Kerry Went to Extreme Lengths to Back Communist Ortega and Undermine U.S.
Dave Eberhart
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Most of us old enough to have been reading newspapers and watching television in the mid-1980s remember when the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist junta “Sandinistas” were battling the anti-communist guerrilla army of “Contras” in Nicaragua.
And who could forget the overblown Iran-Contra affair, the attempt to arm the Contras through a deal to swap arms for hostages with the mullahs in Iran.
What might be hazy in the memory after 20 years, however, is the Keystone Kops, I-want-to-play-president role of the freshman senator from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry.
Still humming his “Give peace a chance” mantra from Vietnam days, Kerry jumped into the fray, pre-empting President Ronald Reagan, butting aside the State Department and wrecking havoc with U.S. Constitution, according to a recent timely look back at the fiasco by Michael Waller, writing for Insight on the News.
Waller poignantly reminds us that in those days before the rise of Osama bin Laden, the country’s front lines were drawn against the old Soviet Union and its dangerous inroads into the American hemisphere and elsewhere around the globe. The Evil Empire was hard at work sponsoring pro-communist guerrilla forces such as the Sandinistas.
Enter stage left, John Kerry, who saw an opportunity to make political hay.
Before his latest stab at 15 minutes of fame was over, the novice on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had accused his own government of sponsoring terrorism, worked hand in hand with the nation’s sworn ideological enemies, damaged an FBI operation against a Colombian cocaine cartel and co-wrote a sham "peace" proposal aimed at disarming the U.S.-backed forces fighting to oust the Soviet-backed Sandinistas.
The Background on America's Chamberlains
President Ronald Reagan and a bipartisan majority in Congress were financing the Contras in Nicaragua in their fight against the Sandinista junta, which had been sponsoring communist guerrilla and terrorist groups from neighboring countries – lighting a powder keg that threatened the entire region.
Reagan was in the middle of a delicate balancing act - seeking the release of a $14 million appropriation for the Nicaraguan resistance. On the table: an offer to limit U.S. aid to the Contras to humanitarian assistance. The quid pro quo: the Sandinistas would agree to national reconciliation and free elections.
The scene was set for Kerry to bluster into the equation like a bull in a China shop.
Teaming with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the pair - without portfolio - traveled to Managua to chat with Sandinista junta leader Daniel Ortega.
The result: a meaningless document that State Department experts considered little more than an offer to the Contras to surrender. The Sandinistas made no commitment to national reconciliation, and that was the heart of the matter.
Nonetheless, Kerry raced back to Washington with the document he touted as a “peace proposal.” Indeed, Ortega promises a cease-fire, as long as the United States cut off all assistance, including humanitarian aid, to the anti-communist forces and their families.
“Here,” Kerry boldly pronounced to the Senate, “is a guarantee of the security interest of the United States.”
An Awkward Backlash
But few bought the grandstanding. Overnight, Kerry found himself not the returning hero and peacemaker but a pariah.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., accused Kerry and Harkin of “transgressing” against the Constitution by holding unauthorized negotiations with a foreign leader.
A peeved Secretary of State George Shultz announced, “Those who assure us that these dire consequences are not in prospect [in Central America] are some of those who assured us of the same in Indochina before 1975. The litany of apology for communists, and condemnation for America and our friends, is beginning again.”
White House spokesman Larry Speakes rained more buckets on Kerry's parade: “The very hour the House was rejecting the aid package [to the Nicaraguan resistance], President Ortega was going to Moscow to seek funds for his Marxist regime.” Ortega had, indeed, announced a trip to the U.S.S.R. to petition for $200 million more in Soviet support.
Teddy K. and 'KKK' Byrd to the Rescue
A frantic Kerry had his staff seek out anybody willing to praise his efforts. The only takers were Sens. Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who styled the controversial mission to Managua as a masterstroke forcing a recalcitrant Reagan to parley with the commies.
Perhaps figuring that if he stood still, the unwelcome mantle of “soft on communism” would cloak his shoulders, Kerry decided that the best defense was a colorful and flamboyant offense.
The former prosecutor got busy in 1986, launching a full-scale “investigation” to discredit the Nicaraguan resistance and the Reagan administration. The aim: stitch together - by whatever means - an international criminal conspiracy.
Using the unlikely fodder of allegations in lawsuits, Kerry's probe predictably hit rough waters.
Kerry's Bribery Scandal and 'Illegal Racket'
According to Insight's report, a British soldier of fortune, Peter Glibbery, swore that Kerry staffers bribed him to accuse Sandinista opponents of crimes, only to recant the next day. A former French soldier named Claude Chaffard claimed that Kerry staffers promised to help him with U.S. visa problems and paid him money while he cooperated.
Such wrinkles certainly did not bolster Kerry’s insistent demands to the Republican majority's staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to crank up full hearings on his shadowy conspiracy theories.
In desperation to keep the raked muck churning, Kerry signed a letter used in a direct-mail appeal for an outside group to raise money. That outside group was Commission on United States-Central American Relations, which was reportedly a front of International Center for Development Policy and included as members open supporters of the Sandinistas, the communist Cuban dictatorship of Fidel Castro and the communist FMLN guerrillas of El Salvador, according to commission literature.
“It was a racket that was probably illegal at the time, and certainly would be illegal now,” a former Senate staffer with firsthand knowledge of the investigation revealed to Insight.
The work product of the “racket”: alleged widespread drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan resistance. It was enough to prod the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to create a subcommittee to investigate.
Kerry feverishly honed a theory that the Contras were nothing less than a major hub in an international cocaine-smuggling operation.
Underlings Damage Federal Investigation
But by the summer of 1986, the Washington Times was reporting that aides to Kerry “severely damaged a federal drug investigation by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance.”
The Times later followed up with a report, citing federal law-enforcement officials. The revelation: The FBI repeatedly had warned Kerry's staffers to back off because they were endangering a federal anti-drug operation. According to the report, an FBI informant became “spooked” and stopped cooperating after Kerry’s staff interfered – going as far as to change her story to include the Contras as part of the plot.
As was the case earlier, Kerry's ploy began to unravel. Drug traffickers "are selling a story to Congress and to the media that they have concocted to have their sentences reduced or to have their cases dismissed,” a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the New York Times.
Eventually the DEA and Justice Department dismissing the claims of one of Kerry’s star witnesses, accused cocaine trafficker Jorge Morales, that the CIA and Nicaraguan resistance forces were involved in large-scale drug trafficking.
Kerry Covers for Cocaine Commies
Thickening the unsavory brew, the Washington Times then revealed that Kerry had concealed evidence of Sandinista drug trafficking and had deleted information from his staff report of the previous October to pin the blame on the Sandinistas’ U.S.-backed opponents.
The camera-hogging Kerry suddenly made himself scarce. He refused to speak to journalists seeking to question him.
“Sen. John Kerry is coming under increasing fire from federal law-enforcement officials,” the Associated Press reported. “The officials have said Kerry’s work was based largely on unsubstantiated allegations from informants, most of whom already have been interviewed by federal law-enforcement officials and some of whom have previously been found to be unreliable. A number of them are charged with various crimes or are in jail.”
Unrepentant, Kerry switched again to the attack mode for defense, trying to connect drug dealers to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was campaigning at the time to succeed Reagan as president of the United States.
In May 1988, Bush accused Kerry of leaking unsubstantiated allegations that his office approved drugs-for-weapons deals to arm the contras. No evidence ever surfaced to confirm the claims.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the ranking Republican on Kerry’s subcommittee, publicly accused Kerry of abusing the subcommittee to damage Bush and to help the flagging presidential campaign of Kerry’s longtime friend, mentor and ally Michael Dukakis. McConnell charged that Kerry had given credibility to witnesses who were critical of President Reagan and Vice President Bush but failed to summon others to testify who would rebut the criticisms.
Concluded Insight's report: “The politicization of the current 9/11 commission, and the attempts by Democratic partisans to prove that the current president, George W. Bush, failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he could have stopped them, seems to be a repeat of the Kerry subcommittee’s modus operandi of 1987-88.”
McConnell perhaps summed things up best when he told the Boston Globe: “I think the integrity of the Senate investigative process and the objectivity, fairness and balance of this particular effort have been compromised for political purposes.” |
