SANDINISTAS HAVE 'BLUEPRINT FOR SUBVERSIVE AGGRESSION'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670027-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 8, 2010
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: May 17, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE APPEARED WASHINGTON TIMES
KPAQ Z 17 May 1985
Sandinistas have `bluepruit for
subversive aggression'
Following is the text of a speech
prepared for delivery by CIA Direc-
tor William Casey to the World Busi-
ness Council in San Antonio, Texas,
tomorrow. A copy of the speech was
obtained by The Washington Times.
Today, I would like to tell you about
the subversive war which the Soviet
Union and its partners have been
waging against the United States
and its interests around the world
for a quarter of a century or more.
This campaign of aggressive sub-
version has nibbled away at friendly
governments and our vital interests
until today our national security is
impaired in our immediate neigh-
borhood as well as in Europe, Asia,
Africa and Latin America.
This is not an undeclared war. In
1961, [Nikital Khrushchev, then
leader of the Soviet Union, told us
that communism would win not
through nuclear war which could
destroy the world or conventional
war which could quickly lead to
nuclear war, but through "wars of
national liberation" in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America. We were reluc-
tant to believe him then. Just as in
the 1930s we were reluctant to take
Hitler seriously when he spelled out
in "Mein Kampf" how he would take
over Europe.
Over the last 10 years, Soviet
power has been established:
? In Vietnam, along China's bor-
der and astride the sea lanes which
bring Persian Gulf oil to Japan.
? In Afghanistan, 500 miles closer
to the warm-water ports of the
Indian Ocean and to the Straits of
Hormuz. Through which comes the
oil essential to Western Europe.
? In the Horn of Africa, dominat-
ing the southern approaches to the
Red Sea and the southern tip of the
Arabian Peninsula.
? In.Southern Africa. The source
of minerals which we and other
industrial nations must have.
? And in the Caribbean and Cen-
tral America, on the very doorstep of
the United States.
This is not a bloodless war.
Marxist-Leninist policies and tac-
tics have unleashed the four horses
of the apocalypse - Famine, Pes-
tilence, War and Death. Throughout
the Third World we see famine in
Africa, pestilence through chemical
and biological agents in Afghanistan
and Indochina, war an three conti-
nents, and death everywhere. Even
as I speak, some 300,000 Soviet, Viet-
namese, and Cuban troops are car-
rying out savage military operations
directed at wiping out national resis-
tance in Afghanistan, Kampuchea,
Ethiopia, and several other coun-
tries.
In the occupied countries -
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia,
Angola, Nicaragua - in which
Marxist regimes have been either
imposed or maintained by external
forces, there has occurred a holo-
caust comparable to that which Nazi
Germany inflicted in Europe some
40 years ago. Some four million
Afghans, more than one-quarter of
the population, have had to flee their
country. The Helsinki Watch tells us
that they have fled because "the
crimes of indiscriminate warfare
are combined with the worst
excesses of unbridled state-
sanctioned violence against civil-
ians." It cites evidence of "civilians
burned alive, dynamited, beheaded;
crushed by Soviet tanks; grenades
thrown into rooms where women
and children have been told to wait."
In Cambodia, two to three million
people, something like one-quarter
of the pre-war population, have been
killed in the most violent and brutal
manner by both internal and exter-
nal Marxist forces.
In Ethiopia, a Marxist military
government, supported with exten-
sive military support from Moscow
and thousands of Cuban troops, by
collectivizing agriculture and keep-
ing food prices low in order to main-
tain urban support, has exacerbated
a famine which threatens the lives of
millions of its citizens. It has
exploited the famine by using food
as a weapon to forcibly relocate peo-
ple fighting an oppressive govern-
ment in the north hundreds of miles
to the south where there is no prep-
aration to receive them. In urban
areas, food rations are distributed
through party cells.
In Nicaragua, the Communist
government killed outright a mini-
mum of 1,000 former Somoza
national guardsmen during the sum-
mer of 1979. In 1982, it forcibly relo-
cated some 15,000 Miskito Indians to
detention camps, forced many more
to flee to refugee camps in Hondu-
ras, and burned some 40 Indian vil-
lages. Last month, the Sandinistas
forcibly moved 60,000 campesinos
from areas close to the Honduran
regions, burning their houses and
killing their cattle.
What is the purpose of all this car-
nage, this creeping imperialism? In
my view, there are two primary tar-
gets - the oil fields of the Middle
East which are the lifeline of the
Western Alliance, and the Isthmus
between North and South America.
Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia,
as well as Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam,
and Mozambique and Angola in
southern Africa, bring Soviet power
astride the sea lanes which carry
those resources to America, Europe
and Japan.
Capabilities to threaten the
Panama Canal in the short term and
Mexico in a somewhat longer term
are being developed in Nicaragua
where the Sandinista revolution is
the first successful Castroite sei-
zure of power on the American main-
land. They have worked quietly and
steadily toward their objectives of
building the power of the state secu-
rity apparatus, building the
strongest armed forces in Central
America, and becoming a center for
exporting subversion to Nicaragua's
neighbors.
The American intelligence com-
munity over recent months unan-
imously concurred in four national
estimates on the military buildup,
the consolidation and the objectives
of the Soviets and the Cubans and
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. If I
were to boil the key judgments of
those estimates down to a single sen-
tence it would be this: The Soviet
Union and Cuba have established
and are consolidating a beachhead
on the American continent, are put-
ting hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of military equipment into it,
and have begun to use it as a
launching pad to carry their style of
aggressive subversion into the rest
of Central America and elsewhere in
Latin America.
Let me review quickly what has
already happened in Nicaragua. The
Sandinistas have developed the best
equipped military in the region.
They have an active strength of
some 65,000 and a fully mobilized
strength including militia and
reserves of nearly 120,000. These
forces are equipped with Soviet
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exiled
tanks hrmorect vehicl s tat. f the
art helicopters, patrol boats and an
increasingly comprehensive air
defense system. This gives the San-
dinistas a military capability far
beyond that of any other Central
American nation and indeed all Cen-
tral American nations put together.
In addition to the considerable
military hardware, there are now an
estimated 6,000 to 7,500 Cuban
advisers and several hundred other
communists and radical personnel
in Nicaragua assisting the regime in
its military buildup and its consoli-
dation of power.
The Communist 'government
under Cuban direction and guidance
has been essential in helping the
regime establish control over the
media, create propaganda
mechanisms and neutralize the
effectiveness of those who oppose
the Sandinista totalitarianism.
'Ibday, we see Nicaragua becom-
ing to Central and Latin America
what Beirut was to the Middle East
for almost 15 years since 1970 when
Lebanon became the focal point for
international and regional terror-
ists. Managua's support for training
of Central American subversives is
well documented - they support
Salvadoran communists, Guatema-
lan communists, radical leftists in
Costa Rica, and are attempting to
increase the number of radical left-
ist terrorists in Honduras. More
recent evidence indicates Nicara-
guan support for some South
American terrorist groups and
growing contacts with other interna-
tional terrorist groups.
Yet, just last week the American
congress refused to approve $14 mil-
lion for people resisting communist
domination of Nicaragua, on the
very day that a Sovet ship unloaded
more than $14 million worth of heli-
copters, East German trucks, and
other military cargo at Corinto, the
principal port in Nicaragua.
On.the very next day, [Daniel]
Ortega, the Nicaraguan communist
dictator, traveled to Moscow to ask
the Soviet Union to make $200 mil-
lion available to him to consolidate a
Leninist communist dictatorship
across a stretch of land which sep-
arates South America from North
America.
This development in our immedi-
ate neighborhood should not be
viewed in isolation but as a part of a
worldwide process which has
already worked in Europe, Africa,
Asia and Latin America.
Let me now give you an insight on
how all this happens. In early 1981,
I had a talk with Bob Ames, our CIA
Middle East expert, who died at the
hand of a terrorist attack in Beirut
in 1983. Stationed in Aden, South
Yemen, in 1967, he met and
befriended the young revolutionary
Abd'al Fatah Ismail, who became
president of South Yemen and is now
back in Aden after being
briefly to the USSR. Abd'al Fatah
told Bob of his experience in the
higher Komsomol school which the
Soviets maintain for training young
revolutionaries from non-
communist countries. lie explained
that he had been taught in Moscow
that he needed 20 years, a genera-
tion, to consolidate his revolution.
He would have to control the edu-
cation of the youth and to uproot and
undermine and ultimately change
the traditional elements of society.
This meant undermining the influ-
ence. of religion and taking the
young away from their parents for
education by the state. He was
taught that to control the people he
would have to establish block com-
mittees as a powerful secret police.
Finally, Abd'al Fatah spoke in impas-
sioned terms of a need to export rev-
olution to carry out his mission as a
dedicated Marxist-Leninist and to
ensure that attention was focused on
neighboring countries thus divert-
ing attention from his own country
and allowing it to consolidate its rev-
olution.
Bob Ames said that as he looked
back, Abd'al Fatah - with Soviet
Bloc help - had done as he said he
would. He captured and subverted a
legitimate war of liberation. He
killed or drove into exile those mem-
bers of the movement who believed
in democracy and then went about
the work of consolidating a commu-
nist regime and began armed sub-
version against Oman and North
Yemen.
In Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan,
and Grenada, dedicated Marxist-
Leninist revolutionaries followed
this Soviet blueprint with only slight
modifications.
Our analysts have studied this
blueprint for taking over a govern-
ment and consolidating a totalitarian
regime as it has been exemplified in
seven totalitarian regimes; six
Marxist-Leninist in Cuba, South
Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Grenada,
Nicaragua, and the Islamic
revolutionary government of Iran.
They have identified 46 indicators of
the consolidation of power by a
Marxist-Leninist regime. These
indicators measure the movement
toward one-party government, con-
trol of the military, of the security
services, of the media, of education,
of the economy, the forming or take-
over of labor or other mass organiza-
tions, exerting social and population
control, curbing religious influence
and alignment with the Soviet bloc.
Of the 46 indicators, Nicaragua in
five and one-half years has accom-
plished 33. They have established
control of the media, taken over
radio and TV, censored the
broadcasts of Sunday sermons of the
jected the only free newspaper, La
Prensa, to a brutal daily censorship.
They have taken control of the edu-
cation system. Nicaraguan text-
books now teach - Marxism. They
attack the tenets of Western democ-
racy. They attack traditional reli-
gious teachings and encourage
children to maintain revolutionary
vigilance by watching for signs of
ideological impurities in their
neighbors, friends and relatives.
The Sandinistas have taken control
of the military. They have taken con-
trol of the internal secret police and
have established a Directorate of
State Security. That directorate,
according to our reports, has 400
Cubans, 70 Soviets, 40-50 East Ger-
man and 20-25 Bulgarian advisers.
There are Soviet advisers at every
level of the secret police. In fact, it
is safe to say that it is controlled by
the Soviet Union and its surrogates.
Block committees have been estab-
lished to watch and control the peo-
ple. The ,church has been
persecuted.
Witness the campaign mounted
by the Directorate of State Security
to harass and embarrass Pope John
Paul II during his 1983 visit to Nica-
ragua. They have used political
mobs (similar to the Red Guards of
Soviet and Chinese revolutionary
history) to attack democratic politi-
cians, union members and religious
leaders. And finally, just as Abd'al
Fatah told Bob Ames what he must
do, and following Hitler and Khrush-
chev, the Sandinistas have told the
world that they would spread the
example of Nicaragua beyond El Sal-
vador to Honduras, Guatemala, and
the entire region.
An integral part of this blueprint
for subversive aggression is decep-
tion and disinformation to manip-
ulate and influence public opinion
and policies in western countries.
This takes many shapes and forms.
A worldwide propaganda cam-
paign has been mounted and carried
out on behalf of the Sandinista
regime and Salvadoran guerrillas
which would not have been possible
without the capabilities, the con- -
tacts, and the communication chan-
nels provided by the Soviet bloc and
Cuba. The Sandinistas themselves
have shown remarkable ingenuity
and skill in projecting disinfor-
mation into the United States itself.
Perhaps the best example of this is
the systematic campaign to deceive
well-intentioned members of the
western media and of, western reli-
gious institutions.
There are many examples of
Nicaraguan deception. The Sandin-
ista press, radio and government
ministry have put out claims that the
0pllolied
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United States used chemical weap-
ons in Grenada, that the United
States was supplying Nicaraguan
freedom fighters with drugs, and
that the United States might give the
opposition bacteriological weapons.
The debate in the Congress dis-
closed few who think that what is
happening in Central America is a
desirable state of affairs or that it is
compatible with avoiding a possibly
permanent impairment of our
national security and a serious dete-
rioration in the American geopoliti-
cal position in the world.
There are some who will be
content with an agreement that the
Nicaraguans will now forego further
aggression. Our experience in
Korea and Indochina provides some
lessons on the value of agreements
with communist governments.
Korea started to violate the Korean
'Armistice within days of the truce
signing.
Under the 1973 Paris Accords,
North Vietnam agreed to cease fir-
ing in South Vietnam, withdraw its
forces from Cambodia and Laos, and
refrain from introducing additional
troops and war materiel into South
Vietnam except on a one-for-one
replacement basis. North Vietnam
never observed the cease-fire and
troop withdrawal requirements, and
within little more than two months
after it had signed the peace agree-
ments it had already infiltrated
some 30,000 additional troops and
over 30,000 tons of military
equipment into South Vietnam.
We believe the Sandinistas' main
objectives in regional negotiations
are to buy time to further consoli-
date the regime. History and the
record and purposes of Marxist-
Leninist regimes in general and the
Sandinistas in particular lead us to
believe that unless Nicaragua has
implemented a genuine democracy
as required by the Organization of
American States such assurances
could not be adequately verified and
would not be complied with. Cuban
officials have urged the Salvadoran
communist guerrillas to slow down
their attacks against the Duarte gov-
ernment in order to fortify and con-
solidate the Nicaraguan revolution.
We believe that Cuba has assured the
Salvadoran communists that it
might take as long as five to 10 years,
but as long as the Sandinista regime
in Nicaragua remains, that country
will serve as a base for communist
expansion in the area and the Salva-
doran insurgency will be renewed
once the Sandinistas have been able
to eliminate the armed resistance.
What does this (Wean for
America's future? Should Central
America fall under communist con-
trol, it could mean a tidal wave of
refugees into the U.S.
Every country that has fallen
under communist control since
World War II has sent refugees
streaming over the borders - first
Eastern Europe, then Cuba, and
more recently Vietnam and Afghan-
istan - and the potential influx from
Central America is even higher than
from any of these. Since 1980, some
200,000 Salvadorans fleeing the
communist-initiated violence in
their own country have entered the
U.S. illegally. Illegal movement from
Mexico has increased, with some
one million Mexicans illegally enter-
ing this country in 1983 alone. In
1984, the Bipartisan Commission on
Central America warned that a com-
munist Central America would
likely be followed by the
destabilization of Mexico and that
this could result in many millions of
additional Mexicans fleeing into the
United States.
Today, the Cuban and Nicaraguan
military forces are together four
times the size of those of Mexico and
are equipped with vastly superior
CIA Director William Casey
3
weapons. Today, with armed forces
larger and better equipped than the
rest of Central America put
together, Nicaragua. could walk
through Costa Rica, which has no
army, to Panama, and Cuba can
threaten our vital sea lanes in the
Caribbean.
The insurgency is a major obsta-
cle to Sandinista consolidation in
that it encourages the erosion of
active support for the Sandinistas by
creating uncertainties about the
future of the regime; by challenging
its claims of political legitimacy;
and by giving hope to the leaders of
the political opposition.
The largest anti-Sandinista insur-
gent group, the FDN, is still provid-
ing strong military resistance
despite cutoff of United States aid
almost a year ago. Popular sympathy
for the insurgents appears to be
increasing in the countryside, and
the FDN continues to receive signifi-
cant numbers of new recruits.
That opposition can increase the
pressure until the Sandinista sup-
port has eroded sufficiently to leave
them no option other than modifica-
tion of their rejection of internal rec-
onciliation. The objective is to allow
for the same process of democra-
tization that is taking place in the
rest of Central America to occur in
Nicaragua.
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