CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

MOST OF MY LIFE up to this point had been filled with various tyrants and killers. Terrorists in Lebanon, Cold War insurgents in Vietnam and Africa, communist guerrillas in Cuba and Nicaragua. … It was a never-ending cycle requiring we either continue to fight or succumb. There seemed to be no middle ground.

I was at home one evening in my favorite reading chair when Barbara sat on its arm and leaned over wearing that amazing smile of hers. “What are you reading, Bill?”

She reached to see the front cover. Sir Robert Thompson on insurgency.

“Sounds thrilling,” she teased.

“We have counterinsurgency down,” I said. “It worked for us in Vietnam, but we lost the war to politicians at home. We’re infants, though, when it comes to building insurgencies to fight against the communists. Things are about to fall down around our ears in Nicaragua.”

Shortly before I left the CIA to return to the Navy in 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) led by Daniel Ortega ousted Nicaragua’s current dictator, Anastasa Somoza, and set about fundamentally transforming the little nation, Cuban style.

“You are either with the Soviets or you are against them,” declared Humberto Ortega, Daniel’s brother and the new regime’s minister of defense. “We are with the Soviets. … Sandinism without Marxist-Leninism cannot be revolutionary. Because of this they are indivisibly united and, therefore … our political force is Sandinism and our doctrine is Marxist-Leninism.”

Daniel Ortega aligned himself with Castro, Moscow, and the Eastern Bloc and began exporting revolution to El Salvador and other Central American countries. In Nicaragua, he simply replaced the Somoza dictatorship with his own and crushed any signs of democratic sentiment more ruthlessly than Somoza ever had. He seized television and radio stations, censored newspapers, and set about on the path of Stalin to nationalizing means of production, seizing and redistributing wealth, and initiating what passed for land reform in communist nations. That meant stripping farmers of private ownership and casting them onto collective farms patterned after the kolkhozes of the Stalinist era that led to famine and the starvation deaths of some ten million peasants.

Sandinista tanks and troops attacked Miskito Indian farmers who resisted relocation, burning their houses and leaving bodies where they fell.

Supermarket shelves where food was once abundant went bare. Poultry, beef, pork, fish, and staples like rice and beans were rationed and often unobtainable. Homemakers stood in lines all day for a roll of toilet paper or a can of cooking oil. Ragged, half-naked children prowled the streets and fought over scraps of food.

A military draft made it illegal for a teenager to leave the country for any reason other than advanced military training in Cuba or some other Soviet Bloc nation. Mail was censored, telephone calls monitored, and “block captains” reported directly to the Sandinista Defense Committee in a system of “people control” modeled after Cuba’s. Thousands vanished into Managua’s infamous El Chipote prison.

At least 400,000 people out of a 1979 population of 2,800,000 fled Nicaragua. Most of them were poor. Laborers, campesinos, factory workers, white-collar day workers, the so-called proletariat that Marxists always claimed to champion and protect.

Liberation theology was the going philosophy throughout Latin America. Left-wing priests, Jesuits, and nuns claimed Jesus advocated the violent overthrow of ruthless capitalist systems and replacing them by compassionate communism.

The official head of the Human Rights Office in Nicaragua was an American nun who assumed the moniker Sister Mary Hartman. She assured nosy reporters that no political prisoners were being held by the Ortegas. Not a single one.

“Your problem is that you don’t understand the poor,” she scolded. “I think the U.S. is evil. I am afraid to go back home very often because of fear of an outbreak of fascism in the streets.”

I always found such people incomprehensible in their thinking. It wasn’t like they got drunk at a Managua cantina one night, picked up a lovely senorita, then awoke the next morning to find themselves in bed with a slut. They should have known she was a communist slut when they entered the bar.

President Jimmy Carter seemed to have been among the most eager to jump into the bed. During Danny Ortega’s first eighteen months as new dictator and avowed communist, the Carter administration provided him with 100,000 tons of food, $142.6 million in economic aid, and helped the Sandinistas obtain $1.6 billion from international lending institutions and Western governments.

Even while the Carter administration helped the new collectivist state get on its feet, the CIA discovered a combat brigade of Soviet troops setting up in Cuba. I remembered all too well the Cuban Missile Crisis. At first, Carter took a Kennedy stance and called the presence of Russian troops on our doorstep “unacceptable.” Nonetheless, he capitulated almost immediately and abandoned his stand.

In a major address to the nation, he said he was “satisfied by assurances … from the highest level of the Soviet government that the Soviet personnel in Cuba are not and will not be a threat to the United States or any other nation.”

The Soviet brigade remained on the island.

During his 1980 campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan had vowed to stop the spread of communism throughout Latin America and the world and to take on international terrorism. Iran released our American hostages as soon as he moved into the White House in 1981, and Jimmy Carter received that year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel chairman Gunnar Berge took a swipe at the new president’s stance against communism.

The award to Carter, he said, “should be interpreted as a criticism of the [anti-communist] line the current administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”

The Reagan Doctrine piqued the ire of opponents by advocating military support for movements opposing Soviet-sponsored communist governments around the world. An increasingly liberal Congress, intent on “détente” with the Soviet Union, fought to block President Reagan’s efforts to provide assistance to anticommunist Nicaraguan guerrillas known as Contras, who were training and organizing in Honduras to fight Ortega’s Sandinistas.

Prior to an important Congressional vote on aid to the Contras, the communist Nicaraguan minister of interior, Tomas Borge, employed the law firm of Reichler & Applebaum in D.C. to research “human rights abuses by Contras.” By no coincidence, that attorney, Reed Brody, released the report just prior to the vote. During his “research” in Nicaragua, he was housed and given office space by the Sandinistas. Naturally, his report reflected unfavorably on the Contras.

Even while Nicaraguan campesinos were being slaughtered and dissenters by the thousands imprisoned, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry met with Ortega and proclaimed him “a misunderstood democrat rather than a Marxist autocrat.”

The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives dispatched a “Dear Commandante” letter to Ortega, commending his efforts to install “democracy” in his country. The letter expressed regret over the declining relationship between Nicaragua and the U.S. and pledged the congressmen’s support for the Sandinistas. The letter was signed by House Majority Leader Jim Wright and nine other congressmen.

Congressman Newt Gingrich, Georgia Republican, called the letter “a remarkable statement to a foreign dictator. It shows sympathy and support for his actions against the U.S. government.”

Sometimes I felt like batting my head against the wall in frustration. What was the matter with all these people? Didn’t they know the history of how communism always arrived in a country by force and ended up murdering and enslaving millions? The Iron Curtain was not intended to keep people out; it was built to keep people in.

American “progressives” swarmed Managua to witness and celebrate the rise of another socialist utopia. Celebrities and politicians donated blood for communists injured by campesinos who fought back. They returned to the United States singing joyous hallelujahs to Marxism. We called them “Sandalistas.” They arrived on their buses, chanting, “We are Sandinistas too!”

“People are afraid,” said a former Sandinista now in exile. “Sandinistas hold the power because they hold the guns. They are killing those who oppose them.”

American UW and counterterrorism efforts suffered serious setbacks at a time when worldwide Islamic terrorism was exploding, literally, and when Islamists and communists seemed to be cooperating with each other. It seemed all the Sandinistas had to do in order to survive and spread communism throughout the southern American hemisphere was to outlast the Reagan administration.

The third Boland Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress cut off all funds to the Contras in 1985. It prohibited the CIA, the Defense Department, in fact all U.S. government agencies from aiding the anticommunist Contras in any way. American resistance to communism and terrorism was rapidly being torn to shambles in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps I was tired after all these years as a Cold War warrior, a night fighter against evil. There seemed to be fewer and fewer of us willing to keep up the good fight. Optimism about my country and future seemed to be draining from my pores.

“Barb,” I said, “I am afraid that the generations that follow us will soon give up and live in tyranny.”