John Negroponte

Born in London in 1939. Current Director of National Intelligence for the United States, the first to occupy this position created by George W. Bush. Negroponte entered the United States Foreign Service in 1960. He has a history of close links to covert activities, of support for terrorist regimes and of encouraging the practice of state terrorism.

He began to earn this reputation between 1981 and 1985, when he served as ambassador to Honduras. In 1981, U.S. Special Forces began training about a third of Honduras’ army; over the following two years, they also supplied the Honduran army with artillery, communications equipment and ships. In 1982, the Pentagon asked Congress for an additional $21 million to upgrade the Honduran aviation fields of Palmerola, La Ceiba and Goloson, to remodel El Aguacate base and to construct a new airport in Puerto Lempira, near the border with Nicaragua, where the Sandinista revolution had just triumphed.

The United States rented El Aguacate to the Honduran army. Several private companies were contracted and the U.S. Army 46th Engineer Battalion, under Negroponte’s supervision, took charge of operations. In August 2001, forensic excavations conducted at El Aguacate unearthed some of the remains of the 185 people believed to have been extra-legally executed and buried clandestinely there.

Negroponte had replaced Ambassador Jack Binns, who, on repeated occasions, had addressed higher-ups in Washington with concerns about egregious human rights violations in Honduras and the United States’ involvement in these.

Negroponte’s response to Binn’s complaints was to eliminate any reference to torture or extra-legal execution in the yearly human rights reports submitted by the embassy, as Rick Chidester explains. In 1982, the latter was assigned to the embassy to gather data for the annual human rights report; Chidester said that while in Honduras, he interviewed human rights advocates and journalists who provided him with information that the Honduran military was illegally detaining, torturing and executing people. "I had allegations about vans coming up to police cells and taking out people they [the Honduran military] didn't want ... and shooting them. I had allegations that, as part of the interrogation techniques, torture was being used."

Chidester claims he included the allegations in his draft of the 1982 report. A supervisor, however, demanded proof -- sworn testimony or photographs of torture victims. Chidester said he was admonished for basing his report on rumors when he was unable to produce such evidence and that he argued that, while he had not interviewed torture victims, the allegations came from too many credible sources to be ignored. But by the time the report reached the U.S. Congress, the serious accusations against the Honduran military had been removed. The report stated that there had been no official interference with the media in the course of that year.

In June 1982, Negroponte had to personally intervene to have Oscar Reyes, a renowned journalist, released from captivity, where, for a week, he had been tortured by the 3-16 Battalion. The ambassador did this at the request of embassy press spokesperson, who told Negroponte: “We cannot allow him to come to harm, it would be disastrous for us.” At around the same time, Negroponte wrote a letter to The Economist stating that “it is simply untrue (…) that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.” According to a Baltimore Sun report, approximately 318 murders and kidnappings were carried out by Honduran army in 1982.

On August 27, 1997, CIA inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified document entitled “Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980’s.” This report was partially declassified on October 22, 1988 in response to repeated requests by the Honduran human rights attorney. CIA training for the Honduran military was corroborated by Richard Stolz, director of operations at the time, in a secret testimony given before the Senate in 1988: “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 (…) Physical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected, not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective," he said.

During his tenure in Honduras, Negroponte’s chief mission was to destroy the Sandinista government, whichever way possible. Honduras became so saturated with U.S. military equipment and personnel that members of the U.S. Army began to refer to the nation as the USS Honduras. In an article entitled “America’s Secret War. Target: Nicaragua,” Newsweek magazine pointed out: “the CIA Director, Casey, personally supervised the operation. Ambassador Negroponte conducted it. The Contras called him ‘The Boss’.”

At the beginning of 1984, two U.S. mercenaries, Thomas Poisey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, telling him they wished to supply the Contras with weapons. There appear to be documents which show that Negroponte put them in touch with someone in the Honduran army. Other documents reveal a plan by which Negroponte and then Vice-President George Bush hoped to channel aid to the Contras through the Honduran government. To date, Negroponte denies that there existed any kind of systematic repression in Honduras and, therefore, his complicity in such acts.

Despite his extremely bad reputation, or perhaps because of it, successive U.S. administrations have appointed him ambassador (to Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations) and proconsul of occupied Iraq.

Sources:

• Michael Dobbs: Negroponte’s Time in Honduras At Issue. The Washington Post. March 21, 2005.

• John Negroponte: A Tradition of Deceit (May I Speak Freely Media - extensive list of links to critical commentary and news articles, etc., February 2005)