Predator (6 page)

Originally Neal had wanted to spend the summer flying across the Soviet Union to see what lay behind the Iron Curtain, but the Soviet embassy in Washington never got the brothers the necessary permission from Moscow. Since both Neal and Linden had studied Spanish at Yale, they had decided instead to explore Latin America and look for a business opportunity to pursue after college. “Presented with a fait accompli,” as a newspaper article later recounted, “their parents became resigned and then enthusiastic about their summer plans.”

The trip to Latin America would be more expensive than the
Yale Daily News
expedition, and Neal decided they should finance this one by putting together a “syndicate” of newspapers to buy articles and photos. To establish the syndicate, they spent their 1956 spring vacation flying across the United States, pitching their proposal to city editors at major papers. Before each stop, they would send the next newspaper on their list a “night letter” (a reduced-rate telegram transmitted after office hours for delivery the next morning) requesting an appointment. Then, without awaiting a reply, they would fly in and show up in person to describe their plan. For a package fee of $1,500, they offered fifteen hundred words of copy and four glossy photos a week.

Their syndication plan succeeded splendidly. They signed up major papers coast to coast, including the
Boston Globe
,
New York Herald Tribune
,
New Orleans Times-Picayune
,
Houston Post
,
San Diego Union
, and their hometown
Denver Post
. The papers paid the brothers a combined $3,000 in advance, more than covering the $1,350 they had paid for the used 1946 Piper Super Cruiser they had purchased to fly across the country while putting the syndicate together. Buoyed by that success, and realizing they needed an aircraft with more power, speed, and range for the expedition to Latin America, the Blues now elevated their aim. On a trip to New York, they visited
Life
magazine and negotiated another good deal.
Life
would provide them all the film they needed for the trip and consider buying their story when they got back. Armed with that commitment, the Blues next contacted the New York public relations agency for Piper Aircraft, whose director liked the idea of the free publicity the young men were promising if the company loaned them a better plane than their Super Cruiser. An agreement was quickly struck there, too, and the Blues delivered as promised.

Their trip in the
Blue Bird
—as they dubbed the brand-new, four-seat, fabric-covered Tri-Pacer plane Piper loaned them—included a number of adventures. In Ecuador, they visited with headhunters who showed them “the apple-sized and goateed head of a German prospector the Indians had captured 25 years ago.” In Chile, they skied the Andes in springtime and had to make ad hoc repairs to their landing gear after a wheel rolled into a deep rut during a takeoff from frozen Lago de los Incas. In Brazil they got lost over some flatlands, ran low on fuel, and had to make a forced landing on a country road, bashing their plane's wings into fence posts as they bounced to a stop. While Neal flew home to arrange repairs for the
Blue Bird
, Linden spent two weeks in Brazil, putting his time to good use by interviewing the country's president, Juscelino Kubitschek, for their newspaper syndicate and sunbathing on a Rio de Janeiro beach with a pretty girl he met there.

Ultimately their aerial expedition included forty-four stops in one hundred and ten days and nine crossings of the Andes.
Life
bought their story and photos for eight thousand dollars, a princely sum in the 1950s, and then featured Neal and Linden on the cover of its April 8, 1957, issue, under the headline “The Flying Blue Brothers.” Shown in the cockpit of the
Blue Bird
wearing gleeful grins, the two dashing young men looked for all the world as if they were capable of anything.

*   *   *

Neal and Linden Blue found the investment opportunity they were looking for during one of the first stops on their tour. In Managua, Nicaragua, a letter of introduction from some friends of their mother's got them an interview with the president, Anastasio Somoza García, who had been the country's dictator and a reliable U.S. ally for two decades. Their talk with “Tacho” Somoza in July 1956 was not intended as grist for their articles for
Life
or the newspapers; instead, it was meant to be a discussion of investment ideas between a couple of ambitious young Americans endowed with pioneering spirit and a head of state eager to explore new financial opportunities. Tacho liked wealth himself—he generally used patronage rather than violence to maintain power—and couldn't have been more charmed by his young visitors. When Neal told him that some agronomists the brothers had met in Guatemala thought they might find it profitable to grow cacao, the basis for chocolate and other foods, Somoza was all for it.

“Why don't you guys come down and go into business?” asked the president, who had spent his teenage years in Philadelphia and gone to college at a small business school there.

A year later, using some of their
Life
and newspaper fees to buy a plane of their own, the Blues flew back to Managua. But this time they would not be meeting with Tacho Somoza: he was dead, shot on September 21, 1956, by an assassin who was himself killed on the spot. Tacho's eldest son, Luis, was now president, and Neal and Linden visited the new ruler. They also renewed acquaintances with Luis's younger brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a Class of '46 West Point graduate known as Tachito, who served as a senior official in the National Guard and helped his brother rule Nicaragua. When the Blues explained that they were interested in starting a cacao plantation on the country's agriculturally underdeveloped east coast, they found Tachito just as welcoming as his father had been.

“Well, happy to have you here,” Tachito replied. “That would go well here in Nicaragua, and furthermore, we have some land that we'll invest in your company for an equity position. So come to Nicaragua!”

By 1958, Neal and Linden, ages twenty-three and twenty-two respectively, had graduated from Yale and become the principal owners of a three-thousand-acre cacao and banana plantation carved out of the jungle along Nicaragua's northeast coast. The Somoza family owned 17 percent of the venture, which was financed by the Nicaraguan Development Bank. Before long, the plantation had five hundred employees, its own airstrip, and a house designed by Neal that the Blue brothers shared. They often flew a plane across the country to Managua, where they rented another house, this one up in the cool hills outside the capital, and socialized with Tachito and, more often, his brother Luis. The Blues also had a standing invitation to the presidential palace, and though seeing Luis could require waiting for hours in an ornate anteroom, over the next couple of years they found many reasons to stay in close touch with both the Somoza brothers.

*   *   *

On March 24, 1961, Neal passed some anxious hours waiting in the tower of Managua's airport, trying to get word over air traffic control radio of Linden, who was overdue on a return trip from the United States. To save a stop for fuel and a day's transit time, Linden had planned to fly in the brothers' Beechcraft Twin Bonanza from Key West to Nicaragua via Cuba, using an international airway over the island nation's capital, Havana. Tensions between the United States and Cuba were running high: two years earlier, Cuba's pro-U.S. dictator had been overthrown in a revolution led by belligerent, blustery Fidel Castro, and the country had immediately become a close ally of the Soviet Union. As Castro suspected, the CIA was now trying to help Cuban exiles overthrow his Communist regime; years later, it would be revealed that the CIA was also plotting to assassinate the island nation's new leader.

Linden was well aware that he'd chosen a touchy moment to be flying through Cuba's air space. “There were some clouds I didn't want to get into,” he recalled years later. “I was talking to air traffic control Havana. As I approached the coast, I asked them for a change in altitude. They said, ‘Stand by,' and then when they came back on, they said, ‘Your flight over the international airway has been cancelled. You're to land in Havana.' And I said, ‘Well, I don't really want to do that. I think I'll return to Key West.' And they said, ‘No, you're going into Havana, and we have two jets being vectored on you to make sure that you do.'”

As Linden dutifully descended, he assured a passenger he had with him, Gerber baby food executive Don Swenson, that the Cubans would probably search the plane for contraband and, finding none, let them go. All they had aboard was a banana puree machine the Blues had bought as part of a proposal to sell pureed bananas to Gerber for baby food. Swenson had been on his way to Mexico City when Linden persuaded him to fly to Nicaragua with him for the weekend to see the brothers' plantation and show workers there how to use the puree machine.

When their plane came to a stop on the tarmac in Havana, Linden instantly saw that he had been naïve to assume their stay would be brief. Bearded men carrying submachine guns rushed to surround the plane, and Linden and Swenson were whisked to the government's intelligence headquarters for an interrogation that lasted until eleven o'clock that night. The interrogator had them watch as he signed a transcript, adding beneath his signature with a flourish, “Death to the invaders!” Then the two men were taken down a hallway; as a door opened, they felt a blast of heat on their faces before they were shoved into a cramped, smelly room containing nearly forty sweat-soaked prisoners. All were Cubans.

For the next twelve days, the two Americans were held by the government and given no opportunity to communicate with anyone. Every time the door opened, Linden tensed, waiting for his name to be called and wondering if hearing it would mean he was on his way to freedom or to execution. He also wondered if anyone at home knew where he was.

They did—and his parents were working feverishly to get him and Don Swenson freed. Their friend U.S. Senator Gordon Allott, a Colorado Republican, made calls to the State Department and elsewhere on their behalf, trying to work behind the scenes. Another friend, Peter Dominick, a Republican serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives that year, counseled them to make Linden's captivity public and speak about it as loudly as possible so the Cubans couldn't deny they were holding him. After several days of intense negotiations, Cuba finally released the two Americans. A photograph accompanying an April 6
New York Times
story about tensions with Cuba showed Swenson and Linden after their arrival in Miami on a Pan Am flight, both looking gaunt and a bit in shock. Linden also looked a little angry, and for good reason: as he and Swenson were being marched under guard to the airliner in Havana, Linden had seen his Beechcraft across the ramp. When he protested that he wanted to fly his
own
plane home, he felt the business end of a submachine gun in his ribs. “
¡Camine!
” was the reply. “Walk!”

Thirteen days after Linden and Swenson were released, CIA-backed exiles invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, staging their operation from the northeast coast of Nicaragua. For reasons that included President John F. Kennedy cancelling a key air strike the exiles had planned to mount on Castro's air force using old World War II B-26 bombers provided by the CIA, the invaders were repulsed, and nearly all 1,511 of them killed. Linden was convinced he and Swenson had narrowly escaped death themselves, for as he later learned most of their fellow prisoners were taken out and shot after the invasion. Had he and Swenson been held only a little longer, their captors might well have assumed that the two Americans they had captured flying over Cuba two weeks before the invasion were complicit and executed them, too.

The abrupt and frightening confinement by Cuban authorities was a formative experience for Linden. Suddenly, through no misdeed of his own, he had lost his freedom to the whim of a regime with the absolute power to decide whether he lived or died, a regime that might have killed him just on the suspicion—false, he insisted years later—that he was in league with the CIA and Castro's enemies. Linden and Neal Blue had always been anticommunists; now they were anticommunists with a grievance.

The Blues left Nicaragua the next year. The brothers had joined Air Force ROTC while in college, and now the Air Force was demanding that they serve the three years they had signed up for. Commissioned second lieutenants upon graduation from Yale, they had managed to delay their service by enrolling at an agricultural university in Managua and thereby receiving graduate student deferments. By 1962, though, they could put off their obligation no longer. Besides, it was clear by now that they weren't going to get rich growing cacao and bananas. Before returning to the United States, they left the plantation to the Nicaraguan Development Bank and the Somozas.

Linden reported for duty first; Neal followed six months later. Though they were avid fliers—Neal had once aimed to fly fighter planes—neither signed up to become an Air Force pilot. That would have meant extending their service beyond three years, which wasn't part of their plan. They were going to be entrepreneurs.

In 1963, the year after the Blues left Nicaragua, a leftist rebel movement funded by Cuba and the Soviet Union began working to overthrow the Somozas. Taking their name from 1920s rebel leader Augusto César Sandino, the insurgents called themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or more simply Sandinistas. As the years went on, the Blue brothers watched the rise of the Sandinistas with much interest and concern—and they never forgot their friends in Nicaragua.

*   *   *

Two decades after leaving Nicaragua, Neal and Linden Blue were the owners of Cordillera Corporation, a private Denver company whose substantial holdings included local commercial real estate, construction businesses and ranches, oil and gas interests in Canada, aviation facilities, and 880 acres of the valley at Telluride, the Colorado ski resort—land they bought in 1983, to much local consternation, for a mere six million dollars. Neal Blue, the driving force in their investment company, had a reputation for bare-knuckle bargaining and hard-nosed tactics that would result in more than one lawsuit against the Blues and their companies over the years. Linden, widely regarded as the kinder and gentler of the two, was his older brother's partner but had also served a term on the Denver city council in the early 1970s, attended Harvard Business School, and held top jobs at Gates Learjet Corporation and Beech Aircraft Corporation, where in 1982 he became president and chief executive officer. Along the way, Linden became an expert in, and ardent advocate of, using advanced composite materials such as carbon epoxy—a new technology in those days—to build aircraft.