The day I was Argentina’s G Kidnapped by ucci Gunmen
STRIPPED down to his underpants, on a dirt road 20 miles from Buenos Aires, Julian Manyon was told to walk away from the gunmen who had kidnapped him and his colleagues. “It was the longest walk of my life,” Julian remembers. “I remember Ted and I holding hands and thinking that these were the last few steps we would ever take.
“I had a feeling of utter fatalism. There was no way that I wasn’t going to be shot in the back.”
Just hours earlier, Manyon, a journalist for the Thames TV current affairs programme TV Eye, had been in the centre of Buenos Aires, attempting to report on the escalating warfare in the Falkland Islands.
Two days before the kidnapping, the HMS Sheffield had sunk after being heavily damaged by an Exocet missile fired by the Argentinian Air Force, taking 20 British lives.
Manyon and his crew were leaving the Foreign Ministry on the warm afternoon of May 12 after a thwarted attempt to interview the notoriously irascible Minister Nicanor Costa Mendez.
As they were getting into their own car, Manyon remembers another car cutting in front of them and four burly men in sharp suits leaping out, yelling “Police”.
He recalls: “Next thing I knew, I was in the rear seatwell covered in a blanket with a pistol pressed against my head. I knew straight away these people were professionals and related to the state.
“There was constant radio contact coming from the driver over his intercom and the way they expertly tied leather thongs between the door handle and the door lock so I couldn’t kick the door open was done at such amazing speed. It was clear they had kidnapped people in this way many times before.”
Relieved of 800 US dollars in his pocket, Manyon and the rest of his crew, who were thrown into a different vehicle, were driven out of the city until they reached a dirt road.
Manyon recalls clearly thinking they were about to receive the same fatal punishment as thousands of other Argentinians who had displeased the brutal regime.
But rather than hearing the sound of a gunshot, the kidnappers leapt into their Ford Falcons and drove away. Somehow, Manyon and his colleagues Ted Adcock and Trefor Hunter had survived and were now standing alone and almost naked in a remote field.
“We were so relieved we were laughing,” recalls Julian.
“We were still in our underpants and had to walk to a barn where we dressed ourselves, caveman style, in old sacks. It was an Argentinian farmer who found us and drove us to the Pilar police station.
“I remember him saying to us, ‘It must be my birthday – I’ve found three naked Englishmen’.”
Astonishingly, a mere eight hours after almost being murdered, a fatigued and disorientated Manyon and his team were led into the Presidential Palace.
But first they had to deal with officials at the local police station in Pilar, who were initially convinced Manyon, Adcock and Hunter were British special agents whose assignment had come unstuck. “The local police were convinced we were commandos,” recalls Julian.
“I remember saying over and
over again, ‘periodista, periodista’, meaning journalist. It didn’t do any good until they got through to the capital. I remember the local constable saluting the telephone when he finally got through to Buenos Aires.”
Eventually reaching the Interior Minister, the local police immediately changed their tune.
Evidently furious at the TV crew’s treatment, the minister sent a limousine and six motorcycle couriers to pick the traumatised journalists up and take them straight to Buenos Aires where, remarkably, their destination was the Presidential Palace, known as the Casa Rosada.
IT WAS A scenario absurdly emblematic of the chaos, incompetence, corruption and deadly violence which enveloped Argentina all the way up to the highest level of government under the tenure of the Junta’s military dictator, Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli.
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ent at the hands of the dnappers, the men were ushered to the inner sanctum, walking ong vast galleries past guardsman essed in 18th century uniforms.
Shuffling forwards, clearly the orse for drink in Manyon’s recolctions, Galtieri allowed the jourlist to ask a few questions on the ngoing war while cameramen and hotographers from the Buenos
res press filmed the awkward terchange.
Responding in slurred, feeble nglish, when Manyon asked altieri if his troops were prepared
pull down the Argentinian flag in rt Stanley in order to get negotiaons started, he said, “No senor. But can be discussed.”
At the time police blamed many
these random kidnappings on eelance hit squads called “descoldos”. Translated as “disconnected nes” their members were former
lice or intelligence agents who ursued their own political causes.
It was an argument that never connced Manyon. Recent declassifyg of secret CIA documents led him n a journey, four decades on from s kidnapping, to find out more
out Anibal Gordon, the man ultiately responsible for his abduction
d terrifying ordeal. His soldiers ere nicknamed Gucci Gunmen.
“There’s no doubt that Gordon as a psychopath,” says Julian. “The ories that come from the survivors test to that. I do think that he
rived some sort of twisted please from the things he did.”
Anibal Gordon was the ringleader
a gang known as the “Triple A”. A former bank robber he was recruited to be a ringleader in the so called “dirty wars” against Marxist and other Leftist opponents to the Junta. Also a leading operative in SIDE (the Argentinian intelligence agency), Gordon abused his position to enrich himself and engage in his love of torture and murder.
An admirer of the Third Reich with a portrait of Hitler in his office, Gordon ran the Automotores Orletti, a former car garage in Buenos Aires that was converted into a torture chamber for those considered enemies to the regime.
Those who survived recall techniques such as the “wet submarine”, where victims were lowered from a hook into a vat of water until they were close to drowning.
THERE was also the “olgada” or hanging treatment, where victims were lowered by a hook onto a floor covered with water and salt and then given electric shocks with cattle prods while buckets of cold water were thrown over them to intensify the pain.
“The Automotores Orletti had already closed down by the time we were kidnapped,” explains Julian.
“There were over 50 of those torture centres around the country.
“The shutdowns were an attempt, prior to the war, by the Junta to try and clean up its act a little – to show the world it was respectable.
“But the state was out of control with operatives like Gordon doing exactly as they pleased.” Clothed for the Presidential meeting but still minus their camera equipment, money and documents, Manyon and the TV Eye team were bundled out of Argentina.
Just weeks later, the Argentinian surrender in the Falklands was complete and the Junta began to collapse. President Galtieri quit within days while for many of the most brutal exponents of the regime, trials awaited.
Sentenced to 16 years in jail in 1986 for another kidnapping, Gordon died in a Buenos Aires hospital 12 months into his term. Requests by the families of his victims for Gordon’s body to have an autopsy recorded were ignored.
Going on to a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent with ITN, it is only now, after his research into who was responsible for his ordeal, that Manyon feels able to make peace with an experience he describes as the most terrifying of his life.
“The worst part was the feeling of total powerlessness,” he says.
“In a war, when you’re being shot at, you can attempt to do something to protect yourself. For the three of us, we were in the hands of people who could kill us and there would be nothing we could do.”
‘I remember thinking these were the last few steps we would ever take. I had a feeling of utter fatalism...’ JULIAN MANYON
Kidnapped By The Junta by Julian Manyon is published by Icon Books, £20