This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey there, my name is Jodi Avergan. Have you noticed the present day? It feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians, Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. I had all the skin was burned off my face and my left hand was, all the skin was burned off and the bones were sticking out. I mean, we kept saying our interest is what's the identity of the bomber and who was the pay master. That's what we want to track. Hey fiasco listeners, we are now halfway through our season on the Iran Contra scandal, which feels like the perfect time to take a break from our regular episodes and share something a little different. It's a conversation with two reporters, Martha Honey and Tony Avergan, husband and wife team covered the Contra war in Central America. In the mid 1980s, Martha and Tony were living in and reporting from Costa Rica. Costa Rica, which is located just south of Nicaragua, was a peaceful country that had abolished its army and was using the money on infrastructure and education. For Martha and Tony, it was an ideal place to raise their kids, but it was also a good place for a couple of reporters. Well, Costa Rica was nice and peaceful. There were wars going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala and Costa Rica was not in those wars, but close enough that we could report on them. Except what we didn't realize at the time was that just about the time we relocated there, the CIA was also in the process of tripling the size of its operations in Costa Rica. As you may remember from episode three, and it's okay if you don't, the Contras were not one unified army. There were several leaders and factions fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the war was being waged on two fronts, the North and the South. So far this season, you've been hearing mostly about the Northern Front, where the Nicaraguan Democratic force, known as the FDN, was operating out of Honduras. In Costa Rica, Martha and Tony were close to the Southern Front of the war. There, the Contras were led by a man named Eden Pastora. Pastora was a former Sandinista who had grown disillusioned and alienated from the leftist movement. The Contra forces under Pastora's command had a reputation for being less brutal than the FDN. As you'll hear in this interview, Martha and Tony's time in Costa Rica came to be defined by one incident, an assassination attempt against Eden Pastora. It happened during a press conference that Tony was covering for ABC News. A bomb killed four people and left Tony seriously injured. The incident turned out to be the beginning of an ordeal that would drag on for years, as Tony and Martha set out to figure out the bomber's identity and ended up as the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the number of Americans involved in Iran Contra. But before we get into all that, let's start with Martha and Tony talking about how hard it was to convince their editors that the Contras even had a presence in Costa Rica. The official story was that all of the infrastructure and the war against Nicaragua was out of Honduras, the northern front. And we moved to Costa Rica, which became known as the southern front. And because Costa Rica had abolished its army, didn't have an army, and was officially neutral, the Costa Rican government and the U.S. government both denied that there was anything going on in Costa Rica. When you arrived, could you see Contras around you? Was it obvious that they were there? Well, that was the interesting thing that when we would call our editors in, particularly in Washington, and say, we've seen this or that, and they say, no, no, no, no, it can't be. We're told by the State Department, we're told by the White House, that there's nothing going on in Costa Rica. But there would be journalists from the local press who would go up to see the, to the Contra camps. And they always had to say that they went deep inside Nicaragua. In fact, when we first, a few months after we arrived, we were taken up to a Contra camp, it was in Costa Rica. And so that was becoming better known. And there were reports of hospitals in private homes, right in our neighborhood, that were hospitals for wounded Contras that they were being brought down to San Jose for recuperation. Sometimes that would be exposed by neighbors or whatever and would make it into the local press. So it was just anybody who opened their eyes would see what was going on. And then we very quickly began to develop sources who told us much more. I mean, there was, at that point, the government of Costa Rica was really very much in collaboration with the U.S. And the deal was that they were getting enormous amounts of economic aid in return for the creation of the Southern Front. Or allowing the presence. Allowing the presence of it. And just to be clear, like this is 83, 84, is there anything in the public realm about the U.S. using Costa Rica as a base for Contra activity? Well, there was much more attention to what was going on in the North from Honduras, because that was where the FDN and the main Contra force was. And just about all the news was about that. And it was hard to convince our editors and people, especially Americans, it was a much harder sell trying to convince them that there was something important happening in on the Southern Front, because it just wasn't nearly as developed as what was going on in Honduras. But did you manage to file stories that got published about this? Well, I think one of the early, you know, really big ones, Tony was filming for ABC television and I was writing for the New York Times as a stringer. So it never had my byline, but was writing for them. And we actually uncovered what was eating pastora's secret radio station that he always said was broadcasting from the hills of Nicaragua. In fact, it was broadcasting from the hills of San Jose. Tell our listeners real quick who is eating pastora. So eating pastora was the main Contra anti-Sandinista leader on the Southern Front. And there were a number of different sort of small armies that were under his coalition, which was known as Ardi. And he officially denied he was getting CIA for a long, for the first period of time that we were there. He denied that he was getting any CIA help. The fiction was that he was running his own war. And it was so important to him and others to conceal his location, not just for like military strategic reasons, but because Costa Rica was officially not supposed to be involved in the war. That was the condition under which he was allowed to operate there. And did that story sort of establish as fact that there was in fact a Contra operation being run out of Costa Rica? Yes, it did. And there were beginnings to be other reports. As I recall, there was an expose in Newsweek that had also talked about it. And there were beginning to be reports, but this was one of the early sort of real, sort of caught them. What do you think accounts for the difference between the character of the Contras in the North and the seemingly gentler, less brutal Contras you're describing in the South? In the North, I mean, these were Samosas, National Guard, and they continued to commit atrocities. They would go into villages and just shoot everybody and things like that. None of that was happening on the Southern Front. The people in the South were much different. They were peasants from Southern Nicaragua who didn't like the heavy-handed reforms being made by the San Anistas. There were some people from the Atlantic coast who didn't like the imposition of Spanish-based culture. They were generally not Catholic. They were Moravian or other Protestant groups. So the San Anistas were trying to change their schools and change their culture, and they rebelled against that. And militarily, they were not very competent. I mean, they didn't have a lot of military experience or very good military training. The arms they were getting from the U.S. were like the dregs of the arms. They were just sort of the leftover stuff, and they would complain that even the uniforms they were getting, their camouflage uniforms were made for like six-foot-tall Americans. These enormous boots and the pants that dragged down on the ground, shirts that reached their knees and stuff, and so they were ill-equipped and ill-suited to really do any real fighting despite the aid coming from the U.S. Yes. There were periods of time when money was flowing and arms were supposed to be coming in, and still the southern front was always the stepchild. And one of the questions was, was money being ripped off? And I think some of the work that we did in Miami and really looking deeper into the drug trafficking and so on, it was apparent that some of the contra-leaders were ripping off money, and there was just no priority given to either training or equipping the the cannon fodder on the southern front. Okay, so you just heard Martha reference drug trafficking. I get asked a lot about the drug angle of the Iran Contra story. Is it true that the Contras were smuggling cocaine into the U.S.? Is it true that American officials put a blind eye to it? According to Tony and Martha, the answers to these questions are gauzy and unsatisfying at best. One of the things that I think we know, and I mean we've learned, looking at drug trafficking in a number of parts of the world, is that it tends to thrive where there are covert operations. So I think that the operations out of Costa Rica on, you know, based out of the north and these airstrips that were sort of a classic cover for moving drugs, it was at the time when first marijuana and then cocaine was was coming in from Colombia and they needed sort of stopover places in Central America, a lot of the countries in Central America, Guatemala and so on became bases for drug stopping, but the contra operations provided, you know, particular ability to to move the drugs. The CIA had this problem that they had to move arms in through these very small airstrips carved out of the jungle, and they needed pilots willing to do that. And there's not too many pilots are willing to land on these very short landing and takeoff runway airstrips. And the only, the most experienced people at doing that were drug pilots. So they ended up recruiting a bunch of these, these pilots and these people had a background in drugs, so they were figuring well, they're flying these planes down full of arms, unloading your arms and flying back empty, that's a waste. So they would fly back with drugs that started to come up from Colombia or other places in South America, and they would fly them back into the into the States, often with the actually the cover of the CIA. So just as a table setting question, what would have been in it for the U.S. or the CIA to put a blind eye towards this or to encourage it? If it's sort of what layer, what level are you talking about? Because there were the CIA operatives or contract employees in the field, the pilots, and these various other sort of lower level officials who were clearly profiting from it. The CIA operation, the Southern Front needed this kind of pilots, and so they kind of turned, at least they turned a blind eye. The central question that are one of the central questions we have never been able to fully resolve is how far up the the line of command did profiting from the drug operations go, and I don't think we know that. If you're curious to learn more on the drug smuggling aspect of Iran-Contra, it's worth looking up the findings of a Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry that looked into the issue in 1987. In their official report, Kerry and his investigators concluded that there was no evidence that Contra leaders were personally involved in drug smuggling. However, there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling on the part of individual contras, as well as Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region. The report also found that U.S. officials worked in Central America failed to address the drug issue out of fear, and doing so would jeopardize the war effort against the Sandinista government. We'll be right back. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day it feels pretty rocky? Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. The drug trade was not the only murky story that Martha Honey and Tony Avergan came across during their time in Central America. At one point, Tony and Martha got word about a dramatic new development on the southern front of the Contra war. It involved Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista, who is now the primary Contra leader in Costa Rica. Pastora was going to hold a press conference at one of his bases in the Nicaraguan jungle. We had developed some very good sources. This is 1984, by the way. This is 1984. This is May 1984. But leading up to that, we had developed particularly one intelligence officer within the Contra movement who became a very important source. We later learned that he was Costa Rican and he was actually had infiltrated to try to find out for a pro-neutral Costa Rican's what was going on inside. One of the things that Andres said was that the CIA was really putting pressure on Pastora to align the southern front with the northern front, known as the FDN, Somos' old National Guard in the northern front. Pastora was under a lot of pressure. Pastora at that point had never said that he was getting CIA money. What does it mean to align? What does it mean that they wanted him to align with that? They wanted, for instance, Pastora to take all of his military orders out of Honduras. He would accept being under the command of the FDN. So that he would no longer really be the general in the south, but he would be taking his orders from the north and basically from the CIA that they would be directing it. One of the things that I was told a few days before the press conference was that the CIA had given Pastora an ultimatum, a 30-day ultimatum that was up May 30th, 1984, that he had to by then publicly say that he was aligning with the FDN in the north. Pastora basically called the press conference to say publicly for the first time that he was getting CIA support and that he was announcing that he was breaking his ties with the CIA and going to basically run his own operation out of the south. So that was the purpose of the press conference because... Wow, so this was no routine press conference? No, no, no. And because I knew this, I decided not to go to the press conference and I wrote a story for the New York Times that was a front-page story the next day saying that the CIA had put this 30-day ultimatum on Pastora. I didn't know that the bombing was going to happen. You said the CIA? Yes. You were able to say that it was the CIA? Yes, yes, yes. And so I stayed home. And I was stringing then for ABC television and I had to go there because we needed actually tape of Pastora saying it. So we had a Toyota Jeep and we used that and a bunch of others to go up, travel up to the north and then get into these small boats to go down to the San Juan River to separate Nicaragua and Costa Rica and up to the place called La Penca. But there was one person there who was not part of our regular group. He wasn't one of the Costa Rican journalists or the foreign journalists that were regularly doing these trips up to the contra camps. I went and talked to him and he said that he was a Danish photographer and was going to cover the press conference. And I mean, that wasn't so unusual. I didn't think that was anything alarming about that. Anyway, we got up to the contra camp known as La Penca just after sundown and it was just really a one-room shack piled high inside. There were piles of rice bags that people were using to seats and there were various contras with AK-47s or M16s over their shoulders milling around and like a high table in the center and pastore got behind that. So just as he began speaking, he motioned to a young woman who was part of his force, a woman named Rosita, to bring him a cup of coffee. We found out later that the bomber, the person who came to the press conference with four pounds of C4 plastic explosive in a Halliburton camera case, was this very, the Danish journalist who I had said hello to early in the morning and he put that down underneath the counter on which pastore was leaning and talking and then went outside and set it off by remote control. But this young woman handed him a cup of coffee and as she did so, her foot hit the camera case, knocked it on its side. So then when the brass went off, it went up and down and made a huge hole in the floor and blew the roof off the building. Finally, I realized that everything was black and there was this mony and crying and there was all this dust in the air and everything and well, it killed three journalists and Rosita and there were nearly 20 people injured and some very people lost arms and legs and eyes and I had all the skin was burned off my face and I had a big cut on the side of my face and then my left hand was, all the skin was burned off and the bones were sticking out and I had a big hole the size of a tennis ball a little bigger than that in my side. I didn't think I was going to die but I thought if I did die it was going to be because of this hole in my side so I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the hole and then there was only one boat there and the people who were rest injured ran down to the boat and left the most injured behind and I ended up being on the ground for nearly 12 hours before the boat had to make a four-hour round trip to go down to the nearest rural hospital from there and well Martha was there and she can tell you about what happened that now but go ahead and tell her. So just backtracking a little so I hadn't gone to the press conference because I already knew what pastoral was going to say so I wrote a story for the New York Times, filed it and was sitting at home with our daughter and the phone rang and it was another American journalist and I said oh I thought you were at the press conference he said no I overslept I didn't go but do you have the radio on? I said no he said well I'm really sorry to tell you this but there's been a bomb that's gone off at the press conference and they're reporting that at least one American has been killed and they haven't said who it is and so it was kind of like you know my world fell apart and I began calling everybody I could think of in the Contras, in the US Embassy, in the Costa Rican government and everybody said yeah we're hearing these reports you know some people have died including an American and we but we don't we don't have any names so of course I thought the worst and eventually good Canadian friends of ours came over and the woman stayed with our kids and I went to the hospital in San Carlos where they were bringing in the people and while I was standing there I noticed that there was someone sitting outside in a hospital guard but sitting in a wheelchair with a beard just sitting there very quietly outside the hospital and at one point one of the nurses came over to me and said are you the woman who has come to collect and she pointed to this guy and I said who is that and she said oh he's a Danish journalist and he wasn't injured and he says that a woman's coming to collect him and he's waiting for her I said no no it's not me and didn't think anything more of it I remember when Tony finally arrived in the last ambulance I was following Tony in through the swinging doors and I remember glancing and seeing that the wheelchair was empty that this guy had been sitting in that we learned two days later was the bomber and he managed to get himself out on his own and then he disappeared more with Martha Honey and Tony Avergan after a quick break hey there my name is Jody Avergan have you noticed the present day it feels pretty rocky well I think history can help what's more this little country of ours the United States it's turning 250 soon so how did we get here on this day historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past silly surprising deeply relevant that feel like they have something to teach us about today this day three times a week you can find it wherever you're listening right now after the bombing at Eden Pastora's press conference Tony Avergan had to be flown to an American hospital where he was treated by a world-class hand specialist after two months in the hospital Tony recovered and kept his hand but the episode would consume Martha and Tony's lives for years to I was contacted by the committee to protect journalists in New York and they had put together you know very modest fund and they said could you undertake an investigation and find out who was responsible and I said sure you know I thought it'd be pretty easy and so you thought it'd be easy thought a couple you know a couple weeks couple months well you know down this down and was it easy as you thought no no it was a nightmare it was and it's still as you know we're not we don't there's still unanswered questions but we initially started out you know the investigation so I went back to meet with this contra guy in Costa Rica in Costa Rica in San Jose and set up a meeting with Andres the intelligence officer within pastora's operation who was really reporting for the pro-newt outtrality folks and I said okay who did it and he said well it was either the extreme right or the extreme left I said that's helpful thanks yeah and he said but he said but that started us on that path and because of the 30-day ultimatum we assumed that the CIA was responsible the assumption would be that the CIA was trying to stop the press conference from happening or right right I think that our view was that we just wanted more information on we wanted a good investigation of the the bombing and clearly the US wasn't helping in fact the US had taken the one piece of of the bomb that remained which was the detonator and someone from the southern command in Panama an American came to the Costa Ricans said oh we'll examine that and figure out who made the bomb and they took it away and it disappeared no report was ever given so systematically the US was trying to block a serious investigation the Costa Ricans at that point were not doing a serious investigation they did subsequently and so we a year later we published our report on the La Panca bombing which we had just a rich array of sources who were reporting you know sort of confirming what what our hypothesis was and so we published this report a year after the bombing for the Committee to Protect Journalists and also published a Spanish edition in Costa Rica was your central allegation that the bomber like the identity the bomber it is what it is but was your central allegation that he had ties to the US government and that he had been ordered to carry out the bombing by the CIA yes we were given the name from some of our sources in in Miami and and sources in in Costa Rica who were mainly contra sources and we knew that he wasn't the the Danish journalist I mean that was he was traveling on a stolen passport and so on and that was that was all we had so you know for a long time our leads all seemed to point to the CIA we still did not know the real name of the bomber and we had this other known the garable we assume that wasn't a real name and we didn't know his real identity and we didn't know how where the bomb had been put together we didn't know those details who who's the pay master so we began talking about okay could we bring a lawsuit that would help to get more information through depositions would be able to do a serious investigation so we began calling I mean we had some lawyer friends in the state and they all said this is a really difficult case you're Americans the journalists who went to the press conference left from Costa Rica it happened in Nicaragua you know just jurisdiction is a huge issue plus you're up against it looks like the US government and national security issues and so on and so it's going to be very very hard and we really couldn't find anyone who would take the case in June of 1986 the public interest lawyer Danny Sheehan filed a sprawling lawsuit on Martha and Tony's behalf the suit alleged a conspiracy involving an American farmer living in Costa Rica named John Hall as well as a group of Cuban Americans who worked with him later it was confirmed that Hall's ranch had been used as part of the American government's secret effort to aid the Contras Sheehan's lawsuit also targeted multiple individuals who would later become implicated in the Iran Contra scandal among them was Major General Richard Secord whose story you heard in episode four Martha and Tony say the sheer scale of the lawsuit caught them off guard we had you know just because we were so overwhelmed with things going on in Costa Rica we hadn't paid a lot of attention to what he was putting together we had no idea it was going to be 28 29 people and so on I mean we kept saying to him our interest is what's the identity of the bomber and who was the pay master that's what we want to track and suddenly it was this lawsuit with you know all of these different people a lot of names we know charging a broad conspiracy with LaPanca being you know sort of one one piece of it but a much broader conspiracy going back both many years and involving just this fast network he never showed us anything before it was filed with the court we never he kept us away from every court appearance he went himself and he really kept us marginalized but he kept saying I have more information about the people you're interested in and I'll you know but he never he never produced that information and we started complaining about the the nature of the lawsuit he kept saying well nobody cares about the bombing he had to make it about the secret government that was running yeah so and so they named he named Richard C. Cord Robert Owen right who was one of North's people he did not name North and they said why and he said because he is the one person working for the government and if we name someone working for the government they'll throw it out of national security grounds which is probably a correct legal decision even though for us you know Hull and North were the centerpieces of of what we were looking at other people you knew North's name at this point oh yeah yeah and you understood him to be the person who is directing the Southern Front yes yeah did anything did anything good come out of the lawsuit in your mind did anything did any information shake loose as a result of yes at the end of the day you know it did help to dismantle the the Southern Front the whole investigation that not only we began but then other people began looking at Hull and and the Cuban Americans and so on and that definitely had a huge impact and then the secret airstrip little Santalena airstrip and the Hassan Fluss plane and so on so all of that came down a couple months after the lawsuit was filed yeah and so all of that began this whole process that eventually unraveled the the Southern Front or help feed into this whole growing awareness of the Iran contra the scandal scheme yes you lost the lawsuit we lost the lawsuit yes but there was a lot of good information that was turned up which eventually led to what we believe is the truth that the the bomber was actually working for the sandinistas the sandinistas despite all their suspicions about cia involvement in eden pastora's attempted assassination martha and tony concluded that it was most likely the sandinistas who were responsible for me the confusion around this incident underscores just how tangled and bewildering the Iran contra story is as a whole how many moving parts it involved how many different fault lines and alliances there were it was really convoluted and i think that's also why the allegations of cia complicity and contra drug smuggling have never been fully fleshed out or definitively proven the deeper you dive the more reason you have to doubt every story you hear and the harder it gets to pin anything down why do you think these allegations are so hard to well prove is one thing it's it's obvious why they're hard to prove but why are they hard to believe why is it hard for people to to sort of accommodate the notion that the cia might have a network of airstrips that are being used to run guns and drugs you know there's the shuddering down of hassen fuces playing that's a straightforward simple story everybody can understand that in a few paragraphs that the plane was carrying arms and they have evidence and it was shot down the story of the supply of arms that are contra the connections between the cia and drug trafficking it's much more involved and it doesn't it just doesn't fit into a fast news story it's just not an easy thing to to explain it takes a while to to explain but see i think some i think it's something more than that i i think that the press did over time and over a lot of objections from us officials and costarican officials did come to understand and and accept that that whole ranch was being used as a southern front for the contras and that there were these cuban americans involved and so on they were able to understand that and for a long period of time and still today in central america there was you know there's been a strong feeling that it was the cia that did it in fact the costaricans under the next president launched investigation which we had nothing to do with but i think that the the whole drug connection was very hard we never had a drug plane that fell from the sky you know with contras on it or cia operatives on it this is such a hard story to report and oftentimes you don't have hard evidence and so it's piecing together from stories you know and it's the kind of thing that can be discredited because there's so much money behind it and so much interest in keeping a lid on it and so i i think that that piece of it has not been fully either acknowledged or accepted because we didn't have the hard you know we just never had the real hard evidence that's it for our interview with martha honey and tony avergam thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of fiasco iran contra coming up episode five in which members of the reagan administration try to stem the fallout of iran contra going public after watergate we all understood that the cover up could be worse than the crime itself fiasco is a production of prologue projects and it's distributed by pushkin industries this episode was produced by ula culpa with editorial support from andrew parson's and me leon mayfock our music is by nix silvestre our theme song is by space relations and our artwork is by teddie blanks at chips ny audio mix by rob byers michael rayfield and johnny vince evans special thanks to luminary and thank you for listening bing the entire season of 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