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- NATION, Page 40Grapevine
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-
- TIMBERRR! Elliott Abrams used to lay the wood to Honduras
- whenever it threatened to waver in helping the contras fight
- the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Now the Reagan
- Administration's point man for Latin America has teamed up with
- retired General Paul Gorman, former boss of the U.S. Army's
- Southern Command based in Panama, to profit from their previous
- official contacts. They are pushing a scheme to use
- cargo-carrying blimps to extract mahogany logs from otherwise
- unreachable forests in Honduras. Abrams has also arranged a
- logging deal in Brazil that will expedite timber sales to Japan.
- Says he: "I'm making lots of money. It's great."
-
- HIGH SEAS. When the fleet's in, San Francisco drug pushers
- smile. They claim that many U.S. sailors on liberty buy LSD
- from dealers in Golden Gate Park to help them get through long,
- tedious tours at sea. The hallucinogenic of the '60s may be the
- choice of wayward sailors because it metabolizes so quickly that
- it is difficult to detect in random drug tests aboard ship.
-
- HOWE NOW? Word on the Washington diplomatic circuit is that
- those rumors about Britain's Sir Geoffrey Howe's losing his
- Foreign Ministry portfolio in a midterm Maggie Thatcher Cabinet
- shake-up are getting hotter. Howe is said to be telling friends
- that his days are dwindling to a precious few. His most likely
- replacement: Defense Minister George Younger.
-
- STILL SPOOKY. The cold war may be over, but Soviet attempts
- to lure American diplomats into spying for the Kremlin are on
- the rise. U.S. intelligence sources report that in the past
- twelve months, the KGB made three blunt offers to pay money for
- secrets to American foreign service personnel. What worries
- counterintelligence officials is how many approaches went
- unreported.
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