Too many forked tongues

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

The Reagan Administration is learning what the craftier masters of statecraft know by instinct. Never debate a prospec- tive war, get your country into the conflict as quickly and with as few words as possi- ble, then people will rally to your patriotic fait accompli. Earlier presidents have understood that, despite the bluster, Americans are burdened with as little mar- tial ardour as the citizens of any other coun- try. Like the rest of the world, they must be pushed into their blood baths. In that vein a respectable historian has just published a book arguing that Franklin Roosevelt did have foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour but said nothing, thinking it would be beaten off while affording him the casus belli he needed to get America in- to the fight.

Be that as it may, the President's dif- ficulties have been compounded by the decision to mount a Penguin Island opera‘ Lion in which the country is to be inundated with evidence that the insurgents in El Salvador and the government in Managua, Nicaragua, are controlled a) by the Rus- sians, b) by Castro and c) by home-grown native Marxist-Leninists. You might have thought that after the release and demoli- tion of last year's White Paper on El Salvador proving these three points, somebody in the White House would have remembered that in politics the best evidence is no evidence. The strongest case is built on simple, bold-faced assertion without any offerings of fact.

Never was the maxim better demonstrated than in Washington these past days. The more evidence the Ad- ministration offered the goofier the Ad- ministration looked. Admiral Bobby R. In- man, the Deputy Director of the Central In- telligence Agency, called a press conference at the State Department. It is difficult to

take a man whose first name is Bobby seriously, but the Admiral came on strong enough to make sceptics suspend disbelief; `I'm Bob Inman.' (Note the Admiral also Is aware of drawbacks of his Bobbydorn.) `I'm here this afternoon because I'm angrY. I'm concerned about ensuring that you, and through you the public, have a clear and thorough understanding of what's been worrying those of us in the intelligence community for months now. That's the military build-up in Nicaragua and what it portends for this country.'

If memory serves, this was the first occa- sion that the CIA had dropped all pretence, public or private, of being dispassionate and detached intelligence analysts in favour of going on the stump for an Administra• tion's foreign policy. Bobby relinquished the podium to all interpreter of aerial reconnaissance photographs who mounted an exhibition of enlarged pictures which, if they proved nothing else, showed that the United States is regularly and routinely violating Nicaraguan airspace. But what the hell, that's better than occupying the country something American Marines did more or less continuously from 1913 to 1933. (111 1928 a local patriot by the name of SandIno tried to kick the Americans out. He failed but lent his name to the Sandinistas.) With pointer in hand, the photographic gentleman told his audience things like,' 'These are two Soviet ETR-64 armoured personnel carriers, Soviet-built, to carry a squad of infantry into battle under ar- moured cover.' For war-lovers it was distill' bing information without a doubt. But the less serious giggled as the speaker tapped Ills pointer on a picture and told the groufh `There's the Soviet physical training area equipped with chin-bars and other types of equipment to exercise the forces, and a run' ning track.' Next the Russians will have

Parallel bars and gymnastic rings throughout the entire isthmus. Will it end anywhere short of the Olympics?

There were also pictures of the newly elongated runway at the Managua airport, a runway which 'can accommodate any jet fighter aircraft today'. This sounded 'lightening until it was learnt a few hours afterwards that the airfield improvement had been paid for by an American grant Made during the Carter Administration. Lastly, there were photographs showing that the Sandinistas had evacuated the Meskito Indian areas and burned their villages along the Coco River. Given the three centuries of unblemished goodwill between the Indians of North America and the European immigrants, it ill behoves American officials to pose as the friend of any Indian anywhere in the Western hemi- sPhere. But when it comes to talking about forced removals, we do not remember how the US Army marched the Seminole tribe On a death trek of nearly 2,000 miles from their Florida homeland to Oklahoma. Me thinkum Admiral Bobby, he talkum with heal) big forked tongue. The Nicaraguans countered by saying that they were uprooting the Meskitos because their home territory was becoming a battleground where hostile forces were be- ing infiltrated from Honduras. No sooner was that argument made than some validity was accorded it by a rash of news stories about the arming and training in California of ancien regime Nicaraguans. Immediately after which came television stories showing men described as American soldiers in Hon- duras training irregulars for infiltration and sabotage across the border. Major news- papers ran stories asserting that the CIA had appropriated millions of dollars to sup- Port these efforts. The Administration could not bring itself to deny the reports that it was engaged in acts of war against Nicaragua. Instead, it has alternated bet- ween insisting that the country has already become a de facto Communist state and maintaining that the problem is that it is supplying the El Salvadorian guerrillas with Military aid. The Secretary of State promised incon- trovertible evidence, and in short order a 19-Year-old Nicaraguan, a certain Orlando Jose Tardencillas Espinosa, was flown up ti° Washington from El Salvador where he had been captured fighting with the in- surgents. Young Senor Tardencillas was, reporters were told, going to tell how he'd been sent to Cuba and Ethiopia for military training and then ordered into El Salvador to lead the Marxist-Leninists to victory. , Apparently nobody in the CIA or elsewhere in the intelligence community was able to recognise that the Tardencillas yarn was unbelievable. Any poliCe detective who 9ilestioned the boy for 30 minutes would have realised this. Neither the Russians nor the Nicaraguans have the money to ship 19-Year-old cannon fodder across an ocean .arid a

continent to Ethiopia, of all

,...benighted places, for military training. The Ethiopians or the Russians or the whoevers

providing the instruction would be flown to Nicaragua. In fact that's what Admiral Bobby at his press conference said the Rus- sians were doing.

Nonetheless this teenager was the star performer at a State Department press con- ference where he stunned the Government's flunkeys by saying the official story was horse feathers. He said he had gone to El Salvador absolutely on his own where he had indeed fought with the revolutionaries, been captured and been beaten and tor- tured into concocting the story about his Ethiopian military education.

Many giggles and guffaws, but not from the President, who made a revealing remark about the incident. Instead of complaining about the rotten staff work in his State Department, he wanted to know if it had occurred to some of the wise guys in the press that maybe the kid was a set-up, a propaganda booby trap planted in El Salvador to be captured so that he could re- cant the whole thing on American televi- sion. Such a convoluted idea had not occur- rred to the press or to anyone else, but if the gentlemen running Nicaragua are able to pull off such schemes, they are smarter than Castro, and he has made every American president from Kennedy to Carter look mentally handicapped.

The Reagan remark shows him to be a man whose ideological passions will make him force all data to fit his preconceptions. This is a brain-hardened politician who does not revise his opinions on the receipt of new information. For Ronald Reagan the last, the one and only good revolution took place in 1776, and any uprising since has been a conspiracy against duly con- stituted and legitimate authority. For him the possibility of a popular upheaval, an in- surrection by a populace demanding a revi- sion of the social contract, does not exist.

The soberest opinion holds that the Nicaraguans are not yet communists, but that they will be if the United States con- tinues to spurn .Mexico's offers to mediate and persists in acts of war and subversion against the government in Managua. As for the revolutionaries in El Salvador, they aren't bourgeois parliamentarians, that's for sure. The President of the Revolu- tionary Front, Senor Guillermo Ungo, has recently been touring the United States. He struck me as a social democrat in a Marxist- Leninist shark pond. I had the premonition , that, two days after the Revolution trium- phs, this gentle and moving man will be shot. Whether that entitles the United States to direct El Salvador's internal af- fairs depends on what you make of the legitimacy of Russia's credentials to do the same in Poland.