April 28, 2025 • 34 mins
A bonus interview with journalists Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan. Honey and Avirgan tell Leon about their time reporting on the Contra war from the southern front in Costa Rica.
For a list of books, documentaries and resources we used to research this season visit: bit.ly/fiascopolitics
Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear the entire season of Fiasco: Iran Contra, ad-free, right now. Find Pushkin+ on the Fiasco show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm.
Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I had all the skin was burned off my face
and my left hand was all the skin was burned
off and the bones were sticking out.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I mean, we kept saying, our interest is what's the
identity of the bomber and who was the paymaster? That's
what we want to track.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, Fiasco listeners, we are now halfway through our season
on the Iran Contra Scandal, which feels like the perfect
time to take a break from our regular episodes and
share something a little different. It's a conversation with two reporters,
Martha Honey and Tony Abergan, a husband and wife team
covered the Contra War in Central America in the mid
(01:02):
nineteen eighties. Martha and Tony were living in and reporting
from Costa Rica. Costa Rica, which is located just south
of Nicaragua, was a peaceful country that had abolished its
army and was using the money on infrastructure and education.
For Martha and Toni, it was an ideal place to
raise their kids, but it was also a good place
(01:22):
for a couple of reporters.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Although Costa Rica was nice and peaceful, there were wars
going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala and
Costa Rica was not in those wars, but close enough
that we could report on them.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Except what we didn't realize at the time was that
just about the time we relocated there, the CIA was
also in the process of tripling the size of its
operations in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
As you may remember from episode three, and it's okay
if you don't, the Contras were not one unified army.
There were several leaders in factions fighting against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua, and the war was being waged on
two fronts, the north and the south. So far this season,
you've been hearing mostly about the northern front, where the
(02:08):
Nicaragua Democratic Force known as the FDN was operating out
of Honduras. In Costa Rica, Martha and Tony were close
to the southern front of the war. There, the Contras
were led by a man named Eden Pastora. Pastora was
a former Sandinista who had grown disillusioned and alienated from
(02:28):
the leftist movement. The Contra forces under Pastora's command had
a reputation for being less brutal than the FDN, as
you'll hear in this interview, Martha and Tony's time in
Costa Rica came to be defined by one incident, an
assassination attempt against Eden Pastora. It happened during a press
conference that Tony was covering for ABC News. A bomb
(02:51):
killed four people and left Tony seriously injured. The incident
turned out to be the beginning of an ordeal that
would drag on for years, as Tony and Martha set
out to figure out the bomber's identity and ended up
as the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the number of
Americans involved in Iran Contra. But before we get into
all that, let's start with Martha and Tony talking about
(03:13):
how hard it was to convince their editors that the
Contras even had a presence in Costa Rica.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
The official story was that all of the infrastructure and
the war against Nicaragua was out of Honduras the Northern Front,
and we moved to Costa Rica, which became known as
the Southern Front. And because Costa Rica had abolished its army,
didn't have an army and was officially neutral, the Costa
Rican government and the US government both denied that there
was anything going on in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
When you arrived, could you see Contras around you or
was it obvious that they were there.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well, that was the interesting thing that when we would
call our editors in particularly in Washington, and say we've
seen this or that, and they say, oh, no, no, no, no,
it can't be. We're told by the State Department, we're
told by the White House that there's nothing going on
in Costa Rica. But there would be journalists from the
local press who would go up to see to the
Quandra camps, and they always had to say that they
(04:06):
went deep inside Nicaragua. In fact, when we first a
few months after we arrived, we were taken up to
a contra camp. It was in Costa Rica, and so
that was becoming better known. And there were reports of
hospitals in private homes right in our neighborhood that were
hospitals for wounded Contras that they were being brought down
to San Jose for recuperation. Sometimes it would be exposed
(04:28):
by neighbors or whatever and would make it into the
local press. So it was just anybody who opened their
eyes would see what was going on. And then we
very quickly began to develop sources who told us much more.
I mean, there was at that point the government of
Costa Rica was really very much in collaboration with the US,
and the deal was that they were getting enormous amounts
(04:49):
of economic aid in return for the creation of the
Southern fronting the presidents allowing the presence of it, and
just to be.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Clear, like this is eighty three eighty four, is there
anything in the public realm about the US using Costa
Rica as a base for contra activity.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
There was much more attention to what was going on
in the north from Honduras because that was where the
FDN and the main contra force was, and just about
all the news was about that, and it was it
was hard to convince our editors and people, especially Americans,
It was a much harder sell trying to convince them
that there was something important happening in the on the
Southern Front, because it just wasn't it wasn't nearly as
(05:33):
developed as what was going on in Honduras.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
But did you manage to file stories that got published out? Well?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
I think one of the early, you know, really big ones.
Tony was filming for ABC Television and I was writing
for the New York Times as a stringer, so it
never had my byline was writing for them and we
actually uncovered what was Eden Pastora's secret radio station that
he always said was broadcasting from the hills of Nicaragua.
(05:58):
In fact, it was broadcasting from the hills of San Jose.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Tell our listeners real quick, who is so?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Eden Pastora was the main contraur anti Sandinista leader on
the Southern Front, and there were a number of different
sort of small armies that were under his coalition, which
was known as ARDI. And he officially denied he was
getting CIA for a long For the first period of
time that we were there, he denied that he was
getting any CIA help. The fiction was that he was
running his own.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
War and it was so important to him and others
to conceal his location, not just for like military strategic reasons,
because but because Coast Eco was officially not supposed to
be there all.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
In the way, that was the condition under which he
was allowed to operate there.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And did that story sort of establish as fact that
there was in fact a contra operation being run out
of Custrica.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yes, it did, and there were other there were there
were beginnings to be other reports. As I recall, there
was an expose in Newsweek that had also talked about
and there were you know, there were beginning to be reports,
but this was one of the early sort of real
you know, we sort of caught them.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
What do you think accounts for the difference between the
character of the contras in the north and the seemingly gentler,
less brutal contras are just driving in the south.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
In the north, I mean, these were you know, Somosa's
National Guard, and they continued to commit atrocities. They would
go into villages and just shoot everybody and things like that,
and none of that was happening on the southern front.
I mean, the people in the south were much different.
They were peasants from southern Nicaragua who didn't like the
(07:35):
heavy handed reforms being made by the Sandinistas. There were
some people from the Atlantic coast who didn't like the
imposition of a Spanish based culture. They were generally not Catholic.
They were Moravian or other Protestant groups. So the Sandinistas
(07:55):
were trying to change their schools and change their culture,
and they rebelled against that. And militarily they were not
very competent. I mean, they didn't have a lot of
military experience or very good military training. The arms they
were getting from the US were like the dregs of
(08:17):
the arms. They were, you know, the sort of the
leftover stuff. And they would complain that even the uniforms
they were getting, their camouflage uniforms were made for like
six foot tall Americans, these enormous boots and the pants
that dragged down on the ground, shirts that were reached
their knees and stuff. So they were well equipped and
(08:41):
well suited to really do any real.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Fighting despite the aid coming from the US.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yes, there were periods of time when money was flowing
and arms were supposed to be coming in, and still
the Southern Front was always the step child. And one
of the questions was was money being ripped off? And
I think, you know, some of the work that we
did in Miami and really looking deeper into the drug
trafficking and so on, it was apparent that some of
(09:06):
the Countra leaders were ripping off money and there was
just no priority given to either training or equipping the
sort of the cannon fodder on the Southern Front.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Okay, so you just heard Martha reference drug trafficking. I
get asked a lot about the drug angle of the
Iran Contra story. Is it true that the Contras were
smuggling cocaine into the US, is it true that American
officials put a blind eye to it? According to Tony
and Martha, the answers to these questions are gauzy and
(09:35):
unsatisfying at best.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
One of the things that I think we know, I mean,
we've learned looking at drug trafficking and in a number
of parts of the world, is that it tends to
thrive where they are covert operations. So I think that
the operations out of Costa Rica on, you know, based
out of the north, on these airstrips that were sort
(10:00):
of a classic cover for moving drugs. It was at
the time when first marijuana and then cocaine was coming
in from Columbia and they needed sort of stop over
places in Central America. A lot of the countries in
Central America, Guatemalan so on, became bases for drugs stopping.
But the Contra operations provided, you know, particular ability to
(10:23):
move the drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
The CIA had this problem that they had to move
arms in through these very small airstrips carved out of
the jungle, and they needed pilots willing to do that,
and there was not too many pilots are willing to
land on these very short landing and takeoff runway airstrips,
and the only the most experienced people at doing that
(10:44):
were drug pilots. So they ended up recruiting a bunch
of these pilots. And these people had a background in drunks,
so they were figuring, well, they're flying these planes down
full of arms, unloading the arms and flying back empty,
that's a wist. So they would fly back with drugs
(11:04):
that started to come up from Colombia or other places
and America, and they would five them back into the States,
often with actually the cover of the CIA.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So, just as a table setting question, what would have
been in it for the US or the CIA to
put a blind eye towards this or to encourage it.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
It's sort of lay what level are you talking about?
Because there were the CIA operatives or contract employees in
the field, the pilots, and these various other sort of
lower level officials who were clearly profiting from it. The
CIA operation the Southern Front needed this kind of pilots,
(11:51):
and so they kind of turned at least they turned
a blind eye. The central question that or one of
the central questions we have never been able to fully
resolve as how far up the line of command did
profiting from the drug operations go. And I don't think
we know that.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
If you're curious to learn more on the drug smuggling
aspect of Iran Contra, it's worth looking up the findings
of a Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry that looked
into the issue in nineteen eighty seven. In their official report,
Kerry and his investigators concluded that there was no evidence
that Contra leaders were personally involved in drug smuggling. However,
(12:31):
there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling on the part
of individual Contras, as well as Contra suppliers, Contra pilots,
mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout
the region. The report also found that US officials working
in Central America failed to address the drug issue out
of fear that doing so would jeopardize the war effort
(12:51):
against the Sandinista government. We'll be right back. The drug
trade was not the only murky story that Martha Honey
(13:13):
and Tony Averrigan came across during their time in Central America.
At one point, Tony and Martha got worried about a
dramatic new development on the southern front of the Contra war.
It involved Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista who is now
the primary Contra leader in Costa Rica. Pastora was going
to hold a press conference at one of his bases
(13:35):
in the Nicaraguan jungle.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
We had developed some very good sources.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Thiseteen eighty four.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
This is nineteen eighty four. This is May nineteen eighty four.
But leading up to that we had developed it, particularly
one intelligence officer within the Quantum movement who became a
very important source. And we later learned that he was
Costa Rican and he was actually had infiltrated to try
to find out for a proral Costa Ricans what was
going on inside. And so one of the things that
(14:02):
Andras said was that the CIA was really putting pressure
on Pastora to align the of in Front with the
Northern Front, with the known as the FDN, Somosa's old
National Guard in the Northern Front, and Pastor was under
a lot of pressure. Pastor at that point had never
said that he was getting CIA money, but.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
In the align, what does it mean that they wanted
him to do so?
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They wanted they wanted for instance, Pastor to take all
of his military orders out of Honduras.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Rather, they were switching under the command of the FDN.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
So that he would no longer really be the general
in the South, but he would be taking his orders
from the North and basically from the CIA, that they
would be directing it. And so one of the things
that I was told a few days before the press
conference was that the CIA had given Pastor an ultimatum,
a thirty day ultimatum that was up May thirtieth, nineteen
(15:00):
eighty four, that he had to by then publicly say
that he was aligning with the FDN in the North.
And Pastor Or basically called the press conference to say
publicly for the first time that he was getting CIA
support and that he was announcing that he was breaking
his ties with the CIA and going to basically run
(15:21):
his own operation out of the South. So that was
the purpose of the press conference, because wow.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
So this was no this was no routine press conference.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
No, no, no, no. And because I knew this, I
decided not to go to the press conference, and I
wrote a story for the New York Times. There was
a front page story the next day saying that the
CIA put this thirty day ultimatum on Pastor. I didn't
know that the bombing was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
You said the CIA, yes, you were able to say
that it was.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yes, yes. And so I stayed home and I.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Was stringing them for ABC Television, and you know, I
had to go there because we needed actually tape of
Pastora saying it. So we had a Toyota jeep and
we used that and a bunch of others to go
up travel up to the north and then get into
these small boats to go down to the San Juan
(16:15):
River that separates Nicaraguay and Costa Rica and up to
the place called Lopenka. But there was one person there
who was not part of our regular group. He wasn't
one of the Costa Rican journalists or the foreign journalists
that were regularly doing these these trips up to the
country camps. I went and talked to him and he
(16:35):
said that he was a Danish photographer and was going
to cover the press conference. And I mean, I wasn't
so unusual. I didn't think that was anything alarming about that. Anyway,
we got up to the country camp known as Lipenka
just after sundown and it was just really a one
(17:00):
room shack piled high. Inside, there were piles of rice
bags that people were using the seats, and there were
various contras with AK forty seven and sixteen's over their shoulders,
(17:23):
milling around and like a high table in the center,
and Pastora got behind that. So just as he began speaking,
he motioned to a young woman who was part of
his force, woman named Rosita, to bring him a cup
(17:44):
of coffee. We found out later that the bomber, the
person who came to the press conference with four pounds
of Sea four plastic explosive in a Haliburton camera case,
was this very the Danish journalist who I had said
hello to early in the morning, and he put that
down underneath the counter on which Pastora was leaning and talking,
(18:10):
and then went outside and set it off by remote control.
But this young woman handed him a cup of coffee,
and as she did so, her foot hit the camera
case knocked it on its side. So then when the
glass went off, it went up and down and made
a huge hole in the floor and blew the roof
(18:31):
off the building. Finally I realized that everything was black,
and there was this moaning and crying, and there was
all this dust in the air and everything. Well, it
killed three journalists in Rosita, and there were nearly twenty
people injured, and some very people lost arms and legs
(18:56):
and eyes. And I had all the skin was burned
off my face, and I had a big cut on
the side of my face, and then my left hand
was all the skin was burned off and the bone
were sticking out, and I had a big hole the
size of a tennis boar a little bigger than that
(19:17):
in my side. I didn't think I was going to die,
but I thought if I did die, it was going
to be because of this hole on my side. So
I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the hole.
And then there was only one boat there, and the
people who were released injured ran down to the boat
and left the most injured behind. And I ended up
(19:44):
being on the ground for nearly twelve hours before any
the boat had to make a four hour round trip
to go down to the nearest rural hospital from there.
And well, Martha was there, and she can tell you
about about what happened to that, and.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
So just backtracking a little, so I hadn't gone to
the press conference because I already knew what Pestora was
going to say. So. I wrote a story for the
New York Times, filed it and was sitting at home
with our daughter and the phone rang and it was
another American journalist and I said, oh, I thought you
were at the press conference. He said no, I overslept,
I didn't go. But do you have the radio on?
(20:22):
I said no. He said, well, I'm really sorry to
tell you this, but there's been a bomb that's gone
off at the press conference, and they're reporting that at
least one American has been killed, and they haven't said
who it is, and so I was kind of like,
you know, my world fell apart, and I began calling
everybody I could think of in the Contras, in the
(20:44):
US embassy and the coast streaking government, and everybody said, yeah,
we're hearing these reports. You know, some people have died,
including an American, and we but we don't have any names.
So of course I thought the worst, and eventually good
Canadian friends of ours came over and the woman stayed
with our kids and I went to the hospital in
(21:05):
San Carlos where they were bringing in the people, and
while I was standing there, I noticed that there was
someone sitting outside in a hospital garb but sitting in
a wheelchair with a beard, just sitting there very quietly
outside the hospital. And at one point one of the
nurses came over to me and said, are you the
woman who has come to collect And she pointed to
(21:27):
this guy and I said, who is that and she said, oh,
he's a Danish journalist and he wasn't injured and he
says that a woman's coming to collect him and he's
waiting for her. And said, no, no, it's not me,
and didn't think anything more of it. I remember when
Tony finally arrived in the last ambulance. I was following
Tony into the swinging doors and I remember glancing and
seeing that the wheelchair was empty. This guy had been
(21:49):
sitting in that we learned two days later was the bomber.
And he managed to get himself out on his own
and then he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
More with Martha Honey and Tony Averergan. After a quick
break after the bombing at Eden Pastora's press conference, Tony
Averergan had to be flown to an American hospital where
he was treated by a world class hand specialist. After
(22:23):
two months in the hospital, Tony recovered and kept his hand,
but the episode would consume Martha and Tony's lives for
years to come.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
I was contacted by the Committee to Protect Journalists in
New York and they had put together, you know, very
modest fun and they said, could you undertake an investigation
and find out who was responsible? And I said, sure,
you know, I thought it would be pretty easy, and
so he thought it put it be easy. I thought,
a couple you know, a couple of weeks, a couple
of months, will you nail this down?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
And was it easy as you thought?
Speaker 3 (22:54):
No, No, it was a nightmare. It was and it
still is. You know, we're not we don't. There's still
unanswered questions. But we initially started out, you know, the investigation.
So I went back to meet with this contrac guy
in Costa Rica in San Jose and set up a
meeting with Andras, the intelligence officer within Pastora's operation who
(23:18):
was really reporting for the pro new Trility folks. And
I said, okay, who did it? And he said, well,
it was either the extreme right or the extreme left.
I said, that's helpful. He said yeah, he said, but
he said, but that started us on that path. And
because of the thirty day ultimatum, we assumed that the
(23:38):
CIA was responsible.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
The assumption would be that the CIA was trying to
stop the press conference from happening or right.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I think that our view was that we just wanted
more information on We wanted a good investigation of the bombing,
and clearly the US wasn't helping. In fact, the US
had taken the one piece of the bomb that remained,
which was the detonator, and someone from the Southern Command
in Panama on American came to the Costa Ricans and said, oh,
we'll examine that and figure out who made the bomb,
and they took it away and it disappeared. No report
(24:07):
was ever given. So systematic the US was trying to
block a serious investigation. The Costa Ricans at that point,
we're not doing a serious investigation. They did subsequently, and
so we a year later we published our report on
the Lapenka bombing, which we had just a rich array
of sources who were reporting, you know, sort of confirming
(24:28):
what our hypothesis was. And so we published this report
a year after the bombing for the Committee to Protect
Journalists and also published a Spanish edition in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Was your central allegation that the bomber, like the identity
the bomber, it is what it is, But was your
central allegation that he had ties to the US government
and that he had been ordered to carry out the
bombing by the Y.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yes, we were given the name from some of our
sources in Miami and sources in Costa Rica who were
mainly contra sources, and we knew that he wasn't the
Danish journalist. I mean that was he was traveling on
a stolen passport and so on, and that was all
(25:12):
we had. So you know, for a long time, our
leads all seemed to point to the CIA. We still
did not know the real name of the bomber, and
we had this other known the gear, but we assumed
that wasn't a real name, and we didn't know his
real identity, and we didn't know how where the bomb
had been put together. We didn't know those details. Who's
(25:34):
the paymaster. So we began talking about, okay, could we
bring a lawsuit that would help to get more information
through depositions, would be able to do a serious investigation.
So we began calling. I mean, we had some lawyer
friends in the States and they all said, this is
a really difficult case. You're Americans. The journalists who went
(25:54):
to the press conference left from Costa Rica. It happened
in Nicaragua. You know, just jurisdiction is a huge issue.
Plus you're up against it looks like the US government
and national security issues and so on, and so it's
going to be very, very hard, and we really couldn't
find anyone who would take the case.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
In June of nineteen eighty six, the public interest lawyer
Danny Shehan filed a sprawling lawsuit on Martha and Tony's behalf.
The suit alleged a conspiracy involving an American farmer living
in Costa Rica named John Hull, as well as a
group of Cuban Americans who worked with him. Later, it
was confirmed that Hull's ranch had been used as part
(26:34):
of the American government's secret effort to aid the Contras.
Shean's lawsuit also targeted multiple individuals who would later become
implicated in the Iran Contra scandal. Among them was Major
General Richard Seacoord, whose story you heard in episode four.
Martha and Tony say the sheer scale of the lawsuit
caught them off guard.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
We had just because we were so overwhelmed with things
going on in Costa Rica. We hadn't paid a lot
of attention to what he was putting together. We had
no idea it was going to be twenty eight, twenty
nine people and so on. I mean, we kept saying
to him, our interest is what's the identity of the
b and who was the paymaster? That's what we want
to track. And suddenly it was this lawsuit with you know,
(27:15):
all of these different people, a lot of names. We
started to charging a broad conspiracy, with La Panka being
you know, sort of one piece of it, but a
much broader conspiracy going back both many years and involving
just this fast network.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
As he never showed us anything before it was filed
with the court. We never he kept us away from
every court appearance he went himself, and he really kept
us marginalized. But he kept saying, I have more information
about the people you were interested in, and you know,
(27:54):
but he never he never produced that information. And we
started complaining about the nature of the was wuit. He
kept saying, well, nobody cares about the bombing.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
He had to make it about the secret government that
was running, right, and so they he named Richard Squel,
Lord Robert Owen right, who was one of North's people.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
He did not name North, and they said why and
he said, because he is the one person working for
the government, and if we name someone working for the government,
they'll throw it out of national security grounds, which is
probably a correct legal decision, even though for us, you know,
Hull and North were the centerpieces of what we were
looking at.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Then you knew North's name at this point or yeah, yeah,
and you understood him to be the person who is
directing the Southern Front?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Did anything Did anything good come out of the lawsuit?
In your mind? Did anything? Did any information shake loose
as a result of Yes, at.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
The end of the day, you know, it did help
to dismantle the Southern Front, the whole investigation that not
only we began, but then other people began looking at
Hull and the Cuban Americans and so on, and that
definitely had a huge impact. And then the secret airstrip,
the little Santa Lana airstrip in the Hasenthuss plane and
(29:06):
so on.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
So all of that point came down a couple of
months after the lawsuit was filed.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Yeah, and so all of that began this whole process
that eventually unraveled the Southern Front, or helped feed into
this whole growing awareness of the Iran Contra scheme.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yes, you lost the lawsuit.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
We lost the lawsuit, Yes, but there was a lot
of good information that was turned up which eventually led
to what we believe is the truth that the bomber
was actually working for the Sandinistas.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
The Sandinistas, despite all their suspicions about CIA involvement in
Eden Pastora's attempted assassination, Martha and Tony concluded that it
was most likely the Sandinistas who were responsible for me.
The confusion around this incident underscores just how tangled and
bewildering the Iran Contra story is as a whole. How
(30:00):
many moving parts it involved, how many different fault lines
and alliances there were. It was really convoluted. And I
think that's also why the allegations of CIA complicity and
Contra drug smuggling have never been fully fleshed out or
definitively proven. The deeper you dive, the more reason you
have to doubt every story you hear, and the harder
(30:21):
it gets to pin anything down. Why do you think
these allegations are so hard to well prove is one thing.
It's it's obvious why they're hard to prove, But why
are they hard to believe? Why is it hard for
people to sort of accommodate the notion that the CIA
might have a network of airstrips that are being used
(30:44):
to run guns and drugs.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
You know, there's the shooting down of Hasumfusu's playing. That's
a straightforward, simple story. Everybody can understand that, and a
few paragraphs that the plane was carrying arms and you
have evidence and it was shut down. The story of
the supply of arms that are contra or the connections
between the CIA and drug trafficking, it's much more, and
(31:10):
it doesn't it just doesn't fit into a fast news story.
It's just not an easy thing to explain. It takes
a while to explain to see.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
I think it's something more than that. I think that
the press did, over time and over a lot of
objections from US officials and Costa Rican officials, did come
to understand and accept that the Hull Branch was being
used as the southern front for the Quantras, and that
there were these Cuban Americans involved and so on, they
(31:42):
were able to understand that and for a long period
of time, and still today in Central America there was
you know, there's been a strong feeling that it was
the CIA that did it. In fact, the Costa Ricans
under the next president launched an investigation which we had
nothing to do with. But I think that the whole
drug connection was very hard. We never had a drug
(32:04):
plane that fell from the sky, you know, with Countras
on it or CIA operatives on it. This is such
a hard story to report, and oftentimes you don't have
heard evidence, and so it's piecing together from stories, you know,
and it's the kind of thing that can be discredited
because there's so much money behind it and so much
interest in keeping a lid on it. And so I
(32:25):
think that that piece of it has not been fully
either acknowledged or accepted because we didn't have the heart,
you know, we just didn't never have the real hard evidence.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
That's it for our interview with Martha Honey and Tony Abragan.
Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of Fiasco
Iran Contra Coming up, episode five, in which members of
the Reagan administration try to stem the fallout of Iran
(33:02):
Contra going public.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
After Watergate, we all understood that the cover up could
be worse than the crime itself.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Ula Culpa
with editorial support from Andrew Parsons and me Leon Mayfock.
Our music is by Nick Silvester. Our theme song is
by Space for Relations, and our artwork is by Teddy
Blanks at chips n y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers,
Michael Rayfield and Johnny Vince Evans. Special thanks to Luminary
(33:40):
and thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of
Fiasco Iran Contra ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
(34:03):
can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and
bonus content for all Pushkin podcasts
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I had all the skin was burned off my face
and my left hand was all the skin was burned
off and the bones were sticking out.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I mean, we kept saying, our interest is what's the
identity of the bomber and who was the paymaster? That's
what we want to track.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, Fiasco listeners, we are now halfway through our season
on the Iran Contra Scandal, which feels like the perfect
time to take a break from our regular episodes and
share something a little different. It's a conversation with two reporters,
Martha Honey and Tony Abergan, a husband and wife team
covered the Contra War in Central America in the mid
(01:02):
nineteen eighties. Martha and Tony were living in and reporting
from Costa Rica. Costa Rica, which is located just south
of Nicaragua, was a peaceful country that had abolished its
army and was using the money on infrastructure and education.
For Martha and Toni, it was an ideal place to
raise their kids, but it was also a good place
(01:22):
for a couple of reporters.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Although Costa Rica was nice and peaceful, there were wars
going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala and
Costa Rica was not in those wars, but close enough
that we could report on them.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Except what we didn't realize at the time was that
just about the time we relocated there, the CIA was
also in the process of tripling the size of its
operations in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
As you may remember from episode three, and it's okay
if you don't, the Contras were not one unified army.
There were several leaders in factions fighting against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua, and the war was being waged on
two fronts, the north and the south. So far this season,
you've been hearing mostly about the northern front, where the
(02:08):
Nicaragua Democratic Force known as the FDN was operating out
of Honduras. In Costa Rica, Martha and Tony were close
to the southern front of the war. There, the Contras
were led by a man named Eden Pastora. Pastora was
a former Sandinista who had grown disillusioned and alienated from
(02:28):
the leftist movement. The Contra forces under Pastora's command had
a reputation for being less brutal than the FDN, as
you'll hear in this interview, Martha and Tony's time in
Costa Rica came to be defined by one incident, an
assassination attempt against Eden Pastora. It happened during a press
conference that Tony was covering for ABC News. A bomb
(02:51):
killed four people and left Tony seriously injured. The incident
turned out to be the beginning of an ordeal that
would drag on for years, as Tony and Martha set
out to figure out the bomber's identity and ended up
as the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the number of
Americans involved in Iran Contra. But before we get into
all that, let's start with Martha and Tony talking about
(03:13):
how hard it was to convince their editors that the
Contras even had a presence in Costa Rica.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
The official story was that all of the infrastructure and
the war against Nicaragua was out of Honduras the Northern Front,
and we moved to Costa Rica, which became known as
the Southern Front. And because Costa Rica had abolished its army,
didn't have an army and was officially neutral, the Costa
Rican government and the US government both denied that there
was anything going on in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
When you arrived, could you see Contras around you or
was it obvious that they were there.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well, that was the interesting thing that when we would
call our editors in particularly in Washington, and say we've
seen this or that, and they say, oh, no, no, no, no,
it can't be. We're told by the State Department, we're
told by the White House that there's nothing going on
in Costa Rica. But there would be journalists from the
local press who would go up to see to the
Quandra camps, and they always had to say that they
(04:06):
went deep inside Nicaragua. In fact, when we first a
few months after we arrived, we were taken up to
a contra camp. It was in Costa Rica, and so
that was becoming better known. And there were reports of
hospitals in private homes right in our neighborhood that were
hospitals for wounded Contras that they were being brought down
to San Jose for recuperation. Sometimes it would be exposed
(04:28):
by neighbors or whatever and would make it into the
local press. So it was just anybody who opened their
eyes would see what was going on. And then we
very quickly began to develop sources who told us much more.
I mean, there was at that point the government of
Costa Rica was really very much in collaboration with the US,
and the deal was that they were getting enormous amounts
(04:49):
of economic aid in return for the creation of the
Southern fronting the presidents allowing the presence of it, and
just to be.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Clear, like this is eighty three eighty four, is there
anything in the public realm about the US using Costa
Rica as a base for contra activity.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
There was much more attention to what was going on
in the north from Honduras because that was where the
FDN and the main contra force was, and just about
all the news was about that, and it was it
was hard to convince our editors and people, especially Americans,
It was a much harder sell trying to convince them
that there was something important happening in the on the
Southern Front, because it just wasn't it wasn't nearly as
(05:33):
developed as what was going on in Honduras.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
But did you manage to file stories that got published out? Well?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
I think one of the early, you know, really big ones.
Tony was filming for ABC Television and I was writing
for the New York Times as a stringer, so it
never had my byline was writing for them and we
actually uncovered what was Eden Pastora's secret radio station that
he always said was broadcasting from the hills of Nicaragua.
(05:58):
In fact, it was broadcasting from the hills of San Jose.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Tell our listeners real quick, who is so?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Eden Pastora was the main contraur anti Sandinista leader on
the Southern Front, and there were a number of different
sort of small armies that were under his coalition, which
was known as ARDI. And he officially denied he was
getting CIA for a long For the first period of
time that we were there, he denied that he was
getting any CIA help. The fiction was that he was
running his own.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
War and it was so important to him and others
to conceal his location, not just for like military strategic reasons,
because but because Coast Eco was officially not supposed to
be there all.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
In the way, that was the condition under which he
was allowed to operate there.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And did that story sort of establish as fact that
there was in fact a contra operation being run out
of Custrica.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yes, it did, and there were other there were there
were beginnings to be other reports. As I recall, there
was an expose in Newsweek that had also talked about
and there were you know, there were beginning to be reports,
but this was one of the early sort of real
you know, we sort of caught them.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
What do you think accounts for the difference between the
character of the contras in the north and the seemingly gentler,
less brutal contras are just driving in the south.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
In the north, I mean, these were you know, Somosa's
National Guard, and they continued to commit atrocities. They would
go into villages and just shoot everybody and things like that,
and none of that was happening on the southern front.
I mean, the people in the south were much different.
They were peasants from southern Nicaragua who didn't like the
(07:35):
heavy handed reforms being made by the Sandinistas. There were
some people from the Atlantic coast who didn't like the
imposition of a Spanish based culture. They were generally not Catholic.
They were Moravian or other Protestant groups. So the Sandinistas
(07:55):
were trying to change their schools and change their culture,
and they rebelled against that. And militarily they were not
very competent. I mean, they didn't have a lot of
military experience or very good military training. The arms they
were getting from the US were like the dregs of
(08:17):
the arms. They were, you know, the sort of the
leftover stuff. And they would complain that even the uniforms
they were getting, their camouflage uniforms were made for like
six foot tall Americans, these enormous boots and the pants
that dragged down on the ground, shirts that were reached
their knees and stuff. So they were well equipped and
(08:41):
well suited to really do any real.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Fighting despite the aid coming from the US.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yes, there were periods of time when money was flowing
and arms were supposed to be coming in, and still
the Southern Front was always the step child. And one
of the questions was was money being ripped off? And
I think, you know, some of the work that we
did in Miami and really looking deeper into the drug
trafficking and so on, it was apparent that some of
(09:06):
the Countra leaders were ripping off money and there was
just no priority given to either training or equipping the
sort of the cannon fodder on the Southern Front.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Okay, so you just heard Martha reference drug trafficking. I
get asked a lot about the drug angle of the
Iran Contra story. Is it true that the Contras were
smuggling cocaine into the US, is it true that American
officials put a blind eye to it? According to Tony
and Martha, the answers to these questions are gauzy and
(09:35):
unsatisfying at best.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
One of the things that I think we know, I mean,
we've learned looking at drug trafficking and in a number
of parts of the world, is that it tends to
thrive where they are covert operations. So I think that
the operations out of Costa Rica on, you know, based
out of the north, on these airstrips that were sort
(10:00):
of a classic cover for moving drugs. It was at
the time when first marijuana and then cocaine was coming
in from Columbia and they needed sort of stop over
places in Central America. A lot of the countries in
Central America, Guatemalan so on, became bases for drugs stopping.
But the Contra operations provided, you know, particular ability to
(10:23):
move the drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
The CIA had this problem that they had to move
arms in through these very small airstrips carved out of
the jungle, and they needed pilots willing to do that,
and there was not too many pilots are willing to
land on these very short landing and takeoff runway airstrips,
and the only the most experienced people at doing that
(10:44):
were drug pilots. So they ended up recruiting a bunch
of these pilots. And these people had a background in drunks,
so they were figuring, well, they're flying these planes down
full of arms, unloading the arms and flying back empty,
that's a wist. So they would fly back with drugs
(11:04):
that started to come up from Colombia or other places
and America, and they would five them back into the States,
often with actually the cover of the CIA.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So, just as a table setting question, what would have
been in it for the US or the CIA to
put a blind eye towards this or to encourage it.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
It's sort of lay what level are you talking about?
Because there were the CIA operatives or contract employees in
the field, the pilots, and these various other sort of
lower level officials who were clearly profiting from it. The
CIA operation the Southern Front needed this kind of pilots,
(11:51):
and so they kind of turned at least they turned
a blind eye. The central question that or one of
the central questions we have never been able to fully
resolve as how far up the line of command did
profiting from the drug operations go. And I don't think
we know that.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
If you're curious to learn more on the drug smuggling
aspect of Iran Contra, it's worth looking up the findings
of a Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry that looked
into the issue in nineteen eighty seven. In their official report,
Kerry and his investigators concluded that there was no evidence
that Contra leaders were personally involved in drug smuggling. However,
(12:31):
there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling on the part
of individual Contras, as well as Contra suppliers, Contra pilots,
mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout
the region. The report also found that US officials working
in Central America failed to address the drug issue out
of fear that doing so would jeopardize the war effort
(12:51):
against the Sandinista government. We'll be right back. The drug
trade was not the only murky story that Martha Honey
(13:13):
and Tony Averrigan came across during their time in Central America.
At one point, Tony and Martha got worried about a
dramatic new development on the southern front of the Contra war.
It involved Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista who is now
the primary Contra leader in Costa Rica. Pastora was going
to hold a press conference at one of his bases
(13:35):
in the Nicaraguan jungle.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
We had developed some very good sources.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Thiseteen eighty four.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
This is nineteen eighty four. This is May nineteen eighty four.
But leading up to that we had developed it, particularly
one intelligence officer within the Quantum movement who became a
very important source. And we later learned that he was
Costa Rican and he was actually had infiltrated to try
to find out for a proral Costa Ricans what was
going on inside. And so one of the things that
(14:02):
Andras said was that the CIA was really putting pressure
on Pastora to align the of in Front with the
Northern Front, with the known as the FDN, Somosa's old
National Guard in the Northern Front, and Pastor was under
a lot of pressure. Pastor at that point had never
said that he was getting CIA money, but.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
In the align, what does it mean that they wanted
him to do so?
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They wanted they wanted for instance, Pastor to take all
of his military orders out of Honduras.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Rather, they were switching under the command of the FDN.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
So that he would no longer really be the general
in the South, but he would be taking his orders
from the North and basically from the CIA, that they
would be directing it. And so one of the things
that I was told a few days before the press
conference was that the CIA had given Pastor an ultimatum,
a thirty day ultimatum that was up May thirtieth, nineteen
(15:00):
eighty four, that he had to by then publicly say
that he was aligning with the FDN in the North.
And Pastor Or basically called the press conference to say
publicly for the first time that he was getting CIA
support and that he was announcing that he was breaking
his ties with the CIA and going to basically run
(15:21):
his own operation out of the South. So that was
the purpose of the press conference, because wow.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
So this was no this was no routine press conference.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
No, no, no, no. And because I knew this, I
decided not to go to the press conference, and I
wrote a story for the New York Times. There was
a front page story the next day saying that the
CIA put this thirty day ultimatum on Pastor. I didn't
know that the bombing was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
You said the CIA, yes, you were able to say
that it was.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yes, yes. And so I stayed home and I.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Was stringing them for ABC Television, and you know, I
had to go there because we needed actually tape of
Pastora saying it. So we had a Toyota jeep and
we used that and a bunch of others to go
up travel up to the north and then get into
these small boats to go down to the San Juan
(16:15):
River that separates Nicaraguay and Costa Rica and up to
the place called Lopenka. But there was one person there
who was not part of our regular group. He wasn't
one of the Costa Rican journalists or the foreign journalists
that were regularly doing these these trips up to the
country camps. I went and talked to him and he
(16:35):
said that he was a Danish photographer and was going
to cover the press conference. And I mean, I wasn't
so unusual. I didn't think that was anything alarming about that. Anyway,
we got up to the country camp known as Lipenka
just after sundown and it was just really a one
(17:00):
room shack piled high. Inside, there were piles of rice
bags that people were using the seats, and there were
various contras with AK forty seven and sixteen's over their shoulders,
(17:23):
milling around and like a high table in the center,
and Pastora got behind that. So just as he began speaking,
he motioned to a young woman who was part of
his force, woman named Rosita, to bring him a cup
(17:44):
of coffee. We found out later that the bomber, the
person who came to the press conference with four pounds
of Sea four plastic explosive in a Haliburton camera case,
was this very the Danish journalist who I had said
hello to early in the morning, and he put that
down underneath the counter on which Pastora was leaning and talking,
(18:10):
and then went outside and set it off by remote control.
But this young woman handed him a cup of coffee,
and as she did so, her foot hit the camera
case knocked it on its side. So then when the
glass went off, it went up and down and made
a huge hole in the floor and blew the roof
(18:31):
off the building. Finally I realized that everything was black,
and there was this moaning and crying, and there was
all this dust in the air and everything. Well, it
killed three journalists in Rosita, and there were nearly twenty
people injured, and some very people lost arms and legs
(18:56):
and eyes. And I had all the skin was burned
off my face, and I had a big cut on
the side of my face, and then my left hand
was all the skin was burned off and the bone
were sticking out, and I had a big hole the
size of a tennis boar a little bigger than that
(19:17):
in my side. I didn't think I was going to die,
but I thought if I did die, it was going
to be because of this hole on my side. So
I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the hole.
And then there was only one boat there, and the
people who were released injured ran down to the boat
and left the most injured behind. And I ended up
(19:44):
being on the ground for nearly twelve hours before any
the boat had to make a four hour round trip
to go down to the nearest rural hospital from there.
And well, Martha was there, and she can tell you
about about what happened to that, and.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
So just backtracking a little, so I hadn't gone to
the press conference because I already knew what Pestora was
going to say. So. I wrote a story for the
New York Times, filed it and was sitting at home
with our daughter and the phone rang and it was
another American journalist and I said, oh, I thought you
were at the press conference. He said no, I overslept,
I didn't go. But do you have the radio on?
(20:22):
I said no. He said, well, I'm really sorry to
tell you this, but there's been a bomb that's gone
off at the press conference, and they're reporting that at
least one American has been killed, and they haven't said
who it is, and so I was kind of like,
you know, my world fell apart, and I began calling
everybody I could think of in the Contras, in the
(20:44):
US embassy and the coast streaking government, and everybody said, yeah,
we're hearing these reports. You know, some people have died,
including an American, and we but we don't have any names.
So of course I thought the worst, and eventually good
Canadian friends of ours came over and the woman stayed
with our kids and I went to the hospital in
(21:05):
San Carlos where they were bringing in the people, and
while I was standing there, I noticed that there was
someone sitting outside in a hospital garb but sitting in
a wheelchair with a beard, just sitting there very quietly
outside the hospital. And at one point one of the
nurses came over to me and said, are you the
woman who has come to collect And she pointed to
(21:27):
this guy and I said, who is that and she said, oh,
he's a Danish journalist and he wasn't injured and he
says that a woman's coming to collect him and he's
waiting for her. And said, no, no, it's not me,
and didn't think anything more of it. I remember when
Tony finally arrived in the last ambulance. I was following
Tony into the swinging doors and I remember glancing and
seeing that the wheelchair was empty. This guy had been
(21:49):
sitting in that we learned two days later was the bomber.
And he managed to get himself out on his own
and then he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
More with Martha Honey and Tony Averergan. After a quick
break after the bombing at Eden Pastora's press conference, Tony
Averergan had to be flown to an American hospital where
he was treated by a world class hand specialist. After
(22:23):
two months in the hospital, Tony recovered and kept his hand,
but the episode would consume Martha and Tony's lives for
years to come.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
I was contacted by the Committee to Protect Journalists in
New York and they had put together, you know, very
modest fun and they said, could you undertake an investigation
and find out who was responsible? And I said, sure,
you know, I thought it would be pretty easy, and
so he thought it put it be easy. I thought,
a couple you know, a couple of weeks, a couple
of months, will you nail this down?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
And was it easy as you thought?
Speaker 3 (22:54):
No, No, it was a nightmare. It was and it
still is. You know, we're not we don't. There's still
unanswered questions. But we initially started out, you know, the investigation.
So I went back to meet with this contrac guy
in Costa Rica in San Jose and set up a
meeting with Andras, the intelligence officer within Pastora's operation who
(23:18):
was really reporting for the pro new Trility folks. And
I said, okay, who did it? And he said, well,
it was either the extreme right or the extreme left.
I said, that's helpful. He said yeah, he said, but
he said, but that started us on that path. And
because of the thirty day ultimatum, we assumed that the
(23:38):
CIA was responsible.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
The assumption would be that the CIA was trying to
stop the press conference from happening or right.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I think that our view was that we just wanted
more information on We wanted a good investigation of the bombing,
and clearly the US wasn't helping. In fact, the US
had taken the one piece of the bomb that remained,
which was the detonator, and someone from the Southern Command
in Panama on American came to the Costa Ricans and said, oh,
we'll examine that and figure out who made the bomb,
and they took it away and it disappeared. No report
(24:07):
was ever given. So systematic the US was trying to
block a serious investigation. The Costa Ricans at that point,
we're not doing a serious investigation. They did subsequently, and
so we a year later we published our report on
the Lapenka bombing, which we had just a rich array
of sources who were reporting, you know, sort of confirming
(24:28):
what our hypothesis was. And so we published this report
a year after the bombing for the Committee to Protect
Journalists and also published a Spanish edition in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Was your central allegation that the bomber, like the identity
the bomber, it is what it is, But was your
central allegation that he had ties to the US government
and that he had been ordered to carry out the
bombing by the Y.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yes, we were given the name from some of our
sources in Miami and sources in Costa Rica who were
mainly contra sources, and we knew that he wasn't the
Danish journalist. I mean that was he was traveling on
a stolen passport and so on, and that was all
(25:12):
we had. So you know, for a long time, our
leads all seemed to point to the CIA. We still
did not know the real name of the bomber, and
we had this other known the gear, but we assumed
that wasn't a real name, and we didn't know his
real identity, and we didn't know how where the bomb
had been put together. We didn't know those details. Who's
(25:34):
the paymaster. So we began talking about, okay, could we
bring a lawsuit that would help to get more information
through depositions, would be able to do a serious investigation.
So we began calling. I mean, we had some lawyer
friends in the States and they all said, this is
a really difficult case. You're Americans. The journalists who went
(25:54):
to the press conference left from Costa Rica. It happened
in Nicaragua. You know, just jurisdiction is a huge issue.
Plus you're up against it looks like the US government
and national security issues and so on, and so it's
going to be very, very hard, and we really couldn't
find anyone who would take the case.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
In June of nineteen eighty six, the public interest lawyer
Danny Shehan filed a sprawling lawsuit on Martha and Tony's behalf.
The suit alleged a conspiracy involving an American farmer living
in Costa Rica named John Hull, as well as a
group of Cuban Americans who worked with him. Later, it
was confirmed that Hull's ranch had been used as part
(26:34):
of the American government's secret effort to aid the Contras.
Shean's lawsuit also targeted multiple individuals who would later become
implicated in the Iran Contra scandal. Among them was Major
General Richard Seacoord, whose story you heard in episode four.
Martha and Tony say the sheer scale of the lawsuit
caught them off guard.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
We had just because we were so overwhelmed with things
going on in Costa Rica. We hadn't paid a lot
of attention to what he was putting together. We had
no idea it was going to be twenty eight, twenty
nine people and so on. I mean, we kept saying
to him, our interest is what's the identity of the
b and who was the paymaster? That's what we want
to track. And suddenly it was this lawsuit with you know,
(27:15):
all of these different people, a lot of names. We
started to charging a broad conspiracy, with La Panka being
you know, sort of one piece of it, but a
much broader conspiracy going back both many years and involving
just this fast network.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
As he never showed us anything before it was filed
with the court. We never he kept us away from
every court appearance he went himself, and he really kept
us marginalized. But he kept saying, I have more information
about the people you were interested in, and you know,
(27:54):
but he never he never produced that information. And we
started complaining about the nature of the was wuit. He
kept saying, well, nobody cares about the bombing.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
He had to make it about the secret government that
was running, right, and so they he named Richard Squel,
Lord Robert Owen right, who was one of North's people.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
He did not name North, and they said why and
he said, because he is the one person working for
the government, and if we name someone working for the government,
they'll throw it out of national security grounds, which is
probably a correct legal decision, even though for us, you know,
Hull and North were the centerpieces of what we were
looking at.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Then you knew North's name at this point or yeah, yeah,
and you understood him to be the person who is
directing the Southern Front?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Did anything Did anything good come out of the lawsuit?
In your mind? Did anything? Did any information shake loose
as a result of Yes, at.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
The end of the day, you know, it did help
to dismantle the Southern Front, the whole investigation that not
only we began, but then other people began looking at
Hull and the Cuban Americans and so on, and that
definitely had a huge impact. And then the secret airstrip,
the little Santa Lana airstrip in the Hasenthuss plane and
(29:06):
so on.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
So all of that point came down a couple of
months after the lawsuit was filed.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Yeah, and so all of that began this whole process
that eventually unraveled the Southern Front, or helped feed into
this whole growing awareness of the Iran Contra scheme.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yes, you lost the lawsuit.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
We lost the lawsuit, Yes, but there was a lot
of good information that was turned up which eventually led
to what we believe is the truth that the bomber
was actually working for the Sandinistas.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
The Sandinistas, despite all their suspicions about CIA involvement in
Eden Pastora's attempted assassination, Martha and Tony concluded that it
was most likely the Sandinistas who were responsible for me.
The confusion around this incident underscores just how tangled and
bewildering the Iran Contra story is as a whole. How
(30:00):
many moving parts it involved, how many different fault lines
and alliances there were. It was really convoluted. And I
think that's also why the allegations of CIA complicity and
Contra drug smuggling have never been fully fleshed out or
definitively proven. The deeper you dive, the more reason you
have to doubt every story you hear, and the harder
(30:21):
it gets to pin anything down. Why do you think
these allegations are so hard to well prove is one thing.
It's it's obvious why they're hard to prove, But why
are they hard to believe? Why is it hard for
people to sort of accommodate the notion that the CIA
might have a network of airstrips that are being used
(30:44):
to run guns and drugs.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
You know, there's the shooting down of Hasumfusu's playing. That's
a straightforward, simple story. Everybody can understand that, and a
few paragraphs that the plane was carrying arms and you
have evidence and it was shut down. The story of
the supply of arms that are contra or the connections
between the CIA and drug trafficking, it's much more, and
(31:10):
it doesn't it just doesn't fit into a fast news story.
It's just not an easy thing to explain. It takes
a while to explain to see.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
I think it's something more than that. I think that
the press did, over time and over a lot of
objections from US officials and Costa Rican officials, did come
to understand and accept that the Hull Branch was being
used as the southern front for the Quantras, and that
there were these Cuban Americans involved and so on, they
(31:42):
were able to understand that and for a long period
of time, and still today in Central America there was
you know, there's been a strong feeling that it was
the CIA that did it. In fact, the Costa Ricans
under the next president launched an investigation which we had
nothing to do with. But I think that the whole
drug connection was very hard. We never had a drug
(32:04):
plane that fell from the sky, you know, with Countras
on it or CIA operatives on it. This is such
a hard story to report, and oftentimes you don't have
heard evidence, and so it's piecing together from stories, you know,
and it's the kind of thing that can be discredited
because there's so much money behind it and so much
interest in keeping a lid on it. And so I
(32:25):
think that that piece of it has not been fully
either acknowledged or accepted because we didn't have the heart,
you know, we just didn't never have the real hard evidence.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
That's it for our interview with Martha Honey and Tony Abragan.
Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of Fiasco
Iran Contra Coming up, episode five, in which members of
the Reagan administration try to stem the fallout of Iran
(33:02):
Contra going public.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
After Watergate, we all understood that the cover up could
be worse than the crime itself.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Ula Culpa
with editorial support from Andrew Parsons and me Leon Mayfock.
Our music is by Nick Silvester. Our theme song is
by Space for Relations, and our artwork is by Teddy
Blanks at chips n y Audio, mixed by Rob Buyers,
Michael Rayfield and Johnny Vince Evans. Special thanks to Luminary
(33:40):
and thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of
Fiasco Iran Contra ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
(34:03):
can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and
bonus content for all Pushkin podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.