INTERVIEW DR. ROSITZKE/CIA INVOLVEMENT IN NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201160005-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 10, 2008
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 16, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
DATE April 16, 1984 6:11 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Interview Dr. Rositzke/CIA Involvement in Nicaragua
PAT BUCHANAN: Charles Krauthammer of The New Republic,
senior editor, sitting in for Tom Braden.
BUCHANAN: We're going to talk this hour about Nicara-
gua, the mining of the harbor, the reaction to it, official
reaction to the Central Intelligence Agency's apparent involve-
ment, that they ran a mother ship from which some expert frogmen
laid these acoustical mines in the harbors of Nicaragua, three
harbors. And these mines come up and make a horrendous noise on
hitting the hull of a ship. They haven't sunk any yet.
Let's now, though, with Dr. Harry Rositzke, who's the
author of Managing Moscow. It's a new book that's out. Its
subtitle is The Expert Analysis and the True Nature of the
Long-term Soviet Threat. But we want to talk with him now about
an article he wrote in the Washington Post that the CIA really
ought to be out of this operation. Maybe the Pentagon should do
it, if we do it.
BUCHANAN: Why not, given the size of the operation, why
not have the CIA do it?
HARRY ROSITZKE: Well, the reason that the CIA was given
this kind of a job, a so-called covert action job in the old
days, was so they could handle it in such a way that there would
be no direct involvement of the President, that nobody could say,
"Ah-ha. This is an official job." And that so-called plausible
denial operated for a while. With the Bay of Pigs, that was
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broken. For a while it looked like Angola. And now here in
Nicaragua, that reason for CIA doing it no longer exists.
BUCHANAN: Well, can't we -- where was the problem here,
Harry Rositzke? Was it not in the fact that we've got to inform
these two committees of Congress, and members of these committees
don't want any part of our involvement, so therefore they leak it
to their friends at the Washington Post and the New York Times?
ROSITZKE: I doubt if that's the main reason, Pat. I
think the answer is that when you have a large-scale operation in
an area that has all the world's attention, including hundreds of
journalists, that the actual facts cannot be kept quiet. And as
long as somebody persists in, for example, interviewing the
Contras, going up to the border and finding out what they can,
they find that it is a CIA job.
And since, so far as I'm concerned, CIA is supposed to
be a secre intelligence organization, if an operation gets to
this level and it's this kind of noise, then I think the Pentagon
ought to do it and leave the civilians out of it.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: But you aren't talking now about
all CIA operations. I understand that you were the Chief of
Soviet Operations Division at CIA. So you must have had some
involvement in operations behind the Iron Curtain.
ROSITZKE: Well, we had scores of operations in Eastern
Europe, within the Soviet Union itself.
BUCHANAN: Right. Well, Dr. Rositzke, on that line, I
recall the famous incident, the betrayal -- I guess Philby
betrayed them. But didn't you all drop 300 guys into Albania?
ROSITZKE: No, no, no. In the early '50s, there were, I
think, probably several score of Albanians, for the most part,
brought into Albania by boat. Now, that was a paramilitary
affair. The CIA had to do it, since the President wanted it
done, because nobody else could speak Albanian, nobody was in
touch with the Albanians.
BUCHANAN: Well, didn't you fund the Ukrainian war of
resistance all the way up till around 1950?
ROSITZKE: We were in touch with the Ukrainian resis-
tance up to '53.
My point here is that operating in the Soviet Union is a
pretty tough job, and therefore you have to have some people with
some experience in what we called the denied area operations.
But if we're talking about, for example, giving assistance to
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Holdin Roberto in Angola or to the Contras in Nicaragua, it
doesn't take any particular expertise. It might even take an
interpreter or two. But otherwise, all we're doing in the Third
World, now we're talking about, is giving them some arms and some
training. And there is no reason at all why the Special Forces
and the Rangers, and so on, can't do that.
KRAUTHAMMER: But the CIA did a pretty good job in
Guatemala in '54 and in Iran in toppling Mossadegh.
ROSITZKE: That was a very small-scale operation,
Guatemala, and it went pretty well.
BUCHANAN: But that was bigger than the mining.
ROSITZKE: I beg pardon?
BUCHANAN: The operation in Guatemala was at least
scores of guys, or hundreds. It was bigger than the mining,
wasn't it?
ROSITZKE: Oh, yeah, it was. As you may recall, there
was already an organized and trained several battalions of
Guatemalan troops under Colonel Armas in neighboring Honduras.
And actually, if you look at the story -- it has been done up
pretty well since -- it was really a psychological warfare
operation in which radios were telling, mainly, the population in
Guatemala City and the army, saying "An invasion is coming. You
better get rid of this guy."
KRAUTHAMMER: Dr. Rositzke, as I understand it, then,
your criterion for deciding what should be CIA and what should be
Pentagon is a matter of scale. Is that right?
ROSITZKE: I would say any large operation is out. Any
small operation probably could be done by either the Pentagon or
CIA.
KRAUTHAMMER: Now, wouldn't one of the arguments for not
having the Pentagon involved in something like this is that even
though it is hard to deny CIA involvement if that is reported in
the press, it becomes doubly hard if it's the Pentagon; and it
does tie the President and the country much more closely into an
operation?
ROSITZKE: Well, if you have, for example, Marines in
full battle equipment training these people, let us say now, in
Honduras, then obviously the American hand is pretty clear.
KRAUTHAMMER: Yeah, but in Honduras we're not transgres-
sing any principles of international law. In mining harbors,
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there is at least a question about whether we're involved in an
act of war. And it's a conservative senator who's charged the
Administration with having conducted an act of war.
ROSITZKE: Now you're getting on to the mining business.
That is, I gather, even in our own history, a rather unique
operation. I think it's probably one of the most stupidly
planned and clumsily carried out operations I know. And even
without the political and the legal and the moral factors
involved, it obviously isn't designed to achieve its end, which
is to interdict the movement of supplies from Nicaragua to
Salvador.
I, personally, cannot understand why anybody thought
that was a worthwhile activity.
BUCHANAN: Well, look, if the Contras -- Harry Rositzke,
if you arm, train, equip 10,000 or 15,000 guys and they go in, I
gather than when they attack a barracks or blow up a radio
station, that's not clearly designed, either, strictly to
interdict supplies going from Nicaragua to El Salvador. I mean I
think it's a given that the United States is arming an organiza-
tion, which organization, whether we agree or not, has as its
objective the dumping over -- waging war until they dump over the
Sandinista regime. And I think the mining is part and parcel of
that operation.
ROSITZKE: Pat, we're hitting, I think, one of the key
questions about the present policy. There isn't any question the
Contras are in this to regain power in Managua. We have not
officially admitted that. We say we're putting stress on the
Sandinista government to make them come to some kind of a
negotiating table to our satisfaction.
I think what we've done here is started a straight
large-scale subversion, since it's against an established
government, which has gotten beyond control because the Contras
are going to do what they want to do whether we agree or not.
And therefore, to that extent, it really is out of our control.
KRAUTHAMMER: Let me ask you, Dr. Rositzke, as an
experienced man in these matters, do you think there's any chance
that the Contras can achieve either their objective, which is
overthrow, or the American objective, which is to interdict
supplies that go into El Salvador?
ROSITZKE: I think the first is absolutely and totally
unrealistic. We're acting as though there were no real army in
Nicaragua. We know that they're equally well-equipped, they're
fairly large, they have Cuban support, Cuban instruction. And I
think what they've really done now is given up any notion of
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taking over the government, but simply getting on a consistent
plan of economic sabotage. And I do not think that that can, in
effect, get the government out of power.
KRAUTHAMMER: What do you think is an alternative policy
that might advance our interests and moderate the government in
Nicaragua?
ROSITZKE: Well, I have my own formula, which I don't
think really has been tried yet. It would have been a formula
that we would have applied, perhaps, in other instances of this
sort.
There is no reason why we cannot sit down and have
absolutely honest, straightforward, back-and-forth negotiations
with the government in Managua -- we've not had that yet. We've
had a few people stop in and pass a few words -- and actually get
down to pros and cons: What do they want from us? We know what
they want -- what we want from them. Sit down and see if it can
be worked out.
BUCHANAN: Well, let us suppose that they sit down and
tell us all the nice things that we want to hear, but they
continue behaving like Fidel Castro does and state by their
actions that their intention is to expand their revolution and to
dump over the pro-Western, pro-American governments in Central
America and make of Central America a permanent and large
beachhead for Cuba and the Soviet Union in the hemisphere and to
bring the revolution home to the belly of the beast? They don't
tell us that, as they never do, but they indicate so by their
behavior.
ROSITZKE: Look, those little fellows down there are
finding it hard enough to make their own Nicaraguan society go.
BUCHANAN: Well, they're doing a good job of exporting
their revolution to El Salvador.
ROSITZKE: They're pretty badly pressed on supplying
arms to Salvador.
I think the one concrete thing we want from them --let's
not interfere in what they do at home, but cut out actual support
to the Salvadorian rebels.
BUCHANAN: Suppose they continue it?
ROSITZKE: If they continue it, then all I can say is
that the best way I can find of going against that is within
Salvador itself. We're right back where we were in the old days.
BUCHANAN: Well, wait a minute. How can you -- what I'm
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getting at is, look, Salvador can only last so long in this war,
you know. If the guerrillas don't lose the war, they win it.
And as long as the guerrilla war is being sustained by a constant
inflow of personnel and weapons from Nicaragua, then it's really
a matter of time before El Salvador, one way or the other,
collapses.
ROSITZKE: Pat, the evidence isn't all that good on the
extent of outside help that the rebels are now getting. They
seem to have gotten themselves together with, you know, small
arms and ammunition. Probably something is going over the
border, except the government doesn't bother to tell us exactly
what is going over, and perhaps they don't even know.
But you know as well as I that if were interested in
really simply defending Salvador, there would be ways of getting
at border control inside Salvador, of getting any arms that came
through, confining the fighting to Salvador, and then giving,
obviously, the Salvadorian government the wherewithal it needs to
stabilize its own society.
KRAUTHAMMER: Dr. Rositzke, let me switch gears for a
second and ask you what you think about the current arrangements
for the way the Administration tells Congress about its opera-
tions. Do you think that -- as you know, -there's been a chorus
of complaints from some in Congress, notably Senator Moynihan and
Goldwater, that the information about the mining was inadequate.
On the other hand, other senators, like [unintelligible], I
think, and Biden, have indicated that there was adequate informa-
tion.
Do you think that we're creating a situation in which
these leaks are inevitable and all operations are bound to end up
in the New York Times. Or do you think, on the other hand, that
there's not enough being told to Congress and that the Admini-
stration is, in the words of Senator Church -- that the CIA has
become, in the words of Senator Church, a rogue elephant in this
operation?
ROSITZKE: Well, there's a real squeeze there. You have
two Intelligence Committees now that are supposed to be informed.
A couple of years ago, as you know, it was eight, which was
almost an impossible matter for security.
I don't fault the Intelligence Committees. I gather
they've been really very disciplined in not making leaks them-
selves. But when an operation actually blows as much as it has,
then obviously the whole town and the whole world is in on it.
Now, exactly how much Director Casey told them, the
impression I get from the press is he mentioned the mining in a .
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briefing
for
some of, I gather, the House committee. Well, I
don't know
how
many people picked it up, how many people thought
about it.
It
looks to me as though the CIA did not adequately
tell them,
"Look, here's what we're doing. Here are the hazards
involved.
And before we go on, we'd like to have you know what
kind of chances we're taking."
day?
KRAUTHAMMER: Did you tell them more or less in your
ROSITZKE: Well, in the old days hardly anybody wanted
to hear about it. You know, in the '50s and the '60s, there were
-- you know, these were the military committees, mainly. The man
in charge would say, "Well, yes, boys. You go ahead, now. You
go ahead."
ROSITZKE: ...into the Soviet Union which were never
cleaed by the State Department, but the Congress knew about it.
BUCHANAN: Were we better served by that system?
ROSITZKE: I don't think so. No. Because that would
mean that there were almost two independent foreign policies we
were carrying out. You remember in the old days when the
Director of CIA was the brother of the Secretary of State, that
put those two heads together. We don't have anything like that
now.
BUCHANAN: Okay, Harry Rositzke. Thanks very much for
giving us the time.
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