The phone rang at 8:30 within the night on Could 30, 1984. The younger lady in San José, Costa Rica answered. An officious voice got here from the opposite finish. “Hi there, my title is Cecilia Alvear, I’m calling from NBC Information in Miami. There’s been a bombing at a press convention of insurgent chief Edén Pastora on the Nicaraguan facet of the San Juan River. Are you able to rent a digital camera crew and rise up there as quickly as potential?”
“Effectively, I don’t know, it’s sort of late, all the pieces is closed,” stated the lady.
“I used to be informed you had been somebody who might get issues achieved,” got here the curt reply.
That’s how Lyle Prescott obtained into the tv information enterprise.
Prescott got here to Costa Rica as a College of Pennsylvania alternate pupil to check biology with the famend U. Penn. biologist Daniel Janzen, finding out the restoration of deforested ecosystems within the northern Costa Rican Santa Elena Peninsula.
She fell into journalism through the Sandinista Revolution when northern Costa Rica was abuzz with Sandinista exercise. The rebels used Costa Rican territory to launch assaults towards the regime of dictator Anastasio Somoza and likewise acquired arms from Cuba by way of Costa Rica the place the help for the Sandinistas was overwhelming, virtually unanimous.
Prescott labored as stringer for numerous information organizations within the remaining phases of the Revolution and rode into Managua on July 19, 1979 when the Nicaraguan capital lastly fell because the triumphant Sandinistas celebrated the downfall of the 43-year-old Somoza tyranny.
Prescott additionally did work for The Tico Occasions, Costa Rica’s English-language weekly newspaper. The Tico Occasions was a coaching floor for younger journalists from the U.S. and Europe and Tico Occasions journalists additionally served as a supply of stringers for worldwide media. The Tico Occasions was an compulsory cease for international correspondents touring by way of the area who relied on the newspaper’s journalists to place them in contact with the native political scene.
Following the Sandinista victory, quite a lot of information companies despatched representatives to reside in Costa Rica, which was a “protected nation” with out warfare which the journalists might use as a base.
Among the many reporters to make Costa Rica their residence had been Joe Frazier from the Related Press, whose spouse, Linda, went to work for The Tico Occasions, Reid Miller additionally of the Related Press, whose spouse Pauline Jellenick, additionally labored with AP, Bob Rivard from the Dallas Morning Information, whose spouse Monika, additionally a journalist, contributed to The Tico Occasions, husband-and-wife freelancers Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan and John Moody from Time Journal.
However so far as the foremost worldwide information companies had been involved, Costa Rica was comparatively “off the map” which is why NBC had no crew in Costa Rica the day of the La Penca bombing.
The evening she was assigned to cowl the bombing at Pastora’s jungle stronghold at La Penca in southern Nicaragua, Prescott lived as much as her popularity. She rousted the proprietor of a video provide firm to lease tools, discovered a cameraman from among the many college students at her husband Alberto Moreno’s College of Costa Rica visible arts class, and recruited Alberto to be sound man.
By midnight, the makeshift information crew was on its method down the fog-shrouded mountain street to Ciudad Quesada in northern Costa Rica, the place about two dozen journalists, lots of them critically injured, had been being evacuated from the bombing scene by dugout canoe and rushed in ambulances to the San Carlos Hospital.
Within the chaos instantly following the bombing, nobody knew who had positioned the bomb, or even when there was a bomb. Some speculated that the press convention had been attacked by a Sandinista rocket-propelled grenade, since following the explosion, the sound of small-arms fireplace stuffed the evening as panicked rebels fired their weapons wildly into the encompassing jungle.
Among the many wounded was Miller of the Related Press, who had a number of shrapnel wounds. ABC Information cameraman Avirgan had holes in his facet and the pores and skin on the fingers of 1 hand burned off. Roberto Cruz, correspondent for the Chinese language Information Company Xinhua, would lose an eye fixed and a leg within the bombing. Veteran Costa Rican journalist Carlos Vargas suffered a shattered leg.
With digital camera rolling, Lyle’s crew caught one scruffy bearded journalist, apparently unharmed, leaving the hospital in a automobile. Earlier, the well-built journalist had been captured by a photographer sitting calmly in a hospital chair, smoking a cigarette, a bandage on his hand.
It was the one close-up of the “photographer” and have become the picture used for posters and paid commercials in newspapers across the Americas for info on the suspected bomber.
A Costa Rican police investigation would finally confirm that this man, who glided by the false id of a Danish journalist named Per Anker Hansen, had introduced the bomb to the press convention in a digital camera case. However for 3 days after the bombing, everybody who had attended the press convention was suspect—and the bomber had ample time to vanish.
Information photographers had captured photos of “Hansen” together with the opposite journalists touring up Costa Rica’s Sarapiquí River, which empties into the San Juan, in outboard-powered dugouts. The surviving journalists remembered the “Danish photographer” fussing over his giant metallic digital camera case which he had wrapped in plastic, attempting to maintain it dry.
The bomber’s meant goal, the colourful, charismatic Pastora, met the journalists as they arrived on the hut on stilts within the riverside clearing often called La Penca.
The group entered the hut and gathered round a chest-high desk in the midst of the room. TV photographers caught photos of “Hansen” leaving the desk and making his method out of the hut.
Shortly thereafter, a blinding flash accompanied the deafening roar of an explosion. The “photographer” had detonated a bomb by distant management. Pictures of the following chaos confirmed him sprawled on the bottom, apparently feigning shock. He was aboard one of many first boats to depart the scene.
Pastora, shortly evacuated by his lieutenants, escaped along with his life, wounded in each legs.
Three journalists, Linda Frazier of The Tico Occasions, Evelio Sequeira, cameraman for Costa Rican Channel 6 TV, and his sound man, Jorge Quirós, weren’t as fortunate. All died, together with two of Pastora’s guerrillas. The bomb severed each of Frazier’s legs on the knees. She was positioned on the final boat leaving the scene and died en path to Ciudad Quesada.
Frazier’s editor, Dery Dyer, had pleaded by way of the evening with the U.S. Embassy to ship helicopters from the Panama Canal Zone to the scene to evacuate the wounded. She was assured a number of occasions in the middle of the evening by U.S. Consul Lynn Curtin that the helicopters had been on their method. They by no means arrived.
The bomber, who had been handled for a superficial, apparently self-inflicted minimize on his hand when he arrived on the hospital, returned to San José, checked out of his lodge, walked into the crowded downtown avenue and vanished.
Within the ensuing years, the saga of La Penca would occupy the eye of journalists from all over the world because the press struggled to unravel the riddle of the bombing, whereas navigating the flamable ideological minefield created by the story.
A lot of the eye of the investigations centered on Pastora’s background that made him enemies on all sides of the Nicaraguan battle.
Pastora was a hero of the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew Somoza. In 1978, the flamboyant revolutionary led the takeover the Nicaraguan Parliament, holding Nicaraguan law-makers hostage till Somoza freed quite a lot of Sandinistas being held in Somoza’s prisons.
However when the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza, the Sandinista management marginalized Pastora, giving him a secondary function as vice minister of inside. And when average members of the Sandinista authorities left or had been pressured out with the Marxist flip of the Sandinista junta, Pastora left with them.
Pastora laid low for a few yr earlier than declaring his choice to mount an armed opposition to the Sandinistas from the “southern entrance” out of Costa Rica.
Costa Rica had been a second residence to Pastora throughout his years as an anti-Somoza revolutionary. During times he would make a dwelling as a fisherman in Costa Rican village of Barra del Colorado on the Atlantic Coast close to the mouth of the San Juan River which separates Costa Rica from Nicaragua.
Regardless of his new-found dislike of the Sandinistas, Pastora refused to unite with the U.S.-backed Contra rebels combating out of Honduras. The management of the Honduran-based CIA-backed Contras was made up of members of Somoza’s hated Nationwide Guard and Pastora vowed to do battle with them as soon as he threw out the Sandinistas.
The CIA intermittently supplied arms and provides to Pastora, however solely sufficient to supply an enticement to affix with the Contras within the north. However the relationship with the CIA remained decidedly hostile. At one level, as a taunt, a CIA dropped a cargo of enormous bins crammed with Kotex. Pastora alleged that this recalcitrance led the CIA to attempt to drive him be part of the Honduran-based Contras or stop the battle and go away the southern entrance to somebody extra pliable.
The spy company discovered a candidate for the southern entrance chief in a former Managua automobile salesman named Pedro “El Negro” Chamorro, however Chamorro was unable to muster a lot of a drive to switch the Pastora.
Reporters in Costa Rica and Nicaragua had been following these developments carefully and Pastora referred to as the La Penca press convention to denounce the CIA for pressuring him to unite or else.
So within the wake of the La Penca bombing suspicion instantly fell on the CIA.
Investigating the Bombing: Honey and Avirgan’s Campaign
Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan had been husband-and-wife journalists who got here to Costa Rica within the early Nineteen Eighties to cowl the regional wars for numerous information providers. Tony was a cameraman who labored variously with ABC Information and CBS Information on a contract foundation and amongst Martha’s strings had been The New York Occasions.
The day of the La Penca bombing, Honey had a front-page story in The New York Occasions in regards to the CIA pressuring Pastora to affix the FDN or stop the struggle.
Following the bombing, Martha obtained a grant from the New York-based Committee to Shield Journalists to research the assault.
The publishers of The Tico Occasions, Richard Dyer and his daughter, Tico Occasions Editor Dery had hoped that native and worldwide information companies might kind a consortium to unravel the La Penca thriller.
However Honey and Avirgan had a popularity amongst journalists of placing their political opinions and sixties-style activism earlier than their journalistic objectivity—producing their very own drama and turning into a part of the story they had been masking—and any likelihood of cooperation among the many massive weapons of worldwide journalism to seek out the La Penca bomber vanished when Martha was awarded the grant.
It didn’t take lengthy for Honey’s investigation to give attention to a conspicuous goal: a rancher initially from Indiana by the title of John Hull, a person in his early 60s.
Hull got here to Costa Rica within the Sixties and commenced farming close to Ciudad Quesada within the northern a part of the nation. He ended up with a significantly giant farm within the space often called Muelle de San Carlos.
In time he additionally got here to handle different farms within the northern Costa Rican area belonging to absentee U.S. house owners.
When the 80s rolled round and the Reagan Administration set its sights on overthrowing the Sandinista authorities, Hull was ideally located to help the CIA in organising the southern entrance: He owned or had entry to giant acreage of land the place Contras might prepare and his land and those who he managed contained airstrips to which arms may very well be flown.
Apparently believing himself resistant to official scrutiny, Hull, together with a number of different U.S. anti-communists working in northern Costa Rica, had been conspicuous in help to the anti-Sandinista rebels, making themselves symbols of U.S. meddling in Costa Rican and placing Hull at odds with newspapers like The Tico Occasions with whom he clashed over the weekly’s reporting of his pro-Contra exercise. Hull’s lack of discretion made him a straightforward goal for Honey.
In early 1985, by obvious likelihood, Honey’s secretary Julia Meeks ran right into a carpenter named Jorge Rojas Chinchilla at a restaurant close to Meek’s San José residence who named Hull as one of many mental authors of the bombing.
Rojas was to turn out to be Honey’s prime supply for her La Penca investigation. The carpenter struck up a dialog with Meeks and informed her a few younger Contra he had met who had informed him he had visited John Hull’s farm and had overheard Hull and a Cuban-American named Felipe Vidal admit to planning the La Penca bombing. The 2 Contra supporters had been additionally concerned in trafficking cocaine, stated the supply. Rojas stated he knew the person solely by his first title, David.
Meeks informed Honey and Avirgan the story. The journalists interrogated Rojas and repeatedly requested to contact David immediately, however the carpenter insisted that the Contra feared for his life and would communicate solely with Rojas throughout fastidiously prearranged secret conferences.
Based on Rojas, David was finally murdered.
Rojas acquired demise threats and was pressured to depart Costa Rica for Canada, however not earlier than being the prime witness at a libel trial introduced by Hull towards Avirgan and Honey. After a fiery trial earlier than a packed courtroom the court docket absolved the journalists.
The trial was the start of hassle for Hull. Costa Rica’s judicial authorities had been starting to give attention to the numerous accusations introduced by Avirgan and Honey towards the Indiana farmer, which finally led to formal fees towards Hull for homicide within the case of La Penca, drug trafficking and “hostile acts,” a statute designed to guard the Costa Rican state towards acts of subversion.
As soon as, commenting on vagaries of coping with a CIA that was continuously altering its mode of operations, Hull informed a reporter for United Press Worldwide, “I by no means knew when issues had been going from over to covert to pervert.”
If nothing else, the fees introduced towards Hull and Vidal confirmed the independence of Costa Rica’s judicial authorities who dared to indict U.S. authorities brokers.
Honey ended up writing a e book referred to as Hostile Acts, a digital dictionary of acts by U.S.-backed brokers, each CIA operatives and anti-Sandinista impartial operators, who undermined Costa Rica’s coverage of neutrality of their efforts to overthrow the Sandinista.
The e book is definitely two elements. One which outlines the hassle by america Company for Worldwide Improvement (AID) to maintain Costa Rica’s economic system afloat whereas weaning it off of international support and a second part detailing the numerous covert operations and operatives launched by the U.S. in help of the Contra trigger in violation of Costa Rica’s neutrality stance.
The e book makes an attempt to attract a parallel between U.S. AID’s applications and the covert efforts to help the anti-Sandinistas from Costa Rica. But it surely’s laborious to construe support within the quantity of a billion {dollars} over a decade to save lots of the Costa Rica’s tanking economic system as a “hostile act” even when the help was aimed toward serving to dismantle Costa Rica’s state-led financial order.
However the e book did serve to display how U.S. international coverage towards Costa Rica was at cross functions, propping up the nation’s democratic establishments with one hand whereas undermining Costa Rican democracy with its covert actions towards the Sandinista authorities with the opposite.
A Confrontation Over Proof
At one level, Honey and Avirgan discovered the tables turned and themselves accused of drug trafficking. Someday the couple’s housekeeper went to retrieve a bundle addressed to the journalists on the central put up workplace in San José. Police had been ready, in possession of a kilo of cocaine, together with a addressed to the Avirgans by “Tomás” (presumably Sandinista Junta member Tomás Borge) which stated that U.S. Sen. John Kerry was ready for the bundle in Miami.
The clumsy, to not say absurd, nature of the try to border the teetotaling journalists didn’t cease the cops from detaining the housekeeper, whom they took to the couple’s home in an try and get inside and search it. Meeks referred to as The Tico Occasions, in hopes that the presence of the press would maintain the police from looking out the home.
Tico Occasions reporter Beth Hawkins and I grabbed a cab and arrived to see the couple’s housekeeper cowering within the rear of an unmarked cop automobile, Avirgan standing midway inside it in an effort to forestall its departure. Honey, in the meantime, was confronting a plainclothes policeman. Avirgan and the cop additionally traded epithets, with Avirgan calling the cop a maricón (fag), which prompted the policeman to grit his enamel and place his hand on the revolver strapped to his facet.
The couple’s lawyer, Otto Castro, arrived and demanded to see a warrant the cops couldn’t produce. Then he pleaded plaintively with the couple to let the policemen take the housekeeper. “We will free her later,” he stated. “What they need are paperwork.”
Avirgan relented and the cop automobile took away the housekeeper. The journalists piled into Castro’s automobile and headed for the courts, the place the lawyer would struggle off any search warrant with the argument that Honey and Avirgan had been clearly arrange. As he’d predicted, the fees towards the housekeeper and her employers had been dropped and the housekeeper launched that day.
Aftermath and Revelations
If anybody will be stated to have gained the escalating battle between left and proper represented by the Honey-Avirgan feud with Hull, it needed to be the previous, provided that Hull and Vidal had been accused of masterminding the La Penca bombing, drug trafficking and hostile acts, whereas the husband-and-wife journalists went on to work for public advocacy teams based mostly in Washington.
Vidal, a Bay of Pigs veteran, who helped the Contras in Costa Rica with logistics earlier than eradicating himself to Miami after the fees pleaded his innocence to the press. The homicide fees filed towards Vidal prevented the Cuban-American from acquiring a job for a few years.
Hull was briefly jailed for the fees, earlier than claiming chest pains and being eliminated to an area hospital.
In the meantime, Miami Herald reporter Juan Tamayo met with a member of the Argentine Individuals’s Military in Paris, who informed him that he acknowledged “Per Anker Hansen” as a part of the guerrilla group and stated he helped prepare Nicaraguan fighters who had been members of the Sandinista militia.
Across the identical time, Doug Vaughn of the general public curiosity group the Christian Institute discovered a fingerprint and {a photograph} of the attacker in a motorized vehicle division in Panama.
Juan and Doug joined forces and went to Buenos Aires, the place, with the assistance of two journalists, they discovered a photograph of the attacker together with a fingerprint in a police file.
They took the fingerprint to an skilled in Miami and located an ideal match: Per Anker Hansen was really Very important Roberto Gaguine, a member of the leftist motion. The Argentine Individuals’s Military was apparently killed in a suicide assault in 1985 on the Argentine army base in La Tablada.
The mystery was solved; the Sandinistas succeeded. Or not? For Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan, circumstantial proof such because the testimony of carpenter Jorge Rojas remained vital.
However the decisive issue was the testimony of Swedish journalist Peter Torbiornsson, who, guilt-ridden, traveled to Managua to confess that Sandinista commander Tomás Borge had satisfied him to take Gaguine to Pastora.
Torbiornsson says he knew he was touring with a spy, however had no thought he was touring with a terrorist.
The proof is irrefutable: the Sandinistas did it.
Nonetheless, some, together with Linda’s husband, Joe, suppose that america by some means had something to do with it, even when it was realizing in regards to the bombing and permitting it to occur.
Concerning the Writer
John McPhaul Fournier is The Tico Occasions ‘former editor
