Copyright by Gregory Krauss 2007 - The University of Texas at Austin

discuss the next day’s event. 15 Lister wrote to Brandon Grove that d’Escoto wished to
meet him and Viron P. Vaky, the two top officials in ARA. 16
Lister worked hard to broker a meeting between ARA leadership and
d’Escoto. On June 22, Lister went to speak with d’Escoto in an anteroom at the OAS,
where d’Escoto was preparing for a speech to the assembly. 17 The priest still had not
met with Grove or Vaky. 18 Lister emphasized in a memo to Vaky later that day that
failing to meet with d’Escoto would cause the priest to “complain loudly…and the
incident will be magnified, exploited and misinterpreted out of all proportion.” 19 This
time, Vaky took Lister’s advice. Lister’s next memo, from June 23, thanks Vaky for
meeting with d’Escoto, but reports that d’Escoto had not been impressed. 20 Lister told
Vaky that a longer, more substantive discussion with d’Escoto would be necessary.
By June 25, a meeting had taken place between d’Escoto and the U.S. Ambassador to
Nicaragua, Larry Pezzullo. 21 Lister wrote that the meeting had been a good idea
because the “top Sandinista leaders are as abysmally ignorant of us as we are of
them.” 22
Somoza fled Nicaragua on July 19 and a Sandinista government soon came to
power. 23 Lister’s correspondence from the late 1970s suggests that he was hoping to
establish a working relationship between the U.S. government and the Sandinistas.
Lister sought to facilitate a dialogue with the Sandinista government in order to
influence them to come within the U.S. orbit in the Cold War context. He had
advocated a similar policy when Allende came to power in Chile in 1970. However,
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