Smudged Papers And Fudged Facts

When young children do it to their parents, we reprimand them. When teenagers do it, we start to worry about their futures. But when U.S. government officials do it to us, they get away with it--almost. Unlike a child's fib, the February white paper issued by the State Department, offering evidence of communist involvement in El Salvador on the part of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and their allies, is deadly.

Almost four months passed before this "incontrovertible" evidence was shown to be based on distortions, extrapolations, and in some cases, just plain lies. Ironically, the story was broken by the Wall Street Journal--hardly a progressive, left-wing periodical.

The white paper was based on 19 documents supposedly seized from two caches in San Salvador--one in an art gallery, the other behind a false wall in a grocery store. The documents, stored in suitcases and plastic bags, were handwritten notes in Spanish and minutes of meetings typed on paper torn out of spiral notebooks.

The white paper attributed several of the most important documents to guerrilla leaders who clearly didn't write them. In one case, Jon Glassman, the State Department official who was promoted for his role in discovering the documents and compiling the white paper, used the name of a leader whose code name he thought he had broken; he now admits, "We completely screwed it up."

One of the major arguments for evidence of Soviet support in El Salvador surrounds the trip of Shafik Handal, secretary general of the small Salvadoran Communist Party, to Moscow, Hanoi, Havana, and other socialist capitals to acquire donations of arms. When a document attributed to Handal appeared in the white paper, something got lost in the translation: a critical sentence making it clear that the document had to have been written by someone in Cuba after Handal had left there.

The white paper summarizes Handal's trip as a successful venture from which he returned with assurances of help from the Soviets in transporting arms from Vietnam. However, one of the 19 documents, written by Handal, tells a different story. He was put off by Moscow officials. He complained about their indecisiveness, and feared their lack of assistance would be repeated elsewhere. This was hardly the kind of treatment a government gives to an official if it is trying to start a communist revolution in his country. Beside paying Handal's airfare to Vietnam and reluctantly offering to train 30 Salvadoran students in Moscow, the Soviet Union offered no support. This was the only document in the white paper that mentioned the Soviet Union.

The white paper's most widely publicized statistics are the 800 tons of arms supposedly committed by several communist states to the El Salvador insurgents, and the 200 tons already delivered. Glassman has admitted that these figures were extrapolations from air and truck traffic, the 200 ton figure being based on the carrying capacity of four trucks mentioned in one document--three of which were yet to be built or purchased.

Reports of sophisticated weaponry among the guerrilla forces in El Salvador are contradicted by reality. Most weapons captured are outdated (including one British World War I Lewis machine gun), some homemade, and many from the black market. One document, omitted from those released to the press, states that the guerrillas have 626 weapons for 9,000 men.

The white paper also states that the Salvadoran guerrilla leaders formed a unified opposition front "as a precondition for large-scale Cuban aid." Glassman admits that there is nothing to that effect in the documents and that the assertion is drawn from what happened in Nicaragua.

Reputable institutions, even art galleries, have been known to offer forgeries. And to those who have made such allegations about the documents, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, himself skeptical, concedes, "The only thing that ever made me think that the documents were genuine was that they proved so little."

As the truth about the documents unfolded, it became clear that the white paper was at best gray. Glassman admits that parts of it are "misleading" and "overembellished," acknowledging that there were "mistakes" and "guessing" by the analysts who translated and interpreted them.

Political scientist William LeoGrande observed that "The gap between the white paper and the facts is as wide and deep as the Gulf of Tonkin," referring to President Johnson's now-discredited reports of North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. patrol boats which led to the resolution that eventually led us into the Vietnam War. But the State Department stood by its conclusions in a rebuttal it released in mid-June: "The few points of misstated detail or ambiguous formulations...do not in any way change the conclusions of the report. The analysis and conclusions...are soundly based and fully valid."

It would be naive to believe that left-wing Salvadoran groups have not sought military support from socialist nations. But the truth remains that the overwhelming amount of arms and military aid flowing into El Salvador comes from the United States.

Salvadoran government officials have charged that Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Jr. has an "incredible imagination" when he sees El Salvador as the next target for a communist takeover and the battlefield for a major East-West confrontation. Tragically, Haig can't seem to imagine the thousands of innocent peasants, many of whom are Christians, many of whom work nonviolently for justice, being torn apart in the war in El Salvador.

The white paper is part of a hard-sell campaign to conjure up yet again the fear of communism and to rally support for the Reagan El Salvador policy. It shows clearly that this administration will stop at nothing to justify ever-increasing military aid to El Salvador's government, a government which recent evidence indicates aided the murder of three American nuns and a lay missioner found dead last December.

John Dinges of Pacific News Service has uncovered firsthand accounts that show that the murders may have been ordered and carried out in a planned operation by the Salvadoran military. The evidence contrasts sharply with the theory U.S. government officials have provided: that the murders were spontaneous acts of violence--nervous over-reactions by soldiers who misread the movement of the women's van from the San Salvador airport as an effort to run a roadblock, according to Haig.

Two months after the April arrests of six soldiers, the new evidence came to light. Former U.S. Ambassador Robert White recounted that he had received a transcript of a radio transmission intercepted on the day of the murders from a high-ranking Christian Democrat in the Salvadoran government. The transcript had been provided by a military source opposed to the rampant violence of the security forces. The transmission, which included the sentence, "No, she didn't arrive on that flight; we'll have to wait for the next," took place between the arrival of a flight from Nicaragua which was missed by the murdered Maryknoll sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, and one a few hours later on which they actually arrived. White believes that the sentence referred to Ita Ford, who had been singled out for execution because of her work with the poor.

The presence of the military roadblock beyond the airport that night, the discovery of a death list which included the names of the sisters, the involvement of National Guard soldiers in the burial of the four women, and the radio transmission all seem to point to strong military involvement in the murders.

White is convinced that a cover-up is taking place, and that the six soldiers were arrested and ordered to keep quiet to protect higher officers. Referring to what would happen if the extent of military involvement were to become known, he stated, "The message we were getting [from the Salvadoran officials] was that this would crack the military wide open; it could even cause the government to fall."

The last thing the United States wants is to have this government, sympathetic to U.S. interests, fall--despite the terror and repression it perpetrates. And so we have to dig deeply for the hidden falsehoods in distorted white papers and aborted murder investigations.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, the deaths continue. As one Salvadoran exile has stated, "The great danger is that my country will bleed to death, and that will be called a great anticommunist victory."

Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.