Word: contras
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...small window into Iran-contra and my impression was that Gates was never one of the main players, if one at all. Although I wasn't surprised that the scandal forced him to withdraw his nomination to replace Casey in 1987, I also wasn't surprised that Congress and the special prosecutor essentially gave him a pass. Or that in 1991 he eventually was confirmed as CIA director. Gates didn't mind being the little gray man, keeping his name off policies that could blow up in his face...
...Gates established a reputation for discretion and consensus. He let Casey fight the CIA's secret wars and the even more vicious inside-the-Beltway wars. He must have driven the special prosecutor crazy during Iran-contra, sticking to the truth but giving up nothing that could sink the Reagan Administration. When Gates finally left government, he wrote a bland, ruffle-no-feathers memoir. He never talked out of school about the Bushes. He never took on the CIA in public or offended the rank and file. Gates is a company man, a loyal civil servant, a realist. Reducing...
...ahead of his U.S.-backed opponent, conservative banker Eduardo Montealegre - is no doubt a concern. After he and Sandinista guerrillas toppled Nicaragua's brutal dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, Ortega led an authoritarian, Soviet-backed regime that wrecked the economy and fought a civil war with U.S.-backed contra rebels that killed some 50,000 people. Ortega was finally ousted in a 1990 election, and for the past 16 years, during which he twice failed to recapture the presidency, he seemed little more than a relic of the communist...
...Chavez, to boost Ortega. Roger Noriega, who until last year was Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, wrote that an Ortega presidency would "invigorate the axis of leftist proto-dictators led by" Chavez. Familiar Cold Warriors like former U.S. Marine Colonel Oliver North, a cynosure of the Contra war, started showing up in Managua to denounce the Sandinista leader. And U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez even warned recently that the Administration might suspend its almost $100 million in annual aid to Nicaragua if Ortega...
...regarding left-wing presidential candidate and Chavez acolyte Evo Morales. In Bolivia, the perception of imperious yanqui meddling helped turn Morales into a front-runner who was eventually elected President last year. Gutierrez did much the same for Ortega, says Ortega's running mate, Jaime Morales, a former Contra leader whose house had been confiscated by Ortega in the 1980s (Ortega has since paid him for the home) but who has reconciled and allied with Ortega. "I don't blame the U.S. for all of Nicaragua's problems as many do," says Morales. "But the U.S. and President Bush...