Details Surface of U.S. Deal to Aid Contras

For the men in Ronald Reagan’s White House whose mission was to keep the Nicaraguan rebels fighting, the first weeks of 1985 were a time of creeping desperation.

Congress had cut off the CIA’s covert military aid to the Contras. Stopgap aid from Saudi Arabia and Israel was beginning to run low. And then came what looked like a potential last straw: Honduras, where the main Contra army was camped, threatened to disarm the rebels and halt their military operations against Nicaragua.

“Honduran cooperation with (the Contras) . . . must continue if the resistance is to survive,” Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, wrote in a secret memorandum to the President later that year.

Within weeks, Reagan agreed to provide Honduras with what some White House documents called a “quid pro quo.” If Honduras would tolerate the Contras, it would be rewarded with accelerated U.S. economic and military aid. Two months later, then-Vice President George Bush told Honduras’ leaders that the promised aid was on its way.

Did Bush, who has never publicly acknowledged a role in seeking foreign aid for the Contras, secretly broker a Contra deal with Honduras? And did the Reagan Administration’s action violate Congress’ Boland Amendment, written by former Rep. Edward P. Boland (D-Mass.), which barred the United States from aiding the rebels “directly or indirectly”?

Four years after the events, the answers remain unclear. But previously secret documents released during the trial of former White House aide Oliver L. North and interviews with officials who were involved in Bush’s mission provide a new and more complete account of a once-hidden chapter in the Reagan Administration’s Central American crusade--the secret swap of U.S. aid for Honduran support for the Contras.

Even as they were seeking Honduras’ support, White House officials recognized that their actions violated at least the spirit, if not the letter, of Congress’ ban on aiding the Contras.

A memo written by North and another aide argued that the deal with Honduras should be carried out in secret for that very reason: “Notwithstanding our own interpretations (of the law), it is very clear . . . that the legislative intent was to deny any direct or indirect support for military/paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.”

As a result, the disclosures in the North documents raise serious questions about Congress’ ability, even by passing a legal ban, to stop a heedless President from pursuing secret foreign policies through pressure on U.S. allies.

Several members of Congress, led by Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), who was chairman of the House committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair, say they may reopen their inquiry to find out exactly what occurred in the Honduran deal.

“The documents clearly suggest that then-Vice President Bush--now President Bush--was involved in the quid pro quo arrangements with Honduras,” Hamilton said last week. “I don’t think the documents prove that, but they clearly suggest it . . . . I think the important thing now is just to get the documents out, have the White House turn them over to us as they committed themselves to do. Let’s get a clean sweep here, and get this information out.”

The documents that have been released, and officials who were involved, describe the 1985 deal with Honduras not as a single, isolated quid pro quo deal. Rather, they say, it was one of many trades of aid for cooperation by the impoverished country that had become the most important U.S. military ally in Central America.

“The Hondurans were shaking us down all the time, not just on the Contra issue,” according to one official. “They wanted more aid for everything they did.”

Honduras, then ruled jointly by President Roberto Suazo Cordova and the chief of staff of the armed forces, Brig. Gen. Walter Lopez, had several demands of the United States, officials said.

“The main concern in Honduras was that they wanted a security pact with the United States, an assurance that we would come to their defense if they were invaded,” said Langhorne A. Motley, assistant secretary of state at the time.

But the Hondurans also wanted “to know what our intentions were on the Contras,” he added. When Honduras first allowed the rebels to put their bases on its territory, the CIA was promising that the Contras would soon invade Nicaragua. Instead, to the Hondurans’ dismay, Congress halted U.S. aid to the rebels. “Their question was: ‘Will the real United States please stand up?’ ” Motley said.

The Hondurans’ concerns came together on Jan. 18, 1985, when Lopez and the other generals held a dinner for the visiting McFarlane at the Air Force Club in Tegucigalpa. The United States, they complained, had left them to play host to more than 10,000 Contras, and Nicaragua was threatening to send troops across the border to clean the rebels out.

Halfway through the Hondurans’ tirade, McFarlane had heard enough. Without a word, as the generals gaped, he walked out of the room--leaving the U.S. ambassador to stammer an excuse about “an urgent appointment,” officials who were present said.

The Hondurans responded, two weeks later, by privately informing the United States that they wanted the Contras removed from their territory or they would force the rebels back into Nicaragua.

“They called our bluff,” a senior official said. “It was a shakedown.”

And it hit its mark. On Feb. 7, McFarlane convened a meeting of the Crisis Pre-Planning Group, the White House National Security Council’s panel on urgent foreign policy issues.

“The CPPG . . . agreed that we should make an approach to the Hondurans which emphasizes our commitment to their sovereignty and provides incentives for them to persist in aiding the freedom fighters,” McFarlane wrote in a memorandum to Reagan. “The group further agreed that the incentives should include:

“--The release of some economic support (We are currently withholding disbursement of $174 million until the Hondurans commit to certain economic reform).

“--Expedited security assistance deliveries . . . .

“--Enhancements to existing CIA programs.”

The group recommended also that Reagan send an emissary to Honduras to inform the country’s leaders of what North, in another memorandum, called “conditions” attached to the accelerated aid: continued help for the Contras.

All members of the Crisis Pre-Planning Group agreed on this approach, according to memos written by North and another NSC aide, Raymond F. Burghardt. But a bureaucratic squabble erupted over who would carry the private message about the aid’s “conditions” to the Hondurans.

“We will need to decide who the emissary will be,” McFarlane’s deputy, John M. Poindexter, wrote in a note to his boss. “It should not be Motley--maybe Dick Walters.” Vernon A. Walters, President Bush’s nominee as ambassador to West Germany, was then a special adviser at the State Department.

Motley, who had been engaged in a long-running turf battle with the NSC over Central America, objected to the idea of entrusting the message to someone else. “We had a U.S. ambassador who was perfectly capable of delivering the mail,” he said last week. “With special emissaries, you never know whether they’re following their instructions.”

Compromise on Message

Motley won--sort of. The initial message to the Hondurans would go through the U.S. ambassador in Honduras, John D. Negroponte (now Bush’s nominee as ambassador to Mexico). But a few weeks later, the NSC would send its own man, Burghardt, to Honduras--ostensibly to hand-carry a formal copy of the message that Negroponte had already transmitted.

And, in March, then-Vice President Bush was scheduled to visit Honduras. He, too, could reaffirm U.S. interests in the area.

The bureaucrats were also debating what Negroponte should tell the Hondurans. North and Burghardt drafted “talking points” for the ambassador that included an explicit reference to the link between the added U.S. aid and the Contras: “In order to ensure that our appreciation manifests itself in more than words, the President has directed that my government undertake to provide expedited delivery on certain items of assistance to your country.”

But North and Burghardt warned that it was a bad idea to have the ambassador deliver that message because turning the matter over to the State Department could lead to a leak.

“To date, all Administration officials have been able to state to the Congress that we have not approached any other government to support the resistance,” they wrote--even though they both knew, according to documents, that several governments had already been approached.

Poindexter apparently agreed. He crossed out the reference to a quid pro quo in the talking points and scrawled next to it: “Add that we want VP to also discuss this matter with Suazo.”

That left Negroponte with a more general message to deliver, plus a letter from President Reagan calling on Honduras “to continue to do all in its power to support those who struggle for freedom and democracy.” Also, the NSC informed the State Department: “The vice president will discuss with President (Suazo) the issues raised in President Reagan’s letter during his visit to Honduras.”

Negroponte delivered Reagan’s letter and the accompanying message to Suazo on Feb. 24. In an interview last week, he said he remembered nothing like a swap of aid in exchange for Honduran help on the Contra issue. “There was no quid pro quo from my perspective,” he said.

A week later, the NSC’s Burghardt--who had helped draft the quid pro quo language--arrived in Tegucigalpa for his own meetings with Honduran officials. “If there was a quid pro quo discussed, it was probably then,” a senior official said. Burghardt, who now serves in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, could not be reached for his account.

Meanwhile, the accelerated aid was beginning to flow. The State Department told the Hondurans that it was preparing to release $72.5 million in economic aid that had been held up to pressure the country to make economic reforms. (“The economic guys weren’t happy about that,” one official recalled.) The Pentagon readied expedited shipments of military equipment to the Honduran armed forces: M-16 rifles, ammunition, trucks and boots.

The return message came through the U.S. military in early March, according to a document released in the North trial: “The military leaders of Honduras . . . offered assurances that the resistance could continue to deliver supplies through Honduras, and that Honduras would continue to supply end-user certificates for arms purchases by the resistance.” End-user certificates are licenses to buy military weaponry on the international market.

So, by the time Bush arrived in Honduras on March 16, the deal was already done. Bush met with President Suazo at the Honduran’s country home in La Paz, near the giant U.S. military base at Palmerola. Both Motley and Negroponte, who were present, insist that there was no explicit talk of a swap.

Motley acknowledged that the United States was using its aid as leverage to encourage Honduras to help the Contras but denied that such a linkage amounted to a quid pro quo.

“You speed up the (aid) pipeline, and at the same time you tell him your concerns,” Motley said. “That isn’t a quid pro quo. . . . We don’t work that way.”

In fact, the 10-page cable of minutes from the Bush-Suazo meeting that the U.S. Embassy in Honduras sent to Washington does not mention any explicit linkage between U.S. aid and Honduran help for the Contras.

An official with access to the cable said it describes Bush’s hourlong talk with Suazo as touching on both the U.S. decision to accelerate aid to Honduras and the Hondurans’ commitment to continue supporting the Contras--but not in the context of a quid pro quo.

Bush has refused to explain his role in the dealings with Honduras, or even to say whether he understood that the aid he was describing to the Hondurans had anything to do with their help on the Contra issue. But he did say last week that Negroponte and Motley’s accounts of his visit to Honduras were correct.

The delivery of aid was a success. So much military equipment was flooding into Honduras that “there was some concern early on that (the shipments) would logistically overwhelm the Hondurans’ ability to absorb the materiel,” North wrote in a memo nine days after the Bush visit.

“This apparently has not happened,” he wrote, “and the Hondurans have expressed their gratitude through those who are supporting the resistance forces.”

But it was only one round among many in the U.S.-Honduran tangle, officials said. Only a month later, after Congress again rejected U.S. aid for the Contras, the Honduran military threatened once again to disarm the rebels. Reagan himself had to telephone Suazo to urge him to stop any such move.

“(Suazo) expressed his support of me and his belief we must continue to oppose Communism,” Reagan’s own handwritten notes of the conversation say. “Will call his mil commander . . . “ Then, Reagan noted, Suazo brought up another subject: Honduras was seeking the release of “about $75 mil in aid.”