Case reopened - investigation into the 1984 assassination of Nicaraguan contra leader Eden Pastora Gomez

National Review, Dec 13, 1993 by Martha Honey

So who did try to kill Comandante Cero? The Left, the CIA, neither--or both?

MARTIN AROSTEGUI, in his piece "The La Penca Bombing: The Case of the Danish Assassin" (May 24), almost hit the bull's eye. He came close to accurately determining the true identity of the man who, posing as a Danish photographer, planted a bomb at a 1984 press conference at a Nicaraguan Contra camp. The object of the attack--Eden Pastora (a/k/a Comandante Cero), a maverick rebel leader who was being simultaneously targeted by the Sandinistas, the CIA, ultra-rightist Contras, and the drug cartel--survived. Three journalists died and two dozen others were wounded in the bombing, which became one of the most complex and perplexing mysteries of the Reagan era's war against the Sandinistas.

Arostegui, however, named the wrong guy and so blew what would have been a major scoop. Instead his piece contributes--to use his own phrase-to the "vine of disinformation" which has surrounded the La Penca investigation. The handful of us who have devoted years to finding the bomber's true identity and his paymaster know that disinformation--including scores of false identities and phony leads--was time and again circulated by Reagan and Bush hardliners, CIA hirelings, and their Contra underlings. This disinformation always blamed the Sandinistas, but--curiously--always named the wrong trigger man and terrorist group.

That Arostegui missed the mark is not surprising. His article was not intended to uncover the truth. Rather, its purpose was to take potshots at two of the so-called leftist journalists injured in the bombing--Susan Morgan and my husband, Tony Avirgan--and to discredit the evidence indicating CIA involvement in the bombing and its cover-up. Quoting Curtin Winsor, former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Arostegui makes the preposterous and slanderous assertions that "the Avirgans were suspected of being paid agents of the Sandinistas," and that Tony Avirgan has a violent revolutionary past, was seen accepting money from Nicaraguan Embassy officials, and was in on the La Penca bombing plot. Incredibly, Arostegui never bothered to call us to solicit our response to these crude charges, and NATIONAL REVIEW never checked before publishing them.

The truth is that, as freelance journalists for two decades, we have reported for major U.S., British, and Canadian media. We have never taken money from the Sandinistas or from anyone other than our news clients. Any of our editors or colleagues would attest to our honesty. We have won numerous awards in Canada, the U.S., and Costa Rica for our investigative reporting. Tony has no violent past. Like millions of Americans we opposed the Vietnam War. As pacifists, we organized non-violent protests and opposed violent tactics.

Arostegui also irresponsibly "outs" an important and very nervous source, Jorge Massetti. A one-time Argentine guerrilla who has become a critic of both Castro's Cuba and the Sandinistas, Massetti has asked everyone who has interviewed him to protect his anonymity. Arostegui broke this promise, and Massetti feels betrayed and endangered.

Massetti is also angered because Arostegui attributes a mixture of fact and fiction to him. The ex-guerrilla says that, from photos, he recognizes the La Penca bomber as another Argentine leftist guerrilla whom he knew only by the code name "Martin El Ingles." Massetti says he met "Martin El Ingles" briefly in Europe and in Managua years before the bombing, that this man became part of the Sandinista countor-intelligence unit known as the Fifth Directorate, and that he supposedly died in an ill-conceived 1989 guerrilla attack in Argentina. Massetti says he knows nothing about the La Penca plot itself, although years after the bombing he did overhear some comrades make a cryptic reference which implied that "Martin" was the bomber.

Arostegui, however, embellishes on this by falsely stating that Massetti told him that the bomber's real name was Alberto Martin Diaz (Massetti says he's never heard this name), that he had also been part of the hit team which in 1980 assassinated exiled Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay (not true), and that he had seen "Diaz" in Havana in 1982 (Massetti didn't say this). Who fed Arostegui this false information? Was it Curtin Winsor or Otto Reich (former head of the State Department's now defunct propaganda unit, the Office of Public Diplomacy), the only others he quotes and two of the Reaganites key in spreading disinformation about La Penca? Again, why didn't NR fact-checkers catch this?

Arostegui uses these misstatements to accuse us of purposely ignoring Pastora's early statement that the bomber reminded him of one of the members of the Argentine-led hit team which the Sandinistas had dispatched to kill Somoza. In fact, Pastora initially told us that the bomber resembled a Colombian named Calvo who had been part of the hit team. However, upon closer study of the photos and other information Pastora concluded that Calvo was too old and too short to have been the La Penca bomber.