Ambush at Daybreak

Puerto Rican terrorists kill two U.S. sailors

At 6:40 on a balmy morning last week, the yellow bus wheeled out of the U.S. Navy compound in Toa Baja, a San Juan suburb. Bouncing in their seats, the passengers--13 men and five women--dozed or talked quietly as they traveled the familiar route from the Sabana Seca Communications Station to a radio transmitter site four miles away. Nobody paid any attention to a green pickup truck that was following close behind.

About a mile from Sabana Seca, the truck suddenly accelerated. It passed the bus, slowed, and forced the bigger vehicle to a halt beside a trash dump. Simultaneously, a white van that had been parked down the road came roaring toward the scene, and the blast of automatic weapons fire shattered the dawn silence. The fusillade from the white van lasted for 30 seconds--"a lifetime," said one survivor--and when it was over two U.S. sailors lay dead and ten others, including all of the women, were wounded. The dead were Petty Officer 1st Class John R. Ball, 29, of Madison, Wis., and Radioman 3rd Class Emil E. White, 20, of Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands, who was driving the bus.

Credit for the savage attack, the worst outbreak of political violence in Puerto Rico in two decades, was claimed by three terrorist groups that favor Puerto Rico's independence from the U.S.: the Volunteers for the Puerto Rican Revolution, the Boricua Popular Army, and the Armed Forces of Popular Resistance. "We are not playing at war," they declared in a note left in a telephone booth. "We are prepared to take this struggle to its ultimate consequences." The murders, they said, were in retaliation for a police ambush that killed two young leftists in July 1978, and for the death of Angel Rodriguez Cristobal. An activist, Cristobal was arrested last May with 20 other protesters for trespassing on Vieques Island, which the Navy uses for bombing and shelling practice and amphibious exercises. Last month he was found dead in his cell at a federal prison in Tallahassee, Fla. His death was ruled a suicide, but pro-independence activists charged he was murdered.

More broadly, the left-wing terrorist groups oppose any movement of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico toward statehood. If he is re-elected next year, Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo has promised to hold a plebiscite in 1981 to let Puerto Ricans choose between statehood, independence and the status quo. A second cause for protesters is the Navy's determination to keep using Vieques for maneuvers.

After the killings, FBI Agent Bernard Perez said: "An open attack is a new thing. It could be an escalation." Officials worriedly recalled the stealing of hundreds of pounds of explosives from a construction site in October 1978 and the looting of weapons from a police armory last spring. One potential flashpoint for more violence: Navy maneuvers that are expected to be held in late January or early February. Anti-Navy protesters are already planning mass demonstrations.

After last week's attack, American service personnel were advised not to wear their uniforms off post or to get into potentially dangerous situations. Navy personnel are now traveling in small vans that have police-car escorts. Riding shotgun in the vans are Marines that the Pentagon flew to Puerto Rico after the bus ambush.

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