Iran-Contra: Pt 1: The Iran Contra Era V.2

 The Iran-Contra Era: Global Counter-Revolution,

      and the Triumph of the National Security State

   My next article will deal in depth with the illegal Contra resupply operation and the Iran arms deal. This article is meant to serve as a brief introduction to the case followed by a much broader analysis of the whole Iran-Contra era. I thought it was best to get some tangents out of my system in this extended introduction. In following the threads that make up the tapestry of the Iran-Contra scandal one is quickly covered with a web of connections that cover the world. The globalization of the covert warfare apparatus, although it did not begin in this era, reached new heights. Faced with the threat of congressional oversight the national security state outsourced covert operations to allied and even enemy countries. It also increasingly privatized covert war, turning to networks of ex-spies and military men, arms dealers, mercenaries, NGO’s lobbyists, religious groups, and drug cartels.  

   The Iran Contra era stretches from late 1975-1992 covering the final third of the Cold War, which begins in the aftermath of the liberation and reunification of Vietnam, a humiliating defeat for the American Empire. The first post-war chapter of the Cold war had stretched from 1945 (secretly 1943) to 1959 with the Cuban Revolution marking the beginning of the second part of the Cold War. The Cold War had actually begun in 1917 with the Russian revolution and the failed invasion to crush the Soviet Union, followed by the attempt to isolate the USSR, while arming Nazi Germany for an attack on the USSR. World War 2 was only a minor interruption in this cold war. The post-war cold war began in Greece during WW2 as the British attempted to install the Greek fascist collaborators and death squads into power and to destroy the communist partisans that had already liberated Greece. The OSS and MI6 were already planning to recruit the Nazis and their allies to battle the Soviets. The post-war cold war had seen dissent crushed to make way for an anti-Soviet hysteria, the fixing of the Italian elections to prevent a communist victory, the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the US partition of Korea and its subsequent war to prevent national unification, the CIA creation of South Vietnam, coups in Iran and Guatemala and around the world. The Second third of the Cold War covered the Cuban Revolution, the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, the export of US counter-insurgency advisers around the world to teach torture, and assassination to prevent “another Cuba” and the transformation of the Vietnam war from a covert counter-insurgency campaign to a genocidal military occupation. However the empire managed a major diplomatic success opening relations with the People’s Republic of China. In the Iran-Contra era, China would help the US arm and sometimes train counter-revolutionary forces around the world including UNITA in Angola, the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Afghan Mujahedeen. It also worked with the US backing the Khmer rouge in Cambodia and waging war on Vietnam.  Domestically during this second phase of the cold war the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement had briefly awakened some awareness of the ugly realities of the empire. Watergate, the Pinochet coup in Chile, exposed an imperial presidency and the CIA’s role in replacing democratic socialism with fascism. The third chapter began with the post-independence war in Angola when Cuba intervened to foil a US-backed invasion from apartheid South Africa. Congress passed the Clark amendment barring further US involvement but the CIA merely turned to its allies in the Safari club to continue the war, which would last until 1992. The Safari club would also play a key role in giving birth to Al Qaeda. The CIA was already meddling in Afghanistan by the late 70s, in part through the Shah of Iran. The Cuban victory in Angola would ultimately contribute to the fall of the South African apartheid regime in the early 90s. However at the same time American soft power (the NED) had infiltrated and destroyed the Soviet Union, thanks to the treachery and incompetence of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was himself overthrown and the Soviet Union disbanded. The Warsaw pact was absorbed into NATO.  Russia was ruled by a drunken US puppet named Boris Yeltsin. Hundreds of millions were plunged into poverty and chaos as the country was looted.

   

    Between 1975-1992 the US waged covert and overt dirty wars around the globe in Afghanistan, Libya, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda, Congo, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Grenada, Cambodia, East Timor, Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, Nicaragua, Panama, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile and more. The US was supplying both sides in the Iran/Iraq war. It was backing Israel’s plans to dominate and balkanize the Middle East. It was backing South Africa’s efforts to dominate Southern Africa. These were the true crimes of the Iran/Contra era, the crimes of the American empire. It would take a team of historians to catalogue all the covert wars of the Iran-Contra era, which covered four presidencies, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush and to begin to assess the death count. The Clinton years, that strange period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror, saw the US create chaos around the globe in order to justify the continued existence of the National Security State: the destruction of Yugoslavia, and the wars in Rwanda and the Congo which lead to millions of dead were examples of sophisticated psychological warfare. The US covertly instigated civil wars, fuelling ethnic and tribal strife, while pretending merely to be a concerned bystander and eventually “saviours” when they overtly intervened. The Clinton years, with the destruction of Yugoslavia and its massive NATO expansion, set the stage for the second cold war.

    The conventional narrative of Iran-Contra Scandal was consciously created to narrow the focus in time and geography so as to expose as little as possible about the American Empire. It also narrowed the focus to avoid the domestic implications of the scandal. Congress only investigated activities between 1984-1986. Thus the soft coup that brought Reagan to power in 1980 could remain shrouded. Back in late 1975, CIA director William Colby had been fired and replaced with George H. W. Bush. Bush’s ties to the agency went back to the 1950’s when he was recruited into the CIA, a fact he successfully kept secret for decades. While Ambassador to China, Bush and the CIA chief of station James Lilley had recruited Deng Xiaoping who would later rule China and rollback socialism.  Bush’s reign as CIA director in 1976 was brief but memorable. He was in charge when Cuban forces managed to halt the South African advance in Angola. He turned to the Safari Club to help the US wage war in Angola. He was in charge when the Argentine junta seized power and began their bloody dirty war. Bush was CIA director when the CIA Cubans formed CORU and launched an international terrorist campaign, including blowing up a Cuban airliner. The culprit Louis Posada Carrilles would later mysteriously “escape” (via CIA bribes) from a Venezuelan prison and end up as part of the Contra resupply operation. 1976 was also the year of the Orlando Letlier bombing when Chile’s former Ambassador was killed in a car bomb set by CIA Cubans working for DINA (Chilean Intelligence.) Bush had ignored the warnings he received that DINA assassins were trying to obtain fake passports for the assassination. After it took place he tried to blame left wing exiles for the Letelier assassination to protect fascist Chile.

   When President Carter won the 1976 election promising to reform the National Security State, Bush begged him to let him keep his job. Carter refused and Bush vowed revenge. Over 40 former and current CIA employees made up the CIA officers for Bush contingent during the Republican primary and the 1980 election. Reagan’s campaign manager was an old OSS hand Bill Casey who had also invented the tax shelter. He created his own team of spies that had moles inside the Carter Administration like Donald Gregg at the NSC, a Bush loyalist. They set out to destabilize Carter. Their friends in the oil industry launched a full-scale economic war on the US to create a phony oil shortage. Carter’s brother was lured into a Libyan arms deal and then exposed. Finally the Reagan campaign resorted to outright treason negotiating a deal with Iran for a huge amount of weapons in exchange for not freeing the hostages until after the election. This part of the scandal is so shocking (to most Americans) that media and academia have largely ignored all the evidence that has emerged over the years in support of it. It is known as the October Surprise. There is another theory called the deep October Surprise in which the US, the UK and France and their allies with Savak and the Shah’s government intentionally helped install Khomeini as preferable to a nationalist or socialist style government in Iran. The October surprise arms deal undermined the secular minded Iranian President Bani Sadr while elevating Khomeini’s faction. The whole world has been reshaped in Reagan’s image. Neo-liberalism has triumphed at home and abroad. Reagan can never be allowed to be exposed as a traitor. The fact that it is accepted that his policies lead to mass murder and genocide around the world show the minor importance most Westerners place on the lives of billions of Third World people. To get excited or angry about such things is bad form.  No US president has ever been prosecuted for war crimes.

   The Iran-Contra era can thus be seen from multiple angles. America’s War on the World. The National Security State vs the illusion of democracy.  The triumph of capitalism, the slashing of the social safety net. The taming of the media. The triumphant return to impunity for the CIA. The rise of Bush from CIA director to President. The mobilization of the Christian right and far right voters. The rise of the imperial presidency. The triumph of the executive branch over any form of checks and balances. The birth of the NED. 

   Iran-Contra is part of an interlocking pattern of scandals, coups, wars and deep events that go back to the early years of the Cold War and before. Particularly relevant are the coups in Guatemala and Iran, the Bay of Pigs, the JFK, MLK, and RFK and Malcolm X assassinations, Vietnam, the secret war in Laos, Watergate, The Chilean coup of 1973, the Letelier bombing, GLADIO, Nugan Hand, Koreagate, the Ed Wilson affair, the EATSCO scandal, Iraqgate, WACL, BCCI, Inslaw. A rotating cast of characters making multiple appearances. People like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, and George H.W. Bush. The same names keep popping up. The never-ending scandal of the CIA drug connection. The way things “really work” money laundering, fraud, corruption as standard operating procedure in the alliance between politicians, organized crime, intelligence, and big business that form the basis for the study of “Deep Politics”

   As I write it is the 35th anniversary of the unravelling of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration was caught waging an illegal war on Nicaragua funded in part with profits from the sale to Iran of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles in exchange for freeing American hostages. Back in 1984 Congress had passed the Second Boland Amendment forbidding any aid or advice to the Contras after the CIA was caught mining Nicaraguan harbours and supplying the Contras with what the Press had dubbed an “Assassination Manual”, a Phoenix program style guide to psychological warfare and armed propaganda. Congress was less offended by the Contras numerous war crimes than the constant lies the administration told them about what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua. Casey had gotten them to agree originally to a 500-man force whose purpose was solely to prevent Nicaragua from arming the Salvadoran guerrillas—the FMLN, who were attempting to overthrow the US-supported, mass-murdering regime in San Salvador. In a couple years they had grown to 12,000 men. Congress passed the first Boland amendment forbidding the Contras from being used to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, Reagan’s and Casey’s actual goal. Now by authorizing the harbour mining without properly informing them Casey had made Congress look like fools. The fact that the Contras operated like a death squad mutilating some village doctor for providing health care or a teacher for providing education were less important to Congress.  

    The story of the National Security Council and Oliver North’s role in waging an illegal war against Nicaragua had begun to leak in the Press in 1985 thanks to journalists Robert Parry, Brian Barger and Alfonso Chardy. However when Congress chose to accept administration denials, Parry’s editors at AP tried to kill the story. It was Lee Hamilton, head of the House Intelligence Committee and who later chaired the Iran/Contra hearings, who decided to trust North and ignore the investigative journalists. The media was secretly aware that Oliver North was negotiating the hostages release because some of the hostages were journalists. However the colluded in the cover up rather than risk sabotaging the deals. North was in fact in regular contact with Parry’s editors at AP on efforts to release AP journalist Terry Anderson. North was also a favourite source for journalists. North’s role at NSC was basically an open secret. There was also a civil suit filed by the Christic Institute in the wake of the La Penca bombing which hoped to expose a vast criminal conspiracy by ex-CIA and ex-military who were acting as private contractors in the illegal Contra resupply operation and an even more illegal drug importation operation. On 5 October 1986, a plane carrying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras was shot down by a 14-year-old Sandinista with a Soviet surface to air missile (SAM). The cargo kicker, a former Air America (the notorious drug smuggling CIA airline) employee Eugene Hasenfus, was wearing a parachute and managed to jump out of the plane and parachute to the ground. He was captured and began to talk, saying he was working for the CIA and naming “Max Gomez” and others working on the illegal contra resupply operation. Max Gomez turned out to be the notorious Felix Rodriguez, a drug dealing Cuban CIA man whose history went back to the Bay of Pigs invasion and who had helped capture and kill Che Guevara in Bolivia, reportedly keeping Guevara’s severed hands in a jar. He had served in the Phoenix program in Vietnam under Vice President George H.W. Bush’s National Security adviser Donald Gregg. President Ronald Reagan had personally ordered his National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane to find ways to circumvent the Boland Amendment and keep the Contras together “Body and Soul”. McFarlane had put Oliver North in charge of the illegal Contra resupply operation. The scandal went all the way to the top. Likewise by following the threads of the careers of men like Felix Rodriguez it was possible to unravel a great deal of secret history.

   In summer 1986, Congress had ironically agreed to restore USD 100 million in lethal aid to the Contras. Hence the Reagan Administration was desperate to cover up their blatant violation of the Boland amendment in case congress decided to change its mind. There was a three-month delay before the funds became available so the illegal contra resupply operation had continued. Elliot Abrams who had been supervising the whole illegal Contra resupply as the State Department representative on the Restricted Interagency Group, along with the NSC’s Oliver North and the CIA’s Alan Fiers. Elliot Abrams was sent out to the Press and Congress to deny everything. Abrams was an expert in lies and denial. His prior role had been Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights when he pretended that El Salvador and Guatemala were showing progress on human rights while they were still waging a campaign of mass murder and genocide. His lies got honest reporters like Raymond Bonner reassigned for exposing massacres during the Central American dirty wars. 

  Once again many in the media fell for Elliot Abrams categorical denials of any connection between the Reagan administration and the Contra resupply operation that Hasenfus exposed. Generally the US media parrot the line put out by the US State Department, which is why a supposedly independent press are in practice government propagandists. Journalists may be interested in exposing the truth but their editors or producers prefer a cosy relationship with the national security state. They all go to the same dinners and cocktail parties. Luckily before the Contra resupply story could be killed news of the Iran arms for hostages deals were published in the Lebanese newspaper Al Shiras. Once the Western press picked up on it, the story exploded. Reagan had publicly called Iran murder incorporated. Its ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon, had bombed the US embassy killing a dozen CIA Middle East operatives; kidnapped the CIA station chief William Buckley, then bombed the US Marine barracks killing 241. Iran had been officially labelled a terror sponsor by the US, which was waging an international campaign Operation Staunch to force its allies to stop selling arms to Iran. Unlike the illegal war on Nicaragua which was in line with Reagan’s public rhetoric, the Iran arms deals had the potential to alienate Reagan’s right wing base. Moreover if the facts had been known and if there had been the political will, President Reagan could have been impeached or even sent to prison for violation of the Arms Export Control Act. At first the Reagan administration tried its usual strategy of denial but it soon became clear that scapegoats and limited hangouts would be required. The current Attorney General Edwin Meese, a key adviser to Reagan for decades, took charge of the cover-up. He conducted a brief investigation. Then his aides discovered a memo from Oliver North on plans to divert funds from the Iran arms sales to the Contras. Meese checked with North, CIA director Bill Casey, and National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter who all agreed that they would shield Reagan by pretending he did not know about the diversion. It became known as the “Diversion Memo” and Meese used it as a giant diversion from Reagan’s illegal authorization of arms sales from Israel to Iran in the fall of 1985. Instead the issue became did the President know about the diversion? “What did he know? and When did he Know it?” was the media refrain echoing Watergate coverage. North was all to happy to play the political fall guy taking full responsibility although when criminal charges loomed he would later reveal that Reagan knew everything he was doing. By then however the Press were again told to kill the story by their editors. Robert Parry at Newsweek was told in 1989 the North trial was not newsworthy. George H.W. Bush was now president thanks to the inability of the Press, the legislative and judicial branches to get to the bottom of the Iran-Contra scandal in which Bush was deeply implicated. 

   Returning to late 1986: President Reagan appointed the Tower Commission to confirm Meese’s version of events, creating the myth of a rogue National Security Council that Reagan had failed to properly supervise. Then the House and Senate held a circus-like joint investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal broadcast nationwide, where the Democrats aimed to embarrass rather then destroy Reagan. Their strategy backfired when the telegenic Oliver North was embraced as a hero. The Republicans however decided that the only crime had been Congress’ passage of the Boland amendment and their attempt to meddle in the President’s control of foreign policy. That was the view of future Vice President Dick Cheney who was then a House Rep. for Wyoming serving on the Iran-Contra committee.  In 2004 at the height of the war on terror he would cite the minority report on the Iran-Contra scandal and its argument for absolute executive power as a blueprint for the Bush Administration’s policies.  The price of this failed spectacle which catapulted North to stardom was Congress’ grant of limited immunity to North and Poindexter for anything they might say. This would later sabotage the criminal investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Christic Institute lawsuit was dismissed and they were forced to pay USD 1 million in damages. The Kerry Committee investigated the Contra drug connection but the media ignored or mocked him. An independent counsel was appointed in December 1986. A six-year investigation would gradually unravel the true story of Iran-Contra. However with non-stop obstruction from the intelligence community and the Department of Justice, the court of appeals would overturn the convictions of North and Poindexter. Finally President George Bush, whose Iran-Contra role was becoming ever more exposed, decided to pardon a dozen Iran-Contra figures after loosing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. Clinton had been tied to CIA man Barry Seals while governor of Arkansas—where much of the gunrunning and drug trafficking was staged. Needless to say President Clinton did not want anyone digging into Iran-Contra either. The story was revived briefly by the heroic journalist Gary Webb. Webb’s career was destroyed. His life ended with apparent suicide. Ironically however thanks to his work the Contra drug connection, a part of the scandal many in the media and Congress wanted to suppress, is now the most well known aspect of the scandal.

   Having laid out the basics of the scandal I will provide some historical background. Early in the 19th the US had proclaimed the so-called Monroe Doctrine. Framed as opposing European imperialism in the Americas, it was in reality the US laying claim to the entire hemisphere. As its power grew it began to enforce these claims with bribery, invasions and coups. In the 19th century Nicaragua was embroiled in a civil war between the liberals and conservatives. William Walker had attempted to conquer northern Mexico but failed. The Nicaraguan Liberal party hired American mercenary William Walker and his “Filibusters” to intervene but he decided to seize power and institute slavery. He ruled Nicaragua for a year as a dictator but was forced out when Nicaragua’s neighbours invaded to expel him. He died when he tried to invade and seize power again. Shortly before World War I, the US had invaded and occupied Nicaragua for nearly 20 years. Revolutionary general Augusto Sandino would fight a guerrilla war in the attempt to expel them. Nicaragua would become a laboratory for the use of air power in a counter-insurgency campaign. Sandino was able to survive the bombs and the endless manhunt by US Marines, outsmarting US forces. However once he had signed a peace deal he was assassinated. The US had trained the Nicaraguan National Guard to carry out the dirty war against the Nicaraguan people. They appointed their lackey Anastasio Somoza as its head. He would soon seize power with his family ruling Nicaragua for decades until the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution. Somoza would be a key backer of the coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in nearby Guatemala in 1954. The coup in Guatemala would form a blueprint for the later, failed Bay of Pigs invasion and later the attempt to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. 

    However the dirty war on Nicaragua would be far more brutal and last far longer then the earlier campaigns. After the Cuban Revolution the US had spent two decades training the militaries in Latin American countries to wage dirty wars on their people. In each country Intelligence agencies, the military, and the police waged a coordinated campaign of kidnapping torture and assassination. In the Southern cone countries Operation Condor would unite the regimes in one vast dirty war on the continent. This would occur in the wake of the CIA-backed Chilean coup of Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew elected president Salvador Allende in 1973. The roots went back to the beginnings of the Cold War and the chain of fascist coups that had started much earlier in Brazil in 1964. Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay were the first seven members of a network of countries that carried out a coordinated campaign of assassination, torture, and kidnapping. In the 1970s this was increasingly combined with installing neoliberal shock therapy economic reforms in Chile and Argentina. Tiny Central America was home to even worse horrors as hundreds of thousands were killed in dirty wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua under Somoza. Guatemala’s campaign of terror had begun when a wave of military uprisings swept the country in protest over the training of Cuban exiles for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion in camps in Guatemala. By the late 60s, it had evolved into a revolutionary armed struggle. Then Guatemala was flooded with CIA and Special Forces advisers to wage a scorched earth campaign to destroy the Guerrillas. In El Salvador after a huge massacre was conducted by the fascist dictator General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez of Indians and suspected communists that killed 32,000, the government had faced little opposition. The US still sent in its advisers in the 1960s and by the 1970s their endless murder of political opponents and labour had forced the opposition to take up arms. In Nicaragua a revolution had begun in the mid-1970s and Somoza had waged a brutal scorched earth campaign in an attempt to hold onto power. But on 26 July 1979, he was forced to flee the country and for the first time since Cuba in 1959, a revolution had succeeded in overthrowing a brutal US-backed dictator. 

   The Carter administration had cut off aid to Somoza because of his outrageous war crimes and refusal to negotiate with the opposition. Somoza turned to Israel for arms. Israel was also playing key roles in the dirty wars in El Salvador and Guatemala providing arms and advisers, helping Guatemala carry out genocide against the Maya Indians. Five hundred of Somoza’s national guard, who had carried out numerous war crimes, relocated briefly to Guatemala taking shelter with the “Godfather of the Death Squads” Mario Sandoval Alarcon. They were determined to follow the example of the Cuban exiles and wage covert war on revolutionary Nicaragua. Soon they were joined by Argentine advisers fresh from their own dirty war. They arrived after having recently carried out the Bolivian cocaine coup and began to advise these Contras or counter-revolutionaries. The Carter administration hoped to use aid as leverage to control Nicaragua’s new government. The CIA was doubtless already backing the Contras, who named themselves the 15 September Legion and began carrying out kidnappings, terrorism, and drug smuggling. Reagan would be elected in part through illegal campaign donations from Central American oligarchs in Guatemala and El Salvador who had been promised full support in waging their dirty wars by former DIA director General Daniel Graham and General John Singlaub, a military/CIA man and future World Anti-Communist League head. Reagan would keep this promise, vastly escalating the wars in Central America. 300,000 would die in Guatemala and El Salvador in the name of preventing “another Nicaragua.” Torture rape and mass murder were standard operating procedures. Like in Nicaragua, the administration would lie to Congress to carry out the dirty wars in Guatemala and El Salvador and constantly find ways to circumvent any congressional limits to US support. This never became a scandal. In Nicaragua 35,000 would perish in attacks by the Contra death squads. Casey put Duane “Dewey” Clarridge in charge of Latin America and he ran the Contras until turning them over to Oliver North in the wake of Boland II. Clarridge was transferred to head the European Division, where he would help arm the Contras and facilitate the Iran arms deals.

   To summarize the Cold War history of the Middle East would be impossible in so short a space and would require months or years of extra research. The US’s backing of Israel alienated the entire region. The US scheme to create a Middle Eastern version of NATO and its constant coups to install pro-western regimes would backfire. In Iran in 1953 the CIA overthrew prime minister Mossadegh and restored Shah Pahlavi. Mossadegh, a fervent secular nationalist, had been branded a communist for nationalizing the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British Petroleum). He had expelled all the British spies and diplomats after their failed coup plots and attempt to lay siege to the country and prevent it from selling oil. The British were forced to turn to the CIA and after the coup they turned over half of Iran’s oil over to US corporations. The CIA and Mossad trained the Shah’s secret police, the Savak, to torture and murder their opponents.  Iran became a top customer of the American military industrial complex. Richard Secord would serve as an air force adviser in the 1960s and then after serving in Vietnam and Laos return in the late 1970s as head of the US military assistance program. He would meet various corrupt Iranian businessmen with intelligence ties that would later appear in the October surprise and Iran Contra scandals. Then he would supervise arms sales at the Pentagon. In Egypt the CIA recruited Nasser’s successor Sadat. He would sabotage the 1973 Arab Israeli war, expel the Soviet advisers from Egypt. President Carter then convinced Sadat to completely betray the Arab cause by signing a separate peace deal with Israel. His reward was a massive increase in weapons sales from the US. Secord at the Pentagon was a silent partner along with Ted Shackley in EATSCO, a transport company run by Ed Wilson and Thomas Clines, created to profit off the Egyptian arms sales. However Sadat’s peace deal was an obstacle to Israeli plans to invade Lebanon. His security personnel were trained by American advisers connected to EATSCO. The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated him. Mubarak who was also a key figure in the Egyptian side of skimming money from the arms sales was installed as Egypt’s new leader. In the late 1970s, Ed Wilson would be part of a scheme to supply huge amounts of C4 explosives and special forces advisers to Libya in order to gain intelligence on the revolutionaries and nationalists that Gaddafi allowed to train there and in the hopes of stealing Soviet weapons systems. Wilson was carrying out an off the books operation for the CIA but they denied any connection to him. His business partners Secord, Shackley, and Clines had grown envious of the vast wealth he had amassed running CIA front companies. Once Reagan became president, Libya was falsely blamed for a number of terrorist attacks like the La Belle disco attack in Berlin and the Lockerbie bombing. The US would wage a proxy war on Libya via Chad, and shoot down Libyan aircraft and boats attempting to defend their territorial waters during American war games. The campaign would culminate in a bombing raid aiming to assassinate Gaddafi, which would wound his wife and seven children and kill his adopted baby daughter. Dozens of civilians would also be killed. This occurred in 1986 during the height of the Iran-Contra scandal. Oliver North, who was also the terror czar, was a key planner of the attacks. Gaddafi would survive until the 2011 NATO war when Libya was bombed into submission while Al Qaeda terrorists seized the country. 

   Lebanon was another country that was key to understanding the Iran-Contra affair. Israel saw it as a key testing ground for its Oded Yinon style plans to balkanize the Middle East. Lebanon was divided along religious lines and its political parties each represented a different faction. The Christian minority held disproportionate power, the Sunnis were divided into pro-Western and pro-Arab nationalist factions, and the Shiite’s were under represented. At one point in the mid 1970s, left wing Arab nationalists were on the verge of seizing power. Kissinger had to convince Hafez Assad to prevent their victory in order to avoid an Israeli invasion. Lebanon was home to a huge number of Palestinian exiles, who had been forced to flee Jordan after the events of “Black September” after which Jordan had launched a brutal crackdown. The Israelis encouraged the Christian fascists to seize power and, failing that, break away and form their own country. This led to the Lebanese civil war. In 1978 Israel invaded southern Lebanon but the Carter administration convinced them to withdraw. In 1982 Israel would invade again this time with the support of the Reagan administration. They kidnapped a number of visiting Iranian officials and of course kidnapped imprisoned and tortured huge numbers of Lebanese just as it has arrested, imprisoned and tortured untold numbers of Palestinians over the decades. In 1982 Iran sent the IRGC into Lebanon to help train Hezbollah. Israel captured Beirut and installed the Christian Phalange leader as president. He was assassinated and in revenge thousands of Palestinians cordoned off by the Israeli army were massacred by the Christian Phalange in Sabra and Shatila. 

   The US pretended neutrality, but sided with Israel. The Marines were sent in and the US Navy began shelling Lebanese villages. In 1983 Hezbollah chased the US out with a series of bombings. In 1984 it began kidnapping Americans to use as leverage to free the 17 Da’awa prisoners in Kuwait who had attacked French and US targets there. They had also kidnapped the CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured into revealing decades of dirty secrets. The stage was set for the Iran arms for hostages deals. Of course the stage had already been set during the October surprise negotiations that got Reagan elected in the first place. Israel would be the middleman in the October surprise arms deals and the early Iran-Contra arms deals. Egypt would be the middleman in the Iraqgate arms deals. The course of the Iran-Iraq war would be prolonged, as the US supplied arms to both sides nearly one million Iraqis and Iranians would die. The US supplied Iraq Intelligence so it could use its chemical weapons to best effect against Iran. Then in 1986 the US began supplying Iran with intelligence that shifted the balance of the war.  The fallout of the Iran-Contra affair would lead to the first Gulf War. President Bush had started authorizing huge loans and weapons shipments to Iraq while encouraging Kuwait to provoke Iraq. Bush had the State department give Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait, followed by sanctions which killed another million, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the intentional creation of a sectarian civil war that would claim at least a million more lives.

   The Iran-Contra era saw the seeds planted that would more recently bloom into many more recent wars. The invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the failed attempt to destroy Syria. In the case of Syria the US and Israel had helped launch a Muslim brotherhood uprising in 1983 with the aid of Iraq that would eerily mirror the Syrian war of 2011 to today. And then of course, there was Afghanistan where the US was again arming drug-dealing contras. Socialist Afghanistan was destroyed. Afghanistan was taken over by warlords who battled each other. Eventually the Clinton Administration and Pakistan had the Taliban seize control of the country. The Iran-Contra were a key period in the origins of the war on terror with Benjamin Netanyahu holding the Jerusalem Conference on anti-terrorism in 1979. Casey, North and even Secretary of State Schultz all backed plans to form counter-terror squads to carry out “pre-emptive strikes” on groups labelled “terrorists” (often legitimate resistance groups and left wing guerrillas) Theire were plans to declare martial law and round up hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees and tens of thousands of peace activists in the event that the US invaded Nicaragua. Of course the US has been waging war on Central American refugees for decades. However after 9/11 these Iran-Contra era plans were dusted off to form the basis of the USA Patriot Act, the rounding up of thousands of innocent Muslims and the total surveillance of everyone on the planet. Not only that, but many key figures in Iran-Contra were put back into power in the George W Bush administrations. Plus of course the creation of a global Phoenix program or Operation Condor system of kidnap, assassination and torture that is applied worldwide. All in the name of battling an al Qaeda that within ten years it was quite openly supporting. Thanks to the Reagan era victory of “Public Diplomacy” over investigative journalism no one in the media dared point out this little fact. In truth US soft power proved more effective than covert war. It was soft power in the form of the NED interference in the Nicaraguan election of 1990 that brought down the Sandinistas. It was NED soft power not the war in Afghanistan that destroyed the Soviet Union and insured the electoral victory of neoliberalism. The era of the colour revolution had begun. The NED had been another of Bill Casey’s projects.

   The victory of Reagan and Bush in the Cold War has led to our current dystopian age. American hyper power is free to rampage around the globe destroying country after country. Always we are reminded that there is no alternative to capitalism. That we should just let the market decide. If a country manages to resist US covert wars and coup plots it will have its economy throttled by sanctions like Venezuela and Syria. Today historians have begun to talk of the world having suffered a 50-year counter-revolution with seemingly no end in sight. This is the ultimate legacy of the Iran-Contra era.

   

 

 

Sources

My next article will include an extensive list of Iran Contra books I used. 

For now I would like to recommend just two.

Malcolm Byrne’s Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power is the definitive mainstream version of events.

Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, The Press & Project Truth by Robert Parry gives many details left out of mainstream accounts. He has an in-depth discussion of the Contra drug connection as well as the role of drugs in Panama and Honduras. He also discusses the Reagan Administration Public Diplomacy campaign that destroyed investigative journalism in the US. 

Malcolm Byrne lecture about his Iran Contra Book

https://youtu.be/xUu8f9rBh_g

A Robert Parry Interview

https://youtu.be/_X3v4Di8YyM

A discussion of the October Surprise

https://youtu.be/2oTY7fQuieY

My earlier series on Iran Contra

Part 1 The Secret Team

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/05/irancontra-pt-1-secret-team.html

Part 2 World War 3

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/06/irancontra-pt-2-world-war-3.html

Part 3 The World Anti-Communist League Part 1

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/07/irancontra-pt-3-wacl.html

Part 4 The World Anti-Communist League Part 2

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/08/irancontra-pt-4-wacl-2.html

Ted Shackley a Life in the CIA

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/12/ted-shackley-life-in-cia.html

Iran-Contra Pt 3: Arms Deals with Iran

Iran Contra Scandal: Arms for Hostages Deals with Iran

   The second element in the Iran-Contra scandal were the arms for hostages deals. At the time they were the most controversial aspect of the scandal. Iran and it’s ally Hezbollah had inflicted a series of humiliations on the US that began during the Iranian Revolution and escalated during the war on Lebanon. The Iran Hostage Crisis, the US embassy bombing in Beiruit, the kidnapping of CIA Chief of Station William Buckley and most dramatically the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. The US had branded Iran a state terror sponsor and the State Department and CIA had launched Operation Staunch to pressure the whole world to stop selling arms to Iran. The US was allied with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Monarchs in backing Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war. Reagan had publicly called Iran “Murder Incorporated” and claimed the US would never negotiate or make concessions with terrorists. Yet at the same time as Reagan was publicly condemning Iran the US was supplying them with thousands of anti-tank missiles, helping Iran rebuild it’s air defenses and providing it with intelligence that managed to shift the balance in the Iran/Iraq war in Iran’s favor. This was all in an effort to free seven American hostages in Beirut. Of course the deeper geopolitical purpose was to prolong the Iran/Iraq war making it as bloody and destructive as possible a goal the Israeli Mossad veteran David  Kimche  openly admitted. President Ronald Reagan over ruled objections from his own cabinet  to carry the deal out. Even when warned that he could face impeachment and prison Reagan pushed for the deals to continue. Among Reagan’s cabinet only Vice President George H. W. Bush and CIA Director Bill Casey consistently supported the continuation of the arms for hostage deals. At a lower level North and Secord once they were brought in on the deals, also consistently backed the plans as they benefited “The Enterprise.” Secord was able to turn a profit while North was able to funnel money to the Contras in Nicaragua.

   The Iran-Contra investigations failed to investigate the true origins of the Iran arms for hostages deal. First there had been the role of the Shah’s Iran as one of the top customers of America’s military industrial complex. In the final years of the Shah’s reign Richard Secord had headed the Military Assistance program in Iran helping his arms dealing friends generate vast profits. When the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah the Rockefeller family interests in the form of Chase Manhattan bank were worried the new Iranian government might withdraw  the hundreds of millions Iran had deposited in their bank. They had helped to launch the career of President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski convinced Carter to allow the exiled Shah into the US for cancer treatment. Back in Iran many thought the US was preparing to launch another coup like the one that had toppled Mossadegh and installed the Shah back in 1953. In protest of the US admission of the Shah and in hopes of finding out what the US was plotting a group of Iranian students seized the embassy. They captured 52 Americans on the embassy staff officials of the state department, the CIA, and the military. They also seized all the files documenting decades of US support for the Shah’s dirty war on the Iranian people. The Hostage Crisis began on November 4 1979.  President Carter retaliated by freezing Iran’s overseas accounts allowing Chase-Manhattan to keep Iran’s money. This at least is one simplified version of events the Iranian revolution was far more complex then most realize and in fact went  through two stages. First the initial overthrow of the Shah by broader movement that included left wing forces and nationalists. Second the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revolution. Also there is evidence that the rise of Khomeini and the whole hostage crisis were manipulated by western intelligence. Iran’s mullahs had long been on the CIA payroll since the days of the 1953 coup. Iran is by no means a puppet of the US or it’s allies. Iran remains one of the few countries willing to stand up to the US and Israel. However despite the hostile rhetoric from both sides secret deals were made between the US and Iran.

   President Jimmy Carter began a year of efforts to rescue or negotiate the release of the hostages. However unknown to Carter or his administration he was being targeted for a soft coup by the GOP, disgruntled elements of the CIA, and big business in the form of David Rockefeller and his allies. It became known as the “October Surprise” a term for last minute manipulations in October aiming to alter the election results in November. The GOP were obsessed with the idea Carter would free the hostages in October 1980 swinging the election in his favor. Yet the GOP began to manipulate events far earlier then October 1980. The first secret deals between the GOP and the Khomeini faction took place at least as early as March 1980.  Reagan’s campaign manager was OSS veteran Bill Casey. Casey set up an October Surprise group to monitor Carter’s efforts to free the hostages. Elements within the Carter administration like Donald Gregg at the NSC and Robert Gates at the CIA were leaking information to Casey. Bush had his own CIA agents for Bush contingent which included Robert Gambino. Many CIA agents for Bush would join Casey’s October surprise group once Reagan picked Bush as Vice Presidential candidate.

   To negotiate with Iran Carter’s administration had picked Cyrus Hashemi.  Cyrus and his brother Jamshid Hashemi had close ties to Mehdi and Hassan Karrubi in Iran. (Hassan Karrubi and Cyrus Hashemi would both be deeply involved in the Iran Contra scandal.) The Hashemi brothers were also close to Admiral Madani who was the main rival of Iran’s President Bani Sadr. Unknown to Carter Cyrus Hashemi had close ties to Bill Casey through Lebanese American businessman John Shaheen. Casey had done legal work for them and had known Shaheen for decades. Cyrus Hashemi became a double agent for the Reagan campaign initially providing them intelligence on Carter’s negotiations and then acting as a middleman to set up negotiations between Casey and the Iranians. Cyrus Hashemi’s bank First Gulf and Trust had been used by the CIA, the Shah’s Family, and the new Iranian government to move money. It had close ties to BCCI an infamous CIA backed bank whose clients included drug cartels and terrorists. 

   A series of meetings were held. In March 1980 Reagan crony Earl Brian (who served as Secretary of Health under Governor Reagan) and Robert “Bud” McFarlane (who would later set the Iran Contra arms for hostage deals in motion) along with Bill Casey met in Madrid with Iranian Mehdi Bazargan (Close to Hashemi’s contact Mehdi Karrubbi) to arrange a deal whereby Iran would refuse to release the hostages until after the election in exchange for massive shipments of arms and other concessions. The Israeli’s were also in on the deal. Israel had begun selling arms to Iran back in September of 1979 and would act as middleman in the October Surprise arms deals. After the Madrid meet Israel supplied Iran with 300 tires for Iran’s F4 fighter jets in March 1980. Iranian born Israeli Ari Ben Menashe would play a major role in the arms deals and in later exposing the October Surprise. In return the Reagan Administration would turn a blind eye as Israel sold nearly a billion dollars in arms to Iran in the early 1980’s.  Bush’s man ex-CIA Ted Shackley would later meet with the Iranians in London and Hamburg and was Bush’s point man on October Surprise. A Bush memo was uncovered revealing Bush later told Richard Allen (who would go on to be Reagan’s first National Security Adviser) to contact Shackely with any last minute details on Carter’s hostage. negotiations. Shackley was also close to Michael Ledeen who was involved in the October surprise and the “BillyGate” scandal targeting Carter’s brother. In July of 1980 Hashemi would begin a series of secret meetings with Iranian representatives including Mehdi Karrubi in Madrid. After meeting with Khomeini Karrubi requested another meet with Casey that was held in August 1980.

   Meanwhile the Carter administration was working from a hard bargaining stance completely unaware that the Iranians had already gotten a better offer from the GOP. On April 24 1980 the US mounted a disastrous rescue attempt “Operation Eagle Claw” either through bad luck, incompetence, or sabotage it ended in complete disaster when two of the helicopters crashed in the Iranian desert landing zone called Desert One. Eight men from the US military died in the crash the others were forced to flee as they no longer had enough helicopters to carry out the rescue. The corpses of the dead Americans were paraded through Tehran enraging the US public and humiliating Carter. Richard Secord, Robert Dutton, and Richard Gadd future members of “The Enterprise” were all involved in the hostage rescue plans. The failure would lead to a massive re-expansion of the Special Forces that began under Carter growing under Reagan and continuing to expand into our own time.

   In September 1980 Carter’s luck was finally poised to change. Iran’s President Bani Sadr had learned of the GOP’s secret deal with Khomeini and planned to go public on September 8 1980. To keep him quiet Khomeini agreed to reopen negotiations with the US. Iran was also worried about an increasingly hostile Iraq. Khomeini sent Sadegh Tatabani to make a deal and Carter’s negotiators seized on the opportunity. Yet once again Brzezinski’s machinations would sabotage Carter. Brzezinski had convinced Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to invade Iran the war began on September 22 1980 and Tatabani was unable to return to Iran because Iraq was bombing the Tehran airport. In late September or early October the Iranians would meet with GOP representatives at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington DC where Israeli Housang Lavi, Americans Richard Allen, Robert McFarlane, and Lawrence Silberman met with Iranian representatives. (President Reagan would later appoint Silberman a judge  and Judge Silberman would overturn North and Poindexter’s Iran Contra convictions) The DC meeting was followed by a meeting at the Ritz Hotel in Paris October 17-18 1980 attended by Bill Casey and Vice Presidential Candidate George H. W. Bush along with Robert McFarlane, Robert Gates, Donald Gregg and George Cave . The Iranians agreed to hold the hostages until after the inauguration. It was bad enough the GOP was convincing the Iranians to hold onto the hostages until after the election. Now it wanted Iran to hold onto them even longer so that Reagan could come into office with a boost in popularity. To cement the deal a French Israeli arms shipment was sent to Iran on October 23 1980 consisting of 250 F4 spare tires and M6 tank spare parts. On November 4, 1980 the US election was held on the one year anniversary of the start of the hostage crisis Carter lost to Reagan. On January 20, 1981 Reagan was inaugurated President and the hostages were released. The US was soon supplying Iran with hundreds of millions in arms through Israel, South Korea and it’s NATO allies. Israel used it’s knowledge of the “October Surprise” secret to get away with selling Iran nearly a billion dollars in arms in 1981-1983. Naive Americans believed the strange coincidence of the hostages being released on the day of the inauguration was because of Reagan’s tough stance on terrorism. By massively expanding Carter’s war in Afghanistan Reagan and Casey would play a major role in giving birth to Al Qaeda. The Reagan years would also see the origins of the same rhetoric and tactics of the later “War on Terror.”   Although Reagan did not personally take part in the October Surprise negotiations he was almost certainly let in on the secret. It is the only way to explain his obsession with pursuing the Iran-Contra arms for hostage deals despite their quickly evolving into a farce filled with lies and broken promises. The October Surprise would be covered up by Congress and most of the media. The October Surprise story has been confirmed by dozens of witnesses from around the world including former President Bani Sadr, Ari Ben Menashe, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, Alexandre DeMarenches (former head of French Intelligence and close Bush ally) Russian Intelligence, and the Iranian Government offered to send proof to Bill Clinton. 

   In the years that followed the bloody Iran-Iraq war would continue eventually claiming over a million lives. The US was busy supplying Iraq with arms via Egypt and the CIA provided the Iraqis intelligence to plan their attacks. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and installed a puppet government. The Israeli’s had sparked the Lebanese civil war back in 1975 encouraging their fascist christian phalange allies to try to seize control of the country. Southern Lebanon was being used as a base for Palestinian forces to shell Israel. The Israelis were even more annoyed with them when the Palestinians maintained a ceasefire. In 1978 Israel had invaded and occupied Southern Lebanon but Carter had forced them to withdraw. Now with Reagan in office in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon eventually creating a puppet state in Southern Lebanon. Southern Lebanon was also home to a huge Shiite population and with the aid of Iran’s IRGC they formed Hezbollah in 1982. The US became increasingly involved in Lebanon siding with the Israelis and the Phalange while pretending to be neutral peacekeepers. It would take Hezbollah nearly 20 years to force Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. Hezbollah would force the US to withdraw in just 1 year.  On April 18 1983 Hezbollah set off a van packed with explosives outside the US embassy 63 were killed. A dozen high level CIA personnel including their top Mid-East analyst Robert Ames who Casey had sent to Beirut. Robert McFarlane was sent as a special emissary to Beirut and he escalated US involvement in the war shelling and bombing Lebanese civilians. Then on October 23 1983 the Marine Barracks were bombed in Beirut by a huge truck bomb. 241 members of the US military were killed. The US claimed it wouldn’t pull out but quietly did. To distract the US public the US launched the Invasion of Grenada where it had just carried out a coup. Oliver North helped plan the invasion. 

   On March 7 1984 CNN journalist Jeremy Levin was kidnapped. Then on March 16 1984 the CIA station Chief William Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah on the way to work he was later sent to Iran for questioning under torture. His capture and worry over what he might reveal was a major factor in motivating the US to trade arms for hostages. Buckley would tell all to the Iranians and they transcribed his confession into a 400 page book. Buckley would die before he could be freed. Six more American hostages would be kidnapped by Hezbollah or it’s front groups in Beirut between May 8 1984 and June 9 1985. They were Reverend Benjamin Weir, Peter Kilburn (librarian at American University) Father Lawrence Martin Jenco (Catholic relief services), Terry Anderson (AP journalist) David Jacobsen (Hospital Director at American University) and finally Thomas Southerland (Director of Agriculture at American University) They were kidnapped to gain leverage to free the Dawa prisoners being held in Kuwait after a series of attacks on American and French targets there. Their kidnappings would provide the motivations or the excuse for the US to carry out the arms for hostage deals. Except for Jeremy Levin would seemingly escape after being ransomed.

   A key factor behind the Iran-Contra scandal that few delved into was a web of groups set up by Vice President George H.W. Bush that dealt with Crisis management and Counter-Terrorism. It was thanks to the key role that North played in the counter-terror network or as Peter Dales Scott calls it “a Cabal” that North became not just the point man for the Contras but also in charge of counter-terrorism and eventually in charge of the Iran arms for hostages negotiations. The “Cabal” included Admiral John Poindexter (NSC), Oliver North(NSC), Duane “Dewey” Clarridge (CIA) Charles Allen (CIA), Robert Oakley (State Department), Noel Koch (DOD) Lt Gen John Moellering (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Oliver “Buck” Revell (FBI). They communicated via “Flashboard” a secret email system. NSDD (National Security Directive) 3 had put Vice President Bush in charge of crisis management back in 1982. Bush recruited North and his secretary Fawn Hall to work on crisis management. This lead to North drawing up Continuity of Government plans calling for declaring martial law, suspending the constitution, total surveillance, and rounding up tens of thousands of dissidents and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the event of nuclear war, terror attacks, or even civil unrest. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would also be involved in these plans during the Clinton administration. They formed the blueprint for America’s post 9/11 response. Bush also created a Crisis Preplanning group and a Special Situations Group. North worked on the creation of a Crisis Management Center. In April of 1984 North Drafted an NSDD that created the TIWG (Terrorist Incident Working Group) 2 TIWG members would work closely with North, Craig Coy and Robert Earl. In July of 1985 President Reagan convened the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism. At the exact same time the US suddenly reversed it’s Iran strategy opening the door for the Iran arms for hostage deals Peter Dale Scott points out. On January 20 86 just as the US was preparing to make direct arms sales to Iran NSDD 207 put North in charge of Counter-Terrorism and set up a secret Office to Combat Terrorism run by Oliver North staffed by veterans of Bush’s Counter-terror cabal. Michael Ledeen and the Israeli Amiram Nir were also part of this counter-terror network and like North would play major roles in the Iran Contra Scandal along with Robert Oakley and Dewey Clarridge. Through counter-terror network Bush and North became close. Thanks to this shadowy network within the government Bush became as deeply embroiled in the Iran side of the scandal as he had been in the contra side. It was sort of the government equivalent of setting up a bunch of shell companies. The bloodiest incident in North’s war on terror was the attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah leader Muhammed Hussein Fadallah with a car bomb  80 people were killed in the attack but Fadallah survived. 

   Now it’s time to introduce North’s bosses at the NSC Robert “Bud” McFarlane and John Poindexter. “Bud” McFarlane was the son of democratic congressman in Texas. He graduated from Annapolis Naval Academy in 1959, was commissioned as a marine officer. McFarlane lead the first US combat unit in Vietnam. He studied in Switzerland and received a White House Fellowship. Al Haig Henry Kissinger’s deputy at the NSC brought on McFarlane as his military assistant. McFarlane came to regard Kissinger as his mentor and McFarlane was involved in his secret negotiations with China. McFarlane would later hope that his Iran initiative would earn him a similar place in history. He retired from the marines as a Lt. Colonel and served two years on the Senate Arms Services Committee under Senator John Tower. Tower was also involved in the October Surprise and was picked by Reagan to investigate/Cover-up the Iran Contra scandal. Once Reagan was President he picked Al Haig as his Secretary of State. Haig brought McFarlane on as a Counselor to the State Department. Then with Haig on the way out as Secretary of State McFarlane returned to the NSC as National Security Advised Willam Clark’s deputy. When Clark stepped down as National Security Adviser the Ed Meese, Michael Deaver, and Jim Baker faction called the “Troika”  which dominated the early Reagan Administration tried to appoint James Baker as the new National Security Adviser. Baker was a close friend of George H.W. Bush who has become infamous as the Bush family “Fixer.” Bill Casey blocked the appointment and McFarlane was chosen as the National Security adviser as a compromise. Since “Bud” McFarlane and Ollie North were both marine Lt. Colonels serving on the NSC and both workaholics they developed a sort of father son relationship and McFarlane came to rely ever more on North. McFarlane was also a longtime friend of Mossad veteran and director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry David Kimche. McFarlane put great trust in the advice of Bill Casey. McFarlane trust in both Casey and Kimche would lead him to plunge into the disastrous Iranian arms for hostage deals.

   Vice Admiral John Poindexter was McFarlane’s deputy at NSC and would succeed him as National Security Adviser in early December 1985. He was born in a small farming town in Indiana. He graduated top of his class at Annapolis Naval Academy then received a PHD in nuclear physics from the California Institute of Technology. He served under three Secretaries of the Navy and as executive assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Holloway. He also commanded a guided missile cruiser and a destroyer squadron. Poindexter was recruited to set up the computer network for Bush’s Crisis Management Center. He had IBM install a prototype version of the Internet at the NSC allowing North and the other Iran Contra conspirators to email each other via PROF messages. The NSC crisis management network linked the NSC computer network to the computer networks of the State Department, The CIA, the Pentagon, numerous law enforcement agencies, military bases around the world and foreign intelligence services. This was a few years before anyone in the general public knew what an email was. This would come back to haunt Poindexter, North and others when they deleted all their PROF messages only to have some low level research assistant to the Tower Committee figure out how to recover them all. On the internet nothing is ever really deleted. Poindexter was secretive and a bit more reckless then McFarlane. At the height of the Iran Contra scandal Poindexter would save Reagan by testifying to Congress (almost certainly falsely) that Reagan had not been informed of the diversion of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Contras.

   Adnan Khashoggi the Saudi Billionaire who the press dubbed “the world’s wealthiest man” had made a fortune being a CIA conduit for bribes to middle eastern officials to buy American weapons systems. He was famous for his yachts, lavish parties and high class call girl ring. One of Khashoggi’s call girls would bring down presidential hopeful Senator Gary Hart. Khashoggi was close friends with Donald Trump and sold him a yacht. Adnan was the  uncle of Jamal Khashoggi who made news when he was murdered in a Saudi Embassy in Turkey on orders of King Muhammed bin Salman back in 2018. Between 1983 and 1984 Khashoggi met frequently with “Bud” McFarlane at NSC trying to sell him on various schemes. In late 1984 Khashoggi would team up with Manucher Ghorbanifar on a scheme to sell arms to Iran in order to free the hostages. Iran was desperate for weapons the Iraqis soviet supplied tanks were smashing them on the battlefield. Iraq was bombing Iran and Iran was running out of missiles and parts for it’s air defense system. It would later emerge during the Iraqgate investigations that Vice President Bush had provided intelligence and encouragement for Iraq to bomb Iran to pressure Iran during the arms for hostage scheme but this was probably later.

   Manucher Ghorbanifar the middleman in the Iran arms deals was an arms dealer who had served in Savak, become an Israeli agent, and supplied information to the CIA that was so unreliable they issued a burn notice on him as a known fabricator after he failed too many lie detector tests. The Iranians were desperate enough for weapons that they were willing to use a known Israeli agent like Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar would become infamous for lying to both the Americans and the Iranians to get them to the bargaining table. Ghorbanifar’s Iranian contacts Hassan Karrubi and Mohsen Kangarlou had been involved in the earlier October Surprise negotiations. Ghorbanifar hoped to make millions off the Arms  deals. Oliver North was as big of a liar as Ghorbanifar practicing that special American brand of bullshitting necessary to the salesman or the sports coach. Desperate to gain the confidence of the American’s after the CIA had discarded him Ghorbanifar met with Theodore Shackley in Hamburg Germany on November 20 1984. Ghorbanifar warned (falsely) that Iran was in danger of becoming a soviet satellite in 5 years. Ghorbanifar wanted to buy TOW anti-tank missiles and offered to free the kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley and to provide captured soviet equipment to the US. Ted Shackley was running a risk management firm Research Associates Inc. and was closely monitoring the Iran-Iraq war. Shackley had hired an Iranian named Razmara who introduced Shackley to the former head of the Savak’s Counter-Intelligence General Manucher Hashemi in October 1984 and Hashemi had arranged the meet with Ghorbanifar. According to veteran CIA Iran operative George Cave Shackley was working for the NSC. Shackley was also working for Vice President George H.W. Bush while ostensibly in the private intelligence business. Shackley was close to both Secord and Clines his “former” business partners. Shackley wrote up a memo on November 22 1984 and sent it to Vernon Walters Reagan’s ambassador at large and fellow CIA veteran infamous for his role in the 1964 coup in Brazil. Walters forwarded the memo Robert Oakley the State Department’s point man on counter-terrorism (Part of the Bush/North Counter terror network) and to Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East Richard W. Murphy. Because of Ghorbanifar’s dubious reputation the offer was initially rejected. By March 1988 Shackley’s memo landed on NSC consultant Michael Ledeen who claimed (probably falsely) that he never read it but forwarded it to Oliver North. Ledeen was another of Shackley’s friends from the October Surprise days.

    Michael Ledeen would jump start the languishing Iran arms for hostages deal. Ledeen was a CIA press asset, a contractor for Italy’s SISMI intelligence agency along with Shackley. In Italy Ledeen would help cover up GLADIO and spread the myth of the Soviet Union being behind all the world’s terror attacks. Ledeen had close ties to Israeli intelligence, was a far right neo-con, and had earlier befriended Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres when Ledeen was sent to infiltrate the socialist international of which Peres’s Labor Party was a member. Currently Ledeen was a consultant on counter terrorism at the NSC. Ledeen got McFarlane’s permission to travel to Israel to explore using Israel’s contacts to gain intelligence on Iran. Once in Israel the Israelis introduced Ledeen to the Iranian Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Saudi Adnan Khashoggi, along with two Israeli arms dealers Adolph Schwimmer  and Yaacov Nimrodi. They had a pile of disinformation to sell Ledeen along with the promise to free the seven American hostages. The disinformation was that Iran was in danger of falling into the soviet orbit, but that Ghorbanifar was in contact with a pro-western faction that hoped to take power once Khomeini was dead. Supposedly Iran was divided into 3 factions a pro-soviet faction, a neutral faction, and a pro-western faction. Ghorbanifar promised to put the US in contact with the “Moderates.” In reality Iranian politics in the Islamic republic had nothing to do with such simple cold war dynamics. There were no pro-soviet factions and no pro-american factions. Back in 1983 a Soviet defector had supplied the CIA with a complete list of KGB assets and Casey decided to send the list to Iran. Khoemeini had them killed or arrested. However like most countries Iran was ruled by ruthless pragmatists who were willing to buy arms from Israel or the US because of the Iran-Iraq war. Arms procurement was controlled by Iran’s IRGC the revolutionary guard but they were used to operating through Iranian exiles and shady characters like Ghorbanifar. While in Israel Ledeen also met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and David Kimche the director general of the Israeli Foreign ministry a Mossad veteran. Kimche would go on to advise the greatest mass murderer of recent times Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame in the 1990’s. Kimche would fly to Washington DC to meet with McFarlane a couple weeks after Ledeen’s return. When Ledeen met with the Israeli Prime Minister Peres vouched for Ghorbanifar, Khashoggi, Schwimmer, and Nimrodi and asked Ledeen to deliver a personal message to “Bud McFarlane.” Schwimmer was a major backer of Peres and the Iran deal was meant to reward him. The Labor party had been cut out of the lucrative arms market by the Likud party, the Mossad, and the Israeli defense department and Peres hoped that with US backing his cronies could get into the Iran arms sales business. 

   Returning to the US Ledeen briefed McFarlane on the arms for hostage deal and passed on Peres’s message. McFarlane bought the cover story on Iranian moderates and hoped that by bringing Iran back into the US orbit he would earn his place alongside his mentor Kissinger in the history books. CIA director Bill Casey encouraged this delusion he intentionally kept the CIA’s top Iranian analysts reports from reaching the NSC lest they discredit the cover story about selling arms to Iranian moderates. Instead Casey had Graham Fuller (later infamous for his role backing al Qaeda style groups in Central Asia) write a report calling for a complete reversal  on US policy towards Iran. Soon the NSC had a draft finding on a new Iran policy that would enable the Iran arms for hostage deals to go forward. Now it was a decision for the President and his NSPG (National Security Planning Group a modified NSC.) The idea was strongly opposed by both Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Casey, McFarlane, and Vice President Bush supported the arms for hostages scheme. The idea got a boost in June 1985 when Iran and Syria helped negotiate the release of the TWA 847 hostages being held in Beirut after their plane was hijacked by a Hezbollah front Islamic Jihad. Israel freed hundreds of shiite prisoners it was holding in exchange. The deal was brokered by Iranian speaker of the parliament Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who was also a key player behind the scenes on the arms for hostage deals. The decisive voice belonged to President Ronald Reagan and he was in favor of going ahead. President Reagan gave the final green light to McFarlane on July 13 1985 while in the hospital recovering from a polyp operation.

   Manucher Ghorbanifar had promised to free all of the hostages once 100 TOW anti-tank missiles were delivered. Israel was to act as the middle man it would ship TOWS from it’s own stocks and the US promised to send replacements. To finance the deal Ghorbanifar borrowed $1 million from Khashoggi. Yaacov Nimrodi and Al Schwimmer charged Ghorbainfar $10,000 for each missile. The Israeli Defense Ministry sold them to the two Israeli arms dealers for only $6,000 each.  Ghorbanifar charged Iran $12,000 for each TOW. On August 20 1985 Israel delivered 96 TOW missiles to Iran choosing the defective or obsolete TOWs from their stockpile. (apparently TOWs are shipped in 8 packs) On landing in Iran the IRGC immediately seized the TOWs. No hostages were released. Ghorbanifar used the excuse that since the IRGC not the “Moderates” had gotten the missiles the moderates hadn’t freed any hostages. However Ghorbanifar had a new deal for 400 more TOW missiles plus the 4 TOWs Israel owed them from the first shipment Iran would get a hostage freed. Amazingly the arrogant US agreed to this second deal after Ghorbanifar had failed to deliver the first time. On September 15, 1985 Israel delivered 408 TOWs to Iran. Within hours the hostage Reverend Benjamin Weir was released. The US had hoped to free CIA station chief William Buckley first, Casey had even played Reagan a video of Buckley being tortured. The Iranian’s claimed Buckley was to ill to travel in reality he had died in June of 1985.

   Iran now hoped to rebuild it’s air defenses with the next deal. The Iranians were now demanding HAWK surface to air missiles and Phoenix missiles. The US refused to sell the Phoenix missiles which it didn’t even supply to most of it’s allies. It agreed to sell the HAWKs however. The deal was for 120 IHAWK missiles Iran would pay 18 million or $225,000 each. IHAWKS were the more advanced version. The plan was for Israel to ship them to Iran via Portugal. This is when Oliver North was recruited to run the Iran arms for hostages deals. At first McFarlane had put North in charge of replenishing Israeli stocks. McFarlane was busy preparing for the arms control summit in Geneva. However Portugal was refusing permission to allow the missiles to land and take off from their country. On November 17 1985 Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin called North to fix the problem and McFarlane called soon after to confirm that he had referred Rabin to North. North brought in Secord who’s partner Tom Clines had close contacts with the Portuguese arms company DEFEX. However DEFEX had strong ties to the party that had recently been voted out of office instead of the new government. The HAWK deal quickly turned into a fiasco. Secord’s attempt to hold an unscheduled meeting with the foreign minister at the airport only upset Portugal. The US embassy was ignorant of the deal and told Portugal not to approve it. North brought in Duane “Dewey” Clarridge serving as the CIA’s head of European operations to get the CIA’s help in pressuring Portugal. Al Schwimmer lost patience and tried to send the plane in without clearance hoping the problem would be solved before it landed. The plane was forced to turn around and it’s lease ran out. The Israeli’s agreed to pay Secord’s “Enterprise” 1 million for transport. Dewey Clarridge called Langley to get the name of a CIA controlled airline St. Lucia. This would raise also sorts of legal problems once the scandal broke. To engage in a covert operation the CIA needed a Presidential finding. Anyways the St. Lucia plane was smaller then the one Schwimmer had rented and could carry fewer missiles. Secord arranged for the flight to be rerouted through Cyprus and then over Turkey to Iran. Cyprus didn’t give official permission but someone probably paid off the right people as no one interfered. On November 25, 1985 18 HAWK missiles arrived in Iran. The Iranians were furious they were not the IHAWKS they had been promised but the less advanced HAWKS and Israel hadn’t bothered to scrape off the “stars of David” on them. Ghorbanifar called North in a panic warning the Iranians were furious and the hostages lives were in danger. Back at the CIA Casey’s more cautious deputy director John McMahon demanded that a “retroactive” Presidential finding be created to cover for the CIA. A retroactive finding was created and signed by President Reagan December 5 1985 and then thrown into an NSC safe. The whole point of a finding was to inform congress and there was not supposed to be any such thing as a retroactive finding. On December 4 1985 President Reagan had  announced that McFarlane was resigning as National Security Adviser to be replaced by Admiral John Poindexter. McFarlane was getting increasingly frustrated with the Iran arms deals he wanted all the hostages freed first before more weapons were sent and was beginning to realize that he had been duped about the possibility of installing a “moderate” government in Iran. After the scandal broke in November 1986 Poindexter would burn the retroactive finding because it clearly showed an arms for hostage deal.

   North had another scheme to free the hostages alongside the Iran arms for hostages deal. Two DEA agents William Dweyer and Frank Tarallo had come to North with a scheme to use an informant they had in Beirut a major drug trafficker to act as middle man in arranging to ransom the hostages. North turned to Texas Billionaire H. Ross Perot to provide the ransom. Perot made his money in electronics and so had tight ties with the intelligence community. During the Iran hostage crisis he had managed to free 4 of his employees. There were a couple attempts to ransom a hostage in Beirut ending in failure. The first try the informant claimed he had spent $300,000 in bribes and was suspected of pocketing some of the money. Another time North planned to treat the ransom with a chemical that would cause the money to disintegrate days later a scheme which would have damaged all future hostage negotiations. Finally the deal fell through when the informant demanded a million dollars up front. The DEA men refused. Perot was very angry over the failure but was consoled with a personal letter from Reagan thanking him for his efforts. It’s believed that during Perot’s involvement in the Iran Contra scandal he developed a lasting grudge against George H. W. Bush inspiring Perot to launch a third party campaign in 1992 that sabotaged President Bush’s re-election campaign.

   Between December of 1985 and January of 1986 the Iran arms for hostages deals would undergo a major shift. North blamed the Israelis for the fiasco with the IHAWKS, Schwimmer, Nimrodi and Kimche were to be cut out of the deals and replaced with Peres’ counter-terrorism adviser Amiram Nir. North and Nir had worked closely together on the Achille Lauro Hijacking back in October 1985. North’s plan to intercept the escaping Achille Lauro hijackers who had been offered safe passage by Egypt in exchange for releasing the hostages nearly provoked an armed clash between US special forces and the Italian Carabinieri on an Italian runway that the US air force had forced their plane to land on. Nir had been in constant contact with North during the crisis providing Israeli intelligence. Now Nir would replace Schwimmer and Nimrodi as the Israeli liaison to the operation. Then it was decided to cut the Israeli role as middlemen. The arms deals in 1985 had been illegal under the Arms Export Control Act. The Reagan Administration believed that a loophole in the economy act would make the deals legal. The new middleman would be Secord’s enterprise. The Pentagon would sell the weapons to the CIA, the CIA would sell them to Secord, and then Secord would sell them to Iran. 

   This scheme making the Secord’s Enterprise the middleman had the added bonus of allowing North to divert the profits to the Nicaraguan Contras. During the HAWKs deal Israel had paid the Enterprise $1 million to cover transport. But since the deal had been aborted after only 18 HAWKs were delivered the Enterprise only spent $200,000 renting the CIA plane and other on costs leaving them with $800,000 Israel allowed them to keep. North diverted some of this to the Contras. Now with the Defense department selling the TOW missiles for only $3,469 each and Ghorbanifar still paying $10,000 each the Enterprise would make a hefty profit on each missile. The new plans that January envisioned a series of deals whereby the US would sell Iran 4,000 TOW missiles and Iran would free 4 hostages. In addition to diverting money to the Contras North diverted some of the money to Nir’s scheme to train a 40 man team of Druze in Beirut that would carry out pre-emptive assassinations and perhaps even act as a hostage rescue force. On January 17 1986 President Reagan signed a finding authorizing the scheme to supply arms to Iran via the DOD, CIA, and the Enterprise. The new finding was kept secret from Congress. On February 17 1986 a shipment of 500 TOWs was shipped to Iran on Enterprise planes rented from Southern Air Transport the “former” CIA airline that was also being used to smuggle arms to the Contras. On February 27, 1986 another 500 TOW missiles were delivered. No hostages were freed.

   With the involvement of the Enterprise the deal had developed a momentum of it’s own. Even if no hostages were freed the Enterprise profited and the resources of North’s “off the Shelf” Project Democracy were expanded. Ghorbanifar was now promising direct contacts with the highest levels of the Iranian government. McFarlane would act as special envoy on a trip to Iran. Originally the meet was to take place on the Isle of Kish but the location was soon changed to Iran’s capital Tehran. Vice President Bush arranged to have the meeting delayed until after his planned visit to Saudi Arabia to avoid being asked awkward questions from an angry ally which hated Iran and was backing Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. After a series of meetings in Europe with the Iranians to arrange the details plans were finalized. The US was to arrive bringing HAWK spare parts and upon their arrival all the hostages were to be freed. At least that was what Ghorbanifar told them. He told the Iranians that the Americans were bringing all the HAWK spare parts 15 million worth. Ghorbanifar had borrowed the money for the deal from Khashoggi.  

   On May 25, 1986 the McFarlane delegation arrived for the infamous Tehran meetings. They flew in from Israel where they purchased a chocolate cake and they brought along a bunch of revolvers and a small amount of HAWK spare parts. They had left the rest in Israel to be delivered once the hostages were freed. The delegation included McFarlane, North, Secord, Secord’s partner and Iranian exile Albert Hakim, ex-CIA George Cave, Howard Teicher of the NSC and a CIA radio man. Casey had given them cyanide pills in case the Iranians decided to hold them hostage. The meeting was badly timed taking place in the month of Ramadan when muslims fast during the day. The Iranians weren’t up to negotiating till after their evening meal. No one was there at the airport to meet the McFarlane delegation. Ghorbanifar arrived late and the delegation traveled to a hotel. Finally some low ranking Iranian officials arrived to negotiate. McFarlane was outraged at the slight. The Iranians were angry that the US hadn’t brought all the HAWK spare parts. The US realized that the Iranians hadn’t even begun to bargain to free the hostages. Then after Iran contacted Hezbollah, Hezbollah demanded Israel abandon it’s occupation of Southern Lebanon withdraw from the Golan heights and other just but costly demands. Gradually over the next couple days the negotiations began to improve higher level officials began to arrive, Hezbollah lowered it’s demands to freeing the Dawa prisoners. Reagan authorized the shipment of the remaining HAWK spares and Iran was promising to free 2 hostages if they could be given a little more time. To North and Secord’s disappointment McFarlane and Poindexter convinced Reagan to cancel the deal. They wanted all the hostages freed first and McFarlane was tired of waiting he wanted to leave Tehran. The Iranians begged him to stay for 6 more hours offering to free 2 hostages in exchange for the HAWK spare parts. McFarlane refused and on May 28, 1986 the plane carried the delegation back to Israel. On returning to the US to brief the president McFarlane advised Reagan to abandon the arms for hostage deals. However President Reagan and Oliver North had not given up hope yet. North would work hard to convince his boss Poindexter to abandon the “All or Nothing” approach and adopt the more realistic “Sequential” release approach. The Iranians were not about to give up all their leverage by freeing all the hostages in advance. Yet sequential release would ultimately prove futile as in September through October of 1986 Hezbollah would kidnap 3 more Americans Joseph Cicippio, Frank Reed, and Edward Tracy, while the arms for hostage deals would only get 3 hostages released meaning the total number of hostages would end up the same. It would take until 1992 for the final hostages to be freed.

   In June of 1986 after the failed Tehran meeting the Reagan administration began to plan a hostage rescue mission using Secord, the CIA and the pentagon. It proved too difficult to locate the hostages locations. North received a call from Nir and Ghorbanifar promising to free a hostage on the 4th of July. North excitedly told the Reagan and Bush. Expensive arrangements were made to escort the hostage home. Then on the 4th of July nothing happened North was made to look like a fool and refused to speak to Nir for weeks forcing Nir to go through Charles Allen at the CIA who would later be given the task of babysitting Ghorbanifar. On July, 25, 1986 Ghorbanifar and Nir finally came through and the hostage Reverend Lawrence Jenco was freed. Ghorbanifar was desperate to restart the arms for hostages deals. He was millions in debt to Khashoggi because Iran refused to pay him for the HAWK parts that had never been delivered during the Tehran meet. Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi had become ticking time bombs unless they were paid off they might go public. North considered paying off Ghorbanifar from the Enterprise’s coffers or convincing the Iranians to pay him off. On July 29 1986 Vice President Bush flew to Israel to meet with Nir who bragged that they were dealing with the most “radical elements” in Iran because they were the ones who could get things done. 

  

    Tehran had another disastrous result for Ghorbanifar it had convinced the Americans that they should find a “second Channel” into Iran their term for a 2nd middleman. Secord assigned his Iranian partner Albert Hakim to find one. Through his exile contacts Hakim was introduced to Ali Hashemi Bahramani the young nephew of Iran’s speaker of the parliament Rafsanjani and also a member of the IRGC. Poindexter and North were so pleased with Bahramani that they had Secord smuggle him to Washington DC for a meeting at the NSC’s offices in the Old Executive building. The. North took Bahramani on a white house tour and arranged CIA approved call girls for him and his party.

   On October 6-8 North Secord Hakim met with Bahramani  and other Iranians in Frankfurt to arrange the next arms deal. North brought a bible signed by president Reagan. North had to leave early Eugene Hasenfus was being paraded in front of international television after being shot down over Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal was beginning to unravel but the Iran deals continued. The Iranians warned the Americans that 5 million pamphlets describing McFarlane’s visit had been printed in Tehran. Albert Hakim took over the negotiations agreeing on a 9 point plan with the Iranians to free all the hostages sequentially in exchange for HAWK parts, technical assistance 1500 TOWS, intelligence on Iraq and the freeing of the Dawa prisoners in Kuwait. On October 28 1986 500 TOWs were shipped to Iran. On November 2, 1986 just in time for the midterm elections hostage David Jacobsen was freed. The next day November 3, 1986 the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa published an expose on the McFarlane visit to Tehran. The American press picked up the story and the controversy over the Iran Contra scandal exploded. Reagan went on TV and denied everything.

   The cover up went into high gear. Actually back in the fall of 1985 after Congressman Michael Barnes began demanding to see NSC documents on North’s contra resupply; McFarlane had OK’d North’s plan to start altering NSC files to cover up violations of the Boland amendment. Then once Hasenfus was captured Casey had warned North to start shredding documents. Now the whole Reagan Administration was desperate to cover up Iran Contra. On November 13, 1986 Reagan held a disastrous press conference claiming that there had been no arms for hostage deal and that the arms sent could fit on one small plane a blatant lie. On November 19, 1986 Reagan held another failed press conference where he claimed that no third country had been involved. 20 minutes later his aides issued a correction that there had been a 3rd country. Reagan was especially vulnerable on the Iran issue. His approval rating dropped from 67% to 46% during November 1986. Reagan had violated the Arms Export Control, sold arms to a country designated a terror sponsor and also conducted covert operations without any presidential finding. Violating the Boland amendment carried no legal penalty.

   Longtime Reagan loyalist Attorney General Ed Meese who had served under Reagan since his days as Governor of California took charge of the cover up. On November 21, 1986 Meese launched a formal inquiry into the Iran Contra affair he failed to involve the DOJ Criminal division and failed to take notes at important meetings with Casey, McFarlane, and Poindexter. Even as he was being supposedly investigated North was allowed to continue to shred documents. While North was busy shredding Meese’s Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds discovered the so called “diversion memo” North had written back in April of 1986 summarizing the history of the Iran arms deal and containing North’s plans to divert 12 million to the Contras. Meese saw it as a perfect opportunity to divert attention from Reagan’s illegal arms deals in 1985 and onto North the NSC and the diversion. North had long bragged that he was willing to take the fall for Iran Contra if necessary to protect the President. Poindexter had already offered to resign and after interviewing him Meese was certain that he would deny having told Reagan about the diversion. Reagan’s Chief of Staff Donald Regan was Meese’s partner in the coverup. He began to leak damaging info on McFarlane to the press. On November 25, 1986 Reagan announced that Meese had informed him of some shocking news, Meese then took the stage and revealed the diversion to the Press. He announced that Poindexter had resigned but North had been “relieved of his duties” meaning fired. North found out about it watching it live on TV. Then he received a call from President Reagan who told North he was an “American Hero” and that his life would make a great movie. North transferred back to the Marine corps.

   It would take another article or even a book to do justice to the whole aftermath once the scandal was exposed and this article is long enough already. I dealt with the aftermath back in the first part of my Iran Contra series. I also discuss it in an interview on Our Hidden History that either has come out or will come out soon depending on when this article is released. Before the scandal had broken the Christic institute had filed a civil suit against North and the Iran contra conspirators. After the scandal broke there followed the Tower Commission, the Joint House and Senate Iran Contra hearings and a 6 year long investigation by the Office of the independent council. Nearly a dozen people were convicted or signed plea deals. Bush pardoned them all. The one exception was Thomas Clines who was jailed for income tax invasion for failing to report his income from the enterprise. Democracy and rule of law versus the national security state it’s sort of like Bambi vs Godzilla (a cartoon from the time) the outcome was never in doubt. There is the way things are “supposed” to work and the way they really work. On the international stage the aftermath of Iran-Contra lead directly to the wars in Panama and Iraq. The Iraq war in various forms continues 30 years later a horrifying bloodbath that has cost millions of lives. Thanks to the efforts of the NED and a populace exhausted by contra terror and sick of the economic blockade the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1991. Thanks to the failure of America’s neoliberal puppets in Nicaragua the Sandinistas were voted back into power and the US is once again intent on overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. There has never been any serious official investigation into the CIA supplying arms cash and advisers to al Qaeda style terrorists through third country proxies like Saudi Arabia. Thanks to the stranglehold of the Israel lobby on US foreign policy the US has yet to establish friendly relations with Iran. Yet Iran has grown too powerful for the US to invade and occupy. Hezbollah eventually decided to adopt the tactics of guerrilla warfare targeting military targets and avoiding civilian targets. They have defeated Israel twice forcing it to withdraw from Lebanon then halting a more recent Israeli invasion earning Hezbollah respect and admiration around the world. In the west Reagan’s legacy continues to dominate the ruling class, capitalism and imperialism continue to run rampant and fascism seems always to be just around the corner.

Sources

 Malcolm Byrne’s Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power is the definitive mainstream version of events. Byrne has been researching Iran-Contra for nearly 30 years.

Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, The Press & Project Truth by Robert Parry gives many details left out of mainstream accounts. He has an in depth discussion of the Contra drug connection as well as the role of drugs in Panama and Honduras. He also discusses the Reagan Administration Public Diplomacy campaign that destroyed investigative journalism in the US.

Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq is another must read. It has a long section covering the “October Surprise” including the mass of evidence he discovered after writing “Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery. It also contains lots of interesting dirt on George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush. 

Theodore Draper wrote the earlier definitive mainstream account back in the 1990’s ‘A Very Thin Line: The Iran Contra Affairs” It is longer and more detailed then Byrne’s although the author has a sinister past (former communist turned anti-communist scholar for various CIA funded fronts) that makes him all too willing to trust the CIA and fail to dig deeply into the scandal. He never mentions drugs. Still it’s worth reading for anyone interested in the Iran side of Iran Contra.

Firewall: The Iran Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up by Lawrence E. Walsh the Independent Counsel in The Iran-Contra Investigation offers a long account of his offices investigation and prosecution of Oliver North and other Iran Contra Conspirators. It’s fun to see the case slowly unravel and Walsh’s investigation revealed a great deal that Congress failed to uncover and he gradually begins to have more evidence about the role of then President George H. W. Bush and former President Ronald Reagan in the scandal.

Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North by Ben Bradlee jr. is a detailed and entertaining account of the life of Oliver North and the Iran Contra scandal although it came out to early to contain some of the later evidence uncovered. 

The Iran Contra Scandal the Declassified History Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne provides a valuable resource for studying the Iran Contra Scandal it contains compact summaries of events as introductions to reprints of declassified documents released during the Congressional and Walsh investigations, plus a timeline of events and a list of key players.

A good book on the war  in Lebanon is Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East by David Hirst it covers the complex history of Lebanon from the 1940’s to the 2006 war.

The section on Bush and North’s counter-terrorism network is based on Peter Dale Scott’s article “Bush and North: The Task Force on Combatting Terrorism” in Covert Action Information Bulletin issue 33 Their classic special issue on Bush and the CIA which is packed full of Iran Contra information and dirt on Bush. Also check out Peter Dale Scott’s Deep State for an in depth account of continuity of government planning.

Subscribe here to gain access to Covert Action’s archive

https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives/

Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era by Steve Emerson contains interesting information on the Special Operations role during the Iran-Contra era as well as Emerson’s own take on Iran-Contra. He was given access because he was aligned with the goals of the national security state. He also had close ties to Israel’s Likud party and played a major role in covering up the October Surprise. Emerson later become an insane neo-con war on terror hysteric.

Casey: From the OSS to the CIA by Joseph Persico contains some interesting information but is generally a complete disappointment. Persico is too naive and inexperienced to write about the CIA has no idea how they operate and no idea what to look into. It completely fails to provide a complete picture of the CIA in the 1980’s and the author is way to sympathetic to Bill Casey. That’s why Casey befriended Persico and then his widow granted him access to Casey’s papers.

Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn is full of shocking details about the Israeli role around the world including their drug smuggling in Panama, Colombia, and Central America. It also provides many insights into the Israeli view of Iran Contra.

Malcolm Byrne lecture about his Iran Contra Book

https://youtu.be/xUu8f9rBh_g

A Robert Parry Interview

https://youtu.be/_X3v4Di8YyM

Robert Parry’s Frontline documentary on October Surprise

https://archive.org/details/InvestigatingtheOctoberSurprise

A discussion of the October Surprise

https://youtu.be/2oTY7fQuieY

The 1st part of Dave Emory’s 4 part series on the “Deep October” surprise with Iranian researcher Fara Mansoor who argues that the whole hostage crisis and the rise of Khomeini were engineered by a faction of the CIA loyal to Bush with help from Thatcher and MI6.

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-896-fara-mansoor-on-the-deep-october-surprise-part-1/

Deep October Surprise Part 2 

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-897-fara-mansoor-on-the-deep-october-surprise-part-2/

Deep October Surprise Part 3

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-898-fara-mansoor-on-the-deep-october-surprise-part-3/

Deep October Surprise Part 4

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-899-fara-mansoor-on-the-deep-october-surprise/

Documentary Cover-Up Behind the Iran Contra Affair

https://youtu.be/ZDdItm-PDeM

An Archival radio interview on Iraqgate the flip side of the Iran arms sales the much larger sales of arms by the US to Iraq. The Bush administration massively expanded arms sales to Iraq right until the moment Iraq invaded Kuwait and America launched it’s 30 year long series of wars on Iraq.

https://youtu.be/MwEXdPzJKs4

My earlier series on Iran Contra

Part 1 The Secret Team

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/05/irancontra-pt-1-secret-team.html

Part 2 World War 3

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/06/irancontra-pt-2-world-war-3.html

Part 3 The World Anti-Communist League Part 1

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/07/irancontra-pt-3-wacl.html

Part 4 The World Anti-Communist League Part 2

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/08/irancontra-pt-4-wacl-2.html

Ted Shackley a Life in the CIA

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/12/ted-shackley-life-in-cia.html

Old Nazis, New Right (Also covers the Coors Connection)

http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2017/10/old-nazis-new-right.html

Subscribe to the Our Hidden History Youtube channel for dozens of Iran/Contra and CIA/Drugs related videos like my interview on Oliver North

https://youtu.be/7LXbeeVJVfs