Letter from Washington

Congress is in session, but you wouldn’t know it from the talk in the nation’s capital, so absorbed is everyone here with foreign news—Lebanon, East/West relations (in the aftermath of KAL 007), Shamir’s accession in Israel, ominous turbulence in the Philippines and Chile, George Bush’s Eastern European swing, and Caspar Weinberger’s Orient express.

Central America was almost eclipsed by this rash of events, but it is being pulled rapidly back into the picture by, among other items, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s remarkable 13 to 2 vote to provide $19 million in fiscal 1984 to extend covert aid to the rebel forces (the Contras) fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Committee members were mightily impressed by Messrs. Shultz and Casey’s presentation of Ronald Reagan’s formal finding that our national security interest is, indeed, served by this paramilitary effort. Mr. Shultz was especially impressive in describing what we have done both to reassure our friends and allies, and to deter the Sandinistas from extending their operation into Honduras. He made no bones about the shifting of the Administration’s rationale for the covert aid: The funding is no longer being urged just to stop the flow of arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador. The new rationale is that this help to the Contras will inhibit the subversion of neighboring states by Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista cohorts.

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Congress is in session, but you wouldn’t know it from the talk in the nation’s capital, so absorbed is everyone here with foreign news—Lebanon, East/West relations (in the aftermath of KAL 007), Shamir’s accession in Israel, ominous turbulence in the Philippines and Chile, George Bush’s Eastern European swing, and Caspar Weinberger’s Orient express.

Central America was almost eclipsed by this rash of events, but it is being pulled rapidly back into the picture by, among other items, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s remarkable 13 to 2 vote to provide $19 million in fiscal 1984 to extend covert aid to the rebel forces (the Contras) fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Committee members were mightily impressed by Messrs. Shultz and Casey’s presentation of Ronald Reagan’s formal finding that our national security interest is, indeed, served by this paramilitary effort. Mr. Shultz was especially impressive in describing what we have done both to reassure our friends and allies, and to deter the Sandinistas from extending their operation into Honduras. He made no bones about the shifting of the Administration’s rationale for the covert aid: The funding is no longer being urged just to stop the flow of arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador. The new rationale is that this help to the Contras will inhibit the subversion of neighboring states by Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista cohorts.