Word: manual
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After an 89-page CIA manual that instructed rebels in Nicaragua on terrorist tactics surfaced last month, the White House promised that any official involved in its development or approval would be dismissed. But in a letter to members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees that was made public last week, CIA Director William Casey insisted that the thrust of the manual had been misinterpreted, and he attempted to justify its overall purpose. "The emphasis is on education," Casey wrote, "not on turning a town into a battlefield...
Reagan also was mistaken about a CIA manual giving advice to contra guerrillas battling the Sandinista government of Nicaragua on how to assassinate Sandinista officials, hire "criminals" to kill contras who would then be presented as martyrs, and stir up mob violence. The President said the manual had been written by a CIA contract employee "in Nicaragua" (he hastily corrected himself to say "in that area," meaning Central America) and censored in Washington, but "some way or other" about a dozen copies with the offending passages got out to the contras. He wrongly remembered what briefers had told him just...
...gringo" who arrived as a CIA operative at rebel headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was described by Chamorro as an Irishman who fought for the U.S. in the Korean War and admired the "psychological operations" of the Irish Republican Army. Chamorro printed up 2,000 copies of the manual and handed out 200 of them to his troops, but then he had second thoughts. He revised the rest by censoring out references to "criminals" and "murder." (It was not the only time that contra leaders have balked at CIA help. Last spring they objected to a 16-page CIA Freedom...
Adolfo Calero, one of the contra leaders, denied last week that his guerrillas followed the terrorist teachings in the CIA manual. But in the field, the contras do use psychological and physical coercion to win over the peasantry, just as Communist-backed rebel organizations do. Government sympathizers are sometimes executed, and contra commanders have discussed assassinating one or another of the nine-member ruling Sandinista directorate. The contras had a list of 60 Sandinistas in the village of San Fernando who had to be "eliminated" before the contras could safely occupy the town last year, according to those who traveled...
Reaction to the CIA manual, the existence of which was first revealed by the Associated Press last Monday, was fast and furious. Walter Mondale demanded the resignation of CIA Director William Casey, and questioned Reagan's role. "Did he know this was going on?" asked Mondale. "I don't know which is worse-knowing this was going on or having a Government where no one is in charge." Congressman Edward Boland, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, fumed that the document was "repugnant to a nation that condemns such acts by others. It embraces the Communist revolutionary...