OUT OF CONTROL: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection.

In the fall and winter of 1986 the American people learned that their government had secretly financed and directed a war in Central America at a time when it was barred from doing so.

The official investigations have concentrated on the authority for and the legality of this activity. But equally important are questions of who was actually fighting this war and what they were actually doing.

Out of Control supplies the answer. Leslie Cockburn has been following the trail of Lieut. Col. Oliver North and his secret army since 1984 as a producer for CBS News. In the course of innumerable trips to Central America and elsewhere, she found the foot soldiers of this secret army and the men who controlled them. They told of an arms pipeline running directly from the United States to the front lines of the contra war. They told of a contra leadership more interested in their own personal welfare than in fighting the war. They told of plots to provoke direct United States military intervention in Nicaragua. They told of secret meetings to plan assassinations. Most shockingly of all, members of the network laid out the intimate connection between the secret army and narcotics, and how the very same people had been simultaneously shipping arms, shipping drugs, and receiving subsidies of United States taxpayers' money.

The American people did not know about these activities. American government agencies did know, and strove to prevent the facts from being revealed.

Out of Control tells how people risked careers, liberty, and their lives to try to reveal the truth. Some of these people paid a bitter price, abandoned by superiors who found their knowledge inconvenient and embarrassing. At least one of them paid the ultimate price.

As the story moves between the jungles of Central America, the Miami underworld, and Washington, D.C., we learn for the first time the extraordinary details of the secret war in Nicaragua.

Recent works like John Prados's Presidents' Secret Wars ( LJ 2/15/87) and Gregory Treverton's Covert Action (Basic Books, 1987) show that "the secret government" is no aberration, as the report of the Iran-contra hearings suggested, but an entrenched, pervasive, institutionalized way of life. CBS news producer Cockburn provides even more evidence in this fascinating and troubling account of the covert war in Central America and its connection to the drug trade. She takes up where the Iran-contra hearings left off, or more precisely did not choose to tread, and traces the story of this ugly war from the mud and blood of the La Penca killings to the highest corridors of power in Washington. For specialists and informed readers. Henry Steck, SUNY Coll. at Cortland
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.