The Mexican Estimate
How covert action threatened to engulf the US' southern neighbour in the 1980s
Map of Mexico from the CIA World Fact Book (Central Intelligence Agency, public domain).
Taken as a whole, the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term have been an unprecedent display of summary executive power. Yet many of his actions have precursors in the wilder moments of previous presidents.
Even Trump’s repeated threat to attack drug cartels in Mexico without the co-operation of the country’s government, effectively invading the United States’ southern neighbour, has its precursors in the early Reagan years.
On the face of it, Reagan represented a very different style of conservatism, one that was bolstered by ‘Reagan Democrats.’ At the activist level many of these were anti-communist former social democrats in the process of becoming neoconservatives. In the Reagan Administration they would fight one last round of the Cold War, often through organisations like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, part of a ‘state-private network’ which Trump now threatens to dismantle.
Yet the priorities of Reagan’s global anti-communist crusade sometimes reflected a more traditional sphere-of-interest politics. Although the CIA supported Solidarity’s struggle in Poland, Director Bill Casey turned his focus to other areas once the operation was under way. The then Deputy Director for Intelligence, Robert Gates, recalled that Casey ‘would be briefed periodically, but he certainly did not devote the attention to it that I would see in other areas, especially in the Third World.’1 According to Gates, ‘no individual covert action aroused his passion or significantly occupied his thoughts or even his time, save one. For reasons, I never fully comprehended, Bill Casey became obsessed with Central America.’2
Casey’s approach was bolstered by the appointment of a new National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Latin America in 1981. Conservative scholar Constantine Menges soon earned the soubriquet ‘constant menace’ from administration pragmatists.3
In a 1979 article entitled ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door?’ Menges had charged that ‘the example of Iran, the war against Somoza in Nicaragua and the real prospects for success might tempt the various Mexican radical groups to establish a broad coalition which joins all dissatisfied elements together in a coordinated effort to overthrow the current system.’4 In a 1981 follow-up he argued that the Mexican government was seeking to secure its own position by supporting a ‘leftist coalition’ in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.5
The analysis which endeared Menges to the CIA director antagonised senior agency professionals, including Casey’s deputy John McMahon.6 By 1983, even Dewey Clarridge, the veteran operations officer who ran covert action in Central America, felt that the NIO ‘had alienated too many people with his arrogance and extremist political views.’ Having become a liability at the agency, Menges left for a more comfortable berth at the National Security Council (NSC).7
His replacement was John R. Horton, a CIA ‘old boy’ who had served as Mexico City station chief and supported the administration’s stance on Central America.8 Yet Horton did not prove to be the pliable instrument that Casey might have hoped for. Within a year the New York Times reported that he had left the agency.
The senior Latin America analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency resigned in May after William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, insisted that he revise a report on Mexico so it would support Reagan Administration policy, intelligence officials asserted today.9
According to the Times’ account, ‘Administration officials said that Mr. Casey wanted a tougher report from Mr. Horton, in part to help persuade the White House to approve a program of covert and economic American pressures on Mexico to induce its support for United States policies in Central America.’10
McMahon later told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that ‘Bill Casey wanted that estimate to read that Mexico was falling apart and was going to be a disaster down there. The intelligence we had, which had to come through Bob Gates, did not support that and at no time, even as the intelligence flowed out, it went out to the community, at no time did Bill Casey stop that flow.’11
McMahon did, however, note an ‘aberration’ by which a NSC official who had previously worked for Casey at CIA was allowed to comment on the draft National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), breaking the agency’s traditional firewall between analysis and policy. Although he declined to name the NSC official, it was obviously Menges.12
Gates’ successor as Deputy Director for Intelligence, Richard Kerr, told the Senate Committee that the Mexican estimate ‘wasn’t politicized. It was just a bad job and a bad process.’13
However, one of his subordinates, analyst Melvin Goodman, accused Horton’s deputy and successor, Brian Latell, of producing ‘the analysis that Casey and Gates wanted.’ Goodman argued that ‘if there had been serious oversight from Congress in the 1980s, Horton would have been subpoenaed to testify on the corruption of intelligence.’14
Horton himself compared the administration’s approach to an interrogator repeatedly asking a prisoner the same question, ‘waiting for him to break and come up with what is needed.’15
However, even as he argued that Mexico could never be forced into endorsing US policy, Horton credited Reagan with pressuring regional governments into establishing the Contadora peace process.
Wiser heads saw that the interest of the United States lay in helping Mexico weather the storm, not in handicapping her further. Further, punishing Mexico could hardly be done quietly and the attempt would only justify the worst fears of xenophobic Mexicans without getting the Mexican government to knuckle under. It is one thing to find the Mexicans annoying in their self-righteous preaching at us about Central America, while themselves favoring tinpot dictatorships. It is something else to lash out at Mexico to relieve our own anger, indulging in a tantrum unworthy of a great power.16
Four decades later, the warning is as salutary as ever.
Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p.238.
Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p.242.
Joe Holley, Constantine Menges: National Security Aide, Washington Post, 13 July 2004.
Constantine Menges, Mexico: The Iran Next Door? San Diego Union, 5 August 1979. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency.
Constantine Menges, Mexico’s Central America Strategy, Christian Science Monitor, 13 July 1981.
Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-87, Simon & Schuster, 1987, p257.
Duane Clarridge, with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, Scribner, 1997, p.241.
Woodward, Veil, p.258.
Philip Taubman, ANALYST SAID TO HAVE QUIT C.I.A. IN DISPUTE, New York Times, 28 September 1984.
Philip Taubman, ANALYST SAID TO HAVE QUIT C.I.A. IN DISPUTE, New York Times, 28 September 1984.
Statement of John McMahon, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24 October 24, 1991, p.175.
Statement of John McMahon, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24 October 24, 1991, p.175.
Statement of Richard Kerr, Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24 October 24, 1991, p.176.
Melvin Goodman, Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence, City Light Books, 2017, p.287.
John Horton, Mexico, The Way of Iran? The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 1, No.2, 1986, p.99. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency.
John Horton, Mexico, The Way of Iran? The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 1, No.2, 1986, p.100. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency..
Personal Story
I was serving on active duty in the Marine Corps at the time a documents control Officer for the Second Marine Division. There was much attention given to Central America and the Caribbean area. Much of the concern was that the Soviets through Castro were expanding their influence throughout Latin America.
While these concerns were indeed genuine, the article above shows the dichotomy that existed within the National Security Establishment. The new Reagan Administration brought in a number of radical ideologues whose extreme views appalled even seasoned Cold Warriors. CIA director William Casey was himself leading the charge for more extreme covert action in Latin America. The divisions within the Reagan administration between the ideologues and the pragmatists were quite contentious, with the more pragmatic faction being led by Vice President and former CIA director George H. W. Bush and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.
The role of Bush ( Whose own knowledge of Latin America was quite extensive), in keeping the more hare brained elements of the National Security Establishment at bay is a story yet to be told.
I doubt Latell politicized the Mexico estimate. He's too independent. As a line of analysis, "Mexico is about to fall apart" is a hardy perennial. That said, the process might not have been that great. In 1986, Latell published an article derived from it, which is strange.