Don’t Abandon Contras: Reagan : Views Differ on Arms Buildup in Nicaragua

Amid green fields of sugar cane 19 miles from Nicaragua’s capital of Managua, soldiers and technicians are putting the finishing touches on a huge military air base that is the clearest symbol of what the Reagan Administration fears in Central America.

When the airfield at Punta Huete is complete, U.S. officials say it will be the largest in Central America, a base from which Soviet reconnaissance planes--or even nuclear- armed bombers--could reach the California coast.

But while President Reagan and other officials have charged that Nicaragua’s military poses a clear danger to U.S. interests, CIA and Pentagon analysts say the peril, like the prospect of Soviet bombers at Punta Huete, is more potential than real.

Defensive Buildup

The growth of armed forces in Marxist-led Nicaragua, the Administration’s own analysts say, appears mostly defensive, aimed at the threats posed to Sandinista rule by the United States and the pro-American rebels . While Soviet forces could theoretically use Nicaraguan bases, they say, they are unlikely to do so soon--and then, only if the United States failed to prevent such use.

“The overall buildup is primarily defense-oriented,” a secret U.S. intelligence study concluded last year.

President Reagan’s rhetoric reflects little of that caution. Congress will vote Tuesday on his package of military aid to the contras-- as the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime are called--and Reagan insisted last week that “a vote against this proposal is literally a vote against peace.”

In his national radio address Saturday, Reagan charged that Soviet military advisers have entered the combat area in northern Nicaragua. While Reagan offered no evidence to back up his charge, an Administration official, who declined to be identified, said about a dozen Soviet personnel were identified in the town of Ocatal, nine miles south of the Honduran border.

Reagan has accused Nicaragua of building “a war machine . . . that dwarfs the forces of all their neighbors combined” and of planning “to turn Central America into a beachhead of Soviet aggression that could spread terror and instability north and south.”

But Administration officials who deal with Central America say clearly that they are more worried about future threats from Nicaragua than about what is on the ground today.

“Both the equipment and their strategic objective at this time is to destroy the armed opposition; they want to get control of their own country,” said Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle. “What they have now and even what they may have a year hence is not an invasion force to attack El Salvador and Guatemala. That’s nonsense. We shouldn’t be saying that; I hope we haven’t been saying that.”

Ikle and other Administration strategists believe that Nicaragua does indeed pose a potential military threat to U.S. interests in Central America--but primarily as a base from which leftists from neighboring countries could plot revolutions of their own.

‘Feeding an Insurgency’

“They will try to change the regime in Costa Rica and Honduras and eventually in El Salvador not by conventional invasion but by feeding an insurgency,” Ikle said.

The Sandinistas disavow any intention to “export” their revolution. “At this moment, Nicaragua is hardly exporting anything, not even cotton,” Victor Tirado, one of the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s nine ruling comandantes, said in a recent interview. “We give moral and political support to all national liberation movements. How those movements resolve themselves is up to them.”

And some American analysts agree that the Sandinistas, with plenty of domestic problems, are unlikely to engage in active subversion against their neighbors--and could, in any event, be restrained through a regional treaty that would also prohibit the United States from acting against them.

“There’s been a lot of ‘worst-case’ intelligence analysis going on,” said Edward L. King, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who has advised Democrats in Congress on Latin American military issues. “The magnitude of this military threat has been overstated; the amount of their support to the Salvadoran guerrillas has been overstated.”

King said that Sandinista Defense Minister Humberto Ortega once told him that Nicaragua would be willing to reduce the size of its armed forces if the contras stopped fighting. “I don’t know whether that’s true, but it’s worth trying,” King said.

Meanwhile, King argues that the war with the contras has actually strengthened Managua’s military hand. “A year ago, the Sandinista army was pretty inept; that’s not the case now,” King said. “The presence of the contras is a training opportunity for them.”

As of today, the Nicaraguan armed forces are clearly the largest in Central America, with about 41,000 regular army troops and another 21,000 less-trained militiamen on active duty, according to Defense Department figures.

By contrast, Honduras has only 22,000 men in uniform, Guatemala has 40,000 and El Salvador 48,000. But the Nicaraguan force of 62,000 is still far too small, officials agree, to invade one of those countries in the face of combined resistance from Central American forces aided by the United States.

The Administration frequently points to the Sandinistas’ Soviet-supplied tank force, also the largest in Central America with about 110 T-55 medium tanks and almost 30 Pt-76 light tanks. Honduras, by contrast, has only 16 tanks.

The tank force “exceeds all legitimate defensive needs,” a State Department publication charges. But U.S. officials privately acknowledge that a Nicaraguan tank attack against any of its neighbors is highly unlikely--both because the terrain is unsuited to offensive operations and because the U.S. Air Force would quickly destroy a tank column.

In addition, officials say, the Sandinistas have had considerable difficulty keeping their Soviet-supplied vehicles running. One secret U.S. intelligence report shows that an estimated 40% of the Nicaraguan army’s trucks are out of action because of insufficient maintenance. King estimated that as many as 25% of the tanks may be out of service, “and they’re 1971 model tanks, real junk.”

Nor do the Nicaraguans have the fuel supplies necessary to sustain large armored operations, officials say--in part because a CIA-directed air raid last year destroyed part of their main fuel depot.

The Administration, in a report submitted to Congress last week, warned that the 10 Soviet-built MI-24 helicopters that Nicaragua is now believed to possess--the top of the Soviet line of attack helicopters--”added a new dimension to warfare in Central America. . . . Key targets in El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica are all within range of this ‘flying tank.’ ”

Overdrawn Warning

But Administration officials acknowledged that the warning to Congress about the helicopters’ use against Nicaragua’s neighbors was probably overdrawn. “It’s a counterinsurgency weapon,” said one. “They clearly want to use them against the contras.”

The Nicaraguan air force has no jet aircraft, except for three old U.S.-made trainer planes left over from the regime of dictator Anastasio Somoza, which was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. The Sandinistas have said they want jet fighters--specifically, Soviet MIG 21s--but U.S. officials have made it clear they would feel free to destroy the MIGS or any similar advanced aircraft if they turned up in Nicaragua, a warning that appears to have stayed Managua’s hand. For the time being, Honduras’ air force, with 13 French-made jet fighters now being modernized with U.S. help, is the region’s best.

Administration officials say that they are also worried about the Sandinistas’ sophisticated air defense system, which includes four modern “early warning” stations reportedly installed by Soviet technicians as well as almost 200 anti-aircraft guns and more than 300 SAM-7 missile launchers.

“The Sandinistas now have radar coverage over most of Nicaragua and can monitor air traffic deep into Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica as well,” last week’s report to Congress said. “There is no other comparable radar capability in the area.”

Although anti-aircraft systems are defensive, officials say they make it more difficult for other countries to retaliate if Nicaragua becomes the source of guerrilla activity against its neighbors. “That source will then be well protected by this so-called defensive equipment that they’ve been accumulating,” Ikle said.

Beyond the dispute over Nicaragua’s military capability, Administration officials are unanimous on one point: They predict that the Sandinistas, if unchecked, will attempt to spread their brand of revolution throughout Central America. “They preach the doctrine of a revolution without frontiers,” Reagan once said.

Ikle said: “The current military buildup is disturbing because it confirms a long-term trend which was forecast in the programmatic speeches of the present ruling crowd back in 1979. It’s sort of like reading ‘Mein Kampf’ and then seeing each chapter being implemented.”

The Sandinistas deny any such intention. They claim that a “revolution without frontiers” is a misinterpretation of a slogan once uttered by one of their leaders, Interior Minister Tomas Borge, in reference to political--not military--support of other leftist movements.

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, they also claim that they never gave any weapons to the leftist rebels in El Salvador--and promise never to. “We have never supplied arms to El Salvador,” the Sandinista leader Tirado declared. “We promise not to. It’s not really a concession.”

In 1983, reporters discovered an arms depot in northwestern Nicaragua--disguised as a “fishing cooperative”--that local residents said had been the site of frequent visits by boats that loaded rifles and unloaded no fish. But U.S. officials admit they lack a “smoking gun” that would establish a current arms traffic link between Nicaragua and rebels in El Salvador.

Although Sandinista ideology lays a foundation for alliance with the Soviet Bloc, U.S. analysts say Moscow has been deliberately cautious about the relationship. The Soviet Union now supplies Nicaragua with almost all its arms and at least half its oil, and about 200 Soviet technicians are working in the country, U.S. officials said.

In 1981, Defense Minister Ortega told an army gathering that he saw the world divided into two camps. “On the one side, (there is) the imperialist camp headed by the United States and the rest of the capitalist countries,” he said. “And on the other side, (there is) the socialist camp composed of different countries of Europe, Asia and Latin America, with the Soviet Union in the vanguard.”

Two years later, Ortega suggested that the government might permit the basing of Soviet missiles in Nicaragua--a suggestion he later retracted.

Such statements give U.S. strategic planners nightmares, although they say a Soviet military presence in Nicaragua is still only a potential threat--if only because the United States has made clear its firm opposition. If Congress votes down military aid to the contras, Ikle said, the Soviets might feel free to fly their bombers and fighters in and out of Nicaragua.

“These things have a certain range,” he said. “They already have access to our Atlantic Coast from Cuba. Now they could have something comparable on the Pacific side. . . . It’s very worrisome.”

Hence the U.S. attention to Punta Huete, an unfinished airfield reminiscent of the 10,000-foot airport Cuban technicians were building in Grenada before the United States led an invasion of that island in October, 1983.

The Administration, which almost never reveals information gathered by its intelligence agencies, routinely publishes aerial photographs of Punta Huete.

“They’re going great guns,” one official said last week, exhibiting once-classified pictures to a reporter. “The runways are there, the taxiways are there. All they need is underground fuel storage facilities and to finish the ramp. And they’ll be ready to go. . . . You almost have to admire it.”

Times reporter Dan Williams in Nicaragua also contributed to this story.

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