Making Peace at Home

By George Russell

Shultz forestalls a diplomatic flap by picking his own man for El Salvador

Secretary of State George Shultz was plunged into another delicate and important peace-keeping mission last week. This time, he was not involved in untangling the problems of the Atlantic Alliance or the Middle East. Instead, he was faced with an ill-defined upheaval in his own pinstriped bailiwick at Foggy Bottom. Washington's professional diplomats were up in arms over the Reagan Administration's surprise decision two weeks ago to replace Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders, 51, and U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Deane R. Hinton, 60, as the key players in the nation's most contentious foreign policy game, how to deal with troublesome Central America.

Shultz countered the diplomatic insurgency by announcing that Hinton's replacement in El Salvador would be Thomas R. Pickering, 51, a distinguished career diplomat who is currently U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria. Pickering thus becomes the third member of a new diplomatic troika. The other two previously appointed members are L. Anthony Motley, 45, who was Ambassador to Brazil, and Richard Stone, a former Democratic Senator from Florida, who was sworn in last week as the State Department's special envoy to Central America. Said Shultz: "[Pickering] is the best possible man for the job. We picked out of the very heavy cream the best that the Foreign Service has to offer."

Shultz's praise for Pickering glossed over a power struggle that has absorbed Washington ever since the Secretary of State abruptly announced on an airplane bound for the Williamsburg summit that he would replace the tall, patrician Enders. According to the Administration, the shift was merely routine. In fact, it brought into the open a fight over who would control U.S. policy in Central America and especially in embattled El Salvador. In theory, the change left Shultz in absolute charge of Central American affairs, but some skeptics wondered if the shuffle might leave more authority with the White House, where National Security Adviser William Clark and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick increasingly hold sway over the President's attitudes toward Central America.

Whether the changes in personalities at State presage a further turn to the right in U.S. policy in Central America, however, is doubtful. As Shultz said last week: "Our Central American policy is set. Our policy is, and remains, as it was enunciated by the President in his speech to Congress [on April 27]." Declared Reagan: "We are not changing the policy I have outlined."

Nonetheless, Shultz was confronted with an uncommon degree of rancor among State Department officials after word came that Enders, an architect of U.S. policy toward Central America, was about to be shuffled off as Ambassador to Madrid. Professional diplomats at State became increasingly outraged over a steady stream of anonymous denigrating comments about Enders that emerged from the White House. Among the accusations: that, contrary to White House policy, Enders favored conciliatory negotiations with the guerrillas in El Salvador; that he insisted excessively on the importance of emphasizing economic as well as military aid to El Salvador in President Reagan's April speech to Congress. Above all, there was a clash of personalities, particularly between Enders and Kirkpatrick. Said a top State Department official: "He [Enders] should not have been treated that way. No one here believes that character assassination is a good mechanism for handling personnel disputes."

The State Department bureaucrats decided to draw the line at the White House staffs desire to replace Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton with a man of their own choosing. A colorful, outspoken and energetic diplomat, Hinton was due to leave El Salvador this summer in any case; by all accounts, he has been highly successful at what Shultz last week described as one of the "most important, difficult, demanding and sophisticated" U.S. diplomatic jobs any where.*

From time to time, however, Hinton has caused discomfort to the White House. Last year he was reprimanded--"brutally," according to one account--by National Security Adviser Clark when he publicly castigated El Salvador for its abysmal human rights record. Clark wanted to replace Hinton with Gerald E. Thomas, a black retired Navy admiral who has served, without undue distinction, as U.S. Ambassador to Guyana since December 1981. Thomas was seen by the Reagan White House as a diplomat who, unlike the arrogant Enders and the mercurial Hinton, would easily comply with Oval Office views.

The news immediately provoked outrage. Senior State Department officials warned Shultz that it was imperative that he choose Hinton's successor himself, in order to show who really ran the main instrument of U.S. diplomacy. Said a participant in the bureaucratic wrangling: "Others may have had their candidate [for the ambassadorial post], but if it was really the Secretary's responsibility to run [Central American] policy, then he had to have his choice."

Shultz concurred with his aides that El Salvador required the most competent career emissary that his department could provide--meaning Pickering. In the end, winning the bureaucratic trial of strength was relatively easy. Shultz took the matter directly to Clark, who readily agreed to the choice. According to some State Department cynics, Clark merely recognized that the White House needed no further unfavorable publicity over its choices of diplomatic personnel.

What is still unclear is whether Shultz or the White House staff is now in charge of Central American policy. And whoever is in charge, what does that mean? According to Shultz, the U.S. remains committed to a "sophisticated but I think very correct" set of policies in connection with war-torn El Salvador. That policy, Shultz reiterated last week, contains four elements: 1) increased aid in developing the economy and democratic institutions; 2) military assistance aimed at strengthening the Salvadoran army so that it can keep the guerrillas at bay long enough for the first goal to produce results; 3) support for negotiations to broaden participation in the democratic process, notably in the elections now scheduled for late 1983; and 4) encouragement of multilateral talks in which other countries in the region would try to help solve security problems. That combination of aims, said Shultz, "is the policy that has been and remains fully in effect."

As one sign of its commitment to those goals, the Administration last week sent off Special Envoy Richard Stone on a twelve-day, ten-nation "listening" tour of Central America. On his first stop, in El Salvador, Stone met with Provisional President Alvaro Alfredo Magana, Defense Minister Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, and the country's archbishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas. Stone will also visit Nicaragua; it will be the first high-level U.S. visit to the revolutionary Sandinista government since Enders met with Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra there in 1981. Among other things, the Stone visit is intended to emphasize to the U.S. Congress that the Reagan Administration is still willing to pursue a reasonable and flexible course in its Central American policy. Nonetheless, said Stone, "the odds are long" against expectations for peace any time soon in the region.

Many Congressmen are equally skeptical about that prospect. Last week the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives used parliamentary procedures for the third time to put off a vote by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to cut off funding for the Administration's ill-concealed covert support for armed Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries who oppose their country's leftist government. Clement Zablocki, chairman of the House committee, called the latest maneuverings at State "not helpful" in the long-term effort to prevent an anti-Administration vote. Argued liberal Democratic Congressman Gerry Studds of Massachusetts: "The Administration is clearly in violation of a host of international laws and treaties. If you have to behave like the Soviets to compete with the Soviets, you've squandered the one area of competition where we are clearly ahead." To suggest that the Reagan Administration, whatever its faults, is behaving "like the Soviets" must strike even-handed observers as outlandish.

But Administration policy was further tarnished last week with the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency had suggested to two congressional oversight committees last December that the CIA undertake a covert operation aimed at overthrowing the Marxist-oriented dictatorship of Desi Bouterse in the South American nation of Suriname. The idea was flatly turned down by Congress, on the ground that the CIA had failed to prove that the Surinamese government had fallen solidly into the Cuban and Soviet camp. If anything, the attempt seemed to help solidify congressional antagonism toward the kind of covert actions that the Reagan Administration is now sponsoring in Nicaragua. Said a congressional committee member who helped to veto the Surinamese operation: "Suriname just confirmed our fears that covert operations were no longer an instrument of last resort for this Administration.''

Comparisons with Soviet behavior, protests over covert action and the latest bureaucratic maneuvers in Washington have tended to obscure the fact that Marxist-led insurgents in countries like El Salvador are as adept as the U.S. and their clients in their use of firearms. A faction of the Salvadoran rebels reaffirmed that fact last week. Having taken credit for the May 25 assassination of U.S. Military Adviser Lieut. Commander Albert Schaufelberger III in the capital of San Salvador, the so-called Popular Forces of Liberation (F.P.L.) warned that the guerrillas would now step up armed attacks against military men in the country. All of the U.S. advisers, said a radio broadcast heard in San Salvador, would be carried home "in coffins."

Whatever its other problems, the Reagan Administration showed no signs of quailing before that threat. The White House has decided to send 20 to 25 U.S. medical specialists to El Salvador. More important, the U.S. has already announced that it will send 100 military advisers to Honduras in order to train Salvadoran troops. In doing so, the Administration gets around the self-imposed ceiling of 55 U.S. trainers allowed in El Salvador. Nonetheless, said an Administration official, "there's no consideration at present of increasing personnel, funding or the level of U.S. involvement" in Central America.

--By George Russell. Reported by Johanna McGeary and Evan Thomas/Washington

*Four months ago, Hinton married a Salvadoran. While the relationship may have contributed to Hinton's sophisticated understanding of El Salvador, it did not violate any State Department regulations and played no role in his transfer.

With reporting by Johanna McGeary, Evan Thomas This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.