Document Tells of Bush Contra Role : Was Reportedly Involved in ’85 Honduran Deal

President Bush, as part of a bid to ensure Honduran military assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels, told the president of Honduras in 1985 that the United States was accelerating economic aid payments to his country, according to a government document released Thursday.

Bush, who was then vice president, personally told Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordoba that the United States had decided to release blocked economic aid and speed the delivery of military hardware to Honduras after Suazo’s government had agreed to assist the Contras’ military operations, the document said.

Disclosed at North Trial

The disclosure, made during the trial of former White House aide Oliver L. North, suggests that Bush was more directly involved in the Ronald Reagan Administration’s secret efforts to arrange foreign aid for the Contras than he has previously acknowledged.

In the past, Bush has emphatically denied playing any role in North’s attempts to organize private support for the Contras from 1984 through 1986, when Congress prohibited U.S. military aid to the rebels. But he never has addressed directly the issue of whether he played a role in the Administration’s requests for aid from foreign countries.

When Bush made the promise, the congressional ban outlawed all U.S. aid to the Contras, “direct or indirect.” But whether that ban applied to solicitation of aid from foreign countries remains an unresolved question.

Spokesmen for Bush refused to comment on the disclosure. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said: “We can’t say anything. It would become a part of the case.”

But a U.S. ambassador who attended Bush’s meeting with Suazo said in an interview that he does not believe the aid to Honduras was part of an explicit exchange for help to the Contras. “There was no quid pro quo that I could see,” said John D. Negroponte, then the U.S. ambassador to Honduras.

The exchange of foreign aid for Contra assistance was described in a written “admission of facts” agreed to by the Bush Administration for introduction at the North trial. It says that President Reagan approved the aid to Honduras in what it called a “quid pro quo arrangement” after discussions with members of the National Security Council. It does not make clear, however, whether Bush, an NSC member, was aware of that aspect of the deal.

Worried About Demands

In an NSC meeting in 1984, Bush said that he favored seeking foreign aid for the Contras but worried about demands for a quid pro quo. “The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people might interpret this as some kind of an exchange,” he said, according to minutes of the meeting released last month.

Bush declined to comment on the document Thursday night when asked about it at a dinner party for visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Bush said he had not seen the document, “and I don’t worry about it.”

Bush’s reported promise to the Hondurans appears to have been part of one of a series of deals that the Reagan Administration made or explored with countries that were willing to supply the Contras, the document revealed.

Other countries named in the document include Israel--which donated “several hundred tons” of captured Arab weapons to the Contras through the Pentagon and the CIA--as well as Saudi Arabia, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador. All have been previously reported as donors of guns, money or other assistance to the rebels, but the government had long refused to confirm those accounts.

Mentions Noriega Offer

The document also reveals that Panamanian leader Manuel A. Noriega offered in 1986 to assassinate Nicaraguan leaders “in exchange for a promise from the U.S. government to help clean up Noriega’s image.” President Reagan’s national security adviser at the time, Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, responded that “the United States could not be involved with assassination, but Panamanian assistance with sabotage would be another story.”

The 42-page “admission of facts” was negotiated jointly by the prosecution, the defense, U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell and a Bush Administration review board as a means of introducing sensitive information into the record of the North trial without inadvertently divulging highly secret material.

North’s defense attorney, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., had pressed for the information to show that his client, who is accused of lying to Congress about his secret operations, acted at the direction of high-level Reagan Administration officials.

The document, drawn largely from secret records of the Reagan Administration, confirmed testimony from former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane last month that top officials explicitly promised increased aid to Honduras and other countries if they would assist the Contras, who were fighting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.

Honduras was especially important to the U.S. strategy because most of the Contra troops were--and still are--based in camps along the country’s southern border with Nicaragua.

In February, 1985, the document said, McFarlane sent President Reagan a formal recommendation “to provide incentives to Honduras so that it would maintain its aid to the resistance . . . . President Reagan personally authorized the entire plan.” The incentives included accelerated delivery of military hardware, release of blocked economic aid and other support.

Within a month, it said, Honduras’ top military officers assured the U.S. government that it would continue helping the Contras buy and import weapons through Honduras, as McFarlane and North had asked.

On March 16, Bush visited the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. “When Vice President Bush met with President Suazo, Bush told Suazo that President Reagan had directed expedited delivery of U.S. military items to Honduras,” the document said. “Vice President Bush also informed Suazo that President Reagan had directed that currently withheld economic assistance for Honduras should be released,” and offered other aid.

Deliver of Planes

At the time, the document said, Bush was aware that Honduras had been providing aid to the Contras. In 1984, it said, the then-vice president was given a CIA report that noted that Honduras had given the rebels two C-47 airplanes and 10,000 pounds of equipment.

However, Negroponte, who was present at Bush’s meeting with Suazo, said in the interview that he could not remember whether the issue of the Contras came up during the session. He acknowledged that it could have, because “as a philosophical and policy matter, both of our governments felt that the viability of the Contras was desirable.”

But he said that the main issue and Honduras’ main concern at the time was not aid for the Contras but fear of cross-border raids by the Nicaraguan army. “As far as expedited delivery of military support, from where I sat it was entirely in the context of the Hondurans feeling increasingly exposed to that security threat,” he said.

Nevertheless, according to the document, Honduras continued to ask for more U.S. aid as the price of its cooperation with the Contras. In April and October, 1985, Honduran officials held up Contra military shipments and complained that they were receiving insufficient U.S. aid, it said. And in January, 1986, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa reported that “Honduran cooperation (on the Contra issue) would turn upon the extent of U.S. government security assurances and military and economic support.”

In other quid pro quo arrangements, the document revealed:

--In 1983 and 1984, in a project called Operation Tipped Kettle, Israel donated “several hundred tons of weapons” captured from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Defense Department for delivery to the Contras. The Pentagon “assured Israel that, in exchange for the weapons, the U.S. government would be as flexible as possible in its approach to Israeli military and economic needs.”

--In January, 1985, CIA official Alan D. Fiers told McFarlane that Guatemala was willing to help the Contras, “provided that it received a quid pro quo from the United States in the form of foreign assistance funds . . . or other forms of assistance.” In 1986, Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo told a U.S. official that he would “pursue U.S. government goals in Central America, including specific support for the armed resistance, but that he would seek additional military aid from the U.S. in return.” Aid to Guatemala was subsequently increased, but not as much as Cerezo reportedly asked.

--The Reagan Administration also encouraged aid to the Contras from Saudi Arabia, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Brunei and other countries, but without any known quid pro quo.

Throughout the Reagan Administration, officials denied that they were seeking foreign aid for the rebels in any form. When asked in a Senate hearing whether the Administration was soliciting foreign help, then-Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley replied that he understood the law to prohibit all forms of aid, “direct and indirect, including third party.”

“Nobody is trying to play games with you or any other member of Congress,” Motley said. “That resolution stands, and it will continue to stand, and it says ‘no direct or indirect.’ And that is pretty plain English.” He spoke 10 days after Bush’s visit to Honduras.

In 1985, reacting to reports of the Reagan Administration’s efforts to win aid from other countries, Congress amended the foreign aid law to prohibit any quid pro quo arrangement for U.S. aid. The new law barred the Administration from “conditioning, expressly or implicitly, the provision of assistance” to another country on an arrangement for that country to help the Contras.

The law went into effect five months after Bush’s visit to Honduras.