How to "Neutralize" the Enemy

By Evan Thomas

A shocking CIA primer jolts the Administration

The 89-page booklet entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare is a primer on insurgency, a how-to book in the struggle for hearts and minds. Some of the "techniques of persuasion" are benign: helping the peasants harvest crops, learn to read, improve hygiene. Others are decidedly brutal: assassination, kidnaping, blackmail, mob violence.

It could be a manual for the Viet Cong or the Cuban-backed rebels in El Salvador. If it were, the Administration would likely be waving it as proof of its thesis about the sources of insidious world terrorism. In fact, however, it is a publication of the CIA, written for Nicaraguan contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Its disclosure last week came as a political embarrassment to the Administration and a major moral one for the U.S. It stirred memories of CIA abuses that were supposedly outlawed a decade ago and gave Democrats a potentially hot new campaign issue.

The pamphlet, written in Spanish, recommends use of "selective violence" to "neutralize" Sandinista public officials "such as court judges, police and state security officials." To make an example of an execution, it is "absolutely necessary to gather together the population affected, so that they will be present and take part in the act." If "it should be necessary" to shoot a "citizen who is trying to leave town," guerrillas should claim that he was "an enemy of the people." Targets who fail to cooperate, the manual instructs, should be "exposed" to police "with false statements from citizens." The finale of a successful local insurgency is a mob riot. "Professional criminals will be hired to carry out specific selective jobs" like provoking a shooting that will "cause the death of one or more people who would become martyrs for the cause." A guerrilla commander stationed in a tower or tree should give the signal to begin the mayhem, the manual instructs. "Shock troops" armed with "knives, razors, chains, clubs and bludgeons" will "march slightly behind the innocent and gullible participants."

The document clearly violates the spirit of an Executive Order signed by Reagan in 1981 that prohibits even indirect participation in assassination. At the very least, the document undercuts Reagan's moral pronouncements condemning state-sponsored terrorism by such nations as Libya, Syria and Iran. Last June, for example, Secretary of State George Shultz declared, "It is not hard to tell, as we look around the world, who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters . . . The contras in Nicaragua do not blow up school buses or hold mass executions of civilians." (Asked how to reconcile Shultz's statement with the manual, a State Department spokesman said he was prohibited from discussing intelligence matters.)

A contra leader now in exile in Miami, Edgar Chamorro, told TIME that the document is based on notes given him a year ago by a "gringo" who arrived as a CIA operative at rebel headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was described by Chamorro as an Irishman who fought for the U.S. in the Korean War and admired the "psychological operations" of the Irish Republican Army. Chamorro printed up 2,000 copies of the manual and handed out 200 of them to his troops, but then he had second thoughts. He revised the rest by censoring out references to "criminals" and "murder." (It was not the only time that contra leaders have balked at CIA help. Last spring they objected to a 16-page CIA Freedom Fighters' Manual, which showed, with comic-book-style illustrations, sabotage techniques like pulling down power cables and putting dirt into gas tanks. It was eventually distributed, but one contra leader objected that the cartoon characters depicted in the drawings "didn't look very Nicaraguan.")

Adolfo Calero, one of the contra leaders, denied last week that his guerrillas followed the terrorist teachings in the CIA manual. But in the field, the contras do use psychological and physical coercion to win over the peasantry, just as Communist-backed rebel organizations do. Government sympathizers are sometimes executed, and contra commanders have discussed assassinating one or another of the nine-member ruling Sandinista directorate. The contras had a list of 60 Sandinistas in the village of San Fernando who had to be "eliminated" before the contras could safely occupy the town last year, according to those who traveled with the contras. (They never took the town.)

Reaction to the CIA manual, the existence of which was first revealed by the Associated Press last Monday, was fast and furious. Walter Mondale demanded the resignation of CIA Director William Casey, and questioned Reagan's role. "Did he know this was going on?" asked Mondale. "I don't know which is worse--knowing this was going on or having a Government where no one is in charge." Congressman Edward Boland, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, fumed that the document was "repugnant to a nation that condemns such acts by others. It embraces the Communist revolutionary tactics that the United States is pledged to defeat throughout the world." His committee launched an investigation, and its Senate counterpart scheduled a closed briefing by CIA officials.

The White House moved quickly to disavow the document. President Reagan ordered two investigations, one by the CIA inspector general's office and the other by the agency's three-member oversight board. "The Administration has not advocated or condoned political assassination or any other attacks on civilians, nor will we," said Spokesman Larry Speakes. Other officials claimed that the booklet had been prepared by a "low-level contract employee" of the CIA and was never cleared for publication by higher-ups. The document indicates a sophisticated knowledge, apparently drawn from CIA field reports, of techniques currently being used by Communist guerrillas. The key political and moral question is whether senior Government officials knew what the CIA manual was advocating, and if not, why not. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Martin Casey/Miami and Ross H. Munro/ Washington

With reporting by Martin Casey/Miami, Ross H. Munro/Washington