New Light Falls on a Not-So-Secret Secret: Salvador’s Help for Contras

The downing last week of a plane carrying supplies to the rebels in Nicaragua has brought into the open an old, not very well kept secret--that El Salvador, despite public denials, is cooperating in the Reagan Administration effort to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

The use of El Salvador’s Ilopango air force base by the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels to fly supplies into Nicaragua makes El Salvador, along with Honduras, the second Central American country collaborating in the U.S.-administered campaign against the Sandinistas.

Honduras permits its territory to be used as a haven for training, rest and resupply for about 10,000 contras, as the rebels are called. El Salvador gives the rebels a place to store arms and equipment and provides a runway for supply flights.

The government of Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s other close neighbor in Central America, says its territory is not used for contras activities, but there are persistent reports of clandestine airstrips and contras bases in northern Costa Rica.

Salvador Takeoff Reported

New light was thrown on the Salvadoran connection with the contras when the Nicaraguan army shot down a C-123 transport plane on Oct. 5. A surviving member of the crew, Eugene Hasenfus, a U.S. citizen, said the plane had taken off from Ilopango and was on a mission directed by a CIA employee.

With the ensuing controversy over links between Vice President George Bush and the man named by Hasenfus as director of the supply operation, the day when the activities at Ilopango could be kept discreetly silent appears to be past.

Bush said that the man, whom he identified as Max Gomez but whose real name is Felix Rodriguez, worked in El Salvador as a military adviser with the approval of the Salvadoran government. He did not discuss the details of Rodriguez’s activities.

Gen. Adolfo Blandon, head of the Salvadoran joint chiefs of staff, denied that Rodriguez held an advisory position with the Salvadoran military or that any foreign citizen other than authorized U.S. military personnel has worked with the Salvadoran military. But Bush’s statement that Rodriguez worked in El Salvador has complicated Salvadoran efforts to sweep the issue aside.

See Way to Hurt Rebels

“He (Bush) said it publicly, and that makes it harder for us,” a high official of the Salvadoran government said.

No one in the Salvadoran military seems especially embarrassed by the disclosure. Conversations with high-ranking Salvadoran officers indicate that they justify the action as a means of crippling the leftist guerrilla movement in El Salvador by hitting at the leftist government of Nicaragua. Nicaragua reportedly supports the guerrillas in El Salvador with arms and other supplies.

“We know that one way to hurt your enemy is to get to his rear guard,” a Salvadoran army officer said. “Nicaragua is the rear guard for the Salvadoran guerrillas.”

The government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte faces some embarrassment over disclosure of the supply operation. Duarte has long preached against interfering in the affairs of neighboring countries. His country is described as a victim of such interference--support for the Salvadoran guerrillas from Cuba and Nicaragua.

Among questions now being asked are: Did Duarte know of the supply project? Or has he, like civilian leaders in Honduras, merely acquiesced in the military’s helping the contras while keeping a public stance of innocence?

Salvadoran Vice President Rodolfo Castillo Claramount professed ignorance of any contras supply line involving Ilopango. “I know nothing of this,” he said in an interview with The Times.

A close associate of Duarte said the Salvadoran president knew of and opposed the contras’ supply program. “He was heading for a confrontation with the military over it,” the associate said.

However, with the new preoccupation over earthquake damage in San Salvador, any such confrontation has been put off, the associate added.

There is some irony in the emergence of El Salvador as a contras supply base. According to the Reagan Administration, the contras’ program originally was designed to intercept arms shipments from Nicaragua to Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. Now, El Salvador is an arms conduit for rebels inside Nicaragua.

The U.S. government has denied any connection with the supply plane incident, although officials in Washington characterized Hasenfus and two dead crew members as heroes.

The Salvadoran military publicly denied any contras activity at Ilopango. But the C-123 crash was not the first of a series of apparent arms shipments linked to El Salvador.

Earlier this year, a small DeHavilland aircraft crash-landed at an air strip in rural El Salvador. The three-man crew busily tossed out bundles before the plane went down, and Salvadoran troops combed the area to recover the cargo.

U.S. officials denied knowledge of the incident. The Salvadoran military refused to comment.

5 Costa Rica Arrests

Last year, Costa Rica police arrested five soldiers of fortune in a Nicaraguan rebel camp on Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua. Two of the men, Steven P. Carr, a U.S. citizen, and Peter F. Glibbery, a British subject, said they had flown to El Salvador from Miami on a contras arms supply flight.

An unspecified amount of guns and ammunition was carried aboard a DC-3 cargo plane flown by a Cuban-American pilot, the two men said. Salvadoran air force officers met them upon their arrival at Ilopango, and Salvadoran troops unloaded the cargo.

The weaponry was then put aboard smaller aircraft for delivery to contras camps in Costa Rica, the captives said.

El Salvador started growing in importance as part of contras supply lines when, in 1984, Honduras balked at delivering U.S. supplies to the contras in an effort to obtain more economic and military aid.

Previously, the Salvadoran air force had permitted CIA supplies to reach Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista commander who had joined the contras. But that operation dissolved when the CIA cut off supplies to Pastora in 1984.

Attack on Managua Airport

In 1983, the Nicaraguan government said that an air attack on the airport at Managua was launched from El Salvador. The attack plane, a Cessna 404, crashed in the attack, and the Nicaraguans produced a logbook that they said showed frequent landings in El Salvador.

It is difficult to believe that the U.S. government has no knowledge of the various incidents of contras activity here. The United States has military advisers and civilian maintenance workers at Ilopango.

Radio transmissions are routinely monitored throughout the country, especially those from airplanes, for the United States is constantly on the lookout for arms supply flights from Nicaragua into El Salvador.

The CIA is known to have a large contingent of operatives in the country and to have penetrated the Salvadoran military through payoffs. At one point, U.S. Senate sources said that Nicolas Carranza, the former head of the Salvadoran Treasury Police, received a salary of $90,000 a year from the CIA.