The Shadow Warrior.

• Author: Parry, Robert

Memoirs of the Man the White House Said Didn't Exist

It was to be one of the last flights of Oliver North's little air force of broken-down planes and burnt-out pilots. After skirting Nicaragua's west coast, the C-123 cargo plane sliced inland over Costa Rica's rugged jungles and up into Nicaragua. There, on October 5, 1986, a sleepy Sunday morning, a teenage Sandinista draftee aimed a surface-to-air missile at the plane, fired, and watched mesmerized as the missile found its target. As the doomed plane spun wildly out of control, an umemployed Wisconsin construction worker and onetime CIA cargo handler named Eugene Hasenfus, struggled to open cargo door, pushed himself clear, and parachuted safely to earth, the only survivor of the four-person crew.

One of the first names out of Hasenfus's mouth when he was brought before the international press in Managua three days later was "Max Gomez." Hasenfus identified "Gomez" as the CIA man running the secret air force from El Salvador and a personal associate of Vice President George Bush. Hasenfus's claims, of course, were heatedly denied by the White House, but the alleged roles of the CIA and Bush in North's contra operation remain to this day two of the most frustrating loose ends of the Iran-contra scandal.

A key to unlocking those mysteries would be "Max Gomez," whose real name, it turned out, is Felix Rodriguez, if only this Cuban exile and former CIA officer ever really told his story. In this autobiography (*1), Rodriguez offers much less than that. The book, modestly subtitled "The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles," sticks to the now familiar refrain of implausible ignorance that Bush and his advisers have been reciting for three years. In pulp-novel style, the book gives Rodriguez's personal recollection of his CIA adventures, including the execution of Ernesto "Che" Guevara after the legendary Latin revolutionary was captured in Bolivia in 1967. Other chapters are devoted to his unsuccessful efforts to organize uprisings against Castro--which were to coincide with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion--and his later work with the CIA in Vietnam.

The problem with the Iran-contra affair in general--and Bush's participation in particular--is that the truth seems to have gotten so wrapped up in plausible deniability that neither the press nor Congress has had the patience to sort out the facts. Simply by stone-walling and delaying, the administration guaranteed that the public would quickly grow bored and the story would disappear from the front pages. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the Sandinista soldier's lucky aim, the American people might have been kept happily ignorant for years about how the nation's foreign policy was really being run during the Reagan era.

Even after the Hasenfus shootdown, the Reagan administration, grown cocky from its long and easy manipulation of the press, continued to issue glaringly false stories. In a classic display of the administration's arrogance, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams even disputed the existence of "Max Gomez." On a CNN cable news show, Abrams told columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak that "I can say first of all there's no Max Gomez." It was one of those narrowly constructed statements that must have thrilled Abrams, who has embraced deceit like a kind of secular religion. As a measure of how easily the press could be gulled, however, the two battle-tested columnists swallowed Abrams's story whole. "I've seen a lot of cover-ups in this town, Rowland," Novak sagely noted. "But this doesn't look like a cover-up, and it doesn't because there's no equivocation. . . . The so-called Max Gomez, the CIA operative, supposedly hired by the CIA or Vice President Bush, doesn't even exist."

But "Max Gomez"--or Felix Rodriguez--did exist. He was an anti-Castro Cuban exile, a dedicated veteran of the CIA's globe-straddling wars against communism, and a man who indeed had met personally with George Bush. Rodriguez was also close friends with Donald Gregg, who had been one of his CIA superiors in Vietnam and then was Vice President Bush's national security adviser. Gregg had helped place Rodriguez in El Salvador and talked to him frequently by phone while the Cuban exile was managing the air resupply operation. But in the...