Reed Irvine - Editor
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Were elements of the Sandinista gang that used terror to seize control of Nicaragua involved in the cowardly February bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the later plot to blow up the Hudson River tunnels and other facilities? New evidence from Managua, largely ignored by the media, indicates a possible Sandinista link to the bomb plot. The evidence also proves that although the people voted to throw the communists out of office three years ago, their power and terrorist activities continue unabated.
But for the 70 percent of Americans who say that television is their primary (and often only) source of news, the story remains unreported. Throughout the 1980s the media--and especially the Big 3 TV networks--frequently derided documented evidence compiled by the Reagan Administration proving that the Sandinistas were supporting violent revolution elsewhere in Central America, especially the campaign of the communist-led Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) to overthrow popularly- elected presidents of El Salvador.
During that decade we documented repeatedly how the media covered up Sandinista complicity in the El Salvadoran terrorism, even when a veritable truckload of arms was seized at a border crossing. In another notorious instance, CBS News in 1983 showed a film clip of a Soviet freighter being unloaded at Corinto, a Nicaraguan port, to refute President Reagan's contention that Soviet military equipment, including tanks and helicopters, was coming into the country. Correspondent Richard Wagner said the film came from a "source friendly to Nicaragua." Only after the State Department protested did CBS admit that the film was made by Cubans.
Now the coverup by CBS, the other networks and such print giants as The New York Times continues, this time on one of the more explosive political stories to come out of Central America in recent years.
An explosion early the morning of Sunday, May 23 in Managua, Nicaragua, finally blew apart the leftist/media myth that the Sandinistas are well-meaning populist revolutionaries. The episode began when a violent blast rocked an auto repair shop in Santa Rosa, a Managua suburb. Police who rushed to the scene found two persons dead and extensive property damage. But the real discovery lay beneath the rubble. There police came upon a vast underground bunker laden with tons of arms, ranging from AK-47 rifles to 19 sophisticated surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and boxes of plastique explosives. The bunker was protected with hydraulic doors, with tunnels connecting separated chambers.
One of the chambers, according to Nicaraguan authorities, housed the headquarters of an international terrorist kidnapping ring which created false passports and other identification papers, and compiled dossiers on the movements of potential victims, chiefly wealthy Latin Americans.
That The New York Times ignored the story is particularly peculiar. When an Egyptian immigrant named Ibraham Elgabrowny was arrested in Brooklyn in early March on charges of complicity in the plot to bomb the World Trade Center, authorities found five Nicaraguan passports and visas in his apartment. The passports were for the family of convicted terrorist El Sayyid Nosair, serving a prison sentence for the 1980s murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish activist.
Despite the extensive coverage it has given this plot and the later scheme to bomb the Hudson River tunnels, the UN Building, and other facilities, the Times has not pursued a possible link between the Elgabrowny documents and the Managua bunker.
The existence of the "terrorist central" bunker has important international political implications. Although defeated at the polls in February 1990, the communist Sandinistas continue to exert de facto control over Nicaragua's security and intelligence agencies. The episode again points up the political blunder President Violeta Chamorro made when she did not purge communists from office after she won her overwhelming electoral victory, getting 54.7 percent of the vote versus 40.8 percent for the communists.
Some of the seized documents date back to 1986, demonstrating that the bunker was active when the Sandinistas still ruled Nicaragua. One account stated that Tomas Borge, former Sandinista Minister of the Interior, which controlled the secret police, rushed to the site in his pajamas when he learned of the explosion. To us, Borge's panic--he holds no office now--suggests something more significant than the natural reaction from a man who hears a loud bang in the night.
Many of the arms belonged to the Salvadoran communist guerrilla group, the FMLN in El Salvador. A 1992 truce obliged the FMLN to surrender its arms. In its public statements, generally unchallenged by the media, the FMLN for months claimed to have done just that. Press attention therefore has focused on FMLN demands that President Alfredo Cristiani keep his end of the bargain and cashier top-ranking officers in the Salvadoran military. By all accounts, Cristiani has done just that, firing a host of top generals and colonels.
Now we know that the FMLN lied in stating that it laid down its arms--the bunker explosion jarred loose the truth. In a June 11 letter to the United Nations, Salvador Sanchez Ceren admitted that his Popular Liberation Forces, one of the five guerrilla factions making up the FMLN, owned most of the weapons. He apologized to UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for lying when he swore earlier that the weapons had been destroyed.
Sanchez Ceren went on to insist that no arms had been removed from the vault since the ceasefire. But physical evidence suggests otherwise. Nicaraguan authorities said the blast occurred when guns and explosives were being transferred from the bunker to a car.
The bunker cache also proves that international terrorism survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Managua as a safe haven. The owner of the repair shop above the bunker was said to be associated with the Spanish separatist group ETA; he disappeared after the blast. Although Nicaraguan authorities have released no information on the origin of the weapons, reporter Douglas Farah wrote in The Washington Post on July 14, "Former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega has visited Iraq at least once and Libya twice this year, once immediately after the arms cache was discovered."
Wire services carried brief accounts of the explosion in the days immediately after May 23, centering on FMLN denials that the guerrillas needed any arms after the ceasefire, and the deportations from Nicaragua of three accused ETA terrorists to Spain. The scope of the vast arms and documents cache was apparently first reported on June 18 by a Brazilian paper which focused on evidence linking the bunker to a series of high- ransom kidnappings in that country.
But the United States press ignored the import of the story until June 20, when Tim Johnson wrote a long front-page story in the Miami Herald. As did the Brazilian newspaper, Johnson concentrated on the kidnap angle and the connection between Basque and Latin American terrorists. He gave examples of the specificity of the details that the terrorists had compiled in dossiers of potential targets. For instance, the ring knew that a garbage truck went by the mansion of one millionaire in the Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec "every day at 10:00 A.M. and a guard opens the gate."
Not until the end of the story did Johnson address the key question of whether the Sandinistas were involved. Even then he gave the issue short shrift, suggesting that the blame, if any, could be that of fringe groups. "Radical elements within the Sandinista Front appear to have played a role in the ring, if only as hosts, diplomats and analysts say," he wrote.
Douglas Farah of The Washington Post wrote a much tougher story which ran on the front page on July 14 under the headline "Managua Blasts Rip Lid Off Secrets." Farah's account, of more than 2,500 words, had extraordinary and sensational detail. But even given Farah's guidance, none of the Big 3 TV networks or national papers such as The New York Times or Los Angeles Times have mentioned the discovery. There was editorial commentary in such newspapers as The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, The Sacramento Bee and The Arizona Republic. The Wall Street Journal, in a July 23 editorial, suggested that "Ollie North was right" in having a security fence built around his Virginia home in the 1980s to keep out terrorists. (This incident, of course, prompted one of the charges brought against North by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in the Iran-Contra affair.)
Obtaining the story would have required little journalistic enterprise on the part of United States reporters, for much of what the Herald and Farah reported had been in the public domain for weeks and readily available to anyone who looked for it. One public disclosure was in the letter of FMLN leader Sanchez Ceren to the UN, written a week after the disclosure. The UN press office in New York told us the letter was routinely made available to correspondents. But reporters who write about Latin affairs chose to busy themselves with either the ouster of Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano Elias or the shakeup of the Salvadoran military high command as part of the "peace" process in that country.
According to Farah's account, Judge Martha Quezada, who is presiding over the investigation, made 43 folders of evidence available to journalists in Managua the week before he filed his story. "She let reporters review the documents," Farah wrote. They included 310 passports, many blank, from 21 countries, plus "scores" of other false ID papers and transit visas and blank weapons permit forms from the Sandinista government.
In a front-page story on July 15, The New York Times mentioned that "five fraudulent Nicaraguan passports" had been found in the possession of Elgabrowny, described as a 42-year-old Egyptian immigrant. Elgabrowny had originally been arrested as a suspect in the February World Trade Center bombing.
Here arises the connection between the Managua bunker and the New York bomb plots, the latter the subject of intensive coverage by the Times. But the newspaper withheld from its readers information on how the Managua ring used falsified Nicaraguan documents to permit terrorists to travel covertly around the world. Did the Elgabrowny passports come from Managua? We don't know. We do know that a State Department spokesman, in commenting on the Farah articles on July 14, said that the FBI had dispatched investigators to Managua to learn whether the terrorist materials had been used in the U.S. Again, this briefing gave the Times and other media, including the Big 3 TV networks, a chance to report on the original explosion story.
Both the Farah and Miami Herald stories were discussed by Senator Jesse Helms during hearings on July 14 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Helms noted, he has repeatedly spoken out on the subject of the Sandinistas supplying arms to the FMLN, only to be ignored by colleagues and the press. "Now, this is not new information," he said of the stories, "and we have a fellow down at home who said, 'I never want to say "I told you so," but I told you so.'"
On July 15 Senator John McCain put both articles in the Congressional Record, declaring that the Sandinistas are "posing an incredible danger to the lives of millions of innocent people...." McCain continued, "Those of us who supported freedom and democracy and aid to the Contras are again vindicated by this clear record of what the Sandinistas are doing with the help of Cuba and others...."
On McCain's motion, the Senate voted without recorded dissent to suspend U.S. aid to Nicaragua pending an investigation into the Sandinista relationship "to acts of terrorism which threaten to undermine the security of the United States and economic prosperity of the Western Hemisphere." The Clinton Administration earlier this year approved the release of $50 million in aid for the Nicaraguan government. This money is now on hold. But not even the Senate vote jarred the networks into mentioning the story.
There was a plethora of other "news pegs," to use a journalistic term. One came when Romeu Tuma, a vice president of Interpol, the international police agency, discussed the kidnappings at a June 30 press conference in Managua. According to Farah, Tuma "said the ring appeared to be the result of an alliance formed among leftist Latin American groups at meetings in Hamburg, Germany, and elsewhere in the late 1980s." The Managua paper La Prensa ran long accounts of the arms discovery, including the disclosure that serial numbers had been removed from 16 of the 19 surface-to-air missiles after the blast, apparently to conceal their origin.
Senator Helms' remark about the disclosures being "old information" was true. A widely-disregarded report from the Republican minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a year ago foretold what came to light with the May 23 explosion. The 144-page report, "Nicaragua Today," was issued in August 1992. Its primary author was Deborah L. De Moss, who works for Helms. The Republican staff director, James W. Nance, concluded that Nicaragua "is not merely a country controlled by Sandinista communists. A more accurate description is that Nicaragua is a country overwhelmingly controlled by terrorists, thugs, thieves and murderers at the highest levels."
The report detailed how President Chamorro permitted the Sandinistas to transfer their State Security intelligence agency from the Ministry of the Interior into the Sandinista Popular Army, under the euphemistic cover title of "Defense Information Directorate." The aptly-named Lenin Cherna, a protege of Daniel Ortega, continues to run the agency. (His brother, Engels Cherna, is also a Sandinista functionary.) Similarly, the Ministry of the Interior, once run by Tomas Borge, became the Ministry of the Government, with Chamorro replacing only 20 of 11,700 persons who held office under the Sandinistas.
De Moss and associates reported that the Sandinista military and intelligence agencies ran an active--and open--arms market from Managua. "The Sandinistas have hundreds of thousands of assault weapons, side arms, and millions of rounds of ammunition, as well as hundreds of cannons and rocket launchers," the report stated. "These are among the weapons that the Sandinista Popular Army has shipped regularly to terrorist groups around the region." These include several terrorist groups in Guatemala, the Cinchoneros in Honduras, the M-20 in Panama and the "Free Fatherland" faction in Peru.
But the most flagrant violations, the report stated, concerned an unabated flow of arms to the FMLN, in flagrant violation of the cease-fire provided by the January 1992 peace treaty. The Sandinistas were bequeathed these arms by their former Soviet and Cuban supporters. Even though this aid has ceased, the Nicaraguan army, including reserves, still numbers 202,874 persons--four times the size of the military of Guatemala, and five times that of Honduras, its immediate neighbors. Military and police spending soak up a quarter of the nation's annual budget. [The report is available from Republican Staff Office, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 446 SDOB, Washington, DC 20510-6225: (202) 224-3941.]
The De Moss report also details systematic thievery by the Sandinista leadership. Tens of thousands of confiscated properties remain in the hands of Sandinistas and their cronies. Many formerly belonged to Americans living and working in Nicaragua. One particularly egregious offender is General Humberto Ortega (brother of former President Daniel Ortega) who continues as commander in chief of the army. Humberto Ortega "seized an entire neighborhood that includes some 20 homes in a wealthy subdivision," the report states. "This subdivision, which is located on a main highway outside of Managua, has been walled-in and is protected at all hours by military security. We measured the length of one side of the property as a little less than one half mile."
In most instances, President Chamorro has taken no steps to restore the seized properties to their lawful owners. Several cases in which she acted ended in violence. When a man received an order for the return of his gas station "Sandinista mobs attacked the local state attorney who was seeking to enforce the order." A mob occupied a ranch and refused to let the owner resume possession.
These concerns were raised repeatedly with the State Department, and Helms and other Senators urged that President Clinton not give aid to Nicaragua until the property rights of Americans were respected. Clinton overrode these protests earlier this year when he approved releasing $50 million in aid. As McCain told the Senate on July 14, the American people will be "hard pressed" to understand how a state which tolerates terrorism should benefit from our tax money.
The Miami Herald article by Tim Johnson also documents that the Sandinista movement--which liberals a decade ago proclaimed to be a progressive new voice in Latin politics --is now revealing itself to be a criminal organization. This should come as no surprise to persons who watched the Sandinistas from their inception. Earlier we mentioned Lenin Cerna, head of Sandinista security. A State Department document quoted in the De Moss report notes that while assigned to the Nicaraguan embassy in Honduras he "directed assassinations of Sandinista regime opponents in exile." The State Department said Cerna is "widely believed to have personally tortured civil opposition activists, including Sofonias Cisneros, president of the Union of Christian School Parents."
The dossiers on prospective victims show the skill with which the terrorists stalked their prey. One document reported on Mexican hotel magnate Antonio Gutierrez Prieto attending a Mass to celebrate the second anniversary of his wife's death. Shortly afterward his son was abducted and held for eight months before his release for ransom.
The motive for these schemes was monetary, not revolutionary. Dossiers on Ecuadoran targets spoke of targeting persons "with the biggest personal fortunes. Amount to negotiate: $10 million (could be higher, depending on the negotiation)."
Predictably, longterm FMLN zealots are already denying vehemently that their terrorist friends had any connection with the bunker. The evening of July 14 a representative of the radical group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, in an interview over WPFW, the Pacifica Radio station in Washington, criticized the Douglas Farah article as stemming from the CIA. By FAIR's account, the fact that Farah quoted unnamed "embassy sources" meant that the CIA fed him the story. We've watched Farah's reporting from Central America for years. He might be accused of many things--but never that of being a tool of the CIA or an American embassy. FAIR's spokesman seemingly had not read--or chose to ignore--the admission by FMLN chieftain Sanchez Ceren that the arms belonged to his organization, for this crucial fact went unmentioned in his commentary.
It is not surprising that the far left should spring to the defense of the regime in Nicaragua, since it is evident that the Sandinistas are brazenly strengthening their grip on the country. On July 22, former Sandinista troops occupied the town of Esteli and looted the banks, reportedly stealing $4 million. The New York Times reported on July 26 that there was evidence that Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista who commands the army, first sanctioned the attack and then moved in the army to suppress it, killing 41 of the rebels. This enabled him to attack the Chamorro government for creating conditions that ignited rebellion and claim credit for restoring order.
Send the enclosed card or your own letter to a publication of your choice to alert others to the deteriorating hopes for democracy in Nicaragua. We are also enclosing a card that you can use to order two important POW/MIA books discussed in the Notes. A third card announces our move to a new address on August 7 and our new phone and fax numbers.
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
LAST APRIL, EVERY U.S. ATTORNEY IN THE COUNTRY, 93 OF THEM IN ALL, WAS simultaneously sacked by the Justice Department. While it is customary for a new administration to replace the U.S. attorneys with its own appointees, this has always been done gradually as their replacements were selected. The mass firing was unprecedented, as no replacements for any of the dismissed attorneys were named. Since Jay B. Stephens, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, had let it be known that he would decide within thirty days whether or not he would seek an indictment of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, there were many, including Jay Stephens, who suspected that the mass firings were designed to get rid of Stephens without singling him out for attention. Rostenkowski was to play a key role in getting President Clinton's budget through Congress. He couldn't do that if Stephens secured his indictment because under House rules he would have to step down as chairman.
IN THE JUNE-B AIM REPORT, I CALLED ATTENTION TO THIS, NOTING THAT ONLY THREE new U.S. attorneys had been nominated. That has since risen to 12, none of whom has as yet been confirmed. Obviously, the rush to dismiss all the attorneys was not because Clinton had replacements eager and ready to go. This fathered the suspicion that the real motive was to get rid of Stephens and delay action on the Rostenkowski case. That suspicion was further strengthened by the fact that Attorney General Reno, in choosing Stephens' interim replacement, skipped over several senior attorneys on his staff to choose one who had no involvement in the Rostenkowski investigation. I pointed out that the media, which were accused of being excessively hard on Clinton, had not said a word about the scandal of the two month delay in announcing whether or not an indictment would be sought in the Rostenkowski case. It had dropped off the screen.
IT SUDDENLY REAPPEARED ON JULY 20, WHEN ROBERT V. ROTA, THE FORMER POST- master of the House Post Office, pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts and agreed to testify that he had helped at least two members of Congress embezzle public funds. The court papers didn't name the Congressmen, but reporters soon learned that they were Dan Rostenkowski and former Rep. John Kolter of Pennsylvania. The Congressmen were said to have obtained large numbers of stamps by signing official vouchers and then exchanging the stamps for cash. The Congressman identified as Rostenkowski was said to have received at least $21,300 from the Post Office illegally between 1985 and 1991. The practice was terminated in May 1987 because a new supervisor of accounts had been hired and Rota did not trust him to go along with the illegal scheme. It was resumed in May 1989 when James C. Smith was given the job at Rostenkowski's insistence. Smith exposed the practice in statements made to federal prosecutors a year ago, leading to the subpoenaing of the records of the Congressmen.
THE WASHINGTON POST CAME UP WITH THIS EDITORIAL COMMENT THE DAY AFTER IT informed its readers about Robert Rota's guilty plea: "The prosecutor (Jay Stephens) implied on his way out that perhaps the Democrats were plotting to call the prosecution off. Some plot. Under Democratic auspices, Mr. Stephens' former subordinates and acting successors have done just fine. They have wrung a guilty plea from former House postmaster Robert Rota that he helped several members of Congress embezzle funds from the post office .... Mr. Rostenkowski has not been charged, and throughout the investigation has denied that he did anything wrong. But on the record so far, the Democratic Justice Department seems to be proceeding about as it ought to proceed with regard to this senior Democrat. Regular order, no pulling punches." Neither the Post's news story nor editorial mentioned that 93 U.S. attorneys had been fired and none had yet been permanently replaced with only one result: a delay of the decision on the indictment of Rostenkowski by three months and counting. A big punch has definitely been pulled, and I would be surprised to see it delivered before the conference committee on the Clinton budget sends its report to the House and Senate for a final vote. If Reagan and Meese had engineered that kind of delay to get, say, aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters through Congress, what would the Post have called it? "Regular order" or "obstruction of justice?"
THE BIG MEDIA IGNORED SEVERAL NEWSWORTHY EVENTS ON THE POW FRONT during the week of July 12-17. One was Sen. Bob Smith's news conference immediately after returning from Vietnam. Smith reported that he had been able to find three installations where credible witnesses had reported seeing live American POWs even though the Pentagon had claimed the installations did not exist and the witnesses were fabricators. At one site he saw the iron bunk and the western-size manacles used to restrain a POW the witness said he saw. Smith blamed the failure of the 180 MIA hunters we now have in Vietnam to find these installations on a lack of will. He released a letter to Attorney General Reno asking for a criminal investigation of 10 government officials for having given perjured testimony to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. This was on C-SPAN, but it was ignored by other television networks and most newspapers.
THE NEXT DAY DR. STEPHEN MORRIS TESTIFIED BEFORE A HOUSE COMMITTEE ON THE "smoking gun" that he discovered in the Communist Party archives in Moscow. This was the secret report of Lt. Gen. Tran Van Quang. It revealed that North Vietnam held 1,205 American military POWs in September 1973, and that meant that over 700 of our POWs were held in Vietnam after they claimed to have returned them all in March 1973. Dr. Morris discussed the efforts made to discredit this document and rebutted them. He said that from the very beginning the Defense Department had tried to discredit the document. For example, Robert R. Sheetz, former chief of the DIA's office on POW/MIA affairs, said POWs described by Quang as American military must have included South Vietnamese commandos. Morris said the communists never confused ARVN forces with Americans. They always called them American puppets. Jim Sanders, co-author with Mark Sauter of a fine new book, The Men We Left Behind, described what we had been told by defectors Le Dinh and Dr. Dang Tan that confirms the Quang document. Again, there was no media coverage, not even by C-SPAN.
ON JULY 15 ROSS PEROT HELD A NEWS CONFERENCE IN WASHINGTON IN CONNECTION with the annual meeting of the National Alliance of Families. Perot explained the masons that we left POWs behind and the evidence that some of them are still being held captive by North Vietnam. He said the presumption should be life, not death. He also showed how officials had not merely closed their eyes to this evidence, but had tried systematically to discredit it. Sen. Smith, Stephen Morris, Jim Sanders and several other experts also spoke at this news conference. The media, including TV cameras, were there in force. The coverage was limited to C-SPAN. The two-day meetings of the National Alliance of Families and the National League of Families got the same treatment from the major media. Samuel Berger, Deputy National Security Adviser to the President, told the League of Families that the decision to approve IMF credits to Vietnam was a tactical move, taken because we would be outvoted by other countries. He said the administration would not move forward on any economic or political steps under our control "until there are further tangible results from the Vietnamese." The next day the Vietnamese were informed that we would be willing to station three of our diplomats in Hanoi, a step they will see as another move toward normalization. Roy Neel, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, had earlier been quoted as saying it was his opinion that any American POWs still in Vietnam were probably deserters who have elected to stay there. That seems to be Clinton's view as well.
I COMMEND TO YOUR ATTENTION AND THE PRESIDENT'S A NEW BOOK, THE MEN WE Left Behind, by Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders. I have come to know the authors personally and have been highly impressed by their selfless devotion to the cause of exposing the callous abandonment of Americans held captive by the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and Vietnam. They were coauthors with Cort Kirkwood of Soldiers of Misfortune, which was published last year and dealt with the POWs abandoned in the Soviet Union and Korea. The Men We Left Behind tells in great detail the incredible story of how our government has for two decades closed its eyes to powerful evidence that live American POWs were being held in Vietnamese prisons. This book spells out in detail the disinformation that has been spread by those in the government intent on debunking the evidence that we abandoned live POWs in Vietnam and Laos. Many Republican as well as Democrat politicians and officials are tarnished by this book. I personally don't buy all of its judgments and charges, but the major thrust is unquestionably accurate. The list price on both books is $23.95. You can order them from AIM for $19.95 each postpaid. Use the enclosed card to order. Note that this card is addressed to our new office. See below.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: WE WILL BE MOVING TO A NEW OFFICE AUGUST 7. OUR new address is 4455 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 330, Washington, D.C. 20008. Our new phone number: 202-364-4401. Our new FAX: 202-364-4098.