Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992 TAG: 9202230298
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PRESTON BRYANT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE EMBARRASING TRUTH BEHIND THE CONTRAS
COMMANDOS: THE CIA AND NICARAGUA'S CONTRA REBELS. By Sam Dillon. Henry Holt. $27.50.The stormy winds of war that blew down from Washington and swirled around Nicaragua for a decade left a death toll equivalent of 100 Hurricane Camilles. More than 30,000 were killed in the CIA-sponsored war against the ruling Sandinistas; Camille, one of America's most devastating storms this century, killed only 300.
Newspaperman Sam Dillon covered the Contra war from 1983 until its cease-fire five years later, and then set out on his own to find answers to the many questions that still troubled him - questions of Contra drug-running, human rights violations and, as in Vietnam, the true depth of American popular support. "Commandos" is the result of his private investigation. It takes us into the Miami hotel rooms where Washington first established headquarters for the burgeoning rebel movement, and into the very Contra tents that for years the CIA denied knowing about, much less paying for.
Dillon's primary source is Luis Fley, a disillusioned Sandinista who crossed over to the Contras, rose to command a rebel battalion and then became, at the war's end, his army's chief investigator of its own military crimes. Indeed, it is from Fley that Dillon gets the answers to his perplexing questions, which ultimately serve as the narrative basis for the book.
We are intrigued by the sophisticated A to Z operations of "The Project," the CIA's name for the whole Honduran-based covert operation, and horrified by the many so called "anomalies," documented Contra acts of torture, rape and murder being investigated by Fley. The CIA knew about them but viewed them with the blindest of eyes.
Dillon's style is so readable it takes the occasional footnote to remind us that we are not engaged in the fiction of, say, John LeCarre, but in world news of the recent past that Washington never really wanted to become news at all.
Dillon does not assume a great deal of prior knowledge on the part of his readers. What may first seem like wild digressions are quickly recognized as strategically placed accounts of Nicaraguan history that facilitate our understanding of the narrative's unfolding events.
"Commandos" strips many Contra - and American - emperors of their new clothes, revealing the sometimes unattractive and embarrassing truths behind a cause highly and nobly celebrated by the Reagan administration. That Dillon remains generally objective and does little editorializing is to his, and his book's, credit.
Preston Bryant writes about politics from Lynchburg.