It’s time to leave for Rick Nuccio, a man who has been living in a peculiar Washington shadow world between one-time influence and persisting notoriety.
He has fallen out of favor, like a minister of old who displeased his royal highness. And even if some would argue he suffers from self-inflicted wounds, his exit suggests the harshness of a small town whose ruling elite has turned on a minion.
“I don’t have a career in government service anymore,” he said last week, with chagrin, even bitterness.
The declaration came as Nuccio was finding himself in demand as an observer of government, just as he was packing for a job in Rhode Island, where he’ll pursue the topic, foreign affairs, that brought him into government in the first place.
In sum, he believes that after the Immigration and Naturalization Service initially botched the Elian Gonzalez case by releasing the child to his American relatives, the dispute became “a surrogate for your views on U.S. policy toward Cuba, whatever those views are, and much less on what’s the best for Elian.”
“People who detest our policy see his return to Cuba as a victory, punishing the Cuban-American community in Miami, which is seen as having too much influence on our policy,” he said.
“On the other side, that same community, and conservative Republicans, defend sanctions and the embargo and want to punish [Fidel] Castro by holding up the little boy as a symbol of all that is repressive and to celebrate his [late] mother’s supposed flight to freedom. They, too, could care less about the boy.”
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With a doctorate in political science and teaching experience at Mt. Holyoke and Williams Colleges, Nuccio, 53, was once a leading Latin American expert in the State Department and then the Clinton administration’s top gun on policy toward Cuba.
Indeed, as an aide to then-Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), he was involved in Torricelli-led legislation, which is known mostly for heightening the U.S. embargo against the island, but also did open the door to long-distance phone service and some expanded dealings between the two nations.
He then departed Torricelli, a man who is shrewd and cutthroat and whose increasingly anti-Castro views were seen by Nuccio and others as a function of sensitivity–some say pandering–to the Cuban-Americans in New Jersey. He took the key position of senior policy adviser and assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs.
Then, he was the special adviser to President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Cuba. He did that for less than a year. As he puts it, Clinton essentially caved in to Cuba bashers in Congress, signing the tough, anti-Castro Helms-Burton bill, leaving him “with little to do.”
He returned to the State Department with his former title but quit after being reprimanded by the State Department and punished by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA yanked his top-level security clearance, furious with his decision to disclose to Torricelli the fact that a CIA informant covered up, and was possibly involved in, murders in Guatemala, including those of a U.S. citizen and a guerrilla leader married to an American lawyer.
Nuccio went public and was portrayed by many as an honorable whistle-blower.
But others, even some journalists, were not as charitable, suggesting that he broke the rules and should have simply accepted his punishment quietly (one claims to me that Nuccio lied initially in denying flatly to the reporter that he was the leaker).
In addition, some Cuba observers see him as having been on various sides of the policy fence. He was with Torricelli in shafting Castro, then was an advocate for liberalization of our dealings when in the Clinton administration.
Yet Nuccio clearly concurs with the assessment by one syndicated columnist back then that, when it came to his ethical dilemma, he was “telling inconvenient truths in arenas that prefer to deal with convenient untruths.”
And Nuccio does not concur with President Clinton’s acquiescence to his security clearances being dumped. “I had the crazy idea that they [the CIA] worked for him, not the other way around.”
Convinced he had been “hounded out of government” by the CIA, he worked briefly again for Torricelli, doing a lot of foreign policy and intelligence counseling for him but nothing on Cuba. “Since his position by then was identical to the Miami Cubans, there may have been lots of things I could do for him but Cuba was not one of them.”
He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and did some consulting before being named director of the Claiborne Pell Center at Salve Regina, a gorgeous Catholic college in Newport, R.I. Pell is the former longtime senator from Rhode Island and the aim of center is to focus on international affairs and public policy.
He’ll be there next week but has fielded no shortage of calls on the Gonzalez controversy, with his own “bottom line that the boy probably belongs with the father. And if the dad believes he should be in Cuba, that should be honored.”
He comes away especially disenchanted with the performance of the INS, which “I know and worked with but which has become a cruel and callous organization, letting too many things happen behind closed doors without scrutiny.”
“I don’t trust them to be objective,” Nuccio said. “Once they made the mistake of releasing him [Elian] to the community,” and then hooked up with his American relatives, “they couldn’t simply pick him up as a result of one interview they did with the father in Havana.”
So what should the INS have done?
“If I was head of the INS, I would have treated and kept him in `detention,’ as it’s called. Not cruel detention. But I would have then had real-time contact with the Cuban government, to locate the father and quickly discern his wishes, before releasing the boy to the community.
“Once you released him to the community, you couldn’t just jerk him back,” he said.
One of Nuccio’s fears is that, if we don’t play our cards right, key accords with Cuba, perhaps little-known to most Americans, could collapse.
Those so-called migration agreements include allowing the U.S. to run an extensive visa operation on the island and to peacefully return by Coast Guard cutter any fleeing rafters picked up at sea.
The rancorous response in the Gonzalez case could threaten those and related deals, he believes, to our detriment.
“There needs to be close cooperation with the Cuban government” for those dealings to continue to be successful, he said.
“All that could be ended overnight and the Cuban government could say, as Fidel did in 1994, `Fine, everybody, go to America'”
That might then provoke another emergency outflow of people, such as the one in 1994, which forced the U.S. to pick up thousands of rafters and move them to our military base at Guantanamo Bay.
As he begins at least a part-time migration to Rhode Island (he’ll keep his place here because his wife has a good job), he is rueful. “I don’t have a career in government service anymore,” he said.
When he considers his leaking of information, he asserts that, “I didn’t realize that I would be confronting the CIA and be on `60 Minutes.'”
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But he also concedes that he has heard often how whistle-blowers are often naive.
“I came to Washington thinking you could do well by doing good,” Nuccio said Friday before heading off to speak to a small international affairs group in western Illinois.
“Frankly, I don’t think that anymore. It’s a difficult environment in which to follow principle, serve people and be rewarded.
“I’m looking forward to leaving.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.