Mercenary Army Aviation Special Operations FARP Team? Where to recruit?

[Icelander]

Having reviewed the regulations for residency and citizenship, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC), as well as the history of the relevant Central American countries in this era (they were having a spot of trouble, with all the civil wars), I've come up with some preliminary locations.

Now, it's not necessarily good to have all their helicopters registered to the same company or even kept in the same place. Even if they participate in exercises with national armies where numerous helicopters are needed, they can lease them from sub-contractors.

The shoot house and tactical exercise facility will be in Guatemala right from 1991. Yes, this means that it's technically in a country still going through a civil war and maybe they'll be hired to perform some activities dangerously close to participating in it. This is fine, it's not like they've planning to emigrate to the US and having the CIA view them as regional mercenaries is actually decent cover.

They will not want to live in Guatemala, though. Residency through investment in Honduras means they can immediately get a residency permit there and after they live there for three years, they can become citizens. And while a lot of Salvadorans and Nicaraguan contras were trained in Honduras, by the US and others, the country was, at least, not a warzone.

From 1994, once they become Honduran citizens, they can set up another shoot house and tactical training facility close to their homes, to reduce the need for commuting. They'll still have the Guatemala facility, to use in case of training that is closer to there.

They'll also train in Panama's Darién Gap, illegally, as well performing the kind of infiltrations they'd do for real as dry runs in some neighbouring countries with poor border security, using the opportunity to stash arms caches.

Some of the helicopters can be owned by Colombian companies, as the Mi-8/Mi-17 are commercially type certified there. Obviously, the Mi-24 Hinds and armed Mi-8 Hips will be registered with a Private Military Company, first in Honduras, then in Guatemala.

Does anyone know about Central American countries where Hip helicopters are commercially certified?

Any of the mercenaries will have the option of having a second home in Costa Rica or Panama, to use during leaves. Or they can just travel during leave weeks, stay in hotels or resorts. Once they can no longer have a training facility in Honduras, after 2003, I imagine they move away from there, even if they retain the citizenship.

[Icelander]

As these mercenaries aren't supposed to be able to blow J.R. Kessler's operations or any important connections to the central hubs of his networks, they'll have to be recruited by cut-outs who aren't linked to Kessler and, ideally, don't have a clue for whom they work.

Fortunately, Kessler has a very old and loyal friend, Antonio José Villareal y Herrera (b. February 19, 1913; Santiago de Compostella, Spain; d. November 16, 1992; Roseau, Dominica), who was still alive in 1991, living on Dominica with his much younger wife, Elena Cartagena Blanco de Villareal (b. April 2, 1941; Havana, Cuba), whom he married while running a casino with Kessler in pre-Castro Havana. And Antonio Villareal had a son out of wedlock before that, while serving in the French Foreign Legion during WWII, Rafael Villareal (b. May 5, 1941; Paris, France).

By 1991, Rafael Villareal is a senior intelligence officer in the DGSE. And Kessler, his (unofficial, on account of the German defeat of France and the occupation of Paris having prevented either Antonio or Kessler from attending the baptism) godfather reached out to him to find the right people to recruit men with a very specific set of skills from the former Soviet Union or other Warsaw Pact countries, which Rafael was in an extremely good position to do, as the DGSE, just like other Western intelligence services, was making deep cuts in their former Soviet departments, to enjoy the 'Peace dividend'.

So, with the enigmatic Jean René Marie Souètre (b. October 15, 1930; Ayguemorte-les-Graves, France) acting as the go-between, two former DGSE officers are hired to act as recruiters and talent scouts in the chaotic, still-in-flux former USSR and other Warsaw Pact countries in 1991. They were previously presented with their redundancy and pension packages by DGSE, as well as rather a lot of official NDAs enforced through the French version of an Official Secrets Act.

The senior intelligence officer was born at some point between 1946 to 1950. His paternal grandfather came to France in 1920 with his aristocratic mother and siblings, fleeing from Russia, and married a French-born White Russian woman. He was raised speaking Russian at home and French at school, as well as valuing Russian culture, attending military academies and graduating from St. Cyr, before becoming a combat arms officer in the French military.

I'm trying to figure out what a normal junior officer career might be, after graduating from St. Cyr in the 1970s, but after some 6-8 years in the military, depending on when exactly he's born and how French officer contracts and careers are usually structured, might even be 10-12 years, he moves over to SDECE or DGSE, depending on the exact year he makes his career change, and becomes a paramilitary officer there. He's trained in fieldcraft and as a case officer, but his expected role in the field is to recruit and control locals for those rare covert operations where there is a stabbing, shooting or an explosion.

I need his name, which would probably consist of a noble surname from a family who lived in St. Petersburg (but might have had estates somewhere else), but the given names should work in both Russian and French.

Then there would be a Ukrainian of Cossack heritage, born around 1955, whose father defected to the UK, along with his family, when he was a teenager. While his father was paid a small pension, it wasn't enough to provide the whole family with the decadent lifestyle they'd been hoping for, and the son had an angry, resentful, rebellious reaction to the whole thing, and after several arrests for brawling and being expelled from more than one school, in 1973, the youngster ended up crossing the Channel and signing up for the French Foreign Legion, like he'd seen in movies.

He served fifteen years in the Legion, ending up in the Commandos de Renseignement et d'Action dans la Profondeur of the 2e REP Legion parachute regiment. Because of his origins, he spoke Ukrainian, Russian, English and French well. The combination of his capacity for ruthless violence, his extensive training in its application and his language skills led to a job offer from DGSE in 1988, but while he had the skill set to be the perfect operator for a personal security detail, surveillance and overwatch for officers on dangerous assignments, there were concerns that in a new post-Cold War world, he wouldn't fit into a gentler, more civilized DGSE.

Going to need an original Ukrainian name for him, as well as maybe a variation of it he uses in France.

The third isn't actually a DGSE officer or even contractor, yet. He was born in Marseille in 1966, to a Corsican French father and a mother of Moroccan origin. He enlisted in the military as a contract soldier, served for a couple of years in the 33e Régiment d'Infanterie de Marine (33e RIMa), stationed on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, and then made it through the selection to join the paratroopers of the 1er Régiment de Parachutistes d'Infanterie de Marine (1er RPIMa).

At the moment, however, he is in the brig, after he was caught running a sizeable black market scheme selling various military supplies over the border to Basques in Spain. Apparently, he had no political motive, he was just trying to make enough money to get his 'girlfriend', a teenage prostitute with a drug habit, out of the life, so they could marry and be happy. Apparently, they've been together two years and he's already learned her language, which, with her being a Moldovan from Transnistria, is Russian.

Even when offered freedom and all charges dropped, the boy wouldn't cooperate until they brought the girl to him. When he heard she'd been released, as she didn't have anything illegal on her when they were arrested, he was frantic that she'd go back on heroin wandering alone without him, and insisted she be found immediately.

He gave up a list of safe houses where she might have gone, which revealed quite a bit of organization and preparation, as well as suggesting others were involved, but when asked if she might be back with her pimp and the men who trafficked her to France, he didn't appear too concerned. Said that was over and they weren't looking for her any more.

Only, about three months before that, there was a fight at a whorehouse. A bad one. Left six dead, all Eastern European men. Three stabbed, five shot, not a wrong count there, one was stabbed in his lower back, below a tactical vest, his gun apparently drawn and used to kill three other men, who shot back without immediately incapacitating hits, then he was shot in the side of the head from contact range.

Then the two other men on the top floor, they must have tried to flee. A Romanian AK-type rifle apparently belonging to one of the men downstairs was used to stop them climbing out on the roof. One hit in the back of the knee and the upper arm, of his right. Maybe he had a gun? The other might have been a miss, it didn't get the knee, but the thigh. Messy scene, with the femoral artery ruptured, even though the wounded man tried to keep pressure on it. He didn't manage it for long, anyway, as someone stabbed him where the neck meets the shoulder, must have been a good-sized, long blade, as it reached through a lung and ruptured the aorta. Bled out pretty quick, then.

The other one, with the busted kneecap and shot-up arm. He got the worst of it. They're up on a roof, it's raining, a bit slippery, and even if it's out in the sticks, you have to figure gunfire will bring cops eventually. So, it wasn't slow, not as such. Just pretty thorough. Broke his left wrist and elbow, must have been some kind of grappling move to hold it still while he did what he did with the fingers. Cut them all off, even the thumb. Then rammed the knife up the peritoneum, through the jeans, and cut forward, until the knife came out at the zipper. Didn't nick an artery or anything.

Man was still alive when police arrived, just hoarse from screaming so long. He couldn't climb, even with assistance, and the cops couldn't get him down without equipment. While they were waiting for a fire truck or EMTs, the man slipped into unconsciousness, like he'd screamed out all his energy. They got him to a hospital, but it didn't matter, in the end, he never did wake up. Slipped into a coma and I don't know who they call to decide whether to pull the plug. Too much blood loss and oxygen-deprivation to the brain.

Anyway, those six guys, they all had Yugoslav or something passports. One of those new Eastern European countries, maybe. Refugees, they said they were, but they'd been here longer than just a few months. They were the heavies running the house and maybe a few more. Until somebody closed them down. Didn't even look like they came in there with guns. Don't know how many it was, but there was a lot of blood and inevitably, some bloody footprints. If it was more than one guy, they was all wearing the same size Nike sneakers.

I'll need a name for the Marseillais kid and his Moldovan girlfriend.

[Icelander]

A kid who grew up in a normal, middle class home in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the 1960s and 1970s, until age 15, how much Russian would they speak?

And would they have used Ukrainian for all regular conversations, at home and with friends, assuming that the parents are not Russian-speaking, but have ancestors from around there several generations back?

Is Russian a totally different language for the Ukrainian boy, while related to his and belonging to the same language family, not actually mutually intelligible, like Icelandic and Danish? Which I learned in school a couple of decades ago, and despite scoring 95% on my final exam after a decade of classes, speak abominably.

It might be good to know how well the undercover recruiter could pass as a native, depending on where in the dissolving USSR they go.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

A kid who grew up in a normal, middle class home in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the 1960s and 1970s, until age 15, how much Russian would they speak?

And would they have used Ukrainian for all regular conversations, at home and with friends, assuming that the parents are not Russian-speaking, but have ancestors from around there several generations back?

This was a political issue at the time in Ukraine. Parents could chose to have their children educated in Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking schools. The USSR central government was trying to Russify all the non-Russian speaking peoples, although it had more sense by this time than to do that by force. Some Ukrainian-speaking parents sent their children to Russian-speaking schools to seek future advantage for them.

Is Russian a totally different language for the Ukrainian boy, while related to his and belonging to the same language family, not actually mutually intelligible, like Icelandic and Danish?

Russian and Ukrainian have some genuine mutual intelligibility (although Ukrainian has more with Belarusian), but they have enough differences to make it obvious which is your native language. Learning to speak the other like a native is likely possible, but would take real effort.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

This was a political issue at the time in Ukraine. Parents could chose to have their children educated in Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking schools. The USSR central government was trying to Russify all the non-Russian speaking peoples, although it had more sense by this time than to do that by force. Some Ukrainian-speaking parents sent their children to Russian-speaking schools to seek future advantage for them.

Ah, that is interesting and means that I have to make a decision on what the parents would do about choosing a school.

The father was a policeman, enforcing laws that effectively make Ukraine an unwilling part of a larger polity, a polity governed mostly by and for Russians. Outwardly, the father accepted this and was an authoritarian, fearsome servant of the state, a powerful wielder of the state's monopoly on force. In this way, the father acted as his recent ancestors did, as he is descended from Zaporozhian Cossacks who fought for Tsarist Russia in the Caucasus, and in return received freedoms and privileges beyond what was granted to many others under Tsarist imperial rule.

On the other hand, in his heart of hearts, the father felt as did the many generations of Zaporozhian Cossacks before they fell under the endless tide of Tsarist armies, whoever seeks to rule his people, whether it is Polish-Lithuanian hussars, Tsarist soldiers or Tatars hordes, they are the enemy, and he should find a way to send them a sternly worded letter expressing his sentiments and the desire of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to live free and choose their own leaders.

While the father was torn, the mother was not. She was a free Cossack living under Russian occupation. She was wise enough to keep her hatred of the occupying forces secret, but the strength of her convictions eventually led to both her and her husband defecting to the West in 1973, after obtaining and passing to the first Western intelligence officer they could find (which happened to be one from the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain) as much valuable information harmful to Soviet interests as they could gather through their positions and the mother's dissident friends.

It would make sense for the father to have sent his son to a Russian-language school in order to prepare for him for a career in the security services or other public service. That would best deflect suspicion from them and almost be expected of a moderately senior police officer. The sentiments of the mother were too strong, however, and her son spoke Ukrainian at home, with friends and at school, except when he was in Russian classes. And then he moved to Britain and learned to speak English, through the musical repertoire of the Rolling Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, the Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Bowie and Elton John, before discovering his true self in the punk, Sex Pistols and The Clash, The Damned, The Jam, The Stranglers, The Buzzcocks, etc.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Russian and Ukrainian have some genuine mutual intelligibility (although Ukrainian has more with Belarusian), but they have enough differences to make it obvious which is your native language. Learning to speak the other like a native is likely possible, but would take real effort.

Interesting and perfect for the adventure. Having absorbed the passionate (if secretive) hatred of his mother for the Russians, the son never learned to speak Russian well, though he did pass all his classes. He will sound very Ukrainian not matter how much he tries to remember Russian lessons from twenty years ago.

[Icelander]

If we assume that separate teams of mercenary recruiters, former intelligence officers, agents, arms dealers and black marketeers are sent to several locations in the former USSR, as well as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, PCs might, of course, accompany any one of them.

Others, probably NPCs at the start, will need to set up a camp where prospective mercenaries can be evaluated and assessed, sort the braggarts and liars from the genuinely skilled soldiers with the right specialities, and run them through some sort of assessment and selection process, so that no one too untrustworthy, difficult, stupid, undisciplined or otherwise unsuitable is expensively re-settled in Central America.

This base will be obtained courtesy of the government of Angola, who will turn over a former militia or militant faction camp to the new Private Military Contractor (PMC) they've hired. At some point, PCs will then have to juggle actually providing genuine PMC services, with actual PMC personnel, to the former guerillas turned government soldiers, while also assessing conspiciously not sub-Saharan African former USSR soldiers, Spetsnaz, pilots, mechanics and other helicopter specialists, without Angola becoming aware that anything fishy is going on.

To staff this base, the PCs will be relying on a few Angolans whom the paymasters have used before, as well as Namibians, South Africans, ex-Rhodesians and Zimbabweans, all the military flotsam of at least three (and possibly six or seven, depending on how you count them) wars.

I need suggestions on a few things.

A) Where is a nicely remote part of Angola, where it's difficult to reach except with aircraft and helicopters? Would be nice is there's some jungle nearby, but it's not a requirement.

B) In connection with A, above, where would be a nice air field somewhere with nicely bribable staff, in order to ferry arms and men into the camp. Yes, the Angolans know they'll be there, no, they are not supposed to know about all the aircraft, arms and men, just the ones that don't contravene the UN-monitored peace process. The PCs aren't planning on using the aircraft, arms, men and ordnance to alter any balance of power before crucial milestones of the peace process are reached... but, if the Angolans find out how much striking power they have, they'll probably try to pressurize them to intervene on their side.

C) Practical issue, what language do you standardize on when speakers of about a dozen tribal languages, Afrikaans, English, Portuguese and Spanish are supposed to be instructing, assessing, commanding and training a group of men who all speak some Russian, but whose native languages range from South Slavic to Tajik and Uzbek? English is the international language of aviation, but did Warsaw Pact pilots acknowledge that before the fall of the Soviet Union?

[Icelander]

The PCs, upon arrival in Africa, will be employed by the Durban-registered Ukhozi Services, which seems less dominated by South Africans than the rival Executive Outcomes, but the ultimate beneficial owners of which are not easy to discover, as the company was founded by an attorney acting for Strategic Security Services Ltd., registered on the island of Jersey in 1989, taking advantage of lenient company legislation on the Channel Island, where disclosing company officials is not required.

The man in charge introduces himself as Commandant Bison. He's tall, athletic and imposing, with the build of a rugby flanker, but a grotesquely mishapen face and head, like a lot of facial and skull bones were broken and didn't heal right. His black skin is smooth and a practised observer can tell that despite his injuries masking his youthful facial features, he is not much older than the average National Serviceman when he finishes his two-year term at twenty or twenty one, but it does not seem likely that he is one of the Cape Coloured men who are called up for National Service in South Africa.

He has darker colouring than most Cape Coloured, the kind of build most Xhosa or Zulu warriors strive toward, and he speaks English with no trace of Afrikaans accent. If anything, his accent is British, his diction precise, and his orders given without hesitation and with total assurance they will be obeyed. He seems completely indifferent to the stares of the less courteous of the recruits and his mere presence soon quiets even the inveterate jokers, constant grumblers and stubborn troublemakers.

His first instructions are simple. The men have a choice about how much of themselves they reveal to each other, but before giving out full names and addresses, consider that in Angola, allegiances shift, and actions that were legal security assistance to the government might become revolutionary acts or terrorism in the eyes of the next government. Unless they have nothing and no one left at home they want to protect from hostile questioning, least said, soonest mended.

He then introduces the other officers and NCOs, an eclectic mix of Black, Coloured and White men, few of whom appear to come from the same tribes or even countries. His words are translated into Russian by a black translator, whose musical cadence and Portuguese accent on the occasional Russian term suggest that he is a native Angolan.

For the duration of their stay or until he gives orders otherwise, the new men rank as Recruits, no matter what their prior rank or service might have been. There are expressions of dismay from some of the new faces, but no chirping or audible grumbling.

Few things I could use suggestions on:

D) I want the new recruits to wear uniform clothing, which feel and look somewhat military, without being the uniform of any combatant country or faction in Angola, or, for that matter, any ongoing or recent warfare in nearby countries. I also want the clothing to be practical for the terrain and climate, easy to keep clean and made from durable materials. They'll need PT clothing, daily duty clothing and full tactical exercise outfits, with load-bearing battle belt, web gear and pouches and the whole nine yards.

At the end of 1990, where should the well-funded paramilitary equipment manager shop for this clothing, if the goal is both for the clothing to be practical and comfortable, and also for the soldiers to compare their current management favourably with their prior ones? Not necessarily the most expensive kit (soldiers might well display reverse snobbery), but the best value and utility, for clothing that will be used exclusively in the Global South, probably no further from the Equator than Iraq or Namibia (but probably significantly more humid)?

Edit: I figure that what I want is light, but strong khaki cargo pants and shirt, with multiple pockets which can be securely closed. What was a good brand of khaki 'safari' clothing in 1990?

E) The aim is to arm the men with USSR weaponry. The officers and NCOs had self-defence arms before the cheap Soviet arms started flooding the market; what might be good deals bought from Israeli arms dealers and others involved in evading sanctions to South Africa? Surplus FN FAL rifles should be available at decent prices, Uzis are not that expensive even if you buy them new, but what might be good deals on good pistols?

It's easy to say Browning Hi-Power, obviously every mercenary in the 1980s wanted one, but during sanctions, the SADF and security forces couldn't get enough of them and the Israelis themselves were buying from Belgium at scandalous prices. Pay a premium for genuine, newest-model, FN-made Browning Mark III pistols or buy much cheaper Spanish-made Star pistols (pretty much a 9mm 1911 design with 8-rd magazine) like the SADF did?

Something else?