EXECUTION IN THE JUNGLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000200830003-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 16, 2010
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: April 29, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/16: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200830003-2
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Execution in the Jungle
The victim dug his own grave. scooping the dirt out with his
hands. Squatting in the hole, he ate some dry powdered milk. and
then lay down to die. No one gagged him. But he didn't scream.
He crossed himself. Then acontra executioner knelt and rammed
a k-bar knife into his throat. A second enforcer stabbed at his
? jugular, then his abdomen. When the corpse was finally still, the
contras threw din over the shallow grave-and walked away.
The execution. on Jan. 7 just inside Nicaragua, summoned up
other grisly images, such as Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan's
shooting of a Viet Cong lieutenant on a Saigon street in 1968. "We
have absolutely no knowledge of such an incident," said FDN
spokesman Frank Arana in Tegucigalpa. "Something of that
nature could have happened, but it does not represent official
FDN policy." An eyewitness said FDN guerrillas told him the
dead man had been a
spy for the Sandinis-
ta security apparatus.
They accused the man
of reporting rebel lo-
cations and informing
on civilians who sold
food to the contras;
they said such civil-
ians had been killed or
taken away by the
Sandinistas. The con-
tras took the man into
the jungle and tied
him to a tree. The next
day they killed him-before the camera of a U.S. student.
Frank Wohl, 21, a conservative activist from Northwestern
University, had been traveling with the contras as a noncombat-
ant for nearly four months. The rebels, he argued, had to kill or
abandon their prisoner, since guerrillas on the run cannot main-.
tain POW camps. The executioners used a knife instead of shoot-
ing their victim because Sandinistas were patrolling the neigh-
boring mountain. "With my 200-millimeter lens, I could clearly
see them," he remembers. "There were about 20 of them."
At first, W ohl recalls, he didn't believe the contras were going
tokill the prisoner. ("He was so calm.") But when Wohl saw him
digging the grave, he asked the contras if he could take pictures.
"If we had let him go, he would have disclosed our position-and
I would have been killed, too," Wohl said. "The Sandinistas
would have loved to shoot me-an American-and claim that I
was a mercenary." Wohl escaped. The body count in Central
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/16: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200830003-2