John Negroponte

A Servant of the Empire

by Matthew Rothschild

excerpted from the The Progressive magazine, April 2005

If you wink at torture, if you don't mind mass slaughter, if lying is of no concern to you, you can go far in this world.

Just ask John Negroponte.

He served as a State Department political officer in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, and then he headed up the Vietnam desk at the National Security Council from 1971 to 1973. During that decade, the Johnson-Nixon war was killing three million people in Indochina, along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers.

But Negroponte did not want the war to end. In fact, as an aide to Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks, he urged Kissinger not to come to terms.

A decade later in Central America, Negroponte essentially ran the illegal Contra War against Nicaragua from his post as U.S. ambassador to Honduras.

This war cost the lives of some 30,000 people.

An inescapable feature of U.S.-

Central America policy in the 1980s was support for torturers. Here, Negroponte did his part.

In particular, he knew about and supported Battalion 316, the Honduran intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, that killed at least 184 people. One of those was the former secretary to Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, himself the victim of a CIA-funded death squad in 1980. The secretary fled to Honduras after Romero's assassination. Battalion 316 then abducted her and threw her from a helicopter to her death.

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun ran a prizewinning series on Battalion 316.

It concluded that Negroponte knew about the tortures and murders and covered them up. Under his direct supervision, the embassy prepared reports to Congress that never mentioned the brutality of the Honduran military, the Sun reported. This omission allowed Honduras to keep getting U.S. funding.

"I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras," Negroponte testified before Congress in 2001.

But here's what the Sun said. "The intelligence unit, known as Battalion 316, used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations," it reported. "Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Newly declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, committed by Battalion 316, yet continued to collaborate closely with its leaders."

When he took office in 2001, George W. Bush plucked Negroponte to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. There Negroponte led the diplomatic offensive for the war on Iraq, trumpeting the now-discredited claims about weapons of mass destruction and bullying other nations to go along.

For his hard work, he was rewarded the post of U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and from there he has risen now to be Bush's nominee for director of national intelligence.

Negroponte has served the empire his whole life.

To do so properly, you need to get some blood on your résumé.

Negroponte has plenty. For Bush, that makes him the ideal man for the job.

*****

Negroponte's Dark Past

The case against Bush's new intelligence czar

by Robert Parry

In These Times magazine, March 2005

George W. Bush's choice of John Negroponte to be the first U.S. intelligence czar signals that Washington is heading down the same road that has led to earlier American intelligence failures and controversies-from politicizing analysis to winking at human rights abuses.

Although Negroponte's nomination is expected to sail through the Senate, one question that might be worth asking about his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 is: "Were you oblivious to the Honduran military's human rights violations and drug trafficking, or did you just ignore these problems for geopolitical reasons?"

Negroponte either oversaw a stunningly inept U.S. intelligence operation at the embassy in Tegucigalpa, missing major events occurring under his nose-or he tolerated atrocities that included torture, rape and murder, while slanting intelligence reports to please his superiors in Washington.

'Whichever it is-incompetence or complicity-it is hard to understand how Negroponte, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, can be expected to fix the intelligence flaws revealed by the Bush administration's failure to connect the dots before the 9/11 terror attacks or to avert the scandalous use of torture on Muslim suspects captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the bipartisan praise Negroponte's nomination has elicited, a clear-eyed look at his record suggests that the Bush administration intends to continue making two demands on the U.S. intelligence community: that analysts wear rose-colored glasses when assessing U.S. policies and that field operatives turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by U.S. allies or American interrogators.

A history of oversight

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte's tenure as ambassador the early '80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that's one of the reasons Bush picked him.

Negroponte's work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of "death squad" operations by the Honduran military in the '80s.

In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States.

"Elements of the Honduran military were involved in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on' is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. "These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue."

It's unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

Negroponte's ambassadorship also coincided with the evolution of the Nicaraguan contra forces from a small band under the tutelage of Argentine intelligence officers into an irregular army supported by the CIA, and later by a secret operation inside the White House run by National Security Council aide Oliver North.

Recent revelations

Despite several investigations into what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, many documents about Negroponte's involvement remained classified, outside public knowledge. Some of that information bubbled to the surface in September 2001 when Negroponte was facing confirmation to be Bush's ambassador to the United Nations.

In a Senate floor speech before Negroponte won confirmation, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said, "The picture that emerges in analyzing this new information is a troubling one." Summarizing the new documents from the State Department and CIA, Dodd said the evidence pointed to the fact that from 1980 to 1984, the Honduran military committed most of the country's hundreds of human rights abuses. The documents reported that some Honduran military units, trained by the United States, were implicated in "death squad" operations that employed counterterrorist tactics, including torture, rape, and assassinations against people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas in El Salvador or leftist movements in Honduras.

Dodd criticized Negroponte's earlier Senate testimony. In response to questions about one of these units, Battalion 316, Negroponte had said, "I have never seen any convincing substantiation that they were involved in death squad-type activities."

"Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous." said Dodd. "I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte's unwillingness to admit that-as a consequence of other US. policy priorities-the US. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s."

"The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987]' Dodd said. "The Court found that 'a practice of disappearances carried out or tolerated by Honduran officials existed between 1981-84' ... Based upon an extensive review of US. intelligence information by the CIA Working Group in 1996, the CIA is prepared to stipulate that 'during the 1980-84 period, the Honduran military committed most of the hundreds of human rights abuses reported in Honduras. These abuses were often politically motivated and officially sanctioned"

However, when Bush nominated Negroponte to be ambassador to Iraq in 2004, Dodd and other Democrats largely dropped their objections. The National Catholic Reporter, which had covered the right-wing persecution of Catholic clergy in Central America during the '80s, was one of the few publications still questioning Negroponte's fitness.

In an April 2004 article, the magazine recounted a statement from Society of Helpers' Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had gone to Honduras and approached Negroponte about the "disappearances" of 32 women who had fled to Honduras after rightist death squads in El Salvador assassinated Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.

Later, these women, including one who had been Romero's secretary, "were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared:' Sister Laetitia Bordes said. "John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts .... Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US. embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government:'

The National Catholic Reporter noted, "Years later, the Baltimore Sun would reveal that Negroponte apparently knew more than he was letting on. In fact, charge his many critics, the ambassador oversaw an exponential increase in military aid to the Honduran army, deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently found to be among the cruelest of the cruel."

Many congressional Democrats, as well as Republicans, consider those two-decade-old concerns about Central America stale and irrelevant to Negroponte's nomination as the nation's first National Intelligence Director. But his tenure as ambassador to Honduras raises questions not only about his moral judgment and integrity, but his capacity to assess information and to ensure that political pressures don't influence intelligence reporting.

As the first person chosen to hold this post-with oversight responsibility for all U.S. intelligence activities-Negroponte might legitimately be expected to represent something other than tolerance of death squads and politicization of intelligence information.

ROBERT PARRY broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the '80s for the Associated Press and Newsweek His new book; Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com, as can his 1999 book; Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &'Project Truth :A version of this article appeared on ConsortiumNews.com.

*****

John Negroponte - Our Man in Baghdad

International Socialist Review, July/August 2004

... Real power in Iraq will continue to lie in the hands of the military coalition and its civilian counterpart-the newly created U.S. embassy.

When it opens on July 1, this embassy will be the largest in the world-with 1,000 American and 700 foreign employees. It will be double the size of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which is currently the largest. One State Department official has referred to it as "an embassy on steroids." On May 6, in a greatly expedited process, the Senate confirmed Bush's nominee to run this mission-current U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte. It's a choice that tells you a lot about U.S. strategy and priorities for post-June 30 Iraq.

Negroponte's career highlights from his time as the U.S. ambassador in Honduras include:

* Supervising the creation of a death squad unit (Battalion 316) that has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of Hondurans;

* Crafting human rights reports that carefully exclude a pattern of torture and human rights violations covered by the entire Honduran media and later documented by the CIA;

* Brokering a steady stream of U.S. aid to Honduras in exchange for the right to use the country as a launching pad for the U.S.-backed Contra attack on Nicaragua.

As ambassador, Negroponte will not simply take over U.S. occupation head L. Paul Bremer's offices; he will also take over his role as the ultimate political authority in the country. While a handpicked interim government will have nominal control, Negroponte will wield real power. He will coordinate with coalition military forces, which will operate under a U.S. chain of command and retain control over security for the country. He will be in charge of the $20 billion U.S. reconstruction budget. And his office will absorb the officials currently working in the Coalition Provisional Authority. To be successful, the U.S. needs to create the appearance of a sovereign government while controlling the key decisions from behind the scenes. They need someone who can quietly carry out U.S. interests while working to suppress the inevitable resistance. And no one understands the difference between appearances and reality better than John Negroponte.

Deadly credentials

Though Negroponte is most notorious for his role in the dirty wars of Central America when serving as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, his political career serves as something of a road map of U.S. imperialist strategy over the last thirty-five years.

Negroponte's reputation as a hard-line cold warrior goes back to his early days serving in Vietnam. He got his start as a junior political officer at the U.S. embassy in Saigon in the early 1960s-just as the U.S. was intensifying its involvement in Vietnam. He was present at the Paris peace talks where he argued that his mentor Henry Kissinger was making too many concessions. He eventually left Kissinger's National Security Council over these differences.

After the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the government found itself reluctant to commit a large number of troops abroad and to aggressively pursue its aims. This "Vietnam syndrome" tied the hands of the United States and gave confidence to national liberation movements around the world. But hawks within the U.S. military establishment refused to accept such limitations on U.S. power. John Negroponte was one such figure. At his Senate confirmation hearing in 1981, he spoke for many military and political figures when he said: "I believe we must do our best not to allow the tragic outcome of Indochina to be repeated in Central America""

When the Sandanistas overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator in Nicaragua in 1979 and inspired revolutionary movements in Guatemala and El Salvador, Central America became the flashpoint for a new cold war. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration launched a covert war to overthrow the government in Nicaragua and to turn back the insurgency throughout Latin America. The tiny country of Honduras, lying at the crossroads of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, became the main staging ground for this operation. In the process, a country that had known relative social peace became a land of the disappeared and death squads.

No one was more central to the success of U.S. operations in Honduras than John Negroponte. Negroponte, who served as Reagan's ambassador from 1981 to 1985, wielded so much power in the country that he was known as the proconsul. During his reign, the U.S. embassy staff in Honduras increased ten-fold and came to house one of the largest CIA deployments in all of Latin America."

Negroponte was responsible for ensuring that arms could flow smoothly through Honduras, that the U.S. could conduct training exercises there, and that the Honduran army was sufficiently equipped and supported to wipe out any rebels within its borders. U.S. military aid to Honduras increase from $4 million in 1980 to $77 million in 1984. By 1985, its economic aid had surpassed $200 million-becoming the world's eighth largest recipient of U.S. aid."

Negroponte played a key role in organizing pro-Contra projects such as a U.S. counter-insurgency center at Puerto Castilla. Between 1981 and 1986, more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers and National Guard members traversed Honduras in military exercises that delivered arms to the Contras. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, which the U.S. used as a training facility for the Contras. The base was also used as a secret detention and torture center-the Abu Ghraib of its day. In August 2001, excavations performed at the base uncovered 185 corpses, evidence of those thought to have been killed and buried there."

Negroponte was the central agent overseeing a plan for the CIA to train a special intelligence unit under the direction of the chief of the Honduran armed forces General Gustavo Alvarez. Multiple investigations by the Honduran government, the CIA inspector general, and major newspapers have since revealed that this unit, Battalion 316, operated as a death squad in Honduras. Throughout its existence, Battalion 316 kidnapped suspects, used extensive means of torture in its interrogations, and then killed and dumped the bodies of those that were no longer useful. The exact number of people killed by Battalion 316 remains unknown. As of late 1993, the Honduran government listed 184 people as missing and presumed dead.

The cold warrior Negroponte and the ardent anti-communist General Alvarez made natural collaborators. In a 1983 interview, Negroponte told New York Times correspondent James LeMoyne that "Marxist guerrillas are organizing here." He went on to say that Alvarez was a hard man but an effective officer."

Alvarez believed that the only way to deal with "subversives" was with terror and violence. In a cable to Washington, former ambassador Jack Binns reported with alarm a conversation he had had with the general. 'Alvarez stressed to me that democracies and the West are soft, perhaps too soft to resist Communist subversion. The Argentines, he said, had met the threat effectively, identifying-and taking care of the subversives. Their method, he opined, is the only effective way of meeting the challenge."" (In the mid-1970s, more than 12,000 Argentines were disappeared in a state-directed campaign of repression.)

With U.S. cooperation, Argentine military leaders were invited to Honduras to train Contra fighters and Honduran military officers in Battalion 316. Later, these leaders were trained by U.S. CIA agents both in Honduras and in the United States. Former members of the battalion have testified extensively about the training they received. Oscar Alvarez, a former Honduran special forces officer and diplomat, told the Baltimore Sun:

The Argentines came in first, and they taught us how to disappear people. The United States made them more efficient. They said, "You need someone to tap phones, you need someone to transcribe the tapes, you need surveillance groups." They taught us interrogation techniques.

The CIA training has been confirmed by Richard Stolz-who was deputy director of operations at the time-in secret testimony before the Senate in 1988. Stolz told the Select

Committee on Intelligence, "The course consisted of three weeks of classroom instruction followed by two weeks of practical exercises, which included the questioning of actual prisoners by the students.""

Although Negroponte would step in when a case threatened to get out of hand, he did not interfere with the activities of Battalion 316. In fact, Negroponte continued to deliver glowing reports of General Alvarez and the Honduran military throughout his tenure as ambassador. 'When General Alvarez came under attack, the ambassador was quick to deny any claims against him. On Negroponte's recommendation, Reagan awarded Alvarez the Legion of Merit for "encouraging democracy" in 1983.

In order to keep a stream of U.S. funds flowing, Negroponte consistently turned his back on and covered up pervasive human rights abuses in Honduras. Reading the reports filed by Negroponte's office between 1981 and 1985, one would imagine Honduras to be a constitutional democracy with full democratic rights. But his predecessor, Jack Binns, painted a very different picture in his cables to Washington. In a 1981 cable, Binns reported: "I am deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations of political and criminal targets, which clearly indicate [Honduran government] repression has built up a head of steam much faster than we had anticipated.""

In response, Binns was brought to Washington and told by assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs Thomas Enders, "to stop human rights reporting except in back channel. The fear was that if it came into the State Department, it will leak. They wanted to keep assistance flowing. Increased violations by the Honduran military would prejudice that." Enders confirmed Binn's account of the 1981 meeting: "I told him that whereas human rights violations had been the single most important focus of the previous administration's policy in Latin America, the Reagan administration had broader interests." Shortly thereafter, Binns was removed from his post and replaced by Negroponte.

Despite the rising tide of violence and the increasing disappearances of Honduran citizens, Negroponte continued to send glowing reports to Washington. The 1983 State Department human rights report on Honduras claimed, "There are no political prisoners in Honduras."" However, it would have been impossible for Negroponte not to have known about political prisoners and rights abuses. Honduran papers carried daily reports of the violence, including full-page pictures of the missing. In 1982 alone, there were at least 318 published stories of military violence. Members of Congress drafted resolutions calling for an investigation into the disappearances. And there were numerous demonstrations, numbering in the hundreds, of the families and friends of the disappeared."

Negroponte could not have missed the growing pile of evidence that human rights abuses were being committed. In fact, subsequent reports and investigations reveal an attempt to systematically cover up such abuses. Rick Chidester, a junior political officer in the embassy, compiled substantial evidence of abuses in 1982 but claims he was ordered to delete most of it from the human rights report prepared for the State Department." This dovetails with a report that the CIA inspector general made in the early 1990s. Though the published version of the report is heavily edited, it does show that diplomats serving under Negroponte were discouraged from reporting abuses.

A diplomat whose name is blacked out in the report is quoted saying, "the embassy country team in Honduras wanted reports on subjects such as this to be benign." The inspector general goes on to conclude that Negroponte

was particularly sensitive regarding the issue and was concerned that earlier CIA reporting on the same topic might create human rights problems for Honduras. Based on the ambassador's reported concerns, actively discouraged from following up the information reported by the source.

The following two pages of the report are entirely blacked out." Negroponte displayed the defining characteristics necessary for imposing the will of a foreign government on an unwilling population: a casual disdain for the truth, a willingness to work with despots and dictators, and the ability to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses.

After the Iran-Contra scandal (during which it was revealed that the Reagan administration secretly traded arms to Iran, and U.S. agencies engaged in cocaine trafficking, to fund the Contras), Negroponte did have some difficulty finding another diplomatic post. Eventually, though, he became U.S. ambassador to Mexico where he helped to push through neoliberal economic measures. In 1993, President Clinton appointed him ambassador to the Philippines.

But his true comeback came in 2001 when George W. Bush picked him for the role of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Negroponte was one of a series of former Contra era officials to be nominated by the Bush administration, including Elliot Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state under Reagan, who had been convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Negroponte's appointment, in particular, signaled a new posture for the U.S. vis-à-vis the United Nations. A State Department official explained it this way:

In this new administration, we have a lot of people who are a decade or two older than the people who had the same jobs in the last administration. They remember the cold war. They want to reward and elevate people who fought on our side, including people who supported the contras. Negroponte is known as a guy who is devoted to realpolitik, which is in many ways the opposite of what the UN stands for. Giving him this job is a way of telling the UN: "We hate you."

Although Negroponte's nomination was initially held up in the Senate, after the September 11 attacks he was quickly confirmed. As U.S. ambassador to the UN, Negroponte has once again shown his ability to push through U.S. foreign policy objectives at any cost. Early on in his tenure, he delivered a threat to shut down military bases in any country that signed on to the International Criminal Court."

More important, he negotiated a unanimous vote on UN Resolution 1441, the resolution that allowed weapons inspectors back into Iraq and provided the pretext for the U.S. war in Iraq. In order to achieve this unanimity, he strong-armed Mexico and Chile into recalling their ambassadors." In October 2003, after the U.S. had gone to war in defiance of the United Nations, Negroponte spent seven weeks winning support for a UN resolution that effectively endorsed the U.S. occupation.

Today, he is a key player in getting the UN to provide crucial cover for the ongoing occupation of Iraq. The reality is that the U.S. aims to have a military presence in Iraq well into the future. As ambassador, John Negroponte's job will be to put a

diplomatic cover on that presence while organizing repression of any resistance to American objectives. In the last months, the whole world has seen the brutality that the U.S. must inflict to achieve its aims against the democratic aspirations of the occupied Iraqis. Over a decades-long career, John Negroponte has become a master of working with and covering up such brutality. His past "achievements" show us the future that the U.S. envisions for Iraq-and it is the opposite of liberation.

*****

John Negroponte - from the book Robbing Us Blind - Steve Brouwer - p181

John Negroponte was never pursued by Congress for his old role as the ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, even though he was one of those responsible for coordinating aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and holding together the dictatorship of an assortment of Honduran generals. Although the level of brutality toward the people of Honduras was lower than in the war zones on either side of them, there were hundreds of assassinations and disappearances perpetrated by the ruling Honduran military's notorious Battalion 3-16, a U.S. trained unit; one of their victims was Joseph Carney, a Jesuit priest from the U.S. Negroponte's job was to keep silent about their atrocities and help cover them up.

The Bush Gang brought Negroponte back in 2001 as Ambassador to the United Nations, where he had the tricky task of feigning to work at diplomacy with the other member states while trying to make it possible for the United States to pursue its aggressive objectives without being constrained by the UN...

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