Forced To Play The Kidnap Game, Colombian Style

SOME 85 FOREIGNERS are held hostage in Colombia. For 11 months last year, one of them was Texas-born Tom Hargrove. His anxious family eventually succeeded in getting him released, only because they learned there was just one set of rules: the kidnappers'. -----------------------------------------------------------------

The one-room adobe hut sat hidden by the clouds high in the Andes. Inside, leftist guerrillas in fatigues lounged in their rough wooden bunks, recovering from a night of drunken revelry. Tom Hargrove, their U.S. prisoner, sliced up an onion for lunch.

Thousands of feet below the hut, in Cali, Colombia, at the foot of those same mountains, Hargrove's wife and two sons were virtual prisoners in their home. What they feared most was missing a phone call from the guerrillas.

Their job was to master the Byzantine rules of the Colombian kidnap game. Hargrove's job? To stay alive.

Tom Hargrove, a globe-trotting Texas Aggie, languished in the mountains for 11 months before his family found the key that freed them all.

"The reality of life in Colombia is that you pay a ransom if you want to see your loved one alive again," said Miles Hargrove, 21, Hargrove's elder son.

An estimated 85 foreigners are held hostage in Colombia. Although common criminals pull some kidnappings, authorities say leftist guerrillas are responsible in most cases.

Hargrove and his family are recovering from their ordeal. In a series of interviews, they lifted the veil that enshrouds most such kidnap cases.

"There is a naivete about these so-called Communist guerrillas in South America," Hargrove said. "People think they are some kind of idealistic and intelligent university types. All they are is criminals, and all they want is money."

The family declined to reveal the amount of the ransom payments.

"Even though we are out of there, we are still very much emotionally involved with other kidnap families down there, and the reporting of a number could have an impact on their cases," Hargrove said.

Cocaine, brandy and anguish

Tom Hargrove, 51, was born and raised on a red-dirt cotton farm in West Texas. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 with a degree in agriculture, became an Army officer and fought in Vietnam.

After the war, he earned a doctorate from the University of Iowa in agricultural science and became a journalist for the International Rice Research Institute in Manila. His translations of complex crop-science procedures into plain language helped Third World farmers increase their yields.

In 1992, he went to work for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali. The organization operates all over the world and is known by its Spanish abbreviation, CIAT.

Despite his worldly sophistication, Hargrove says nothing prepared him for captivity in the Andes of Colombia. He tells the following story from Oct. 20, 1994, his 27th day as a prisoner:

The sun was up, and Juaco was high on a lethal combination of cocaine, brandy and anguish. He and the six leftist guerrillas under his command were charged with guarding Hargrove.

They had begun drinking and smoking and firing their rifles shortly after midnight. One of them accidentally shot a cow during a drunken bout of target practice, a waste of valuable beef that could cost Juaco his command.

Hargrove was preparing lunch in the adobe hut when he felt Juaco put the muzzle of his Galil assault rifle against the back of Hargrove's head. A split second before pulling the trigger, Juaco raised the rifle a few inches, and a single bullet zipped through the thatched roof.

Juaco fell back on his bunk and lay there, hugging his rifle as if in a trance. Another guerrilla, Gustavo, frantically waved his hand, motioning Hargrove to go back to his cell quickly.

Later that afternoon, Juaco put his Galil on full automatic, nestled the barrel under his chin and killed himself with three quick shots to the head.

Mountain climbing with Rambo

The Hargroves lived in a guarded, walled compound in Pance, a suburb of Cali. Inside the walls, their home and three others surrounded a large courtyard and swimming pool.

Foreign businessmen, upper-middle-class Colombians and, so the Hargroves heard, several cocaine traffickers populated the upscale neighborhood.

On the morning of Sept. 23, 1994, Hargrove decided to drive to work through scenic sugar-cane fields.

"That was the last decision I would make on my own for a long, long time," he said.

Near the town of Puerto Tejada, he ran into un reten, a roadblock set up by armed men in fatigues and ski masks.

Within minutes, they herded Hargrove into the back of a pickup and headed into the mountains. Two guards carrying AK-47 assault rifles bounced along beside him in the truck bed.

"I was struck by how young they were," he said. "One of these kids didn't look like he was 14. They were laughing about this one fella at the roadblock who was hysterical and crying and begging them not to kill him."

Hargrove was the only one taken hostage, presumably because he was a foreigner. They took his briefcase and $400 in cash, but, inexplicably, they gave him back two checkbooks.

That night, camped out at the home of an Indian farmer, he began writing a diary in tiny words on a checkbook. He kept the pages hidden in a secret compartment in his belt.

The next day, Hargrove and 15 guerrillas climbed onto horses and mules and headed higher into the mountains. His mule was named Batalla. The unit's comandante called himself Rambo.

"We rode for two days on some of the highest cliffs, hundreds of feet above rushing rivers, and I kept thinking about the saying `Sure-footed as a mule,' " he said.

The group arrived in a high mountain valley, a damp and swampy pastureland surrounded by peaks of 10,000 to 12,000 feet. Here, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC, left Hargrove with seven guards ranging in age from 13 to 20.

The guerrillas bunked in the adobe hut. A plastic-covered shed next to it was Hargrove's cell. His bunk was a wooden frame filled with leaves covered with blankets.

Hargrove was confined from 6 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. and allowed to roam near the hut during the day. Up to now, his captors had not mistreated him. But things were to get worse.

Threats to sink "the boat"

A CIAT representative arrived at the Hargrove home at 11 a.m. to report the kidnapping.

The Hargroves had known each other since the 1950s, when they were in junior-high school in Rotan, Texas.

Their separation during Hargrove's tour in Vietnam had been hard, but Susan Hargrove sensed this experience would be the worst.

"I knew it was going to be a very long time before I saw him again," she said.

Her first call went to Miles Hargrove's dormitory at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. The second went to Geddie, 20, the Hargroves' second son, who was studying at American University in Cairo, Egypt. Both joined their mother in Colombia.

The more they talked to knowledgeable people, the more they realized the Colombian kidnap industry has formal, if unwritten, rules and the family must learn them.

The Hargrove family "talked to the people they needed to talk to and did what they had to do," said Oscar Tejeda, the FBI agent assigned to the Hargrove case. The FBI was operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogata.

Home videos the family took at the time show a large map of Colombia on the wall above a two-way radio in their living room. Hand-held walkie-talkies in battery chargers covered another table. The Hargroves had rented a high-tech spy phone that is impossible to tap.

As if life were imitating a Hollywood script, they talked with the guerrillas in code on the two-way radio. The word for Hargrove was el barco, "the boat." Throughout the ransom negotiations, the guerrillas threatened to sink "the boat" if the family did not meet their demands.

The family's support team consisted of Tejeda, a paid security consultant from Great Britain and a tight-knit group of friends and neighbors.

"Children like to be read to"

An open hearth anchored one corner of the 12-square-foot adobe hut. Because there was no chimney, wood smoke filled the hut when the guerrillas cooked a meal or built a fire for warmth. Everything reeked of smoke.

Hargrove ate what his captors ate - mostly rice, beans, lentils, pasta and potatoes. "Sometimes sardines and very rarely meat," he added. His weight dropped from a robust 180 pounds on a 6-foot frame to 130 pounds.

One diary entry reads: "Thursday, Nov. 24, Thanksgiving day. Susan will be at the Fishers' unless she's in Texas. If so, there'll be a big turkey and, maybe a honey-cured ham. . . . Miles will be there and Geddie. . . . Now I only pray that our family will be together at Christmas."

The guerrilla guards were largely illiterate youths with one or two years of schooling. They were not good company, and they kept little to read around the hut.

"They would read some, but it was hard for them," he said. "In fact, when there was a magazine, I would read stories to the guerrillas, which I liked to do. Children like to be read to."

The guerrillas began chaining him by the ankle to his bunk in late November after a new comandante arrived at the camp. He accused Hargrove of being a colonel in the U.S. Army, a hero of the Vietnam War and an expert in counter-guerrilla warfare.

"He asked me to respond to the charges, and I thought, `Oh, Hargrove, you are dead.' I had to write a letter in Spanish, the most important letter I would ever write."

For more than two months, the guerrillas kept him tethered day and night with the 15-foot chain.

"Eventually, they told me the charges had been dropped and that they knew I was who I said I was. I was never physically tortured or beaten, but I could make a good case that being tethered to the end of a chain is torture."

Hargrove acknowledges the guerrillas occasionally were kind to him, but he said he never sympathized with them.

"That's not me," he said. "I never fell in love with my captors."

A photo in the restroom

The family's initial communications with the guerrillas were ominous.

"We gave them our ransom offer, and they got mighty peeved," Miles Hargrove said. "But our advisers had told us that we had to get them to the point where they understood we didn't have all the money in the world."

The guerrillas responded by imposing a "silence," a tactic designed to psychologically torture the family.

"It was late February," five months after the kidnapping, Miles recalled. "We had been talking to them at the rate of twice a week. For two weeks, we did not hear anything. Even though we were advised this could happen, it was very hard for us."

The Hargroves raised their ransom offer after the two-week silence but not enough. The guerrillas punished them with a four-week silence and then an eight-week silence.

To break the silences, volunteers trekked into the mountains to plead Hargrove's case, but the FARC refused to see them.

When the guerrillas lifted the eight-week silence at the end of May, the family substantially raised its ransom offer and asked for a new "proof of life."

To their surprise, the guerrillas accepted the offer and left a recent photo of Hargrove taped behind a toilet tank in a restroom at

a fast-food restaurant in Cali.

"He did not look good in the photo," Miles Hargrove said. "But we decided to go ahead and accept it because he looked alive."

Advisers told the Hargroves that the FARC might kidnap them if they tried to deliver the ransom money, so volunteers drove into the mountains with a red rag hanging from the driver's window. In a black bag, they carried stacks of 10,000-peso Colombian bank notes wrapped in plastic.

"It's not a deal like where we throw you the money and you throw dad back at us," Miles Hargrove said. "We were advised that it would be as long as a week before they released him."

The volunteers delivered the money in a face-to-face meeting with the guerrillas.

One week, two weeks passed. And no Hargrove.

To the Hargroves' horror, FARC executed two U.S. missionaries after holding them for 18 months. The Colombian Army reported it was closing in on a guerrilla unit when the missionaries were shot.

"This scared us because the military was busy with a lot of operations in the area where we believed my father was being held," Miles Hargrove said.

"Each step is closer to Susan"

A full month of silence passed after the ransom payment. The Hargroves took to their beds as if hobbled by a virulent flu. They had no new strategy.

Then the guerrillas made contact. Negotiations - termed Round 2 - resumed last summer.

Round 2 negotiations resulted in a deal for a second ransom payment. A priest, traditionally men of influence in predominantly Catholic Colombia, went to the mountains and delivered the money on Aug. 13.

A week passed, and no Tom Hargrove.

"We just sat around and wondered what to do and wondered if he was dead," Miles said.

Accompanied by five guerrillas, Tom Hargrove headed down the mountain carrying two blankets. He wasn't sure whether he was changing camps or on his way to freedom.

As they walked closer to civilization, the guerrillas began to worry about running into the Colombian army and decided to go no farther, Hargrove said. They gave him a 10,000-peso Colombian bank note (about $12) and drew a rudimentary map for him to follow.

"They showed me this trail and said I would eventually reach a road," he said. "I was released at 10:47 a.m. on Aug. 22. I shook hands with each of them and walked away."

Hargrove marched through mountains to a repetitive cadence: "Each step is closer to Susan. Each step is closer to home. Each step is closer to Susan. Each step is closer to home."

By midafternoon, he arrived at the home of an Indian potato farmer with a motorbike. Together, they rode down the mountain to the town of Tecayo.

Several men were taking a load of coffee farther down the mountain to Santander. Hargrove piled into their Jeep. The potato farmer followed on his motorbike.

"We became a caravan and drove all the way into Cali," he said.

A reed-thin scarecrow

Hargrove walked into his house at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 22, almost 11 months to the day after his kidnapping.

Miles was in the house. Geddie was cooking dinner in the courtyard. Susan was on the telephone.

"I heard this noise, and the door opened," Miles Hargrove said.

Tom Hargrove's hair was long and dirty. A bad diet had turned it from gray to orange. A scraggly gray beard had erupted from his cadaverous face. He looked like a reed-thin scarecrow in his shirt, pants and rubber boots.

"He looked like he had just stepped out of the costume room at a movie set," Miles Hargrove said.

And then everyone started screaming with joy.

The Hargroves broke kidnap industry rules when they revealed the ransom payments. Most victims and their employers publicly vow not to negotiate ransom demands while privately dealing with the guerrillas.

When the victim is released, according to the Hargroves and their advisers, the companies and their security consultants concoct a story to cover up the ransom payment: The victim got sick and the guerrillas released him. Or the victim escaped. Or pressure from other countries secured the release.

But Hargrove said he does not want FARC guerrillas to emerge from his case with a benign image.

Hargrove is still the head of communications for CIAT, but he does not know whether he will return to work there. For now, he is editing his diary into a book.

Miles and Geddie plan to return to college in the spring, but they worry about fitting into the academic environment after a yearlong adrenaline rush in Cali.

"I think about how I'm going to go back to class and take studying for a quiz seriously," Miles Hargrove said.

Susan Hargrove sums it up: "We would kind of like to get this all over and not be the kidnap family anymore."