NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301630009-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 21, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: March 15, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM The Fred F i s k e Show STATION W A M U- F M
DATE March 15, 1985 9:05 P.M.
SUBJECT Nicaragua
Washington, D.C.
FRED FISKE: The controversy over Nicaragua continues,
with President Reagan taking a firmer, more open stance regarding
the Sandinista regime and the United States-supported Contras,
and with divisions in the Congress as well as in the press
concerning all of this.
Recently, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs released a
report, "The Military Balance in Central America: An Analysis
and Critical Evaluation of Administration Claims."
That's a long title, Larry.
Among the writers of this report are Colin Danvy (?),
who is with COHA, Colin?
COLIN DANVY: Yes. ~
/~ ////Gft/l'`
FISKE: David McMichael, who is a former CIA analyst.
And we have both of those gentlemen here.
David, good evening to you, so we can establish your
DAVID MCMICHAEL: Thank you.
FISKE: And a more familiar voice, that of Lawrence
Burns, who is Director of COHA.
Now, I understand that you are a former Marine, David,
and that you were a CIA analyst concerned with Central America?
MCMICHAEL: Both those statements are true, Fred. Yes.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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2
FISKE: And that your contract with the CIA was not
renewed.
MCMICHAEL: That is true. I left on the expiration of
my two-year contract in April of 1983.
FISKE: Why was your contract not renewed?
MCMICHAEL: Well, it was a two year contract and I had
completed two years, and the determination was not to extend or
to renew it.
FISKE: Well, do you suspect that there was some reason
for that? Were you expecting or hoping that the contract would
be renewed, as it usually is? Don't I understand that you, in
fact, made arguments or recommendations or criticisms in the CIA
concerning Central America which didn't sit well with your
superiors?
MCMICHAEL: Well, I certainly was in disagreement with
the policy toward Nicargua, especially as it was based on the
alleged arms flow from Nicaragua to El Salvador, because in my
judgment the evidence did not support Administration claims of
such a flow.
FISKE: Didn't that play a part in the decision not to
renew your contract?
MCMICHAEL: Arguably, it did. But that was not so
stated to me at the time I left.
FISKE: All right.
You charge in this report, gentlemen, that the Admini-
stration is misleading the Congress and the public about Nicara-
guan activity in El Salvador. Would you make the case?
COLIN DANVY: Well, it's not so much the activity in El
Salvador, something that David has worked on before, so much as
the intentions that lie behind the arms buildup that has been
carried on by the Sandinista government. The Administration has
consistently claimed that their intentions are aggressive, that
they want to intimidate, or perhaps even conquer, neighboring
states.
We found that the buildup -- and there certainly has
been a buildup -- is in fact defensive, and that it has been
impelled by the attacks by the Contra forces backed by the United
States, and also by the very real fear of a direct U.S. invasion.
MCMICHAEL: Another factor there, too, Fred, is that
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this is not a study simply of Nicaragua's arms buildup, it is an
examination of the regional arms buildup. The whole region has
been militarizing, and over the last four years the armed forces
of all the countries in Central America, save in Costa Rica,
which has no formal military, have doubled, even tripled in size.
And the amount of sophisticated weaponry that's been introduced
into the region, particularly in aircraft -- which, incidentally,
one of the things, we point out, that Nicaragua almost entirely
lacks -- has really changed the situation there. And in the
regional context, one of the things we point out is that Nicara-
gua is far more defensively postured than the other countries, in
terms of weaponry it does possess. And in terms of the overall
size of its armed forces, it is by no means predominant in the
region. The other countries, alone or in combination...
FISKE: Do I understand correctly from your report that
in fact the Nicaraguan armed forces are probably larger and
stronger than those of any other single Central American country,
but that when you add up the forces, the manpower, the tanks, the
planes and so on, of other countries in the area, that in fact
they would outbalance those of Nicaragua?
MCMICHAEL: The total Nicaraguan armed forces on active
duty, in terms of number of personnel, are larger than any other
single country, but not by very much, as a matter of fact. A
very few thousand in the case of, for example, El Salvador,
particularly. But since they, for example, possess no combat
aircraft worth mentioning at all, it's very difficult to say they
are stronger than any other country.
DANVY: In overall terms, the armed forces of E1
Salvador are probably the strongest, particularly given their
ability to move an entire battalion of troops by means of their
Huey helicopters supplied by the United States, the strength of
their Air Force to conduct bombing, and the extent of U.S.
training that they've gotten.
As David pointed out, the Nicaraguans have the largest
military force in terms of personnel, although it's only really
about ten thousand larger than those of El Salvador. But in
terms of hardware, equipment and capacity, El Salvador probably
has the strongest. Honduras still has an air force which is
predominant in the region.
But the overall point, if we're trying to make these
comparisons -- and this is something that we point out in the
report -- is that there is no country in Central American that
really has the military capacity decisively to invade any other
country. These are all small countries. None of them are very
strong militarily. The difficulties of terrain and logistics are
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so great that in fact it's, in the case of Central America, only
the United States that possesses the capacity to invade any other
country at the moment.
FISKE: Larry, this is the longest you've ever sat at a
microphone without saying something.
LAWRENCE BURNS: I'm sitting here in rapt amazement at
my colleagues, their sound perceptions.
What are we talking about here? I think what we're
talking about is an environment, a political and military
environment that has bee superheated by Administration policy, an
overreaction, a significant, almost a desperate overreaction that
is proving to be extremely costly in terms of our generalized
foreign policy goals.
We were visited recently by the Swedish Undersecretary
of the Foreign Ministry, Pierre Sharie (?), a man who is probably
Europe's most knowledgeable Latin Americanist, a person who's
written a book, knows all of the actors...
FISKE: Sort of a Swedish Larry Burns?
BURNS: He's a Swedish Larry Burns, and he gets his
regular briefings from the American Larry Burns.
But what he said to me -- we were talking about U.S.
policy. And he was going to meet a series of U.S. dignitaries.
He just met them, including the Deputy Secretary of State and
others. And I was coming forth with a modality of what I would
say if I would be he at these meetings. And he said to me, "I
think that you are a patsy. That you're much too mild on this.
Because I think that U.S. national interests are being betrayed
right now in Central America. And I think a much more forthright
presentation has to be made."
And then he went through an extraordinary litany of
reports coming out of Europe that I wasn't even aware of.
For example, the Spanish Parliament, including the most
conservative political parties, as I understand it, unanimously
passed a resolution condemning U.S. policy in Nicaragua.
All the parties of the Swedish Parliament, conservative
as well as the Social Democratic Party, have passed a similar
resolution. In fact, the Secretary General of the Social
Democratic Party called us up the other day from Stockholm and he
wanted the telex numbers of all the congressmen and senators to
send them telegrams from Swedish parliamentarians.
They have been -- our congressmen have been visited and
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have received communications from parliamentarians throughout
Europe. Even a man like the Italian Prime Minister, on his
recent trip here, who toes the line on Administration NATO
policy, said, when he was here, "We're unhappy about Nicaragua."
And one of the things they're unhappy about is they
feel, quite correctly, that the kinds of quality moments, in
terms of foreign policy strategizing, thta the Administration
should be given over to the problems in the Philippines and the
problems in Afghanistan, the problems in Central Europe and
disarmament, are being diverted to a minor foreign policy where
no real national security interests are at stake.
FISKE: I don't know if you fellows know somebody named
Jim Girard, Jr. He wrote to me recently and he did this column
for the Washington Times. He's concerned with the problems of
Central America. He's formerly a Hill staffer. And he quotes
Humberto Ortega, who is Minister of Defense of Nicaragua and a
brother of Daniel Ortega, chief of the junta: "We are not going
to give ourselves a false name. Our revolution has a profoundly
anti-imperialist, profoundly revolutionary, profoundly class
nature. We are anti-Yankee. We are against the bourgeoisie. We
guide ourselves by the scientific doctrine of revolution, of
Marxism-Leninism. Without Sandinism, we cannot be Marxist-
Leninists. And Sandinism without Marxism and Leninism cannot be
revolutionary. So we are making the effort to transform our
society in a revolutionary way, not a reformist way."
If in fact he's describing the Sandinista government,
they describe themselves as Marxist-Leninist, it would seem that
the United States would have some justifiable concern about their
eventual intentions and their existence in this hemisphere. It
would seem -- this column goes on to point out that many of the
people who are in the opposition, among the Contras, are people
who were Sandinistas, who supported their revolution, who were
opposed to the Somozas. People like Alfonso Robain (?), like
Eden Pastora, like Arturo Cruz, like Jose Francisco Cardenal,
Jose Esteban Gonzales.
How do you like that Spanish?
BURNS: Excellent. It's bilingual.
FISKE: Violetta Chamorro, and on and on and on, a whole
long list of people who are anti-Somozista.
BURNS: Your Spanish began to lapse there....
FISKE: If these people are concerned about the direct-
ion that the Sandinista revolution has taken, why are we not
justified being concerned?
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BURNS: Well, I'll have a quick go at that, and then
I'll turn it over to the rest of you folks.
I was down in Nicaragua on several occasions and I had
conversations with various members of the junta. In fact, we
attended a meeting with the directorate, the junta, and the
details of that meeting were later relayed in the New York Times
article by Alan Riding, who was also at that meeting. And he
quoted me as saying to the junta people, "Why do you have to use
all this Marxist palaver? Why don't you just get on with
reconstructing this country?"
And the response, both at that meeting and afterward at
a reception that evening which a lot of the folks from the
Sandinista government came to, was that this is a mixed govern-
ment, there are Marxists. in this government. There are non-
Marxists in the government. The important determinant is that
this is not a Moscow satellite. This had very little to do with
Moscow. It was not Moscow that brought about the victory of the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It was the social democrats in
Venezuela. It was Torrijos in Panama. It was the PRE (?) Party
in Mexico. And it was the PLM Party, and so forth, in Costa
Rica. The Soviets had no role in the Sandinista victory.
Now, right after July '79, when they came to power, I
feel, my own perception, that the Sandinistas were excessive in
some of their policies, certainly their policy toward -- the
initial policy towards the Miskito Indians, which they themselves
acknowledge was a mistake. It was clearly a mistake.
I think that they were too flippant in terms of press
censorship questions, and there were human rights violations,
which caused concern to folks like ourselves, who expressed them
publicly at the time.
But we felt that the situation in Nicaragua was very
fluid, very open to all kinds of influences, and that the status
of pluralism in Nicaragua waxed and waned according to outside
conditions, and that there was a kind of struggle, both on the
outside and the inside, to maintain pluralism against the more
doctrinaire thinkers there.
But the question really was, and came down to, was there
an open society in Nicaragua? And the answer that I would come
up with that, at any time, the situation in Nicaragua, while
never comparable to a Sweden or to a Holland or to a Costa Rica,
it was certainly easily comparable to situations in El Salvador,
Honduras and Guatemala, which would be much more logical places
to compare Nicaragua, because its history was more similar to
those countries. And certainly Nicaragua was never a threat to
any of its neighbors.
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DANVY: And actually, if we're going to make that kind
of a comparison, its human rights picture, while not perfect, is
qualitatively better than that of any of those three neighbors
that you just mentioned.
Certainly, the U.S. has rights to be concerned about
threats to its national security and the security of the hemis-
phere in general. But...
FISKE: Don't we, with justification, have a right to
understand that Marxist-Leninist states regard it as a sacred
duty to spread their political philosophy?
DANVY: Well, that's very frequently asserted, but no
one's been able to confirm quotations attributed to that effect.
There is nothing in Marxist writings that...
FISKE: Well, not in Marxist writings, but in Leninist
writings there certainly are.
DANVY: Well, even in Leninist writings. This is an
attempt to make, usually, an a priori argument: Because these
people are Marxist, therefore they're communists, therefore
they're aggressors.
FISKE: What does Marxist-Leninist mean to you? What
does Marxist-Leninist mean to you?
MCMICHAEL: You know, before, you know, we get into that
sort of near-theological question, I think I could refer many of
your listeners to, I think, the very best book on this with
reference to the region, particularly, is that by Arthur
McGovern, the Jesuit priest on the philosophy faculty at the
University of Detroit, called Marxism- and -- American- Christianity.
That's slightly mistitled but that s basics y it, which hand es
many of the varieties of descriptions of Marxism-Leninism,
particularly the way it's been used in Latin America and so
forth .
Getting back to some-of your previous statements, Fred,
the one I would choose to deal with is that introducing most of
those involved today, either in the Contra or in the overt and
very strong opposition to the Sandinistas, as former Sandinistas
or former fighters in the revolution. I think it has to be
understood that by 1977-78, when it was clear that Somoza's game
was up and he had to leave -- and, of course, he overstayed and
his whole system came down with him -- that there were many
people in opposition to Somoza, for a whole variety of reasons.
And most of those you mentioned were not Sandinistas. So that
Eden Pastora is the only one demonstrably so.
FISKE: According to this column by Girard, he lists a
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whole lot of them as former Sandinistas. Robain, for example.
Alfonso Robain, a leader of the first revolution, a member of the
original Sandinista junta.
MCMICHAEL: Oh, that's Alfonso Robelo. Alfonso Robelo
was never a Sandinista. As a matter of fact, he's the head of
something -- his own group called the Movemento Democratico
Nacional, the National Democratic Movement. And that is true.
He was, as a matter of fact, on the first junta of the Government
of National Reconstruction, and quit that himself.
Arturo Cruz, whom you mentioned, for example, has not
lived in Nicaragua...
MCMICHAEL: He was the Ambassador of Nicaragua to the
United States.
MCMICHAEL: Under the current government, yes, the
Government of National Reconstruction. And he was an official of
the Inter-American Development Bank. You know, has not lived in
Nicaragua for many, many years, and is not, by any definition, a
Sandinista.
junta...
Violetta Chamorro, who was also originally on the first
FISKE: Well, let me point out...
MCMICHAEL: What this does point out, Fred, is the
pluralist nature of the governing structure from the very
beginning in Nicaragua, where all these people had posts within
the government, and for whatever reason have decided to leave
them. In some cases stay within the country in opposition, and
in other cases go out of the country in opposition.
FISKE: It could also be argued that if people of such
wide-varying background who had confidence and faith in and hope
for the Sandinista revolution at the outset, so that in fact they
served it -- and there's a list of 20 of them here -- and who, in
spite of their varying backgrounds, have parted company with this
administration and look upon it and speak about it critically,
and in some cases are actively opposing it, they're working with
the Contras, that there'd be some sane reason for it.
BURNS: Well, Fred, not entirely, actually. It would be
very much like listing to a foreign audience a list of
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conservative Democrats who defected from the Democratic Caucus
vote in the House of Representatives, that if these people are
leaving or dropping out of the caucus or voting against official
Democratic Party positions, that somehow this is something to say
about the Democratic Party. Now, it clearly...
FISKE: Larry, it seems to me that on previous programs
you have spoken with great affection and admiration of Arturo
Cruz.
BURNS: Right.
FISKE: And he's among these.
BURNS: Right. Okay. Let me just run over those names
a bit for you. Each name deserves its own story.
Arturo Cruz is clearly in a class by himself, as is Eden
Pastora. Those are two special situations.
Violetta Chamorro, the wife of the famous publisher, a
totally apolitical person. She used to live just a block or two
away from this radio station when she was in Washington. She was
brought on the junta as an act of sentiment by the government.
She was never very political political and she was never profes-
sedly a Sandinista, really. She had a personal problem, and the
problem was that her family was split over the Sandinista
government. That is, one of her sons was vigorously, Pedro
Joaquin, was vigorously opposed to the government from the very
beginning. Another one was the editor of the government news-
paper. There were splits in the family. And she had a neurolo-
gical situation, and for reasons of health she dropped out.
Now, in recent years her criticism of the government has
increased. But it was not so much a political statement, about
her departure. It was really a more personal matter.
FISKE: Well, even if I accept that, we have people, for
example, as Archbishop Obando y Bravo, who's head of the Nicara-
guan Catholic Church and a former Sandinista.
MCMICHAEL: Wait a minute. He is not. Let's get this
straight, Fred. Dr. Obando y Bravo is the Archbishop of Managua,
which does not make him the head of the Nicaraguan Catholic
Church, if you know the structure of governance in the Catholic
Church.
FISKE: Well, that's the way Girard lists him.
MCMICHAEL: Well, you see, that displays Mr. Girard's
ignorance, which goes throughout the column.
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FISKE: Did you read the column? Have you read this
MCMICHAEL: I have just heard your reading of it. And
as I say, when he lists these people...
FISKE: Well, then, maybe you oughtn't say it goes
throughout the column.
MCMICHAEL: Well, yes. But when he lists these people
as former Sandinistas, who are not -- on July 19th, 1979, for
example, Archbishop Obando y Bravo was found not in Managua
celebrating the triumph. He was in Caracas, Venezuela trying to
round up opposition to the Sandinistas. That's precisely where
he was on that day. He has been a determined enemy of the
Sandinistas throughout.
BURNS: If one would have nothing to say about any of
the other names, I think that the fact that the author of that
column lists that man's name as a Sandinista somewhat casts a
shadow on the research that went into that.
FISKE: He says "former Sandinista supporter."
BURNS: He was never a Sandinista supporter. Quite to
the contrary, he was a vigorous Somoza supporter.
Now, at the end, of course, it was very much like after
World War II. There were no Germans, there were just Austrians,
if you took a trip to Central Europe. Naturally, no one close to
the end of -- you see, one of the problems, one of the unique
situations in Nicaragua was that the upper class and the solid
middle class had become more and more anti-Somoza because of
Somoza's domination of the economy -- it amounted to something
like 65 percent of the economy was personally owned -- and the
limitation of opportunities for entrepreneurship under the Somoza
regime. So Somoza -- and Somoza, of course, had a policy of
great favoritism to certain people. So the people who were not
being favored, people of wealth and station, were very anti-
Somoza.
Now, it is clear that what they wanted was a change of
government, an ouster of Somoza, and a continuation, more or
less, of a political system that would be open to the kinds of
activities, private-sector activities, that they wanted to carry
out.
Now, the people who did the fighting, the people who
actually suffered the 50,000 casualties, they had a different
vision, which was a transformed Nicaragua.
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Now, the question is, there were certain differences
within Nicaragua as to how that transformation would take place.
And there was also a dearth of talent in terms of administering
that transformation, because many of the formerly trained people
in public Administration, and so forth, left the country because
their jobs had been in the public sector. They had worked for
Somoza.
In the beginning of the revolution -- that is, in 1979
through 1980 -- the government really didn't know what to do with
the private sector, and they came forth with regulations that
were self-contradictory, and you couldn't function in the private
sector, even if you wanted to, easily. And you know who told me
this? A couple of cabinet ministers in the government said to me
that if things are hopeless here -- you know, one agency comes
out with one list of directives, another comes out with another.
But what was taking place in Nicaragua was, you know, in
terms of the church, no priests murdered, compared to the 14 or
15 priests killed in Guatemala and El Salvador. No journalists
murdered, compared to the more than 30 journalists murdered in El
Salvador, and an even larger number murdered in Guatemala.
In other words, you didn't have a bestial society. You
had a confused, erratic society with political -- some of them
being ideological extremists, some of them not. You had a fluid
situation. And instead of trying to work with this fluid
situation, what we did is we tried to eliminate it.
FISKE: Let me understand one other thing. A while ago,
Colin spoke about the Nicaraguan government arming itself because
it was faced with the danger of the Contras. Now, this is a
chicken-and-egg situation, of course. Maybe a leapfrog situat-
ion. The same set of problems that we find ourselves in with
regard to the Soviet Union. The Contras presumably were organiz-
ed because the Nicaraguans posed a threat. Now the Nicaraguans
feel that they have to increase their armaments because the
Contras are present.
DANVY: The Contras were never organized because of the
armaments the Sandinistas were getting. The Contras were built
on a force of something over a thousand former members of the
National Guard during the Somoza regime. These are people who
fled after the Guard disintegrated in July of 1979. Many of them
ended up in Honduras and took to cattle rustling, cross-border
raiding, occasional assassinations, that kind of thing, during
1979 and 1980. Anyone...
FISKE: Do you mean Contras generally, or a portion of
them.?
DANVY: Okay. These are the people upon whom the force
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that we now know as the Contras was built by the CIA.
But to get back to the beginning. People who were in
the country in the fall of '79 say that they were hearing gunfire
every night. That is, there was a Contra problem from the
beginning. I mean Somoza was toppled, but a lot of his followers
kept fighting, and they're still fighting.
You also had a certain amount of doubt among the
Sandinistas about the intentions of the United States, and this
is fairly early on. Certainly when President Reagan came into
office, the Republican platform on which he ran was very hostile
to the Sandinista government. So that you can't claim, as the
Administration does, that the Contras didn't start until a long
time after the pattern of armaments was clear. And in that
pattern of armaments, again, we see a very clearly defensive
posture. We don't see the sort of armaments that would be
necessary to attack any of the neighboring countries. There is
no capacity there. We see a defensive posture and defensive
armaments.
FISKE: The Sandinista government is very fearful of an
American invasion. This question has been raised by some of my
listeners from time to time, and I personally have the feeling
that there's not likely to be any kind of an American invasion of
Nicaragua. I can understand that they would have this fear. But
what's your assessment of it?
DANVY: I would certainly share your feelings that a
direct U.S. invasion is not likely, given the various political
problems that that would create here.
However, for the Sandinistas, they don't necessarily see
what's going on now with the Contras and a U.S. invasion as
totally different things. That is, they've seen the Contras
built by the CIA from roughly a thousand Somoza National Guards-
men to its present 12 to 15 thousand, and this was done on
schedule by the CIA, according to their own plans. They've seen
the Central Intelligence Agency...
DANVY: Well, I'll do my best.
In any case, they have seen the CIA carry out attacks on
their four major ports, using Contra personnel, but planning and
conducting these attacks.
So that all of these things, for them, you might say,
are part of the U.S. invasion.
As far as actually using U.S. troops, no. That seems
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very unlikely. But from someone sitting down in Managua, that
may not be very reassuring for us here in Washington to say, "No,
we don't think it's going to happen." And they can remember the
Bay of Pigs. They can remember the Guatemalan coup in 1954, any
number of U.S. interventions. They have to take the statements
by the Reagan Administration seriously. They see the maneuvers
going on in Honduras, the naval maneuvers off both their coasts.
And, you know, they're undertaking their defense.
FISKE: I suspect that voicing fear of an actual United
States invasion helps to mobilize their population.
MCMICHAEL: Arguably, Fred, that does do it. But I
think if you had been there, for example, in the first week of
November of last year, when...
[Confusion of voices]
MCMICHAEL: ...certain, I would have to say, puerile and
mean-spirited persons in the United States Administration decided
that the reconnaissance aircraft which overfly Nicaragua on a
continual basis, U.S. aircraft in their airspace, you know, were
going to fly faster and lower to produce sonic booms over the
country twice a day for a period of about a week.
MCMICHAEL: Well, the reaction, you know, a lot of
children were frightened. You know, that's the way these people
are. They like to frighten children.
During the deliberately manufactured so-called MiG
crisis of November the 6th and the few days thereafter, when the
actual threat of invasion seemed very great, you know, as a
matter of a show of force, I believe, the Nicaraguans themselves
put tanks into what I do not believe were their real defensive
positions around Managua. They partially mobilized youth who had
been prepared to go on the coffee harvest into defensive brigades
for Managua. You know, it was a show of determination in the
face of a threat.
But there is no doubt, as Colin has pointed out, that
the United States, either by proxy, through the Contras, trained,
supported, paid, directed by the United States, operating out of
bases both in Honduras and Costa Rica, carrying out military
attacks against Nicaragua.
And secondly, as the recent series of articles in the
Wall Street Journal pointed out, the air and sea attacks against
Nicaraguan ports and oil facilities were actually carried out
directly by United States personnel. So they've been attacked,
you know.
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FISKE: I take it that you made some of these arguments
in your reports when you were in the CIA. What were you told?
MCMICHAEL: To tell you the truth, Fred, my concern at
that time, when the Contra war was being organized and defended
on the basis that it was necessary to interdict the flow of arms
going from Nicaragua to El Salvador, what bothered me was (A)
that I hadn't seen and couldn't find any evidence of this arms
flow. I was told that it went on, but I had access to intelli-
gence and did not see it. Wayne Smith, for example, who at that
time was head of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana, was also
calling for that information.
FISKE: Did you have a top security clearance?
MCMICHAEL: Oh, yes -- and not finding it.
Now, you know, this -- you know, this is my judgment as
an analyst. There are perhaps, you know, other people reach
different judgments.
But what concerned me, as a person who had worked in
counterinsurgency for many years in Southeast Asia during the
Vietnam period...
BURNS: It's a ten-year Marine fellow here.
MCMICHAEL: And I've done other work in that line -- you
see, is that the critical point, in most counterinsurgency
doctrine, is to be able to cut the supply links to an insurgency
in the field. And if we were really interested, you know, in
crushing the FMLN in El Salvador, a great deal of analysis should
have been going into how that supply system was organized, where
it was coming from.
And what I saw instead was a great deal of effort going
into incriminating the Nicaraguan government in this, but without
any real description of the supply system that the FMLN does
have.
FISKE: I don't know whether any of you saw CBS News
tonight. Dan Rather was in Cuba for a lengthy interview with
Fidel Castro, and they showed a piece of it tonight. And one of
the questions that Rather asked Castro was whether -- you know,
he asked him why he hadn't been to the funeral, and so on; and if
he was seeking to improve his relations with the United States,
whether he would consider removing his military advisers from
Nicaragua. Now, there has been some question about whether in
fact there had been Cuban military advisers there. And Castro
set that to rest. He acknowledged that there were.
DANVY: I think it's always been clear that there were.
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The number's been in dispute, but it's always been clear there
were Cuban military advisers.
FISKE: And, of course, he said he would under no
circumstances remove them because it would be a betrayal of the
Sandinistas, and so on.
But what does the presence of Cuban advisers there tell
you? What does it mean to you? Why are they there?
MCMICHAEL: Well, I'll tell you the reason that they
give for having there, and the Nicaraguans give, is that they had
a guerrilla army that in 1979-1980, a ragtag bunch of guys that
had just chased the Guardia Nacional out of the country. They're
now in the process of changing that into a regular army, and they
need instructors in communications, logistics, command pro-
cedures, and so forth. And this is the stated reason and the
stated purpose for the Cuban advisers within the country.
Now, I was a little surprised and a little disappointed,
frankly, because the figure most frequently given to me by the
Nicaraguans and by Cubans I talked to in Nicaragua for the number
of those advisers had consistently been 250 to 300. And the
Nicaraguan government, on announcing that they, as a conciliatory
gesture, are sending 100 of the advisers home, are now saying
that the number is actually about 800.
So, whether this means there's been a redesignation, a
redefinition of who is a security adviser and who is not, I don't
know. But these are the numbers.
FISKE: Or an attempt to obscure it. You don't know.
MCMICHAEL: Well, probably. I'd say that that might
well be the case.
BURNS: In my experience with Nicaraguan officials, I
have found a certain sense of guilelessness and innocence in
terms of what to do with data. I was very surprised -- this
raisiong the number of officially acknowledged Cuban military
folks in Nicaragua is very recent, just a few days ago. I was
very surprised because, characteristically, the Nicaraguans have
been very forthcoming in giving out information, surprisingly
forthright. In fact, they understated the total number of
civilian casualties that they were suffering for some period of
time, I guess not to cause domestic alarm over the high toll that
the Contra attacks were taking place.
But I just wanted to make an observation about U.S.
military intentions in Nicaragua. I think that there have been a
series, there have been parallel military projections of what to
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do with Nicaragua that have taken place over the last year and a
half. There have been military options that have been entertain-
ed, usually based on plans that would involve provocations coming
from the Honduran military, overflights and artillery being laid
down, to lure the Nicaraguans into counterattacking, which would
then turn Honduras to CANDECA, the Central American Defense
Community, very much like Barbados turned to the OECS with
Grenada in 1983. And at that point, CANDECA would turn to
Washington and say, "Our ally is being attacked." And at that
point, Washington would send in naval and air power to attack
Nicaraguan military targets, broadly defined to include economic
targets as well.
FISKE: Okay. I'm long past the time when I usually
invite listeners to join, so let's do that....
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