Comandos.

• Author: Barger, Brian

Comandos. Sam Dillon. Holt, $27. One of the big myths propagated by the Reagan administration was the urgency of winning the war in Nicaragua. For eight long years, the Reagan White House served the American public romanticized images of the Nicaraguan contras: freedom-loving democrats who would rise up and liberate their nation from the shackles of communist tyranny. They were, Reagan told us, defenders of human rights, "the moral equivalents of our founding fathers," and certainly worthy of a little CIA support.

To help drive the message home, the administration mounted a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign led by the now-convicted former secretary of state, Elliot Abrams. Its mission? To overcome persistent reports that the contras were little more than a cast of armed banditos. At the White House, the axiom perception is reality" dominated; that is, the administration believed that by altering public perception it could achieve the desired reality. Abrams quickly labeled any reports of abuse by the freedom fighters outright lies. The messengers of those subversive reports-the press and human rights groups-were, at best, willing dupes of what he called the "Sandinista lobby." At worst, they were themselves Sandinista spies.

The fallaciousness of this campaign has since been made clear, but for those with lingering doubts about the legacy of the contras, this book by Miami Herald reporter Sam Dillon should help put them to rest.

Dillon follows the the trail of Luis Fley, a contra field commander who went by the nom de guerre Comandante Jhonson [sic]. As the war wound down in early 1988, Jhonson was selected as chief investigator of a congressionally mandated review of the contra human rights program. But instead of pursuing the rampant rumors about contras raping, torturing, and murdering suspected Sandinistas or sympathizers, he focused on reports of rape, torture, and murder by contra commanders against their own troops.

Dillon deftly documents the frustrations-and ultimate futility-of Jhonson's efforts to bring some of the most brutal contras to justice. For the rebels it was a time of war, and what little justice prevailed was rooted in a military code of conduct adopted from the former regime's National Guard. Theirs was a system of tribunals where the judges and jury were rebel peers and where the maximum sentence was mere expulsion from the contras' ranks. Even so, Jhonson faced resistance at every step of his investigation, as...