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The Sandinista commander

Pastora joined the Sandinistas in the early 1970s and became famous when he led the August 22, 1978 seizure of the Nicaraguan National Palace, which held the legislature hostage until Anastasio Somoza released prisoners and paid a ransom.¹⁴ The CIA's Inspector General recorded that he was excluded in 1979 from the Sandinista front's nine-man directorate and given relatively minor posts, that he said he was dismayed by the revolution's turn to the left, and that in 1981 he broke with the Sandinistas and went into exile in Costa Rica.¹

ARDE and the CIA

Pastora formed the Sandino Revolutionary Front (FRS) in early 1982 and allied it with other groups to form ARDE in September 1982; Fernando Chamorro's UDN-FARN left the FDN to join him, Webb wrote, and Pastora publicly called the FDN "criminal mummies and gorillas."¹⁵ Gary Webb wrote that the CIA officer Dewey Clarridge recruited him in 1981 to command the Southern Front.⁶ The CIA's Inspector General recorded that from early 1982 to mid-1984 Pastora was the main recipient of the funds the CIA channeled to Southern Front forces, that the appropriation ran out in August 1984, and that it replaced him as ARDE's military leader in July 1984; ARDE's spokesman attributed that to injuries from the May 1984 bomb attack and the CIA said his refusal to join forces with the Northern Front also undermined him. The Senate's Kerry subcommittee wrote that on May 30, 1984 he was wounded by a bomb at La Penca, Nicaragua, that according to ARDE officer Karol Prado aid from the United States was cut off that day, and that the CIA regarded him as "disruptive and unpredictable"; the bomb killed seven people, three of them journalists.¹²⁴ The Inspector General listed the CIA's other reasons for ending the relationship: the poor performance of his fighters, counterintelligence concerns about his contacts with the Sandinistas in Managua, and the congressional restrictions that took effect in October 1984.¹

By September 1984 the CIA recorded Marcos Aguado as Chief of Air Operations for the FRS and ARDE and as Pastora's personal pilot. A December 1984 cable reported that Pastora had designated Aguado "one of his 18 commandantes, to be in charge of air operations and logistics at Ilopango," and said that Aguado "may very well be actively participating in alleged narcotics activities . . . or at least aware of such activities." In July 1987 Aguado asked, through Octaviano Cesar, to give the CIA information tying Pastora to "past drug trafficking"; the station declined to meet him on counterintelligence grounds and passed the matter to the local DEA office.⁷ The Senate subcommittee called Aguado "Eden Pastora's air force chief." In an October 31, 1987 deposition in San José, Aguado said that traffickers "took advantage of the anti-Communist sentiment which existed in Central America" and "undoubtedly used it for drug trafficking."⁸⁹

In March 1986 retired Army major general John Singlaub travelled to Costa Rica, met Pastora and negotiated an agreement with him, purportedly on behalf of the United States. The Independent Counsel's report states that word of the agreement briefly gave Pastora the advantage in the competition among the Newly Aligned Commanders for resupply; Alan Fiers cabled that Singlaub's actions did not reflect a new posture toward Pastora and that all United States support would come through UNO.¹⁰ A Miami Herald clipping places the announcement in Costa Rica: Singlaub said he had come to persuade Pastora to visit Washington and that United States officials wanted Pastora to play a role like that of Charles de Gaulle in the French resistance.¹¹ Adolfo Calero testified that people in Washington were upset about Singlaub's involvement and that the FDN ended by sending Pastora nothing.¹² In May 1986 Singlaub travelled to the Far East to solicit funds after asking Elliott Abrams how the United States would send a "signal"; Abrams told him to stop the plan.¹³

Morales

In October 1984 the CIA began receiving reports that Pastora's associates had agreed to help the Miami-based trafficker Jorge Morales bring drugs into the United States in return for material and financial help. The State Department's July 1986 report to Congress said a senior member of the FRS agreed late in 1984 that FRS pilots would fly narcotics from South America to sites in Costa Rica and Nicaragua; Morales gave the FRS a C-47 and two crated helicopters and about $100,000.² A November 1984 cable reported that Pastora, Adolfo "Popo" Chamorro and Roberto Chamorro were traveling to Miami to meet Morales, that Morales had transferred about $30,000 to an ARDE account, and that two ARDE pilots, including Gerardo Duran, were there for a flight for Morales. A December 1984 cable said Pastora met Morales and did not like his "pressuring him to immediately meet [Pastora's] end of their arrangement, which is providing pilots and operational facilities in Costa Rica for Morales' drug operations." The CIA disseminated this to thirteen senior government officials in a December 1984 sensitive memorandum and briefed the DEA and the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami on December 6; its representatives told the House intelligence committee in January 1985 that members of Pastora's organization had agreed, "either with Pastora's direct knowledge or tacit approval," to supply pilots and landing strips to a Miami-based Colombian drug dealer.¹ Pastora told the Inspector General that he did not know Morales was a trafficker until October 1984, ended the arrangement in January 1985 when he realized the political cost, and returned the planes; Popo Chamorro said Pastora learned of it only after the October meetings and his own December meeting with Morales; Pastora said Morales also gave him about $40,000, and he listed about $20,000 from a Cuban, about $40,000 and two helicopters from Leo Fernandez, and about $25,000 from Manuel Noriega.¹¹⁴ Morales testified to the Kerry subcommittee that he hoped helping the Contras would get his indictment dropped because of their CIA contacts.²

Further reports followed. A Sandinista radio broadcast in February 1985 said Pastora's associates were building landing strips in Guanacaste for drug flights; an April 1985 cable named Duran and David Mayorga as owners of an air company said to hide cocaine in yucca shipments, with a plane belonging to Pastora and ARDE; a December 1985 cable said a Panamanian with business ties to Noriega, Cesar Rodriguez, was gathering money for Pastora, and in June 1986 the CIA was told Pastora accepted $10,000 from Rodriguez during a trip to Panama; and a January 1986 cable reported that a Costa Rican associate had 200 kilograms of cocaine he wished to use to help finance Pastora's activities. A February 1986 cable asked for an interagency review of the evidence on David Mayorga, one of Pastora's closest advisers, and noted that it "needs to be made available to those still bent on seeing that [Pastora] is given . . . funding"; the Inspector General found no record that the review took place. In March 1986 a CIA station chief wrote that the Southern Front structure was "too badly penetrated by Sandinistas and too many of the players have been associated with narcotics smuggling."¹ Marcos Aguado, Pastora's pilot and, in Pastora's words, his son-in-law, was among those named by Robert Owen as involved in trafficking, and Prado told the Kerry subcommittee that the allegations against Pastora's group were a CIA effort to discredit him; the subcommittee could not validate Owen's claims.¹²

The CIA's Central American Task Force chief, Alan Fiers, testified to the Iran-Contra committees on August 5, 1987 that "we knew that everybody around Pastora was involved in cocaine. His staff and friends . . . they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling." He told the Senate intelligence committee on July 31, 1987 that the CIA had no knowledge that Pastora was directly involved in the Morales deal but had "a significant body of evidence" that Pastora's people were directly involved in cocaine trafficking to the United States, and said on October 14, 1987, as Pastora planned to return to Nicaragua, "This guy is a cocaine runner. Period. He ran cocaine." In January 1988 he told Senator Bill Bradley that "Pastora had been involved with a Colombian trafficker, but the FDN was clean."¹¹⁵ Webb wrote that the CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez disputed Pastora's claim of a CIA plot, that CIA files showed the agency passed the drug reporting about Pastora to a wide range of officials in contrast to its silence about the FDN and UDN-FARN, and that after an Associated Press story in late 1985 Pastora quit within months.³ The CIA's Inspector General recorded that he left ARDE in 1986 and withdrew from the war; the Associated Press reported that he then ran a fishing cooperative in Costa Rica.¹⁴

Blandon, Meneses and the California circle

The Justice Department and CIA inspectors recorded the money Danilo Blandon gave him and disagree about its source and meaning. Blandón said he let Pastora live rent-free in a house he owned in Costa Rica from about 1983 or 1984 to 1987, gave him about $9,000 in 1985 or 1986 "for personal use," from his legitimate businesses, and gave him two cars; he told the Justice Department's inspectors that Pastora "didn't want to know" about the source and that he never told him he dealt drugs. Pastora told the Senate intelligence committee on November 26, 1996 that Blandón gave him $3,000 twice between 1985 and 1987 and two pickup trucks, that he met Blandón three or four times, and that he knew nothing of the trafficking until Blandón's 1992 arrest; he told the CIA's inspectors Blandón gave about $6,000 and the housing and that the trucks were worth about $1,500 each. Blandón estimated the total at about $30,000, including the housing. The DEA informant DEA CI-1 told the Inspectors General that Pastora and Adolfo Calero "lied" in congressional hearings in denying they knew Meneses, Blandón and Torres; Pastora testified that he met Norwin Meneses in 1979 and by chance in Costa Rica around 1988.¹⁴¹⁶ An informant told the FBI that Pastora met Blandón in Miami in January 1985 seeking cocaine funds for Contra operations; LA CI-1 told the Inspector General he meant the funds were cocaine money, not that Pastora knew it, and that Blandón, drunk at a Miami party, produced no money. The Rolodex from Blandón's car lot listed a number for Pastora in Costa Rica.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸ In the January 1987 Operation Perico reports, DEA CI-1 recorded that Blandón's organization had given Pastora weapons until two years earlier, that Pastora lived in a Blandón house, and, separately, that Pastora lived in Meneses's house in Costa Rica and told Meneses he wanted to enter cocaine trafficking to funnel money to the Contras and asked Meneses to find a buyer for a DC-3 at Ilopango, with Aguado as his representative in El Salvador.¹⁹ Webb wrote that Pastora got money and trucks from Blandón and that the physician Felix Saborio, a Blandón friend, became his Cuban-community liaison in Miami and an ARDE fundraiser; Pastora said of both, "Blandón and Saborio . . . both vanished from my ranks when it became clear that I was not willing to march to the tune of the CIA."³

Webb also relayed that Pastora visited Blandón's silk-screen shop in Los Angeles in 1982, where T-shirts with his likeness were printed, and a San Francisco Chronicle report in 1994 that he attended a weapons demonstration at a firing range near the Cabazon Indian Reservation in 1981, a claim Webb wrote Pastora both confirmed and denied.²⁰ Blandón said he arranged a presentation by Ronald Lister of weapons for Contra leaders including Pastora and Adolfo Chamorro, who showed no interest; a handwritten note seized from Lister's home in 1986 listed the names of several CIA officers working with Pastora's ARDE, Webb wrote.³¹⁴

Later years

Webb wrote that Pastora said the CIA had targeted him after he refused to merge his force with the former Guardsmen of the FDN, and that he ran for president of Nicaragua in 1996.³⁶ After Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007 he rejoined the Sandinistas and was given oversight of the San Juan River region. He died on June 16, 2020 at the military hospital in Managua at the age of 83.⁴

Footnotes

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, Report of Investigation (96-0143-IG), Volume II: The Contra Story, October 8, 1998, section on Southern Front Contras, https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine2/south.html ↩︎
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (December 1988), pp. 50-53 (the case of George Morales and FRS/ARDE), https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 10: "Teach a man a craft and he's liable to practice it." ↩︎
Associated Press, "Eden Pastora, Nicaraguan revolutionary, dead at 83," June 16, 2020, https://www.news4jax.com/news/2020/06/16/eden-pastora-nicarguan-revolutionary-dead-at-83/ ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 5: "God, Fatherland and Freedom." ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Cast of Characters. ↩︎
CIA Inspector General, Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States, Volume II (October 8, 1998), Marcos Antonio Aguado section of the Southern Front chapter, https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine2/south.html ↩︎
U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), pp. 37, 50 to 52, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy: The Cartel, Haiti and Central America, Part 3, hearing of April 7, 1988, testimony of Jorge Morales (pp. 297 to 300) and videotaped depositions of October 31, 1987, https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41152832_0005. Gary Webb, in Dark Alliance (1998), dates the "CIA agents" statement to 1986 congressional testimony, and his chapter notes give April 7, 1986 and March 27, 1987. ↩︎
Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, vol. I, ch. 19 (Fiers), citing DIRECTOR 772442 (March 11, 1986) and DIRECTOR 799822 (March 28, 1986). https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/walsh/chap_19.htm ↩︎
Miami Herald clipping (undated), FBI Vault, "John Singlaub (Final)," p. 8. https://vault.fbi.gov/john-singlaub/john-singlaub-final ↩︎
Deposition of Adolfo Calero, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, vol. 3, transcript p. 166 (Internet Archive item micro_IA41152840_0235). ↩︎
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, ch. 3, pp. 69-70 (HathiTrust full view, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=txu.059173017837367&seq=93). ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Inspector General, Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (96-0143-IG), Volume I: The California Story, January 29, 1998, Findings (Ross, Blandon, Meneses), https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/cocaine/findings1.html ↩︎
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (the Kerry report), December 1988, p. 38, quoting the August 5, 1987 testimony of the CIA Central American Task Force chief before the Iran-Contra Committees, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Chapter IV, section B (OIG investigation regarding support of the Contras by Blandon and Meneses), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch04p2.htm ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions (December 1997, released July 1998), Chapter II (Oscar Danilo Blandon), sections A-D, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p1.htm ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Chapter IV, section A (sources of the allegations), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch04p1.htm ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Chapter II, section G (the 1987 Los Angeles OCDETF investigation), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p4.htm ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 6: "They were doing their patriotic duty." ↩︎

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