CIA MINING OF HARBORS 'A FIASCO'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000100250013-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 24, 2011
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: March 5, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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APPEARED
etback ar Contras
CIA leaning
v
fit Harbors
`a Fiasco'
By DOYLEMcMANUS
and ROBERT C. TOTH,
Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON-When Presi-
dent Reagan's foreign policy advis-
ers urged him to order the CIA to
mine Nicaragua's harbors late in
1983, their reasoning was simple:
No civilian cargo vessel would dare
run such a gantlet, and the cutoff of
imported weapons, fuel and other
supplies would deal a grievous
blow to the Sandinista government-
. never dreamed that mer-
chant captains would keep sailing
in," one of the operation's planners
confessed later. "The whole thing
was a fiasco."
The mining ploy was intended as
a critical boost to the CIA-backed
rebels who were launching a major
offensive-an offensive same
hoped would ' spark a full-scale
uprising against the leftist Sandin-
istas. Instead, when the mines blew
up, so did the Reagan Administra-
tion's whole strategy-with conse-
quences that still hobble U.S. policy
in Central America.
The "firecracker" mines sowed
by CIA-hired commandos working
from speedboats were too small to
do serious damage to ships, but the
outrage they sparked forced Con-
gress to confront squarely the
mounting American role in the
conflict.
In a few weeks of fury in
mid-1984, Congress cut off funding
for the anti-Sandinista rebels,
known as contras, and the Reagan
Administration's -war against the
leftists-intended as a discreetly
"covert" operation-stood with all
its flaws exposed.
`Whole Thing Backwards'
"We discovered that we had
done the whole thing backwards,"
said a senior U.S. official who
helped run the contra program.
"We decided to take the action
LOS ANGELES TIMES
5 March 1985
before we had achieved a national
consensus on Nicaragua. We
should have achieved a consensus
first"
Indeed, by the time the furor
over the harbor mining broke, the
Administration did not even have a
consensus of support on the key
congressional watchdog commit-
tees because the CIA officer who
ran the covert war, although re-
markably successful in building up
guerrilla forces, botched the job of
winning over the House and Senate
intelligence panels.
More than two years of uneasy
dealings with the fast-talking CIA
officer, who was code-named Ma-
roni, had eroded many intelligence
committee members' confidence in
the agency: the disclosure about
the CIA's direct role in mining
Nicaraguan harbors was the last
straw.
The consequences of congres-
sional ire snowballed quickly. By
the beginning of this year, Rea-
gan's policy on Nicaragua was dead
in the water. The contras were
militarily stalemated and political-
ly divided: the CIA was under
public fire for mismanaging the
Program, and Honduras, the key
..S. ally in the conflict, was in-
creasingly nervous about the rela-
tionship-
Now, Reagan has launched a
new riper to turn Congress
around, complete with fiery rheto-
ric portraying the Sandinistas as
"cruel totalitarians" and a warning
that a loss on the issue would
cripple his Central America poli-
ties If the President loses this
fight. Secretary of State George P.
Shultz said last month, "all U.S.
diplomatic efforts (in Central
America) will be undermined, .. .
(and) we may find later, when we
can no longer avoid acting, that the
stakes will be higher and the costs
greater."
But some White House and State
Department aides say privately
that they see little chance of suc-
cess.
None of these disasters was
foreseen.
When the mining of Nicaragua's
harbors was planned in the waning
months of 1983, there was no
significant opposition in the higher
councils of the Administration, of-
ficials say. In the Defense Depart-
went, Deputy Assistant Secretary
Nestor D. Sanchez--cam a skeptic
about the covert war-supported
the mining because of the damage
it was expected to do to Nicaragua's
military buildup. In the State De-
partment, Assistant Secretary
Langhorne A. Motley supported it
because of the increased leverage it
would give him in negotiations
with the Sandinistas.
The policy-makers considered
mining the harbors to be only a
small jump beyond the CIA sabo-
tage raids that had already been
carried out, with little public no-
tice, against ports, bridges, arms
dumps and oil facilities.
`People Kept Sailing In'
"And you should have seen some
of the things we didn't try," one
quipped.
It was a U.S.-run operation from
start to finish. The mines them-
selves were slipped into three Nic-
araguan harbors-Corinto, Puerto
Sandino and El Bluff-by South
American commandos. The com-
mandos, who were brought in
aboard a CIA-run "mother ship,"
slipped into the ports in agency-
supplied speedboats, and U.S.-pi-
loted attack helicopters supplied air
cover.
The mines were.laid in January
and February of - 1984. Several
Nicaraguan fishing boats, a Dutch
dredger, even a Soviet oil tanker
ran into them, but the .Sandinistas
quickly discovered how small they
were and cleared them-The most
serious loss: seven fishing boats.
"The mines were very large
firecrackers intended to cause a
sense of alarm, force them to put
military resources into minesweep -
ing, divert resources from other
,things-they weren't intended to
sink anything," said an official who
was involved "We anticipated,
wrongly, that as soon as word of
the mines got out, - - . shipping
would stop coming in. It seemed
insane; but people kept sailing in. It
was a basic miscalculation on our
parL"
At the time, the contras, their
ranks swollen to an estimated
16,000 thanks to two years and
almost $80 million of CIA help,'
were launching a new offensive. In
the planning meetings in Washing-
ton, some officials suggested that]
this small application of additional'.
U.S. force could tip the scales in the
rebels' favor. Other American offi-
cials would later call that hubris.
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Bargaining Chip -
Some State Department officials
also hoped that the mining might
help bring the Sanatni to the
negotiating table. They saw mining
as a bargaining chip that the United
States could trade for an end to
Managua's support of leftist rebels
in El Salvador.
However, the Sandinistas never
knew that the mining could be
treated as a bargaining chip; the
U.S. diplomats never had time to
propose a tradeoff.
The contras didn't know about
that possibility, either. Although
their leaders claimed responsibility
for the mining, they had no part in
it. Edgar Chamorro, then a leader
of the Honduras-based Nicaraguan
Democratic Force, the largest rebel
group, said the CIA even wrote his
group's communique announcing
the operation.
"The (CIA) deputy station chief
wrote our statement on the min-
ing." Chamorro said. "He woke me
up in the middle of the night and
told me .o issue it. It was the first I
knew of it."
Nor, of course, did Congress
quite know what was going on. CIA
Director William J. Casey told the
House and Senate Intelligence
Committees that harbors were be-
ing mined, but he did not mention
that the operation was being car-
ried out by CIA-employed com-
mandos operating from an Ameri-
can -run mother ship.
The Democratic-led House panel
pursued the issue, and agen
officials gave its staff a detailed
briefing. But the leaders of the
Republican -controll ed Senate In-
telligence Committee never real-
ized that Americans were directly
involved until they read about it in
the newspapers-and when that
happened, they were enraged.
"This is no way to run a rail-
road," Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-
Ariz.), chairman of the Senate
panel, stormed in a letter to Casey.
"I am pissed off!"
Congress' easy acceptance was
short-lived, however. Intelligence
Committee leaders, Republicans
and Democrats alike, had already
complained that Casey did not keep
them as fully informed as they
wanted. They soon discovered, to
their chagrin, that Casey's execu-
continued 'to .rig to that as its
main rationale Tor the covert pro-
gram.
The result was that Casey and
Maroni squandered the confidence
of the intelligence committees,
confidence that had been labori-
ously built since the CIA scandals
of the 1970s. When the public
uproar over the mining broke in
April, 1984, they had no reservoir
of good will to draw on. And they
left a heavy legacy to be dealt with
in Reagan's second term.
"The trust isn't there," mourned
Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.),
now chairman of the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee. "There is an
important amount of trust that has
to exist . . . between the committee
and the (CIA) professionals it's
overseeing. And it's in this area
that things have fallen down."
When Reagan first submitted
the secret document called a "find-
ing" to the two intelligence com-
mittees in 1981, informing them of
his decision to support the contras,
a majority went along. The pro-
gram was small, its objectives were
described as limited to intercepting
Nicaraguan arms shipments bound
for El Salvador and the money was
taken from the CIA's existing con-
tingency funds.
tive officer for the Nicaraguan war,
Dewey "Maroni," was cut from the
same cloth.
"The problems began early on,"
recalled a source who attended the
secret hearings. When the commit-
tees asked for evidence of Nicara-
gua's arms shipments to leftists in
El Salvador, he said, "Dewey put it
in very broad statements. He raised
a credibility problem right off."
"He typified the CIA bureau-
crat's view: Congress ought not to
be messing in this business," a
Democratic member of the House
committee complained. "When he
had to tell us something, he seemed
to feel he was betraying the CIA's
trust in him. ..- . We were just not
fully informed, and we never lost
that feeling."
'We Got Stonewalling'
"All we got from Casey was
stonewalling," another congress-
man said. "Trying to get facts was
difficult. How do you know the,
numbers (of contras)? 'Morning ,
reports.' How's your command and
control? 'Tight.' Then at night we'd
see on CBS how the- contras were
hitting economic targets-which
the agency said they weren't hit-
ting.
And (Maroni) was a loose can-
-non," the congressman added. "He
had the approach that 'This is my
war, and I'm out to win it, regard-
less.' We just were never sure he
gave us the information straight."
In fact, the faster Maroni suc-
ceeded in increasing the contras'
ranks, the more alarmed the Dem-
ocrats became. The CIA man had
little sympathy for their concerns.
"What's this about 12,000 men?"
one irritated Democratic congress-
man complained during a secret
1983 hearing on the contras' prog-
ress. "You never told us there were
that many." -
"You're lucky it's not 14,000,"
Maroni retorted.
Evasions and Brashness
Casey's evasions and Maroni's
brashness were not the only prob-
lems. Through 1982 and 1983, long
after it was apparent that the
contras were up to more than
intercepting Nicaraguan arms
shipments, the Administration
The debacle of the mining gave
congressional Democrats the solid
majority they had long sought to
block any further funding for the
contras. The Administration
warned that it would mean aban-
doning "freedom fighters," but the
House repeatedly blocked requests
for more funds.
The discovery in October, 1984,
of the CIA-written contra manual
on psychological warfare, which
Maroni commissioned in 1983, only
made matters worse. The booklet
urged guerrillas to "neutralize"
local Sandinista officials-a word
that, in context, seemed to many to
mean assassination-and one edi-
tion went further, suggesting that
the rebels hire professional crimi-
nals to carry out sabotage tasks.
asey argued that the manual
was produced in an' attempt to
improve the contras' behavior; oth-
er officials said it was intended
partly to terrify the Sandinistas
and claimed that copies were actu-
ally airlifted into Nicaragua with
balloons.
Unwelcome Attention
Either way, the episode exposed
the agency to yet more unwelcome
attention. In December, the House
Intelligence Committee issued an
unprecedented statement charging
the CIA with violating Congress'
prohibition against efforts to over-
throw the Sandinista regime. It
said, "The incident of the manual
&rvi i,i ed
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illustrates once again ... tfiit the
CIA did not have adequate'-tom-
wand and control of the entire
Nicaraguan covert action.'. w ~'
Meanwhile, in Honduras; the
?Nicaraguan Democratic Farce,
known by its Spanish initials FDN,
was falling on hard times.
The CIA stretched out the re-
maining funds as long as it could.
Mareni and Army Col. Oliver
North, a member of the National
Security Council staff, "assured the
erectors that they would find a
way to keep us alive," said Cha-
Morro, an FDN leader who soon
became disenchanted with the de-
teriorating state of affairs. He was
later expelled from the organiza-
tion for complaining about its lead-
Prshit .
By last June, the FDN could not
meet its payroll or cover the rent
on all its houses in the Honduran
capital of Tegucigalpa. In the field,
ammunition ran low and guerrilla
-operations came to a virtual halt.
The directors squabbled in public.
And Honduras' new military
-readers, who came to power by
toppling a pro-FDN general,
-?y'arned that they would be much
less indulgent toward the Nicara-
^an rebels operating in their ter-
ritorv.
Fry 'We Were Bay-of-Pigged'
Taken all together, FDN chair-
man Adclfo Calero felt that the
-:-United States had betrayed him-
just as, he said, the United States
had betrayed the abortive Cuban
insurgency it sponsored in 1961.
"We were Bay-of-Pigged," Cal-
ero said recently.
11 Eden Pastora, the ex-Sandinista
..,contra leader who was running his
-own guerrilla force from Costa
Rica, was even worse off. Pastora
--had patched up his running feud
,,with the CIA long enough to join in
a loose alliance with the FDN and
help it claim responsibility for the
mining.
We are performing miracles,"
he declared in a typical burst of
bravado. "We are blocked by the
CIA and persecuted by the
KGB, . . . but we are mining the
ports."
But the prickly Pastora was soon
quarreling with his fellow contras
again, and in May his own faction
split in two over the issue of joining
the FDN. Pastora stalked off into
the mountains to fight on his
own-only to be badly wounaea
when an assassin detonated a bomb
in his jungle headquarters during a
Press conference on May 30,1984.
This time, the CIA cut off his
funding for good. Unpaid pilots
absconded with his remaining air-
craft, many of his guerrillas simply
drifted away and at one point the
man whom Dewey Maroni once
promoted as the contras' greatest
political hope was reduced to send-
ing his followers door-to-door in
the Costa Rican capital to beg for
funds.
"The State Department and the
CIA haven't just cut off our aid,"
Pastora charged last week.
"They've been blocking European
countries and Latin American
countries from helping us, too .. .
For a year now, we haven't gotten
a bullet or a broken rifle."
Administration officials now dis-
miss Pastora as "impossible." Ma-
roni, who once urged Col. Enrique
Bermudez of the FDN to adopt
more of Pastora's tactics, admitted
to the FDN leadership last year
that he had been wrong.
"Keep it up, colonel," Maroni told
Bermudez, a former officer in the
hated National Guard of pre-San-
dinista dictator Anastasio Somoza.
"You're doing a good job."
Bermudez is still fighting-both
in the jungles of northern Nicara-
gua and, figuratively, in the hear-
ing rooms of Congress. His FDN
has stayed alive by collecting an
assortment of stopgap aid, ranging
from fund-raising drives among
right-wing groups in the United
States to clandestine help from the
governments of Honduras and El
Salvador.
Despite the organization's un-
certain future, a steady stream of
new recruits walks into FDN bases
in southern Honduras, driven out of
Nicaragua by the Sandinistas' con-
fiscations of property and their
universal military draft.
Forced by circumstance to con-
centrate on small-group guerrilla
operations, the FDN has managed
to hold its own militarily.
"We're doing more ambushes
that don't require as much ammu-
nition, using small groups, covering
more territory," Calero said in a
recent interview. "And this is a
success, because the Sandinistas
thought they were going to show
the world the extermination of the
contras."
For the moment, however, . the
congressional battlefield -is more
important. While the contras have
survived for nine months since CIA
funding ran out, they readily admit
that without a large infusion of
money soon their crusade will
probably collapse. Bermudez and
Calero both came to Washington to
lobby for renewed aid but with
little visible success.
`Right Versus Wrong'
Reagan has staked considerable
prestige on the issue, hailing the
contras as "our brothers" and de-
fining U.S. aid to their struggle as a
matter of honor. "We cannot turn
away from them," he said last
week, "for the struggle here is not
right versus left, but right versus
wrong."
Administration officials admit
that they have seen few sign of a
new consensus in favor of aiding
the rebels, however. They are
willing to accept almost any ar-
rangement Congress will ap-
prove-"we'll go where the votes
are," one aide said-but no one has
found a formula to reconstitute a
majority for funding the covert
war. Even if the votes could be
found, though, the contras' war
would remain divisive at home and
uncertain in its prospects abroad.
"We're in a bog with no easy way
out," a State Department official
confessed. "Look around: Over
here you got snakes, over here
alligators, over here piranhas.
Where do you go? Which way do
you choose?"
As often happens in Washington
when a policy fails, everyone has
drawn his own lesson from the
four-year history of Reagan's
once-secret war.
Some say the basic flaw was in
the conception of the CIA effort.
Liberals charge that the United
States had no business waging war
against the Sandinistas in the first
place. Conservatives who support
pressuring the Marxist regime
complain that the covert scheme
was too small to prevail but too
large to keep secret.
"For a covert program to suc-
ceed, it had to be of such scope that
it couldn't stay covert," said former
Secretary of State Alexander M.
alai;i!ed
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Haig Jr., who argued for `overt
action against Nicaragua instead.
"It was fundamentally a failure of
the policy -making apparatus."
'Ineptness a Problem'
Others say that the concept was
fine but that the White House
failed to set clear goals, or the State
Department put too many limits on
the effort, or the CIA simply made
too many mistakes in carrying it
out.
"The Administration smugly
thought it could handle the conflict
in aims (between the United States
and) the contra groups, whether it
was to interdict arms or overthrow
the Sandinistas," an intelligence
source said. "And ineptness was a
major problem . . . the mining, the
manual."
Still others blame Congress for
interfering just at the moment
when they insist success was in
sight. Partisans of this view, not
surprisingly, include those who ran
the program. And others also point
to Congress but blame the Admin-
istration for failing to maintain
Congress' confidence.
"Nicaragua has moved beyond a
substantive issue to an issue of
trust between the two branches,"
former CIA Director James R.
Schlesinger told the Senate For-
eign Relations Committee last
month. "That issue of distrust has
to be resolved"
The committees of Congress will
debate all these points and more
this spring, as Reagan presses his
plea for a renewal of U.S. aid to the
contras.
But Dewey Maroni, the CIA
operations officer who ran the
covert effort for Casey and Reagan,
will not be part of that debate; last
summer, he moved on to a new job
within the agency, directing covert
operations in Europe.
At least six members of Maroni's
staff were officially reprimanded
for some of the failings of the
program, particularly the guerrilla
manual that aroused Congress' ire
in 1984. But not Maroni.
"It was amazing that Dewey
skated out of the manual fiasco
without a letter (of reprimand) in
his file," an intelligence source
said. "He was responsible . . . but
only the junior guys were repri-
manded."
In fact, colleagues say, Maroni's
career does not appear to have
suffered at all. When he left his
post in the CIA's Latin American
division, the State Department
even awarded him its Superior
Honor Award-a rare accolade for
a non-diplomat.
"He deserved it," said an Admin-
istration official still involved in
managing U.S. policy toward Nica-
ragua. "He did what he was asked
to do. And he did it well."
Last in a series.
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