What Lies Ahead: A Deepening U.S. Commitment – 3 November 1986
CIA-RDP88B00443R002004490006-0

Newsweek
The Secret World of New America’s Mercenaries
The Private War: Heroes and Zeroes
100 million aid package: the Reagan administration’s war on the Sandinistas stops being a private one and turns into a semicovert operation of the U.S. government. John Barry, NEWSWEEK’s national-security correspondent, reports on how the CIA plans to wage the stepped-up struggle:
The White House has had two years to map its campaign, and administration sources say U.S. plans are well advanced. Training the contras will be an elaborate, open-ended project—one that officials expect will cost far more than the $100 million currently allocated. Officials also expect the war to cost some American lives—but they insist the risks to U.S. personnel will be minimal.
“The good ole boys aboard [Hasenfus’s] C-123 were doing a fine job,” said one Air Force officer cheerfully. “But you wouldn’t exactly call them the cream of the crop, would you?” Some of the highlights of the administration’s plan:
Initially, most airdrops of supplies to contras inside Nicaragua will have to be done by U.S. crews, probably from the Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing, headquartered at Hurlburt Air Force Base in northern Florida. The wing specializes in high-risk infiltration and exfiltration.
In the long run, the CIA hopes the contras’ own pilots can be trained to do the drops. Sources insist that U.S. Special Forces won’t be needed on the ground in Nicaragua.
There’s not enough money to bring the contras to Fort Bragg, so the rebels will most likely be trained in Guatemala by U.S. forces; officers and NCOs will be flown to the United States for extra instruction. The first contras picked for training are the 12,000 troops now in the Las Vegas salient on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. They will be split into teams of about 500, with Spanish-speaking Green Berets as instructors. At the moment, says one source, there are only a few dozen Green Berets fluent in Spanish, but administration sources believe they’ll be able to cope.
The Navy, sources hint, may also be involved in resupply operations along Nicaragua’s coast. That suggests that the strategy mapped out for the contras includes seizing a chunk of Miskito territory in the northeast. One source conceded that the CIA’s plan does have “territorial elements.”
Some branches of the administration are more gung-ho than others. CIA Director William Casey and Elliott Abrams at the State Department seem to be two of the zealots. “Casey really is a throwback to the early days of the CIA,” said one source. “Things were played pretty rough back then, and Casey’s basic drive is to revive those good times.” Casey sees the contra-training operation as a field test of the agency’s revived operational capabilities.
The Joint Chiefs are privately far less optimistic about the U.S. foray into Central America. Haunted by the Vietnam syndrome, they worry about public support for any adventure in Central America. They also have doubts about the contras’ military capabilities. Finally, the chiefs believe the Soviets are using Central America as a cheap way to distract Washington from what should be, in their view, the primary U.S. strategic concerns in Western Europe.
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