Reagan Says Sandinistas Were Beaten in Honduras

President Reagan contended in a radio address from his ranch Saturday that Nicaraguan rebel forces backed by his Administration had dealt “a resounding defeat” to Communist-backed Nicaraguan government troops that crossed the border into Honduras to attack rebel installations.

And in an interview with reporters, White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan said that the successful military performance of the contras, as the rebels are known, should convince skeptical congressmen that they are more than “a ragtag bunch” and worthy of U.S. military assistance.

The Presidents’s bid for $100 million in mostly military aid for the contras comes up again in the Democratic-controlled House in mid-April after the Easter recess. The House defeated the proposal by 12 votes earlier this month, a defeat White House officials are hopeful will be overturned in the wake of the Sandinista offensive.

Reagan won the Senate’s endorsement Thursday by a vote of 53 to 47.

‘Might Be Formidable’

“The contras were able to defend themselves handily,” Regan said. “Now if they’re able to do that when they’re really pressed, when they’re better armed, they might be a formidable force.”

But at the same time, Regan admitted that the Administration’s information on the military clash was sketchy. And he seemed reluctant to embrace the President’s description of the encounter in his weekly radio address as “a resounding defeat” for the Sandinistas.

“We don’t know details of the battle,” he said. “We know a battle took place--that there were casualties and a number of prisoners.”

From the time the Administration first reported Monday that Sandinista troops had crossed the Honduran border over the weekend, there have been conflicting estimates of how many troops were involved and whether their infiltration constituted a full-scale invasion.

Administration critics and even some allies accused the White House of exaggerating the cross-border raid in an effort to build support for the President’s aid package for the contras.

Vacation at Ranch

While Congress is adjourned, the President is vacationing for 10 days at his ranch north of Santa Barbara. Today marks the fifth anniversary of the attempt on his life by John Hinckley.

Reagan shows no apparent ill effects from the surgery he underwent at the time to remove a bullet from his chest--or from the operation he had last summer to remove a cancerous tumor from his colon. Aides said he is spending this vacation riding horses and chopping wood, his two favorite ranch activities. He is to return to Washington next Sunday, a full week before the House is expected to vote on his contra aid package.

Chief of Staff Regan said polls show that a majority of the American public “still doesn’t understand what’s going on (in Nicaragua) and is accordingly negative. They fear another Vietnam if we get involved down there.”

Passage Not Ensured

Congressmen on both sides of the aisle initially thought that the Sandinista incursion into Honduras would ensure passage of Reagan’s aid package, in the same way that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s trip to Moscow last year prodded the House to reverse itself and vote $27 million in non-military aid for the contras.

But Regan said the impact of the incursion on the coming vote is “hard to measure because it’s been so fuzzed up” by contradictory reports over its extent.

Regan admitted that the Administration “did request” the Honduran government to make public its request for U.S. emergency assistance to repel the Sandinistas.

“For 24 hours they said it didn’t happen,” Regan said. “That was our problem.”

Nevertheless, Regan said he expects the President to prevail in the critical House vote because he has to change only a handful of votes to make it over the top.

$500-Million Estimate

Meanwhile, Robert C. McFarlane, who retired in December after two years as national security adviser to the President, seconded Reagan’s hopes for the contras, but was quoted as putting a half-billion-dollar price tag on the U.S. aid required to achieve a contra victory.

While the contras “can win . . . because they enjoy the support of the people,” McFarlane said in an interview appearing in the April 7 edition of U.S. News and World Report, “they need training, equipment.”

He estimated the overall cost at “about $500 million.” The request for $100 million that is stalled in Congress is designed to cover only 18 months of military support, and the door has been left open for a follow-up request.

The training could be conducted outside Nicaragua in a third country by “a cadre of good, solid retired Marines and Special Forces people,” said McFarlane, who is a retired Marine officer.

Meanwhile, a challenge to the Administration’s Nicaraguan policy, but not its goals, came from Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who delivered the Democratic response to Reagan’s weekly broadcast.

Failure Predicted

Declaring that Reagan “‘places too much trust in military force and too little trust in what creative diplomacy can achieve,” Hamilton predicted that funding the contras to support democracy and oppose Cuban and Soviet penetration of Central America “will not succeed.”

“Nicaragua is in every way more of a Communist country now than it was four years ago when America began funding the contras,” Hamilton said. He warned that approval of the requested $100 million “will only lead to more Soviet aid to Nicaragua, more bloodshed and stalemate.”

As an alternative to building up the contras, Hamilton proposed a three-part policy based on political, economic and military containment of the Marxist-oriented Sandinista regime.

He proposed strengthening democratic governments in Central America; using a “carrot and stick” treatment of the Sandinista regime through positive responses to reductions in Nicaraguan hostility or working with U.S. allies to impose economic and diplomatic penalties if its behavior worsened, and supporting regional negotiations as proposed by the so-called Contadora Group--Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and Colombia.