Word: mig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...matter of immediate concern was an ominous decline in Washington's al ready troubled relations with Nicaragua. Though the Administration retreated from a leak made the previous week that a Soviet freighter was delivering MiG fighter jets to the pro-Marxist Sandinista regime, it continued to decry, in unusually harsh terms, the "incessant" buildup of other arms supplies in Nicaragua. Weinberger pointedly compared Moscow's current stockpiling of the country to its step-by-step militarization of Cuba nearly 25 years ago. The U.S. increased surveillance of the Soviet freighter Bakuriani, docked at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto...
...latest spasms arose, ironically enough, from a false alarm. On Election Day, someone in the U.S. Government leaked word, based on sketchy and unconfirmed spy-satellite information, that crated Soviet MiG-21 interceptors were about to be unloaded at Nicaragua's Pacific port of Corinto from the Soviet freighter Bakuriani. The U.S. has long warned Nicaragua that the arrival of MiG-21s or similar fighters would be "unacceptable," since such weapons would upset the regional balance of air power...
...election," said Department Spokesman John Hughes. "It was just a piece of theater for the Sandinistas." On Tuesday evening, U.S. intelligence sources told TIME that a Soviet ship due to tie up in a Nicaraguan port was carrying twelve shipping crates of the type used to transport high-performance MiG-21 jet fighters. The Soviets, they reported, last week had already delivered more than half a dozen Hind assault helicopters with night-flying capability and firepower equal to that of the most powerful American gunships. If so, it would mark the first time the Soviets have shipped weapons directly...
DISCUSSING THE MIG "crisis" on the November 7th edition of "Nightline," Nicaragua's foreign minister Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann gracefully exposed the biases behind Ted Koppel's questions, and in doing so laid bare the shameful subjectivity of one of America's most influential opinion makers. If such closed mindedness could be attributed only to Koppel, there would be no need to write this commentary. Unfortunately the ABC commentator's one-sided view of the Nicaraguan "problem" permeates the electronic media...
...straightforward no-nonense manner, Koppel asked D'Escoto, "are there MIG's on that (Soviet) ship?" D'Escoto replied that Nicaragua had not received any in the past, was not receiving any at present, and had no future plans to receive MIG's. But then he got to the crux of the matter. What right, he asked rhetorically, has the United States to dictate to Nicaragua what weapons it may or may not purchase from another nation? Where in international law is it written that one sovereign nation may not procure the weaponry it determines necessary for its self-defense...