I remember Eliot Abrams, but I don’t know what his advice and opinions actually were under Reagan. I do know that Reagan had a lot of resistance from his own people, in the State Department and elsewhere, and constantly had to fight their efforts to undermine his work to bring down the Soviet Union.
This does certainly lead me to suspect that the guy is a deliberate liar, not someone who was deceived. I suspect that he is accusing Newt of doing pretty much what HE was doing—questioning and undermining Reagan. He was a professional foreign service guy, and nearly all of those guys were liberals during the Cold War.
Abrams was pretty much a hawk. But I suspect that he,like alot of people, dislike Newt. He had(s?) a bad habit of making people feel small, maybe to protect his own thin skin.. You can only step on so many toes and get by.