TAKING AIM AT NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000302440019-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 16, 2010
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: March 22, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/16: CIA-RDP90-00552R000302440019-0
ARTICLE APPEARED
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h-sliSWEEK
22 MARCH 1982
Hughes points out a military installation: Longer and louder alarms about communist meddling in America's backyard
V_F" S-1 a 0
E
T he lights dimmed, the projector
beamed and the screen filled with
blown-up aerial photographs that conjured
up an earlier time of confrontation. Before a
packed house of reporters, John Hughes,
the photo-intelligence expert who present-
ed the evidence in the Cuban missile crisis
twenty years ago, took a pointer last week
and made the Reagan Administration's
case against Nicaragua. Flipping through
the grainy photographs, Hughes said the
Sandinistas have built 36 new military in-
stallations in just two years. He pointed to
new airfields, lengthened runways and a
dramatic array of Soviet-made tanks, truck-
drawn howitzers, helicopters and amphibi-
ous ferries. He showed Nicaraguan troops
in training and put the total number of men
under arms at 70,000=the biggest and most
threatening army in Central America.
"Who is helping the Sandinistas do this?"
he asked. "The fingerprint we find, in every
case ... [belongs to] the Cubans."
The carefully orchestrated show-and-tell
session was the most successful element in a
ragged propaganda blitz last week. The of-
fensive seemed to reflect the Administra-
tion's growing frustration over the limits of
its ability to act in Central America. Neither
Congress nor the public seems inclined to
accept Reagan's warnings about communist
meddling in theregion.Thepublic mood has
from candid about the size of their military
buildup, nothing in the declassified material
showed a direct conduit of arms into El
Salvador. "I think most people were ready
to believe that the Nicaraguans are building
up their army," said one U.S. official, "but
that was never the problem."
The Administration hoped to make the
Nicaragua-Salvador connection with a pa-
rade of witnesses from the front but the
first step went disastrously awry. The State
Department invited six reporters to inter-
view Orlando Jose Tardencillas Espinosa,
19, a Nicaraguan captured in El Salvador.
Tardencillas had "confessed" earlier that he
had been sent to the war zone by the Sandin-
istas. But when the tape recorders started
rolling, he stunned the reporters-and U.S.
officials-by suddenly taking back every-
thing he had said. He described himself as a
free-lance revolutionary and said lie had
been tortured and beaten into collaborating
withEl Salvadorand Washington. "The day
before I came, an officer from the U.S. Em-
bassy told me what I should say," he said.
"He told me they needed to demonstrate the
presence of Cubans in El Salvador. I was
given a choice. I could come here and do
what I'm doing-or facecertain death."
Tardencillas's bizarre turnabout left the
Administration in a bind. For weeks offi-
cials had been hinting that they had top-
secret intelligence data on the Sandinistas'
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As a result, the Administration has found
itselfwith few alternatives other than sound-
ing ever longer and louder alarms.
It was hard to say what the alarm bells
foretold. Washington seemed tobeplaying a
high-stakes game of psychological warfare
designed to keep the Nicaraguans, Cubans
and Soviets guessing about Reagan's ulti-
mateintentions. Onepossibilitywasthat the
Administration was hoping to use its evi-
The Administration
launches a frenetic
propaganda campaign
that leaves troubling
questions unanswered.
dence to enlist other Latin American na-
tions to help cut the flow of arms to Salva-
doran leftists. Looming behind it all was the
prospect of a darker plan: a CIA proposal to
help paramilitary groups cut the flow of
arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador.
There was no doubt about theearnestness
of the Administration's concern, but its me-
dia campaign raised as many questions as it
answered. While the photo evidence dem-
onstrated that the Sandinistas had been far