Overt Actions, Covert Worries

By KURT ANDERSEN

Washington and Managua exchange charges and expulsions

For a country its size, Nicaragua set a lot of swivel chairs spinning in the U.S. last week. The same day that three American diplomats expelled from Nicaragua landed at Washington's National Airport, 21 Nicaraguan consular officials were ordered to leave the U.S. by the Reagan Administration. That same day as well, a House committee voted to cut off covert aid to anti-Sandinista guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and based in Honduras. On Friday, U.S. Special Envoy Richard Stone stopped in Nicaragua to meet with members of the junta and the Marxist-led Sandinista directorate. Said Stone, in Spanish, on his arrival: "I am interested in carrying out profound conversations."

These latest convolutions in U.S.-Nicaraguan relations began on Sunday night at the U.S. embassy residence in Managua. A reception had been going on for hours, but when he knocked on the door at 10:30 p.m., Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto was not arriving fashionably late for a nightcap. He handed the Americans a curt note declaring that there were three spies on the embassy staff--Political Affairs Counselor Linda Pfeifel, First Secretary David Greig and Second Secretary Ermila Rodriguez--and they were hereby persona non grata. The trio, D'Escoto said, were to leave Nicaragua within 24 hours.

Then on Monday, Nicaraguan officials staged a curious show in Managua. Security Chief Lenin Cerna charged that Pfeifel, Greig and Rodriguez had been trying to assemble "a counterrevolutionary network to carry out attacks on our leaders." A Nicaraguan army lieutenant described how Greig and others, by providing invisible ink and a transmitter camouflaged in an ice chest, had tried to turn him into a traitor.

The star witness was a Foreign Ministry employee, Marlene Moncada, who claimed to have been working as a double agent: she said a CIA agent recruited her last year in Honduras, where she was stationed at the Nicaraguan embassy. Cerna showed off an espionage kit allegedly provided Moncada by the CIA (Sony short-wave radio, edible paper, hollow Mayan book ends containing codebooks), as well as photographs of her meeting with Rodriguez and a color videotape montage of various other rendezvous. (The Sandinistas displayed a funny show-biz bent: the video agitprop had a musical sound track appropriate for a spy movie.)

The most bizarre artifact presented at the press conference was a bottle of Benedictine liqueur laced with a poison called thallium. Its ultimate recipient, Cerna charged, was to have been Foreign Minister D'Escoto, who is a Roman Catholic priest. "It sounds like a movie plot," Cerna admitted, "but it isn't."

It was difficult to imagine just what it was. The CIA has hatched farfetched assassination plots before, most famously the exploding cigar meant for Cuba's Fidel Castro. But harming D'Escoto would not make sense. The Foreign Minister, who often travels abroad to dispense the Sandinista line, is derided even by comrades as "the Flying Nun." He wields no real power within the government, and his overwrought rhetoric sometimes drives away potential supporters. "D'Escoto is the man who loses a friend a day for Nicaragua," said a State Department official. "Why should we eliminate him?" Declared Secretary of State George Shultz: "The charges have no merit, and some of the physical evidence is ridiculous."

Various observers suspect that the Sandinista directorate, seeking a new excuse for a domestic crackdown, invented the plot. Last week several leaders of the country's Conservative Democratic Party were jailed. But political opponents have been arrested in the past without recourse to elaborate spy charges. A plausible explanation is that radicals within the leadership trumped up the charges to dramatize concretely their alarm over U.S. efforts to destabilize the government.

Ordinarily, faced with the expulsion of three officials, the U.S. would have retaliated tit for tat, expelling three diplomats of the offending country. Instead, 21 officials stationed in the New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco consulates of Nicaragua were ordered out and their offices shut. Both consul generals in California, for instance, had lived in the U.S. since 1961, and left behind spouses who are U.S. citizens. New Orleans Consul General Augustin Alfaro, U.S.-educated and a resident of the city for ten years, decided to stay: just before the Administration's departure deadline she requested (and doubtless will be granted) political asylum.

There was apparently no dispute within the Administration about the wisdom of the seven-for-one U.S. retaliation. The practical effect will be to dump the work of the consulates, processing visas and trade documents, onto Nicaragua's inexperienced Washington embassy staff. The six closed consulates, the State Department claimed somewhat unpersuasively, had been used "for intelligence operations."

Stone's visit to Managua went ahead as planned. Both sides were courteous. "We have had serious talks during this intense visit here," said Stone on departure. And, back in Washington, no diplomat among the 13 at Nicaragua's embassy was expelled. Insisted Shultz: "We don't have any thought of breaking diplomatic relations."

That was certainly intended to reassure Congress more than Managua. Since the replacement last month of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders, a move seen by some as a triumph for hardliners, congressional Democrats have grown even more uneasy about U.S. support of armed attacks against the Nicaraguan government. Thus last week the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voting almost entirely along party lines, passed a Democratic measure that would stop the millions of dollars in covert military aid now going to anti-Sandinista guerrillas.

While such a bill stands almost no chance in the Senate, it could pass in the full House despite strong Administration opposition. Even in the Senate, the Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Chairman Barry Goldwater, has approved a measure designed to provide Congress with a mechanism to end funding for all covert operations against Nicaragua. A compromise with the Reagan Administration is not out of the question. But some kind of direct congressional veto over the Administration's covert actions seems closer to reality than ever.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by June Erlick/ Managua and Johanna McGeary/ Washington

With reporting by June Erlick, Johanna McGeary This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.