‘’SECRET ASSIGNMENTS’’

St. Croix

United States Virgin Islands

The wheels lifted off the ground as the American Airlines island hopper headed for St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands.

As I gazed out the window at the dark blue Atlantic Ocean, the palm trees waving in the breeze and the white sand, a buffer between the sea and the swaying trees, I was reminded what a beautiful island Puerto Rico is, resting just south of the United States mainland.

The plane had about twenty passengers aboard and you could read them like books.  The Puerto Rican businessmen in their traditional guyabara shirts with accompanying leather briefcases.  They were the “day-trippers” commuting to the Virgin Islands for a day of business meetings and then back to San Juan and a short drive to their “casas”.  The “mainlanders”, young couples all in white on their honeymoons, were totally engrossed in each other to the exclusion of everyone else, filled with the excitement of an “exotic” island on their first trip away from mom and dad. This time the sex would be legal and the anticipation showed on their faces.  I envied them, but now it was time to concentrate on the business at hand.

I had been in the Caribbean for about a year, assigned to the FBI Field Office in San Juan.  The island of Puerto Rico is bordered on its northern coast by the Atlantic Ocean and on its southern coast by the calm Caribbean Sea.  The tropical heat, the exotic surroundings, and the dominance of the beautiful but foreign Spanish language when mixed with the violence of terrorism made this field office not the most popular or sought-after in the FBI and occasionally contributed to bizarre behavior on the part of some of our Special Agents.

I arrived there in January 1977.  During my first week in the office a supervisor tried to strangle the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) because he wanted off the island.  The supervisor did have a drinking problem and needed medical help, which he received.  Seeing the supervisor climbing over the SAC’s desk in order to get a piece of him and the SAC yelling, “Take him to Rosie Roads for evaluation”, was not reassuring to me.  The U.S. Naval Hospital was located on the east end of the island at Roosevelt Roads Naval Base and it was a good thing the hospital was there.

As the plane lumbered up the north coast of Puerto Rico we passed over the beautiful beach at Luquillo and then made a slight course correction east.