National Security Directive Number Three

National Security Directive Number Three is the authority John Hobbs invokes to explain the covert campaign against communist movements in Latin America. As he describes it to Art Keller, the directive empowers the vice president to direct such activity across the region, creating an executive chain that reaches from the White House through interagency operations to the anti-Sandinista campaign. The directive gives the novel’s clandestine war a claimed legal and political foundation, while exposing how expansive threat claims can make exceptional action appear necessary.

Threat and rationale

Hobbs presents the directive against a broad vision of regional danger. He casts Nicaragua as a Soviet foothold in Central America and argues that its geography makes the threat impossible to contain as Cuba had been: the country lies near the Panama Canal, borders states facing insurgencies, and sits south of poor, rural Mexican regions he describes as vulnerable to revolutionary movements. In this account, the possibility of a communist advance toward Mexico—and of Soviet military reach across the Gulf and Caribbean—becomes a threat to U.S. security.

That argument is not merely background. Hobbs uses it to narrow the choices Keller is offered: support the Contras and other local forces, or accept the prospect of American soldiers fighting in the region. Keller objects that those forces include drug traffickers and violent militias responsible for killing civilians. The exchange reveals the directive’s governing logic as Hobbs presents it: the scale of the alleged danger is used to defend alliances and methods that would otherwise be difficult to justify.

Authorization and chain of command

Hobbs insists that Operation Cerberus did not originate with the Central Intelligence Agency acting on its own. He says it came from the highest authority, and attributes to Ronald Reagan an order to reverse events in Central America and overthrow the Sandinistas by whatever means necessary. The directive, which Hobbs also calls National Security Department Directive Number Three, is described as authorizing the vice president to take charge of activities against communist terrorists anywhere in Latin America.

Hobbs then lays out the administrative chain: the vice president formed the Terrorist Incident Working Group, based in El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica; that group instituted the National Humanitarian Assistance Operation; and the operation was presented, in accordance with the Boland Amendment, as nonlethal humanitarian aid for Nicaraguan refugees, identified in Hobbs’s explanation with the Contras. Cerberus, he says, ran through the vice president’s office rather than the CIA. Sal Scachi reported to Hobbs, and Hobbs reported to the vice president. The structure makes the directive more than a declaration of policy: it is the stated source of an operational hierarchy designed to act through offices and programs with different public descriptions.

From directive to regional coordination

The novel connects this executive framework to Red Mist, a code name for coordinating operations intended to neutralize left-wing movements across Latin America. Sal Scachi’s role was to circulate intelligence, distribute assets, coordinate targets, and prevent separate operations from interfering with one another. The network he serviced extended far beyond a single agency or country: it encompassed hundreds of right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, roughly a thousand army officers, hundreds of thousands of troops, numerous intelligence agencies and police forces, and the Church.

This wider apparatus is not presented as a simple, transparent extension of one directive. Many participating operations did not know they were being coordinated under Red Mist. The contrast between a named authorization at the top and dispersed, partly unknowing activity below underscores the distance between formal command and the reach of covert power.

Later uses of security rationale

The novel returns to the same political logic in Mexico. With insurgent activity growing in Chiapas and the Popular Revolutionary Army carrying out attacks in several states, John Hobbs sees a renewed opportunity to frame regional intervention as urgent anti-communist defense. He judges that Mexican officials would not openly accept military assistance for fighting insurgents, and that Congress would not fund such a package under that description. Instead, seventy-five Huey helicopters and twelve C-26 aircraft are funded as equipment for suppressing drug traffickers, then quietly transferred to the Mexican Army for use against the Zapatistas and the Popular Revolutionary Army.

The episode does not establish that National Security Directive Number Three itself authorizes this later transfer. Rather, it shows the continuing method associated with Hobbs’s earlier account: present a politically difficult intervention through a more acceptable security mandate. Across the novel, the directive stands for an executive claim to exceptional authority, while the operations linked to that claim reveal how anti-communist and anti-drug campaigns can serve as overlapping public justifications for covert action.