A Mystery Involving "Mercs"

By Ed Magnuson

Deaths in Nicaragua raise questions about U.S. involvement

Version 1: The scene is a clearing in Nicaragua controlled by the anti-Sandinista contra guerrillas. "We're going on a rescue mission," shouts Dana Parker, a captain in the Alabama National Guard, as he jumps into a green Hughes 500 helicopter, joining James Powell, a Viet Nam veteran and flight instructor from Memphis. They take off with a contra pilot at the controls. The two Americans are unarmed. The chopper's rocket pods are empty. The visitors, who have no ties to the CIA, are bringing boots and uniforms for the contras. Their aircraft crashes -its whereabouts unknown.

Version 2: The scene is an airstrip in Jamastran, Honduras, recently improved by the U.S. Two armed Americans lift off in a helicopter carrying 36 rockets and a machine gun. It joins three Cessna aircraft in a contra raid on a military school and an electric plant near Santa Clara, ten miles inside Nicaragua. The planes fire 24 rockets, killing a 40-year-old male civilian and three girls. The chopper is shot down, and its three occupants are killed. The Americans were on a combat mission with the knowledge and implicit approval of the CIA.

These were the conflicting and irreconcilable accounts of how two Americans last week became casualties of the guerrilla warfare against Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The first, relatively neutral version, given by contra spokesmen, and the second, accusative account, provided by Nicaraguan officials, seemed tailored to fit their opposite political purposes. But the incident stirred a new controversy over whether the CIA has been accepting the voluntary help of American civilians to support the contras since last May, when Congress cut off further funding of the CIA's not-so-covert operation in Nicaragua. It also focused attention on the shadowy activity of mercenary fighters -meres, as they call themselves.

Some points are not in dispute. Parker, 36, was a popular 13-year veteran of the police department in Huntsville and an active weekend officer in the Alabama National Guard's elite Special Forces unit at nearby Decatur. The CIA had used the Alabama Air National Guard surreptitiously in the early 1960s to train Cuban exiles as pilots for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Powell, also 36, had piloted helicopters in Viet Nam, surviving three crashes caused by enemy fire. Parker belonged to a little-known anti-Communist organization in Alabama called the Civilian Military Assistants group (CMA). Powell was a member of a Memphis offshoot known as Civilian Refugee Military Assistants.

The casual origin of CMA was explained by Tom Posey, 38, a balding former Marine who is one of its founders. He said that he and four other veterans began meeting in Huntsville restaurants in July of last year, "just shooting the bull about what we could do to help" the anti-Communist forces in Central America. "At first we didn't know there was even anything going on in Nicaragua. We thought the contras were Communists."

Posey said his group's Nicaragua venture began belatedly last November after the group learned from newspapers that the contras were righting the Sandinistas, and that General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, then Honduras' strongman, was supporting the rebels. Posey impulsively sent a letter to the general, offering his group's help in opposing Communists. "I was tickled pink when I got a letter back. He invited us down." Posey said that he and three CMA colleagues flew to Tegucigalpa in a chartered plane in January after notifying the Honduran embassy in Washington that they were taking handguns and rifles ("for our own protection") as well as $4,000 worth of medical supplies. Posey said he showed Alvarez's letter to a U.S. embassy official in Honduras, who arranged for a Honduran military aide to make contact with the Americans. They delivered their supplies, Posey said, to a contra base camp in Honduras.

Posey, with Parker, Powell and three other CMA members, flew back to Honduras in late August, bringing what Posey described as nonlethal items, including socks, blue jeans and even baseball bats for contra children. In all, he said, CMA has donated about $70,000 worth of goods to the contras. A contra spokesman said the Americans also taught the guerrillas "survival techniques." It was on this visit that the helicopter crash occurred.

Administration officials conceded that both State and Defense Department employees have helped CMA and other private groups send military and civilian supplies to El Salvador in support of that government's war against Marxist-led rebel forces. The Administration contends that such private aid to a friendly government is legal. State Department Spokesman John Hughes said that the Justice Department is examining whether CMA also provided munitions to the insurgents in Nicaragua and, if so, whether this violated the neutrality laws.

In response to inquiries by New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA conceded that it was aware of the Americans' activity in Honduras. But the agency assured the committee that it was not sending American citizens on combat missions against the Sandinistas.

Actually, there does not seem to be any extensive involvement of American mercenaries in combat in either El Salvador or Nicaragua. Robert K. Brown of Boulder, Colo., a former Special Forces officer who publishes Soldier of Fortune, said that his magazine has coordinated the shipment of some 20 tons of medical supplies to the El Salvador government and has sent teams of experts in small arms, mortars, explosives and medical treatment there on six "training missions." But he estimates that only four or five American civilians are involved in the "antiCommunist" combat in Central America, mainly because no one pays enough for such service. "All these guys get," scoffs Dale Dye, the magazine's executive editor, "is beans, rice and bullets."

With reporting by Jerome Chandler, Ross H. Munro