THE CONTRAS: HOW U.S. GOT ENTANGLED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706780026-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 20, 2011
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: March 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706780026-9
CIA Irrnact Enormous
The Contras:
~J U.S. Got
tangled
y DOYLE McMANUS
d ROBERT C. TOTH,
imes S of Writers
VASHINGTON-Col. Enrique
Bermudez, a hard-bitten officer of
Nicaragua's vanquished National
Guard, h:id been fighting a lonely
war against his country's leftist
regime for two years when, in 1981,
he heard news that seemed the
answer to his prayers: The United
States had secretly decided to back
his r ebel army.
Suddenly, as Bermudez recalled
recently, "I could feel the steps of a
giant animal."
The giant animal was the Central
InteLLgence Agency, and its impact
on the ragtag opponents of Nicara-
gua's leftist Sandinista regime was
enormous. Acting through a covert
action officer with a penchant for
quick action and a direct line to
U.S. spy chief William J. Casey,
CIA operatives took a scant 24
months to whip Bermudez's guer-
rillas into a well-equipped, aggres-
sive army of more than 10,000 men,
then sent the CIA's own paramili-
tary experts-some of them Amer-
leans-into the thick of the escalat-
ing war.
CIA helicopters with American
pilots, providing air cover for com-
mando raids, battled Nicaraguan
army units at the Pacific coast
ports of Potosi and San Juan del
Sur. Ecuadorean frogmen hired by
the CIA slipped ashore from speed-
boats to plant bombs under Nicara-
guan bridges. CIA transport planes
flew deep into Nicaragua to drop
supplies to guerrillas in the jungle.
And a CIA "mother ship" in the
Pacific launched seaborne com-
mando teams to mine Nicaragua's
harbors in an attempt to cut off the
Sandinistas' overseas supply lines.
This whirlwind of action, direct-
ed b} a man known to the insur-
LOS ?y'GELES TI"'ES
4 `arch 1985
gents by the code name "MaronL"
is still lauded by some U.S. officials
as a classic covert action that
almost succeeded. But it also illus-
trates a problem that haunts U.S.
policy-makers down to the pres-
ent-a dilemma which, with the
Reagan Administration now calling
on Congress to renew its support
for action against the Sandinistas,
is more pressing than ever.
Reliance on Local Leaders
In the jungles of Nicaragua, as in
Vietnam, Lebanon and other Third
World trouble spots, U.S. policy
often relies heavily on the coopera-
tion of local leaders who may
eventually prove both unsuited and
unwilling to serve as instruments
of American national interests.
In Nicaragua, the United States
set out to forge a cluster of guerrilla
bands, known as contras, into a
weapon capable of coercing the
Sandinistas into changing their
leftward course, or even forcing
the regime from power entirely. To
succeed, however, that strategy
rested on three crucial assump-
tions:
-That the anti-Sandinista reb-
els could unite their squabbling
factions.
-That they could win broad
Political support among the Nica-
raguan peasants.
-That they could achieve clear
military victories over the revolu-
tionary government in Managua.
The rebels fell short on all three.
r First, the contras' two largest
4actions, far from . being united,
were in fact led by archenemies:
_$ermudez was tied to the late
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio So-
moza, while the other principle
insurgent leader was Eden Pastora,
-6 disaffected Sandinista hero.
= Second, while Maroni-called
:-Dewey since his school days but
-whose full name remains protected
'~tunder federal law-considered the
`charismatic Pastora more likely to
=win political support in Nicaragua
;than Bermudez, Pastora refused to f
submit to the agency's demands.
he agency sought tighter control
`over his operations, but the ex-
-Sandinista bristled instinctively at
any hint of serving U.S. interests.
"I had only one problem with the
CIA," Pastora said bitterly last
.week. "I didn't speak English well
.enough to say, 'Yes, sir.' " In the
end, that meant the CIA was left
relying on Bermudez, whose past
service under Somoza drastically.
%mited the supportth leis guerril -
,las could hope to attract in the
~FOUntryside.
No Convincing Victories
Finally, the contras were unable
10 win convincing military victo-
ries all by themselves. That drew
the CIA ineluctably into a direct
role in the war. Initially, the Ad-
ministration had wanted to remain
at arm's length but, by the begin-
ning of 1984, American special-op-
erations men were in the center of
the contras' fight.
In Nicaragua as so often before,
growing U.S. involvement in a
distant country not only raised
awkward questions about a sup-
posedly covert war but soon trig-
gered cries of alarm in Congress-
cries that eventually brought the
Administration's efforts to a stand-
still.
When President Reagan secretly
approved aid to the contras in
November, 1981, the idea of over-
throwing the Sandinistas seemed
fffi-fetched. Bermudez' Nicara-
guan Democratic Force (known as
the FDN, for its Spanish initials)
had been fighting since 1979, when
the colonel and other National
Guardsmen fled the Sandinista
revolution, but it had accomplished
little more than raids on farms in
southern Honduras and northern
Nicaragua
Miskito Indian resistance groups
also fought for control of their
homeland along the Caribbean
coast, and former Sandinista hero
Pastora was organizing his own
guerrilla force in southern Nicara-
gua But the contras, divided and
ill-organized, did not seriously
threaten the Managua regime. One
skeptical Administration official
dismissed them as "insects buzzing
around the Sandinistas' ankles."
Hard-Linen Back Contras
Yet hard-liners in the Adminis-
tration wanted to see the Sandinis-
tas overthrown and insisted that,
with enough U.S. support, the
contras could do the job. State
Department officials said that ob-
jective was unattainable, arguing
instead for using the contras to
wring concessions from the San-
dinistas.
Casey, reportedly skeptical at
first, came in time to agree with the
hard-liners, officials say. So while
the Administration officially dis-
claimed any such intention-"We
are not doing anything to over-
V
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::.row the government of Nicara-
r-ua." Reagan would say-most of
the men actually running the war
agreed that the goal was to topple
the regime. By 1383, "Casey made
o bones about it," as one senior
State Department official remem-
bers it.
But even the so-called soft-lin-
ers agreed that the CIA should
build the contras into a credible
:.treat-so Naroni's mission either
way: was the same.
"Different people had different
obiec::ves, but none of this was
Dewey's problem," another official
said. "He wasn't hired to make that
kind of distinction. He just carried
it out."
Almost immediately after Rea-
gan signed a directive committing
the United States to the guerrilla
war on Nov. 23, 1981, the CIA
station in the Honduran capital of
Tegucitalpa grew to about 25 offi-
cers under a new station chief who
rented a handsome suburban home
near the airport for his staff, mostly
Military supply experts and ac-
countantz. Maroni and CIA Direc-
tor Casey made frequent visits to
the area.
The new station's first tasks
were to arm the contras' growing
ranks,-to-make certain the subsis-
tence budget of $1 per day for each
recruit was not skimmed by their
officers and, in the words of a
former FDN leader, to "get our
officers out of Tegucigalpa, where
they wanted to stay, and into the
countryside where they could
fight."
By those lights, Maroni's effort
was remarkably successful. When
Bermudez's FDN carried off its
first major operation inside Nicara-
gua, blowing up two bridges in the
north of the country in March,
19S2, "there was great enthusiasm
in the CIA and in the Administra-
tide," an intelligence source-re-
called "We were finally bringing
pressure to bear on the Sandinis-
tas."
Maroni's political mission was
another story. The CIA recognized
from the outset that Bermudez, as a
former officer in the hated National
Guard, would have trouble winning
followers in a country that had only
recently cast cff Somoza's rule.
And officials were worried about
reports that contra units routinely
killed civilians and stole livestock.
So, early in 1982, Maroni met
secretly with Pastora, a disillu-
sioned one-time Sandinista combat
commander who was organizing
his own guerrilla force in Costa
Rica. Maroni and other U.S. offi-
cials were captivated by Pastora's
charisma; they reported to Wash-
ington that the socialist-leaning
revolutionary, not the rightist Ber-
mudez, was the real political threat
to Sandinista rule.
Pastora would long deny that he
took any help from the CIA. But in
fact, the ex-Sandinista accepted
U.S. money from the start-on
condition that he have absolute
"deniability" because his creden-
tials as a nationalist would be
weakened if his CIA ties were
revealed. As a result, CIA guns and
money were delivered to Pastora
through an elaborate network of
Latin American intermediaries-
the funds sometimes in plain brown
envelopes.
Pastora now admits that he met
with Casey and Maroni, but he says
that money was never explicitly
discussed. "Officially, the United
States never committed itself to
me," he said, "but I can't say that
the United States never came
through for me."
When he met with Casey, Pasto-
ra complained, the CIA chief dozed
off during his passionate spiel.
As early as July, 1982, Maroni
was pressing Pastora to ally with
the FDN, but the prickly ex-San-
dinista refused-and charged pub-
licly that the CIA was trying to
`force him to join up with "Somo-
cists" and "criminal mummies." It
was only the first spat in a relation-
ship that was destined to be
stormy; later, the CIA would cut off
Pastora's funding because he was
"unmanageable"-a charge the
guerrilla leader cheerfully admits.
Eventually, the U.S. effort would
he concentrated almost entirely on
the FDN in the north.
Maroni also struggled to change
the FDN's Somocist image. CIA
officers combed the Nicaraguan
exile commuftes in Miami Hon-
duras and Costa Rica for attractive.
figurGuardes-domtoirepldace the National
nate leadership. At a
December, 1982, news conference
in Miami, the FDN unveiled its new
"directorate," a board of six leaders
including a former Jesuit named
Edgar Chamorro, a former Sandin-
ista named Indalecio Rodriguez-
and Bermudez.
"It was done in a great hurry, in a
week," recalled Chamorro, who has
since broken with the FDN. "We
complained about this. They were
just improvising, reacting to things*
They said . . . they had to repack-
age the program in a way to be
palatable to Congress."
A few months later, to emphasize
the idea of non-Somocist control,
the FDN named a new "command-
er in chief"-Adolfo Calero, a for-
mer chairman of the Coca-Cola
bottling company of Nicaiagua
who had been jailed by Somoza for
leading a faction of the Nicaraguan
Conservative Party into opposition.
Despite the title, directorate mem-
ber Alfonso Callejas said. Bermu-
dez's men often treated the civil-
ians as mere front men. "Some of
them still refer to us as `the
political branch,' " he said ruefully.
There were fights over the reb-
els' conduct, too. The Americans
pressed the contra leaders to get rid
of officers with bad reputations,
among them Ricardo (Chino) Lau,
Bermudez's counterintelligence
chief, who has been accused' of
murdering Honduran dissidents.
Like Pastors, Bermudez resisted
pressure; U.S. officials say they
were assured by rebel leaders in
1983 that Lau had been removed,
only to find that he had merely
been shifted to a less visible posi-
tion in the FDN. Today, Bermudez
refuses to say whether Lau is still
in the organization or not.
"If he has committed a crime,"
the colonel said, "let the proof be
brought forward."
"The Americans were very
strong on human rights," Chamor-
ro said. "Bermudez was critical of
some of them on that He felt they
were trying to find out too much."
Maroni and his aides sternly
instructed the new leaders never to
call openly for the overthrow of the
Sandinistas but gave conflicting
advice on military strategy, Cha-
morro said.
"The problem was they told us
different things at different times,"
be recalled. He quoted one CIA
officer as "always saying the Presi-
dent of the United States wants you
to go to Managua:... But the
station chief in Tegucigalpa was
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more realistic. He said we didn't
have the strength to march to
Managua, and we should plan for a
long guerrilla presence in the
mountains."
Large-Scale Attacks
With CIA-supplied small arms
and manpower swelling its ranks
from some 5,000 in early 1983 to as
many as 8,000 in midyear, the FDN
began launching large-scale at-
tacks. In March, 1983, a column of
rebels nearly reached Matagalpa, a
provincial capital only 65 miles
northeast of Managua, before it was
beaten back. Other rebel units
roamed increasingly freely in the
northern provinces of Nueva Sego-
via and Jinotega, attacking Sandin-
is'a military posts but destroying
economic targets as well.
Maroni's men in Tegucigalpa
were optimistic: "We'll be in Mana-
gua by December," one of them
told a visiting congressman.
But the fighting turned out to be
inconclusive.
Chamorro and other FDN offi-
cials, complaining that the CIA
simply wasn't giving them enough
resources to do the job, asked for
bigger guns. "They were paying us
to fight, but they weren't letting us
win," Chamorro said. "It didn't
correspond to the purposes that
Maroni and others were talking
about- If you wanted us to take
cities, we needed machine guns and
mortars. But we weren't getting
anything near that; we were get-
ting bolt-action rifles."
At home, the Administration was
in no position to step up its aid. For
one thing, the change of govern-
ment in Argentina which followed
its defeat in the Falklands war
brought an end to Argentina's role
as a third-party surrogate for the
United States in funneling aid to
the contras in Nicaragua.
"When the Argentines pulled out
in 1983, as a result of the Falkland
events, ... the contras supported
by the United States zoomed up by
maybe 5,000 who had been sup-
ported by the Argentines. The
whole Argentine crowd suddenly
belonged to us," one intelligence
official said. "When they (the
Argentines) left, the U.S. fig leaf
was gone, and the size and scope of
the U.S.-supported contra effort _
changed radically."
An even bigger problem for the
Reagan Administration was the
rising complaint from Congression-
al Democrats that the covert pro-
gram seemed out of control and
aimed at overthrowing the Sandin-
istas instead of intercepting arms.
In May, 1983, the Democratic-
controlled House Intelligence
Committee voted for the first time
to cut off the contras' funds entire-
ly; the Republican Senate later
restored the money, but the fund-
ing level remained modest.
Casey and Maroni visited the
contras in Honduras again that
summer, FDN and U.S. officials
say-Casey to assure them that the
Administration would stay with
them, Maroni to deliver a less
cheerful message.
"Maroni told us Pastora's guer-
rilla tactics were a good approach,
and he criticized our conventional
tactics," Chamorro recalled in an
account confirmed by others. "He
said we should go more to guerrilla
war. He Praised Pastora as one who
knew how to fight. We resented
that, because it seemed the. CIA
was supporting (Pastora's) liberal
socialists while we, the conserva-
tives, were carrying the brunt of
the fighting."
CIA Contract Employees
To go with the new emphasis on
guerrilla warfare, Maroni brought
in a CIA contract employee to write
a manual of "psychological opera-
lions" for the FDN's officers. He
also told the contras that they
should avoid destroying economic
targets, under the theory that such
actions would only alienate the :
Nicaraguan peasantry, Chamorro
But later in 1983, contra leaders I
and U.S. officials say, the Adminis-
tration decided on a fateful new
escalation of the guerrilla war:
sabotage raids on such targets as oil
supplies and port facilities, to ham-
per the Nicaraguan military effort.
Some of the attacks would be
carried out by the FDN, but most
would be launched by the CIA;
itself, with both U.S. personnel and
Latin American agents.
"There were questions about the
competence of the contras . .
whether they could conduct effec-
tive (sabotage) operations," an
intelligence source recalled. "So `
the CIA went out to contract
employees."
One U.S. official said the tactic
was borrowed directly from the
leftist guerrillas in Ed Salvador.
"We had seen how effectively
sabotage could divert an army's
energy into static defense," he said.
At the end of August, 1983, the
FDN launched another offensive in
the north. This time, the Sandinis-
tas toured themselves fighftg on.
several fronts at once, with attacks
suddenly coming from the air and }
sea as well as on land.
From the south, Pastora
launched a pair of Cessna light
airplanes to bomb Managua air-
port-an attack some U.S. officials
said they never approved. (Pastora
lost half of his two-plane "air
force" when one of the Cessnas
crashed into the airport control
tower; after that, he complained,
the CIA cut off his aircraft sup-
plies.)
The neat day, an airplane
bombed the Nicaraguan port of
Corinto. Credit for that raid was
claimed by the FDN, but it was
actually carried out by the CIA,
according to congressional sources
and contras. Speedboat-borne
commandos landed at night to blow
up bridges, sabotage oil pipelines
and destroy a Sandinista arms
depot-all under the direct control
of the CIA, rebel leaders and U.S.
officials have since said.
"There were some operations
that we didn't even know about
until afterwards," said Chamorro.
"Calero didn't have any part in it at
all. Bermudez went once to blow up
a bridge, but he wasn't taking an
active part; he was just a guest in a
boat. He told me the man doing the
job was an Ecuadorean who almost
drowned and never found the tar-
get. The sun was coming up, the
frogman wasn't back yet and ev-
eryone in the boat was very ner-
vous. The man finally showed up at
the last minute and they grabbed
him and ran north. Bermudez was
very critical; he said, 'Why don't
the North Americans just give us '
the money and let us do it?' "
Bermudez tersely confirmed the
account. "That was at Paso Cabal - lo," he said. "It didn't succeed."
Despite such criticism, many of
the other sabotage operations were
remarkably successful. On Oct. 14,
1983, a team of CIA-sponsored
commandos went ashore at Corinto
and set Nicaragua's largest oil-
storage facility afire; the resulting
blaze burned for several days and
forced the Sandinistas to evacuate
25,000 people from their homes.
The ground offensive was more
successful than earlier campaigns.
But it slowed to a halt, U.S. officials
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