Nicaraguan President : Ortega a Figurehead, Rep. Dornan Declares

Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), a hawkish anti-Communist, met the enemy Saturday in the form of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and came away convinced that Ortega believes his own anti-American propaganda and is not the true head of state in his country.

“After four hours with him, I’m convinced that there are stronger forces in that group of nine commandantes (in Nicaragua) and he is the figurehead of the nine Sandinistas,” Dornan said Monday from his home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Dornan said he told Ortega and his entourage that the Nicaraguan president’s U. S. itinerary smells of “radical chic.”

‘Hollywood Elite’

“I said that if you go into the big wealthy homes of the Hollywood elite up in the canyons of Beverly Hills, and they compliment you and you guilt-trip them about how they’re not being part of any left-wing revolutions around the world . . . you don’t accomplish a thing. Because as soon as you’ve left some of those houses, they break out the cocaine to ease their limousine-liberal guilt.”

Dornan was one of several members of Congress and journalists invited by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Jackson’s home on Chicago’s South Side for discussions with Ortega over dinner Saturday.

It was Dornan’s first face-to-face meeting with a man whom he has portrayed as a scoundrel and murderer on Capitol Hill and on nationally televised talk shows. Dornan said he has visited Nicaragua four times but was rejected in previous attempts to meet Ortega.

Appearance Cited

“He is much younger looking than when he appears before the U. N. on videotape,” Dornan said. He added that it appeared to him that the ruling junta had by consensus decided to make Ortega, 36, president of the country because “he is young and harmless looking.”

Dornan said he concurred with U. S. intelligence reports that Victor Hugo Tinoco, deputy foreign minister, “truly runs the show.”

Dornan said he bases his feelings about Ortega on a “disquieting feeling” that the Nicaraguan “truly believes some of the blatant misinformation that he’s putting out. For example, on the persecution of the (Catholic) church, at first I thought I was getting, by rote, the Marxist-Leninist line. But then I got the feeling after two or three hours that he really believes that 80% of the people love the Sandinistas” over more moderate political forces.

“I haven’t even found any reporters, who were initially very sympathetic to the Sandinistas, who believe that,” Dornan said. “It’s like believing your own propaganda.”

Dornan said he also based his opinion on an exchange he had with Ortega about political prisoners in which Ortega said there were few or none in Nicaragua.

Reconnaissance Photos

Dornan said he told Ortega of personally seeing U. S. Air Force reconnaissance photos of Nicaragua’s prisons that showed they have been greatly expanded under Ortega.

He said Ortega continued to cite prison population figures sharply disputed by Amnesty International, a worldwide organization that monitors the imprisonment and torture of people for so-called political crimes.

Despite coming away with the feeling that Ortega is not as forceful as he would like people to believe he is, Dornan said, “He never flinched once. Almost four hours of give and take, and he hung in there.”

The fiery Orange County congressman faces a tough re-election battle this fall against Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D--Garden Grove). He said he offered to help set up a meeting between Ortega and President Reagan but that earlier news accounts of his offer failed to add that he also provided Reagan’s probable answer: “No, until you have met with conservative Republican congressmen and senators, and let them hammer at you and you hammer back your side of the story.”

Phone Calls Received

Dornan said he would help set up meetings with conservatives after his November election fight with Robinson. He also said Monday that stories about his advice to Ortega caused conservatives to phone him demanding to know why he is being friendly to a Communist.

He said he told such callers to “please read between the lines.”