Disposable Patriot: Contra War Mercenary Turned Whistleblower
Our Hidden History
Dennis Bernstein Jack Terrell, before we get into what exactly happened, what you discovered working with and for the Contras, and in association with the United States government. Before we get into that, I’d like to just get a little bit of your own background in terms of how you came to be a Contra supporter, a military operative, a trainer working with the Contras. Could you just give me a little bit of your background that would lead you into a position where you would be accepted to do that kind of work?
Jack Terrell Well, basically my involvement in the Contra war came about after the shoot-down of two Alabamians in September of 1984, during a helicopter assault on a military academy in Santa Clara. These two men were members of a heretofore unknown group called Civilian Military Assistance out of Decatur, Alabama. At this time, I was in Mobile, Alabama running a business, and had read about this in the newspaper. So, my initial instinct was one of a patriotic sort of knee-jerk reaction to Americans being killed in this war, especially when the press played the whole event as “volunteers” involved in this raid. But as the papers progressed over the next couple of days, the government sort of took the line first of, “We don’t know who these individuals are.”
It was like two tourists went to Nicaragua and decided to fly a MD-500 with 2.75 rockets on it, into a military academy. As different aspects of the story broke, I became more enthralled with the idea of going down and doing my part to wage war against the so-called communist threat in Nicaragua that was now splashing itself across every front page in the United States as this terrible threat against the United States. Now, Ronald Reagan got involved in the situation by making the statement, if he were young enough, he would go down and do the same thing that these two Americans did. This virtually threw open the door for every right-wing gun nut and subscriber to Soldier of Fortune magazine to become involved in this war.
But I sort of honed in on Civilian Military Assistance group because they were located in Alabama, and being a Southerner with the values that I have, I thought this would be the opportunity to, as I said, go down and do my part. So, I sought CMA out, and through Tom Posey, met some of the members of the organization in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the logistics headquarters of the Contra group known as the FDN, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which had its warehouse located in New Orleans. After my first meeting with this group, I was then contacted by the late Donald Fortier, who was then the number three man in the National Security Council, to become his eyes and ears in Honduras or Nicaragua in what he believed was too much play on American volunteer involvement in this conflict.
Dennis Bernstein Why would a man on the National Security Council call you, as you describe yourself, is just a Southerner who’s a patriot? Did you have a prior relationship with this gentleman?
Jack Terrell I had never met Donald Fortier in my life. I sort of had a history of involving… Not really involving myself, being associated with intelligence people and certain military aspects of covert operations, as far back as 1958 in Washington, DC, when I met and came to know real well a gentleman that was a UDT officer in the Navy, and also had run some operations with the CIA. He introduced me to some people that, at the early age of 18, I kind of became… It’s hard to describe. You might say the romantic notion that becoming an intelligence agent would really be something in my life. Of course I was too young at that time, but as my life progressed, I stayed in touch with certain individuals.
Dennis Bernstein What did you do in that time?
Jack Terrell Well, after meeting the man in Washington, I went back to Alabama and started a business, and eventually the business grew to a quite large operation, where I was making millions of dollars a year. During this time, I spent money and amused myself by training as a civilian with Special Forces units out of Mississippi to hone my skills as a military person, since I did not get drafted, nor did I join the effort in Vietnam. I came to learn a great deal about military operations. Weapons, and actually did a brief stint with the Grey Scouts, with the Ian Smith government in Rhodesia which was a very brief stint because this was at the end of the Rhodesian conflict or civil war.
But I was improving my military skills as I went through life, but nothing as if I were in a uniform of the United States government, which had always been my dream, but I never fulfilled that dream. But I came to know a lot of people by association, and even to this day, I question why Donald Fortier called me, and I have to believe that it was mainly because I was known to certain people in Washington, and also that I was available to become involved in covert operations, which I made no secret of, and thirdly, it was because I was from Alabama, and because most of the people involved in CMA were Alabamians, then it made sense to me, because I was never given a complete or full explanation of why.
Dennis Bernstein Okay, so you were talking about, you had heard about this shoot-down, and you became even more curious, and that’s how you got this phone call. So, where did it go from there?
Jack Terrell Well, after the shoot-down, and my contact with Fortier was offered $50,000 to carry out the so-called mission for Fortier, in installments of $10,000 down and two payments of $20,000 each, which would be paid to me in cash. Indeed, the first installment was paid to me in November of… Actually, it was October, 1984, in New Orleans, Louisiana. I also was given a resume as being a former Major in the Army that was involved in certain classified operations in Laos. One was Daniel Boone and the other one was Prairie Fire. I was given a persona that literally could not be disproved, because both of those operations are classified to this day. So, it was sort of like inventing a person that I would become, in order to have credibility with the FDN, and also with the CMA, which they bought hook, line and sinker.
This later came back to haunt me, by them saying, “Well, I lied to get in the group.” Of course, I lied, and as a cohort of operations, is a lie to start with, so it’s one offsetting the other. But it accomplished what I wanted to do, and that was become directly involved with the Contras, which ultimately led me into Honduras, and the main Contra base at Las Vegas.
Dennis Bernstein Let’s talk a little bit about what your mission was, and what you observed when you were sent down to Honduras.
Jack Terrell The mission was suggested to me that I was to put in place, which was something similar to the Phoenix project which was carried out in Vietnam. In this particular case, it was an operation known as Operation Pegasus, which was an operation that was designed to get, I think the number was 240 Nicaraguans and Americans combined into Managua to both attack the infrastructure, the main infrastructure, blow certain dams north of Managua, which would have virtually killed 20 or 30,000 people, and also assassinate at least five of the leaders of the Sandinista movement, including Daniel Ortega, and Nora Astorga, and I think it was Manuel Descota. This was a very elaborate plan, and it was a very serious plan.
When I went to Honduras, I took the plan to the head of the FDN military, a man by the name of Enrique Bermudez, a former Colonel in the Samosa National Guard. He was the chief Samosista, if you will, in the area heading the Contras in this massive camp on the Honduran/Nicaraguan border. The camp, when I arrived, probably had 12,000 to 13,000 Campesina peasants at the base, and I soon discovered, because being as I was treated sort of like an elite coming into the base, I didn’t get the opportunity to live or hardly mingle with the Campesina fighters, who were very ragtag, poorly equipped, poorly fed, and fairly abused, in many ways. But I was taken above a fence that divided this camp, and above this fence is where the officers and the former Samosa National Guardsmen who were running this army lived, and found that they lived in virtual luxury in a jungle.
They had VCRs, televisions, refrigerators, canned goods, the best of everything. But right below three strands of barbed wire were thousands of starving Campesinas that they called the Contras, that were supposed to be waging war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but I found out real fast that was not the agenda. The agenda, was told to me directly by Bermudez, that they were there to create an incident which would cause some type of border incursion that would get the United States directly involved in a war in Nicaragua. The evidence throughout Honduras, it was very evident of a massive buildup the United States government was carrying on, through various military exercises from National Guardsmen to the 82nd Airborne, under Big Pine 1, Big Pine 2 and so on.
But the object was, the military would bring men and equipment to Honduras, and only the men would go home. So, they would leave their equipment and Honduras. They were building massive airbases under the guise of training the Honduran Air Force. So, there was a massive buildup, and the Contras, much to the chagrin of a lot of people in the United States, were not there to overthrow the Sandinistas. The Reagan administration was fanning the fire of communism in Nicaragua, talking about how there was a possibility that 750 miles off our coast was this tremendous war machine that had been supplied with thousands of tons of material from the Soviet Union, and they were about to invade Arizona.
But in the realest sense, the Sandinistas were a microcosm in comparison to someone that would have been a greater threat only 90 miles off our coast, Fidel Castro. Yet it served a purpose, because during this time, Reagan was going to Congress for funds for SDI. They were trying to get certain missiles, the B2 Bomber, you name it. The defense industrial complex was seeing a heyday in this time. So, what it all boiled down to, that it was an economical decision to keep the defense industry intact, and the way you do it is you create a threat. Then if you have this threat, which they called the Sandinistas, and then you amplify it to something 100 times greater than what it is, then you have a great deal of support in your corner to fight a war.
Dennis Bernstein All right, lets talk a little bit more about what you saw. I’d like to hear some more detail about exactly what you saw. You talked about a barbed wire fence, you talked about the leadership living quite a bit better than the so-called Contras, but of course we know in all military circles, the colonels and the generals live a lot better than the foot soldiers. I’d like you to give some more light on what you saw there, what concerned you, and what actually drove you to be one of the most, according to Oliver North, one of the most dangerous loose cannons to his operation with the Contras. What did you see?
Jack Terrell Well, there were thousands of examples. I was following the party line when I first went there, because I was being sort of treated as a celebrity, because the FDN didn’t know whether I was really a CIA agent, or whether I was not. They didn’t know what to make out of me, but it sort of worked to my advantage, because I became a much feared person by them, because they didn’t know just how far my power reached. So, I was treated with kid gloves, and allowed to go into areas and see things that most people couldn’t see. When the government was denying that the two Americans that were killed in that helicopter were just two tourists down there playing around, I was shown the doors of the helicopters that were taken off, the spare rockets that were offloaded off the helicopter before the mission was flown, and Enrique Bermudez complaining, not because two Americans were killed, but because he lost his helicopter that served as a taxi for him between the border and Tegucigalpa.
I saw the hospital complex, which was staffed by one Cuban doctor, and the conditions there were totally atrocious. The food that the people ate, the ration a day was like a canteen cup of rice and a couple of tortillas a day. They had women working in tortilla kitchens there, virtually in slave labor, 24 hours a day. The things that were being preached in the United States about the Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinistas to join the Contras was just a boldfaced lie, and that they were conscripting people by sending small bands of armed Contras into Nicaragua, to plantations and co-ops, where they would catch the older men and women at the homes, while the younger men were out working the coffee fields or whatever. They would murder the families, and then they would go tell the young men, “Oh come look, see what the Sandinstas did. Come back to Honduras and let us train you to go back and fight this menace.”
But what they left out was, when the people arrived at the Contra base, the first thing that happened to them was they took their shoes away from them so that they could not walk back. Secondly, they were brutally trained and beaten with bamboo sticks to keep them in line, and if they tried to escape, they were murdered. It was just that simple. So, they were conscripted, they were not volunteers, and of course there were some volunteers, because Bermudez had his own special operations company called COI, which had the best equipment, the best uniforms, the best of everything. But what they didn’t want people to know was that they were also receiving funds from the CIA every month as what they called family support to fight, and to protect the Samosistas and Bermudez were the Campesinas. If they got a meal a day, they were lucky.
South of the base was a small village called Espanol, where on one of my little adventures one day, I went down and witnessed 24 men rape a 12-year-old girl to death. So, it was lawlessness. It was like a Latino frontier camp.
Dennis Bernstein Why didn’t you try and intercede?
Jack Terrell Well, you have to remember, I’m standing in the middle of a camp of thousands of people that had their own code of justice. For me to intercede would have been the same thing as putting a gun to my head and killing myself, because they had a rationale for everything they did. Had I interceded, or had I tried to physically prevent this situation, I might have been, without knowing, messing with some of Bermudez’s personal people.
Dennis Bernstein Did Bermudez approve of this kind of thing? He was the leader, he was the US’s man there in Honduras. He was going to lead the Contras back to Managua. Did he intercede? Did he attempt to undermine this terrible thing?
Jack Terrell No, Bermudez, even though he was the chief law enforcement officer in the camp, several times, several nights where men were shot and murdered over food, over women, over whatever in the camps. As far as Bermudez was concerned, it was their affair. He sort of presented himself as what he was, a strict elitist, and that these people were lesser humans. So, if they want to devour themselves, no problem. Let them devour themselves, so it will work itself out. The only thing that he would ever intercede on was anything that happened above that fence, that directly had a bearing on him. I was astonished that I had been told that millions of dollars had been poured into this situation from the US government, that these people had the best uniforms, the best equipment, the best medicine, the best of everything, and it just wasn’t in evidence there.
When I questioned that, an example was that Bermudez had shelves of canned goods in his place, and also I had seen a warehouse completely full of canned goods and items donated by the Cuban community in Miami to this war, and I asked the questions, “Why aren’t the soldiers eating this food?” And Bermudez told me quite cheeky, he says, “You know, canned food makes Nicaraguans sick to their stomach, so we can’t give them this.” But yet, he was a Nicaraguan and did pretty good on it. So, they had an excuse and a rationale for everything. Where are the uniforms? Why aren’t these people dressed in Sears and Roebuck type uniforms? And I found out again that equipment was being diverted to Guatemala, being sold. It was going to different places.
Dennis Bernstein Wait, you mean that the Contras in Honduras, like with Bermudez in charge, were actually taking the equipment, the money, supplies that were coming from the United States and selling them on the black market?
Jack Terrell Well, of course. I mean, an LC1, anyone in the military knows what an Alice pack is, that is on every American soldier. They took the frames out of the packs because they said it hurt their backs, but the frames would be sold somewhere else to another military. In their base camp in Tegucigalpa, they would regularly black-market ammunition to the Honduran military, but the Honduran military was smart enough that when Israeli weapons were sent in, for instance 122mm mortars, which are quite large guns, the Honduran Army took the gun sights and the firing mechanisms off of them, because they feared that one day they might be used against them.
So, you had a force of people who were murderers and thieves, running a massive army, at the expense of the US government taxpayer, with the agenda of never taking an inch of dirt in Nicaragua. But yet, the public was being told, these are a bunch of fighters running down, doing tremendous damage to the Sandinistas infrastructure, and they’re going to pressure the Sandinistas into some type of election or peace. And that oh yes, these people are the equivalent of our Founding Fathers. I gave them the nickname of pinstripe guerrillas, because people like Adolfo Calero, and the hierarchy, Alfonso Robelo, the people that were trotted out with Reagan in front of televisions were actually living in luxurious houses and condominiums in Miami.
So, they fought a great war for Miami, but the only time they went to the field was to put a dog and pony show on for the television networks, rallying the troops to go fight. But there was nothing being accomplished. It was this Catch-22 situation.
Dennis Bernstein All right, this is Dennis Bernstein. I’m speaking with Jack Terrell. His book is Disposable Patriot. It’s about his work as a mercenary and a military trainer, working with the US government in Honduras. These things that you discovered there, I guess sent you back to the United States to complain about what you saw. You try to, I guess come back to this country and make heads or tails, to try and inform people about, people in positions of power about what was going on in Honduras. How did you decide to do that? Was there one particular incident that sent you finally north to tell the truth about this?
Jack Terrell Well, actually I changed factions of the Contras, first. I was so disenchanted with the FDN and the corruption, and the lies, and the obvious things that were going on from drug running, to theft of aid that was being sent by both voluntary contributions and for US government channels to these people.
Dennis Bernstein Who was running drugs?
Jack Terrell Who wasn’t running drugs, you should say. Drugs were in evidence everywhere, in that during the time I was there, Noriega invited Pablo Escobar, and I think it was Jorge Ochoa, and Carlos Ledehr to Panama City to meet, and they virtually franchised Central America for Colombian drug dealers for the Medellín cartel. People say, “Well, what does drugs have to do with war?” It has to do with, when the Contra aid was cut under the Boland Amendment, which was a punitive action levied against the government because of the illegal mining of harbors in Nicaragua, the agency and the enterprise, or concerned citizens, any semantics you want to use, got into what they called creative financing. They needed money to keep their ragtag army going while the aid was cut off, vis a vis drugs.
Drugs is international currency. Cocaine started flowing like water during those times, and I think statistics would bear the fact out that during the Contra war, the price of a kilo dramatically decreased, because when you’ve got planes flying under a so-called military authority to bring humanitarian aid, or military supplies into a war zone, and they go back loaded with cocaine, nobody is going to stop them and take a look-see. There’s just been too many proven cases. I was approached myself, in December of 1985, and offered $1 million cash to allow drug shipments that were contained in blast frozen seafood to be shipped from La Mon, Costa Rica to Houston, Texas. It was a very pervasive thing, and sort of taken for granted the drugs had become a currency.
Dennis Bernstein Okay, so you’re saying that before you left the region, you decided to give a shot with a different faction.
Jack Terrell Yes. I joined, or went down to advise a confederation of Indian tribes on the eastern coast of Nicaragua, the Miskitos, the Sumas and the Ramas, and they when under the confederation name of the Missouras. I found these people to be the true victims of this war. These people were very religious, courageous, and had one thing on their mind, that the Contras or the Sandinistas didn’t have. That was autonomy for themselves. So, I took up the challenge for them, to number one, try to get aid, medicine, and anything I could, nonlethal aid to the Miskito Indians, because as I walked through [inaudible 00:27:06] and what they call La Mosquitia, the area where these people had been forced by the Sandinistas in the early ’80s and butchered by various factions there, and the Honduran government didn’t want them on their land.
I walked through some of these refugee camps, and I was witnessing a Somalia in our hemisphere, but not one word of it was ever showing up in the newspaper. There’s thousands and thousands of people, starving to death, and were really, truly in bad shape, but nobody cared. All these people wanted was their own freedom, from the time they were really brought into civilization by Moravian Baptists 100 years ago, they had been repressed by every regime, even Samosa, the Sandinistas, and had the Contras come to power, they would have been even more repressed by them. So I saw, this was an opportunity to do what I came for. To help somebody, and do something that counted.
The Indians were prepared to sit down with the Sandinistas and negotiate peace, and then they were in turn prepared to turn around and fight the Contras to keep them out of their territory, because they controlled the gold mines, the seafood industry, and most of the raw materials in Nicaragua. So, when I went in this direction, with the full backing of the Council of Elders and the general staff of Miskito Indians, the Reagan administration saw this real quickly as something that was diverting from their foreign policy initiative. “Do not have an American citizen down here telling a couple of hundred thousand starving Indians what to do, especially when they’ve got enough armament to really take on their so-called Contras and defeat them.”
Because the Contras under the FDN fought with no purpose. They were just there. They had no rhyme or reason for what they were doing. They weren’t driven, and this was evident when we saw Saddam Hussein’s soldiers come in and surrender in the tens of thousands, because they had nothing to fight for. Whereas the Miskito Indians had a burning desire to have their own autonomous state in Nicaragua, and they were prepared to die to the last man to get it. I saw this in them. I saw the fire in their eyes, and they made me, the only white man, and I have the documentation to prove it, their war chief.
I had the ultimate power there. They did what I said, would do anything I said. The FDN even had to deal with me, as far as trying to get them food, and medical supplies, and the bare necessities that they needed. I used this position, and also their fear of me to accomplish this. But when I came to Washington DC, to sit down and negotiate with then Senator Jeremiah Denton, my senator from Alabama, to ask for a planeload of food and medicine for these people. I was quickly put in touch with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, not directly, but through Denton’s representative, Joel Lisker, who had the telephone in his hand and he called old Ollie and said, “Here’s a guy that’s down there with a bunch of Americans, they’re training these Indians. He’s come here to ask for help.”
But it became more of a bargain, because I also had in my possession a map which showed three very large cocaine processing plants that were being operated in the Rama region of Southeast Nicaragua. North wanted the coordinates off this map to turn a satellite around to take pictures of it so they could propagandize the Sandinistas by saying that they were drug dealers in a similar fashion as how they did with Barry Seal, which ultimately cost him his life because of the release of these photos. I wouldn’t have any part of it. I said, “This is not a publicity campaign. I’ve got the ultimate responsibility for saying who eats today, who doesn’t. Who lives, who dies today, who gets medicine, who doesn’t, on my shoulders. All I’m asking for his help from my government, who says that they are now humanitarian supporting these people, and you’re telling me the only way I can get it is to trade you a map with cocaine plants on it so you can get a publicity hit? No way.”
So, I walked out. This angered North, so within five days, I returned to La Mosquitia, and I had waiting on me a company of Special Forces from the Honduran military known as the Pumas, who had already surrounded our base camp there, had the other Americans virtually under house arrest, and I was given the option, “Walk out or be carried out.” And I was brought out with an Uzi pointed at my head, and this was at the direct orders of Oliver North through the State Department. Because here I was, I was a thorn in a festering sore down there, and if their foreign policy was thrown off, and the American public got wind of what was really transpiring down there, then these close votes on Contra aid would have been a real horse race, because they did not want people to know what was going on.
So, I came back to the United States by force. I was a man without a country. My papers were taken, I was persona non grata everywhere. I felt like that in my mission, that I started out, was two things. Number one, it was idealistic. I felt that I was doing my patriotic duty, in an odd sort of way. I viewed as much corruption and dishonor, and unethical practices of any war that anybody could ever imagine, and saw the crimes being committed in the name of war against people. When I went to Honduras, I was three shades right of Muammar Gaddafi, but as I witnessed those things and live them, it wasn’t just seeing them. I lived this whole situation where I had lost weight because of the weary and the strain on me, to where I was a shell when I came back. It had eaten me like cancer.
So, I was very, very much involved in this situation, from a personal vantage point. I wasn’t viewing documents, I wasn’t hearing this from anybody else. I was seeing this, I was living this adventure, and I felt like, because I did what I felt any other American would have done, had they been in my shoes, I was stabbed between the shoulder blades by the United States government. My life had literally been like a glass of water, turned over on the table, and I tried to put my life back into that glass, like picking up water and trying to put it back in the glass. I was devastated, destroyed.
Dennis Bernstein This is Dennis Bernstein, we’re talking to Jack Terrell. We’re talking about his book, Disposable Patriot. This is scandals of the Reagan-Bush era. All right, so here you are. You’re back in the country. You’re trying to put your life together. What did you do that, besides, did you threaten to tell the story publicly? Because it wasn’t too long after that, Oliver North, the North Network, the FBI, parts of the Justice Department, high officials in the Reagan era up to Ronald Reagan himself were aware that you were around, and were concerned about you. So, how did this happen?
Jack Terrell When I came back to the United States, I really had no intention of saying a word, because number one, I felt that, who would listen? Who cared? Because it seemed like the United States and the electorate was hell-bent on keeping this little situation going on in Honduras, without any knowledge. It was much like they had bought a car without test driving it, and I felt like, what the hell? Why say anything? So, I went to New Orleans, Louisiana, and got an apartment, and for a few months, just virtually sat around and let it eat on me. I did a lot of soul-searching about the situation. To my amazement, I was called again by someone else from Washington, and especially after I went down, believing I was working for Donald Fortier.
Never talked to the man again, always wondered, when am I going to be contacted? But extraordinary amounts of money was left in safety deposit boxes and given to me by strange people. I had more money than I knew what to do with, and was spending it pretty rapidly for supplies there. So, it was a big mystery about the whole Fortier bit, because there was no backup to it. He kept saying, “Well,” he had told me in the conversations, “When you go down there, we’ll be in touch and you can tell us what’s going on.” But I never had anybody to report to, so I was sort of spun off on my own, and something in my own hands, and evolved up to what I did, being known as Colonel Flaco, and I said a lot of people feared me, because North even branded me the most ruthless commander in Central America.
What he based that on was the fact that I did not allow any more Americans to be killed by going out and, I suppose he put it, “Killing a commie for mommy.” Because I had asked an American one time who had a gun in his hand near the border, I said, “Go across the border and bring me back a communist.” And he started towards the border, and he stopped, and he turned and looked at me and he says, “Well, what does a communist look like?” I said, “My God, this is a graphic example of what’s going on in the United States. What does a communist look like?” Especially when you have peasant fighters that are given a gun with an hour training by either the Sandinistas or by the Contras and saying, “Shoot at each other.” These people can’t even tell you what democracy means, much less what communism means.
So, do you have these very, very ingrained ideological armies opposing each other? No. You have just two varieties of peasants that know nothing except they’ve got a gun, and they’re told, “You shoot at each other, or we shoot you.” This capsulizes what the war was.
Dennis Bernstein So, I don’t understand, you sent somebody to what, to get somebody for you to assassinate?
Jack Terrell No, no, no. I just was using that as an example to the Americans. People I call legends in their own mind. The people that were drifting into Honduras through CMA and other channels, that came down to do their thing, what they read in Soldier of Fortune magazine about the great communist threat. They didn’t even know what a communist was. So, how could you expect a poor peasant to know this? When they didn’t really care. They only cared about, “Do I have a house, a couple of chickens, and a pig, and a garden to support my family? Democracy? What is that? Communism? What is that?” They didn’t understand the politics of what we were being told they were fighting for. So, it was all a backwards situation.
But when I got to New Orleans, my phone rang again. This time, I was contacted by people who told me that they knew about the Fortier situation. I was told the name Mr. Smith, but Mr. Smith was many voices. Mr. Smith was a composite that I was talking to, but somebody that knew enough about me, knew enough about what I did, who I had talked to, to where I knew authentically that they were from somewhere, but I didn’t know where. But what I was asked to do, because they knew my feelings, my bitterness towards the whole situation, was to go to Washington, and they would tell me how I could accomplish this, and they wanted me to be their conduit for leaks of information from various intelligence agencies to the press, because these people also saw our government out of control.
The hawks and the doves, where the hawks were winning the battle, and the scale that we knew as checks and balances had gone totally out of control. I didn’t really know as much about the NSC North operation and the Eånterprise as people would believe at that time. But I was given enough classified information, or most certainly confidential information that gave me a background, and an education, and a blueprint to exactly how they were running the war. I was told how to contact the FBI, the DEA, various people to get my name out, and tell them I was going to defect to Nicaragua. This would bring attention of law enforcement agents, because they would say, “Why do you want to defect to Nicaragua? Well, who are you?”
So, when I first met with FBI agents in New Orleans, they asked me just that question. “Well, who are you, and why would you want to defect to Nicaragua, and who cares?” So, then with the few documents I had, pictures and things that I tried not to accumulate, but did accumulate down there. They looked at it, and they immediately went back to their office, and came back the next day and said, “Well, we have a cable from Miami that says, if you can find Jack Terrell anywhere, let us know.” So, there had already been radar out for me in the country. “Where is this guy located? We’ve got to put our finger on him.” And in evidence that came out in the Iran-Contra hearing, Robert Owen, the courier or the protégé of Oliver North very much was interested in where I was, because they were afraid that I would try to re-involve myself in the war and would really cause them some problems.
So, during this time, I was discovered by the staff of Senator John Kerry through a conversation I had with the then public defender, John Mattis in Florida, who was representing a Cuban by the name of Jesus Garcia who had told him a very, very tall tale. Something you would expect to hear as a Star Trek adventure, and the only person who believed this about what was going on as far as assassinations, and plots, and plans regarding the war was John Mattis. So he called me out of the blue. How did he get my number? Like everyone else, I was listed in the phone book. He called me on a long shot and said, “My name is John Mattis. I’m representing Jesus Garcia. I heard this, I heard this, I heard this. Do you know anything about it?”
When I went into it, it was like, “Oh my God, look what I found.” So again, the chains started coming together, various links. The next thing I know, I’m being visited by the staff of Senator John Kerry, newspaper people, law enforcement agents, and boom, I’m in Washington, just as foretold by the group I was dealing with, which called themselves Internal Command and Control, or InComCon. I wound up in Washington, was put on as a consultant with a public policy group in Washington called International Center for Developmental Policy. At this location, I served as a switchboard between InComCon and the press. The press, and documents, and everything else showed that in many, many instances, I was releasing information to the press far in advance of when they were finding out.
Even when I made a trip to the Philippines, and suddenly appeared back in Washington, on the same day a classified document was released to the press, and I knew about it. People said, “Oh my God, we’ve got a CIA agent working for us.” Because people said your information is just, as Jack Blum, the attorney for the Kerry Committee said, “The problem with Jack Terrell is that he knows too much. He knows too much information. His information is just too good.” So, people suspected that I was a CIA plant, working in a liberal public policy group, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though I was leaking relevant information to the press, and switchboarding facts so that the whole picture could be painted, of a back channel, shadow government in control of foreign policy under direction of Oliver North, but known to, believe me, known to Ronald Reagan and George Bush very much.
They called the shots, but North was taking the spears in the chest. As this was being divulged piecemeal, because the press was very resistant to somebody who came from the Contra theater, into Washington, and was accusing people of things that they said, “You cannot possibly prove.” As I told people, history will be all the proof that I need. When Eugene Hassenfus survived the shoot-down of a supply plane flown out of Ilopango Air Force Base, then again, a big splash on the front page. What’s going on in the Contra war? The administration says, “No, we’re not supporting them. They’re only getting humanitarian aid.” Then you’ve got Oliver North saying, “No, it’s not government money. This is donations, and what Air Force? What supply planes?”
Everybody knew nothing about something, but it was something going on, but nobody knew anything. So, when Hassenfus was brought out, than the Sandinistas, for the first time had real, tangible proof, the US government is doing it to us. We’ve got a plane that’s shot down. Where did the plane come from? As they now call it, the flying filing cabinet, they got a tremendous treasure trove of documents off of this plane that was taken on by the pilot. I think it was the copilot, Buzz Sawyer. But again, when that plane hit the ground, and there were documents discovered, within days I had them in my hands in Washington, when nobody else knew about it. They even knew there were any types of logs, or cards, or names on this plane, I had them in my hands in Washington, delivered by a mysterious source.
Dennis Bernstein Okay, are you are in Washington, DC. You’re at the International Development Center. This is the center founded by Robert White, the former ambassador to El Salvador. You have a source for information that appears to be a very good government source. You are taking this material and playing conduit, feeding it to the hungry press, who is very interested to, particularly after Hassenfus got shot down and threw the spotlight on Nicaragua. There you are with this material. Before we go on, I want to just ask you, you don’t have any idea about InComCon, who they really were, where that material, why they had such a good source of material, and why they were so upset and feeding it to you? You don’t know what their ax might have been?
Jack Terrell Oh, I know exactly what it was, but because of the many voices I talked to over a period of time, it wasn’t strictly clinical. I knew it was them, because when my phone would ring, the receptionist would say, “There’s Mr. Smith on line three.” The conversation always started the same way. “It is March the 5th, it’s 5:30, 1988. This is what I’ve got to say.” But when the information was given, there would be a little casual talk, but not much, in that I was picking up the agenda that people within the agency that was primarily behind this, the CIA, were quite unhappy with the fact that William Casey had come to the CIA and had virtually destroyed the command structure there. That he would just as soon come down from the fifth or seventh floor of the CIA to some poor analysts and say, “Do this, and if you don’t, you’ll wind up being an analyst in Chad.”
There was a lot of drastic change, extraordinary behavior by Casey, and some of the people he was bringing into this agency that took the bureaucratic career type agency analyst or estimator, or whatever there, and really shaking them up. So, they saw this as a way to get back the stability in their institution, number one. Number two, they also saw it as a way to impeach Ronald Reagan, because they had far more knowledge than they told me of what was really going on, even though I was getting a very good taste of the illegalities that were going on that oversight committees and Congress was saying, “No, this is not happening.” But they couldn’t explain away Hassenfus, they couldn’t explain away a lot of things.
Then all of a sudden, Edwin Meese walks out in a briefing room at the White House and puts a straight razor to the throat of the administration and says, “Well, we’ve been selling missiles to our archenemy, the Ayatollah, but we’ve been doing it at a profit, and this profit is being sent to our good buddies, the Contras.” But five days prior to this Meese announcement, which really rattled the framework of this country and instigated the hearings, I called the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, the Houston Post, several papers and told them, “The money is going to the Contras.” But they refused to believe me. “Oh, sure. Where did you dream that one up?”
But when Meese came out and virtually validated what I had said five days earlier, at my office in the International Center, I literally had cameras, and cameramen, and news crews stacked up out in the streets, waiting to talk to me. “Good God, how did you know this?” It’s like the second coming of the Messiah or something. Quite simple, the same way I knew about the documentation on the C-123 that was shot down. Mr. Smith called, said, “Get to the CAB. Get all of the logs on Southern Air Transport,” which happened to be a US proprietary flying the supplies out of Florida. I did, and right after I got the documents, they stopped giving them to people. They slammed the door at the CAB.
But reading these documents, I was able to put together the pattern of how air flights were operating between the US, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Columbia. I mean, some strange, strange places that CIA proprietary aircraft were making flights. In fact, I learned that they were supplying both sides of the war in Angola. So, it was a very elaborate scheme going on with this proprietary.
Dennis Bernstein All right, let’s talk a little bit about, we’re running out of time and I want to get now too, you became an incredible source of information that would undermine the Reagan Administration, what the North Network was doing in Central America. You had extraordinary material, and they responded. They responded in an attempt to close you down. Could you elucidate that situation?
Jack Terrell Well, I was introduced to… Actually, I was called to the Washington News Network in Washington, DC, headed by Walter Gold. I was introduced to a man by the name of Glenn Robinette, who I was told at the time was an attorney. The Washington News Network lured me there by offering to show me film of a C-123 at Ilopango Air Force Base, where the supply operation was running, with the Star of David on it, which I did view, and asked them if I could get a copy of it for 60 Minutes, but naturally, no way. Glenn Robinette approached me as an attorney that was representing motion picture producers, and book people. Boy, my story was really great, and they’d like to know more about me, and were interested in helping me.
They knew I was down and out, and broke, which was true. I wasn’t doing this for money, by any stretch of the imagination. So, Robinette, I found out was an agent, former CIA agent that was working for General Richard Secord, and Oliver North, trying to find ways to shut me up, because I was giving out too much information, too fast, to too many people, and they were trying to stop it. I appeared on a CBS program called West 57th Street, which I literally coined the name Contra-gate. I started it out. “There’s a cancer growing in this country, and it’s not going to go away, and it’s going to be called Contra-gate.” This was long before people even had a twinkling in their eyes about a hearing, because I knew what was going to happen.
So, they were very much interested in shutting me up, getting me out of the country, doing something with me. So first, I was offered the possibility of opening up a helicopter service in Costa Rica, to get me out of the country. Hence, when that didn’t fly, they decided that something more drastic had to be done, and this drastic step was, one day I was called by the FBI at my office at the center. They said, “We’d like to talk to you today down at the Washington field office.” Fine. I went to the office. I walked into a room full of Secret Service agents and FBI agents, and they informed me that they had been informed that I was going to assassinate the President of the United States.
I went through the floor. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I said, “I might have done a lot of crazy things, and been a strange person in this town, but regardless of how much I oppose the policy of my country, I would never kill my president.” They said, “Will you take a polygraph to back this up?” I said, “Yeah, right now.” So, they literally put me in a car full of agents, took me to the Secret Service headquarters downtown, three stories underground, and for two days I was polygraphed. But the only problem with the polygraph was, they never asked me if I was going to kill the President of the United States. They asked me questions like, “Do you agree with the president’s policy in Central America? Have you ever been in the Nicaraguan Embassy? Do you know Martine Vega, the security officer there?”
Questions along this line, and I’m thinking, “What is this?” Then, they got to the big question. I’m waiting, “Are you going to kill the President of the United States?” They said, “Have you ever threatened a government official?” And you’re thinking to yourself, the IRS? What, a Park Ranger? That was it, and I was astonished that here I am, being drug down for two days, the FBI one day, the Secret Service for one day, accusing me of assassinating the President of the United States, and they never asked me if I was going to do it. Then, after the whole thing was over, and I passed the test with flying colors, I was escorted out of the building, and they patted me on the shoulder and said, “We just wanted to know where you stood.”
I was so upset about this, I immediately came back and called Bob Parry, who then worked for the Associated Press. I told him, I said, “Bob, you’ll never believe what happened.” Bob wanted to run an article immediately. He said, “This is the greatest abuse of a human, of government resources I’ve ever seen.” I said, “No, no, don’t do this. I’ve had enough. Because they accuse you of killing the president, and you can wind up in a straitjacket in some sanatorium for six months, pilled up on Thorazine.” So I said, “No, let’s let this one go.” Then, since this didn’t work, and I kept on leaking, leaking, leaking information, the next step was, I was indicted in Fort Lauderdale, on six counts of violation of the Enemy Neutrality Act, the Arms Control Export Act.
They looked through law books so diligently that one of the charges was conspiring to put a luggage tag on a suitcase that had a gun in it. They were really searching. So, they brought this indictment against me, which ultimately became a laugher for the judge, when now, John Mattis, my attorney, who resigned his job as a public defender to defend me in this case. We filed a motion, which became a motion of precedent-setting proportion, saying that we were not at peace with Nicaragua. So, how could they indict me on these charges? The judge totally agree, but not only with the Nicaraguan war, he went all the way back to Korea. He said, “It’s amazing what people have done, governments have done, administrations have done in these undeclared wars that we have around the country.”
So, the judge pointed out, saying that they were selectively using this against me, even though we had a selective prosecution motion in the hopper, waiting if this one didn’t work, and they threw out four charges on this motion. The government threw in the towel on the other two, because my attorney, John Mattis, asked to see the polygraph results. We asked to get certain information about what we believed to be true, and later found out to be true, that my telephones were tapped. They went through my trash, they went through my motel room. Most likely, were tapping the offices of the United States Senator. When we asked for this in discovery, they were too quick to want to get out of it.
To this day, I can’t get it. During this time, a federal judge had to hold the FBI in contempt of his court because they wouldn’t give it to him. So, it was a pattern of cover-up, cover-up, cover-up that lasted several years, but this is the type of things that they used, not only against me, but would quickly use against anybody who dissented against that policy.
Dennis Bernstein Let’s talk just a minute more about this intimidation. They were attempting to intimidate you, to silence you, to undermine you, because you knew a lot, obviously, it appears about the North Network. I just want to talk about some of the other information that came out of that trial, through discovery. You’re talking about finding out your phones were tapped, so on and so forth. There are also some very interesting documents that tied the FBI in at the highest levels, in surveilling you, and in collaborating with the North Network in terms of trying to suppress information. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Jack Terrell Sure. We found out that number one, North claimed that the so-called threat against the president, and the FBI claimed that they couldn’t say where it came from because of the sourcing method, it was some classified deal. Which as it turned out, the classified deal was Oliver North calling Glenn Robinette out of a birthday party and bring into the basement of the White House and saying, “Go to the FBI and tell them Terrell is going to whack the president.” But they had a collaborator at the FBI, the executive assistant director, by the name of Oliver Buck Ravel, who was right in the situation with them, because on the night this whole thing came about, about the presidential assassination, we had documents that proved that Robinette was called there, what North did, and a memo written that night by Oliver Ravel as to this threat that I was.
And also, we got a hold of a memo, a draft memo, a second rewrite and a final memo of a memorandum put together by Oliver North, for John Poindexter, and was initialed by Ronald Reagan, that called me a terrorist threat, and that I was a threat to, the essence was that I was a secret agent working for a foreign government, and I was an anti-Contra type sympathizer in Washington, trying to bring down their foreign policy. That’s the gist of it, but it was much longer. So again, people say, “Well, Ronald Reagan didn’t know what was going on.” But I have the document with his initials on it.
So, we were recovering document after document, cable traffic, all types of classified memos that put the CIA, put the FBI, the Department of Justice, everybody in a massive campaign to shut me up, and to cover up what they were doing, and even cover up what the government was doing for years, until it got to a point to where they could no longer cover up. As Judge Wallace said, after the pardons of the people involved in the whole situation by President George Bush, the last card of the cover-up had been played. So, the American public was literally snowed for seven or eight years about this thing, because they didn’t have the right of discovery to see the kind of paperwork that you can generate when you dissent against any policy in the United States. They’ll teach you things that the KGB never thought of.
Dennis Bernstein Okay, we’re speaking with Jack Terrell. He is the author of Disposable Patriot, and just a final question. This is a more general, philosophical question, Jack Terrell. If that phone rang tomorrow, and it was the National Security Council calling you, saying that they need you, there’s an important mission in Somalia, Sarajevo, Iraq, wherever, that the government really needed you. That they needed your work, your help, your support. Would you stand up and fight for your country, in their characterization of it?
Jack Terrell Not today. No, they broke me from sucking lemons, in many ways. I found out that even though people said I went from ultra-right to this flaming liberal, I found out that I am more of a right-wing liberal with a left-wing conservative outlook, in that I learned one thing. I would never, ever again in my life trust anything my government told me, because they lie. I empathize, and I sympathize with what’s going on in places like Bosnia, Herzegovina, where there’s so-called ethnic cleansing. If I was prone to do that, I would just go myself over there, and try to help those people. But if it was on the invitation of the United States government, they don’t make bills in large enough denominations to get me to walk to the airport on their behalf, no.
Dennis Bernstein Well, how do I know that what you’re telling me now is the truth? How do I know that, if you were a good agent, if you were a good intelligence person, if you wanted to keep working for the government, you wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway, would you?
Jack Terrell There was a time where I would agree, no, I wouldn’t have told you. I would have done like I had done on many occasions, lie like a rug, which as I said, they used as the very ax to chop my own credibility down with. But today, had I not written a book that is not a Contra book. It’s built around the Contras, but this is a book where I feel like I went out in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and stripped like a banana being peeled. I virtually told the world, “This is who I am, this is where I came from, this is what I’ve done, this is what I believe.” I can’t take it back, nor would I want to take it back, because I just got an education in a very short time that had I known when I was a young man, growing up in the segregated Birmingham, Alabama, would have probably been shot by the Klan back then for carrying a picket sign, because I would have gone against what I was taught about segregation.
So, your ideological bent is learned behavior, and I was acting on the instinct of learned behavior, of what I thought patriotism meant. Being a good American, what we are brainwashed into believing, what good Americans are all about. But if you go against the good Americans, you’ll find out how fast you’ll wind up being a citizen of another country.
Dennis Bernstein Your book is called Disposable Patriot, and this is finally it. Why did you name it Disposable Patriot?
Jack Terrell Well, actually the name was suggested by Dennis Bernstein when he was working at a radio station in New York, and I originally was going to name the book In Shades of Gray, because I felt that it was something that dealt with the gray area between black operations and legitimate operations as far as intelligence goes. After thrashing it about with the publishers, I told them, I said, “Well, one time a gentleman by the name of Dennis Bernstein said, you ought to write a book and call it Disposable Patriot.” So, there you have it. You’re now [crosstalk 01:05:20].
Dennis Bernstein Actually Jack, you got it wrong. My title was Disposable Heroes.
Jack Terrell I could have sworn it was Disposable Patriot.
Dennis Bernstein Your title is better. I thank you for joining us on this special, devoted to scandals of the Reagan-Bush era.