One of the most difficult problems the Reagan administration and its neocon advisers faced in the heightened confrontation with the Soviets was the situation in Central America. Here the issues of human rights, articulated so eloquently by Moynihan and Kirkpatrick at the UN and in other forums, collided with the need to counter Soviet influence in the United States' backyard in Central and Latin America. The Soviets, in fact, had become interested in opening a new front in the Cold War by supporting leftist insurgencies in this part of the world.

There is some dispute among the authorities I have consulted as to when this new strategy took concrete form. According to Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution of War and Peace at Stanford University, who has had access to KGB files, the Soviets began to provide financial support and weapons to a guerrilla army, the Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN), which was waging a decade-old war against the bitterly hated Somoza regime in Nicaragua, as early as 1966. While some people in the West viewed the Sandinistas, a coalition of groups with different ideologies, as a democratic ally in overthrowing a widely acknowledged reactionary regime, the Soviets, Schweizer asserts, looked upon them as a vehicle for penetration into this hemisphere. The Soviet Union wanted not only to overthrow the Somoza regime but also to install in its place the Sandinistas, led by Marxist-Leninists, Daniel Ortega and his brother Humberto.