Whose Revolution Is This, Anyway?
editors, The
Whose Revolution Is This, Anyway? On the homefront, President Reagan's mission has been to shape the way Americans see his escalating war in Nicaragua. The way the president tells it, the armed...
...servicemen have died flying helicopter missions over both Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...The editors...
...But isn't it more accurate to say that we are hiring the Hessians...
...But from accounts of next of kin, combined with other sources, Greve pieced together the story of the kind of covert operation a Gordon Liddy might daydream about on slow days in Langley...
...All they need is the guns...
...In Nicaragua, by contrast, it is we who are supplying the foreign forces seeking to overthrow an indigenous government...
...The way the president tells it, the armed opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinista government (the "Contras") are freedom fighters in the mold of George Washington and Patrick Henry—the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers," he has called them...
...Another series of articles, by Frank Greve and Ellen Warren of the Knight-Ridder chain, casts question on the administration claim that no Americans have lost their lives in this conflict...
...During these raids, American helicopter pilots fired directly on Sandinista positions, giving air cover for commando raids, while U.S...
...While the administration and the Pentagon are still denying Greve's account of helicopter crashes, there is no denying that the CIA's " "covert" operation is floundering...
...Ronald Reagan has compared our role in Nicaragua to that of the French under General Lafayette during the American Revolution...
...The alleged fatalities have occurred in the 100th Task Force of the Army's 101st Airborne, created after the failed Iranian hostage mission to ferry elite commando units into combat...
...We are providing not only guns, but fighting forces as well...
...These accounts do not come from hysterical left-wing journals...
...Reports from Nicaragua tell a different story...
...In 1983 the 100th suffered 17 deaths, one-half the total for the entire Army...
...We are hiring a paramilitary force to do their work for them...
...Furthermore, in Afghanistan, the rebels are fighting a foreign army occupying their country, just as we did during our own revolution...
...We're in a bog with no easy way out," one State Department official told the Los Angeles Times...
...When The Washington Monthly asked Elliot Abrams, the Reagan administration's assistant secretary of state for human rights, about the Times and Journal articles, he denied that they were true...
...planes with sophisticated radar provided support for nighttime attacks...
...Over here you have snakes...
...Which way do you choose...
...They have the men...
...These mercenaries, acting under American supervision and with American participation, began to take on important missions like blowing up fuel tanks and mining harbors...
...A classified CIA document detailed 19 such raids in early 1984 alone in which Americans were involved directly along with what the CIA calls our "UCLA"—'unilaterally controlled Latin assets...
...over here pirannhas...
...They have the heart...
...A National Intelligence Estimate, dated June 30, said that the Contras would be hard pressed to hold a large population center, let alone overthrow the Sandinista government...
...They packed weapons of their own choosing—knives, Colt .45s and Uzi machine guns were the favorites...
...Originally the administration saw the Contra war as a way of—surprise!—halting a Soviet takeover of the region...
...The conflict in Nicaragua is becoming an American one...
...Now things are looking less clear cut...
...They were told to expect no help from the U.S...
...Over there alligators...
...They are the work of respected reporters with The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times...
...The answer, of course, is that we are not hiring just one expert to help the Contras...
...But, he added, "as a hypothetical matter," would we object to hiring a mercenary who was expert in some arcane branch of warfare to help the Afghan rebels...
...There were some operations we didn't even know about," recalls Edgar Chammaro, a former Contra leader...
...Dressed in civilian clothes and outfitted with high-tech goggles for seeing at night, the U. S. airmen flew Contras deep into Nicaraguan territory...
...If downed, they were instructed to blow up their helicopters...
...Their account suggests strongly that U.S...
...They have the tacit consent of an enslaved people...
...Army officials maintain that these deaths occurred in training...
...Their worthy struggle will surely triumph if only we supply them with the weapons they need...
...government that sent them there—but did receive thousands of dollars in cash for bribing their way out of the country and a credit card for airfare home...
...What happened is that by mid-1983, the CIA had lost faith in the Contras' ability to win...
...In radio broadcasts, the Contras took credit for successful raids...
...But in fact they were the work of ourselves and the mercenaries we hired...
...So the CIA hired mercenaries from other Latin American countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia...
Vol. 17 • April 1985 • No. 3
