The Galloping Ghost (2 page)

The imminent commissioning of the new headquarters was not only a symbol of NATO solidarity against external threats, but also represented much greater responsibility for Fluckey in the top post of commander (COMIBERLANT). From an initial force of 16, he would direct 41 officers from Portugal, England, and the United States, 159 enlisted men, 6 civilians, and a French liaison officer. Portugal contributed 40 naval vessels, including modern frigates and an antisubmarine squadron, augmenting a smaller detachment of British and American vessels that were occasionally joined by warships of 12 other NATO nations.

Fluckey had been keeping a wary eye on internal strife gnawing at Portugal. As a student of Portuguese history and politics, he had followed the nation's messy entanglement in Africa. Throughout the 1960s Portugal had struggled to put down rebellions in its colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. In twelve years more than 100,000 Portuguese soldiers
had fought in Africa. Nearly 8,000 had lost their lives, while 26,000 returned home seriously maimed and injured. By the fall of 1971 much of Portugal was demoralized by a war that seemed endless and futile. Fluckey and many NATO officials believed Communists aligned with a dissident Catholic priest were taking advantage of the situation by fanning unrest against the dictatorial regime of Marcelo Caetano. Yet no one expected the dissent to manifest itself in an attempt to sabotage the new IBERLANT complex. Overt terrorism was all but unheard of in Portugal, where widespread censorship for forty years and a secret police force numbering twenty thousand made resistance difficult.

With the commissioning ceremony only two days off, Admiral Fluckey was inside his office attending to last-minute details. There would be a formal reception for the president of Portugal, followed by speeches by NATO's supreme Atlantic commander from the United States and the secretary general from the Netherlands. Portugal's minister of defense then would transfer the headquarters to NATO. Fluckey, in accepting the transfer, planned to frame his speech around the significance of IBERLANT to European security and to remind visitors that “the Russian wolf passes ever closer to our door.” He viewed Africa as “a continent in confusion,” particularly vulnerable to an unprecedented expansion of Soviet naval influence in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian and Atlantic oceans at a time when the U.S. Navy was shrinking. The cost of the Vietnam War had steadily drained the Navy's budget. Congress had forced the service to downsize its personnel by 10 percent—70,000 officers and enlisted men—plus deactivate 60 ships, 770 aircraft, and 8 aircraft carriers. The Soviet Navy, meanwhile, was dramatically more powerful than it had been ten years earlier and had new airfields south of Europe.

In Fluckey's view, the opening of IBERLANT was a step toward reversing the trend. But establishing the new command hadn't been easy. For months he had wrangled with a stubborn Portuguese bureaucracy, a lackadaisical workforce at the construction site, and even NATO allies. “There are contractor problems in training, equipment, and responsibility,” he groused privately to U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Dick H. Guinn back in the States. “There are myriad problems with the Portuguese, tax-wise, legally, logistically, financially, messing, housing, teaching English, training, leading, and keeping strong and active in NATO. The way has been thorny, with much ‘rug-from-under pulling' by highly placed officers of certain nationalities. I know them and they know me to be determined and unsidetrackable.”

Such was the case when construction inexplicably slowed at the new headquarters. The admiral retaliated by ordering his entire command to
occupy the building. It had the desired effect. “The minute we moved into our Topside Headquarters without water and lights, the contractor realized we meant business and seemed to have tripled his labor force.”

A pre-dedication dinner fiasco, however, complicated matters. When a Portuguese caterer bowed out, Fluckey turned to IBERLANT staffers. But no one seemed to understand how to order the food or set up the affair. The admiral had no choice but to take charge himself, figure out the menu and the bar, order food, and hire cooks and waiters. At one point, he had gotten on the phone to Navy Secretary John H. Chafee in the United States to get him to bring over six cases of Campbell's Golden Mushroom Soup. Mixed with sherry, Fluckey believed it was quite delicious and perfect for the dinner.

The latest crisis was the British comptroller reneging on a promise to provide 150 place settings for the event. Fluckey had to scramble. He contacted a surplus yard at the U.S. naval air station in Rota, Spain, where he was known as the “King of the Junkyard.” He had often combed it for discarded equipment that was still useful and donated it to Portugal to pad relations. This time he needed help—quick—and got it. Place settings were available at no charge but the admiral would have to arrange an emergency airlift. The tablecloths, glasses, plates, service settings, ashtrays, and serving dishes had just arrived.

It was this kind of dogged determination that made Fluckey a natural choice as COMIBERLANT.

He had served as naval attaché to Portugal for three years, from 1951 to 1954, during which time he achieved near fluency in Portuguese and French, and some Spanish and Italian. In a career spanning much of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, he had served in submarine operational commands and directed the Navy's intelligence division. He was known as a prolific writer and speaker with boundless “can do” enthusiasm, an officer who described himself as a “diehard winner.” He was deceptively mild mannered but single-minded in achieving goals—and creative. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) once described him as “fearless and foresighted, a footnoter whose lone dissents of one year became majority view of the next.” Fluckey, in fact, was never shy about his abilities and accomplishments though he seemed the most unlikely of warriors as a slightly built redhead, six feet tall with a disarmingly toothy smile and warm personality. His successes—especially in wartime—were astounding and a source of immense personal satisfaction.

As the afternoon faded at IBERLANT headquarters, the admiral thought of his days as a young attaché in Lisbon, the ancient capital city.
He pondered the happy irony that he would end his career there in less than a year. His wife Marjorie, in fragile health due to a lifelong battle with diabetes and other complications, suffered from extremes of heat and cold. Portugal, with its temperate climate most of the year, had been ideal for her and they were considering staying. The couple enjoyed their comfortable quinta, a farmette in the resort of Sintra about forty miles to the north. They also had many friends in Portugal and throughout Europe.

As far as the commissioning of the new headquarters was concerned, all seemed in order as a quiet confidence settled over Admiral Fluckey. But outside his office, Portuguese painters completed the job of positioning explosives where they might cause the most damage. The fuses were set. The workers announced to a guard that they were taking an early dinner break and would be back to finish up. They never returned. And it wasn't long before the bombs went off as planned. The shock wave shattered windows and blew out window frames on both floors. Doorways and office equipment were blown apart. Electrical control panels and overhead fixtures tumbled to the floor. Passageways crumbled in piles of mortared bricks and twisted metal. Underground, the new bunker and communications center suffered serious damage.

Stunned rescuers raced to the scene, wondering if Admiral Fluckey—the Navy's “Galloping Ghost”—was a casualty in the debris.

Gene Fluckey learned at an early age the meaning of courage, self-control, and determination.

The year was 1922, and the great summer getaway for families like the Fluckeys was the new resort town of North Beach, Maryland, about an hour's drive south from the family home in Washington. Long before the Bay Bridge connected the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake to the mainland and made Ocean City, Fenwick Island, and Bethany Beach on the Atlantic the favored haunts of capital families, North Beach on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake was the primary destination of those escaping the city heat. The resort was well known for its comfortable bayside cottages and two- and three-story Colonials along a seven-block waterfront. There a broad, sandy beach and a fishing pier jutting far out into the bay provided recreation for all. A trolley system made getting around easy. Restaurants and legalized gambling catered to vacationers.

The Fluckey family often made the trip from their brownstone Victorian in the Capitol Hill development where Gene Fluckey grew up as the second youngest of four children. He was born on 5 October 1913 in Washington to Justice Department lawyer Isaac Newton Fluckey and his wife, Louella Snowden Fluckey. In North Beach the Fluckeys rented a cottage on the edge of the bay where the kids could play at will.

It was that summer of '22 that Gene brought along Phil Greenwell, a neighborhood pal. Both loved the outdoors and were excellent swimmers.
The two dived in and swam about a quarter mile off the beach, when cramps suddenly overcame Greenwell. He yelled for help, unable to swim. Gene moved in, hooked an arm around his buddy's chin, and then started back to shore while urging Phil not to struggle. With great exertion Fluckey made the long swim, using a combination of floating backward and kicking and using his free arm to stroke the water while towing his friend and saving his life.

Gene's growing sense of confidence was reinforced a year later while he was dabbling with a radio set he had built. “I was tickling the crystal of my radio and picked up a station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just as our president, Calvin Coolidge, was starting a famous speech. Silent Cal did not speak often but when he did people listened,” recalled Fluckey. What the president said was to have profound influence on the youngster: “Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Fluckey was awestruck, scribbling down the president's message. He was so impressed that he named his first mongrel dog Calvin Coolidge. What the president said was more than fodder for a pet's name, however. It provided the young boy with a creed to live by: persistence and determination. Previously an average student, he now began to excel at his studies, enabling him to graduate early from grammar school. He refined the president's mantra later, recasting it in his own special way. “Put more into life than you expect to get out of it. Drive yourself and lead others.”

With flaming red hair and blue eyes and so many freckles that he boasted of winning a freckle contest at age six, Fluckey was gregarious and inquisitive as a teenager and a dead-ringer for his father in both looks and personality. His infectious smile was so broad that when he was ten he noticed a sign advertising a smile contest near his home. He entered and won. He was a quick learner and very popular on the local sandlot as well as in school. In addition to swimming, he loved playing golf, riding horses, and playing tennis. He graduated from public grade school at eleven and at fifteen from Washington's prestigious Western High School. Alumni included Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, who would command the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941.

As a student, Gene loved reading and writing and wanted to be a scientist or engineer. He also had one other consuming interest: military history. His ancestors had fought in every American war going all the way back to
the founding of the nation, when the original Fluckey served on both sides of the American Revolution.

His name was Jorge Flocke. As the story goes, he was a single German in his twenties who happened to be riding his horse through Hesse in the German province of Alsace Lorraine on the border of France when he ran into Hessian soldiers, whose services had been purchased by Britain from the prince of Hesse for twenty-two dollars a head. They were among eight thousand mercenaries to join an expeditionary force of thirty thousand English troops in an attempt to put down a rebellion in colonial America. Flocke was conscripted on the spot, leaving him no time to even say goodbye to his family.

Arriving in New York City with the invasion force, Flocke became a foot soldier with orders to march south with the British to capture Philadelphia. En route he met a young Dutch woman, Margareth Stotz, who asked what he was fighting for. “Simple,” replied Flocke. “I fight or get shot.” Stotz was a secret agent for rebel Gen. George Washington, desperate to recruit replacement troops for an army of three thousand that had been overwhelmed by the British in New York and several skirmishes in New Jersey. Stotz convinced Flocke of the righteousness of the American cause. He subsequently defected by hiding in her beehive oven as the British and Hessians moved on and later adopted a new last name—Fluckey—to keep from being hung if captured by the British.

The newly minted Fluckey joined the Continental Army and quartered with Washington at Valley Forge in the bitter winter of 1776. Because he had been an apprentice tailor in Alsace, he made two uniforms for the general. He also was with Washington when he made his famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Eve of 1776, in a surprise attack on nine hundred Hessian troops garrisoning Trenton. Washington's triumph was the turning point in the Revolution, handing the British their first major defeat.