A SECRET WAR FOR NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84B00049R001403500031-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 2, 2007
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: November 8, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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INTERNATIONAL
A covert operation to restrict the flow of Cuban arms
to El Salvador expands into a larger plan to undermine
the Sandinista government in Managua, miring the
Reagan administration deeper in Central America.
T he smoky bar in Tegucigalpa was a
cousin to Rick's Cafe in "Casa-
blanca," a nightly gathering place
for the dangerous and the desperate in Hon-
duras. Squeezed into a corner one evening
last week were four Argentine military ad-
visers, speaking machine-gun Spanish and
occasionally stealing furtive glances around
the room. A half-dozen Americans stood in
a loose line at the bar, drinking beer and
talking too loudly about guns. In the center
of the room, grouped around a table that
listed far right, were seven men drinking
rum. One of them wore a gold earring. He
explained that the seven men were Nicara-
guan exiles who belonged to various fac-
tions of la contra, a band of counterrev-
olutionaries trying, to topple the leftist
Sandinista regime. They were ready to
move toward Managua, one of the men said.
"We just need to hear from The Boss that
it's time to go." Who was The Boss? The
man with the earring was impatient with
stupid questions. "He's the man you call
`Mr. Ambassador'."
The envoy in question was John D. Ne-
groponte, the American ambassador in
Honduras. Official sources told NEWS-
WEEK last week that Negroponte is oversee-
ing an ambitious covert campaign to arm,
American airman preps Hondurans durin
train and direct Nicaraguan exiles to inter-
cept the flow of arms to leftist guerrillas in
El Salvador. But the operation has another
objective: to harass and undermine the Cu-
ban-backed government of Nicaragua. The
project traces back to Jimmy Carter's ef-
forts to support Nicaraguan moderates.
Ronald Reagan added the task of cutting
the Cuban-Nicaraguan arms pipeline to El
Salvador. The plot, launched mostly with
popguns and machismo, now threatens in-
stead to destabilize Honduras, to fortify the
Marxists in Nicaragua and to waste U.S.
prestige along the tangled banks of the Coco
River. Worse, U.S. officials concede there is
A Honduran colonel escorts American civilians from a helicopter at Puerto Lempira: Some friendly visitors from the north
Randy Taylor-Sygma
n 'NOVEMBER 8, 19882 I
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 ohn Hoagland-Gamma-Liaison
rring pint maneuvers: A mushrooming commitment
r- a danger that the operation could provoke a
in Nicaraguan counterattack on Honduras
.r that could drag the United States directly
i- into the conflict. "This is the big fiasco of
ie this administratian," says one U.S. c fficial.
f- "This is our Bay of Pigs."
s. Reports of secret operations along the
~g Nicaraguan-Honduran border have circu-
31 lated for months. But NEWSWEEK has un-
h covered extensive details of a campaign that
i- has escalated far beyond Washington's
le original intentions. Administration sources
told NEWSWEEK that there are now almost
o 50 CIA personnel serving in Honduras-
is certainly the longest manifest in Central
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America. That team is supplemented by
dozens of oneratives including a number of
retired military and intelligence officers.
Argentine military advisers are supporting
the operation in Honduras; separate anti-
Sandinista activities are underway in Mexi-
co and Venezuela.
Camps: The fighting forces are drawn
from 2,000 Miskito Indians, an estimated
10,000 anti-Sandinistas in Nicaragua itself
and an assorted group of former Nicaraguan
National Guardsmen and supporters of de-
posed dictator Anastasio Somoza. They
have set up 10 training camps divided be-
tween Honduran and Nicaraguan territory.
Their hit-and-run forays against Nicara-
guan bridges, construction sites and patrols
are designed to harass the Sandinistas while
CIA operatives cast around for a moderate
new Nicaraguan leadership. Among others,
the United Statestried tocultivateEden Pas-
tora-the former Sandinista hero known as
Commander Zero-after he resigned from
the government in July 1981. That effort
failed. "Pastora is a man who would not
accept a penny from the CIA," swears one
associate. "If he did, I would kill him."
The operation posed some very disturb-
ing questions: did it violate the spirit if not
Hitting the silk: A Honduran trainee bails
out behind his American adviser
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Mario Ruiz
43
 A nursing mother, a funeral at Mocoron: Willing recruits among Miskito refugees
Mario Ruiz
the letter of congressional restrictions on
dirty tricks-and would it only make a bad
situation in Central America even worse?
A congressional-committee spokesman
said that CIA Director William Casey
(who personally inspected the operation in
Honduras) had adequately briefed con-
gressional oversight committees. But some
congressional sources complained that the
CIA's briefings had been bland and disin-
genuous. And others wondered pointedly
whether the administration had used ap-
proval for plans to cut off the flow of
Cuban arms to rebels in El Salvador as a
cover for a more reckless plot to topple the
Sandinistas. "This operation's just about
out of control and people are getting pan-
icky," said one source. According to one
U.S. official, Secretary of State George
Shultz was- "fuming" over the mess. Said
another, "Only Shultz can change it-if
there is still time."
Moderates: Washingtoh's covert in-
volvement in Nicaragua began even be-
fore Somoza fled the country. In
1978, with the dynasty nearing collapse,
Jimmy Carter signed a "finding," as
required by post-Watergate law, au-
thorizing under-the-table CIA support
for democratic elements in Nicaraguan
society, such as the press and labor
unions. The Carter administration cor-
rectly recognized that with the Somoza
regime crumbling, Cuban-backed leftist
forces would try to squeeze out more
moderate elements. American financial
support for Nicaragua's opposition
forces has continued, and it remains
one of the many items on the CIA's
yearly "Classified Schedule of
Authorizations."
After the Sandinistas seized power
anyway, the Reagan administration took
office worried that Nicaragua would be-
come a platform for Cuban-sponsored sub-
version. Ronald Reagan's first national-se-
curity adviser, Richard Allen, set to work on
plans to harass the Sandinistas. Former Sec-
retary of State Alexander Haig and Thomas
0. Enders, assistant secretary of state, be-
came increasingly concerned that the San-
dinistas were providing weapons to leftist
rebels in El Salvador-much of the hard-
ware shipped across Honduras. In several
meetings, a well-placed administration
source says, Enders spoke about the need to
"get rid of the Sandinistas." "The driving
forces behind this operation were Haig and
Enders," said one insider. "Both the agency
and the Pentagon had qualms."
Joint Action: At first, the administra-
tion's planning focused entirely on how to
cut the Salvadoran rebels' supply lines from
Cuba and other communist nations through
Nicaragua and Honduras into El Salvador.
Haig directed then State Department coun-
selor Robert McFarlane to prepare a series
of option papers. Senior Defense Depart-
ment officials rejected a blockade of Cuba or
Nicaragua, pointing out that much of the
arms traffic moved by air. Administration
officials say McFarlane then asked the CIA
to explore possible covert action against the
rebels' supply lines, an option that proved
more promising and less politically risky
than the direct use of U.S. forces. Early on,
Haig's ambassador at large, Gen. Vernon
Walters, and other officials discussed possi-
blejointcovert operationswith conservative
Latin American governments, including
Argentina, Guatemala and Honduras.
Last December Reagan signed his own
"finding," expanding on Carter's and au-
thorizing the CIA to contact dissident
Commander Zero: A rebuff to the CIA
Bosio-Gammaliaison
Nicaraguans in exile and to conduct po-
litical and paramilitary operations to in-
terdict weapons shipments from Nicara-
gua to Salvadoran guerrillas. A second
document, known as a "scope paper,"
outlined permissible operations and
their estimated cost. In its first stage, the
plan was to create a 500-man, U.S.-
trained paramilitary force at a cost of
$19.9 million. Argentina would train an
additional 1,000-man force. "The focus
was on action which would interdict the
flow of arms to guerrillas in the friendly
countries," said one source who has read
both documents. "Nowhere does it talk
about overthrow." But one senior offi-
cial involved in the decisions conceded
that "there are secondary and tertiary
consequences which you can't con-
trol"-such as the fall of the Sandinista
government.
As U.S. officials tell it, the size of the
CIA station in Honduras doubled,
bringing it to about 50, with orders to
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help interdict the arms supplies by training
the Honduran intelligence and security
forces in intelligence gathering and interro-
gation, providing logistical support for
raids into Nicaragua, aiding the Honduran
coast guard and helping the Argentines and
other non-Nicaraguans train anti-Sandinis-
ta Nicaraguans in sabotage operations us-
ing small arms supplied by the Americans.
Washington had used Honduras once be-
fore as a base for a destabilization program:
in 1954, when the United States toppled the
reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala. In the view of the Reagan ad-
ministration, Honduras itself had become
dangerously vulnerable to the Cuban-
backed spread of communism. Honduras
had managed to remain relatively calm and
largely unaffected after the 1979 Nicara-
guan revolution by simply looking the other
way as Cuban-Nicaraguan arms passed
through to El Salvador. "There was kind of
an understanding that if we looked the other
Way, the subversivos wouldn't - look our
way," said one Honduran Army officer.
`Spearhead': That changed when John
Negroponte arrived. He was handpicked
for the job and reported to Enders. with
whom he had worked in Southeast Asia
during the Vietnam War and later under
then national-security adviser Henry Kis-
singer. "Negroponte is the spearhead," said
one Washington insider. "He was sent
down there by Haig and Enders to
carry out the operation without
any qualms of conscience."
Negroponte forged close ties
with powerful Hondurans, espe-
cially the commander of the
armed forces, Gen. Gustavo Al-
dofo Alvarez, who is still the
most powerful Honduran in the
country despite the election in
January of President Roberto
Suazo Cordova, the first civilian
president in nine years. "They
discuss what should be done, and
then Alvarez does what Negro-
ponte tells him to," a member of
the military high command said
matter-of-factly. The two appear
to dislike each other personally,
said one aide to Alvarez, because
"they both run the Army, al-
though only one of them has the
title for that job." Alvarez's G-2
military-intelligence agents act as
liaisons to the contras and Al-
varez himself reports to Negro-
ponte. In addition, two officials in
Washington said, Alvarez's mili-
tary is the main conduit for small
arms being delivered to the Nica-
raguan exiles and is the main link
to Argentine military advisers in
Honduras. Alvarez has reason to
cooperate: in the past two years,
total U.S. assistance to Honduras
has totaled $187 million. A $78.3
million aid package has been pro-
posed for 1983.
The interdiction project proved more dif-
ficult than expected. The rebel supply lines
were elusive: as the Honduran Army
cracked down on arms shipments across
land, the leftists began receiving aid by sea
and air. At the same time, the Sandinistas
undertook a massive military buildup. Un-
der the new pressures, the plan spread be-
yond its original bounds. "It became clear
that cutting the roads from Nicaragua
wasn't enough," said one source. "It was
necessary to raise the cost to the Sandinistas
and the Cubans of meddling in El Salvador."
Problems: That meant, at the least,
cross-border harassment-and that, too,
proved more difficult than Washington
planned. First, according to sources in Hon-
duras, the Argentines reduced their partici-
pation in the covert training program and in
the overt training of the Honduran Army
after the outbreak of the Falklands War.
(Washington officials said, however, that
there were about 20 Argentine trainers in
A Miskito Major
camps Sandinista
Contra ^ military
? camps bases
Anti-
? Refugee Sandinista
camps actions
U.S.
Jl advisers
Airstrip
0 MILES 100 150
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John Hoagland-Gamma-Liaison
President Cordova: A struggling democracy
EL SALVADOR
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Sandinistas hold guardsmen during the civil war: Can the Somocistas come back?
the country last week and that the numbers
had not changed appreciably during the
Falklands War.) Then the Miskito Indians,
who had been forcibly driven from their
homes along the Honduran-Nicaraguan
border, proved eager but unpromising mod-
em soldiers. "The Indians aren't very quick
learners," says one knowledgeable source.
Such problems soon led to strange bedfel-
lows. When the covert policy was first de-
veloped, direct U.S. dealings with exiled
Somocistas were officially ruled out. "Our
guidelines are pretty damn firm," says one
senior U.S. official. "At no time has there
Our Man in Tegucigalpa
John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Honduras, doesn't
look like the Ugly American. At 43, he is tall and baldish; his
manner is studiedly bland. His deliberate, pause-filled conversa-
tion, says one frequent dinner guest, "prompts a keen desire for
coffee." Butanother who knows Negroponte better calls him "'a
Machiavelli-only shrewder." He is street smart. He speaks
fluent Spanish, French, Greek and Vietnamese. He reads Shake-
:;peare Says one Honduran official who has followed his prog-
ress, "He must love 'Julius Caesar'."
Negroponte's 12-month tenure in Honduras has been a bit
imperious. At the Inauguration of President Roberto Suazo
Cordova last January-the first civilian president in nine
years-=a messenger handed the new leader a four-page letter
from the U.S. Embassy drafted by the new American ambassa-
dor. Encouraging a prompt "revitalization." of the ailing econo-
my, the letter--using the imperative form of
Spanish-directed the government of Hondu- Negroponte: The proconsul
taxes on mining companies and lifting some
price controls. The government dutifully com-
plied with many of the demands. Negroponte's
influence steadily grew, and, it appears, so did
his involvement in covert action against Nica-
ragua. "I'm not saying that the guy who gives
all the orders here, even for covert ops, is:
Negroponte,"= says ~a Western:souree 'whoi
knows. "But that guy wears Negropontes suits
and eats his breakfast. Do you get the picture?"
Negroponte's arrival in Tegucigalpa was
something of a surprise. Few expected an, am-
bassador of quite his caliber. "Anyone who
thinks. that I'm extremely ambitious just'
doesn't know me verywell,",he says mildly.
galpa. Fellow envoys are particularly galled by
his habit of sending upbraiding cables when he
disapproves of their actions. His efforts have
not been as successful as he might have hoped:
Hondurans in frequent contact with the ambas-
sador say he was "deeply disappointed" and
"personally hurt" that President Reagan chose
to make Costa Rica his only stop in Central
America during a planned five-day tour of
Latin America at the beginning of December.
The ambassador maybe in for more disappoint-
ment. "His obsession to get to the top fast will be
the very thing that brings him crashing down,"
concludes a foreign diplomatic colleague in
Honduras. "The question is whether he might_
not bring a policy and the fragile government of
Honduras down with him."
BETH NISSEN in Tegucigalpa
NEWSWEEK/NOVEMBER 8, 1982
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INTERNATIONAL
been any authorization to deal with the
Somoza people." But Negroponte, under
pressure from Haig and Enders to produce
some successes against the Sandinistas,
turned to the only promising group avail-
able-the Somocistas. "It was Negroponte
the Somocistas," says one U.S. official.
"That wasn't the original plan. He had to
improvise." Sources in both Washington
and Honduras say the ambassador has been
careful to deal with the Somocistas through:
intermediaries to preserve his deniability; '
Asked about U.S. support for Somocistas or:
"No comment, no comment and a big fat no
comment." Of his own contacts, he said,
"The only Nicaraguan I know personally is.
the Nicaraguan ambassador to Honduras.~
The only Nicaraguan I deal with in any.
official way is the ambassador."
At the same time, the Reagan administra-
tion looked for a leader around whom to
build the opposition. No one connected
with the hated Somocistas would do. The
most attractive candidate was Pastora-
Commander Zero. After leaving the gov-
ernment in 1981, he suddenly surfaced in
Costa Rica last April, denounced his former
But no one has evercalledhim an underachiever. "Knowing this
administration's preoccupation with Central America and its
worries about Honduras in particular, he set out to make a mark
in Honduras that would be noticed all the way to the top, says a
colleague who has known him for years.
Career. Educated at Exeter and Yale, Negroponte joined the
Foreign Service at the age of 21 and rose quickly. He was a
favored political officer in Saigon at the height of the war in
Vietnam. He was sent as an emissary to the Paris peace talks,
where he insisted that the United States was giving up too much-
to the communist 3. The young Negroponte was rewarded with a
post at the National Security Council. After a falling-out with
his onetime mentor, Henry Kissinger, who was then national-
security adviser, Negroponte was exiled to Ecuador as political
counselor, but he bounced back to become U.S. consul general in.
Thessaloniki, Greece.
Since coming to Honduras, Negroponte has worked hard to
establish himself as something more than our man in Teguci
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INTERNATIONAL
comrades as "traitors and assassins" and
announced: "I will drag them with bul-
lets from their mansions and Mercedes-
Benzes." The CIA first tried to cultivate
Pastora after he left the Sandinista gov-
ernment, but he would not cooperate.
After Negroponte began to deal with the
Somocistas, any chance of recruiting
Pastora probably was lost.
Alienated: Negroponte now has fro-
zen him out of the action. Pastora and
other disillusioned Sandinistas, such as
former junta member Alfonso Robelo,
have been told that "Honduras is closed
to us, we cannot work here," says one of
them. NEWSWEEK has learned that Pas-
tora has made two clandestine trips to
Honduras since spring to try to win sup-
port and establish base camps. Both
times he was kept under virtual house
arrest by the military. "He couldn't
make a phone call, let alone organize a
contra group," says one Honduran mili-
tary officer. "The orders came from Al-
varez himself that our American friends
did not want this guy to have any part of Clark, Enders: `Get rid of the Sandinistas'
the game." As a result, despite Washing-
ton's intentions, Negroponte has alienated
the only group likely to attract widespread
support inside Nicaragua. "There's no
question that Nicaragua is ripe for a
change," said one European observer in the
region. "But the U.S. is supporting the only
wrong, the only truly evil alternative."
After Negroponte and the Somocistas
became partners, the new American allies
began to force Washington's hand. The So-
mocistas bivouacked in Honduras were al-
ready trained soldiers, backed by wealthy
exiles in Miami. With the added boost of
tacit U.S. support, they soon took a com-
manding position among competing contra
groups. They also developed their own pri-
vate plan numero uno: to move the contra
camps that remain in Honduras across the
border into Nicaragua, then move the
camps already established in Nicaragua far-
ther down toward Managua and, finally,
past the capital into the south. When the
time is right, the Somocistas say, they will
draw their loose circle of camps together in
toward Managua and force the Sandinistas
out. And then? "Come the counterrevolu-
tion, there will be a massacre in Nicaragua,"
promises one contra officer. "We have a lot
of scores to settle. There will be bodies
from the border to Managua."
That obviously was not what Wash-
ington had in mind. Despite the dirty
little war on the ground, there is little
support in Washington either for a mas-
sive contra invasion or for a border war
between Nicaragua and Honduras. In-
stead, the constant pressure on Nicara-
gua from the border areas is designed to
keep the four-year-old Sandinista gov-
ernment in a jumpy state of alert. While
U.S. officials maintain that the primary
objective of the operation remains cut-
ting off the supply routes, they also hope"
that a threatened Sandinista government
will bring itself down by further repress-
ing its internal opposition, thereby
strengthening the determination of mod-
erate forces to resist. If that happens,
says one U.S. official in Central Amer-
ica, "then the Sandinistas will fall like a
house of cards in a wind."
Thin Line: Although the Reagan ad-
ministration and the Somocistas dis-
agree on strategy, U.S. involvement
with the contras has escalated. When
equipment-helicopters and radios, for
example-breaks down, Americans re-
pair it. Americans established the guerril-
las' training regime, and arming the con-
tras was easy: the massive American
buildup of the Honduran military freed
older Honduran equipment, which was
shipped off to counterrevolutionary bases.
The Americans were soon treading the thin
line between instructing insurgents and
plotting the missions they were being
trained for. Though Americans are express-
ly forbidden to go out on operations, one
veteran of other paramilitary operations
said: "Inevitably that happens... You lose
your credibility with the people you're
GETTING IN DEEPER --A TIM
ELINE FOR TROUBLE
APRIL 1982. Eden Pastora, the legendary
Although the United States has steadily increa
sed its military and economic commitments in
"Commander Zero" who defected from the
Central America. the troubled region has only g
rown more volatile.
Sandinistas in 1981, surfaces in Costa Rica;
th
CIA t
i
f
ll
li
h
e
r
es unsuccess
y to en
st
im to
u
1978. The Carter administration authorizes .
AUGUST 1981. U.S. Assistant Secretaryof
lead the Honduran-based opponents of the
the. CIA- to support moderate opposition
=State Enders visits Managua and promises
Sandinistas.Ataboutthesametime,U.S.Am-
groups in Nicaragua opposed to the dictator- `
aid and U.S. noninterference in Nicaraguan
bassadorNegroponte makescontactwithfor-
ship ofGen. Anastasio Somoza.