Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

The problem with India is that surely at the moment it's not a friend of China and Pakistan and border incident are very common in that area; once the war start the risk of expansion of the conflict will be enourmous (basically July crisis level) as both Bejing and Islamabad will fear a possible New Dehli intervention to secure the disputed territories.
At the moment, if change are not happened, Indira Ghandi it's at the helm of the nation, and she was very friendly with the URSS and OTL at the moment it also was the biggest commercial patner...and while she worked well with Reagan (even if her personal opinion of him was not high), i doubt that she have the same to says about Kennedy.

(85)

February 1983:

Ten days after the crash of the Chinese airliner in North East Asia, a smaller aircraft went down in the Caribbean. This was a Panamanian military aircraft, a VIP-configured transport. It was carrying the President of Panama and the Interior Minister (and de facto foreign affairs spokesman too) of Nicaragua who were on their way to the UN up in New York. The aircraft had left Panama City carrying Omar Torrijos and made a stop in Nicaragua to collect Tomás Borge. From there, it flew onwards heading for a refuelling stop in Atlanta and then the final destination being La Guardia Airport. It never made it to the United States. There had been inspections for explosive devices made in Panama and at Managua which had found nothing. The whole aircraft was one big bomb though. When over the Caribbean, the internal fuel was ignited by a small charge inside the main tank and there was an almighty blast in the sky. The aircraft was blown apart mid-air. Torrijos and Borge, along with nine others, were killed. The Panamanian president wouldn’t be making his speech at the UN where he would talk about his vision for Latin America; the man behind the Red Terror which had struck Nicaragua when it had fallen to the Sandinistas wouldn’t be able to question allegations stating that the Soviets had shot down that airliner and instead direct blame towards the United States. The false flag assertion would be made afterwards elsewhere with his death instead. A US Navy destroyer which would several days later find wreckage on the sea’s surface and body parts, but wouldn’t be able to locate any survivors.

There was outrage among the people in Panama. Torrijos’ death (quite pre-emptively) was announced by the authorities and there was a deliberate effort made by the government to spread the rumour that he had been killed by the United States. This was the work of the CIA! Rioting spread across the Canal Zone, an area under American control but full of Panamanian civilians. US military personnel and families were kept inside secure areas while outside the Panamanian authorities did little to stop the smashing of glass, vehicles being overturned and burning of American flags. It was a serious situation though direct violence against US military forces didn’t occur because at the first hint of that, that was when the Panamanian police stepped in. Up in Nicaragua, there was calm. The news about Borge was carefully released to the people. His two fellow leaders in the now-broken troika, the Ortega brothers Daniel and Humberto, had no desire to see the crowds in Managua come out into the streets for the fear that they might not be able to control them should they be whipped up. The allegations coming from Panama that the disappearance of that aircraft had been the work of the CIA weren’t openly repeated in Managua by the state-controlled media though there were hints towards that with an investigation by the government promised. Borge was a hero of the revolution, the people were told, and he was feared dead with the belief that he had been slain as a martyr alongside Torrijos by enemies of the Nicaraguan Revolution.

It was Noriega who had killed Torrijos and Borge. He had help, help which had come from the Cuban DGI. A Cuban team had helped Noriega’s own people in rigging that aircraft into the flying bomb which it was and making sure that the work couldn’t be detected. Why did Noriega murder his camarada and the others on that aircraft including such a senior Nicaraguan leader? The reasons were many. For him personally, Noriega wanted the power that Torrijos had. There was a lot to that in terms of nuance, but that was the long and short of it. He wanted to be the man running Panama and was sure that he could do a far better job. Torrijos was in his way and the only way to get rid of him was to kill him. Blaming it on someone else was more than convenient: it had to be done unless Torrijos’ supporters – many soon to disappear – turned on him afterwards. Torrijos was also starting to question the actions of Noriega as well. There was the issue with cocaine trafficking which had come to an almost complete stop via Panama as Torrijos had wanted to clean up the country’s image to get the Americans to hand over the Canal Zone. Noriega liked the money he earned from allowing it to take place. Torrijos had once liked the money too, then he had decided that he no longer did and would rather become a ‘serious politician’. Noriega had kept on moving some drugs, sending them northwards towards the United States, poisoning millions with the powder, but not enough. The drug cartels down in Colombia – dangerous people – were soon to cut him off completely if he didn’t do something about Torrijos’ moral high ground. Torrijos had people looking into Noriega’s continued deals. When in Cuba last month and being told by Fidel how Torrijos was no longer valuable to them, the Cubans hadn’t spoken a word about any objections to cocaine trafficking: Noriega took that as being given tacit approval to re-start that… he was wrong but just didn’t know that yet. As to the Cubans, it was they who wanted Borge to die. Noriega had been told what he needed to be when it came to that man who he knew was always close to Cuba and who had only months ago defended Cuba’s actions when at that summit in Jamaica. That Borge had done, but he was also someone whom Fidel and his brother Raúl saw as restricting their influence in the region. Borge was the one of the three in-charge in Nicaragua who had tried to affirm Nicaragua’s position as independent of Cuban control: an ally, not a client state. He had limited Nicaragua’s role supporting Guatemala in the Belize War and then raised serious misgivings after Fidel had got the Ortegas to send troops into Honduras to fight in the undeclared war going on there. That man was working against Cuban interests even without purposely intending to. Cuba wanted him gone and in exchange for their assistance in getting rid of Torrijos, they wanted to make sure that Borge was killed he had been alongside Torrijos. A bond made in blood between Havana and Panama City had thus been forged. Blaming it all on the Americans was perfect cover for all involved too; who would really believe that the twin assassinations were the work of Cuba and Noriega acting in concert?

It will. Though it must be noted that he is still a CIA 'contact' at this time. The duplicity of Noriega will surprise men who shouldn't be surprised.

I will agree on that but say no more for now.
Anyway, we now go to West Germany next.

I wonder if the Greens are going to be as bad as the Reds.

The Greens at that time were people who had some good ideas. Just absolutely and certainly not when it came to foreign policy.