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They Never Knew They Won
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20246 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1992 |
2,152 Words |
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Russ Braley
Russ Braley was a U.S. Navy mine disposal officer in the
Mediterranean and Pacific theaters in World War II. For
twenty years he was a foreign correspondent for the New York
Daily News. He is the author of Bad News: the Foreign Policy
of the New York Times (Regnery Gateway, 1984). |
EVERYBODY HAD HIS OWN GRINGO
The CIA & the Contras
Glenn Garvin, foreword by P.J. O'Rourke
Washington, New York, London: Brassey's/Macmillan, 1992
274 pp., $23.95
The Contras of Nicaragua never were favorites of the American public or the U.S. news media during their decade-long civil war with the communist-run Sandinistas government. Hollywood had given its heart to Sandinistas when they defeated, then assassinated, dictator Anastasio Somoza. Television, the liberal press, and peace groups, including some churches, branded the Contras thugs of the former National Guard or tools of a malevolent CIA. House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill and his Massachusetts delegation, especially Rep. Edward P. Boland, worked hard to isolate them. Sen. John Kerry (Massachusetts) probed alleged drug running for three years, but his committee found cases involving only individual Contras (and Americans).
In October 1986, when Contra guerrillas had been fighting for six years with only sporadic support and were about to get some real U.S. funding at last, it suddenly looked like they were finished. A Sandinista soldier in south central Nicaragua fired a Soviet SAM-7 missile and knocked out of the sky a C-123 transport plane ready to drop ten thousand pounds of ammunition and arms to the Contras. The pilot, William Cooper, died in the crash, and the cargo kicker, Eugene Hasenfus, leaped to safety with a sports parachute and was captured. Both were Americans, veterans of the CIA's Air America in Southeast Asia. Documents found on the plane implicating the United States were as explosive as the ammunition.
In Washington, the news triggered the Iran-Contra affair, filling television news screens for a year with exotic, clandestine American-Israeli-Iranian arms deals and congressional hearings that the Democrats hoped would be Ronald Reagan's Watergate. Oliver North became a villain to some, a hero to others. Scandalous intrigue with Iran dominated the hearings, and the Contras were lost in the shuffle.
Glenn Garvin arrives to correct the record, and Everybody Had His Own Gringo is a breath of fresh air. Garvin covered the war for the Washington Times from 1983 to 1989, winning a National Press Club award and collecting material to support his premise that the Contras were not tropical Hell's Angels but a legitimate political-military
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