DOUBTS LINGER ON EL SALVADOR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000302620023-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 20, 2010
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: May 31, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/20: CIA-RDP90-00552R000302620023-5 STAT
ARTICLE APPEARED
01; PAGE C -/
31 Ilay 1984
'
WASHINGTON TIMES
'REWETT
linger El Salva or
on
Doubts
W ashington's perennial
foreign-policy manip-
ulators are trussing up
another nation's people,
this time the Salvadorans, for step-
by-step delivery to the kind of
national prison farm wherein dwell
the hapless Nicaraguans. And the
Cubans, the Vietnamese, and
scores of others, right back to the
Poles, who were trussed up and
handed over at Yalta in 1944.
Each time the Washington give-
away formula is different. But it all
leads to the same animal farm.
American journalists, many of
them, cheer the parade.
On El Salvador, our major media
have almost feverishly embraced
the black legend that Salvadoran
free-enterprisers are vicious kill-
ers, cruel oppressors, and all that
anti-capitalist class warfare says is
evil.
In sharp contrast, such things as
the Salvadoran guerrilla high com-
mand's May 1 communique
claiming to have killed and
wounded 18,000 Salvadorans in
four years rarely get reported at all.
And nowadays, with the story of
how the CIA used $2 million to rig
the Salvadoran elections against
conservatives copiously on the
record, journalists friendly to Pres-
ident Reagan are not supposed to
mention this, "lest it hurt chances
to get congressional military aid for
El Salvador." Thus communist
armed aggression in that country is
used to force us into making a
mockery of democracy. As The Wall
Street Journal editorialized on May
11, the president himself has fallen
into a trap. Tiptoeing now can only
set Mr. Reagan up for a "Duar-
__ tegate" later.
Consider the time-sequence of
leaks on CIA Salvadoran election-
rigging. The Washington, Post on
May 3 prepared a story to front-
page on May 4 saying the CIA as
well as the Agency for International
Development had helped fund the
electoral defeat of the conservative
candidate, Roberto D'Aubuisson.
The CIA rushed that same day to
the Senate Intelligence Committee
to confess behind closed doors that
it had indeed done so. Senators
present did not confirm this to the
Western Hemisphere Subcommit-
tee chairman, Sen. Jesse Helms,
until days later.
But someone in the CIA got
ready to flood leaks to The Wall
Street Journal, The New York
Times, and The Washington Post
confirming the first Washington
Post story of covert funding of Can-
didate Jose Napoleon Duarte. As I
read the signs, the CIA is divided on
El Salvador, for meanwhile it
appears that a CIA source itself
made sure that Sen. Helms would
"stumble" onto the May 3 Senate
Intelligence Committee show-and-
tell session.
One yet-unpublicized part of the
May 3 CIA confession to senators is
that President Reagan himself did
not know CIA funds were being
used selectively against the Salva-
doran anti-communist ARENA
party, and that this twist was added
by the bureaucratic policy-making
in-group on its own. This is a fact of
key importance to Mr. Reagan's
political health.
Some of the intense behind-
scenes top-level anti-Helms flap
may have been designed to keep
that key fact from emerging. The
manipulators who torpedoed
ARENA are safest if they can make
it seem the president knew all of the
scheme all along.'Ib intimidate the
whistle-blowers, rumors of "mur-
der plots" and "death threats"
against Americans in the scenario
even have been peddled around
Washington, giving the episode a
John Le Carre flip-flop intrigue fla-
vor.
Sen. Helms in fact stumbled - or
was steered - onto the CIA
election-rigging just in time to
warn Mr. Reagan against the gross
embarrassment of praising the
Salvadorans' election of Mr. Duarte
as "fair and democratic" in his
nationally televised speech on May
8, just before copious CIA confes-
sions to major American newspa-
pers. The obvious White House ban
on any journalist's question about
the CIA caper at Mr. Reagan's press
conference last week after the CIA
confessions is embarrassing
enough.
That the Senate should be less
irate at the election-rigging than at
Mr. Helms for his timely warning
boggles the mind. Great senators
from Henry Clay to Arthur Vanden-
berg must be spinning in their
graves. For what the CIA did to sub-
vert El Salvador's elections violates
sacrosanct Senate-ratified U.S.
international pledges: the Charter
of the Organization of American
States, of the United Nations and
many inter-American treaties. It
violates, above all, the human and
civic rights of the Salvadoran peo-
ple.
If a White House with newly
burned fingers believes Washing-
ton manipulators can - or indeed
will wish to - moderate Mr. Duarte,
surprises are in store. Mr. Duarte's
ideology could.scarcely.be further
from Mr. Reagan's.
Mr. Duarte says he plans to
"investigate" alleged crimes by
conservatives, even as he "pre-
pares political space" for the com-
munist guerrillas, who will no
doubt arrive with tumbrels rat-
tling. The Duarte dream, oft spoken
during the campaign, is "absolute
power" consolidated through
electing a national assembly of
"peasants and workers" in March
1985. That has a familiar sound.
With CIA funds and a few dollars
more, his star-chamber inquisitors
can buy witnesses for show trials
convicting any political enemy of
anything his "revolution" requires.
It will require finishing off the
political and economic assets of the
Salvadoran free-enterprise sector.
As did the Sandinistas in Nicara-
gua, Mr. Duarte's "revolution" can
of course buy itself a thin facade of
business community support.
Washington's manipulators are
playing a dangerous game with El
Salvador. Its people over-
whelmingly rejected the commu-
nist guerrillas in one election in
1982 and in two in 1984. It took the
CIA, AID, and blatant vote-
miscounting to give Mr..Duarte
even a small majority, 100,884
votes, on May 6. Few in El Salvador
want the communists in on running
things. -
Nor do they want Napoleon
Duarte as a Maurice Bishop draped'
in an American flag. But that's what :
they're going to get from Washing-'
r" i1seems'
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/20: CIA-RDP90-00552R000302620023-5