Dewey Clarridge’s account of the mine campaign is highly suspect. The Latin baron puts the timing toward the end of January 1984, telling a story of how for once he arrived home with time to reflect. Over a cigar and a tumbler of gin, Clarridge achieved sudden clarity:

  . . . it hit me. Sea mines were the solution. We should mine the harbors of Nicaragua, Corinto and the oil facility at Puerto Sandino in particular. The export season was coming up, and if we could block their shipping for even a short period, it would be enough of an economic hardship to bring them around.

  The next morning Clarridge, alert to the political dangers of this course—he says—sent an officer to the library to look up the international law on mining. Clarridge concluded that nothing barred his proposed course of action.

  Much of this rendition is questionable. First off, the mines already existed. The CIA and the navy needed time to manufacture and test the mines, and they were certainly created for a concrete purpose, not on the off-chance that someday someone would think up a use for them. Then there is the timing. Mines had been exploding under ships off the Nicaraguan coast since January 3. And the last of the NSPG meetings that considered mining before the fact had happened in December. The baron’s private skull session most likely resulted from the NSPG meeting of January 6, where the group had agreed to try to force a decision against Nicaragua as soon as possible. On January 12 Casey informed Congress that the CIA proposed to empty its contra funding accounts immediately. The likely truth is that Clarridge merely resolved to escalate a mining campaign already in progress.

  Also objectionable is the baron’s reading of the international law on sea mines, the Hague Convention of October 18, 1907, titled “Convention Relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines.” The United States and Nicaragua were both parties to the treaty, which makes it illegal to mine the coast or ports of an enemy even during times of war for the sole purpose of intercepting commercial shipping, or to lay unanchored contact mines (unless configured to become inert at most an hour after being set). The treaty requires that the perpetrator act to preserve peaceful shipping and notify ship owners of danger zones. According to Clarridge, the convention applies only to free-floating mines. Few lawyers would agree, certainly not the International Court of Justice, which soon had to pronounce on the matter.

  The mining aimed at a final coup de grace for the Nicaraguan port network. On January 3, 1984, Managua radio denounced the mines for the first time. Edgar Chamorro recalls being awakened by a CIA officer at two in the morning a couple of nights later. John Mallett, deputy chief of station in Tegu, handed Chamorro a press release the CIA had prepared in which the contras claimed responsibility for the mining. Several days afterward the FDN declared all Nicaraguan ports to be a “danger zone,” no doubt to satisfy the Hague Convention.

  A Japanese flag ship was the victim outside Corinto on January 3 and had to be towed back to port. This became the first of a dozen vessels of six nations damaged in the mining. On January 13 a Nicaraguan patrol boat struck another mine. There were also six raids on the port of Potosí on the Gulf of Fonseca, in at least one of which a CIA contract agent piloted an armed Hughes 500 chopper in combat. Rudy Enders, CIA paramilitary chief, directly supervised the operations. Listening to the radio chatter of one of these raids at the operations center on March 30, as Enders told Langley one of his Q-boats had stalled, Clarridge realized from the background noise that Enders actually sat in the helicopter. Dismayed, the baron could do little but curse. Puerto Sandino suffered attacks by speedboats supported by three helicopters. Clarridge describes the mining there on February 7 as the opening act of the mine campaign. On March 7 the CIA helicopters intervened again when the Q-boats were nearly trapped at San Juan del Sur. About seventy mines were laid during the campaign.

  In view of the Boland Amendment, the CIA trod on thin ice indeed. Throughout the years of the burgeoning project Congress had become increasingly uncomfortable. Edgar Chamorro recounts, significantly, that the first CIA demands that the contras form a united front came during congressional debate over the Boland Amendment. Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, chairman of the intelligence committee since 1981, had been sympathetic to Reagan administration aims, but his relations with Langley soured somewhat in the controversy over the Casey appointment. Yet Goldwater, despite qualms, had been key to restoring CIA secret-war money, and the agency could ill afford to lose his support. The mining campaign destroyed it.

  When the port campaign began, the CIA became curiously circumspect about its information to Congress. Bill Casey personally conducted the important briefings, so there is no doubt he aimed to do what he did. Perhaps Casey had merely been unintelligible—he was notorious all over town for his mumbling. The standard joke at Langley was that the director had no need for a scrambler phone since his speech came out already scrambled. Clair George complained to journalists that briefing upon briefing of Congress made no difference. Clarridge insists the agency made no effort to keep the mining secret, that CIA informed the oversight committees “as we were supposed to.” He goes on: “At least the [House committee] had the decency to own up to the fact that they had been briefed, which is more than I can say for the Senate.” The truth lies elsewhere.

  First, the CIA used the contras both as cover for the mining and to mislead Congress. Early in its preparations, Langley reported that contras were training to use mines, then left overseers to assume the mining was FDN’s when it would actually be a unilateral CIA project. The public claims about mining—made only by the contras and on CIA orders—reinforced that. To evade the budget cap, the mother ship was apparently funded directly out of the DCI’s contingency account. Its presence at the big Corinto raid would not be disclosed for five months while combat action by CIA contract officers in January and March 1984 also went unacknowledged for months. It is not clear that Rudy Enders’s direct participation was ever admitted.

  Because self-serving statements were made—both by Casey in a CIA employee newsletter and by Robert McFarlane in a speech at the Naval Academy—confusion surrounds the issue of the adequacy of CIA notification. A careful review is necessary. In January 1984 the Senate committee sought information, its interest piqued by CIA’s intention to exhaust its Nicaragua budget. Senator Goldwater asked Rob Simmons to arrange a briefing for early February. Clair George, far from complying, tried and failed to get a postponement, whereupon Casey personally called Goldwater and got the date pushed back to March 8. Meanwhile Casey testified before the House committee on January 31 but not specifically on mining. The agency also arranged private briefings for Patrick Leahy and Rhode Island Democrat Claiborne Pell where mining was a topic. There is no evidence that officials went beyond their contra cover story.

  By March the harbor mining had become controversial. Yet before the Senate overseers at the previously arranged March 8 session—and again five days later—Casey focused on a new CIA budget request for an extra $21 million, again not the mining, which the CIA referred to in a single sentence in a presentation of more than two hours, twenty-seven words in eighty-four pages of text. That reference stated merely that mines had been placed in Nicaraguan harbors by U.S.-backed groups—the CIA cover story recycled to its congressional overseers.

  The agency tried to bypass Goldwater altogether and get the money direct from the CIA subunit of the Appropriations Committee, which had parallel responsibility. Headed by Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, a friend to Langley, the CIA subcommittee would have agreed except for vice chairman William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat, who insisted on enforcing the Senate rule requiring the prior approval of the committee with substantive jurisdiction. When the Goldwater committee learned of the maneuver, all hell broke loose.

  As for the House being “told” of the CIA mining, that happened on March 27 at a HPSCI hearing where Casey tried the same tack. Two committee members pressed him repeatedly on who was directing the mining until Casey admitted, “We are.” Even today it is still not known whether the CIA director went beyond this image of a contra operation “directed” by CIA to disclose that the mining was a unilateral CIA effort.

  Then Rob Simmons saw a March 30 Casey letter to Senator Pell that supplied additional detail on questions at his private briefing. The letter contained the phrase “Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets.” Before joining the Senate staff Simmons had worked in the DO for a decade. He knew the implication instantly. He understood plastic explosives too and figured “firecrackers” did not do justice to the power of the CIA mines. Simmons went to House staff chief Thomas Latimer and asked to see records of the CIA’s briefings there, where he immediately found Casey’s admission of a few days earlier. Simmons put the pieces together.

  On April 2 Casey appeared combative before the Senate intelligence committee. Four days later Goldwater rose on the Senate floor to deliver a speech on the mining, mistakenly referring to classified information. Simmons had to stop him in mid-sentence. Later that afternoon the staff chief entered Goldwater’s office to find the chairman in darkness, the shades drawn, pondering his blunder. Simmons related his findings: “The CIA was directly involved in the mining. Casey withheld the information from us. The President personally gave the go-ahead to start the mining in the fall of 1983. Casey and McMahon admitted it. They claim they told us.” The staffer described the limited briefings, adding that the context had been contra activity, not CIA operations. In his 1988 memoir Goldwater confirms that he too understood Casey to be talking about contras, not CIA. (Circumspection applied even within the administration—Secretary of State George Shultz asserts that he was also given the impression the contras were doing the mining.) Simmons felt the senator had been cut out because Casey feared he would try to talk Reagan out of the mining. Goldwater had pulled Casey’s chestnuts out of the fire many times. He was devastated and bitter. On April 9 he fired off a letter to Casey frankly declaring, “I am pissed off!” When that leaked, Goldwater followed with a public statement that the “requirement of the law was not followed in this case. . . . I told Mr. Casey that this was no way to run a railroad.”

  Casey came to Capitol Hill the next day to denounce the SSCI complaints. Goldwater had left for a trip to the Far East, and now Langley went to full-court press. A piece in the CIA’s internal newsletter asserted positively that the agency had fully informed Congress of its actions. Quietly, according to SSCI vice chairman Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, spooks went to the New York Times to insinuate that Goldwater simply did not remember, that perhaps he was too old. Simmons is quoted as observing that these actions “can only be described as a domestic disinformation campaign against the U.S. Congress.” Robert McFarlane capped the effort in his speech at Annapolis where he told the assembled midshipmen that every important detail of the mining had been shared fully.

  The extravagant claims quickly disintegrated after vice chairman Moynihan resigned in protest. A slew of leaks revealed many particulars of the CIA’s limited briefings. Goldwater returned and convinced Moynihan to withdraw his resignation, and Director Casey appeared contrite before the committee on April 26, promising better. Both Casey and McFarlane apologized. An SSCI annual report supplied chapter and verse on the deception. In the later Iran-Contra hearings, McFarlane testified under oath that the intelligence committees were not, in fact, informed of the mining as required by law.

  In June 1984, prodded by the White House, CIA negotiated with Congress on the definition of reporting requirements. Langley agreed to give prior notice of covert actions that went beyond a finding, of anything requiring NSC or presidential approval, and on subjects in which the committees expressed interest. These so-called Casey Accords, which the director had not wanted to sign in the first place, had to be reaffirmed a year later.

  To this day Dewey Clarridge remains defiant. He claims eleven separate briefings took place, implying that CIA disclosures were more than adequate. But four of those events were parts of the original deception, two concerned the budget end run, and three were Casey’s after-the-fact explanations, leaving only the private contacts with Leahy and Pell. Clarridge wonders why those senators did not immediately tell their colleagues—a fair question—but he fails to discuss what promises of secrecy the CIA extracted from them.

  Clarridge also terms the mining “just another operation consistent with a Presidential Finding,” arguing that giving it special notice would have been “absurd” and claiming the distinction between a contra mining and a unilateral CIA action was “specious.” The last point brings back the question of whether the September 1983 finding provided for CIA attacks. Director Casey himself had told the intelligence committee at the time that the authority no longer permitted the CIA to engage in paramilitary operations. The currently available declassified version of the finding contains nothing that disputes this. In sum, Clarridge’s position is that this direct CIA action, which had both U.S. and international legal implications, required no special mention to overseers (and no approval from higher authority for American participation), and the question of whether it had been legal at all amounted to a side issue.

  The CIA mining constituted a flagrant violation of international law. Not only did it obstruct freedom of the seas, the CIA specifically aimed at merchant shipping and issued no danger notices to mariners until mines had begun exploding; even then it released only the vague claims put out by the contras. Mining is a clearly defined act of war under the 1856 Treaty of Paris and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. This in turn raised questions regarding the CIA’s authority under the War Powers Act. All this came to a head outside Corinto on March 20 when the Soviet tanker Lugansk hit a mine, wounding five sailors. In the scramble to contain this flap, CIA’s John Mallett now told FDN leader Chamorro to deny that contra mines could have caused the damage. Giving that statement substance necessarily forced an end to the mining.

  A year later Director Casey tried to assuage Senator Goldwater. When a professional group awarded the senator an achievement medal named for the eminent technologist William O. Baker, the CIA director went out of his way to give the speech honoring Goldwater. The senator’s feelings can be imagined.

  Dewey Clarridge asserts that one more month of mining would have driven Managua to the negotiating table. The claim is eerily reminiscent of U.S. officials talking about bombing North Vietnam, or prescient of Bush administration claims about victory in Iraq. That a Soviet vessel would be mined had been perfectly predictable. Blaming Congress or the press is what is specious—international furor plus danger of confrontation with Russia, not Barry Goldwater, are what made the mining unsustainable.

  Domestic criticism gained a fierce intensity. Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the U.S. action. Nicaragua brought suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Reagan administration suddenly felt compelled to reverse long-standing U.S. policy recognizing ICJ jurisdiction, with further adverse effects on world opinion. Among countries lodging protests, in addition to the Soviet Union, were allies Britain and France. The French debated sending a minesweeper to help Nicaragua clear its waters.

  The mining caused Managua real damage. Toward the end of June, Nicaraguan Fisheries Minister Alfredo Alaníz stated that five fishermen had been killed, thirty injured, and thirteen fishing boats lost. With trade volume reduced, Nicaragua estimated it had lost $4.3 million in export income. Nicaragua’s fishermen took the greatest risks as they swept the mines. At Corinto by May, damage was estimated at $9 million. More than thirty mines had been detonated, with a pair of improvised minesweepers sunk. At the United Nations only a veto by U.S. Ambassador Vernon Walters prevented passage of a Security Council condemnation of the United States.

  At The Hague, Nicaragua filed suit with the International Court of Justice on April 9, 1984, charging U.S. violations of international law with the contra program in general and the harbor mining in particular. Although the United States renounced the Court’s jurisdiction, it nevertheless submitted material condemning Nicaragua, such as reports from the propagandists of the Office of Public Diplomacy on Latin America and the Caribbean, an NSC-CIA political action unit housed within the State Department. The ICJ accepted these materials into evidence, but the American offerings did not overcome the testimony of witnesses like contra leader Edgar Chamorro and former CIA analyst David MacMichael, the evidence of the mining, or the contra manual Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. The ICJ found in favor of Nicaragua. The court determined that the United States had no right to seek the overthrow of the Sandinista government, no right to attack Nicaragua in the name of the self-defense of El Salvador, and no right to mine or attack ports. Only the American, British, and Japanese justices dissented from portions of the 11 to 3 decision rendered on June 27, 1986.

  The Reagan administration dismissed the ICJ decision and vetoed a UN resolution designed to enforce the Court’s findings. This blow underlined how little the U.S. action had to do with supporting democracy. The huge consequences compared with the limited risk that CIA planners envisioned in adopting the mining project shows how delusional the concept had been. Secretary of State George Shultz records quite straightforwardly, “The mining episode was a political disaster for the administration.” Amazingly, Dewey Clarridge does not see that.

  Meanwhile other aspects of the CIA project also encountered difficulties. The Miskito were essentially knocked out of the war. Brooklyn Rivera’s faction of Indians reached an accommodation with Managua. Stedman Fagoth Mueller lost control over Misura, which stopped receiving supplies, Fagoth himself being expelled from Honduras. Then Colonel Bermudez’s air force was set back when one of its two C-47 transports went down on a flight out of El Aguacate. All that was left was a C-54 that could not fly for lack of spare parts, and one last C-47 that Chamorro nicknamed the “rusty pelican.” Honduras itself took a dimmer view of the contras, placing Washington under increasing pressure to sweeten the aid pot to Tegucigalpa so as to preserve friendliness toward the resistance.