The CIA vs. the Colonel 1983
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Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey appeared before members of the House and Senate intelligence committees last December to deal with a touchy problem: Lt. Col. Dési Bouterse, the erratic new leader of Surinam, a former Dutch colony on the north coast of South America. The colonel had seized power in 1980. In late 1982 he rounded up 15 of his leading opponents and had them shot.
To make matters worse, Casey’s dossier had Bouterse flirting with Fidel Castro and inviting 100 Cuban advisers to his country. To head off another Nicaragua, Casey proposed an old-fashioned CIA solution: to arm a force of Surinamese exiles and send them back to toss out the troublesome leftist.
The plan, disclosed last week by ABC News, outraged committee members. Even Republican loyalists called it “hare-brained” and “preposterous.” Most members weren’t objecting to the principle of such an operation; but they demanded far more evidence that Surinam represented a threat to United States security. Still, the CIA pressed on.
To beef up its case, the administration brought U.S. Ambassador to Surinam Robert Duemling back from Paramaribo to explain just how deeply Bouterse was being drawn into Castro’s orbit. Duemling reported that a high-level Soviet diplomat was stationed in Surinam and that Bouterse was spending a great deal of time with Cubans at odd hours in the morning.
On the other side, there were plenty of candidates eager for a coup. Dr. Henk Chin A Sen, a former surgeon and leader-in-exile, was spending a lot of time on KLM flights between the United States, where he works at a Pittsburgh hospital, and Holland, where he heads the Surinamese Liberation Movement. The doctor had been president of Surinam for the first 14 months of Bouterse’s regime. He was forced to resign when the military leader blocked his plans for democratic reforms.
Since then, the Dutch press has reported Chin A Sen’s attempts to organize a small army from among the 250,000 Surinamese in Holland. He has also pledged repeatedly on the world broadcast of Radio Netherlands that the “liberation” of Surinam would be imminent. Bouterse ordered his people not to listen to Radio Netherlands after his men noticed that the streets of Paramaribo emptied every evening when the Dutch news came on. There have been rumors in Holland about ties between the former president and the CIA. But no one has ever proved them.
Veto: The story of Casey’s plan has sharpened the debate on how much power Congress should have over CIA operations. Under present law, committees can reduce funding for a covert operation they do not approve of, but they cannot cut off the operation altogether.
Taking full advantage of those rules, Casey did not give up his coup idea immediately after hearing the congressmen denounce it. The plan was killed, said a congressional source, only much later, after administration officials warned that it would complicate congressional support for other CIA operations in Latin America.
Democratic Rep. Wyche Fowler has scheduled a hearing next month on his bill to give Congress an outright veto over the CIA covert activities. But the CIA’s friends on the Hill are trying to turn the Surinam debate to their own purpose: even now they argue disingenuously that, since congressional disapproval killed Casey’s plan to topple Bouterse, Congress doesn’t need a stiffer law.
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