From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (145 page)

The not-so-covert war against Nicaragua grew steadily from 1981 to 1984. Reagan in time adopted the contras as his own, publicly referring to them as "our brothers" and the "moral equal of our Founding Fathers." He came to see Nicaragua as the major front in a global struggle "to repeal the infamous Brezhnev Doctrine, which contends that once a country has fallen into Communist darkness, it can never be allowed to see the light of freedom." The operation began with a small group of former officers from Somoza's National Guard. Supposedly limited to five hundred men, the contra force grew into a guerrilla army of ten thousand. Despite the increase in size, the contras never really threatened the government. They gained notoriety for repeated human rights abuses against peasants. The CIA took over operational control in late 1982. Agency operatives backed the contras' efforts the next year by attacking Nicaragua's fuel storage and mining its harbors. To intimidate Nicaragua, the United States in the summer and fall of 1983 conducted military operations in Honduras lasting six months and involving more than four thousand troops.
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Even more than El Salvador, the widening war against Nicaragua provoked increasingly bitter debate in the country and Congress. Not persuaded of the urgency of the alleged Sandinista threat or the viability or legitimacy of the contras, and above all fearful of another Vietnam, Americans strongly opposed deepening involvement in Nicaragua. As early as October 1982, an already wary Congress forbade the use of U.S. funds to overthrow the Sandinista government, a restriction the administration readily dismissed by continuing to insist—disingenuously—that was not its intention. A more serious threat developed in 1984. Press reports of the CIA mining of Nicaraguan ports set off a furor and opened a sizeable credibility gap between the executive and Congress. A veteran of the glory days of the OSS in World War II, Casey had contempt for "those assholes on the Hill" and especially for congressional oversight of covert operations. From the outset, he had ignored, misled, or deceived legislators about Nicaragua. He mumbled almost unintelligibly—his voice had a "built-in scrambler," according to Weinberger—and when all else failed he gave answers no one could understand.
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The realization after the mining operations that they had been repeatedly deceived on Nicaragua emboldened congressional foes of contra aid and infuriated even supportive legislators like Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. With a presidential election approaching, the administration in the summer of 1984 managed to get Nicaragua off the front pages by going through the motions of negotiating with the Sandinistas. But after months of often fractious debate, Congress in October passed another measure effectively cutting off funding for the contras. Reagan responded by instructing his subordinates to "do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together."
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The cutoff in aid and Reagan's open-ended instructions tested the ingenuity of NSC staffer Oliver North, a zealous marine labeled by one senator the only "five-star lieutenant colonel in the history of the military." Tireless, charming, not troubled by scruples about the truth or the law, North in the words of a colleague could "speak a blue haze of bull shit."
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Utterly devoted to the president, he and his cohorts observed no bounds in carrying out what they thought were his wishes. Contemptuous of the institutions of government—their code name for the State Department was Wimp—North and his "cowboys," presumably with Casey's blessings, arranged an incredibly complex operation to implement policies outside the bureaucracy
and away from the scrutiny of Congress. In effect, they privatized U.S. foreign policy. With Reagan's knowledge and encouragement, NSC staffers solicited a total of $50 million from friendly governments such as Taiwan, Brunei, and Saudi Arabia, which alone contributed $32 million, and from right-wing U.S. citizens such as beer magnate Joseph Coors. In an early 1986 venture that North called a "neat idea" and Casey "the ultimate covert operation"—and that ultimately proved their undoing—they diverted to the contras funds from arms sold to Iran.
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North used Project Democracy, an ostensibly private corporation established by Reagan to "cultivate the fragile flower of democracy" across the world, as the instrument of his operation. The "Enterprise," run by retired Air Force Gen. Richard Secord, had its own ships and airplanes and private landing strips throughout Central America, dummy corporations and secret banking accounts, and special highly sophisticated coding devices provided by North from the super-secret National Security Agency. Some of the operatives appear to have reaped handsome profits, and millions of dollars could not be accounted for. A $10 million contribution from the sultan of Brunei was mistakenly deposited in the account of a Geneva businessman.
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The administration's clumsy efforts to cover up its sins got it into more hot water. When the story of arms sales to Iran broke in November 1986, the Justice Department dawdled its investigation of NSC wrongdoing while North and his glamorous, equally zealous secretary, Fawn Hall, shredded thousands of "problem memos." National Security Adviser John Poindexter deleted five thousand e-mails (later retrieved). McFarlane doctored a "chronology" to obscure the president's role. Reagan at first alternated between denying knowledge of what had happened and blaming lapses of memory. "There was an awful lot going on and it's awfully easy to be a little short of memory," he confessed on one occasion. Testimony before a congressional committee investigating what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair subsequently revealed that he knew a great deal and had approved much. In time, he publicly boasted that funding the contras was "my idea to begin with."
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The scandal at least temporarily crippled the Reagan presidency. The president's approval rating plummeted to 36 percent; in the fall elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. The Great Communicator escaped impeachment mainly because it could not be established that he had ordered the illegal actions.

The war in Nicaragua ended through a bizarre, almost surreal, chain of events—despite rather than because of the United States. The architect of a cease-fire was Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez. Educated in the United States and Britain, a staunch anti-Communist who disliked the Sandinistas almost as much as the Reaganites, Arias feared that the contra war might escalate into a regional conflict. Small of stature, by reputation an intellectual, he proved a tough and creative diplomat. He devised a peace plan calling for a cease-fire, an end to outside aid, and democratization for Nicaragua. He locked the presidents of El Salvador and Honduras in a room until they went along, a trick he claimed to have learned from Franklin Roosevelt. He courageously stood up against bullying and threats from the United States; once when Reagan summoned him to the White House for a fifteen-minute lecture, Arias responded with a statement twice as long emphasizing that on Nicaragua the United States stood alone. In a strange gambit that backfired, the administration enlisted Democratic House of Representatives Speaker Jim Wright to draft a peace plan. When Wright backed Arias's proposals, an administration weakened by the Iran-Contra revelations had little choice but to go along. Defiant to the end, Reagan and his advisers counted on the Sandinistas to reject the plan and continued to seek to undermine it by securing additional contra aid. To Washington's shock, the Sandinistas went along because of Nicaragua's dire economic straits and in full expectation that they would win elections set for 1990. When Congress again rejected aid for the Nicaraguan rebels, the contras had no choice but to accept Arias's proposals. Despite persistent U.S. efforts at sabotage, a cease-fire was approved in March 1988. Although it did not bring peace, it did make war more difficult to wage.
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Once the most secure outpost of the U.S. empire, Central America during the Reagan years provided the most graphic example of the limits of U.S. power. Thinking it could win one in its own backyard, the United States set out in El Salvador and Nicaragua to exorcize the ghosts of Vietnam. The Reagan administration could claim victory in the narrow sense that the insurgents never gained power in El Salvador. Moreover, to the shock of everyone, the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election to a centrist coalition and willingly gave up power. In fact, the Reagan Doctrine ran aground in Central America. Despite millions of U.S. dollars, the insurgency dragged on in El Salvador, and the extreme right emerged victorious in March 1988 elections. Honduras was increasingly militarized and destabilized politically. Without the intervention of Arias and Wright, the
elections that deposed the Sandinistas would never have taken place. The Reagan administration grossly exaggerated the Communist threat in Central America. It poured more than $5 billion into what became a "sterile regional bloodletting." At home, its misguided and often illegal policies polarized the political atmosphere and corrupted the political process. Abroad, it defied international institutions such as the UN and the World Court. Rarely in the history of U.S. foreign policy had so much zeal, energy, and money been invested in such a dubious and destructive cause. At the end, the White House's determination to back the contras "body and soul," in Reagan's words, seemed about little more than pride and stubborn commitment.
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The result for Central America was catastrophic, an estimated thirty thousand dead in Nicaragua (proportionately equal to the total U.S. killed in the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam) and eighty thousand in El Salvador, many of them civilians. The United States "laid waste to Nicaragua," leaving an economy with 1,300 percent inflation and rampant unemployment.
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The administration claimed some responsibility for the growth of democracy in Latin America as a whole, and during the 1980s seven civilian governments did come to power. But hemispheric leaders protested the "Centralamericanization" of U.S. policy and warned that a crisis caused by $420 billion of debt imperiled the fragile democratic gains and raised the threat of a new wave of extremism from left and right.
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Had Reagan left office in 1987, his presidency would have gone down a failure, the victim of his own inattention and mismanagement so starkly manifested in Iran-Contra. In fact, even while he was reeling from setbacks in the Middle East and Central America, he was engaged in a dramatic and totally unexpected turnaround in relations with the Soviet Union. These initiatives would help bring about the
annus mirabilis
of 1989 when peace and freedom seemed to break out everywhere and a diplomatic revolution comparable to that of World War II began to take shape. In a little more than a year, Reagan rose from the ashes of scandal to heroic stature, the "man who ended the Cold War," in the exuberant
words of one of his advisers.
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A triumphalist myth took root among Reagan partisans that by standing forth boldly for freedom, confronting the Soviets across the world, and launching a military buildup they could not match, the former actor brought the "evil empire" to its knees.

The transformation in Soviet-American relations
was
sudden and momentous, and Reagan
did
play a major role, but its origins are much more complex than the triumphalists allow. Most decisive was the stunning volte-face engineered by Mikhail Gorbachev. In Reagan's first years, instability had gripped the Kremlin. The aged and infirm Brezhnev died in 1982 and was succeeded by former KGB head Yuri Andropov, who lasted but two years. Andropov's successor, Konstantin Cherenko, died little more than a year later. "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians . . . ," Reagan quipped, "if they keep dying on me?"
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Gorbachev brought stability and a new spirit to the Soviet government. Part of a generation of reform-minded officials, this onetime farm worker and aspiring actor broke sharply with the sclerotic patterns of his immediate predecessors. The child of peasants in the Caucasus, the self-confident, ambitious, and hard-driving Gorbachev combined a charm and sophistication so conspicuously lacking in most earlier Soviet leaders with toughness—a "nice smile but he's got iron teeth," said Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who would later feel their bite.
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Less ideological and more open-minded, he saw the need for major changes in foreign policy to make possible urgent domestic reforms. An incorrigible optimist, he set out to reform the Soviet system without destroying it, what he called
perestroika,
and to permit more openness,
glasnost,
without going all the way to democracy. In foreign policy, he determined to close what he called the "bleeding wound" in Afghanistan, shift to Eastern European Communist leaders responsibility for their own survival, and ease Cold War tensions in order to divert precious resources to domestic needs, secure desperately needed credits and technology from the West, and reduce the risk of nuclear war. Gorbachev's dramatic initiatives sprang more from internal exigencies than from external pressures.
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Reagan's change of heart evolved slowly and from a mix of motives. In a January 1984 speech, he conspicuously toned down the anti-Soviet rhetoric, spoke hopefully of peace, and in one of his more memorable passages wondered aloud what might happen if Ivan and Anya and Jim
and Sally (characters he made up) could sit down and talk together.
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From the outset, he had viewed the military buildup as a means to negotiate from strength. He believed he had achieved that position by 1985 and, over the strong objections of hawks like Casey and Weinberger, was willing to test the waters.
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Soviet-American tensions had escalated dangerously in Reagan's first three years in office, raising fears at home and among U.S. allies that in turn created pressures for more conciliatory policies. Nancy Reagan shared such concerns and regularly nudged her husband toward a more accommodating posture. The president felt certain that his solid anti-Communist credentials would protect his right flank. After his overwhelming reelection in 1984, he was increasingly concerned about his place in history. Always inclined to reduce complex problems to the simplest terms, he had especially strong feelings on the nuclear issue. His reading of the Bible, especially its prophecies of the world ending in a climactic battle between good and evil at Armageddon, aroused in him deeply emotional fears of nuclear war, a war that could "never be won and must never be fought," he told the Japanese Diet. He hoped to replace the doctrine of mutual assured destruction with one of "assured survival." He held conflicting visions of a world without nuclear weapons and one where people would be sheltered by the umbrella of nuclear defense, his cherished Star Wars.
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Reagan's anti-nuclearism and his willingness to risk negotiations rather than his bluster and military buildup made possible the transformation in Soviet-American relations.
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