Iran Contra Affair
✍️ Siddharth Tewari
Published: 2023-02-09
Iran Contra Affair
The sale of arms to Iran, supposed hostage exchanges, Hezbollah and the civil war in Nicaragua. How are all these related? Well, it’s a long story.
In simple terms; during the second Reagan term, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sales of weapons to Iran which at the time was under an arms embargo, and diverted the profits to the Contras, a group of anti-socialist rebels in Nicaragua that were opposed to the socialist Sandinista led government.
A brief on the contra-sandinista rivalry:
When Reagan initially assumed office, he immediately condemned the Sandinista National Liberation Front which had aligned itself with cuba and had begun supporting similar socialist influenced movements in Latin America in countries such as El Salvador. Under his administration the CIA were authorized to start financing, training, arming and providing aid to rebels, most of whom were the leftovers of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard, the last of the Somoza family to be president, the Somozas were a family that had been in power since 1937, Somoza had been deposed of by the Sandinistas in 1979. The contras engaged in economic sabotage as was typical in limited guerrilla warfare.
But how is this related to selling arms to Iran, hostage exchanges and Hezbollah?
Shady dealings:
Under the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi(the last Shah of the Imperial State of Iran before it became the Islamic Republic of Iran), most of the military hardware that Iran had was American made, they in fact even had the iconic F-14 Tomcat and were the only operators of the Tomcat other than the United States Navy and were even sold AIM-54 Phoenix air to air missiles before the islamic revolution.
The newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran needed a steady supply of spares to support its air force’s planes. But then the American embassy was stormed by Iranian Students and many Americans were taken hostage. After this, Iran was imposed with an arms embargo by the Carter administration. After the invasion of Iran by Iraq, Iran fell in dire straits with regards to the supply of American made spares and weapons. But once Reagan assumed office he continued Carter’s policy of blocking arms sales to Iran.
Now in 1981, a group of senior Regan Administration officials concluded that an arms embargo on Iran would be ineffective since Iran could buy spares and weapons from elsewhere and that the embargo may lead to them being pulled into the Soviet sphere of influence as the Russians could sell Iran weapons if the US did not. The conclusion? Selling arms to Iran as soon as politically possible would keep them away from getting in bbed with the soviets.
Now the irony is that the US had launched an operation to convince countries around the world to not sell any sort of spares or weaponry to Iran(see Operation Staunch), and it was quite the shocker when it was revealed that the US was selling weapons to Iran themselves!
Keep in mind that the Democrat led Congress had passed legislation in 1984 (the second Boland Amendment)that disallowed both direct and indirect US military aid to the contras, which was much against the wishes of Reagan.
On top of all this, US efforts to engage with moderate elements in Iran were further complicated when shiʿite terrorists in Lebanon loyal to Iran took a number of American citizens hostage.
Further Shady Dealings and Convolution:
Once the Iran-Iraq war was kicked off, in the midst of all this bloodshed, one state was quite pleased with what was kicking off between the two neighbours. The state of Israel took a very keen interest in keeping these two potential enemies at war with each other.
Now the “official” reasoning and justification for the arms sales to Iran was to supposed get Iran to release hostages in the above mentioned Lebanese hostage situation. The hostages were being held by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with ties to the IRGC(Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps). This idea of exchanging arms for hostages was supposedly proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expat Iranian Arms dealer and former SAVAK agent(secret police during the Pahlavi dynasty). The hostage crisis and supposed subsequent sales started in 1985.
Now circling back to the Israelis, a New York Times article published in 1991 claims that secret Israeli arms sales and shipments begun taking place in 1981. This claim was based on what a General in the Israeli defense ministry said 1981, he claimed that there was an oral agreement to allow the sale of spares to Iran. This was based on a supposed understanding with then Secretary Alexander Haig. These claims were denied by a Haig adviser. There were also various accounts of these sales in the early 80s, much of it is from supposed former high level CIA officials and Senior American diplomats. The veracity of these claims is tough to verify since te paper trail of the Iran weapons sales starts only from ‘85.
Sales!
Now even though congress had passed the second boland amendment in ‘84, there was stil a few loopholes. The first loophole was that the solicitation of third-party funds from private donors or third party countries was still allowed. The second loophole was that the use of the NSC or National Security Council was supposedly not covered under Boland amendments. Reagan trusted his National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and Lt. Col Oliver North, a then member of the NSC, to keep the Contras going.
Creative efforts to resupply the contras such as air supply operations, intelligence support amd further solicitation of third party funds did not provide as much support as North wanted for the Contras, North had a thought. They were already supplying the Iranians with arms and spares so why not overcharge ever so slightly and slyly divert the profits to the Contras? Seems pretty good right? North then proceeded to write the now famous “Diversion memo” to the new NSA John Poindexter and Reagan outlining how he and his associates would be able to purchase critically required supplies for the Contras with the 12mn dollars in profit from weapons sales to Iran. Of all the happenings in the mess that is the Iran-Contra Affair, this was perhaps the most explosive.
This led to the birth of “the enterprise”, which facilitated the flow of arms to Iran via Israel. The deal was wholly managed through private actors- Ghorbanifar for Iran and Schwimmer and Nimrodi for Israel. A lot of money was skimmed by these private actors and it was said that of the initial proposed 12mn dollars the contras were lucky if they could get even 2mn dollars of tangible benefit.
Unravelling and Aftermath:
On November 3, 1986, two Lebanese newspapers broke the story of the Iran arms deal, and quickly thereafter the entire mess began to unravel in the United States. The first two weeks following the newspaper leak were marked by an increasing crisis of confidence in the government as facts about the affair rapidly became public. The month of November was marked by heavy media coverage, and by December 1986 everything from the Contra affair to the diversion scheme found its way into the press.
With the scandal spiraling out of control and a growing loss of confidence in the government, three mechanisms were established to uncover the truth of the Iran-Contra Affair in hopes of regaining public trust: a special review board appointed by Reagan(i.e the Tower Commission), an independent counsel per the Attorney General’s request, and the holding of immunized joint-congressional hearings. In the joint-congressional hearings, North was basically made the scape-goat for the whole affair since what North and his associates did was technically illegal and may have counted as even high treason since North, in his testimony revealed that he had willingly participated in covert illegal activities and had even shredded documents because the attorney general’s people were coming to look through his office the next day. To add insult to injury his secretary Fawn Hall also testified extensively about altering documents and helping shred official NSC documents. North appeared to some as a hero, to some as a victim. When his testimony was said and done, regardless of what he said, he had a 67% approval rating.
The hearings’ Majority Report concluded that North’s testimony demonstrates that he also lied to members of the Executive branch, including the Attorney General, and officials of the State Department, CIA and NSC. And also that other officials lied repeatedly to Congress and to the American people about the Contra covert action and Iran arms sales, and that he altered and destroyed official documents.
North was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before Congress about the scheme. He was initially convicted on three felony charges, but the convictions were vacated and reversed and all charges against him dismissed in 1991.
Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s secretary, was given immunity from prosecution on charges of conspiracy and destroying documents in exchange for her testimony.
National Security Advisor John Poindexter was convicted of five counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence. A panel of the D.C. Circuit overturned the convictions on 15 November 1991 for the same reason the court had overturned Oliver North’s, and by the same 2 to 1 vote.
Albert Hakim. A businessman, he pleaded guilty in November 1989 to supplementing the salary of North by buying a $13,800 fence for North with money from “the Enterprise,” which was a set of foreign companies Hakim used in Iran–Contra. In addition, Swiss company Lake Resources Inc., used for storing money from arms sales to Iran to give to the Contras, plead guilty to stealing government property.
Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Adviser, convicted of withholding evidence, but after a plea bargain was given only two years of probation. Later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.
At the end of the Bush presidency, H. W. Bush pardoned five administration officials that had been found guilty on charges relating to the affair.
North went on to become the National Rifle Association’s president in 2018, and had a brief foray into politics in 1994, and also had his own show on the Fox News Channel.