Disposable Patriot: Revelations of a Soldier in America's Secret Wars

by Jack Terrell, Ron Martz

Surviving two assassination attempts, Terrell lived to reveal an inside story of how the CIA & other intelligence agencies are out of control, plotting against the president, defying federal court orders & pursuing their own reprehensible military agenda. His story reads like a novel, with a fascinating mix of odd characters & complicated subplots involving assassination plans, gunrunning & drug dealing. Disposable Patriot is written from ground zero, not by a journalist who merely reviewed public documents, but by a combatant in a zone reeking with the smell of corruption & death. Disposable Patriot is as much a personal tragedy, a story of lost innocence, as it's an adventure story. Terrell went to Central America to fight communists & came back to wage war against Oliver North. A rugged veteran of America's dirty little wars, he provides a thrilling account of how the intelligence community recruits, programs, trains, uses & disposes of civilians in backchannel dirty-work which is considered too politically sensitive for ordinary government operatives to handle. In the mid-80's he hooked up with an Alabama-based paramilitary group called Civilian Military Assistance, which was formed with the encouragement of the Reagan Administration, to provide illegal assistance to the Contras. CMA attracted a motley crew of misfits, loners & good old boys, either in search of adventure or determined to combat mid-life crisis. He was tapped by Donald Fortier, the number three man at the National Security Council, who needed a plant within the CMA to act as its eyes & ears in Central America. He was an essential part of Oliver North's campaign in Honduras & Nicaragua, who with Fortier's assistance, acted as a conduit for cash & weapons to the Contras. He became disenchanted with the US government & the Contras because of widespread corruption, drug dealing & violence.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A page turner, this book took three days to read. Jack Terrell is no great writer and, indeed, he had the help of Ron Martz, but the subject matter was of such interest as to make it hard to put down.

Occasionally I make it a point to pick up and read books by avowed right-wingers in order to challenge my own leftist predilections. This one, about the Reagan administration's illegal war against Nicaragua, has been the first on this issue I've confronted.

I was going to Loyola University Chicago, studying philosophy, when the United States fought its undeclared wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada and Guatemala while trying to subvert the government of Costa Rica. I was also involved with a political journal, Left Court, which did extensive reporting about these events. I "knew" then that agencies of our government were not only conducting war and terror campaigns in these countries, but that some of them were fostering the illegal shipment of drugs, primarily cocaine, into our country in order to fund these activities during the period that the Boland Amendment forbade official involvement.

But did I really know? Frankly, I still have trouble believing all the horrible things I "know" about what our tax money does to kill, immisserate and oppress people throughout the world. I want to believe our president(s) and their sanctimonious claims about promoting peace and freedom. I want to be a part of that programme. Don't we all? (I am assuming that the "important" people don't join things like GoodReads).

Well, reading the supposed opposition is a way to test one's supposed knowledge and Terrell seemed to fit the bill. A southerner of my generation, he is pro-military, obsessed with and expert about weaponry, comfortable with killing enemies of the U.S.A., rabidly anticommunist and antisocialist. But, as I learned, he's not all bad. He's not, for one thing, racist. Nor is he notably sexist. He seems pretty open-minded about people so long as they're not red. Indeed, thanks to his experiences working with the Contra armies and the C.I.A. against the "red" Nicaraguan government of the eighties, he appears to have even become more open-minded about them.

Anyway, when an "expert" of the right agrees with an "expert" of the left about the same events, then, no matter how reluctant one might be to believe them, then perhaps what they agree upon is actually true. It certainly is a test, but one should, of course, read a representative sampling of both.

In any case, Terrell's testimony is that, yes, agencies of our government were running guns and drugs, were conducting illegal warfare, were lying to congress and the public--and that in the case of Nicaragua at least, this conspiracy reached into the Oval Office.

Oh, have you noticed? Nothing's changed. It's only gotten worse.