IRAN-CONTRA: STILL A MYSTERY. Part 2: Did Reagan trade arms for hostages?
An MOR series
If you didn’t read Part 1 yet, you may do so here:
Ronald Reagan made secret weapons transfers to Iran.
The official story says: arms for hostages.
But that is impossible.
As explained in Part 1, back in 1986 US President Ronald Reagan and his vice-president George Bush Sr. were caught red-handed making secret weapons transfers—very large (billions per year)—to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: the Iran-Contra Affair.
Gigantic international scandal.
Khomeini was an Iranian jihadi terrorist publicly pledged to destroy the United States of America, so Reagan-Bush’s Iran-Contra behaviors might have resulted in formal charges of treason.
To weasel out of that, Reagan-Bush—after telling some obvious lies—settled finally on the story that the weapons shipments were well-intentioned: meant as ransom payments to free seven civilian US hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah. Since the terror group Hezbollah had been created by Khomeini’s Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), the idea, according to this official story, was to coax Khomeini to get Hezbollah to release those hostages.
So Reagan sent billions in weapons to enemies of the US who murder civilians in order to protect… US civilians?
That’s a self-contradiction, therefore false.
But if you’d like a historical demonstration to go with the above logical necessity, just order up. That demonstration follows.
Did Reagan-Bush even care about the hostages in Lebanon?
It doesn’t seem like they cared.
Consider Jerry Levin, CNN Bureau Chief in Beirut (Lebanon’s capital city), who was abducted in March of 1984. His wife, Sis Levin, interviewed afterwards for Cover Up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, a documentary from 1988, recalled on camera that she and other relatives of the hostages in Lebanon had found scant support from the Reagan administration.
“[Reagan] was too busy to even see us. We had no access. We had no task force. We had no hearings in Congress. All of those things were denied us. We were simply told to stay home, to be quiet, to trust, and the agenda will be fulfilled. Now we know the agenda was to Iran.”
Frustrated after seven months of zero progress to secure her husband’s freedom, this plucky lady traveled to the Middle East and herself negotiated for her husband’s release via the Syrian government. Thanks to her efforts, Jerry Levin was allowed to escape. The wife got him out. How many billions in weapons did she bring for the Iranian terrorists? Not one rifle.
Sis Levin’s experience convinced her that Reagan-Bush did not care about the hostages. This is her on-camera postmortem:
“The claim on the part of the government was that the administration was so anxious about the hostage situation that they were pressured into giving arms to the Ayatollah [Khomeini] to bring the hostages out. Many of us think, in looking at it, that if there had not been hostages, they would have had to have been created. Because if the agenda to get arms to Iran were discovered, the only thing the American people would take as an excuse would be the very human element of a very human president weeping over hostages.”
Levin made a strong accusation: in her view, “the agenda to get arms to Iran” had nothing whatever to do with freeing hostages. Yes, Reagan was a good actor—he knew how to tear up in front of a camera. But Sis Levin, close to the action, sniffed a con.
The dramatic historical fact
Three years later, Seymour Hersh confirmed her suspicions when the New York Times published his piece, ‘The Iran Pipeline’ (8 December 1991). It reported what several investigations—starting with research by the Danish Seamen’s Union—had already found:
“Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy … The flow of arms [to Iran] began only a few months after … [Reagan’s] Inauguration Day in 1981.”1
Anything as complicated as making secret and illegal arms transfers to Iran requires logistical acumen and special-ops chops—and that takes some planning and organization. At the very least a few months. Reagan therefore came into office already knowing that he would send weapons to Iran. His presidential campaign was an act (see Part 1).
He was an actor.
In any case, the established fact—that weapons shipments to Iran began “in 1981,” right after Reagan took office—refuted the official story, as Hersh made clear, because this was
“before the Iranian-sponsored seizure of American hostages in Lebanon began in 1982…” (my emphasis).
I call this a dramatic historical fact. It’s a technical term. I define it like this: a dramatic historical fact is one that—all by itself—refutes (or ‘falsifies’) a hypothesis, because the hypothesis requires the fact in question to be impossible. And yet there it is.
They are nice to have, but dramatic facts are not always on hand. Imagine that Reagan had begun his secret arms transfers after 1982—suppose these transfers had really begun in 1985, as he claimed to the cameras (in one of his many, many lies). We’d then be forced to sift through mountains of data to debate whether or not the preponderance of evidence supports the ‘arms-for-hostages’ story that Reagan gave us.
But we don’t have to do that because look: Reagan started the arms transfers in 1981 and no hostages would exist in Lebanon until 1982. Bam. We’re done: hypothesis refuted: The decision to start making arms transfers to Iran had nothing to do with freeing hostages. Reagan lied (again).
You can see now why ‘chronology is the backbone of historiography,’ as they say.
Now, a political theorist must produce a model of the causal and institutional—or system—structure of events. In this business, dramatic historical facts are especially useful, because, when handy, they allow us to exclude certain hypotheses from consideration. Good theorists will keep a sharp eye out for them. But this is a negative process: excluding Reagan’s ‘arms for hostages’ claim does not tell us what is true.
So the question remains:
Why did US bosses send weapons to Iran?
The question is sharpened once you see that Khomeini was in a bind, as the Iran-Iraq war raged already and Iranian weapons caches—which the US had earlier built for the deposed Shah—had been somewhat depleted in the Iranian Revolution. Plus, the Iraqi enemy was well armed. And so it was that “Iran at that time,” as Hersh explained, “was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal.”
This has a rather important implication, and it is this: Reagan, at no risk to himself, could have stood by and watched how a starved-for-weapons Khomeini and his jihadi ideology were both destroyed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But no. Reagan gave Khomeini weapons and spare parts. Lots of them: “$2 billion a year” according to Hersh. And perhaps it was a great deal more, for Hersh also writes that “several billion dollars flowed to Iran each year during the early 1980’s” (emphasis mine).
So, at great risk to themselves—meaning it really mattered to them—Reagan-Bush pulled all the stops to rebuild Khomeini’s military infrastructure.
Why?
Khomeini was destroying the flower of the Iranian people!
“young boys, aged 12 to 17, … recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, [are] given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the slogan: ‘I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.’ ”2
Reagan-Bush sent cartloads of weapons to a regime that slaughtered its own children and promised to destroy the United States? Why? Why?
No sexier question can be imagined for a free press that speaks Truth to Power. Yet Seymour Hersh and ‘the newspaper of record,’ as the New York Times likes to be known, preferred restraint. They neither solved the puzzle nor even proposed a hypothesis. As if none could be imagined; as if the alternative to Reagan’s lies had to be that an entire conspiracy to arm Khomeini was put together for, well, for no reason. Wrote Hersh: “No American rationale for permitting covert arms sales to Iran could be established.”3 Case closed!
There is plenty of drama here. But let’s stick to the implications for a science of politics.
How should students of US democracy evaluate this episode?
Generally, in the West, a widespread bias in academic and media circles frowns upon any suggestion that illegal and secret high-level conspiracies to con the citizenry and undermine democracy might be at work. The very idea, one is repeatedly told, is ridiculous. And yet, as historian Theodore Draper, author of a book on Iran-Contra, has said,
“ ‘During the course of the Iran-Contra affairs, something in the nature of a junta was at work inside the US government…, [working] to overthrow an established constitutional rule of law with the help of a president.’ ”4
An entire democratic society was conned from the very top. It did happen, which proves it can happen.
But there is an optimist counter to this, I know.
It goes like this. Yes, an entire democracy was conned, but only for a few years. The criminals were caught red-handed. So, one might conclude, the system worked (in the end). High-level conspiracies are possible, sure, but, in the United States at least they are also likely to be discovered and exposed by a free press and then prosecuted by the appropriate branches of government.
This optimistic view may in principle be correct but presuming it so may not be wise. Just as we are well advised, every so often, to get a medical checkup, we ought also to examine the health of our political ‘immune system,’ because those who would undermine democracy, like pathogens that attack the body, always exist, and many exist within the body, waiting for their chance.
We know from our own biology that a good immune response will do three things: 1) spot the infection; 2) defeat the hostile agent; and 3) learn its ‘signature.’ By learning that ‘signature’—a form of memory—the immune system can later recognize hostile agents of the same type and disable them with appropriate countermeasures. This is why, if you get measles and live, you don’t get it twice. By analogy, then, we may ask about the Iran-Contra Affair:
Did the US media—the ‘Fourth Estate’—spot the hostile agent?
Was the hostile agent defeated by the prosecutorial powers of the State?
Was a properly functional, institutional memory stored for later use?
To the first question, I must answer ‘no.’ It was the Arab, not the US press, that uncovered this story, which first broke in the Lebanese weekly Al Shiraa.
To the second question, on a first pass, one might answer ‘yes,’ because some conspirators were prosecuted. But I will answer ‘no’ because nobody was punished. Write Kornbluh & Byrne:
“In the end, those officials who admitted to, or were convicted of, criminal acts—none of whom received more than a minor fine as punishment—were pardoned by President Bush on December 24, 1992. The pardons also preempted the scheduled trials of former CIA official Duane Claridge and former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, and prevented public exposure of a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Reagan White House to cover up the president’s role in the illegal sale of arms to Iran. ‘The pardons in themselves perfect[ed] the cover-up,’ [special prosecutor] Walsh would later say.”5
Those pardons were possible because the treason law was not applied.
The US Code stipulates that even if a US traitor is not executed, then, for certain, he or she “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” Yet Vice President George Bush Sr.—consummate insider, former CIA Director, and top co-conspirator in the CIA’s operation to arm Ayatollah Khomeini—didn’t merely return to office, he became the next president!
With that power, Bush Sr. eliminated the entire legal effort against the Iran-Contra conspirators and made himself safe. Indeed, other traitors in the Iran-Contra team, not just Bush, would return to positions of great influence in matters of US foreign policy.
So the US system failed utterly on points 1 and 2 above.
But what about the third point? Was a strong, functional, institutional memory stored for later use, allowing us to recognize, in the future, the signature of such cons?
No. Malcolm Byrne wrote in 2014 that the Iran-Contra Affair, “the biggest U.S. political scandal of the Reagan era … has now largely been forgotten.”
It is worth asking the question: What should have happened? What was required to build a functional and institutional memory—one that could protect US citizens from future acts of presidential treason? I mean a memory that would help us at least to recognize new activities bearing the same ‘signature’?
Strong memories bind to powerful emotions. To construct a functional memory, US citizens needed media saturation on the ‘big reveal,’ legal-thriller style, to elicit the strong emotions that could bind to the key information for proper storage and easy retrieval. To help you see what I mean, imagine with me a courtroom scene that never happened—but should have.
An imagined courtroom drama
[Open scene…]
On the witness stand, oozing charisma but looking a bit uncomfortable, sits the accused, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. Striding before him is Mr. P., the prosecutor, doing that lawyer thing where he directs questions to the witness while having a silent conversation with the jury. Mind you, he never winks, raises an eyebrow, or throws a knowing glance at the jury, for grave questions of State are before the court and they demand decorum. But you can feel his total animal awareness of the impaneled citizens of the United States, for whose benefit his every movement is coldly calculated.
“Mr. Reagan. Mr. President,” he begins politely. “Is it your testimony that, abusing your authority as president, you conspired to send weapons, in secret, to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; to this blood-curling terrorist who joyfully murders men, women, and children he considers ‘infidels,’ and also many of his own people; to this famously declared enemy of the United States who vows to destroy our country?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“No further questions, Your Honor.”
“Your Honor, may I redirect?” Reagan’s defense attorney, Mr. D., is on his feet, quite eager.
“You may.”
To Reagan: “Mr. President, were you trying to destroy the United States?”
“No, of course not.”
“Were you hoping to kill infidels”?
“Absolutely not!”
“Did you have a different reason, then, to send weapons to Imam Khomeini?”
“I did.”
“Pray tell the jury what that was.”
Reagan and his perfect pompadour turn to the jury and—by golly—his eye literally twinkles. A dapple of sunlight leaks through the tall courtroom window and bounces off his million-dollar smile. And his eyebrows reach for each other in grandfatherly tenderness as he gives that trademark cock of the head before regaling us with his famous storyteller voice:
“I just had to do something for those innocent Americans held hostage in Lebanon. I was their president. They were ordinary US citizens. Like you. Like your friends. Like your family. I could not leave them behind. I sent those weapons to Khomeini because he had the power to release the hostages. If I did wrong, in my heart, it still feels right.”
The defense lawyer steals a glance at the jury. It’s all over their faces: they are eating out of Reagan’s hand. They are thinking: What would I have done? Could I leave those poor bastards behind? And if my own son were there? The president did what any of us would. God help me, I love Ronald Reagan!
Mr. D. knows to quit while he’s ahead. “No further questions, Your Honor.”
The prosecutor rises. “Your Honor, may I?”
“Your witness.”
“Mr. President,” resumes Mr. P., the prosecutor, as he walks slowly toward the witness box, buttoning his suit. “When was the first hostage taken in Lebanon?”
“That was July 1982.”
“That hostage was David Dodge, acting president of the American University of Beirut. Was it not, Mr. President?”
“It was.”
“And David Dodge was released one year later, in 1983, on the anniversary of his abduction?”
“That’s right.”
“And no further hostages were taken until February 1984?”
“Yes, I believe that is correct.”
“Would you agree, Mr. President, as a matter of simple logic, that arms shipments to Khomeini cannot have the purpose of liberating hostages if those hostages do not yet exist?”
“I… yes. I do.”
“In other words, as a matter of simple logic, any US arms shipments sent to Khomeini before July 1982 cannot have been intended to release hostages in Lebanon, because no such hostages yet existed. Would you agree with that, Mr. President?”
“Yes, but…”
“Yes? Mr. President? But what?”
“But I… don’t quite understand.”
“Well let me see if I can help you, Mr. President. When did you first ship weapons to Khomeini?”
“Why, in 1985.”
“Is that your testimony, Mr. President? That you began sending arms shipments to Khomeini in the year 1985? Not before?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” protests the defense attorney. “Asked and answered.”
Judge: “Sustained. Get to the point Mr. P.”
Prosecutor pauses for effect, straightens his back, looks Reagan in the eyes. He requests that a document be admitted into evidence and hands opposite counsel and judge each a copy. Then he gives a copy to the witness. “Mr. President, is that your signature at the bottom?”
“It… it is. How did you…?”
“Does that document authorize weapons transfers to Khomeini?”
There is a long pause. “Yes.”
“Would you read out loud to the court the date on that document?”
“I… I… cannot.”
“Mr. President, is the date on that document 1981?”
“I… I…”
The air has been thickening and you can now cut it with a knife. The judge is visibly aghast by what is obviously coming. His hand is twitching. So is his lower lip. He is reddening. But his role is clear: “The witness will answer the question,” he sputters.
“Yes, the date is 1981,” says Reagan in a soft voice as he slumps into his chair.
All at once, sighs, gasps, whispers, and cries of horror escape from audience and jury, flooding the courtroom as if a dam had burst under the weight of accumulated pressure, easily overwhelming the staccato protests of the judge’s gavel. There is a rallentando to that gaveling, eventually, as the cacophonous commotion dies on its own and His Honor regains command. People shush each other. A deathly silence falls—you could hear a pin drop now.
“Is it not the case, then, Mr. President,” intones Mr. P., and his voice carries like a shout in an empty warehouse, “that secret arms shipments to Khomeini began, under your authority, in 1981, before any hostages yet existed in Lebanon?”
“I… I…” Reagan cannot finish the sentence. He is staring at the document he signed.
“Is it not the case, Mr. President, that you lied here to the jury, as you did to the American people, when you claimed that your secret and illegal weapons to Khomeini were meant to secure the release of hostages?”
“I…”
“In fact your weapons shipments—billions of dollars in weapons to the terrorist Khomeini; to this declared enemy of the United States and all of our freedoms—had nothing whatever to do with those hostages. Isn’t that true, Mr. President? It’s a simple matter. I put it to you that you committed treason. You banked on our trust and affection, betrayed your oath of office, and conned the American people. Is that not so?”
“Objection, Your Honor!” Defense counsel, snapping out of a paralyzing shock, is finally up on his feet. And trembling. “Counsel is testifying. And badgering the witness!”
“Withdrawn. No further questions.”
[And… scene!]
So, have they been managing our reality?
Whoever writes a legal thriller, and whoever honestly prosecutes a real case, wants a gotcha moment like this, for it sweeps from the stage a morass of confusing and distracting details and focuses audience and jury on the key structural item—the ‘smoking gun’—that will establish causality and responsibility, and therefore innocence or guilt.
But the official Iran-Contra investigators apparently lacked the dramatic good sense of any mercenary novelist or screenwriter worth his first two cents. For, as international-law specialist Karen Parker remarked to the filmmakers of Cover Up, the congressional investigators presented “nauseating detail on [a] few transactions” and “cheated [citizens] out of the whole ball of wax.”
Were all those congressional hearings and the media pandemonium, then, asked the film’s narrator, “merely an attempt to keep the real truth hidden from public view?”
Were they managing our reality?
Barbara Honegger, formerly on the Reagan-Bush team, and later, offended by all these revelations, turning on them to become an Iran-Contra private investigator, answered on camera:
“The bottom line is that the Iran-Contra Committee and the Walsh investigation, because their mandates only take us back to 1984, in and of themselves are a cover-up.”
In other words, Congress held hearings, committees examined evidence, prosecutors deposed witnesses, and high officials were humbled—all of it on TV; but that production, which showcased to the world the institutional machinery of US democracy ostensibly repairing itself, was in fact steering everybody’s attention away from the key dramatic fact: that arms shipments to Khomeini began in 1981, before any hostages existed in Lebanon.
The con, therefore, was still on.
It’s still on. But that demonstration—of how the Iran-Contra reality continues to be managed (making it impossible for people today to understand the Middle East)—will be for my next piece:
IRAN-CONTRA: STILL A MYSTERY. Part 3: Media, Scholars, and public memory.
I examine the kind of ‘memory’ about Iran-Contra that the Extended Fourth Estate (press plus academia) has preserved for US citizens. This case study will teach us how the major meaning-making institutions actually function. This piece is the third in my series on Iran-Contra.
The Iran Pipeline: A Hidden Chapter/A special report.; U.S. Said to Have Allowed Israel to Sell Arms to Iran, The New York Times, December 8, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk, 2897 words, By SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Special to The New York Times, WASHINGTON, Dec. 7
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/iran-pipeline-hidden-chapter-special-report-us-said-have-allowed-israel-sell.html
‘IRAN: FIVE YEARS OF FANATICISM’; New York Times; February 12, 1984, Section 6, Page 21; by Terence Smith.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/12/magazine/iran-five-years-of-fanaticism.html
The Iran Pipeline: A Hidden Chapter/A special report.; U.S. Said to Have Allowed Israel to Sell Arms to Iran, The New York Times, December 8, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk, 2897 words, By SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Special to The New York Times, WASHINGTON, Dec. 7
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/iran-pipeline-hidden-chapter-special-report-us-said-have-allowed-israel-sell.html
Quoted in: Kornbluh, P., & Byrne, M. 1993. The Iran-Contra Scandal: The declassified history. New York: The New Press. (pp.xiii)
Kornbluh, P., & Byrne, M. 1993. The Iran-Contra Scandal: The declassified history. New York: The New Press. (pp.xx-xxi)
Very good piece! I particularly enjoyed the courtroom scene :)
Looking forward to the Next article.
If you haven't already considered it, I suggest that you consider writing a TV series on courtroom drama, very much in the Matlock mold. Seat-of-the-pants stuff. Reminds me of my youth in South Africa before they allowed us to watch TV. Radio theatre was the food of imagination and scenarios such as this were what we lived for. A good radio play had us working our imagination. This is no different.