Helms and the New Right

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The Foreign Minister of the New Right

By Jonathan MarshallCity Paper , June 19, 1987

The measure of America's greatness as a land of opportunity used to be that any citizen could aspire to become president. Since the Iran-contra revelations, however, almost anybody with enough ambition can

now aspire to make US foreign policy without any of the hassles of running for office, reporting to Congressor answering to the public.

Summing up the first round of Iran-contra hearings, a disapproving Rep. Lee Hamilton warned that the“privatization of foreign policy is a prescription for confusion and failure. . . . The use of private parties tocarry out high purposes of government makes us the subject of puzzlement and ridicule.”

No doubt Hamilton had in mind the long parade of private covert operators who had testified about secretairstrips, aerial supply drops and undercover arms shipments to Iran and Central America. But men likeRichard Secord, Albert Hakim and Robert Owen don't hold a candle to the ultimate private operator: Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Not since William Walker filibustered into Nicaragua has any American so blatantly run a parallel foreign policy.

To date, members of the joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair have shown no public interest in Helms or his role in the scandal. But the evidence is there if they care to put truth ahead of congressional courtesy.

The committee heard the former US ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs, testify that a leading privateoperator in the contra network, retired General John Singlaub, had come to Costa Rica in the spring of 1986to help reorganize the southern front of the Nicaraguan counterrevolution. Of particular interest to Singlaubwas Eden Pastora, a former hero of the Sandinista revolution who had turned against its authoritarian,Marxist tendencies. To Tambs' astonishment, Singlaub produced a copy of an agreement he and Pastora hadsigned. In return for Pastora becoming more cooperative, it promised, the United States would provide food,ammunition, medicine, maps, military supplies and training for Pastora's troops. Tambs objected, “Youcannot negotiate for the United States government.”

State Department officials were shocked and deeply worried by Tambs' report. Secretary of State George

Shultz cabled back that “your disclaimers of US Government involvement notwithstanding, Pastora mightattempt to use the Singlaub agreement to pressure or embarrass the United States Government.”

But Singlaub was not quite the lone ranger that press accounts have made him seem. In his cable to FoggyBottom, Tambs had noted, “Singlaub is envoy of Senator Helms and will report to him his observations, andhis own reservations upon return to Washington . . .” Singlaub thus took his direction on this unauthorizedand highly risky mission from no less than the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign RelationsCommittee.

It wasn't the first time Helms had sent emissaries to Costa Rica. Hector Frances, an Argentine army adviser involved in training the contras, said he met Nat Hamrick, a Helms representative, with a group of CostaRican rightists in 1981 and 1982. “We agreed that, to bring about operational conditions for the(Nicaraguan) counterrevolution in Costa Rica, it was necessary to pressure (Costa Rican) President Monge

with economic pressures to guarantee that he would ensure that Costa Rica would provide us with the rightconditions,” Frances said in 1982. “Pressures are being made, and are reflected in the continued presence of Eden Pastora in Costa Rica and of many other counterrevolutionary groups.”

Helms did not confine his meddling to reorganizing the contras' southern front, however. If anything, he waseven more deeply involved in the Iran arms-for-hostage deals.

In particular, he arranged what the Tower report refers to as the “second channel” for discussions betweenthe Reagan administration and Iranian “moderates” in 1986. But Helms had left his disruptive mark on the



ransom negotiations even earlier, on the first channel embodied by the expatriate Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Oliver North disparaged Ghorbanifar and his Iranian contacts as “a primitive, unsophisticated group” in aDecember 4, 1985 memo to his boss, Admiral Poindexter. “They have not the slightest idea of what is goingon in our government or how our system works,” North continued with multiple unintended ironies. “Today,

for example, Gorba [Ghorbanifar] called [Richard Secord] in absolute confusion over the fact that[Parliament Speaker Hashemi] Rafsanjani had just received a letter from (of all people) Sen. Helmsregarding the American Hostages. Since the Iranians are adamant that they not be publicly connected withthe seizure, holding or release of the [hostages], why, Gorba wanted to know, was Helms being brought intothis `solution to the puzzle.' Gorba reiterated that `[Vice President Bush] ought to have more control over themembers of his parliament' than to allow them to confuse an already difficult problem. Dick told him theletter had nothing to do with what we are about, but Gorba did not seem convinced that this wasn't some sortof effort to embarrass Iran.”

Ghorbanifar was closer to the mark than North gave him credit for. Helms did poison the deal for the shadyIranian negotiator. And the senator from North Carolina was, as usual, totally out of control.

Helms helped undermine Ghorbanifar by introducing the “second channel” to North and the StateDepartment in mid-1986. In early June, a Helms aide took around to North's office a new emissary, a cousinof Sadegh Tabatabai, the former deputy prime minister and brother-in-law of the Ayatollah Khomeini's sonAhmed. North's diary indicates another meeting with Senator Helms and one “Tabatabai” on June 27, 1986.The next month, a CIA officer, George Cave, met with Sadegh himself in Europe. North and his associatesfound this new connection, with his close ties to both the Khomeini family and Rafsanjani, especiallyattractive because of Ghorbanifar's proven unreliability. Sadegh Tabatabai, moreover, had been instrumentalin freeing the American hostages held in Tehran a few years earlier.

Yet this switch blew up in North's face. Ghorbanifar called it “a major error.” In an interview with theTower Commission, he claimed “that he had involved all three major lines or factions within the governmentof Iran in the initiative, and that the second channel involved only the Rafsanjani faction thus stimulatingfriction among the factions and leading to the leak of the story to embarrass Rafsanjani.” Quite possibly, aspiteful Ghorbanifar himself chose to blow the whole operation, using his contacts in Tehran to leak the

operation to anti-American radicals. Helms had struck out again.These episodes from Costa Rica to Iran epitomize Helms' career as an independent foreign policy operator.The owlish, scowling senator has managed remarkably to combine a succession of losing causes withextraordinary personal success in public office. His policy setbacks have only spurred him to become ever more aggressive in the pursuit of his personal initiatives.

As a former television editorial commentator, Helms earned a reputation for his blasts against Walter Cronkite (“a hysterical crybaby”), integration (“Negro hoodlums are creating chaos”) and the 1964 CivilRights Act (“something the communists would very much like to see enacted”). Even as these enemiestriumphed against his wrath, however, so the radical-right Helms paradoxically went on to triumph against asuccession of moderate political opponents.

In 1972 he won the Senate seat he has held ever since. Before his first term was up, Helms had already

become the loose cannon whose shrapnel would wound liberal and conservative, Democratic andRepublican administrations alike.

In early 1976, for example, several Helms aides and associates visited Argentina shortly before the militarycoup that resulted in the “disappearance” of more than 10,000 civilians in the “dirty war” that followed. Thevisit of Raymond Molina, a member of the Bay of Pigs veterans group and a business associate of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, was paid for by “one of several nonprofit organizations set up andcontrolled by Helms staff members,” according to an investigation by KRON-TV in San Francisco. One of those who accompanied Molina on the visit was James Lucier, Helms' top aide.



Molina told KRON that Argentine military leaders were informed that Helms would signal his support for them through a Senate speech. According to Molina, Helms “actually encouraged the military to move inand depose President Peron.” Molina says he personally “worked hard in the control room” with the militaryofficers planning the takeover. Frank Zambito, a political officer in the US embassy at the time, confirmedthat Helms and his aides were promoting a military coup at the time. Zambito complained, “when (Helms)goes overseas and begins to speak with officials as if he is speaking for the US government . . . he throws

everything that we are trying to do into chaos.”

Helms denied joining Molina and Lucier on this mission, but he made at least two other trips to Argentina.In July 1976, after the coup, he stopped off in Buenos Aires, perhaps to celebrate the change of regime.Undisclosed on his Senate reporting forms, however, Helms had taken at least one earlier trip, in April 1975,after attending a conference of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in Rio de Janeiro. With him onthat trip were two individuals, including a legislative assistant to Senator Strom Thurmond, who was theninvolved in plotting a secessionist rebellion in the Azores in conjunction with neofascist mercenaries inPortugal.

Helms' close association with WACL, a coalition of ultra-right national organizations originally inspired byTaiwan and South Korea, typifies his independent approach to foreign policy. In 1974, a former Britishmember of the organization denounced “the pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism of some of the WACL

members.” Besides attending and speaking at WACL conferences, Helms has published with Roger Pearson,a racial theorist who “was the man most responsible for turning the League into a platform for Norwegianneo-Nazis, German SS officers and Italian terrorists wanted for murder,” according to one major study of WACL. (Anderson, Inside the League) And Helms' choice of Singlaub as an emissary to Central Americawas no accident: As chairman of WACL in the 1980s, the ex-general raised funds and arms for the contrasfrom its national chapters.

WACL's Latin branch, the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), was “used as a front for the region's assassination groups,” according to investigative columnist Jack Anderson. In September 1980,Helms aide John Carbaugh attended the CAL conference in Buenos Aires. Also on hand for the festivitieswere Argentine Gen. Suarez Mason, recently arrested in California pending extradition for his notorious rolein the “dirty war” of the 1970s; Stefano delle Chiaie, an Italian terrorist recently arrested in Venezuela oncharges relating to his role in a bloody train station massacre; Roberto d'Aubuisson, a leader of theSalvadoran death squads; and General Luis Garcia Meza, who had just taken power in Bolivia. (Later, under Singlaub's leadership, WACL purged CAL from its ranks.)

The CAL conferees celebrated the overthrow of Bolivia's democracy that July by a band of army officersfinanced by the country's leading cocaine merchants and the Argentine military junta. The violence of thetakeover and subsequent repression was extraordinary even by Bolivian standards; before long the US StateDepartment was reporting “widespread, even savage violations of human rights.”

To Helms, that report merely confirmed his faith in the new regime. In November 1980, he greeted Interior Minister Col. Luis Arce Gomez, who had recruited a band of killers led by Stefano delle Chiaie (of the CALconference) and former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, now on trial in France for war crimes, to exterminatehis rivals in politics and the cocaine trade. (Arce was indicted in 1983 by a Miami grand jury on narcoticscharges.) In December 1980, Helms wrote the leader of Bolivia's “cocaine coup,” Gen. Luis Garcia Meza: “I

am impressed with the progress Bolivia has made in recent months in providing security for its citizens,which is among the most fundamental of human rights, despite the misguided policies of our Government. Iassure you that, as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Senate, I will call for areexamination of our policies toward Latin America.”

Helms evidently thought the Carter administration's policies in other regions of the world were no lessmisguided. In the fall of 1979, Helms aides John Carbaugh and James Lucier went to London during thenegotiations over the future of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to urge Ian Smith, leader of the white regime, to holdout for further concessions. The British government protested sharply to Washington over the meddling of



the senator's emissaries. (The cause of white supremacy remains dear to Helms. Last year, he introducedSouth African foreign minister Pik Botha around Washington to lobby against the sanctions bill, leadingthen-Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar to denounce foreign “interference” in thelegislative process. Helms got the last laugh, beating out Lugar as ranking minority member of thecommittee in 1987.)

But if Ronald Reagan thought his conservative credentials pure enough to tame Jesse Helms, he quicklylearned his lesson. Whether it comes to supporting the price of tobacco or the anti-communist crusade, JesseHelms steps aside for no one.

Indeed, nobody has faced more frustration in dealing with Helms and his private foreign policy than GeorgeShultz. At times it has been hard to tell just who was secretary of state, Helms or Shultz. The street-fightingsenator has held up literally dozens of the latter's appointments, placing a “hold” on their nomination,subjecting them to a barrage of questioning and multiple committee hearings to express his displeasure withreal or imagined ideological sins. He held up the promotion of Edwin Corr, ambassador to El Salvador, for an entire year. His recent targets have included Melissa Wells, named ambassador to Mozambique, whodared criticize the Renamo guerrillas as killers of civilians, and T. Frank Crigler, named ambassador toSomalia, who donated $100 to Mondale-Ferraro campaign in 1984.

Helms has never sacrificed a cause to spare the administration embarrassment. After the State Departmenttried to quietly dispose of the case of a Ukrainian sailor who twice jumped ship into the Mississippi, Helmsgot the agriculture committee to issue a subpoena for the sailor. The administration loyalist Sen. Mark Andrews, R-ND, grumbled, “As far as I'm concerned, there is only one President at a time, and I'm pickingRonald Reagan over Jesse Helms.”

Nowhere has Helms distinguished his brand of radicalism from Reagan's conservatism more than in LatinAmerica. In El Salvador, for example, the administration's pragmatic anti-communists have pinned their hopes on the social democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte. For Helms, however, no one but reputed death squadleader Major Roberto d'Aubuisson would do.

Helms aides John Carbaugh, Christopher Manion and Deborah DeMoss reportedly formed a close politicalrelationship with d'Aubuisson and even gave him campaign advice. Helms has praised d'Aubuisson, who ranagainst Duarte for president as former head of the Arena party, as a “deeply religious man,” despiteconvincing evidence in the hands of US officials implicating him in the 1980 assassination of ArchbishopOscar Romero. D'Aubuisson summed up his personal world view in an interview with a group of Germanreporters: “You Europeans had the right idea. You saw the Jews were behind communism and you started tokill them.” Helms explained his support of men like d'Aubuisson: “You don't have perfect choices in tryingto prevent a communist takeover of this world.”

Helms' backing of the Salvadoran major took a sinister turn in June 1984, when he appeared withd'Aubuisson to denounce the CIA and US ambassador Thomas Pickering (whom he branded the“paymaster”) for buying the Salvadoran presidential election on Duarte's behalf. D'Aubuisson's associateswere later linked to an assassination plot against Pickering, which some US officials darkly suggested had been encouraged inadvertently by Helms' outspoken attack on the ambassador.

In Chile, after an initial embrace between administration officials and representatives of General Pinochet's

junta, relations between Washington and Santiago cooled as it became clear that Pinochet's ambition toremain dictator for life would encourage a resurgence of underground radicalism. Helms remains as ardentan advocate as ever for the regime, however, and never lets the administration forget it.

In 1981, during a visit to Washington by Chile's foreign minister, Rene Rojas Galdames, Helms was full of praise for a regime long snubbed by the Carter administration. The Chilean embassy issued a statementquoting Helms as saying “We have an obligation to give Chile equal treatment. The Chilean system is notmuch different from what we have here.”



President Reagan's representatives have recently come to the conclusion that the differences are significantindeed. Last year, after members of the Chilean military apparently burned to death a 19-year-old USresident involved in anti-government demonstration, US ambassador Harry Barnes attended the funeral. Ontrip to Chile last July, Helms accused Barnes of trying “to undermine the efforts of the government of Chileto impede a taking of power by the communists.” Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, no shrinkingliberal, complained, “This is not the way a US senator should conduct business.” Helms in turn accused

Abrams and Barnes of trying “to spread the myth that human rights is a major problem in Chile,” and blasted the State Department for aiming “to sell out the friends of the United States and cozy up to theadversaries of the United States.”

The furor escalated when the Senate Intelligence Committee received information that Helms or one of hisaides had leaked classified information to the Pinochet regime, allowing it to close down a source of information valued by US intelligence. At the committee's request, the FBI opened an investigation, onetarget of which was Helms aide Christopher Manion (brother of Daniel Manion, President Reagan'scontroversial judicial nominee). Helms counterattacked with charges that the CIA had eavesdropped on hisconversations with General Pinochet and with claims that “the State Department and the CIA are controlled by the New York banking interests.” At the same time, he introduced legislation to punish the CIA bysubordinating it to the Defense Intelligence Agency with regard to military assessments.

Jesse Helms will not go quietly into the night. His victory over Richard Lugar in January to capture theranking minority slot on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ensures him a powerful platform fromwhich to broadcast his views and pursue his private foreign policy agenda. Liberals and conservatives alikewho despise his radical views give him wide berth out of respect for his venom, tenacity and phenomenalfundraising abilities. Their excuse for giving him free rein is respect for the very senatorial courtesies thatHelms himself holds in contempt.

So don't expect to see much about the senior Senator from North Carolina in the next phase of the Iran-Contra hearings, despite his role in both ends of the affair. Unlike Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, Helmscan bite back.

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Helms and the New Right