Kerry used enemy to win battle at home
Pact with communist Sandinistas 'trademark' of his statecraft

Posted: May 18, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By J. Michael Waller
2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc.

In his first major foreign-policy action as a U.S. senator nearly 20 years ago,
John Kerry accused the United States of "funding terrorism."

Fresh from a trip to the Far East, Kerry made his sensational allegation in
Washington before flying to Nicaragua, then in the grip of a Marxist-Leninist
junta, to coauthor a propagandistic peace proposal designed to disarm the
U.S.-backed forces fighting to oust the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime.

Barely three months after being sworn as a senator, Kerry made his mark, and he
made it big, as one of the leading opponents of President Reagan's effort to
defeat Soviet-sponsored revolutionaries in the American hemisphere.

The junior senator stopped at nothing: working with the nation's sworn
ideological enemies, making damaging, distorted and often baseless allegations
about U.S. covert operations, accusing his own government of sponsoring
terrorism, and even damaging an FBI operation against a Colombian cocaine
cartel.

That April 1985 journey to Nicaragua would become a trademark of the Kerry
school of statecraft: making common cause with enemies of the United States --
and allowing himself to be used by them -- in order to win political battles at
home.

The enemy of the 1980s was not Osama bin Laden and his allies, but the Soviet
Union and its proxy regimes and guerrilla forces around the world. In addition
to the strategic nuclear-missile threat it posed to the survival of the United
States, the U.S.S.R. at the time was also the world's primary sponsor of
international terrorism.

It was not without concern, then, that Reagan, with the help of a bipartisan
majority in Congress, financed an anticommunist guerrilla army in Nicaragua,
made up mainly of peasants disenfranchised by the Soviet-backed
Marxist-Leninist junta that had taken power shortly before Reagan was elected
to office. That junta had by now sponsored communist guerrilla and terrorist
groups from neighboring countries and presented a threat to the entire region.
But Kerry, ever the defender of the communist left, didn't buy it.

To prevent the junta, known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front, from
consolidating power, Reagan strongly backed the resistance fighters, whom the
Sandinistas dubbed "contras," to pressure the regime either to hold free and
fair elections or be overthrown.

U.S. involvement in resisting the Soviet-backed revolutionary movements in
Central America was a politically emotional issue at the time, and the highly
charged atmosphere forced Reagan to tread carefully on Capitol Hill.

Seeking the release of a $14 million appropriation from the previous year for
the Nicaraguan resistance, and faced with public opposition, Reagan offered to
limit U.S. aid to the "contras" to humanitarian assistance only, provided the
Sandinistas agreed to national reconciliation and free elections that would
have broken their total grip on power. The president told Congress that if the
Sandinistas failed to comply by the deadline, he would use part of the $14
million to arm and militarily equip the growing insurgent army.

Reagan's compromise with Congress wasn't good enough for Kerry, the only
freshman senator on the then-prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. For the
new lawmaker, Central America was a cause -- and he was on the other side.

The new senator already had placed himself among the intractable opposition to
Reagan's national-security strategy. In announcing his candidacy for the U.S.
Senate, on Jan. 26, 1984, at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel, Kerry assailed Reagan's
anticommunist, pro-democracy policy as barbaric.

"How can you teach liberty and justice and support death squads?" he demanded,
falsely accusing the administration of backing the most thuggish and
undemocratic elements in Central America.

Vietnam in Nicaragua

Once in office in 1985, Kerry acted on his words. He held a news conference
accusing the U.S. government of financing terrorism.

"Foreign policy should represent the democratic values that have made our
country great, not subvert those values by funding terrorism to overthrow the
governments of other countries," Kerry said in a statement.

He announced he and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, would go to Managua, the
Nicaraguan capital. The pair of Vietnam-era radicals held two days of secret
talks with Sandinista junta leader Daniel Ortega, timing the visit just before
a scheduled vote on release of the $14 million to the freedom fighters.

They arrived in the Nicaraguan capital late on April 18 for two days of
scheduled talks with Marxist officials. On the eve of his meeting with Ortega,
Kerry told the Boston Globe correspondent in Managua that the talks would
"provide them [Kerry and Harkin] with enough information to sway congressional
votes on the issue of aid to antigovernment rebels."

In an interview with the Globe, Harkin said that as Vietnam veterans he and
Kerry "bring perspective to the situation here in Central America that perhaps
others not involved in the Vietnam War might not have."

According to the New York Times, Harkin and Kerry said "that they were seeking
commitments that could help defeat President Reagan's request."

The Globe reported from Managua, "After marathon meetings with the senators
that spilled into the early-morning hours, Ortega reasserted Nicaragua's
commitment to Central America as a zone free of nuclear weapons and foreign
military bases, including those of the Soviet Union and Cuba."

Kerry foreign-policy aide Richard McCall and Sandinista officials hammered out
a working paper that Kerry said he would present to President Reagan. Ortega
reportedly was at their side for the last three hours of the meeting.

The final three-page product, which Kerry called a "peace proposal," included
Sandinista promises of a cease-fire, as long as the United States cut off all
assistance, including humanitarian aid, to the anticommunist forces and their
families.

Back in Washington, Harkin claimed that the Sandinistas "desire peace and not
only normal but friendly relations with the United States. What we have is a
new, bold and innovative approach. I am hopeful that we can pursue it."

"This is a wonderful opening" for peace, Kerry added of the Ortega plan,
"without having to militarize the region."

But the plan was phony. It was nothing more than a "restatement of old
positions," a State Department official said at the time. "There is no mention
of any dialogue with the unified democratic opposition, which we consider
essential to internal reconciliation. Without such a dialogue, a cease-fire
proposal is meaningless, essentially a call for the opposition to surrender."

A White House spokesman dismissed the Kerry-Harkin-Ortega plan as nothing more
than "propaganda."

Even the Sandinistas' own Washington lawyer, Paul S. Reichler, said the plan
offered nothing new.

"There is no offer of any kind from the government of Nicaragua today that is
any different from what they've been saying all along," Reichler told the New
York Times. The newspaper also noted that in the plan the Sandinistas made no
commitment to national reconciliation.

Nevertheless, on the floor of the Senate in an emotional April 23 speech, Kerry
presented the document as something new.

"I share with this body the aide-mémoire which was presented to us by President
Ortega," he told his colleagues -- without mentioning his own role and that of
his aide McCall in its drafting.

He took Ortega's word for everything.

"Here," he pronounced to the Senate, "is a guarantee of the security interest
of the United States."

Kerry continued: "My generation, a lot of us grew up with the phrase 'give
peace a chance' as part of a song that captured a lot of people's imagination.
I hope that the president of the United States will give peace a chance."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., who was also
at loggerheads with the administration over Central America, took the unusual
step April 23 of rebuking his colleagues and accusing Kerry and Harkin of
breaking the law and "transgressing" against the Constitution by holding
unauthorized negotiations with a foreign leader.

With Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., heaping praise on
the Managua trip, Goldwater said Kerry and Harkin "negotiated over there ...
and now they're trying to force the president of the United States to negotiate
with the president of Nicaragua. I honestly think two members of our body are
violating the [federal] code when they undertake to negotiate" and are
"usurping a section of the Constitution" giving only the president the right to
negotiate with foreign leaders, Goldwater said. "To transgress against the
Constitution is wrong, wrong, wrong."

Kerry shot back that he was "a veteran of Vietnam who fought and was wounded in
that conflict."

He added that Secretary of State George P. Shultz had encouraged the trip,
quoting from a letter to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, D-Mass., encouraging
"congressional travel to Nicaragua and Central America."

Rebuked by the Secretary of State

But collaboration with the Sandinistas wasn't what Shultz had in mind.

Speaking before several thousand State Department employees two days after the
above exchange on the Senate floor, Shultz took an indirect swipe at Kerry and
Harkin. He zeroed in on policy critics who previously had pooh-poohed what
would happen to Southeast Asia as they demanded and achieved an end to U.S.
support for those embattled peoples.

Referring to "the fate of the people of Cuba, South Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos," Shultz said, "those who assure us that these dire consequences are not
in prospect [in Central America] are some of those who assured us of the same
in Indochina before 1975. The litany of apology for communists, and
condemnation for America and our friends, is beginning again."

"Do we want another Cuba in this hemisphere? How many times must we learn the
same lesson?" asked Shultz. "Broken promises. Communist dictatorships.
Refugees. Widened Soviet influence, this time near our very borders. Here is
your parallel between Vietnam and Central America. Just as the Vietnamese
communists used progressive and nationalist slogans to conceal their
intentions, the Nicaraguan communists employ the slogans of social reform,
nationalism and democracy to obscure their totalitarian goals."

White House spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters, "The very hour the House
was rejecting the aid package [to the Nicaraguan resistance], President Ortega
was going to Moscow to seek funds for his Marxist regime."

White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan went further, accusing congressional
Democrats of "supporting communism" in Central America.

Kerry's political allies duck

Kerry scrambled for political cover. He asked Massachusetts Gov. Michael
Dukakis, under whom he had served as lieutenant governor, to hold a news
conference praising his Nicaragua initiative. Dukakis declined. Kerry asked the
same of his predecessor, retired Sen. Paul Tsongas, D-Mass. Tsongas did not do
so.

Kerry even approached former congressman James Shannon, whom he had defeated in
the Senate primary the year before, asking for a written statement of support.
No statement came, though Shannon, according to the Boston Herald, did give
some radio interviews on Kerry's behalf.

Kerry's staff asked other Massachusetts congressmen "to speak out in the House
in praise of Kerry's trip and meeting with Ortega so that support could be seen
on television through C-SPAN," according to the Herald. "All those contacted
turned him down."

Most of Kerry's Senate colleagues ignored the plan and voted for aid to the
Nicaraguan resistance. The House, however, voted against the aid. Kerry was
thrilled. So was Ortega, who immediately announced a trip to the U.S.S.R. to
petition for $200 million more in Soviet support.

Kerry didn't blame the Sandinistas for going to Moscow, of course. Instead, he
blasted the Reagan administration for rejecting his "peace offer."

Said Kerry, "I think it was a silly and rather immature approach" on the part
of Reagan. He was not surprised that Ortega would respond with a fund-raising
trip to the Soviet Union, saying breathlessly, in the words of a Boston Globe
story, that Reagan "forced Ortega to look to the Soviets for help."

This, then, was the context of John F. Kerry's very first national-security
initiative in the U.S. Senate.

Were his actions those of commitment to principle or crass selfishness?

"He's a shrewd opportunist whose personal political ambitions dictate every
move he makes," Boston Globe columnist David Farrell wrote with specific
reference to Kerry's trip. "The arrogance he often displays came through in his
boastful assertion last week that his conversations with the Sandinistas 'were
longer than any the Secretary of State has had with the Nicaraguan government
in five years.'"

Farrell predicted that, as a result of the Sandinista venture, "a buildup of
Kerry by liberals ... can be expected in the weeks ahead. He'll likely be
getting excellent television coverage to dispel, or at least blunt, Republican
charges that Kerry and the Democratic Party have been groveling at Ortega's
feet in their effort to give House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. one victory
over Reagan. The buildup of Kerry is already under way with commentaries which
suggest that the state's junior senator now has added substance to his widely
recognized flashy style."

His liberal detractors within the Democratic Party, Farrell wrote, had long
accused him of "all style, no substance."

Farrell continued, "The eagerness of Kerry and his party to fall for the
Sandinista government's phony sales pitch to rid the country of Red advisers
has a high disaster potential for the Democrats who are gradually assuming the
label of being soft on communism."

Some Massachusetts Democrats, including then-representative Brian Donnelly,
complained that thanks to people like Kerry, "We face the very real prospect of
being called soft on communism. We certainly don't need that."

Kerry launches his own 'investigation'

Fed by supportive journalists and Washington-based think tanks that supported
the Sandinistas, Kerry put his experience as a former assistant county
prosecutor to work in 1986, launching a full-scale "investigation" of his own
to discredit the Nicaraguan resistance and the Reagan administration.

His probe, alleging an international criminal conspiracy, coincided with
lawsuits against retired Army Gen. John Singlaub and others in what was called
a legal harassment campaign against American opponents of the Sandinista
regime, alleging bizarre international plots.

The cases collapsed under legal scrutiny but made sensational headlines that
fueled Reagan opponents for years. The first significant lawsuit was filed in
May of that year by Tony Avirgan and his wife Martha Honey, two U.S.
journalists who were open Sandinista sympathizers.

Evidence in their lawsuit, much of which Kerry and his staff recycled as public
statements, was based "largely on information from a dead informant whom they
never met and identified only as 'David X,'" the Washington Times' James
Morrison reported at the time. According to Morrison, Avirgan "admitted that he
had never met David X," who "was the source of the information of the entire
conspiracy."

Fed by Honey and Avirgan, who worked closely with his staff, Kerry gave the
false allegations credibility in the press. Despite its accomplishments in
muddying the waters of the emotional Central America debate, the Kerry probe
kept falling apart. One key witness, British soldier of fortune Peter Glibbery,
swore that Kerry staffers bribed him to accuse Sandinista opponents of crimes,
only to recant the next day. Others, including a former French soldier named
Claude Chaffard, said that Kerry staffers promised to help him out with U.S.
visa problems and paid him money while he cooperated.

Kerry's staff engaged in bitter battles with the Republican majority staff on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanding full hearings. Halfway
attempts to allow Kerry to air his concerns on the panel failed to appease.

Bribery allegations persisted.

"Sen. John Kerry's attempts to prove criminal activity by the Nicaraguan
resistance have stretched from California to Costa Rica, cost thousands of
dollars paid by one of his aides, and have drawn allegations that he offered
potential witnesses money or immigration favors to testify against the
anticommunist rebels," Morrison reported in the Times in August 1986.

"A Justice Department investigation discovered nothing of significance, but
gave Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, a platform to denounce the resistance
and ask hostile questions about U.S. policy in Central America."

Signed appeal by 'illegal racket'

Kerry personally signed a letter used in a direct-mail appeal for an outside
group to raise funds to continue digging up the dirt for his "investigation."
The group, headed by former ambassador Robert E. White, called itself the
Commission on United States-Central American Relations, which operated out of a
Capitol Hill town house.

The commission, a front of the International Center for Development Policy,
included as members open supporters of the Sandinistas, the Cuban government of
Fidel Castro, and the communist FMLN guerrillas of El Salvador, according to
commission literature.

"It was a racket that was probably illegal at the time, and certainly would be
illegal now," a former Senate staffer with firsthand knowledge of the
investigation tells Insight. Kerry wrote a letter on U.S. Senate letterhead,
praising White and his response "to our call for help on the Contra
investigation." White's group in turn reprinted the letter as part of its
fund-raising package. The donation pledge card had a picture of Kerry's face
with a quote exhorting recipients to send in their money.

Receipts from credit cards and money orders, obtained by Insight and separately
by the Washington Times, showed that White's organization and Kerry's
foreign-policy aide McCall paid the expenses of the witnesses. Neither Kerry
nor the witnesses publicly disclosed these expenses.

Kerry's office periodically released statements and draft staff reports to keep
his allegations in the headlines. One of the reports, issued in October 1986,
was authored by staffers Jonathan Weiner and Ron Rosenblith and alleged
widespread drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan resistance. The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee created a subcommittee to investigate these theories.

Then, in November, a new and unrelated development broke: that elements in the
Reagan administration had tried to arm the contras through a deal to swap arms
for hostages with the mullahs in Iran. This became known as the Iran-Contra
scandal and added new seriousness and credibility to Kerry's allegations.

FBI agents accused Kerry of damaging probe

Kerry won key collaboration from some conservatives by alleging that the
contras were a major hub in an international cocaine-smuggling operation. In so
doing, the senator damaged an FBI investigation of Colombia's Medellin cartel.

Aides to Kerry "severely damaged a federal drug investigation" in the summer of
1986 "by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug
smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance," the Washington Times reported in
January 1987, citing federal law-enforcement officials.

The FBI repeatedly had warned the staffers to back off, saying they were
endangering an ongoing federal antidrug operation. An FBI informant became
"spooked" and stopped cooperating after Kerry's staff interfered, the officials
said, and changed her story to include the contras as part of the plot.

"She got spooked off by all the Kerry thing, by going to Massachusetts and
feeling she had to be protected, and that was that," an official said. The
informant would not make herself available to the FBI to discuss her previously
unstated allegations against the Nicaraguan resistance.

Other drug traffickers started talking to Kerry's staff.

"These individuals are selling a story to Congress and to the media that they
have concocted to have their sentences reduced or to have their cases
dismissed," a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the New York Times.

They never mentioned the contras or the White House until the Iran-Contra
affair broke. "They had plenty of opportunities to tell their story in court
and none of them did."

Kerry's conspiracy theories unravel

By early 1987, even with the Iran-Contra scandal unfolding against the Reagan
administration, Kerry's own drug-conspiracy theories continued to crumble.

The DEA and Justice Department had dismissed the claims of one of Kerry's star
witnesses, accused cocaine trafficker Jorge Morales, that the CIA and
Nicaraguan resistance forces were involved in large-scale drug trafficking --
an allegation that Kerry used in a widely publicized staff report.

Morales himself offered to recant what he told Kerry and say he fabricated much
of his story. As part of his plea bargain, Morales was free to testify to
Kerry's investigators, but the plea bargain also stated that he would be
further penalized if he gave any false, misleading or incomplete information.
Morales never testified to Kerry.

The senator had no sooner lost one of his star witnesses than the Washington
Times revealed that Kerry had concealed evidence of Sandinista drug trafficking
and had deleted information from his staff report of the previous October to
pin the blame on the Sandinistas' U.S.-backed opponents. As with several news
stories that discredited Kerry's investigations, the senator refused to speak
to journalists seeking to question him.

"Law-enforcement officials and congressional sources said the witness incident
was typical of interference in Justice Department investigations by Kerry
staff," the Times reported.

Kerry's office issued a written statement instead, in which the senator made no
comment about the report his office had ruined the FBI investigation. The
statement claimed that he had "repeatedly sought the cooperation of the Justice
Department and the FBI," but that the federal agencies did not reciprocate.

By that point, though, his investigation was under full-scale attack.

"Sen. John Kerry is coming under increasing fire from federal law-enforcement
officials," the Associated Press reported. "The officials have said Kerry's
work was based largely on unsubstantiated allegations from informants, most of
whom already have been interviewed by federal law-enforcement officials and
some of whom have previously been found to be unreliable. A number of them are
charged with various crimes or are in jail."

The Kerry team then muddied the issue further by alleging that the Justice
Department had meddled in a federal drug probe to cover up politically
embarrassing information, and by trying to connect drug dealers to then-Vice
President George H.W. Bush, who was campaigning at the time to succeed Reagan
as president of the United States.

Kerry appeared to be using his subcommittee to throw mud at Bush. In May 1988,
Bush accused Kerry of leaking unsubstantiated allegations that his office
approved drugs-for-weapons deals to arm the contras. No evidence surfaced to
confirm the claims, and Kerry and his staff squelched testimony to refute them.


Kerry refused to let a former CIA operative, who had testified at a closed
hearing of the senator's subcommittee, make his testimony public so he could
clear his name. Coincidentally that former operative, Cuban-American Felix
Rodriguez, was being pinned as Bush's connection to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Rodriguez repeatedly asked Kerry and subcommittee investigator Jack Blum to
release his testimony, so he could defend himself from accusations that he had
arranged an illegal drug deal.

"I have been trying desperately to testify publicly," Rodriguez said in June
1988, saying that Kerry and Blum repeatedly reneged on agreements to release
his earlier closed testimony.

He suspected Kerry did it for political purposes. Sen. Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, defended Rodriguez
against the allegations and confirmed the former CIA operative's version of
events.

McConnell publicly accused Kerry of abusing the subcommittee to damage Bush and
to help the flagging presidential campaign of Kerry's longtime friend and ally
Dukakis.

The politicization of the current 9/11 commission, and the attempts by
Democratic partisans to prove that the current president, George W. Bush,
failed to prevent the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he could have stopped them,
seems to be a repeat of the Kerry subcommittee's modus operandi of 1987-88.

According to the Boston Globe, McConnell "said Kerry had given credibility to
witnesses who were critical of President Reagan and Vice President George Bush
but failed to summon others to testify who would rebut the criticisms. Also,
McConnell said Kerry had purposely held the hearings during periods when the
Senate was not in session in order to limit the number of committee members who
might attend the hearings and test the truthfulness of the witnesses."

McConnell told the Globe, "I think the integrity of the Senate investigative
process and the objectivity, fairness and balance of this particular effort
have been compromised for political purposes."


J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight Online.

Kerry used enemy to win battle at home
Pact with communist Sandinistas 'trademark' of his statecraft

Posted: May 18, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By J. Michael Waller
2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc.

In his first major foreign-policy action as a U.S. senator nearly 20 years ago,
John Kerry accused the United States of "funding terrorism."