BOOKS OF THE TIMES: REVIEW

The narrative ends, four years later, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with the story of the execution by his superiors of the Guard sergeant called Suicida, under circumstances that ''people call a rumor even when they know the fact.'' Suicida has in the meantime become a leader of what President Reagan later called the ''freedom fighters'' opposing the left-leaning Sandinista government of Nicaragua that was drifting steadily into the Soviet orbit. According to ''With the Contras,'' the circumstances leading to Suicida's execution suggest that the President's epithet is a misnomer, to say the least. Indeed, according to this book, that rule came into effect even before the Reagan Administration began to oppose the Sandinistas. Since before the revolution, when the Cuban leader Fidel Castro had helped to pull together the various Sandinista factions, he had counseled the leaders not to make the mistakes he had made in provoking Washington. ''The money of the United States was good money,'' Mr. [Christopher Dickey] paraphrases Castro, ''and if you were smart, and the right administration was in power, you could get it to underwrite the rebuilding of the country.'' He concludes, ''But this Republican candidate,'' Castro said, ''he is something else. If he and these men should come in, calculations will have to change.''