A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaragua Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. - book reviews

Progressive, The, March, 1993 by Saul Landau

If some clever member of President Bill Clinton's legal staff were to read

William Robinson's book, he might order an investigation into the multiple improprieties that Bush Administration officials pulled in rigging the 1990 Nicaraguan election. Indeed, we might have four years of digging into the behavior of national-security officials who "did not content themselves," as the late Senator Sam Ervin would have said, "to remain on the windy side of the law."

But don't hold your breath. President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have embraced the democracy crusade and welcomed into their ranks some of the neocons who jumped like rats from the sinking Reagan ship. Others - before George Bush granted their Christmas Eve pardons - complained bitterly about the injustice done to them by vengeful special prosecutors.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams, for example, published an apologia titled Undue Process: How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes. Rather than risk serving time for lying to Congress, Abrams copped a plea to several misdemeanors. But, instead of seeing his behavior as destructive of life in Nicaragua and inimical to the democratic process at home, Abrams whines about how his career was damaged and his life interrupted. He shows no awareness that he violated the primary moral and legal codes of democracy.

In one passage - which Gore Vidal might have, but didn't, write as parody - Abrams reveals the depth of his thinking. Fearing his children will read about the scandal, Abrams tries to clarify the issues for them. The United States, he explains, was "fighting the communists in Nicaragua. Well, I knew lots of secrets about that, and Secretary Shultz and President Reagan didn't want me to tell. Now, some people are saying, you should have told Congress. You had to tell. When they asked you, you had to tell, and not telling is a crime. And I'm shying, no, it isn't."

Abrams as Faust? Besides money and the pleasure of beating up a weaker adversary, what did the national-security mavens receive for selling out U.S. law? Did any of them possess a soul worthy of a devil's bargain? And if so, what knowledge - power - could they have hoped to gain from defeating the Sandinistas? I can see the nuclear gang back in the 1940s trading their essences for an atomic monopoly, but the people engaged in trying to cook the 1990 Nicaraguan election, as Robinson portrays them, are less than heroic in their ambition.

Robinson picks up the intervention story where Peter Kornbluh's Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention left off, in the mid-1980s. After the phase-out of multiple covert operations in the late 1980s, Bush Administration officials designed, financed, and organized the anti-Sandinista opposition's election campaign. The author amasses a vast array of documentation to show how even former President Jimmy Carter was used as a kind of unwitting consigliere to get the Sandinistas to agree to U.S. conditions: free, U.S.-style elections.

Robinson shows how CIA operatives worked with other national-security officials, members of Congress, and the filthy rich crowd that sucks off political power to create a private-public network, international in scope, to finance and build an anti-Sandinista coalition out of spatting Nicaraguan sects and narrowly focused political parties. Then the self-styled protectors of freedom fashioned their imperfect progeny into a "civic front." Another team ran the propaganda apparatus. The CIA continued to run its agents in and out of Nicaragua, turn contra mobsters into "civic leaders," and plant anti-sandinista and pro-contra stories in the world's press.

Robinson shows how this gang of officials and "private citizens" laundered money through Miami and coordinated the efforts of PR men, ad hustlers, press agents, fixers, and hangers-on, finally setting up UNO (the acronym of the anti- Sandinista coalition) headquarters. This "democracy" bunch allowed its right-wing Nicaraguan clients to take cuts off the top of the loot raised from the right-wing rich. In addition, Robinson details the efforts that went into the actual campaign, from the design of posters, T-shirts, and buttons to the newly purchased vehicles required for U.S.-style electioneering.

The startling fact that Robinson emphasizes is that the Sandinistas calculated they could overcome all of this U.S. input because the masses still believed in them. "The Sandinistas designed their own electoral strategy," he writes, "on the basis of a completely mistaken assessment, that a majority of Nicaraguan people still stood behind them, ready to endure more hardship and sacrifice for hopes and ideals that ... simply could not be realized."

In his "Afterword," Robinson enters into an interesting polemic with Robert Pastor, former National Security Council point man on Latin America for the Carter Administration, and Sandinista official Alejandro Bendana. The debate centers around the blame question: Was the playing field level? Pastor says, "The election was a referendum on ten years of Sandinista rule."