Contras May Hike Political Demands : Facing Reality, U.S., Rebels Saw Need for Pact

In a drab room off a bland sixth-floor State Department hallway, leaders of the Nicaraguan Resistance met early this month with Reagan Administration officials for an anguished encounter with reality.

The House had just killed a $30.5-million package of Contra aid, once backed by both parties, in a political feud with the White House. A Contra army already desperately short of food and bullets now was also short of hope.

Contra directorate member Adolfo Calero, the man the United States chose in 1982 to lead the fight against Nicaragua’s Marxist regime, minced no words. The United States, he complained, was an unreliable ally--”more unreliable than the Soviet Union,” one witness quoted him as saying.

Bleak Assessment

U.S. officials listened to a bleak assessment for nearly three hours. Then, several witnesses said, they agreed with Calero: Future U.S. aid to the rebels would be small, and it would not come soon, if ever.

Two weeks later, Calero and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega struck a deal to end their fighting while the Contras and the Sandinistas iron out a permanent peace.

The March 8 meeting and one a few days later, Administration officials now say, reflected a U-turn in both U.S. and rebel beliefs about a 7-year war that had become a holy crusade for both the Contras and their White House backers.

For the rebels, they say, the dream that American aid would propel them to victory over a larger and more entrenched foe was permanently dashed with the House vote. “They saw the need for a cease-fire. They recognized that they were in a difficult position, politically here and militarily on the ground,” one U.S. official said.

Just as painfully, some Administration officials admitted that the control of U.S. policy in Central America--and the war itself--had shifted from the White House to Congress, and specifically to a Contra critic, House Speaker Jim Wright.

“What this shows,” one U.S. official said of Wednesday’s cease-fire pact, “is that Oscar Arias Sanchez and Jim Wright have won another round, and we’re running out of rounds.”

Wright and Arias, the Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, have been the forces behind a regional peace proposal that calls for the Contras to stop fighting and the Ortega regime to grant them amnesty and restore suspended political freedoms.

Wright’s political savvy elevated the plan and its demand for an end to Nicaragua’s civil war to unofficial policy, one that the White House could not publicly contest without looking like a warmonger.

It remained so, Administration officials complained, as Nicaragua sidestepped the plan’s toughest requirements and, last week, even launched a minor invasion of neighboring Honduras.

Tried to Wipe Out Supplies

The Honduras invasion sought but failed to wipe out the Contras’ remaining dumps of munitions and other supplies. It briefly raised Administration hopes that Congress would reverse itself and allot more military aid to the rebels, officials said this week.

But by some accounts, the invasion came too late to change the Contra leaders’ own belief that the war had become all but unwinnable. When the House turned down a rare Democratic-backed aid package for the rebels on March 3, some rebel officials concluded that peace with Ortega was the best hope for the survival of their forces, not to mention political power in Nicaragua.

That was one implicit message in meetings between Contra leaders and State Department officials the next week, witnesses said. “We have a moral obligation to our people” inside Nicaragua, the Contras’ top financial adviser, Jaime Morales, reportedly told State Department officials at one session.

Moral Obligation

Another Contra official explained afterward: “We have a moral obligation to our people to save as many as we can. We are trying to plan what you could call a painful but orderly withdrawal from the battlefield.”

Officials at the meeting did not discourage the rebel leaders from seeking a cease-fire. Several Administration officials maintained this week that the United States played no role in the cease-fire negotiations beyond “being briefed on what their proposals were going to be and getting readouts after the fact each day.”

“While they still wanted to hear our views,” one said, “they were in no mood to take guidance from us. They told us what their thinking was.”

And a Wright aide maintained Thursday that Contra and Sandinista officials were secretly brokering a peace accord in the last three weeks even as public negotiations were bogged down and Ortega’s army streamed into Honduras.

Possible Derailment

“There was a danger that it could have been derailed by what was going on last week,” that aide said, “and it could have been if the Contras had chosen to do so. But they wanted a cease-fire, and they didn’t back out.”

Administration spokesmen put the cease-fire agreement in the best light Thursday. Secretary of State George P. Shultz called the accord “an important step forward” and urged Congress to approve a package of humanitarian aid to the rebels.