel drive is expected. According to some, it may have the same relative impact on El Salvador’s civil war as the Tet offensive had in Vietnam 21 years ago.

A report on El Salvador by four U.S. Army lieutenant colonels a year ago described U.S. intervention here as “this country’s most significant sustained military enterprise since Vietnam.” And despite nine years and more than $3.3 billion in U.S. aid, the Salvadoran government, they say, has won neither popular support nor the war.

For at least 14 months, the rebels have held the military initiative. The numbers for the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency don’t look good. According to Salvadoran Army colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, FMLN assaults have forced the government to deploy 85 per cent of its troops in defensive positions. Since 1987, El Salvador has been more dependent on U.S. aid than any country since the former Republic of South Vietnam.

U.S. military advisers are frustrated. “This isn’t like World War II,” said one. “There are no population centers to control and industrial centers to attack.” Looking out over the country’s rugged terrain, he said: “Out here, how to you eliminate the enemy’s ability to fight?”

U.S. advisers asked that the same question in Vietnam; FMLN rebels look to that insurgency as a model.

SITTING WITH HER legs crossed, a camouflage hat on her head, and an Ak-47 on her lap, Comandante Elsa explained the difference between the army and the FMLN. “One can’t underestimate the enemy’s potential. They know how to defend themselves,” she says. But “the interests that drive the army are not the just interests of the people.”

Behind her, a young woman transcribed numbered radio codes, while another rebel tended the campfire. The guerillas said it was the same type used by the Vietcong; it burns in a dugout hold to avoid detection.

“Our army,” says Elsa, “did not grow based upon forced recruitment. We are rooted within the population.”

Soft-spoken, pleasant, and always smiling, Elsa doesn’t fit the image of a hardened guerilla leader. But she sits on the FMLN’s Joint Command for the “Central Front,” which includes both San Salvador and Guazapa volcanoes as well as the capital city. “If we say that Guazapa is the arrow in the heart of the enemy,” she said, “on [San Salvador] volcano we are the point of the arrow.”

Unlike in more secured areas under FMLN control, here the location of the army is always in some doubt. An unexpected encounter with a government patrol is a rare but real possibility, For us, getting past army checkpoints near the volcano’s base was the most dangerous exercise, but a clandestine network of civilians facilitated in our entry. Further on, two guerillas walking “point” provided cover as our patrol marched by moonlight through fields of recently harvested coffee.

The close proximity of the volcano to both the city and the army also makes conditions difficult. Base camps, for example, must move every few days. And life as a compa – a companero, or FMLN combatant – is essentially one of the perpetual camping out. A bed consists of two pieces of heavy plastic – one for above and one for below the body. Meals are the same tin cup of rice and beans every day. And to avoid detection, conversation must be kept to a near whisper.

Nonetheless, morale is exceptionally high. “Vergon!” – Salvadoran slang for the greatest – is the way most compass answer ‘How’s it going?” Among scores of combatants I’ve interviewed in the last several months, all but one were convinced or an eventual rebel victory. If morale is an indication, the odds are heavily weighed against the army.

And morale doesn’t fall from the sky. It is the rebels who define the terms of the conflict. They initiate most engagements, and government casualties are disproportionately high. In contrast to the guerillas, army soldiers usually say “A saber, va” – Who knows? – when asked which side is winning the war.

Literally dragged from movie theaters, bus stops, and high schools into military service, most army soldiers seem more interested in getting a visa to the United States than fighting guerillas. According to FMLN rebels, soldiers are notorious for firing their weapons in the air to give away their location – and thereby avoid a confrontation.

But according to Comandante Elsa, the key to the rebel’s success on San Salvador volcano is the civilian population.

IT IS DIFFICULT to determine popular support in any guerilla war. Most upper- and middle-class Salvadorans reject the rebels and their cause. But the FMLN is predominantly a rural-based insurgency.

“The masses are the ones who provide supplies,” said Elsa. “They also, up to a certain point, go out on scouting explorations to inform us about the location of the enemy.”
We met with a group of peasants working in a field. A rebel sent two men out to keep watch for the army; they trimmed coffee trees as a cover. Other peasants, mostly women, dropped about two handfuls of fresh tortillas each in a straw basket, which we later carried back to camp.

“To struggle you don’t need a weapon,” said Aristides, the guerilla leading our patrol. “Just to make tortillas is enough.”

Most of the people living on the volcano pick coffee. El Salvador’s leading export, coffee earns more than 60 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange. These pickers and others like them constitute the primary work force of the country.

Aristides emphasized class divisions. “Those who work a lot,” he told them, “earn a little. But those who hardly work have millions of colones [worth five to the dollar].”

El Salvador’s U.S.-backed land reform affected about 18 per cent of the country’s peasants. Most of them are organized in cooperatives, many of which remain strapped for access to credit, equipment, and seed. A land-to-the-tiller program had less success. Out of a potential 117,000 beneficiaries, only 18,000 received definitive land titles. And eight years after it was conceived, the breakup of the large coffee farms – on paper, the meat of the reform – is still blocked by landowners.

The rebels’ simple Marxist message made sense to the pickers. Landless and illiterate, they don’t understand the material dialectics, but they do know the different between rich and poor. For them, the guerillas have not only brought a sense of hope for their future, but an immediate material gain in their lives.

“Thanks to them, we make more now,” said one weather-beaten man. Before, the pickers received the equivalent of 65 cents for picking 25 pounds of beans; now they receive about $1.10.

“We sent letters to the owners of these farms asking them to raise the workers’ salaries,” said Aristides. And now, he said, “the majority of the owners on this volcano are paying what we ask.”
“And what happens to the growers who don’t want to pay more?” I said.

“Well… there are laws, laws of war that have their limits. If a grower doesn’t pay what we say, then we sabotage his property,” he said. “We’ll burn his farm or destroy his property in San Salvador.”

A shy wrinkled old woman sat on the ground eating a tortilla. I asked her what she thought of the rebels’ coercive tactics.

Está bien.” – It’s good, she said.

“Why?”

“Because we eat more,” she said laughing, crumbs falling from her mouth. “Because we eat more.”

The army, on the other hang, protects the growers. Washington pundits may look to Sunday’s presidential elections as proof of democracy, but the drama being played out around San Salvador and Guazapa volcanoes, Usulutan, San Miguel, Santa Ana, and the other agro-export regions remains a class-based war.

“I became aware that they were paying more,” said army colonel Zepeda. The government’s counterpart to Comandante Elsa, Zepeda is responsible for the same territory as the Central Front.

Zepeda said that one Guazapa the rebels also demand a war tax from the growers. He met with growers from both volcanoes. Nobody, he told them, has to pay a tax or give workers more than the government’s set minimum wage. Thus, the minimum wage becomes a maximum wage; anyone demanding more – guerilla or peasant – is a subversive.

Zepeda also denies that the rebels have a legitimate social base. They only survive because of outside assistance, he says. “If Nicaragua were to stop providing aid to this Marxist movement, we could finish the conflict in a short time.”

“Yes, we receive some support,” said Noe, another FMLN comandante within the Central Front, when asked about foreign backing. “It comes from other countries in the world that support our cause.” But they get most out of their material, he added, from inside the country.

MASKING TAPE, coiled wire, flashlight batteries, PVC pipe, fuses, plastic bags, and containers with a variety of powdered chemicals were laid out on a plastic tarp.

“At first we weren’t sure about it,” said a scraggly looking guerilla, as he presided over his collection of homemade bombs. “But later…” He broke into a smile.

Homemade land minds are the rebels’ most common and effective weapon; they cause at least 60 per cent of army casualties. The rebels said they started experimenting with them to repel the army’s counterinsurgency sweep, “Operation Phoenix,” on Guazapa volcano.

A contact bomb, the mine is housed in the closed end of a three-inch piece of plastic PVC water pipe. It can be filled with almost any type of explosive or homemade gunpowder. The most essential ingredient is potassium nitrate, or saltpeter – available, said a rebel, from the local pharmacy.

PVC is used because it doesn’t conduct electricity, but other containers, even shampoo bottles, he says, will work as well. Two AA batteries are places inside the container and connected to an electrical detonator. Stepping on the buried mine from above completes the circuit.

Of all the materials required, only the detonator must be secured from the outside. For larger bombs, the rebels sometimes use TNT, which also must come from outside. But most often they use a highly explosive homemade mixture of ammonia and aluminum powder. This mixture is also used for rampas – a projectile that looks like a small soccer ball wrapped in masking tape. The rampa is hurled by an exploding charge set beneath a crude-looking wooden catapult.

The rebels have also converted car bombs into a more powerful catapult-like device. These have been effective against military bases throughout the capital city. But the two-charge bombs often misfire. In the latest attacks, they have killed more civilians than soldiers. The FMLN announced it was suspending their use late last month.

On the volcano, the rebels plant land mines around their perimeter and remove them whenever they change their camp. I learned the location of both the mines and the latrine – and made sure not confuse the two.

Later that day, I watched music videos with a guerilla on his handheld Sony Watchman. The beat was interrupted by the sound of machine guns. A firefight had broken out between the army and another rebel unit less than one mile away.

“What was that?” I asked, hearing an explosion.

“A mine.” Apparently an army soldier had discovered the perimeter of the other rebel camp.

A new U2 video came on, with images of Times Square and Richard Nixon. By the time the screen had changed to Madonna, the battle was just about over.

HELLO, COMMANDER TWO ZERO
– GO AHEAD, OVER.
– LISTEN IN – THE SHIT IS HITTING THE FAN PRETTY BAD OUT HERE … I’M … I’M BAILING OUT OF HERE, I’M GETTING OUT OF HERE…I’M BREAKING THROUGH.

On February 21, FMLN guerillas attacked a Salvadoran army base in Zacatecoluca, 27 miles southeast of the capital. U.S. Embassy spokesman Barry Jacobs confirmed that it was a U.S. Special Forces adviser was present at the base. During the attack, the adviser – Commander Two Zero – reported his situation by radio to the U.S. Military Group command – Retelo – in San Salvador. A tape recording of that transmission indicates that the adviser – one of the 55 officially posted in the country – felt his life to be in immediate danger.

– GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE. THE SHIT IS HITTING THE FAN, OVER? … I’M TELLING YOU … I DON’T WANT NOBODY TO CALL ON ME TONIGHT … JUST COME OUT FOR ME TOMORROW, OVER.

The transmission took place from 4:00 to 4:30 a.m. The adviser originally referred to the rebel action as an exploratory “probe.”

– COMMANDER TWO ZERO, THIS IS ROTELO. GO AHEAD, OVER.
– AS YOU KNOW, WE ARE BEING PROBED, WE ARE BEING PROBED, WE ARE ALSO RECEIVING RAMPAS, OVER.
– … ALL WE GOT IS …THEY’RE …THE 22 DEFENSIVE POSITIONS … AT THIS TIME IT IS JUST PROBING FIRE … THEY FIRED A COUPLE OF R. P. SEVENS [rocket propelled grenades], BUT THAT’S ABOUT IT, OVER.
– YOU ARE…YOU’VE GOT APPROXIMATELY THE SIZE OF THE FORCE DOING THE PROBING? OVER.
– SAY AGAIN…UH… REAL QUICK… UH…
– HOW MANY PEOPLE YOU THINK ARE DOING THE PROBE? OVER.
– RIGHT NOW I ESTIMATE FOUR TO FIVE. THEY MIGHT BE THE … THEY MAY BE THE … UH… FRONT ELEMENT OF A BIGGER UNIT WITH RAMPAS, BUT I’M NOT SURE RIGHT NOW…THEY’RE COMING AGAIN. WE ARE GETTING RAMPAS, OVER.
– HELLOW, THIS IS COMMANDO TWO ZERO.
– COMMANDO TWO ZERO, RETELO, GO AHEAD, OVER.
– YEAH, THE PROBE HAS TURNED INTO A… AN ATTACK FROM THE NORTHEAST. WE GOT, AH… THREE WOUNDED ALREADY, WE HAVE ONE BLINDADO [armor-plated assault vehicle] IN AMBUSH… AND WE GOT ONE KID – HE’S IN PRETTY BAD SHAPE. HE’S PROBABLY GOING TO GO AWAY. AND WE HAVE TWO OTHER WOUNDED, OVER.

Later that day, a Salvadoran military officer at the scene said that four soldiers were killed and another 13 were wounded. A Salvadoran army major was among the dead. It appears that the U.S. adviser suffered no injury.

– THIS IS COMMANDER TWO ZERO, OVER.
– ROGER, AH… CAN YOU AH… GIVE US THE DIRECTION WHICH YOU THINK THAT THEY…AH…ARE RETREATING TO, OVER?
– THERE IS A…THERE IS A… A CREEK, A CREEK AND THAT’S THE WAY…I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHICH WAY THEY ARE GOING…BUT THEY ARE PROBABLY GOING NORTH. THERE IS PROBABLY A GROUP GOING NORTH AND ONE GROUP GOING SOUTH. THERE IS ALSO AN ELEMENT SOUTHWEST FROM HERE THAT AMBUSED A VEHICLE. WE GOT THOSE PEOPLE HERE. WE ALSO GOT PEOPLE THAT THE LEFT THE PERIMETER. SO…AND WE GOT AMBUSGED COORDINATD TO GET THEM ON THE WITHDRAWAL, OVER.
– ROGER, STAND BY.
– COMMANDER TWO ZERO. WE ALSO PREPARED A UNIT TO…AH…TO CHACE…PUT A CHASE ON THEM AS SOON AS DAYBREAK, OVER.
– RETELO. ROGER, UNDERSTAND

U.S. officials admit to only three occasions of U.S. military personnel engaging in combat in El Salvador – once in 1987 and twice last year. But U.S. advisers are widely believed to have found themselves in conflict situations more frequently than is reported. Advisers are posted at even minor military bases throughout the country. Said a Western diplomat after the Zacatecoluca attack, “I would presume that every time a military base is attacked, a U.S. soldier comes under attack.”

Nine years after the American advisers were first deployed here, Vice-President Dan Quayle said that the congressionally imposed 55-man ceiling should be lifted. Including the U.S. Embassy’s 13-man Military Group command and the Special Forces advisers rotated into the country on 90-day temporary duty assignment, there is already an average of 150 U.S. military personnel in El Salvador at any given time. Many of these advisers are experienced in counterinsurgency. One Special Forces adviser with three years here, for instance, did four years of duty leading ARVN reconnaissance patrols in Vietnam.

CHARRING KERNELS over a hot stone slab, a woman looks up and says hello. She uses roast corn, she explained, to make a cheap substitute for coffee.

A displaced peasant, she lives in one of the many poor barrios on the fringe of the city. The woman said she remembered me from my last visit two months ago.

I asked her if she thought the rebels would win. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so. What do you think?”

Secret Warriors: U.S. Advisers Have Taken Up Arms in El Salvador

Original story found here.

MR. NIELDS: Well, you put in some blanks. You said “blank” in two places. There’s nothing classified about either of these words. One of them is CIA—
LT. COL. NORTH: Well—
MR. NIELDS: —and the other is Southern Command. “Delicate state of transition from CIA run op to Southern Command run op.”
LT. COL. NORTH: That’s referring to the country in which FR [Felix Rodriguez] was living, and I though that was a classified program. It has nothing to do with the Nicaraguan resistence.

El Salvador was the country in question, not Nicaragua. Chief House Counsel John Nields was quoting from notes that North had taken on a conversation with then U.S. Southern Command head General Paul Gorman; the brief exchange between Nields and North, on the afternoon of July 8, went largely unnoticed in the voluminous Iran-contra press coverage. But they shed dirst light on the participation of U.S. military and paramilitary personnel in combat in El Salvador.

Fighting in El Salvador has been more intense and claimed more lives than the better-known “contra war” in nearby Nicaragua. El Salvador has been a laboratory for the post-Vietnam Pentagon, which has been trying to figure out how to run a massive counterinsurgency program without committing U.S. troops. Judging from death tolls, the Pentagon’s efforts have been quite “successful.” But in another sense, the plan has gone awry. A military counterinsurgency specialist notes that the U.S. never intended to implement some “Machiavellian plan.” That, however, is exactly what the Salvador counterinsurgency has turned out to be.

The U.S. has backed the Salvadoran government in its war against leftist insurgents for the past seven years. The Reagan administration has provided El Salvador with over $1.5 billion in war-related aid since 1981, and has assigned a group of U.S. military advisers to the country. The advisers, limited by a White House-Congress agreement to no more than 55 at a time, are prohibited from entering combat.

Yet U.S. advisers have engaged in combat in El Salvador, according to interviews with military sources.

The exchange between Nields and North refers to a secret military operations involving both the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces of the Southern Command. Following the initial exposure of this operation during the July 8 hearings, CIA officials quoted in The Los Angeles Times admitted that the agency’s operatives had trained and led military teams in El Salvador. These officials would not say whether the units sough out the enemy or willingly engaged in combat. The purpose of these missions, CIA officials said, was to collect intelligence information on guerilla movements in order to call in air strikes.

Documents obtained from the War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, however, indicate that “Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols,” trained and led by the CIA with assistance from the U.S. Army Special Forces, were heavily engaged in combat. The documents, dated January 1, 1985, state: “One of the more gratifying improvements was the establishment of a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (PRAL) capability….This unit, operating in small teams, has accounted for hundreds of guerilla casualties and has been instrumental in disrupting guerrilla combat operations, logistical nets and base camps.”

These teams consist of two to seven specially trained Salvadoran troops, led by a CIA paramilitary operative. It is inconceivable that the CIA operatives who accompanies and led these united did not engage in combat. The War College report, for example, which is entitled “El Salvador: Observations and Experiences in Counterinsurgency,” describted the PRAL teams as one of the most effective components of the government’s counterinsurgency. “The unit has proven that El Salvadoran troops, with the proper training and leadership, can operate effectively in small groups and they have set a standard of valor for the rest of the [Armed Forces]” (emphasis added).

The War College documents state that PRAL units were first trained by the Third Battalion of the U.S. 7th Special Forces in Panama. Former 7th Special Forces advisers with experience in El Salvador and Central America reveal that U.S. military advisers, in addition to CIA paramilitary operatives, engaged in combat operations in El Salvador and neighboring countries.

Many of these advisers are from Puerto Rico, where the U.S. military recruits heavily with an eye towards Central America operations. A former Special Forces operative from Puerto Rico, who participated in the 1968 Bolivian campaign that resulted in the death of Che Guevera, was called back from retirement to aid in counterinsurgency training.

The bulk of this covert involvement, former Special Forces operatives say, occurred from 1982 to 1984, when U.S. military aid and assistance to El Salvador was highly controversial .

When the Reagan administration first came to power in 1981, El Salvador, not Nicaragua, was its primary concern in Central America. Leftist guerilla forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was growing and by 1982 controlled up to one-third of the country’s terrain. There was great fear in Washington of a leftist takeover, and the administration was and still is committed to preventing the “loss” of a second Central American nation after Nicaragua.

The Salvadoran armed forces were plagued by incompetence, corruption, and poor leadership. In the early stage of the conflict, the military and the extreme right committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in the region’s history. More than 28,000 people were killed by 1982, according to the San Salvador archdiocese’s human rights office, most of them at the hands of Salvadoran armed forces.

The U.S. began to equip and train the Salvadoran military in 1981, at a time when their repressive activities were most out of control. The U.S. Army’s Mobile Training Team began by creating Atlacatl Immediate Action Battalion. A second Immediate Action Battalion, Atonal, was trained in 1982. A third battalion, Ramon Belloso, was trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the same year. Brought to the U.S. to overcome the limitations imposed by the 55-adviser limit, the Belloso battalion cost $8 million to train.

In a similar effort to overcome the 55-man limit, small marine-commando units were trained by elite U.S. Navy SEAL unites in Panama, Additional marine commandos were trained in El Salvador. In 1983, the very successful and feared Arce Cazador or “hunter” patrols, were trained in El Salvador and Honduras by the U.S.

Eventually, these elite units and battalions began to make a difference in the war, but a chronic shortage of competent and specifically trained battle officers contined to complicate operations in the field. “Souble or tripple hatting,” for example, where a company commander might also take on the duties of an operations officer or an intelligence officer, was common.

As a result, military sources say, U.S. advisers were forced to take a more active role in the filed. The air force representative of the U.S. Military Group, for example, was moved from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador to the air base in Ilopango. The U.S. Military Group consists of about 13 midranking officers, whom the Department of Defense does not clarify as advisers. According to the January 1985 War College report, the senior air force representtive became a “full-time advisor” to Salvadoran Air Force commander Colonel Bustillo.

Former Special Forces advisers say tht U.S. advisers were also assigned as Combat Brigade Officers to advise and assist Salvadoran battle operations in the field. Providing full-time advice to Salvadoran colonels, these Special Forces advisers functioned as intelligence or operations officers for infantry brigades. Intelligence officers attempt to predict enemy movements; operations officers plan and coordinate attacks.

U.S. advisers are, of course, prohibited from participation in combat manuevers and are told not to discuss the nature of their assignments with these brigades. A brigade consists of two to four battalions, which are the principal combat units in countering a guerilla war. A former Special Forces adviser says these assignments were spontaneous and erratic, due to the highly secretive nature of this operation and the U.S. government’s attempt to keep it concealed.

Smaller team-size units of independent Special Forces troops, a U.S. military officer says, were also deployed in Honduras along the Salvadoran border in 1982 and 1983. It is not clear that they engaged in combat. The Reagan administration hoped these teams could stop the overland arms flow from Nicaragua through Honduras to El Salvador. But another goal of this operation, military sources say, was to find and produce evidence of such a flow to further the administration’s overall policy aims. The administration has repeatedly accused the Sandinistas of aiding the leftist rebels in El Salvador and has advanced this argument to justify military aid to both the contras in Nicaragua and the government in El Salvador. Reliable U.S. military intelligence sources say the FMLN does receive weapons from abroad, but the flow has decreased substantially since 1982. The guerillas are generally able to get what they need on the Salvadoran black market, including U.S.-supplied M-16s. A year ago, I was quoted a prie of $2000 for an M-16 in San Salvador; bulk prices would presumably be lower.

Overall, the counterinsurgency effort in El Salvador represents the largest commitment of U.S. resources to a developing country since the Vietnam War. Unlike Vietnam, the Pentagon has been unable to run this war without using large numbers of troops; the assigning of CIA operatives and Special Forces advisers to patrol behind enemy lines has been crucial to the new, scaled-down strategy. Nevertheless, though direct participation by U.S. resouces has been markedly low, in the past few months a number of Special Forces personnel have been wounded or killed.

Many Salvadoran officers and units singled out by the War College for their effectiveness, such as former lieutenant colonel Sigfrido Ochoa, are some of the worst known violators of human rights. Elite U.S.-trained battalions such as Arce, Atonal, and Atlacatl are favorite sons of the U.S. Department of Defense. But these same battalions have been responsible for a host of massacres since 1981.

For example, the Atlacal battalion massacred 700 people in a “search and destroy” mission in El Mozote in northeast Morazán in 1981. More recently, the Arce Battalion killed five suspected “subversives” last May. The victims, who were peasants, were shot and dumped in a well at Los Palitos in the eastern province of San Miguel. Colonel Mauricio Staben, the commander of Arce battalion, is believed to have overseen the killing of hundreds of suspected leftists or sympathizers. Last sprin, the U.S.-trained colonel was also implicated in a kidnapping-for-profit ring, but no charges were brought after fellow officers came to his defense.
Although the conflict in Nicaragua has domintated U.S. attention in the past six months, measured in terms of resource commitment the war in El Salvador is the Reagan administration’s primary concern. The administration claims that most of its assistance is development-related. But three-fourths of U.S. aid to El Salvador goes either directly or indirectly to the war.

The Salvadoran armed forces have expanded from 14,000 in 1981, when the U.S. began to play an active role, to 54,000 troops last year. El Salvador’s leftist guerillas , on the other hand, have decreased from 10,000 to less than 6000 combatants, many of whom have been fighting throughout the last seven years. The War College documents state that one goal of the adminstration’s policy is “neutralization of the guerillas.” As a result, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Edwin Corr predicts that war will drag on another seven to 10 years. Already 60,000 people have died; 25 per cent of the popuation is displaced.

The CIA no longer leads PRAL missions in El Salvador, as coordination of that and other Salvadoran military efforts have been handed over to the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces of the Panama-based Southern Command. The Special Forces’ goal is to “professionalize” the Salvadoran military, and according to the War College documents, “sensitize” them to the issue of human rights. Even the Pentagon realizes the war will not be won by “simply killing guerillas.” Yet, despite administration claims to the contrary, killing is the only thing the Salvadoran military does well.