My training as an agent and then as a certified explosives specialist had exposed me to a variety of grenades and other ordnance commonly encountered on the U.S streets. I had seen my share of grenades, mortar rounds, and mining explosives working on the border out of El Paso, Texas. I had dealt with the legendary pineapple grenades, real ones and reloads. I had seen M33 and M67 grenades that had been pilfered from the military or brought back from Vietnam as souvenirs. I had seen improvised grenades, some sophisticated in configuration; others simple, but no less lethal.
During the early days of my assignment, I had the opportunity to travel to Villavicencio in the eastern llanos of Colombia to examine a caché of grenades and anti-tank rockets captured from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). I saw what appeared to be shoulder-fired, disposable U.S. – made M72 LAWS anti-tank rockets, the kind seen in Vietnam war movies. Except they weren’t. The color of the tubes was different. They were a much lighter shade of green than the olive drab of the U.S. variety. The grenades were especially confusing. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were round like baseball style grenades, but smaller. I saw tinier versions of pineapple-style grenades. Others looked like cans of beans. I saw M67-type grenades that appeared to be of U.S. origin but for the markings that were in Spanish. (Later I would encounter some marked in Hebrew). I saw 60mm mortar rounds and 40mm grenades that looked U.S. – made, but discovered after running the lot numbers that they were not.
I conferred with ATF Explosives Technology Branch (ETB) and they quickly brought me up-to-speed. They faxed me reference material and sent me what literature they could muster. They gave me over-the-phone lectures relating to the intricacies of identifying ordnance. In the meantime, I compiled a list of the various types of grenades, rifle grenades, mortar rounds, anti-tank rockets, and surface-to-air missiles that I had either encountered in Colombia or ascertained were available in the region, especially Central America.
In time, I realized that the guerrillas, especially the FARC, had a steady supply of grenades, rifle grenades, mortars, and anti-tank rockets that had been pilfered from the militaries of other countries in the northern tier of South America, primarily Venezuela and Ecuador. I discovered that other countries copied U.S. – made grenades that were slightly bigger in height and diameter, suggesting that the country making them used an original to make the mold. I did find some U.S.- sourced LAWS rockets that had been sold in a military sale to the Ecuadoran army before finding their way into the hands of the FARC.
I began to study the situation to understand how these items were being acquired by the guerrillas. During my visits of Colombian military bases to inspect captured weapons and ordnance, I interviewed officers and frontline soldiers to tap into their knowledge. I also met with diplomats and police attachés of other countries in a social setting to learn from them what they could tell me. I ventured into the conflict areas (often incognito) and met with national policemen and spoke to other sources to get a better grasp of the situation. I traveled to Panama, Costa Rica, and El Salvador to gather intelligence, debriefing security agents, military officers, and informants regarding the issue of weapons trafficking.
I came across a leaflet in Quito, Ecuador the FARC distributed soliciting soldiers in Western Colombia and Ecuador offering cash for ammunition, grenades, mortar rounds, and anti-tank rockets. I understood they did the same in Venezuela. I was told by more than one source that fishermen from Bluefields in Nicaragua, fishing common waters with Colombian fisherman often traded guns for food and medicine. I also learned that corrupt Sandinista armory personnel sold surplus weapons to gun traffickers. I confirmed my suspicions from a highly-credible source in Costa Rica that gunrunners used that country as a staging point to bring Central American civil war surplus weapons down the Pacific coast by fishing boat to Buenaventura on the west coast of Colombia or the Urabá region on the north coast. I confirmed, through tracing that the U.S. army apparently missed many of the weapons warehoused in Panama by Manuel Noriega during Operation Just Cause. The Colombians recovered samples of these guns destined for the FARC coming in through the Darien in southern Panama to the Chocó of Colombia.
I learned that the FARC stole mining explosives from the various mining and oil exploration companies operating in Colombia and Ecuador and may have even been paid off by these companies to be left alone. They made improvised land mines and shape charges using mining explosives. They were fond of using bell-shaped perforation charges strung together with detonation (det) cord to mine roads that could take out several vehicles in a convoy with a single blast.
The Medellin cartel also used mining explosives. They used ammonium nitrate dynamite procured from the Ecuadoran black market to make car bombs. Their favorite method was to steal a taxi and load a barrel with 80 kilos of dynamite, pointing the open end of the barrel toward the target. They tended to insert numerous blasting caps (detonators) into the sticks of dynamite and used car batteries (sometimes more than one) to detonate the device. I surmised that they overdid the capping and power source to ensure success.
Military ordnance and mining explosives were not the only things the guerrillas and narcos had been accessing to arm their guerrillas or sicarios and paramilitaries respectively. The guerrillas had help from Cuba. I don’t recall any definitive incident where a Cuban operative had been identified, but do recall the signature. I collected homemade manuals relating to the manufacture of improvised explosives devices that were of Cuban origin. The Medellin cartel hired Israeli mercenaries, ETA bomb makers, and later IRA bomb makers to teach their sicarios how to make car bombs.
With the assistance of ATF’s Explosives Technology Branch and the help of two Colombian secretaries working for the DEA, I assembled an identification book of grenades, rifles grenades, mortar rounds, anti-tank rockets, and surface-to-air missiles that had either been recovered in Colombia or existed on the black market in the region. I put my name on the book as a contact point for any authority that wanted assistance. My name was subsequently replaced by the agent that followed me giving many the false impression that he assembled that guide. He did, however make the book pretty by having the illustrations and cover professionally done. That book, I understand is still being circulated around the Americas.
As I previously stated: I had no guidebook or model to use in developing my operation. I literally made it up as I went along. I incorporated explosives identification and handling into the firearms identification training program I had begun. In a relatively short time, there wasn’t anywhere I went to in the four corners of Colombia where I didn’t run into someone I had trained. I began to realize that I could use this to my advantage and formulated a plan to develop an intelligence collection network.
I will relate how I went about implementing that network in the next installment.
