Tracking the Arms Pipeline

The U.S. presents new evidence of Nicaraguan meddling

Time and again, the Reagan Administration has charged Nicaragua with running a secret arms pipeline to the Marxist guerrillas of El Salvador. The insurgents deny the accusation, claiming that they capture most of their arms from U.S.-supported Salvadoran troops. Last week, in a bid to prove its case as Congress considered a request for additional military aid to El Salvador, the Administration opened its intelligence cupboard wider than ever before.

The most intriguing exhibits were blurry "low light" television footage taken from U.S. AC-130 reconnaissance aircraft off the Salvadoran coast. According to General Paul Gorman, head of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, one series of images showed a Nicaraguan "mother ship" unloading crates into small seagoing canoes. The canoes then speed toward shore near El Salvador's Lempa River, where the cargo was packed onto mules and taken inland. To novice viewers, the film sequence resembled nothing more than a series of large and small white blobs. Gorman insisted, however, that the film showed only about 60% of what the reconnaissance crew could see clearly through night-vision goggles.

Gorman also traced an earlier shipment of guerrilla munitions from its April 28 arrival on El Salvador's Pacific coast. The weapons, he said, were moved north by backpack and mule train up to the provincial capital of San Miguel. After a battle on May 6, Salvadoran government troops found Bulgarian-made ammunition and a North Vietnamese mortar sight that Gorman said "probably" arrived in the April 28 shipment. Then Gorman displayed a map discovered at a guerrilla campsite on May 25. The crude chart showed "safe routes" nearly identical to those that Gorman had earlier outlined.

The general offered intelligence tracings of the serial numbers on 214 U.S.-made M-16 rifles that were discovered in a guerrilla cache on July 27. No fewer than 156 of the rifles had been sent to U.S. forces in Viet Nam during the 1960s; only 40 were delivered to the Salvadoran army. The evidence, Gorman said, suggested that the weapons were supplied by Viet Nam through Cuba and Nicaragua. Likewise, captured Chinese-made grenade launchers bore serial numbers in sequence with those of identical weapons captured by U.S. troops in Grenada. The U.S. explanation is that all the launchers were part of the same shipment from Cuba.

Impressed by that information and by the performance in office of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, the Senate, by a 69-to-29 vote, granted Reagan's request for $117 million in supplemental military aid to El Salvador for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. In a surprise turnaround two days later, the House voted 234 to 161 to approve $70 million of the Administration's request.

In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the Sandinistas announced that they will withhold political privileges from a coalition of opposition parties, businessmen and labor unions that so far has refused to take part in presidential elections on Nov. 4. The move would limit the opposition's freedom of expression. Both sides were still seeking a compromise, but the threat is bound to undercut Nicaraguan claims that the elections are a manifestation of political pluralism. Further grounds for skepticism about Sandinista intentions came last week in the Miami Herald, which published remarks allegedly made in May by Bayardo Arce Castano, a member of the country's nine-man National Directorate. Arce reportedly told members of a small Marxist-Leninist splinter party that the elections were "bothersome" and indicated that they had been scheduled only because of U.S. pressure. According to the Herald, he invited his audience "to begin to think about eliminating all this, let's call it facade, of pluralism ... which has been useful to us up to now. That has reached its end."