Overt Actions, Covert Worries

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It was difficult to imagine just what it was. The CIA has hatched farfetched assassination plots before, most famously the exploding cigar meant for Cuba's Fidel Castro. But harming D'Escoto would not make sense. The Foreign Minister, who often travels abroad to dispense the Sandinista line, is derided even by comrades as "the Flying Nun." He wields no real power within the government, and his overwrought rhetoric sometimes drives away potential supporters. "D'Escoto is the man who loses a friend a day for Nicaragua," said a State Department official. "Why should we eliminate him?" Declared Secretary of State George Shultz: "The charges have no merit, and some of the physical evidence is ridiculous."

Various observers suspect that the Sandinista directorate, seeking a new excuse for a domestic crackdown, invented the plot. Last week several leaders of the country's Conservative Democratic Party were jailed. But political opponents have been arrested in the past without recourse to elaborate spy charges. A plausible explanation is that radicals within the leadership trumped up the charges to dramatize concretely their alarm over U.S. efforts to destabilize the government.

Ordinarily, faced with the expulsion of three officials, the U.S. would have retaliated tit for tat, expelling three diplomats of the offending country. Instead, 21 officials stationed in the New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco consulates of Nicaragua were ordered out and their offices shut. Both consul generals in California, for instance, had lived in the U.S. since 1961, and left behind spouses who are U.S. citizens. New Orleans Consul General Augustin Alfaro, U.S.-educated and a resident of the city for ten years, decided to stay: just before the Administration's departure deadline she requested (and doubtless will be granted) political asylum.

There was apparently no dispute within the Administration about the wisdom of the seven-for-one U.S. retaliation. The practical effect will be to dump the work of the consulates, processing visas and trade documents, onto Nicaragua's inexperienced Washington embassy staff. The six closed consulates, the State Department claimed somewhat unpersuasively, had been used "for intelligence operations."

Stone's visit to Managua went ahead as planned. Both sides were courteous. "We have had serious talks during this intense visit here," said Stone on departure. And, back in Washington, no diplomat among the 13 at Nicaragua's embassy was expelled. Insisted Shultz: "We don't have any thought of breaking diplomatic relations."

That was certainly intended to reassure Congress more than Managua. Since the replacement last month of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders, a move seen by some as a triumph for hardliners, congressional Democrats have grown even more uneasy about U.S. support of armed attacks against the Nicaraguan government. Thus last week the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voting almost entirely along party lines, passed a Democratic measure that would stop the millions of dollars in covert military aid now going to anti-Sandinista guerrillas.