Congress Wants Nothing Left for Contras in Honduras : Auditors to Check Supplies Used in War Games

As 3,150 U.S. troops prepare to return home starting Monday from emergency maneuvers with the Honduran military, a small army of government auditors dispatched by Congress will be taking inventory of every boot, bean and bullet.

The auditors’ mission: to make sure that all the U.S. military supplies and equipment that went to Honduras with the troops is returned to the United States, out of reach of the Nicaraguan Contras.

Congress’ zeal for such accounting stems from charges that the United States may have used past Honduran exercises as a back door way to aid the rebels, although several investigations by the General Accounting Office and Defense Department auditors have failed to turn up firm evidence that any such illegal diversion has actually taken place.

Allegations Persist

But the allegations persist, a measure of the depth of suspicion Congress harbors toward the Reagan Administration in matters concerning the Contras. The suspicion continues even though a 60-day cease-fire between the Contras and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua would appear to have removed any incentive for such deception, and even as the White House has begun to concede openly that its hopes for the success of the Contra forces are fading.

“Recent history shows the Administration will do almost anything to get material to the Contras,” said California Sen. Alan Cranston, one of seven Senate Democrats who called for a GAO audit of the maneuvers. “If we’re not careful, they could do it again.”

Senior Defense Department officials deny categorically that there is any plan to leave supplies behind for the Contras. They note that U.S. Army auditors now monitor almost all exercises in the wake of a controversial Army audit of a 1986 Central American exercise called “Blazing Trails” that suggested that supplies could be left behind.

But that practice “wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be legal,” said Richard L. Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. “We can’t just leave ammunition and equipment behind to get around congressional statutes.”

Since the revelations of the Iran-Contra affair, some lawmakers are skeptical that the Pentagon has a firm grip on inventories.

“This exercise is being directed out of the White House and the State Department,” said Rep. Edward F. Feighan (D-Ohio), who joined in the call for the GAO audit. “That gives me a greater concern that this . . . is an effort to aid the Contras than would be the case if it were a straight military operation.”

Some lawmakers fear that it may already be too late for the auditors to prevent an illegal transfer of equipment or, if there is such a transfer, to document it. The watchdogs arrived seven days after about 55 cargo aircraft, including several loaded with small arms and ammunition, landed at Palmerola Air Base in Honduras at the start of “Operation Golden Pheasant.”

Feighan said that if a decision were made to slip ammunition to the Contras, the Reagan Administration could direct the Pentagon to inflate its reports of ammunition, fuel and food consumed in the exercise and pass the difference to the Contras.

Congressional suspicion was aroused after the Army’s routine audit of the “Blazing Trails” exercise “raised the possibility that materiel, including ammunition, fuel and rations, could be diverted for unauthorized purposes,” according to a December, 1987, account by Derek J. Vander Schaaf, the Defense Department’s inspector general. Soon after that, Vander Schaaf informed California Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, that there was “no evidence that the exercise forces left behind materiel for the Contras.”

The suspicion became deeper after the General Accounting Office, in a secret inquiry into a 1986 emergency military aid package to Honduras, concluded that all but $200,000 of the $20 million provided was used for military purposes other than those specified in the package. Rep. David R. Obey (D-Ohio), who disclosed the existence of the report, said the case cast further doubt on the Administration’s forthrightness in proposing emergency military assistance to Central American countries.

Lawmakers Complain

Some lawmakers, among them Feighan, complain that the auditors can do nothing to turn back the clock on five years of ambitious military construction efforts in Honduras. The Pentagon defends the construction, funded by U.S. taxpayers, as a necessary part of the training of U.S. forces. Critics charge that the military construction program, though legal, has transformed Honduras from a roadless backwater into a network of military outposts that could serve as staging areas for any forces fighting the Sandinistas.

As Army infantrymen and paratroopers arrived in Honduras for “Operation Golden Pheasant,” an engineer battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division was already there, improving a road between the Caribbean port of Puerta Limpera and Mocoron, reportedly an area of past resistance activity.

About 2,000 U.S. military personnel were already in Honduras on military construction projects conducted for training purposes, an activity on which the Pentagon plans to spend $6 million this year, and has spent roughly $25 million in the past five years.

Later this year, U.S. troops are to construct a port staging area in Honduras, repair a landing strip and construct an airfield access road near the Gulf of Fonseca, in an area through which Soviet arms have been shipped to Nicaragua.

In 1983, the Americans built an airstrip at Aguacate. Located about 50 miles from the Nicaraguan border, Aguacate was used in at least 15 private resupply flights carrying arms and equipment for the Contras, according to flight logs taken from an aircraft the Sandinistas downed in 1986. The same logs disclosed that the Contra resupply effort used an airstrip at Mocoron, where engineers from the 82nd Airborne Division were making repairs this month.