Posts

My Spy Story

/in /by

Original article can be found here.

WASHINGTON – After several days in a prison near Baghdad in 1991, I was told “they” wanted to see me. Blindfolded, I was led into a room where, judging from the voices, there were at least half a dozen men. For days, I had heard and sometimes watched as guards beat and tortured Iraqi prisoners.

The translator asked what my “real job” was. “I’m a reporter” for The Village Voice and CBS News Radio, I said. He translated my response in Arabic. I heard the reply from a man whose voice sounded older and less sympathetic. “You’re lying,” the translator echoed in English. “Tell us about your relationship with the C.I.A.” I had none.
The interrogation lasted two hours. I was not abused. The Iraqis found me guilty of entering their country without a visa: I had admitted sneaking in from Syria after the Persian Gulf war with Kurdish guerrillas who wanted to overthrow President Saddam Hussein. As for the charge of being a C.I.A. agent, I remained “under suspicion,” I was told. A week later, Iraq let me leave.

Last week, a blue-ribbon panel, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed repealing a 19-year policy that prevents C.I.A. agents from posing as representatives of the working press.

Part of the panel’s rationale is that the C.I.A.’s use of American embassies as a cover won’t wash any longer. Skeptical foreign officials, are asking why an embassy that issues relatively few visas has so many consular officials, why the political section has doubled in size or whether that new department is really doing economic research.

The panel director, Richard N. Haass, a former member of the National Security Council, asks whether precluding the use of journalism as a cover “is a luxury the United States can still afford.” (Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist who is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, disagrees with the proposal.)

The C.I.A. supposedly terminated the practice in 1977, but last month the agency admitted that the practice has continued–on extraordinarily rare occasions, it says.

If the Iraqis had been aware of this during the war, any of the 47or so journalists picked up and held by authorities might not have come back. (One didn’t: Gad Gross, a freelance photographer, was executed minutes after soldiers captured him.)

If agents began regularly passing themselves off as reporters again, governments around the globe could easily accuse almost any American reporter of being a C.I.A. plant. The burden of proof would fall on the journalist to demonstrate that he or she is not a spy.

The council’s proposal, if adopted, would make it easy for any hostile official who fears inquiries by the foreign press to accuse reporters of being spies. The most probing reporters may well be denied entry or expelled.
The council’s panel concluded that if spooks could get press credentials, the C.I.A. would be more effective. But many academics and policy makers seem to agree that the information available in the media is often as good as, if not better than, that found in classified C.I.A. documents. Aren’t many offices in the Pentagon and elsewhere always tuned to CNN?

Allowing C.I.A. agents to pose as journalists not only needlessly puts reporters at risk but also undermines their ability to report foreign news properly or at all, limiting the information available to policy makers and the public. Instead of rehabilitating this passé cold war practice, the C.I.A. should be ordered to end it for real.

Gunning for His Enemies: Neal Knox, the Real Power at the NRA, Sees Diabolical Plots Everywhere

/in /by

An artful conspiracy theorist can easily cultivate believers.

One day, history will add to the conspiratorial log the name of Neal Knox, one of America’s more widely-read gun-magazine columnists and a veteran torchbearer of the National Rifle Association.

Knox neatly divides the world into those who support gun control and those, like him, who do not. Thus, gun-control advocates become suspects in what Knox sees as a fantastic and diabolical plot to disarm Americans.

It might be tempting merely to dismiss Knox, if he weren’t today the NRA’s most influential leader. Now one of the NRA’s top executive officers, Knox for decades has used his magazine columns to endorse — or sometimes to bury — candidates for seats on the NRA’s 76-member board of directors.

Even Knox’s rivals openly concede his gains, while fretting about his influence. “That’s always a bad situation, when you have somebody that has a group that more or less if he just raises his hand, they wait till he does and they’re gonna vote that way,” said board member Joe Foss, a past NRA president and former South Dakota governor.

Like Foss, the NRA’s current president, Thomas L. Washington, represents the NRA’s traditional wing of hunters and competition shooters.

Washington is himself an avid hunter who has long lobbied for right-to-hunt legislation in his home state of Michigan. But he is also proud of his environmental record.

Such “soft” issues, however, have little appeal for Knox. The former [Texas; original story incorrectly said Oklahoma] National Guardsman has been trying to seize power within the NRA for decades, ever since Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Approved in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the law tightened the interstate sale of firearms and banned fully automatic weapons. When it was passed, the NRA leadership endorsed the bill.

But Knox and other hardliners disagreed and have been accumulating power ever since. A key victory came in 1975, when they established the Institute for Legislative Action, a new NRA division that effectively turned the organization into the gun lobby.

Knox later became chief of the ILA, while his protégé, Tanya K. Metaksa, became its deputy director. Knox was forced to resign from that position in 1982, however, by former allies who found both his militancy and tactics too abrasive.

Ever resilient, Knox returned and, largely through his own newsletters and columns that appear in and other publications, by 1991 had managed to get 11 allies onto the NRA’s board.

Today, with strong influence over the board, Knox wants to go way beyond the NRA’s stated goals of repealing the Brady law (which requires a brief waiting period for handgun purchases) and the assault-weapons ban (on some semi-automatic weapons).

Most of the NRA’s critics have ignored the differences between leaders like Washington and Knox, but these differences are crucial at a time when an increasing number of gun rights activists are openly defending their right to armed struggle. And they are even more important when a number of armed groups are reaching out to the NRA.

One is the Michigan Militia, a group that Oklahoma bombing suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols reportedly tried to join. Even before they did, NRA President Washington had criticized the Michigan Militia for advocating extremist views. But, as reported by ABC’s, that didn’t stop Knox’s ally Metaksa from meeting with Michigan Militia leaders in February.

Another group working to align itself with the NRA is the National Alliance, led by author William L. Pierce. The fictional diaries, which among other things show how to make a fuel-oil and fertilizer bomb, tell the story of rightist militias who overthrow a Jewish-dominated government.

What Knox and all these extremist groups today share is the belief that gun control is the result of a government-led conspiracy.

Knox continues to propagate this view, as he moves the NRA ever further from its traditional sporting and hunting roots.

Freelance journalist Smyth covers the NRA for the Village Voice.

Where’s the Brief

/in /by

Congressman Robert Torricelli is Washington’s most aggressive anti-Castro politician, even though 90 percent of his northern New Jersey district is non-Hispanic (mostly Italian, Jewish, or Irish descent) and less than 2 percent is Cuban. These Cubans have yet to organize even one demonstration against Castro. But recently people have begun to demonstrate against Torricelli. Even The Bergen Record, his county’s paper, has begun to question his stance: “It is an odd twist, perhaps, that Torricelli should find himself leading the offensive against Castro,” reports Thomas Moran. “He represents a district that is just 10 percent Hispanic, yet he is a champion for anti-Castro voters nationwide.”

Anti-Castro groups gave Torricelli $26,750 for his re-election in 1992, and about $10,000 so far this year. He has already secured the powerful Cuban vote based in Hudson County, adjoining his district, should he ever seek statewide office. And if he entertains higher ambitions, he can count on help from the Miami Cuban exile community’s hard-line leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, as one of his biggest fans. “He is presidential material,” Mas Canosa told the Record. “You have dinner and drinks with him, and you come to know him. There are very few people who have his sense of purpose, of direction, and destiny. He has been called for a bigger mission.”

Torricelli defends his Cuba interest by saying that he is motivated by principle and commitment to a democratic ideal. Indeed, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, he has been an active supporter of human rights in Latin America. During his first campaign in 1982, he criticized the Salvadoran government’s abuses. (His current companion in Englewood, Bianca Jagger, was once an activist on El Salvador.)

Later, like many of his colleagues, Torricelli questioned the way U.S. officials handled the 1989 murders of sic Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Shortly after the killings, U.S. Army Major Eric Warren Buckland implicated El Salvador’s High Command and its Chief of Staff, Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, in testimony to the F.B.I. But State Department officials buried the affidavit for nine months, and, when it was “discovered,” claimed that the F.B.I. had bullied Buckland, a Special Forces Green Beret, into making a false statement. Last year, after the United Nations Truth Commission found that Ponce himself had ordered the murders, the official U.S. response went something like, “Gee whiz, whaddaya know?”

Torricelli, however, expressed outrage and promised to investigate whether U.S. officials had committed perjury when testifying to Congress about that and other crimes. Eighteen months later, no such investigation or hearing has occurred. When asked why, Torricelli declined to comment. He made a promise to principle and to the people in his district. But so far he has shown more loyalty to the Cuban vote outside it.

Why Hutu and Tutsi Are Killing Each Other: A Rwanda Primer

/in /by

Rwanda’s Tutsi kings ruled over Hutu peasant farmers for three centuries.
But in 1959, the Hutu finally overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. From then until
President Juvenal Habyarimana’s death two weeks ago, Hutu have ruled the
country. But today, Tutsi guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
are fighting their way toward power.

If the RPF defeats the predominantly Hutu Rwandan army, the question is
whether it would share power with Hutu, who make up about 85 percent of the
population. RPF leaders say they will. But as their guerrillas advance on
the capital of Kigali, they pass by the corpses of at least 20,000 Tutsi
civilians, most of them killed by Hutu soldiers or ruling party militiamen.
For a while at least, revenge may preclude reconciliation.

The (recent) violence began hours after Hutu President Habyarimana’s plane
either crashed or was shot down April 6, killing him as well as the Hutu
president of neighboring Burundi.

Unlike in Rwanda, Burundi’s Tutsi never lost power, although they
represent no more than 14 percent of the population in either country. In
recent years, both Burundi’s minority Tutsi regime and Rwanda’s majority
Hutu regime have allowed opposition parties to form. But elements of
Burundi’s Tutsi army assassinated its previously elected Hutu president in
October, while this month elements of Rwanda’s ruling Hutu regime, in
addition to slaughtering Tutsi civilians, murdered Hutu opposition party
members en masse.

Rather than two separate tribes, Hutu and Tutsi are different ethnic
groups of the same society. The Tutsi migrated from the Horn of Africa in
the area of Ethiopia to the Lake Victoria region of Central Africa many
centuries ago, and came to subjugate the Hutu who lived there. Since the
17th century, the two ethnic groups evolved as a single society, sharing a
common language, Kinyarwanda, but not power. While nobles, military chiefs
and cattle herders were Tutsi, Hutu were predominantly subsistence farmers.

Rwanda’s ruling Hutu regime has been in power since 1973, when then
Defense Minister Habyarimana deposed the Hutu president who had appointed
him. As president, Mr. Habyarimana promised not to discriminate against
Tutsi. But with time he discriminated against both ethnicities, giving most
government positions to people from his own northwest region. Until
recently, Mr. Habyarimana generally appointed Cabinet ministers only related
to either him or his wife. This ruling clan was known in Kinyarwanda as “the
Akazu.” It translates as “the little house” around the president.

They ruled over one of Africa’s poorest countries. Rwanda has little
industry or resources. Although most people are peasant farmers, Rwanda, the
size of Maryland with a population more than 50 percent larger, does not
have enough land to go around. (Its population is denser than any nation
except Bangladesh.) Jobs are also scarce, with many peasants, prostitutes
and professionals alike all dependent upon foreigners or their organizations
for income or food.

Although Mr. Habyarimana developed his country’s infrastructure, largely
financed through foreign aid, he did little to improve conditions for
people. Last year, for example, relief agencies suspended food shipments
because his regime was stealing more than acceptable amounts. This year, the
same agencies reported — before the present crisis — that one in eight
Rwandans is on the verge of starving.

One in three is HIV positive in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Yet, civilian
hospitals are atrocious. Military hospitals are almost as bad. In one last
year, I saw a soldier suffering from gangrene, while another endured an
untreated open femur fracture. Both had been wounded in combat several days
before. But it was Sunday; government doctors don’t work weekends.

This hospital, like every public building, Western embassy and even relief
organization, was required by law to hang Mr. Habyarimana’s photo. He and
the Akazu relied on repression to maintain power. They formed a ruling
party, and organized armed militia called the Interahamwe, meaning “Those
who attack together,” and the Impuzamugambi, or “Those who have the same
goal.”

Until this decade, they ruled Rwanda as a one-party state. But under both
domestic and international pressure, Mr. Habyarimana, in July 1990, finally
allowed opposition parties to form. All but one of them, a very small one,
were Hutu.

One of the reasons Mr. Habyarimana allowed Hutu parties to form inside
Rwanda is that he knew a guerrilla movement of expatriate Tutsi was forming
abroad. Three decades before, after the Hutu seized power, its leaders
publicly executed some 20 prominent Tutsi leaders, while agitated Hutu mobs
killed as many as 20,000 others. By 1964, an estimated 150,000 Rwandan Tutsi
had fled. Since then, they and their descendants have swelled to a Tutsi
population of about 500,000. Although they have been living in neighboring
countries now for three decades, most of them remain refugees without
statehood or citizenship.

About 200,000 of them have lived in Uganda, competing with its citizens —
sometimes violently — for land and water. Like many Ugandans, Rwandan
refugees there were repressed under both dictators Idi Amin and Milton
Obote. As a result, at least 2,000 of them eventually joined a guerrilla
movement which began in 1981. Five years later they won power. Their leader,
ex-Defense Minister Yoweri Museveni, is now president of Uganda.

On Oct. 1, 1990, about 7,000 RPF guerrillas invaded Rwanda. More than half
of them had been soldiers in the Ugandan army, which provided most of their
weapons. To counter what it called “aggression launched from an
English-speaking country,” France rushed in 300 troops from the Central
African Republic, and supplied mortars, artillery and ammunition.

France was honoring a military cooperation agreement it had signed with
Mr. Habyarimana in 1975; France has similar arrangements with most
Francophone African countries.

France was usurping the role previously played by Belgium, which had
governed Rwanda as a protectorate until its independence in 1962. Since
then, Belgium had been Rwanda’s main military patron. But Belgian law
prohibits the providing of arms to a country at war. Shortly after the RPF
invasion, Belgium cut off all lethal aid. France made up the difference, and
pursued a military victory rather than a political settlement.

While Belgium, for example, recalled its ambassador in March 1993 for two
weeks over human rights abuses, French officials defended the record of the
Habyarimana regime.

Although the RPF’s 1990 invasion was limited to only the northeastern area
of Rwanda, forces loyal to the Habyarimana regime simulated a firefight in
Kigali three days later. This alleged attack was used as pretext to arrest
at least 8,000 people, mostly Tutsi. Many were beaten and tortured.

In the countryside, violations were worse. Local officials and members of
the ruling party militia organized mobs of agitated Hutu. Often carrying
placards of Mr. Habyarimana above their heads, they went field to field in
search of Tutsi. About 2,000 were killed, most of them hacked to death by
machete. In February 1993, the RPF launched an even bigger offensive with
more heavy weapons. France rushed in at least 680 troops, including
paratroopers.

But in August 1993 the RPF and Mr. Habyarimana signed a treaty to end the
war. Although the peace process had been delayed many times, this February
Mr. Habyarimana agreed to a new transitional government. Cabinet posts were
divided equally among the regime’s Akazu, RPF representatives, and Hutu
opposition representatives.

Rwanda’s political conflicts never seemed closer to ending: Mr.
Habyarimana’s regime was sharing political power with other Hutu; and for
the first time in its history, Rwanda’s Hutu and Tutsi had accepted a
concrete formula for reconciliation. Among the three groups participating,
the regime’s Akazu was the most reluctant to go along.

Immediately after the president died in his own plane, the Akazu ordered
the Presidential Guard to cordon off the airport crash site; its soldiers
prevented Western diplomats or United Nations peacekeeping commanders from
examining it. While both French and Rwandan officials claimed that the plane
was shot down by ground fire, State Department and other Western diplomats
await confirmation.

Hours later, members of the Presidential Guard killed two Hutu opposition
party Cabinet members, Premier Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian
peacekeepers. Most other leaders and many rank-and-file members of the
opposition also appear to have been killed.

While the slaughter against these mostly Hutu victims numbered in the
thousands, members of the regime’s ruling party militia, soldiers under
irregular command, along with mobs of other drunken Hutu men, killed Tutsi
men, women and children, numbering into the tens of thousands. In a
population of 7.5 million, most of them were killed within three days. It
was the worst violence in Rwanda since 1961.

Within a week of the plane crash, the main body of RPF forces began to
attack Kigali. Since then, the Hutu regime’s slaughter of its Hutu opponents
and all Tutsi has been largely replaced with a military struggle between the
RPF and the army. The armed forces had more than 30,000 men before this
crisis. They were equipped with at least $ 5.9 million in arms bought from
South Africa in 1992, and another $ 6 million bought the same year from
Egypt.

Fighting has been intense. On Wednesday, Rwandan army mortars fell upon
refugees huddled in the national stadium for safety. The same day, the RPF
began to use Katyusha multiple rocket launchers within city lines.

Representatives of both sides have recognized the need for a cease-fire,
but neither has offered to sign one. As a Third World guerrilla army, the
RPF struck me as exceptionally motivated, highly disciplined and well
trained. The Rwandan army is far less professional. But many of its soldiers
and officers may nonetheless fight to the death, as they would expect the
RPF to torture and execute prisoners.

RPF commanders say that instead they will bring members of the ruling Hutu
regime responsible for most of the bloodletting to trial. The world will
have to wait to see. It would be an indication whether an RPF takeover would
merely mean the restoration of Tutsi dominance over Hutu, or a new start
toward sharing power.

Regardless, Tutsi will remain a minority. Once the fighting is over, the
United Nations, the United States, and Rwanda’s mother country of Belgium
should throw their collective diplomatic weight behind a formula for
power-sharing to make the establishment of another ethnic-based dictatorship
less likely.

A free-lance journalist and consultant, Frank Smyth is the author of
“Arming Rwanda: The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses,” released in January
by the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project based in New York.

Official Sources, Western Diplomats and Other Voices from the Mission

/in /by

On the post-Cold War era, ethnic rivalry may have replaced ideology as the most likely cause of conflict, but while all else changes, one journalistic habit picked up during the past four decades will, in all likelihood, persist — the habit of relying heavily on the mission, as the U.S. embassy is known, for assessments and information. In an increasingly unfamiliar world, in fact, the temptation to do so will be even stronger.

What’s wrong with this? A close look at coverage of the last of the Cold-War conflicts — the civil war in El Salvador — shows that all too often such reliance results in distorted news.

Following the November 1989 murder of six Jesuit intellectuals, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s daughter, U.S. embassy officials in San Salvador told Newsweek that they had intelligence information indicating that rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, long identified with El Salvador’s death squads, had been planning to kill the priests. The claim was based on an alleged CIA report. The officials said that, on the night before the murders, D’Aubuisson had told advisers that something had to be done about the Jesuits. Newsweek ran the story as an “exclusive” on December 11, 1989.

But it was later shown in court that D’Aubuisson had nothing to do with the murders. And except for the mission officials who spoke to Newsweek, almost every other Western diplomat in the country told reporters — from the start — that the Salvadoran military, not D’Aubuisson, was most likely responsible.

No corroboration of the alleged CIA report pointing to D’Aubuisson has ever been provided, not even to the presiding Salvadoran court or to the U.S. congressional task force investigating the Jesuit murders. In fact, the report may very well have been a fabrication designed to deflect attention from the Salvadoran military, which was then receiving nearly a quarter million dollars a day in U.S. aid.

Reporters in El Salvador frequently received information and assessments from the mission. And correspondents who have covered El Salvador say that editors in almost all U.S. media have tended to demand a far lower standard of evidence for information obtained from embassy officials than for that obtained from other sources. For example, while claims by political activists of any stripe would rarely be published without at least two additional sources of confirmation, information coming from U.S. officials was frequently run without any additional confirmation. “Don’t worry, I got it from the embassy,” was usually enough to put an editor at ease.

The assumption here is that political activists have a political agenda, while American officials do not. This ignore that fact that U.S. embassy officials in El Salvador were engaged in what they themselves called the largest and most significant American military endeavor in the period since the Vietnam war. The assumption led to inaccurate and misleading reports.

For example, on July 30, 1989, New York Times correspondent Lindsey Gruson wrote an article headlined “With Training and New Tactics, Salvador’s Army Gains on Rebels.” The story’s nut quote was from a “senior American official” who said: “The F.M.L.N. [leftist guerrillas] can still mass troops, carry out actions, and inflict casualties, but not with its previous success. . .These offensives now come at greater cost and achieve less. In contrast to the early 1980s, many guerrilla actions are now a draw or outright defeat.”

While the U.S. embassy was claiming in briefing papers that the insurgency “is now in a period of decline and frustration,” many other observers, including non-American diplomats, believed that the war was stalemated — at best. Indeed, in November, less than four months after Gruson’s piece appeared, the F.M.L.N. launched its strongest sustained offensive of the war, taking over much of the capital and other major cities for up to ten days. American officials were taken completely by surprise. So were most American readers.

Another problem for reporters in El Salvador was attribution. For example, in background briefings given in early 1991, William Walker, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, told reporters that U.N. mediator Alvaro de Soto was biased toward leftist guerrillas, unprofessional as a diplomat, and ineffective. But when speaking in San Salvador, Walker demanded that he be referred to only as an unidentified Western diplomat, giving the impression that his view of the U.N. mediator was representative of that of the diplomatic corps at large. In fact, most other major Western diplomats in San Salvador considered the veteran Peruvian mediator to be not only highly competent, professional, and fair, but the right man for the job.

The term “Western diplomat” is meant to inspire confidence in readers. It implies that the source is an experienced diplomat of some stature, is knowledgeable about the country in question, and has access to a wide boy of both public and official information. But in El Salvador, reporters sometimes allowed the term to be misused.

New York Times correspondent James LeMoyne found ways to deal with this problem, using attributions such as “a top official whose country has an active interest in El Salvador.” The reader was thus alerted that this diplomat was not a neutral observer. Another solution was to follow a debatable statement — uttered by American officials but attributed only to unidentified “Western diplomats” — with something like “But many non-American Western diplomats disagree.”

Unfortunately, reporters and editors tend to be more interested in securing access to embassy sources than in substantiating embassy claims. The El Salvador experience suggests that strict standards of evidence and uniform rules of attribution should be applied to all sources.

Salvadoran Rebels Anticipated Soviet Fall, Shifted Tack

/in /by

Please see the original story here: http://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0506/06102.html

SAN SALVADOR – EL SALVADOR’S leftist guerrilla movement began moving away from Marxism-Leninism several years before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, they and independent analysts say.

Since the FMLN was already in transition, the Soviet Union’s collapse “wasn’t like a bucket of cold water, but of water which was already warmed,” says William, a pseudonym for a high-ranking 15-year veteran of the Salvadoran Communist Party, one of five rebel organizations that make up the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) coalition.

On Feb. 1, El Salvador’s 12-year civil war came to an end as a result of UN-mediated negotiations. With the FMLN now a legal entity openly participating in the political process, its members are willing for the first time to discuss previous clandestine relations with the Soviet Union and other countries.

“We’ve studied all the texts, Marxism-Leninism, Mao, and social democracy,” says Chano Guevara, a peasant who rose to become a top FMLN comandante in the rebel stronghold of Guazapa volcano. “But if we had followed the socialist camp we wouldn’t exist now. We continue to exist [because of] the politically and economically rooted problems in this country.”

Despite their ongoing ties to Cuba, the FMLN is one of the largest leftist insurgencies in the world to accept democracy. The decision to make reforms in advance of the Soviet Union’s collapse is a main reason the FMLN remains a viable political force in El Salvador, Western experts say.

“The age of the romantic revolutionary linked with Marxist-Leninist ideology is finished,” said Wayne Smith, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who was the chief United States diplomat in Cuba in the early 1980s. “[But] movements such as the FMLN, who champion the poor but who do it through electoral means, are going to have a growing place in Latin America.”

The FMLN’s transition began as a direct result of changes in the Soviet Union. Although by the late 1980s, the FMLN was not dependent on the Soviet bloc to continue fighting, the insurgency would have needed direct foreign aid if they had ever taken power by force. But as early as 1986, the reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev communicated to the FMLN that it favored a negotiated settlement and would not finance a new leftist government, FMLN sources say.

Guerrilla leaders left secluded base camps in northern El Salvador to embark on a nine-country tour of Latin America in October 1988. FLMN leaders had always viewed themselves as within a broad vein of Latin American nationalism. But on this tour, they received criticism from many governments considered allies, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Peru, all of whom encouraged the rebels to consider a negotiated settlement.

THE rebel leadership was especially influenced by the dramatic decline of the Nicaraguan economy in the late 1980s, which signaled that no revolution in Central America could survive in isolation, FLMN sources say.

FMLN leaders were also swayed by changes in Eastern Europe. Most, including the FMLN’s top comandante and strategist, Joaquin Villalobos, supported popular reform movements there. Two months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a January 1990 internal document was published, which praises the “social forces that demand more democracy and independence” in Eastern Europe and openly rejects a one-party state.

“The people are removing the authoritarian, inept, and corrupt governments,” notes the document. “The masses feel … they must sweep out the mistakes of the parties in power, as well as their old and closed formulas.”

More than 1,000 Salvadoran revolutionaries received political and military training in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Nicaragua, they and East German sources say.

“During the week we had classes in Spanish,” says William, who was in the Soviet Union for nine months in 1979-80. “On weekends, we all had military training.”

The Soviet Union, Cuba, and to a lesser degree Nicaragua provided funds, weapons, and training to the FMLN throughout the war, FMLN veterans here say. But the support was heaviest in the early 1980s, they say.

While Moscow began to distance itself from the FMLN in 1986, East Germany continued to train Salvadorans until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, according to an East German who worked with the FMLN there.

In order to make up the aid shortfall, the FLMN developed new sources of weapons and funds from radical third-world countries including Vietnam and North Korea, and won substantial funding from church groups in the US and Western Europe, FMLN veterans say.

The Cubans, however, were the FMLN’s most consistent backers, providing specialized military training, as well as materiel and other support to the Salvadoran insurgency throughout the war, FLMN veterans say.

“We still have relations with Cuba, Vietnam and others,” says Ramon Medrano, a member of the FMLN’s top political commission, “and we have a right to.”

The insurgency also received substantial funds from several social democratic Scandinavian countries, especially in the early 1980s, according to FMLN veterans.

This eclectic base of support boosted the insurgency, FMLN leaders say. Nonetheless, they insist that the insurgency itself was domestically rooted, and that degree of foreign support was always exaggerated by the US.Some Western experts agree. “I don’t think there’s any question the Cubans helped the FMLN,” said Dr. Smith. “[But] the movement would have continued without any outside help at all.”

FMLN units extorted war taxes — running as high as $60,000 from individual coffee growers during harvest season, rebel and coffee-producing sources here say.

Throughout the war, these and other funds were used to buy weapons from the Salvadoran military, which ran a ubiquitous business in sales of US-provided weapons, according to FMLN operatives and civilians involved in arms transactions with Salvadoran military officers.

Out on a Limb: The Use and Abuse of Stringers in the Combat Zone

/1 Comment/in /by

Somewhere just outside of Baghdad, I was blindfolded and led down a corridor into a room where, to judge by the sound of the voices, there were at least half a dozen men. The possibility of being beaten or tortured was on my mind. I was ordered to sit, and waited in the darkness.

The interrogator asked me what was my “real job.”

I said I was a reporter.

He said I was lying. “Tell us about your relationship with the CIA,” he said.

I denied having any relationship with the CIA or any other intelligence organization.

The interrogator, who was from Iraq’s military intelligence, then offered me a deal: “If you tell us the truth, you will go free. But if you continue to lie, you will stay here many years.”

Only twelve months before, an Iranian-born British journalist, Farzad Bazoft, had been offered the same promise: if he “confessed” to working for British intelligence, he would go free. He did, and was hanged.

This predicament demonstrates the risk faced by all journalists covering armed conflicts — a risk that is especially threatening to stringers.

The gulf war in particular proved an exceptionally difficult story to cover, due to its highly technological nature and to the logistical barriers erected by both sides: neither the allies or Iraq respected the concept of journalistic neutrality; both sides saw reporters as intruders.

Yet those barriers could be and on occasion were overcome, as journalists circumvented the allies’ press pool south of Iraq in Saudi Arabia and entered northern Iraq illegally without a visa. Reporters also paid a price: Gad Gross, a German photographer from J. B. Pictures on assignment for Newsweek, was executed by low-ranking Iraqi soldiers. Charles Maxwell and Nicholas Della Casa, a British freelance camera team on assignment for BBC Television, were also killed in northern Iraq last March, reportedly murdered by their Turkish guide. Della Casa’s wife, Rosanna, who was working with the team, has not been seen since and is believed dead.

For weeks, these four free-lance journalists, as well as several teams of staff reporters, were classified as missing. News organizations and professional associations pressured Iraqi authorities for information. But the level of concern varied greatly depending on the news organization involved, and sometimes on whether the missing reporter was a staff correspondent or a stringer.

These incidents raise the question of the obligation news organizations have to free-lancers in trouble in the field. The matter can be further complicated by the nationality of the journalist, and by the fact that the line between a legitimate journalist and an intelligence operative is — sometimes — blurred.

Every major network, newspaper, magazine, and wire service uses stringers, especially for reports from abroad. Some publications, such as The Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, rely frequently on stringers for their foreign reports. The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times, like most papers, give stringers bylines, designating them as “special” correspondents. The New York Times runs stringers’ articles, but does not give them a byline.

Leading wire services such the A.P. and Reuters rely on stringers’ copy from countries in which they do not have full-time, staff correspondents. Financially strapped U.P.I. currently has more stringers abroad than staff correspondents. Reuters and the A.P. use as many freelance photojournalists as salaried staff photographers in their foreign bureaus.

Most major news organizations use stringers to brief staff correspondents (who usually “parachute” into foreign locations for only a few days), arrange interviews, and provide background information. Television also buys footage from freelance camera crews. Magazines such as Newsweek and Time rely on a worldwide network of print stringers and buy most of their photos from agency-affiliated free-lance photographers.

Of all the media, radio is the most dependent on freelancers. All national news radio services rely predominantly on stringers for their primary international news, especially on-the-scene foreign reporting, or “spots.”

The main reason the media rely so heavily on stringers is money. While a salaried staff correspondent may draw well over $50,000 in salary and benefits, stringers are usually paid only for reports that are used. A one-minute radio spot, for example, pays about $50. A 900-word article pays an average of $150. And an average newspaper photo pays about $75. Meanwhile, as a rule, freelancers must pay their own transportation and other expenses.

And although stringers may be accredited with a major news organization and represent it in the field, they usually enjoy no benefits, such as health or life insurance. If, for example, a stringer is injured in a bus accident in a foreign country but not while pursuing an assigned report, it is unlikely that he or she would be covered. And when stringers are injured while actually reporting, compensation is usually arranged post facto on a case-by-case basis. Some stringers have their own health insurance. But they must first find a policy that does not exclude “acts of war” and they must usually pay at least $2,000 annually. With such a high premium, many work without coverage — even in war zones.

On a cost-benefit basis, freelancers are news organizations’ most productive journalists. In a recession, when both advertising revenues and operating budgets are low, stringers are in particularly great demand — especially when it comes to covering strife-torn countries. What news directors and editors are looking for, as a rule, is live combat footage or eyewitness print dispatches accompanied by dramatic still photos. Yet, the news organization rarely takes responsibility for sending the free-lancer into a conflict zone.

Take the all-too-typical case of veteran print journalist Tom Long. The Miami Herald has customarily identified Long as one of its “special correspondents.” Yet when he was recently injured in a mortar attack in northern El Salvador, the Herald identified him in its story only as a “freelance journalist.” Both the Herald and The New York Times, for which Long also reports, offered to cover some of Long’s medical costs. But both news organizations made it clear that the support was being offered only out of charity, on a one-time basis, and that Long, who did not have his own insurance, would be responsible for any long-term health care needs that might arise.

In countries like El Salvador and Chile, where the foreign press has been a frequent target of attack, members of the foreign press corps have organized press associations to lobby authorities on behalf of individual journalists in trouble. American journalists can also rely on the Washington, D.C.-based Congressional Committee to Support Writers and Journalists; American and non-American journalists alike rely on the independent New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The outcome of any particular confrontation may well depend on what such organizations and the news outlets involved choose to do. In Iraq, for example, captured reporters were accused of being Israeli, American, or other Western intelligence agents. My case and that of Gamma-Liaison photographer Alain Buu seemed to be caught up in a debate within the Iraqi government, the intelligence and information ministries taking different sides on whether we were spies or journalists.

Our predicament was aggravated by the fact that I was a CBS News stringer — a distinction in status that was lost on Iraqi authorities. They seemed aware only that, while CBS News had mobilized an impressive campaign for the release of staff correspondent Bob Simon, it had done considerably less for me. This difference was interpreted by the authorities as indicating that I was not a real journalist but a spy.

Unfortunately for legitimate journalists, the Iraqis may have had reason to be wary. One Western journalist who had been detained in the Middle East was approached by his country’s intelligence service soon after his release. The journalist, who requested anonymity, says he was asked to become a clandestine government agent while continuing to work as a journalist.

In the United States, the CIA’s use of journalists as intelligence agents is believed to have decreased since the practice was exposed by congressional inquiry in the mid-1970s. Whether it has been completely abandoned is impossible to ascertain. The best way for journalists to convince foreign authorities of their legitimacy is by maintaining their integrity. In other words, information gathered should appear only in published reports and not be relayed privately in background briefings given to government officials.

Veteran photographer Bill Gentile, who was the Dutch cameraman Cornel Lagrouw when Lagrouw was killed in El Salvador in March 1989, has observed that combat can be covered with reasonable safety when one is traveling with one side or another. The problem arises when battle lines swiftly change and journalists find themselves unwillingly or even unwittingly crossing sides. Lagrouw’s last words were, “Great pictures, aye,” only moments before a bullet struck him.

Journalists who take such risks are often responding to the networks’ insatiable appetite for “bang-bang.” The difference between a routine shot of Kurdish rebels posing atop a captured tank, for example, and a shot of an Iraqi helicopter attack could be — depending on demand –over $50,000. That is largely why free-lance cameramen have earned the reputation of being the loose cannons of the business.

However, the motivation may not necessarily be higher compensation but the compelling desire to document the situation at hand. Gvido Zvaigzne filmed some of the most spectacular footage of Soviet troops and tanks crushing the Latvian rebellion in January 1991. In his tape, the viewer hears the impact of the bullets and watches the landscape bob as the camera falls. The viewer sees and hears further battle, as Zvaignze, who died soon after, continues to aim his lens as he crawls away.

While news organizations are increasingly relying on freelance journalists for their primary coverage of foreign wars, they have yet to come to terms with the responsibilities this entails.

At the very least, they should offer freelancers working in war zones some kind of basic insurance coverage. Newspapers that publish stringers’ articles should not only offer them bylines, but pay them professional rates as well. And news organizations that find it both economical and convenient to buy material from free-lancers should recognize their obligation to stand behind anyone representing them — regardless of whether they are staff or stringer — in the field.