My Life in the Time of the Contras

My Life in the Time of the Contras
Author: Bruce P. Cameron
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780826342515

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"People whose paths crossed Cameron's are names familiar to those who recall "Iran Contra." They include Ollie North, Tom Harkin, Arturo Cruz, Daniel Ortega, Jim Wright Jr., Dave McCurdy, and Richard Secord."--BOOK JACKET.

Contra Cross

Contra Cross
Author: William R. Meara
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

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Why does the United States have such difficulty dealing with insurgency? A look back at the Central American wars of the 1980s sheds light on the problem. Contra Cross presents one young American officer's journey through Central America's violent decade of revolution and counterrevolution. Bill Meara started out as a teacher at a Catholic school in Guatemala, but he went on to become one of fifty-five U.S. military advisers assisting the Salvadorans in their fight against communism. By the end of the decade, he was in the U.S. Foreign Service working as a liaison officer to the Nicaraguan contras. Meara was one of very few Americans to work on both sides of insurgency in the region: in El Salvador he supported efforts to defeat insurgents; with Nicaraguans he worked to keep an insurgency alive. Contra Cross takes readers into the world of an American adviser struggling with cultural differences and human rights violations while trying to stay alive in murderous El Salvador. We join Meara on dangerous helicopter rides into contra base camps on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, and learn what it's like to be in a U.S. embassy under attack. From Special Forces school at Ft. Bragg, to lunch with Communist defectors in El Salvador, to a contra POW camp deep in the jungle, we get a taste of life on the cutting edge of America's controversial Central America policy. More than a collection of war stories, Contra Cross explores the difficult moral and ideological issues of the Central American wars. Meara's experiences with insurgency and counterinsurgency allow him to provide critically important insights on why the United States has such difficulty dealing with ragtag armies of third-world rebels.

Dark Alliance

Dark Alliance
Author: Gary Webb
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1609802020

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Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

Blood on the Border

Blood on the Border
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2016-08-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806156430

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Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as “a force of nature on the page and off.” That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz’s firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City—a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay—the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra “affair” and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world—connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.

A Very Thin Line

A Very Thin Line
Author: Theodore Draper
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 690
Release: 1991-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780809096138

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Details the origins of the Iran-Contra scandal, the roles of Reagan, Bush, CIA Director Casey, and others, and argues that President Reagan clearly set the policy then feigned ignorance to escape blame

Powderburns

Powderburns
Author: Celerino Castillo
Publisher: Oakville, Ont. : Sundial
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

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The truth about the remaining dark secret of the Iran-Contra scandal- the United States government's collaboration with drug smugglers. Powderburns is the story of Celerino Castillo III who spent 12 years in the Drug Enforcement Administration. During that time, he built cases against organized drug rings in Manhattan, raided jungle cocaine labs in the Amazon, conducted aerial eradication operations in Guatemala, and assembled and trained anti-narcotics units in several countries. The eerie climax of Agent Castillo's career with the DEA took place in El Salvador. One day, he recieved a cable from a fellow agent. He was told to investigate possible drug smuggling by Nicaraguan Contras operating from the ilpango air force base. Castillo quickly discovered that Contra pilots were, indeed, smuggling narcotics back into the United States - using the same pilots, planes, and hangars that the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, under the Direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North, used to maintain their covert supply operation to the Contras.

With the Contras

With the Contras
Author: Christopher Dickey
Publisher: Touchstone Books
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1987
Genre: History
ISBN:

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The Ghost

The Ghost
Author: Jefferson Morley
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1250139104

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"The best book ever written about the strangest CIA chief who ever lived." - Tim Weiner, National Book Award-winning author of Legacy of Ashes A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades. CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency. In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature within the CIA that continues to this day.

Company Man

Company Man
Author: John Rizzo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451673949

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At the intersection of politics, law and national security--from "protect us at all costs" to "what the hell have you guys been up to, anyway?"--A lawyer's life in the CIA. Under seven presidents and 11 different CIA directors, Rizzo rose to become the CIA's most powerful career attorney. Given the agency's dangerous and secret mission, spotting and deterring possible abuses of law, offering guidance and protecting personnel from legal jeopardy was, and remains, no easy task. The author accumulated more than 30 years of war stories, and he tells most of them.

Iran-Contra

Iran-Contra
Author: Malcolm Byrne
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2017-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700625909

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Everything began to unravel on October 5, 1986, when a Nicaraguan soldier downed an American plane carrying arms to “Contra” guerrillas, exposing a tightly held U.S. clandestine program. A month later, reports surfaced that Washington had been covertly selling arms to Iran (our sworn enemy and a state sponsor of terrorism), in exchange for help freeing hostages in Beirut. The profits, it turned out, were going to support the Contras, despite an explicit ban by Congress. In the firestorm that erupted, shocking details emerged, raising the prospect of impeachment, and the American public confronted a scandal as momentous as it was confusing. At its center was President Ronald Reagan amid a swirl of questions about illegal wars, consorting with terrorists, and the abuse of presidential power. Yet, despite the enormity of the issues, the affair dropped from the public radar due to media overkill, years of legal wrangling, and a vigorous campaign to forestall another Watergate. As a result, many Americans failed to grasp the scandal’s full import. Through exhaustive use of declassified documents, previously unavailable investigative materials, and wide-ranging interviews, Malcolm Byrne revisits this largely forgotten and misrepresented episode. Placing the events in their historical and political context (notably the Cold War and a sharp partisan domestic divide), he explores what made the affair possible and meticulously relates how it unfolded—including clarifying minor myths about cakes, keys, bibles, diversion memos, and shredding parties. Iran-Contra demonstrates that, far from being a “junta” against the president, the affair could not have occurred without awareness and approval at the very top of the U.S. government. Byrne reveals an unmistakable pattern of dubious behavior—including potentially illegal conduct by the president, vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the CIA director and others—that formed the true core of the scandal. Given the lack of meaningful consequences for those involved, the volume raises critical questions about the ability of our current system of checks and balances to address presidential abuses of power, and about the possibility of similar outbreaks in the future.