Letters

From the April 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Contra-dictions

Glenn Garvin's "Hooked on Fantasies" (January) hit the mark. Besides being one of the few serious journalists to write objectively about the contras, he is almost certainly the one who has been most painstaking in his research on the whole Central American scene from the early 1980s to the present. The history of that period has been so distorted by Sandinista apologists that it will remain for another generation of historians to separate fact from fiction. Garvin's writings on the subject will be a good place to start.

Gary Webb's Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Cocaine Explosion, apart from being pure poppycock, has served a sinister purpose. It launched another internal investigation within the CIA of the type that usually results in some poor middle-level chief of station losing his job. In this case, however, nearly all of the station and base chiefs who served in Central America during this period had already been hounded out of the agency by other liberal-inspired witch hunts of one kind or another. The real sin of these officers was to offend congressional liberals and their supporters by running successful programs which forced fair elections in Nicaragua that the Sandinistas could not win.

Their reward for this service has been humiliation and early retirement. Enough already.

James L. Adkins
Retired CIA Officer
Huntington, WV