Dominican Republic Revolution by K3ZO

Dominican Republic Revolution 1965
by Fred Laun K3ZO

Here's a story about my own exploits during the Dominican Republic revolution of 1965. Part of this was the subject of an article in the December 1965 issue of QST. (This piece was written in 2005, I have now been a ham for 66 years). 2018
73, Fred, K3ZO

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In the course of my 53 years as a ham I have had the experience of using knowledge I had acquired, without realizing it, just by being an active ham and keeping my ears open. I did not consider myself a technical person, having flunked the theory part of the Extra Class exam twice before I finally passed it. My degree is in Political Science. But technical knowledge I had picked up just by being an active ham suddenly came in quite handy when emergency situations presented themselves.

This happened a few times during my first foreign service overseas tour in the Dominican Republic, 1964-1967, where I was licensed as HI8XAL.

Before joining the Foreign Service I had spent a lot of time operating contests at the impressively-equipped station of Butch Greve, W9EWC, and we developed quite a close friendship in the process. Thus once I got on the air as HI8XAL, we QSOed frequently. This was not hard because Butch maintained a daily schedule with Empty Wessels, ZS6KD. His beam heading when working South Africa was not that far off of me, so when I had a chance I would often call Butch after he finished with ZS6KD.

So it was on Saturday, April 24, 1965. I had been talking with Butch for about half an hour when I heard a sudden burst of machine-gun fire which seemed not too far away. Since I was the American Embassy's Duty Officer that weekend, it was also my job to try to find out what was going on. As I'm sure some of you know, smaller U. S. Embassies designate, on a rotating basis, officers who serve as the first contact point for the public during the weekend, so that the other Embassy officers can enjoy their weekends with their families unless something comes up which requires their presence in the Embassy.

As duty officer I had spent Saturday morning at the Embassy reading incoming cables from the State Department in Washington and reading the local newspapers. If it appeared that there was a need for urgent handling of some matter, at my discretion I would call the responsible officer on the telephone and inform him of the situation. He would then either direct me to take a particular action or come to the Embassy himself to work on the problem. That particular Saturday morning things had been very quiet so I went home for lunch and after lunch I worked Butch.

On hearing the machine-gun fire I told Butch that something had come up and immediately went QRT. The Dominican Republic's National Palace, the seat of government, was not far from my residence and I quickly determined that the firing was coming from the vicinity of that building. I immediately drove to the Embassy, prepared to call the Political Counsellor to tell him what I had seen and heard. But when I got to the Embassy the place was already a beehive of activity as the Political Counsellor and the Military Attache had already been called by their local contacts who told them what was going on. They were busy calling around to people they knew and filing reports by cable to Washington. It appeared that there had been a split in the Dominican military, with one group of officers having captured the National Palace in an effort to bring back a former President who had been a victim of a coup d'etat, while elements of the military who had carried out the coup d'etat were trying to recapture the National Palace.

Being a very junior officer there was not really a lot for me to do so I returned home. By that time the level of hostilities had escalated and P-51s from the Dominican Air Force were diving in and strafing the National Palace. From the roof of my house it was a fascinating show to watch, but of course in the back of my mind I realized that the situation was deadly serious. The rebel officers had also taken control of a couple of local radio and TV stations and were making dramatic announcements, interspersed with martial music. I regret to this day that I didn't take the trouble to tape-record these broadcasts as it would be great history to have them to listen to today. The Embassy was caught flat-footed as the Ambassador was away on vacation and the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM), who with his wife had astonished the local high society by such things as holding dinners which began at midnight, was in charge. But when it became urgent for him to exert leadership at the Embassy he was utterly incapable of doing so and in effect had a nervous breakdown. As the city gradually spun out of control all the DCM's wife could worry about was what would happen to the animals at the Zoo.

So the Military Attache, no stranger to command, took charge. The Ambassador was located in the USA and began his trip to return but given the situation it took a while for him to get there. Meanwhile there was a lot to do and every officer pitched in to contribute according to his or her special capabilities and knowledge.

I had shipped my air-cooled Chevrolet Corvair, the same car I drove to Washington from my home state of Wisconsin when I first went to work for the U. S. Information Agency (USIA), to the Dominican Republic. Fortunately, just prior to my leaving Wisconsin, John Koster, W9DDD had spent a whole day installing my Hallicrafters SR-150 in my car and a home-brew whip on the back bumper, using an Air Dux coil, usually meant for use in tank circuits of linear amplifiers, as a loading coil with taps so I could resonate it on any frequency I chose between 3.5 and 21.4 MHz. For use on 10 meters the coil was bypassed altogether. The antenna was designed and built by Larry Jacobson, then K9ANJ, now K5LJ.

It wasn't long before the Peace Corps Director asked me whether I could operate on a frequency of approximately 7600 KHz. I answered that I thought I could, but since my transceiver was ham-band only, I would need to make an adjustment to the VFO first. I also advised him that I could operate the radio in my car if necessary. Having been given the frequency and the tactical call signs to listen for, I returned to my house, where fortunately I had installed a Hammarlund HQ-180 which belonged to my office. My office was at the American Library, right downtown in an area now controlled by the rebels, so had the HQ-180 been there I might not have been able to get to it. Occasionally it became good foresight to borrow office equipment for one's personal use!

I first used it to find the tactical net around 7600 and then, with the SR-150 switched to the 40 meter position, fiddled with the slugs on top of the SR-150 VFO housing until I heard myself come in on the frequency in question. I put the SR-150 in the car and went back to the Embassy.

It turned out that the U. S. Government had decided to intervene in the Dominican revolt, having become alarmed at some of the talk on the rebel radio and TV stations, which appeared to show that Fidel Castro might have been involved in fomenting the revolt. The tactical net I was now a part of, my call sign being "Shade Tree One", was a net of the U. S. Naval fleet now steaming to the vicinity of the Dominican Republic. My first attempt at checking in was successful, and from that point onward I was fully occupied for several days.

I parked my Corvair beside the Embassy, not far from the front door. The headquarters of the National Police was a block away from the Embassy and the two sides fought for control of that building, so bullets from the firefight over there regularly whistled through the trees above my head.

In order not to run down the battery in my car I had to keep the engine running. In the hot climate of Santo Domingo, this wasn't so good for my air-cooled engine since I was stationary the whole time. Every evening about six o'clock I raced the engine with the accelerator to clean it out and watched the clouds of black smoke come out of the exhaust pipe.

The Ambassador had meanwhile returned to post and three or four times a day he would come out of the Embassy to my car and talk to the Admiral of the Fleet, ducking down as he walked to stay below the line of fire from the hostilities in the next block. The only other way he could communicate with the Admiral was to send a teletype message to Washington, which would then be relayed to the Canal Zone and thence to the fleet. So my car-installed radio was the only way for him to have instantaneous contact with the Admiral. I understand that not long afterwards the State Department ordered that every U. S. Embassy and Consulate in the world have a Collins KWM-2A on site.

I labored this way for several days until the Marines were able to offload an armed personnel carrier bristling with communications gear and drive it to the Embassy grounds. Surprisingly when they tried to contact the fleet they couldn't be heard, so my SR-150 did duty for a couple more days while they figured out what was wrong with the APC. At least I had a crew of marines to operate my radio now so all I had to do was keep it running!

Once I was freed from communications duty I was asked to participate in a planning meeting chaired by Gen. Bruce Palmer, the commander of U. S. forces in the operation. He and his staff were concerned that the rebels controlled a government broadcasting network that had radio stations all around the country. They were worried that the revolution, thus far confined only to the city of Santo Domingo, might be spread to the whole country in this way. Because it was my job to interface with the country's broadcasters, I was aware that the network in question used a mountaintop FM relay to feed those stations around the country. I pinpointed its location on a map for him and not long after that a helicopter-borne team was dispatched to remove certain components from the FM relay transmitter, disabling it.

By then those of us working for the U. S. Information Service (USIS) had set up a command post at the house of my boss, the USIS Chief, because he had a roomy place as one of the most senior Embassy officers and its location was well away from the area of hostilities. USIA Washington had dispatched a few people to augment our small staff and we all worked, ate and slept at my boss's house.

I was told that we would be installing a small broadcast transmitter at the house and was asked to recommend a clear frequency so that it could be heard clearly throughout the Santo Domingo area both day and night. I returned to my house in order to retrieve the office's HQ-180 as I needed it to carry out that assignment. Much to my horror I discovered that my house was now inside the rebel zone, but only by half a block. So I parked my car just outside the zone and walked in. There was a rebel policeman manning a checkpoint for cars transiting between the two zones, but I pretended not to see him and he pretended not to see me as I carried the bulky HQ-180 past him to my car.

Once installed at my boss' house, the HQ-180 helped me determine that 1060 Kc. appeared to be the clearest night-time frequency on the standard broadcast band, so that was where it was decided to put our transmitter. A U. S. Army crew installed an antenna in the trees in a vacant lot next to the house and a 1 KW Gates transmitter arrived.

Imagine my surprise when I saw fellow PVRC member Ray Aylor, W3DVO walk into the compound with his suitcase. Ray, a Voice of America engineer who had designed a lot of medium wave antennas for VOA relay stations around the world, had been dispatched to get the broadcast transmitter set up and operating. Pretty soon it was on the air.

Another one of my duties was to scan the broadcast bands, both AM and FM, to detect any rebel broadcasts that we didn't already know about. Since the presence of the broadcast transmitter in the compound made the AM band somewhat difficult to monitor, I spent most of my time with the office's Zenith Transoceanic tuning the FM band. I heard what appeared to be a strident rebel agitator at several points on the FM dial. Putting two and two together I realized that what I was hearing was the result of overloading from the AM transmitter in the house. I had never bothered to listen directly on 1060 because since the station was "friendly" there was no reason to monitor it.

I went to the fellow from Washington who had been sent down to run our operation and he confirmed that our transmitter was being used by another U. S. Government agency to pretend to be controlled by a rebel faction which was unhappy with the way the rebel leadership was running the insurgency. The idea was to try to drive a wedge between rebel leaders. Indeed the real rebel radio soon began to denounce the broadcasts as not coming from the legitimate insurgents.

Once Ray had the transmitter up and running he was assigned other duties. Since I spoke fluent Spanish and knew something about radio I was assigned to accompany him. Our first job was to take a Collins R-390 provided by another U. S. Government agency and set it up at an operating local broadcast transmitter so that the Voice of America's Spanish-language service, which had been extended to 24-hours-per-day as a result of the crisis, could be retransmitted in the standard AM broadcast band using a local transmitter.

Almost all of the Santo Domingo broadcast transmitters were located on the east side of the Ozama River which bordered downtown Santo Domingo. We had to use a street which had become the dividing line between the rebel zone and the loyalist zone to get there, and since we were using a U. S. Army truck manned by a squad of riflemen we occasionally drew a bit of small-arms fire. For years afterward Ray regaled visitors to his home with tales about how he had been shot at during his TDY in Santo Domingo. But what bothered Ray more than the shooting was having to work inside stuffy transmitter buildings in the tropical heat. "Shot at and missed; shit at and hit" was the way Ray put it in his typically unvarnished language.

The first transmitter we had arrived at was the site of Radio Station HIAS, Onda Musical, on 1150 Kc. The first thing the national police did when there was a revolt or coup d'etat brewing was to go around to all the privately-owned broadcast transmitters and impound their crystals, putting them off the air. The only station remaining on the air was the official government station. Unfortunately this time the rebels controlled the government station.

Ray had brought a bunch of crystals with him from Washington but one for 1150 was not among them. He had one for a nearby frequency and was preparing to rejigger the tank circuit of the homebrew 5 KW transmitter to resonate on that frequency. Meanwhile I was explaining in Spanish to the caretaker of the transmitter site what we were doing. He urged me to talk to the station's owner, who I knew, first, and got him on the telephone. The owner told me to go into his workshop where I would find a big jar of nuts and bolts. I should thrust my hand all the way down to the bottom of the jar where I would find a crystal for 1150 Kc. Sure enough, there it was! So we plugged it into the transmitter and fired it up. Then we offloaded the R-390 and tuned in the Voice of America Spanish service on about 11 Mc. and fed the audio to the local transmitter. Presto! The VOA was broadcasting loud and clear from right inside the city of Santo Domingo.

As we were about to leave we were stopped by a roving patrol of Dominican Air Force soldiers commanded by none other than Maximo Fiallo, HI8MF who I knew from the Radio Club Dominicano. The principal air base of the Dominican Air Force was not far from the Santo Domingo broadcast transmitter zone. HI8MF was a talented engineer, and since the loyalist side did not have control of the government station, he had commandeered the transmitter site of HIAT, Radio Universal, and was running an Air Force broadcast operation from there. While we were nominally on the same side of the war, I don't think Maximo particularly appreciated our mucking around in "his" territory, but after we explained what we had done he let us continue without protest.

Ray's next assignment was to try to figure out how to jam the rebel radio station. The rebels had commandeered the 10 KW broadcast transmitter of HISD, 620 Kc., principal station of the government's Radio Santo Domingo network. We arrived at the transmitter site of HIAW, Radio Guarachita on 690 Kc., with the idea of trying to retune the 10 KW RCA transmitter there to operate on 620 Kc and thus jam the HISD signal. Ray worked for several hours retuning the transmitter's tank circuit and the antenna tuner at the base of the tower to 620 Kc. and succeeded. We then discussed how we should carry out the jamming operation. We could either zero-beat the HISD signal and feed an audio tone to the HIAW transmitter, or we could offset the signal putting a beat-note against the HISD carrier. Ray was concerned that should the latter method be used, listeners could slope-detect the HISD signal on the opposite side from where we had placed the carrier and pretty much nullify the jamming. So we fired up an audio signal generator that Ray had brought along and set the tone to modulate about 15%.

When we got back to the USIS headquarters we were delighted to observe that the jamming was quite effective. But our joy was short-lived. It turned out that the HIAW modulation transformer couldn't stand the steady 15% load in the tropical heat and blew up. Several months later I drove a USIS van to the local air force base and an RCA modulation transformer was offloaded from a USAF plane and was quietly unloaded in the yard of the house of the owner of HIAW without comment. "Your tax money at work."

Meanwhile after they had time and knew what they needed, the U. S. military had brought in their own transmitter which was hooked up to the antenna of a local station and our own local "Voz de la Zona de Seguridad" was on the air on 1000 Kc with VOA Spanish-speaking announcers flown down from Washington to man the station. This gave the U. S. propaganda effort the capability of tailoring the programming to local conditions rather than simply repeating the Washington- based programming which, by the way, was tailored for the entire Hemisphere and not just for the Dominican Republic.

The military also brought in a "transportable" transmitter with its own antenna system which was used to jam HISD with a series of squeaks and squawks that were truly distracting to the ordinary listener.

The Voice of America had also dispatched its own bilingual Spanish/English reporter, Harry Caicedo to cover the story of the attempted revolution and file reports back to Washington. By this time the story had attracted the world press and the line to file stories at the overburdened local telegraph office was always a mile long. Harry was complaining that he spent more time standing in line at the telegraph office than he did running around town getting news to write about. So Ray and I got the idea that maybe we could put Amateur Radio to
work to help Harry out.

We got the Army antenna crew to make a 20 meter dipole for us and put it up in the trees, and fired up the SR-150 on 20 meter CW. It wasn't long before we managed to find someone in the Washington area and we got them to call Vic Clark, W4KFC to get on the air. We asked Vic to get in touch with the VOA Newsroom and see if we could set up a schedule to have 14085 KHz manned by PVRC members at certain times so that we could file Harry's press dispatches by CW. Vic set it up and besides himself I remember that Dick Young, W3PZW did yeoman service in the operation. So thanks to ham radio Harry Caicedo became the only foreign correspondent who didn't have to stand in line at the telegraph office. The frequency of 14085 was selected because in those days there was no digital stuff up at that end of the CW band, and though the CW band was a lot more crowded than it is these days, that end of the band was not very busy.

Ray's TDY term came to an end and he went back to Washington, to be replaced by VOA Engineer Larry Mennitt, W4IVF. All along we had been puzzled at why the in- house transmitter on 1060 didn't seem to have the signal around town that would have been expected, so Larry was tasked to look at it. What he found was that Ray had resonated the transmitter on the second harmonic, so all along we had been putting out a terrific signal on 2120 where nobody was listening to it. No wonder the rebels hadn't been complaining all that much about the station!

Eventually the two sides in the war negotiated a settlement and a non-politician who got along with everybody, Hector Garcia-Godoy was chosen to lead a caretaker government until new elections could be held. The day came for Dr. Garcia-Godoy to take office and he wanted to address the nation that evening. Naturally he expected to be heard all around the country so we had to get the mountaintop relay transmitter up and running again.

Fortunately this time I was included in the party that helicoptered up to the mountain to put the relay station back on the air. The party was led by a Signal Corps Master Sergeant whose W4 call I unfortunately didn't make a note of. The group was busily installing the required parts back into the FM transmitter when someone said: "Oh no! I forgot to bring the IF crystal for the receiver." There was no time to get the helicopter back to Santo Domingo and then back up on the mountain again in time for the President's address to the nation. What to do?

This time a Political Science graduate who had fooled around with ham radio came to the rescue. I thought that if we could somehow generate a signal around 10.7 Mc. and feed it into the receiver's crystal socket we might be able to get around the lack of the crystal. I noticed that next door to the FM transmitter site was a telephone company relay site and there was an engineer on duty there. So we went over and asked him if he had a signal generator. He said yes and we asked to borrow it. He wasn't about to say no to a squad of rifle-toting soldiers. It even came with its own dolly so we wheeled it over to the FM transmitter, plugged its output cable into the receiver's crystal socket, rocked the signal generator's VFO around 10.7 Mc. and lo and behold! the signal from the Santo Domingo FM transmitter came in loud and clear. So we locked everything down and flew back to Santo Domingo, mission accomplished. The signal generator actually held the frequency for two more days until the government network's own staff could drive up the mountain and replace the missing crystal.

The kicker of this story is that the Chief Engineer of the rebel radio station which we had spent so much time and effort trying to jam turned out to be none other than Hector Cambero, HI8HC who had been the one who had earlier accompanied me to the HIAT transmitter when I did my 160 meter experiments. For his efforts he was named Director General of the Telecommunications Department, the office that issued ham radio licenses, because the political settlement dictated that people from both of the warring sides would divide up the political appointments to government departments.

Hector and I had many a laugh over drinks comparing our electronic war efforts during the preceding months. Though he gently chided me for interfering in his country's internal affairs, he was the one who finally saw to it that I was issued an honest-to-goodness Dominican Republic Amateur Radio license.

Oh yes, I kept track of the two R-390 receivers that we had installed at local broadcast transmitters and when they were no longer needed I took them to my QTH; by then I had rented a nice place out in the country and put up a couple of towers with a 40 meter beam and a 10-15-20 meter 4 element quad. When it came time for my tour in the Dominican Republic to end I attempted to return the receivers back to their parent Agency, only to learn that the property records for those two receivers had been destroyed, so that officially at least, these two receivers "didn't exist."

I didn't feel right about keeping them for myself, however, so Hector's monitoring department at the Telecommunications office suddenly received a Collins general coverage receiver from the "U. S. aid program," while the other one went as a reward to a radio station which had used a lot of our canned VOA programming. They used it to receive broadcasts on short wave from their sports announcer when they dispatched him to New York to cover New York Yankees games live.

Courtesy of K3ZO