U.S. SEEMS MORE WILLING TO SUPPORT INSURGENCIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870064-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 64
• Publication Date: May 26, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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WASHINGTON POST I
RRTICL APPEAR U .
OK PAGr r4 -/
26 May 1985 1
J.S. Seems More Willing
To Support Insurgencies
Funding for Anticommunists Gains on Hill
First of two articles
By Joanne Omang
and David Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
. The Reagan administration, sup-
ported and sometimes prodded by a
broad range of congressmen and
senators, appears increasingly will-
ing to give direct aid to anticommu-
nist and antileftist insurgencies in
many parts of the Third World.
So far the support for these in-
surgencies is largely rhetorical, and
the record of U.S. aid delivery is
confused and contradictory-and
probably incomplete, because the
public record does not include all
covert operations. But a chorus of
administration speeches has begun
to generate a flurry of independent
papers, hearings, arguments and
legislative efforts that could pres-
age a wider shift in public attitude.
"We must not break faith with
those who are risking their lives-
on every continent, from Afghan-
istan to Nicaragua-to defy Soviet-
supported aggression and secure
rights which have been ours from
birth," President Reagan said in his
last State of the Union address.
Similar messages have been repeat-
ed by numerous senior officials in
Reagan's administration.
Congress,' departing from its re-
cent history of opposing U.S. in-
volvement in messy Third World
conflicts, appears surprisingly ea-
ger to help. Democrats in Congress
have actively pushed for overt aid
to rebels in communist-ruled Cam-
bodia and Afghanistan.
Two Republican senators have
proposed setting up a special office
in the White House to coordinate
U.S. aid to insurgent groups rising
against Soviet-backed governments
in the Third World, from Indochina
to southern Africa to Central Amer-
ica.
i Other suggestions would make
aid an overt program by sw
control over it from the Central
telligence Agency to the Defense
Department.
But some officials worry that too
formal a doctrine might cramp their
flexibility, which now permits con-
tradictory behavior in different
cases. Nevertheless, there is gen-
eral agreement that real content is
slowly being given to a policy that is
still more sentiment than sub-
stance.
The idea of "revolutionary de-
mocracy" seems to be catching on,
in spite of-or perhaps because
of-the fact that it has not yet been
precisely defined.
The "Reagan doctrine," former
United Nations ambassador Jeane J.
Kirkpatrick said at a May 10 lun-
cheon, "states the case for the mor-
al superiority of democratic insti-
tutions," a superiority that is "noth-
ing short of revolutionary" for "free-
dom fighters defending them
selves against incorporation into a
great warrior empire."
"The American people have a
long and noble tradition of support-
: -ing the struggle of other peoples for
freedom, democracy and indepen-
-'dence," Secretary of State George
P. Shultz said in a recent article in
Foreign Affairs magazine. "If we
turned our backs on this tradition,
we would be conceding the Soviet
notion that communist revolutions
are irreversible while everything
,else is up for grabs."
Shultz's statement reflected one
of the roots of this development:
conservatives' longstanding irrita-
tion at what they call U.S. passivity
in the face of an active Soviet drive
to foment revolution and win allies
worldwide. In the 1970s, several
have said, frustration soared over
Soviet gains in the Third World and
over the apparent reliance on co-
vert action alone as a response.
"The '70s seem to have given the
United States a reputation for un-
reliability," Donald L. Fortier, a Na-
tional Security Council staff mem-
ber responsible for political-military
affairs, said in a February speech.
He called the U.S. role then "reac-
tive, just responding" to events.
Conservatives and liberals both con-
demned covert action as an excuse
to cover a void in policy.
"There was a time when armed
insurgencies were almost by defin-
ition leftist and pro-Soviet. That's
no longer true," Fortier said. "The
trend of the '80s [is] liberation
movements against pro-Soviet re-
gimes."
William J. Casey, the director of _
central intelligence, noted the
"good news" of widespread anticom-
munist insurgencies in a January
speec Moscow is spenclinF close
to $8 billion a year to snuff out free-
dom" in Afghanistan, Angola, Cam-
bodia, Ethiopia and Nicaragua,
Casey said.
The West, he added, need not
match this Soviet effort: "Op-
pressed people want freedom and
are fighting for it. They need onl
modest support from nations
which want to see freedom prevail
~ITiere are insurgencies fighting
leftist governments in all the coun-
tries Casey mentioned, plus Laos,
Mozambique and Vietnam. Overtly,
at least, the Reagan administration
has moved as cautiously as any of
its predecessors in providing aid,
but it is starting its praise for the
new insurgencies at the enthusias-
tic eve t at it took years to attain
for antigovernment rebels in Nic-
aragua.
When U.S. officials first sought to
justify helping the Nicaraguan
contra (counterrevolutionary)
forces in 1981, they did not say
much to Congress about the goals
of the insurgents or the need to re-
move Marxist-Leninists from the
Nicaraguan government. Instead,
they cited only a tactical need: to
stop Nicaragua from aiding leftist
guerrillas in El Salvador, where the
Reagan administration had inher-
ited a substantial American commit-
ment to a government threatened
by left-wing rebellion.
Continued
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77.
Gradually the terms changed.
The goals became loftier. The con-
tras are now "freedom fighters"
who need U.S. backing to achieve a
democratic and communist-free
government in Managua. Similar
descriptions are being applied to
other countries' anticommunist in-
surgents from the start.
A senior State Department offi-
cial traced the administration's new
approach to President Carter's con-
troversial advocacy of human
rights. "We debated whether we
had the right to dictate the form of.
another country's government. The
bottom line was yes, that some
rights are more fundamental than
the right of nations to noninterven-
tion, like the rights of individual
people," the official said.
The current in-house debate, he
said, has taken this a step further.
"There's a growing sense that peo-
ple's rights include the right to de-
termine their own form of govern-
ment; that is, we don't have the
right to subvert a democratic gov-
ernment, but we do have the right
against an undemocratic one."
In pursuit of that controversial
proposition, the administration is
already stepping gingerly into the
twilight zone where it is not so easy
to decide which rebel groups are
genuinely democratic, and which
leftist governments are beyond
some nonviolent form of redemp-
tion.
"What we're trying to understand
is what are the essential traits dis-
tinguishing one group of freedom
fighters from another," said Sen.
Robert W. Kasten Jr. (R-Wis.),
opening a May 8 hearing on the
subject before his Senate Appropri-
ations subcommittee on foreign op-
erations.
Rep. Stephen J. Solarz, a liberal
New York Democrat, offered six
possible criteria, arguing that aid
should be considered for groups
fighting noncommunist repressive
governments as well as communist
or Soviet-backed regimes.
The rebel group should be indig-
enous to the country, he said, and
resisting a foreign occupier rather
than an established, recognized
government. It should have broad
regional and international support
that its government lacks, as well
as backing in the United States.
And U.S. military support should
advance a significant American ob-
jective as well as enhance the pros-
pects for a negotiated settlement.
Under these guidelines, Solarz
said, aid to the contras is not jus-
tified, because the Sandinista gov-
ernment of Nicaragua is not a for-
eign occupation force. Aid to the
African National Congress against
South Africa and to the UNITA reb-
els in Angola is ruled out for the
same reason, he said.
But Solarz sponsored the propos-
al for $5 million in overt military aid
to noncommunist Cambodian insur-
gents that has been zooming
through Congress, because that
group meets his standards, he said.
In what several officials called
the clearest statement yet of the
administration's position, Richard
L. Armitage, assistant secretary of
defense for international security
affairs, told Kasten's hearing, "the
enemy of our enemy will be assured
of our friendship if he shares our
values in his opposition to our en-
emy .... Not every group that
professes anticommunism deserves
our support."
But he avoided listing criteria,
saying the decisions must be made
on a case-by-case basis. "The only
real issue here is the type of sup-
port w is should be offereovert or covert. guns or medicine.
money or food. It should come in
conjunction with social reform ef-
forts and after consultation with
U.S. allies, and should include con-
sideration of the effect on U.S.-So-
viet relations, he said.
"Once we have extended aid, the
recipients should have a reasonable
expectation that the aid will contin-
ue," Armitage said. "The struggle of
anticommunist groups takes place
within and affects an international
context in which the stakes are
very high."
Noel C. Koch, Armitage's prin-
cipal deputy, said in an interview
that-Kasten's hearing was "a water-
shed in the policy process" and that
Armitage's statement is about as
far as one can go in spelling out cri-
teria for groups worthy of U.S. aid.
"When you come up with a doctrine
and announce it to the world and
it's definitive, it's also vulnerable"
to damage from cases that don't
quite fit, he said.
"Basically were supporting peo-
ple trying to live in freedom and
according to democratic norms," he
said. "That's about as inclusive as
you can get ... without creating
rigidities that are exclusionary."
Kasten is considering writing leg-
islation to set up a "freedom fight-
ers' fund" that would be readily
available to help resistance groups
worldwide, once criteria are set,
according to aides.
Sens. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-
N.H.) and Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.)
have proposed that the White
House set up a presidential coor-
dinating office "to look for and cat-
alogue opportunities to advance the
cause of freedom fighters around
the world, to make policy proposals
and ... make sure the bureaucracy
carries them out," as Humphrey put
it.
An aide to Wallop said presiden-
tial aide Patrick J. Buchanan appar-
ently liked the idea, but that there
was resistance from the National
Security Council and the CIA.
There is also resistance from the
State Department, all the branches
of the armed forces and theAgency
for International Development to
the idea of an "insurgency czar,"
according.to Richard Shultz, a pro-
fessor of international politics at
Tufts University's Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, who has
written extensively on the idea for
the conservative Heritage Founda-
tion think tank.
Koch said it is still too early in
the policy process to establish any
central control. "You can't create a
structure and set it on top of an em-
bryonic consciousness," he said.
NEXT.? U.S aids two insurgencies
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WASHINGTON POST
27 May 1925
U.S. Course Uncharted
On Aid to Insurgencies
Rhetoric Bumps Into Inconsistent Decisions
Last of two articles
By David B. Ottaway
and Joanne Omang
Washington Post Staff Writers
In October 1982, rebels fighting
the Soviet-backed Marxist regime
in Ethiopia asked the Central Intel-
ligence Agency to support their up-
hill struggle. The answer was no.
That reply was most unexpected.
Maj. Yosef Yazew, one of the dis-
sident leaders, said in an interview
that he had been encouraged by the
U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, . Sudan,
to go to Washington to ask for the
help in the first place.
But the CIA, he said, "told us the
U.S. government has no policy and
doesn't want to be involved in a pro-
gra assisting military operations
inside Ethiopia . They just
wanted information collection and
rpropaganda activities."
Rhetorically, the Reagan admin-
istration's support for "freedom
fighters" battling communist and
communist-backed regimes around
the world has been steadfast.
"Our party has been unstinting in
its support of democratic develop-
ment in the struggle against total-
itarianism," Reagan said in a May
17 speech to the National Repub-
lican Heritage Groups Council. This
period is "a critical turning point in
the struggle between totalitarian-
ism and freedom," he said.
But administration behavior to-
ward anticommunist insurgencies
has generally been a mishmash of
ad hoc decisions, or nondecisions,
as to who gets aid, with no apparent
consistency or strategy. Of course, some
aspects of the administration's covert as-
sistance to various insurgencies probably
aren't publicly known.
Of eight anticommunist insurgencies ac-
tive in the. Third World, the United States is
providing military aid to two, in Nicaragua
and Afghanistan. In Mozambique, the Rea-
gan administration has decided to support
the Marxist government, amazing Congress
by proposing "nonlethal" military aid to help
defeat a non-Marxist armed insurrection.
Other anticommunist resistance groups
in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Angola and
Ethiopia get no overt military aid, although
food aid is going, directly or indirectly, to
those in Cambodia and Ethiopia.
Now, however, there is a drive within the
administration and Congress to establish a
policy and a strategy for helping armed an-
ticommunist insurgencies, to show, as one
top official put it, that "socialism is not ir-
reversible" and "the Brezhnev doctrine is
dead."
That doctrine, never labeled as such by
Moscow, was named by U.S. officials for the
late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who de-
clared in 1968 after his troops invaded
Czechoslovakia that the Soviet Union and
other members of the "socialist common-
wealth" could send "military aid to a frater-
nal country to thwart the threat to the so-
cialist order."
Many in the West interpreted this as
meaning that once a country joined that "so-
cialist commonwealth," the Soviets would
take any action, including military invasion,
to keep it there.
Until now, the United States has followed
a patchwork policy comprised of a contra-
dictory combination of old Carter adminis-
tration decisions (Afghanistan), congres-
sional restraints (Angola) and independent
bureaucratic initiative (Mozambique) or
confusion (Ethiopia).
In Ethiopia, half a dozen Marxist and non-
Marxist opposition groups have been fight-
ing for 10 years either to topple the Marxist
/I
government or to set up independent mini-
states. Despite innumerable opportunities
to aid these rebels and revenge the loss to
Moscow of an old U.S. ally in Africa, the
Reagan administration is not known to have
provided arms to any of the factions.
A 28-page memorandum submitted to
the CIA by the Ethiopian Peoples' emo-
cratic Alliance (EPDA) in October 1982
spelled out-down to the cost of statio-
nery-a plan for training a first batch of
350 Ethiopian guerrilla leaders who would
o into western Ethiopia to organize and
spread the resistance under way there. The
group requested $547,000 for the first six
months.
When the CIA said no, the EPDA, a co-
alition of non-Marxist factions that split off
from Marxist groups, shortly afterward
ceased to function-a victim of a harsh mil-
itary repression, lack of outside support and
internal squabbling.
But less than a year later, the U.S. gov-
ernment, alarmed by reports of pending
widespread famine in northern Ethiopia,
launched a secret cross-border feeding op-
eration that bypassed non-Marxist factions
and sent food to the victims through the ci-
vilian arms of two Marxist-oriented guer-
rilla groups.
At the same time, the United States sent
more than 325,000 tons of food, worth
$178 million, to the Marxist government in
Addis Abbaba and U.S. private voluntary re-
lief organizations working with it to stem
the worsening famine.
These inconsistencies illustrate the
swings of a policy caught between conser-
vative hard-liners in the administration and
Congress who are implacably hostile to the
central government there, and pragmatists
still hoping to win Ethiopia back from the
Soviets with inducements.
In Mozambique, the same U.S. factions
are clashing over administration proposals
for $15 million in economic support and $3
million in military assistance to the Marxist
regime for fiscal 1986.
Last year, conservatives in Congress
killed the administration's $1 million mil-
itary aid request for that southern African
nation. This year, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-
N.C.) has attached an amendment to the
1986 foreign aid bill that conditions military
aid on free elections, an improved human-
rights record and a cut in the estimated
1,500 to 2,000 Cuban and east-bloc military
advisers to 55-the same conditions and
same limit on U.S advisers attached by li-
berals to aid to El Salvador.
Since none of these demands are likely to
be met, the amendment probably kills the
military-aid request.
fAntnued
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For years the administration has turned
its back on the Mozambican anti-Marxist
opposition movement, Renamo, and sought
instead to woo the government under Sa-
mora Machel away from its Marxist domes-
tic and pro-communist foreign policies.
The rationale has been first to promote
detente between white-ruled South Africa
and its black-ruled neighbors, and then to
take advantage of Mozambique's show of in-
terest in greater ties to the West in hopes
of changing its Marxist orientation.
In Angola, the administration is barred by
a 1975 law from giving assistance to Jonas
Savimbi's anticommunist National Union for
the Total Indpendence of Angola (UNITA).
The administration has made no push to re-
verse this legislation.
During the 1975-76 civil war in Angola,
the CIA channeled about $32 million to
I UNITA and another group, the National
Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)
in a bid to prevent the Cuban-backed Marx-
ists now in power from winning. The FNLA
subsequently collapsed, but UNITA is
stronger than ever.
Again, the administration's rhetorical
backing for anticommunist insurgencies has
been overshadowed by the dictates of its
policy of detente in southern Africa. This
seeks to gain the Angolan government's co-
operation for a regional settlement that
would send 25,000 Cuban troops home and
gain independence for neighboring Namibia.
In Asia, Congress has taken the lead
away from the administration in proposing
overt humanitarian aid to rebels in Cambo-
dia and Afghanistan. The Senate has ap-
proved $15 million for the Afghans, and the
House Foreign Affairs Committee has voted
$5 million for two noncommunist rebel
groups in Cambodia.
Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), sponsor
of the Cambodia-aid provision, argues that
the United States must help build an effec-
tive noncommunist resistance movement as
an alternative to the brutal Khmer Rouge,
the main rebel force fighting the Vietnam-
backed Communist regime in Cambodia.
Earlier, the United States was reported
to have funneled some food aid to the
Khmer Rouge through the Thai army as
part of its overall humanitarian-assistance
program to Cambodian refugees camped
just inside Thailand. Congress cut off that
aid in 1980.
Regarding Afghanistan, Congress is con-
cerned that covert aid may not be reaching
its intended recipients and is considering
$15 million in overt nonlethal aid. Congress
has appropriated $380 million to $400 mil-
lion for covert aid through the CIA to the
Afghan rebels since the viet invasion in
1979, according to the Federation for
American Afghan Action, a sup ort rou .
At least anot her mi ion is expected
this year, the federation says.
The Reagan administration took over and
vastly expanded a Democratic policy of aid-
ing the Afghan rebels. But limits apparently
have been placed on the sophistication of
arms that may be provided, with antiaircraft
missiles capable of dealing with Soviet gun-
ships and aircraft in short supply.
The State Department is against chang-
ing the U.S. military aid program to the Af-
ghan rebels into an overt operation, a stand
that Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-N.Y.) has
attacked as "incredibly convoluted."
"The Soviets know what we're doing".co-
vertly, and it's "ridiculous, absolutely ridic-
ulous" to pretend they don't, D'Amato said
at a May 8 hearing of the Senate Appropri-
ations subcommittee on foreign operations.
D'Amato summed up the status of U.S.
efforts to aid insurgent groups worldwide:
"We have such a piecemeal theory. We hop
from crisis to crisis ... like little kids."
D'Amato's frustration is widely shared on
Capitol Hill and in many parts of the Reagan
administration as well. _
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c?eTt^t r r'- Ek! EU
History of Aid
To Rebels
Is Checkered
By David B. Ottaway
and Joanne Omang
Washington Post Staff Writers
WASHINGTON POST
27 May 1985
The United States has a long and
checkered record of attempts to aid
anticommunist movements, dating
from the onset of the Cold War.
Most of the efforts have failed.
The largest efforts of this kind
mounted byte Central Intelligence
Agency were aimed at Soviet-
backed governments or movements
in Cuba, Iraq and Angola. None was
successful.
The CIA did succeed in engineer
ing coups that installed friendly
governments in Iran (1953) and
Guatemala (1954), and its aid
)helped to pave the way for the
present government of Chile
(1973). It also backed the winning
side in the Chadian civil war of
1981-82. Other interventions have
been alleged but not documented.
It was characteristic of past ef-
forts to begin supporting an insur-
gency group only to drop it later as
a result of shifting politics at home
or changing circumstances abroad.
Washington helped organize
Cuban exiles after Fidel Castro
came to power in 1959 and
launched them on the disastrous
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in
1961. Cuban exiles still blame that
fiasco on inadequate CIA support.
In the first Nixon administration,
the United States gave extensive
covert aid to Mustafa Barzani, lead-
er of rebel Kurds fighting for auton-
omy against the Soviet-backed Iraqi.
government in Baghdad. With the
help of tens of millions of dollars in
U.S. assistance channeled through
Iran, Barzani marshaled an army he
claimed included 100,000 troops.
But when the shah of Iran nego-
tiated a settlement to an old border
dispute with Iraq in March 1975,
Iran and the United States abruptly
cut off their support for Barzani.
The decision sent 200,000 to
300,000 Kurds fleeing into Iran,
and t3arzani accused Washington
and Tehran of betrayal. He went
into exile and died here in 1978, a
bitter and broken man.
In Angola, the United States be-
came deeply involved in the three-
way struggle for power among na-
tionalist factions at the time of the
former Portuguese colony's inde-
pendence in 1975. The United
States gave principal backing to
Holden Roberto, leader of the Na-
tional Front for the Liberation of
Angola (FNLA), and some aid to the
National Union for the Total Inde-
pendence of Angola (UNITA), hop-
ing to block a third faction, backed
by Cuba, the Popular Movement for
the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
But the MPLA took the capital.
When the extent of U.S. secret in-
volvement in the war became
known, Congress voted overwhelm-
ingly in late 1975 to ban military aid
to the two pro-western Angolan
'factions. The FNLA quickly col-
lapsed, but UNITA has survived
and grown much stronger, thanks
partly to aid from South Africa.
Today, a move is: afoot in both
houses of Congress to repeal the aid
ban in order to help UNITA again.
In Chad the CIA scored its only
recent public success. The agency
worked with the intelligence ser-
uan an t _to back
vicesSudan--
Hissene abre in his 1981-1982
strug le against a Lib van-backed
government headed by President
Goukouni Oueddei. With French
help, Ida re has remained in power.
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