Overt Actions, Covert Worries

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Washington and Managua exchange charges and expulsions

For a country its size, Nicaragua set a lot of swivel chairs spinning in the U.S. last week. The same day that three American diplomats expelled from Nicaragua landed at Washington's National Airport, 21 Nicaraguan consular officials were ordered to leave the U.S. by the Reagan Administration. That same day as well, a House committee voted to cut off covert aid to anti-Sandinista guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and based in Honduras. On Friday, U.S. Special Envoy Richard Stone stopped in Nicaragua to meet with members of the junta and the Marxist-led Sandinista directorate. Said Stone, in Spanish, on his arrival: "I am interested in carrying out profound conversations."

These latest convolutions in U.S.-Nicaraguan relations began on Sunday night at the U.S. embassy residence in Managua. A reception had been going on for hours, but when he knocked on the door at 10:30 p.m., Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto was not arriving fashionably late for a nightcap. He handed the Americans a curt note declaring that there were three spies on the embassy staff—Political Affairs Counselor Linda Pfeifel, First Secretary David Greig and Second Secretary Ermila Rodriguez—and they were hereby persona non grata. The trio, D'Escoto said, were to leave Nicaragua within 24 hours.

Then on Monday, Nicaraguan officials staged a curious show in Managua. Security Chief Lenin Cerna charged that Pfeifel, Greig and Rodriguez had been trying to assemble "a counterrevolutionary network to carry out attacks on our leaders." A Nicaraguan army lieutenant described how Greig and others, by providing invisible ink and a transmitter camouflaged in an ice chest, had tried to turn him into a traitor.

The star witness was a Foreign Ministry employee, Marlene Moncada, who claimed to have been working as a double agent: she said a CIA agent recruited her last year in Honduras, where she was stationed at the Nicaraguan embassy. Cerna showed off an espionage kit allegedly provided Moncada by the CIA (Sony short-wave radio, edible paper, hollow Mayan book ends containing codebooks), as well as photographs of her meeting with Rodriguez and a color videotape montage of various other rendezvous. (The Sandinistas displayed a funny show-biz bent: the video agitprop had a musical sound track appropriate for a spy movie.)

The most bizarre artifact presented at the press conference was a bottle of Benedictine liqueur laced with a poison called thallium. Its ultimate recipient, Cerna charged, was to have been Foreign Minister D'Escoto, who is a Roman Catholic priest. "It sounds like a movie plot," Cerna admitted, "but it isn't."