No. 8

With one of its two motors wheezing fitfully, the World War II B-25 bomber flew high over Haiti's southeastern mountains, cut across the heart of Port-au-Prince, and dropped two homemade bombs near the presidential palace and two more on the capital's Bowen Field. Only one of the four exploded. Banking to the north, the plane then headed to a clandestine base located somewhere outside Haiti, apparently loaded up with more bombs, and proceeded on to a small airstrip near Cap Haitien. There one and possibly two other larger planes had just landed with 20 well-armed men, probably trainees from secret camps in the Bahamas. Thus last week, for the eighth time in ten years, began another attempt by Haitian exiles to topple the brutal and corrupt government of Haitian Dictator Franc,ois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier.

As always in the tiny tropical police state, official details of the raid--such as it was--were soon clouded in confusion, contradiction and half-truths. But one thing was certain: the invaders, in their clumsy way, meant business. Before word of the bombing reached the north, the commander of the Cap Haitien garrison drove out to the airport to investigate the landings and ran into a hail of bullets; he was seriously wounded and two aides with him were killed.

Meeting force with force, Duvalier rushed 200 troops into the north, blocked the main road to Cap Haitien, surrounded the airport and personally directed every operation and news release from his corner office in the palace. "We must bomb the enemy systematically," he instructed his commander by phone. Later, Duvalier rang up Washington, where the Haitian ambassador, Arthur Bonhomme, was holding a press conference, and instructed the diplomat to inform the assembled reporters that Papa's troops were "mopping up right now."

In the mop-up, several of the invaders were killed and eight were captured. The others managed to escape into the countryside, either going into hiding or fleeing toward the Dominican border. On the one plane that did not get away, the B-25 that had bombed Port-au-Prince, the government claimed that it had found anti-Duvalier leaflets ("Down with crime! Down with misery! Down with Duvalier!"), implicating New York's Haitian Coalition, a group of exiles bent on Duvalier's overthrow. To try to fix the blame, Duvalier had the eight prisoners flown to the capital and grilled them personally for eight hours. Then, wearing camouflage uniforms with tags obscurely reading "Big Game! Styled by Broadway," they were marched off--presumably to their execution. At week's end, Duvalier indignantly demanded a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to investigate this latest "armed aggression" against his dark fiefdom.

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