Selects: Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s, Part 1

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1:35Terms at lowes.com slash shipping terms. Hey guys, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2019 episode on the Iran-Contra affair. We called it Shady in the 80s for two good reasons. One, it took place in the 80s. And two, it was probably the shadiest thing the U.S. government has ever done. And that's really saying something. Anyway, if you like your Stuff You Should Know episodes eye-popping, then prepare for this one.

2:09Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there eating with chopsticks, as a matter of fact. You know, when Jerry pulls out the chopsticks. It's time to record. That's right. Yeah. She's got Facebook open, and she's sitting there with her chopsticks. So we're recording now. Jerry's been fork-free since 83.

2:41Speaking of 83, your shirt? I guess it's kind of 83-ish. It looks very Thomas Magnum. It does, Chuck. It does. Not just the shirt, the whole outfit. Look at the jeans, the shoes. Yeah? Yeah. You got the Ferrari out back? Thank you for noticing, man. I look like a chubby Thomas Magnum. It's funny because I just finished Stranger Things 3, and I saw that there was a... Have you seen it yet? Are you into that? No. I liked the first season, and I never really got back into it after that.

3:12No offense to anybody. Sure. The main, the sheriff guy, Yeah. Hopper, wears a shirt kind of like that through most of this season. Is that right? And so someone did a cut of like a Magnum P.I. intro and had him running around and shooting things and jumping into cars all set to the Magnum thing. Very cool. And it really fits. All you got to do is throw that song with the guy with the shirt like that, and it's Magnum. Yep. Of course, he has the mustache too. Well, I'm a mustache-less chubby Magnum.

3:43You should wear a mustache. That'd look interesting. I don't know. I do solve a lot of mysteries though. Nothing can change a look like mustaches. Oh, dude. Instantaneously. Right. Especially a fake mustache because you just put it on and bam, you're done. That's right. So, I tried, I'm going to go back to the 83 segue. Yeah, we're here. We're right in the middle of the 80s. Yeah, like, this was super 80s. This is as 80s as it gets. Yeah. The Iran-Contra affair. That's what we're talking about. Some people call it Iran-gate. I poo-poo that name.

4:14Iran-Contra. Sure.

4:17I remember this going on at the time. Me too. I remember watching Oliver North testify. Me too. And my sister was like, he's so dreamy. Look at how much poise he has. He got his dress greens on. Right, exactly. All those medals. Had his Boy Scout three fingers up, like swearing. I really think he did do that. But, even as an adult, like, everything I knew about Iran-Contra, like, until researching this, it was just the glossiest version. Well, I mean, I was, like,

4:4810 and 11, so you were, like, 7 and 8. Sure, sure. But, I mean, like, still, over time as you age, you're like, oh, that's what was going on, or, oh, I understand that. Even as an adult, my conception of it was not very thorough at all, and as I dug into it, I'm like, this is one of the shadiest things America's ever done. Yeah. Ever. Yeah, and it was really great to do this, and, like, now I know it. Now I have a full understanding of what happened, and if it ever comes up at a party, Right.

5:18and people are like, oh, what was that all about anyway? I'm going to be like, well. Please sit down for an hour. And I'll just pull up my smartphone and play our episode. Right. Actually, maybe an hour and a half. We'll see how this goes. Yeah, by the way, everyone, this is a two-parter. Yeah, buckle up. And so, this is part one. I figured we'd start with the beginning. I think that's a really good idea. That reminds me of my friend in college, watched the movie, oh, which one was it? Weekend at Bernie's. Shortcuts. Weekend at Bernie's 2. It was a movie that was on two videocassettes.

5:50What? It was so long, you know, they had to split them up. Was it Magnolia? The Bridge Too Far. I can't remember. My friend in college, very famously among our friends, watched the second tape first and then watched the first tape second and didn't really put it together. She was just like, I thought it was a little confusing. Really? Oh, so it was accidental. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. And then she was like, and then she showed up in the second part and I was like, she's already dead. She was kind of country. This is kind of funny. This movie is one of them anachronisms.

6:21Yeah. Well, this is not an anachronism because we're going to be normal, smart, sane people and start at the beginning. That's right. And there's really no better place to start than the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Ronald Reagan, if you weren't familiar with him already, when he was president, he had already been governor of California, but even before that, he had a pretty extensive career in Hollywood. Yeah. And while he was a pretty big star in Hollywood, at least B plus list, if not A list actor. Yeah. I mean,

6:51he was a medium-sized star. Sure. But definitely way more famous as president than he ever was as a movie star. Sure. He learned to detest communism. Yeah. And at the time, communism was a really big thing in Hollywood. Like it was very fashionable, especially among the intellectuals of Hollywood. Yeah. And he learned to hate it. So much so that by the time he got to be president, he had this idea that there was, it was impossible for capitalist democracy

7:24and communism to coexist, even peacefully on earth. Yeah. You couldn't have both. You had to have one or the other. And by God, Ronald Reagan was going to see to it that the one that we had was a capitalist democracy. Yeah. He wanted to stamp out communism wherever it reared its head. And it was rearing its head close to home, which we'll see here in a second, but all over the world. Oh, yeah, for sure. It was called the Reagan. Yeah, bits and pieces of it were. Right. And he came up with the Reagan doctrine.

7:54And the Reagan doctrine was, we will aid any opposition to communism wherever it sprouts. Like if you're fighting against a communist revolution, we'll support your country. If you're a rebel fighting against a leftist communist government, we'll help you overthrow. That's the Reagan doctrine. Yeah. Via money, via arms, via training, via covert operations that we carried out ourselves. Yeah.

8:24There were all kinds of ways that we could and did help stem the flow of communism. Yeah. So there was, as you were saying, there was a place pretty close to home where communism had sprouted up. And that was Nicaragua down in Central America. And in Central America in the 30s, the Sandinista government had taken power and had held on to power well into the 70s. And by this time, the early 80s. And it drove Ronald Reagan nuts that there was a communist power right there that was being supported by the Soviet Union through Cuba,

8:57ostensibly. I've never gotten the impression that this was ever conclusively proven. They definitely got support from Cuba. But whether it was the Soviet Union who was really calling the shots in Nicaragua or not, I don't know. Yeah. And I think, you know, to go even further back and draw the lines a little even more clear, the Sandinistans were named for Augusto Sandino, who led the nationalist rebellion against what? The U.S. occupation of Central America.

9:28Oh, that's where it started, huh? That's where it all started. And from 19, you know, the U.S. occupied, this is all part of the banana wars. Right. So we occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 for a lot of reasons. But one was like, hey, no one's going to build a canal here unless it's us. Right. That was sort of one of the main reasons. And that all ceased in 1933 with Roosevelt's good neighbor policy, which is basically like we're going to pull out of Nicaragua. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So. But we had our fingers all over Central America.

10:00Right. For many, many, many years. And that's why when people forget or choose not to remember when people flee horrible situations in Central America to come to the United States now, like kind of where all these horrible situations started years and years ago. Right. Because of things that we did. Right. Well, when, when Reagan became president, intervening in Nicaragua, man, I'm going to have a hard time. If I can't say Nicaragua, um, intervening in Nicaragua became like a, a like first and foremost priority for him.

10:32Yeah, for sure. Almost immediately. They started, um, funding the Contras, the Contra rebels or the groups who were fighting against the Sandinista government. They were right wing groups. Um, and they were funding them. They were training them. Like you were saying, and they were doing all this secretly. There was an operation called operation black Eagle. Man, that one. That was something else. Yeah. So we were already funding them. And, and at the time Congress was on board and Congress was on board, especially at first because the Republicans controlled the house. Well,

11:03you know how when somebody comes in and just steamrolls over the other party, usually in a presidential election. Yeah. Very frequently there's in the midterms, the congressional midterms, there's like a backlash against that. Yeah. Like a house flip. Believe it or not, that happened to Ronald Reagan in 1982. Yeah. And the house did flip. They flipped over to the Democrats and, um, that Democrat controlled house combined with a Newsweek cover story that came out, kind of turned the tide against,

11:33um, Reagan's policy on helping out in Nicaragua. Yeah. There was a CIA director named William Casey, who was, um, he was kind of telling Congress what they needed to hear here and there. Uh, you have in here vague briefings. That, that was probably, um, a generous way to say it. Sometimes Casey would send another guy though named Dwayne Dewey Claridge. And this is where things really went South because Claridge did not present well to Congress. Um, and anytime Congress feels like they're being subverted or ignored or like kept out of the

12:10loop or like not able to offer their checks and balances on the executive branch, they really get mad. They do. Like we're seeing that today. This is like history just repeats itself over and over again. Exactly. Yeah. And, and in this particular case, the, the place where, um, where the, the administration, the Reagan administration and Congress just started butting heads over Nicaragua, it was Dwayne Claridge. Yeah. You know, he just, that's how poor a job he did. But in his defense, he was coming from a place where he was a CIA man through and through.

12:41And this is less than 10 years after Congress had just basically rooted out the CIA, held public hearings. Yeah. That's when like the, um, MK Ultra came out and the fact that they'd been dosing, um, unsuspecting Americans with LSD. Yeah. So in his defense, he was mad because they uncovered all the awful things that he'd been doing. Right. Right. Right. True compassion, Chuck. Yeah. It's true compassion. So, um, so Congress is starting to get a little unhappy with this. And there was one congressman in particular named,

13:14uh, Edward, Edward Boland, I believe. Mm-hmm. And he was from Massachusetts. And he said, hey, I just read about this cover story in Newsweek. It has a, a title, America's Secret War, colon, Nicaragua. Mm-hmm. Seems like they should have flip-flopped that, you know, Nicaragua, colon, America's Secret War. Mm, I think they both had the same end goal. It's fine. Right. But he was like, wait, why am I reading about this in a magazine? Yes. And I'm a member of Congress. Right. Um, because at this time, like, Congress was like, well, okay,

13:46we think we're just kind of funding things. We're maybe helping out a little bit. This Newsweek magazine was like, no, no, no, it's way more than that. Like, there is way more American involvement down in Nicaragua than, than you've been led to believe Congress. Like actual covert CIA ops, like blowing up bridges and blowing up buildings and, you know, direct saboteur type ops. Yeah. Not just, here's some arms. Yeah. And then, you know, you, you close this one eye, but leave this eye open when you're shooting.

14:16There was way more involved than that. Or we could just do the shooting. Basically. Yeah. That might make it easier. Here, just let me do it. So Congress, uh, uh, in the guise of Edward Boland said, Nope, we're not doing that. And they passed the Boland amendment, which basically said, if, uh, you cannot use CIA funds or depart, defense department funds to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, it's done. Good night. That's right. And Congress went to sleep. And so that should have been the, that's the end of it, right?

14:47Because Congress passed a, uh, what was it? A law? No, passed an amendment. An act. An act. Yeah. And so everyone just stopped, right? That's how it works. All right. What's part two going to be about? We're just going to sit here quietly. So, um, this did not stop anything. Uh, here's what happened in 1983. The CIA, uh, had this one operation where they went into the commercial shipping harbors of Nicaragua. Nicaragua. Oh boy. I know it's, it's contagious. I said it right in my head all morning.

15:18Nicaragua. There you go. Uh, and they put mines there, you know, I was about to say landmines, but they were sea mines. Yeah. Mines. Floating mines. Right. And, uh, the idea here was we're going to plant these mines that we're going to whip up our own press releases for the Contras. Right. Where they take credit for it. Like we don't even trust them to write a good press release. Right. The CIA wrote the press release for them. So where the Contras are saying that they did it. And, uh, the overall effect it's going to have is they're not going to be able to ship arms via the seaport at least.

15:48Right. Into Nicaragua. Plus it also makes the Contras look way more together. Sure. And with it than they actually were. Right. Like all we need to do is give them some money and they got it covered. Right. So the CIA does this and, and they're thinking, okay, so, um, mine or shipping in the Nicaraguan harbors is going to stop. It does not stop. No. Um, as a matter of fact, there, there were, there was damage. So they used little firecracker mines, which make a big blast and a lot of water everywhere. But if it's a big ship, it's not going to hurt the ship. Mm-hmm. Well, it sunk a lot of small fishing vessels.

16:18Right. But it also damaged ships from the Netherlands, Great Britain. Oops. Japan. Yeah. And the USSR commercial ships. So, um, the Wall Street Journal broke this story and said, hey, you guys, you Congress, you remember how you passed this amendment saying there could be no CIA involvement in, in Nicaragua? Well, they mined the harbor of the sovereign nation and it blew up a bunch of other, other country's ships. And Congress, once again, it's like, man, you keep doing secret things behind our back.

16:48Right. That really makes us mad. Right. Should we take a break? All right. Let's take a break.

16:57Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck. Woo!

17:05Stuff you should know.

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19:44Okay, let's keep going. So what does Congress do? They're like, all right. They're mad. We passed one Boland Amendment, which I don't think we said, Chuck, that first Boland Amendment was passed 411 to zero. Yeah. Unanimously saying, do not mess around in Nicaragua anymore. That's when you know Congress is mad.

20:15Right. When they unanimously agree on something. Yeah. And then the Wall Street Journal breaks the story about the harbor mining long after the Boland Amendment was passed. Mm-hmm. And now Congress is even madder. Right. So they passed two more amendments, Boland Amendments. Right. Because there were loopholes, basically, that allowed, you know, the U.S. to sort of do these things semi-legally. So it was like, well, here's a loophole. So it wasn't really fully illegal that we did this stuff. Yeah. That's like the Reagan administration's way.

20:46All right. They closed these loopholes. And now this was like, it was pretty ironclad. I don't know about ironclad, but it was pretty tight amendment-wise. At the very least, Congress walked away thinking, it's done. It's settled. We made ourselves quite clear. Right. Ronald Reagan signed these into law. Yeah. He didn't veto them. Nope. He accepted these things. I think he even said like, yeah, this is a good idea, great way to go, Congress, and signed it. I'm not going to do a Reagan impression.

21:17But so Congress thought that the matter was settled, but it wasn't settled. Like, this is how laser-focused Reagan was on overthrowing the Sandinista government down in Nicaragua. He just took a CIA operation and took it even further underground than it had been before, basically. He was like, okay, if you guys are going to outlaw this stuff, we're just going to have to get even more illegal. Yeah. So there were a couple of factions here at work.

21:48One was this continued operation underground, deep, deep underground now. And then there was Reagan's public. Like, he still wanted to get real money from Congress. Right. So he didn't have to do this stuff. Right. So he kept up this public PR campaign beating this drum about communism at our doorstep. He said that the Contras were the moral equals of our founding fathers. That's a big one to pull out. Like, that's a direct quote. Yeah. Of our founding fathers. Yeah. Um, and started in with the,

22:20and again, you see this stuff kind of repeating itself. The campaign of fear, uh, where he basically said, unless we do something tough here, then there will be a tidal wave of feet people. I don't even know what that means, but that's, that just seems super offensive. Swarming into our country. He meant, you know, refugees. Feet people. Seeking a safe haven. It was one word even, I think. One word. It's funny because I looked up feet people and that's a company that like, I think it makes shoelaces. And they're like, yes, say it again. Say .com.

22:52Uh, so this is all going on. And on the, on the, on the down low, all the operations are going on. And on the public facing side, Reagan's just continuing this PR push. Right. Basically saying like Congress, look at these heartless old, you know, gas bags turning off the funding to these founding father, moral equivalent to our founding fathers. Go vote these guys out of office and vote in some people who will turn the funding back on. Yeah. And while the Contras may have been fighting, uh, communism, they were doing so through means

23:23that the founding fathers probably would not have approved of, like murder and torture and rape and mutilation, kidnapping, and not, you know, I mean, it wasn't so widespread that it was like, that's all they were doing, but they would resort to those tactics. Right. Uh, and that's not founding father stuff. No, it's definitely not, not as far as I've ever learned. No, I don't think so. And I mean, it's had a few hundred, couple hundred years to come out. Yeah. And it still hasn't. So yeah. I read some of the stuff too, like some of the, um, affidavits were like just brutal.

23:54Oh yeah, dude. The, the, the war down in Nicaragua, the civil war. Yeah. That the U.S. basically fomented and supported, um, it went on for a decade. Like it was, it went on into the nineties and it was like, not just like countrymen against countrymen, like civilians were getting murdered by the scores. Yeah. And just, they would get kidnapped and tortured and killed. And like, it was a really brutal time in Nicaragua and the, the Reagan administration is right in the middle of this, like providing as much aid

24:24as they can to one side. Yeah. And it was, uh, one of the big problems was that the Contras back then were a bunch of different factions and they didn't answer to a single leader. Right. And the one thing I got out of the affidavits, uh, one of which this woman described them taking her children and her finding their mutilated bodies the next day. Good God. It was brutal. Um, one of the leaders said that there's, there's no disciplinary system at all within the Contra, uh, groups. Oh yeah? Yeah, like there, there's no accountability.

24:54Right. So you could do anything you wanted and there's no discipline set up. Right. So it was just, they were fractured and no one, you know, was talking to each other and it was just a big mess. Right. But, Reagan was doing his best to, to paint everything in black and white. Right. Contra's good, Sandinista's bad. So anything that Contra's did was good and stuff that couldn't be painted as good would just be denied or glossed over or not reported on. That's right. So, uh, while, while Reagan's out running around trying to drum up public support

25:25for the Contra's and thus congressional aid being turned back on. And also saying, don't do drugs. He, uh, yeah, that was a big one. Even though we're shipping a lot of drugs back and forth. It's awfully rich now that you know all that stuff, you know? Yeah. Um, he's also secretly supporting them going in flagrant violation of what Congress has said that, that America can do. Um, he tells his people, he wants the Contra's movement to be kept alive body and soul is how he put it. Mm-hmm. Which, and he basically said,

25:56do it. This is what history has told us is that Reagan basically said, keep the Contra movement alive, body and soul. I'm gonna go work on Congress. I'm putting my hands over my ears from now on. Yeah. Whether that's true or not, we will probably never know. Right. Because it's all been shredded. As far as the history books is concerned, Yeah. that was, that's what happened. Right. So, uh, here's what they did. They said the CIA has a bad rap, um, for a lot of reasons and Congress is not super friendly with them. Well, they expressly forbade

26:26the CIA from operating there. Right. So, he said, here's what we're gonna do. Um, we're gonna use the National Security Council. Mm-hmm. And, the CIA chief, William Casey, he's around, he's gonna just, like, advise here and there. And William Casey was like, oh no, I really gotta be involved because this is really good stuff. They're like, no, no, no, we're talking, like, officially here. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. So, at first, a National Security Advisor was Robert McFarlane and then he was succeeded by John Poindexter. Very important you remember that name. Um, and then Casey's still there,

26:57like you said, doing his thing on the down low, unofficially. Right. I think even in some cases kind of stepping on toes or whatever, he was like a, an additional boss to the, to the main guy. The guy everybody's heard of. The guy whose mind, or whose name jumps to mind when you hear about this, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Ollie North. And in, in, in retrospect, especially if you went, if you lived through the Iran-Contra hearings and you're familiar with Ollie North, like, you would guess that when Ollie North was tapped to head up

27:28this extraordinarily difficult secret operation to go against Congress and keep the Contra movement alive and kicking, that Ollie North was a, a, a bad, a covert operator to the ninth degree, right? Right. That is not at all correct. No. Career Marine, a very highly decorated Marine, served in Vietnam, won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. Yeah. A devout Catholic,

27:59and by all accounts, a stand-up guy and to many, many Americans, he is still, like, a top-notch American hero. Sure. Well, he was, like, the president of the NRA until, I think, recently. Yeah. I think there's some scandal that just happened where there was. It came out that he, like, tried to depose Wayne LaPierre or something like that. I don't know. I don't either. But even beyond that, like, even beyond whether he's a stand-up guy or not as far as, you know, patriotism is concerned. Sure.

28:29Just job experience, he had, like, none. Yeah. He had no experience whatsoever, as far as I could ever tell, in covert operations. He did a pretty good job for a while, though. He did an amazing job.