The Grocery-Store Papers

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On Jan. 10, the day El Salvador's leftist guerrillas launched their unsuccessful "final offensive," a squad of National Police raided a small grocery store in San Salvador. Hidden behind a hollow wall, they found a plastic garbage bag and a large suitcase, both filled with papers. At first the papers sat on a dusty, police-office desk; no one imagined that the scores of documents would provide most of the U.S. proof that the Cubans and Soviets supplied arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas. Their recovery was due to the enterprise, and luck, of Diplomat Jon Glassman, 37, a political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City.

In mid-January, Glassman arrived in San Salvador to seek information about how the guerrillas were obtaining large quantities of sophisticated weapons. The Salvadoran general staff had already provided some captured documents, including an account of an arms shopping trip made last year by a Salvadoran Communist official to Moscow, Hanoi and Soviet bloc capitals. But there was no evidence that any weapons had been delivered or shipped to nearby countries. Discouraged, Glassman was about to return to Mexico City when he decided to ask the National Police. They gave him the grocery-store papers.

Glassman quickly scanned the notes, letters and committee reports, but they were mostly in code. Then a guerrilla leader's letter mentioned an effort by "the Esmeralda management" to help patch up a factional split among the guerrillas. A second letter openly thanked a Cuban official for his assistance in ending the dispute.

Realizing that the Esmeralda management meant the Cuban government, Glassman reread the documents, substituting Cuba for Esmeralda. One report discussed the Communist official's trip and the weapons he was promised. Another document spoke of Esmeralda-Cuba as a transshipment point for weapons from Ethiopia and Viet Nam, and mentioned guerrilla supply lines through Nicaragua. The grocery-store papers represented over 70% of the material that Washington used to draw up last month's White Paper documenting Soviet and Cuban arms aid to El Salvador's insurgency.