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Contra Cross: Insurgency and Tyranny in Central America, 1979-1989

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It is often quipped that the mark of a brilliant man is that he agrees with what you believe; I read Bill Meara's book Contra Cross yesterday and I would use the words brilliant and brilliantly delivered to describe it.

Let me back up in time a bit. In 1988 just back from UN duty in Lebanon and Egypt I sat down in my 15-man section at CGSC and we did the "where I have been and what I have been doing" confessional. My section leader looked at me and quipped, "you have not been in the Army." I simply asked him and the larger group, "Have any of you been shot at lately?" No one answered. Later the same guy in discussing low intensity conflict remarked, "I cannot see anyway the US Army will ever get involved in a counter-insurgency again after what happend in Vietnam." I asked him what exactly he thought was going on in Central America at the very moment. He suggested that what was happening was not really the US Army. Six years later I greeted that same individual as he arrived in Goma with a water truck task force. He had a stunned look on his face. I said, "Welcome to my world."

Contra Cross is about Bill Meara's world, one like and at once unlike my own. The book is from the foot soldier's perspective and it offers unique insights on the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Bill was a Special Forces officer trained in psychological operations and as a regional specialist. He served in uniform with the Military Advisory Group in El Salvador and later as a Foreign Service Officer as liaison to the Contras from Honduras. Like any good read, Bill's book offers key themes and messages, weaving them through the pages, repeatedly exposing the reader to them in the hopes they will imprint. I will list some here:

Culture and Cultural Understanding is Critical

Language is Fundamental

COIN and Guerrilla Warfare Target the Minds of the Population, Not the Enemy

The Greatest Cultural Gap is Between DC and the Field

The Unconventional Warrior is Indeed From Venus and the Conventional Warrior Refuses to Visit From Mars


I tell every Soldier that I coach, teach, and mentor that I have two fundamental rules for cross cultural understanding:

They do not think like you do

They have an agenda in every interaction with you

Bill's narrative hammers home the first point and his story reinforces the second. His self-reflection on his role as an US government representative while serving as liaison to the Contras is one of the book's greatest strengths.

I would recommend this book to all from Strategic Corporal to the White House. I only wish that it had come out earlier.

Great job, Bill!

Sincerely,

Tom Odom
Author Journey Into Darkeness: Genocide in Rwanda

"In 1949, Alexander Foote wrote a small book, "A Handbook for Spies" which contains all one needs to know to conduct espionage. Now comes another small volume, "Contra Cross", by William Meara which contains much of what one needs to understand to counter or for that matter support an insurgency. Based on his experience in El Salvador and with the Contras in Honduras/Nicaragua during the 1980's, Meara provides a crisp, thoughtful exposition of the problems and requirements for the winning of such conflicts. Meara's thoughts and experiences are well worth pondering as our nation takes on its current adversaries."

Duane Clarridge - Thirty-three year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, Chief of CIA Latin American Division 1981-84, conceiver and chief of CIA Counterterrorism Center 1986-88, author of " The Spy for All Seasons."

William R. Meara's book *Contra Cross* is another piece of well-researched and written evidence that describes why the U.S. does not do well at insurgency or 4th Generation Warfare today. His book deals with his missions in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. Bill has served in the Special Forces as well as the Department of State, so he is well qualified to make such frank assessments.

Before I go on further, I must point out that there are instances that our nation knew how to conduct insurgency warfare--Our own Revolutionary War, the Marines in Central America and the Caribean nations in the 20s and 30s, and the Army in the Phillipines at the turn of the 20th Century.

Bill Meara does it right because he was there, he lived it, made it work, knew the ground, people and the culture. Today, the Army likes using the Lawrence of Arabia analogy in seeking its future warrior leaders, another powerful, but shallow message on power point briefings without wanting to understand the total cultural implications that must occur to create such leaders.

What made people like Lawrence successful? Trust. The attainment of trust came from an incredible amount of education and self examination, which produced learning enabling Lawrence to become an expert on the Arab culture, while retaining his ties to his country of orgin, Great Britain. There was also a tolerence for the eccentric, which Lawrence was, more so than the paper cutter all-American physical and handsome looking types we nurture today.

Lawrence was able to self educate, then empowered by his government to go and perform a broad mission, which he defined further based on his knowledge of the culture. Meara on the other hand, operating in the Industrial and Bureaucratic age of the Army, was constantly having to fight his own organization in order to get the resources, time and people to do his job. Despite these obstacles, which were put in place to control people and prevent the incompetent from making mistakes, Meara accomplished a lot in local areas, but overarching policies and cultural beliefs diminished his efforts.

But most importantly, Meara had the moral courage not to quit, and continue the fight in another bureaucratic organization, the State Department. This displays another trait with Lawrence, and what it will take to win the wars of the future, aspiration for true professionalism, which is autonomy and enlightenment, driven by strength of character.

Both of these individuals did (do) not need rules, regulations and laws, and layers of supervisors to do their jobs, better defined as missions with the individual tasked for the mission to define the details. As Meara points out, the Industrial Age personnel system of the Army (as well as the military and government) attempts to cast everyone as a spare part, where one can replace the other. In an attempt in doing so, our nation in effect dumb downs everything, while driving out most of the talented people we need who seek the responsibility and challenges combating 4th Generation Warfare.

Hopefully, soon, Bill Meara's book will be considered as part of a critical analysis of lessons learned that the future Army, as well as the nation learned from, made adjustments to current organizations, and will win the wars of the future.

The ongoing Coalition conflicts against insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated just how difficult a challenge conventional expeditionary forces face in adapting to asymmetric threats. Nowhere is this difficulty of adaptation greater than within the US Armed Forces, currently the most powerful and technologically-advanced military in the world.

What is significant is that failure to adapt at a theater, or even tactical, level engenders dysfunction at a strategic level, and creates deeply-paralyzing or divisive morale problems which eventually pervade the political structures of democratic societies. Indeed, the damage to (or impact on) the society is often evident even before the damage caused by the failure to adapt to asymmetric warfare shows up in the overall capabilities of the military forces itself. The result can often be a "hollow force": a monolithic defense structure, incapable of acting against the adversaries who besiege it daily, and yet waiting, becoming more bureaucratic by the day, for a "worthy [symmetric] adversary" who may come but once in a lifetime, if at all.

It is the persistent failure of much of the US conventional military leadership as well as the US political leadership to understand how to successfully prosecute warfare against a fluid, informal adversarial structure, operating within a broader psychopolitical environment, in Iraq (and Afghanistan) which is the Achilles Heel of the US as a strategic power into the 21st Century.

These are lessons which should have been learned after the Vietnam War ended in the 1970s. After all, the Vietnamese, the Soviets, and the leadership of the People's Republic of China (PRC) all emphasized that they had defeated the US in the media, and by sowing disenchantment (and narcotics) within US and Western society; in other words, by irregular, contextual, and psychopolitical stratagems. But peace after the Vietnam War -- as with the peace which followed World War I and World War II -- merely allowed the rump of the conventional US forces to re-assert the formal, highly-bureaucratized doctrine and methodologies which suit a rigidly hierarchical command and control system. Today's "Net-Centric Warfare", for example, is designed to use modern technologies, such as computerization and communications, imagery, and the like, to give true battlefield advantage to the field commanders, down to platoon level. Instead, it has been used repeatedly to afford centralized, remote micro-management of conflict, denying fluidity and cultural insinuation in the conflict zone by the forces there, where field officers should be able to exercise the command mandates of their commissions.

Significantly, many of the failures attributed to outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were caused by his determination to bring change and greater flexibility to the US defense structures. He may have had other failings, but his attempt to force change on the services is what created many of his enemies within the uniformed leadership, those who are reluctant to change, and to learn the lessons of history.

What better time, then, for a book about an aspect of the "lost history" of the Cold War to emerge, giving profound lessons from the battle front on the business of asymmetric warfare.

William R. Meara's new book, Contra Cross: Insurgency and Tyranny in Central America, 1979-1989, is a profound contribution to thinking about strategic doctrine, as the US -- and all major industrial powers -- face a watershed of introspection following the US electorate's decision to essentially retire from the global battlefield. Meara's great contribution is the fact that his book recounts the impact of doctrine and the strategic environment on the battlefield of that "small" war against the Nicaraguan Sandinista leadership which projected one of the last aspects of the Soviet grand strategy against the West before the end of the Cold War.

The book is also timely in that it reminds a new generation of strategic thinkers of the real origins of the Sandinista Government which has now returned to Nicaragua, following the re- election of former Sandinista Pres. Daniel Ortega -- now 60 years old -- with the November 5, 2006, Nicaraguan Presidential election. But more than that, Meara's book, told from the perspective of a "boots on the ground" true Cold Warrior, has the true grit of realism. It is not a book of theory, but a book which shows how theory translates on the ground in an asymmetric conflict.

William Meara was a US Army Special Forces officer who trained as a Foreign Area Officer (FAO), and then specialized in, and relished, psychological operations. His field of expertise was Central America. His book cover, and the name of his book, reflect the "Contra Cross", the Contra crucifix memento made from a neutralized M-16 5.56mm ammunition by wounded Contra veterans in the hospitals which housed them after their personal war was over. Meara carried with him the memento, and the draft of his book, for a couple of decades before deciding to finally publish his writings.

The US Armed Forces and Government -- operating mostly from Honduras, supporting the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinistas -- were at this time still nursing their wounds after Vietnam. Many of the US military policies being pursued in Central America were based on either lessons learned from Vietnam and other Cold War theaters, or on a stubborn persistence in the view that a monolithic military machine -- the Green Machine of the Army, as Meara reminds us -- could roll over any adversary with "superior firepower" and technology. Clearly, the mainstream US Army had little time for psychological warriors or for grubby little wars. But there were those who understood this kind of warfare, such as the "crusty old SF (Special Forces) team sergeant" who embraced what he called "Low Intensity, High Per Diem War".

Meara, who left the US Army for the US Foreign Service (he remains a US diplomat) where he essentially continued his liaison and support work with the Contras of the ERN (Army of the Nicaraguan Resistance) until the end, highlights the profound importance of understanding the language and culture of the environment in which any war is being conducted. He knew that he had made the breakthrough when, as he put it, he was able to "swear like a Contra", and be able to converse at a truly meaningful level with the forces and cultures in which he had to operate. His time in Nicaragua, before he became part of the US-supported war supporting the Contras, gave him a good understanding of the Sandinistas, who took their name from the 1920s nationalist Nicaraguan fighter, Augusto César Sandino.

But before he was engaged in supporting the Contras, Meara was also engaged in US Army support operations in El Salvador where he also learned not only how Latin American armed forces shaped their priorities and doctrine, but also how guerilla forces, such as the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), functioned. He also faced the more enduring adversary: US Army "milicrats".

Apart from the profound timeliness of the book, as Sandinista Daniel Ortega returns to power in Nicaragua -- this time ostensibly within the framework of an ongoing process of democratic elections (we have yet to see whether he abides by the process, or whether he continues to think of "one-man, one-vote, once" as the process of re-entrenching pseudo-marxist-leninist governance) -- Contra Cross has real lessons for war- fighters and planners considering Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or Sudan.

William Meara also highlights the distinctions which often exist between the actual combatants in the guerilla wars and their political leaders, citing the case of the Contras, whose political leadership was based in Miami, Florida, where sophistry and political expediency prevailed to the detriment of the forces in the field. Meara highlights the disservice done to the Nicaraguan rebellion by the Contra political leadership in Miami, which was the principal interface with the US political system.

Meara's final chapter, Contrarian Conclusions, outlines some of his maxims for conducting irregular or asymmetric warfare, and particularly the aspect of this which is conducted by great powers at arm's length: surrogate warfare. But before that, Meara had to defend, even resurrect, the image of the Contras, noting: "My positive sentiments about the Nicaraguan resistance put me clearly in contrarian territory. It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which the contras were vilified in the United States."

He added: "But I think the world should be proud of the contras. The young peasants of Nicaragua refused to be enslaved by communism. They waged a courageous struggle against great odds. They persevered when the situation looked very bleak. They sacrificed for the good of their people and the future of their country. They were noble and honorable freedom fighters. The mucos refused to be like Longfellow's `dumb, driven cattle'. They were heroes in the strife. ... I give the contras most of the credit for the elections held in Nicaragua in February 1990."

Equally, in saying that he felt that "Americans should be proud of what the Reagan Administration did and tried to do in Central America", he added: "But I don't think that everyone has the right to feel good about their actions during the Central American conflict. I think those Americans who gave aid and comfort to the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran communists should feel guilty. They were on the wrong side in the Cold War." These were, he said, what Lenin called "useful idiots".

In his "lessons learned" in that concluding chapter, Meara notes: "Cultural factors really are the equivalent of a terrain feature that cannot be ignored [in surrogate wars]."

And: "Fluency in foreign languages is the indispensable key to understanding." "Regional expertise and experience are crucial. People working on insurgencies shouldn't be doing so on their first trip to the region."

He went on: "Americans need to be aware of the institutional biases and shortcomings which make it difficult for us to deal with foreign insurgencies. We need to realize that our big, high-tech military machine -- our big catapult -- might not be much use against an insurgency built around people like Miguel Castellanos [real name Napoleón Romero García, an El Salvadoran FMLN guerilla who later defected to the Government]. I saw many signs of our weakness in this area: the tank traps we were building in the `Choluteca gap' [in Honduras, to face literally a non-existent cross-border threat from Sandinista tanks]; our big bucks, high-tech approach to support for the Salvadoran armed forces; our army's conviction that `any good officer' can work on insurgency. I came to the conclusion that our powerful military is a blunt instrument. It is very capable of performing its primary mission (destroying enemy military forces), but is poorly-suited for cross-cultural battles for foreign hearts and minds."

"Finally, when we get involved in foreign insurgencies," Meara says, "we should always strive to conduct ourselves in a manner consistent with our national values ... we should remember our history. We should remember that we were helped by foreigners when we were fighting for our independence. We should remember that we too were once embattled farmers. ... we should not think of these people [the surrogate fighters] as dis- posable pawns."

Contra Cross is full of personal insights and anecdotes "from the field", and is an inspiring and timely read. It is, in fact, essential reading, not just for those psyops and special forces practitioners who already embrace asymmetric warfare, but for the policymakers and those who have found their careers in the bureaucracy of military leadership. That is where the lessons need to be learned.

We all should thank William Meara for carrying this document with him over the decades, and giving it to us at this particular time.

[Reviewed by Gregory R. Copley, Editor, Defense & Foreign Affairs Publications, at the International Strategic Studies Association, Washington, DC area.]

Contra Cross is unique among personal memoirs of former soldiers, government officials, diplomats, and intelligence officers. The author is humble. He had a front row seat at the numerous Central American proxy wars the United States engaged in during the 1980s. Despite this experience, the author never believed he was as important as the events around him, a trait that so many memoirs lack. He was a Cold War grunt and he knew it.

The numerous insurgencies and counter-insurgencies fought in Central America are slowly being forgotten. Located between the large and divisive Vietnam War and the even larger Global War on Terror, the proxy wars in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador are now seen as the last gaps of the Cold War. Despite this hindsight, during the 1980s it was where the action was.

Since the author was involved at the ground level, he is able to give the people of the area a real human feel, which is lost in the Cold War rhetoric of policy makers from Washington.

The author makes several outstanding points about the need for cultural and language skills when dealing with local conflicts. While our current conflict is called the Global War on Terror it is the really combination of thousands of local conflicts tied together. Having the deep local cultural knowledge is the real key to winning our current war. While the book is far from being the seminal book on U.S. involvement in Central America, it never tries or claims to be. Its true strength is how it depicts dedicated Americans, whether military or Department of State, attempt to implement strategic policy made thousands of miles away in Washington into actual action on the ground amongst real people.

The book is part memoir, part analysis. It begins with a chapter on the author's experiences working at a Catholic missionary school in Huehuetenango, Guatemala in the summer of 1979. It was here that Meara began to gain a "grunt's eye' view of Latin American culture and the deep, underlying social, political, and economic problems confronted in many of the countries. Two weeks after he departed, a right wing death squad assassinated one of the school's teachers, Brother Jim Miller. This event partially radicalized Meara and made him deeply suspicious of the government in Guatemala at the time. It also spurred him to visit Nicaragua, which had just witnessed the victory of the Sandinistas. Meara traveled to Managua with romantic visions of the revolution and left there disillusioned by the totalitarianism he experienced. Nicaragua transformed him from a left-leaning college student to a more center-oriented future military advisor and diplomat.

Meara's career with the U.S. Army began at the age of 17, when he joined the National Guard. In college, he attended Officer Candidate School, and decided to become a full-time Special Forces officer soon after returning from Nicaragua. The Special Forces "impressed him" with its combination of adventure and foreign culture immersion. After completing the "Q" course and the Foreign Area Officer training program at Fort Bragg, Captain Meara began his first real-world assignment as a psychological warfare instructor for the El Salvador Armed Forces (ESAF).

In 1986, El Salvador was mired in civil war with the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), an umbrella group of five Marxist organizations trying to overthrow the government. Meara's job entailed training his Salvadoran counterparts in Communist ideology, tactics, and strategies. This role put him in close touch with several FMLN defectors, whom he invited to his class as guest instructors. Through these courses, Meara gained a complex understanding of the institutional culture of ESAF. For example, he learned that it was just as preoccupied with Honduras, an historic enemy, as the FMLN. Furthermore, the Salvadoran officer corps resembled a social club more than a traditional military hierarchy. This club-like system fostered tolerance for officers who failed to perform and bred paranoia within the corps. It also made it extremely difficult for the U.S. Military Group (MILGRP) to convince the Salvadoran military to punish human rights violations. In the end, however, U.S. influence did convince the Salvadorans to clean up their act and in 1992, the FMLN laid down its arms in part because of assurances from the United States that it would "keep the Salvadoran military in line."

The second half of the book covers Meara's work as a State Department Liaison Officer to the Contras in 1988 and 1989. In that role, he oversaw United States Agency for International Development aid to the Honduras-based Contras and served as a de-facto ambassador to the insurgency during the waning days of the struggle. Meara shuttled between the Contra base area at Yamales and the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, trying to secure adequate humanitarian assistance for the insurgency, and bridge the cultural gap between the troops in the field and their foreign benefactors.

As a fluent Spanish speaker with extensive experience in Latin America, Meara developed a close rapport with the Contras, but struggled to maintain emotional distance from the insurgency. This became particularly challenging towards the end of his tour when the U.S. began to cut off support to the fighters. In the end, Meara saw the Contras as embattled farmers similar in some respects to the colonial militia of the American Revolution--poor farmers whose way of life was threatened by the economic policies of the prevailing government. Meara had profound respect for the difficult odds under which they struggled but in the end never forgot that his primary loyalty lay to the U.S. and its policies. Meara's description of the isolated situation at Yamales reveals how easy it is for special operations types to succumb to Joseph Conrad-like influences of the field and become advocates of the insurgents as opposed to mere advisors. It takes a very special type of person to keep these impulses in check.

The main lesson of his book is that only people well-versed in foreign languages and cultures have any hope of successfully waging insurgency or counter-insurgency wars in the third world. In order to be effective in special operations, you need to be able to "curse like a Contra," and in this regard America is still woefully unprepared, not just in the U.S. Armed Forces but government-wide. The strength of Meara's work is its first-hand look at insurgency and counter-insurgency, and the author's nuanced understanding of the local cultures in El Salvador and Nicaragua . Contra Cross also stands out as one of the few published accounts of America 's struggle against Communism in Latin America in the 1980s, and for this reason is important.

I was privileged to serve with Bill Meara in Special Forces in Central America. His book is dead on it's mark. Bill's frustrations with the military are shared by many. It seems that our government doesn't learn from history. Conventional commanders continue to lead unconventional wars with no comprehension of the difference between the two. Language capability continues to be a key factor in the success. The book is short and well written. A book for all to enjoy and learn.