lkk@mit-eddie.UUCP (Larry Kolodney) (06/14/84)
This story comes from the N.Y.Times, Monday, June 11, 1984:
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
WASHINGTON - A year ago David C. MacMichael worked for the Central
Intelligence Agency analyzing political and military developments in
Central America. Two months ago, MacMichael, no longer a government
employee, marched in front of the United States Embassy in Managua,
Nicaragua, to protest CIA support of rebels opposed to the Sandinista
regime.
MacMichael's metamorphosis, the sort that intelligence officials
dread, has led him to challenge one of the foundations of the Reagan
administration's policy in Central America: the assumption that
Nicaragua is spoiling to export revolution to its neighbors.
''The whole picture that the administration has presented of
Salvadoran insurgent operations being planned, directed and supplied
from Nicaragua is simply not true,'' he said in recent interviews.
''There has not been a successful interdiction, or a verified report,
of arms moving from Nicaragua to El Salvador since April 1981.''
MacMichael, the first CIA analyst in recent years to make a public
break with the agency, said that before he left the CIA last July he
had access to the most sensitive intelligence about Nicaragua,
including arms shipments to El Salvador. Based on that, he said, he
concluded that ''the administration and the CIA have systematically
misrepresented Nicaraguan involvement in the supply of arms to
Salvadoran guerrillas to justify its efforts to overthrow the
Nicaraguan government.''
The charge, like the accusation that American commanders in Vietnam
distorted data about the numbers of the enemy's forces, is likely to
provoke more heated debate. Since the administration began focusing
attention on Central America in 1981, Congress has questioned giving
funds to the CIA for support of Nicaraguan rebels. At first it asked
whether the United States was indirectly trying to overthrow the
Sandinista government. But, after disclosures about CIA roles in the
mining of Nicaraguan harbors and other questions involving the
verification of arms shipments, the debate has become a question of
whether the United States should support the rebels at all. The House
has voted twice in the last year to cut off aid to the rebels.
In his nationally televised speech on Central America in May,
President Reagan said: ''Weapons, supplies and funds are shipped from
the Soviet bloc to Cuba, from Cuba to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to
the Salvadoran guerrillas. These facts were confirmed last year by
the House intelligence committee.''
The committee, which suggested the United States no longer support
Nicaraguan rebels as a way to stop the arms shipments, said in a
report that ''a major portion of the arms and other material sent by
Cuba and other Communist countries to the Salvadoran insurgents
transits Nicaragua with the permission and assistance of the
Sandinists.''
Well aware that the weight of official opinion runs contrary to his
contentions, MacMichael insisted that the House report and Reagan's
comments were based on old intelligence information.
While it is impossible independently to verify MacMichael's account,
both administration officials and members of Congress familiar with
intelligence data on Nicaragua suggested that the issue of arms
shipments to El Salvador was susceptible to differing interpretations.
''It is true we do not have shipments we have interdicted,'' one
intelligence official said. ''But we do have numerous sightings, we
do have intelligence showing beyond question flights at night by
small, unmarked planes from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and we have
tracked boats crossing the Gulf of Fonseca. We know from monitoring
radio communications that these planes and boats carry weapons.''
MacMichael argues that such intelligence information falls short of
definitive proof. ''It's hard to believe, if we know so much about
all these shipments, that we haven't been able to capture one plane
or boat,'' he said. ''It's even hard to believe that in the last two
years one of the planes hasn't crashed or one crate of guns hasn't
been dropped mistakenly into a tree.''
When he raised these doubts with his superiors at the CIA,
MacMichael said, they assured him that there was definitive
intelligence. ''A senior aide to Casey told me, 'It's there, you just
don't know about it,' '' he recalled. William J. Casey is the
director of Central Intelligence.
Although the CIA would not officially comment on MacMichael or his
accusations, intelligence officials privately confirmed that he had
worked as an agency analyst from 1981 to 1983. They said his contract
was not renewed because of questions about the quality of his work.
Other agency officials said MacMichael was let go because he had
repeatedly challenged established policy and pressed officials to
produce intelligence data to support their conclusions about
Nicaragua.
The CIA has not faced a defection like MacMichael's since the 1970s
when a number of former employees produced books highly critical of
the agency, including ''The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence'' by
Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks and ''Decent Interval'' by Frank
Snepp. The dissent ebbed after the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that
in publishing his book about CIA activities in Vietnam Snepp had
breached a legitimate secrecy agreement with the agency and that he
must turn over to the government all earnings from the book.
MacMichael, who signed a secrecy agreement when he joined the CIA,
said he had submitted an article about his views on Nicaragua to the
CIA for pre-publication review. He also said he would not disclose
classified information. The secrecy agreement requires former
employees to clear any manuscripts, speeches or other accounts about
intelligence matters that they intend to make public.
However, MacMichael said, he felt compelled to express his concerns
before the review was completed for fear that President Reagan's
policies in Central America were moving the United States toward ''a
major military intervention.'' He said his lawyers had advised him he
could comment ''extemporaneously'' about his experiences.
Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department consultant who
turned against the war in Vietnam and made the government's secret
history of American involvement there available to newspapers in
1971, MacMichael is fully committed to opposing government policy.
Since he left the CIA last July, he has traveled twice to Nicaragua,
spending a total of more than three months there. He said he talked
with Sandinista officials, spent a weekend picking cotton, joined the
weekly demonstrations by Americans outside the United States Embassy
and spent most of his time touring the country ''to see what it is
really like.''
He said he did not discuss intelligence information with anyone in
Nicaragua and was not asked by officials there to publicize his
differences with the CIA
MacMichael, 56 years old, joined the CIA in 1981 after a varied
career that included a stint in the Marine Corps, a period of
academic research and teaching and 11 years service at SRI
International, a California consulting company, where he specialized
in government contracts on counterinsurgency strategy that included a
1966-69 tour in Thailand.
Not long after his arrival at the CIA, MacMichael said, he was asked
to prepare a paper on political and social conditions in Nicaragua.
After reviewing intelligence and State Department reports going back
to 1979, he said he found that ''I could not accept the conclusion,
held widely within the administration, that this was a
well-established Marxist-Leninist state.''
MacMichael said that despite ''a surprising degree of support'' for
his position from colleagues, the paper was never published as an
official agency report. ''It made them too uncomfortable,'' he said.
Later, he said, he attended an interagency meeting to discuss CIA
plans to support Nicaraguan rebels. ''Although the stated objective
was to interdict arms going into El Salvador,'' he said, ''there was
hardly any discussion of the arms traffic, the routes it followed,
the amount involved, the ways it could be stopped and the impact
interdiction might have on the guerrillas in El Salvador.
''I couldn't understand this failure,'' he said, ''until months
later when I realized, like everyone else, that arms interdiction had
never been a serious objective.''
When the CIA first notified Congress in 1981 about its intent to
support Nicaraguan rebels, it said that blocking arms shipments to El
Salvador was the principal goal. In 1982, after Congress pressed for
evidence of arms shipments that had been halted, the agency revised
the justification to include harassment of the Nicaraguan government.
A devout Catholic, MacMichael said he had consulted church officials
and hesitated a long time before approaching a reporter, wondering
whether he was doing the right thing. ''I'm trying to be a patriot,''
he said. ''I think Congress and the public should know that within
the CIA there is pressure to bend information to fit policy. It would
be a terrible tragedy if we ended up going to war in Central
America.''
nyt-06-11-84 1514edt
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