Investigative Techniques 2.0: Piecing the Puzzle

It was a particularly steamy Miami evening. I'd been invited to a farewell party for a neighbor, a Special Forces sergeant stationed in Miami with the United States Armed Services Southern Command (SouthCom), now reassigned to the ongoing conflict in Iraq. With three international intrigue novels set in Southern Command's Latin America theater of operations, I'd developed a reasonable fan club among SouthCom personnel. Which in turn had spawned advance copy readers and technical advisers all the way up to an intelligence-branch brigadier general still useful in my current research.

The sergeant's wife was the only other female present in this bastion of testosterone, muscled frames, flowing liquor and loud-cracking jokes. When a tall newcomer entered with stride and body language exuding command presence, I didn't need to be told this wasn't just another of the guys. My host waved me over. "Captain So-and-so, this is Jeanette Windle, the author you've been hearing about."

My host then turned to me. "Jeanette, I'd like to introduce my commanding officer. He just got in from two weeks TDY (temporary duty) down south."

Craning my head far back to permit my five foot, one inch frame to look comfortably into a shrewdly penetrating gaze, I commented without the slightest forethought, "So how did you find Saravena?"

You'd have thought I'd been caught red-handed with the original Declaration of Independence. All conversation (and drinking) halted as the commanding officer exploded, a G-rated, sanitized summary of his tirade as follows: "Who let that author woman in here? How could she possibly know where I spent the last two weeks in the eastern guerrilla zones of Colombia? When I find out who's been talking out of turn, heads will roll!"

My host simply grinned. "I told you she knows more about what we're doing down there than we do."

Not the kind of reassurance one likes to hear from the military intelligence assigned to keep one's birth country safe. Since my SouthCom contacts were as tight-lipped a bunch as they were trained to be, I had not picked up any usable intel from them. So how could I know the classified location of a Special Forces temporary duty operation? In actuality, it was simple enough, as I explained to the commanding officer (an explanation he grudgingly accepted, though like Queen Victoria, he was not amused!). Here's how it all came together:

The US military has long had fingers in Latin America's counternarcotics war. But with the post 9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, Congress had recently expanded SouthCom's mission to include training Colombian troops in counterterrorism techniques against leftist guerrillas infesting their jungles. Miami TV news coverage had made mention that the expanded operation would be delayed until Colombia could supply an adequately fortified operating base to house American Special Operations troops.

The exact location of said op was classified. However, American intel restrictions couldn't keep local photojournalists in the eastern guerrilla zones of Colombia from capturing on film the newly reinforced walls and sandbag barricades of a small military base outside the jungle town of Saravena, its reconstruction rumored to be paid for by the Americans.

Then came a casual mention in the Miami Herald that SouthCom troops could heading to Colombia within the month, pending approval of the new facility by US Special Forces command. Again no details. However, just a few days later, the front page of eastern Colombia's regional newspaper boasted a large photo of an American military jet disgorging a dozen US soldiers in camouflage fatigues onto the single airstrip of Saravena's tiny airport. The caption underneath proclaimed, "Southern Command officers arrive from Miami to inspect the future home of their soldiers."

SO when a SouthCom Special Forces captain walks in the door a few days later from 'two weeks TDY down south', where else but Saravena, Colombia, is he likely to have been spending his time?

You (like that Special Forces captain) may be asking just why I'd coincidentally been checking out local Spanish newspapers from a Colombian guerrilla stronghold? That is even simpler. I'd spent my adolescence in Saravena, and I just happened to keep a Google alert for any news from the zone.

Which all goes to show that investigation is basically a matter of:
 1) Putting puzzle pieces together.

2) More importantly, being in the right place and time to uncover those particular puzzle pieces.

I've mentioned in previous postings my upbringing as daughter of American missionaries among the jungles, rivers, Andes mountain trails of the Colombian Amazon. If the guerrillas were back then just unorganized, roving bandits, it was an adventurous environment for an expatriate family, far more so for my parents than for their five offspring, to whom it was simply home. As a child, I really did believe "Yanqui, Go Jom" [Yankee Go Home], scrawled on the whitewash of our perimeter wall, was a normal decoration of any expatriate home. I was barely a teenager the first time I was accused of being a CIA agent; my smart-alecky reply that I was still too young to be recruited.

Today virtually every place I lived as a child remains under guerrilla control. Saravena, a small homesteading town in Colombia's eastern plains, was in my teen years a Wild West stereotype of cantinas, unpaved streets, cowboys galloping into town shooting pistols into the air for weekend drinking sprees, and one tiny thatched evangelical church where my father preached. It was in fact the blueprint for the fictional town in The DMZ, my second adult novel set in the Colombian guerrilla zones.

The discover of oil in the region brought in electricity and pavement, followed by bombs and guerrilla attacks that left much of the town in rubble. But I could still recognize in news photos the vegetation-shaded airstrip where my siblings and I would jog. And the dusty playing field and rusted hoops at the tiny military base on the outskirts of town where as teens we squared off at volleyball and basketball with conscripts little older. Are local youth still allowed through those massive new gates and security barriers to play sports with American Special Ops? Somehow I doubt it.

Since Saravena, I've currently lived in six countries and traveled for ministry in more than thirty on five continents. I raised my own expatriate family in Bolivia, one of the world’s top-five most corrupt countries, where I had the dubious pleasure of a front-row seat to the development of one of the planet's first narco-states, which birthed my first adult novel, CrossFire..

If not a typical North American lifestyle—and certainly not always comfortable—it is a lifestyle with which other members of ICFW can identify. I'm sure those members would agree that there is no better training for an investigative writer. I learned to be wary, observant, always looking over my shoulder and asking who, what, when, why. where, and how. Why is that man across the street looking at me? What is he reaching for in the small of his back? How I can get out of this alley without being backed into a no-exit corner?

How many contradictions did that Customs Officer just make? Why is he patting that over-sized pocket on his padded vest? What size of bribe am I supposed to be slipping in there? When did those two armed guards move in on either side of the exit?

Why did that pickup and white Toyota Corolla just pull up on the shoulder of the road? Who is getting out of the pickup and walking toward the Corolla? Why is he reaching into the trunk to pull out that briefcase instead of speaking to the driver? Where are they speeding off to in opposite directions? How can I discreetly duck out of sight before they notice I’m walking by?

In short, sheer nosy curiosity is not only a survival instinct, but the underlying base of any effective investigative technique.

Now, how to go about applying the above to ferreting out your own puzzle pieces and putting them together? In writing for a different blog, I actually gave some practical tips on just that. If you're interested, here is the post: http://internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com/2010/03/investigative-techniques-from-trenches.html

Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago, on the morning of 9/11/01, I was sitting in my home office in Miami, scribbling out the closing scene of my then latest work-in-project, The DMZ, set against the Islamic involvement in Colombia's guerrilla zones where I grew up, when my husband called from our ministry headquarters in Miami to tell me to turn on the news.

"I can't; I'm finishing my last scene," I told him.

"Turn on the news," he insisted.

As I did and watched our world change forever, a phrase I'd written in the mouth of a main protagonist, encapsulating the theme of the book, suddenly took on new meaning.: "Those who are not willing to bleed and die for what they hold dear will always be held hostage by those who are."

The story behind The DMZ originated simply because I'd written my first suspense novel, CrossFire, set in the counternarcotics war in Bolivia where I'd spent 16 years, and my publishers wanted another. I'd grown up what are now the guerrilla zones of Colombia, so it was an obvious setting. As I began to research, I was stunned to uncover the completely unpublicized involvement of Islamic militant groups in Colombia's guerrilla conflict.

Then I came across a Colombian news item that never made our media of Iran trying to push through a “humanitarian aid project” to build a meat-packing plant, complete with airport, in a small jungle town smack in the middle of the guerrilla demilitarized zone, or DMZ--and incidentally 300 kilometers from the closest cattle ranching area. That set me to questioning just what Iran was doing there, which birthed The DMZ.

In real life, the U.S. embassy managed to derail that Iranian project, which permitted me to use it for my fiction plot. But I'd always wondered what Iran's Plan B was. Interestingly, that Plan B has actually materialized very closely to my plot line within the last year on the Venezuelan side of that same jungle zone in an alliance between Iran and Hugo Chavez, another startling example of seeing my fiction in the headlines.

A brief synopsis of the story:

When the US loses three major military assets in Colombia within weeks, attention turns to the demilitarized zone, a Switzerland-sized piece of territory handed over to the guerrillas in the vain hope it would make them start talking peace. The death of three American environmentalist activists in the same area bring a UN inspection/media team to the scene, including environmental journalist Julie Baker. For Julie it is at once a career opportunity of a lifetime and a revisiting of old hurts and terrors as she returns to the place of her birth—and her parents’ deaths at the guerrilla hands.

As Julie’s probing unleashes a terrorist plot that spans from the rainforests of Colombia to the Middle East and the very heartland of America, she must confront resurging issues from her own past. Does God have a right to demand our total sacrifice? Does He have the right to demand our sacrifice of those we love? "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds . . . If anyone comes to me and does not hate (count as of lesser importance) his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple (John 12:24; Luke 14:26). Are these just words or a philosophy of life God seriously expects us to apply beyond our comfortable suburban neighborhoods?

But when I was writing that morning of September 11, 2001, I was not thinking of a broader application, rather of the country where I'd grown up as a missionary kid and loved dearly, 40 million people being held hostage by less than 20,000 leftist guerrillas. A poll taken in Colombia at the time of my writing revealed that the top Colombian choice on how to handle the guerrillas was to have the Americans come in and defeat the guerrillas for them.

I never dreamed how relevant the phrase I'd written that became theme of the book would become on a world-wide scale by the time The DMZ actually went to print: "Those who are not willing to bleed and die for what they hold dear will always be held hostage by those who are".
Ten years later, those words still hold true. As we remember on this day, may we hold our lives in an open hand and be known for what and whom we are willing to lay down our lives.

"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13)."

"But God demonstrates His love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)."

"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers (1 John 3:16)."