Bush Nominates "Dirty Tricks" Diplomat to UN

Remember Honduras, the refuge for the Contras during the undeclared, illegal war in Latin America? Twenty years later, one of the conflict's main U.S. players, John Negroponte, has a key position in the new Bush administration.

During the Reagan era, the Honduran military -- trained and equipped by the CIA -- murdered, kidnapped and tortured suspected subversives. Hiding these atrocities from Congress and the American public was Negroponte, then the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. He and then-vice president George H. W. Bush also schemed to give millions of dollars to the Honduran government to encourage it to increase aid to the Contras.

Now President George W. Bush has chosen Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bush has stated that Negroponte will be a "key member" of the administration's foreign policy team.

"The declassified record on Ambassador Negroponte's role in Honduras is a shocking one," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archives in Washington and a top authority on covert U.S. involvement in Latin America. "His activities in support of the illicit Contra war operations, and disregard for repression by the Honduran military run directly counter to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

Nor is Negroponte's shady past limited to his 1981-85 tour of duty in Honduras. That past is solidly on the record thanks to two years of digging by Baltimore Sun investigative reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, from 1994-95. But no similar investigation has yet been made of his role as political officer in Saigon from 1964 to 1968. During those years he worked closely with Henry Kissinger, who has been exposed as having sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace negotiations. As a result, in the following four years until the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, 20,763 Americans, 109,230 South Vietnamese, and 496,260 North Vietnamese servicemen lost their lives.

After their defeat by the Sandinistas in 1979, top officers of Somoza's National Guard fled to Miami where they began immediately to plot their return. When Reagan was inaugurated as president in 1981, he ordered the CIA to give every possible support in arms and training to the flying squads - soon to be known as the Contras -- that were organizing along the Honduran border for a guerrilla war against the new Nicaraguan government.

To turn Honduras into a springboard and refuge for the Contras required the support of the Honduran government, one notorious for its violations of human rights. It also required that the U.S. Congress and public remain in the dark about these violations. In essence, the main job qualification for the U.S. ambasssador to Honduras was the ability to lie well.

Jack Binns, a Carter appointee, did not fit the bill. Shortly after Reagan's inauguration, he sent a classified cable to the State Department expressing his concern "at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations of political and criminal targets." He was immediately told not to send reports of human rights abuses through ordinary channels, even classified ones. He should use only "the back channel." Within months he was fired and Negroponte took over.

Meanwhile, the CIA was training and equipping special Honduran forces known as Battalion 316 who quickly came to be feared the most by opponents of the regime. The CIA chose the Argentine military, already notorious for torture and disappearances during Argentina's dirty war, to do the training. Cohn and Thompson described the results in their series in the Sun: "They used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners were often kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."

The U.S. Administration knew what was going on. "We were concerned about the violations of human rights [there]," Thomas O. Enders, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, later admitted, "but we had no choice but to use the Argentines. There were not many people with counterinsurgency experience. How many who were Spanish-speaking?"