MANAGUA -- When Ronald Reagan and Sandinista leaders slugged it out during the 1980s over events in Nicaragua, Reagan was right more often than they liked to admit, the Sandinistas now say.

In a series of interviews with The Herald, several past and present Sandinista officials confirmed that they shipped weapons to Marxist guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador, a statement they once hotly denied.

The Sandinistas also said that the Soviet Union agreed to supply them with MiG jet fighters and even arranged for Nicaraguan pilots to be trained on the planes in Bulgaria. But the Soviets reneged on the deal, sending the Sandinistas scurrying to make peace with the contras.

Domino theory

``The Sandinista leadership thought they could be Che Guevaras of all Latin America, from Mexico to Antarctica,'' former Sandinista leader Moises Hassan told The Herald. ``The domino theory wasn't so crazy.''

During their explosive battles with Congress over U.S. aid to anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials frequently justified helping the rebels on the grounds that the Sandinistas were shipping arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas.

Reagan's deputies also accused the Sandinistas of planning to acquire the MiGs, a move that they warned that the United States ``would view with the utmost concern.'' In 1984, when American officials spotted large crates being unloaded from Soviet ships in Nicaraguan ports, there was widespread fear that the two countries would go to war. But the crates turned out to contain helicopters, and tensions eased.

Sandinista leaders had denied supplying the Salvadoran guerrillas. ``We are not responsible for what is happening in El Salvador,'' said Sandinista party cofounder Tomas Borge said in 1980.

Earlier this month, Borge and former president Daniel Ortega both said the denials were false. They said the Sandinistas had shipped arms to Salvadoran guerrillas because the Salvadorans helped them in their successful insurrection against Anastasio Somoza, and also because they thought it would be more difficult for the United States to attack two revolutionary regimes instead of one.

`A matter of ethics'

``We wanted to broaden the territory of the revolution, to make it wider, so it would be harder for the Americans to come after us,'' Borge said. Ortega added that it was ``a matter of ethics'' to arm the Salvadorans.

Neither man offered details on how many weapons were supplied. But Hassan, a former Sandinista official who was a member of the revolutionary junta that governed Nicaragua in the early 1980s, said he believed about 50,000 weapons and a corresponding amount of ammunition were sent to El Salvador just in the first 16 months of the Sandinista government.

``Ortega and Borge didn't tell me about it, because they thought I was unreliable, but other people who just assumed I knew would casually bring it up,'' Hassan said.

Hassan resigned from the Sandinista party in June 1985 but continued to work closely with his old colleagues as mayor of Managua until late 1988.

He also confirmed that the Sandinistas had a commitment for MiGs from the Soviet Union.

He said he learned of the plan for the MiGs during 1982, when he was minister of construction and the Sandinistas began building a base for the jet fighters at Punta Huete, a remote site on the east side of Lake Managua.

The site included a 10,000-foot concrete runway -- the longest in Central America -- capable of handling any military aircraft in the Soviet fleet.

Code name: Panchito

``It was top secret -- we even had a code name, Panchito, so we could talk about it without the CIA hearing,'' Hassan said. ``But somehow the Americans found out.''

Alejandro Bendaña, who was secretary general of foreign affairs during the Sandinista government, said Nicaraguan pilots trained to fly the MiGs in Bulgaria. But in 1987, soon after the Punta Huete site was finished, the Soviets backed out, he said.

The news that they weren't getting a weapon they had always considered a security blanket, coupled with Soviet advice that it was ``time to achieve a regional settlement of security problems,'' made the Sandinistas realize that they could no longer depend on the USSR for help, Bendaña said.

Quickly, the Sandinistas signed onto a regional peace plan sponsored by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, which required peace talks with the U.S.-backed contra army, Bendaña said. Those talks led eventually to an agreement for internationally supervised elections that resulted in a Sandinista defeat in 1990.