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

For the last two years, the author has been investigating the secret funding of the Contras by the White House. Here, she identifies the network of National Security Council staff (led by Colonel Oliver North), CIA operatives and ex-agents who set up this illegal support system, after the passage of the Boland Amendment in October 1984 made it illegal for the US government to give direct and indirect aid to the Contras. There is a detailed account of how mercenaries were recruited from all over the world and sent to CIA-run training bases in Costa Rica; how money was obtained through various means, ranging from the Iran arms deal to an arrangement with cocaine smugglers bringing drugs into Florida in return for quarterly payments into Contra bank accounts; how guns were procured, flown to US-controlled military bases in Central America, and then delivered into the hands of the Contras. The author, a British journalist, has worked for CBS News since 1978.

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.