AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (17 page)
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Authors: Larry Kahaner
BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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As hostilities grew, small arms rushed into Nicaragua. The Sandinistas received support from the Soviet Union, mainly through Cuba and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Sandinista army at first was poorly equipped and ill managed. Their weapons consisted of some AKs from Cuba and whatever was left behind when Somoza’s National Guard fled the country. This hodgepodge was gradually replaced by AKs only. The Contras had very few weapons save some hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols. This changed immediately after they began to be funded by the United States beginning in 1981 when William Casey, newly appointed CIA director, suggested to Reagan that he support $19 million for the agency, which Congress later approved, to establish opposition to the Sandinistas. In 1982, the CIA created Contra bases in Honduras. In southern Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica, CIA-supported Contra camps were established under the leadership of a former Sandinista commander with the colorful moniker of “Commandante Zero.”
Congress was becoming increasingly uneasy about the conflict, however, and the situation came to a head when the CIA illegally mined one of Nicaragua’s harbors, sinking a Soviet freighter. In December, Congress unanimously passed the Boland Amendment to the 1983 military budget bill, which made it illegal for the CIA to continue funding the Contras. This did not stop the Reagan administration. They continued to fund the Contras through third parties, other countries, and through other U.S. government agencies that, the White House maintained, were legally outside the Boland Amendment’s edict.
In August 1985, the Contras received a shipment from Poland of ten thousand Polish-made AKs worth about $6 million. Polish officials denied they would ever directly sell weapons to a group opposed to the Marxist Sandinistas. Polish embassy official Andrzej Dobrynski said publicly, “It is so preposterous, it is undignified even to deny it.” Indeed, Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was a guest of honor at ceremonies in Warsaw commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
U.S. officials claimed that the Contras had hijacked the Polish shipment, intended for an unspecified Latin American country, but government critics suggested that the United States had bought the AKs for the Contras despite the congressional prohibition. They said that although it did seem preposterous, Poland needed the money so badly that it was willing to go against its political ideology for cold cash.
Neither side budged from their accusatory position until late 1986 when Sandinista soldiers monitored a camouflaged Vietnamera C-123 cargo plane that had taken off from a field outside of San Salvador and was nearing the Nicaraguan town of San Carlos. As the plane flew down to twenty-five hundred feet, preparing to drop its load, a nineteen-year-old soldier fired his shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile. Direct hit. The plane spiraled, trailed smoke, and crashed, but not before a single parachute opened, safely lowering Gene Hasenfus of Marinette, Wisconsin, to the ground.
When soldiers reached the wrecked plane, they discovered seventy AKs, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, rocket grenades, jungle fatigues, boots, and two dead Americans. One of the dead crew members, William J. Cooper, carried an ID card from Southern Air Transport, a Miami company once owned by the CIA and still thought to have ties to the agency. The plane had previously been used in 1984 as part of a government sting, filmed by the CIA, showing the Nicaraguan interior minister involved in selling cocaine. Reagan had publicly displayed a still photograph from the film months earlier to bolster the administration’s position that the Contras should be supported to fight the Sandinistas, who were now drug dealers. He could not have known that the photo later would provide solid evidence of his illegal connection to the Contras.
Any doubt about the CIA’s involvement in funding the Contras, including the AK shipment from Poland, disappeared as the captured Hasenfus spilled the beans on the entire operation, telling about flying missions for the CIA, bringing weapons and supplies to the Contras. Even Reagan supporters felt betrayed at the disconnect between the administration’s public rhetoric denying aid to the Contras in violation of law and the mounting evidence to the contrary. The fact that the plane carried Soviet-style AKs added a more sinister veneer to a situation that was growing more disturbing every day.
In November 1986, the scandal grew even larger when the Lebanese magazine
Ash Shiraa
reported that the United States had been selling weapons to Iran. Profits from the arms deals were being used to buy weapons and for direct funding of the Contras. These weapons sales to Iran reportedly funded Hasenfus’s ill-fated flight.
Ash Shiraa
reported that the United States had been selling weapons to Iran. Profits from the arms deals were being used to buy weapons and for direct funding of the Contras. These weapons sales to Iran reportedly funded Hasenfus’s ill-fated flight.
During congressional testimony about the Iran-Contra affair—which only covered activities from October 1984 to 1986—investigators uncovered more details about arms shipments. For example, investigators learned that White House aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North had shredded documents pertaining to the arms sales shortly after Hasenfus’s plane was shot down. Contra leader Adolfo Calero offered documents showing that he had established a financial structure to funnel aid to the Contras. North, who was at the National Security Council, had set up dummy corporations and bank accounts to transfer money to Calero’s organization. Two former military officers, Major General Richard V. Secord and Major General John K. Singlaub, were also involved in the ruse.
Calero testified that Secord and Singlaub were particularly pleased at the bargain prices the group had received. The Contras paid half of the going rate for ammunition, about nine to twelve cents a round, and $145 for AKs, which normally cost $230 on the open market. He went into great detail about the $6 million Poland deal, handled by Singlaub, that netted several thousand AKs and millions of rounds of ammunition.
Calero also testified that Secord said that he had not profited from the total $11.4 million arms deals, but he later learned that Secord had lied and doubled the price of the AKs that he sold to the Contras.
Further media investigations revealed that the CIA maintained stateside warehouses of Soviet bloc weapons, mainly AKs, as did the Defense Department. In several instances, records showed that these AKs entered the United States from Eastern Europe and landed at the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Many had their serial numbers removed so they could not be traced to their country of origin.
The televised hearings from May to August 1987 captured the attention of Americans as they watched North and others endure hours of probing questions. When Congress issued its findings on the Iran-Contra scandal, they said that North had been the main negotiator of the deals despite his pleas that he was only following orders from superiors. In May 1989, he was convicted of obstructing Congress and destroying government documents. His conviction was later overturned.
The results of the Iran-Contra probe—the full report was issued in January 1994, seven years after it began—never uncovered the entire story, because CIA officials refused to disclose the full extent of their involvement with the Contras. North, the principal dealmaker, also refused to answer many questions put to him, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The report concluded, “The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President’s willful activities.”
While this was a low point in U.S. history, the real legacy of the Iran-Contra scandal was that it brought tens of thousands of AKs to Nicaragua. These arms have spread throughout Central and South America, wreaking havoc and devastation not only in these countries but also in the United States, which has become a final destination for drugs produced there.
BY 1989, EXHAUSTION WAS SETTING in among the Nicaraguan combatants, but as happens in many postwar situations, like Afghanistan and in Sierra Leone, the large number of cheap leftover arms gave people a way to survive amid the chaos. As in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern countries, the weapons became a way to make a living. As the war wound down, there were widespread reports of soldiers and former soldiers armed with AKs hijacking government trucks for food. Citizens bought rifles for protection against such gangs, while others set up firing ranges so well-to-do people could fire these plentiful weapons safely, for a fee, in a convivial setting. Still others, seeking to obtain hard currency, sold caches of leftover AKs to rebels in other countries such as El Salvador.
By 1989, the civil war in El Salvador was already a decade old. The country had been ruled by a string of dictatorships since the 1930s, but the seventies saw the growth of more active guerrilla movements, most notably Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which opposed the oppressive right-wing government. Between 1979 and 1981 about thirty thousand people were killed by government death squads, and the moderate presidency of José Napoleon Duarte from 1984 to 1989 failed to end the war. Instead, it grew even more violent.
During this time, the FMLN had received large shipments of AKs to bolster their struggle against the U.S.-backed right-wing regime. President George H. W. Bush publicly stated that the weapons were coming from Soviet-backed groups in Cuba and Nicaragua, mainly the Sandinistas. These were not trivial shipments. According to U.S. ambassador William Walker, the entire guerrilla force of six thousand to eight thousand was now reequipped with AKs and ready to renew its efforts against the government.
Walker claimed that these weapons came from Cuba, which turned out to be wrong. The White House later amended his statement, saying that the weapons were from Soviet bloc nations but the ammunition came from Cuba through Nicaragua.
As the days progressed, the story changed again. The U.S.-backed government in El Salvador never blamed the Nicaraguans, and the White House offered scant evidence to back its own claim of a Nicaraguan connection.
As it turned out, the weapons came from an unexpected source. Honduran military officials, hoping to cash in on the debris of Nicaragua’s civil war, had raided weapons caches left over by the CIA in their country. These arms originally were intended for the Contras as Congress was preparing to cut off funding. When the Contras faded from the scene, the weapons lay unused but secured. With the assistance of professional arms dealers, they found their way to left-wing rebels in El Salvador.
This influx of AKs bolstered the rebels’ morale and offered them greater firepower over the Salvadoran army, which was outfitted with M-16s from the United States. The FMLN even changed their battle tactics to take advantage of the AK’s intermediate round—7.62 × 39mm models were and are still manufactured in many Warsaw Pact countries like Romania, as well as China—which was heavier and traveled farther than the smaller M-16 round. On election day in March 1989, for example, one battle of a coordinated nationwide push by AK-armed rebel forces held government helicopters at a distance in the village of San Isidro, keeping them just out of range from supplying air support to their ground troops. This tactic was repeated throughout the country.
This and subsequent guerrilla attacks were so successful that the government had no choice but to accept a peace accord that included the FMLN and was brokered by the United Nations in 1991. A nine-month cease-fire took effect on February 1, 1992, and has held since. The last remnants of the FMLN’s military structure were dismantled as it became a legitimate political party and integrated into the government. Unfortunately, El Salvador, like its Central American neighbors, still suffers from domestic violence, gangs, street crime, and high homicide rates as AKs and other weapons remain plentiful despite arms collection and destruction programs.
In a ceremony intended to symbolize a more peaceful era for the region, Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro in September 1990 gave President George H. W. Bush an AK cut in half by a blowtorch. The weapon had been taken from a citizen as part of the country’s efforts to destroy the large numbers of small arms that still existed. (Many of these weapons were distributed wholesale by Sandinista leaders when Chamorro in 1990 beat their candidate, Daniel Ortega.)
Other countries, including Guatemala and Honduras, had similar programs to de-arm their nations, but they, like Nicaragua, met with less than stellar results. Small arms possess too much utility to be turned in. Not only can they be used for hunting and self-protection against domestic crime, but also as a hedge in case of renewed civil war or an oppressive regime taking power. The tradition of people holding small arms and the prestige associated with it was just so strong in the region; government decommissioning programs could not overcome it.
To Chamorro, a disabled AK was the perfect icon of the country’s efforts to stem violence, but despite this gesture, the cold war had left Central America awash in weapons, which were now heading southward to countries like Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia where they were slowly replacing the Belgian FN-FALs that had for decades been popular among rebel groups because of their availability. In addition, because of the now weakened and lawless condition of Central American nations, illegal arms shipments from Europe were streaming through these countries on their way to South America.
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