Down and Dirty

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They are the moral equal of our founding fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.

We cannot turn.

Away from them for the struggle here.

Smuggle.

Here is not right versus left, It is right versus wrong.

Welcome back to the Journalista Podcast. That was President Reagan comparing the Nicaraguan contrast to our founding fathers. I think George Washington just turned over in his grave. This episode is about terror as it pertains to Central America in the eighties. Who did it, where it came from, who funded it, and who bore the brunt of the evil that was unleashed, told primarily through the eyes of two journalists. You already know Cookie, but you're about to meet one

You worked with Larry Doyle and you worked with Richard Wagner.

You were the krem de la creb.

They were both highly respected in their field. They had seen it all everywhere in the world. And by the way, rest in peace Richard Wagner. He was a wonderful, wonderful correspondent to work with. So I think we're on a junket. We're heading to the jungles for something, some story, or we're just looking for a story. We had several vehicles in our convoy and then all of a sudden, in between two of the vehicles, a mortar blows up. Exit

Cookie, Cookie, is that you?

And Richard Wagner and Larry Doyle both turn around in the dirt look at me, and Richard Wagner says, I cannot believe that someone knows you right here where we are. This soldier helped guide us to safety. We eventually got back to our vehicles to continue.

On our junket.

We took him back with us, so we sort of saved him from whatever was going on in that mortar attack because a few more mortars went off, but we got out safely. And if I'm not mistaken, I think it was this guy. He was a Sandinista soldier, not very educated, probably a grunt doing grunt work.

Had come across a book.

It was in English, and he really didn't know what it meant. He says, I have something. I don't know if it means anything, but I'd like to give it to you.

Can you tell me what it means?

And so I'm reading it, and I'm like on the inside freaking out.

I'm acting like it's no big deal.

I turned to Richard Wagner and I said to him, can you look at this and confirm what I think it is? So Richard's reading it and I could see He's getting the same visceral reaction that I did. And he says, this is a goddamn CIA torture manual.

The manual was compiled in nineteen eighty three by a CIA advisor to the Contra rebels, instructing them and the techniques of political assassination, guerrilla warfare, and torture. According to the Washington Post, US Army intelligence manuals were used to train Latin American military officers advocating the use of executions, torture, blackmail, and other forms of coercion. The same brutal techniques used successfully by Honduran and Salvadoran desk squads.

What it was, basically was a manual that the CIA had put out, obviously, you know, hush hush, teaching them how to torture Sandinistas so they could stop them from going over to the Sandinista side and get them to come over to the contryside.

It was horrific.

It was a how to peeling off faces, peeling off the soles of feet, beheading, putting the head on a stake.

It was a torture manual.

What's the purpose of that?

To create terror among the civilians and even probably to some of the soldiers to come to our side, come to our way of taking This is.

What President Reagan had to say about the CIA manual.

Mister Reagan said the dispute over a manual on guerrilla warfare prepared for Nicaraguan rebels by the Central Intelligence Agency was quote much ado about nothing. I have had some information on it and have been assured that there's not one word in there that refers to assassination.

By the way, anyone who's listening to this, you can actually access it online. Really, yes, it's available online. I'm just telling them right now.

Can I say I did not know that?

Yeah, So America was teaching torture and terror not totally surprising. We had similar revelations revealed during the insanity following the attack on nine to eleven in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cookie introduces us to the amazing Jane Wallace, former CBS news correspondent who finds another piece of the puzzle quite by accident.

Jane Wallace was an extraord is an extraordinary person. She was on air talent, whether it be morning news, evening news, weekend news, West fifty seventh, she did it all. She was CBS's golden girl. She was someone you could rely on in battle, in the hard times. You knew she had your back. She was funny, she was brilliant. She was a grunt, which she needed to be a grunt. She got down and dirty when she needed to get down and dirty. She was never a prima donna. The

Jane wanted to go to Old Salvador, but the CBS patriarchy had other ideas.

I had to fight to get sent to Central America by CBS because I was a girl. I was supposed to go to Salvador and then at the last minute somebody says, oh, no, you're going to Honduras treat me. But El Salvador was because I couldn't imagine. I just could not imagine any place where they would actually murder and rape nuns.

It is reported today from L Salvador that four Americans have been killed there. This was the first time that Americans seem to have been singled out by a desk squad.

They were shot execution style bullets to the back of the head.

Later, their bodies were found in a shallow grave.

The New York Times said this about the crime.

The churchwomen were arrested after two of them went to Como Lapa International Airport to meet the other two who were arriving on a flight from Nicaragua. After members of the security corps took the women to a remote location, they were given the order quote unquote to liquidate them, to kill them. Robert White, who was the American ambassador to L Salvador at the time of the killing, said, when the act was done, I knew immediately it was the military.

That would be the same military funded and supplied by the United States of America.

Remember being stunned in my early twenties, I covered it as part of a local news story in New York. I just honestly couldn't imagine the kind of evil that would murder and rape nuns and then toss them by the side of a road. But that was Salvador. I didn't come into Honduras with any preconceptions except I'd rather

The Contras were being trained and supplied in Honduras by the CIA and leaders of the Honduran death squads.

I didn't know what to think. I was so rude, but I was also young and tired and hot and naive to just be direct. Made an appointment. I got some time with the PR guy for the embassy, and I walked into his office on the embassy grounds, closed his door and said, yes, I'm Jane Wallis for CBS News. What the fuck is going on in this country? And he burst into laughter. He'd never had anybody be that direct, and he knew I was smelling exactly what they were

Certainly the worst kept secret in Central America, that's for.

Sure, you're kidding, and for good reason. They were just so obvious. But it was such a backwater they didn't figure anybody was going to notice.

But Jane noticed, and she's headed to Nicaragua to cover one of the most brutal stories of her professional life. We'll be right back.

For four years, we've been helping to wage the world's worst kept secret war, training and equipping a force known as the Contrast, who are trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, a government the Reagan Whitehouse believes is a communist threat in our own backyard. What kind of war are we paying for? And who are they killing?

Welcome back? That was Jane Wallace in the opening of an episode of the CBS news magazine West fifty seventh, billed as a younger hipper version of sixty Minutes. The Christian Science Monitor called it a ditsy, disco beat documag for viewers with short attention spans. The New York Times said it isn't really television, and it certainly isn't journalism. It's as if news and entertainment fell into combat and

Oh? God, I think I just got sent there. It was a horrible place to go to. The people were poor, they were hungry, the country was going nowhere, and the only good thing about going to Nicaragua was Cookie. She was the saving grace of being in Monagua. If she'd been what she appeared to be, sort of a party girl and just to fix her or I'll make a call and then I'm going to go get high, she wouldn't have been Cookie. The truth is that woman knew what she was doing and she was born to it

One of the big stories that came out of your tenure there was what they call the Contra atrocities story, and it involves a lot of your colleagues and a lot of people that you rolled with all the time. So tell me a little bit about how this kind of came to pass and where it went.

We witnessed Coultra atrocities way before the story that I'm about to tell you massacres of women and children, massacres of soldiers, torture techniques, so all these atrocities that we had seen firsthand got But I like to call the dream team. Leslie Coburn, Producer, Jane Wallace, on air talent Manny Alvarez, camera crew with irv ran Hart, sound sometimes George Bosa and myself. We were considered the dream team

Clearly a band of brothers.

Leslie calls me and tells me, listen, we want to do a contratrocity story.

We've heard about this American.

Nun that lives in again the asshole of the.

World in the jungles.

We hear that she's got a lot of stories, and she's got a lot of victims that survived these atrocities that she takes care of. She was in some remote end of the earth place called Seuna. D.

Coburn is an award winning producer and journalist covering wars with CBS, ABC and PBS's Frontline. While all accounts, the best there is She's also Olivia Wilde's mom, who Cookie first met as a toddler. In a chapter from her book Looking for Trouble, Leslie tells us what motivated her to do this story.

My intention was to get out of the Capitol and into the remote countryside where the war was being fought. Reports filtering out from priests and nuns suggested a systematic use of classic terror tactics. New clinics docked with Cuban medicine were blown up, Volunteers carrying vaccines into the jungle had their throats slit. Even American nuns were kidnapped and threatened with rape. I wanted to establish at what level

Jane collaborated with Leslie for years on some of the biggest stories of the eighties.

Leslie with further left than I was by entry and belief. I didn't share that I didn't have the left right boloney, because it turned out to be a set of choices that didn't fit what was on the ground. Anyway, I was nervous about having to do this story. I was not anxious to do it, except that I knew there was a reality there that needed to be revealed. I knew there was ugliness, and I knew it was not at all what was being touted in the States. Oh Jee,

The region had been closed off the journalists by Interior Minister Thomas Borge because it was controlled by the contrast. It was too dangerous. Leslie asked Cookie to set up a meeting with him.

Cookie, Jane, and I arrived to find ourselves ushered into a private dining room at the Officers Club with a well appointed table for six. It seemed Borge, infatuated with Jane, had thoughtfully brought two friends in toe. I was paired off with a well traveled ambassador. Cookie was assigned to a Rakish general. We survived this absurd lunch without disgracing ourselves. And by the time we returned to the CBS bureau, a dozen Roses were waiting for Jane.

Needless to say, they got the permission they wanted. But that was the easy part.

If you're going to stage some lies like the Contras are a really great All American fighting force, you stage that line a place where no one can get to it, to hold the light up to it. That's what they had done. So these places were remote, isn't the word for it. They were inaccessible for the most party except by Donkey.

Was it a long trap to get to where you were going.

Everywhere we went for that story, it was a place no one was meant to go to. The logistics in these places were hideous. The roads were not meant to be driven on. The vehicles had no air conditioning. It was, you know, one hundred degrees with ninety eight percent humidity and Monovo five about eleven thirty in the morning. I never wanted to go to that country again as long as ise life.

Their journey soon evolves into a dark Central American version of planes, trains, and automobiles, except with the Russian biplane. A couple of beat up old Chevy and Paula's and an indigenous canoe called a paponte. They spend the first day driving to the last vestige of civilization they would see for a couple of weeks, Rio Blanco, hooking up with a military convoy for a couple of hours, and traveling alone through the contra infested territory at night. Leslie describes it like this.

Are odds of being attacked for fifty to fifty we were easy pray for ambush. The thought of who was waiting in the darkness blade my nerves. No one spoke. I steadied myself, breathed deeply, and let Bonnie raate belt through my headphones.

You go through ten flat tires in a day, you couldn't count on getting anywhere. So by the time you're rolling up somewhere, a lot has gone into having those tires underneath you and any idea of where you're going. So that's how we ended up taking that canoe. The road stopped. What are you going to do? You take a canoe and try and hitch something on the other side. You can't just drive through in the car If it doesn't, I mean, nothing works like that.

Where they are heading is so remote and inaccessible. The only way to get there is through the air.

I've got to set up a plane, which is one of these rinky dig two propeller clopboard planes that once you get on you're not sure if you're going to get to where you're going. And we all head to see you to meet the nun. Yeah, this is a town that has no paved roads, shacks, they didn't even have electricity.

It's hard for me to describe the kind of desolation of these places, and like something was there once that got ruined. All it is a difference slightly in the vegetation or a pile of graves somewhere.

So we go, we meet with the nun sister something, and we proceed to do our story.

And with that Gal, the none we spoke to first. I remember sitting on her porch trying to do an interview. This port was so small. I'm chewing my knees across from this woman who has an equally small space because there's nowhere else with any shade to shoot an interview. Man fell asleep on my shoulder because he'd taken so much gramamine in anticipation of this Russian biplane. The guy is such a great cameraman that he never went out

What does she tell me about?

She's telling us about all these atrocities and how she's keeping the faith helping these survivors, which were mostly children that we were getting ready to meet.

The Nine introduces them to Guadalupe da Vila, a fourteen year old girl who survived a recent Contra attack.

Family was murdered by the Contra in November when the baby was six days old.

The parents were murdered.

Yes, a brother of the mother, his girlfriend, the four year old brother of this baby. Contra attacked about twenty of them and one night.

In this interview with Guadeloupe, you can hear Cookie translating her story. Is hard to listen to.

Did they shoot them?

You see, young Papaguya.

They split us through? How about your mother? They killed her and then they took her clothes off?

And what happened that when like.

To burn her clothes?

Lily pure graph of faith?

Oh God, we are you know. It's one thing to sort of think people are behaving in that kind of almost pure evil. It's another thing to hear that through the mouth of a child who's lost her parent or who's had to witness something like this that's almost on fathomable as a human being.

They interviewed a priest with a similar.

Story rape a girl of fourteen years old because her father was a member of a committee, cut off her head and put her head along the trail. So that the rest of the Compassino's get the idea that in no way should they be participating in some kind of government sponsored organization.

Jane spoke to twin brothers who witnessed contra Atrocity's firsthand.

The twins survived the killing that let their father and friends get in a ditch. La Contrell jakeamar Alianri, one of the countries, said let's set all of these dead people on fire, and their boss said no, let's just throw them all in the ditch and let him be there and there and.

What happened then the pass.

There.

Then they finished off a couple of kids that were just wounded. They finished them off. They killed them, Yes, in front of your kids, in front see what happened to your.

Daddy, Pierre.

He pulled off the skin off his face and his feet.

When you're standing there in Nicaragua and you're looking into a child's face. It's other worldly dark. It is hard to grasp it as a reality because it's so damn dark. Who would do this to another human being in front of the child? To do this by design? To people who are campasinos. These are simple folks. These are the people that will share their tortillas with you. If that's all anybody's got, they'll give them to you. And they

In listening to the interview, the one thing that I was taken by, other than the obvious horror that they're describing, there's a solemn quality of just talking to someone. I was hearing your words, I was hearing the children or the victims speaking about what happened, and I was hearing cookies translation, and there was like this kind of a strange respect, something very powerful happening in that three way exchange.

Yes, there's not a lot of extra jabber or talk. I mean, all of us were just tuned in. There's a real deep respect for somebody having been so badly treated. Those kids. Oh my god. You know, I looked at these pieces again and thought, wonder how she grew up with that. I wonder what happened. I wonder who raised that baby. I mean happen you looking to wonder what kind of an effect that had on their lives. To remember, in the larger world, they're still talking about how to

The tactics are what we call terrorist tactics. They are not military tactics.

Edward Chimorrow was one of the top political leaders of the Countra Group FDN. He was fired last November. The FDN says foreign competence.

Neither Jane nor I expected them to be nearly so forthcoming about the contra army that he had helped run.

How much did and does the CIA know of the abuses taking place? How long have they known of those abuses?

They knew everything. They were all the time with us, very close to us. They were monitoring all the action. They were briefing. They briefing. They were in close contact in our basis with our men. They were exposed to all autrocities abuse.

Did the White House know about these abuses?

We talked only to high people in the CIA, and those people used to say that the White House knows very well what's going on.

In her book, Leslie sums us up in one horrible nutshell.

A CIA field manual was the bible of the camps. With the manual, they were condoning the practical use of terror.

I had never heard of people peeling other people's skins, or some will be headed in there, head put on a pole for others to see the brutality of it, or that your government had a hand in this actually happening to people. It's just beyond the panel.

I want to finish with a great piece of journalism, something we don't see much of these days. Jane Wallace doing her thing old school sweating out a contra military leader and.

I had the commandant. Is that they have executed people in cold blood because they were part of this machinery.

Is someone who teaches reading a legitimate target. Someone who teaches reading for the government is someone who works on a cooperative for the government. A legitimate target, listen, is someone who gives vaccinations. A legitimate target is somebody whose relative is in the army or the militia.

A legitimate target.

Are you saying you only attack military targets and military people, Yes, for sure. Why do these civilians they have to be in uniform or they have to be armed.

I guess the Contraus soldiers that slaughtered these families didn't get the memo. In the next segment, the dream Team is invited by Contraus soldiers to witness an actual war crime. We'll be right back, welcome back. I'll be honest. There are several accounts of the story, all a little bit different. I'm not sure how it actually went down. All I know is that it actually happened, and they all agree

We were approached by someone that said, we'd like you to come take pictures of something that's going to happen in a few days or in a day or so.

We didn't know who this person was.

We found out later that he was playing like he was a Sandinista, but he was in league with the Contras, and so we were taken out to this remote area where these Contras had a pow. A Sandinista prisoner.

Manny Alvarez, the cameraman for the Dream Team, sets it up for us.

The Cultures had captured a spy who they called the spy a peasant.

They wanted us to not film, but to take pictures of what was about to happen.

And it was this poor guy.

Digging and digging and digging, and it didn't take us long to realize they're making him dig his own grave. And at this point we're getting a little nervous because we're taking pictures. We obviously see what is going to be the inevitable result of this, And then are they going to kill us for witnessing.

And taking pictures.

But these were again a group of conscious that were very educated, didn't even realize, you know, what they were letting us witness how it could affect the grand scheme of things. And sure enough, the poor guys digging and digging. I think that maybe he even realized that he was digging his own grave, but hoping against hope, they.

Put him in the grave and they stopped them.

They killed them with a bait a knife.

Why didn't you shoot the guy?

I have no idea.

I mean, they certainly had enough bullets.

The victim was a civilian accused by the countries of collaborating with the Sandinistas.

When I went to FDN, I found out the I mean, this thing that CIA used to give us was a big knife. You know, it's called commander knife. Everybody wanted to have a knife like that, and the Knight was to kill people, to cut their throats.

So we've got these still photos and they're gonna let us walk away, which we did. Still photos don't do much for video. People like news like news. How are we gonna post still shots on the news?

Yeah, like CBS, isn't Life magazine, right?

You're showing your age there with Life magazine.

So we decided we're just gonna send these pictures to New York and let them see what they can do with it, because obviously this is a contra atrocity.

They took those still.

Photos and they made it work like with cartoons. You know when you animation, you shuffle the papers so quickly it looks like it's moving.

Yeah, they just animated the photos.

Yeah.

Do you remember the moment this is happening where you think you guys are kind of in danger in this moment.

Oh, we all thought that what's to stop them from killing us?

Are you just sort of stuck in there? Like you can't leave, you can't go forward, You're just sort.

Of we're stuck in there. But at the same time, we know way we need this.

This is great.

This is some sort of exclusive and that's what war correspondents are all about, the risk to.

Get the story. But yeah, there was some fear of that.

But then again, if they killed us, then their story wouldn't get out.

Can you imagine being someone who thinks this would be a good story for the news come see?

Yeah, insane, insanity.

The photograph show a man whom the other troops had determined was spy being murdered, forced to dig his own grave cut up?

What do you think of that?

Well, I think it was necessary to do it in the way they did.

It was not necessary.

Not because they could be shot at.

That's all. I shieved.

No problem with people being murdered at the whim of the troops.

He was a spy, according to what the report said, and in war despite had to be ponies in that way.

One of the strangest things about war, as we've talked about it over this podcast and in just in general, is like what becomes okay to.

People soldiers, victims and journalists alike. Everybody gets to a point that they're numb. Now, that was one thing I tried to fight against my whole career, not getting so numb to the point where things didn't affect me or matter to me anymore.

And for the most part it worked.

There was one story that didn't make it to the West fifty seventh broadcast.

What happened was that after days and days and days of either trying to get to these remote places and I mean scraping it out, whether it's changing tires for the fifteenth time, and could anybody have a coke in this town. That's maybe you know, less than eighty degrees. After days and days of that, and then you finally interview somebody and you're hearing about this horrific stuff, just

After all they've seen and heard, they get one more interview.

It wasn't even like a farmer, like, you know, some guy that he did have his own house of some sort, but houses there are kind of limited deals. This is not a two story ranch with a couple of cars out front. Most of these places didn't have a TV. Radio was a big deal. But it was that isolated and that remote and that hard.

We were kind of in I want to say it was a sugarcane area or so. We were kind of outside amongst the trees. This guy was a little old guy, little peasant, dark skinned, typical Niclauguan peasant. And he starts telling us the story of his encounter with the cultures. You know, I'm shooting James in front of me, Leslie's off to the side, and IRV is right behind me running the body.

So we're listening to this guy's story and I think his property had been torched. He was being attacked. His wife was there, and he was relaying his story about having some god Ah. I believe he was describing. We're out in this field, you know, like a sideyard of a place that once existed, you know, Central America began to feel like it was a sideyard of a place that once existed more than once. But this guy had shown us around this tangled property. But it's not even

Something triggered us, like on a Saturday Night Live skit when somebody starts laughing and they all start laughing and can't control the laughter.

I don't know why I started laughing, but I found it just I couldn't hold it it.

Then I heard Manny behind me. He'd seen the same thing. It was just out of nowhere. We all noticed this hysterically cartoonish gesture in the middle of this catch on this horrible story, but it was funny, and so Manny started to lose it behind me, I felt last we go, and by the time I started laughing, I was the most ashamed in the world and uncontrollable laughter.

We're all giggling, we're trying to hide it, we're trying to act normal, and the poor guy just had no idea what he had said. Why it triggered us that way, and we didn't want him to think that we were laughing at him.

Do you remember the look on his face when you were.

I just didn't know what was going on.

You know he was an uneducated, humble peasant that had no clue why we were laughing, and he didn't take it personally.

It was horrifying for us.

Nothing had been funny in so many days. Everything had just been done offul and all of a sudden, this one little gesture like the guy is stabbing him something the throat struck all of us as that funny.

And meanwhile, this guy's sitting there looking at us, like, are you people insane?

Cookie's down below, she doesn't have to look him right face man, He's behind me with a lens to his eye. Astley's off turning around on one side, and I'm stuck looking the guy in the face, and I have tears. I'm laughing so hard that there are tears running down the side of my face. I'm trying to lie, I'm not a liar or nature, but I'm like, oh no, you know, we're laughing because she got something in her eye.

It was kind of one of those moments where you know, in the middle of all the horror, for whatever reason, you know, we found a moment where something ended up at least seeming to be one of those indescribable moments where you wish that had never happened.

The most embarrassing, horrifying moment of my career, and of course, of Jane's career, of Manny's career. We cannot stop laughing.

That is such a terrible and funny story all mixed.

Together, funny and got awful. But that was Central America. It was funny and got awful, got awful and funny, full eyes full of beans, full of oh my god. But if you didn't laugh, you would just not be able to get up and work again and again and again.

Every time I'm talking to somebody about that story, like I talked to Manny, he goes, oh, that was the That might have been my worst day ever in the field. That was one of the worst. I'm so ashamed. You're not going to put that in there, are you. And I'm like, well, everybody keeps bringing it up, So I think it's a tale that feels like a part of something, not its own standalone thing. It's not like you're laughing at some poor peasant. It's a result of the whole experience.

It was pent up nervousness on our end. Maybe it was because we had witnessed so many horrible things on that trip, heard about so many horrible things, saw the results of survivors.

One of those kind of things where it's just all of the anxiety and all of the agony that you've witnessed it just sort of all comes up in this really wrong way.

Yeah, like if you're at a funeral and you just start getting the giggles and you don't know why.

The Contra Atrocity story aired on West fifty seventh in August of nineteen eighty five. Americans were finding out for the first time what was really happening in Nicaragua what their own government was paying for. Next time, on Journalista Cookie Saves the World from Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction.

There were some rumors about some possible Russian big aircraft headed to Nicaragua. The State Department of the US is not happy with this, and I think that you should know that they're saying there will be a problem if this up and remakes it into Nicaragua.

The Journalista Podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood. Narrated by Steven Estev, Produced by Sean J. Donnelly. Executive producers Jason Wagensback, Roy Laughlin, and Ellen k iHeart Executive producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Estev. Music by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Stephen Tanti.