WITH THE CONTRAS: A REPORTER IN THE WILDS OF NICARAGUA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504130042-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 42
• Publication Date: March 1, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504130042-6
"TIC" WASHINGTON JOURNALISM RLVILW
ON PAGE March 1986
WITH THE CONTRAS: A Reporter
In the Wilds of Nicaragua
By Christopher Dickey
Simon and Schuster
327 pages; $ 18.95
By Doyle McManus
Three years ago, in the spring of
1983, the CIA-directed contras fighting
Nicaragua's leftist regime decided it was
time to improve their image. A debate
already raged in Washington over the
United States' role in launching what
was then still officially a "secret" war;
contra supporters in the Reagan admin-
istration believed that if the contras
could succeed in casting themselves as
freedom fighters, rather than
"beasts"-which is what the Sandinistas
called them-their cause in Congress
would he immeasurably helped. And so,
after consulting with their CIA advisers,
the contras invited two reporters, Chris-
topher Dickey of the 3kinshington Post
and James 1.eMovne, then of .Newsweek,
to trek into the jungle, join their troops
in battle and interview their most charis-
matic guerrilla commander. The hero
thus designated was a former sergeant
in the Nicaraguan National Guard
named Pedro Pablo Ortiz Centeno, bet-
ter known by his ghoulish nom de guerre
as Comandante .Suirida-"Commander
Suicide."
It was a singularly unfortunate
choice. Suicida was not only less heroic
than first advertised: he was gripped by
an irrepressible drive toward self-de-
struction. Only two months after the
first reporters wrote their (largely posi-
tive) profiles, Suicida and his lieutenants
became increasingly violent. They raped
women, murdered prisoners, shot some
of their own men in the back, launched
erratic, doomed offensives and finally
Doyle McManus, a reporter in the I ashing-
ton bureau of the Los Angeles Times, has
covered Latin American issues from Wash-
ington since 1983,
mutinied against the contra leadership
in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.
At that, the leaders cracked down. They
had Suicida captured, tried and shot in
the fall of 1983 and denied any knowl-
edge of his fate for several months.
This moral tale forms the center-
piece and guiding metaphor of Christo-
pher Dickey's gripping book about the
contras, the first full-length history of
their six-year-old war. Dickey, then Cen-
tral America correspondent for the Post,
was one of the first reporters to visit
Suicida's camp in the mountains of Ja-
lapa.
His harrowing story of that journey
is a nice piece of writing by itself. In
addition to providing him with a good,
long look at the gritty reality of the war,
the trip to Suicida's camp also gave
Dickey a basis for his reporting that, like
the corner of a jigsaw puzzle, later en-
abled other pieces to fall into place.
As our first history of where the
contras came from, of how the CIA
built them into an ill-controlled army
and why they collapsed in 1983, With the
Contras succeeds admirably. It reads like
a thriller, carries the authority of solid
reporting and, for those of us who care
about such things, comes with wonder-
fully scrupulous footnotes. Dickey's con-
clusions about the men the Reagan ad-
ministration has chosen as its
instruments will be criticized by the
contras and their promoters, who have
been waiting nervously for this book to
land in the middle of Congress' renewed
debate on the issue. But even his detrac-
tors will have to admire Dickey's enter-
prise in piecing together the story, and
they will find themselves forced to take
his analysis seriously.
For Dickey, the story of Suicida is
nothing less than the contras' My Lai.
"Just as the special case of My Lai grew
from the common horror of Vietnam,"
he writes, "as the history of covert ac-
tion against Nicaragua emerged ... it
was clear that [Suicida] represented
much of what was wrong with the secret
war, and much that could never be set
right with it."
Two lessons emerge from Dickey's
account. One is obvious but useful to
repeat: that the truth about this war,
like all others, is to be found not in
Washington, but in the field. An intelli-
gent and energetic foreign correspon-
dent is sometimes worth an entire bu-
reau of Washington reporters.
But Dickey's main message is that
for all the president's rhetoric about
freedom fighters, the real-life contras
are brutal, squalid and-what may be
most damning in the end-incompetent.
These guerrillas are capable of harassing
Sandinista patrols and ambushing coffee
convoys, but they have no clear goal he-
yond revenge and no hope of truly
threatening the Sandinista regime. Al-
though new recruits have swollen the
contras' ranks to perhaps 15,000, "their
leaders were still the guardian, the killers
and the chosen front-men of the CIA,"
Dickey concludes. "The fight continued,
now, with no end in sight and the con-
stant threat that the Reagan administra-
tion, having committed itself to the San-
dinistas' overthrow, would finally decide
it had no option but open, direct U.S.
military action ....'
Now, that is a reasonable and de-
fensible view. Roughly half the Congress
shares it, as do, in private, a good num-
ber of administration officials. But it is
also a view that needs defending, for the
contras and their promoters have been
working to rebut it for some time. It is
here that Dickey's otherwise fine book
falters. His sorties into straightforward
analysis are intermittent and brief. The
headlong narrative is charged with car-
rying the burden of analysis as well and
is not always equal to the task.
Too many basic questions remain
unanswered. Did Ronald Reagan really
believe in 1981 and 1982 that Suicida's
men could topple the Managua regime?
Was Suicida's blood-lust an "anomaly."
as the CIA put it? (Dickey says no, but
does not offer much specific evidence-
although plenty is available.) Most im-
portant for the current debate, are the
contras of 1986 the same brutal thugs
they were in 1983?
The contras and their backers in the
administration say no: the contras of to-
day, they insist, have reformed since the
days of human rights abuses and assas-
sination manuals. In making that argu-
ment, the contras' supporters tacitly ac-
cept much of Dickey's. The contras of
1983 were uncontrolled and incompe-
tent, they now admit, but the contras of
today are neither. One proof they offer,
ironically, is the execution of Suicida by
the commanders who once lionized him.
Another is the steady trickle of new vol-
unteers into the contras' camps (al-
though that is a tricky measure of virtue:
by most accounts, there are still more
volunteers in the Sandinista army).
Dickey's book cannot answer those
arguments fully, for its story runs only
to the middle of 1984, when the covert
CIA pipeline collapsed and the contras
were forced to concentrate on produc-
ing at least the appearance of reform.
But With the Contras is an indispensable
starting point for the debate. It will find
its way quickly into briefcases from Cap-
itol Hill to Langley-and Managua and
Tegucigalpa too. ?
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504130042-6