What was contragate

Donald Pfost's article in this issue, "Reagan's Nicaraguan Policy: A Case Study of Deviance and Crime," analyzes these Reagan administration violations of international and domestic law, as well as the policy's ideological underpinnings. The article argues that U. Other laws or acts of Congress possibly violated by the secret financing of the contras are the Boland Amendment, which prohibited military aid to the contras by federal agencies, and the Arms Export Control Act, which bars military aid to any country supporting terrorism.

Also violated was the Neutrality Act, which makes it a criminal offense to aid or participate in military expeditions against countries with which the U. Internationally, the World Court decided that U. Despite early recognition of many of these violations, the Reagan administration, in its effort to reverse public antipathy to intervening in foreign revolutions, successfully exploited public fear of "random" nonstate terrorist violence as the primary ideological vehicle to replace moribund anticommunism.

Funding the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua was presented by the administration as part of a seemingly coherent antiterrorist global strategy and moral imperative that encompassed:. Classical counterinsurgency warfare against "terrorist subversion" that had evolved into guerrilla war in Central America, utilizing Special Operations Forces SOF supplemented by police and intelligence service training programs in "counterterrorism";. Short-term "active self-defense against terrorism"-type operations featuring pre-emptive military actions, such as the combined SOF and quick-strike conventional forces launched against Grenada and Libya, were viewed as a low-risk, high-payoff variant of the Reagan Doctrine.

The seeming coherence in this triad belied fissures in the Reagan Doctrine. According to conservative analysts, resistance to the doctrine emanated from a faction in the executive branch that preferred a strategy of negotiations with Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. Negotiations were geared to a "political transition model," that is, forcing a change in the current government by requiring the incorporation of U.

McMahon, who opposed the Afghan program and resisted arms sales to Iran not authorized by the president. The second faction, which pursued a strategy of violently overthrowing these governments and replacing them with more pliable anticommunist regimes composed of the prerevolutionary ruling strata, included key members of the National Security Council staff, ranking Defense Department civilians Secretary Weinberger, Nestor Sanchez, and Richard Armitage , the CIA Director Casey, his task force chief on Nicaragua, and Clair George, the deputy director for clandestine operations , and the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams Insight, March 16, 11; San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, Solarz N.

In , President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 17, which was a secret declaration of covert war against Nicaragua Bamford, Project Democracy, the parallel foreign policy apparatus born of the Reagan administration's antidemocratic thrust, was first mentioned by Reagan in a speech. But the worldwide network, funded initially by foreign governments as early as , became the covert manifestation of the Reagan Doctrine beginning in San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, At that time, the White House was displeased with State Department reluctance, and believed that Reagan Doctrine initiatives had to be run covertly to circumvent opposition.

Responsibility for coordinating the program fell to the National Security Council staff, which was empowered to implement it by a January presidential national security decision directive that permitted the council to coordinate interagency "political action strategies" against the Soviet Union and its "surrogates" Insight, March 16, This, it is said, was the genesis of the series of events documented in the Tower Commission report.

The contra terrorist war against Nicaragua is modeled after the CIA's covert war against the Cuban Revolution, which had represented the first rift in U. As James Petras points out in "Political Economy of State Terror: Chile, El Salvador, and Brazil" in this issue, the contra war is part of a wider process that has witnessed the growth and proliferation of state terror networks in Latin America that are part of, and in most cases subordinated to, an ongoing global terror network.

Washington has become the organizational center for a variety of institutions, agencies, and training programs that provide the expertise, financing, and technology to service client-state terrorist institutions. Since the s, this expertise has been supplemented by private services run by former intelligence and military officers. All recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, have supported this network, and it has served as a significant foreign policy instrument.

Martha Huggins' article, "U. Subsequently, a pliant Congress allowed the Reagan administration to re-institute U. Peter Dale Scott's article, "Contragate: Reagan, Foreign Money, and the Contra Deal," focuses on the network of former CIA officials and agents of influence as well as other international backers of the contras, who comprise what a Senate Committee report has described as the CIA's "world-wide infrastructure.

On the other hand, Scott says, Contragate is the collusion and conspiracy to install and maintain a U. These reforms of the CIA had the effect of building a powerful coalition of both Americans ousted CIA clandestine operators, the Taiwan-Somoza Lobby, and the American Security Council and foreigners the World Anti-Communist League, and the secret Masonic Lodge guiding rightwing government actions across Italy, P-2 who were determined to restore the clandestine services.

The rightward shift of political power as a result of the presidential election sharpened the prospects for a revival of domestic intelligence structures and operations and suggested a return to the weapon of secrecy afforded by intelligence, which permits unaccountability and freedom from the control of constitutional constraints and norms restricting official state action, and freedom from prohibitions on interfering with political expression.

The strong domestic lobby for U. After passage of the Boland Amendment the administration conspired to continue the contra program ostensibly outside the State Department and the CIA. This had two operational consequences: the first was to turn to extra-governmental expertise in the military and logistical aspects of covert war Singlaub, Secord, and his business partners ; the second was to secure covert funding outside congressional channels.

In the s, the CIA had directly disbursed millions of dollars to pro-U. In the s, after these payments had been exposed and became a domestic scandal, payments to the CIA's foreign networks were continued through a global system of "commissions" or political payoffs including laundered U.

Air Force funds made by Lockheed Corporation to its foreign representatives such as Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi businessman who is close to the Saudi royal family Scott, ; Hougan, Partly as a result of the reforms of the CIA, U. Khashoggi was an architect of improved Iran-Israel-U. Since the Carter presidency, a third system of payments for covert U. As with the "commissions," these costs are borne by the foreign purchaser. Under this system, middlemen would purchase government aircraft and weapons at a low "manufacturer's cost," and sell them to nations at the much higher "replacement cost.

These government deals would therefore take place under the control of private companies directed most recently by retired U. This is the contour of much of the Project Democracy funding scheme. The "privatization" of the contra war began with the decision of high Reagan administration officials to circumvent planned congressional restraints on the CIA after it was caught violating international law in with the mining of civilian harbors in Nicaragua and the passing out of manuals advocating the physical assassination of civilian government authorities inside Nicaragua to bring about the overthrow of that government.

Sheehan 16 makes the claim -- as yet not verified by other sources -- that Edwin Meese, George Bush, and Robert McFarlane conceived of this plan. When the U. Supporters of the sale claimed that to combat the terrorist threat posed by Libya, U. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy said the sales were needed to send "a political signal" to the Iranians, whose military successes against Iraq had placed Saudi oil fields in jeopardy New York Times, April 18, To fund the contras through arms sales was surely to employ such sales as a tool of foreign policy without congressional approval.

This situation benefited central figures in Contragate such as Clines, Secord, and von Marbod, who had become involved in the covert arms flow to the contras. Although he was to become a member of the Pentagon's Special Operations Policy Advisory Group following his official retirement in , Secord became a private arms supplier to the contras, operating much as Edwin Wilson had. His connections with the contras, with the rulers of Iran, and with the royal house of Saudi Arabia especially suited him for the role, and his affiliations were considered unmatched by anyone in the military.

As it turned out, the funneling of Saudi millions to the contras in and was through Secord and Hakim. A complex of interests was at stake in the covert Saudi role other than financing the U. Indeed, the move toward improved relations with Iran favored by King Fahd resulted in a power struggle in the royal family. Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister, had argued for a rapprochement with Iran after assessing that its close ally, Iraq, was unlikely to win its war with Iran.

Khashoggi was a key intermediary in securing the necessary degree of mutual understanding between Iran and Saudi Arabia. According to Scott , the Iran-Israel-U.

Irangate demonstrates that the U. Similar to the U. Although the Reagan administration had adamantly denounced state-supported terrorism in the Middle East and the "outrageous weapons deals made by Western European nations with the terrorist states in pursuit of appeasement," in August President Reagan approved the first shipment of U.

A schism between publicly stated counterterrorism policy and practice had developed under the mantle of intelligence gathering, the rationale for which was freeing hostages and thereby picking up votes in the congressional elections , and combating terrorism. Noam Chomsky's article, "International Terrorism: Image and Reality," analyzes the Israeli model of countersubversive "antiterrorism" that the U. That policy reduced itself to the subjection of entire populations, such as southern Lebanon, to unremitting terrorism and foreign domination in the name of eliminating the "evil scourge of terrorism.

The policy of selling arms to Iranian "moderates" was not debated either in the U. While the U. David Kimche, a year veteran and one-time deputy director of Israel's Mossad intelligence service who has long been a central figure in developing Israel's counterterrorism policy, met twice with Oliver North in San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, ; New York Times, December 30, Nimrodi, believed to be one of the richest men in Israel because of his arms deals with the Shah of Iran, was instrumental in opening up the U.

Peres participated in the original arrangements worked out between Iran and Washington, exchanging arms for hostages New York Times, December 1, ; San Francisco Chronicle, November 27, The article extensively details the history of U.

It also supports part of the Tower Commission report, which concluded that Israeli motives in arming Iran included the promotion of its arms export industry, the weakening of its old adversary, Iraq, and the desire to draw the U. Other authors have proposed that the U. As the State Department terrorism expert in Reagan's first term, Ledeen sought public support for covert actions aimed at the assassination of terrorists; he also hawked the idea, repeated by the American Security Council, that Nicaragua's Sandinista government had organized "a vast drugs and arms smuggling network to finance their terrorists and guerrillas, flooding our country with narcotics" New York Times, February 2, A friend of Theodore Shackley and recipient of Shackley's summary of Ghorbanifar's proposal, Ledeen played a decisive role in the initial stages of the Iran weapons-and-bribes initiative, coordinating directly with Israel's Foreign Minister David Kimche and Prime Minister Peres Ibid.

Ledeen denies it and has repeatedly denied being an agent of Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, but the Israeli government refused to go on record retracting Nir's statement Ibid.

Many of the principals in the current scandal were participants in the failed April U. This constellation of individuals was central to carrying out -- and perhaps played a role in shaping -- the new U.

Since the early s, Hakim had tried to continue doing business with Iran and to persuade the Reagan administration to improve relations with Iran. Privatization of the Iran arms sales policy had as its entree a January 17, , secret intelligence finding signed by President Reagan that authorized the CIA to "interfere in the affairs of a foreign country," and to assist "third parties," as well as foreign countries, in shipping weapons.

The operation was an extension of an Israeli initiative designed to gather intelligence and to shape the behavior of the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor. To their dismay, in January , Nimrodi, Schwimmer, and Kimche were replaced by the prime minister's counterterrorism expert, Amiram Nir. According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, Prime Minister Peres was uncomfortable with the idea of an Israeli, especially one of his friends, making commissions on the transactions.

Perhaps more pointedly, Haaretz reported that some Israeli mediators had "meddled" with the bank account in Switzerland that was used to channel money from the Iranians to the Americans and eventually to the contras New York Times, December 1, This meddling, combined with the Israeli arms merchants' substitution of obsolete antiaircraft missile parts to Iran in November , led North to bring Secord into the operation.

Ledeen was cut out, and although Ghorbanifar flunked a polygraph test ordered by CIA Director Casey, he was allowed to continue on. Ghorbanifar and the delivery operation. The shift stripped the White House of deniability, however, and crossing over personnel and financial conduits jeopardized the security of both operations New York Times, February 27, ; San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, For his part, Ghorbanifar states that the CIA was far more deeply involved than has become known in setting up arms sales via the Hashemi "channel," and it demanded complete control over all participants.

Pieterse alludes in this issue to a series of arrests surrounding illegal arms sales to Iran that took place precisely in this period. Cyrus Hashemi had been an informant who cooperated in setting up a U. Customs Service sting. Corruption of the U. The Iranian leadership, beginning with Ayatollah Khomeini, had a keen interest in keeping open the pipeline to coveted U.

Oliver North, it appears, did not create, but rather inherited the Israeli system of seeking intelligence by overcharging Iran and funneling the surplus back to Iranian "moderates" in the form of bribes. Beginning in January , North attempted to use this surplus to bankroll the contras as well San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, The leader of the Global Islamic Movement, Mehdi Hashemi, was arrested in October on charges of treason, at which time he confessed to working for Montazeri.

Before the arrest, the organization received a commission of three to five percent on any weapons procurements for Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The Global Islamic Movement allegedly has helped fund and organize terrorist groups in Lebanon, including the Party of God, which has taken responsibility for much of the hostage taking Ibid. That channel, it so happens, is the Hakim-Secord-Shackley-Clines connection.

As the report also indicates, it was Shackley, "a former United States intelligence officer," who was told by Ghorbanifar that there might have to be "payment of a cash ransom for the hostages in Beirut" Ibid. In July , Cyrus Hashemi suddenly died in London. In November, his cousin would reveal the covert arms arrangement with the U. Contragate is at once the story of an ideological anticommunist crusade laced by petty corruption and bureaucratic competition, and an elite-level battle over control of the U.

Rightwing rollback forces embedded in the government, Congress, the media, and the "military-industrial complex" have mounted several historic counterattacks on prevailing containment doctrine in response to real or perceived disequilibrium in the balance of nuclear terror between the U. The first was in the to period, when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device.

The McCarthy purges of the labor unions, the State Department, and the attempted assault on the Army followed. The second was in , when China acquired the capacity to explode an atomic bomb.

In that year the Vietnam War escalated from covert to overt with the "Tonkin Gulf incident," while in the U. The latest instance, which arguably rests on the rightwing insistence that the Soviet Union gained nuclear superiority over the U. Contragate shares characteristics with previous rightwing initiatives, and there have been signs of changes underway in the rightwing "establishment" that could presage further oligarchic consolidation upward.

The governing alliance during the Reagan years has been characterized by the incorporation of the rightwing professional and small-business sector into a corporate ruling stratum that had shifted radically rightward during the s. Tensions in that alliance over the post-Reagan leadership succession have combined with the downward economic and social movement of its base to produce a disintegrative effect on the movement as a whole. An internecine struggle erupted publicly in the conservative movement before the congressional elections in the form of strategy feuding that reflected a deeper doctrinal dispute initiated by conservative ideologues pushing a more activist social agenda to forestall defection of voters to the Democratic Party.

A more profound malaise lies in the old-line Goldwater conservatives' recognition of having learned "how little is accomplished by winning elections. SDI is defended as part of the rightwing rollback agenda because by forcing the USSR into costly weapons expenditures, economic modernization efforts could be crippled.

At Reykjavik, President Reagan was willing to accept large reductions in offensive strategic nuclear weapons because SDI's effectiveness is enhanced the fewer the missiles there are to defend against.

As Gould and Bodenheimer point out, at Reykjavik President Reagan's incompetent understanding of nuclear strategy led him to agree to the elimination of all nuclear weapons over 10 years, including bombers and cruise missiles that, in combination with SDI, would have been most advantageous for U.

This massive blunder seems to have been a prelude to Contragate, for it angered the rightwing and that faction of the U. After the Irangate scandal broke in November , members of Reagan's "kitchen cabinet" reportedly pressed for a cabinet shakeup that called for the replacement of Secretary of State Shultz, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, and national security adviser Adm. The day after the rumored shakeup was publicized, President Reagan and Attorney General Meese made the historic and damaging disclosure of the diversion of Iran arms sales funds to the contras.

As events unfold, the political forces that achieved dominance over the foreign policy apparatus on the eve of November 24, , will become clearer. It could be said that this struggle is the real story behind the Contragate scandal.

The kitchen cabinet's "right-wing coup" did not succeed in its goal, for Secretary Shultz did not resign, although Donald Regan and John Poindexter were compelled to tender their resignations. Key Reagan Doctrine supporters subsequently formed a "forget about Iran-a-smear" lobbying coalition in December , calling it America at Risk.

It was actively supported from within the administration by Education Secretary William Bennett, former political affairs director Patrick J. Buchanan, and budget director James T. Among the coalition's odd members were the core of President Reagan's "grass-roots" support: the American Security Council of which Oliver North has been an active adviser , the Citizens for Reagan which in the elections had tried to engineer the defeat of congressional candidates who opposed funding the contras , the American Conservative Union, the Concerned Women for America, and Citizens for America, among a range of other groups that had supported Reagan's anticommunist foreign policy agenda New York Times, January 17, The long-range implications of the executive-level personnel changes for foreign policy are still a matter of conjecture.

The newly appointed national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, has traditionally been disliked by reactionaries because of his role with Stansfield Turner in firing the CIA's covert directorate, but he appears to be attempting to forge a conservative consensus similar to that of his predecessors. It is known that Carlucci once ordered the reinstatement of General Secord when Secord was faced with legal problems stemming from his connections with Edwin Wilson, and he also hired Erich von Marbod into the private arms sales business.

Carlucci and von Marbod worked for a subsidiary of Sears Roebuck, historically a major corporate backer of the American Security Council Maas, The question is who, indeed, Carlucci and other new advisers represent in the highest councils of elite policy-making.

Some of the new Reagan administration staff choices have led to dissatisfaction by sectors of the Right because they had considered Reagan the last great hope of carrying out their global anticommunist agenda.

Richard Viguerie howled that President Reagan had abandoned every pretense of standing up against the Washington establishment Time, March 23, 26 , and even went so far as to suggest over the nationally televised "Nightline" that Reagan himself should resign over Contragate.

In part, Reagan's Republican Party successes in and produced hard times for New Right fundraisers such as Mr. Viguerie, who was forced to sell his national magazine, Conservative Digest, and to put his company's headquarters up for sale to fend off creditors. Further, the flagship of rightwing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute, was forced to cut its staff and program to recover it financial solvency New York Times, January 14, ; January 19, This apparent paradox is based in the flow of contributions to the Republican Party proper instead of New Right organizations.

In greater measure, however, these symptoms of the Right's relative misfortunes result directly from the fall in world oil prices. It has been widely reported that Texas oil multimillionaires such as the late Clint Murchison, Jr. The fiscal crisis Texas is experiencing itself stems from the fall in oil revenue Insight, March 30, The domestic consequence politically has been a diminishing role for the once disproportionately influential rightwing domestic oil interests, which earlier had funneled a major share of all funds received by the New Right's political action committees the financial base of Viguerie's crumbled empire , but their total contribution has fallen significantly in recent years Washington Post, November 7, Internationally, the negotiations for increased oil prices with Saudi Arabia and Iran, championed by Vice President Bush, were central to his goal of developing and securing a reactionary base in the Republican Party as the presidential candidate.

Promoting high world-market prices for oil as a tried-and-true mechanism for financing world arms sales through petro-dollars would also sit well with the interests of the military-industrial complex, which had supported the Reagan presidency just as the super-rich executives at EXXON, Mobil, Standard Oil, and other large oil-related transnationals also had done.

The current scandal may mean hard times for the Reagan Doctrine as well: in March , conservatives in Congress and at the Heritage Foundation pressed the administration to officially scrap the accord made with the Mozambican government, and instead to support the South Africa-based terrorist Mozambique National Resistance Movement.

That effort failed. Although the Reagan Doctrine may be down, it is not out. Frank Carlucci announced increased aid to anticommunist insurgents in Afghanistan; CIA support to the contras in supplying intelligence to facilitate terrorist bombings has accelerated; and a new CIA counterinsurgency program in the Philippines was announced after revelations that Singlaub had been plotting in a Marcos stronghold along with Asians and others who had served in the Special Forces in Vietnam New York Times, February 20, ; San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, ; February 16, Some key players in the Doctrine's game plan have now been dislodged or have resigned from government -- William Casey, Oliver North, Nestor Sanchez, John Poindexter, Richard Perle, Patrick Buchanan, and Lewis Tambs -- but with the exception of Casey, the composition of the council setting the policies has not changed.

The World Anti-Communist League, which gave teeth to the Reagan Doctrine and strongly reinforced the antidemocratic tendencies already prominent in ruling circles, will undoubted continue its active private foreign policy. The disenchanted Right seems intent on making the Reagan Doctrine its primary issue in the presidential election. The trained, activist cadre of prior CIA special operations would certainly play a role in keeping the Reagan Doctrine on the agenda.

Some of the covert structures underlying the counterterrorism policy have been revealed again to be instruments central to a president's ability to conduct what amounts to a secret foreign policy. This is not unique to the Reagan administration. For 30 years, despite the Constitution, successive presidents have conducted secret wars without the advice and consent of Congress.

Watergate, which narrowly construed the vast wrongdoing of the Nixon administration, did succeed in setting precedents on the abuse of power. The force of public opinion made it necessary for an antidemocratic administration to transgress the law in its arrogant effort to rule the globe. Perhaps the law can again force a retreat from hypocrisy, and counterterrorism will no longer surreptitiously dominate foreign policy. Admiral William J.

He was found guilty on four of the charges and sentenced to two years in prison, although his convictions were later vacated.

In addition, four CIA officers and five government contractors were also prosecuted; although all were found guilty of charges ranging from conspiracy to perjury to fraud, only one—private contractor Thomas Clines—ultimately served time in prison. Despite the fact that Reagan had promised voters he would never negotiate with terrorists—which he or his underlings did while brokering the weapons sales with Iran—the two-term occupant of the White House left office as a popular president.

However, his legacy, at least among his supporters, remains intact—and the Iran-Contra Affair has been relegated to an often-overlooked chapter in U. The Iran-Contra Affair— The Washington Post. The Iran-Contra Affairs. Brown University. The Iran-Contra Affair. Iran Hostage Crisis. The Iran-contra scandal 25 years later. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Fueled by territorial, religious and political disputes between the two nations, the conflict ended in an effective stalemate and a cease-fire nearly eight years The United States and Iran have never formally been at war, but tensions between the two countries have persisted for decades. Below is an overview of the long-running conflict between Iran and the United States—and measures taken economic and otherwise in the wake of flare On November 4, , a group of Iranian students stormed the U.

Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. Civil War For many people in the United States, the late s were a troubled and troubling time.

The radical and countercultural movements of the s and early s, the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, uncertainty in the Middle East and economic crisis at home had undermined For several decades, the U. But ironically, the reason Iran has the technology to build these weapons in the first place is because the U.

This nuclear assistance was part of a The Persian Empire is the name given to a series of dynasties centered in modern-day Iran that spanned several centuries—from the sixth century B. In the late s and early s, a virus that had previously appeared sporadically around the world began to spread throughout the United States. As with most anti-drug initiatives, Just Say No—which became an American catch phrase in the s—evoked both support and criticism from the public.

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