Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whether the change in the NSC's role was conscious or evolutionary, it is clear that in anticipation of a congressional ban on CIA contact with the contras, Casey and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane turned to North to run the secret war in Nicaragua. Says Neil Livingstone, a consultant on counterterrorism who worked with North: "Bill Casey was not prepared to fight the bureaucratic battles. He knew there were a lot of people who could raise great problems if they went public with their concerns. He turned the NSC into the Washington station...
...Nicaragua, which the Administration regards as an all-important test of the Reagan Doctrine, the U.S. got itself trapped in a self-damaging cycle. In 1984 it was discovered that the CIA had secretly supervised the mining of Nicaraguan harbors -- another operation that North had a hand in planning. Vessels of friendly countries were damaged, and Congress was furious at not being adequately informed of the operation. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater angrily wrote Casey, "The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don't know what the hell...
...felt so committed to bringing down the Marxist Sandinista government that they were driven to circumvent, if not outright break, the law. Some Reagan officials have since taken refuge in legalistic quibbles about exactly what the Boland amendment prohibited. In truth, the amendment, like Congress's whole policy toward Nicaragua, was no model of clarity. But North, according to one participant in his schemes, knew full well what he was doing. According to this source, North kept copies of the Boland amendment in his desk drawer, and once pulled one out and remarked cavalierly, "This...
...with what Secord has chosen to call 'the enterprise,' " Shackley told TIME last week. "I have had nothing to do with North." Nonetheless, North's projects freely used private operators. Secord, for example, retained the services of American National Management Corp. to fly supplies to the contras in Nicaragua. That company was founded and run by Colonel Richard Gadd, a retired Air Force cargo-plane pilot who was a longtime associate of Secord's. Gadd had also worked for the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, which hired him in 1983 to transport helicopter pilots to Barbados prior to the invasion...
During 1984, after Congress cut off funds for the contras, North became obsessed with the men he referred to as freedom fighters. He kept a shoe box filled with pictures of contra leaders and talked about how he did not want to lose Nicaragua the way he saw the U.S. lose Viet Nam. North had been in the NSC longer than many of his superiors, and he began to believe in his own indispensability. "Being in the White House is heady," says a colleague. "You start carrying the cross by yourself, and if you don't do it, democracy falls...