CIA psychology
Christopher Hitchens
iwas more stirred than I can easily say by the news that a brigade of the CIA's Nicaraguan mercenary army has named itself the Jeane Kirkpatrick Task Force. Here at last is a banner, a blazing guerdon, under which a brave man might cheerfully die. Here is the answer to those ragged squadrons which defended the River Ebro and Madrid University under the forgotten names of Thaelmann, Gramsci, Abraham Lincoln and Clem Attlee. The counter- revolution has found its Pasionaria. The Sandinistas shall not pass. The gesture must have a special poignancy for those 'advisers' from the Argentine army, to Whom the very name Kirkpatrick recalls the days of martial glory and sacrifice. Many a whiskered cheek in the old guard must be wet with honest tears.
Mrs Kirkpatrick is busy elsewhere this Month, manoeuvring for a better job in the new administration and giving out that nothing less than the post of National Security adviser will serve. She will prob- ably not have time to visit the trenches, as Major Attlee did, and give the salute. But this does not mean that her name will not be on the lips of the contras. For it was John Kirkpatrick of the CIA who, under the nom de guerre of Tayacan, penned the non-famous pamphlet Psychological Oper- ations in Guerrilla Warfare. Everybody now knows about the manual, with its relentless emphasis on sabotage, murder and intimidation. It is no longer pretended in Washington that the Project did not have official endorsement.
ven the President's powers of emollience and euphemism have been defeated. Not many people believed him when he said that the word 'neutralised' in the manual Meant 'you just say to the fellow who's sitting there in the office, "you're not in the office anymore." In fact, officialdom has come up with one of the most ingenious explanations I },ave heard in a long time. It seems that, oefore 'Mr Kirkpatrick went on his fact- finding tour, the contra forces were behav- ,ing in rather an undisciplined fashion. • they took no prisoners, made no distinc- ton between government soldiers and civi- lians, did not observe the difference be- tween meum and tuum and were immodest With the local womenfolk. This intelligence is said to have come as a shock to the CIA, which had invested Millions of dollars in arming and equipping the lads. It did not come as a shock to anybody who had known General Somo- za's National Guard, from which most of the lads had been recruited. Here I am relying on the testimony of Edgar Chamor- ro, spokesman for the Nicaraguan Demo- cratic Force (FDN), the principal contra organisation. In recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Cha- morro disarmingly admitted that the Kirk- patrick manual was supposed to raise the standards of the FDN. There was so much random killing, rape and looting, he said, that it was thought best to canalise and tame it. He instanced the lamentable case of 'Commander Suicide', the former Somoza officer who had gone 'on a ram- page' in Nueva Segovia province last year. The rampage consisted of forced recruit- ment, public executions, kidnapping and rape. Perhaps seeking to reassure his hear- ers, Chamorro told them that 'Commander Suicide' was later 'executed' by the Argen- tine military advisers attached to his com- mand. One is naturally impressed by the record of anybody who could revolt the Argentine army.
Chamorro had more reassurances to offer. He spoke in glowing terms of Kirk- patrick's team spirit. 'At the beginning of each course, Juanito would give each student a new set of clothes and a baseball cap, and brought them food. They had a lot of respect for him.' He evidently returned this respect because, according to a report in front of me:
In a speech he gave in one class along the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, Chamorro re- called, Kirkpatrick equated the Nicaraguan rebels with the Irish Republican Army, which was fighting a similar battle to rid its country of British domination.
Not a bad little analogy in its way, except that the IRA almost certainly have more popular support than the FDN. Enoch Powell, please note.
By the time he had finished 'reassuring' them, Chamorro's Capitol Hill auditors had aged at least five years apiece. It has to be remembered that Congress votes money for the FDN for the sole purpose of preventing arms shipments fron Nicaragua to El Salvador. American law forbids the use of that money for the overthrow of the Sandinista government, and Ronald Reagan has several times said publicly that there is no such intention on the part of his Administration. Chamorro was asked by his patrons on the hill if it was his purpose to overthrow the government in Managua. He replied that this was his sole aim in life. He was then asked if his CIA advisers knew of or approved this objective. He replied that they never talked about any- thing else. Never talked about anything else, Senor Chamorro? Well, replied this candid man, the Yankee advisers told them that they should tell the Congress another story, or funds would dry up. The House
Intelligence Committee is not made up of bleeding hearts, but this was a bit strong.
One possible response to this fiasco is already being offered by the harder kind of conservative. Why not come out and say that communism can't be fought with kid gloves, that the stuff about 'interdicting' arms shipments to El Salvador is all bull- shit and hypocrisy, and that the FDN should be given enough help to finish the job? Why not indeed, especially since, shorn of pretence, that is already the Administration's position? The problem is that the contras are no good. They have been trained only to fight civilians, and only for money. They squabble over the loot. It would take them a thousand years to get to Managua, and they would stand no chance of forming a government once they did get there. If the United States wants to remove the Sandinistas, it will have to do so itself. It will also, subse- quently, have to devise some sort of government for the place. That last prob- lem, which is probably the thornier of the two, is the one which gets the least attention. The Nicaraguans may be fed up with many aspects of Sandinista rule, but they won't wear a new Somoza. And a new Somoza is exactly what the geniuses at the CIA have come up with. In their excite- ment at having guerrillas of their own, and at being able to borrow from the classic works of Che Guevara and Carlos Marighela, the Kirkpatricks have over- looked the obvious.
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