CIA INVOLVEMENT IN NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201160009-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 10, 2008
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 16, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
DATE April 16, 1984 12:00 Noon CITY Washington, D.C.
CIA Involvement in Nicaragua
MAURY POVICH: Welcome, please, Ray Cline, formerly the
Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for Intelli-
gence. He is now with the Center for Strategic and International
Studies at Georgetown University. And Harry Rositzke, station
chief in many countries, as well as the head of the division
regarding the Soviet Union, served with the CIA for more than 25
years now, and has this new book out called Managing Moscow:
Guns or Goods.
Let's start with you, Harry, and the premise. You say
your brethren, people you worked with for 25 years, maybe because
of the Bay of Pigs experience and others, the CIA should not be
running the war on an operational basis.
HARRY ROSITZKE: Well, the only reason for getting CIA
in is to have a kind of a cover so that at any time it comes up,
the President can say, in effect, this is not an official
American operation. In other words, this so-called plausible
denial means he can say no without really lying.
POVICH: We are not legitimately in there unless we send
in the United States Army.
ROSITZKE: That's right.
So, that has broken down three times. When the U-2 went
over, President Eisenhower said, "I did it." When the Bay of
Pigs messed up, the President, in effect, said, "I'm responsi-
ble." Then it got down to be kind of silly, whereas the Angolan
support was debated in Congress. And now we suddenly have the
support for the Contras being a matter of discussion in the
press, in pulpits, in Congress, and among anybody who's
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POVICH: And you say, in this big article in the Outlook
section of The Post yesterday, that the CIA can serve a purpose
there, but an intelligence purpose, in terms of infiltrating
various factions and understanding and gathering intelligence and
data, so that a policy can be formed.
ROSITZKE: CIA started off as an espionage and counter-
espionage service. Over the next five or six years, back then,
we got into action.
What I'm suggesting -- and I suggested this or many
years, even while I was inside -- let's get back to our real
business. America needs a highly competent foreign intelligence
service. There are situations all over the place where we don't
have enough information. You can say we didn't know what was
going on in Grenada. I don't think we know exactly what's going
on in Managua now. I'm not sure we had an objective look at how
effective the Contras have been. We apparently can't even do as
well as the press can on saying, "Look, here's where the next
fight's going to be."
POVICH: Ray, what's 'with that kind of premise?
RAY CLINE: Well, I think it's a kind of a cop-out,
really. Of course we need more intelligence. I agree entirely
with Harry. But that's not the issue.
The question is, when someone, as I was 20 years ago,
gets some evidence that's very firm, they take it in to the
President and said, "Look, here is what the Russians are doing in
Cuba," in 1962. "Here are missiles that can hit the United
States," somebody has to decide what to do. Now, in that case we
decided a blockade, an open blockade, a military action. No
problem.
But there are occasions when the United States, for good
reasons, does not want to take what essentially is military
action. To say that we would take military action in Nicaragua
today, I think, is just a cop-out because we really wouldn't do
it.
The alternative, over the years, has been for CIA
officials -- not the ones who take care of collecting intel-
ligence -- to arrange, to assist local people, not Americans, who
have their own motivation for fighting against the regime that is
causing the strategic difficulties the United States is con-
fronting. That's when you turn to CIA covert actions.
POVICH: Doesn't this cause a problem, though, in terms
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of image of the CIA, when they take over a military operation,
Don? Isn't that when members of Congress start to question as to
should it be the CIA, I mean should we be doing all this covert-
ly, in terms of an actual military operation?
DON OBERDORFER: Well, what happened in this case, as
Ray sort of suggested, back in 1981, in November of 1981,
then-Secretary of State Haig wanted to go in there with a
military operation. He wanted, basically, to blockade Cuba and
to use American power to tell the Nicaraguans, "Cut it out. We
don't like what you're doing. And we're going to put pressure
on." The White House and the President rejected that because it
seemed to be too dangerous, because they had a domestic program
to get through, for whatever reason; and instead decided to do a
small-scale, at that time, CIA operation to support a force near
Nicaragua, to put pressure on them, beginning with 500 men --that
was the initial, 500 men. Then it was a thousand. Then it was
two thousand. Then it was five thousand. Now they've got it up
to 15 to 18 thousand men all around Nicaragua being supported.
Well, that's no secret anymore, as was said by Harry.
They debate it in Congress. The Administration has to ask for
the money.
POVICH: But, Rollie, didn't the Administration put a
lot of -- maybe make a possible media error by putting all of
this on the front burner? In other words, putting Nicaragua on
the front burner of foreign policy and El Salvador on the front
border, instead of leaving it on the back burner. If you have
covert operations, don't you want to hang back and not have this
constantly in the press so that it has public attention all the
time?
ROWLAND EVANS: Well, I think it's very hard to do that,
Maury, because there is a free press in this country. And a lot
of people have been going down there, including myself, and I
think Don's been down there, and you see what's going on. And
you know there is a twilight area, as Ray Cline suggests, in
which going to the Congress and asking for a declaration of war
is impossible because you couldn't get it, and yet there has to
be something, some barricade -- some effort to barricade against
this sweeping -- this movement of Marxism from Cuba and the
Soviet Union. Every Administration think it's a'danger to the
future of this country. I happen to agree. Some people may not.
I happen to agree that it is a danger.
So, how do you do it? Well, then you get into the
trouble. You go into the twilight zone. You do CIA covert
operations. Of course, they're not covert.
CLINE: It's easy to see the disadvantages of covert
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action. It is not in keeping with our national traditions of
openness and morality. But there is no other good substitute for
helping a people who are fighting, presumably, for principles we
agree with, a more democratic government than the Sandinistas are
offering in Nicaragua and less interference by the Sandinistas
from Nicaragua in El Salvador. Those are good causes. And if
you don't do it with military force, you have to do it with
covert force. What we're facing is a covert warfare from the
Soviet Union and Cuba.
POVICH: You disagree with Harry. The CIA can conduct a
covert operation successfully.
ROSITZKE: It hasn't in the last ten years, that I know
Let me make one point, though, which is another matter.
EVANS: What about Nicaragua?
ROSITZKE: What covert operation?
EVANS: An operation that goes, quote, covert, unquote.
It's been operating...
ROSITZKE: I'm sorry. No operation that has been kept
-- that has kept the President's hands secret.
EVANS: Well, how would you know?
ROSITZKE: Because every operation -- well, every large
operation. Let's put it that way.
EVANS: There has been no clandestine CIA operation in
the last five years?
[Confusion of voices]
POVICH: Successfully.
ROSITZKE: Maury, there's one thing
I think that's been missed which I think is worth looking at over
and beyond the moral, the legal, the political, the anti-Marxist.
To what extent is this particular operation likely to succeed in
its goals? Now, there have been plenty of analysis whereas you
start supporting invaders of a country, you then support an
enormous security and patriotic reaction. So that in many ways,
I think right now we are giving the Sandinistas the chance to
really tighten up the regime, to get a hell of a lot of support,
including from Europe.
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POVICH: But the goal is, at the least, to open up the
regime, to elections...
ROSITZKE: And we're doing the exact opposite right now.
POVICH: Ray, you think so?
CLINE: No. I don't agree with that. I think that you
have to have a combination of carrot and stick in all these
matters. We can offer that if the Sandinistas do open up, then
everything's different. But for the moment, they have not opened
up anything. The only thing they're scared of is those thousands
of Contras who thought that it was going to be a democratic
revolution, found that they were completely, lock, stock and
barrel, in the hands of Castro and the Soviet Union.
POVICH: Don, do you see on the Hill an attitude by a
significant number, a majority -- not majority, a significant
number of people on the Hill that maybe we'd better just give
this all up. I mean this is just...
OBERDORFER: Well, let's not -- it's sort of been
forgotten, but the House of Representatives last August voted to
stop it. So you already had the House on record as in opposi-
tion, under the leadership of Mr. Boland of Massachusetts. And
the whole House voted we want to cut this off. And instead, they
wanted to, basically, do an interdiction to, in a sense, build a
fence around Nicaragua.
POVICH: Can the Administration, through covert activi-
ties, operate without the consent of Congress? Is it possible?
OBERDORFER: They cannot operate without the money from
Congress. That is for sure.
EVANS: There is no way. They cannot.
OBERDORFER: There is no way an Administration can print
POVICH: Ray and Harry probably know more than I do
whether the CIA budget is scrutinized more today on the Hill than
it has been in the past because of those days of the '70s.
ROSITZKE: That isn't the issue. The issue now, I
think, is that we are always forced to refer to the Senate and
House Intelligence Committee rather than the old eight commit-
tees. And therefore, nothing serious can be done without letting
them know.
Now, that doesn't mean they've got the right of veto.
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POVICH: Should the President of the United States come
out and now talk about Soviet threats, Cuban threats, threats to
our national security? Maybe he could shift onto that...
ROSITZKE: Well, he's done a bit of that over the last
three years.
CLINE: Listen, Harry, you've been filibustering on
turning it over to the Army, which I think is a cop-out. Only
the CIA can conduct discreet secret operations which provides
arms and money to people who want to fight for purposes we agree
in, without attributing it to our own government. We were doing
that, apparently, for over a year or so. It has now busted out
in the press, largely, I think, because of political disagree-
ments in the Congress. It may be that our oversight system won't
work. But it is possible to fight these kind of covert opera-
tions.
POVICH: Isn't it that, though? Can not the President
say, "Okay. Now I'm going to tell you the real reason we're
there. We're there because if we weren't there, Cuba would build
a Soviet Marxist state right there in Nicaragua, and it would
spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica"?
EVANS: Let me say that with that stump speech, Povich
ought to be running the White House NSC staff. And I mean that
quite seriously. Because this is the dilemma that the President
faces. His political advisers, coming into an election, do not
want to present him in the guise of a latter-day Genghis Khan or
Attila the Hun. And that looks like, and it is, an invitation to
possible use of American force in Nicaragua.
And, of course, what you've just said, the counterargu-
ment is even more important, that this is happening, these
inroads are being made and we have to resist it.
He should make that speech, and I think he'd carry the
American people with him.
POVICH: Would he really, Don, carry the American
people, or would he have some problems with that?
OBERFORFER: Well, the American people's reaction
--Reagan has made a very similar speech, not about the Contras
but about Central America, and he's made it repeatedly, to a
joint session of Congress, in press conferences, and you name it,
saying this is vital to our national security.
The American people's reaction is on two points. They
agree, every poll shows, that it's vital to our national secur-
ity. And by an equally overwhelming majority, they do not want
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the United States involved in that situation militarily. And
they want to stay out of there even though they know it's vital.
CLINE: So, the answer is covert operations. There is
no other answer. You either quit or you conduct these covert
operations, hopefully with more secrecy and more discretion than
we have in the past.
POVICH: Could you not mute all the criticism, Ray, if
you could have a significant victory somewhere, you could see the
Sandinistas begin to lose a bit, I mean their grip? You don't
ever see that. That's the problem with covert operations,
because the results are so murky.
CLINE: That would help.
But I agree with you, Maury, that really the rationale
of the just war, of what we're doing there being in the interest
of our value system and our politics and being the direct result
of an attempt to resist Cuban and Soviet infiltration, that's the
answer that will get the public aware of what it's all about.
POVICH: But, Harry, you say that the covert operation
cannot bring that about.
ROSITZKE: I'll put it this way: It's no longer covert.
The Congress and the public are against it. And to this point,
no one has ever assessed the likelihood that the Contras would
stop arms going to Salvador, which is the only purpose I know of.
POVICH: Thank you, all, very much.
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