Challenging the CIA's Evidence

The Reagan Administration has long claimed that many of the arms used by rebel forces in El Salvador are supplied by the Marxist-led Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Washington justifies its support of the antigovernment contra forces largely as a way to stanch this flow. Last week a former CIA analyst made the unsettling charge that for the past three years the agency has been unable to produce hard evidence that such shipments are still occurring.

David MacMichael, 56, who until April 1983 served as a CIA estimates officer specializing in Central American and Caribbean affairs, claims that intelligence reports of cross-border arms shipments "fell off to nothing" after the failure of the Salvadoran guerrillas' "final offensive" in the spring of 1981. Now, he says, he believes the Administration has "systematically misrepresented Nicaraguan involvement in the supply of arms to Salvadoran guerrillas to justify its efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government." Secretary of State George Shultz says of MacMichael, "He must be living in some other world."