Contras Office Latest Scene of Files Theft

A Nicaraguan rebel group linked to the arms-sales scandal said Monday that most of the financial records in its Washington office have disappeared, apparently in a burglary.

“Our bank records are gone. All the canceled checks are gone, all the receipts,” said Bosco Matamoros, Washington representative of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), the largest of several U.S.-backed rebel armies.

“I think it was somebody trying to find out about our operations,” he said. “It was a very selective search.”

Matamoros said he was unable to explain how the theft occurred. He said he discovered that the documents were missing from an unlocked cabinet Monday, on returning from a Christmas vacation.

“There’s no sign of anybody breaking in,” he said, “but the locks on our doors were not very good. I think we were overly confident.”

The alleged burglary followed several other unexplained thefts of documents connected to private financial support of the Nicaraguan rebels and the arms deals with Iran.

Scandal Link Unlikely

It appeared unlikely, however, that the records of the FDN’s Washington office would have been central to the investigations of the scandal.

The rebels are at the center of the controversy because money from the secret sale of U.S. arms to Tehran allegedly was diverted to buy weapons for their war against Nicaragua’s leftist government.

FDN has carried on most of its arms-buying operations through offices in Miami and Honduras, however, and reportedly used bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and other offshore banking centers. The group has used its Washington office mainly as a base for lobbying Congress, maintaining contact with Reagan Administration officials and wooing the media.

Last month, a Cupertino, Calif., attorney reported that burglars had stolen his file on Albert A. Hakim, a key figure in the arms-sales operation. A week later, the lawyer announced that the file had been returned just as mysteriously. Hakim, owner of San Francisco-based Stanford Technology Corp., is a business partner of Richard V. Secord, the retired Air Force major general who helped set up both the airlift of arms to Iran and the secret arms pipeline to the contras.

Other Documents Thefts

Also in December, burglars apparently broke into the Washington office of the Center for International Development, a liberal group that has sponsored a private investigation of the contras’ arms deals, and stole several documents, according to officials of that group.

Several other anti-contra groups around the country also have reported burglaries at their offices, in which records and documents often were the apparent targets.

The FDN office is part of a suite occupied by the United Nicaraguan Opposition, a coalition of Nicaraguan rebel groups. It occupies the top floors of a three-story building near the National Zoo.

Checks, Receipts Taken

Matamoros said that the missing records included financial ledgers for the years 1983 through 1985, copies of checks from private U.S. donors, and receipts for payments the FDN has made.

Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department was investigating the incident, and a spokesman for the FBI said that the bureau “is aware of the case.”