DARK SHADOWS: IRAN-CONTRA, SECRET WARS &

COVERT OPERATIONS, PART 1 JANUARY 11, 2017

| DOUG VAUGHAN
HTTP://WHOWHATWHY.ORG/2017/01/11/DARK-
SHADOWS-IRAN-CONTRA-SECRET-WARS-
COVERT-OPERATIONS-PART-1/
How the National Security State Created a State of Global
Insecurity

Oliver North (left), Eugene Hasenfus capture (right top), newspaper clipping (right middle) and
President Ronald Reagan in Robert McFarlane's office with Adolfo Calero, a Nicaraguan Democratic
Resistance (Contra) leader, and Oliver North (right bottom). Photo credit: C-SPAN, University of
Wisconsin, The Constantine Report and National Archives
INTRODUCTION:
Dear Reader: As journalism chases the perceived diminishing attention span by
making everything shorter and shorter, were going to head in the opposite
direction on occasion go really deep and thorough on something historical and
still of interest. Heres one such case: a remarkable look at Iran-Contra, a still
somewhat-mysterious big scandal of 30 years ago that tells us much about the
Deep State, the Military-Industrial complex and Americas will to empire that
provides context to so much happening today.
This is the first of a three-part series exploring Iran-Contra and its implications.
Part I describes the Reagan Administrations secret wars and illegal arms deals
exposed in the scandal. Part II explains how the constitutional and legal crisis
unfolded but backfired politically in the Bush and Clinton years. Part III will survey
the era of global insecurity we have entered in the second Bush and Obama
Administrations and the role key members of the incoming Trump team played in
creating it by immunizing themselves from the consequences of past criminality.
The author, Doug Vaughan, spent years as an investigative journalist covering the
Central/South American horrors of the 1970s and 80s. In this series, he draws a
throughline from that troubling time to the present cast of characters taking their
places in a new administration. It provides background to Donald Trumps decision
to ignore many veterans of the George W. Bush administration while reaching back
to those who served Bushs father and Ronald Reagan, and the pernicious
influence of Dick Cheney.
Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. Claudius1
Thirty years ago the United States government was embroiled in a scandal whose
repercussions are felt today in a perverse variation on the idea that those who
dont learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We have been repeating Iran-
Contra operations in various forms and guises ever since, only now theyre not a
scandalous aberration but standard operating procedure of the Deep State.
Illegal wars are now legal. Covert operations are continuous. Only revealing them is
illegal.
Thirty years later, every day is Day of the Dead and each night is New Years Eve
when we make resolutions to do better next time. Where to begin the body count?
The scandal itself began dramatically enough, at least in the theater of television if
not the cauldron of secret war where it had been simmering, waiting to explode, for
years.
The Fat Lady, the Arrow & a Rabbits Foot
.
Lets return, then, to the unmasking of aged players, the unraveling of ancient
plots:
On the night of October 5, 1986, a young conscript in the Peoples Sandinista Army
named Jose Fernando Canales Aleman was on patrol near San Carlos on the Rio
San Juan in the hills of southern Nicaragua. Hearing the now-familiar low roar of a
big propeller-driven airplane, Canales aimed his shoulder-fired rocket-launcher at
the big belly of a lumbering Fairchild C-123K Provider as it swung down to 2,500
feet overhead in the moonlit clouds.
Bwooshh! The Soviet-made Strela (arrow in Russian) surface-to-air missile roared
off with its characteristic tailing flare, then Boom! exploded near the fuselage of
the aircraft. Much to the boy-soldiers delight and surprise shock and awe were
terms reserved for later displays of superior firepower the big bird burst into
flame. Down it came like a wounded duck, crashing into the jungle.
A single parachute popped open. Fluttering down came the lucky survivor. The
patrol quickly surrounded him, tied him up and took him to their camp while others
searched the wreckage. In the mess, they found 3 bodies with documents
identifying the dead pilot as William Cooper; the co-pilot as Wallace Sawyer; the
radioman as Freddy Vilches, a Nicaraguan.
Their lone captive identified himself as Eugene Hasenfus (rabbits foot in
German), a semi-employed construction worker from Marinette, Wisconsin, an ex-
Marine and Vietnam War vet. Like his dead companions, Hasenfus had signed on
with Corporate Air Services to load and kick cargo out of the Provider for a lousy
$3,000 a month. So cheap were his employers, he had borrowed the parachute
from his sky-diving brother; it was the only chute on board. A day later, Hasenfus
was in Managua with smiling guards of the state-security force facing the cameras
as the hapless mug of a two-faced war.2
Nicaraguan Contras, 1987.
Photo credit: Tiomono / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Call it a lucky shot in the dark: It was inevitable, perhaps, that a soldier someday
would shoot down a plane. But because that lone crewman survived, that one lucky
shot put the lie to at least seven years of deceptions by the US government: Since
the Sandinistas took power in July 1979, reporters had been chronicling the
murderous raids by the US-trained and supplied Contras (from the Spanish for
counter-revolutionary) on villages along the northern border with Honduras for six
years, and the southern border with Costa Rica for four. Most of these reports were
widely distributed in Latin America and Europe but ignored by the public or
dismissed as Communist propaganda in the US.3
There should have been no surprise because there was ample precedent: The
United States government supported mercenaries under William Walker who
invaded Nicaragua in 1855 and declared himself president with ambitions to rule
all of Central America. But he made the mistake of seizing a railroad from the
Vanderbilt interests, who organized a counter-counter-revolutionary expedition to
overthrow the usurper, culminating in his execution in 1861.
The United States threatened the country by gunboat diplomacy throughout the
19th century as a potential route for a transoceanic canal and to guarantee
payment of loans secured by a lien on customs duties and excise taxes. The US
directly occupied the port cities, then took over the country from 1912-25, and
1926-33, triggering an uprising led by Augusto Cesar Sandino. Sandino was
executed by the commander of the US-created National Guard, Anastasio Somoza,
whose family ruled until his sons overthrow in July 1979 by Sandinos successors
and namesakes, the Frente de Liberacion Nacional Sandinista.4
The Carter Administration had handled the Sandinistas gingerly, withdrawing
support from Somoza, as they had the Shah of Iran a year earlier, encouraging
economic development a euphemism for investment of foreign capital to
contain communist expansionism and supporting a democratic opposition and
free and fair elections in the name of human rights.5
But the ousted Somocistas had already begun organizing in exile with support from
sympathetic governments in league with exiled Cubans from Miami all around the
Gulf and Caribbean coasts. The Republican Partys candidates made their
intentions clear during the 1980 campaigns,6 openly calling for regime change in
both Nicaragua and Iran, starting with economic strangulation of their debt-
strapped economies, and psychological warfare using private companies,
foundations, churches, pro-business newspapers and labor unions, a model that
had worked in Chile in 1973.
A former CIA officer laid out this blueprint in a paper published by the right-wing
Heritage Foundation on the eve of Reagans election,7 followed afterward by a
series of policy papers, journal articles, speeches and a propaganda offensive
orchestrated by his National Security Council.8 As in any war, psywar preferred its
victims far away, where their screams could not be heard, but the targets of this
propaganda were at home, watching TV.
The war had never been confined to words, as the head of the new Nicaraguan
government, Daniel Ortega, made clear to the United Nations Security Council on
March 25, 1982, when he denounced the US-trained and supplied counter-
revolutionary army in Honduras and the Panama Canal Zone, continuous violations
of the countrys air space and offshore territory by surveillance and resupply craft,
bombing of bridges and ports, even the rendition kidnapping and torture of
prisoners of this covert war. The US response was not to deny these attacks but to
accuse Ortega of paranoia based on a guilty conscience 9 a psy-war tactic
todays social media call gas-lighting. There was another motive: the US war on
 Nicaragua was illegal, not only under international law and the UN Convention, but
US law, including the Neutrality Act.
As in any war, psywar preferred its victims far away, where their screams
could not be heard, but the targets of this propaganda were at home,
watching TV.
The organizers of this not-so-secret war had maintained the fiction that, since
Congress banned the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from
providing weapons two years earlier, all this mayhem had been orchestrated by a
private network of supporters while the ever merciful US government had
confined itself to providing humanitarian assistance to refugees. But, unkicked by
Hasenfus inside the cargo bay were, according to the manifest, 60 collapsible AK-
47 rifles, 50,000 AK-47 rifle cartridges, several dozen RPG-7 grenade launchers and
150 pairs of jungle boots. (Others put the take at 70 AKs, 100,000 rounds.) A flight
log showed the Provider had left a CIA hive at Ilopango air base in El Salvador,
buzzed down the western coast of Nicaragua, swung over the Costa Rican side of
the San Juan, only to be hit by the Strela when it crossed the border into
Nicaraguan air space to drop its load. It was just another lawless act of war in
another illegal, undeclared war made visible by the inevitable collateral damage.10

Echoes in the Garbage Can

.
News of the downed Provider and Hasenfus captured arrived in Denver thanks to a
wire dispatch from the Associated Press on October 8, 1986, hot-handed to me by
a colleague over a beer at the Press Club. My primitive online computer bulletin
board was already buzzing with rumors confirmed by expensive collect calls from
friends in Managua. Between jobs, marriages and stints in Latin America where I
had travelled, studied, worked since 1968, I was flogging as a freelance reporter
for, among others, The New York Times, mostly chasing Klansmen and Nazis who
had gunned down11 a friend, Alan Berg, a radio talk-show host, in June 1984. They
had shown up in various fracases with protesters in Denver then hid in their homey
bunkers while pumping up each others courage in the new online chat rooms like
Usenet, where they were so far beyond conservative, or conventional notions of
the Right that they took on the moniker alt-right.
Lines converge for events, revealing a pattern: I also was pursuing ties of a local
investor to weapons tests in the California desert for the Contras, assembled by a
private security firm staffed by veterans of the military and the CIA. And they led
me back to my home turf.
A retired Army officer, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, lived in the mountains near Denver
but was seldom home to answer the phone or random knocks on his door.
Singlaub had served in World War II with the Office of Special Services (OSS,
forerunner of CIA) as a Jedburgh, part of a team that parachuted behind enemy
lines to organize resistance and sabotage. He worked with the CIA, fought in Korea,
and rose to chief of special operations for the military in Vietnam. His Military
Assistance Command-Vietnam/Special Operations Group (MACV-SOG) was the
hatchery for later elite combined-operations like Delta Force. He returned to
Korea as commander of Army forces there but was forced to retire by Jimmy Carter
when, like his idol and patron Gen. MacArthur, he denounced the commander-in-
chiefs effort to reduce the number of troops and nukes on the peninsula as part of
negotiations to end that war.

Retired Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, former Office of Strategic Services officer and
founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), gets his Special Forces
tab pinned on his chest in 2/20/2016. Inset: a younger portrait of Singlaub.
Photo credit: US Army and US Army / Wikimedia
As head of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL),12 Singlaub was fronting
internationally as a fundraiser and cheerleader for that ostensibly private
network of right-wing supporters of the Contras, including the Coors brewing clan
(patriarch Joseph Coors made an easy touch: he had funded the John Birch Society,
was a member of Reagans informal kitchen cabinet of advisers). The network
included outright Nazis, fascists, Latin military dictators, the Moonie religious cult
with ties to the Korean CIA that owned the Washington Times, predecessor to the
newly formed Fox News as mouthpiece for the Right.
WACL provided a forum for coordinating mercenaries recruited through Soldier of
Fortune, the magazine published in Boulder by retired Lt. Col. Robert K.
Brown,13 who had worked under Singlaub in Vietnam, running Green Beret A-teams
into the countryside to capture, interrogate and kill Viet Cong for CIAs Phoenix
Project. An SoF editor, veteran of MACV-SOG in Vietnam, Operation Menu in
Cambodia, and CIAs Laotian war, George Bacon had been engaged earlier on
behalf of CIA-backed warlord Holden Roberto in Angola.14 Another merc,
represented by a lawyer friend of mine, had been captured within days of arrival in
1976, tried, and released in 1982. He was not a happy guy and told us why: Like
Hasenfus, he had been promised fortune if not fame, and blamed his ignominious
capture on the incompetence of his superiors like Bacon, whose name is on a wall
of honor at CIA headquarters. Another SoF editor and ex-Army Ranger, Mike
Echanis, hired out as dictator Anastasio Somozas presidential guard and died there
when his chopper was shot down on the Rio Sapoa in 1978.15
Singlaub had a direct link to the Reagan White House in the person of Donald
Gregg, who had served as CIA station chief in Seoul when Singlaub commanded
the Army there. Gregg now served as national security adviser to Vice-President
Bush, to whom the management of the Contra war had been delegated. The crusty
old generals old boss in the Jedburghs was Reagans CIA Director William V. Casey.
Looking back, none of this was news to anyone who had been paying attention
beyond their doorstep, not just reporters with some experience in the region but
even to casual travelers, like those many supporters of the Sandinistas
sandalistas they were derisively dubbed college students who went there to
study, church groups who put up schools and clinics, but especially those who had
come to oppose US policy, based on past experience in the region or testimony
from the frontlines by groups like Witness for Peace.16
Most of the public probably didnt know or werent interested because most of the
media which then meant newspapers, an already endangered species at the
height of hubris, which provided the news to television and radio, where call-in
talk-shows with shock-jocks like Berg or his conservative competitors like Rush
Limbaugh were the rage were not paying attention or playing catch-up or worse,
beating the drums for war.
Colorado was hardly unique: Singlaub and Brown set up a charity to help the
Contras get supplies by small planes and helicopters, run by another retired
general in Texas, Heinie Aderholdt, who had been Singlaubs deputy for air
operations at MACV-SOG. There were much larger nodes in Southern California,
Texas, Louisiana and Florida, especially where there were concentrations of
Vietnamese and Hmong who had worked for the CIA, Cuban exiles longing for
revenge against Castro, even Nazi collaborators who had scampered down the
Ratlines into the nascent Agencys embrace at the end of the Good War. Like the
Butcher of Riga, Edgars Laipenieks Olympic hero, coach of track and ski at the
University of Denver, recruiter of Soviet defectors in Mexico City, 1968, according
to Agency whistleblower Philip Agee.17 Laipenieks had been fingered to me by my
dean at the Universitys Graduate School of International Studies, Josef Korbel,
himself a CIA-sponsored refugee, father of future Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and mentor to my classmate, Condoleezza Rice. So, follow the money if
you can find it. But first, follow the men. Privateers maybe, but private? Gimme a
break.
I had also done some work for the Washington Post on the escapades of Edwin
Wilson and Frank Terpil, former CIA contractors who allegedly had gone rogue in
working for the Reagan administrations once and future bogeyman, Col. Muammar
Qaddafi, in Libya.18
Wilson served in the Army during the Korean War, was recruited to CIAs Office of
Security, then its International Organizations division, subverting labor
organizations until 1971. He joined the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) where
he applied his specialty setting up proprietary companies and contractors and
recruiting and infiltrating agents for Task Force 157, seconded to CIA for
surveillance of Soviet naval operations. He also coordinated logistics for covert
operations moving men and materials for overthrowing governments and
waging counter-insurgency wars in Latin America, Africa and the Far East. After
helping overthrow the government of Chile in 1973, Wilson had worked with Air
Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord in supplying equipment to the Shah of Iran; he also
allegedly set up and trained a secret surveillance and assassinations unit under
cover of the Air Force to track, interrogate, recruit or kill opponents.

Col. Muammar Qaddafi, 1972 (left), Frank Terpil (top left) and Edwin Wilson
(bottom left).
Photo credit: Rex Features / Wikimedia and ISleepNow / YouTube
After the fall of the Shah in 1978, Secord and an exiled Iranian partner, Albert
Hakim, won a huge contract to supply weapons to Egypt as part of the Camp David
accords. But Wilson had been indicted for supplying 22 tons of C-4 explosives to
Libya. He also was implicated in the attempted murder of a Libyan dissident in Fort
Collins, CO, and thefirebombing of a rival suppliers car in Canada.19
Wilson claimed his work for Qaddafi as an indicted fugitive was an elaborate cover
for spying on those same terrorists for CIA and, ever alert to proliferation of what
would later be called weapons of mass destruction, he was monitoring shipments
of Soviet-bloc military equipment. After years on the run, he had been lured out of
Libya by an offer from Reagans National Security Adviser, Richard V. Allen, who
promised that he would be put in charge of an operation running hit-teams against
the Sandinistas, their Salvadoran allies and other Cuban-inspired guerrilla
movements under cover of the offshore oil platforms of the Mexican oil company,
PEMEX.20
Instead, he was arrested on-board an airplane diverted from the Dominican
Republic to the US, was tried, convicted and imprisoned for life based largely on
the CIAs disclaimer that it had nothing to do with him, directly or indirectly since
he left the Agency in 1971.21
Eventually, however, his lawyer produced documents that showed no less than 80
meetings between Wilson and CIA officials between 1971 and 1978. His convictions
were overturned;22 he was released in 2004, sued the former CIA officials and
prosecutors who had withheld exculpatory evidence and presented false evidence,
but the case was dismissed because their actions were immune from civil liability.
He died in September 2012, deniable and disposable to the bitter end, outliving
Qaddafi by a year. And, he maintained, he had been set-up and sacrificed by his
old colleagues as a distraction to protect the officially sanctioned channels of illegal
arms deals for hostages that funded the Contras.23 Among the casualties was
whistleblower Kevin Mulcahy, who had left the CIA to work with the retired
cowboys, only to find them up to old and supposedly banned tricks, and that he,
too, was only a cut-out.24
It made sense: In Libya and Iran, many of those who worked with Wilson and
Secord, notably his deputy Tom Clines and henchman Rafael Chi-Chi Quintero,
were part of a network that had earlier operated under the CIAs legendary Blond
Ghost, Theodore Shackley,25 deputy director of [covert] operations (DDO) under
George H.W. Bush (DCI, 1975-76) until sacked by Carter in 1978 because Shackley
and his boss, Deputy Director Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters, had been implicated in the
CIAs Operation Condor in South America (modelled after the infamous Phoenix
Program in Vietnam). Condors claws reached out to the bombing in downtown
Washington that took the lives of a man I had met in Chile, former Chilean Defense
Minister and Ambassador Orlando Letelier, and his assistant, Ronni Karpen
Moffitt.26
That domestic-cum-international terrorist act went back to the infamous
military coup detat organized by the CIA in Chile in 1973, the burglary and
wiretapping of Democratic Party offices at the Watergate complex during the
presidential campaign of 1972, the Phoenix Program of assassinations of
Vietnamese, the Secret War that chewed up HMong in Laos, assassination plots
against Castro, and the US-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April
1961, even back to the Nazis who escaped justice and hid with CIAs help in Latin
America then worked for right-wing dictators.
Back, back, back it went until it spiraled around the wormhole to emerge as the
present. And there was an unwritten rule for investigating ordinary crimes no less
applicable to extraordinary official lawlessness: If they did it before, theyll do it
again. Call em unrepentant recidivists or over-enthusiastic super-patriots, they had
been driven under a political rock in the mid-70s but crawled out with an appetite
under Reagan.

A Curtiss C-46 Commando operated by the CIA-affiliated Civil Air Transport (CAT).
Photo credit: US Air Force / Wikimedia
When the Fat Lady went down, The Timess national desk asked me to look into the
crews backgrounds: I found Buzz Sawyer in a yearbook of the Air Force Academy.
Cooper had flown for the Air Force even longer. In an old roster of the Air America
Association, I found them listed as members, as were the radioman and the cargo-
kicker. Air America had been the CIAs proprietary27 a company set up in 1947
and owned by the Agency for airlifting troops and materiel during the long wars in
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, earlier in Congo, later in Angola, the Middle East. Since
 absorbing the assets of its predecessor, Civil Air Transport (CAT) going back to the
1950s and bequeathing them to a supposedly privately-owned successor, Southern
Air Transport (SAT) in the 1970s, Air America had made up to $50 million a year as
a profitable company within the Company . By mid-October, reporters were all over
SATs facility at the Miami airport and digging through the corporate paperwork in
Wilmington, Delaware, that showed it had been owned by CIA from 1947 to
1975,28 then sold to a former executive of the proprietary, sold again in 1979 to
another front-man or beard to run airlifts for the Agency. So it was no longer
owned outright by CIA, but it worked for CIA as a private contractor for profit.29

Contra-dictions: A Milieu of Murder, Mayhem and Lies

.
It was panic in Spook Town: When Hasenfuss name appeared on front pages in
Nicaragua, then around the world, the White House, CIA, Pentagon and Congress
went into damage-control mode based on the principle of plausible deniability.
The security of any operation required that any participant know only what he or
she needed to know; this need-to-know rule operated down the line of command
but also up. It also invited deception, the truth of a missions procedures and
purpose to be protected by a Bodyguard of Lies. An order could be conveyed by
a wink and a nod, never committed to paper unless necessary to insulate oneself
from the consequences (after-action reports tended to become cover-your-ass or
CYA papers).
Compartmentalized operations allowed the Agency to carry out the orders of a
president so he could plausibly deny responsibility for unanticipated consequences,
mistakes, blunders, even crimes. The assumption that a secret is justifiable is
based on a hidden premise that the intended consequences might not pan out,
embarrassing the authors, so deception was necessary to preserve secrecy: A lie in
defense of a smaller violent act was better than a factual statement of
responsibility that might cause a larger and longer series of violent responses, up
to war. And there was always the natural human tendency to embellish the
successes, blame others for failures, spread rumor and misinformation to muddy
the waters, fabricate evidence to hide the truth. And bury the evidence, sometimes
by destroying it, sometimes literally disappearing the bodies.
So, escalating violence begets escalating deception until evidence accumulates to
visible, palpable, measurable, detectable levels. When the inflatable turd explodes
you want to be hiding under your desk or at home in bed with the flu or on
vacation, blissfully sipping a cold one. The cell phone was a device out of the
Jetsons; radio walkie-talkies were heavier, shorter leashes but unavailable to the
ordinary reporter or source. Shoe-leather still counted and computer keyboards
had begun to inhabit newsrooms with green glowing screens. Google was not yet a
thing, let alone a verb.
Cynics called it the Mission Impossible clause: If youre caught, well deny your
existence. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 had been a notable
test of this principle: The plans for an invasion and beach landing of more than a
thousand troops could not be hidden but distractions and diversions could confuse
the defenders. A Times reporter, Sydney Gruson, got wind of the invasion while
mucking around Guatemala but management suppressed his story; had it run, the
mission might have been aborted. A new President learned of the plot after his
inauguration beyond leaks to favored outsiders by insiders there was no
equivalent of the current law that provides for a transition period of cooperation in
sharing classified information. Too far along to cancel the plan he inherited, JFK
withheld direct US air support because it would make deniability impossible; but
that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a mistake never to be repeated. So, Cuban
exiles piloted retired Air Force planes with markings painted over, but no one under
fire is fooled for long. There was no denying, plausible or otherwise, the bloated
corpses all over Playa Giron and prisoners dragged before the cameras, a
triumphant Fidel commanding from atop a tank.30
One of the piquant ironies of the Iran-Contra affair was the way secret
agents exposed each other, accused each other as frauds and liars in a
veritable shit-shower of leaks that percolated up from the bowels of the
Deep State.
Not that they didnt try: Success has a thousand fathers but failure is everywhere
an orphan, Kennedy mused. He took the blame anyway but canned the invasions
planners and executors for, among other blunders, confidently predicting a popular
uprising that never occurred. Did they return to put Kennedy in his coffin? We may
never know for sure but the incoming administration is almost certainly moving to
rescind the law passed in the wake of Iran-Contra that would force the CIA to
release in 2017 more than 17,000 pages of material related to the hit that are still
considered too sensitive for the public to see 53 years after the assassination and
counting.
By the time Iran-Contra brought the old operators together for another go, covert
operations had been retooled to make them more secure to preserve deniability in
the event of failure but who would believe it? More and more effort went into
deception to hermetically seal any discrete operation. But, the more elaborate the
plot, the greater the danger of leaks. And the greater the risk of premature
exposure, the more deception required in the planning, especially propaganda to
defame and demonize the target in advance, to subvert its popular support and to
excite domestic applause for attacking in the name of self-defense. See Congo,
1962, Guyana, 1962, Brazil, 1964; Dominican Republic, Indonesia (500,000 dead in
our first great flirtation with Muslim fanatics against alleged communists), the
Tonkin Gulf incident that gave LBJ his congressional approval for invasion of
Vietnam, 1965; Bolivia, 1967; Chile, 1970-73. Practice made perfect by a long list
of casualties abroad that were largely unknown to the oblivious citizen who paid
the bills. Whatever the outcome, covert operations worked if they fooled the public.
Now, here was Hasenfus blowing the lid off a nice little war with his big mouth:
Press Guidance was prepared which states no U.S.G. involvement or connection,
wrote Vincent Cannistraro, director of intelligence programs for the NSC on Oct. 8
to National Security Adviser Robert Bud McFarlane, but that we are generally
aware of such support contracted by the ContrasElliott [Deputy Secretary of
State for Hemispheric Affairs Abrams] said he would continue to tell the press
these were brave men and brave deeds. We recommended he not do this because
it contributes to perception U.S.G. inspired and encouraged private lethal aid
effort. 31

And we wouldnt want that, would we?

Perception management was important to Cannistraro because he was more than
generally aware of the CIAs management of the Contra war, having directed
CIAs Central American Task Force from 1981 to 1984 before moving to NSC. At
that very moment, the old Contra hand knew that the other hand, North, had a
private Danish ship en route with more weapons for the Contras, purchased by
Secord and Hakims private company through shell companies with profits from
overcharging the private middlemen who shipped other weapons to Iran.
Another lesson: When deniability becomes implausible, scapegoating is inevitable,
opening the valves that control the flow of information. Called on the carpet for the
bungled air-resupply operation, Oliver North, who had let it be known proudly that
Casey had chosen him as the designated fall guy, laid it off on Singlaub, who would
nottake the blame for what he regarded as incompetence by rank amateurs,
including his former subordinate, the profiteering Secord.32 Besides, the Agencys
fingerprints were all over the debris: Coopers little notebook, for example,
included phone numbers for a man named Max Gomez in El Salvador; he turned
out to be Felix Rodriguez, a career officer with CIA who was coordinating regional
counter-insurgency operations out of Ilopango, El Salvador. Rodriguez was
notorious as the man who had captured Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and wore
the slain guerrillero heroicos Rolex as a trophy.33(Ches hands had been cut off to
send back to identify his fingerprints.)
Hasenfus identified another Cuban at Ilopango as Ramon Medina; he was Luis
Bambi Posada Carriles, who had worked for the CIA since Pigs, then Operation
Condor, was convicted for planting a bomb aboard a Cuban airliner that killed 73
passengers in October 6, 1976 (again, just two weeks after the Letelier-Moffitt
bombing in Washington by Cuban agents of Pinochets Chilean secret police, while
Shackley was DDO under DCI Bush). But Bambi escaped from a Venezuelan prison
with help from the Agency in 1985 to work with old pal Felix at Ilopango for Secord.
Other numbers led back to Corporate Air Services, Secords subcontractor
which hired pilots and crew for SAT.
And in Hasenfuss wallet was a business card for Robert C. Owen in Costa Rica. A
former aide to Sen. Dan Quayle (later George H.W. Bushs vice president), Owen
was liaison for North to the Southern Front coordinator, an Indiana-born character
named John Hull who operated a string of farms as landing strips and air-drops in
Ticoland but had a habit of showing up in territory hostile to farming. The CIA had a
station chief in Costa Rica, Joe Fernandez, cut from the same Cuban cloth, and a
veteran of MACV SOG and Phoenix, Gary Mattocks as liaison to the Contras
Southern Front. In Honduras, another Vietnam vet, Jim Adkins, advised the main
contra force brought together as the FDN. Their identities remained secret for
awhile longer because a law passed in 1978 made it illegal to reveal their names.
This was indeed, in contemporary military parlance, a target-rich environment for
investigative reporting. Long before Google, all you needed was a phone book to
be a ghostbuster.
Even the plane had a bizarre and incriminating history: Rebranded as CASs tail
number HPF821, records of the Federal Aviation Administration were tracked by a
radio reporter in Oklahoma City to a broker who had acquired it from another pilot,
Adler Berriman Seal, of Baton Rouge. Seal, a convicted drug smuggler, called it
The Fat Lady for its cavernous hold. He had flown it first in Laos for Air America
resupplying Vang Paos tribal army 20 years earlier, lugging heroin in the backloads
when Shackley was station chief in Vientiane, then took over for William Colby in
Saigon when Colby ascended to DCI.
The Fat Man also had flown it in and out of Nicaragua, notoriously in 1984, outfitted
by CIA with a hidden camera at Wright AFB outside Dayton, supervised by that
same Gary Mattocks, for a sting operation by US Customs. The set-up was
arranged by the White House multiagency Task Force on the drug traffic in South
Florida under Vice President Bush. The idea was to entrap Sandinistas in the act of
loading cocaine on board. But the operation was blown, along with Seals cover, by
none other than Ollie North, who gave copies of the blurry photos, alleged to
identify a Sandinista official (named, inconveniently for me and as commonly
misspelled, Federico Vaughan) and Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Cartel on the
military airstrip at Los Brasiles, to the Washington Times in an effort to sway
Congress to release funds for the Contras. After convictions for drug smuggling in
Fort Lauderdale and Louisiana, Seal was gunned down by Colombian hit-men
outside his probationary halfway house in Baton Rouge, in February 1985. (One of
 the hit-mens lawyers accused North of arranging the hit, gangster style, to
preserve his own deniability.)
Now, scrubbed with a new tail number and sent out to shake it, truly the Fat Lady
had sung a very different tune from the one North had played for Congress.
Reporters and congressional investigators scoured the hills of northwest Arkansas
around the regional airport at Mena, where Seal had set up a contra resupply-cum-
drug-smuggling operation as early as 1981 under the ruddy nose of the ambitious
young governor, Bill Clinton. Contra training and resupply ops continued, even
expanded after Seals untimely death until 1988. Allegations by participants,
notably pilot Terry Reed who claimed he also worked for North and Rodriguez in
Mexico,34 plagued Clinton during the run-up to his election in 1992 and, thanks to
the enduring half-life of social media, up to the present.
Iran-Contra was a neocon love-child, still-born, thanks to the legerdemain
of a Hidden Hand, its creators in the secret services of the State.
In the fall of 1986, however, most reporters were myopically fixated on two merged
aspects: the legality of the lethality. Boots were not lethal, Reagans amen chorus
dutifully sang. The freedom fighters couldnt go shoeless, that would be
inhumane. And the guns and bullets were for self-defense, who could blame
anyone for that? Hasenfus confessed to illegally smuggling weapons into
Nicaragua, naming the CIA as giving his crews orders. He only did it for the money.
Its not my war, he told 60 Minutes. Its not Americas war either. He was
sentenced to 30 years in jail, then pardoned and released on Dec. 17, 1986, a gift
of peace said then-and-again President Daniel Ortega. The kicker did not get even
a half-hearted heros parade to welcome him home to Wisconsin because another
shoe had dropped far way.

The Hammer, the Bible, and a Cake

.
The crash of the Fat Lady made the covert operation undeniably obvious, but did
not stop the denials. It was still doubtful that Fernando Canaless little Red Arrow
would bring down the Contra War, the larger wars in which it was a part, let alone
the vast machinery that launched them and the men behind the controls. With
Singlaubs network unwilling to take the blame, it looked like can-do Ollie would
have to fall on his sword for the blunder. In fact, when the same plane nearly
crashed on a previous mission, the pilot had warned Secords men it was not fit to
fly. Within days of the Fat Ladys swan song, another SAT plane crashed in Texas,
threatening to further expose the illegal re-supply project.

The downed Iran-Contra Fairchild C-123 was moved to Costa Rica and converted
into a restaurant and bar.
Photo credit: Cherie Stafford / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
One of the piquant ironies of the Iran-Contra affair was the way secret agents
exposed each other, accused each other as frauds and liars in a veritable shit-
shower of leaks that percolated up from the bowels of the Deep State. The bile of
personal vindictiveness rose from the muck to stinking heights. For all the
public bonhomie, there was no love lost between the president and his loyal
servants and the vice-president and his court-in-waiting. As director of the CIA in
those critical years of 1976-77, when much of the apparatus went underground,
Bush had made himself Jaubert to Philip Agees Valjean. He accused Agee of
responsibility for the death ofRichard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens who
had been gunned down by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Friendly
media organs blared the smear that Agee was a Soviet or Cuban agent, forcing
European countries to expel him or deny him asylum.35 In 1982, Congress passed
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), legislation that seemed directly
aimed at Agees work. Now, CIAs covert network of shadow companies and
contractors was unravelling thanks to the bungling and name-calling and finger-
pointing of the operatives themselves, all scrambling to escape the blame and the
consequences. The pretense of presidential deniability was a shaky scaffold of lies
that threatened to tumble, leaving Reagan and Bush unsupported in the air.
With a cascade of fallout pouring down from all sides during a midterm election,
Reagan tried to keep mum, above the fray, disclaiming any connection to the
rogue dealings of low-level scam artists. Instead, he flew to Reykjavik, Iceland, for
a meeting with his arch-nemesis, the leader of the Soviet Union, on October 11-12.
Unexpectedly by all accounts, Gorbachev proposed rapid nuclear disarmament,
replete with all the guarantees of mutual inspection so long demanded by the US
To the consternation of his more militant backers, Reagan accepted a freeze on
production of nuclear weapons but vowed to move ahead with his fanciful Star
Wars missile defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative,36 even though it
violated the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty and threatened to undo the MAD doctrine of
Mutually Assured Destruction that had kept an armed truce between the nuclear
powers. Bolting into this opening on their right, many Democrats in Congress said
Reagan had lost his senses at the very moment he had found them, albeit
temporarily. He was soon to lose them again in a lapse of memory so grand, it
came to characterize his presidency. (After leaving office, Reagan admitted he had
been diagnosed with Alzheimers but insisted it hadnt affected his
judgment 37 during his tenure.)
Viewed from inside the bunker, constant pressure on the Soviets and their allies
seemed to be working and should be intensified, accelerated, petty costs be
damned. Besides, the exposures in Central America served to hide the much
bigger operations in Africa and Afghanistan. So smitten were the Democrats by the
overtures of Gorby, even as evidence was mounting that they had been deceived,
seduced and abandoned by Reagans team on foreign policy, enough Democrats
joined Republicans in a compromise that restored $100 million to the Contras,
small change in a war budget approaching $500 billion, of which the Pentagon had
its own $36 billion in unrestricted funds to spend on covert projects.38
The funds were released October 17, after Abrams and others assured lawmakers
that Hasenfus and his crewmates were not CIA employees true enough,
technically, because they were subcontracted by CAS for SAT which was no longer
a proprietary but a private contractor, even though the CIA and military were SATs
biggest clients. For the Sandinistas, their allies in Salvador and mentors in Cuba,
Gorbachevs deal with Reagan signaled not peace but betrayal, surrender. The
legalized war continued with greater lethality, but the winding down of Soviet
subsidies forced their dependents to become more self-sufficient. They turned
increasingly to other available but less reputable means of hard
currency,39 including drug deals and kidnappings for ransom that only served to
fulfill Reagans casting call for them to play the role of bad guys the empire had
scripted for them.
Then came what looked like a lifeline: On November 2, a hostage in Lebanon,
David Jacobsen, was released. On November 3, a small-circulation magazine in
Beirut, al-Shiraa, told another part of the hidden tale: Arms shipped to Iran for the
release of hostages held by Hezbollah. The article described a hush-hush trip of
Bud and Ollie, supplicants bearing a Bible and a cake in the shape of a key, to
Teheran to meet with the Ayatollahs favorite nephew back in 1985. On November
4, Democrats retook control of the Senate and announced they would open
hearings in the next session. They hired a small army of investigators to gather
ammo, much of it piling up in reporters notebooks or lying in court files of
defendants who had been rolled up to protect the officially sanctioned channel.
Reagan Oz-like said, Pay no attention to that rag in Beirut. So, off we went: Over
the next few weeks, reporters around the globe pieced together the puzzle of arms
deals for hostages. A rug-merchants MuttnJeff routine with names like Manucher
Ghorbanifar, a wraith-like, goateed Iranian fixer and his roly-poly Saudi sidekick,
Adnan Khashoggi, would become household, thanks to the televised hearings to
follow. In the shadows, the man who referred nave Ollie North (codename:
Hammer) to these cagey if smarmy flimflammers, lurked the Blond Ghost
himself, Theodore Shackley, retired former chief of CIAs covert operations.
Following the money, reporters unearthed four flights by SAT planes to Iran and a
series of transactions through a latticework of front companies and their bank
accounts in Panama, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands, many of
them using the facilities of the Bank of Commerce & Credit International, BCCI
already tainted by purchase of banks in the US through top Democrats, Jimmy
Carters former Treasury Secretary Bert Lance and former Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford. Forensic accounting and Norths own handy flowcharts showed profits from
those sales had been laundered illegally into operations Congress had refused to
fund. The glowering visage of Ayatollah Khomeini, grim reaper incarnate, was the
other side of the Iran-contra coin staring back at affable showman Ronnie Reagan.

On November 13, Reagan returned to the teleprompters to accept responsibility at

least nominally for the arms-for-hostages deal but flatly denied any knowledge of
the diversion of funds to the Contras. The take on those four SAT-shipped deals was
$42 million, the tip of a proverbial iceberg; below the surface, bobbed another $1
billion or more.
The relentless pulling together of all these loose ends emanating from Iran-Contra
slowly tightened into a noose around the small group of beleaguered intelligence
operatives and military aides in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building
linked by subterranean tunnels to the White House.
On November 24, 1986, Attorney General Ed Meese confirmed what reporters had
been saying for months, some for years:
The Reagan Administration had sold weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages held
by its allies in Lebanon, including the CIAs station chief there. And he
acknowledged that proceeds from the arms sales had been diverted to buy
weapons for rebels coordinated by the CIA to overthrow the elected government of
Nicaragua. Both sets of acts weapons to Iran and funds for the Contras
violated explicit laws passed by Congress.40
Finally, on November 25, 1986, Reagan was forced to issue a reluctant mea culpa,
a televised address in which he admitted sending arms to terrorists. In his heart of
hearts, he assured us, he never intended that. But even here was a greater
dissimulation: by terrorists he meant not the Contras whom he likened to our
own Founding Fathers[!] but the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Shia allies, for
whom US weapons had been embargoed as illegal since protesters detained US
embassy personnel in 1979.

One of the great sidebars to the Iran-Contra Affair is the story of hundreds of
weavers, mostly young and very old women, who were handed huge piles of paper
strips salvaged from the embassys shredders. Painstakingly assembled and
stitched together by the weavers, translated and decoded into 79 thick volumes,
these secret cables and reports revealed why there was little exaggeration in the
hostage-takers characterization of the embassy as a nest of spies. But they
were never published in the United States; fittingly, the information released and
widely publicized by the hostage-takers is held hostage to the laws of secrecy for
classified information.
 The hostages themselves had been released the day Reagan swore the oath to
uphold the law and the constitution, after which arms shipments resumed
immediately and illegally. Some of us had always suspected a quid pro quo and
worked backward through the participants and the paperwork of these shipments
toward that possibility.41 But going forward, Iran desperately needed these
weapons to defend itself against Saddam Husseins Iraq, also armed by the US. The
stalemate cost a million lives but forced both countries to pump oil, sold well below
the OPEC-set price, breaking the producer-nations cartel and enriching US oil
companies that refined and distributed the products. Nicaragua was always a
disposable sideshow to this larger game.

Strip-tease
.
With each new revelation, Reagans cloak of invisibility gradually unraveled as he
shed advisers, subordinates, disposable helpmates who had covered for him. This
time, he accepted the resignation of his National Security Adviser, Vice Admiral
John Poindexter, and fired his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. He
commissioned Sen. John Tower, a Texas Republican, to investigate what happened.
Reagan addressed the country again after Thanksgiving holidays, saying he was
aghast to learn the Tower Commission had found evidence of crimes committed on
his watch.42
On Dec. 4, Meese requested that a special prosecutor be named to investigate
what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair, scandal, connection or simply
Iran-Contra. The US District Court in Washington appointed a distinguished
conservative lawyer, former judge and president of the American Bar Association,
Lawrence Walsh, to investigate and bring charges against the culpable. After the
Christmas recess, the newly elected majority in Congress began hearings into the
affair.
As the hearings got underway, on March 4, 1987, Reagan addressed a nationwide
audience to make an amazing and unexpected confession. After months of silence,
he admitted what had become obvious to anyone who read a newspaper, listened
to radio or watched TV. (The internet was in its infancy.) He had shipped missiles
and other hardware to terrorists in violation of the law and his own pledge that he
would never negotiate with hostage-takers. In the easy-going, straightforward style
that endeared him to millions early in his career as a movie star and television
pitchman, Reagan apologized. In his heart, he didnt believe trading arms for
hostages was what he was doing but, he said, thats what it was. Then he lied
some more: He confessed that his aides had sold these weapons at a profit and
laundered the money to supply weapons to another group of terrorists despite
Congress having explicitly prohibited his administration from doing so. That, he
said, was a mistake, and he promised never to do it again.

That was the biggest lie of all: At that very moment his administration secretly
allowed Saudi Arabia to provide American-made weapons to the Iraqi regime and
other nations, a policy that continued from 1982 until its exposure in 1991 in
violation of restrictions imposed by Congress. The Bush Administration shared
intelligence information with Hussein until at least May, 1990, three months before
Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, even though Congress had been told that such
cooperation ended in 1988 when the war between Iraq and Iran ended.43
Reagans speech and the televised hearings that summer introduced a parade of
characters and exposed a small set of secret operations to public scrutiny before a
worldwide audience but the proceedings only served to obscure a larger field of
vision. Vigorous defense of Reagan by his loyalists, led by a junior congressman
from Wyoming named Dick Cheney, turned into offense against his critics. The
special prosecutor brought criminal charges against more than a dozen of Reagans
advisers but decided impeachment was the only remedy for Reagan himself, by
which time he had left office. His term had ended even as the investigation
continued against his successor, George H.W. Bush, who reached the end of his
own term under investigation but pardoned all those convicted in the scandal.
Viewed close up if not from the inside looking out at the world, the interlocking
series of scandals that the news media shorthanded as Iran-Contra had no
discernible beginning and no perceivable end. But 30 years later with a long lens
panning over the events before and after, we can detect a pattern. Rendered
binary and stripped of historical context, Iran-Contra was a neocon love-child, still-
born, thanks to the legerdemain of a Hidden Hand, its creators in the secret
services of the State. But their creature would never have recovered from the
trauma of birth, let alone grown and metastasized into the monstrous thing it is
today, without the tunnel vision of accomplices in the bureaucracy, the self-
imposed blinders of the news media to internally inconsistent narratives and
contradictory evidence outside their narrow ambit, and not least the inculcated
gullibility of the public who paid the bills institutionalized ignorance purchased at
the expense of countless distant victims invisible in the cost-benefit calculations of
the reigning system. Bloody they were but, Reagans mea culpa notwithstanding,
they were not mistakes.
They were many episodes in an on-going series of covert operations and
increasingly overt wars, some big and some small, stretching back to World War II
and forward into the permanent warfare, mass murder on the big screen or
handheld game-boy, 24/7 spectacle in which the world is immersed today, its
masses not actors but voyeurs or victims at the mercy of powerful men and a few
aspiring women planning other peoples futures in the dark. The world is a
battlefield with humans rendered targets, sometimes up close and almost
personal, sometimes by remote control as anonymous figures on a landscape
relentlessly pursued by drone controlled by peach-fuzzed kids watching a screen in
the Pentagon or Langley. But the incidents that embodied and summarized that
trajectory of lies in a way that slowly, partially became visible 30 years ago, have
 submerged again in selective memory, self-serving myth and deliberate
mystification, resurfacing now and then like neural depth-charges as lessons
unlearned when some little group of malcontents runs amok and disturbs the
slumber of empires praetorian guard.
COMING in PART II: Investigations, Cover-ups, & Impunity for Crime Pave the Way to
More War

Postscript: Durrani
.
The case of Arif Ali Durrani is instructive: He was jailed October 3, 1986 the day
before the Fat Lady lifted off from Ilopango for selling $22,000 of radio gear for
HAWK missiles to Iran without a license from the State Department. The US
Attorney said Durrani had no connection to the Reagan Administration and was
acting for his own venal purposes. Arms deals were the family business: Son of a
Pakistani army officer, Durrani got an MBA from USC and opened a business called
Merex, Inc. with his mom co-signing on a $2 million line of credit from the LA-
branch of BCCI. They did well, taking orders to ship military equipment to Pakistan
destined for the mujaheddinbased in Peshawar for hopping the Durand line into
Afghanistan. Annual sales topped out at $16 million before the feds dropped the lid
on him. Durrani had a nice house in Sherman Oaks, CA, an airplane, a Rolls-Royce,
a Mercedes Benz, two Porsches, a pregnant wife and a mistress who flounced with
him to London, Brussels, Zurich and various third-world ports-of-call.
Durrani said this deal began in Frankfurt with a CIA agent who happened to be the
former police chief of Teheran, for 25 Klystron tubes used in the Hawk missile radar
system, to be marked for delivery to Jordans Royal Air Force. In July, Durrani found
the parts at Radio Research Instrument Co. of Danbury CT, and arranged to sell
them to one of his usual customers, Kram Ltd. in Brussels. But an executive at
Radio Research got suspicious because the tubes were so-called dual use items
with possible military application, and Durrani had yet to produce a license from
the Arms Control & Export Office; the exec tipped the Customs Service, whose
agents tapped the phones, filmed Durrani, and helpfully trucked the boxes to
Jetstream Freight Services of Valley Stream, NY, where they spray-painted over the
markings on the boxes, all routine, for forwarding as machine parts not to Jordan
but to Comexas Air Freight Services in Brussels for Kram, Ltd. and on to the
National Iranian Oil Co. Customs allowed that shipment to go through while Durrani
held three meetings in London with another CIA man called Mr. White who
vouchsafed the deal. But, when Durrani placed another order on Sept 26, Customs
surveilled the meeting, showed the tape and paperwork to a prosecutor, got an
indictment and arrested Durrani.
In a related deal that somehow escaped Customs attention, Durrani took his
bombshell mistress to an outfit called Turbo Systems In Hamden CT. While she
dangled her gams enticingly out the door of the Porsche, Durrani forked over a
BCCI cashiers check for $25,000 as deposit, stuffed two Textron fuel-control units
for Bell helicopter turbine engines in the silver Porsche, and sped off to ship them
by the same route. In February 1987, as the Iran-Contra hearings were underway,
Durrani filed an affidavit with the court in Connecticut. He recognized Mr. White,
as the ramrod soldier on TV, Oliver North, swearing to tell the truth so help me
God. Durrani was convicted anyway, sentenced to 5 years in prison, fined $2
million. He lost the house, the plane, the wife, the girlfriend but never the belief
that he had been set up as cover for Mr. White.
Released after 5 years, he went back into business. I tracked him down in California
for an explanation about Merex because it shared a name with Merex AG, founded
in Vevey, Switzerland by Gerhardt Mertins, a protg of the commando Otto
Skorzeny who organized the post-war Nazi networks of Kameradenwerke and Die
Spinne. Skorzeny was the idolized practitioner of special and combined operations
assigned by NATO to recruit retired Nazi technicians to work with Arab nationalists
like Egypts Nasser; their shared antipathy for Israel provided air-tight cover for
espionage, just as Wilsons contract did 20 years later in Libya.
By the time of Iran-Contra, Merex had become one of the biggest arms-dealers for
NATOs surplus stocks to US allies, notably Egypt, Zias Pakistan, the Shah of Iran,
Turkey, and Israel. I also staked out Mertinss houses in suburban Virginia and
south Florida, only to be chased off by his pet Doberman bodyguards and matching
canines. And in Mexico where Mertens had set up a Contra training camp and
resupply depot on a drug gangs ranch that had been frequented by the Fat Man in
 his trampoline bounces from Colombia to the US Mertins died in 1993. Durrani sold
his mini-Merex, set up a new shop, was jailed again in 2006 for a subsequent,
separate but similar series of transactions to Iran when it resumed its role as
Bushs bete noire after the demise of Saddam.
Durrani was, like the parts he shipped, just another part of the machinery,
expendable, replaceable. Now you can buy Klystron tubes on eBay or Amazon. He
remains, 30 years later, the only man to spend real, if not very hard, time in prison
for Iran-Contra.

References
.

1. Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934

2. Based on authors interviews in Nicaragua 1986-88 and contemporaneous news

accounts.

3. An early warning shot was Eddie Adams, How Latin Guerrillas Train on Our Soil,
Parade Magazine, March 15, 1981; George Black, Judy Butler, Target Nicaragua,
NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Jan-Feb. 1982; Jeff McConnell,
Counterrevolution in Nicaragua: the US Connection, CounterSpy, May-June 1982,
pp. 11-23. The well-known secret was announced in the mainstream English-
language media by John Brecher, John Walcott, David Martin and Beth Nissen, A
Secret War for Nicaragua, Newsweek, Nov. 8, 1982.

4. This capsule history is based on the authors unpublished doctoral dissertation

on the canal routes, The GeoPolitics of Convenience, 1979.

5. Lawrence Pezzullo [Carters Ambassador to Nicaragua] and Ralph Pezzullo, At

the Fall of Somoza, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1993.

6. Ikle, Luttwak, Nitze, Wohlstetter et al, National Security in the 1980s: From
Weakness to Strength, (San Francisco: Institute of Contemporary Studies, 1980).
7. Cleto Di Giovanni, Jr., Backgrounder: Nicaragua, Heritage Foundation
Backgrounder series, No. 128, Oct. 15, 1980.

8. Notably, UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick sought to distinguish US-supported

autocratic regimes as a worthy ally against totalitarian socialist and communist
governments, a distinction largely tautological, based on support for US policies, in
a series of articles and speeches collected as Dictatorships and Double Standards:
Rationalism & Reason in Politics, (New York: American Enterprise Institute/ Simon &
Schuster, 1982).

9. Ortegas address and Kirkpatricks sarcastic reply are reproduced with other
useful material by Peter Rosset and John Vandermeer, eds., The Nicaragua Reader:
Documents of a Revolution under Fire, (new York: Grove Press, 1983).

10. Based on authors interviews in Nicaragua 1986-88 and contemporaneous

news accounts.

11. Doug Vaughan, Who Killed Alan Berg? Westword (Denver), October, 1984;
Attack of the Aryans, New Times (Phoenix, Miami); see also authors contributions
to Wayne King, 20 HELD IN 7 STATES IN SWEEP OF NAZIS ARMING FOR WAR ON
U.S. March 5, 1985; T. R. Reid FBI Says It Blunted Neo-Nazi Uprising, Washington
Post, April 14, 1985, p. A-7; and the authors [bylined as Special to] series on
their trials in Denver, JURY TOLD OF PLAN TO KILL RADIO HOST , New York Times,
Nov. 8, 1987; Dismissal of Case Rejected In the Killing of Radio Host, Nov. 15,
1987, p. A-17; 2 White Racists Convicted in Killing of Radio Host, Nov. 18, 1987.

12. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co., 1986); Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection; Old Nazis, the New tight
and the Republican Party, [both originally published as monographs by Political
Research Associates] (Boston, South End Press, 1988, 1991)
13. Doug Vaughan, Soldier of Fortune recruits mercenaries, Enlisted Times,
(Oakland, CA), pp. 3, 16, May 1980..

14. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, (New York: Norton & Co.,
1978); The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order (Boston: South
End Press, 1991). After Agees apostasy, Stockwell, chief of CIAs Angola Task
Force, was the highest ranking officer to testify to its atrocities.

15. Bernard Diederich, Somoza and the legacy of U.S. involvement in Central
America (Waterfront Press, 1989), pp. 186197. ISBN 978-0-943862-42-2. For a
more adulatory take, see N. E. McDonald, N.E., Tribute to a Professional Warrior:
Michael Echanis 16 Nov 1950 8 Sept 1978. Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 5 No. 1, p. 36,
Jan. 1, 1980.

16. Notable for its use of first-person accounts of victims in sworn affidavits is Reed
Brody, Contra Terror in Nicaragua: Report of a Fact-finding Mission: September
1984-January 1985, South End Press, 1985.

17. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: A CIA Diary (New York, Stonehill, 1975).

18. Douglas L. Vaughan, Shooting Trial to Examine Data on Qaddafi Role,

Washington Post, Nov. 10, 1981, p. A-6; Libyan Identifies Tafoya as His Assailant,
Nov. 18, 1981, p. A-20; Tafoya Takes Stand in Trial On Charges He Shot Libyan,
Nov. 25, 1981, p. A-10; Ex-Green Beret Denies Being a Mercenary Nov. 26, 1981,
p. A-2; CIA Lawyer Said Agency Would Deny Link to Ex-Green Beret, Dec. 1 1981;
Words Misinterpreted, CIA Lawyer Testifies, Dec. 2, 1981; The Qaddafi
Disconnection, Nov. 22, 1981; Tafoya Guilty of Misdemeanor in Shooting of
Libyan, Dec. 5, 1981, p. A-9; Maximum Sentence, Jan. 6, 1982; [with Al Kamen]
Wilson Associate Indicted Over Exports to Libya, Mar. 8, 1982, p. A-11.
19. The competitor was indicted for shipping night-vision devices to Canada then
Libya in violation of the Arms Export Control Act 22 U.S.C. 2778, effectively
preserving Wilsons monopoly. See In the Matter of Applied Systems Corp., Sept.
30, 1982, Munitions Control Newsletter, No. 97 10/82; U.S. v. Robert Antonio
Manina, U.S. Dist. Ct. E. Va., 82-99176-A.

20. Seymour Hersh, The Qaddafi Connection, (two-parts), New York Times
Sunday Magazine, June 14, 21, 1981, based largely on revelations of Mulcahy.

21. Peter Maas, Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist,
(New York: Random House, 1986); Joseph C. Goulden with Alex Raffio [a former
employee of Wilson], The Death Merchant, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

22. Judge Lynn Hughess scathing order can be found at www.fas.org: United States
of America vs. Edwin Paul Wilson, United States District Court, Southern District of
Texas, Criminal Case H-82-139, Opinion on Conviction in Ancillary Civil Action H-
97-831, p. 17, Oct. 27, 2003.

23. Authors interviews with Wilson and attorneys, 1981-86; Joe Conason & James
Ridgeway, The Missing Witness, Village Voice, June 3, 1987, p. 31.

24. On Mulcahys suspicious death, see [Douglas L. Vaughan, no byline], Witness

in CIA case fears ex-agent slain, Philadelphia Inquirer, October, 1983, p. A-3.

25. David Corn, The Blond Ghost: Theodore Shackley & the CIAs Crusades (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

26. Saul Landau & John Dinges, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York:
Pantheon: 1980); Taylor Branch & Eugene M. Propper [prosecutor who tried the
Cuban-American culprits], Labyrinth (New York: Viking, 1982); Dinges, The Condor
Years (New York: New Press/Norton, 2004). Heraldo Muoz, The Dictators Shadow:
Life Under Pinochet: A Political Memoir, (New York: Basic Books, 2008) Peter
Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: The Declassified History (New York: New Press, 2003).
(Muoz, a friend of the author in graduate school; he became Chiles Ambassador
to the UN post-Pinochet.

27. Christopher Robbins, Air America: The Story of the CIAs Secret Airlines (New
YorK: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1979); The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in Americas
Secret War in Laos (New York, Crown, 1987); William M. Leary, Perilous Missions:
Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia, (Univ. of Alabama, 1984);
Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. (New York:
Knopf, 1974) ISBN 978-0-394-48239-2.

28. CIA Sold Miami Airlines To Former Front Executive, Playground Daily News,
Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Tuesday,11 March 1975, Volume 30, Number 28, page
6.

29. See, for example, Barry Bearak, Intrigue Trails Airline Linked to Iran, Contras,
Los Angeles Times, 26 December 1986.

30. Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion
of Cuba(New York: New Press, 1998).

31. Cannistraro, PROF note to Poindexter, AKW 021747, Oct. 8, 1986, In Walsh,
Final Report, Ch. 16 (Abrams).

32. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty, (Summit Books, 1991).

33. Rodriguez and John Weisman, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1989) is a self-adulatory version of Iran-Contra and other exploits. A more sober
account is Jon Lee Andersons magisterial biography, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary
Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
34. Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA
(Granite Bay, CA: Clandestine Publishing, 1995).

35. Agee, On the Run, (Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987). The false accusation that
he was responsible for blowing Welchs cover and therefore his death made its way
to Barbara Bushs own 1994 memoir, but was removed from its paperback edition
after Agee sued her for libel. The IIPA would come back to haunt the Bushes in the
run-up to the Iraq invasion, when officials leaked a serving case officers name to
the media as payback for her husbands public accusation that the Bush regime
had lied its way to war.

36. Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York:
Random House, 1982; Frances FitzGerald, Way out There in The Blue Way: Reagan,
Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000);
Andrew L. Johns, Kenneth Osgood, Selling Star Wars: Ronald Reagans Strategic
Defense Initiative, Ch. 8, Selling War in a Media Age (Univ. Florida, 2010).

37. Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: HarperCollins,
1999).

38. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagons Black Budget ( New York: Warner
books, 1990).

39. Authors interviews with Jorge Masetti, former Argentine guerrilla, participant in
the Sandinista war, and Cuban intelligence operative.

40. See also, generally, Peter Kornbluh (with Malcolm Byrne), The Iran-Contra
Scandal: The Declassified History, (New York: New Press, 1993).

41. Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York:
Sheridan Square Press, 1993), supplemented by his work at consortiumnews.org.
Gary Sick, October Surprise: Americas hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald
Reagan (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991).

42. Tower et al, Report of the Presidents Special Review Board, reprinted as The
Tower Commission Report, (New York: Times/Bantam Books, February 1987.

43. Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, Saudi Arms Link to Iraq Allowed; Mideast:
Under Reagan and Bush, U.S. weapons were secretly provided to Baghdad,
classified documents show. The White House kept Congress in the dark. Los
Angeles Times. April 18, 1992. Alan Friedman, Spiders Web: The secret history of
how the White House illegally armed Iraq (New York: Bantam, 1993). Peter Mantius,
Shell Game: A true story of spies, lies, politics and the arming of Saddam
Hussein, (New York: St. Martins, 1995).

Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert

Operations, Part 2

President Ronald Reagan shaking hands with Donald Trump at a White House reception in 1987. Photo
credit: White House / National Archives
INTRODUCTION:
This is the second of a five-part series exploring the Iran-Contra Affair and its consequences. Part 1
described the Reagan Administrations secret wars and illegal arms deals exposed in the scandal. Part 2
explains how the constitutional crisis unfolded as a result of Congresss failure to address the CIAs
power to wage secret wars in the name of avoiding a world-ending nuclear confrontation between the
Superpowers. Part 3 exposes the roots of Iran-Contra in the Watergate scandal, but congressional
abdication of responsibility and judicial deference backfired in the restoration of the Imperial
Presidency, suppressing civil liberties and expanding wars justified as necessary to fighting the Cold
War, even as the Cold War ended with collapse of the Soviet Union. Part 4 will survey the era of global
insecurity we entered in the second Bush and Obama Administrations, while Part 5 examines the role
key members of the incoming Trump team played in creating this permanent state of war by immunizing
themselves from the consequences of past criminality.
The author, Doug Vaughan, spent years as an investigative reporter in Latin America covering the
horrors of the 1970s and 80s. In this series, he connects the secret wars and warriors past and present
to their most recent incarnation as architects of an aggressive approach to reimpose their will on the
world that has escaped their control.
Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Marx
Thirty years ago, the Iran-Contra Scandal exposed and connected two of the many sets of secret actions
of the Reagan years. The congressional, judicial and media responses to that crisis shaped a public
narrative that set the stage for what was to come in wars, both overt and covert, in the subsequent
administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and in a contradictory way, Barack
Obama.
Iran-Contra also introduced us to many of the future players, neocons and neoliberals who framed the
debates over policy for three decades. Now, some survivors of the wreckage have re-emerged from the
paneled woodwork of corporate boardrooms and right-wing think-tanks to roam the corridors of the
Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies.
Like Watergate before that, a newly elected president has immersed himself in a shower of allegations
and counter-allegations that pit the legitimacy of his election and the authority of his office against a
splintered opposition, including prominent members of his own party, some of his own nominees to head
the military and intelligence services, and those appointees against their predecessors and prospective
employees.
The emerging fissures in the Intelligence Communitys putative consensus about supposed foreign
interference in the election and the shaky factual structure undergirding it, already have set factions
against each other in the FBI, the Bureau against its co-communicants, with the Director facing an
internal investigation and calls for his head, while the new President accuses the CIA of acting like
Nazis, yet declares hes the Agencys biggest fan. Erosion of the public trust in governing institutions has
sunk to an all-time low, if polls can be believed.
If it seems like were stuck in a tape loop from the 1970s or 80s its because we are reliving a scripted
Republican resurgence in a new round of crises for which they as players and we as spectators are
unprepared. The suspense may soon be killing us. Pick your metaphor: zombies, vampires or
werewolves, warrior-queens and troll-kings stalk the landscape. Is this an episode of Game of Thrones, a
remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or a rerun of Night of the Living Dead? Or are we watching
something unprecedented, unpredictable?
Reality TV this is not: Donald Trump is no longer merely the blustering casino owner, real-estate and
gambling mogul, or pitchman for Celebrity Apprentice yelling youre fired. Sworn to uphold and
defend a Constitution he does not understand, perhaps has never read, and to faithfully execute the laws
he has flouted, now he is POTUS. Like Shiva, creator and destroyer of worlds.1

What could go wrong? When the Trumpees, echoing Dubyas taunt to Iraqi insurgents who became Al-
Qaeda in Iraq, then morphed into ISIS during Obamas promised withdrawal, boldly dare the world to
Bring It On, theyre looking in the rearview mirror at Iran-Contra.

But the past, the chronicler of our national sins told us, is never dead. Its not even past.2 Marx went
him one better: History does indeed repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.3 But
this? What strange beast is this slouching toward Washington? Better take a look over your shoulder. The
most subversive thing in America, a troubadour sang, is a long memory.4

Resurrecting Ghosts
Who can watch an aging Oliver North retelling other peoples war stories on Fox, rhapsodizing about
some heroic exploit in the age of knightly chivalry, or singing Homeric praise of some newfangled
arms and the man, and not feel a faint nostalgia for the Reagan years?
Those were the days. Off-the-books, off-the-shelf operations. HAWKs and TOWs and PROFs. Boland I
and Boland II. The Belly-Button account. The Courier and The Hammer. Ollie threatening to go mano-
a-mano with Abu Nidal. Ollie pulling blank travelers checks from his office safe, proceeds of arms
sales to the Ayatollah, and padding off on a patriotic mission to buy new snow tires for his wifes station
wagon and fresh underwear for his secretary.
Quaint, no? Now we have PayPal and chip-embedded credit cards that track every transaction and
movement of the card-holder, as Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and other victims of self-inflicted
kompromat should have known. But for those faded receipts, we might never have heard the testimony.
The alluring, mini-skirted Fawn Hall smuggling Ollies notes out of the White House in her pantyhose
one thigh-high boot-step away from a subpoena. Ollie and Fawns little shredding party in the
basement of the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House with their brooding,
bespectacled boss, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, National Security Adviser to the POTUS, lending a
hand. Or Ollies old boss, Robert McFarlane, testifying to Congress that Ollie was a stone-cold liar, then
under sneering assault from Dick Cheney, slouching home to attempt suicide.
Like any good contretemps, the tale was punctuated by the odd coincidence and the convenient
premature death: CIA Director William Casey, a brain tumor the night before his scheduled testimony;
Israeli adviser Amiram Nir, about to be subpoenaed, an airplane crash during an avocado-inspection visit
(!) to Mexico.
Steady clawing by the press (yes, there once were newsrooms only recently invaded by computers, and
printing presses clanging out lead type daily, circulation in the tens of millions) had stripped away the
insulation of the Teflon-coated President. His credibility in tatters, the Great Communicator was
reduced to feeble excuses, denying the obvious, blaming underlings, firing Poindexter and North,
shedding more of the cover they provided. He appointed a commission, chaired by former Republican
Senator from Texas, John Tower, to get to the bottom of what proved bottomless illegality.5 By January
1987, a federal court had appointed an Independent Counsel (sometimes called Special Prosecutor),
Lawrence Walsh, to investigate the spreading pool of lies and corruption. Soon after, Congress opened
public hearings.

Fawn Hall (left top), Oliver North (right top), Abu Nidal (right bottom) and President Reagan meeting in
the oval office with staff (left to right) Admiral Crowe, Caspar Weinberger, George H.W. Bush, Don
Regan, President and Admiral Poindexter in 1986. Photo credit: C-SPAN, Unknown / Wikimedia,
Israeli Army / Wikimedia, and White House / National Archives
The Reagan teams gambit was what had been called in the Watergate scandal a limited hangout of the
dirty laundry, giving up a little bit of operations already blown to save a lot that were even dirtier,
bloodier, more disastrous. At the center of this narrow ambit of the binary Iran-Contra scandal, the
connecting tissue, the hyphen itself, was money money to make war when Congress had refused to
authorize it.
In an effort to pre-empt Congress, Reagan, feigning ignorance it came so easily tasked the Tower
Commission to find out what happened but not to identify or punish wrong-doers. The commissioners
narrow purpose was to improve the performance of the agency at the center of the scandal, the National
Security Council, not work up the ladder to the man in the Oval Office. Without taking any sworn
testimony, the Commission interviewed 53 sitting, former and future officials, including Presidents
Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon; Vice Presidents Bush, Mondale; Secretaries of State Schultz, Haig, Vance,
Kissinger, Rogers; Defense Secretaries Weinberger, Clifford, Laird, Schlesinger; Attorneys General
Meese, Bell; National Security Advisers McFarlane (who had worked on Towers Senate staff), Allen,
Brzezinski, Rostow; CIA Directors Turner, Colby, Helms. The staff interviewed many more subordinates
and secured documents from relevant agencies. Two key participants, Poindexter and North, declined
invitations to appear, invoking their right not to incriminate themselves.
It was a friendly chat amongst a veritable Whos Who of the American establishment but their
statements left most of the big questions unanswered. Not surprisingly, their Report released in February
1987 concluded that the President had been ill-advised and blamed Poindexter and North for
functioning largely outside the orbit of the US government.6

This was a curious circumlocution: How could Reagans underlings be outside his orbit? Had they
disobeyed his orders, usurped his authority to wage war? Or was the Commander-in-Chief the one who
was out of the loop? Or was the ol Gipper just getting loopy? With talk of impeachment in the air, some
of Reagans oldest friends thought it was time for him to throw in the monogrammed towel and cede
power to his vice-president, George Herbert Walker Bush. Others counseled Reagan to hang tough.7

The Commission had been unable to trace the diversion of funds from the sale of weapons to Iran to
finance the Contras, so it deferred the legality of those transactions to the Independent Counsel, Walsh.
Predictably, their Report criticized the underlings for excesses and failure to implement policies through
established interagency channels and procedures but absolved Reagan of responsibility on grounds he
didnt really know what those subordinates were doing. This further contradicted the Presidents own
testimony that he liked to set policy, hire the best people and let them do their jobs. Were they authorized
or were they not?
In short, the Tower Commission was an evasion of the real issues of life or death for millions of people:
War who had the authority to wage it, and why? How should war be fought, by what rules? Who
should pay for it? And the never-asked big one: Do the victims ever get a vote?
These were not idle philosophical questions or academic debates but moral issues with the gravest legal
and constitutional implications for democratic self-government. The answers define who we are as a
people, what we have become in the world to which we have held ourselves accountable. In a self-
proclaimed republic presuming to act as a model for the rest of humanity, the electorate holds itself
responsible for the the acts of its representatives and the consequences, seen or unforeseen. After all,
within living memory the victors in World War II had tried and executed German and Japanese officials,
political and military, for aggressive war, killing non-combatants, torture, genocide and other crimes
against humanity. Punishment was intended as a deterrent to future crime. There was to be no more
impunity for tyrants, especially for the ultimate crime of war.8

Nonetheless, undeclared wars had become ever more popular with presidents9 since World War II
precisely because they do not require popular support: They are, in fact, proof that sufficient support is
lacking to get a declaration of war from Congress, let alone the consent required by the United Nations
Security Council before attacking another country: The only justification for war in international law is
self-defense. So, reasons had to be given or invented excuses made, just as the Nazis and Japanese
militarists had before.
The President could order criminal acts, then absolve the criminals of their crimes, then be
pardoned himself by his successor; this was the essence of tyranny.

During the Vietnam War, the bloodiest, longest undeclared war in US history, Congress had gradually
ceded the power to declare war to Presidents, then, alarmed at the ravages set loose, sought belatedly to
protect its constitutional turf the power to declare war and fund it. The war provoked public
opposition and whistleblowers emerged to expose fresh outrages and reveal hidden motives, only to be
denounced by their government as traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy.10
A key event to unlocking access to the inner workings of the government was the release of the Pentagon
Papers, a multi-year, multi-volume study of the war in Vietnam by Daniel Ellsbergs colleagues at Rand
Corp. The studies and the supporting documents from State, Defense, NSC and CIA included highly
classified cable traffic between embassies and the NSC in which commanders on the ground and
diplomats in the field contradicted their superiors about progress in their decades-long effort to impose
their will on tiny Vietnam. This provoked a crisis on several levels, political, military and legal; as this
structure shifted, like tectonic plates sliding over each other, they exposed other events below the
surface.
First, word that the Papers had been removed from the Rand Corp. or the NSC provoked Nixon, already
suspicious of the loyalties of his staff, and egged on by Kissinger, angered to near apoplexy at this
embarrassing challenge to his mastery of the levers of power, to recruit their own secret police unit, the
plumbers, to plug leaks and identify the leakers for prosecution, firing or harassment. The Plumbers
illegally wiretapped phones and burglarized Ellsbergs psychiatrists office in an attempt to gather
derogatory information to discredit him. Some of Kissingers staff quit rather than be polygraphed.
At the political level, Nixon and Kissinger tried to suppress publication of the Papers, only to be rejected
by the Supreme Court. While the case was on appeal, Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) read the Papers into
the Congressional Record, in a marathon session without benefit of the cameras of C-SPAN. This
effectively placed the classified material in the public domain and preempted accusations that Ellsberg
had violated state secrets.
Nixon also wanted Ellsberg and his alleged accomplices, including a future National Security Adviser,
Anthony Lake, tried for treason. They had to settle for a conspiracy to violate rules governing the release
of classified information, for which the defendants were acquitted. The trials put the war itself on trial,
and helped put Nixon himself in the dock.
At the deeper political and military level, the Papers showed how all the imperial Wise Men Johnson,
Defense Secretary McNamara (against his own better judgment, he would later claim) and Clifford;
Rusk and Vance at State, National Security Advisers Bundy and Rostow, DCIs McCone and Helms, the
Joint Chiefs told each other winning the war was not only possible but losing was unacceptable. They
had escalated, invaded, occupied, bombed relentlessly with nothing but war crimes like My Lai to show
for it.
The timing of the leak also suggested that influential figures within the military and intelligence
apparatus had also turned against the war and were attacking Nixons strategy to force him to abandon
the war or they would get rid of him. Heres the context:
Faced with ever-growing dissent in the streets and his own party, Johnson had quit the race for reelection
in March 1968 and suspended bombing to allow the hapless Happy Warrior, Hubert Humphrey, to run
as a peace candidate, but millions of people didnt buy it. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy
had been shot and killed. Humphrey won the nomination at the Chicago convention that turned into what
a presidential commission called a police riot against protestors. Mayor Richard Daleys police and
prosecutors charged eight antiwar leaders with conspiracy and incitement to riot. In this milieu of fear,
confusion and division, Nixon narrowly won a three-way race with George Wallace taking votes from
both major candidates.
Nixon squeaked through with a promise that he had a secret plan to end the war. The bigger secret was
Nixons October Surprise promise to South Vietnams rump President Thieu, that he would get even
more help if he backed out of negotiations. In effect, Nixon stole the election by treasonous sabotage of
Johnsons diplomatic effort to get a truce and negotiate an end to the war.
The steady escalation of war coincided with a crescendo of revelations that led to Watergate the
break-in at the offices where the Democratic Party was housed by a team of burglars composed of
veterans of the CIA, unleashed by the Nixon White House to surveil, intercept communications and
subvert the campaign of the antiwar candidate, George McGovern. Their capture in the act triggered
efforts by the President to prevent the inquiry from reaching his own closest advisers and himself,
destroying evidence, suborning perjury, paying bribes to cover-up even greater crimes. He dug the hole
deeper until he buried himself.
And there was more: As companion to bombing the North, Defense Secretary Lairds plan for
Vietnamization of the South was an echo of Johnsons anguished plea that American boys shouldnt
have to do what Vietnamese boys should be doing fight a peasant war on the side of the landlords, a
civil war on the side of the foreign imperialist. At home, a draft lottery replaced systematic
conscription in hopes of tamping down protests. Troops started coming home. But in Vietnam, the
puppet army could not recruit soldiers. The bombing intensified to hold the enemy at bay, morale was
eroding to mutinous attacks by grunts on junior officers, heroin addiction was rampant, the US military
weakened. By the time of his own reelection in 1972, the real secret was out: There was no plan beyond
bombing the Vietnamese to force them to bargain. In short, small war, big war and in-between war had
all disastrously failed.
Later it emerged that Nixon contemplated nuking Vietnam, risking nuclear war with the Soviets and
possibly Chinese intervention as in Korea, but Kissinger talked him out of it. Instead, they played the
China card against the Soviets by abandoning the Nationalist regime in Taiwan, a long-term strategic
gamble that cost Nixon support on the right. At the same time, the Armed Services committees learned
from disgruntled GIs and officers that the military had conducted secret air and naval strikes in
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia even scrambled B-52s with nuclear bombs under orders from the
White House and National Security Adviser Kissinger, incredibly by-passing the Joint Chiefs of Staff
along with the rest of the military chain-of-command.11

Nixon had set out to convince the Soviets that he maybe was a little crazy, unpredictable, to scare them
and keep them off guard. But, as the Watergate investigations by a Special Prosecutor advanced on
Nixons closest advisers Attorney General Mitchell, former Commerce Secretary Stans, his chief of
staff Haldemann, and adviser Erlichman, counselor Colson all the Presidents men turning on him,
the paranoia, rancor and lunacy seemed more than a ruse. The attempted cover-up led inexorably to
Nixons impeachment and resignation. His successor pardoned him for his crimes.12 The presidential
power to pardon became a precedent for impunity, as we shall see: The President could order criminal
acts, then absolve the criminals of their crimes, then be pardoned himself by his successor; this was the
essence of tyranny.
If war is the health of the state as Randolph Bourne postulated after World War I, this State was on life
support.

Rogue Elephant or Trained Herd?

Watergate dovetailed with investigations by special committees established by Congress13 into what
they described as abuses by the CIA, FBI and military intelligence agencies at home and abroad,
including assassinations of foreign leaders, illegal domestic spying, manipulation of the news media
with propaganda (including what was later coined spin and fake news), use of agents provocateurs,
to disrupt legal assemblies, the MK-ULTRA experiments with drugs and biological agents on unwitting
victims, even lethal operations against civilian citizens.
Those historic antecedents were part of a list of crimes and failures compiled by the CIA at the request
of a new CIA Director James Schlesinger14 and released by his successor, William Colby15; 683 pages
long, this compendium of crime became known as the family jewels. By 1975, this glittering array of
lethal plaster, glass and junk included over 900 major projects the most notorious of which, Phoenix in
Vietnam, killed upwards of 40,000 people in order to dismantle the infrastructure of the communist-led
insurgency.16 Saigon fell anyway, in April 1975, then Laos and Cambodia, but Phoenix became the
model for similar programs to be applied elsewhere.17

Looking over the jewels, even Colby had been forced to admit that the CIA not only exceeded its legal
authority, but its interference in elections or when unsuccessful, the overthrow of elected
governments often fueled the insurgencies with revolutionary momentum. Efforts to suppress popular
movements forced desperate people to take up armed self-defense, and that served as a trip-wire to
escalations from covert to overt military intervention all to keep copper coming from Chile and
Congo, tin and titanium from Vietnam and Bolivia, oil flowing from Iran and Saudi Arabia, profits
flowing to the big banks.
Many thought that, after the departure of Richard Helms, only Colby had the experience and stature
within the Agency to fire James Angleton, the Counterintelligence chief who ran an imperium inside the
imperium since its inception, wreaking havoc in his obsessive and paranoid search for a double-agent
within its ranks.18

Helms and Angleton made convenient scapegoats for most of the Family Jewels, then Colby himself felt
the axe on his neck, along with Schlesinger in what was called the Halloween Massacre. Colby was
replaced by George H.W. Bush; Kissinger stayed as Secretary of State but relinquished his job as
National Security Adviser to Brent Scowcroft; Ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld took
Schlesingers job at Defense; Richard Cheney as chief of Fords staff. In the coup de grace, Vice
President Rockefeller opted out as Fords running mate for 1976. When the shuffling was done, Colby
was left holding the bag for the Family Jewels.
Colby certainly bore a share of the blame, but the revolving doors were all part of the larger game: All
this law-breaking mayhem had been unleashed by the enabling legislation that created CIA and gave it
authority under presidential directive to gather intelligence by covert means and heres the catch-and-
release also perform such other functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national
security.19 That was all it took: perform other functions.

The architects of the national security state were adept at the art of deliberately vague, ambiguous and
deceptive language to hide their motives, even in the writing of laws, especially in the National Security
Act of 1947 that created the institutions for fighting the Cold War. Post-Hiroshima, with the supposed
life-or-death struggle against communism as justification for any means necessary, they argued that
instruments of statecraft beyond diplomacy but short of total, nuclear war were still necessary but
should be carefully limited and controlled, as one of its drafters, Clark Clifford, testified to the Church
Committee. His old boss, President Truman, suspicious of the power of both the FBI and CIA, had
disputed his own paternity of the Agency, saying it was never his intent to create the monster when he
signed that law. He likened it to Hitlers Gestapo. If he knew that honest-to-god SS and Gestapo thugs
were working for the Agency20, he never revealed it publically.

Whether a species of macabre humor or more artful dodging, requests to kill people were
screened by a Health Alteration Committee.

By 1953, when his successor, Eisenhower, had installed the Dulles brothers, John Foster at State and
Allen at CIA, they had 53 covert projects underway, including the overthrow of the government of
Guatemala, where a democratically elected government had proposed to buy (not seize) the untilled
property of United Fruit Co., and Iran, where Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had proposed
legislation to nationalize British oil interests; both had been clients of the Dulleses law firm.21 As would
become a pattern, both these great successes of covert action at the inception of the National Security
State proved to be unmitigated and recurring disasters for the next 60 years and counting.
Based on recommendations of a presidential commission that the danger of communism required
desperate, even illegal and immoral measures,22 Eisenhower unleashed the Dulles brothers to try to roll
back the Iron Curtain with Nazis and collaborators as their shock troops in stay-behind networks,
relying heavily on the former German military intelligence chief, Reinhard Gehlen.23 Buying elections,
overthrowing governments to reverse elections that couldnt be bought, assassinations of the
uncooperative and recalcitrant what legendary counter-intelligence officer William Harvey artfully
called executive action: the last resort beyond a last resort and a confession of weakness all
became commonplace, routine, standard operating procedure, gloves off, no holds barred. Whether a
species of macabre humor or more artful dodging, requests to kill people were screened by a Health
Alteration Committee.
And legal, thanks to sheer defiance of the law: Crimes committed abroad would have to be detected,
tried, punished under the laws of the victims, who were powerless, thanks to the perpetrators. Good luck
with that. And crimes committed in the US were effectively immunized by presidential authority and a
simple exception, quietly worked out between the CIAs top lawyer, Lawrence Houston, and the deputy
attorney general, William P. Rogers (later to become Richard Nixons first Secretary of State). Congress
passed a law24 that required all federal agencies to report to the Attorney General any possible illegal
activities committed by their employees, but Rogers agreed to Houstons suggestion that any matters
related to national security would be reviewed by the CIA director before referral to the Justice
Department.
Even the existence of this Memorandum of Understanding remained a secret for another 20 years, during
which a total of 31 cases, mostly financial crimes like pilfering from the expense account, were
reviewed; of the 14 referred to Justice for prosecution, only two were brought to trial with a single
conviction. In the name of operational security, CIA was licensed to lie, steal, cheat, even kill with
impunity.
Popular songs and a John Wayne movie drove home the message domestically that these
guys were tough and cool and keeping little kids safe from evil terrorist Commies.

After the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy Administration moved many of the CIAs functions
back to the Defense Department. Another huge bureaucracy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, rivalled
CIA. The National Security Agency, even larger, combined the old signals gathering, cryptography and
surveillance methods of the Army and Navy with ever-expanding electronic interception techniques and
photographic capability by world-encompassing networks of aircraft and satellites managed by another
new agency, the National Reconnaissance Office. DIA, NSA, NRO all answered to the Department of
Defense and NSC, relegating CIA to a mere consumer of their product. These new toys arrived after
the Cuban Missile Crisis forced both the US and USSR to step back from the brink of nuclear war.
But the first halting steps toward disarmament ended with Kennedys assassination. In the nuclear
stalemate that ensued, the armed movements of the left in the impoverished Third World took up the
slogan of One, Two, Three Many Vietnams while the political warfare experts met them tit-for-tat.
Under Johnson, CIA compensated by expanding its covert action arm, the Directorate of Plans, later
called Operations. CIA worked with JFKs military overseers Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Edward
Lansdale, John Paul Vann to combine civic action programs of rural development with
pacification by teams of US Army Special Forces in their distinctive Green Berets, deployed to hot-
spots of insurgency in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. Popular songs and a John Wayne
movie drove home the message domestically that these guys were tough and cool and keeping little kids
safe from evil terrorist Commies.
Small units working with local collaborators, they were modeled on the counter-insurgency wars the US
itself waged against Native Americans, then indigenous resistance in the Philippines, then Central
America, and by the British Special Operations Command in Malaysia, and the French paratroopers in
Algeria and Indochina against national uprisings. Their advisers, however, were often experts in
paramilitary operations drawn from the military, trained by the CIAs covert action arm, then sent back
in civilian dress to manage the intelligence-gathering and psychological warfare components, which
were primary, including torture and simulated terrorism blamed on the demonized enemy to confirm
how evil they were.25

To the analysts back at Langley and the silk-stocking diplomatic corps, the paramilitaries were known as
knuckledraggers but that didnt inhibit the Companys customers from using the take to formulate
their estimates of the enemies capabilities and recommendations for combatting them, usually requiring
more of the same.
The Johnson and Nixon Administrations escalated the small wars into bigger ones, especially in
Vietnam, where secret wars spilled over borders in every direction,26 even provocative raids north of
the 17th parallel (launched by Colby). Elsewhere, operations designed to create friendly regimes, no
matter how dictatorial, morphed into efforts to prevent anything remotely hostile to the operations of
transnational corporations.

From Other Functions to Mass Murder

The freshest blood was from some 3-4,000 victims of the overthrow of the democratically elected,
socialist government of Chile by the military. In 1964, CIA had successfully thwarted the socialist
candidate, Salvador Allendes bid to replace the Christian Democrat, Eduardo Frei, preferred by Dean
Rusk at the State Department and Cyrus Vance at Defense. Despite more money, propaganda, and
provocations, including the assassination of the Army chief of staff, Allende won a narrow plurality in
1970. Track 1, manipulating elections, shifted to Track 2, economic and political warfare.
In retaliation for Chiles congress expropriating the copper mines owned by Anaconda and Kennecott,
the telephone network owned by ITT, and other US companies, as in Cuba, Nixon and Kissinger had
ordered DCI Richard Helms, to make the economy scream. They imposed an embargo on exports of
Chilean copper (also illegal since the US hadnt formally declared war), vetoing loans and credits from
international agencies, planting phony stories in local newspapers and radio stations, supporting the
private sector by buying up scarce commodities and selling them on the black market to undercut the
currency. They even orchestrated terror attacks to be blamed on the militant left, some of which I
witnessed first-hand.
As a budding reporter I saw some of this sordid business unfold on an extended tour of Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile in 1972-73. It started, believe it or not, as my honeymoon. (Thats my
story and I stuck to it even after the divorce.) We trekked across Colombia by every means of
conveyance from the coca-eating Arhuacos of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, just then becoming
first hop on the trampoline north for drugs, through what the newspapers described as guerrilla
infested mountains to the Ecuadorian border. There I was detained by DAS, the Departamento
Administrativo de Seguridad, a combined FBI-CIA-Mafia that, then as now, controlled the drug trade
and managed a counter-insurgency war against Marxist guerrillas inspired by the Cuban example a
war that only last month has ended in a fragile truce.
The DAS stole my notebooks, camera and film at a border crossing, presumably to cull for incriminating
material; luckily, I had changed names and places in code to make their task more difficult and less
dangerous for my sources. Over the next week, my bride waited and worried in the usual fleabag
accommodation on the Ecuadorian side while I smuggled myself in greasy car trunks and produce-laden
trucks across the border to file a formal complaint against DAS with help from a local radio station.
First, I had to convince a magistrate to put stamps and seals on the papers. After cajoling a clerk, he led
me to the judge hiding from me or DAS, who could say? in a broom closet, reading a Scrooge
McDuck comic book. The episode ended with the regional chief, a colonel, and his scar-faced sicario
kicking me out of a jeep into a ravine while firing a .50-caliber machine gun over my head. Merciful,
considering the alternative of the corbata (neck tie, a gruesome act youll have to look up on your own)
had I been a non-bribing gringo cokehead horning in on their racket or the guerrilla sympathizer I had
become after talking to the victims of DAS and the armys death squads.
Among the more casual stops, the price of travelling without documents was to join a busload of
smugglers to Quito: Entire propane stoves disassembled and tucked into folds of petticoats and clanging
skirts; a boy with huge flopping clown feet because he wore three pairs of shoes inside, each a couple
sizes smaller, and expected to return barefoot; an old man wearing seven fedoras in hopes that only five
would be confiscated as bribes by soldiers at checkpoints along the way, so he could sell one and wear
one home in dignity; contraband Ritz crackers, cigarettes and bottles of Aqua Velva shaving lotion
replaced stolen film and camera in my vest.
Dont worry, the Indians said: The soldiers wont touch you because theyll think youre CIA. On
arrival at the famous market in Otavalo, we sold our stuff, got hammered on bootleg aguardiente and
watched a double-feature from the balcony no Indians allowed in the main seating: suave Sean
Connery as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever followed by Planet of the Apes. We rooted for the
horse-riding monkeys to off Charlton Heston. Magic realism is not all about the glamor.
After the promised visit to the ruins at Macchu Picchu, I packed my ailing wife home from Peru, and
marched on. I spent a week touring cocaine-processing labs in fish-canning factories and watched the
powder shipped off to Long Beach under the protection of the military. A side trip to Ayacucho with the
son of a famous revolutionary introduced me to a philosophy professor soon to be founder of Sendero
Luminoso, the Communist Party of Peru-Marxist-Leninist on the Shining Path of Carlos Mariategui.You
take your lesser evils as you find them, or they find you.
Chile was my destination if not destiny: That June, I watched an armored detachment from the Tacna
regiment roll tanks toward Santiago, only to be turned back by loyal troops and civilians in the streets.
The coup plotter, Roberto Viaux, was arrested; he was working with a fascist paramilitary group called
Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty) with help from the CIA. But it was all a dress rehearsal,
allowing the CIA and Chilean military intelligence to identify and eliminate officers loyal to the
constitution and prepare the population for the terror to come.
Playing dumb, my specialty, got me invitations. A German glider pilot took me soaring over the Andes to
visit friends in Argentina bedecked with Nazi paraphernalia. Some rich kids from the private school in
Nido de Aguilas, where scions of the military and mine owners rubbed elbows and other body parts with
children of the US Embassy, took me on a road trip to deliver black-market supplies they had hoarded,
bought with funds from CIA, to striking truck drivers in Rancagua, paid not to mount their rigs by
CIA. On the way back, these posh brats pointed out where their fascist friends planned to bomb pylons
to knock out power lines, courtesy of CIA.
Despite massive demonstrations in support of the government I marched with at least a million
people in Santiago chanting the people united will never be defeated with the economy screaming,
the Popular Unity coalition was oxymoronically wracked by confusion and division on how to proceed.
Thanks to a telegram from my wife Come home STOP Im pregnant STOP I love you STOP I
was lucky to get out of Chile a few weeks before the coup, but friends like Charlie Horman and Frank
Teruggi were determined to stay. My yet-to-be-first-born saved my life.
The military struck again on Sept. 11, 1973, killing President Allende, rounding up thousands of
suspected resisters, torturing and disappearing victims murdering and destroying the evidence at
least 4,000, including Charlie, Frank and other people I knew. This bloody success would inspire the
like-minded dictators in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile to extend their internal dirty wars against
subversion up and down the hemisphere, the talons of Operation Condor reaching out to assassinate and
bomb opponents in Paris, Rome, and Washington, D.C. even as the CIA was disclaiming any connection.
Kissinger was quoted as telling the NSC, I dont see why we need to stand by and watch a country go
communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. That, by the way, was the first of 168 passages
censored from a book written by a disgusted CIA veteran a year later.27

After Watergate, DCI Helms, manager of Kissingers massacre in Chile, superviser of the pogroms in
Vietnam and Laos, had been dispatched as Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Peacock Throne of the
Shah of Shah, Protector of the Aryan Race, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Brought back to testify to
Congress, Helmss lies were so preposterously grandiose, that Rep. Michael Harrington (D-MA) was
censured by his colleagues for disclosing the contradictions of classified testimony, and correspondent
Daniel Schorr of CBS was threatened with jail for releasing contents of the Pike Report to the Village
Voice.
All this accelerated with impeachment proceedings, Nixons resignation in 1974, leaking of the Family
Jewels and the domestic spying operations and political disruptions by the FBI, CIA, NSA and military.
There was genuine fear of a coup detat that would install a military dictatorship like Chile. So alarmed
were the congressional committees that they held a public hearing into the threat covert actions posed to
the fabric of constitutional government, the separation of powers, the lives and liberties of American
citizens and the provocations against peace, law and order in the world. Sen. Church likened the CIA to
a rogue elephant crashing through the worlds jungles and humble villages. His committee considered
banning all forms of covert action. In the end, though, it was all show: Congress accepted the premise of
necessity, then tried to develop some way to regulate the elephant herd, as if it needed a better team of
drivers in the seat.
The evidence demonstrated convincingly, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the US
government itself, not surrogates or privateers, was at war with Nicaragua since 1981; it was
(no pun necessary) incontrovertible.

Those exposs led Congress to pass the Hughes-Ryan Act, which prohibited the executive branch,
military and intelligence agencies from using appropriated funds for covert operations unless and until
the President issued an official Finding that each such operation was in the interest of national
security. This procedure, they thought, would force the President and staff to consult with relevant
departments to develop coherent policies, the very purpose of the NSC. They also required the President
to submit these Findings to the appropriate congressional committees six originally, then eight when
the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence were established in 1980 as part of the
checks and balances on presidential power.28

The War Powers Act allowed the President to conduct war in an emergency for up to 30 days unfettered,
then required the President to report to Congress and seek its specific authorization to use military force
(AUMF) abroad for actions lasting more than 60 days. Ever since, Presidents had sought and relied upon
such an authorization to continue undeclared wars beyond that 60-day limit or so they said.29

The Trust Us Legacy

Youd think they might have learned something. In order to understand Iran-Contra and its consequences
for war-making, the limitations of the Tower Commission, the congressional investigations and the
report of the Special Prosecutor and how ill they bode for the future it is useful to reprise the
historical context.
First, in order to win passage of the War Powers Act in numbers sufficient to override Nixons expected
veto, Congress deliberately ignored the problem of covert wars waged by the intelligence agencies
through surrogates in other words, the bulk of such actions remained below the surface.
The secret (that is, unauthorized by Congress) bombing and invasion of Cambodia a flagrant, in-
your-face usurpation of the power to declare war coordinated by the National Security Adviser, Henry
Kissinger was included in the original bill of impeachment brought against Nixon, but dropped in
order to win support from conservative (mostly southern, military-supporting) Democrats and
moderate or liberal Republicans. (Remember them?)
The War Powers Resolution applied only to the Armed Forces, not to the CIA or any other
bureaucratically distinct entity, like the NSC. The 60-day limit allowed the President to conduct short-
term but intense military operations under guise of emergency threats to national security. The ink on
the Resolution was barely dry in 1975 when President Ford, at the urging of his Secretary of State,
Kissinger, doubling as National Security Adviser, sent troops to Cambodia in a contrived test of that
power, allegedly to free the merchant ship Mayaguez that had been seized by the Cambodian
government as a spy-ship.
Only in the case of CIA operations in Angola in 1974-75 did Congress belatedly pull the plug on an
ongoing presidential directive to conduct undeclared war against another government, largely because of
the exposures in the media and the denunciations of the CIAs war in Angola by its project manager,
John Stockwell.30

Badges? We Dont Need No Stinkin Badges!

Another series of revelatory headlines was generated by the report of yet another commission to study
illegal CIA activities within the US, this time chaired by Fords Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, the
former governor of New York whom Nixon had defeated for the Republican nomination in 1968 as
Goldwater had in 1964. But long before becoming governor of what was still the most populous and
financially powerful state in 1958, Rockefeller had worked closely with CIA and its predecessors. The
State Dept. and OSS had virtually assigned all of Latin America to him as viceroy, so extensive were his
familys holdings Essos (later Exxon) oil in Venezuela and Peru, coffee plantations in Ecuador, a
chain of supermarkets in virtually all the cities, investments up and down the Andes and across the
Amazon.
After World War II, Rockefeller worked in States Office of Policy Coordination, running covert ops in
Latin America, a role that continued informally when CIA took in OPC. Nelsons personal friend and
family retainer Galo Plaza helped run the empire as head of the Organization of American States, a
virtual ministry of neo-colonial affairs. (While in Ecuador in 1973, I tried to help the imprisoned
journalist Jaime Galarza, arrested for exposing former president Galo Plazas role in collaborating with
the oil companies use of the Peruvian military to seize a third of his countrys territory, then opening
what was left to missionaries from the Rockefeller-supported Summer Institute for Linguistics to soften
up the indigenous resisters so the oil companies could move in, creating the environmental disaster I
chronicled on a trip in a dugout canoe down the Rio Napo, only to be turned away by the Peruvian
military.)
But Rockefellers brief was not to look to CIAs crimes abroad, only those that it committed at home
where it wasnt supposed to operate at all. That included a Special Operations Group of 52 officers, a
secret unit within the secret Counterintelligence Staff that secretly ran Operation CHAOS from 1967 to
1973, when it was shut down for fear of exposure in the Watergate mess. They used agents to compile
some 13,000 files with documents containing the names of 300,000 persons and dozens of organizations,
all entered into a computerized index. Their reports were shared with Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and
through them with the Defense Intelligence Agency and services branches (Armys Criminal
Investigations Division, Navys CIS, Air Force Office of Security) to ferret out antiwar GIs at military
bases around the world, even civilian coffeehouses and off-base bars.
They also shared and cross-referenced files with the FBIs various Counterintelligence Programs
(CoIntelPros) on the civil-rights movement, Black Militants, the New Left, and with local cops through
the private network of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs) in every city and town, including
a former CIA guy who ran the Red Squad that opened a file on me for the Intelligence Bureau of the
Denver police department shortly after I arrived here in the wake of the shootings at Kent State, May 4,
1970. Back then, entries were made on 3-by-5 inch file cards and placed in a big Rolodex. Today,
information is fed from satellites and social media through servers using searchable software made by
vendors like Palantir and Geofeedia. (Before switching to the latter application last year, Denvers
software had a pull-down menu that offered criminal activity as the default option for placing people
under surveillance, so peaceful protesters at public meetings were labelled criminals without ever
committing a crime.)31

But one item stood out in the Rockefeller Commissions report: The admission that crimes committed by
the CIAs employees and agents in the US had been effectively immunized since 1954. Means of
collecting foreign intelligence up to and including torture and murder, no matter how horrific when
committed abroad, were considered beyond the reach of US law even though they were illegal under
treaties to which the US was a signatory; then they were reimported and legalized under the rationale
that they might be useful in establishing an elusive, frequently asserted but never-proved foreign
connection to domestic dissent against those government policies and practices that had provoked the
conscience of millions and inspired constitutionally protected dissent.
When DCI William Colby finally told the acting Attorney General, Lawrence Silberman about the 1954
MoU in 1974, wondering whether it would apply to the case of Richard Helms, Silberman said theres
no way in the world the CIA is going to be given the extra legal privilege of deciding which of its
employees should be prosecuted and which shouldnt. But Silberman never mentioned it to the
Criminal Division, which is responsible for prosecutions. Nor did he bother to check to see whether the
statute of limitations had run out on any of those unreferred cases.32

We can only assume from subsequent behavior that at least one of Rockefellers fellow commissioners
was paying attention to the report that bore their signatures: Gov. Ronald Reagan of California was
preparing to challenge Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. He lost but continued to rally
Republicans against the Carter Administration as soft on communism and weak on domestic protest.
As evidence, Reagan and his surrogates pointed repeatedly to Vice President Mondale, who had served
on the Church committee and criticized the Nixon-Ford wars abroad and repression at home. Another
present danger was Sen. Gary Hart (D.-CO), a victim of Nixons dirty tricks as McGoverns campaign
manager in 1972, earnest member of the Church Committee, and persistent critic of domestic spying on
antiwar advocates like himself.
The post-Watergate reforms lasted about two years one electoral cycle. By 1977, with a Democratic
president in office, the heavily Democratic Congress was again in a more permissive mood regarding
presidential prerogatives in foreign policy. While legislation to tighten restrictions on the intelligence
agencies and NSC languished in Congress, Carters CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner and his deputy,
Adm. Bobby Inman emphasized analysis of signals intelligence gathered by the National Security
Agency, streamlined the Company, shut down some operations, developed guidelines for covert action
(mainly to keep them deniable), and purged, at least nominally, hundreds of covert operators, many of
whom became contractors in the operations that continued.
In the White House, however, the National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, went ga-ga over the
idea of a Green Belt of militant Islam that would cinch the soft underbelly of the Russian Bear and
protect the Persian Gulf oilfields and sea lanes from the old tsarist dream of warm-water ports.33 Covert
war using local proxies against the government of Afghanistan provoked a coup detat in which a more
moderate faction took power, then invited neighborly fraternal Soviet assistance against local bandits,
terrorists, warlords and foreign mercenaries. Like the US in Vietnam, advisers and Spetznaz special
forces were not enough. The counterinsurgency campaign by which the Soviets sought to prop-up that
teetering government (similar to the US approach of search-and-destroy, pacification plus Phoenix)
steadily escalated to invasion, occupation and international condemnation.34

And to the extent that many voters (and citizens too disgusted or apathetic to vote) found all
this just politics, North was right: Not enough people gave a rats patootie, then or now.

Bleeding the Soviets seemed to be a winning strategy but only served to illustrate the alleged weakness
of the Brzezinski approach to halt Soviet aggression and reinforced the notion of inherent Communist
expansionism. Counter-escalating the response to what it had provoked, the CIA even helped to set up
madrassa religious schools to teach jihad to the newly converted.35 These Afghan mujaheddin found
ready patrons in Pakistan, where Gen. Zia ul-Haq had seized power from the elected government of
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged Bhutto, declared an Islamic state under sharia law, and embarked on the
quest for a Green Bomb with Kissinger and his acolytes cheering him on.36 Eager allies like Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, even China were happy to send money and volunteers. The butchery of teachers,
nurses, artists and heretics in the name of a religion of peace was necessary and desirable if it brought
down the baited bear.
Among the many ironies of the Afghan Project, the CIAs largest ever after Vietnam, was that its
inception coincided with the perception of US powerlessness after Vietnam, for which smaller wars were
proposed as an antidote. Never again, so the mantra went, would the US get bogged down in the
quagmire of a major conventional war and occupation on the landmass of Asia. The Trilateral
Commission had been formed by luminaries like David Rockefeller precisely to address this problem,
even as his brother Nelson had served as Fords consigliere and Vice President, investigating the Family
Jewels in the same way as Tower did Iran-Contra, to improve the performance of the intelligence
agencies alongside his own former policy adviser, Kissinger. The biggest bosses of finance and oil and
military-industrial capital seemed to have all their bases covered, but there were many more ironies yet
to unfold.
The sponsorship of an Afghan insurgency also met the challenge presented by neighboring Irans Islamic
Revolution or seemed to a policy failure derived from the previous 25 years of the CIAs greatest
covert success of installing and protecting the Shah. Domestic pressures and regional ambitions had
prompted the Shah to join the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and even join
Arab rivals in raising prices in response to US support for Israel in the 1973 war and even more, to
Nixons double-devaluation of the dollar and abandonment of the gold standard to boost US exports in
1974 (a policy orchestrated in large part by his Treasury Secretary, George Shultz, who would take up
key positions in the Reagan-Bush administration). The Shah used these increased revenues for self-
aggrandizing projects that employed Schultzs big construction and engineering company, Bechtel Corp.,
and to buy weapons, especially fighter jets for his Air Force, assisted by Secord. Not much trickled down
to the masses, however, and communist-led workers struck the oil fields. Street demonstrations and open
rebellion finally drove the Shah into exile.
When he was granted asylum in the US, at the urging of Kissinger and Helms, the people of Iran rightly
feared another attempt at his restoration, so they seized the US embassy on November 4, 1979, and held
the employees, many of whom were CIA officers under diplomatic cover. Then, to reassure Iran that the
US was not so belligerently inclined, Carter dispatched the Shah to Panama, at the invitation of Gen.
Omar Torrijos, with whom Carter had negotiated a treaty to return the canal and zone to Panamanian
sovereignty. Rather than appease, this only hardened the attitude of the Iranian mullahs. (I later
questioned the Presidents adviser, Lloyd Cutler, whether they had foreseen this possibility, in the offices
of the Aspen Foundation, where he was busily helping the Shahs widow produce her husbands
memoirs after they generously contributed to that erstwhile philanthropy. He said there was no quid pro
quo for this humanitarian gesture, nor in his post-retirement employment.)
All these diplomatic moves invited nothing but contempt and derision from Republicans, especially the
presumptive front-runner for their nomination, Ronald Reagan, and many right-wing, pro-Israeli, anti-
Soviet Democrats, led by Sen. Henry Jackson, whose aides included neo-conservatives like Richard
Perle, who became a leading figure in future Republican administrations, and Al From, who founded the
Democratic Leadership Council, the neo-liberal alternative that bred candidates like Bill Clinton and
Gore.
Perversely, both Iran and Afghanistan reinforced the presumed need for covert action and the complicity
of Congress in ceding power to the Presidency. The Carter-Brzezinski National Security Council
recurred to Secord for the shipment of weapons and supplies to Afghanistan, with the assistance of
Egypt after the Camp David Accords as cover. Then they tapped Secord, who knew Iran because he had
coordinated arms shipments to the Shah from 1975-78, to supervise Operation Eagle Claw, the hostage-
rescue mission by the combined Delta Force, assisted by a young major, Oliver North. Secords partner
Albert Hakim recruited Iranian agents for support in Tehran but the helicopters crashed in the desert,
aborting the operation. Meanwhile, the price of gasoline kept going up, long lines formed at gas stations,
the US economy was gripped by stagflation and the hostages were held for 365 days, which ABCs
special Nightline turned into a nightly countdown of American paralysis.
In retrospect, Reagans victory on Day #365 of America Held Hostage seems inevitable. The oscillation
between containment and rollback that characterized the Cold War swung irreversibly into the great
crusade against the Evil Empire under Reagan and his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, a protege of
Kissinger to whom the National Security Advisers, the ineffectual William Clark and the neutral
mediator Richard V. Allen, deferred. Reagans NSC agreed to a massive effort to aid Afghan rebels
(again, freedom fighters or terrorists depending on whose water buffalo or cousin was getting gored).
That lofty and legal bipartisan effort dwarfed the unauthorized little Contra war, contracted out by Bush,
Shackley & Co. to their private network of retirees and subcontractors in blood, treasure, and payoff
for a time so much so that Brzezinski fans and Kissinger clones have been disputing paternity of
the Lilliputians who brought down the Soviet giant ever since. Once that geopolitical fantasy came to
fruition and the proverbial chickens came home to roost in the rubble of the World Trade Center, one
would think the Democrats would have learned the old adage, equally applicable to marital infidelity,
business, politics and war: What they can do for you, they can do to you. But that was now, this is then.
With success, the ends always justify the means. Never mind that killing another human being, except in
self-defense, is murder, and war, except in self-defense is simply mass murder. Belatedly, Congress
passed the Intelligence Oversight Act in 1980; it required the President to personally authorize each and
every significant covert operation, then consult with the congressional intelligence oversight panels in
a timely fashion, whatever that meant. In effect, what Senator Church called the dark arts of secret
intervention and a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies
whatever is deemed useful in bending other countries to our will all would be legal so long as the
President approved them and told Congress about them someday and all in secret. Congress had
not only relinquished its power to declare war, it had made itself complicit in the lesser included crimes,
as well as the cover-ups and the lies.
The very same institutional apparatus of paramilitary operations, including many of the same personnel
weaned on counterinsurgency doctrine in Southeast Asia, was pressed into service when Ronald Reagan
took power in 1981, the very day the hostages in Iran flew home.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance in the White House, August 1977. Photo credit:
White House / Wikimedia

TRICK OR TREAT?
Whether Reagan was himself the beneficiary of a secret pre-election deal to ship arms to Iran in return
for the mullahs keeping the hostages until he took office the October Surprise scenario37
remains one of the great unresolved questions of our time but only because the evidence, which is
convincing, was never presented in a court to convict the participants who stole an election, illegally
sold weapons, subverted foreign policy and usurped the authority of the President to conduct it.38 That
Congress was unable to develop clear and convincing evidence of such a plot says more about its
investigative acumen or the will to pursue it than about the evidence.

Walshs Final Report39 was of little help, either, and by congressional design. Because he was directed
to investigate the direct or indirect sale, shipment, or transfer since in or about 1984 of weapons to
Iran and the Contras, any earlier sales, directly to Iran or through Israel and there were many such
deals were off-limits.40 Secord, for example, had been put in charge of Operation Tipped Kettle, by
which arms seized from the Palestine Liberation Organization during the invasion of Lebanon in 1981
were diverted to the Contras. The larger but equally savage counter-insurgencies in Guatemala and El
Salvador were also off-limits, confirming the cynics view that the exceptions dwarfed the rule.
Congressional supporters of the Contras and their authoritarian allies in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia,
neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala werent alone in trying to keep the lid on their own
complicity. Given the composition of the D.C. Circuit Court (Laurence Silberman again, implicated in
the October Surprise before his appointment by Reagan, was one of the judges), the order restricting
Walshs investigatory authority can be interpreted as the first of many self-protective efforts by
Republican stalwarts to tie his hands.
With publication of Walshs Final report and a book in which he elaborated on these restrictions, the
investigative circle was effectively closed on that October Surprise, but an historical ellipsis remained
for a few tenacious reporters to attempt to fill.
No matter. The theme of Watergate and the investigations it spawned especially the congressional
probes of the CIA41 that gave rise to the system of congressional oversight (unlucky choice of
malapropism, that double entendre) was Trust us: We didnt do it and we promise never to do it
again. Unless, of course, the boss tells us to.
On that, at least, Walsh had plenty to say, and its not pretty. He ended as he began with the observation
and warning that problems presented by Iran/Contra are not those of rogue operations, but rather those
of Executive Branch efforts to evade congressional oversight42

President Reagan being sworn in on Inaugural Day, US Capitol, 1981. Photo credit: White House /
National Archives
Reagan came to office on a vow to reverse the Vietnam syndrome of which the War Powers Act and
Hughes-Ryan restrictions on covert operations were seen as symptomatic the squeamishness of
Congress in the face of popular opposition to US military intervention abroad. Following a procedure
established by Congress in the 1947 National Security Act, Reagan immediately launched a series of
executive decrees called National Security Decision Directives, each of which required a presidential
finding that the directed activity was necessary to protect national security. These NSDDs directed the
diplomatic, military, and intelligence agencies to conduct secret operations and assist surrogates in
making war to subvert or overthrow foreign governments without a formal declaration of war by
Congress.
Early on, I tried to ask Kissinger about this when his old deputy Haig and Reagan appointed him to head
another commission to solve the problems of the region. Dr. Kissinger, I yelled at a press conference
with former Presidents Ford, Destaing of France, Schroeder of West Germany, How do you win a
peasant war on the side of the landlords? He muttered gutturally, Who are you? Who are you with? I
waved from the back of the room, How many peasants will you have to kill this time around? He was
already walking out the door.43 By the time he was through, the UN and OAS estimated at least 100,000
died over the next decade; human-rights groups said many more but it took years of forensic pathology
to make the case for genocide.
As the first successful revolution in the hemisphere since Cuba 20 years earlier, Nicaraguas Sandinistas
topped the list and provoked the ire of most Republicans, a few Democrats and the supporters of the
overthrown dictator, Anastasio Somoza.44

This early commitment by the Reagan-Bush administration and its retainers, acolytes, and proxies to a
war of sabotage, torture and assassination was revealed in news accounts of atrocities committed by
Contras.45 As evidence of government support for the Contras mounted, popular opposition increased.
Congress rejected a bill that would have barred all funding of the Contras. Then, by a vote of 411-0,
Congress in December 1982 passed the first Boland Amendment. It prohibited the CIA from providing
military assistance to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.46 The
remaining array of purposes constituted a loophole big enough to drive a Pentagon through.
And soon enough, the Defense Departments Special Operations Division and Intelligence Support
Activity born of the failure of the Iran hostage-rescue mission leapt into the breach in operations
dubbed Yellow Fruit and Elephant Herd.47 Veterans of these operations, including Richard Secord and
his deputies, Richard Gadd and Robert Dutton, soon figured in the ostensibly private network with
retired Generals Singlaub and Aderholdt, their former chiefs in Vietnam (see Part 1). At the same time,
not wanting to be stingy with Reagans little war, lest they be accused of insufficient patriotism,
Congress gave the CIA money for the Contras so long as they stuck to the original lie that their goal
was merely to interdict the flow of arms from Nicaragua to Salvadoran guerrillas.48

Using the rationale of interdiction and deploying personnel for existing Military Assistance Programs,
Reagans National Security Council, with assistance from the old coalition that was Operation Condor
and its retinue of Cuban exiles: like-minded dependents in military-dictated and Nazi-coddling
Argentina under Videla (with help from old and new fascists recruited from Italys Operation Gladio),
Brazil under Geisel and Stroessner of Paraguay (both of whom gave refuge to Dr. Josef Mengele of
Auschwitz), Bolivia under Banzer and the cocodrilos of Roberto Suarez and Guzman (with help from
the fugitive Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie, the Gestapos Butcher of Lyon), Chile under Pinochet
(with help from Nazi SS Col. Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas-chambers used by Gehlens
Abwehr and the SS Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front in World War II).
With such expert allies, merely authoritarian according to the taxonomy of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the
MAPs stepped up support for the murderous, racist regime of Gen. Rios Montt in Guatemala (now on
trial for war crimes), Gen. Alvarezs Battalion 3-16 in Honduras, the death-squads of Col. DAubuisson
in Salvador. Even Costa Rica received unwanted attention (there was no standing army since 1946)
when its national police force somehow found an incubus implanted in vitro, a surveillance unit and
aspiring hit-team a la Phoenix known as los Bebes because they were secretly and illegally funded,
trained and advised by a CIA agent, John Dimitrios Papas.49

All were in close contact with Israeli export-import agents, arms dealers like Pesach Ben-Or in
Guatemala, a huge Arms Supermarket in Tegucigalpa run by the former US military adviser to
Somoza, and in Panama, Mike Harari, chief of an Israeli assassination team who retired in disgrace
when his unit killed an innocent Palestinian waiter in Lillehammer, Norway during the 1976 Olympics,
then found his way into the inner sanctum of Panamas Defense Forces as adviser to Manuel Antonio
Noriega, himself on the CIA and military intelligence payrolls since 1958.
I first encountered the sinister Noriega in 1975, when I was in graduate school and invited to Panama to
study negotiations for the recovery of the canal and the zone that split the country in half since 1903,
when it was invented by the Morgan banking interests represented by Sullivan & Cromwell, the same
law firm that employed the Dulles brothers.50 At one meeting in the hotel, I watched Noriega slither into
the room, just conspicuous enough to be noticed, look around as if taking inventory of every face, then
wordlessly slip away. My Panamanian host whispered to me, Keep an eye on him, too, because thats
the spook whos going to take over if something happens to Gen. Torrijos. And it did: Torrijos died in a
plane crash in 1981. I would cross paths with Noriega literally and figuratively until his trial and
conviction drug-smuggling charges, the least of his crimes, years later.
Noriegas relationship with CIA was never a one-way street. More like the traffic in Panama City, there
were no lanes but all vehicles started and ended at one of Tonys hideaways. He played amenable but
never trustworthy in allowing the US to establish a string of bases for so-called low-intensity counter-
insurgency wars in which the doctrine of national security was simultaneously inflated to absorb the
internal security of the imperial dependencies and conflated to make their security dependent and
coterminous with the definitions and decisions of Washington. Blustering he had Bush by the balls,
Noriega had been indicted for taking bribes from drug-traffickers, allowing them to use Panama as a
processing lab and transshipment pad, and laundry for their profits at convenient branches of BCCI and
other banks; also conveniently, these drug shippers were competitors of those who had helped the
Contras but Noriega had placed a price on his head.51

But back to that bump in the road, that blip on the screen in uncooperative, recalcitrant, Cuban-inspired
Nicaragua and their allies next door in the Salvadoran FMLN: In April 1983, asked if he was doing
anything to overthrow the pesky Nicaraguan government, Reagan said, No, because that would be
violating the law. Pressed on the point after reports the US had mined Nicaraguan harbors, he
explained, We are complying with the law, the Boland Amendment, which is the law.52

It was a lie whether Reagan believed it or not, even in a Congress divided between the gullible who
wanted to believe and the cynical who knew better but claimed otherwise. A month later, the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence demanded a new presidential finding that spelled out the national-
security interest before it would authorize more aid to the Contras. The House analogue barred aid to the
Contras but, taking the Administration at its word, authorized funds to stop the flow of arms to any rebel
groups in the region.
The Administration responded by pumping up the propaganda to justify its proxy armies in the region,
by shaping news abroad with the intent to influence the public and Congress at home. To get the word
out, Reagans team established an Office of Public Diplomacy in the State Department with another
Cuban exile, Otto Reich, at the helm, but coordinated by a former CIA psychological warfare specialist,
Walter Raymond, assigned to the NSC, to muster public support through taxpayer-financed propaganda
later declared illegal by the Comptroller General.53

Even here, there was a twisted history below the surface: The National Security Acts deceptive clause
allowing the CIA to perform other functions had effectively empowered the President to wage
psychological warfare abroad. The composer and conductor of what he dubbed his Mighty Wurlitzer
was Frank Wisner, who had run OSS operations in Romania during World War II, then against the
Soviets from quarters in the State Departments Office of Policy Coordination before joining CIA as
chief covert operator under Allen Dulles. Wisner supervised Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to
transmit a CIA-approved version of reality what they called the truth about events in denied
territory behind the Iron Curtain as well as publication of books, sponsorship of artists, writers and
intellectuals through foundations and groups like the Congress of Cultural Freedom.54 He also
developed Operation Mockingbird, which recruited agents among reporters and editors to run stories in
friendly outlets in Europe, often used to embed coded instructions to agents, including armed stay-
behind groups in areas liberated from Nazi occupation by the Red Army. Even within the CIA, but
especially at the State Dept. and Pentagon, people worried that calls for armed rebellion could provoke a
Soviet response that would escalate to confrontation, and possibly nuclear war, as it almost had in
Germany, Poland and fatally, in Hungary in 1956.
Some of this information, misinformation and disinformation bounced back to be replayed in the US
media, the original form of blowback propaganda that had been planted abroad came back as
news here, with potentially disastrous unintended effects ratcheting up the demand for war in
Congress or in the streets, or otherwise influencing the decisions and pre-empting the options of policy-
makers. Another lucky accident, perhaps, to increase funding for the CIA, FBI and the military, but the
practice was illegal under section 501 of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 55 because most members of
Congress and the public didnt want to pay for government-produced fake news that they might
believe enough to shape their views on important issues. This smacked too much of Goebbels in
Germany or the portrayal of Soviet methods for comfort. Smith-Mundt prohibited the CIA from
disseminating within the United States any information about the United States, its people, and its
policies prepared for dissemination abroad.
Also, RFE and VoA were exposed in stunts where its reporters, recruited from emigre groups, some of
whom had been collaborators with the Nazis, incited rebellion and riot in direct contradiction of official
policy, jeopardizing other diplomatic efforts to counter the influence of the Soviets and develop better
relations with countries on the periphery and the Third World. Later, they closed RFE and rolled VoA out
of CIA into a new, ostensibly autonomous and independent US Information Agency.
The military had always been parsimonious with information that might aid the enemy, but the
revelations by Daniel Ellsberg and other military whistleblowers showed the Pentagon had engaged in
a massive campaign of censorship and deception about its casualties, the enemys, and atrocities like the
My Lai massacre. In 1972, alarmed at efforts by the White House, under communications director
Patrick Buchanan, to control information from the executive branch, including the military and USIA,
about Vietnam, Congress attached the Zorinsky Amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act
of 1972. The Zorinsky Amendment added a new prohibition: no funds authorized to be appropriated to
the United States Information Agency shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States, and
no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the
United States.
Now, in 1986, here was Buchanan, uninhibited by Smith-Mundt and unrepentant for his defense of his
lying boss in the Watergate scandal, back as communications director for Reagan. Working closely with
Elliott Abrams at State, Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, and CIA officers as necessary, OPD shaped the
Administrations image of its policy in order to shape policy in that image.The target of this psych-war
was the American populace and especially critics of US policy. The weapons were a battery of right-
wing foundations, think-tanks, sponsored publications, subsidized writers, hired media critics and
volunteer truth squads who toured the country spreading the gospel according to Reagan and attacking
as subversive anyone who disputed them. Some in the mainstream were already true believers, like
contra-defender Cliff May, editorial writer at the Rocky Mountain News, later editorial director for its
parent Scripps-Howard chain, and after 9-11, chief of communications for the Republican Party.

Despite the scandal and closure of OPDs most egregious operations, Reich moved up in the State Dept.
under George H.W. Bush. His successor at OPD, Robert Kagan, escaped the Iran-Contra trap but served
as Abramss deputy on the State Departments Policy Planning Staff for 1984-88, helping implement the
Contra War and its propaganda-driven diplomacy. When the investigations closed the shop, Kagan
landed at American University where he wrote a massive tome justifying his own handiwork and
declaring it a smashing success despite the embarrassment accruing from Iran-Contra.56

Embarrassment. Let that sink in. The real purpose of vindication (note the publication date, 1996 a
presidential campaign year in which small wars were flaring larger in the former Yugoslavia, Central
Africa, and the ex-Soviet periphery) was to repeat the mistakes, blunders and crimes on a grander scale,
with more firepower to guarantee success and greater secrecy to keep the embarrassing details from
the public.
But, again, back to the future of those means and ends in Nicaragua: In anticipation of a cut-off, the
Pentagon agreed to transfer equipment cost-free to the CIA for the Contras until that, too, was
deemed illegal. After big joint exercises in Honduras, huge stockpiles were declared surplus and
donated to the Contras. Even friendly governors were asked to donate their National Guard stocks with
promise the Pentagon would replace them with new, better equipment.
Biding for time, a new Finding was drafted in September 1983 to rationalize aid to the Contras get
this as a means to force Nicaragua to negotiate a treaty pledging non-interference in the affairs of its
neighbors. Reagans people were nothing if not brazen in their hypocrisy, yet the Senate Intelligence
Committee bought this lie, too. The House voted to cut off all aid. A compromise allowed another $4
million to the CIA for the Contras. The CIA stepped up its war, mining harbors, bombing airfields and
ports, sending Contras off to raid villages, burned down clinics, kill volunteers like hydrologist Ben
Linder. (He was armed in self-defense, so deserved to be shot, according to Contras.) Even Barry
Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Reagans best friend on the Senate Intelligence Committee, realized he had been
lied to. He complained that it was hard to defend their policy if we dont know what the hell is going
on.57
Even in that confession there was a lie: Anyone who wanted to could easily know exactly what was
going on. Finally, Congress passed and Reagan signed Boland II which extended the ban to the Pentagon
and any intelligence agency. 58

From Con to Fraud: PROJECT DEMOCRACY

Defiant and contemptuous, CIA Director William Casey shambled uneasily through the slightly
tightened loophole of Boland 2 and, Congress be damned, handed the baton to a Marine lieutenant
colonel seconded to the staff of the National Security Council as his agent and operational point-man for
continuing the Administrations covert policy. Oliver North dubbed the fundraising and contra-resupply
program Project Democracy. He got plenty of help from other members of the Restricted Interagency
Group (RIG) of sub-cabinet officials like Undersecretary of State Abrams.
A tiny Grenada, a Caribbean spice-island whose principal export was cinnamon, showed the way. The
administration had been plotting to get rid of the islands governing New Jewel Movement, led by the
charismatic Maurice Bishop59, since the Reagan transition team in 1980, working with the hardline
Council on lnterAmerican Security, issued its Santa Fe documents on proposed policy in Latin
America. (Besides the Sandinistas, identified targets included Panamas Omar Torrijos, who died in a
plane crash in July 1981 and was succeeded eventually by the double and triple-dealing Manuel
Noriega.) Among Bishops sins: he had invited Cuban construction workers to build an extended runway
for jets that might be for tourists but also could serve Soviet bombers a far-fetched idea that recurred
to incite the fever-dreams of the counterinsurgency strategists on the Potomac who imagined Soviet
tanks rumbling up the Pan-American highway from their base in Nicaragua, then made their
hallucinations real as posters distributed by Reich, Raymond and Kagans lapidarian OPD.

Point Salines International Airport, Grenada. Photo credit: US Army / Wikimedia

More realistically, Bishop had granted a passport to the CIAs most wanted man, and George H.W.
Bushs bete noire, renegade CIA whistleblower Philip Agee.60 The NSC tasked the RIG Cowboys in the
OEOB basement to come up with a plan. They got their chance in early October 1984, when a faction of
the New Jewel Movement seized power, arrested and shot Prime Minister Bishop on spurious grounds
that he had been playing footsie with the US, a charge that may have been fabricated, similar to that
planted in El Salvador against poet Roque Dalton, who was summarily tried and executed by his own
comrades in the ERP, or Ana Maria Montes of the FPS, or perhaps even the Cuban militarys alleged
coup against the Castro brothers in 1989.
False stories soon appeared that claimed the rebels had taken a few American tourists and medical
students hostage, or that they might be planning to, how many was unknown. The Marines landed and
within a few days declared the hostages freed. There were none but no matter to jarheads like
McFarlane and North, it was a cheap PR victory to take the spotlight off the smoking rubble of the
barracks in Beirut. By then the more likely target of the invasion, Agee, had fled Grenada for Cuba,
where he resided until his death in 2008. Like Edward Snowden a few years later, Agees asylum was
twisted by his tormentors into proof that he had always been a traitorous agent of the only country that
would give him refuge from the persecution of his former employers. Now, however, denied targets
beyond the reach of law in enemy territory are susceptible to surveillance and summary execution by
drone.
From October 1984 to October 1986, when Congress re-authorized humanitarian assistance to the
Contras, Reagan and his senior advisers sought by hook (soliciting donations from private citizens and
foreign governments, in return for favorable treatment) or crook (illegal diversion of appropriated funds
from other sources) to field their Contra army. National Security Adviser McFarlane, assigned the task
of keeping the Contras together body and soul, delegated the job bagman in conventional parlance
to his ambitious younger colleague, North.61

Rich people like Joseph Coors, the beer baron,62 and Ellen Garwood, an heiress with spare change,
asked Casey what they could do to help. Routinely, Casey sent such donors to North for a tour of the
White House and a sales pitch that ended with a handshake and photo with the President himself. The
money was donated to nonprofit shell organizations illegally claiming tax exemptions for the donors;
some of the shell operators had formerly worked for the Office of Public Diplomacy and the US
Information Agency.63 It was then laundered through a network of Panamanian companies and Swiss
bank accounts to buy guns and ammo, even planes and helicopters all illegal. When exposed, Abrams
told Congress between lies about his own lack of knowledge or involvement that he found it
degrading for a great power to walk around rattling a tin cup.64

Untangling this web of contractors, intermediaries, cut-outs, fronts, and diversionary schemes,65 some
launched only to be shut down as a distraction from the main channel, was the first step of
demystification of the fundamental lie and first lesson to be drawn from Iran-Contra: The evidence
demonstrated convincingly, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the US government itself, not surrogates
or privateers, was at war with Nicaragua since 1981; it was (no pun necessary) incontrovertible. The
International Court of Justice, established to peacefully resolve disputes between member-states of the
United Nations, found the US guilty of waging a war of aggression against its tiny neighbor. The US
arrogantly that is, officially and formally refused to acknowledge the UNs or the Courts
jurisdiction in effect, admitting that Nicaraguas charges were true even as it lied to its own people
about what the government was up to in their name. So much for international law, so useful for beating
up on the likes of Qaddafi or Saddam. So much for democracy.
Given how far we have sunk since, its a useful reminder that international conventions, treaties
(including that governing UN members) and related covenants are, of course, part of our domestic law
of the land but the courts are loathe to intervene in disputes between President and Congress over the
conduct of foreign policy, including especially that extension of politics by other means, war. While the
constitutionality of the War Powers Act has been upheld, accepting the clear language that the
Presidents power to wage war is constrained by the congressional requisite of a declaration of war, no
federal court has ever dared stop a war.
Bookending the period of Norths ascendancy, two years before Hasenfuss plane crash, a helicopter had
been shot down over Nicaragua, killing two US citizens who were blithely dismissed as volunteers by
the Embassy in Managua. That incident led to a very public trial in Miami where pro-Contra
mercenaries, a group ambiguously called Civilian Military Assistance led by an Alabama-based Vietnam
vet named Tom Posey, were prosecuted for violating the Neutrality Act. The court absolved the
mercenaries by ruling that even absent a formal declaration of war, the US was certainly not at peace
with Nicaragua. In fact, the prosecution of that case nearly blew the lid off Iran-Contra a year early, in
1985, as the White House exerted pressure on the US attorneys office in Miami to delay the case.66

The Iranian Triangle: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Uncle Sam

By 1985, the NSC also was engaged in secret negotiations with Irans government to win release of
prisoners held by resistance fighters in Lebanon. That the hostages were taken prisoner in retaliation for
US intervention in August 1982 on the side of Israel and the fascist Phalange of Bashir and Amin
Gemayel is seldom mentioned in characterizations of the US mission in Lebanon as peace-keeping.
Again, had Congress invoked the War Powers Act, the state-sponsored terrorism of the battleship USS
New Jersey, which launched dozens of car-size bombs from its 16-inch guns into the Shiite slums to
protect Americans might not have produced the seizure of hostages by Hezbollah or the suicidal car-
bombs that killed 241 Marines and 48 French paratroopers, a point raised to me after his release by Tom
Sutherland, who spent 2353 days in captivity with Anglican churchman Terry Waite, pawns on the Grand
Chessboard while North played knight. Instead, Congress winked at the involvement of Israel, which
captured weapons from the PLO and shipped them to the Contras as part of a joint strategic initiative
called Operation Tipped Kettle, managed by Secord.
Caseys main concern was William Buckley, his station chief in Beirut, who earlier had worked in
Pakistan to build up that barbaric insult to Islam, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, and the heroin-dealing Afghan faction
of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose greatest military success was bombarding his former allies in Kabul,
the capital, before they drove him into exile. In 1983, in retaliation for Buckleys kidnapping, Casey
even hired local Phalangist hit-men (through Saudi cut-outs, but the Israeli hand was suspected) to blow
up Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual adviser to Hezbollah. The car bomb exploded as
worshippers left Friday prayers at the mosque, killing dozens who dont count in any congressional or
judicial proceeding to date, except perhaps as the loved ones of future martyrs to holy war against the
Great Satan.
William Casey, attorney, historian, and spy, did not answer for his career as terrorist, war criminal, and
murderer. Ultimately, four shipments of missiles would be sent to Iran via SAT in exchange for hostages;
profits were diverted to buy yet more weapons for the Contras. The arms sales to Iran contravened
Reagans promise never to bargain for hostages, let alone trade arms for them. It also violated the law,
specifically, the Arms Export Control Act. Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz
and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger all claimed to have advised against it, but acquiesced even as
they worried that impeachable offenses had been committed. Since no Finding had been issued by the
president to make the first missile sale legal, his aides phonied one up and backdated it when the deal
was exposed. Once exposed, they defended it as retroactive, covered it up and lied some more.
The diversion what North called the secret within the secret violated not only the congressional
restriction on lethal aid, but also the fundamental constitutional authority of Congress to appropriate
funds. North portrayed this crime as an act of heroism of presidential courage, hence derivative
courage on his part, since he was just following orders but the blunders proved otherwise: North gets
Ross Perot to put up ransom money for a couple of DEA agents to pay a snitch to locate the hostages;
the snitch disappears with the money. North leaks word that hes using Anglican church official Terry
Waite as a go-between; Waite disappears into captivity. North coordinates air-drops to the Contras; the
goods miss their mark and eventually the Sandinistas shoot down an old plane. Only incompetence
exposed the mayhem of the operations, but that served to dismiss them as the work of incompetents.
The Democratic majority in Congress had no quarrel with the fueling of the Iraq-Iran War that killed
hundreds of thousands, nor with the arming of murderous mujaheddin to bleed Afghanistan in the name
of Cold War, or the repulsive massacres of Central America but, after three years of creeping revulsion,
vacillation, and posturing, had cut off military aid to the Contras. The issue was framed as a
constitutional struggle pitting the war-declaring and money-raising power of Congress against the war-
making and foreign-policy authority of the president as Commander-in-Chief. At stake was the
definition of representative government and the limits of executive power.
No Honor Among Thieves
What distinguished lran-Contra was precisely that it never was a secret, no matter how highly classified
the operational details. It was simply too big for that, and the much-publicized investigations by
Congress and the courts never got much beyond who lied most brazenly about what everybody knew all
along. Or, as a friend put it, paraphrasing Sen. Howard Bakers portentous question about Nixons
culpability in Watergate, What did the president know, and when did he forget to know it?
Baker neednt have asked: He was brought out of retirement to replace Donald Regan, suspected in the
cover-up, as Reagans chief of staff. After fruitlessly trying to debrief the boss, Baker isolated him in the
cloisters for walks with his wife in the Rose Garden or sent him off to clear brush on his ranch outside
Santa Barbara, the better to shut off investigations that could lead to the President in his increasingly
addled maunderings. Except for carefully staged public events by his old image-managers, Michael
Deaver, Lyn Nofziger and Ed Rollins, functionally, Reagans presidency ended two years before his term
was up. The vacuum was filled by his Vice-President, who continued the covert wars another six years.
Washingtons war-making was never a secret to its victims but in US calculus, victims dont matter;
voters do, sometimes. Therefore, marketing how a policy is packaged and sold means more than
the function or substance of the policy, who benefits and who suffers. The public scandal was not the
policy itself, which ravaged much of Central America, postponed any hope of peace in the Middle East,
and helped the regimes of Iran and Iraq butcher a million or more of each others people. Rather, as in
Watergate, the official indignation was that of a criminal who finds hes been bamboozled by a sneakier
co-conspirator: How could you? And to the extent that many voters (and citizens too disgusted or
apathetic to vote) found all this just politics, North was right: Not enough people gave a rats
patootie, then or now.
The exposure of the secret policies laid bare a political marriage of convenience whose bastard
offspring were the Contras. As in any marriage, the partners had different perceptions of who was doing
what to and with whom; that is, they brought with them different baggage, expectations, levels of
deception and self-deception: Generally, Democrats deceive themselves, while Republicans deceive the
rest of us. Thats why the Democrats expressed such shock and outrage as the truth about flirtations with
Irans regime in peddling arms for hostages unfolded, and thats why the Republicans cried foul at
having been caught with their collective patootie exposed.

The Continuing Cover-up of History, the Creation of an Alternative

Reality
The congressional hearings in the summer of 1987 did not get at the truth so much as inspire another
level of the cover-up. Perversely, they became a forum for Republicans, through North, to accuse
Democrats of abandoning those brave Contras in the field, to ridicule the second-guessing of presidential
power in foreign policy, to berate the hypocrisy of those who denied this vital aid, then switched back
the very month that the scandal exploded to authorize $100 million that exceeded the combined total
of $47 million that flowed through Enterprise accounts from the private aid network and the arms-
sales diversions. Democrats like Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chair of the Senate proceedings,
defended their support of the Contras. The Contras continued their lethal work, legally, constitutionally,
and with predictably deadly results.
The defense of the Reagan Administration was led by an ultra-conservative congressman from the
Cowboy State, a representative of mining corporations and their royalty-collecting ranchers. Richard
Dick Cheney was not just another cowboy. He graduated from Yale but ducked Vietnam by serving in
the Nixon Administration where he befriended Donald Rumsfeld. Tapped by Al Haig to help run the
White House after Nixons henchmen were indicted in Watergate, Cheney and Rumsfeld felt the
humiliation of Nixon in their own bones: Hounded by the press, pressured by years of protest in the
streets, until Nixon himself huddled behind barricades in the White House during the national student
strike on more than 1000 campuses in the wake of the Kent State massacre (to which I was a reluctant
eyewitness and nearly a victim), they vowed never to let it happen again on their watch. Yet here it was:
Cheneys work as a clean-up man after a botched crime prepared him for the role of coordinator of the
defense of Reagan, who was to be protected at all costs.
Obscure until his televised role, Cheney turned his performance as devils advocate into a cross-
examination of the witnesses as Grand Inquisitor, demanding an auto-da-fe of culpability for having
betrayed their beloved President. The forceful, aggressive presentation of these opinions by Cheney not
only established his reputation but elevated him to positions in the next administrations. They might
have drawn a rebuke from Democrats, or at least a refutation as what logicians call the rhetorical fallacy
of proof by vigorous assertion. Instead, cowed by Cheney impugning them as weak and timid, they
proved his assertion that they lacked the strength of will required in a dangerous world.
The Democrats majority report argued that Reagan had licensed his overzealous aides to abuse the
powers of office he had delegated, but exculpated him of bad intentions. Sen. George Mitchell, a former
judge, went from prosecutor to defendant of himself and his party. Joined by a Republican colleague,
also from Maine, William Cohen, they co-wrote their own analysis titled, fittingly, Men of Zeal, and
deferred to a Special Prosecutor to pursue the abuses in court.67
Congressman Dick Cheney questioning Donald Regan during Iran-Contra hearing July 30, 1987. Photo
credit: C-SPAN
Cheney kept his snarl and the worldview it expressed in subsequent incarnations as Bush-1s Secretary
of Defense and Bush-2s Vice-President. When asked 20 years later, in the wake of the disaster of 9-11
that he had done nothing to prevent and everything to use as rationalization for declaring and executing a
global War on Terror, Cheney explained that it was Iran-Contra that had shaped his determination of
the necessity, even the desirability of going over to the Dark Side that he personified:
Judgments about the Iran-Contra Affair ultimately must rest upon ones views about the proper roles of
Congress and the President in foreign policy. [T]hroughout the Nations history, Congress has
accepted substantial exercises of Presidential power in the conduct of diplomacy, the use of force and
covert action which had no basis in statute and only a general basis in the Constitution itself.
[M]uch of what President Reagan did in his actions toward Nicaragua and Iran were constitutionally
protected exercises of inherent Presidential powers. [T]he power of the purse is not and was never
intended to be a license for Congress to usurp Presidential powers and functions.68

The companion or evil twin to this view was what came to be known as the unitary executive: Based
on an argument by Alexander Hamilton against a parliamentary system, the president as chief executive
also had exclusive authority over all limbs and extensions of the Executive Branch, with Congresss only
constitutional role being to advise and consent to presidential appointments and levy the taxes to provide
the revenues necessary for their functions.
In effect, Cheney had begun outlining a doctrine of the Imperial Presidency that Congress had forced
Nixon and Johnson to abandon a decade earlier unlimited authority in peace and war and therefore in
covert action. In his first public address as President, Cheney watching from the wings off the Oval
Office, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his crimes, and announced with relief, Our long national
nightmare is over. Cheney knew better: Even after being driven ignominiously from office, Nixon was
unrepentant. He went so far as to state, If the President does it, its not illegal in effect, his word
was law.69 Once installed as Vice President and arguably superior to his own boss in intellect,
experience and influence, Cheney would implement that principle in the extreme. And now, despite the
mutual contempt in which he is held by his opponents and the general public, it is Cheneys vision and
Cheneys party that has prevailed, whatever Donald Trump does in the White House. Our long national
nightmare is not over, it is not even past.
Click here to go to Part 3.

References

1. Ive borrowed from Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who borrowed it from The
Upanishads to describe the awesome power, newly concentrated in the commander-in-chief, unleashed
by the first explosion of the weapon that would annihilate a half-million people at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

2. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Viking, 1950). Barack Obama borrowed the phrase
for a poignant speech on the lingering effects of racism during the 2008 campaign for the Presidency.

3. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, first published 1852 in Die Revolution, New York, was an
essay on the coup detat that brought what later analysts called fascism to power in France.

4. The phrase belongs to the late Bruce Utah Phillips.

5. The other members of the Special Review Board were former senator and Democratic presidential
candidate Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft, a former aide to Kissinger who became George W.
Bushs National Security Adviser in 1988.

6. Tower et al, Report of the Presidents Special Review Board, published as The Tower Commission
Report, (New York: Bantam/Times Books, 1987). See also, a dissection of the Tower and congressional
reports by Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, (New York: Hill & Wang/Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1991.

7. Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1999).

8. While this argument is drawn from my own unpublished Masters thesis in the joint J.D./M.A. program
in International Law at the University of Denver [now Sturm] College of Law and [Korbel] Graduate
School of International Studies, 1977, a useful recent collection is Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds.,
with Kenneth Anderson, legal ed., Crimes of War: What the Public Needs to Know, (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1999).

9. John Prados, Presidents Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (New
York: Morrow, 1986); John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, (New York:
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1987); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions
Since World War II (updated edition, 2014); Rogue State: A Guide to the Worlds only Superpower
(Common Courage Press, 2005; London: Zed Books, 2006) ISBN: 9781567513745; The CIA: A
forgotten history, (London: Zed Books, 1986).

10. Gravel edition (4 Vols.), The Pentagon Papers, (Boston: Beacon, 1971), New York Times edition
(NY: Quadrangle, 1971); Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1972), Secrets: A
Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, (NY: Viking/Penguin, 2002; Len Ackland, Credibility
Gap: A Digest of the Pentagon Papers, (Phila.: AFSC, 1972); Peter Schrag, A Test of loyalty, (NY: Simon
& Schuster, 1974); Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, (NY: Palgrave, 2001);
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (New York: New Press, 1985, 1994); Noam Chomsky, American
Power and the New Mandarins, (New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1969); Chomsky, Edward S.
Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology: Political
Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 2 (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Paul Joseph: Cracks in the Empire:
State Politics in the Vietnam War (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Peter Dale Scott, The War
Conspiracy (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); Robert W. Chandler, War of Ideas: The U.S. Propaganda
Campaign in Vietnam, (Boulder: Westview, 1981).

11. Two of the Air Force whistleblowers were friends of mine; they also told Seymour Hersh, who
mentions the incident in his takedown of Kissinger, The Price of Power, (NY: Summit, 1983).

12. J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976); J. Fred
Emery, The corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon, (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994);
Stanley J. Cutler, Abuse of Power (NY: Free Press, 1997); Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep
Throat and the CIA (NY: Random House, 1984).

13. Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to
lntelligence Agencies, Vol.1-13; and Recommendations for the Final Report of the House Select
Committee on Intelligence, H.R. No. 94-833, 94th Congress 2nd Session, February II, 1976, more
commonly known as the Church and Pike Committees after their respective chairs, Sen. Frank Church
(DIdaho) and Rep. Otis Pike (DNY). The lead Senate staffer, Loch K. Johnson, wrote a summary, A
Season of Inquiry (U. Kentucky Press, 1985); Americas Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic
Society, (New York, Oxford, 1989) considers the Committees work in the context of the Iran-Contra
scandal, as does a colleague, Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the
Postwar World (NY: Basic Books, 1987).

14. A Harvard-trained economist and Republican, Schlesinger had been director of strategic studies of
the RAND (Research and Development) Corp., a think-tank funded by the CIA and DoD; served only
briefly as DCI (Feb.-July 1973) after Helms had been shipped off to Iran, then replaced Laird as
Secretary of Defense (1973-75), only to be fired for defying Kissinger and Fords order to bomb
Cambodia in the Mayaguez operation.

15. Colby, like Bill Casey, was a Jedburgh in the OSS; his 12 years in Vietnam included management
of the Phoenix Program as station chief. He served as DCI from July 1973 to December 1975, when he
was shoved aside as collateral damage for George H.W. Bush. Colby with Peter Forbath, Honorable
Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978); Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior
(New York: Basic Books/Perseus, 2013). Prados, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy and Presidential
Power (Austin: U. Texas, 2013).
16. Valentine, op. cit., Daniel Ellsberg,and others come up with a range of numbers, all of which pale
compared to the deaths of non-combatants from bombing, napalm, Agent Orange defoliant and other
conventional methods.

17. Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World,
(Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017).

18. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Edward J. Epstein, Deception
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989); David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (NY: Harper & Row, 1980);
David Wise, Molehunt (NY: Random House, 1992).

19. National Security Act of 1947 established both the eponymous Council chaired by the President (61
Stat.496, 50 USC 402), as amended 1949 (63 Stat.579, 50 USC 401 et seq), and the CIA (61 Stat. 497,
50 USC 403) which reported to NSC. For the Agencys formation and early exploits, see Burton Hersh,
The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, (New York: Scribners, 1992; Evan
Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1995); Arthur B. Darling,
The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950 (University Park PA:
Pennsylvania State Univ.,1990). See also, generally, John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline
of the CIA,(New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1987).

20. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1988); Richard Breitman, et
al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) provides updated
documentation released pursuant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

21. David Talbot, The Devils Chessboard (NY: HarperCollins, 2015); Stephen Kinzer & Stephen
Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the Coup in Guatemala; All the Shahs Men: An American
Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; Overthrow: Americas Century of Regime Change from
Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books/Henry Holt & CO. 2006).

22. Doolittle Commission Report, 1954, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS.

23. See n. 17 above and Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (original German edition, Mainz: Haes &
Koehler Verlag, 1971; 1st English, New York: Times Mirror, 1972) not surprisingly (translation by
Holocaust denier David Irving) whitewashes his complicity in war crimes; better but limited are Heinz
Hohne and Hermann Zolling, The General was a Spy, (1st Am. ed., New York: Coward, McCann,
Geoghegan, 1972); E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century, (New York: Random House, 1971).

24. 28 USC 535, August 1954.

25. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Project (NY: Authors Guild, 1999); See also, Neil Sheehan, A
Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann in Vietnam (NY: Random House, 1988); David Galula,
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, 1964.

26. Roger Warner, Backfire: The CIAs Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam, (NY:
Simon & Schuster, 1995); Richard H. Schultz, Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi (NY: HarperCollins,
1995).

27. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1974), quoting Kissinger at the meeting of the NSCs 40 Committee, June 27, 1970.

28. Hughes-Ryan Act, P.L. 93-559, 88 Stat. 1795, 22 U.S.C. ch. 32 2151. Rep. Leo Ryan (D-CA) was
murdered when he attempted to visit the Jonestown compound in Guyana.

29. A cogent analysis of the origin and failures of congressional oversight is found at Harold Hongju
Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran Contra Affair (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990). See also, Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the Constitution (St. Paul: The
Foundation Press, 1972). An astute scholar, Charles Howard McIlwain, explored the history of
legislative efforts to restrain despotic power of the executive, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1947), as the National Security Act sailed through Congress during the Red Scare.

30. Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (NY: Norton, 1978); The Praetorian Guard (Boston: South End,
1991); Ellen Ray et al, Dirty Work 2:The CIA in Africa (Secaucus NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1980).

31. Denver Spy Files cases, files in possession of the author.

32. Dorothy J. Samuels & James A. Goodman, How Justice Shielded the CIA, Inquiry, Oct. 16, 1978,
pp. 10-11.

33. His intentions were laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategic Framework for the
Conduct of the US-Soviet Contest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) ISBN 978-0-87113-084-6; the
explanations and excuses in Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 19771981
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983); the enduring argument with Kissinger in Out of Control:
Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century (Collier Books. 1993) ISBN 978-0-684-82636-3; the
post-Soviet framework in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
(Basic Books, 1997) ISBN 0-465-02725-3.

34. Few Afghan and Russian sources exist in English translation from the early phase of the war. See
[Editorial office of the newspaper] Haqiqat Enqelab Sawer, The True Face of the Afghan Counter-
Revolution (Kabul ,1982); Harry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, (Durham NC, Duke
Univ., 1985); J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First five Years of Occupation, (Washington DC:
National defense Univ., 1986); Antyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalists Account of the
Soviet War in Afghanistan (NY: Atlantic, 1990).

35. Robert Baer, See No Evil (NY: Crown, 2002), Milt Bearden & James Risen, The Main Enemy (NY:
Random House, 2003); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (NY: Penguin, 2004), Edward Giradet, Killing the
Cranes, (White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green Press, 2011).

36. Hersh, The Price of Power, op. cit.; Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, (London:
Verso, 2001); authors interviews with Archie Blood, author of The Blood Telegram, cables that
warned the State Dept. of the massacre of civilians by Zias troops, in Bangladesh, and prompted his
firing by Kissinger.

37. Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York: Sheridan Square Press
1993); and Gary Sick, October Surprise: Americas Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan
(New York: Random House,1991).

38. See Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of
American Hostages in Iran, Report No. 102-1102, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session. January 3, 1993;
Report of the Special
Counsel to the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Committee on Foreign
Relations, US Senate, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session. November 19, 1992. (The former probe was led by
a special counsel E. Lawrence Barcella, federal prosecutor who had been involved in investigation of ex-
CIA operatives Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil, with whom some of the key players In Iran-Contra
notably Shackley, Secord, Clines and Rafael Quintero had been associated, causing them to be
dumped from official positions by DCI Turner. The Iatter effort was led by Reid Weingarten, also on
Walshs staff.)

39. Submitted August 5, 1993, as required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1982 (28 USC 595) to
the special division of the US Court of Appeals for D.C. that appoints independent counsels under
legislation passed as a result of the Watergate scandal. The report was dated December 3, 1993, when the
court ordered its release subject to certain changes, but was not released until January 18, 1994. It
includes three main volumes. Vol. I, 566 pages, describes the 14 cases that were prosecuted and the
investigations of 17 others, and concludes with Walshs observations; Vol. 11, 787 pages, compiles the
indictments, plea agreements, and four interim reports to Congress; a 54-page Classified Appendix,
including briefs on the Classified Information Procedures Act, was withheld from the public on grounds
of national security. A companion Volume III, the largest at 1,150 pages, contains the responses of the
defendants and other subjects of investigation, including Reagan, to Walshs report. Their motions, filed
on December3, 1993, demanding that the Final Report remain sealed or censored, were released by the
court February 8, 1994; among them was a motion by North seeking to suppress the Report with
Norths own name blacked out at his request by court officers. (See AP, North purges name from files,
Rocky Mountain News, February 9, 1994.) Other materials from the investigation that are not contained
in the Final Report, some still classified, have been deposited in the National Archives; others are held,
some under seal, in the US District Courts of D.C., Maryland and Eastern Virginia (Alexandria), and the
Courts of Appeals for D.C. and the Fourth Circuit.

40. See Order of the Special Division of the US Court of Appeals for the Circuit of the District of
Columbia, December 19, 1986, quoted at Walsh, Vol. I, p. xlv.

41. Pike and Church Committees, op. cit.

42. Walsh, Vol. I, p. xiii.

43. Doug Vaughan, Roughing it with Dr. K, Westword, (Denver) Sept. 7, 1983, pp. 13-14.
44. Holly Sklar, Washingtons War on Nicaragua (Boston: South End Press, 1988): Jay Peterzell,
Reagans Secret War (Washington, D.C.: Center for National Security Studies, 1984), and Bob
Woodward, Veil: Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

45. Notably, Christopher Dickey, whose reports in the Washington Post led to a book, With the Contras
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); similarly, Sam Dillon of the Miami Herald, Comandos (NY:
Henry Holt & Co., 1991) and Brian Barger and Robert Parry, then with Associated Press. Glenn Garvin,
Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA & the Contras, (McLean VA: Brasseys, 1992) defends them.

46. Public Law 97377, Defense Appropriations Act for FY 1983, Sec. 793. The amendment was named
for its author, Rep. Edward Boland (D-Mass.). Congress rejected a bill that would have barred all covert
action funding. See lran-Contra Report, Ch. 26.

47. See Steven Emerson, Secret Warriors: lnside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era (New
York: Putnam, 1988).

48. This claim was buttressed by a State Department White Paper, debunked by Philip Agee in Warner
Poelchau, ed., White Paper? Whitewash!: Interviews With Philip Agee on the CIA and El Salvador (New
York: Deep Cover Books, 1981). See also, Stewart Klepper, The United States in El Salvador, Covert
Action, April 1981, pp. 511. David MacMichael, a contract analyst for CIA, also criticized the State
Depts paper.

49. Authors interviews with Costa Rican investigators and prosecutors, 1988-90. See also Martha
Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica (Gainesville, Univ Florida, 1994).

50. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law Unto Itself: The Law Firm of Sullivan & Cromwell (NY:
Wm. Morrow, 1988).

51. Vaughan, Details; Panama Deception Denver Post.

52. Public Papers of the President, Ronald Reagan, Vol. I, pp. 539, 541 (April 14, 1983); this position
was reiterated in an address to Congress, April 27, 1983, pp. 603-4.

53. Iran Contra Report, p. 34.

54. Authors interviews with Thomas Braden, former director of International Organizations Division,
and other retired CIA officers, 1977-95; Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone, Oct. 20,
1977; Hugh Wilford,The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-674-02681-0). See also Hersh, Prados, Ranelagh,Talbot, op. cit.

55. United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, as amendedP.L. 80-402.

56. Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (New York: Free Press,
1996), borrowed the phrase from JFK, see, William D. Rogers, The Twilight Struggle: The Alliance for
Progress and the Politics of Development in Latin America (New York, Random House, 1967), which
laid out the liberal alternative that the neocons wanted undone.

57. The mining of Nicaraguan harbors was confirmed by Karen Tumulty, House Denounces Mining,
Los Angeles Times, April 13.1984. p.I. Goldwaters complaint and Caseys apology are found at S.
Rep.. 98-665, pp. 8-10.

58. Originally added to an omnibus appropriations bill signed by Reagan October 12, 1984, similar
provisions were added to the Defense and Intelligence Authorization bills for fiscal year 1985, also
signed by Reagan.

59. Not to be confused with the pseudonym of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, a key figure in
operations going back to the Guatemala coup in 1954, the operations against Cuba, and Shackleys
predecessor as head of Western Hemisphere operations, founder of the Association of Former
Intelligence Officers.

60. Agee, On the Run, (Lyle Stuart, 1987) ISBN 0-8184-0419-1. He fled the US invasion and resided in
Cuba until his death in 2008.

61. McFarlane Testimony, Hearings, pp. 100-02, May 11. 1987, pp. 5, 20-21.

62. See Bellant, op. cit.

63. Richard Miller and Frank Gomez, among others.

64. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, op. cit, p.189.

65. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, lnside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986); Russ
Bellant, The Coors Connection (Cambridge, Mass.: Political Research Associates, 1986); and Jonathan
Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter, The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Wars
in the Reagan Era, (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Leslie Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn, Morgan
Entrekin, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administrations Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal
Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1987).

66. US v. Terrell, US v. Posey, et al. In a rare act of adversarial consensus, both prosecution and defense
agreed that the ruling, by US District Judge Norman Roettger would be determinative and they would
not appeal. Both Congress and Walsh investigated indications that Attorney General Meese intervened in
the case, obstructing justice, by ordering the US Attorney in Miami, Leon Kellner, to go slow to avoid
compromising the Contra resupply op. Kellner and staff denied they were pressured. Walsh found no
convincing evidence to the contrary. Vol. 1, pp.550-551. See also Jack Terrell with Ron Martz,
Disposable Patriot: Revelations of a Soldier in Americas Secret Wars, (Bethesda MD: National Press
Books, 1992) and authors interviews with participants and their lawyers, 1986-90.

67. Cohen and Mitchell, Men of Zeal (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1988). Cohen became Secretary of
Defense in the second Clinton Administration while Mitchell served as Democrats leader in the Senate.
After retirement, both joined Clintons Secretary of State Albright in a consulting and lobbying firm that
served as a rest-home for opponents of the second Bushs foreign policy and employment agency for
Obamas national security team.

68. Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (NY: Penguin, 2008); Jane Mayer, The Dark
Side; (NY: Doubleday, 2008); Ron Suskind, The One-Percent Doctrine (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007.)

69. Reiterated to David Frost in his televised post-resignation swan song, May 19, 1977, excerpted
http://landmarkcases.org/en/Page/722/Nixons_Views_on_Presidential_Power_Excerpts_from_a_1977_I
nterview_with_David_Frost.

Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert

Operations, Part 3
A State of Rot: Crime without Punishment

Donald Trump in background. Superimposed left to right: George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Dick
Cheney, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Photo credit: Jim Mattis / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), White
House / National Archives, US Government / Wikimedia and US National Archives / Flickr.
INTRODUCTION:
This is the third of a five-part series exploring the Iran-Contra Affair and its consequences. Part 1
described the Reagan Administrations secret wars and illegal arms deals exposed in the scandal. Part 2
explained how the constitutional crisis unfolded as a result of Congresss failure to address the CIAs
power to wage secret wars in the name of avoiding a world-ending nuclear confrontation between the
Superpowers. Part 3 exposes the roots of Iran-Contra in the Watergate scandal, but congressional
abdication of responsibility and judicial deference backfired in the restoration of the Imperial
Presidency, suppressing civil liberties and expanding wars justified as necessary to fighting the Cold
War, even as the Cold War ended with collapse of the Soviet Union. Part 4 will survey the era of global
insecurity we entered in the second Bush and Obama Administrations, while Part 5 examines the role
key members of the incoming Trump team played in creating this permanent state of war by immunizing
themselves from the consequences of past criminality.
The author, Doug Vaughan, spent years as an investigative reporter in Latin America covering the
horrors of the 1970s and 80s. In this series, he connects the secret wars and warriors past and present
to their most recent incarnation as architects of an aggressive approach to re-impose their will on the
world that has escaped their control.
Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

Triumph of the Will

.

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how
it can bear discussion and publicity. Lord Acton
The secret dominates this world, first and foremost as the secret of domination. Guy Debord
Consider:
When the candidate states (hypothetically and hyperbolically, of course) that he could shoot somebody
on the streets of Manhattan and nobody would care because hes so popular, whats to stop him now that
hes President?
When the candidate suggests we should bomb everything and go after their families, who will stop
him from committing war crimes?
Were going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop. David
Addington

Less than two weeks into his term of office why wait for the traditional 100-day mark? President
Donald John Trump has issued a series of edicts that suggest an intention to rule by fiat:
Jeopardizing the fractious alliance battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, where US troops are
again embroiled in street fighting, interrogations and dismantling a guerrilla infrastructure, he repeated a
threat to seize the resources of those countries, a direct violation of international law, as payment for an
invasion and 14-year long occupation that he himself has disclaimed as wrong-headed if not illegal.
In direct contradiction to allied signatories, he threatened to withdraw from the treaty under which Iran
agreed to forsake development of nuclear weapons, imposed economic sanctions unilaterally in arguable
breach of that treaty, issued threats of war (also illegal under international law) because Iran tested an
intermediate (500-mile) range missile not covered by that treaty, and bombed rebels in Yemen supported
by Iran for allegedly firing on a US naval vessel supporting the Saudi invasion of that country.
With little preparation of the enforcers in his Department of Homeland Security or for the consequences
abroad, if not the outrage provoked at home, he effectively suspended immigration from seven countries
that have little or no connection to terrorist acts in the United States, including employees of US
companies and the US military, family members of US citizens who had already been granted visas,
refugees granted asylum who had already submitted to severe vetting in extensive interviews over
several months, and legal permanent residents with valid work permits who had left temporarily, as
required by the law, to renew their visas.
He fired the acting Attorney General who refused to enforce his edict on grounds it was illegal, then
resorted to Twitter to blast as a coddler of terrorists a so-called federal judge (appointed by George W.
Bush and confirmed by Congress) who granted a temporary stay of his order so that its illegality might
be reviewed by a higher court.
He issued a decree reshuffling the National Security Councils Principals Committee (traditionally
consisting of the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and the Attorney
General) so as to replace the Director of National intelligence and the Chairman of the military Joint
Chiefs of Staff with his own political strategist, Stephen Bannon, an advocate of overtly fascist ideology
and war against a religion with over a billion adherents.
He ordered the agencies responsible for counter-terrorism including the FBI to remove domestic
advocates of violence against the government and fellow citizens from their watch-lists in order to
concentrate on suspected radical islamists.
He unilaterally revoked US compliance with terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement,
repeated threats to somehow force Mexico to pay for a 1,500-mile long wall, perhaps by imposing a
tariff or restrictions on repatriation of earnings by Mexican residents in the US, and joked about
sending troops across that border to deal with bad hombres if Mexico does not comply.
He has ordered a moratorium on enforcement of the environmental laws and regulations of pollutants
and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement that limits carbon emissions that induce global warming and
the threat of human extinction.
In his first known military operation abroad, he took time out while dining with his children to sign a
National Security Decision Directive authorizing a team of Navy Seals to attack a compound in Yemen
where they missed the target, lost a $70 million Osprey vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) airplane,
but managed to kill a still-unknown number of civilians including the 8-year old daughter of Anwar al-
Awlaki, a US citizen (born in Las Cruces NM) who was killed by a Predator drone along with his 16-
year old son (born in Denver) in 2011.
His newly confirmed Director of Central Intelligence appointed as his top deputy for covert operations
a known advocate and alleged participant in torture; indeed, having followed illegal orders to commit
war crimes seems to be her main qualification.
Donald, what took you so long?
You would be well-advised to watch what we do, not what we say This countrys going to
go so far to the right you wont recognize it. John Mitchell

The pace has been relentless, the reaction fierce but how long it can be sustained is debatable. This flurry
of executive orders and presidential memos, contradictory explanations and confusing if not incoherent
tweets all should have been expected. But these are only the known knowns. Unless revealed by
some sudden disaster, what has been done in secret may take years to uncover, as the Watergate and
Iran-Contra crises showed. Whatever else the Trump team is up to, they are playing by the rules laid out
by Dick Cheney in the first term of George W. Bush as lessons learned from earlier adventures in the
Imperial Presidency:
Were going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.1

President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the White House Blue Room, December 15, 2006.
Photo credit: The US National Archives / Flickr
And as past events show, dont expect Congress or the courts, those vaunted checks and balances of the
Constitution, to stop him until its too late. Cheney, having offered his support and advice to Trump after
the drubbing of Jeb Bush, may have quibbled with the excess of Trumps immigration ban but he
certainly must have recognized the logic behind it:
It was, after all, an exertion of political will power that only respects greater power an expression
of the doctrine of executive authority Cheney himself has championed since he first entered public
service as an assistant to Richard Nixon 50 years ago, argued as Gerald Fords chief of staff in the wake
of the Watergate scandal, refined and outlined most clearly during the Iran-Contra scandal 30 years ago,
revived as George H.W. Bushs Secretary Defense, and executed himself with a vengeance as they
say as Vice President under George W. Bush.
We should have seen it coming. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, his campaign manager, law
partner, and nominee as Attorney General, John Mitchell, warned, You would be well-advised to watch
what we do, not what we say2 This countrys going to go so far to the right you wont recognize it.3

It is no coincidence that Mitchell made the first of those remarks at a meeting with civil rights leaders
dismayed by his decision not to endorse the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and to slow the pace of court-
ordered desegregation of public schools. Mitchell declared his Justice Department would be a law
enforcement agency, not engaged in social work. He was Nixons wedge in dividing Democrats after the
open appeal to segregationists by the Goldwater campaign in 1964 that led the Republican Party to
embrace the Southern Strategy of abandoning black voters in the south in favor of former southern
Democrats like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, strategists like Lee Atwater and later Trent Lott, and
now, the Trump Administrations nominee for Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. This
was a well-modulated, lawyerly and courtly racism without openly espousing the violence of the Ku
Klux Klan, a new rejection of Reconstruction like the electoral Compromise of 1876 without the robes
and hoods: The chief law enforcement agency would ignore the enforcement of the law.
Instead, Mitchell called for no-knock raids without warrants, warrantless wiretapping of suspects, stop-
and-frisk searches without warrants, defying the constitutional limits of the 4th and 5th Amendments on
police power while disclaiming any racial motive yet knowing the effects would be monstrously racist
selective enforcement. But they over-reached, at least temporarily.
For criminals in power, every scandal is based on the leak of a secret, and the leak itself
demonstrates that the leaker is considered a traitor and the reporter an accomplice to treason.
Impunity for the criminal is the necessary solution to the problem of law.

As for the second quote, that was implied by the first: A secret plan revealed in action:
Mitchell had been a bond lawyer who worked closely with the governor of New York, Nelson
Rockefeller, to craft a new form of municipal bond that effectively removed the voters from decisions
about public debt and put public finance in the hands of bankers and their lawyers, who not only knew
better what was good and right for the rest of us but were bound by attorney-client privilege to keep their
deliberations secret.4 This is now the standard operating procedure in the US and the model extended
through US power to the world.
Like the bond lawyers who effectively ran foreign policy in the Eisenhower Administration, John Foster
and Allen Dulles at the State Department and CIA, respectively, Nixon and Mitchell ran their
administration like a secret intelligence operation compartmentalized top to bottom on a need-to-know
basis. And that, too, has become the model for executive decision-making with rare exceptions that
prove the rule.
Criminal conspiracies require secrecy, by definition; but to continue when secrecy is breached, a
conspiracy requires impunity for the highly-placed authors of the crimes, not merely a grant of immunity
from prosecution to the accomplices but forgiveness in the name of the State. The doctrine of executive
privilege reinforces official secrecy:
All acts and communications of the chief executive are official secrets, unauthorized revelation of which
is punishable as a crime even if the executive acts are illegal or evidence of illegality by others. But if the
President does it in the name of national security, its not illegal because the chief executive decides
what is or is not legal. And the corollary, whats called the unitary executive doctrine, extends this
principle of official lawlessness to any act authorized by the chief executive. Perversely, this makes
secrecy an accomplice to a lie.
And paradoxically, the only check on secrecy is the unauthorized, potentially criminal revelation of the
secret, the leak. Among the conspirators, however, the adroit if not judicious deployment of the leak
confers great power to insulate oneself, to punish rivals or discipline slackers, confuse the enemy,
especially when the press or a segment of the public itself is perceived as the enemy.
The Nixon Administration made this an art form in the pursuit of executive power, even to its own
undoing. Its not a far leap from an enemies list that includes political opponents and critics and
reporters (Nixons henchmen even conceived of the kidnapping and possible killing of reporters) to a
definition of the media as the opposition party. For criminals in power, every scandal is based on the
leak of a secret, and the leak itself demonstrates that the leaker is considered a traitor and the reporter an
accomplice to treason. Impunity for the criminal is the necessary solution to the problem of law.
Hubris is the usual source of tragedy: The domestic intelligence operation against opponents produced
the burglary at the Democratic Partys offices in the Watergate complex by an illegal secret police unit
attempting to plant and retrieve illegal wiretaps on the telephones, a form of surveillance now
accomplished by hacking computerized communications. Nixon was impeached, forced to resign, then
pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, on the advice of his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, among others.
Mitchell, the chief judicial officer in the land, had been convicted and imprisoned for obstructing justice.
The massive and illegal (warrantless), domestic surveillance operation at the heart of
Watergate, involved the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, DIA and military intelligence operatives in a
secret war against the American people.

Meet the Ench

.

Lets go see The Ench, a friend said. It was my second encounter with the Big Enchilada, John
Mitchell. After his release from prison Mitchell had divorced his blabbermouth wife Martha and was
shacking up with my friends aunt in their familys declasse mansion, a bastardized French chateau on a
wooded hill in horse country overlooking a big bend of the Potomac. As we came through the big
double-door of the portico, the former Attorney General of the United States was slowly shuffling down
the staircase, his paunch barely covered by the aunts tattered mauve housecoat, nursing a three-day
growth of stubble on his famous jowls and a hangover only marginally worse than my own.
Hey, Ench, hows it hanging? my friend offered. Mitchell grunted something unintelligible not
well, judging from his gait and padded off toward the kitchen in the aunts fuzzy slippers, one gout-
afflicted hobble and shuffle after the next. My friend poured some orange juice, Mitchell gave him a
baleful look, my friend poured a hefty glug of vodka into the glass. The Ench took a sip, gave my friend
another skeptical look, another shot was administered; satisfied, Mitchell lifted a whos this? brow
towards me. We had met, actually, at my friends bachelor party at the old Jockey Club of the Fairfax
Hotel on Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle where my friends Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen
Moffitt had been blown up by terrorists hired by the Chilean military empowered by the Nixon
administration. But I didnt mention that operation, which came after Mitchells defenestration, when
Ford, Kissinger, Cheney and CIA Director Bush were running the show. I wanted to know what only the
Ench knew about what he called the White House horrors at his trial, and what that might portend for
the current horrors now that so many of the unindicted co-conspirators were back in power in the
Reagan administration. I wanted a peek in Pandoras box of still-secret horrors inside the great head of
the Sphinx.

John Mitchell and President Nixon in January 1969. Photo credit: The White House / Wikimedia.
Instead of asking directly for secrets, I told him I only had two questions: Did he believe the rumor that
his future brother-in-law, my friends father, a renowned raconteur of liberal pedigree was Deep
Throat, the secret source who had revealed key details of the Watergate cover-up to Bob Woodward of
the Washington Post that ultimately brought down Nixon, the Ench himself and (almost) all the
Presidents men, based on a violation of whispered whiskied confidences exchanged over that same
well-worn bar at the Jockey Club when the Ench was embroiled in Watergate but didnt want to go home
to that nagging wife of his?
Fuck no! he said, screwing up his face into a familiar snarling snort of disbelief. I had asked my
friends father the same question and got the same response, only with a bemused bourbon-y smirk
instead of spraying orange juice across that table. But they had both mulled it over, it was plausible, and
hashed it out, suggesting other possibilities. Ok, then. Question #2: Casey?
The Ench pursed and puckered his lips, as if the OJ had soured, then nodded his head affirmatively. He
had considered that, too. Then he uttered a Mitchellian harrumph of scoffing contempt. Sneaky son of a
bitch. But no, Mitchell said. His old friend Bill Casey was a schemer capable of almost infinite
deception and even greater betrayal, especially in defense of his own credibility, accumulated wealth, or
the future field of action that money and reputation held open. But Casey, like the Ench, was a skilled
bridge player. Bluffing was for poker, a simpler game. Casey would want to keep his options, and when
the Watergate investigators turned from the burglars hush-money to the smell of cover-up in the Oval
Office, peripheral players bolted for the exits. The Vesco case got Mitchell and Commerce Secretary
Stans, another old intelligence operative, indicted. Casey had been an intermediary for the bagmen and
launderers of illegal cash but had not purchased his own immunity with evidence of Mitchells
complicity, of that the Ench was sure. Stans took the fall for that one. Casey had gone back to his tax-
advice practice, then resurfaced as Ronald Reagans campaign manager and director of Central
Intelligence, keeper of secrets, manager of the flow into the White House and out, too, in the form of
leaks that concealed even more secret crimes.
Haig? Cheney? Rumsfeld? I wouldnt put it past any of em. Self-important assholes but bit players
back then. But nah, they were never in the loop. He paused, took another swig of vodkated breakfast.
Not then, anyway. Not that part of the loop anyway. Bush-leaguers. He meant baseball novices but I
took the cue. My friend poured some more.
Ok, Bush, was he in the loop? No, as chairman [of the Republican National Committee] he was always
sticking his nose in the tent but he wasnt clued in. If he knew anything he knew better than to say so,
and kept his mouth shut, biding his time, even at CIA. I think that was ol Press influence. (Sen Prescott
Bush, George H.W.s father.) Like father, like son. Neither one knew when to strike.
Inman, then? The CIAs deputy director under Adm. Stansfield Turner in the Carter Administration had
been chief of the the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) where Woodward had worked before becoming
a reporter. Too far afield, said the Ench. The CIA was so up to their ass in shit and wanted no part of
what Hunt and Liddy were up to, thats why we had to get Helms out of Dodge. Schlesinger [Helmss
successor as DCI for four months before replacing Melvin Laird at Defense] didnt know squat thats
why he had his boys round up the Family Jewels and that boy scout Colby simply let it all out. But
none of them were in the loop for Watergate.
This requires some explanation (see Parts 1 and 2): Helms, Director of CIA since JFK fired Allen Dulles
in 1962, was named Ambassador to the Court of the Shah of Iran as Watergate ensnared the Ench in
1973. The palace of the Peacock Throne and the massive Embassy became safe-houses for the man who
kept the secrets.5 But Helms was brought back to testify about the long list of illegalities, the Family
Jewels compiled on orders of interim DCI James Schlesinger. Helms brought himself down by his own
lies to Congress about the secret war that deposed the elected government of Chile in 1973, details of
which emerged because Colby released the Family Jewels to congressional committees and publication
in their multi-volume reports, trapping his old colleague Helms in a perjury rap. The massive and illegal
(warrantless), domestic surveillance operation at the heart of Watergate, involved the CIA, DIA, FBI,
NSA, DIA and military intelligence operatives in a secret war against the American people.6

Mitchell was musing over possible suspects for Deep throat at CIA. Angleton, the counter-intelligence
maven whose lines went out everywhere? Now there was one weird son-of-a-bitch. Certainly capable
of it. He actually thought the whole Sino-Soviet split was just a ruse, a strategic deception and
everybody who told us the situation was ripe for exploitation must be a secret Soviet mole, even
Kissinger, fer chrissakes! Everybody else figured Angletons paranoia was paralyzing the Agency so
maybe he was his own damn mole, hah! He chewed it over.
No, I always figured it was that fucking Mormon, Felt.
No shit? Mark Felt? Felt had risen to #2 in J. Edgar Hoovers FBI and fully expected to be named
director by Nixon when Hoover died in May 1972, much to the relief of everyone who had survived his
48-year reign-of-terror. Much to Felts disappointment, the job went to Mitchells guy, L. Patrick Gray.
So, at minimum, Felt had a motive. By then, what Nixon had dismissed to the press as a third-rate
burglary of the Watergate had already been botched, which begged the question of why two former CIA
guys, (Howard Hunt, James McCord) an FBI man (G. Gordon Liddy) and five Cuban gunsels (Bernard
Barker, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis), their pockets stuffed with $100 bills and
locksmith tools, were there in first place, that fateful June 17, 1972. Nixons inner circle pondered
whether the CIA had set them up. They connived to keep their burglars mouths shut, the start of the
cover-up, the leaks and the loud noises that ended the quiet option starting with McCords
confessional letter to Judge John Sirica. That really bothered the Ench.
In July, Gray unleashed Felt to pursue radical opponents of the Vietnam War: Hunt to exhaustion. No
holds barred.7 Officially, Hoover had banned those black-bag jobs for six years, fearing their exposure
could loosen his hold on the Bureau. With Grays go-ahead, Felt and the head of the intelligence
division, Edwin S. Miller, authorized special units to wiretap and surveill friends and relatives, even
break into the homes and offices of suspected terrorists to prevent violence and other subversive acts
rather than to wait until the bomb has exploded. A diversion? Concocted by Gray to keep Felt out of the
Watergate loop or vice versa, there were more theories than facts but plenty of facts pointing in many
directions. No, that was something the Ench had been trying to get Hoover to do since they came in.
Although I didnt bring it up to Mitchell, I took a personal interest in this because I held Nixon and the
Ench, his enforcer, responsible for trying to kill me at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when
National Guardsmen gunned down friends of mine. (Yes, its a reach, but I cant lay out the somewhat
attenuated chain of evidence here, even now.) There was something else nagging me then: Because I had
once known people who had gone into the Weather Underground back in 1969 and 1970, I had always
suspected that FBI agents dispatched by Felt and Miller were responsible for a series of break-ins of my
own home and office throughout the 1970s, but I could never prove what the FBI and local cops denied.
Stories of the FBI break-ins broke in Los Angeles and Chicago the summer of 1976, while I was in law
school. I wrote a series of articles, later gathered into book form, based on several thousand pages of
documents I obtained and confirmed by interviews with an FBI operative, called Burglar for the FBI.
He had been recruited out of high school, continued in college, and showed pay stubs for seven years as
a snitch for the FBI and the Denver Police Dept.s Intelligence Bureau (DPD-IB), both of whom
interceded now and then to get him released on second-story jobs and drug deals conducted on his own
account. He also turned out to be a Nazi whose nightrider pals shotgunned a local bookstore, broke into
another where my wife and other friends worked, and destroyed offices of a feminist newspaper in a
night-ride with fellow Nazis and Klansmen. We also suspected them of blowing up 50 schoolbuses to
protest a federal judges desegregation order. All these crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished
despite the informants reporting them to his FBI handlers.
My profile of a long-term snitch and agent provocateur drew national attention (Garry Wills cited it in
his nationally syndicated column, it was placed in the Congressional Record) and additional
unwanted attention from the FBI that lead to more stories. One showed how another FBI informant, a
classmate at law school, not only spied on us but was also a Nazi who consorted with a group that, years
later, gunned down a Jewish talk-show host on whose program I had appeared. Another series exposed a
Boulder-based drug-dealer who worked with the DPD-IB to (unsuccessfully) use a fugitive heroin addict
to entrap striking workers from the Coors brewery into making bombs. The FBI connection was an agent
in San Francisco whose brother reported on the supposed terrorist connection for a Denver radio station.
Instigating such attacks by right-wing extremists on the left was part of a nationwide, even international
pattern, culminating in the murder of five members of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro NC,
in 1979 by a group of Klansmen and Nazis that included local police and FBI informants who warned
their bosses in advance.8

While we were trying to make sense of all this, a grand jury in Washington indicted Gray, Felt and
Miller in April 1978 for five specific burglaries. (My own case and stories did not figure into this, so far
as I know.) Felts declaration that he would do it all over again, if ordered, presaged the pre-emptive
spirit of the future. He quoted Thomas Jefferson: To lose our country by scrupulous adherence to the
written law would be to lose the law itself. This trope recurs whenever an official lawbreaker seeks to
immunize himself by way of an ex ante pardon. Just following orders was the moral equivalent of the
devil made me do it.

Mark Felt over aerial view of the Watergate complex. Photo credit: US Government / Wikimedia and
Indutiomarus / Wikimedia.
Felt and Miller, tried separately, were convicted despite testimony from Nixon himself that he had
authorized the Huston Plan, which included black-bag jobs clearly illegal except that his
authorization in the name of national security made it legal: All these concerns were greatly
magnified.by the fact that in 1969, 70, 71, we were at war. He invoked the specter of communist
subversion. Terrorism overseas was a threat. We are concerned it might happen here. So, he testified,
extreme measures were necessary and when he ordered them what would otherwise be unlawful or
illegal becomes legal.
Alrighty, then. Problem solved. Thanks, Dick. And while were at it, quod erat demonstrandum. It
proves itself.
On Nov. 6, the jury convicted Felt and Miller oh, the irony rejecting Nixons defense of the man
who had secretly helped force his resignation six years earlier. The next day, Reagan was elected.
Prosecutors dropped the case against Gray. The court gave Felt and Miller a suspended sentence,
probation and a small fine, but in March 1981, Reagan pardoned them unconditionally, completely.
Echoing Nixon on the witness stand, Reagan declared:
Four years ago thousands of draft evaders and others who violated the Selective Service laws were
unconditionally pardoned by my predecessor. America was generous to those who refused to serve their
country in the Vietnam war. We can be no less generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring
an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.
Hearing that, I could only scream at the TV set. Generous? I refused to go to Vietnam. When Nixon
unleashed his war on dissenters like me, he also unleashed the National Guard that shot at me for no
other reason than shouting at them, wounding a dozen friends and killing four of them. Reagan, then
Governor of California, had threatened as much a few weeks earlier: If theres going to be a bloodbath,
let it be now.9 From Reagans mouth to Nixons ear to Gov. James Rhodes running for reelection in
Ohio, figure of speech took shape in uniform. The Guardsmen who ordered and fired that fusillade were
never jailed.
Thousands of us had to leave the country to avoid prosecution. Others went to jail for up to five years. I
served two years involuntary servitude at bare subsistence wage, $145 a month, no benefits, as a
conscientious objector only to be threatened with five years in prison by none other than Donald
Rumsfeld, then Nixons hatchet-man at the Office of Economic Opportunity, later Fords Chief of Staff
for the Nixon pardon, special envoy of Reagan and Bush-1 who delivered word to Saddam Hussein that
there would be no penalty for using nerve gas on rebellious Kurds, Bush-2s Secretary of Defense for the
contrived invasion of Iraq. My crime: declaring antiwar views and criticizing Nixons domestic policies
in a newsletter published by our legal office for indigent clients. Now here, ten years later was Reagan
again, pardoned arch-criminal Nixon applauding, encouraging criminals to go out and commit more
crimes.
Sure enough, Reagan would launch another war on domestic dissent over his wars in Central America
almost immediately upon taking office. It came in the form of an executive order, classified secret for
reasons of national security, that authorized surveillance and intelligence-gathering by other undisclosed
methods where counter-intelligence information against foreign spies or agents of a foreign power
might be involved. And since anyone who opposed Reagans policies was acting in support of a
government like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were supported by Cuba, and Cuba allegedly was
acting on behalf of the Soviet Union, ipso facto and presto chango, any such person might reasonably be
suspected as an agent of a foreign power, perhaps even a supporter of a terrorist organization, such as the
opponents of the Salvadoran regime. Suspicion was enough to make fact.
Res ipsa loquitor. The thing speaks for itself. Or reductio ad absurdum, take your pick. And consider
that Trumps mentor after his father died was Nixons ally in the McCarthy witch-hunts, the inveterate
Red-baiter and slimeball, Roy Cohn.10

The domestic application of this principle showed in strange places, including the newsroom. My third
informer-provocateur had reappeared as sympathetic landlord for antinuclear activists. He helpfully
provided them with a phone line so he could report their conversations to his handlers, then spied on and
tried to sabotage their legal defense when protesters were arrested for blocking the railroad tracks into
the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant along with, among others, Daniel Ellsberg, the famous leaker of
the Pentagon Papers. That led to a series about thefts of explosives from a missile silo and a series on
secret plans to evacuate the city of Denver in event of nuclear war.11 I suppose that any of these stories
might have brought me back to the attention of the Bureau even if I hadnt blown their informers cover.
(As a form of penance, I suppose, Sy the Velveteen Snitch as we called him, later became a source for
other reporters on Colorados connections to the Iran-Contra scandal.)
It was about that time, coincidentally, that my editor at the Washington Post advised me that my services
were no longer required, despite having contributed to the Posts Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the
attempted assassination of Reagan12, as well as a series on Nazis running amok and former CIA
personnel working for Col. Qaddafi in Libya.13 She said she had heard from sources she could not
reveal! that I was a member of that organization that youre writing about. Huh? Had she simply
accused me of being a radical, a leftist, even a communist, I would have happily confessed. But this was
a different litmus test. Yes, weve heard that youre part of the nuclear freeze movement. Arent you?
she demanded.
First, I explained, its a movement, not an organization so Im not a member. I personally support a
freeze on nuclear weapons, I told her, but so does the President, according to the Post. Hes a recent
convert, just a little late coming around to my way of thinking. That was my last paycheck from the Post.
I shopped my wares to the Times instead. I always wondered whether that editor, an otherwise sensible
person, had gotten a call from her supervisor, and whether her boss had gotten a call from the FBI, or
whatever: If the errant gumshoes, gullible editors or dour James Jesus Angleton and his acolytes, some
of whom were sources and even friends of mine, thought I was a Soviet agent, they were stupider than I
thought, and that was mighty stupid.
Censorship starts from the inside with a shared assumption based on ideological consensus about
acceptable limits, then proceeds to self-censorship for fear of embarrassment long before theres need for
imposition of thought controls from outside by the government. Nixon, Reagans advisers, Cheney were
masters at intimidation and getting the media to internalize the limits that were acceptable to their
definition of acceptable. Now, somewhat heavy handedly, were seeing a similar effort from Trumps
minions, Bannon, KellyAnne Conway, Sean Spicer and the latest incarnation of the great Republican
noise machine coupled to the alt-right trolliverse.
Fast backward thirty years this week to the Iran-Contra scandal:
As supposedly unrelated (dare we say, compartmentalized) hearings on the Iran-Contra dragged from
days into weeks down the hall, the FBIs executive assistant director was testifying to another hearing
before the House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Rep. Don Edwards (D.-CA) a former FBI agent,
fierce critic of Hoovers political espionage disguised as counter-intelligence. The man who succeeded
W. Mark Felt in the job, Oliver Buck Revell, was in the hot seat. Asked what his vaunted Bureau knew
about burglaries at offices of groups opposed to Reagans policies in Central America, nada, he said. But
hadnt the Bureau investigated this suspicious pattern of at least 58 break-ins documented by the Center
for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild since 1981? Zilch, said Revell. It was news to
him. Not on his radar. Too busy chasing terrorists and such. Perhaps the FBIs lack of investigative
enthusiasm indicated the Bureaus involvement in the crimes it chose not to investigate, we wondered.
Oh, no, that would be off-limits. Thats not legal under the FBIs charter and the restrictions imposed
after revelations of such dirty tricks a few years before. There was a catch: The FBI is not involved in
any burglaries or any other illegal activities as an institution, Revell said. This nuance caught the
skeptical ear of Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-CO). Schroeder herself had been a target of earlier FBI
break-ins during the Felt witch-hunts, in her first run for Congress as an anti-war critic. Her campaign
manager and staff guy was a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, prominently featured in my
series on the informant who had broken into her home. I dont really think FBI agents are doing this,
she said, but there might be a little privatization going on.14

Revell denied that informants had been hired to do what agents werent doing. But private contractors
drawn from the ranks of retired FBI guys, like Wackenhut or other companies? He demurred.
There was an even more sinister side: Salvadorans opposed to the US-supported war on their homeland
could be deported, jailed, even tortured. The FBI recruited a U.S. citizen born in El Salvador, to infiltrate
the Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). He later produced the evidence
necessary to justify the infiltration, claiming CISPES was run by communists that might even be
gasp! planning to assassinate the President. There was no basis for the claim but the FBI used it to
expand the operations and justify collaboration with the Salvadoran death-squads.
Perhaps the greatest scandal of the Iran-Contra scandal is that these mass murders in El
Salvador and more in Guatemala committed by US-paid, trained, supplied, advised, even
commanded troops never were considered scandalous enough to merit official denunciation,
investigation, or prosecution of the criminals and their accomplices.

Or Guatemalans: In 1975 I had travelled through Guatemala as part of research on my masters thesis.
Across Lake Atitlan from Panajachel, beneath a smoking volcano of the same name, nestled the idyllic
little town of Santiago Atitlan, not yet emerged as a tourist destination because it was isolated at the end
of a bumpy mud and rubble road around the lake. The family that took me in told me that I could use the
spare room they kept in case their teenaged children came home from school in Antigua, the old colonial
capital close to Guatemala City. I asked when they were expected. The father shrugged and turned away;
the mother began to cry.
They would never come home because they had disappeared one day after school. Months passed, years
of worry, loss of hope. Then came word that an old well had been found near the Honduran border. In
the well were bones of victims of the police and military, the political archaeology of the country going
down to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected reformer Jacobo Arbenz and installed the dictatorship
that still ruled. The old couple didnt know yet whether their kids had been murdered, or whether, as the
police dismissively told them and they secretly hoped, they had run away, perhaps to join the Poor
Peoples Army, the group the US called terrorists. If so, it was the US and its allies who made them that
way not the Evil Empire of international communism and its well-meaning fellow-travelling dupes and
useful idiots like me.
A few years later, I returned to Guatemala and looked up that couple. The husband had hired out to
seasonal work on the Pacific littoral, picking coffee and cotton for a big Japanese company. His wife
worked from home, stitching garments on a loom for sale to tourists off the boat from Panajachel. When
the boat pulled up, little kids with bloated bellies from malnutrition, hands outstretched, begged
takepitch for coins tossed by the camera-wielding visitors. Soldiers from far away had been posted at
a local barracks to keep the villagers safe from the terrorists, their lieutenant told me. The army had
burned whole villages in the mountains, killing thousands. Again.
Those kids and their parents were the people Reagan and his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, called
terrorists, who Second Amendment be damned had no right to defend themselves by force of arms
against their tormentors. The contras in Nicaragua, on the other hand, were freedom fighters and the
Sandinistas were guilty of exporting terrorism to Guatemala and El Salvador by sending what weapons
they could spare from their own self-defense. Three times in his first year in office, Haig had called for
Reagan to strike back at Cuba to fix the problem at its source, a replay of the Bay of Pigs that could lead
to another Missile Crisis, perhaps nuclear war. Cooler heads prevailed, Haig was dumped in mid-1982,
Kissinger was brought in to concoct a plan, and deadly military support for the brutal Salvadoran and
Guatemalan regimes proceeded apace as low-intensity warfare a crime known to the victims but
not to the folks back home praising Reagan for standing up to the Evil Empire, blissfully ignorant of
their own. My only crime, also called free speech, was the public advocacy of their right to self-defense
by whatever means they chose for themselves as appropriate. Is that why my office on the second floor
of a seedy hotel in Denver kept getting burglarized? Or was it my piddling financial support to a local
church that offered sanctuary to immigrants threatened with deportation to the torture chambers or
fleeing the search-and-destroy missions Felix Rodriguez and Ollie North were so proud to inflict on
people who only wanted to be left with a patch for corn and beans?15

This was not a rhetorical question: In January 1982 both the New York Times and Washington Post,
alerted by activists in El Salvador, independently confirmed discovery of a massacre of more than 700
villagers, many of them refugees from other such sites, by the Salvadoran army at El Mozote. Haigs top
deputy for Latin America, Thomas Enders, declared that an investigation by two Embassy staffers
showed conclusively theres no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred
civilians.
Congress accepted Enderss word and dutifully approved $200 million in military and economic support
for the Salvadoran government. In a campaign orchestrated by the Office of Public Diplomacy with help
from compliant newspapers and ideologically suborned editors, Reagan worshippers accused the
reporters for the two leading newspapers of being duped by rebels and their Communist sympathizers
Vietnam-style propaganda. Coverage of the war receded and the State Department repeatedly certified
progress in meeting human rights standards.
Twelve years and $6 billion later and not coincidentally, the deaths of perhaps 50,000 and another
250,000 driven from their homes to become refugees the initial lie was finally exposed: The Embassy
staff had reported to Washington that the Army had refused to allow them anywhere near the site but the
survivors had described the massacre in detail sufficient for them to conclude it was a fact. The staffers,
Maj. John McKay and Todd Greentree, had reported the massacre as fact and the State Department
pretended it didnt happen, then sold this lie to continue the massacres with impunity.16
Perhaps the greatest scandal of the Iran-Contra scandal is that these mass murders in El Salvador and
more in Guatemala committed by US-paid, trained, supplied, advised, even commanded troops never
were considered scandalous enough to merit official denunciation, investigation, or prosecution of the
criminals and their accomplices. Secrecy and lies bred acquiescence and complicity, guaranteed and
reinforced by silence and impunity. Elliot Abrams, for example, repeatedly certified, gave his word, his
personal guarantee that Gen. Elias Rios Montt was a devoted democrat forced by communist subversion
to pacify the country so his successor Vicente Cerezo, a progressive reformer, deserved US assistance to
establish a model democracy even though their own people, whom they murdered by the thousands,
finally have put Rios Montt on trial for acts of genocide against the 440 Mayan indigenous
communities he ravaged.17

Meanwhile, back at that House subcommittee hearing on illegal FBI surveillance of the new anti-war
and sanctuary movement, a lawyer explained that in most of the suspicious, politically inspired break-
ins, the burglars only took membership lists of the organizations that opposed Reagans policies. What
did FBI do with these lists? Did they open investigations to spy on people? Did they break into their
houses or workplaces? Did they send their names or share intelligence with foreign governments? Did
they arrest and deport people to countries where they might be tortured?
Of course. But there were never answers, only silence and secrecy from the organs of the state.

Only after Felt broke his silence in 2005 did Woodward confirm that he was Deep Throat.18 By then,
many of the players in Watergate were dead, too, including Nixon and his Big Enchilada, Mitchell.
Nixon had been resurrected by the Reagan-Bush era, a trusted adviser even to Clinton. Forgive and
forget. My own view was better off dead, the title of an epitaph in which I wrote about showing my
daughter the memorials in our nations capital including that invisible one, the imagined Nixon
Memorial, a wall that stretched from the White House to the Capitol dome as high as Washingtons
monument, etched with the unknown names of the unnamed victims of the wars in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia.19

Those wars were behind us, Reagan said. Its morning again in America. But I remembered what the
Ench said: Watch what we do, not what we say. This countrys going to go so far right you wont
recognize it.
The televised, public Iran-Contra hearings consumed the better part of four months from May to August
1987. Perfectly staged for a telegenic soldier, they made gap-toothed Ollie North hero to the right, not
for glory in battle but for traducing his oath to the constitution and the military code of justice. After ten
months of investigation by hundreds of congressional staff and specially commissioned researchers,
depositions and transcribed interviews of more than 500 witnesses, perused and cross-referenced and
indexed over a million pages of documents, their Report declared limply, Tragedies like the Iran-contra
affair unite our people in their resolve to find answers, draw lessons, and avoid a repetition. More tragic
still, although the Report itself is a stupendously detailed account of a small aspect of a colossal criminal
conspiracy, the Congress set the stage not only to repeat such tragedies but to perpetuate them. The
fact is that most if not all members are going to support the continuation of covert activities, concluded
Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine). Secret wars, overthrowing governments, assassinations.20

Well, no. Assassinations were still illegal. After revelations of the Family Jewels and the Church
Committee, President Ford had issued an executive order in 1976 banning the CIA from participating in
the murder of a foreign head of state or other political official.21 Carter had renewed and extended it in
1978.22 Reagan had repeated the ban in his own executive order on Dec. 4, 1981. Having been victim of
an attempted assassination himself, Reagan declared no person employed by or acting on behalf of the
United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. He added that no
agency of the intelligence community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities
forbidden by this order.23

Notwithstanding this direct order from the boss, Bill Caseys CIA promptly hired a Vietnam veteran with
experience in the Phoenix Project to write up a manual called Psychological Operations in Guerrilla
Warfare. Dutifully if badly translated into a form of classroom Spanish virtually unintelligible to a
peasant who had not been allowed to benefit from the Cuban-led literacy program of the Sandinistas, it
counseled targeted killing murder of political officials down to the level of village leaders and
supporters of the government:
It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judgespolice and state
security officials, CDAS [community defense committee] chiefs, etc.
Exposed in 1984 by a disgusted Contra, none of this criminal conspiracy against a direct order of the
President entered into the deliberations of Congress. No CIA officer or employee was prosecuted for
ordering, writing, publishing, distributing, or teaching this suggested method of democratic persuasion,
although a reprimand may have been issued to a half dozen.24

Needless to say, Congress did not investigate the administration for implementing exactly this Phoenix-
style program systematically in El Salvador and Guatemala. Nor did any court measure the legality of
engaging proxies in attempting to kill Sheik Fadlallah in 1985 with dozens of dead as collateral damages
in Beirut. Nor Qaddafi in air raids in 1986 because the attacks on his compound, which killed his
adopted daughter among other non-combatants, were part of an authorized military operation. So, given
the pattern of immunity and impunity, the Bush Administration allegedly plotted to kill Saddam Hussein
during his trips between Baghdad, Basra and Kuwait in 1991. And the Clinton regime almost killed
Somali Gen. Mohammad Farah Aideed in the famously failed Black Hawk Down raid. All were denied
as assassination attempts but the denials were irrelevant public-relations gambits, anyway, since the
military was not covered by the executive orders.25

Eventually, the only curative or preventive legislation by Congress was to tighten the law that required
the President and intelligence agencies to timely report covert activities to the two Intelligence and
Armed Services committees in each house. This only served to keep the gang of eight chairmen and
ranking members, like David Boren (D-OK) and his chief of staff, George Tenet, Cohen and Rep. Dick
Cheney, sworn to secrecy as partners in crime, insiders to the Loop of murder and mayhem.
Secret illegal campaign contributions to buy candidates and elections, up to and including
the assassination of foreign heads of state, perhaps even the assassination of an American
head of state? In short, if they knew the secrets within secrets, the people might find out that
democracy itself was a fraud.

Cheney didnt mind: He would soon be named Secretary of Defense to conduct the ever-larger small
wars in Central America that culminated in the invasion of Panama on the pretext of capturing a drug
kingpin, a Just Cause that belied the recapture of the former canal zone as a base for expanded
operations in the region, and the high-intensity Gulf War dubbed Desert Shield to liberate Kuwaits oil
reserves from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. Nor did Cohen: He succeeded Cheney as Secretary of
Defense under Bill Clinton and prosecuted the Balkan Wars that dismembered the former socialist
republic of Yugoslavia and the expansion of US military bases into Eastern Europe and the Muslim
periphery of the Soviet Union, just as Carters National Security Adviser had promised. Tenet would be
elevated to Director of Central Intelligence under Clinton in 1997 and continue to serve the second Bush
until 2004.
For all the secrecy and skullduggery of intelligence, the biggest facts, reality itself, escaped them all:
None of them predicted the imminent withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, which consumed
fully 70 percent of the CIAs covert budget.26 They all proclaimed its success, the greatest victory that
ended the Cold War, but the rival factions engaged in civil war that rages on, 28 years later, the past 15
of which make it the longest war in which the US has been continuously engaged, with only an
ignominious defeat in sight. And no one predicted that Gorbachev, in a futile effort to save something
resembling a social contract in Russia, would renounce the Brezhnev Doctrine that required the Soviet
Union to protect any threatened ally. Refusing to play the role of enemy in the imperial Great Game,
instead, he dissolved the USSR only to be removed by his own Russian Federation president, Boris
Yeltsin, who opened the country to pillage of its resources by well-placed cronies and foreign investors.

Crime & Cover-up as Covert Action

.

In retrospect, the main utility of the hearings was to provide a record for comparison to prior and
subsequent statements. For Walsh, however, the hearings were an insurmountable obstacle to
establishing the burden of proof. From the outset, his hands were tied ideologically (he was himself a
conservative Republican and former assistant attorney general) and legally: Neither the Boland
Amendment nor the Arms Export Control Act contained any provision for enforcement. They are not
criminal statutes, although private citizens, some of whom claimed to have operated on government
authority, were prosecuted, convicted and sent to jail for precisely the same acts as the officially
sanctioned privateers who openly flouted these laws. The biggest problem, however, was the missing
link in the chain of evidence:
Reagans CIA Director, William Casey, was unavailable: After a seizure he had been carried from his
office on a stretcher, diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and never recovered; he died May 6,
1987, the day after Congress opened televised hearings to the public. That made it all the more important
for Walsh to work up the ladder of accountability through rungs of plausible deniability.
Walsh would focus not on fixing the political responsibility for the consequences, the ends of the arms-
for-hostages policy, but on the legality of their means. He would necessarily focus on the smaller fry, the
operational personnel who were just following orders. Besides, only Congress itself held the power to
impeach those who issued them. Instead, Democrats decided they would take that argument out of
Congress and the courts to the electorate in 1988, meanwhile milking the scandal for what they could
use against their likely opponents whom they branded fools, incompetents and petty grifters, not
criminals of state who committed high crimes.
In the spring of 1987, Carl R. Spitz Channell, a professional fundraiser, and Richard R. Miller, a
public-relations flak, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the US by using a tax-exempt foundation to
raise money for the illegal purchase of lethal materiel for the Contras. In effect, the conspiracy
concocted by Casey and managed by North inside the NSC as a cut-out, involved money laundering to
evade the limits Congress had set on war-making by proxy. As part of the bargain, Channell and Miller
were sentenced to two years probation in return for testifying that North was their co-conspirator. 27
Norths boss, Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Adviser to the President from October 1983 to
December 1985, attempted suicide after his congressional testimony. Fall on his sword to protect his
king? Nothing so noble. McFarlane intended what samurai called seppuku, ritual atonement for the
disgrace he had caused his family, his clan, his Marine Corps oath of semper fidelis (always faithful),
and his commander-in-chief. But, rather than disembowel himself on his bayonet, he sipped a glass of
wine, swallowed some pills, prayed for forgiveness for taking his own life, not those of others
kissed his wife goodnight and curled up to die. Instead, he woke up even more remorseful at another
failure and, still wound a little too tight, contacted not a priest, but the Special Prosecutor to spill his guts
figuratively rather than literally.
One telling incident drew out McFarlanes sense of morality and the limits of its inherent contradictions:
David Kimche, Director General of Israels Foreign Ministry, floated the idea of assassinating Ayatollah
Khomeini. Perhaps sensing the reaction of millions of Shia faithful to a political murder, no matter how
desirable, McFarlane carefully demurred. McFarlane cited this anecdote as evidence of his rectitude in
the face of temptation but that didnt stop him from tagging along for Caseys vendetta against Sheikh
Fadlallah, nor did he waste tears or ink on the 83 victims of that bombing (see Part 2).
In March 1988, he pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of withholding information from
Congress by denying that North provided military advice and assistance to the Contras and that he and
others had solicited funds from foreign governments, including $32 million from Saudi Arabia and $10
million from the Sultan of Brunei. In return for his testimony, McFarlane received two years probation,
a $20,000 fine and 200 hours of community service.28

Although McFarlane served as Walshs Beatrice for the descent through Iran-Contras labyrinthine plot-
lines and ethical conundra, many of his claims that higher-ups had approved of the machinations could
not be corroborated until the discovery years later of contemporaneous notes kept by Weinberger, Shultz
and their subordinates of key meetings with Reagan.29

Robert McFarlane left), John Poindexter (right top) and Richard V. Secord (right bottom). Photo credit:
White House / National Archives, White House / Wikimedia and US Air Force / Wikimedia
With McFarlanes guilty plea and slippery memory, Walshs investigation stalled. On March 16, 1988, a
grand jury returned a 23-count indictment against Poindexter, North, Secord and Hakim. Count One
charged the four with conspiracy to defraud the US by supporting military operations against Nicaragua
while they were prohibited by Congress; using the sales of US government property to Iran to raise
funds to be spent at the direction of North rather than Congress; and overcharging Iran to generate
profits for the Contras what North thought was a neat idea to get the Ayatollah to pay the bill for
Congress pusillanimity.
Then the Administration tried to get North of the hook, fearing that he would plea bargain and testify
against his superiors. Justice Department filed an amicus curiae brief supporting Norths contention that
the charge should be dismissed because his defense would require him to reveal classified information.
Here was another historical twist:
Under the Classified Information Procedures Act (ClPA), Congress gave the Attorney General complete
discretion to decide whether to declassify information necessary for trial, even in cases where an
Independent Counsel is appointed because the attorney general has a conflict of interest. As Walsh
lamented, This discretion gives the attorney general the power to block almost any potentially
embarrassing prosecution that requires the declassification of information.30

Irony of ironies, CIPA was a product of Watergate and the Church Committees investigation. CIPA was
Congresss answer to the case of DCI Richard Helms, who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge
of withholding information from Congress about the CIAs role in overthrowing Chilean president
Salvador Allende in 1973 not, mind you, for orchestrating assassinations, sabotage and instigating
torture and mass murder by Pinochets death squads. The plea resulted from Helmss threats to reveal
classified information necessary for his defense if he were prosecuted.31

Congress could have decided to impeach Reagan, but the Democrats opted instead to try to
wound and paralyze him through the televised hearings and allow voters to make a political
judgment in the 1988 elections.

Designed to prevent greymail of the government by former intelligence operatives who threatened to
spill secrets if prosecuted, CIPA prescribed a closed hearing in which defense and prosecutors were
themselves sworn to secrecy. If the judge ruled that classified information was necessary to the defense,
the government had to reveal it or choose not to prosecute. In practice, CIPA has been at best a charade;
at worst, a mechanism for hiding selective prosecution under a national-security blanket. Like Watergate
itself, it is a covert operation designed to find out what political rivals knew about earlier covert
operations.
As Nixon himself explained in one of the secret tape-recordings he didnt destroy, if the burglary werent
covered up, and the burglars not bribed into silence, they might bring up the Cuba thing Bay of
Pigs? Secret illegal campaign contributions to buy candidates and elections, up to and including the
assassination of foreign heads of state, perhaps even the assassination of an American head of state? In
short, if they knew the secrets within secrets, the people might find out that democracy itself was a
fraud.
US District Judge Gerhard Gesell, who had presided over trials in the Watergate scandal, upheld the
conspiracy count against North, Poindexter et al, but it was dismissed later by the DC Circuit Court of
Appeals because the Reagan Administration refused to declassify information North claimed was
necessary to his defense, such as his conversations with the conveniently dead Casey. While Gesells
ruling established that conspiracy to subvert civil laws like the Boland Amendment and the Arms Export
Control Act is itself a criminal act, the dismissal effectively barred Walsh from bringing the higher-ups
to account. Walsh blamed the ruling on Judge Silbermans refusal to recuse himself from the decision,
based on Silbermans dislike for Gesell, the judge whose rulings had helped bring down Nixon.
The Recidivists Credo
.

We didnt do it, and we promise to never do it again. On that, at least, Walsh had plenty to say in his
Final Report, and its not pretty. He began and ended with the observation and warning that problems
presented by Iran/Contra are not those of rogue operations, but rather those of Executive Branch efforts
to evade congressional oversight. This was a direct challenge to the Church Committees verdict that
the CIA was a rogue elephant that required congressional leashing.
Suffice to say that the War Powers Resolution has never been successfully invoked to stop a President
from waging war, covertly or otherwise, once the President had been authorized by the National Security
Act and its progeny with such vast power. In short, Congress hadnt learned much from Vietnam and
Watergate, the Church and Pike committees, or its own legislative history:
Fundamentally, the Iran/Contra affair was the first known criminal assault on the post-Watergate rules
governing the activities of national security officials. Reagan Administration officials rendered these
rules ineffective by creating private [sic] operations, supported by privately generated funds that
successfully evaded executive and legislative oversight and control. Congress was defrauded. 32

Unfortunately, while condemning the abuses, Walsh perpetuated the myth propagated by the public
criminals themselves that they were committed by individuals who were nominally private. The
chief law-enforcement officers honored laws in the breach, if at all.
Walsh concluded:
Evidence obtained by Independent Counsel establishes that the Iran/Contra affair was not an
aberrational scheme carried out by a cabal of zealots on the National Security Council staff, as the
congressional Select Committees concluded in their majority report. Instead, it was the product of two
foreign policy directives by President Reagan which skirted the law and which were executed by the
NSC staff with the knowledge and support of high officials in the CIA, State and Defense
departments.33

One of those NSDDs, in fact, had been fabricated then backdated to provide retroactive cover for a
patently illegal, unauthorized operation; yet, amazingly and incomprehensibly, Congress accepted this
direct assault on its constitutional authority as a co-equal branch of government by refusing to impeach.
In such discussions but was it a legal war? the human cost of war is often overlooked. Even as
Walsh pursued indictments and prosecutions, Congress had reauthorized $100 million more for the war
on Nicaragua and much more for the regional counter-insurgencies in El Salvador, Honduras and
Guatemala. Congressional hypocrisy restored the foundation of the illegal war-makers defense.
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
.

Walsh would focus not on fixing the political responsibility for the ends of the policy these were
largely shared in the bipartisan consensus of empire-building, maintenance and control but on the
legality of their means. He would necessarily focus on the smaller fry, the operational personnel who
were just following orders. Only Congress itself held the power to impeach those who issued them, and
there was no clear consensus on that.
Like its predecessor scandals, with which it shared attributes and key personnel, what was ultimately at
stake in Iran-Contra was the legitimacy of the government itself, the right to rule. Congress itself
allowed North to play the martyr and scapegoat. The more be blabbed, the less useful his confessions.
Because North, Poindexter, and Hakim had testified at congressional hearings under a grant of immunity
(meaning that none of that witnesss testimony could be used against himself), Gesell severed their trials.
Congress could have decided to impeach Reagan, but the Democrats opted instead to try to wound and
paralyze him through the televised hearings and allow voters to make a political judgment in the 1988
elections. George Bush became a target of the investigation, but claiming he was out of the loop, he
was not indicted.
Throughout the 1988 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis pointedly avoided
the scandal. Although he had criticized the Contra war, it was his party, after all, that fashioned a
compromise that allowed that war to continue to protect other bigger, ongoing wars and kept the
capacity to wage them out of sight of the public in the future. Bush could rightly claim credit for a policy
that forced the Sandinistas to negotiate. Dukakiss inept alternative to Bushs war-hero image was to don
a silly cap and tool around in a tank. He was derided as Snoopy and looked the part. For Dukakis, the
issue was competence. Had Ollie and friends been any more competent, there would have been a lot
more innocents dead in the abattoir of Central America, the charnel house of Lebanon and the swamps of
Basra. On Afghanistan, there was a telling bipartisan silence.

The Price of Crime

.

North was indicted on sixteen felony counts; four were dismissed before trial. On May 4, 1989, a jury
convicted him of three charges: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a
congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents (by his secretary, Fawn Hall, on his instructions) to
obstruct justice. The illegal gratuity count, a bribe, was a doozy: North claimed he needed a security
fence at his house in suburban Virginia because secret sources warned him that Abu Nidal, a dangerous
Palestinian terrorist34 was coming after his family. To show the seriousness, North then publically
challenged Nidal to duke it out. (Luckily, his opponent was already dead, killed by an Israeli air-
strike.)
Judge Gesell sentenced North on July 5, 1989, to a three-year suspended prison term, two years
probation, $150,000 in fines, and 120 hours community service. The conviction was reversed on appeal
in July 1990 on the grounds that his trial had been tainted by witnesses whose testimony was influenced
by Norths own immunized testimony before Congress. Cheney had carefully threaded the needle in
coordination with Norths defense counsel. In effect, Congress had given North a platform to spout his
position that he was just following presidential orders, then immunized him from self-incrimination. 35

Oliver North during a book signing Nov. 9, 2013. Photo credit: US Air Force
Walsh was unable to convince the court that untainted testimony could be secured; the charges were
dismissed in September 1991. His military pension and benefits restored, North went into business with
his old CIA buddy Joe Fernandez, selling bullet-proof vests and expert commentary for a new cable
channel launched by Rupert Murdoch and former Nixon aide Roger Ailes to compete with liberal, Carter
patron, husband of Hanoi Jane Fonda, Ted Turners CNN. The overt politicization of the media
replaced the pretense of objectivity that masked a covert bipartisan consensus on what was pertinent to
discuss in polite company. Claiming vindication, North campaigned for the Republican nomination for
the US Senate from Virginia in 1994 but was defeated by Democratic incumbent Charles Robb, a
Vietnam-era fighter pilot and LBJs son-in-law. North became a fixture on military shows and the
conservative speaking circuit.
Adm. John M. Poindexter, McFarlanes successor, was indicted on seven felonies; two were dismissed.
He was convicted in April 1990 of the remaining five counts of conspiracy, false statements, destruction
and removal of records, and obstruction of Congress. He was sentenced to six months in prison on each
count, to be served concurrently, but released on bond pending appeal. His conviction was reversed in
November 1991 on the same grounds as Norths; the Supreme Court declined to review the case.36
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he (or rather Rumsfeld and Cheney) tapped Poindexter to
develop a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness to combine data collection and
analysis amongst federal agencies and the military. Inter-service and bureaucratic rivalries and privacy
concerns combined to scrap the ominous idea, but only temporarily.
Within a few months of announcing TIA had been shelved, Cheney and his top staff, David Addington
and I. Lewis Libby prevailed upon the National Security Agency to implement a massive data-collection
program that secretly collected every type of electronic information not only on foreigners abroad but on
US citizens in the US without a warrant in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
They kept it secret from the FISA court, Congress and the public for years until a rebellion in the Justice
Department, led by then acting Attorney General James Comey and FBI director Robert Mueller,
threatened to resign.37 Parts of the program were revised to satisfy their objections but the drift net
special program remained secret until pieces were exposed by the press. Effectively, renamed and
handed off to NSA, TIAs techniques for collection, storage and analysis have been applied in a series of
programs as revealed by whistleblowers, William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden and others.
Richard V. Secord testified under oath to Congress, without immunity. He was charged on six felony
counts in the original indictment; after the main conspiracy counts were dismissed, a second indictment
in April 1989 added nine felony counts of obstructing those same committees of Congress through false
testimony. Five days before trial on the 12 felonies, he pleaded guilty in November 1989 to a single
felony of making false statements to Congress when he denied that North personally benefited from the
Enterprise in the form of a $200,000 insurance fund and a $16,000 security system for Norths
house to protect him from terrorists in the Virginia suburbs. Secord got two years probation; he was
still fighting to recover $2 million stashed in Swiss accounts in 1994.38

After the collapse of the USSR, Secord found work again as a private contractor to the military and
intelligence community in support for allies in Turkey, the intervention in the former Yugoslavia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia and other newly independent countries on the Russian periphery.
Albert Hakim, an Iranian expatriate and Secords business partner, was originally charged with five
felonies. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of supplementing Norths salary through the
infamous Button (bellybutton) account. One of Hakims companies, Lake Resources, also pleaded
guilty to a corporate felony-theft of government property for diverting $16.2 million from the arms-sales
proceeds, of which Hakim personally had received more than $2.5 million. His plea allowed him to keep
another $1.7 million but he had to waive claim to $9 million more still languishing in Swiss accounts.39

Thomas G. Clines, retired CIA officer and assistant to Shackley, who provided logistics and contacts for
the Secord-Hakim arms deals, was convicted of four felonies for failing to report all income from the
deals on his taxes, largely based on testimony of Secord and his Swiss lawyer, Willard Zucker; he was
sentenced to 16 months in prison and a $40,000 fine.40 As he had in the Wilson cases [see Part 1],
Shackley denied any involvement in the money-laundering deals that funded the Contras.41 (His
successor as station chief in Saigon when he offloaded the Phoenix Program and its intelligence
gathering torturers in the PRUs to MACV-SOG, Tom Polgar, was put in charge of investigating Iran-
Contra by Congress.)
CIA denying plausibility
.

Walsh turned his attention to the CIA. Joseph F. Fernandez, alias Tomas Castillo, former station chief in
Costa Rica, was originally indicted in June 1988 on five counts of conspiracy to defraud the US,
obstructing the inquiry of the Tower Commission, and making false statements, mainly about his role in
coordinating construction of an airstrip in Costa Rica for the North-Secord networks use; the case was
dismissed and refiled as a four-count indictment in April 1989. That too was dismissed when Attorney
General Richard Thornburgh refused to invoke CIPA to declassify information needed for his defense, 42
much of which was already public as a result of the Costa Rican governments denunciation of the Santa
Elena strip as a violation of its sovereignty. (The airstrip later figured in another case of high-level
corruption in Costa Rica, having been used in numerous drug-smuggling flights.)43

Alan D. Fiers, Jr., a/k/a Cliff to the Contras, was chief of CIAs Central American Task Force from
October 1984 until his retirement in 1988. As manager of the covert war exposed in the shoot-down of a
resupply plane (see Part 1), Fiers was the key to cracking the conspiracy of silence. ln 1991, he pleaded
guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress, specifically that North told him about
the diversion and he in turn told his superiors, and that he was familiar with Norths role in coordinating
the illegal resupply operation. 44

Alan D. Fiers, Jr. testifying about Iran-Contra during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Robert Gates for
the position of director of Central Intelligence. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN.
Fierss cooperation led to the indictment of his boss, Clair E. George, CIAs Deputy Director for
Operations from July 1984 through December 1987, on ten felonies for perjury, false statements and
obstruction of congressional and grand jury investigations in September 1991. The three obstruction
counts were dismissed after the Poindexter decision; two were restored by a supplemental indictment in
May 1992. In August, a mistrial was declared when the jury could not reach a verdict. Walsh dropped the
two obstruction counts and narrowed the rest. At the second trial, George was acquitted on five counts,
convicted on two: that he lied when he denied to the House committee any knowledge of Felix
Rodriguezs role in the resupply scheme, and that he lied to the Senate when he denied knowing about
Norths and Secords activities. Before he could be sentenced, Bush pardoned him.45

Fierss flamboyant predecessor Duane R. Dewey Clarridge, was indicted on seven counts of perjury
and false statements about the shipment of HAWK missiles to Iran but not for his role in the Contra war.
He faced a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count but was
pardoned before trial by Bush.46 Walsh investigated but did not charge other CIA officers, including the
unidentified station chief in Honduras who facilitated weapons shipments for the Contras and Jim
Adkins, the Contras main CIA adviser from 1984 to 1987.47

Those who helped prepare Caseys false testimony before Congress in 1986 also escaped prosecution, as
did Donald Gregg, a career CIA officer who worked at NSC in the first two years of Reagans term, then
became Bushs national security adviser. Gregg had repeatedly denied to congressional investigators that
anyone in Vice President Bushs office knew North was involved in illegal support of the Contras or that
they themselves were directing the effort through Greggs longtime friend, Felix Rodriguez. Gregg was
questioned again when Bush nominated him in 1989 as Ambassador to South Korea. A key question was
whether Rodriguez briefed Gregg and Bushs military aide, Adm. Sam Watson, about resupply of the
Contras as indicated by Watsons agenda for May 1, 1986. Gregg and Watson insisted this meant
resupply of the choppers to El Salvador, and the Senate confirmed him.

October Surprise Revisited

.

In May 1990, however, Gregg returned to the US to testify against Richard Brenneke, a self-styled arms
dealer and informant for the Customs Service who had been charged with making false statements to a
Denver judge about the Reagan-Bush campaigns October Surprise hostage-retention scheme,
including a claim that Gregg had been present at meetings in Paris with Iranians in October 1980.
Gregg testified that he had been playing on the beach in Delaware on the weekend in question, and
produced snapshots of his wife and daughter supposedly taken at the time. But the jury chose instead to
believe a local weatherman who said the weather was different that weekend from the sunny day
depicted in Greggs photos. Brenneke was acquitted.48

In the summer of 1990, Walsh asked Gregg to submit to a polygraph an offer Gregg had made to the
FBI back in December 1986 when questioned about Iran-Contra.49 An FBI examiner concluded that
Greggs responses indicated deception when he denied being involved in an October Surprise deal in
1980, when he denied knowing that Rodriguez was working with North and the Contras prior to August
1986, when he denied ever having told Bush about covert military aid to the Contras before October
1986, and when he denied lying to Congress.50 Gregg was given a second test and flunked again.
Nevertheless, Walsh decided the evidence was insufficient to charge Gregg or Watson.

STATE SECRETS, STATE LIES

.

At the State Department, Walsh focused on the testimony of Secretary of State George Shultz and his
Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams.51 Shultz had testified to Congress that he
opposed the arms-for-hostages deal, warned that they might be impeachable offenses, and knew nothing
of the diversion. In 1990 and 1991, however, Walshs staff came across new evidence in the form of
handwritten notes by Shultzs executive secretary, M. Charles Hill, and his successor, Nicholas Platt.
Shultz even described Hills notes as a remorselessly precise record and a vivid picture after using
them to write his memoirs.52 The problem was that Hills notes were not consistent with Shultzs
testimony. In an interview with Walsh in February 1992, Shultz denied the errors were deliberate.
The Hill and Platt notes provided snapshots of the extent of high-level complicity and unvarnished
character sketches of the participants:
Shultz after hearing Bushs denials that arms were sold to Iran, Bush on TV saying it (is] ridiculous to
even consider selling arms to Iran. VP was part of it. .. Getting drawn into web of lies. Blows his
integrity. Hes finished then. Shd. be v. careful how he plays the loyal lieutenant role now.53

On Weinberger: Hes either stupid or dishonest, one or the other.54 On Reagans first National Security
Adviser: Bill Clark has no substance. An influence peddler. 55

On North: Ollie told Iranians that as part of Night Owl deal They should give up tism [terrorism]-
install moderate govt -win war with IQ [Iraq] (!) ha ha Ollie is laughable.56

Walsh chose not to prosecute Shultz because he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt his
testimony to Congress was willfully false. That decision let Hill off the hook, despite Walshs conclusion
that he had deliberately withheld the notes when they were subpoenaed; the evidence against Platt was
deemed inconclusive. 57

George Shultz (left), President Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese and Don
Regan discussing the Presidents remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, oval office, November 25, 1986
(right top) and President Reagan Meeting with Elliott Abrams and John Whitehead about trip to Central
America in oval office, March 24, 1986 (right bottom). Photo credit: White House / National Archives,
White House / National Archives and White House / National Archives
Elliott Abrams was another story. North had testified that Abrams was aware of his full service
operation to the Contras, but it was not until 1990 and 1991 that Hill and Platts notes corroborated
Norths assertions and contradicted Abrams, as did notes produced by Edwin Corr, the Ambassador to El
Salvador in 1985. Before seeking a multi-count felony indictment, Walsh invited Abrams to consider a
guilty plea. On October 7, 1991, he pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from
Congress about Norths resupply operation and another for denying his participation in soliciting $10
million from the Sultan of Brunei. 58

Thanks to a pardon by George H. W. Bush, Abrams resumed a key post in the George W. Bush
administration. As a signatory to the program of the Project for a New American Century, Abrams
implemented PNACs strategy of aggressive regime change directed at Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea,
the axis of evil. He developed policy for economic and military to isolate and attack those countries on
the imperial hit-list. Like his predecessors, and blessed with a grant of impunity, Abrams was confident
of his own rectitude and the moral supremacy of his position. That applied to lesser evils, too. Abrams
was involved in planning a military coup detat against the elected president of Venezuela, Hugo
Chavez, in 2002, alongside the US Ambassador, Otto Reich, former director of OPD exposed in the Iran-
Contra investigation. Paul Wolfowitz, Weinburgers deputy at Defense, returned as deputy to Donald
Rumsfeld. And now comes word that Trump, despite his claim that he opposed the Iraq invasion from
the beginning, has signed Abrams to another tour of duty as Undersecretary of State under Exxon
chairman Rex Tillerson. What could possibly go wrong?

DEFENDING DEFENSE FROM CHARGES OF WAR

.

Walsh turned to the Defense Department, where the discovery of notes and diaries put the lies in the
liars own words. Such documents had been repeatedly requested throughout the years, but one of the
Hill notes quoted Schultz: Cap takes notes but never referred to them (to Congress] so never had to
cough them up.59

Weinberger was subpoenaed in August 1990, but insisted he had turned over all relevant material to
Congress three years earlier. In November 1991, OIC investigators found thousands of pages of notes
and diaries at the Library of Congress, which had not segregated them with classified materials when
Weinberger left office. The notes showed that Contrary to his sworn testimony, Weinberger knew in
advance that US arms were to be shipped to Iran through Israel in November 1985 without congressional
notification [and) he knew that Saudi Arabia was secretly providing $25 million to the Contras
during the ban on US aid.60

Weinberger quickly produced instead a polygraph that concluded he had not intentionally concealed the
notes, an affidavit from Gen. Colin Powell attesting to his honesty (Powell had succeeded Poindexter as
National Security Adviser, then jumped over many senior officers to become chairman of the Joint
Chiefs under Bush-1), and a letter from Senators Inouye and Rudman gullible, credulous or cynical,
who knows? expressing their disbelief that Weinberger would ever have lied to them.61 Nonetheless,
a grand jury indicted him on four counts of perjury and false statements. He was pardoned before trial by
Bush, along with Clarridge, George, Fiers, Abrams and McFarlane.

STALKING A PRESIDENT
.

By then, Reagan and Bush had become targets of the criminal investigation. Like Congress, however,
Walsh found no credible evidence that the President [Reagan personally] authorized [as he should have,
by law] or was aware of the diversion of profits from the Iran arms sales to assist the Contras [as he
should have been, if the National Security Council functioned according to laws that the Chief Executive
was constitutionally sworn to take care to uphold], or that [Chief of Staff Donald] Regan, [Vice
President] Bush or [Attorney General] Meese was aware of the diversion.62

but the Soviet Union fell, and tiny Nicaragua was bludgeoned into submission, an object
lesson for all who dare imagine something better than living and dying at Washingtons and
Wall Streets whim. You cant argue with success.

McFarlane, Poindexter and North all claimed Reagan had authorized their illegal activities on behalf of
the Contras, but Walsh found, The Presidents own activities were not on the face of it forbidden
by criminal law.63 Walsh found no evidence to prove Reagan committed perjury or intentionally lied in
his many demonstrably false statements to the Tower Commission, to the public, or in answers to written
interrogatories by Walshs office. 64 The remedy, Walsh decided, was impeachment, for which the time
had long passed.
Don Regan and Ed Meese also escaped prosecution, although Walsh found evidence in the notes and
diaries that they had participated in the cover-up, spearheaded by Meese, to protect Reagan and each
other by presenting a false version of the Iran-Contra scheme to Congress and the Tower Commission.
Walsh described Regan as forthright and truthful when his own notes were finally subpoenaed in 1992.65
Meese, on the other hand, was engaged in damage control not quite the criminal obstruction of
justice attributed to Mitchell in Watergate rather than vigorous enforcement of the law as Attorney
General.66

When the congressional hearings closed, one of the first and most enthusiastic congratulations to Reagan
came from his old friend and mentor, Richard Nixon, who advised to stonewall the prosecutors: Have
instructions issued to all White House staffersthat they must never answer any question about that
issue in the future.67 This advice was neither surprising nor necessary but it was consistent with
Nixons own refusal to give up the 1,000 hours of tape-recordings Public Records Act be damned
that he had taken from the White House in August 4, 1973, and guarded until his death in 1994. Reagan
finally agreed to talk to Walsh anyway, in 1992, but by then his memory had failed completely.
Bush, however, was a sitting president campaigning for re-election when he came under renewed
scrutiny in 1992, thanks to the notes and diaries of Hill, Platt and Weinberger. Negotiations became a
delaying tactic, and Walsh was reluctant to confront Bush in an election year. Bush stonewalled repeated
requests for his own diaries. After Bushs defeat, he revealed to Walsh the existence of a diary that had
been withheld since 1986.68 Walsh decided not to subpoena the diary because a criminal prosecution
was unlikely: (T)he statute of limitations had passed on most of the relevant acts and statements of
Bush.69

On the street, wed say Bush skated.

FINAL VERDICT: IMPUNITY

.

Much of Walshs Report and an explanatory book he wrote as an autopsy on his still-born investigation
were necessarily an apology for lack of results. Walsh got a jury to convict North, only to have an
appeals court reverse the verdict on what conservatives (a term, which in the US, includes fascists) are
wont to call a technicality when applied to others that is, a constitutional principle against self-
incrimination so important that, in order to uphold that higher law, known criminals are let loose on the
street. That conviction would have disqualified Norths political ambitions, but dismissed on
constitutional grounds, self-incrimination became his parody of a medal of honor for self-sacrifice to his
chief, the unindicted and unimpeachable Reagan. North was defeated in his run for the Senate in 1994
but emerged a martyr to the cause of secret war because congressional Democrats preferred to
grandstand by giving him immunity for his testimony.
Yet, to this day, Democrats point to Iran-Contra, as to Watergate, and declare, The system works.
Right.
The greater tragedy is that, by and large, the Reagan-Bush policies accomplished their goals: A devils
bargain between the Ayatollahs minions and the Great Satan left all sides bankrupt and bleeding, but the
Soviet Union fell, and tiny Nicaragua was bludgeoned into submission, an object lesson for all who dare
imagine something better than living and dying at Washingtons and Wall Streets whim. You cant argue
with success. Walsh tried and the conclusions he reached about a slew of individuals are devastating:
They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the
presidents willful activities. What protection do the people of the United States [less so the targets] have
against such a concerted action by such powerful officers? The disrespect for Congress by a popular and
powerful president and his appointees was obscured when Congress accepted the tendered concept of a
runaway conspiracy of subordinate officers and avoided the unpleasant confrontation with a powerful
president and his Cabinet. In haste to display and conclude its investigation of this unwelcome issue,
Congress destroyed the most effective lines of [criminal] inquiry by giving immunity to Oliver L North
and John M. Poindexter so that they could exculpate and eliminate the need for testimony of President
Reagan and Vice President Bush .
The Iran/Contra investigation did not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than
the Watergate [and Church-Pike Committees] investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not
arise out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both . When a
president, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is
incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and their fealty are to the Constitution
and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the
power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are
faithful to their oaths.70

So, in the end, Walsh reaffirmed his faith in the system which has produced scandals and constitutional
abuses with tedious regularity. When his Report was finally released in censored form by the court, the
absurdity of the doctrine of national security as a rationale for state secrets was further exposed by CIAs
bizarre request to see the secret section to find out if it contained anything it didnt already know about
itself.71

In 1994, I wrote, When the next round comes, it is unlikely that Walshs admonitions will do much to
deter those who regard democracy as much more than an ideological soapbox on which to stand while
they plot any secret scheme they deem necessary to get their way. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our
present state of affairs: Rendition, torture, wars of aggression founded on lies is anyone surprised that
these are openly discussed?
Each and every example of imperial malefaction is defined as an exception to the Exceptional, a scandal,
not emblematic or illustrative of the governing systems continuity but a personal failure of imperfect
operators, fallible humans, not a fatal flaw in the Infernal but Perfect Machinery. Solution: more
controls, checks, regulations, technical fixes of technical glitches, work-arounds. But in the end, all they
accomplished was to legalize what had been illegal. It can only get worse under Trump.

References
.

1. Statement attributed to Cheneys legal adviser, David Addington, by Barton Gellman, Angler: The
Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 330.

2. [unsigned editorial],Watch What We Do, Washington Post, July 7, 1969, p. A22.

3. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/10/obituaries/john-n-mitchell-dies-at-75-major-figure-in-
watergate.html?pagewanted=all

4. Joseph Mysak and George Marlin, Fiscal Administration: Analysis and Applications for the Public
Sector. (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks, 1991); William P. Kittredge and David W. Kreutzer, We Only Pay
the Bills: The Ongoing Effort to Disfranchise Virginias Voters (2001)..

5. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, (New York: Knopf,
1979).

6. Seymour Hershs expose of Operation CHAOS, the Huston Plan (the Plumbers unit) and link to
Watergate appeared in a series including Underground for the CIA in New York: An Ex-Agent Tells of
Spying on Students, New York Times, Dec. 29, 1974, p.1; Hunt Tells of Early Work for a CIA
Domestic Unit, Dec. 31, 1974, p. 1.

7. Grays note to Felt quoted in Woodward, The Secret Man, op. cit.

8. Five Klansmen charged with murder were acquitted by an all-white jury but the shooters and the city
lost a civil liability case brought by the victims. Paul Bermanzohn [a wounded survivor] and Sally
Avery. Through Survivors Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre. (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-8265-1439-1.

9. quoted in the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1970; shortly thereafter, Reagan said: I certainly dont
think there should be a bloodbath on campus or anywhere else. It was just a figure of speech. as quoted
by United Press International.

10. Nicholas Von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn; Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, 1992.

11. Vaughan, Death and MegaDeath Westword (Denver) May 12, 1978. Stories about the informant
appeared later in the Aurora Sentinel, What do you do with a load of explosives?, March 28, 1979;
Kid comandos tell of raid on Titan arsenal and 75 explosives theft raises defense security
questions, March 29, 1979. see also Colorado Business (weekly) Flats slump foreseen, July 20, 1981,
Nuclear evacuation plans revealed and War evacuation plans readied Nov. 1981.

12. Ron Schaffer and Neil Henry, Suspected gunman: An Aimless Drifter, March 31, 1981; Neil
Henry and chip Brown, An Aimless Road to a Place in History, April 5, 1981. My name (misspelled)
appears in a contributors box at the end of each story, the first I worked on for the Post. Few people
noticed in the aftermath that John Hinckley had been expelled from a Nazi group in Texas because they
suspected he was an FBI informer, or the odd coincidence that his older brother had dinner with the Vice
Presidents son Neil and the CIA directors son a few days before the shooting. This became the stuff of
unresolved speculation.

13. See sources cited in notes to Part 1.

14. Schroeder was quoted by John Bennett, FBI denies informants used in burglaries, Scripps-Howard
News Service, Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 21, 1987.

15. Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The US Central American Peace Movement (Chicago: U.
Chicago, 1996).

16. Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador, (New York: Times Books,
1984), Mark Danner, El Mozote, The New Yorker, Nov. 28-Dec.5, 1993.

17. Susanne Jonas, Guatemala: Keeping the Lid on, NACLA Report on the Americas, Sepy-Oct. 1988,
pp. 7-8.

18. Woodward, The Secret Man, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) but Felt scooped him with Im
the Guy They Called Deep Throat Vanity Fair,May 31, 2005.

19. Vaughan, Better Off Dead: An Epitaph for Richard Nixon, Aurarian Dissent, (Denver: August
1994).

20. ABC News Nightline, July 14, 1987, quoted at Kornbluh, The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Post-
Mortem, World Policy Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1987-88, p. 130.

21. Executive Order 11905, published at 41 Federal Register 7733.

22. Executive Order 12036 , published at 43 Federal Register 3687.

23. Sections 2.11 and 2.12, Executive Order 12333, published at 43 Federal Register 59952.

24. Congressional Quality Almanac, 1984, p. 91.

25. Lewis Fisher, Presidential War Power, (Lawrence: U. Kansas, 1995), p. 171.

26. Best guess extrapolation from the work of John Pike, CIA Spending for Covert Operations, Covert
Action, Number 51, Winter 1994-95. See also [Washington Post],Dr. Dirty [Gus Avrokotos] ran CIAs
covert arming of Afghan rebels in 80s, Denver Post, Dec. 26, 2005, p. 6B.

27. Millers indictment and plea agreement are found at Vol. II, p. 5; Channell, p. 11.

28. McFarlane, Special Trust (Cadell & Davies, 1994). For a sympathetic but critical review, see also
Doug Vaughan, Special Trust Betrayed, Covert Action Quarterly, No. 51 (Winter 1994-95), pp.61-62,

29. On McFarlanes claims and confirmations, see Vol. I, Ch. l, pp. 79104; Vol. II, pp. 1730; Vol. III,
pp. 397-400.

30. Walsh, Vol. I, pp. xii, 565.

31. See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York:
Knopf, 1979).

32. Walsh, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 563. The rules Include the requirement that the President make a Finding
that a given operation is necessary to national security and report any such operation in a timely
fashion to the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence that must approve funding for these
operations.

33. Walsh, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 562. The report to which Walsh refers is: Report of the Congressional
Committees lnvestigating the lran-Contra Affair, US House of Representatives, Select Committee to
Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, and US Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance
to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, November 17, 1987, p. 22.

34. And possibly an Israeli double-agent, see Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, (New York:
Random House, 1991).

35. Walsh described his cases against North in Final Report Vo1. I, Ch. 2, pp. 10522: the indictments
and pleadings are found at Vol. II, pp. 195242. See also, Ben Bradlee, Jr. Guts & Glory: The Rise and
Fall of Oliver North (Dutton, 1988)

36. I, pp. 123-36; Vol. II, pp. 243-78; Poindexters Response to Walshs Report at Vol. IU, pp. 587-90.

37. Gellman, op cit.

38. Secord see Ch. 9 and Vol. l, pp. 173-78; Vol. II, pp. 133 72; Vol. Ill, pp. 797-808. For the defense,
Richard Secord and Jay Wurts, Honored and Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in
Laos, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992) ISBN 9780471573289.

39. Hakim see Vol. I, pp. 179-80; Vol.II, pp. 189-94; Vol. III, pp. 323-62.

40. Clines, Vol. I, pp. 181-84.

41. See also Shackley and Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: my life in the CIA. (Washington: Potomac
Books, 1992) ISBN 1-57488-915-X.

42. Fernandez, Vol. I, pp. 283-93

43. Martha Honey, Hostile Acts; Gary Webb, Dark Alliance, based in part on the reporting of myself and
Georg Hodel

44. Fiers, Vol. I, pp. 263-81.

45. George, Vol. I, pp 233-43.

46. Clarridge, Vol. I, pp. 247-62.

47. Cases are discussed In Vol. I, pp. 293324, and in the Classified Appendix.

48. Authors notes of trials, US v. Rupp (a bank fraud case), US District Court, Denver; US v.
Brenneke, Portland, Oregon. Brenneke also claimed to have been involved in the Israeli shipments from
Lebanon to the Contras, Operation Tipped Kettle, and Panama, Operation Black Eagle.

49. Gregg, Vol. I, p. 501.

50. , p. 501. Walsh said, n. 146, that this was reported to the Justice Dept. in 1990 and the House
October Surprise Task Force in 1992.

51. Abrams, Vol. I, pp. 325-73.

52. George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (New York: Scribners, 1993), p. xiii.

53. Re: Bush, Hill Note, November 9,1986, ANS 000174$. cited at Vol. I, p. 353, n. 223.

54. Re: Weinberger, Hill Note, July 16, 1986, ANS 0000705, at ibid.

55. Re: Clark, Hill Note, December 19, 1986, ANS 0002078, at ibid.

56.Re: North, Hill Note, December 6, 1985, ANS 00001238, quoted at Vot.l, p. 435.

57. Walsh on Schultz, Vol. I, p. 372.

58. I, pp. 375-92. Abrams provided a number to a Swiss bank account; it proved to be the wrong
account in that it didnt get to the Contras; instead, it was held by an intelligence operative named Bruce
Rappaport, who contested Walshs attempts to recover the $10 million. What he had done to earn the
money was another secret.

59. Hill Note, August 7, 1987, AL W 0056370, quoted at Vol. I, p. 412, n. 84.
60. I, p. 413.

61. II, pp.1012-19, 1107 (Powell), 1010-11 (Inouye and Rudman) respectively.

62. l, p. 443.

63. Vol 1, p. 452.

64. 1, p. 472.

65. I, pp. 505-23.

66. I, pp. 525-53.

67. Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate, (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1999), p. 154-55.

68. Dan Morgan and David S. Broder. President to Disclose Everything; White House Disputes
Walshs Charges of Cover-up, Washington Post. December 26, 1992, p. A1.

69. Vol, 1, p. 474.

70. Walsh, pp. 561-66.

71. Walter Pincus. CIA Seeks to Review Classified Walsh Report On Iran-Contra Affair, Washington
Post, February 12, 1994, p. A4.