SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 15
• Publication Date: August 26, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
ARTICLE AP ED
ON PAGE AR
NEW REPUBLIC
26 August 1985
A course for aspiring mercenaries.
SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS
Hueytown, Alabama
J'-IV JUNE 24, the day after Air India's Flight 182
v plunged into the Atlantic, Secretary of State George
Shultz publicly deplored the recent wave of terrorism.
First the TWA hijacking to Beirut, then a bomb blast at the
Frankfurt airport, and now the Air India crash, which,
along with an explosion the same day at an airport near
Tokyo, was thought to be the work of Sikh terrorists.
Denouncing "the despicable acts of terrorists," Shultz
proclaimed, "All nations must unite in decisive action to
curb this threat." Vice President George Bush took time
out from his trip to Rome to call for "a redoubling of
international tfforts to safeguard innocent people against
this kind of terror."
BOTH MEN missed the local angle. Lal Singh, one
of the Sikhs suspected by the FBI of having had a
hand in the Air India crash (and currently at large)
had received paramilitary training right here in the United
States, with no apparent objection from federal, state,
or local authorities. Last November Lal Singh and three
other radical Sikhs came to this woody western suburb of
Birmingham to learn combat and survival techniques at
The Mercenary School. Now three of them are being
sought by the FBI in connection with various alleged
crimes, including not only the sabotage of the Air India
flight but also assassination plots against Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi and a prominent minister in his govern-
ment, Bhajan Lal, while they were in the U.S. (The fourth
Sikh is in jail.)
Jimmy, who works at The Merc School, as it is famil-
iarly known here, showed me around headquarters, a
warehouse called The Bunker. In a room decorated
with maps of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Lebanon,
he helped me identify an international assortment of
guns hanging from two racks: a Soviet AK-47, an Ameri-
can M-16, a Chinese grenade launcher just like one
that appeared in Red Dawn. Some of these weapons-
the Chinese rocket grenade, for example-are replicas,
fully authentic in every way except their ability to
fire. Others, like the M-16 and the AK-47, are real. Espe-
cially prized are the school's three working submachine
guns. Jimmy unzipped each from its leather pouch: a Brit-
ish Sterling ("That's what I'm getting. These things are
wonderful"), an Israeli Uzi ("the Real McCoy," not the
semi-automatic version you see in gun shops), and a
MAC-10 automatic, the weapon of choice in today's drug
wars. "All the students get to fire all three," Jimmy
explained.
The Mercenary School offers its two-week course in
combat and survival about half a dozen times each year
at a cost of $350 (575 more if you don't have your own
personal gear). Carried out mostly in the field, the course
includes training both in survival techniques (rappeling,
foraging, land navigation) and in hard-core combat (snip-
er fire, hand-to-hand combat, explosives and booby
traps). I arrived on the last day of the most recent class,
too late to witness the field combat training, but Frank
Camper, proprietor of The Merc School since he opened it
in 1981, insists it is as rough as any offered by the U.S.
military, if not more so. Probably the most dangerous
exercise is "live fire," where students make their way up a
15-foot-wide creek while real bullets are shot along the
banks.
The class one naturally wonders the most about is De-
molition. The Sikhs told Camper that they wante to learn
how to make time bombs-it was a time bomb that went
off in the Tokyo airport and probably caused the Air n is
crash. The man who teaches Demolition goes by the nick-
name Pablo, acquired on missions to the Nicaragua-
Honduras border under the sponsorship of the Alabama-
based Civilian Military Assistance group, a mercenary
organization currently trying to ingratiate itself to Con-
gress and the CIA. He has also fought with Major Saad
Haddad's army in Lebanon. Pablo was firm about not
using his real name for this article ("I got too much to do.
Hate to have to come lookin' for you"), but he let me sit in
on his explosives class. He passed around the various
kinds of grenades: pineapple (World War II vintage), base-
ball (the kind "Americans can throw"), and a few others,
none of them operable. Some replica sticks of dynamite
were also passed around, along with a mine, also inopera-
ble, boldly lettered, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. Pablo offered
a few suggestions about how to rig booby traps with the
grenades, some hints about making fuses, and assorted
bits of practical wisdom. (You can use Christmas tree
bulbs as detonators.) The closest he came to explaining
how to make a bomb was when he showed us some am-
monium nitrate (a common fertilizer) and said that it can
be ignited when a fuel-oil base is added and a blasting cap
is rigged. "Naturally you can attach them to any kind of
timing device," he said, but he didn't tell us how to work
one.
In truth, I was not left with the feeling that I
could head off to my local True Value and construct a
bomb in my basement. (Anyway, a full understanding of
the basics is readily available to anyone who pays a trip to
the public library.) But I did feel a bit uneasy as Pablo
showed us how to rig a tripwire for a booby trap, and
when he told us how, in Lebanon, he took the fuses off a
few grenades, then rolled them over the Syrian border.
"Them morons picked them up," he said, and when the
Syrians later pulled the pins to throw them they blew
themselves up. Clearly Pablo was within his First Amend-
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
ment rights to talk about such things, even to foreigners
(there were a few). Arguably the communication of such
information is less of a threat to world peace than, say, the
publication of The Progressive's famous build-your-own-
atom-bomb article, which caused a legal and political stir a
few years ago. But there is a moral difference: where The
Progressive was engaging in a clever (and perhaps irre-
sponsible) form of pacifist polemic, Pablo was passing
along his information with the intention that it be used to
kill people with whom his country may or may not be at
war.
A LEAST that seemed to be his intention. It's a
little hard to tell how much of this talk is meant
simply to titillate. Camper is in the position of having
to convince his customers that his school is the real thing
while at the same time convincing the authorities that
he's running a theme park. (Since the Air India crash, both
Senator Jeremiah Denton and Governor George Wallace
have begun investigations of The Merc School.) On the
one hand, Camper recently pointed out to People maga-
zine that he has trained men who are flow fighting in
Lebanon, South Africa, the Philippines, and Central
America. On the other, his brochure includes a small-
type legal notice that The Merc School "is not a merce-
nary recruitment facility." Only one of the half-dozen or
so students I spoke with let on that he was a real merce-
nary-he ostentatiously declined to name his occupa-
tion-and I suspect that he was putting me on. Among the
others were a mechanic, who regretted having missed
action in Vietnam and said the course helped him build
his confidence; a furniture polisher from Australia whose
bent was less military than Hobbesian ("If you're a
survivalist you're able to find water in times of drought,
food in times of famine, so there's no need for war"); a
15-year-old who seemed to view the whole thing as a rite
of manhood (he only took the first week because "my
mama wouldn't let me" take the other half); and a jolly
fellow who does destruction work on buildings in Bir-
mingham, who said it was just a hobby right now. There
was even one Yuppie, who works for a brokerage firm in
Atlanta and said he'd come strictly for vacation. Two
Yuppies if you count a reporter from The Wall Street Jour-
nal's Atlanta bureau, who put himself through the first
week of the course and won the nickname "Wall Street."
Surely it was for the benefit of the Walter Mittys, rather
than real mercenaries, when, at a graduation dinner to
honor the nine (out of an initial pool of 30) who com-
pleted the course, Camper led the group in a chant of the
old French Foreign Legion motto: Vive la morte / Vive la
guerre / Vive le sacre mercenaire.
I T MIGHT all seem like innocent fun if it weren't for
the four Sikhs who have given Camper's school so
much publicity lately. If, as Camper's brochure proclaims,
"We endorse no doctrine or policy except results in
the field of combat," isn't Camper's school by defini-
tion the ideal training ground for terrorists? Yes and
no. Camper is not permitted to discuss any role he
may have had in the arrest of several Sikhs who trav-
eled down to New Orleans to kill Bhajan Lai-the trial
is pending-but the affidavit filed by the FBI in the case
let slip that a "source of known reliability" from Bir-
mingham, Alabama, had told them that the Sikhs had
told his "business associate" (who is named in the
affidavit, and does work for Camper) that they were off
to kill "an enemy of the people." Another FBI affida-
vit, from the New York office, reveals that the bureau
knew the Sikhs were looking for training in explosives
and urban guerrilla tactics as early as January, though
whether Camper had a direct role in tipping them off then
is less clear. A quick flip through the Birmingham News's
clip file shows Camper has a history of informing on cus-
tomers who break the law. One was shipping arms to
Nigeria, another tried to enlist Camper in a drug hit in
Miami. This, of course, is all to the good. If you're in
Camper's line of work, you have a duty to be a stool
pigeon. And it's clear Camper relishes the role of law
enforcer: "How else are you gonna penetrate their organi-
zation and stop them?"
But what about the Sikhs? Amazingly enough, they
failed to discover Camper's blown FBI cover, and that he
was a rather fervent patriot. (Despite his organization's
claim that it is nonpolitical, you won't hear Camper brag
about former students who've gone off to fight with rebels
the United States doesn't support, like those in El Salvador
or South Africa.) The Sikhs' willingness to reveal their
intentions to Camper shows that not all terrorists are
smart. But you don't necessarily have to be smart to evade
the FBI. Three of the four Sikhs managed to get away, and
are now thought to be somewhere in the Far East. And
what about the terrorists-whoops, I mean "mercenar-
ies"-fighting for causes Camper believes in? Several of
his former students tried to blow up a bridge in Nicaragua
last December under the auspices of the Civilian Military
Assistance group. Camper says he advised them against
going, but what does he expect?
Rajiv Gandhi recently told Blitz, an Indian newsweekly,
that he finds it "incredible" that the United States per-
mits Camper to run his school. (Naturally this rankles
Camper, who says he saved Gandhi's life.) Gandhi's for-
eign minister has added that he finds the Americans'
"legalistic approach" to Camper "deplorable and disap-
pointing." This approach consists of supervision by the
Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms, to whom Camper must pay taxes on his auto-
matic weapons ($200 for each machine gun). Because Ala-
bama does not regulate or prohibit the sale of these
weapons, Camper may fire them off to his heart's con-
tent without the interference of the local police; the
cops aren't even allowed to find out from ATF what
Camper's firing in the woods, since technically that is an
invasion of IRS-guaranteed privacy. If Camper kills some-
one during a live fire exercise, he might get sued or con-
victed of manslaughter, but unless he's convicted on a
criminal charge he may keep his guns. (Camper says no
one's been killed yet, though there have been knife
b1W
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6
wounds and at least one heart attack. The worst injury, he
says, occurred when one of the Sikhs blew off half his eye
with a piece of shrapnel.) Camper's semi-automatic weap-
ons aren't registered with the feds at all. Like all nonauto-
matic guns, they need only be recorded privately with the
manufacturer, the wholesaler, the retailer, and Camper
himself.
THERE'S ALWAYS a danger that people like Camper
will violate the Neutrality Act, which prohibits orga-
nizing an army against a nation with whom the United
States is at peace, but according to an official in the State
Department's legal office, the standard of proof is quite
difficult. New regulations do require that foreigners who
receive paramilitary training in the United States receive a
license from the State Department, but that only covers
half the problem; Americans may still go off to fight as
mercenaries after receiving training at The Merc Camp.
Not even a war is likely to stop the freelance violence.
When I asked Pablo, who has never belonged to the Unit-
ed States military, if he'd join up if we declared war on
Nicaragua, he said he wouldn't. "I'd rather do it private."
TIMOTHY NOAH
Timothy Noah is a contributing editor of The Washington
Monthly.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/28: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504680015-6