August 22, 2023 • 46 mins
Cookie leads a news team into the most remote parts of Nicaragua, in search of terror.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
They are the moral equal of our founding fathers and
the brave men and women of the French Resistance.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
We cannot turn.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Away from them for the struggle here.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Smuggle.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Here is not right versus left, It is right versus wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Welcome back to the Journalista Podcast. That was President Reagan
comparing the Nicaraguan contrast to our founding fathers. I think
George Washington just turned over in his grave. This episode
is about terror as it pertains to Central America in
the eighties. Who did it, where it came from, who
(00:55):
funded it, and who bore the brunt of the evil
that was unleashed, told primarily through the eyes of two journalists.
You already know Cookie, but you're about to meet one
of the rising stars of CBS News. Boy does she
have a story to tell. But first, Cookie makes an
insidious discovery.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
You worked with Larry Doyle and you worked with Richard Wagner.
Speaker 6 (01:21):
You were the krem de la creb.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
They were both highly respected in their field. They had
seen it all everywhere in the world. And by the way,
rest in peace Richard Wagner. He was a wonderful, wonderful
correspondent to work with. So I think we're on a junket.
We're heading to the jungles for something, some story, or
(01:46):
we're just looking for a story. We had several vehicles
in our convoy and then all of a sudden, in
between two of the vehicles, a mortar blows up. Exit
the vehicles, get in the dirt and start crawling. We're
whispering to each other because we don't know where the
(02:08):
enemy is, who was responsible for the mortar attack, And
all of a sudden I hear on the side of
me some soldier whispering.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
Cookie, Cookie, is that you?
Speaker 5 (02:23):
And Richard Wagner and Larry Doyle both turn around in
the dirt look at me, and Richard Wagner says, I
cannot believe that someone knows you right here where we are.
This soldier helped guide us to safety. We eventually got
back to our vehicles to continue.
Speaker 6 (02:44):
On our junket.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
We took him back with us, so we sort of
saved him from whatever was going on in that mortar
attack because a few more mortars went off, but we
got out safely. And if I'm not mistaken, I think
it was this guy. He was a Sandinista soldier, not
very educated, probably a grunt doing grunt work.
Speaker 6 (03:08):
Had come across a book.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
It was in English, and he really didn't know what
it meant. He says, I have something. I don't know
if it means anything, but I'd like to give it
to you.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
Can you tell me what it means?
Speaker 5 (03:21):
And so I'm reading it, and I'm like on the
inside freaking out.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
I'm acting like it's no big deal.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I turned to Richard Wagner and I said to him,
can you look at this and confirm what I think
it is? So Richard's reading it and I could see
He's getting the same visceral reaction that I did. And
he says, this is a goddamn CIA torture manual.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
The manual was compiled in nineteen eighty three by a
CIA advisor to the Contra rebels, instructing them and the
techniques of political assassination, guerrilla warfare, and torture. According to
the Washington Post, US Army intelligence manuals were used to
train Latin American military officers advocating the use of executions, torture, blackmail,
(04:11):
and other forms of coercion. The same brutal techniques used
successfully by Honduran and Salvadoran desk squads.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
What it was, basically was a manual that the CIA
had put out, obviously, you know, hush hush, teaching them
how to torture Sandinistas so they could stop them from
going over to the Sandinista side and get them to
come over to the contryside.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
It was horrific.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
It was a how to peeling off faces, peeling off
the soles of feet, beheading, putting the head on a stake.
Speaker 6 (04:49):
It was a torture manual.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
What's the purpose of that?
Speaker 5 (04:53):
To create terror among the civilians and even probably to
some of the soldiers to come to our side, come
to our way of taking This is.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
What President Reagan had to say about the CIA manual.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Mister Reagan said the dispute over a manual on guerrilla
warfare prepared for Nicaraguan rebels by the Central Intelligence Agency
was quote much ado about nothing. I have had some
information on it and have been assured that there's not
one word in there that refers to assassination.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
By the way, anyone who's listening to this, you can
actually access it online. Really, yes, it's available online. I'm
just telling them right now.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Can I say I did not know that?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, So America was teaching torture and terror not totally surprising.
We had similar revelations revealed during the insanity following the
attack on nine to eleven in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cookie
introduces us to the amazing Jane Wallace, former CBS news
correspondent who finds another piece of the puzzle quite by accident.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
Jane Wallace was an extraord is an extraordinary person. She
was on air talent, whether it be morning news, evening news,
weekend news, West fifty seventh, she did it all. She
was CBS's golden girl. She was someone you could rely
on in battle, in the hard times. You knew she
(06:19):
had your back. She was funny, she was brilliant. She
was a grunt, which she needed to be a grunt.
She got down and dirty when she needed to get
down and dirty. She was never a prima donna. The
crews loved her, the suits loved her. She was one
(06:41):
of us.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Jane wanted to go to Old Salvador, but the CBS
patriarchy had other ideas.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
I had to fight to get sent to Central America
by CBS because I was a girl. I was supposed
to go to Salvador and then at the last minute
somebody says, oh, no, you're going to Honduras treat me.
But El Salvador was because I couldn't imagine. I just
could not imagine any place where they would actually murder
and rape nuns.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
It is reported today from L Salvador that four Americans
have been killed there. This was the first time that
Americans seem to have been singled out by a desk squad.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
They were shot execution style bullets to the back of
the head.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Later, their bodies were found in a shallow grave.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
The New York Times said this about the crime.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
The churchwomen were arrested after two of them went to
Como Lapa International Airport to meet the other two who
were arriving on a flight from Nicaragua. After members of
the security corps took the women to a remote location,
they were given the order quote unquote to liquidate them,
to kill them. Robert White, who was the American ambassador
to L Salvador at the time of the killing, said,
(07:50):
when the act was done, I knew immediately it was
the military.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
That would be the same military funded and supplied by
the United States of America.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Remember being stunned in my early twenties, I covered it
as part of a local news story in New York.
I just honestly couldn't imagine the kind of evil that
would murder and rape nuns and then toss them by
the side of a road. But that was Salvador. I
didn't come into Honduras with any preconceptions except I'd rather
(08:20):
be in El Salvador. And then it turned out any
information that was really to be had about Nicaragua or
information about what was going on in Central America usually
originated in Honduras, which I found out by accident by
having been stuck there, because they thought they'd put the
girl where nothing was going on. There is no war there,
(08:43):
allegedly there. It's just a country. You get there and
it's like, well, for a country with no war, there's
sure a lot of people who look like professional warriors
or something. I mean, it was supposed to be a
civilian country, and they sent me to Honduras because they
assumed nothing was happening there. Okay, we'll let her go,
(09:06):
we'll shut her up, and we're sending her to the
backwater of history. So I end up in Honduras. You
could smell it in retrospect. You could just smell it
the minu you got on the ground in this country.
What was going on in front of your eyes and
what was supposed to be happening did not match. And
(09:27):
so I get off a plane. I've never done anything
like this. I just bugged them to go. But no,
it is a very sleepy I mean, Honduras is the
original Banana Republic. The banana companies ran the country. It
was a piece of real estate basically claimed by various
people over the years, but a soulless backwater and I
(09:49):
land and Jesus, there's just way too many beefy Americans
in type T shirts who are a foot taller than
the locals. Even if they tried to dress the same
way and they couldn't even button those local shirts, they
stood out. And there's too many of them. Okay, So
(10:09):
you're saying there's some indigenous band of fighters that's on
the border out there, who's booking all the rooms over
there at the big hotel. Because it didn't match. Right
off the top. No, it just screamed spooks. And if
you did something so bold to say, oh, excuse me,
where are you from Ohio? What are you doing here?
(10:30):
You never got a straight answer out of anyone, and
it was just really smelly off the top. It took
me a while to for you this out, but someone
finally told me that that Honduran set up was the
third largest CIA station in the world, the second largest
outside of Moscow. I'm sorry, in this country, what are
(10:50):
we doing here? Exactly? Because I'm asking that question because
there's too many beefy white guys and nobody will tell
you what they do for a living. And oh, by
the way, what industry do we have here? Exactly? Sides
government propaganda and dirty wars. The contrasts had been formed
out of the old Samosa horses, and those guys were
(11:12):
seriously bad news, these alleged fighters, even before the big
Regan showdown with them. These guys were, as the kids say, now, sus.
These guys were sus from Jump Street. They were dubious.
No one ever walked in the room and said these upstanding,
(11:33):
fine guys who are clean soldiers from No one ever
said that about the contrast. Nothing's ever established as a truth.
It's always spongy, it's always moving and the guys who
fronted for the contrast in Tagusi Galpa. What a name
for a city, huh. They just weren't real. There was
sort of dark clouds hanging around those guys, and they
(11:55):
had this guy fronting the PR and Tagusikalpa. He wasn't
a fighter. He certainly was not a believer in anything.
The whole operation in Honduras was suspect, and so early
in my time of covering it, somebody had leaked the manual,
the torture manual that was part of the training of
(12:16):
the contrace. Why was anybody training people in torture? What's
this about? Aren't we supposed to be done with these tactics,
you know? And we were supposed to have been done
with those tactics. You know. America brought some real good
imports to that place.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
The Contras were being trained and supplied in Honduras by
the CIA and leaders of the Honduran death squads.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
I didn't know what to think. I was so rude,
but I was also young and tired and hot and
naive to just be direct. Made an appointment. I got
some time with the PR guy for the embassy, and
I walked into his office on the embassy grounds, closed
his door and said, yes, I'm Jane Wallis for CBS News.
(13:02):
What the fuck is going on in this country? And
he burst into laughter. He'd never had anybody be that direct,
and he knew I was smelling exactly what they were
trying to cover up all over town. And that was
the beginning of my time in Honduras and the beginning
of my time in Central America, because virtually everything the
(13:23):
Americans were doing that they didn't belong doing was headquartered
in Honduras and done against Nicaragua or through Salvador.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Certainly the worst kept secret in Central America, that's for.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Sure, you're kidding, and for good reason. They were just
so obvious. But it was such a backwater they didn't
figure anybody was going to notice.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
But Jane noticed, and she's headed to Nicaragua to cover
one of the most brutal stories of her professional life.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 8 (14:07):
For four years, we've been helping to wage the world's
worst kept secret war, training and equipping a force known
as the Contrast, who are trying to overthrow the government
of Nicaragua, a government the Reagan Whitehouse believes is a
communist threat in our own backyard. What kind of war
are we paying for? And who are they killing?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Welcome back? That was Jane Wallace in the opening of
an episode of the CBS news magazine West fifty seventh,
billed as a younger hipper version of sixty Minutes. The
Christian Science Monitor called it a ditsy, disco beat documag
for viewers with short attention spans. The New York Times
said it isn't really television, and it certainly isn't journalism.
(14:49):
It's as if news and entertainment fell into combat and
either side one. I don't know about all that, but
the show is popular in its coverage of Nicaragua and
the Iran contra affair was nothing short of astonishing. I
spoke with Jane about a story she did for West
fifty seventh, one of the biggest stories of her career.
But first she has something to say about Cookie. Was
(15:11):
there a particular story that sent you into Nicaragua or
did you just go there?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Oh? God, I think I just got sent there. It
was a horrible place to go to. The people were poor,
they were hungry, the country was going nowhere, and the
only good thing about going to Nicaragua was Cookie. She
was the saving grace of being in Monagua. If she'd
(15:36):
been what she appeared to be, sort of a party
girl and just to fix her or I'll make a
call and then I'm going to go get high, she
wouldn't have been Cookie. The truth is that woman knew
what she was doing and she was born to it
as a journalist. She wasn't trained to it. How CBS
got so lucky as to find and hire her, I
(16:00):
don't know. She was the only reason anyone could cover
that war. In addition to being as clever and it's
completely charming and tank topped and skinny and riley and
all of that. She knew what she was doing and
she cared. She was never going to tell you that
(16:20):
she didn't have to. It was unspoken.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
One of the big stories that came out of your
tenure there was what they call the Contra atrocities story,
and it involves a lot of your colleagues and a
lot of people that you rolled with all the time.
So tell me a little bit about how this kind
of came to pass and where it went.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
We witnessed Coultra atrocities way before the story that I'm
about to tell you massacres of women and children, massacres
of soldiers, torture techniques, so all these atrocities that we
had seen firsthand got But I like to call the
dream team. Leslie Coburn, Producer, Jane Wallace, on air talent
(17:07):
Manny Alvarez, camera crew with irv ran Hart, sound sometimes
George Bosa and myself. We were considered the dream team
at CBS. We adored each other, we worked well with
each other, and we would each of us go to
the ends of the earth for each other.
Speaker 6 (17:26):
Clearly a band of brothers.
Speaker 5 (17:28):
Leslie calls me and tells me, listen, we want to
do a contratrocity story.
Speaker 6 (17:34):
We've heard about this American.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Nun that lives in again the asshole of the.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
World in the jungles.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
We hear that she's got a lot of stories, and
she's got a lot of victims that survived these atrocities
that she takes care of. She was in some remote
end of the earth place called Seuna. D.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Coburn is an award winning producer and journalist covering wars
with CBS, ABC and PBS's Frontline. While all accounts, the
best there is She's also Olivia Wilde's mom, who Cookie
first met as a toddler. In a chapter from her
book Looking for Trouble, Leslie tells us what motivated her
to do this story.
Speaker 9 (18:20):
My intention was to get out of the Capitol and
into the remote countryside where the war was being fought.
Reports filtering out from priests and nuns suggested a systematic
use of classic terror tactics. New clinics docked with Cuban
medicine were blown up, Volunteers carrying vaccines into the jungle
had their throats slit. Even American nuns were kidnapped and
threatened with rape. I wanted to establish at what level
(18:43):
the tactics were sanctioned by Washington. Cookie was game. Her
translating skills were essential because she spoke the archaic peasant's
Spanish prevalent in the countryside.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Jane collaborated with Leslie for years on some of the
biggest stories of the eighties.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Leslie with further left than I was by entry and belief.
I didn't share that I didn't have the left right boloney,
because it turned out to be a set of choices
that didn't fit what was on the ground. Anyway, I
was nervous about having to do this story. I was
not anxious to do it, except that I knew there
was a reality there that needed to be revealed. I
(19:21):
knew there was ugliness, and I knew it was not
at all what was being touted in the States. Oh Jee,
freedom to give me a break. It was disillusioned very quickly.
But the Americans really needed to know what was being
done in their name. We were totally committed to trying
to get to the places no one else had gotten to,
(19:44):
to talk to people face to face, and it took
more than anybody bargained for.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
The region had been closed off the journalists by Interior
Minister Thomas Borge because it was controlled by the contrast.
It was too dangerous. Leslie asked Cookie to set up
a meeting with him.
Speaker 9 (20:03):
Cookie, Jane, and I arrived to find ourselves ushered into
a private dining room at the Officers Club with a
well appointed table for six. It seemed Borge, infatuated with Jane,
had thoughtfully brought two friends in toe. I was paired
off with a well traveled ambassador. Cookie was assigned to
a Rakish general. We survived this absurd lunch without disgracing ourselves.
(20:26):
And by the time we returned to the CBS bureau,
a dozen Roses were waiting for Jane.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Needless to say, they got the permission they wanted. But
that was the easy part.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
If you're going to stage some lies like the Contras
are a really great All American fighting force, you stage
that line a place where no one can get to it,
to hold the light up to it. That's what they
had done. So these places were remote, isn't the word
for it. They were inaccessible for the most party except
(20:58):
by Donkey.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was it a long trap to get to where you
were going.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
Everywhere we went for that story, it was a place
no one was meant to go to. The logistics in
these places were hideous. The roads were not meant to
be driven on. The vehicles had no air conditioning. It was,
you know, one hundred degrees with ninety eight percent humidity
and Monovo five about eleven thirty in the morning. I
(21:23):
never wanted to go to that country again as long
as ise life.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Their journey soon evolves into a dark Central American version
of planes, trains, and automobiles, except with the Russian biplane.
A couple of beat up old Chevy and Paula's and
an indigenous canoe called a paponte. They spend the first
day driving to the last vestige of civilization they would
see for a couple of weeks, Rio Blanco, hooking up
with a military convoy for a couple of hours, and
(21:49):
traveling alone through the contra infested territory at night. Leslie
describes it like this.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
Are odds of being attacked for fifty to fifty we
were easy pray for ambush. The thought of who was
waiting in the darkness blade my nerves. No one spoke.
I steadied myself, breathed deeply, and let Bonnie raate belt
through my headphones.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
You go through ten flat tires in a day, you
couldn't count on getting anywhere. So by the time you're
rolling up somewhere, a lot has gone into having those
tires underneath you and any idea of where you're going.
So that's how we ended up taking that canoe. The
road stopped. What are you going to do? You take
a canoe and try and hitch something on the other side.
(22:33):
You can't just drive through in the car If it doesn't,
I mean, nothing works like that.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Where they are heading is so remote and inaccessible. The
only way to get there is through the air.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
I've got to set up a plane, which is one
of these rinky dig two propeller clopboard planes that once
you get on you're not sure if you're going to
get to where you're going. And we all head to
see you to meet the nun. Yeah, this is a
town that has no paved roads, shacks, they didn't even
(23:04):
have electricity.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
It's hard for me to describe the kind of desolation
of these places, and like something was there once that
got ruined. All it is a difference slightly in the
vegetation or a pile of graves somewhere.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
So we go, we meet with the nun sister something,
and we proceed to do our story.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And with that Gal, the none we spoke to first.
I remember sitting on her porch trying to do an interview.
This port was so small. I'm chewing my knees across
from this woman who has an equally small space because
there's nowhere else with any shade to shoot an interview.
Man fell asleep on my shoulder because he'd taken so
(23:46):
much gramamine in anticipation of this Russian biplane. The guy
is such a great cameraman that he never went out
of focus. Never, not once I heard him snoring. Yeah,
never lost focus.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
What does she tell me about?
Speaker 5 (24:00):
She's telling us about all these atrocities and how she's
keeping the faith helping these survivors, which were mostly children
that we were getting ready to meet.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
The Nine introduces them to Guadalupe da Vila, a fourteen
year old girl who survived a recent Contra attack.
Speaker 10 (24:17):
Family was murdered by the Contra in November when the
baby was six days old.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
The parents were murdered.
Speaker 10 (24:24):
Yes, a brother of the mother, his girlfriend, the four
year old brother of this baby. Contra attacked about twenty
of them and one night.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
In this interview with Guadeloupe, you can hear Cookie translating
her story. Is hard to listen to.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Did they shoot them?
Speaker 3 (24:47):
You see, young Papaguya.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
They split us through? How about your mother? They killed
her and then they took her clothes off?
Speaker 8 (25:04):
And what happened that when like.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
To burn her clothes?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Lily pure graph of faith?
Speaker 4 (25:19):
Oh God, we are you know. It's one thing to
sort of think people are behaving in that kind of
almost pure evil. It's another thing to hear that through
the mouth of a child who's lost her parent or
who's had to witness something like this that's almost on
fathomable as a human being.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
They interviewed a priest with a similar.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Story rape a girl of fourteen years old because her
father was a member of a committee, cut off her
head and put her head along the trail. So that
the rest of the Compassino's get the idea that in
no way should they be participating in some kind of
government sponsored organization.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Jane spoke to twin brothers who witnessed contra Atrocity's firsthand.
Speaker 8 (26:04):
The twins survived the killing that let their father and
friends get in a ditch. La Contrell jakeamar Alianri, one
of the countries, said let's set all of these dead
people on fire, and their boss said no, let's just
throw them all in the ditch and let him be
there and there and.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
What happened then the pass.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
There.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
Then they finished off a couple of kids that were
just wounded. They finished them off. They killed them, Yes,
in front of your kids, in front see what happened
to your.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Daddy, Pierre.
Speaker 8 (26:44):
He pulled off the skin off his face and his feet.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
When you're standing there in Nicaragua and you're looking into
a child's face. It's other worldly dark. It is hard
to grasp it as a reality because it's so damn dark.
Who would do this to another human being in front
(27:11):
of the child? To do this by design? To people
who are campasinos. These are simple folks. These are the
people that will share their tortillas with you. If that's
all anybody's got, they'll give them to you. And they
aren't political. It's overwhelming that this is real human experience
(27:34):
and someone did that to this person or a group
of people with power, for whatever reason, did that to
these people who didn't have any which is why they
were stuck for it. And it still overwhelms me what
they did, what the countries did to some of these people.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
In listening to the interview, the one thing that I
was taken by, other than the obvious horror that they're describing,
there's a solemn quality of just talking to someone. I
was hearing your words, I was hearing the children or
the victims speaking about what happened, and I was hearing
cookies translation, and there was like this kind of a
strange respect, something very powerful happening in that three way exchange.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yes, there's not a lot of extra jabber or talk.
I mean, all of us were just tuned in. There's
a real deep respect for somebody having been so badly treated.
Those kids. Oh my god. You know, I looked at
these pieces again and thought, wonder how she grew up
(28:36):
with that. I wonder what happened. I wonder who raised
that baby. I mean happen you looking to wonder what
kind of an effect that had on their lives. To remember,
in the larger world, they're still talking about how to
figure out if your husband's cheating on talk shows. But
there you are. You're looking in the face of a
(28:57):
baby who lost both parents and some days when we'll
tell them this terrific story about why they're dead. Yes,
you know, you're doing important work, and the only reason
to do that work is to try and find out
what the hell went on there.
Speaker 11 (29:12):
The tactics are what we call terrorist tactics. They are
not military tactics.
Speaker 8 (29:19):
Edward Chimorrow was one of the top political leaders of
the Countra Group FDN. He was fired last November. The
FDN says foreign competence.
Speaker 9 (29:28):
Neither Jane nor I expected them to be nearly so
forthcoming about the contra army that he had helped run.
Speaker 8 (29:36):
How much did and does the CIA know of the
abuses taking place? How long have they known of those abuses?
Speaker 11 (29:43):
They knew everything. They were all the time with us,
very close to us. They were monitoring all the action.
They were briefing. They briefing. They were in close contact
in our basis with our men. They were exposed to
all autrocities abuse.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
Did the White House know about these abuses?
Speaker 11 (30:03):
We talked only to high people in the CIA, and
those people used to say that the White House knows
very well what's going on.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
In her book, Leslie sums us up in one horrible nutshell.
Speaker 9 (30:19):
A CIA field manual was the bible of the camps.
With the manual, they were condoning the practical use of terror.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I had never heard of people peeling other people's skins,
or some will be headed in there, head put on
a pole for others to see the brutality of it,
or that your government had a hand in this actually
happening to people. It's just beyond the panel.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
I want to finish with a great piece of journalism,
something we don't see much of these days. Jane Wallace
doing her thing old school sweating out a contra military
leader and.
Speaker 11 (30:55):
I had the commandant. Is that they have executed people
in cold blood because they were part of this machinery.
Speaker 8 (31:02):
Is someone who teaches reading a legitimate target. Someone who
teaches reading for the government is someone who works on
a cooperative for the government. A legitimate target, listen, is
someone who gives vaccinations. A legitimate target is somebody whose
relative is in the army or the militia.
Speaker 6 (31:20):
A legitimate target.
Speaker 8 (31:21):
Are you saying you only attack military targets and military people, Yes,
for sure. Why do these civilians they have to be
in uniform or they have to be armed.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I guess the Contraus soldiers that slaughtered these families didn't
get the memo. In the next segment, the dream Team
is invited by Contraus soldiers to witness an actual war crime.
We'll be right back, welcome back. I'll be honest. There
(32:02):
are several accounts of the story, all a little bit different.
I'm not sure how it actually went down. All I
know is that it actually happened, and they all agree
on how it ended. After days and days traveling difficult terrain,
trying to track down the most despicable stories of terror.
The crew is approached by a Contra soldier. He wants
(32:23):
them to see something.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
We were approached by someone that said, we'd like you
to come take pictures of something that's going to happen
in a few days or in a day or so.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
We didn't know who this person was.
Speaker 5 (32:37):
We found out later that he was playing like he
was a Sandinista, but he was in league with the Contras,
and so we were taken out to this remote area
where these Contras had a pow. A Sandinista prisoner.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Manny Alvarez, the cameraman for the Dream Team, sets it
up for us.
Speaker 12 (32:57):
The Cultures had captured a spy who they called the
spy a peasant.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
They wanted us to not film, but to take pictures
of what was about to happen.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
And it was this poor guy.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Digging and digging and digging, and it didn't take us
long to realize they're making him dig his own grave.
And at this point we're getting a little nervous because
we're taking pictures. We obviously see what is going to
be the inevitable result of this, And then are they
going to kill us for witnessing.
Speaker 6 (33:32):
And taking pictures.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
But these were again a group of conscious that were
very educated, didn't even realize, you know, what they were
letting us witness how it could affect the grand scheme
of things. And sure enough, the poor guys digging and digging.
I think that maybe he even realized that he was
digging his own grave, but hoping against hope, they.
Speaker 12 (33:57):
Put him in the grave and they stopped them.
Speaker 13 (34:00):
They killed them with a bait a knife.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Why didn't you shoot the guy?
Speaker 4 (34:04):
I have no idea.
Speaker 13 (34:05):
I mean, they certainly had enough bullets.
Speaker 8 (34:08):
The victim was a civilian accused by the countries of
collaborating with the Sandinistas.
Speaker 11 (34:13):
When I went to FDN, I found out the I mean,
this thing that CIA used to give us was a
big knife. You know, it's called commander knife. Everybody wanted
to have a knife like that, and the Knight was
to kill people, to cut their throats.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
So we've got these still photos and they're gonna let
us walk away, which we did. Still photos don't do
much for video. People like news like news. How are
we gonna post still shots on the news?
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, like CBS, isn't Life magazine, right?
Speaker 6 (34:46):
You're showing your age there with Life magazine.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
So we decided we're just gonna send these pictures to
New York and let them see what they can do
with it, because obviously this is a contra atrocity.
Speaker 6 (34:59):
They took those still.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Photos and they made it work like with cartoons. You
know when you animation, you shuffle the papers so quickly
it looks like it's moving.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, they just animated the photos.
Speaker 6 (35:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Do you remember the moment this is happening where you
think you guys are kind of in danger in this moment.
Speaker 6 (35:18):
Oh, we all thought that what's to stop them from
killing us?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Are you just sort of stuck in there? Like you
can't leave, you can't go forward, You're just sort.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
Of we're stuck in there. But at the same time,
we know way we need this.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
This is great.
Speaker 5 (35:31):
This is some sort of exclusive and that's what war
correspondents are all about, the risk to.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
Get the story. But yeah, there was some fear of that.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
But then again, if they killed us, then their story
wouldn't get out.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Can you imagine being someone who thinks this would be
a good story for the news come see?
Speaker 6 (35:51):
Yeah, insane, insanity.
Speaker 8 (35:55):
The photograph show a man whom the other troops had
determined was spy being murdered, forced to dig his own
grave cut up?
Speaker 6 (36:05):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 7 (36:07):
Well, I think it was necessary to do it in
the way they did.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
It was not necessary.
Speaker 7 (36:14):
Not because they could be shot at.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
That's all. I shieved.
Speaker 8 (36:18):
No problem with people being murdered at the whim of
the troops.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
He was a spy, according to what the report said,
and in war despite had to be ponies in that way.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
One of the strangest things about war, as we've talked
about it over this podcast and in just in general,
is like what becomes okay to.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
People soldiers, victims and journalists alike. Everybody gets to a
point that they're numb. Now, that was one thing I
tried to fight against my whole career, not getting so
numb to the point where things didn't affect me or
matter to me anymore.
Speaker 6 (37:03):
And for the most part it worked.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
There was one story that didn't make it to the
West fifty seventh broadcast.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
What happened was that after days and days and days
of either trying to get to these remote places and
I mean scraping it out, whether it's changing tires for
the fifteenth time, and could anybody have a coke in
this town. That's maybe you know, less than eighty degrees.
After days and days of that, and then you finally
(37:32):
interview somebody and you're hearing about this horrific stuff, just
horrific human experience. You still have to get up the
next morning and keep trying to find the next one
and see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
After all they've seen and heard, they get one more interview.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
It wasn't even like a farmer, like, you know, some
guy that he did have his own house of some sort,
but houses there are kind of limited deals. This is
not a two story ranch with a couple of cars
out front. Most of these places didn't have a TV.
Radio was a big deal. But it was that isolated
and that remote and that hard.
Speaker 12 (38:15):
We were kind of in I want to say it
was a sugarcane area or so. We were kind of
outside amongst the trees. This guy was a little old guy,
little peasant, dark skinned, typical Niclauguan peasant. And he starts
telling us the story of his encounter with the cultures.
You know, I'm shooting James in front of me, Leslie's
(38:37):
off to the side, and IRV is right behind me
running the body.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
So we're listening to this guy's story and I think
his property had been torched. He was being attacked. His
wife was there, and he was relaying his story about
having some god Ah. I believe he was describing. We're
(39:06):
out in this field, you know, like a sideyard of
a place that once existed, you know, Central America began
to feel like it was a sideyard of a place
that once existed more than once. But this guy had
shown us around this tangled property. But it's not even
like you can tell the edge of the yard. This
really is not easy to discern. This guy is telling
(39:28):
us about watching someone else be attacked, like but someone
close in his family. And he lifts up his hand
like he's got a dagger in it, and for some reason,
the move he makes is very animated. He makes a
gesture like he's being stabbed in the throat, but it
(39:49):
looks like all of a sudden, it could have come
out of a road Runner cartoon. And I hear cookies
start to go. She's right down below me because I'm standing,
I'm talking to the guy she's trying, so I'm hearing
the sound come up, but I don't know why. But
without looking down. I can feel her back starting to
go up and down, and I knew when he made
(40:10):
this gesture that she'd lost it. She was gone. She
was starting to laugh.
Speaker 5 (40:16):
Something triggered us, like on a Saturday Night Live skit
when somebody starts laughing and they all start laughing and
can't control the laughter.
Speaker 13 (40:25):
I don't know why I started laughing, but I found
it just I couldn't hold it it.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Then I heard Manny behind me. He'd seen the same thing.
It was just out of nowhere. We all noticed this
hysterically cartoonish gesture in the middle of this catch on
this horrible story, but it was funny, and so Manny
started to lose it behind me, I felt last we go,
(40:52):
and by the time I started laughing, I was the
most ashamed in the world and uncontrollable laughter.
Speaker 5 (41:02):
We're all giggling, we're trying to hide it, we're trying
to act normal, and the poor guy just had no
idea what he had said. Why it triggered us that way,
and we didn't want him to think that we were
laughing at him.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Do you remember the look on his face when you were.
Speaker 6 (41:18):
I just didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
You know he was an uneducated, humble peasant that had
no clue why we were laughing, and he didn't take
it personally.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
It was horrifying for us.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Nothing had been funny in so many days. Everything had
just been done offul and all of a sudden, this
one little gesture like the guy is stabbing him something
the throat struck all of us as that funny.
Speaker 13 (41:44):
And meanwhile, this guy's sitting there looking at us, like,
are you people insane?
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Cookie's down below, she doesn't have to look him right
face man, He's behind me with a lens to his eye.
Astley's off turning around on one side, and I'm stuck
looking the guy in the face, and I have tears.
I'm laughing so hard that there are tears running down
the side of my face. I'm trying to lie, I'm
(42:09):
not a liar or nature, but I'm like, oh no,
you know, we're laughing because she got something in her eye.
And I've never ever felt that ashamed as they did
that day, laughing in this man's face, never And I
can still see him doing this gesture, and all of
us were mortified that we lost it, all of us.
Speaker 13 (42:33):
It was kind of one of those moments where you know,
in the middle of all the horror, for whatever reason,
you know, we found a moment where something ended up
at least seeming to be one of those indescribable moments
where you wish that had never happened.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
The most embarrassing, horrifying moment of my career, and of course,
of Jane's career, of Manny's career. We cannot stop laughing.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
That is such a terrible and funny story all mixed.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
Together, funny and got awful. But that was Central America.
It was funny and got awful, got awful and funny,
full eyes full of beans, full of oh my god.
But if you didn't laugh, you would just not be
able to get up and work again and again and again.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Every time I'm talking to somebody about that story, like
I talked to Manny, he goes, oh, that was the
That might have been my worst day ever in the field.
That was one of the worst. I'm so ashamed. You're
not going to put that in there, are you. And
I'm like, well, everybody keeps bringing it up, So I
think it's a tale that feels like a part of something,
not its own standalone thing. It's not like you're laughing
(43:42):
at some poor peasant. It's a result of the whole experience.
Speaker 5 (43:46):
It was pent up nervousness on our end. Maybe it
was because we had witnessed so many horrible things on
that trip, heard about so many horrible things, saw the
results of survivors.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
One of those kind of things where it's just all
of the anxiety and all of the agony that you've
witnessed it just sort of all comes up in this
really wrong way.
Speaker 5 (44:09):
Yeah, like if you're at a funeral and you just
start getting the giggles and you don't know why.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
The Contra Atrocity story aired on West fifty seventh in
August of nineteen eighty five. Americans were finding out for
the first time what was really happening in Nicaragua what
their own government was paying for. Next time, on Journalista
(44:38):
Cookie Saves the World from Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction.
Speaker 5 (44:42):
There were some rumors about some possible Russian big aircraft
headed to Nicaragua. The State Department of the US is
not happy with this, and I think that you should
know that they're saying there will be a problem if
this up and remakes it into Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
The Journalista Podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood.
Narrated by Steven Estev, Produced by Sean J. Donnelly. Executive
producers Jason Wagensback, Roy Laughlin, and Ellen k iHeart Executive
producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Estev. Music
by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Stephen Tanti.
(45:29):
Sound mixing by Jesse Solan Snyder. Special guest Lloyd Sherr,
the Amazing Jane Wallace, Rachel Whitman Groves as the voice
of Leslie Coeburn Manny Alvarez Special thanks to Esplanade Studios,
The Ranch Studios, Jason Gerwitz, Kyle Frederick, Zach Slaff. This
(45:50):
is a production of Journalista Podcast, LLC and iHeartRadio. They
Never
This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
They are the moral equal of our founding fathers and
the brave men and women of the French Resistance.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
We cannot turn.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Away from them for the struggle here.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
Smuggle.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Here is not right versus left, It is right versus wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Welcome back to the Journalista Podcast. That was President Reagan
comparing the Nicaraguan contrast to our founding fathers. I think
George Washington just turned over in his grave. This episode
is about terror as it pertains to Central America in
the eighties. Who did it, where it came from, who
(00:55):
funded it, and who bore the brunt of the evil
that was unleashed, told primarily through the eyes of two journalists.
You already know Cookie, but you're about to meet one
of the rising stars of CBS News. Boy does she
have a story to tell. But first, Cookie makes an
insidious discovery.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
You worked with Larry Doyle and you worked with Richard Wagner.
Speaker 6 (01:21):
You were the krem de la creb.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
They were both highly respected in their field. They had
seen it all everywhere in the world. And by the way,
rest in peace Richard Wagner. He was a wonderful, wonderful
correspondent to work with. So I think we're on a junket.
We're heading to the jungles for something, some story, or
(01:46):
we're just looking for a story. We had several vehicles
in our convoy and then all of a sudden, in
between two of the vehicles, a mortar blows up. Exit
the vehicles, get in the dirt and start crawling. We're
whispering to each other because we don't know where the
(02:08):
enemy is, who was responsible for the mortar attack, And
all of a sudden I hear on the side of
me some soldier whispering.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
Cookie, Cookie, is that you?
Speaker 5 (02:23):
And Richard Wagner and Larry Doyle both turn around in
the dirt look at me, and Richard Wagner says, I
cannot believe that someone knows you right here where we are.
This soldier helped guide us to safety. We eventually got
back to our vehicles to continue.
Speaker 6 (02:44):
On our junket.
Speaker 5 (02:45):
We took him back with us, so we sort of
saved him from whatever was going on in that mortar
attack because a few more mortars went off, but we
got out safely. And if I'm not mistaken, I think
it was this guy. He was a Sandinista soldier, not
very educated, probably a grunt doing grunt work.
Speaker 6 (03:08):
Had come across a book.
Speaker 5 (03:09):
It was in English, and he really didn't know what
it meant. He says, I have something. I don't know
if it means anything, but I'd like to give it
to you.
Speaker 6 (03:19):
Can you tell me what it means?
Speaker 5 (03:21):
And so I'm reading it, and I'm like on the
inside freaking out.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
I'm acting like it's no big deal.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I turned to Richard Wagner and I said to him,
can you look at this and confirm what I think
it is? So Richard's reading it and I could see
He's getting the same visceral reaction that I did. And
he says, this is a goddamn CIA torture manual.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
The manual was compiled in nineteen eighty three by a
CIA advisor to the Contra rebels, instructing them and the
techniques of political assassination, guerrilla warfare, and torture. According to
the Washington Post, US Army intelligence manuals were used to
train Latin American military officers advocating the use of executions, torture, blackmail,
(04:11):
and other forms of coercion. The same brutal techniques used
successfully by Honduran and Salvadoran desk squads.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
What it was, basically was a manual that the CIA
had put out, obviously, you know, hush hush, teaching them
how to torture Sandinistas so they could stop them from
going over to the Sandinista side and get them to
come over to the contryside.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
It was horrific.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
It was a how to peeling off faces, peeling off
the soles of feet, beheading, putting the head on a stake.
Speaker 6 (04:49):
It was a torture manual.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
What's the purpose of that?
Speaker 5 (04:53):
To create terror among the civilians and even probably to
some of the soldiers to come to our side, come
to our way of taking This is.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
What President Reagan had to say about the CIA manual.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Mister Reagan said the dispute over a manual on guerrilla
warfare prepared for Nicaraguan rebels by the Central Intelligence Agency
was quote much ado about nothing. I have had some
information on it and have been assured that there's not
one word in there that refers to assassination.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
By the way, anyone who's listening to this, you can
actually access it online. Really, yes, it's available online. I'm
just telling them right now.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
Can I say I did not know that?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, So America was teaching torture and terror not totally surprising.
We had similar revelations revealed during the insanity following the
attack on nine to eleven in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cookie
introduces us to the amazing Jane Wallace, former CBS news
correspondent who finds another piece of the puzzle quite by accident.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
Jane Wallace was an extraord is an extraordinary person. She
was on air talent, whether it be morning news, evening news,
weekend news, West fifty seventh, she did it all. She
was CBS's golden girl. She was someone you could rely
on in battle, in the hard times. You knew she
(06:19):
had your back. She was funny, she was brilliant. She
was a grunt, which she needed to be a grunt.
She got down and dirty when she needed to get
down and dirty. She was never a prima donna. The
crews loved her, the suits loved her. She was one
(06:41):
of us.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Jane wanted to go to Old Salvador, but the CBS
patriarchy had other ideas.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
I had to fight to get sent to Central America
by CBS because I was a girl. I was supposed
to go to Salvador and then at the last minute
somebody says, oh, no, you're going to Honduras treat me.
But El Salvador was because I couldn't imagine. I just
could not imagine any place where they would actually murder
and rape nuns.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
It is reported today from L Salvador that four Americans
have been killed there. This was the first time that
Americans seem to have been singled out by a desk squad.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
They were shot execution style bullets to the back of
the head.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Later, their bodies were found in a shallow grave.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
The New York Times said this about the crime.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
The churchwomen were arrested after two of them went to
Como Lapa International Airport to meet the other two who
were arriving on a flight from Nicaragua. After members of
the security corps took the women to a remote location,
they were given the order quote unquote to liquidate them,
to kill them. Robert White, who was the American ambassador
to L Salvador at the time of the killing, said,
(07:50):
when the act was done, I knew immediately it was
the military.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
That would be the same military funded and supplied by
the United States of America.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Remember being stunned in my early twenties, I covered it
as part of a local news story in New York.
I just honestly couldn't imagine the kind of evil that
would murder and rape nuns and then toss them by
the side of a road. But that was Salvador. I
didn't come into Honduras with any preconceptions except I'd rather
(08:20):
be in El Salvador. And then it turned out any
information that was really to be had about Nicaragua or
information about what was going on in Central America usually
originated in Honduras, which I found out by accident by
having been stuck there, because they thought they'd put the
girl where nothing was going on. There is no war there,
(08:43):
allegedly there. It's just a country. You get there and
it's like, well, for a country with no war, there's
sure a lot of people who look like professional warriors
or something. I mean, it was supposed to be a
civilian country, and they sent me to Honduras because they
assumed nothing was happening there. Okay, we'll let her go,
(09:06):
we'll shut her up, and we're sending her to the
backwater of history. So I end up in Honduras. You
could smell it in retrospect. You could just smell it
the minu you got on the ground in this country.
What was going on in front of your eyes and
what was supposed to be happening did not match. And
(09:27):
so I get off a plane. I've never done anything
like this. I just bugged them to go. But no,
it is a very sleepy I mean, Honduras is the
original Banana Republic. The banana companies ran the country. It
was a piece of real estate basically claimed by various
people over the years, but a soulless backwater and I
(09:49):
land and Jesus, there's just way too many beefy Americans
in type T shirts who are a foot taller than
the locals. Even if they tried to dress the same
way and they couldn't even button those local shirts, they
stood out. And there's too many of them. Okay, So
(10:09):
you're saying there's some indigenous band of fighters that's on
the border out there, who's booking all the rooms over
there at the big hotel. Because it didn't match. Right
off the top. No, it just screamed spooks. And if
you did something so bold to say, oh, excuse me,
where are you from Ohio? What are you doing here?
(10:30):
You never got a straight answer out of anyone, and
it was just really smelly off the top. It took
me a while to for you this out, but someone
finally told me that that Honduran set up was the
third largest CIA station in the world, the second largest
outside of Moscow. I'm sorry, in this country, what are
(10:50):
we doing here? Exactly? Because I'm asking that question because
there's too many beefy white guys and nobody will tell
you what they do for a living. And oh, by
the way, what industry do we have here? Exactly? Sides
government propaganda and dirty wars. The contrasts had been formed
out of the old Samosa horses, and those guys were
(11:12):
seriously bad news, these alleged fighters, even before the big
Regan showdown with them. These guys were, as the kids say, now, sus.
These guys were sus from Jump Street. They were dubious.
No one ever walked in the room and said these upstanding,
(11:33):
fine guys who are clean soldiers from No one ever
said that about the contrast. Nothing's ever established as a truth.
It's always spongy, it's always moving and the guys who
fronted for the contrast in Tagusi Galpa. What a name
for a city, huh. They just weren't real. There was
sort of dark clouds hanging around those guys, and they
(11:55):
had this guy fronting the PR and Tagusikalpa. He wasn't
a fighter. He certainly was not a believer in anything.
The whole operation in Honduras was suspect, and so early
in my time of covering it, somebody had leaked the manual,
the torture manual that was part of the training of
(12:16):
the contrace. Why was anybody training people in torture? What's
this about? Aren't we supposed to be done with these tactics,
you know? And we were supposed to have been done
with those tactics. You know. America brought some real good
imports to that place.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
The Contras were being trained and supplied in Honduras by
the CIA and leaders of the Honduran death squads.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
I didn't know what to think. I was so rude,
but I was also young and tired and hot and
naive to just be direct. Made an appointment. I got
some time with the PR guy for the embassy, and
I walked into his office on the embassy grounds, closed
his door and said, yes, I'm Jane Wallis for CBS News.
(13:02):
What the fuck is going on in this country? And
he burst into laughter. He'd never had anybody be that direct,
and he knew I was smelling exactly what they were
trying to cover up all over town. And that was
the beginning of my time in Honduras and the beginning
of my time in Central America, because virtually everything the
(13:23):
Americans were doing that they didn't belong doing was headquartered
in Honduras and done against Nicaragua or through Salvador.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Certainly the worst kept secret in Central America, that's for.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Sure, you're kidding, and for good reason. They were just
so obvious. But it was such a backwater they didn't
figure anybody was going to notice.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
But Jane noticed, and she's headed to Nicaragua to cover
one of the most brutal stories of her professional life.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 8 (14:07):
For four years, we've been helping to wage the world's
worst kept secret war, training and equipping a force known
as the Contrast, who are trying to overthrow the government
of Nicaragua, a government the Reagan Whitehouse believes is a
communist threat in our own backyard. What kind of war
are we paying for? And who are they killing?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Welcome back? That was Jane Wallace in the opening of
an episode of the CBS news magazine West fifty seventh,
billed as a younger hipper version of sixty Minutes. The
Christian Science Monitor called it a ditsy, disco beat documag
for viewers with short attention spans. The New York Times
said it isn't really television, and it certainly isn't journalism.
(14:49):
It's as if news and entertainment fell into combat and
either side one. I don't know about all that, but
the show is popular in its coverage of Nicaragua and
the Iran contra affair was nothing short of astonishing. I
spoke with Jane about a story she did for West
fifty seventh, one of the biggest stories of her career.
But first she has something to say about Cookie. Was
(15:11):
there a particular story that sent you into Nicaragua or
did you just go there?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Oh? God, I think I just got sent there. It
was a horrible place to go to. The people were poor,
they were hungry, the country was going nowhere, and the
only good thing about going to Nicaragua was Cookie. She
was the saving grace of being in Monagua. If she'd
(15:36):
been what she appeared to be, sort of a party
girl and just to fix her or I'll make a
call and then I'm going to go get high, she
wouldn't have been Cookie. The truth is that woman knew
what she was doing and she was born to it
as a journalist. She wasn't trained to it. How CBS
got so lucky as to find and hire her, I
(16:00):
don't know. She was the only reason anyone could cover
that war. In addition to being as clever and it's
completely charming and tank topped and skinny and riley and
all of that. She knew what she was doing and
she cared. She was never going to tell you that
(16:20):
she didn't have to. It was unspoken.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
One of the big stories that came out of your
tenure there was what they call the Contra atrocities story,
and it involves a lot of your colleagues and a
lot of people that you rolled with all the time.
So tell me a little bit about how this kind
of came to pass and where it went.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
We witnessed Coultra atrocities way before the story that I'm
about to tell you massacres of women and children, massacres
of soldiers, torture techniques, so all these atrocities that we
had seen firsthand got But I like to call the
dream team. Leslie Coburn, Producer, Jane Wallace, on air talent
(17:07):
Manny Alvarez, camera crew with irv ran Hart, sound sometimes
George Bosa and myself. We were considered the dream team
at CBS. We adored each other, we worked well with
each other, and we would each of us go to
the ends of the earth for each other.
Speaker 6 (17:26):
Clearly a band of brothers.
Speaker 5 (17:28):
Leslie calls me and tells me, listen, we want to
do a contratrocity story.
Speaker 6 (17:34):
We've heard about this American.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Nun that lives in again the asshole of the.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
World in the jungles.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
We hear that she's got a lot of stories, and
she's got a lot of victims that survived these atrocities
that she takes care of. She was in some remote
end of the earth place called Seuna. D.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Coburn is an award winning producer and journalist covering wars
with CBS, ABC and PBS's Frontline. While all accounts, the
best there is She's also Olivia Wilde's mom, who Cookie
first met as a toddler. In a chapter from her
book Looking for Trouble, Leslie tells us what motivated her
to do this story.
Speaker 9 (18:20):
My intention was to get out of the Capitol and
into the remote countryside where the war was being fought.
Reports filtering out from priests and nuns suggested a systematic
use of classic terror tactics. New clinics docked with Cuban
medicine were blown up, Volunteers carrying vaccines into the jungle
had their throats slit. Even American nuns were kidnapped and
threatened with rape. I wanted to establish at what level
(18:43):
the tactics were sanctioned by Washington. Cookie was game. Her
translating skills were essential because she spoke the archaic peasant's
Spanish prevalent in the countryside.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Jane collaborated with Leslie for years on some of the
biggest stories of the eighties.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Leslie with further left than I was by entry and belief.
I didn't share that I didn't have the left right boloney,
because it turned out to be a set of choices
that didn't fit what was on the ground. Anyway, I
was nervous about having to do this story. I was
not anxious to do it, except that I knew there
was a reality there that needed to be revealed. I
(19:21):
knew there was ugliness, and I knew it was not
at all what was being touted in the States. Oh Jee,
freedom to give me a break. It was disillusioned very quickly.
But the Americans really needed to know what was being
done in their name. We were totally committed to trying
to get to the places no one else had gotten to,
(19:44):
to talk to people face to face, and it took
more than anybody bargained for.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
The region had been closed off the journalists by Interior
Minister Thomas Borge because it was controlled by the contrast.
It was too dangerous. Leslie asked Cookie to set up
a meeting with him.
Speaker 9 (20:03):
Cookie, Jane, and I arrived to find ourselves ushered into
a private dining room at the Officers Club with a
well appointed table for six. It seemed Borge, infatuated with Jane,
had thoughtfully brought two friends in toe. I was paired
off with a well traveled ambassador. Cookie was assigned to
a Rakish general. We survived this absurd lunch without disgracing ourselves.
(20:26):
And by the time we returned to the CBS bureau,
a dozen Roses were waiting for Jane.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Needless to say, they got the permission they wanted. But
that was the easy part.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
If you're going to stage some lies like the Contras
are a really great All American fighting force, you stage
that line a place where no one can get to it,
to hold the light up to it. That's what they
had done. So these places were remote, isn't the word
for it. They were inaccessible for the most party except
(20:58):
by Donkey.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was it a long trap to get to where you
were going.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
Everywhere we went for that story, it was a place
no one was meant to go to. The logistics in
these places were hideous. The roads were not meant to
be driven on. The vehicles had no air conditioning. It was,
you know, one hundred degrees with ninety eight percent humidity
and Monovo five about eleven thirty in the morning. I
(21:23):
never wanted to go to that country again as long
as ise life.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Their journey soon evolves into a dark Central American version
of planes, trains, and automobiles, except with the Russian biplane.
A couple of beat up old Chevy and Paula's and
an indigenous canoe called a paponte. They spend the first
day driving to the last vestige of civilization they would
see for a couple of weeks, Rio Blanco, hooking up
with a military convoy for a couple of hours, and
(21:49):
traveling alone through the contra infested territory at night. Leslie
describes it like this.
Speaker 9 (21:56):
Are odds of being attacked for fifty to fifty we
were easy pray for ambush. The thought of who was
waiting in the darkness blade my nerves. No one spoke.
I steadied myself, breathed deeply, and let Bonnie raate belt
through my headphones.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
You go through ten flat tires in a day, you
couldn't count on getting anywhere. So by the time you're
rolling up somewhere, a lot has gone into having those
tires underneath you and any idea of where you're going.
So that's how we ended up taking that canoe. The
road stopped. What are you going to do? You take
a canoe and try and hitch something on the other side.
(22:33):
You can't just drive through in the car If it doesn't,
I mean, nothing works like that.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Where they are heading is so remote and inaccessible. The
only way to get there is through the air.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
I've got to set up a plane, which is one
of these rinky dig two propeller clopboard planes that once
you get on you're not sure if you're going to
get to where you're going. And we all head to
see you to meet the nun. Yeah, this is a
town that has no paved roads, shacks, they didn't even
(23:04):
have electricity.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
It's hard for me to describe the kind of desolation
of these places, and like something was there once that
got ruined. All it is a difference slightly in the
vegetation or a pile of graves somewhere.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
So we go, we meet with the nun sister something,
and we proceed to do our story.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And with that Gal, the none we spoke to first.
I remember sitting on her porch trying to do an interview.
This port was so small. I'm chewing my knees across
from this woman who has an equally small space because
there's nowhere else with any shade to shoot an interview.
Man fell asleep on my shoulder because he'd taken so
(23:46):
much gramamine in anticipation of this Russian biplane. The guy
is such a great cameraman that he never went out
of focus. Never, not once I heard him snoring. Yeah,
never lost focus.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
What does she tell me about?
Speaker 5 (24:00):
She's telling us about all these atrocities and how she's
keeping the faith helping these survivors, which were mostly children
that we were getting ready to meet.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
The Nine introduces them to Guadalupe da Vila, a fourteen
year old girl who survived a recent Contra attack.
Speaker 10 (24:17):
Family was murdered by the Contra in November when the
baby was six days old.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
The parents were murdered.
Speaker 10 (24:24):
Yes, a brother of the mother, his girlfriend, the four
year old brother of this baby. Contra attacked about twenty
of them and one night.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
In this interview with Guadeloupe, you can hear Cookie translating
her story. Is hard to listen to.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Did they shoot them?
Speaker 3 (24:47):
You see, young Papaguya.
Speaker 6 (24:52):
They split us through? How about your mother? They killed
her and then they took her clothes off?
Speaker 8 (25:04):
And what happened that when like.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
To burn her clothes?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Lily pure graph of faith?
Speaker 4 (25:19):
Oh God, we are you know. It's one thing to
sort of think people are behaving in that kind of
almost pure evil. It's another thing to hear that through
the mouth of a child who's lost her parent or
who's had to witness something like this that's almost on
fathomable as a human being.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
They interviewed a priest with a similar.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Story rape a girl of fourteen years old because her
father was a member of a committee, cut off her
head and put her head along the trail. So that
the rest of the Compassino's get the idea that in
no way should they be participating in some kind of
government sponsored organization.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Jane spoke to twin brothers who witnessed contra Atrocity's firsthand.
Speaker 8 (26:04):
The twins survived the killing that let their father and
friends get in a ditch. La Contrell jakeamar Alianri, one
of the countries, said let's set all of these dead
people on fire, and their boss said no, let's just
throw them all in the ditch and let him be
there and there and.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
What happened then the pass.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
There.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
Then they finished off a couple of kids that were
just wounded. They finished them off. They killed them, Yes,
in front of your kids, in front see what happened
to your.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Daddy, Pierre.
Speaker 8 (26:44):
He pulled off the skin off his face and his feet.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
When you're standing there in Nicaragua and you're looking into
a child's face. It's other worldly dark. It is hard
to grasp it as a reality because it's so damn dark.
Who would do this to another human being in front
(27:11):
of the child? To do this by design? To people
who are campasinos. These are simple folks. These are the
people that will share their tortillas with you. If that's
all anybody's got, they'll give them to you. And they
aren't political. It's overwhelming that this is real human experience
(27:34):
and someone did that to this person or a group
of people with power, for whatever reason, did that to
these people who didn't have any which is why they
were stuck for it. And it still overwhelms me what
they did, what the countries did to some of these people.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
In listening to the interview, the one thing that I
was taken by, other than the obvious horror that they're describing,
there's a solemn quality of just talking to someone. I
was hearing your words, I was hearing the children or
the victims speaking about what happened, and I was hearing
cookies translation, and there was like this kind of a
strange respect, something very powerful happening in that three way exchange.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yes, there's not a lot of extra jabber or talk.
I mean, all of us were just tuned in. There's
a real deep respect for somebody having been so badly treated.
Those kids. Oh my god. You know, I looked at
these pieces again and thought, wonder how she grew up
(28:36):
with that. I wonder what happened. I wonder who raised
that baby. I mean happen you looking to wonder what
kind of an effect that had on their lives. To remember,
in the larger world, they're still talking about how to
figure out if your husband's cheating on talk shows. But
there you are. You're looking in the face of a
(28:57):
baby who lost both parents and some days when we'll
tell them this terrific story about why they're dead. Yes,
you know, you're doing important work, and the only reason
to do that work is to try and find out
what the hell went on there.
Speaker 11 (29:12):
The tactics are what we call terrorist tactics. They are
not military tactics.
Speaker 8 (29:19):
Edward Chimorrow was one of the top political leaders of
the Countra Group FDN. He was fired last November. The
FDN says foreign competence.
Speaker 9 (29:28):
Neither Jane nor I expected them to be nearly so
forthcoming about the contra army that he had helped run.
Speaker 8 (29:36):
How much did and does the CIA know of the
abuses taking place? How long have they known of those abuses?
Speaker 11 (29:43):
They knew everything. They were all the time with us,
very close to us. They were monitoring all the action.
They were briefing. They briefing. They were in close contact
in our basis with our men. They were exposed to
all autrocities abuse.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
Did the White House know about these abuses?
Speaker 11 (30:03):
We talked only to high people in the CIA, and
those people used to say that the White House knows
very well what's going on.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
In her book, Leslie sums us up in one horrible nutshell.
Speaker 9 (30:19):
A CIA field manual was the bible of the camps.
With the manual, they were condoning the practical use of terror.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
I had never heard of people peeling other people's skins,
or some will be headed in there, head put on
a pole for others to see the brutality of it,
or that your government had a hand in this actually
happening to people. It's just beyond the panel.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
I want to finish with a great piece of journalism,
something we don't see much of these days. Jane Wallace
doing her thing old school sweating out a contra military
leader and.
Speaker 11 (30:55):
I had the commandant. Is that they have executed people
in cold blood because they were part of this machinery.
Speaker 8 (31:02):
Is someone who teaches reading a legitimate target. Someone who
teaches reading for the government is someone who works on
a cooperative for the government. A legitimate target, listen, is
someone who gives vaccinations. A legitimate target is somebody whose
relative is in the army or the militia.
Speaker 6 (31:20):
A legitimate target.
Speaker 8 (31:21):
Are you saying you only attack military targets and military people, Yes,
for sure. Why do these civilians they have to be
in uniform or they have to be armed.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I guess the Contraus soldiers that slaughtered these families didn't
get the memo. In the next segment, the dream Team
is invited by Contraus soldiers to witness an actual war crime.
We'll be right back, welcome back. I'll be honest. There
(32:02):
are several accounts of the story, all a little bit different.
I'm not sure how it actually went down. All I
know is that it actually happened, and they all agree
on how it ended. After days and days traveling difficult terrain,
trying to track down the most despicable stories of terror.
The crew is approached by a Contra soldier. He wants
(32:23):
them to see something.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
We were approached by someone that said, we'd like you
to come take pictures of something that's going to happen
in a few days or in a day or so.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
We didn't know who this person was.
Speaker 5 (32:37):
We found out later that he was playing like he
was a Sandinista, but he was in league with the Contras,
and so we were taken out to this remote area
where these Contras had a pow. A Sandinista prisoner.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Manny Alvarez, the cameraman for the Dream Team, sets it
up for us.
Speaker 12 (32:57):
The Cultures had captured a spy who they called the
spy a peasant.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
They wanted us to not film, but to take pictures
of what was about to happen.
Speaker 6 (33:09):
And it was this poor guy.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Digging and digging and digging, and it didn't take us
long to realize they're making him dig his own grave.
And at this point we're getting a little nervous because
we're taking pictures. We obviously see what is going to
be the inevitable result of this, And then are they
going to kill us for witnessing.
Speaker 6 (33:32):
And taking pictures.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
But these were again a group of conscious that were
very educated, didn't even realize, you know, what they were
letting us witness how it could affect the grand scheme
of things. And sure enough, the poor guys digging and digging.
I think that maybe he even realized that he was
digging his own grave, but hoping against hope, they.
Speaker 12 (33:57):
Put him in the grave and they stopped them.
Speaker 13 (34:00):
They killed them with a bait a knife.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Why didn't you shoot the guy?
Speaker 4 (34:04):
I have no idea.
Speaker 13 (34:05):
I mean, they certainly had enough bullets.
Speaker 8 (34:08):
The victim was a civilian accused by the countries of
collaborating with the Sandinistas.
Speaker 11 (34:13):
When I went to FDN, I found out the I mean,
this thing that CIA used to give us was a
big knife. You know, it's called commander knife. Everybody wanted
to have a knife like that, and the Knight was
to kill people, to cut their throats.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
So we've got these still photos and they're gonna let
us walk away, which we did. Still photos don't do
much for video. People like news like news. How are
we gonna post still shots on the news?
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, like CBS, isn't Life magazine, right?
Speaker 6 (34:46):
You're showing your age there with Life magazine.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
So we decided we're just gonna send these pictures to
New York and let them see what they can do
with it, because obviously this is a contra atrocity.
Speaker 6 (34:59):
They took those still.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Photos and they made it work like with cartoons. You
know when you animation, you shuffle the papers so quickly
it looks like it's moving.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, they just animated the photos.
Speaker 6 (35:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Do you remember the moment this is happening where you
think you guys are kind of in danger in this moment.
Speaker 6 (35:18):
Oh, we all thought that what's to stop them from
killing us?
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Are you just sort of stuck in there? Like you
can't leave, you can't go forward, You're just sort.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
Of we're stuck in there. But at the same time,
we know way we need this.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
This is great.
Speaker 5 (35:31):
This is some sort of exclusive and that's what war
correspondents are all about, the risk to.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
Get the story. But yeah, there was some fear of that.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
But then again, if they killed us, then their story
wouldn't get out.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Can you imagine being someone who thinks this would be
a good story for the news come see?
Speaker 6 (35:51):
Yeah, insane, insanity.
Speaker 8 (35:55):
The photograph show a man whom the other troops had
determined was spy being murdered, forced to dig his own
grave cut up?
Speaker 6 (36:05):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 7 (36:07):
Well, I think it was necessary to do it in
the way they did.
Speaker 8 (36:11):
It was not necessary.
Speaker 7 (36:14):
Not because they could be shot at.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
That's all. I shieved.
Speaker 8 (36:18):
No problem with people being murdered at the whim of
the troops.
Speaker 7 (36:23):
He was a spy, according to what the report said,
and in war despite had to be ponies in that way.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
One of the strangest things about war, as we've talked
about it over this podcast and in just in general,
is like what becomes okay to.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
People soldiers, victims and journalists alike. Everybody gets to a
point that they're numb. Now, that was one thing I
tried to fight against my whole career, not getting so
numb to the point where things didn't affect me or
matter to me anymore.
Speaker 6 (37:03):
And for the most part it worked.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
There was one story that didn't make it to the
West fifty seventh broadcast.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
What happened was that after days and days and days
of either trying to get to these remote places and
I mean scraping it out, whether it's changing tires for
the fifteenth time, and could anybody have a coke in
this town. That's maybe you know, less than eighty degrees.
After days and days of that, and then you finally
(37:32):
interview somebody and you're hearing about this horrific stuff, just
horrific human experience. You still have to get up the
next morning and keep trying to find the next one
and see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
After all they've seen and heard, they get one more interview.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
It wasn't even like a farmer, like, you know, some
guy that he did have his own house of some sort,
but houses there are kind of limited deals. This is
not a two story ranch with a couple of cars
out front. Most of these places didn't have a TV.
Radio was a big deal. But it was that isolated
and that remote and that hard.
Speaker 12 (38:15):
We were kind of in I want to say it
was a sugarcane area or so. We were kind of
outside amongst the trees. This guy was a little old guy,
little peasant, dark skinned, typical Niclauguan peasant. And he starts
telling us the story of his encounter with the cultures.
You know, I'm shooting James in front of me, Leslie's
(38:37):
off to the side, and IRV is right behind me
running the body.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
So we're listening to this guy's story and I think
his property had been torched. He was being attacked. His
wife was there, and he was relaying his story about
having some god Ah. I believe he was describing. We're
(39:06):
out in this field, you know, like a sideyard of
a place that once existed, you know, Central America began
to feel like it was a sideyard of a place
that once existed more than once. But this guy had
shown us around this tangled property. But it's not even
like you can tell the edge of the yard. This
really is not easy to discern. This guy is telling
(39:28):
us about watching someone else be attacked, like but someone
close in his family. And he lifts up his hand
like he's got a dagger in it, and for some reason,
the move he makes is very animated. He makes a
gesture like he's being stabbed in the throat, but it
(39:49):
looks like all of a sudden, it could have come
out of a road Runner cartoon. And I hear cookies
start to go. She's right down below me because I'm standing,
I'm talking to the guy she's trying, so I'm hearing
the sound come up, but I don't know why. But
without looking down. I can feel her back starting to
go up and down, and I knew when he made
(40:10):
this gesture that she'd lost it. She was gone. She
was starting to laugh.
Speaker 5 (40:16):
Something triggered us, like on a Saturday Night Live skit
when somebody starts laughing and they all start laughing and
can't control the laughter.
Speaker 13 (40:25):
I don't know why I started laughing, but I found
it just I couldn't hold it it.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Then I heard Manny behind me. He'd seen the same thing.
It was just out of nowhere. We all noticed this
hysterically cartoonish gesture in the middle of this catch on
this horrible story, but it was funny, and so Manny
started to lose it behind me, I felt last we go,
(40:52):
and by the time I started laughing, I was the
most ashamed in the world and uncontrollable laughter.
Speaker 5 (41:02):
We're all giggling, we're trying to hide it, we're trying
to act normal, and the poor guy just had no
idea what he had said. Why it triggered us that way,
and we didn't want him to think that we were
laughing at him.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Do you remember the look on his face when you were.
Speaker 6 (41:18):
I just didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 5 (41:20):
You know he was an uneducated, humble peasant that had
no clue why we were laughing, and he didn't take
it personally.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
It was horrifying for us.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Nothing had been funny in so many days. Everything had
just been done offul and all of a sudden, this
one little gesture like the guy is stabbing him something
the throat struck all of us as that funny.
Speaker 13 (41:44):
And meanwhile, this guy's sitting there looking at us, like,
are you people insane?
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Cookie's down below, she doesn't have to look him right
face man, He's behind me with a lens to his eye.
Astley's off turning around on one side, and I'm stuck
looking the guy in the face, and I have tears.
I'm laughing so hard that there are tears running down
the side of my face. I'm trying to lie, I'm
(42:09):
not a liar or nature, but I'm like, oh no,
you know, we're laughing because she got something in her eye.
And I've never ever felt that ashamed as they did
that day, laughing in this man's face, never And I
can still see him doing this gesture, and all of
us were mortified that we lost it, all of us.
Speaker 13 (42:33):
It was kind of one of those moments where you know,
in the middle of all the horror, for whatever reason,
you know, we found a moment where something ended up
at least seeming to be one of those indescribable moments
where you wish that had never happened.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
The most embarrassing, horrifying moment of my career, and of course,
of Jane's career, of Manny's career. We cannot stop laughing.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
That is such a terrible and funny story all mixed.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
Together, funny and got awful. But that was Central America.
It was funny and got awful, got awful and funny,
full eyes full of beans, full of oh my god.
But if you didn't laugh, you would just not be
able to get up and work again and again and again.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Every time I'm talking to somebody about that story, like
I talked to Manny, he goes, oh, that was the
That might have been my worst day ever in the field.
That was one of the worst. I'm so ashamed. You're
not going to put that in there, are you. And
I'm like, well, everybody keeps bringing it up, So I
think it's a tale that feels like a part of something,
not its own standalone thing. It's not like you're laughing
(43:42):
at some poor peasant. It's a result of the whole experience.
Speaker 5 (43:46):
It was pent up nervousness on our end. Maybe it
was because we had witnessed so many horrible things on
that trip, heard about so many horrible things, saw the
results of survivors.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
One of those kind of things where it's just all
of the anxiety and all of the agony that you've
witnessed it just sort of all comes up in this
really wrong way.
Speaker 5 (44:09):
Yeah, like if you're at a funeral and you just
start getting the giggles and you don't know why.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
The Contra Atrocity story aired on West fifty seventh in
August of nineteen eighty five. Americans were finding out for
the first time what was really happening in Nicaragua what
their own government was paying for. Next time, on Journalista
(44:38):
Cookie Saves the World from Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction.
Speaker 5 (44:42):
There were some rumors about some possible Russian big aircraft
headed to Nicaragua. The State Department of the US is
not happy with this, and I think that you should
know that they're saying there will be a problem if
this up and remakes it into Nicaragua.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
The Journalista Podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood.
Narrated by Steven Estev, Produced by Sean J. Donnelly. Executive
producers Jason Wagensback, Roy Laughlin, and Ellen k iHeart Executive
producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Estev. Music
by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Stephen Tanti.
(45:29):
Sound mixing by Jesse Solan Snyder. Special guest Lloyd Sherr,
the Amazing Jane Wallace, Rachel Whitman Groves as the voice
of Leslie Coeburn Manny Alvarez Special thanks to Esplanade Studios,
The Ranch Studios, Jason Gerwitz, Kyle Frederick, Zach Slaff. This
(45:50):
is a production of Journalista Podcast, LLC and iHeartRadio. They
Never
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