“Boss, you’d better get over here. The Italians are about to assault my position.”
“Damn! DAMN!” was all Admiral Watkins seemed able to manage as American and Italian diplomats and military officials on the ground in Sigonella frantically negotiated over who took custody of the hijackers.
General Stiner called Vice Admiral Arthur Moreau, Admiral Crowe’s assistant at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He laid out the situation in his typically calm and controlled manner while some of us crowded around Moreau in the Tank to listen.
“I want to bring you up to speed and to re-verify my mission,” Stiner said. “Here is the situation: we have the plane. I have verified that the four terrorists are on board, along with eight to ten armed guards from the 77 Force, which I do not consider a threat. Also, there are two other men, one a tough-looking Arab in his mid-forties, who has to be important, and a younger redheaded, freckled-face guy sitting at a table with him. We have not been able to identify these two. I have already taken the pilot off the plane, along with another individual who claims to be an ambassador. He is now calling back to Egypt and we are monitoring his phone conversations. Mostly, he is requesting guidance to deal with the terrible situation they have ended up in.
“The Italian base commander here at Sigonella felt that he had to react. I think more to save face than anything else. In my estimation, they have positioned about three hundred or so troops in a perimeter around us. We are eyeball to eyeball. I have an Italian three-star with me. He has called all the way back to his Ministry of Defense and can find no one with any knowledge of an agreement to turn over the terrorists to us. I have also talked to Ambassador Rabb, and he has no knowledge of such an agreement.
“I am worried about our situation. We have the firepower to prevail. But I am concerned about the immaturity of the Italian troops, some of whom are green conscripts, as well as the absence of anybody with the ability to control them in this tense situation. A backfire from a motorbike or construction cart could precipitate a shooting incident that could lead to a lot of Italian casualties. And I don’t believe that our beef is with our ally, the Italians, but rather with the terrorists.
“I just want to re-verify that my mission is to take the terrorists off the plane and bring them back to the U.S.”
The Joint Chiefs went into a huddle. Five minutes later, Admiral Crowe responded to Stiner: “You are the ranking American on the scene. You do what you think is right.”
Sounded to me like he was passing the buck in case everything went to shit.
Diplomats finally resolved the five-hour impasse as dawn broke over the NATO airfield. Secretary of State George Shultz received assurances from the Italians that the terrorists would be retained and tried for murder in Italy. Molqi and his band surrendered to SEAL Team Six. General Stiner turned them over to the Italians.
Not trusting the Italians to keep their word, Commander Gormly and a contingent of SEALs in a U.S. C-141 Starlighter shadowed the Egyptian airliner when it flew the prisoners to Rome. Claiming engine trouble, The C-141 even landed directly behind the hijackers and their carabinieri guards.
Italian authorities had balls the size of BBs. The freckle-face traveling with Klingenhoffer’s killers was a political officer of the Cairo PLO, a man named Hassan. The tough-looking character was Abu Abbas, wanted by the United States for terrorism. After the plane landed at Rome, Italian authorities refused to turn him over to us. They seemed to want nothing more than to appease the PLO. Hassan and Abbas were tucked safely into passenger seats when the EgyptAir 737 returned to Cairo.
If it were up to me, I think I would have shot the bastards out of the sky and claimed temporary insanity. What a bunch of chicken shits we had for allies.
I yawned. It was over. I went home emotionally and physically drained. Barbara was waiting for me.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
MOST OF MY LIFE up to this point had been filled with various tyrants and killers. Terrorists in Lebanon, Cold War insurgents in Vietnam and Africa, communist guerrillas in Cuba and Nicaragua. … It was a never-ending cycle requiring we either continue to fight or succumb. There seemed to be no middle ground.
I was at home one evening in my favorite reading chair when Barbara sat on its arm and leaned over wearing that amazing smile of hers. “What are you reading, Bill?”
She reached to see the front cover. Sir Robert Thompson on insurgency.
“Sounds thrilling,” she teased.
“We have counterinsurgency down,” I said. “It worked for us in Vietnam, but we lost the war to politicians at home. We’re infants, though, when it comes to building insurgencies to fight against the communists. Things are about to fall down around our ears in Nicaragua.”
Shortly before I left the CIA to return to the Navy in 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) led by Daniel Ortega ousted Nicaragua’s current dictator, Anastasa Somoza, and set about fundamentally transforming the little nation, Cuban style.
“You are either with the Soviets or you are against them,” declared Humberto Ortega, Daniel’s brother and the new regime’s minister of defense. “We are with the Soviets. … Sandinism without Marxist-Leninism cannot be revolutionary. Because of this they are indivisibly united and, therefore … our political force is Sandinism and our doctrine is Marxist-Leninism.”
Daniel Ortega aligned himself with Castro, Moscow, and the Eastern Bloc and began exporting revolution to El Salvador and other Central American countries. In Nicaragua, he simply replaced the Somoza dictatorship with his own and crushed any signs of democratic sentiment more ruthlessly than Somoza ever had. He seized television and radio stations, censored newspapers, and set about on the path of Stalin to nationalizing means of production, seizing and redistributing wealth, and initiating what passed for land reform in communist nations. That meant stripping farmers of private ownership and casting them onto collective farms patterned after the kolkhozes of the Stalinist era that led to famine and the starvation deaths of some ten million peasants.
Sandinista tanks and troops attacked Miskito Indian farmers who resisted relocation, burning their houses and leaving bodies where they fell.
Supermarket shelves where food was once abundant went bare. Poultry, beef, pork, fish, and staples like rice and beans were rationed and often unobtainable. Homemakers stood in lines all day for a roll of toilet paper or a can of cooking oil. Ragged, half-naked children prowled the streets and fought over scraps of food.
A military draft made it illegal for a teenager to leave the country for any reason other than advanced military training in Cuba or some other Soviet Bloc nation. Mail was censored, telephone calls monitored, and “block captains” reported directly to the Sandinista Defense Committee in a system of “people control” modeled after Cuba’s. Thousands vanished into Managua’s infamous El Chipote prison.
At least 400,000 people out of a 1979 population of 2,800,000 fled Nicaragua. Most of them were poor. Laborers, campesinos, factory workers, white-collar day workers, the so-called proletariat that Marxists always claimed to champion and protect.
Liberation theology was the going philosophy throughout Latin America. Left-wing priests, Jesuits, and nuns claimed Jesus advocated the violent overthrow of ruthless capitalist systems and replacing them by compassionate communism.
The official head of the Human Rights Office in Nicaragua was an American nun who assumed the moniker Sister Mary Hartman. She assured nosy reporters that no political prisoners were being held by the Ortegas. Not a single one.
“Your problem is that you don’t understand the poor,” she scolded. “I think the U.S. is evil. I am afraid to go back home very often because of fear of an outbreak of fascism in the streets.”
I always found such people incomprehensible in their thinking. It wasn’t like they got drunk at a Managua cantina one night, picked up a lovely senorita, then awoke the next morning to find themselves in bed with a slut
. They should have known she was a communist slut when they entered the bar.
President Jimmy Carter seemed to have been among the most eager to jump into the bed. During Danny Ortega’s first eighteen months as new dictator and avowed communist, the Carter administration provided him with 100,000 tons of food, $142.6 million in economic aid, and helped the Sandinistas obtain $1.6 billion from international lending institutions and Western governments.
Even while the Carter administration helped the new collectivist state get on its feet, the CIA discovered a combat brigade of Soviet troops setting up in Cuba. I remembered all too well the Cuban Missile Crisis. At first, Carter took a Kennedy stance and called the presence of Russian troops on our doorstep “unacceptable.” Nonetheless, he capitulated almost immediately and abandoned his stand.
In a major address to the nation, he said he was “satisfied by assurances … from the highest level of the Soviet government that the Soviet personnel in Cuba are not and will not be a threat to the United States or any other nation.”
The Soviet brigade remained on the island.
During his 1980 campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan had vowed to stop the spread of communism throughout Latin America and the world and to take on international terrorism. Iran released our American hostages as soon as he moved into the White House in 1981, and Jimmy Carter received that year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel chairman Gunnar Berge took a swipe at the new president’s stance against communism.
The award to Carter, he said, “should be interpreted as a criticism of the [anti-communist] line the current administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”
The Reagan Doctrine piqued the ire of opponents by advocating military support for movements opposing Soviet-sponsored communist governments around the world. An increasingly liberal Congress, intent on “détente” with the Soviet Union, fought to block President Reagan’s efforts to provide assistance to anticommunist Nicaraguan guerrillas known as Contras, who were training and organizing in Honduras to fight Ortega’s Sandinistas.
Prior to an important Congressional vote on aid to the Contras, the communist Nicaraguan minister of interior, Tomas Borge, employed the law firm of Reichler & Applebaum in D.C. to research “human rights abuses by Contras.” By no coincidence, that attorney, Reed Brody, released the report just prior to the vote. During his “research” in Nicaragua, he was housed and given office space by the Sandinistas. Naturally, his report reflected unfavorably on the Contras.
Even while Nicaraguan campesinos were being slaughtered and dissenters by the thousands imprisoned, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry met with Ortega and proclaimed him “a misunderstood democrat rather than a Marxist autocrat.”
The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives dispatched a “Dear Commandante” letter to Ortega, commending his efforts to install “democracy” in his country. The letter expressed regret over the declining relationship between Nicaragua and the U.S. and pledged the congressmen’s support for the Sandinistas. The letter was signed by House Majority Leader Jim Wright and nine other congressmen.
Congressman Newt Gingrich, Georgia Republican, called the letter “a remarkable statement to a foreign dictator. It shows sympathy and support for his actions against the U.S. government.”
Sometimes I felt like batting my head against the wall in frustration. What was the matter with all these people? Didn’t they know the history of how communism always arrived in a country by force and ended up murdering and enslaving millions? The Iron Curtain was not intended to keep people out; it was built to keep people in.
American “progressives” swarmed Managua to witness and celebrate the rise of another socialist utopia. Celebrities and politicians donated blood for communists injured by campesinos who fought back. They returned to the United States singing joyous hallelujahs to Marxism. We called them “Sandalistas.” They arrived on their buses, chanting, “We are Sandinistas too!”
“People are afraid,” said a former Sandinista now in exile. “Sandinistas hold the power because they hold the guns. They are killing those who oppose them.”
American UW and counterterrorism efforts suffered serious setbacks at a time when worldwide Islamic terrorism was exploding, literally, and when Islamists and communists seemed to be cooperating with each other. It seemed all the Sandinistas had to do in order to survive and spread communism throughout the southern American hemisphere was to outlast the Reagan administration.
The third Boland Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress cut off all funds to the Contras in 1985. It prohibited the CIA, the Defense Department, in fact all U.S. government agencies from aiding the anticommunist Contras in any way. American resistance to communism and terrorism was rapidly being torn to shambles in Washington, D.C.
Perhaps I was tired after all these years as a Cold War warrior, a night fighter against evil. There seemed to be fewer and fewer of us willing to keep up the good fight. Optimism about my country and future seemed to be draining from my pores.
“Barb,” I said, “I am afraid that the generations that follow us will soon give up and live in tyranny.”
CHAPTER SIXTY
EFFORTS TO KEEP THE Contra insurgency alive were about to collapse around the ears of the president of the United States and generate a political scandal exceeded only by that of Watergate and the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
At 9:50 a.m. on October 5, 1986, a World War II era C-123 transport aircraft filled with automatic M-16 rifles, ammunition, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers lumbered off Llopango Air Base in San Salvador on its way to a supply drop for the FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Front, the Contras) inside Nicaragua. The three-man crew—pilot Bill Cooper, copilot Buzz Sawyer, and dropmaster Eugene Hasenfus—were veterans of CIA air ops in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
Later that morning, a Sandinista Soviet-made SAM-7 ground-to-air missile brought the plane down. Cooper, Sawyer, and a Contra security officer died in the fiery crash. Hasenfus, a lanky, red-haired Midwesterner, parachuted from the stricken plane and was captured by Nicaraguan authorities.
I knew the shit was about to hit the propeller when the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa published a piece on Hasenfus’s capture that exposed a secret U.S. arrangement with Iran to trade weapons for hostages.
After Congress blocked all aid to the Contras, the Reagan administration had arranged funding and military supplies for the FDN through third countries and private sources. It raised some $36 million between 1984 and 1986. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, deputy director for military affairs at the National Security Council, ran the secret assistance. A highly decorated platoon commander in Vietnam, North created “The Enterprise,” which served as the secret arm of the NSC. It had its own transport airplanes, pilots, access to the airfield in El Salvador, a ship, clandestine operatives, and a secret Swiss bank account. In effect, the NSA was what the CIA used to be.
At the Pentagon, we turned a blind eye to what was going on and kept our mouths shut. After all, most of us agreed with President Reagan that something had to be done to stop the commies from taking over the hemisphere. What we did not know until afterwards, although there were rumors, was that President Reagan may have gone a step too far in his efforts to aid the Contras.
The president had been recovering from colon cancer at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1985 when NSA Security Advisor Robert McFarlane told him that representatives from Israel had contacted the NSA with confidential information that a “moderate” Iranian faction opposing Ayatollah Khomeini’s hard-line anti-American stance wanted to establish a quiet relationship with the United States. To demonstrate their seriousness, the “moderates” offered to persuade Hezbollah militants to release U.S. hostages seized in Lebanon.
In return, the U.S. must provide weapons to the politically influential factions in their struggle to depose Khomeini. These weapons would be used to run out
terrorists that had prompted the U.S. to declare Iran a state sponsor of terrorism and establish a secular democratic government in Iran. The scheme was for Israel to ship weapons to the Iranian moderates, whereupon the U.S. would resupply Israel and receive payment from Iran through Israel. Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger opposed the deal, since U.S. law prohibited negotiating with terrorists.
“Look, we all agree we can’t pay ransom to Hezbollah to get the hostages,” Reagan argued. “But we are not dealing with Hezbollah, we are not doing a thing for them. We are trying to help some people who are looking forward to becoming the next government of Iran, and they are getting the weapons in return for saying that they are going to try to use their influence to free our hostages.”
Oliver North offered an adjustment to the plan. Instead of selling arms through Israel, why not sell direct and use a portion of the proceeds to aid the Contra freedom fighters? Although U.S. law also prohibited sales of weapons to Iran, which presumably included any of its factions, arms sales began on August 30, 1985, with one hundred American-made TOW antitank missiles, followed by 408 more the following month. Other arms shipments continued over the next several months.
Hezbollah released David Jacobsen and Father Lawrence Jenco, former head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon, and promised to release the remaining two hostages. They never did. In fact, a different terrorist group in Lebanon abducted three more Americans in September/October 1986—Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy.
The scandal broke on November 24, 1986, when Attorney General Ed Meese and White House Chief of Staff Don Regan discovered a memo indicating that Ollie North was working with an Iranian faction to arrange release of American hostages through weapons sales and that part of the money from the sales went to the Contras.
Investigations followed through the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Felix Rodriguez, who had run weapons to the FDN out of El Salvador, testified before congressional investigators in a highly charged confrontation with Senator John Kerry. I sat in on the hearing and felt like standing up and cheering for Felix.
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