Although we gave scarcely a second thought to the moral implications of printing the article, we did worry about the legal risks we faced. The defense team working for Daniel Ellsberg (who was on trial for the theft of the Pentagon Papers) recommended that we talk to Charles Nesson, a Harvard professor of law and an expert on the Constitution. Nesson advised us that if we printed the article, and in particular the secret code words it contained, we would be in clear violation of the Espionage Act. But he added that in order to prosecute us, the government would have to reveal even more information about the NSA’s secrets than was contained in the article itself, and for this reason it was extremely unlikely that we would ever be indicted.
We thus learned the lesson other radicals would learn: the freedoms of America could be used to subvert American freedom. We printed the article. We were not prosecuted. Instead we were rewarded with a good deal of media attention, including a front-page story in the New York Times. It was our biggest scoop. We had considered ourselves “better” than the Castroite hacks at NACLA and the Weathermen crazies trying to work themselves up to acts of terrorism. But like others present at the creation of the New Left who had begun the ‘60s asking America to be better, we had ended the decade committing acts of no-fault treason.
The government we had sought to undermine might be unable or unwilling to punish us, but history would not be so kind. After America’s defeat in Vietnam the New Left was presented with a balance sheet showing the consequences of its politics. New Left orthodoxy had scorned the idea that the war was at least partly about Soviet expansion, but soon after the American pullout, the Soviets were in Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay and had secured the rights to exploit the resources of Indochina in unmistakably imperial style. Other things we had claimed were impossible were also now happening with dizzying velocity. Far from being liberated, South Vietnam was occupied by its former “ally” in the North. Large numbers of “indigenous” revolutionaries of the NLF whom we had supported were in “political reeducation” camps set up by Hanoi or taking their chances on the open seas with hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese refugees fleeing the revolution in flimsy boats. In Cambodia two million peasants were dead, slaughtered by the Communist Khmer Rouge, proteges of Hanoi and beneficiaries of the New Left’s “solidarity.” It was a daunting lesson: more people had been killed in three years of a Communist peace than in thirteen years of American war.
For some of us, these events were the occasion for a melancholy rethinking which ultimately led to our retirement from the Left. But for many of our former comrades, there were no second thoughts. For this group, the Communist victory in Indochina provided an opportunity to prove the mettle of their faith and to rededicate themselves to the long-term objectives of a struggle which they believed had only just begun.
Two years after the fall of Saigon, in fact, an event took place that marked the passing of the torch of revolution from one generation of the Left to another. Appalled by the ferocity of the new rulers of Indochina, Joan Baez and other former anti-war activists reentered the political arena with “An Appeal to the Conscience of Vietnam.” In criticizing Hanoi and calling for an end to the repression, the signers of the “Appeal” challenged the remnants of the New Left to live up to the standards of social justice it had advocated for so many years.
Rejection of this plea was swift and decisive. A counter-ad in the New York Times paid for by Cora Weiss, the heiress who had come to function as a sort of bankbook for Left causes during the 1970s, was signed by a list of former anti-war notables, including figures like Dave Dellinger of Liberation magazine and Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies, who reaffirmed their solidarity with the Communists by subscribing to phrases such as this one: “The present government of Vietnam should be hailed for its moderation and for its extraordinary effort to achieve reconciliation among all of its peoples.”
To outsiders, the appearance of these two statements might have seemed a prelude to a struggle for the soul of the Left. But as insiders we recognized that the issue had already been decided. The chastened radicals who signed the Baez “Appeal” were defeated; there was no longer any ground on the Left that they could occupy. Those who stood ready to support Communist Vietnam and, by implication, similar governments elsewhere in the Third World, had won almost by default. Their declaration was thus more than a rebuff of the attempt to hold revolutionary movements accountable for their deeds; it was a manifesto for the successors to the New Left. Sympathizing with and supporting America’s enemies, only a tendency before, would become the dominant characteristic of the post-Vietnam Left.
The personality of this reconstituted Left was further adumbrated in the late 1970s by the rehabilitation of the American Communist party. Books such as Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism and film documentaries like Seeing Red remembered Stalin’s most servile followers as admirable old warriors who had fought the good fight and stayed the course, and who thus might be worthier models in the long struggle ahead than the New Left, which had burned itself out with its theatrics and its need for immediate gratification.
This romanticizing of Stalinist hacks was counter-pointed by the return of Stalinist fronts to the American political scene. By 1979 the World Peace Council, originally created by Stalin in 1949, was once again operating on the American Left. Its American offshoot, the U.S. Peace Council, was holding conferences attended not only by what was left of the Left but also by Senators and Congressmen. The pro-Soviet sycophancy of the Communist party kept its numbers small; but the new spirit of acceptance allowed its influence to grow. Communists became stylistically influential, reintroducing the linguistic and organizational deviousness of the Popular Front period of the late 1930s that made it hard to know what words meant and harder yet to identify the allegiances of those who spoke them.
While the New Left had announced its birth from a university campus, its post-Vietnam successor seemed almost to trumpet its intrinsic hypocrisy by organizing itself in New York’s Riverside Church, built by John D. Rockefeller fifty years earlier as a headquarters for liberal Protestantism. Among the architects of the declaration with which the reconstituted Left was launched were William Sloane Coffin, newly appointed minister of Riverside, and his patron, the ubiquitous Cora Weiss, head of the Church’s Disarmament Program.
Sloane Coffin had become a representative figure in the effort to forge an alliance between the churches and the Third World, one of those who brought the gospel of “liberation theology” and its notion of a Marxist God enjoining the faithful to establish a Communist heaven on earth by supporting revolutionary movements, denned as the “essence of Christian faith.” Defending his own covenant with the dictators in Hanoi, for example, Coffin advised an interviewer that “Communism is a page torn out of the Bible” and that “the social justice that’s been achieved in… North Vietnam [is] an achievement no Christian society on that scale has ever achieved.”
While Coffin articulated the “new morality” of the post-Vietnam Left, Cora Weiss was in a sense more typical as well as far more influential than he. Drawing on a $25-million family fortune inherited from her father Sam Rubin (in his own time an old-line Communist), she had helped fund NACLA, which was continuing to promote the cause of Castro. In addition, she was the leading backer of the Institute for Policy Studies which by the late 1970s had become the heart of a secondary system of institutional lobbies whose programs had elicited the sponsorship of more than fifty members of Congress and whose influence spread from Capitol Hill to the Carter administration itself.
As head of the Riverside Church Disarmament Program, Weiss played a leading role in the opposition to American efforts to neutralize the vast Soviet military buildup of the ‘70s. Her work focused on exposing the “myth” of a Soviet threat. Richard Harriet, a co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies and its resident “expert” on strategic affairs, called the idea of such a threat “the big lie of our times.” In May 1979 Weiss herself
described it as a “hereditary disease transmitted over the past sixty years.”
Barely six months after this aperҫu was delivered, the Soviets assassinated the head of state in Kabul and launched a massive and eventually genocidal invasion of Afghanistan. Weiss’s Disarmament Program at the Riverside Church responded by declaring: “Any form of U.S. intervention, escalation of a military presence or an increase in the defense budget is unnecessary and inappropriate… Russia’s challenge continues to demand restraint, study, and understanding.” In other words, the invasion was merely a “defensive” response to American pressure. Instead of focusing their attention on the Soviet action in Afghanistan, members of the “peace movement” should look at what the U.S. had done to “poison relations between the two superpowers.”
This failure to oppose Soviet aggression or recognize the Soviet threat showed the distance traveled since the early days of the New Left when the malignity of the USSR was a given. It also showed how far the Soviet Union had come in rehabilitating itself since the revelations of Khrushchev, which had destroyed the orthodoxy that held party vanguards in line and controlled the popular fronts. The post-Vietnam era had become a time of new opportunities for the Soviets, an extended school at which Fidel Castro, although dependent on them for a subvention of some $10 billion a year to keep his island afloat, became their most important political teacher.
Castro saw that the American Left, still wary of the USSR, could be made to promote Soviet aims indirectly because of its ties—affective even more than political—with him, ties that would survive his support of the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan a decade later. At the same time he was making Cuba’s economy an appendage to the USSR’s and its intelligence service and military forces instruments of the Soviet state, Castro began the creation of what amounted to a new version of the old Communist International, a new Comintern.
A revolution throughout the hemisphere had always been Castro’s ambition, but through the mid-’60s the cautious Soviets had been wary of what they regarded as “reckless adventurism” sure to provoke an American response. Two events changed their attitude. The first was the American defeat in Indochina and the crucial role which internal opposition had played in forcing the U.S. withdrawal. Second were changes in the American Left itself, foremost among them the establishment of a Fidelista cadre. The Soviets saw that Castro’s charismatic hold over elements of the American Left was such that his adventurism might be less reckless than it had seemed earlier in his career.
Within months after the fall of Saigon, the Soviets began an unprecedented flow of arms to Cuba. By 1980 the flow had become a flood—ten times more military supplies in a single year than the total sent during the entire first decade of the revolution, when Castro presumably faced his greatest external threat. The massive arms buildup had only one purpose—to make Cuba the forward base of a new stage in Soviet expansionism. Castro played his part by dispatching 30,000 troops to anchor Soviet influence in Angola and Ethiopia.
But if Africa was the first front for the new offensive, Central America was always the ultimate prize. Castro had long been the patron of tiny guerrilla bands in Nicaragua and El Salvador whose leaders had been trained in Havana and Moscow and sometimes at PLO terrorist camps in Lebanon. Because he had survived U.S. animosity so long and studied American weaknesses so carefully, Castro better than anyone else understood the “Vietnam equation” which defined the new criteria for revolutionary success. It was not necessary for the Communists to win; it was necessary only for America to lose; and losing was defined by what went on in the domestic politics of the United States rather than on Third World battlefields.
When the Carter administration took office in January 1977, the Soviet bloc was faced with unanswered questions. How much weight could be given to the new president’s expressions of regret for American interventions of the past, or his determination to avoid “another Vietnam”? How vigorously would he pursue his new human-rights policy with regional dictators like Somoza who relied on U.S. support?
Factoring the answers to these questions into the “Vietnam equation” would determine revolutionary options and risk, and there was no Communist leader in the world who had better intelligence for arriving at an answer than Fidel Castro. In creating the Venceremos Brigades in 1969, Castro had placed them under the control of Cuban intelligence with results that were revealed later in the testimony of a Cuban defector:
“The Venceremos Brigades brought the first great quantity of information through American citizens that was obtained in the United States, because up to the moment when the brigades came into existence… the amount of information that we had on American citizens came from public sources, and it was confusing.”
In the changed political atmosphere after Vietnam, the networks which Castro’s loyalists had created now permeated the American political process. The co-founder of NACLA had even been appointed to the Carter administration as a member of the team that was shaping its policy on human rights.
As Jimmy Carter took office, Castro’s favorite Sandinista, Humberto Ortega, unveiled a new political strategy from his Costa Rican headquarters which bore the imprint of the master himself. An immediate Marxist revolution would be deferred in favor of a broad coalition with non-Marxist democrats whose announced goal was replacing the Somoza dictatorship with a pluralistic government. At the moment this tactic was adopted, the Sandinistas had been a minuscule force, barely 200 members and split into three antagonistic factions. But now, as part of a democratic coalition, they were able to launch a mass movement that soon challenged Somoza for power in Nicaragua.
By early 1979, when it was apparent that Somoza could not last, Castro summoned the guerrillas, still feuding among themselves, to Havana. There he created the nine-member comandante directorate with each of the three Sandinista factions represented. The Sandinista command unified, Castro made arrangements to provide them with the arms and military support that would allow them to defeat Somoza and, even more important, allow them also to steal the revolution from the mass movement they had ridden to success.
Once his proteges were firmly established in Managua, Castro turned his attention to El Salvador. Six months after the Sandinista victory, a new summons brought the heads of the five Salvadoran guerrilla factions to Havana where Castro persuaded them too to form a unified command. The new force that Castro created was called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), after an agent of Stalin’s old Comintern. Until then, the Salvadoran guerrillas had been too isolated and weak to open a revolutionary front. But with Castro behind them, they laid plans to move from sporadic actions to a full-scale guerrilla war. In July 1980, the chairman of the Salvadoran Communist party, Shank Handal, a Salvadoran of Lebanese descent with strong ties to the PLO, embarked on a journey to Moscow and from there to Vietnam and other way stations in the Communist bloc. He returned with pledges of some 200 tons of arms to be shipped through Cuba with which the guerrilla forces could begin a “final offensive.”
But as the “Vietnam equation” had shown, organizing the guerrilla forces was only a part, and perhaps the smallest part, of what was required. It was also necessary to assemble what Trotsky had once described as the “frontier guards” of the revolution. Since Castro was preparing to unify the Sandinista command, his American allies had to rush to set up the guerrillas’ support system in the United States, using the “peace movement” as a base. Even before its founding had been officially announced, for example, the Communist-dominated U.S. Peace Council had joined forces with NACLA to stage a National Conference on Nicaragua in Washington. The purpose was to mobilize opposition against a potential U.S. “intervention” in Nicaragua. While claiming that they wanted to prevent “another Vietnam,” the organizers’ real purpose was precisely to achieve another Vietnam—by undermining any U.S. effort to counter the already massive Cuban investment aimed at turning Nicaragua into yet another Communist state.
The Ni
caragua conference proved to be the first step in a long-term plan: the creation of an organizational shield behind which the cause of Communist revolution in the hemisphere could advance. The conference put a stamp of respectability on an organization called “The Network in Solidarity with the People of Nicaragua.” Started on U.S. college campuses by two Nicaraguan nationals acting for the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguan Network soon became a national organization with chapters in hundreds of American cities and on campuses across the country. Its efforts led to a “Pledge of Resistance” signed by 70,000 Americans who declared themselves ready to undertake illegal actions to defend the Communist regime.
Acknowledging the importance of this activity, Sandinista Minister Tomas Borge declared: “The battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States.” But the Nicaragua Network was only one of an array of “issue-oriented” organizations from which—in true popular-front style—the friends of violent revolutions could speak to other Americans in the language of pacifism and humanitarianism. While the Nicaragua Network lobbied against aid to the anti-Communist contras to prevent “another Vietnam,” its movement comrades, working in allied organizations, were able to mobilize even greater support as champions of “human rights.”
One of the most potent of these “human-rights” groups was the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), created by Christian “liberationists” after the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. WOLA’s director, Joe Eldridge, had been active in Chile as an Allende partisan, and WOLA’s first concerns about human-rights abuses were aimed squarely at the Pinochet regime. But in 1977, when Castro and his protégés began launching their new strategy in Nicaragua, WOLA also shifted its attention to Nicaragua, sponsoring public-relations tours to the U.S. by the Sandinista priests Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel D’Escoto, who rallied many Catholics here, including members of the Maryknoll order, to the cause of the “hemispheric revolution” and also to the attempt to convert Christ to Marxism. Led by its Nicaragua coordinator Kay Stubbs, WOLA also stepped up its campaign against human-rights abuses of the Somoza regime and lobbied the Carter administration to withdraw its support. After the Sandinista victory, Stubbs, who all the time had been a secret member of a Sandinista cell in Washington, D.C., left WOLA to join the new Marxist regime and the organization’s interest in human-rights abuses in Nicaragua all but disappeared. WOLA now began to focus on El Salvador, where its investigations into human rights were directed by a woman named Heather Foote, an American Marxist with strong political ties to the FPL faction of the guerrilla forces.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 12