Moscow allies 'running war in Salvador’

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 8

Moscow allies 'running war in Salvador’

NZPA-Reuter Washington The director of the Central Intelligence Agency (Mr William Casey) said yesterday that El Salvador’s guerrilla war was being run from Nicaragua with the help of Cuba, Vietnam, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and others. The Leftist insurgents battling the United Statesbacked junta in El Salvador were being organised entirely from the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, he said. The C.I.A. had evidence that the guerrillas would be unable to keep up the struggle without what he said was a significant supply of equipment from Cuba, but he gave no details. “This whole El Salvador insurgency is run out of Managua by professionals experienced in directing. guerrilla wars,” he said in an interview with the magazine, “U.S. News and World Report." Managua had become an international centre with Cubans, Russians, Bulgarians, East Germans, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, and representatives of the P.L.0., he said. “North Koreans are giving some weapons they manufacture. The P.L.O. provides weapons they’ve picked up around their part of the world.”; About 6000 Cubans were in Managua, while the East Germans and Russians each had between 50 and 100 men in the Nicaraguan capital. The Bulgarians, North Koreans and Vitnamese were fewer, he said. “They all have their little functions ... the East Germans work on the security system, Cubans work on the general strategy, and the Soviets work, for the most part, on the large weapons that have come in,” Mr Casey said. He rejected fears, voiced in Congress and elsewhere, that the United States might be dragged into another Vietnam in El Salvador, saying

the two situations bore no comparison. The Soviet Union had assessed the impact of Vietnam on American public opinion and decided that the United States would be restricted in its ability to respond to low-level insurgency actions, he said; “In the last seven years ... they have developed a very innovative and brilliant mix of tactics: political, diplomatic, destabilisation, subversion, terrorist, and support of insurgencies,” he said. As a result of these, policies the Soviet Union was in a “no-lose” situation. “They can stay in the background ... it’s something we have great difficulty coping with.” In the Vatican Pope John Paul has issued a plea for peace in El Salvador and endorsed a plea by the country’s Catholic bishops for participation in key elections on March 28. He told a crowd of 30,000 people in St Peter’s Square that El Salvador (The Saviour), the only country in the world named after Jesus Chi Ist, had become a “martyred nation” through its civil war. “In these months the people of El Salvador, plagued by a fratricidal war which shows no signs of abating, seem to have been associated with our Lord’s own Passion,’.’ the Pope said in his weekly Angelus address. He quoted a statement by Bishop Arturo Rivera Damas, apostolic administrator of El Salvador since the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romerro in 1980, that “the ar ms come from outside but the dead are all our own people.” In an apparent priticism of violence by troops of President Jose Napoleon .Duarte and his Leftist opponents, the Pope said that guerrilla War-. fare was matched in its severity by the action of armed groups intent on wiping out opposition.