Iran-Contra

Sarah: Like everything I know about central American politics, I learned from the movie Salvador. It's also why I had a crush on James Woods for all of high school, which I feel weird about all the time now.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, a show that we do every Saturday morning, instead of going to brunch. 

Mike: Now that everyone knows what the show is about, it's mostly about eggs.

Sarah: You're Wrong About is a show about us taking issue with things that other people are perfectly able to enjoy, and then making it impossible for them to enjoy in an uncomplicated way forever. So really brunch, we could totally do a brunch episode. 

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post. 

Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer for The New Republic and Buzzfeed. 

Mike: And today we're talking about Iran-Contra. I was born in 1982. I was four years old when all of this happened, so I never had any sense of Iran-Contra at all when I was growing up. It was only when I started researching this that I sort of came to understand what it actually was. I always thought about it as like this weird, complicated footnote that nobody ever really talks about and doesn't seem to have left any lasting legacy.

Sarah: I think I first learned about Iran-Contra because I was reading some list or I was compiling some lists for myself of women in the eighties who had been embroiled in Washington insider type debacles were then seen as the reason that a powerful man was ruined. Fawn Hall was the secretary or somebody, for Oliver North who now has a TV show on Fox, I guess. And that she, in a Rosemary Wood kind of way, had shredded documents for him or helped him shred documents or was called on to testify. That's what I got. There was a lady with a hairstyle involved somewhere. 

Mike: I also love that there's this great metaphorical stuff about how she didn’t just shred documents, she snuck them out of the office in her undergarments. So there's this wonderful extremely clunky literary metaphor of a woman at the heart of this, putting things in her underwear and leaving the office with them. Someone has written a really boring poem about this detail. 

Sarah: And if they haven't, then I will. Okay. So I'll tell you what I think I know. The Reagan White House had been selling arms to Iran in order to finance a proxy war against the Soviets in Nicaragua. One of the big questions about it was like, did Reagan know? When did Reagan know? How much did he know? And then he came out scot-free at the end by being like, “Well, I'm Ronald Reagan and I look like a cowboy.” 

Mike: That’s actually remarkably accurate, Sarah, I’m amazed. 

Sarah: But the details of it, I don't know anything about. Like, who was involved and how much money was it?

Mike: I feel like the first thing to debunk is really this idea that Iran-Contra is complicated, because I was really struck by the extent to which it really is a very simple scandal. We were selling weapons to the Iranians to get money to give to a militia who was trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. You can describe it in one sentence and much of the social construction of this, or the way that it's remembered is this complicated thing and the national security council was going against the wishes of the CIA and the head of the state department didn't know, and all this inter agency technical, very legalistic. 

Sarah: Another hyphenated name, which doesn't help.

Mike: So yeah, the place I want to start is just setting the scene with where we are in the early 1980s. So we're right in the middle of the Cold War. And the place that we get this term, the ‘third world’, is from this period. The capitalist world, like America and Western Europe, is considered the first world. And in the Soviet world, Russia central Asia is considered the second world. And then there's the third world that's up for grabs this term. The third world never had anything to do with poverty, it's just mostly countries, mostly authoritarian at the time, mostly poor, that hadn't really declared allegiance yet. Liberia and Cambodia and Vietnam and all these countries that we end up fighting about. And the Soviets and the Americans are fighting over which direction the third world is going to go in, kind of country by country. 

Sarah: So it's like a hot divorcee at your work, and it's you versus Tim from accounting. And you're like, “I'm going to go on a first date with Jessica after her ex moves out.”

Mike: And so the story, the entire story of Iran Contra, is really about all of the weird contortions that it gets you into when you will do anything to prevent a country from falling into the hands of the Soviets. Including doing things that make no sense. 

So I think the best way to think about Iran-Contra is not as one scandal, but as two completely separate scandals. One of the other You're Wrong About - or Yours Wrong About -  Iran-Contra is this idea that the link between Iran and Nicaragua is the scandal. When actually what happened in Nicaragua is a scandal in itself and what happened in Iran is a scandal in itself. And so this little link between the money that changed hands in between them is actually not that big of a deal. And it's weird that element got so much emphasis at the time.

Sarah: Is this gonna be another story where we destroy a nation and its people because we're afraid of communism?

Mike: Yeah. Two. This is two of those stories, Sarah. Two together. And there's one bank transfer that happens between those two things. And we spent years going, “What about the bank transfer? Who knew about the bank transfer?” And completely ignoring what we were actually doing in Nicaragua and what we were doing in Iran which was both super bad. 

Sarah: Right? Obviously, it's fine to undermine a nation's economy or its own choices for itself in order to stand up for capitalism. That's all fine. But if you misappropriate federal funds in order to do so, that's the bad thing. 

Mike: Let's get into the actual bad things in Nicaragua. You can start the Nicaragua story anywhere basically, but we can just lay our scene in the early 1980s where there's a communist regime in place in Nicaragua.

Sarah: And this is a generally turbulent time in Central America, right? A lot of governmental shake ups and revolutions happening. 

Mike: At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, most of Latin America was still under dictatorships at this time. And they had different ideologies, but you wouldn't want to live under really any of these dictatorships essentially. Especially in Nicaragua, there was this right wing dictator asshole, and then he gets overthrown by the Sandinistas, who are this extremely problematic…

Sarah: Communist regime?

Mike: Yes. So the only thing that the U.S. cares about at this point is whether you're a communist or capitalist, not necessarily what you're doing or how you're doing or how you’re affecting human rights or running your economy or anything else. 

Sarah: We can iron all that out later. 

Mike: When Reagan gets elected, it's actually an election issue. It's a campaign issue of, I think we should overthrow the Nicaraguan government because they're communist and they're bad. And then Carter is like, “No, we shouldn't.” But it's totally out in the open. 

Sarah: But of course, if Carter says that we should do anything, the only natural thing to do is do the opposite because any idea that poor Jimmy Carter has is un-American and overly pacifistic, right?

Mike: Yeah. I mean, that's another thing that is an overlay of this entire story is that the Democrats are really afraid of being seen as weak. And Regan takes this mantle of I'm the strong, masculine, powerful leader who will do what needs to get done. And so he is very clear about the fact we need to be funding the Contras. They’re kind of the offcuts of this previous capitalist dictatorship that was in Nicaragua. 

So they lose to the communists. They flee, they're mostly in Honduras at this point, and they'll do missions into Nicaragua to try to overthrow the government. Reagan and everybody else in the government decides we need to support these guys so that we can help them overthrow the government of Nicaragua. This is sort of the grand tragedy of all of these things is that there's no good guys. 

What happens a lot is that these Contras will show up in villages and say, “Look, you need to give us food, you need to give us shelter. If you don't, we'll kill you.” And they have AK-47s and all this kind of stuff. And for the villagers, if they let them stay in their home and feed them, then they'll live. But then if the government finds out that you aided and abetted the Contras, they'll kill you. So it has the entire country in this terrible situation where you're just deciding who kills you. In the early eighties as we're funding these people to the tune of like hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a very expensive and very important project for Reagan. 

Sarah: We didn't have anything better to be throwing our money at in America, clearly. There wasn't any poverty or AIDS or anything.

Mike: There were no trends going downhill at that time. So Congress knows about this and they're starting to become more and more human rights watch reports. There's this report that came out in 1986 that documents 139 cases of attacks on civilians and 118 were done by the Contras. So you start to see this pendulum swing toward, the communists are bad, but the Contras might actually be worse. And it might not be a great idea to be funding these groups that don't seem to have the wellbeing of the population in mind. They committed 1,300 terrorist attacks, the Contras, in six years. 

Sarah: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, maybe that isn't the best way to go about foreign policy making. 

Mike: And so what starts happening is there's just more and more pressure on Reagan to not give these groups funding anymore. It's now a Democratic House of Representatives and they start passing these laws called the Boland Amendments that prevent Reagan from funding the Contras. They're like, look, you can't do this anymore. It's really bad. 

So Congress steps in to prevent Reagan from giving any more funding to the Contras. Reagan immediately, the next day basically is okay, how can we keep funding the Contras? They seize upon these technicalities. So the Boland amendment says no funds are available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency of the United States involved in 10 intelligence activities may be expended for the purpose, blah, blah, blah. 

Reagan looks at this and sees a loophole. You're preventing the CIA from spending money. You're preventing the department of defense from spending money. And you're preventing agencies engaged in intelligence from spending money. But what about the National Security Council? It's not involved in intelligence. So they use these lame technicalities to start funneling different chunks of money through different agencies and doing exactly the same thing. They also notice, this is the insight of Oliver North, he's like, “Well guys, they didn't say other people couldn't fund the Contras.” So he calls up Saudi Arabia and gets Saudi Arabia to donate a million dollars a month to the Contras. 

Sarah: I'm sure they just have that as loose change in their pockets or whatever.

Mike: One of the overlooked scandals of this scandal, is that Saudi Arabia gave twice as much money to Nicaragua as Iran ever did. Saudi Arabia ended up giving about 32 million to the Contras and all this Iran shenanigan stuff only ever gave about $15 million. The actual main scandal is that they start essentially laundering money from Apartheid South Africa, from Taiwan, from all these other countries and just giving it to Nicaragua. 

And one of the things that's really shocking about this, is that the Contras wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for CIA funding. They're not a grassroots organization with any particular purpose, with any reason to exist, there's no popular support for them. They're not particularly good at what they do. They're really just being propped up by America. So if it wasn't for America doing this, these guys aren't even in Nicaragua. They probably would have just faded out into obscurity or kind of like how a band breaks up, everyone just gets other hobbies, right? They'll just get jobs, and they'll complain while they read the newspaper. But it's essentially what you were saying with Charles Manson. This is an income opportunity. There's a lot of money coming into the country and hey, I can make money by being a revolutionary. So you're essentially incentivizing people to remain revolutionaries rather than just moving on with their lives or using politics and trying to overthrow the Sandinista government through normal political stuff. This is actually what happens is that after all this stuff, the Sandinista government gets voted out of office. So he could have just been using normal political things.

Sarah:  It's frustrating, too, that anarchists blow up a few little buildings and no one can be an anarchist ever again, apparently, because of that. And the CIA is funding all of this international terrorism and money laundering for decades. 

Mike: And there's also something interesting about all this, too, in that a lot of  this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. You hear this from the ‘Bush did 911’ people, the CIA overthrew this and we interfered in this election. I'm reading commission reports that investigated this, and there was an independent counsel who spent four years investigating Iran-Contra. This is all in there. There's this thing about how the CIA put mines, not landmines, but sea mines in a giant Harbor in Nicaragua, so that if boats hit them, they would explode. And they blamed the Contras, or the Contras were blamed for that. But the CIA actually put explosives in the Harbor, and this is in official Senate reports.

Sarah: That’s like how the Mormons would hold up wagon trains going through Utah territory and kill people and take all of their livestock and their money, and be like, “Oh, the Native American did it, classic native American.” They would actually put themselves in black face and be like, well, it couldn't have been the Mormons.

Mike: One of the other things that was really shocking about this is the extent to which Oliver North, who is at the time a Lieutenant Colonel with the Marines, he's a staff member of the National Security Council, he really gets this portfolio and he really runs with it. He's like the perfect little employee. Not only does he coordinate the logistics of giving them money, giving them arms, giving them training, he's actually dictating strategy.

Sarah: To the Contras?

Mike: Yes. This is in the independent counsel's report, that most of the Contras are in Honduras, which is north of Nicaragua. And Oliver North starts saying, you really need to open a second front. You guys really need to start coming in from the south, from Costa Rica. So he builds them a private airstrip in Costa Rica so he can leapfrog Nicaragua and I have a two front war. And this is completely his project. He's like, you really need to start attacking from the south. So he's not only giving them money, giving them weapons, giving them airplanes, giving them airstrips, but telling them actually what to do and opening up new fronts in their militia war.

Sarah: I had no idea that we had this level of involvement. Because the footnote is, we were funneling unethically. But literally to be giving people battle strategy over a period, how long of a period was this before anything got out?

Mike: The Contras didn't exist before 1980. So it's basically from 1980 until it all comes crashing down in 1986. Some of this was known at the time. There were Newsweek cover stories. There were Washington Post investigations. But it was all under this rubric of, you got to do what you got to do. And most of the people that were pointing out all of these human rights violations were groups like Human Rights Watch, which everyone's kind of like, “Ah you know these NGOs, these do-gooders”. So it was easy to sort of roll your eyes at all of these huge human rights violations going on and not really think about the moral culpability of running militia operations. This is legit guerilla killing squad stuff, but nobody thought of it that way, or everybody thought those wages were okay because we were fighting communists.

Sarah: Yeah. It feels like this was a time when you could really get away with a lot in terms of how you waged your wars, based on the idea that it was unmanly to remain isolationist or pacifist. And therefore you can just do whatever you feel like. 

Mike: Yeah. It's a license to do literally anything. Another thing that's important about this is that Reagan knew about all of it. There's some debate about whether or not Reagan knew about the ‘diversion’. That's what they call it, taking the money from Iran and giving it to Nicaragua. It's not clear that he knew about that, but he knew about the Nicaragua stuff. He 100% knew what they were up to. He can read Newsweek, he knew how bad they were. He knew money was being raised for them. He knew Oliver North was holding fundraisers in D.C. to get people put into the Swiss bank account so that he could give it to the countries.

Sarah:  Oh, well, if there's Swiss bank accounts involved, that sounds totally legit.

Mike: Also keep in mind, George HW Bush was the vice president at this time, and he also knew everything. It's in his diaries that he knew exactly what they were doing in Nicaragua. He knew most of what they were doing in Iran. But things like giving money to mean terrorists, everyone knew about that.

Sarah: So it's a classic case of people being remembered as having committed white collar crimes and done dodgy financial stuff. When really the meat of the matter was human rights violations. 

Mike: Totally. So now we leave Nicaragua for now, and we go to Iran where things are slightly more complicated, but it's still not that complicated. 

Sarah: So following the Indiana Jones dotted line as Oliver North puts his fedora over his face.

Mike: So when we meet Iran, it's again, the early eighties. The Ayatollah Khamenei has just come to power. He overthrew the Shah, which was basically installed by the U.S. leader. My parents were actually living in Iran when this happened, they were missionaries at the time. And the Shah sucked. They knew he sucked. Everyone in Iran knew he sucked. Ayatollah Khamenei came in and he also sucked, but he sucked in a new and different way. 

So he's essentially trying to install a radical Islamic dictatorship. And he also has ambitions of expanding. He wants to overthrow Iraq. He wants to become the preeminent power in the Middle East and destroy all these other countries. He has all these expansionary ambitions. We've cut off relations with Iran because of the hostage crisis in 1979, all this Argo shit. We now hate Iran. We've ended all weapons sales. The Iranians were really dependent on the U.S. for weapons. 

Sarah: We've told the Iranians to come to our house and get their box of shit that they left here, and take all their t-shirts and their Jade plants and everything.

Mike: In the hostage crisis it was full on, all hands on deck sanctions. The hostage crisis ends, we lift all the sanctions except for arms. And so the U.S. spent the first three, four years of the 1980s, convincing all these other countries to not sell arms to Iran. We're really gonna make them hurt. We're really gonna cut them off. But Iran is really desperate for weapons, because Iran is in a war with Iraq. Which I found during the research that this is the longest ground war in modern history.

Sarah:  How long? 

Mike: In 1980 to 1988, Iran versus Iraq. And it's like trench warfare. It's a really ugly war. And when we say selling weapons to Iran, oftentimes that sounds in your head like we're talking about AK-47 or Uzis or something. They need missiles. They need  advanced, U.S., technical, deadly, big ass missiles. That's what they want. Guns they can get anywhere. They want advanced weaponry. And they also need spare parts from all the weapons that they've been buying from the U S for years, because missiles like everything else break down over time. 

But then in 1983, in 1984, the U.S. started to discover, they're like, hey, wait a minute. So we've cut off their weapons. We've told everyone else to cut off their weapons. Iran really needs weapons. So, who is it going to turn to for weapons? Hang on, the Soviets. So based on us having spent three years cutting off their weapons, it gives them no option other than to start sucking up to the Soviets to get their weapons. So that then puts the U.S. in this completely ridiculous situation where we are arming the Iraqis. So we are arming the army that is fighting the Iranians, but then we decide, well, we need to arm the Iranians too, because otherwise the Soviets will start arming them. There's also this completely delusional thing where we think that there are moderates within the Iranian government. So we have to fund, we have to give weapons to Iraq so that Iraq and overthrow destroy Iran. However, if that doesn't work, we need to start giving weapons to moderates within Iran to start pushing for change from within.

Sarah:  We're finding the moderates within Khomeini's regime within an extremist Islamicists movement.

Mike: Yeah. That is the main motivation behind sending weapons to Iran. There's also this issue of the hostages. This is one of those things that makes this story seem slightly more complicated, that the U.S. sells weapons to Iran to negotiate to release hostages in Lebanon. This is one of these things that just makes it one level of slightly more confusing. But basically there's U.S. hostages, seven US hostages have been taken hostage in Lebanon by Hezbollah. And Hezbollah, the rumor is Hezbollah is controlled by the Iranian government. And the Iranian government is like, don't know her. I can't say. And the U.S. government is well, if we give you guys weapons, will these other guys release some hostages? And Iran is like, I couldn't say. It puts on sunglasses like, oh, I don't know. I couldn't possibly say. 

So the US identifies this guy within the Iranian government who is a moderate and who wants Khamenei to be less radical and is willing to help us do that. And coincidentally, he knows some folks in Hezbollah, and he can connect us to the people that will start releasing the hostages. His name is Minutiae Ghorbanifar.

Sarah:  Or as we're going to call him, the Nootch. 

Mike: Yes. So North puts on his fedora and starts meeting with the Nootch and negotiating how this is going to work. The first couple of years of this whole scheme are characterized by total incompetence. You read these descriptions of what was going on and you can just hear the Benny Hill theme playing. They sell Iranians the weapons, but they sell them the wrong weapons. And there's another time when a plane is supposed to go there, but it gets turned back because the pilot doesn't know the call sign of his own airplane. So he’s just calling out random call signs, hoping that they let him land. 

Sarah: You had one job. 

Mike: Another thing, of course, this is all totally illegal. There's our arms embargo on Iran. So we cannot sell weapons to Iran.

Sarah:  The federal government is breaking its own laws, in other words.

Mike:  Exactly. Like they are in Nicaragua. What they came up with this Ghorbanifar guy is, we will sell a hundred weapons to Israel. Israel will then send them on to Iran, get the money, and then Israel will give us the money. So that on paper, it looks like, oh, last Wednesday, we sold a hundred missiles to Israel.  

Sarah: It's also like we’re the honor student who doesn’t want to get caught buying weed, so we're going through our cousin, who doesn't have a great GPA anyway.

Mike: It's the same level of sophistication, basically. But then the whole thing breaks down because we sell weapons to Iran and we're like, okay guys, hostages, let's release them. And then Iran is like, we don't know anything about any hostages. And the U.S. is like, wait this was the whole deal. And Iran is like no, we, you sold us 15 missiles, we want 400. So then the U.S. is like, okay, you can have 400. 

Sarah: That's great negotiating.

Mike: One of the big lessons here is that Reagan had said, three days before this trade took place, he said “We don't negotiate with terrorists”. A lot of this comes down to the fact that he was completely lying, but there's also the thing that this is a great demonstration of why you don't negotiate with terrorists. Because they have all the power and there's no appeasing them. 

So at one point we try to get one of the hostages back and they're like, yeah, we'll give you back the hostages, but they've already killed him. So all we get back is a body and they're like, oh, well, technically you didn't say you wanted a live hostage back. It's like, come on. 

Sarah: I can hear the Ron Howard Arrested Development narration with Reagan going, “We don't negotiate with terrorists.” He did.

Mike: Exactly. And so we start trading missiles for hostages, and they give back to hostages, and then they take two more hostages. So this is my favorite thing. They're like, well, you didn't say we couldn't take more hostages. They're keeping the pool of hostages the same size. It’s like, all right guys, you're really going on a technicality here. 

Oliver North, of course, because he's at the center of all this. He decides a much more streamlined way to do this would be to just buy the weapons and keep it off the books somehow. He negotiates with the department of defense to get missiles for 3,700 bucks each. It’s a pretty good deal for missiles. It's like a used Honda Civic, and then he sells them to the Iranians for $10,000 each.

Sarah: It’s so penny ante,  it's like those $6,300 really add up. 

Mike: This is where we get to the enterprise, which is what they call the Swiss bank account. They created a company called Stanford Technology Trading Group International.

Sarah: That is quite boring sounding. So that's good. 

Mike: I was trying to think if I had a Swiss bank account, what I would call my LLC, like Indiana Coldplay Taxes or something. Just thinking what would make people turn their brains off and be like, I don’t want to look into this too hard. 

Sarah: Tube socks unlimited. 

Mike: The Iranian sub scandal is against the law, against all of their public statements, they are selling more than a thousand high tech weapons to an insane dictator who wants to take over the rest of the world. And funneling money under the radar into a Swiss bank account that has no transparency. 

One of the really interesting things about this, and it's amazing to me that this hasn't been investigated more, is that Oliver North, there's something like 10, maybe 8-10 people that know about the Swiss bank account and can make transfers to and from it. There's nothing stopping those people from transferring money to themselves. 

Journalists start getting curious about Oliver North and one of, I think it's a Washington Post journalist in the late eighties, starts being like, “How does a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines have this giant house in the DC suburbs?” And Oliver North never really answered. 

Sarah: I mean, that's the least reprehensible of all of the things that are happening here. He just likes simple, self-interested greed, fine. At least you're not lying to yourself and claiming that you're spreading democracy. Yeah, buy a jacuzzi.

Mike: In this whole scandal, this is the 32nd worst thing, that people are always getting money out of this account. But again, this is why you don't do shit like this. Is because you're just inviting people to be corrupt. You're just making this perfect system for people to skim off money for themselves and not report it to anybody. So that's the Iranian scandal 2. 

Scandal 3 is the massive cover up that takes place after all of this comes out. My favorite thing about this is that, by total coincidence the Nicaragua thing is going for years. The Iran thing has been going for years. In the same month, they both hit the public by total coincidence. So in October of 1986, a plane is downed full of weapons, and money, and game boys, and the Contras get shot down over Nicaragua. The pilot of the plane, whose name is Eugene Hasenfus, gets arrested and he's basically immediately just “Oh yeah, I work for the CIA.” And Nicaragua is like, wait, what? And he's like, oh yeah, I'm here supplying the Contras. They're like, what? So this makes the papers. 

And then less than a month later in November, a Lebanese magazine printed accusations that the U.S. is selling missiles to Iran. And what I love about this, this guy Ghorbanifar, is basically just like a huge con artist. And this is one of these things that doesn't come out until years later, was it this idea that there's moderates within the Iranian government was total bullshit. There never were moderates within the Iranian government. And this guy Ghorbanifar was in debt to the Iranian government for $70 million. So basically this one guy organized this entire thing. He was lying to the CIA constantly. He was telling them that he had high up contacts in the Iranian government when he didn't. He would set up meetings with them and they would all fly to Paris, and then he'd be like, whoops, I guess they didn't show up. And the CIA is like, ugh, but they kept working with him.

Sarah:  It appears to be quite easy to lie to the CIA. 

Mike: This keeps happening  to them. It's unbelievable. But so in November of 1980, the CIA still owes him money. They haven't paid him. And so he threatens, if you guys don't pay me, I'm going to go to the press about this. And three days later, this Lebanese magazine published these accusations. So we don't know if it was him. 

I just love the fact that he basically became a disgruntled vice freelancer, who was like, “If you guys don't pay your invoice, I'm going to go on Twitter about this.” So he is the unsung hero and the unsung villain in all of this because nobody knew what a con artist he was until years later. Thus began the Iran-Contra scandal in late 1986.

Sarah: Now the scandal begins. All of this is just forward for the actual situation. 

Mike: So all of the actual human toll of this has already happened. But nobody knows anything about this.

Sarah:  And you're right. The way that we think of this, it's this boring, kinda complicated, financial thing. It's not, it's War Dogs. 

Mike: Yeah. It's bad things. And we're encouraging bad things to take place, basically. 

Sarah:  Okay. So now the scandal begins.

Mike: So now the scandal begins. Both of these things have happened and there’s starting to be rumors of this diversion of this transfer that takes place from the Iranians to the Nicaraguans. So Reagan's first press conference on this in November of 1986, I love this, Reagan stands at a podium at this press conference he says, “Our administration has sent ‘small amounts’ of defense weapons and spare parts to Ira’.”

Sarah:  Spare parts? No!

Mike:  ‘In an effort to improve relations with moderate Iranians’. So, of course he twists this into the most understandable and benign explanation possible that, some defense weapons, just so you know, there's like some wild foxes in Iran. We're helping them defend themselves against those. Some spare parts, nothing you’d use as a weapon, just a couple of screws, Allen wrenches.

Sarah:   We're just being neighborly. 

Mike: And of course he specified, the hostages had nothing to do with it. We never, we do not negotiate with terrorists. We would never trade weapons for hostages. The independent counsel report goes through, essentially first through Ron Howard's, then in a subsequent press conference, he admitted that the weapons were offensive. In  a subsequent press conference, he admitted that they were for hostages. In a subsequent press conference... So essentially it’s this escalating thing where the press is now on this, the press is looking into this and noticing all of these discrepancies. 

And behind the scenes, the night that he gives his first press conference, this is when Oliver North goes on this shredding spree. Stacks and stacks of documents. This is where Fawn Hall helps him. And somehow, she becomes a lightning rod for all this blame because she's a woman. 

Sarah: Well, because she's a woman. And that was her first mistake. 

Mike: But they shred so many documents that they break the shredder. Which is so fucked up because this isn't an Office Depot choice wastebasket shredder. This is more like the woodchipper in Fargo. Somehow, they break this machine. Behind the scenes they're shredding all these documents, in front of cameras Reagan is trying to neutralize this, trying to minimize this. But eventually the press starts to figure out what's really going on. And the question doesn't become what happened. The question becomes, what did the president know? And when did he know it? Everything gets put into this Watergate frame. 

Sarah: Can we still love Reagan, or must we love him slightly less. 

Mike” He has basically no choice, but to appoint a commission, to look into this and do fact-finding. 

Sarah:  “Fact finding” seems like a good way to actually buy time, right? Because anytime you do like a federal whatever into something, it's going to take months and months.

Mike: So he appoints this thing called the Tower Commission because it's run by this former Senator named John Tower. And he says, okay guys, you guys, you're empowered to look into this, but he gives them a really strict timeline. Four months where they have to figure out everything. He also doesn't give them subpoena power. So in the introduction to this report, it says this board had no authority to subpoena documents, compel testimony, swear witnesses, or grant immunity.

Sarah:  What the hell are they doing? 

Mike: What the hell are they doing? He's well, we're really going to get to the bottom of this, but we're not going to actually empower them with enough time or enough power to really figure it out. So another thing that they note several individuals declined our request to appear before the board. And then they list Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, the Secretary of State.

Sarah:  So they’re given the same fact finding capabilities and resources as the average public defender, which is to say not really anything.

Mike: They can basically call you up and be like, do you guys want to come in? No? Okay, sorry. 

Sarah:  Poor old Tower Commission. Can’t get a date to prom. 

Mike: They're also given a really specific mandate that they're only mandated to look into the role of the National Security Council. The only thing they're able to find is bad apples. They're not able to look at the whole system. They're not able to figure out what really happened. All they're able to find is basically who are the bad guys, and that's it. They can't actually get any of these bad guys to testify to them. So they can't even get confessions from people or grant immunity and get them to flip on each other. 

This is from a Brown University kind of summary of this case. “The Tower commission released its findings on February 26th, 1987, concluding that the National Security Council itself was sound and placing a heavy amount of blame on chief of staff Regan and national security advisor Poindexter.“

Sarah:  All right. Because the chief of staff is a guy named Donald Regan, which they decided to make the White House as silly as possible during those years.

Mike: And also to make these reports as confusing to read as possible. Cause they're like Regan was at fault and you're like, got him. And it's oh, it's Regan not Reagan. The Tower Commission concluded that three or four people were responsible for this, but they didn't really have the magnifying glass they needed to figure out what was really going on.

Sarah:  So interesting how it's always three or four people who are responsible for these international years long terrorism funding activity. It’s amazing the amount of work for three or four people that got done in a day.

Mike: There's also an independent council. Congress appoints an independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, to look into this. And they really empower him. They say, look, you have subpoena power, you can charge witnesses, you can grant immunity, everything else. And so this is when things start to get interesting. 

And one of the components of his investigation is congressional hearings in July of 1987. So six months after all of this stuff comes out, they put Poindexter on the stand. They put Fawn Hall on the stand. They put all these people on the stand. However, in this congressional testimony, the problem is they're immunized. So anything they talk about, they can't be charged for. 

One of the weird things about this is that Congress decides to put Oliver North on the stand in front of cameras, in front of everybody, before he's given his testimony to these congressional committees. And so what that does is they don't have a written document of what actually took place. Normally, the way that this happens is you put in a statement of the facts on this date, I did this, I denied these allegations, but Congress never does that. So there isn't a narrative that they can dive into or say, what about this statement here, sir? What about this inconsistency here, sir? You say you didn't do this, but we have evidence that you did. Basically Oliver North, in July of 1987, shows up before Congress and they have nothing. They're like, tell us what happened. They can't really do any like Perry Mason shit with him. 

Sarah:  And it's actually, they can't cross examine. Everything's just fact-finding at that point. 

Mike: Right, everything is just fact finding. But what he does, and this is one of those famous congressional testimonies in history. He shows up in full dress uniform with all of his medals on, and he plays them like a fiddle. It's really interesting. If you watch clips of this, they're like, “Oh, did you lie to Congress on this date in your testimony?” And he does this long sigh. It's a rough world out there. Here's a quote from him. “I want you to know that lying does not come easy to me. I want you to know that it doesn't come easy to anybody. But I think we all had to weigh in the balance, the difference between lives and lies. I had to do that on a number of occasions in both these operations, and it's not an easy thing to do.”

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: He gets emotional sometimes. And he's like, “What I did, I thought I was doing the right thing, and I knew that American lives were on the line.”

Sarah: That's just so greasy. 

Mike: It's extremely greasy. And the whole thing is done under this rubric of kind of a masculinity thing. You just got to make tough choices.

Sarah: Because that's what men do. And sometimes you have to kill a lot of non-American people in order to save American lives in a nebulous way that no one can explain how you're actually doing it. But you're wearing all these medals right now. 

Mike: He also played into this whole thing that Democrats had this stereotype as chicken kawks, right? The Democrats are soft on national security. Jimmy Carter couldn't do what needed to be done. This whole narrative plays into it. And so the Democrats in Congress get really nervous about doing tough questioning of a Marine Colonel who's wearing his dress uniform. And it's me, this soft, Northeastern, big city Democrat who's going to be like, “I don't think you should have done this.” And he's framing everything around, you can't make the hard choices. Some of us out there on the front lines have to make these hard choices. And so they were really concerned and really aware of the fact that they were coming off soft, and they were fucking right. 

So one of the opinion polls that was done after this found that 67% of Americans had a favorable view of Oliver North after his testimony. 53% of Americans referred to him as the victim of the inquiry and not the villain. It’s fascinating. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. He was one of the most famous Americans in the country, and famous as kind of a war hero and kind of a symbol of, you gotta do what you got to do. 

Sarah:  And he's a Maverick and he's a Renegade, and sure he doesn't play by the rules. Just really literally like Top Gun. That character gets literally named Maverick, and the whole deal with him and characters like that and what we fetishize is maybe, “I don't obey the letter of the law, but at the end of the day, I'm saving American lives.” What lives is he claiming to have saved though? Is it the hostages who were then replaced with other hostages or what? 

Mike: This is the whole third world thing, is that anything that saves a country from communism, you can justify. There's very little discussion at the time about the Nicaraguans or the Iranians that suffered because of this. There's very little, hey guys, this might've had some bad impacts on the ground. It's all under this idea of, we have to save the world from communism. 

The real tragedy of Iran-Contra is what happens afterwards. So there's this independent counsel investigation that goes on for four years. This becomes a partisan Shibboleth. The Republicans are saying, oh, it cost too much. It's gone on for too long. It's a witch hunt. 

One of the reasons why it took so long is because Lawrence Walsh, the guy that's running it, wasn't given any of the documents. In the actual report, he talks about how for years people are withholding their diaries from him. They're withholding their notes from him. So they're essentially knee capping him and at the same time saying, why are you taking so long? Why are you taking so long?

Sarah:   Oh my God.

Mike: So among the findings of the independent counsel report is this quote, “the Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice president George Bush, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, national security,” like everyone knew about what was going on. We've also got George HW Bush, who's the president at the time, that the Office of Independent Counsel produces its report where they conclude “Vice-President George HW Bush was substantially aware of and even participated in elicit operations, even though he denied it vociferously at the time. Confirmation eventually came in the form of dictated notes, which he had refused for years to turn over to the independent counsel.”

Sarah:  And he was like, no, can't, won't do it. 

Mike: One of the grand tragedies of this is that the independent counsel and other investigators, all these different investigations going on, they indict 14 people. They convict 11. Lots of the charges are thrown out on technicalities. Oliver North’s conviction is thrown out on a technicality because of this weird issue with immunization, that he was immunized for his testimony to Congress, but then they asked him stuff anyway. I don't get what went on. 

Sarah: Is that because if you wear a lot of medals when you testify, they can’t actually indict you?

Mike: The guy just got good lawyers. I don't know. So there's 14 indictments, 11 turned into convictions. HW Bush, after he loses the election to Clinton, pardons six of those people. A lot of the reports, the ex post facto reports on this, note that you have a President who is pardoning co-conspirators in a crime that he participated in. He refuses to turn over his notes. When he finally does turn over his notes, it's clear that he was involved in this. and then he pardons other people that were involved in this.

Sarah: And then if you pardon your co-conspirators then you're essentially, I would imagine there's some legal grounds by which you're avoiding a conspiracy charge, which might be used against you.

Mike: 100%. I read this really great Yale law article about this that is basically aw-ooga! It's basically, this is bad, we should all be more pissed off about this. And one of the things is that he pardons people that were indicted, but hadn't been tried yet. We don't know the facts of what they did. They were never put on the stand. They were never convicted. There's no finding of law that we could then use to kind of stair-step upward to the people that were directing this. That had never been done before, that a president pardons someone before they're convicted. That's not normal. 

Sarah: I feel like being one of these rat fuck Washington lawyers, in a way it would be really fun. It would be like being in this Grandmaster game. Someone else is using all these loopholes, so you have to find other loopholes. And it would in a way be a really rewarding and exciting way to be using law, just you would have to not care about being a moral agent of any kind ever, because obviously you're not doing that.

Mike: I got really obsessed with this question of why wasn't Iran-Contra a bigger deal? 

Sarah: Why do I remember Fawn Hall as one of the most salient parts, and clearly she fucking wasn't. 

Mike: And there's this great Columbia journalism review article about how the press dropped the ball. One of the reasons why it wasn't a bigger deal is because Oliver North, and he says in his memoir that he did this deliberately, he was able to focus all of the attention on two questions. What was the deal with this diversion of funds, and what did the president know. 

So one of the biggest problems is that because Watergate was such a big deal, everything gets put into this Watergate narrative. And I think that we sort of see this today, that when we're going through a presidential scandal, we're thinking, what chapter of Watergate are we at? That's kind of what happened with Iran-Contra. What did the president know? And when did he know it is actually not that useful of a question, because like I said, this diversion of funds was pretty small. The much larger scandals are what happened in Iran and what happened in Nicaragua and this huge cover up.

Sarah:  Yeah. Focusing on that question, it's in keeping with one of the great sins of the Reagan administration. Which is that it matters what Ronnie says and how he makes it sound and whatever. It doesn't really matter what he's doing, he's a diversion. The people we should be focusing on are the people in his administration who are actually doing all of this work behind the scenes.

Mike: There's an entire system that knew what was going on and what the human stakes were. One of the excerpts from this Columbia journalism review is super scathing. It says, “The two covert programs were poorly conceived based on skewed readings of the international environment, inadequately staffed, and deliberately concealed from the proper authorities. The entire business was characterized by pervasive dishonesty as officials duped not only the public and formal investigators, but each other.” So it's really about a system rotting from the inside and going after its own momentum, without a sense of any accountability. 

One of the biggest things, and this comes out in the Yale Law review article, why does the president get to make foreign policy as he wants it without any regard to Congress? Congress passed a law saying don't give money to the Contras. He did it anyway. Congress passed another law saying no, really don't give money to the Contras. And he did it anyway. We don't necessarily need to have a country where the president can do anything he wants in foreign policy. That's something that Congress tried to change during the Vietnam war. They were like, we don't like the fact that these presidents have been able to wage this war on their terms. We want to have more congressional oversight and it just went away. 

Sarah:  Congress has all these fancy recommendations, but I am in touch with the heart and soul of American morality or whatever the hell.

Mike: One of the failures of this is really about putting everything into this Watergate narrative and not necessarily thinking that this is different, this is about laws that have failed, this is about a system where a president can do anything that he wants without any accountability or any transparency. He wasn't even reporting to Congress behind the scenes or in confidential memos. Hey, we're funding the Contras Hey, look, we're selling weapons to Iran, right? You don't have to do this stuff in public, but the idea of representative democracy is that somebody knows what's going on and there's some sense of accountability. If you want to do secret wars, okay. There are committees for that. You can get some sort of approval for that. Maybe there's an argument for it, but you have to actually make that argument. You can't just decide that you're going to do it and not run it through anybody. 

One of the really interesting things from this Yale Law review article is that he says ,“The Iran-Contra affair resulted not from bad people violating good laws or from good people violating bad law, but for misguided people violating ineffective laws.” No one ever looked at the system, all they looked at was individuals. 

Sarah:  Because the system that they should have been investigating did not empower them to perform an investigation of that system. 

Mike: No, they weren't empowered to say, is this how it's supposed to work? One of the darkest things in this Columbia journalism review article  is that the press didn't cover Iran Contra, because Congress wasn't doing anything about it. And Congress didn't do anything about it because the press wasn't covering it. So there's this weird circular thing where everyone thinks when this other actor takes it up, we'll take it up. 

Another thing that was super chilling is that there's a political campaign, right? George HW Bush was running in 1988 and we know about Iran Contra by that point. But so there's this Dan Rather interview with George Bush during the election campaign. And first of all, George HW Bush calls it a partisan witch hunt. Why are you being so partisan? And this gets the press to back off that every time anybody brings up Iran Contra, they label it as a partisan thing. Oh, I don't understand why you're being so partisan about this. So that attack works so they drop it. 

There's another thing where in this Dan Rather interview, George HW Bush says, look, I never had any operational involvement in the scandal. And Dan Rather doesn't follow up that for years, Bush had said I had no involvement, I did nothing. This was done behind my back. But Rather has never asked, what did you actually know? What does operational involvement mean to you? What did you actually know? He never pushes it. 

Another thing that really bugged me and we talked about this with the Clinton impeachment episode, is that in this Dan Rather interview, there's this tense confrontation of what did you know about Iran Contra and what happened with Iran Contra. The Columbia journalism review article says, “the next day, the press played the story as a major confrontation, but paid scant attention to the substance. Bush was portrayed as a clear victor over the aggressive anchorman. So basically it just becomes a gossip story. Things got heated in this interview between Dan Rather and George Bush, it was never, hey, this guy told a big lie and Dan Rather got a little pushy, but that never made it into the accounts. It was always just Ooh, look at this tension because it's seen already just two years after the scandal breaks as this technical witch hunt-y hysterical, technical, boring thing. Why would anyone look into it when we already know Reagan didn't know about it. 

Sarah:  And because it's unsexy to root out corruption on a systemic scale, there's something that you can gain an audience around and can make you feel like a crusader if you're taking down the president or if it all flows up to the highest seat of government, it can all come back to this puppet master source who's pulling all the strings and has it all figured out. And that's a scandal and that's why the X-Files was on for a thousand years. But if it's just this big group of people all colluding with each other toward a shared goal and being all kinds of corrupt and in a way that is facilitated by democracy, I feel like people are less interested in that. We don't see that as scandalous.

Mike: There’s also a feedback loop to that because the co-conspirators in this actual conspiracy knew that Watergate would be the frame through which anybody looked at this. So they deliberately insulated Reagan from knowledge. They’re like, well, if anything comes out, he will be under the axe, so let's make sure he doesn't know. The bad guys learned from these scandals, just like the good guys do. 

Sarah:  Compare Iran-Contra to how much Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and then his impeachment hearings were in the news. That was so disproportionately huge. Do you think that we're more likely to see things as scandals or just get excited about them as people taking in the news, if we can feel really judgmental, but if we look at a bunch of people being complicit in a vast systemic abuse of power within a system that facilitates, and one might even say encourages those abuses of power, we feel like that's how my workplace functions also.

Mike: I think it's also a lesson of just how socially constructed the idea of a scandal is. You can make a scandal out of nearly anything it's about making the decision, and no one decided to make Iran Contra a big deal. I've been reading all these New Yorker articles about it and so many of them end with essentially, when is someone going to take this seriously? When is someone going to think about the huge breach of rule of law that just took place and what's going to happen next time. And every article ends with the same plea. They're like, if we don't do something about it, it's going to happen again. If we don't do something about it, it's going to happen again. And they were right. 

I also read a really good article about how instead of using Watergate to view all of our political scandals through, we should start to use Iran-Contra as the story we view all our political scandals through because the bad guys won. And we have this narrative that the way it works is you find out what's going on and you have these dogged reporters and there's leakers from inside. And then everybody does the right thing. 

Sarah:  Dustin Hoff is smoking all the time. 

Mike: And you get people on tape and then you get the confession and all it all kind of culminates in this big event where the president resigns. But there's also things like this where it just fizzles out and where obstructing the investigation works. You wait five years to release your diary and then they find out, oh, hey, in your diary, you admitted to a bunch of crimes, but then the country's like, ah, come on, Clinton’s already been elected. What do we need to do this for? He pardoned a bunch of people on his way out the door, but whatever, that's just what presidents do. What’s the point of chasing this down? That's really the mode that everybody got in, is why are you being hysterical? Why are you looking at this still? Are we still talking about Iran Contra? It’s been five years, drop it. 

Sarah:  Why do you need to look at my phone? Don't you trust me? 

Mike: The lesson here is no one wanted to revisit this thing, because I don't know, because it sounds boring and because there's acronyms involved and because someone narrowly defined this as this one tiny thing. I always think of it as a scandal where we find out you broke into a house and stole a bunch of cash. And then the next day you bought 50 pounds of cocaine. And instead of focusing on breaking into a house is bad and buying a bunch of cocaine is bad, well, did you use the same money that you stole to buy the cocaine? That's the question we zero in on, as opposed to being like, hey, don't break into houses and don't buy a bunch of cocaine. It becomes, was the same money? Do we know?

Sarah:  Did  your dad know? Let’s talk about what your dad knew about all of this.

Mike: So basically everything is bad. And the links between the bad things don't matter as much as we think they do.

Sarah:  Boom.