ISLAND REBELS

      You’ve probably seen beguiling advertisements inviting tourists to visit the tiny coral islet of  Anguilla, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean roughly 1,200 miles southeast of Miami. 

      How irresistible! Surrounded by azure water, it’s an “escape to paradise” with “the best beaches in the world.” The promotions promise you a “charming, modern and iconic” getaway that's fine enough "for the likes of a Beyonce and LeBron James," and “you don’t have to be a celebrity to feel like one in Anguilla.”

      But that island was dirt poor and little known when I saw it for the first time in 1967 –- fresh out of college and lucky to be starting my journalism career as a foreign correspondent based in Puerto Rico with responsibility for coverage of the entire sweep of the Caribbean island chains. 

      What I didn't expect was that going to Anguilla enabled me to score an amazing news “scoop,” but also almost cost me my life. 

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      I went to Anguilla to cover a “rebellion” by most of the 2,000 citizens, populated largely by descendants of escaped sugarcane field slaves. They were calling for an end to their union with St. Kitts-Nevis, a slightly larger composition of two volcanic islands in the eastern Caribbean Sea some 60 miles away. 

      The linkage of islands was part of a geopolitical masterplan that Great Britain drafted to divest its former Caribbean colonies.

      Anguillans felt they’d been gypped in the deal, that they were “second-class” compared to people on  St. Kitts-Nevis.

     I never would’ve made the trip if it hadn’t been for Sixto Dias, a freelance Puerto Rican pilot who owned a small business in San Juan. Using a modified DC-3 plane dating back to World War II, he carried cargo for clients.

      Dias made pickups and deliveries when he flew to the Windward and Leeward Islands. On Fridays, he handled an array of products such as lobsters caught by Anguillans and sold to fancy San Juan restaurants.

     Our first contact was June 16, a Friday, of course. He called mid-afternoon when I was in my apartment in Old San Juan, which was the “bureau” for United Press International, my employer. 

      That’s right,  I lived in the UPI office at that time. And I was the bureau “chief” because I was the only staffer. A teletype machine in a spare bedroom clattered all day and night to have constant contact with UPI’s headquarters in New York.

      Dias told me he had just flown to San Juan from Anguilla and brought a passenger named Peter Adams, who said he had come to announce that the island severed its ties to St. Kitts-Nevis and that he was “president of the ruling council and spokesman” for the new government. 

      Although I’d never heard of Anguilla, I asked Adams to come over for an interview. He told me the revolt started a few days earlier, when locals disarmed six resident St. Kitts police officers, tossed them into a boat and sent them out to sea. He had a letter from the council to confirm his account of the actions.

      Now, he said, Anguilla wanted to be a territory of the United States like the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands.

      As I listened, Adams made clear that he'd had to leave Anguilla to announce what happened because there were no telephones on the island. Not even radio amateurs could communicate with people there, short of putting a message in a bottle.

      That’s when I realized I had a genuine “exclusive” story, so I wrote a report quickly and sent it to UPI in New York on that noisy teletype machine in my apartment.

     The next morning, my report was on the front page of The New York Times, which rarely published any news service reports. It preferred to rely on its own far-flung team of journalists. 

      The headline was straightforward: “Anguilla, Caribbean Coral Islet, Asks to Become U.S. Territory” with a map showing where the island was located.

      Publication of my story so prominently in The Times sparked high interest at other news organizations, partly because it had a “Mouse that Roared” quality which tickled editors’ imaginations around the world. So reporters at broadcast networks as well as newspapers and magazines flooded me with calls, seeking help to contact Peter Adams. They assumed that I had a direct way to reach him, but he’d gone back to Anguilla.

      For the next few weeks, Adams and other activists on Anguilla were effectively out of touch. And to keep all outsiders away, oil drums were placed on the runway of the little airstrip. They were 

rolled off only for Dias’ Friday lobster pickups.

      But my Dias connection helped again when he returned from a trip to Anguilla and told me the governing council had invited me – and only me – to report on an island-wide election. At issue was a proposal for independence. 

      On the day of the voting, Dias flew me to Anguilla. After the results were clear, I left at 2 a.m. in a fast motorboat that took me to French-Dutch St. Martin/St. Maarten, the closest island where phone service was available. From there, I called UPI.

      I was the only journalist able to report that Anguillans voted

overwhelmingly to secede from St. Kitts, and would seek a new arrangement with aprotective power, now preferentially Britain.

      Once more,  The New York Times used my “exclusive” on the front page.

      I had to sleep that night in the St. Maarten jail because there were no hotels open after I finished work shortly before dawn. The police duty officer let me use a spare cot in one of the cells .

      A few weeks later, Dias called to say Adams was with him and asked him to bring me back to Anguilla right away. He thought St. Kitts officials were about to try to retake the island by force. He  wanted me there to report it to the world when it occurred.

      The three of us left for Anguilla  very early the next morning, with Dias in the cockpit of his trusty DC-3. Much of the space in the fuselage was used as a chilled storage unit to take frozen

food to St. Croix, an impromptu stop for Dias in his lucrative island delivery side hustle.

      As we were cruising over the water, there was a sudden “bam” sound, a jolt and a fire broke out in the port engine. The aways unflappable Dias studied the instrument panel.

      "We're not making it to St. Croix, we're ditching," he shouted as he put out a "Mayday" distress call.

      The flight turned into a nailbiter.

       We heard a U.S. Coast Guard response – an offer to launch a rescue operation in the shark-infested Caribbean sea before a sign off with a casual “good luck.”

      As Dias struggled to get his flying antique closer to St. Croix, he told me to find and open an escape hatch behind his seat when we hit the water. 

      Anxiety set in. I envisioned wrestling with a weighty, rusty, outward-opening iron door in a rapidly sinking plane. 

      The next ten minutes? Utter chaos. Dias grappled with the controls as the plane was losing altitude and bucking like an Amarillo colt.

      One of the two 20-year-old engines was straining, the other trailing flames and oily smoke.

      But  with a whole lot of divine intervention, we narrowly cleared a beach hurricane barrier before a hard landing on the St. Croix tarmac. We then veered off the runway, with airport fire trucks in pursuit.

      As soon as Adams got the back door open, he bolted

through it, followed by Dias and me.

      Some hours later, I called my UPI boss to describe what happened. I was expecting a pat on the back for my near-death dedication. 

      All he said was, "No headline is worth dying for, kid."