Word: contra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...appointment of Howard Baker could turn out to be an important first step. To be sure, Reagan took it well past the eleventh hour. He had been under pressure from old friends, Republican allies and his wife to fire Donald Regan as chief of staff ever since the Iran-contra affair broke. Still, Reagan clung to his abrasive, autocratic chief of staff until after the Tower report came out. By comparison with the unsparing criticism directed at almost everyone else, Regan actually got off rather lightly: the commission found no evidence that he had played any significant part in planning...
...count is thought to be 8 to 7 -- and nobody is sure which side would wind up with the eight. The committee will question Gates again in closed session this week, but is likely to put off a vote, possibly until all congressional investigations of the Iran-contra affair are concluded. That would be a "solution" satisfactory to nobody; Gates would be running the CIA as acting director, probably for many months, but with a cloud hanging over...
...position anger the Soviets but it may be impossible to sell to America's European allies. Other foreign policy problems are crowding in, and will be exacerbated by the fallout from the Tower commission report. The most immediate and, for Reagan, disastrous effect may be the collapse of the contra campaign. The contras are central to the so-called Reagan doctrine of helping rebels wage guerrilla war against Marxist governments in widely scattered areas of the globe: Afghanistan, Angola, Kampuchea. But the contras cannot carry on their rebellion without continued U.S. assistance. The Tower report shows the extent to which...
...State Department, officials are privately predicting that Elliott Abrams, the intensely committed Assistant Secretary of State who has served as the point man in the contra crusade, will be gone by summer. The report shows that his involvement in Ollie North's private contra-supply network was far greater than he had previously testified. Says one source close to Abrams: "There is no way Elliott can survive this." The contra-aid program will have similar problems surviving, even though it makes little sense to tie its fate to the Iranian scandal...
Despite the illogic of cutting off the contras as a reaction to the excesses of their Administration backers, State Department officials see no way that, in light of the Tower findings, Reagan can win the additional $105 million he is requesting for the cause. Some have already begun referring to the anti-Sandinista rebels in the past tense. Says one official long involved in the contra war: "We had been devising a strategy to somehow save this thing, but after this report, it's all over. We need to start thinking about evacuating the contras, figuring out what...