Central American Shuffle

By Ed Magnuson

Enders and Hinton are out in a shake-up at the State Department

Secretary of State George Shultz was flying to Williamsburg on Air Force One when he made a rare appearance in the plane's press section. He launched into a soliloquy about the need for the U.S. to promote freedom and democracy in Central America, emphasizing that only a strong military shield in El Salvador can protect their development there. "Now, in all of this," Shultz said, "Tom Enders, a man of vast experience in diplomatic matters, has played a very strong and important role, and I want to take the occasion to pay a tribute to the fine work that Tom Enders has done." Then Shultz dropped a bombshell: "And Ambassador Enders will move to a major diplomatic post."

It was also learned that Deane Hinton, 60, the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, will be replaced soon, several months earlier than his scheduled departure. Both Hinton and Enders, 51, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, are firm but realistic diplomats. Their removal raised the possibility that the Administration may be shifting toward an even harder line on Central America.

The shake-up came at an inopportune time. The news broke just as President Ronald Reagan was about to welcome the leaders of six other nations to an economic summit conference in Colonial Williamsburg, Va. The Administration decided to make the announcement because it learned that word of Enders' imminent departure was about to leak out. Instead of the upbeat summit stories Reagan had expected, the Administration was portrayed as torn by internal conflicts over its Central American policies.

Meanwhile, Congress was wrestling with Administration aid requests for Central America. The deliberations were colored by news of the first U.S. military fatality in El Salvador since American advisers were sent there 32 months ago (see following stories).

Enders, a 25-year veteran of the foreign service, will be nominated as Ambassador to Spain. He will be replaced in Washington by L. Anthony Motley, 44, the Reagan-appointed Ambassador to Brazil. An Alaska real estate executive and Republican fund raiser in the state, Motley has been highly effective in his 18 months in Brasilia. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he spent his first 17 years there. Motley's father, an affluent American oil executive, died when Anthony was twelve; his mother, who is half British and half Brazilian, still lives in Rio. His diplomatic experience is obviously limited, but his diplomatic style is easygoing and straightforward. He has been described in Rio as having "jeito Brasileiro" (Brazilian knack).

Publicly, Shultz and others in the Administration clung to the claim that Enders' transfer was merely routine. Privately, they conceded that National Security Adviser William Clark, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and hard-liners at the Pentagon had found Enders difficult to work with and had been trying to edge him out for months. When Shultz returned from his round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, he moved to recapture control of Central American policy from the NSC. Clark agreed, on one condition. "The quid pro quo," says one official, "was Enders." In this view, Shultz was reluctant to move him but resented Clark's day-to-day involvement in policy and had concluded that "too many hands were running Central American policy. One person had to do it."

An imposing figure at 6 ft. 8 in., with the patrician air of Connecticut wealth and Yale and Harvard degrees, Enders is strong-willed and often prickly. When he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs under Henry Kissinger in 1974 and 1975, Kissinger once said about him, "I finally met a man more arrogant than I." A colleague of Enders' at the State Department recalls that when Clark and Enders tried to work together under Secretary of State Alexander Haig, "the friction between Tom and Clark was palpable in the air." After Clark moved to the NSC, he complained that Enders was formulating policy on his own and running a one-man show.

Still, if personality conflicts were the only problem with Enders, his transfer would not have been a major event in Washington. In fact, Enders had begun to seek some accommodations with congressional critics of the Administration's interventionist policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua, on the valid assumption that without some concessions, Congress might curtail or halt the Administration's program in Central America. He had agreed with some lawmakers that talks between the Salvadoran government and the rebels should be encouraged, even while the U.S. provided military support for the government forces. He had started working on a delicate compromise with Democratic legislators opposed to covert U.S. operations in Nicaragua.

The notion that Enders could be considered too moderate was more than a little ironic. From 1970 to 1974, he had served as deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Phnom-Penh, where he was a key supervisor of the secret American bombing in Cambodia. His reputation for toughness and intellect earned the respect of Haig, who brought Enders to the Latin American desk in 1981. There Enders was an eager proponent of Haig's view that U.S. interests were endangered by Communist-inspired uprisings south of the border. Like his then boss, Enders declared: "The decisive battle for Central America is under way hi El Salvador."

Still, Enders brought a more sophisticated approach to Latin American policy. Rather than viewing the region mainly as a site for a superpower showdown, he put greater emphasis on the economic and sociological roots of unrest indigenous to many Latin American nations. He successfully urged that economic aid and pressure for political reform be pursued by the U.S. along with its military funding.

On Capitol Hill, some Democrats thought they saw Enders mellowing ever so slightly from the hard Reagan-Clark-Kirkpatrick line. "Enders was in a process of evolution," says Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. "He was a real hard-liner two years ago. But now he's talking about a dual track of military and political solutions." Agrees Democrat Clarence Long, chairman of a House foreign operations subcommittee: "I never thought when I first met him that I'd lament the day he left. But I began to find him quite reasonable and moderate." Long figures Enders was fired because "he must have been caught doing the right thing."

One of Enders' most recent brushes with the White House occurred when he fought hard to push his own candidate, Francis McNeil, Ambassador to Costa Rica, as special Central American envoy. The hard-liners won out with their choice, former Senator Richard Stone, a Reagan supporter from Florida. According to a State Department intimate, Enders kept responding to Clark and Kirkpatrick with pleas like "It's not as simple as that."

Enders' successor, Motley, is considered too inexperienced in the State Department to exert the kind of influence that got Enders into trouble. Motley, moreover, is regarded as a Reagan loyalist unlikely to have differences with the White House. Still, Motley has been blunt-spoken and independent in Brasilia. He recently said of his job: "We are dealing with a goddam tough set of facts as representatives of the U.S., and it is no job for cookie-pushing layabouts." He has been critical of diplomats who ignore Congress or fail to answer letters from legislators. "We at State are our own worst enemies before Congress," he contends.

The chunky, cigar-chomping Hinton has been in El Salvador for two years. His unusual blend of realism, toughness, charm and candor earned him wide respect among the Salvadorans, and he seemed to be carrying out Washington's policy with great skill. He irked the White House recently by publicly scolding the Salvadoran government on its lax prosecution of human rights abuses, but did so at Enders' urging.

His closeness to Enders seemed to be the main reason for his imminent removal from his post; another factor may well have been his public warnings that restoring stability in El Salvador could take many years, which presumably did not please the less patient Clark and Kirkpatrick.

A White House adviser said that the "leading and probable" candidate to replace Hinton is Gerald E. Thomas, a retired Navy admiral who is Ambassador to Guyana. A black, Thomas had once been proposed by Clark for a position under Enders in Washington, but Enders had opposed him. Thomas, 53, who holds a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Yale and has been a Russian interpreter, is seen by the White House as a nonbureaucratic type of "cando" diplomat.

With Shultz now in charge of the Administration's hottest foreign problem, speculation arose over what he would do with that power and whether he could hold it. Did it mean a defter and softer touch in Central America? If so, would the White House and Pentagon hard-liners keep hands off for long? Shultz has never publicly differed from the Reagan attitude toward the region, so all of the fuss last week may signal no substantial policy change. "The policy is taking a hell of a beating in terms of credibility," observes a senior State Department official. "To enhance the credibility it was thought that a change in people would be helpful." With such able people ending up sacrificial lambs, it seems that the price of credibility is high, and getting higher. --By EdMagnuson.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Johanna McGeary/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Johanna McGeary/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.