The Seeds of Fiction by Richard Greene, Bernard Diederich Page A

literature to the rebels. A couple of days later Wessin y Wessin’s men raided the camp and arrested everyone, including a number of Haitians living in the Hotel Europa and two French soldiers of fortune.
    I drove out to Villa Mella with my wife and our infant son, but as we came up to the police station along the route a policeman shouted,
‘Ahi viene el hombre del carrito’
(‘Here comes the man with the little car.’) They arrested us and took us to the National Police Headquarters. My wife and son were left waiting in the Volkswagen for two hours in the noon heat. Finally, at my urging, an officer agreed to allow my wife to return home rather than suffer heatstroke in the police yard.
    I was not held in the same cell as the Haitians. A few hours later a high-ranking officer appeared and escorted me not to the jail but to President Donald Reid Cabral’s residence.
    I explained the situation to the President, and he immediately sent someone to retrieve the evidence from Wessin y Wessin. Then we sat down to a drink. In a moment the telephone rang. It was the British Ambassador. Apparently he’d heard that I had been arrested.
    â€˜Diederich?’ Reid Cabral said into the receiver and winked at me. ‘Yes. He’sbeen arrested. I have him right here. I’m torturing him with Johnny Walker.’
    When the messenger arrived with the ‘Communist’ literature confiscated at the camp, Reid Cabral flipped through the pamphlets and discovered the publisher: US Information Service. The following day, on the President’s orders, the Kamoken were released.
    Just as the rebels were settling back on the chicken farm, Father Georges arranged to purchase rifles, munitions and explosives from an anti-Castro Cuban in Miami. One of the guerrillas, Gérard Lafontant, was assigned to take delivery of the weapons in Miami and move them to a safe house near the Miami river.
    The Cuban delivered the weapons and loaned Lafontant a garbage truck to transport them to the safe house. As he drove south on I-95 the truck ran out of petrol. A Florida highway patrolman arrived at the scene, and Lafontant, who did not have a driving licence, told him he was taking the truck to Haiti. Amazingly, the patrolman didn’t ask to see a licence or peer into the back of the truck. Lafontant delivered the arms, which were loaded aboard the 235-foot freighter
Johnny Express.
    The Kamoken also paid $2,000 to a member of the Jeune Haiti movement (an organization comprised mostly of young Haitian exiles, thirteen of whom later landed in southern Haiti to fight Papa Doc) in New York for the purchase of NATO-issued automatic FAL rifles. The arms arrived by ship, concealed inside the insulation of refrigerators, and the ammunition was hidden inside car batteries. The men unloaded the arms, but a few days later they were claimed by a pair of long-time Haitian exiles. At first the Kamoken refused to hand over the weapons but complied after the men threatened to blow up the house where the munitions were stored.
    On the night of 27 June my wife and I attended a diplomatic party at the house of Vince Blocker, the US Embassy’s CIA man in charge of keeping an eye on the Haitian exiles. I was privy to the invasion plans but said nothing. I stayed late at Blocker’s house and watched the clock. I knew that if anything happened his police sources would notify him.
    That night twenty-nine Kamoken were loaded into a van and taken from the chicken farm to a cocktail party at Pierre Rigaud’s apartment on Avenida Independencia. The men ate hors d’oeuvres and mingled until late into the night. Then they were loaded back into the van and driven to the coast near the airport, where they were ferried by a small boat to the
Johnny Express.
    As the freighter got under way the guerrillas broke out the weapons from Miami. They were stunned. The arms the Cuban had sold them were antique First World War British-made