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02-22-2004, 09:57 AM
03, 2003
Ex-Green Beret's Sandinista story emerges 20 years later
Former Green Beret yearned to fight for Nicaraguan cause
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@herald.com
Eric Haney says the killing in the Honduran jungle 20 years ago, when he was a member of Delta Force, the U.S. Army's premier commando group, shook him down to his combat boots.
During a firefight while on a secret mission to help Honduran army troops track down Cuban-trained leftist guerrillas, he shot to death a rebel who appeared to be a leader because he was using a radio, Haney says.
But when he turned over the body of the rebel with the radio after the battle, Haney recognized him: It was David Arturo Báez, a former U.S. Army Green Beret and, even more shockingly, Haney's roommate during tryouts for Delta Force four years earlier.
Haney says he's still not sure whether Báez, a Nicaraguan-born U.S. citizen, had really joined Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista rulers and later the Honduran guerrilla group after he left the Green Berets in 1981, or was an American spy sent to infiltrate the Sandinistas.
''I still can't believe it,'' said Haney, now retired from the U.S. military and an occasional Special Operations analyst on American TV networks.
The full tale of Báez's bizarre mutation from Green Beret to guerrilla and death at Haney's hands in Honduras remained unknown until now, another of the many secret chapters of the wars that wracked much of Central America in the 1980s as part of the Cold War.
It was a time when Cuba and the Sandinistas were arming leftist guerrillas in Honduras and El Salvador, while the Reagan administration financed the anti-Sandinista ''contra'' fighters as well as the Salvadoran and Honduran armed forces.
Báez's once pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan family knew some of the details but kept silent for years. Haney knew other details but had sworn secrecy when he joined the elite Delta Force counterterrorism commandos in 1978.
BOOK PUBLISHED
But Haney retired in 1990 and in his autobiography, Inside Delta Force, published last year, he recounted his killing of the former bunk mate and Green Beret whom he identified as ``Keekee Sáenz.''
He confirmed that ''Sáenz'' was Báez after The Herald identified Báez independently, saying that he changed some details of the story in his book to sidestep his oath of secrecy and avoid possible retaliation from Sandinista sympathizers. Although he initially cooperated with this story, he later stopped, saying its publication ``puts my life in jeopardy.''
ANTI-SOMOZA
Báez was 3 years old when his father Adolfo, a former lieutenant in the Nicaraguan military, was arrested, tortured and executed after a 1954 coup attempt against U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza García.
''David Arturo grew up with an obsession for our father. As kids we even used to play at assassinating Somoza,'' his younger brother Eduardo, now head of Books for Children, a nongovernment organization, told The Herald.
By age 15, Báez was already involved in anti-Somoza protests, so his mother Lillian packed him off to finish high school in the United States, living first with an aunt in California and later with an older brother in New Jersey.
Always attracted to the military, the lean, square-shouldered Báez signed up for the U.S. Army in the early '70s but left after two years, let his hair grow and joined a hippie commune in New Jersey. He later married an American, became a U.S. citizen and rejoined the Army in 1974, eventually earning the rank of sergeant, joining the Green Berets and moving to Fort Gulick in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone.
But Báez was a Nicaraguan through and through, Eduardo said, ''his apartments always filled with maracas,'' his politics always focused on the struggle against the Somoza family dictatorship by the leftist guerrillas of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
As the Sandinistas gained ground in the late 1970s, a frustrated Báez thought of deserting the Army to join them. But their victory in 1979 found him still in Panama, ''feeling guilty he was not in the fight,'' Eduardo said.
'From that time on he talked of nothing but returning to Nicaragua to join the revolution and help the Sandinistas' dream of building heaven in Nicaragua,'' the brother added.
JOINED SANDINISTAS
Báez won an early release and arrived in Nicaragua in mid-1981 -- minus his wife, who thought it was too dangerous. He joined the Sandinista army as a captain, training elite commando units alongside Cuban advisors.
''I never saw him so happy,'' Eduardo recalled. ``He swallowed the whole revolution line, the anti-imperialism, the more humane army, the Cuban ideals. But he wanted to see combat.''
In mid-1982, Báez was transferred to the Sandinista army's intelligence section and began disappearing for weeks and months at a time, added Eduardo, his roommate at the time.
It's now clear he was working with a group of Cuban-trained Honduran guerrillas, led by physician Jose María Reyes Mata, who were preparing to invade their neighboring homeland in an attempt to spark a revolution there.
Báez told Eduardo in May 1983 that he had ''volunteered'' to undertake a secret mission in Honduras and would send him occasional letters using the code name Adolfo, his father's name. For the baby that his new Nicaraguan wife, Alma Ruth, was then expecting, he left a letter.
''One day my commander asked me if I wanted . . . to carry out an internationalist mission for the liberation of a brother country,'' Báez wrote. ``I answered him as follows: You tell me where, when, how, and what.''
INTO HONDURAS
The baby, Carlos Javier, was 3 months old when Báez, Reyes Mata and about 100 others slipped into Honduras on July 19, 1983. Báez was not the only U.S. citizen in the rebel column. Its ''chaplain'' was the Rev. James Carney, a former Jesuit priest from St. Louis who had been expelled from Honduras for his activism on behalf of poor farmers.
The column immediately ran into trouble. Food supplies ran out and 17 members deserted, alerting Honduran authorities.
Haney said he was part of a Delta Force unit training the Honduran army's Special Forces on how to deal with airplane hijackings when news of the invasion came, and was one of two U.S. commandos sent to secretly help the trainees fight the rebels.
A former U.S. military officer in Honduras at the time has confirmed that U.S. advisors took part in the operation. Two media reports at the time also quoted Honduran troops as saying that a dozen U.S. soldiers were involved.
RUTHLESS TROOPS
The Honduran troops were effective but ruthless.
Up to 40 rebels were captured, tortured and executed, according to a report by CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz on Honduran human-rights violations, written in 1997 and declassified the next year.
Haney told The Herald in telephone interviews from his home in Georgia that the last group of 30 to 40 guerrillas was surrounded and wiped out on a hilltop -- the same version Eduardo heard from a Sandinista army friend in 1997.
As the firefight started, Haney said, he spotted a rebel using a radio. ''Anytime you're in action you always seek the person with the radio. That's a leader, someone in command. So I put the [telescopic] scope of my M-16 on his neck and fired,'' he said.
After the battle, he added, the Hondurans finished off an unknown number of wounded guerrillas. ''If I was standing up in front of a crowd I would not say that they were killing the helpless, but it happened,'' he said.
DELTA FORCE
Haney said that he and two other Delta commandos later turned over the body and recognized Báez, one of the 163 Green Berets and Army Rangers who had tried out for Delta Force in 1978 at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Haney was one of the 12 who passed the ultra-rigorous physical and mental tests, going on to take part in the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in 1980 and the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama.
Báez did not make the cut and returned to the Green Berets in Panama, only to run into Haney again five years later in the jungles of eastern Honduras, this time on opposite sides of the Cold War's divide.
''I remembered him . . . as a quiet, competent type. A professional,'' Haney wrote in his book. ``Now he was gone for good. Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.''
CONTRADICTORY DATA
Hitz's CIA report, commissioned because of allegations that the CIA and U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa had failed to report on human-rights abuses by the Honduran military in the 1980s, offers contradictory reports on the fate of Báez.
Hitz mentions one U.S. intelligence report saying that a ''Nicaraguan advisor'' to the guerrillas had been killed in action, and two other reports that he had been captured and executed.
The Hitz report, declassified at the request of the Carney family, also offers contradictory information on the fate of the former Jesuit, variously reported to have starved to death or been captured, tortured and killed.
Báez's and Carney's bodies have never been found.
After the battle, Haney said, he began suspecting Báez had been a CIA agent sent to spy on the Sandinistas, and that CIA officials had blundered by failing to tell Haney that a former Green Beret was among the rebels.
''The whole operation just rang phony, because the whole thing was handled by the CIA,'' he said. ``You couldn't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a CIA agent upside the head on this mission.''
Two former Delta Force members contacted by The Herald confirmed that Haney had been part of the group but could not vouch for the Báez part of the story and criticized him for violating his oath of secrecy.
HIS LEGACY
Báez's son, now a strapping 20-year-old with his father's narrow face and aquiline nose, blames his death on the Sandinistas, who were voted out of power in 1990 but remain a powerful political force in Nicaragua.
''I don't like them at all because Honduras had nothing to do with him. Honduras was nothing to him,'' he said.
The son, a computer engineering student baptized as Carlos Javier, said he changed his name when he was about 5 years old. He's now David Arturo Báez.
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Ex-Green Beret's Sandinista story emerges 20 years later
Former Green Beret yearned to fight for Nicaraguan cause
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@herald.com
Eric Haney says the killing in the Honduran jungle 20 years ago, when he was a member of Delta Force, the U.S. Army's premier commando group, shook him down to his combat boots.
During a firefight while on a secret mission to help Honduran army troops track down Cuban-trained leftist guerrillas, he shot to death a rebel who appeared to be a leader because he was using a radio, Haney says.
But when he turned over the body of the rebel with the radio after the battle, Haney recognized him: It was David Arturo Báez, a former U.S. Army Green Beret and, even more shockingly, Haney's roommate during tryouts for Delta Force four years earlier.
Haney says he's still not sure whether Báez, a Nicaraguan-born U.S. citizen, had really joined Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista rulers and later the Honduran guerrilla group after he left the Green Berets in 1981, or was an American spy sent to infiltrate the Sandinistas.
''I still can't believe it,'' said Haney, now retired from the U.S. military and an occasional Special Operations analyst on American TV networks.
The full tale of Báez's bizarre mutation from Green Beret to guerrilla and death at Haney's hands in Honduras remained unknown until now, another of the many secret chapters of the wars that wracked much of Central America in the 1980s as part of the Cold War.
It was a time when Cuba and the Sandinistas were arming leftist guerrillas in Honduras and El Salvador, while the Reagan administration financed the anti-Sandinista ''contra'' fighters as well as the Salvadoran and Honduran armed forces.
Báez's once pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan family knew some of the details but kept silent for years. Haney knew other details but had sworn secrecy when he joined the elite Delta Force counterterrorism commandos in 1978.
BOOK PUBLISHED
But Haney retired in 1990 and in his autobiography, Inside Delta Force, published last year, he recounted his killing of the former bunk mate and Green Beret whom he identified as ``Keekee Sáenz.''
He confirmed that ''Sáenz'' was Báez after The Herald identified Báez independently, saying that he changed some details of the story in his book to sidestep his oath of secrecy and avoid possible retaliation from Sandinista sympathizers. Although he initially cooperated with this story, he later stopped, saying its publication ``puts my life in jeopardy.''
ANTI-SOMOZA
Báez was 3 years old when his father Adolfo, a former lieutenant in the Nicaraguan military, was arrested, tortured and executed after a 1954 coup attempt against U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza García.
''David Arturo grew up with an obsession for our father. As kids we even used to play at assassinating Somoza,'' his younger brother Eduardo, now head of Books for Children, a nongovernment organization, told The Herald.
By age 15, Báez was already involved in anti-Somoza protests, so his mother Lillian packed him off to finish high school in the United States, living first with an aunt in California and later with an older brother in New Jersey.
Always attracted to the military, the lean, square-shouldered Báez signed up for the U.S. Army in the early '70s but left after two years, let his hair grow and joined a hippie commune in New Jersey. He later married an American, became a U.S. citizen and rejoined the Army in 1974, eventually earning the rank of sergeant, joining the Green Berets and moving to Fort Gulick in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone.
But Báez was a Nicaraguan through and through, Eduardo said, ''his apartments always filled with maracas,'' his politics always focused on the struggle against the Somoza family dictatorship by the leftist guerrillas of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
As the Sandinistas gained ground in the late 1970s, a frustrated Báez thought of deserting the Army to join them. But their victory in 1979 found him still in Panama, ''feeling guilty he was not in the fight,'' Eduardo said.
'From that time on he talked of nothing but returning to Nicaragua to join the revolution and help the Sandinistas' dream of building heaven in Nicaragua,'' the brother added.
JOINED SANDINISTAS
Báez won an early release and arrived in Nicaragua in mid-1981 -- minus his wife, who thought it was too dangerous. He joined the Sandinista army as a captain, training elite commando units alongside Cuban advisors.
''I never saw him so happy,'' Eduardo recalled. ``He swallowed the whole revolution line, the anti-imperialism, the more humane army, the Cuban ideals. But he wanted to see combat.''
In mid-1982, Báez was transferred to the Sandinista army's intelligence section and began disappearing for weeks and months at a time, added Eduardo, his roommate at the time.
It's now clear he was working with a group of Cuban-trained Honduran guerrillas, led by physician Jose María Reyes Mata, who were preparing to invade their neighboring homeland in an attempt to spark a revolution there.
Báez told Eduardo in May 1983 that he had ''volunteered'' to undertake a secret mission in Honduras and would send him occasional letters using the code name Adolfo, his father's name. For the baby that his new Nicaraguan wife, Alma Ruth, was then expecting, he left a letter.
''One day my commander asked me if I wanted . . . to carry out an internationalist mission for the liberation of a brother country,'' Báez wrote. ``I answered him as follows: You tell me where, when, how, and what.''
INTO HONDURAS
The baby, Carlos Javier, was 3 months old when Báez, Reyes Mata and about 100 others slipped into Honduras on July 19, 1983. Báez was not the only U.S. citizen in the rebel column. Its ''chaplain'' was the Rev. James Carney, a former Jesuit priest from St. Louis who had been expelled from Honduras for his activism on behalf of poor farmers.
The column immediately ran into trouble. Food supplies ran out and 17 members deserted, alerting Honduran authorities.
Haney said he was part of a Delta Force unit training the Honduran army's Special Forces on how to deal with airplane hijackings when news of the invasion came, and was one of two U.S. commandos sent to secretly help the trainees fight the rebels.
A former U.S. military officer in Honduras at the time has confirmed that U.S. advisors took part in the operation. Two media reports at the time also quoted Honduran troops as saying that a dozen U.S. soldiers were involved.
RUTHLESS TROOPS
The Honduran troops were effective but ruthless.
Up to 40 rebels were captured, tortured and executed, according to a report by CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz on Honduran human-rights violations, written in 1997 and declassified the next year.
Haney told The Herald in telephone interviews from his home in Georgia that the last group of 30 to 40 guerrillas was surrounded and wiped out on a hilltop -- the same version Eduardo heard from a Sandinista army friend in 1997.
As the firefight started, Haney said, he spotted a rebel using a radio. ''Anytime you're in action you always seek the person with the radio. That's a leader, someone in command. So I put the [telescopic] scope of my M-16 on his neck and fired,'' he said.
After the battle, he added, the Hondurans finished off an unknown number of wounded guerrillas. ''If I was standing up in front of a crowd I would not say that they were killing the helpless, but it happened,'' he said.
DELTA FORCE
Haney said that he and two other Delta commandos later turned over the body and recognized Báez, one of the 163 Green Berets and Army Rangers who had tried out for Delta Force in 1978 at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Haney was one of the 12 who passed the ultra-rigorous physical and mental tests, going on to take part in the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in 1980 and the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama.
Báez did not make the cut and returned to the Green Berets in Panama, only to run into Haney again five years later in the jungles of eastern Honduras, this time on opposite sides of the Cold War's divide.
''I remembered him . . . as a quiet, competent type. A professional,'' Haney wrote in his book. ``Now he was gone for good. Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.''
CONTRADICTORY DATA
Hitz's CIA report, commissioned because of allegations that the CIA and U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa had failed to report on human-rights abuses by the Honduran military in the 1980s, offers contradictory reports on the fate of Báez.
Hitz mentions one U.S. intelligence report saying that a ''Nicaraguan advisor'' to the guerrillas had been killed in action, and two other reports that he had been captured and executed.
The Hitz report, declassified at the request of the Carney family, also offers contradictory information on the fate of the former Jesuit, variously reported to have starved to death or been captured, tortured and killed.
Báez's and Carney's bodies have never been found.
After the battle, Haney said, he began suspecting Báez had been a CIA agent sent to spy on the Sandinistas, and that CIA officials had blundered by failing to tell Haney that a former Green Beret was among the rebels.
''The whole operation just rang phony, because the whole thing was handled by the CIA,'' he said. ``You couldn't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a CIA agent upside the head on this mission.''
Two former Delta Force members contacted by The Herald confirmed that Haney had been part of the group but could not vouch for the Báez part of the story and criticized him for violating his oath of secrecy.
HIS LEGACY
Báez's son, now a strapping 20-year-old with his father's narrow face and aquiline nose, blames his death on the Sandinistas, who were voted out of power in 1990 but remain a powerful political force in Nicaragua.
''I don't like them at all because Honduras had nothing to do with him. Honduras was nothing to him,'' he said.
The son, a computer engineering student baptized as Carlos Javier, said he changed his name when he was about 5 years old. He's now David Arturo Báez.
email this print this license this reprint this