The Real Bad Guys
Landau, Saul
BOOKS The Real Bad Guys WITH THE CONTRAS: I ^^^^^^^^^^m A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua by Christopher Dickey Simon and Schuster. 327 pp. $18.95. by Saul Landau In February, Secretary of...
...Dickey does not know, nor does he investigate in any depth the culture that produced such brutes—other than a few paragraphs on life in Anastasio Somoza's National Guard...
...Those who fought with Suicida, virtually the only effective combat unit for some two years of CIA war, were members of Somoza's National Guard who had escaped in mid-July 1979, when the publicity-seeking Sandinista commander, Eden Pastora, decided not to pursue them, but rather to race to Managua so that he could be present when power was dispersed among the different Sandinista leaders...
...We're on the right side in this issue...
...Those who weren't outright thugs were simply lazy, and ripped offbig salaries from their CIA friends while Suicida and his cutthroats did the fighting...
...The personal experience that Dickey had with the contras makes his book credible...
...It is highly recommended for all citizens who are concerned about war and peace and American values...
...Shultz's "good guys" are shown to be murderers, thieves, torturers—the "freedom fighters...
...Dickey, who spent more than two years covering Central America, never compares the Sandinistas to their neighboring rulers, nor does he report on their tangible reforms since 1979, carried out under duress and in a nation whose population had suffered virtual disenfranchisement for more than forty years...
...Indeed, With the Contras by Christopher Dickey should be required reading for the policy elite...
...Dickey also exposes Shultz and President Reagan as less than candid when reporting to Congress about the Sandinistas and contras...
...Dickey describes the origins of Reagan's "freedom fighters," whom the President has compared to "our Founding Fathers...
...She loves battle, as does Krill, another of her lovers, who blasts a fellow officer full of rifle bullets in a fit of jealous rage...
...Was he genuinely fond of the tenderfoot...
...Dickey, a reporter for The Washington Post, uses his 1983 journalistic adventure, in which he and a fellow reporter lived with the contras, to portray their characters and the nature of the war they have been fighting for the CIA...
...And the noise of other beatings, screams that could not be identified, worked on the mind as well...
...Was he trying to show his own "cojones...
...He assumes that bestiality is a trait of the modern Central American mercenary...
...Nearby was the graveyard...
...Many of them, as one of their defectors, Hector Frances, revealed, were ideological Nazis...
...This mindless San-dinista-bashing cheapens a good book...
...Meanwhile, Somoza's officers lounged in Miami hotels and complained about the quality of the food...
...In any case, those readers who have acted to stop the dirtyCIA war will feel more than vindicated...
...with scores of mounds visible...
...Dickey implicates one of the head contras in the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Romero...
...He had the courage to risk his life to bring the story to the public...
...Contra leader Krill, a murderer of at least thirty people, risked his life to pull Dickey from a river while mortar shells fell all around them...
...public...
...These real-life contras possess courage, charm, and even charisma...
...Ironically, he is not willing to risk his media prestige by saying anything good about the Sandinistas...
...When they can't get it, they kill Sandinistas or each other...
...described them, "brothers," like all humans...
...by Saul Landau In February, Secretary of State George Shultz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "We're for the good guys...
...These guerrillas collected fat salaries at U.S...
...Suicida's "excesses" finally became a liability to the CIA, so he and his lieutenants were "court martialed"—that is, executed...
...With the Contras uncovers the pervasive corruption of the CIA's Nicaragua operation from its inception...
...Figureheads like Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo never had any power over the men with guns...
...The fanatics who continue to laud the contras either must disbelieve the mountains of evidence in this book or become directly complicitous in a murderous operation...
...Dickey leaves no doubt that torture and murder of prisoners were routine BOOKS with Suicida and his gang, that kidnapping was routine, and that ideas like "freedom" meant as much to this group as Hegel's dialectics...
...taxpayers' expense...
...They are the real "bad guys...
...Contrary to the Administration's claim, the contra leaders were not clean democrats, but the worst of Somoza's National Guard...
...Dickey shows that the Administration has consistently lied to Congress about every aspect of the clandestine operation...
...When former multinational corporate executives and supposedly sober decisionmakers begin to talk about foreign policy in Grade-B Hollywood movie patter, we know we're in trouble...
...Dickey introduces us to the CIA man who wrote the famous assassination manual, which explicitly directs the contras to kill and terrorize the civilian population...
...But let's hope that this newly acquired deficiency doesn't stop Secretary Shultz from reading a book that deals with this "moral" issue...
...He has made frequent trips to Nicaragua...
...Unlike cinematic or pulp-novel grammar, investigative reporting does not require good guys to triumph over villains...
...Suicida, a sergeant, and his minions, "the Rattlesnakes," hijacked a boat and reached El Salvador where they were recruited by the CIA...
...With the Contras demonstrates stylistic possibilities for investigative reporting...
...Edgar Chamorro, a defector from the contra leadership, explained to Dickey in painful detail how the CIA manipulated him and everyone else the Agency touched—including Congress and the U.S...
...The CIA resorted to killing its own creatures when they became an embarrassment...
...Dickey's non-judgmental style of reporting can also make you angry enough to become more politically active...
...others, just free-loaders...
...What beatings did not do at first, exposure was left to accomplish for a night or two...
...role that began under Jimmy Carter when mysterious clandestine operators hustled key National Guard figures out of Managua under Red Cross cover...
...Was he following orders to "protect" the gringo reporter...
...Instead he stoops to name calling, charging the Sandinistas with "path-1 ological self-destructiveness" and drifting "into Moscow's orbit...
...A lively, mystery-book format allows the reader to learn about a key issue of our time without academic argument or long footnotes...
...The book answers the key questions: how they were formed (covertly), when (as soon as the Sandinistas had triumphed), by whom (the CIA), and for what ends (to destroy Nicaragua's new government...
...He obeys this unwritten media taboo as if it were a ban on incest...
...The Argentines washed CIA money for the contras and taught them the craft of modern dirty war...
...Dickey nevertheless provides the reader with more than enough information to form a sound political judgment on the contras and the CIA's war...
...I know who the good guys and the bad guys are...
...In this sense they are, as Ronald Reagan Saul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...
...personnel were directly involved in the initial stage of the covert war...
...In the contra camp inside Honduras, "prisoners were chained to trees," Dickey observed...
...CIA Director William J. Casey is shown as either mad or vicious...
...Dickey also describes the shadowy U.S...
...When not fighting with each other, these contras engage the Sandinista militia or the civilian population...
...the contras themselves emerge as cannon fodder for low-intensity conflict, the modern dogs of war, unleashed from the ruins of a U.S.-created dictatorship...
...But Dickey does not demonize them...
...They were left to sleep half naked and sometimes unable to lie down in the rains that fell in the evening and bitter chill that settled into the mountain forests...
...Dickey has written the story of Shultz's "good guys," the contras...
...Dickey introduces us to the Argentine military "advisers" whom CIA Director Casey used to assure Congress that no U.S...
...The respectable contra facade that lobbies Congress is powerless in the face of the Somoza Guardsmen and the CIA, which dictate their policies—indeed, the very words they are to use...
...to the UCLAs (Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets), who mined Nicaragua's harbors and other targets that the Reagan Administration then officially credited to the contras...
...they need love—or at least sex—like anyone else...
...Commander Suicida (Suicide) and his men—and women—are callous, murderous, sadistic...
...She occasionally talks about her children, who she claimed were taken from her by the torturing Sandinistas...
...Commander Suicida loves La Negra, but she sleeps around with Suicida's comrades...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
