Excerpt from James William Gibson Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (Hill and Wang, 1994)

Chapter 12, Paramilitarism as State Policy in the Reagan-Bush Era, p. 265-288

Ronald Reagan seemed to make the world move during his very first day as President. On January 20, 1981, at 12:05 p..m., a mere five minutes after he had been inaugurated, the Iranians released fifty-two American hostages who had been held prisoner since November 4, 1979. The long dark nights of ABC's television news show, "America Held Hostage,"[became Nightline] were over. It was as if a Hollywood movie had suddenly come alive, or, more accurately, as if a film production team had suddenly come to power to stage a presidency. Indeed, that's very close to what did happen. Although Ronald Reagan served as governor of California from 1967 to 1974, he spent most of his adult life as a film and television actor. That experience had vast formative impact upon him, and he treasured it. Even as President, the stories he told friends and staff members, journalists, domestic politicians, and visiting heads of state all had to do with Hollywood figures he had known or films he had seen.

In his eight years as President, Reagan spent 183 weekends at the Presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. Each time he saw at least two movies per weekend. Even when he was not at Camp David, the film projectors rolled. Early in Reagan's presidency, Treasury Secretary James Baker brought him an important briefing book to prepare for an appearance the next day at an international summit meeting of West European leaders. The next morning Baker found that the book had never been opened. When asked what happened, Reagan replied, "Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night."'

Reagan normally worked a roughly nine-to-five day when he was in the White House. Two to three hours each day were always blocked out as "personal staff time." During this period he handled correspondence-not political or governmental correspondence, but replies to personal letters. Reagan thus spent one-third of his working days as President answering his fan mail; there was no disjunction between his Hollywood career and his political performances. Those many film critics who characterize him as only a B-grade movie actor miss the point. As journalist Lou Cannon so aptly subtitles his book on the man, to Reagan being President was The Role of a Lifetime. Reagan took seriously the fantasies created by Hollywood. Westerns and war movies were particular favorites; they both provided ways of understanding the world and possible guides to how he should act on the political stage. During much of the 1950s Reagan had served as host to the Western television series, Death Valley Days, which featured a new tale of pioneer courage in the wilderness each week. During the Vietnam War, Reagan often remarked in his political speeches that it was unthinkable that the descendants of the pioneers who had so resoundingly defeated the Indians could not defeat the Indian-like Vietcong. After all, the United States had the technological capacity to "pave the whole country [Vietnam] and put parking strips on it and still be at home by Christmas."' During his first Presidential primary campaign in 1976, Reagan frequently repeated the applause-winning line, "Let us tell those who fought in that war $at we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a fear our government is afraid to win."' This idea-that the U.S. deliberately refused to win the Vietnam War-became part of the rationale for the massive military expenditures, amounting to two trillion dollars, during his administration. The next war would be fought with everything money could buy.

One of the weapons systems envisioned by the Reagan administration was the complicated network of antimissile missiles and space- based laser guns (powered by nuclear explosions) called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its proponents prophesied that the completed sys- tem would stop most, if not all, incoming Soviet missiles during a nuclear attack. Its opponents decried the SDI as a deadly illusion, an extraordinary boondoggle for the aerospace industry that would at best create a false sense of invulnerability and at worst scare the Soviets into launching a first-strike attack. (In mid-1993 the Pentagon revealed that the successful tests of SDI in the 1980s had been faked.)

Even though the SDI soon got the nickname Star Wars, an obvious allusion to George Lucas's Star Wars movies, news coverage and public debate centered almost exclusively on the practical merits and faults of the proposed system. The debt that the SDI notion owed to fantasy-to those science-fiction novels and movies in which laser weapons had supplanted conventional ones-was not seen as pertinent.' But President Reagan's mind worked in a different way. In 1985 he even offered to share the SDI technology with Soviet Premier Gorbachev, a move straight out of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).' In this sci-fi classic, a wise alien comes to earth to warn the earthlings that unless they abandon their bloody squabbles (the Cold War) earth will be destroyed by the aliens to protect the rest of the galaxy from human aggression. Instead of listening to the alien, the U.S. Army kills him. But as the movie ends, the alien is miraculously resurrected and again warns earthlings that "the universe is getting smaller every day. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. " Apparently Reagan frequently talked about the film and his hope that space invaders might be able to prompt American-Soviet cooperation. By sharing SDI technology with the Soviets, he hoped to make The Day the Earth Stood Still's vision of world peace come true.

The Western movie served as a large part of Reagan's cognitive framework for understanding the Vietnam War, and science fiction helped to inspire the SDI. Nor are these the only instances of his deriving policy from myth. The mythic world was Reagan's primary source of information and inspiration-and he knew that myth sometimes differed from what actually happened. At one of the Washington Press Club's Gridiron dinners, newspaper columnist Charles Mc- Dowell told Reagan how thrilled he had been one day in the late 1930s to walk into his hometown drugstore in Lexington, Virginia, and see Reagan and Eddie Albert in a booth. In McDowell's mind, Reagan had been there filming the 1938 comedy, Brother Rat. But the President insisted McDowell was mistaken: "I have something serious to tell you. I remember the others coming back from Lexington and telling me what it was like, but I simply wasn't there. " McDowell protested, proclaiming that he had been telling people this story all his life. Reagan then inquired about how many times McDowell had seen Brother Rat. Five or six, the newspaperman replied. In response the President commented that seeing the movie so many times "im- planted in your head that I was there. You believed it because you wanted to believe it. There's nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time. "' Reagan thus understood that he sometimes confused what happened in movies with what happened in real life, but he did not think such confusion necessarily caused problems. To the contrary, mythic truth was a higher order of truth to him. As he explained on another occasion, "My actor's instinct simply told me to speak the truth as I saw it and felt

After he retired from the Presidency Reagan reflected on the role of movies in shaping his military and foreign policy: "Maybe I had seen too many war movies, the heroics of which I sometimes confused with real life, but common sense told me something very essential -you can't have a fighting force without an esprit de corps. So one of my first priorities was to rebuild our military and, just as important, our military's morale."' Creating this esprit de corps, both in the military and among civilians, was Reagan's mission. Nothing else mattered. He was a shaman of sorts who wanted to restore and build upon America's fundamental creation myths through Presidential performances. But despite these ambitions, Reagan remained aloof and disengaged from the day-to-day tasks of governing. During many meetings he is reported* to have fallen asleep or, more commonly, to have doodled and told stories not germane to the subjects at hand. Memorandums on important policy matters requiring his decision were frequently reduced to one-page mini-memos, with policy options presented in a short, multiple-choice format. He had neither the analytical ability nor the interest to read and reflect more deeply.

Many cabinet members and White House staff soon learned how to play to Reagan's mythic mentality, or what General Colin Powell termed his hidden transistors. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was a particularly astute player, routinely showing up at White House meetings with animated cartoons or vivid graphics to make his points. In an effort to slow down those playing to Reagan's predilections, his old California crew-Attomey General Edwin Meese, White House Chief of Staff James Baker, and Michael K. Deaver, the man in charge of scheduling (and staging) all of Reagan's activities and meetings-adopted a policy in which at least one of them was required to be present during every Presidential meeting. According to Kenneth Duberstein, chief of staff following the public exposure of the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, for the Reagan White House to function effectively there had to be "a very strong stage manager- producer-director" and "very good technical men and sound men" at all times.' The White House was a movie set, a sound stage.

But it is a mistake to reduce the political culture of the 1980s to the story of one magic mythmaker and his retinue who seduced the innocent and trusting American public. The dreams of redeeming Vietnam and recovering from all the other disappointments and traumas of the late 1960s and 1970s were not Reagan's alone, but a widespread, collective response among the American people. Reagan astutely tapped into these dreams; his candidacy and Presidency provided a formal channel to translate them into practice.

In some ways Reagan's public performances resembled those of Stallone's Rambo. Both were so extreme that they often fell into humorous self-caricature. For example, in a moment of self-recog- nition after Rarnbo: First Blood, Part 2 was released in 1985 Reagan announced that he would send Rambo abroad to handle the next foreign emergency. Such Presidential antics tended to deflect attention away from other, less obvious forms of post-Vietnam warrior myth- ology that animated Reagan's officials and guided their actions.

Nowhere is this process of hidden myth finding its way into policy more evident than in the first major debate concerning the nature of terrorism and what the Reagan administration's approach toward terrorism should be. The debate centered on.joumalist Claire Sterling's book The Terror Network, published in 198 1. Sometime in the summer or fall of 1980, Sterling's publisher gave a copy of the galleys to General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. Haig had both a professional and personal interest in European and Middle Eastern terrorism. In June 1976, while Haig was serving as the commander of NATO forces, terrorists had tried to blow up his limousine near Mons, Belgium.

Haig was particularly impressed with Sterling's charge that most and perhaps all of the major European and Middle Eastern terrorists-from the Irish Republican Army to the German Red Army Faction to groups run by Abu Nidal and "Carlos"-were all part of one vast terror network or "family."'O Moreover, all of them were funded, trained, and controlled by either a "surrogate" or "satellite" of the Soviet KGB-meaning the intelligence service of virtually any Communist country. These countries were simply henchmen carrying out policies formulated and ordered by the top echelons of the KGB. Moreover, the Soviets and their surrogates were so successful that terrorists were said to be "mass-produced. " The terror network itself was so efficient that "the machinery practically runs itself, and any- body who wants to be a terrorist can get to be one."" The terrorist goal was nothing less than "the destruction of Western democracy." One group, the Italian Red Brigades, had even published a timetable for this coming debacle.

For Haig, Sterling's book made the world fall into place. The people who had tried to kill him in Mons were but the offspring of those whom he had fought his entire professional life; the old Cold War and the new war against terrorism were joined in one continuous struggle against monolithic Communism in all its evil forms. After Reagan was elected in November 1980, Haig was made secretary of state. On January 27, 1981, during his very first official press conference, Haig announced that international terrorism had become "rampant" and that the Soviet Union deliberately wanted to "foster, support, and expand" terrorist attacks against the West." Haig's speech was the first by a government official to accuse the Soviet Union of being the hidden force behind terrorism.

On March 1, 1981 The New York Tim-es Magazine published as its cover story Claire Sterling's "Terrorism: Tracing the International Network." Secretary of State Haig's speech was quoted extensively and referred to as outside support for Sterling's thesis that all the West European left-wing political groups (and intellectuals) were fronts for violent terrorists and that the Soviets themselves were ultimately behind the terror network.

Sterling's article, in turn, very much impressed the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William C. Casey. Casey had spent most of his life as a financier; he invented the concept of the tax shelter. But as a young man in World War 11, Casey had joined the predecessor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, and had parachuted into France to help the non-Communist French Resistance fight both the Germans and their other foe, the French Communist Party. For Casey, too, Sterling's book helped explain the war against terrorism as an extension of his World War 11 combat experience and of Cold War anti-Communism.

The week after the New York Times Magazine article appeared, Casey ordered the CIA staff to search their files in an effort to confirm or reject Sterling's the#is. Although Sterling had claimed that South Yemen was the site of "a kind of postgraduate school in international terrorism," regularly attended by members of all terrorist groups, one analyst noted that there was only one known case of an Italian Red Brigade member attending a training camp there. The analysts con- cluded that Sterling practiced rhetorical "linkmanship. " She had used the KGB's presence in South Yemen to assert a connection between the KGB and the Red Brigades when empirical evidence of the pres- ence of many Red Brigade members, much less their control by the KGB, simply was not there. 13

Later the national intelligence officer responsible for the Soviet Union reported that Sterling's thesis about the KGB's crucial role in promoting and controlling terrorist groups also did not match the evidence. Although it was clear that in the name of supporting "lib- eration struggles" Eastern Europe provided safe havens for many terrorists and sold them arms, there was no evidence that the KGB or East European intelligence agencies controlled them. By this time, though, Casey had the book version of The Terror Network and said to his analysts: "Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.""

What The Terror Network gave Haig, Casey, and its other readers inside and outside the Reagan administration was actually something more than a descriptive account of the rise of terrorist groups and a political analysis of their objectives in attacking the entire Western world: for $13.95 a reader bought a ticket to a titillating freak show. The biography of one Italian terrorist reads like a potboiler: "Born to one of the nation's great families and endowed with a bottomless bank account, condemned to a frozen childhood under a succession of Teutonic governesses, sexually impotent, intelligent but untalented, evidently driven by social guilt and God knows what private furies besides." Warped by his harsh frozen nannies, the perverse terrorist could only get an erection "when he turned up a phonograph to recordings of gunfire and rnartial music."" Another terrorist began life with an equally cold mother who imposed "harshly unbending ethical standards" that tormented him and "cut him off from other people his own age." But Sterling reports that "judging from the number of girls who jumped into bed with him during his few grown- up years of freedom, he overcame his childhood inhibitions.""

According to Sterling, the terrorists all have lots of women who want them. Poor "Norbert," yet another terrorist pervert, even made "lists of the girls he slept with and prescriptions he renewed for recurrent bouts of gonorrhea."" The famous "Carlos," the man who held the oil ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Producing States hostage in Vienna in 1974, was said to be "keeping at least two Paris flats and four Venezuelan girls, several if not all taking turns in his bed."" Not to be outdone, IRA members routinely went to brothels and massage parlors to collect money and who knows what other kinds of donations.

The collective portrait of terrorists Sterling creates is thus a familiar one-they are the very same enemies that Mack Bolan and his allies fight in The Executioner series and all the other pulps. In language very similar to that used by the German Freikorps in describing the left, Sterling even wrote about an Italian "mother cell whose proliferating offspring" are responsible "for a terrorist attack somewhere in the country once every three hours and four minutes.""

Terrorism is thus at once a cancer, a crime, and a sexual passion so powerful that it threatens to destroy all social, moral, and psychological bound- aries: everything will dissolve into complete chaos. Sterling's "real" terrorists are identical to the New War fictional villains; they are the living embodiment of the "evil infinite of human desire."

The psychological hook in Sterling's work is first this voyeuristic access to the terrorist life of pleasure unburdened by moral restraints fantasy land of infantile regression. Yet, just like the better pulp writers, Sterling creates a second "hook" by allowing the reader to simultaneously just say no to this seductive portrait and maintain self-control. And the message is clear: social order can triumph over the threatening chaos caused by uncontrolled desire, and good can triumph over evil-but only if the Soviet KGB is recognized as the origin of evil, and a holy war is unleashed against it.

Once the problem was redefined this way, readers such as Alexander Haig, William Casey, and Oliver North could readily "judge" The Terror Network as basically correct, in spite of problems in empirical evidence or the CIA analysts' criticisms of Sterling's "linkmanship." Lincoln Gordan, a past president of Johns Hopkins University hired by the CIA as an outside consultant to study Sterling's thesis, even found that part of her evidence on the Italian Red Brigades had come from a CIA-sponsored "disinformation" campaign in the Italian news media." His report did not matter either.

John Hinckley's assassination attempt against Reagan in 1981 was experienced by many members of the Reagan administration as confirmation of Sterling's assessment that the forces of chaos were be- coming more powerful every day. After all, in the words Sterling attributed to the Italian Red Brigades in her New York Times article, the ultimate objective of terrorists worldwide was "the supreme symbol of multinational imperialism, the United States."" And if the United States was the symbol of imperialism, then surely President Ronald Reagan was the symbol of the United States. An attack on his body was an attack on everybody. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward concluded that after the assassination attempt, "the Reagan presidency, from the inside, would never be the same. That sense of peril, that anyone or anything might strike-terrorists, a quick move by the Soviets, other adversaries-became a permanent, ingrained maxim of Administration policy.""

The New War against this sense of peril began almost immediately. European terrorists were one target, but they were by no means the main adversary. That honor was reserved for the Third World as Reagan carried through on his 1980 campaign promise to radically increase the level of U. S. intervention. The days of "self-imposed restraint" were now officially over. Central America-where the leftist Sandinista movement had come to power in Nicaragua, and where a civil war raged in El Salvador-drew the immediate attention of the Reagan administration.

In the spring of 1981, President Reagan signed a national security decision directive authorizing U.S. intelligence agencies to intervene in the forthcoming Salvadoran elections on behalf of Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democratic Party. Once the decision to intervene was made, the National Security Agency was told by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to use electronic surveillance to spy on both the far right-wing opposition party led by Roberto D'Au- buisson and on the leftist guerrillas fighting in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). NSA officials responded that they had no such monitoring devices in place, so instead a new U.S. Army command structure called the Special Operations Division got the assignment. Formally established in February 1981, SOD was responsible for coordinating and financing most of the Army's growing number of counterterrorist and covert-action units. These secret groups had come into existence in 1980 after the rescue mission that attempted to free American hostages in Iran failed. The units were established because of the Army's dissatisfaction with the raid and what the Army saw as chronic CIA incompetence and Congressionally mandated restrictions that destroyed the agency's ability to conduct operations secretly.

One of these units, the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), carried out covert reconnaissance, together with intelligence collecting and analysis, and provided logistic support for Delta Force and other commando outfit; ISA had its own hit teams as well. SOD further created two air-support units: the relatively overt Task Force 160, a helicopter squadron at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and a "black" group which operated as a commercial air-transport company called Sea- spray. Yellow Fruit-another SOD outfit-established commercial covers and covert financial channels for these operational units and also provided electronic security services to the SOD's shadow warriors.

For the intelligence mission in El Salvador, SOD leased a Beech King Air twin-engine prop plane and modified it with sophisticated electronic monitoring systems. The spy plane was sent to Honduras on a supposed commercial geological mapping operation. In January 1982, it began flights along, the Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua border areas. The Salvadoran government was given information on the location of FMLN guerrillas, while the Nicaraguan contras opposed to the Sandinistas got the take on the locations of Sandinista military units.

The success of this mission in turn prompted further SOD involvement in Central America. In 1982 the ISA and Yellow Fruit opened up scores of businesses, bank accounts, and safe houses and essentially created a secret infrastructure to support large-scale para- military operations. Anii-these covert activities were bolstered by new official policies. Reagan signed a National Security directive (called a "finding") authorizing the CIA to spend $19 million organizing and training the contras. His own National Security Council staff became increasingly active in organizing the campaign against Nicaragua.

But in the fall of 1982 an obstacle developed. Congress passed the first Boland Amendment, prohibiting both the U.S. military and the CIA from spending tax dollars "for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua." The Reagan administration's response to this Congressional challenge was twofold. First, in March 1983 Reagan escalated his rhetorical attacks on Communism, calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Early on in his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, Reagan said, "We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin."" Reagan, a professed believer in the coming of Armageddon in our time, meant what he said- "Communist" countries such as Nicaragua were, to his mind, literally the minions of the devil. Second, the Reagan administration further mobilized its covert action groups. Robert McFarlane of the National Security Council helped organize Operation Tea Kettle, in which Israel shipped thou- sands of tons of weapons and ammunition captured from PLO bases in Lebanon to the contras in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. Yellow Fruit operatives trained Nicaraguans in California and Florida to fly light planes for future bombing attacks. The Air Force in turn declared three planes belonging to the New York Air National Guard that were suitable for these missions to be surplus and therefore of no financial value. They were then transferred to the CIA and the CIA gave them to the contras. SOD even bought a huge ship, a Norwegian grain hauler, to use as a floating base for launching commando attacks.

In September 1983 Reagan signed a new finding, this time declaring that U.S. covert operations were not intended to overthrow the Sandinistas but only to make them negotiate a settlement with their contra opponents. Congress did not renew the Boland Amendment; instead, it appropriated $24 million to fund the contras in 1984. With this legal backing, the CIA then asked the military for $12 million in armaments for the war against Nicaragua; Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger issued a directive to the armed services ordering them to assist the CIA "in accordance with the law. 1114 The future looked good.

But then, yet another major problem emerged. It had begun in the U.S. Army's Yellow Fruit unit. Millions had been spent with little accountability. Planes, boats, and luxury cars had been bought. There had been European junkets, first-class hotels and gourmet meals, and even plain bags full of cash handed out for who knew what. It also emerged that Yellow Fruit had been asked by the head of SOD to bug the hotel rooms and bathrooms at a forthcoming reunion and convention of CIA and Army paramilitary operatives. This information was to be used to give the commander of SOD leverage in future bureaucratic quarrels.

In late 1982 an Army officer assigned to approve all Yellow Fruit expenses reported these violations to higher authorities. The vice chief of staff of the Army, General Maxwell Thurman, pulled the plug on Yellow Fruit. Soon the mainstream Army leadership declared a halt to most SOD covert operations. Thus by the end of 1983, just as the Reagan administration was getting Congressional approval for increased covert action against Nicaragua, the principal component of its paramilitary apparatus was shut down.

The autumn of 1983 also saw a dramatic escalation of the Reagan administration's New War against international peril. The catalytic event occurred on October 23, when a Mercedes cargo truck loaded with twelve tons of explosives crashed into the U. S. Marine compound in Beirut, Lebanon. Two hundred and forty-one soldiers died in the explosion. Subsequent investigations revealed that the attack was sponsored by Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim organiza- tion. Hezbollah had several factions, including the Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Amal, two groups that had been responsible for the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983.

Surely the "defeat" in Lebanon triggered the invasion of Grenada two days later, on October 25, 1983. President Reagan claimed that the invasion was necessary to rescue U.S. medical students supposedly endangered by the recent coup, even though coup leaders had met with U.S. embassy officials and medical school officials and guaranteed the safety of the students and the chancellor of the medical school. In both private communications to the White House and in public announcements the leaders had confirmed that the students were not in danger. Nevertheless, Grenada was invaded. Interestingly, many medical students were not "rescued" until the second, third, and fourth days of the invasion-more than enough time for them to have been executed if the Grenada regime had had hostile intentions. American military maps did not even show the locations of many medical school dorms and facilities."

But this contradiction did not matter to most Americans. Public opinion polls showed enormous support (71%) for the invasion, and gave Reagan his highest overall approval ratings (63%) since April 1981, when he was recovering from Hinckley's bullet." Victory in Grenada immediately displaced the pain and bad symbolism of the catastrophe in Lebanon: the news media could agree with the President's statement that "America is back." A leftist government was overthrown, stopping both the completion of "runways for Soviet bombers" and potential "training camps for terrorists." As Reagan explained in his October 28 address to the nation: "The events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart, are closely related. Not only has Moscow assisted and encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists."" Thus the invasion was justified as a war against Moscow and its minions; Communism was still the ultimate source of evil in the world. The struggle against this evil would continue despite the Marine casualties in Lebanon.

Indeed, in late 1983 and 1984 counterterrorism and other forms of warfare against America's enemies became an obsession of sorts dominating government and media discussion. A new interdepartmental coordinating body was formed called the Terrorist Incident Working Group. At the White House, a young Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North was assigned to the National Security Council. North, a man of prodigious energy, soon became responsible for most counterterrorist efforts; he played a major role drafting National Security Decision Directive 138, issued in 1984, which declared that "states that use or support terrorism cannot be allowed to do so without consequences."

In this martial atmosphere, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up the pace of its attacks against Nicaragua. The agency had begun bombing and strafing attacks from light planes and fast gunboats armed with 25mm cannons during the fall of 1983. (By March 1984, over forty such missions had been conducted.) In January the CIA seriously escalated the level of violence by having its contract operatives mine three Nicaraguan harbors with seventy-five "fire- cracker" mines containing charges of up to three hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosives. Nicaraguan trade, both importing and ex- porting, came to a halt.

Several prominent senators, among them Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Democrat Samuel Cohen of Maine, expressed outrage at the CIA's actions. Planting mines, in their assessment, was an overt act of war, and Congress subsequently refused to appropriate an additional $21 million for the contras. President Reagan delivered a national address on Central America on May 9 in an effort to rally support for the contras. He declared that they were the moral equal of our Founding Fathers," modem "freedom fighters" struggling against "a Communist reign of terror."" But despite this invocation of the American creation myth, public opinion remained divided. In October 1984, the House and the Senate passed a new, more restrictive version of the Boland Amendment prohibiting any direct or indirect expenditure of funds for assistance to the contras or attacks on Nicaragua by the "CIA, Department of Defense or any other agency or entity involved in intelligence activities.""

The Reagan administration had earlier begun preparations to deal with the possibility of a Congressional shutdown of funding. In March, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and CIA Director William Casey began asking other countries to secretly fund the contras. Israel-McFarlane's first choice-refused. On the other hand, Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, agreed to transfer 31 million a month (later increased to 32 million a month) to a secret bank account in the Grand Cayman Islands set up by Yellow Fruit operatives. The Sultan of Brunei gave $10 million. The Honduran government agreed to pass along millions in military equipment to the contras, in exchange ;or increased U.S. military and economic assistance. "

Retired Major General John Singlaub, the former head of the Stud- ies and Observation Group in Vietnam and at the time a leader of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), made overtures to both Taiwan and South Korea for $5 million apiece." These two countries were the primary backers of WACL.' Singlaub first cleared his plan for soliciting with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council staff member in charge of the secret aid program to keep the contras together "body and soul," as President Reagan said." Eventually Singlaub's requests generated millions. The retired general also worked his own domestic network for contributions. The contras' Lady Ellen helicopter (the star of the 1985 Soldier offortune convention) was bought with $65,000 raised by Singlaub from Mary Ellen Garwood of Austin, Texas." Similarly, Soldier of Fortune solicited money and supplies, such as packs aniuniforms, from its middle- and working-class subscribers.

Outright donations, however, were only one source of funding for the contras. They also received millions of dollars from profits made by paramilitary operatives conducting other covert operations. Ac- cording to the version of events that would become most widely accepted in the late 1980s, National Security Council operatives began to sell weapons to Iran in 1985. It was secret business. The return of the U.S. embassy hostages upon Reagan's inauguration had not brought peace with Iran and the two countries still did not have diplomatic relations. Moreover, in the spring of 1983, the United States had launched Operation Staunch, a program to persuade all nations to refuse to sell arms to Iran on the grounds that it sponsored terrorism abroad.

Nevertheless, in the early winter months of 1986 Reagan administration officials approved plans for shipping 4,000 TOW missiles and other munitions and spare parts to Iran. North and his associates decided to price these munitions far above their actual replacement costs, providing a considerable profit to be used in buying weapons by for the Nicaraguan contras. The diversion plan was approved by officials at least as high as North's new boss, Admiral John Poindexter (who had replaced McFarlane as National Security Advisor), and CIA Director Casey.

Some investigative reporters contend that there were other covert business deals that funded the contras. There is some evidence that American government officials made deals with cocaine smugglers in exchange for financial aid to the contras. For example, in November 1991 Carlos Lehder Rivas, a former leader of the Medellin drug cartel, testified as a U.S. government witness in the trial of Panama's former dictator, General Manuel Antonio Noriega. Lehder, already serving a sentence in a U.S. federal prison, said during cross- examination that to the best of his recollection "there was some contribution to the contra anti-Communist movement." Upon further questioning from Noriega's chief counsel, Frank Rubino, Lehder said that the Medellin cartel donated about $10 million to the contras. When asked if this money could have been payment for use of the air strips owned by a man named John Hull in northern Costa Rica, Lehder saif that cocaine shipments "could have been, yes" sent to Hull's ranch before moving further northward.

Hull's 5,000-acre ranch with its six runways was a staging base for the contras. Hull was a CIA contract agent paid to provide security to the contra supply operation from 1982 to 1986. Oliver North paid him an additional $10,000 a month in 1984 and 1985, the years when the most stringent Boland Amendment was in effect. From 1986 to 1989, Senator John Kerry's subcommittee on terrorism and narcoties investigated reports of a connection between the contra resupply network and drug smuggling. Five witnesses testified that John Hull was involved in the narcotics traffic.

Although questions remain about the role of the drug trade in funding the contras, much is known about the resupply operation. Oliver North's network was staffed at the higher levels with "retired" career-soldier agents. At the top was former Major General Richard Secord, who had a long career in U.S. Air Force special operations. In the spring of 1980, after the first attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran (Operation Ricebowl) failed, Secord became exec- utive officer for planning and managing a much larger second mission code-named Snow Bird. But President Jimmy Carter never gave the order for the mission and Snow Bird personnel became the cadre for the units in the Army's SOD as well as for covert-action groups in the other armed services. In 1982, Secord became commander of Operation Tea Kettle, the secret shipment of weapons from Lebanon to the contras. That same year Secord was investigated by the Justice Department for his role in awarding contracts to an air freight firm involved in shipping arms to Egypt that had bilked the U.S. government out of 88 million in overcharges-the firm had been owned by former CIA agents. Although Secord was not charged with any crime, he chose to retire in May 1983, and he soon went into business with several recent retirees from special operations.

In time Secord came to Oliver North's attention and was awarded a near monopoly for resupplying the contras. The operation became known as the Enterprise. According to a Congressional investigation, the firm took in at least $48 million in revenues and over $6.6 million in profits in the mid-1980s.' There seems to have been a tacit quid- pro-quo in this lucrative arrangement. At one point when the Enterprise was being set up, Secord said to CIA Director William Casey, "Mr. Director, if and when you get your hunting license back, whatever assets we are creating right now are yours."'

Thus at one level the Enterprise was a privately run, privately funded business venture, while at another it functioned as an arm of the U.S. government that operated outside the laws and regulations that supposedly regulate government action in a constitutional democracy. This duality characterizes the fundamental structure of paramilitary operations, a synthesis of privateers' tactics and politicians' agendas.

While the Enterprise served as the primary means for funding and supplying the contras, other organizations were also involved. In addition to John Singlaub's WACL, there was the southern-based Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) led by Tom Posey, which recruited volunteers for missions against Nicaragua. In the promotional literature distributed at the Soldier of Fortune conventions, CMA said it was better to fight Communism in Nicaragua than in Mexico or inside the United States; they felt strongly that American interests were being especially threatened in Central America. In September 1984, CMA received considerable national press coverage when one of its helicopters was shot down during a raid against Nicaragua and two 66 volunteer" pilots killed. Although CMA did sometimes send people on ground patrols inside Nicaragua, in this instance CMA was only a cover for the CIA. The agency had borrowed a Hughes 50OMD helicopter from the U.S. Army and hired two contract pilots for the mission.

Aside from these organized efforts, there were also some off-the-street contract operatives and volunteers working to support the contras. Sam Hall and Dr. John McClure were not isolated cases; as political scientist Neil Livingstone reports, Central America at the time was overrun by "flakes purporting to be assassins or counter- terrorist specialists."' The narcissistic fantasies and real limitations of such men have been previously noted. But ironically, these men's emotional instability made them particularly useful to the Enterprise, the CIA, and other major players. Sam Hall and Dr. John McClure belong to a category of operatives the former CIA agent David MacMichael calls "disposable assets." As author Gary Sick, a former NSC officer, learned when he interviewed MacMichael, the recruiting of such assets was conscious CIA policy: "The agency looks for these freelancers at small community airports and gun ranges-places where men go to escape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage."" Both paramilitary romanticism and emotional instability are useful to those who manage covert action because these qualities discredit the operatives if they ever go public and tell their tales. As another former case officer explains, "The agency likes things that way . . .The wilder and crazier and sillier the story, the more they like it. The agency indulges people to come up with that. It's the best defense."'

On October 5, 1986, the Sandinistas shot down a C-123 cargo plane belonging to the Enterprise. Only one crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, survived the attack. Hasenfus was captured and confessed that he thought he was working on a CIA operation, just as he had over a decade before in Laos. After all, he was flying in the very same type of aircraft and was working with many of the same men (Secord had run the covert air war over Laos). The Enterprise ended their contra resupply program immediately. Seven aircraft were ritually destroyed by the CIA in a remarkable ceremony.- "First they had the little air force flown tw a remote airfield. Then an enormous crater was dug with bulldozers. The planes were pushed into the pit, covered with explosives, and blown up. The remaining wreckage was saturated with fuel and then cremated. The fire burned for days."'

Unlike such rituals in New War movies and novels, the consecration of the planes through cleansing fire did not completely erase the 66 stain" of the Enterprise. Back in Washington, Oliver North began shredding documents and preparing his own personal blood sacrifice: "William Casey, the director of the CIA, had told me to 'shut it down and clean it up.' It was clear that somebody's head would have to roll, and I was prepared to be the victim. Offering me up as apolitical scapegoat was part of the plan, although Casey believed there would be others.

In July 1987 the Senate and House of Representatives began televised hearings on the Iran-Contra affair. Oliver North testified for one week, during which he received 150,000 telegrams of support. By July 23, his defense fund had received $1,276,000 in contributions-a figure that grew to $3. 1 million by early December. When the National Enquirer ran a "900" number telephone poll asking readers, "Would you vote for Oliver North for President9l" they answered yes by a 15-to-I margin." Although at the peak of his popularity North got only a 45% approval rating for his actions -the same percentage disapproved of him-his supporters were fervent." "Ollie-mania" ruled the day.

It was as if a mythical hero of New War fiction had stepped off the screen into real life. By the time of the hearings, the images and stories of the fictional New War had been circulating for several years. And North appeared to be on trial for being a man who, like Rambo and Dirty Harry and their whole band of brothers, pointed the way out of defeat in Vietnam toward a healing victory in Central America. Moreover, he seemed unfairly accused, even ahead of his time; after all, in October 1986 Congress had appropriated $100 million for the contras, the highest sum yet. In New War terms, North was a man of action whose only crime was that he ignored the "self-imposed restraints" created by politicians and government bureaucrats. In fact, North publicly accounted for his 1973 clinical depression and hospitalization by blaming the political leaders who "kept putting restraints on how we could respond.

Like the fictional New War heroes, North became known as a man who personally fought duels with the evil ones. One former colleague at the National Security Council said, "Ollie took an oath to hunt and bring to trial the Shiite terrorist who was responsible for the bombing of the Marine Headquarters."" At one point during his televised testimony, the Congressional panel inquired about the Enterprise's installation of a security system in North's home. In response, North claimed that he had been threatened by Abu Nidal, whom he described as the "principal, foremost assassin in the world today" and simply wanted to protect his family. But as for himself, North said, "I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world. There's an even deal for him.

North also shared one other important characteristic with the mythical heroes of the 1980s-an obsessive concern with boundaries. As a young officer .he had asked to be "assigned to a forward-deployed unit at the edge of the empire."' In the mid- 1980s North feared that the empire was shrinking. As Patrick Buchanan recalls, "Late one night when Ollie and I were laboring away on an address for the President on Central America, he mused that if we lose this war, 'I may one day be leading young Marines into battle at Gila Bend (Arizona).’

The Sandinistas even threatened the boundaries of his body. In his autobiography, North writes about Nora Astorga, a Sandinista revolutionary who lured a Sornoza-regime general to her bedroom where commandos killed him. Later she became the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States. The Reagan administration, how- ever, refused to accept her. North gleefully notes that several liberal senators nervously laughed about her role in the revolution, since "Nora Astorga was said to be on very close terms" with them.'

This tremendous fear of "enemies" who threatened to penetrate national, cultural, and even bodily boundaries motivated much of American foreign and domestic policy during the 1980s. The notion that the Sandinistas or the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador would somehow march north and invade the United States was not just an idea peculiar to John Milius's film Red Dawn. Reagan first popularized the idea in his 1983 4dress to Congress on Central America: "El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington, where we're gathered tonight."

Over at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Harold W. Ezell, the commissioner for the western United States, similarly emphasized the necessity of maintaining boundaries against dangerous, polluting foreign elements. In his interview with Soldier of Fortune Ezell sounded the alarm-. "I believe it is the borders that are out of control. The borders that are allowing the drugs, the illegal aliens, terrorists, whatever, to come in . . . and most of them are illiterate and most of them are bringing diseases with them and they're bringing all of the problems found in a Third World country."' Disease, terrorism, drug abuse, and illiteracy were thus condensed into Ezell's nightmare vision of alien forces on the attack. Only if American boundaries were maintained could all these evils be controlled.

North was only the most visible symbol of a whole pyramid of warriors dedicated to maintaining these cultural and national boundaries. At the top were the men of Navy SEAL Team 6, a counterterror team who called themselves The Jedi, after the spiritual fighters in George Lucas's Star Wars films. Neil Livingstone, in his The Cult of Counterterrorism, speaks of the men of SEAL Team 6 as "gods come to earth in the likeness of men." In a world full of terrorists, Livingstone wrote, SEAL Team 6 and the other elite counterterror units "may be all that stands between us and the abyss.""

Below the SEALs and their immediate kin in the pyramid came paramilitary units such as police Special Weapon and Tactics teams. Originally formed in response to such events as the Watts riots in 1965 and the Symbionese Liberation Army attacks in 1974, by the mid-1980s SWAT teams had been established in virtually every local police, sheriff's department, and state police organization in the country. Even small towns had squads equipped with M16s and H&K 9mm submachine guns fitted with noise suppressors, along with--sniper rifles and other military hardware. Magazines such as S.WA.T. and Police Marksman made large-scale combat on American soil seem imminent while at the same time showing how the police could equip themselves to fight this war and win.

Moreover, many local police units had been integrated into state, regional, and national command-and-control "counterterror" net- works. For example, in the 1980s the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)-formally responsible for civil defense projects like bomb shelters-became an intelligence organization that coordinated local police departments in war games which involved sweeping arrests, mass imprisonment, and/or combat against political dissidents, potential terrorists (such as environmentalists), and illegal aliens. '

The National Guard formed the third tier of the pyramid. By 1985 National Guard units that had formerly trained at military bases for one weekend a month and a couple of weeks in the summer were being redeployed for actual paramilitary operations like the "war on drugs." In some states, National Guard helicopters transported joint Guard and police teams into marijuana-growing areas first identified by photograp4., taken from U-2 spy planes.' On other occasions, National Guard construction brigades built roads and buildings for use by Border Patrol agents. And sometimes they patrolled border areas themselves in search of drug smugglers and illegal aliens.'

The National Guard became such an integral part of both the Pentagon's plans for war abroad and for what the Reagan administration called domestic defense that a new kind of guard unit called the state reserve militia or state guard was invented. In theory these state guards would perform the functions of National Guard units in the event that the National Guard was mobilized and sent abroad. But whereas National Guard units were organized in a variety of ways to fulfill different tasks, almost all state guard units were organized as "military police" units, with each county having its own battalion or company. Part of a FEMA plan to enforce martial law, the state guard units were in charge of organizing and training an even larger paramilitary force once a domestic "emergency" had been declared. Open to anyone of "good moral character" between the ages of eighteen and sixty, these state guards frequently recruited new members at gun shows and the annual Soldier of Fortune convention.

Several private militia units (in addition to the ultraright groups discussed earlier) made up the fourth tier. These units also recruited at gun shows. Civilian Military Assistance led its own patrols along the Arizona border. In Texas, a veteran of two tours in Vietnam and mercenary service in the Rhodesian Light Infantry formed the Texas Reserve Militia-and even equipped it with assault rifles of his own design and manufacture.' Although both the CMA and TRM border patrols were halted under government pressure in the mid-eighties, the existence of such private groups indicates the great appeal of paramilitary culture's redemptive warrior hero and the extreme sense of American vulnerability. It should be stressed that the number of terrorist incidents on American soil in the early and mid 1980s was tiny. A citizen was 124 times more likely to choke to death while eating than to be killed in a terrorist attack-a mere sandwich was a far more perilous foe than the evil ones.

Thus, when Oliver North testified in July 1987 he was speaking to a nation saturated with New War fantasies and actual political- military programs, both of which made war and. the warrior essential to America's salvation and survival. New War myths had already framed political leaders' view of the world, and "real" world events -like the Marines' deaths in Lebanon and the invasion of Grenada-had already become departure points for action-adventure movies such as Death Before Dishonor (1987) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986) that had happy endings with clear American victories. North's great popularity was a public celebration of this merger between myth and policy-the New War's dream come true. And the public excitement over North was sufficient to dissuade both the Senate and the news media from a more rigorous investigation of U.S. covert action in Iran and Central America. It was not even an issue in the 1988 election campaign between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.

movies such as Death Before Dishonor (1987) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986) that had happy endings with clear American victories. North's great popularity was a public celebration of this merger between myth and policy-the New War's dream come true. And the public ex- citement over North was sufficient to dissuade both the Senate and the news media from a more rigorous investigation of U.S. covert action in Iran and Central America. It was not even an issue in the 1988 election campaign between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.