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When a federal judge dropped all criminal charges last month against Oliver L. North, the central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, the protracted Contra drama seemed finally to be nearing its epilogue, more than a decade after it first arose amid the languid countryside of northern Nicaragua.
As Sam Dillon tells in his new book "Comandos," North's clandestine finance-and-supply network-source of a headline-grabbing constitutional conflict in Washington-essentially conformed to the Contra framework already well-established by the Central Intelligence Agency, although the quality of materiel and coordination deteriorated somewhat under the Marine lieutenant colonel's square-jawed stewardship.
For most American readers, the war that ravaged Nicaragua during the 1980s has likely receded into distant memory, a Cold War relic clouded in the numbing news mass of so much that has come to pass worldwide since that Washington-sponsored force formally laid down its arms last year. Still, many will recall stern warnings of fatigue-garbed Communists trudging north toward Texas from the "Marxist" enclave in Managua; or the uproar that ensued when it became known that North and his cohorts had brokered arms sales to Iran in an attempt to generate back-door funding for the proxy bush militia in Central America. Others may vaguely recollect hints of darker goings-on: suggestions of drug-running, illicit arms-trading, summary executions and other acts incongruous with the "moral equivalent of our founding fathers" appellation bestowed upon these irregular troops by a certain ex-President.
In Nicaragua, where the war exacted a cataclysmic toll-30,000-plus dead in a nation of perhaps 3 million; 35,000 others left widowed, orphaned or disabled; a ravaged economy, and an intractable legacy of political and social divisions-the hostilities cannot be conveniently filed away. The people of that war-weary nation did indeed "cry uncle," as Ronald Reagan vowed.
In recent months, so-called Recontras have even taken up rebellion anew, disillusioned with the pro-Washington government of Violeta Chamorro, the matronly aristocrat who upset Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista standard-bearer, in the seminal elections of February, 1990. A number of ex-Contras, including Enrique Bermudez, the former National Guard colonel anointed by the CIA as caesar of the Contra ranks, have been gunned down upon their return to their homeland.
In his richly detailed account, Dillon, a staff writer for the Miami Herald who covered the...