THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...wing Cuban exile "Omega 7" group is the leading terrorist threat, left or right, based in the United States...

...Henry Catto is now Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs...

...We knew enough about his background that he seemed de-featable...

...Directed to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Charles Percy, the drive blunted Lefever's wild-eyed charge that his opposition was "Communist-inspired...

...Some 15,000 auto industry-related jobs are expected to evaporate in the next year...

...O'Neill, his jowls sagging even more than usual after the vote, lamented, "I've never seen anything like this in my life, to be perfectly truthful...

...Shackley is now on tour boosting his book promoting covert action...

...The Speaker might as well get used to it...

...It was a natural media story—but not for the Washington Journalism Review...

...Add to that the prospect that it will adjourn for the year late in October or early in November if Majority leader Howard Baker has his way—another sixty days off...

...One such is said to be Periscope Security, in Laurel, Maryland...

...The issue had been given 'extensive treatment in WJR's ostensible competition, Columbia Journalism Review, as well as this magazine, which sent a copy to WJR...

...The Reagan Administration is said to be debating the relative advantages of destabilization of the Sandinistas versus long-term economic isolation...

...His own alternative to the Reagan program—slightly smaller cuts in social spending than the Republicans want, and an open treasury for the Pentagon—is hardly the sort of banner around which his troops would rally for a last-ditch stand...

...The drive to stop Lefever began in February at a meeting of a dozen or so human rights activists, members of the clergy, and at least one former official of the Carter Administration...

...Business is booming in Washington's chic bars and restaurants, and the patrons have an affluent look...

...we asked Jessica Catto...

...Without this authority," the bill reads, "the registration process will be largely unenforceable...

...It's a good idea for members of Congress to get away from all this—and to stay away as long as possible...

...The bill would amend the Selective Service Act to require registrants to provide their Social Security numbers...

...Twenty-nine Democrats—new Democrats—had just joined the Republicans in the House to vote enthusiastically for Ronald Reagan's budget cuts as a single package...

...Watch your mailbox for further developments...

...The Washington Post and The New York Times, Public Broadcasting, Newsweek, and even the "Doonesbury" comic strip soon followed suit...

...First of all, they'll do less harm if they don't lift a finger for a single piece of Reagan-inspired legislation...

...They are, as it is said, "in oil...

...A normal week for the Senate is Tuesday through Thursday, and it usually likes to take off for the whole month of August...

...that, as it turned out, was something like asking them to sign up for a suicide mission...

...Last year, it was purchased by Jessica and Henry Catto, of Houston and other points...

...Nofziger and his staff had good reason to chuckle...

...QUIET DIPLOMACY The Washington Journalism Review was launched a few years back with offices in Georgetown, hardly more than a champagne cork's flight down the cobblestone sidewalks from the State Department...

...has been active in Namibia, with permission from Pretoria...

...It was, as Griesgraber acknowledged, "a coalition of circumstances," but it worked...

...Did she remember discussing the issue with her staff...

...There was, for example, a moving series in The New York Times not long ago about a man who left his family in Michigan to search for work in Texas...

...J.S...

...Dirty Tricks Sketchy details continue to surface concerning U.S.-based covert action directed at Nicaragua...

...And they haven't gotten back to us...

...The desperation behind that statistic is not perceptible as one walks the graceful broad avenues near the Capitol, or the streets congested with shiny new automobiles around the White House, or the charming gaslight-illuminated cobblestone paths of Georgetown...

...Instead, the Bank of America, where Claussen was president, rented him an even more luxurious office...

...According to the FBI, the righttion drive against the nomination...

...Both Cattos were members of George Bush's national steering committee during the 1980 primaries...

...I don't know whether Lynn Nofziger, the hard-edged Political Affairs Director for the White House, was thinking of the same thing, but later that same day, as I walked down a dim corridor in the old Executive Office Building, I heard loud laughter emanating from Nofziger's office—the same office the reclusive Richard M. Nixon used as his hideaway when Watergate was unraveling around him...

...Utah International Co...

...They won't see that sort of thing here...

...Last month, the Sans Souci Restaurant near the White House advertised a special low-priced dinner: $12.95 for sliced chicken and gravy...

...Second, even if the legislators don't do a lick of work back among the home folk, maybe they'll get a glimpse of an unemployment line, or a carload of latter-day Okies heading off to Texas to find work...

...Not off the top of my head," she said, "but that doesn't mean we didn't...

...CHEAP THRILL The successful campaign to block Senate confirmation of Ernest Lefever's nomination to be the State Department's human rights chief cost a trifling $2,489.95, according to figures added up by William Goodfellow of the Center for International Policy, a Washington project of the Fund for Peace, which played a key role in the effort...

...She bent over and answered with a smile, "Well, there's the Republicans, there's the Democrats, and then there's the New Democrats...

...In several Washington suburbs, companies have materialized overnight to recruit former Special Forces personnel...

...Claussen came to Washington last spring to prepare to assume the presidency of the World Bank, he spurned the Bank's luxurious downtown suites...

...Oily Solution Promising oil discoveries in Namibia may be a reason South Africa has been dragging its heels on a negotiated agreement for free elections...

...Formerly, he was President Ford's chief of protocol...

...The budget included a month's salary for one full-time organizer...

...An important contribution turned out to be that of the Chicago-based Clergy and Laity Concerned, which organized a petiAugust Briefing Uncle Sam Wants You A little-noticed provision has been slipped into the military budget request in the House of Representatives to help Selective Service track down non-registrants...

...No less fortuitous was the concurrent publication of Jacobo Timerman's account of torture in Argentina, and his dramatic appearance in the Senate hearing room, jointly arranged by the publisher and anti-Lefever activists...

...About right-wing terrorism, the CIA says (unsurprisingly), "very little information is available...

...Hands Across the Water The recent ballyhooed CIA report, "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1980," cites Libya as "the most prominent state sponsor of and participant in international terrorism...

...According to a recent New York Times account, moreover, both maintained contact with senior CIA official Theodore Shackley throughout their Libyan misadventures...

...They were not optimistic...

...the company is not listed in state records...

...And there's another kicker: "The Selective Service Act would also be amended to permit the Director of Selective Service to provide registration lists to the Department of Defense for purposes of recruiting...

...ambassador to El Salvador in 1971____ "Oh, I see what you're getting at," she said...

...One of Claussen's first official acts was to acquire a bullet-proof limousine and a bodyguard...

...THE 'NEW DEMOCRATS One day late in June, as I waited for an elevator in the Capitol building, I heard a small boy ask his mother, "Mommy, how many parties are there...

...This used to bother me, but it no longer does...

...Precaution When A.W...

...The PNS story had been picked up by some newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, months ago, but was ignored by major eastern papers until The Wall Street Journal published a front-page article early in June...

...Speaker Tip O'Neill's brilliant strategy had been to try to compel members of the House to vote separately on each of the major categories of budget reductions...

...the road to the airport skirts that part of the District of Columbia...

...We'll get back to you on that...

...I now think it's a good idea for members of the House and Senate to spend as much time as possible away from Washington...

...She wondered whether we weren't making too much of it all...

...For those who live here, about the only way to get a sense of what seem to be the increasingly desperate straits of much of the rest of the country is to read the occasional out-of-town dispatches in the newspapers...

...Both had pointed to a Pacific News Service story in April which tore gaping holes in the Government's argument that Soviet and Cuban arms were principally responsible for fanning the rebellion in El Salvador...

...Well, we said, we were wondering ourselves whether Henry Catto's past service as U.S...

...But on the whole," said Jo Marie Gries-graber of the church-sponsored Washington Office on Latin America, "we thought it was worth giving it a try...

...He isn't receiving much sympathy even among the Old Democrats who did not defect...

...In its latest issue, WJR failed to devote a single word to the national press's coverage—or lack of coverage—of deficiencies in the State Department's now notorious "White Paper" on El Salvador...

...Yet nowhere is it mentioned that Muammar al-Qaddafi's chief experts are former CIA officers Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil...