The case of the Danish assassin - failure of US and others to investigate attack against Nicaraguan Contra leader Eden Pastora

National Review, May 24, 1993 by Martin Arostegui

The Left knows who trired to kill the popular Comandante Cero. Or does it?

SPECIAL PROSECUTOR Lawrence Walsh spent six years going after every Reagan Administration Cabinet or intelligence official who might have had anything to do with aiding the Nicaraguan Contras when doing so was allegedly forbidden by Congress. But the conduct of the Marxist side in the Central American conflict has escaped any such scrutiny, and a screen of disinformation has been permitted to obscure the truth about a terrorist atrocity committed in one of the closing battles of the Cold War.

In June 1984, a bomb exploded at a press conference held by Contra leader Eden Pastora ("Comandante Cero") at La Penca, a jungle outpost straddling Nicaragua's border with Costa Rica. Pastora himself was only slightly wounded, but a U.S. newswoman was killed and a score of international journalists were seriously injured. The bomber--who posed as a Danish news photographer--was also wounded, but managed to escape before his identity was established. A book, a television documentary, and even a law suit (filed by the left-wing Christic Institute) have tried to pin the blame for the attack on the usual suspects of left-wing conspiracy theories: anti-Castro Cubans, CIA agents, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, with even a "right-wing Libyan" thrown in for good measure. But fresh evidence supports a more obvious conclusion: that the bombing was commissioned by the Sandinista government with the assistance of Cuba in a bid to decapitate the anti-Communist resistance movement.

The CIA assassination theory was promoted in the book In Search of the Assassin by British journalist Susie Morgan, who was critically wounded in the bombing and had to undergo months of hospitalization and several operations to save her life. She was steered toward the CIA theory by an American couple freelancing as journalists in Costa Rica, Tony and Martha Avirgan. According to the U.S. Ambassador in Costa Rica at the time, Curtin Winsor, the Avirgans were suspected of being paid agents of the Sandinistas. Tony would openly boast about his efforts, during his student days, to sabotage U.S. Air Force transports moving supplies to overseas bases. Costa Rican sources maintained that money had been seen changing hands between Tony Avirgan and officials of the Nicaraguan Embassy.

Miss Morgan quotes a memo she received from Martha Avirgan just as her investigation was getting under way: "We have now solved the La Penca case, basically we were right all along. It was a CIA plot involving John Hull [an American rancher in Costa Rica with strong anti-Communist feelings who cooperated in efforts to aid the Contras], Cubans from Miami and northern FDN [Frente Democratico Nicaraguense] Contras. The bomber is a right-wing anti-Qaddafi Libyan named Amac Galil."

In addition to her own book, Susie Morgan also worked on a British film documentary about La Penca, produced by a woman named Judy Jackson. Miss Morgan describes their trek through Central America in search of the mystery bomber. At one point the frustrated Miss Jackson bursts into tears as one of the many con men approaching them with "evidence" about Amac Galil's CIA connection disappears wtih $2,000 and cannot be found again.

The two women had chosen to disregard the first thing Pastora had told them, according to Miss Morgan's own account of their interview with the former Contra leader:

Two weeks before the press conference when he had been deep inside Nicaragua, Pastora had been contacted by "Hansen," the bomber himself. Hansen had put through a call on Pastora's radio telephone and had offered him money for an interview and photo session, something that no professional journalist would do. And then, a month after the explosion, something had kept niggling at his mind. He thought he had seen the Dane somewhere before. Searching his memory, he thought Hansen may have been a member of the hit squad that had assassinated Somoza (the Nicaraguan president overthrown by the Sandinistas) in Asuncion, Paraguay (where he had gone into exile in 1980). Somoza's limousine had been blown to bits in broad daylight on a main street. The official Sandinista line was that the operation was carried out by left-wing Argentine guerrillas independently of the Sandinistas. The unofficial version was that although the operation had involved Argentine guerrillas the whole thing had been authorized by Managua. Pastora would be likely to have known some of the members of such a team through his former role as Sandinista deputy defense minister.

"I nonetheless found this story unlikely," Miss Morgan asserts, and moves on to question Pastora about the problems he was having with his CIA backers and with other Contra leaders who were pressuring him to join his small force with the much larger FDN. Pastora's resistance to these appeals was, according to the Avirgans, the true motive behind the plot to kill him, which was supposedly hatched in minute detail at John Hull's Costa Rican ranch between the anti-Qaddafi Libyan and his CIA paymasters as the anti-Castro Cubans looked on.