COLUMN ONE : Manila’s Coup of Errors : The Philippine revolt began with a mistake and unfolded in a series of accidents. It nearly succeeded in toppling the government anyway.

The night was quiet in Tagaytay. On a mountaintop perch known as “the palace in the sky,” tall microwave relay towers and radar, a critical military communications link to the south, silently scanned the nation’s most strategic airspace. In the distance, far below, the lights of Manila twinkled.

Suddenly explosions rocked the air. The towers were down. It was 11:45 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 29, and a military mutiny that nearly toppled President Corazon Aquino and plunged her government into its worst crisis had begun.

By the time the rebellion was over in the capital Thursday, at least 83 people had died and 581 were wounded. The nation’s economy reeled. Bomb disposal squads combed luxury condos for booby traps. Aquino had assumed sweeping powers to censor radio and TV, and take over public utilities. Her aides would not rule out another coup attempt.

It never should have unfolded as it did.

The attack on Tagaytay gave Aquino’s government 24 hours’ warning of the coming coup. Capt. Jaime Junio, whose Scout Ranger commando team dynamited the complex, was captured and told all. And the government did almost nothing to prepare.

In coordinated strikes, renegade commandos easily captured the army and marine headquarters, the air force headquarters, and two other key air bases. “They just walked in,” armed forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Oscar Florendo conceded.

But the rebels also erred in the revolt they code-named “7 Days and 7 Nights.” Junio attacked a day too early. Mutineers could not air pre-recorded videotaped victory statements after a government TV executive sabotaged the transmitters. Rebel field officers lost touch in a radio frequency foul-up. And reinforcements never arrived when there were no pilots to fly the fighter planes they captured at a central Philippine air base.

Moreover, the unlikely heroes were a former German stunt man and a Department of Tourism official in designer glasses who won the release of hundreds of foreigners trapped in an urban free-fire zone, while Aquino’s government and the White House stood helplessly by.

It was the sixth coup attempt against Aquino, and it was her worst nightmare. Every armed force and every political faction that had backed previous coups combined in a single effort, drawing with them young, reform-minded officers who had never before challenged the government. Now they joined to battle a government they charge is ineffective in solving the nation’s problems, tolerant of corruption and lax in pressing the war against Communist insurgents.

There are idealistic followers of renegade army Lt. Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan, now a career coup plotter and a highly regarded military strategist. There were well-financed and heavily armed Marcos loyalists, followers of the late Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos and led by rebel Brig. Gen. Jose Zumel. And there were politicians. Even her own vice president, Salvador H. Laurel, called for her to resign while his deputy, Homobono Adaza, told reporters he wanted to be “spokesman for the junta and we can execute some people.”

And money was no problem. Mutinous troops lined up during lulls in the battle to collect $15 a day. Battalion commanders were paid $5,000, nearly a year’s pay for most. One officer, captured south of the capital, carried $2,500 in “crisp, new bills,” Florendo said.

It was a harrowing week of death and destruction, of heroism and pain. At one point, pro-government Pvt. Robert Salvador fired his jeep-mounted 90-millimeter recoilless rifle at a rebel armored personnel carrier, toppling the vehicle and helping to stop a pre-dawn Sunday assault on armed forces headquarters at Camp Aguinaldo.

“When I looked inside, I saw five persons. All dead. And one was my older brother, Roger,” Salvador said in a flat voice. “If I didn’t kill him, he might kill me or my companions. It hurts, but that’s the way it is in war.”

Marines Came

The battle began in earnest at 11 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, a full day after Junio’s attack on the Tagaytay towers, an hour’s drive south of Manila. A battalion of 750 marines suddenly appeared at the Villamor Air Base, in a south Manila suburb, home of the main Philippine air force aerial assault forces.

“The airport police were not prepared for them and they took over in less than an hour,” Florendo said. As mortars roared, Brig. Gen. Loven Abadia, commander of Villamor’s main helicopter strike wing, looked up to see a .30-caliber machine gun aimed his way. He jumped from his first-floor window, sprinted across a field and climbed a fence to escape.

A mile away, renegade army Scout Rangers occupied Ft. Bonifacio, headquarters for the army and marines, taking the entire army operations general staff hostage. Others captured Sangley Air Base, across Manila Bay, and its aging T-28 fighter-bombers and Sikorsky helicopters armed with rockets. Marines captured the government-run television Channel 4, the station that Aquino’s military supporters used to bring her to power in the “people power” revolution of February, 1986.

It was the first time since that revolt that a coup force had taken and held Channel 4. So confident were the rebels that one scrawled, “We’ll miss you” on an office portrait of Aquino. But the station director, before he fled, had deliberately removed the “visual exciter,” a five-watt crystal that permits transmission.

Shortly after daybreak Friday, rebel pilots took off in three T-28s, called “Tora Toras” here. Swooping low over the city, they strafed Aquino’s complex at Malacanang Palace, shattering windows in the press room. One fired a rocket, hitting a coconut tree and the justice secretary’s car. Government F-5 jets flew overhead but did not fire at the attacker.

Brig. Gen. Edgardo Abenina, a rebel ringleader, insisted that no one wanted to kill Aquino. “We just wanted to scare her,” he said.

Aquino was scared. Rebels controlled her top military bases. More important, they controlled the skies. And the head of military logistics at armed forces headquarters had gone over, taking huge stores of ammunition, trucks and fuel.

A column of 500 rebel reinforcements was headed to Manila from northern Cagayan province. A ship had landed 400 rebels at Mactan Air Base, 350 miles south in Cebu province, capturing two fighter jets, six helicopter gunships and a C-130 transport plane. Even though their pilots had fled, it effectively cut the country in half.

Shortly after noon Friday, Aquino spoke to U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Platt by phone and accepted President Bush’s offer of help.

It arrived 45 minutes later in the form of three U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom fighter jets. They joined a squadron of Philippine F-5’s and roared over the Sangley Air Base. While the Phantoms provided cover, the government jets destroyed eight planes on the ground. The F-4 cover was maintained until 6 a.m. Saturday.

Most agree that the air assault stopped the rebels cold. “The greatest crime is we had victory in our hands,” Abenina said. A U.S. Embassy official did not disagree. “By 1 p.m. (Friday), they had the government.”

Hanging signs out front saying “Closed for Holiday,” the embassy barred its gates and helicoptered in 100 heavily armed U.S. Marines, who took over the ballroom and set up positions in the neatly tended gardens. Two aircraft carriers, the Enterprise and Midway, were put on alert for possible evacuation of Americans.

Retaking the skies gave Aquino the upper hand. In sometimes-fierce fighting, government troops retook all the Manila-area bases except Ft. Bonifacio by Saturday night. The column from Cagayan was stopped. Fierce fighting raged in and around Camp Aguinaldo, nerve center of the Philippine armed forces and the civilian Department of Defense, but the camp held.

If Aquino’s pilots ruled the air, they didn’t always use it well. One F-5 strafed government troops behind Aguinaldo, killing six with friendly fire. A Sikorsky helicopter, firing at rebels from too high and too far away, instead rocketed a house in the ritzy White Plains subdivision.

As their losses mounted, the rebels turned to a fallback plan. Apparently unnoticed, they had scouted the Makati business district and had begun storing caches of arms, ammunition and food.

Makati is the showcase of Aquino’s administration, a square mile of steel-and-glass office towers, $300,000 condominiums, and five-star hotels, surrounded by the most exclusive subdivisions in Manila.

That night, the battle of Makati began. More than 400 renegade Scout Rangers and several members of a civilian gun club took sniper positions on rooftops and behind walls. For four long days, they trapped more than 2,000 foreigners and Filipinos as they fired bazookas, grenade launchers and machine guns against government troops.

Aquino Ultimatum

Aquino had already declared the coup crushed, and Sunday she issued an ultimatum to the mutinous troops: “Surrender or die,” she warned. They fought instead.

Bullets riddled the Japanese and British embassies. Rebel snipers in black berets fired from the same building as the Australian Embassy. Fires blazed inside The Atrium, a swanky nine-story shopping mall and office complex. Red Cross ambulances and a group of nuns came under fire. Red tracer bullets filled the sky over Forbes Park, home of top politicians, diplomats and businessmen.

“Wednesday night at 6 p.m., it sounded like the Tet offensive,” said Galen Radke, a former U.S. Embassy military attache who was trapped in the Olympic Tower. “The amount of ammunition expended in this area was fantastic.”

Inside the area’s three international hotels and a dozen apartment towers, people cowered in fear. In the Tuscany tower, Peggy Matheson, a Norwegian Embassy employee, hid in the basement after shots blasted her bedroom window.

“It went behind my maid and it ended in my bed,” she said.

In the Blanco Central Apartments, Candy Lehmann, 33, stuffed a mattress against the shattered window and hid in the bathroom. For four days, she rationed her only food: a can of litchis and a can of tuna fish.

“I didn’t have a phone,” she said later, still shaking from the ordeal. “I didn’t have electricity. I didn’t have radio or TV. I didn’t have food. And there was bombing all around.”

In the Peninsula Hotel, staff closed the pool Saturday. Public rooms were shut Sunday. The bars closed Monday. At 6 a.m. Tuesday, with a firefight raging outside, the 620 guests were herded into a dining room without windows. They slept there that night, curling up on the carpet.

“They fed us and gave us free beer the last couple of days,” said Dr. Harry Richardson, a Canadian physician who had been at the Peninsula to speak at the Philippine Congress on Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. The conference was canceled.

President Bush telephoned Aquino to check on trapped Americans. Japanese, West German, British and other officials also called, putting tremendous pressure on the beleaguered Philippine president. “I’ve never gotten so many calls,” she told aides.

Relief came from an unlikely source. Acting on his own, Rafael Alunan, Philippine Department of Tourism undersecretary in charge of public assistance, broadcast an appeal for an evacuation of tourists and his phone number on radio stations DZRH and DZMM at midnight Monday.

“We are here to ensure the safety, comfort and convenience of tourists from the time they arrive to the time they leave,” Alunan said, when asked to explain his role. “There were tourists trapped and it was our job to get them out.”

He repeated his radio appeal at 3 a.m., and again at 6 a.m.

“Then someone called me probing,” Alunan said. He called his friend and sky-diving instructor, Max Motchmann. The former German paratrooper and movie stunt man knew many of the rebel leaders from their parachute jumps together. Soon Motchmann got a call.

Talking to rebel Lt. Col. Rafael Galvez by phone, Alunan and Motchmann arranged to send buses into Makati early Tuesday to evacuate the tourists. But the plan collapsed when heavy firing broke out. At 3:45 that afternoon, they tried another tack.

Motchmann donned a seven-pound vest of body armor thick enough to stop machine gun bullets. Alunan shed his sport coat. Together with a national police colonel, they jogged nearly a mile through Makati’s eerily deserted high-rise canyons, dashing for cover or dropping to the street as shots came their way.

When they reached the rebel stronghold at the Inter-Continental Hotel, Motchmann offered packs of Hope and Marlboro cigarettes to Galvez and Maj. Abraham Puruggunan. As the fiercest fire fight yet blazed outside, they talked in the ballroom for nearly an hour.

“No politics,” said Motchmann. “Just sky-diving and how to get these people out.”

The agreement was simple. A cease-fire began at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, although one rebel was shot to death two hours later as he stood behind the Twin Towers condominiums. His barefoot body still lay on the steps six hours later.

By 7 a.m., the first buses filed slowly past the burned-out buses and shell-pocked fire engines that had barricaded fashionable Ayala Avenue. By the time Motchmann had checked each building that afternoon, only a few stragglers remained.

“There was one Arab, but the maid was afraid to wake him up,” Motchmann said. “Others were born again. They said they weren’t afraid.”

It didn’t matter. Government negotiators had stepped in. By midnight, the rebels had agreed to return to barracks. And shortly after dawn Thursday, they did, 418 renegade troops marching four-abreast in formation, singing and carrying their weapons along Ayala Avenue behind a waving Philippine flag.

Many Questions

For now, there are more questions than answers. The rebels are under guard at Ft. Bonifacio and no one says how or if they will be punished. President Aquino must try to repair her credibility at home and abroad. Her military is deeply divided. The economy faces a flight of foreign investment. And with up to half of the original rebels and most of their leaders still at large, another coup threatens.

But the week of war in the Philippines had an especially bitter price for Pvt. Salvador, the 25-year-old government soldier who shot his own brother.

“I couldn’t do anything,” he said, sitting on his mother’s couch beside a twinkling Christmas tree. “He turned left. I turned right. I did my job. I had no idea my brother was inside (the vehicle).”