Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (13 page)

Senator Clark’s advocacy of a decade earlier, calling for “the ethical element in foreign policy,” had tragically been emptied of its ethical and democratic content. Clark’s call had capped a dual objective: to end U.S. “political and military interference in the internal affairs of other countries” and to recast U.S. foreign-policy formulation along democratic principles. But the Cold Warriors had learned from the antiwar movement that political advantage came from occupying the moral high ground. The Reaganites incorporated “the ethical element,” though rhetorically and demagogically, to promote interference rather than to end it. Previously clandestine forms of interference were now unabashedly proclaimed as the pursuit of freedom: in his 1985 State of the Union address, Reagan described support of the contras as backing “freedom fighters” in their battle to overthrow Third World “communist tyranny.” When he signed the International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985 (S.960) into law on August 8, 1985, Reagan praised this “assistance for the democratic revolution in Nicaragua.” Proxy war, designed by Kissinger as a makeshift and pragmatic way of avoiding congressional oversight, was turned into a full-blown ideological assault under the Reagan administration.

LIC had several attractions: it offered the prospect of waging war without declaring it, without a draft, with few soldiers deployed,
and with even fewer returning home in body bags. But, for these very reasons, the domestic political costs of LIC were high and, in time, became higher still: for to wage war without declaring it was also to erode and, ultimately, to undermine the democratic process at home. LIC theorists made no secret of their conviction that an active press and vigilant congressional oversight were significant obstacles to military effectiveness. One is struck by the consistency with which this point of view was articulated, whether in testimony to Congress, in military conferences, or in official reports. Its most dramatic statement came in Colonel Oliver North’s July 1987 testimony to the select congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair. Repeatedly affirming that U.S. national security justifies the employment of covert paramilitary operations and the calculated dissemination of false and misleading information to conceal such operations from adversaries, North defended the right of some U.S. officials to deceive other U.S. officials. Deadpan and matter of fact, he declared, “There is great deceit [and] deception practiced in the conduct of covert operations. They are at essence a lie.” LIC theorist Neil Livingstone summed up that same view to senior officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.: “The United States will never win a war fought daily in the U.S. media or on the floor of Congress.” Some years before, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force J. Michael Kelly had told a 1983 National Defense University conference attended by Colonel North: “I think the most critical special operations mission we have today is to persuade the American public that the communists are out to get us. If we win the war of ideas, we will win everywhere else.” And the JLIC report confirmed, “In order to promote a broad understanding of the issues involved, a carefully created, sophisticated, and ongoing public diplomacy effort is necessary.” No matter the language,
the message was consistent: first waged in Vietnam, the war for “hearts and minds” was to be brought home, and in this propaganda effort all institutional safeguards that we may think of as key to a functioning democracy—particularly congressional oversight and an independent press—were considered as no more than inconveniences to be set aside in organizing an efficient war effort. When Colonel North declared in his July 10, 1987, testimony that CIA Director William J. Casey had proposed the establishment of an “off-the-shelf, self-sustaining, stand-alone entity” that could perform covert political and military operations without accountability to Congress, Senator Warren B. Rudman observed: “If you carry this to its logical extreme, you don’t have a democracy anymore.”

Central America: Embracing Terror Openly

With the Sandinista-led Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted from southern Africa to Central America, although the Reagan administration’s foreign policy was very wide ranging. Once Jeanne Kirkpatrick had rationalized the dual strategy of embracing right-wing dictators while targeting left-wing regimes, the Heritage Foundation translated the theoretical maxim into a practical proposal that identified nine countries for rollback: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. In March 1981, CIA Director Casey proposed to Reagan a counterrevolutionary offensive on eight countries—Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Iran, Libya, and Cuba—six of which were taken from the Heritage Foundation’s hit list. Whereas the October 25, 1983, invasion of Grenada signaled the ceremonial beginning of rollback, Nicaragua was the real policy test. The CIA was in command from the time agency operatives established contact with
anti-Sandinista groups in Florida and Central America and brought them together as a single organization—the FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Forces)—under the leadership of former dictator Anastasio Somoza’s national-guard officials. The FDN became the leading organization in the coalition known as the counterrevolutionaries—or, the contras.

The contras were a CIA progeny from the outset. In November 1981, President Reagan had signed National Security Decision Directive 17, authorizing $19.5 million “for the CIA to create a paramilitary commando squad to conduct attacks inside Nicaragua.” In another month, “American agents—some CIA, some U.S. Special Forces—were working through Argentine intermediaries to set up contra safe houses, training centers and base camps along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border.” Contras were an exclusive CIA “asset,” and the war in Nicaragua was a CIA production, from scripting to editing. Take, for example, the testimony of Arturo Cruz, one of the three leaders of the contras from 1985 until he resigned on March 9, 1987. On his resignation, Cruz condemned the Reagan administration for allowing the contras to be controlled by CIA-appointed military commanders and right-wing politicians. Declaring that contra leaders were really puppets of the United States, he said it would be impossible to turn the contras into a democratic movement. A close parallel can be found in the CIA’s relationship to the Royal Lao Army in Vientiane—in Alfred McCoy’s words, “the only army in the world, except for the U.S. army, that was entirely financed by the U.S. government”—and to assorted mercenary forces in the Laotian provinces; in southern Africa, the relationship between the apartheid regime in South Africa and Renamo in Mozambique was also similar.

The counterrevolutionary war in Nicaragua was unofficially declared on March 14, 1982, when “CIA-trained and -equipped
saboteurs blew up two major bridges in Chinandega and Nueva Segovia provinces.” In a matter of months, the contras had established a reputation for brutality and cruelty. By mid-1982, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was reporting contra “assassination of minor government officials.” In late 1983, Duane Clarridge, the CIA agent in charge of the covert war, admitted in a closed briefing of the House Intelligence Committee staff that the contras had killed not only “Sandinista officials in the provinces” but also “heads of cooperatives, nurses, doctors and judges.” The human-rights monitoring group Americas Watch documented contra forces “systematically engaged in the killing of prisoners and the unarmed” including “indiscriminate attacks, torture and other outrages against personal dignity.” By the end of 1985, Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health estimated that 3,652 civilians had been killed, 4,039 wounded, and 5,232 kidnapped during contra raids. The point of kidnapping, whether by contras in Nicaragua or Renamo in Mozambique, was to make recruits out of hostages. The
New York Times
reported a mass contra kidnapping of between fifteen and twenty civilians near the town of Sinna on April 27, 1987. The U.S.-based Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights confirmed in July 1987 that, besides executing prisoners and murdering civilians, contras also forcibly kidnapped peasants as recruits.

As run-of-the-mill contra activities—blowing up bridges, torturing and assassinating officials and professionals, kidnapping civilians—became known, the CIA got involved in providing political cover for the contras. Starting in January 1983, the CIA retained a Miami-based public-relations firm for $600,000 per year; the contract said the firm was to “project a positive image” and to “publicize” the FDN “in specific target countries through newspaper/magazine articles.” The public-relations effort reached its climax in May when President Reagan christened the contras as
“freedom fighters” and soon after upgraded them to “the moral equivalents of our founding fathers,” an epithet he was later to bestow on the Afghan mujahideen as well.

While the contras carried out crude acts of face-to-face violence, the CIA organized the kind of large-scale sabotage that was beyond contra operational capability. Even in these instances—such as the “at least twenty-two air, land, and sea raids on vital Nicaraguan installations” carried out between September 1983 and April 1984—the operations were clandestinely conducted by “a specially trained force of ‘unilaterally controlled Latino assets’ (UCLAs).” “Our mission,” explained one Honduran UCLA, was “to sabotage ports, refineries, boats, and bridges and to try to make it appear that the contras had done it.” Thus, UCLA-manned speedboats launched from a CIA “mother ship” twelve miles offshore struck the oil facilities at Puerto Sandino on September 8, 1983, and CIA commandos fired mortars and grenades to ignite five storage tanks filled with 3.4 million gallons of fuel on October 10. When President Reagan authorized the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, as part of a National Security Council “harassment” plan, in December 1983, UCLA commando teams, once again operating from a CIA mother ship, deposited the mines in shipping channels. Joint CIA-UCLA teams conducted attacks on oil tanks, port facilities, communications centers, and military positions in the first third of 1984. “Our intention is to severely disrupt the flow of shipping essential to Nicaraguan trade during the peak export period,” Oliver North wrote in a “top secret” memorandum, “Special Activities in Nicaragua,” dated March 2, 1984. Add to these activities comprehensive economic sabotage, which included halting all bilateral aid, a trade boycott, an economic embargo, and pressure on the World Bank to suspend all lending to the Sandinistas in October 1982, and you have a full
understanding of the range of policies the United States mustered to isolate and crush this tiny country, the size of Iowa.

Cocaine, Contras, and the CIA

The mining of Nicaraguan harbors created an uproar in public and in Congress. This was around the same time that other U.S.-supported Third World dictators began losing credibility in the public eye: counterinsurgency in El Salvador began to look like propping up a regime condoning death squads; the public image of the Marcos regime in the Philippines began to resemble that of earlier U.S. protégés like the shah of Iran and Somoza of Nicaragua; and there was growing concern within the Republican Party about the extent of domestic black electoral support being lost on account of constructive engagement with apartheid South Africa. The CIA and the Reagan administration seemed to have overreached themselves. In response, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, attached to the Intelligence Authorization Act for 1984:

During fiscal year 1984, no more than $24,000,000 of the funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua, by any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual.

With this amendment—admittedly a much milder version of the Clark Amendment—Congress capped contra funding at
roughly a quarter of what the Reagan administration considered necessary to establish a proper fighting force. Soon after, Robert McFarlane and Oliver North hunted for additional funding sources: they asked the Saudis for $1 million per month and took a mission to apartheid South Africa with a similar objective. In a concerted effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the Reagan administration took two initiatives that were to have lasting impact on U.S. foreign policy. The first was to turn to the drug trade for an illicit source of funds; the second was to turn to the religious right to implement those foreign-policy objectives that Congress had ruled against, thus beginning a trend toward privatizing war.

As in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, so in Central America; the pursuit of war by proxy led to an alliance between the CIA and drug dealers. Even though Nicaragua never produced coca as Laos did opium, CIA assets became key to providing a protective cover for the flow of cocaine from Central America to the United States in return for a reverse flow of materials and armaments from the CIA to the contras. Cocaine production and distribution were controlled by the Medellín cartel in Colombia, whose 1988 annual income was estimated at $8 billion and two of whose leaders, Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar, were placed on the list of the world’s richest men by
Forbes
magazine. Alfred McCoy observed in his study on the global drug trade, “The Medellín cartel’s rise coincided with the start of the CIA’s … support and supply of contra guerrillas.” Indeed, McCoy noted that “all major U.S. agencies have gone on the record stating, with varying degrees of frankness, that the Medellín cartel used the contra resistance forces to smuggle cocaine into the United States.” The minimalist statements came from the State Department, whose view was that “a few people somehow affiliated with the contras may have been
involved with cocaine.” But “better-informed agencies,” such as the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), were more realistic; they “reported that leading contra commanders were major drug traffickers.”