Arguing About Means and Ends

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

And U.S. aid to Nicaragua's contra rebels

The sporadic clashes in the mountains and jungles of Nicaragua's thinly populated northern provinces so far scarcely deserve to be called a war. The forces involved are minor. On one side are perhaps 2,000 exiles, known as contras, who have slipped back into the country from bases in Honduras, where they were trained as guerrillas; on the other are a scattering of militia and border guards of Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista government. Casualties in the past month total a few hundred, of whom many were peasants killed almost at random. But the political struggle touched off in Washington by this low-level fighting is escalating rapidly, especially in Congress. Said one Administration official last week: "The temperature on Capitol Hill is higher than at any time during the past several months." The issue that is causing all the heat: Does the Reagan Administration's no-longer-secret aid to the contras violate U.S. law?

The law in question is the Boland Amendment, a little-noticed rider tacked onto an omnibus Government-spending bill last December. Ironically, it was adopted at the urging of the Administration, as a substitute for a far more restrictive measure proposed by Democrat Thomas Harkin of Iowa. Harkin's rider would have banned U.S. support of any "military activities in or against Nicaragua"; the CIA argued that this would prevent necessary covert actions aimed at reducing the flow of arms supplied by the Nicaraguan government to Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. So the House accepted, 411 to 0, a rider offered by Massachusetts Democrat Edward P. Boland, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that merely repeated language written into an earlier appropriations bill. It forbade aid to guerrilla groups "for the purpose of over throwing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras," presumably in the form of a Nicaraguan counterinvasion of Honduras to destroy the contras' bases.

The contras, however, loudly if extravagantly proclaim their objective to be precisely the overthrow of Nicaragua's increasingly repressive government. To that end, they have launched a much ballyhooed "invasion" -- actually a series of hit-and-run raids by guerrillas operating inside Nicaragua. And a stream of reports by American newsmen who have visited contra bases in Honduras has left no doubt that the Administration is assisting them by supplying training, arms, and intelligence on troop movements in Nicaragua's northern provinces gathered by spy plane.

Consequently, growing numbers of Congressmen are questioning whether the Administration is violating at least the spirit of the Boland Amendment, which it had pledged to obey. Thirty-six House Democrats and one Republican, Jim Leach of Iowa, raised the issue in a letter to the White House in late March. Last week Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, both members of the committee that oversees CIA operations, voiced their doubts on the Senate floor. Democrat Wyche Fowler of Georgia, just returned from a fact-finding visit to Nicaragua, declared, "No branch of our Government may pick and choose which statutes it will obey."

Though most of the critics were careful to question only the legality of aid to the contras, a few went further to doubt its advisability as well. Said Maryland Democrat Michael Barnes, who has rounded up 40 or 50 cosponsors for a bill to shut off all such aid: "Our policy has strengthened the Sandinistas and rallied the country around them in the face of the external threat." Worries are not confined to Democrats. Howard Baker, majority leader of the Republican-controlled Senate, admitted last week that "there is a great concern" about the Administration's activities.

The White House appeared to be caught by surprise and without any strategy for justifying its actions to Congress. The reason: intelligence officials have never briefed the Administration's political operatives on just what the CIA is doing in Nicaragua. Said one concerned Reagan aide: "It is a potentially explosive issue for us. So far our policy is to say 'no comment' and hope it will go away."

That seems unlikely, but much may depend on how convincing a case CIA Director William Casey and other intelligence officials can make to congressional intelligence committees at closed-door hearings this week. Presumably they will repeat an argument that several Administration officials began making privately to newsmen last week. What counts, the officials maintained, is not the intentions of the contras but those of the U.S. And the contras' hope of overthrowing the Sandinista government is a delusion of grandeur; they lack the numbers, training and equipment to do it. All they can accomplish is to harass the Nicaraguan government, and all the U.S. hopes to do by aiding them is to demonstrate to that government that it cannot aid insurrection in El Salvador without suffering reprisals at home.

Whether Congress will buy that rationale remains to be seen. The Administration is caught in a classic trap: it can demonstrate that it is not violating the Boland Amendment (if in fact it is not) only by disclosing enough details of its aid to the contras to strip the last shreds of secrecy from the operation. If it is unwilling to do that, it risks having Congress put much tighter limits on its not-very-covert support of the contras. Says one official: "They could pull the purse strings on us."

On the other hand, Congress faces a dilemma too. Suspicious of the Administration as many of its members are, they are also aware of the danger of seeming to take the side of the angrily anti-American Nicaraguan government. Says one congressional staffer: "No member of Congress wants to be looked on as soft on Commies. The Administration has been playing that card on all fronts, and on this issue it's having a powerful impact."

In any case, there is no indication that the Administration has any intention of changing its policy toward Nicaragua unless Congress forces it to do so. That policy was spelled out in a secret document summarizing decisions reached by President Reagan and his foreign policy advisers a year ago and was published last week by the New York Times. The document identified the goal of U.S. policy in Central America as to prevent "proliferation of Cuba-model states." While it made no mention of military activity against Nicaragua, it defined U.S. strategy as "increasing the pressure on Nicaragua and Cuba to increase for them the costs of interventionism." The pressure obviously is intended in part to be economic. The White House let it be known last week that it is considering reducing the quota under which Nicaragua sells sugar to the U.S. and redistributing that quota among more friendly Central American nations.

However, such actions do not seem to be advancing Washington's hope of isolating Nicaragua. Quite the contrary: U.S. pressure against Nicaragua has roused the old fear of bullying intervention in Central America's internal affairs, even in nations that have little sympathy for Nicaragua's Marxist line. For example, Panama's sugar industry is severely depressed, and many workers at the mills are on layoff. But Panamanians insist that they will spurn any part of Nicaragua's sugar quota that might be offered to them. As for the Washington-supported military campaign of the contras, many Central Americans echo the concern of one Panamanian banker. Says he: "Honduras is being dragged in, and Costa Rica [where a second group of exiles is talking of infiltrating Nicaragua from the south] could follow. I feel the heat of war crossing our border too. If it does, it's goodbye to all of us." This fear that conflict may engulf the whole region might seem overblown, both because of the limited military capabilities of the contras and because Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto specifically disavows any current idea of attacking Honduras in retaliation for contra activities, but it is strongly felt nonetheless.

Anxiety is growing in the U.S. as well. A combined U.S. and Latin-American panel headed by Sol Linowitz, former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States, and Galo Plaza, former President of Ecuador, last week advocated a new approach for negotiations among the U.S., Nicaragua, other Central American governments and revolutionary movements, and even Cuba and the Soviet Union. The aim would be to work out "understandings" like those between Washington and Moscow that ended the Cuban missile crisis by trading a Kremlin agreement not to put Soviet nuclear weapons into Cuba for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. The new understandings would pledge all parties "not to supply assistance to revolutionary or counterrevolutionary movements that might seek to overthrow governments, to terminate any such aid currently being given, and not to allow their territories to be used for subverting other governments." American signatories of the panel's report included former Cabinet officers Robert McNamara, Elliot Richardson, Edmund Muskie and Cyrus Vance; such business leaders as Banker David Rockefeller and Time Inc. Chairman Ralph Davidson; and retired Air Force General David Jones, who until last June was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

However sensible, those are ideas that would take a long time to implement. The near-term outlook thus remains for an odd combination of intermittent, savage but low-intensity fighting in Nicaragua and a continuing, much louder political uproar in both Central America and the U.S.

--By George J. Church. Reported by Bernard Diederich/Panama and Christopher Redman/Washington

With reporting by Bernard Diederich, Christopher Redman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.