Arms Scandal Brings Christic Institute New Visibility : Group Gaining Credibility and Converts in L.A.

From the congressional investigating committees’ Iran- contra hearings, Friday, May 8, 1987:

Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.): As you are no doubt aware, you and Thomas Clines and Rafael Quintero and others have been sued in federal court in Florida for a vast array of alleged illegal and corrupt practices, beginning as far back as the 1960s. Did you know about that?

Ret. Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord: Of course I know about it.

Brooks: Well, the allegations include the organization of assassination programs funded by the drug kingpin in Laos and laundering of millions of dollars skimmed from the sales of military weapons to the Shah of Iran. And we’ve got the provision of military services to Somoza and laundering Colombian drug money . . . .

Secord: . . . The suit, which was filed in May of last year, is the most outrageous fairy tale that anybody’s ever read. Nobody, including the Justice Department, credits it at all. It’s being dealt with. I can only fight on so many fronts at once. I regard that one as a rather minor threat, which will be tossed out of court shortly . . . .

The suit does read like an outrageous fairy tale. It portrays terrorist acts, political assassinations, gunrunning, arms trafficking, drug smuggling, unconventional warfare and secret networks of people, in and out of government, with overlapping interests.

Nevertheless, the suit has not been tossed out of court. In fact, motions to dismiss it--filed by defendants Thomas Clines, Thomas Posey, Rafael Quintero, Theodore Shackley, Albert Hakim, Adolfo Calero, John Singlaub, Bruce Jones and James McCoy--were denied Jan. 30 by James Lawrence King, chief U.S. district judge of the Southern District of Florida.

There are many who regard the lawsuit, filed by the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public-interest law and policy center, as a fairy tale. The skeptics tend to discount it as “conspiracy theory”--explaining almost everything “from the death of J.F.K. to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart,” as one said.

On the other side are those who see the suit as confirmation of their worst fears and suspicions. This side tends to view the Christic Institute as the hope of the Republic, the means for setting things right. Its general counsel, Daniel Sheehan, is viewed as a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue.

Backyard Gathering

Among this latter group are a growing number of people in Los Angeles, the majority of whom are West Side liberals, music and film industry celebrities, community leaders and grass-roots activists. Such was the composition of the casually dressed, mostly affluent crowd of 700 that gathered in a splendid backyard high above the city on Mulholland Drive on a recent Saturday afternoon. They had responded to a startling invitation from rock singer-songwriters Don Henley and Jackson Browne.

“It didn’t begin with the Iran-contra scandal,” read the invitation to hear a presentation by Daniel Sheehan of the La Penca Project (as the lawsuit is sometimes called). “It goes back 25 years to the creation of a Secret Team, which has covertly implemented U.S. foreign policy through its activities of terrorism, assassination, drug smuggling and gun-running in Cuba, Southeast Asia, Chile, Lybia (sic), Iran, Central America. . . .”

Seated on white folding chairs in the hot sun, sipping Perrier and Evian waters out of wineglasses, the crowd listened to Sheehan describe the secret team, a shadow government he calls it, and its 25 years of covert activities. A boyish-looking man in his early 40s, with curly gray hair and the friendly but always calculating blue eyes of a born trial lawyer, he spoke for more than an hour, at times losing some of his listeners in a morass of detail and intricate connections, pausing frequently for effect.

On May 30, 1984, a bomb went off at a press conference that contra leader Eden Pastora was holding in La Penca, Nicaragua, where he was denouncing a rival contra faction, the FDN, which he claimed was a puppet of the CIA. Pastora escaped with minor injuries. Three journalists were killed and 17 people seriously wounded, including ABC cameraman Tony Avirgan. Avirgan and his wife, Martha Honey, also a journalist, are the plaintiffs in the Christic Institute’s case, suing 29 defendants for $17 million in multiple damages.

Extenuating circumstances, however, take this far beyond a personal injury suit. The Christic Institute (which derives its name from a term coined by a Jesuit philosopher) had been looking for a lawsuit on which to hang all of its charges about the secret team, Sheehan has said. The La Penca bombing provided the hook. The suit was filed under a civil section of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which gives plaintiffs extraordinary legal powers. Under it the plaintiff’s attorneys are referred to as “private attorneys general” with authority comparable to that of federal prosecutors, including federal subpoena power for an unusually broad range of testimony and documents, including bank, telephone, travel, business records.

There are stringent requirements in RICO that a “previous historical pattern of activity” be demonstrated, a requirement, Sheehan said laughingly, the Christic Institute is more than happy to meet, since it permits it to investigate and publicize activities of the defendants going back to the early ‘60s.

The complex lawsuit charges that the pattern of activities that resulted in the La Penca bombing involves a criminal conspiracy to wage a private war against Nicaragua partially financed by the smuggling of drugs from Colombia through Costa Rica and into the United States. Arms shipments are alleged to have been financed by the drug money and profits from price switching schemes on arms shipments.

The alleged pattern of activities reaches back to the early 1960s and to events following the Cuban revolution. It details the “first contra war” to overthrow the Castro regime, connects some of the defendants to political assassinations financed by heroin and opium trafficking in Southeast Asia, and, later, an assassination program against enemies of the Shah of Iran. Multiple activities are cited in the ‘80s, where much of the story is related to revelations emerging from the Iran-contra hearings.

“This is the scandal--the activities of these midnight soldiers who have been defying the Constitution and defiling the democratic process,” Sheehan said in summation to the gathering.

Their shadow government was made possible by the National Security Act, he said, and the apparatus set up in its name. Ironically, he noted, this is the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution and the 40th anniversary of the act. The two had been on a collision course for the past 40 years, and now, he said, is the time to set things right.

He appealed to his listeners as an influential group and asked them to protest the limited nature of the congressional investigations that were focusing on the past few years in Central America and Iran. Demand, he told them, that the hearings increase in breadth and depth, going back over the past 25 years of secret activities around the world.

Earlier, Sara Nelson, Sheehan’s wife, had described the Christic Institute, where she serves as executive director. Its founding members had worked on the Karen Silkwood case against Kerr-McGee (involving the nuclear power industry) and found they had common spiritual values. They believed in the evolution of the human family. They held hope, she said, that “as a human family we can come to understand our oneness before destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons.”

Sometimes Nelson describes the shoestring operation as “the little engine that could.” The David-and-Goliath circumstances of the present lawsuit, and the fact that all institute staff, including the attorneys, earn $15,000 a year, add to their altruistic image.

She asked help in spreading the information, organizing support and giving money to finance the investigations and depositions, which were costing $40,000 a month. In all, they expect to need close to $2 million to get them to trial next year, she said.

The crowd in Don Henley’s backyard gave Sheehan and Nelson a standing ovation, wrote checks on the spot amounting to a modest $6,500 but with promises of much more to come.

So it had been several nights before at Temple Emanuel, where 600 people had turned out for a presentation sponsored by Women For, where they raised $6,000, and so it would be later Saturday night when they would speak before almost 1,000 students at UCLA, where they collected another $2,000.

Nelson and Sheehan have been talking about this lawsuit to people in Los Angeles off and on since November, usually to groups gathered in West Side living rooms, although recently Sheehan addressed a World Affairs Council luncheon meeting.

Early support came from Browne, Malibu artist Susanna Dakin and retired businessman Sandy Elster--people already familiar with the Christic Institute. Ted Field of Interscope has already contributed $10,000 and his vice president, Bob Burkett, indicated another contribution was a possibility. Parlor parties sponsored by Carolyn and Aris Anagnos, Bea Breslow, Lila Garrett, and Marjorie and Michael Fasman have brought in about $50,000.

Organized Drive for Support

Los Angeles--the fund-raising Gold Coast--is the first city the institute has turned to for support in an organized way. Since November, people here have given them close to $200,000, a significant amount for a group that had been operating on an annual budget of $500,000, raised until this year from church groups and foundations. The response has been sufficient and important enough that the institute has opened an office in Santa Monica.

It is not hard to find people who will utter the words radical chic with a certain knowing smile at this growing phenomenon. Privately, Sheehan himself voices fears that “we do not want to get Hollywoodized, but we have a responsibility to get the message out.”

When Nelson and Sheehan first spoke here late last year, the Iran-contra controversy was just breaking. The effect on rooms filled with sophisticated, well-educated, wary people “in the know” was remarkable. There were audible gasps of recognition when Sheehan, relating a three-year investigation and year-old lawsuit, would introduce names only recently familiar to his listeners, such as defendants Richard Secord and John Singlaub.

When an unfamiliar name such as Theodore Shackley or Thomas Clines came up, Sheehan would say “remember this name, you’ll be hearing a lot of it.” Before one such December evening had ended in Brentwood, people were throwing out names of possible presidential candidates for Sheehan’s opinion.

“I think he’s one of the great idealists and one of the great thinkers of our time. He really counters the lack of values in our society,” psychologist Connie Katzenstein of Pacific Palisades said recently, indicating her financial support had run into the thousands and that she would probably be giving again.

At the Browne-Henley event, retired businessman Sandy Elster, a longtime activist in human rights and civil liberties, said he met “Danny,” as most who know Sheehan call him, three years ago when he was first researching the case.

“He was talking about secret warehouses filled with arms, teams of gunrunners. I said to myself, ‘another kook.’ After the La Penca bombing he began to develop a little more credibility. He was absolutely from Mars when he first came to me. He came back after he filed the lawsuit. I read the complaint and was hooked.”

A man who said he has been involved in “a lot of do-good activities” in his life, Elster said he never met such “total gratification” as his work for the Christic Institute has brought him.

Anyone who has ever stepped into the campaign headquarters of an underdog candidate high on zeal and low on funds would recognize immediately the kindred atmosphere at the old storefront occupied by the Christic Institute in a depressed Washington neighborhood 13 blocks from the Capitol Building.

Not a scrap of upholstery that is not stained, torn or sprung; not a chair without a bad leg. Paper avalanches all but obscuring ancient wood or metal desks. Kitchen cupboards strewn with condiments, cracker boxes, old newspapers and forgotten mail. In-joke bulletin boards. Coffee cups and ashtrays from stem to stern. A few plants lovingly tended by the valiant. And in the basement, under harsh lights, personal computers whirring and chirping away, manned by people in deep concentration, while a few feet away, at the same tables, others chat and stuff numerous envelopes.

Overriding all, however, is the heady mix of altruism and adventure in the air.

Yuppies need not apply. From the receptionist at the front door to Sheehan, the annual salary for the staff of 30 is $15,000. The people who earn those salaries are, as they often jokingly say, “stressed out.”

“Remember,” media coordinator Sally Schwarz said by way of apology to a new staff member to whom she had just given one too many errands, “this is the Christic Institute. We have no bosses and no slaves. We are all overworked.”

They smoke. People off cigarettes for three or five years are back on them. They often get by on take-out pizza. They don’t exercise. Their backs are bothering them to the extent that they have a chiropractor all but on retainer. Faces swollen from lack of sleep, they often call it a day late at night and then go home to the pleasant, roomy old house where many of them live communally, only to relax with more talk about the case.

Doubled the Staff

In preparation for launching the campaign to bring the lawsuit before the public they doubled their staff from 15 to more than 30 in March and are moving into public education--where the stress will be on the connection between drug smuggling and covert actions. They bought another building two doors away where the legal team will move once renovations are completed.

Donna Henderson, 30, recently came on as the attorney who will handle the evidenciary documents for the trial. A convert to Catholicism, she was a member of the Catholic Worker community in Des Moines.

“I’m here doing these things out of a faith perspective,” said Henderson. I have a commitment to change in this life. Heaven isn’t--you can’t wait until you get there. The whole aspect of heaven being another world is detrimental as far as I’m concerned.”

That kind of talk is in keeping with the traditions of the Christic Institute, which began formally in 1980 when some of the people who had come together on the Karen Silkwood case decided to stay together. At the heart of it were and remain three people, known to all as Billy, Danny and Sara.

Bill Davis, S.J., a Jesuit priest who had directed the order’s Office of Social Ministries, was the investigator for the Silkwood case. Sheehan, formerly counsel for Davis’ office, and before that a Harvard law graduate who worked as a trial lawyer with Cahill, Gordon in New York and with F. Lee Bailey in Boston, was chief counsel in the Silkwood case. Nelson, who headed NOW’s labor task force, played a major role in coordinating labor union, civil liberties, feminist and environmentalist support for the case.

‘A Positive Tool’

They and several others decided to stick together, Davis said. “Danny opened my eyes,” Davis said. “He didn’t conceive of law as something people go back to when they’re in trouble. He saw it as a positive tool to bring about social change.”

And social change is what Christic is all about. Sometimes members simply explain it as “The Force.” The term Christic was coined by Teilhard de Chardin, the late Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist. Davis, Sheehan and Nelson all talk at length about the force of evolution and reconciling science and religion, Sheehan going off into a long description of Hegelian dialectics and the need to reconnect with Natural Law.

Nelson tends to explain the term most simply, calling Christic “a unifying force in the universe, a bonding phenomenon. . . . In the evolution of the human family there is the growth of a sixth sense, a spiritual faculty, that understands the unity and harmony of things.”

Jewish members of the institute admit the word gives them difficulty and that they could do with another, but the concept behind it is one they relate to readily.

“I see this as a direct expression of the highest Jewish values,” staff director and attorney Lanny Sinkin said. With the institute since 1984, he married the former bookkeeper and now lives with her and their daughter and close to a dozen others at the house they own in common. “You look at the basic messages you get as a Jew--your job is to work for justice now, not wait for an afterlife. This is what it’s all about.”

Variety of Cases

In practical terms it has meant involvement in such cases as their suit against the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party and the Greensboro, N.C., police over the murder of anti-Klan demonstrators; the first defense case for the Sanctuary Movement; and a voting rights case. Starting with Silkwood, which ultimately resulted in a Supreme Court decision that established the rights of citizens to seek remedies for nuclear hazards under state laws, thus far the institute has built a winning track record.

As Nelson said, however, they face a challenge of different and far vaster proportions now.

They are mounting their campaign in three unabashedly ambitious stages, public education director Dan Siegal, a young political scientist from Thousand Oaks said. They want to get the word out on the lawsuit and bring the defendants “to trial and get justice for the victims. After that we want to stop the secret team once and for all. Third, we want to reorient our overall foreign policy in the Third World to one of less intervention and of diplomatic solutions. We want a foreign policy based on law and morality.”

Is there life for the Christic Institute after the lawsuit? Bill Davis was asked that question late one morning while sitting in his office and he answered readily.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, there were plenty of issues to take on.

“There is the drug problem, which is massive. It’s been approached so far as this awful poisoning of the minds of youth. We’d like to take a more analytic approach, as to how it’s poisoning the whole body politic, law enforcement, the electoral process. We would not take a moralistic, pietistic approach. You can’t weep for Len Bias and vote money for the contras. . . .

“Also, we’re interested in toxic wastes in the water table. We’d like to involve the churches in this as a moral issue, a right-to-life issue. It’s not for the hippies. It’s profoundly theological--what we pass on to other people.”