May 5, 2025 • 41 mins
How the Reagan administration tried to prevent the Iran scandal from becoming a second Watergate.
For a list of books, documentaries and resources we used to research this episode visit: bit.ly/fiascopolitics
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. On Thursday, November thirteenth, nineteen eighty six, Ronald Reagan
opened his maroon leather bound diary and jotted down a
few thoughts about his day. He was in the middle
(00:38):
of a firestorm, he wrote, caused by the ridiculous falsehoods
the media has been spawning. The firestorm had been ignited
by two separate scandals. First, there was Eugene Hasenfuss, the
former marine whose plane had been shot down over Nicaragua
by a Sandinista soldier.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It has all the makings of a major new uproar.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
The US may have violated a ban on a to
the Contras.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
The Hasenfuss crash seemed to confirm that the Reagan administration
was yet again evading the law that prohibited the US
government from funding the Contra rebels.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
The White House has had full knowledge of this Contra
cargo plane operation for more than a year.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Then, about a month later, the White House was hit
with a seemingly unrelated story about arms trafficking in a
different foreign country. According to an article in a Lebanese magazine,
the US was selling missiles to Iran. Subsequent reports alleged
that the arrangement was part of an arms for hostages swamp.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
Iran has helped the United States free hostage from Lebanon,
and the US is helping Iran in its war with Iraq.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
In his diary, Reagan referred to the controversy as the
Iran incident that was a lot more innocuous than what
people outside the administration were, calling.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
It a very dangerous precedent negotiating with terrorists.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Escapades, and I think that is the word is simply
a misreading of Iranian political realities, and therefore it's dumb.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
The Iran news instantly eclipsed Eugene Hasenfuss and Nicaragua. It
just wasn't that surprising that Reagan still wanted to support
the contras. The arms for hostages story, on the other hand,
seemed to come out of nowhere, and it flatly contradicted
Reagan's stated policies of not negotiating with terrorists and opposing
the sale of weapons to Iran. The outcry was unlike
(02:23):
anything the Reagan White House had ever faced.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
For six years round Reagan was the Teflon president.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
That's Peter Wallson. In nineteen eighty six, he was serving
as White House counsel, a job that involved advising the
president on what was and wasn't legal. Wallison says that
scandals just didn't seem to stick to Reagan through most
of his presidency, but the Iran story was different.
Speaker 6 (02:46):
There was so little official information coming out, only leaks
from various places and people who had some knowledge of it,
either abroad or in the United States. So it was
an enormous media firestorm.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Initially, Reagan tried to just ride it out, even as
advisers urged him to publicly address the controversy. Finally, a
week after American media picked up the arms for hostages story,
Reagan agreed to deliver a televised speech. First order of business,
he wrote in his diary, I will go on TV
at eight pm tonight.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
President Reagan is addressing the nation this evening to set
the record straight as the White House put it on
relations where they ran, and efforts to free you as hostages.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Peter Wallason is one of the White House staffers responsible
for writing the speech.
Speaker 6 (03:33):
We were supposed to explain what all these newspaper reports
were about, all this media coverage. But the idea was
to try to explain, I suppose what it was that
happened in a way that showed that it was innocent.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
But as Wallason and the other speechwriters discovered, the facts
of the arm shipments were not easy to nail down.
Here's Jane Mayer, a reporter at The New Yorker and
co author of the book Landslide.
Speaker 7 (04:06):
What becomes clear is that the as that are most
involved in this scandal are conspiring with each other to
come up with cover stories that will get themselves off
the hook. But in order to do that, they need
to kind of get the President to lie for them.
Speaker 8 (04:27):
Some sources within the administration tell us somewhat different story
than the one the president will tell tonight. One such source,
familiar with the president's speech, said, we are now engaged
in rewriting history.
Speaker 7 (04:38):
This is all putting the president in great peril, and
it rings a familiar bell to at least a couple people.
They remember Watergate.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Here's Peter Wallason again.
Speaker 6 (04:52):
After Watergate, we all understood that the cover up could
be worse than the crime itself.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Reagan's speech was going to be an opportunity to send
a clear signal he was not trying to cover anything up.
Speaker 9 (05:10):
NBC's regular Thursday night schedule beginning with the Cosby Show
will be seen immediately following President Reagan's address on most
of these stations.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
At eight p m. On November thirteenth, Reagan sat down
at his desk in the Oval Office, looked into the camera,
and tried to explain himself.
Speaker 10 (05:29):
Good evening.
Speaker 11 (05:31):
I wanted this time to talk with you about an
extremely sensitive and profoundly important matter of foreign policy. For
eighteen months now, we have had underway a secret diplomatic
initiative to Iran. That initiative was undertaken for the simplest
and best of reasons, to renew a relationship with the
nation of Iran, to bring an honorable end of the
bloody six year war between Iran and Iraq, to eliminate
(05:55):
state sponsored terrorism and subversion, and to effect the safe
return of all hostages.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
There it was confirmation of the arm sales to Iran
to effect the safe return of all the hostages. Except
a minute later, Reagan also said this.
Speaker 11 (06:12):
The charge has been made that the United States has
shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release
of American hostages in Lebanon. Those charges are utterly false.
The United States has not.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
The speech did not play well with viewers.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
It is a new experience for the president. He goes
on television to tell the nation he has never sent
any arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, and
twenty four hours later, the country is far from convinced.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
An ABC News poll found that fifty six percent of
Americans thought the President was lying when he said there
had not been in arms for hostages deal. Suddenly, Reagan
was in an unfamiliar position. People just didn't trust him.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
There was criticism of the President's explanations from both Republicans
and Democrats in Congress.
Speaker 12 (06:58):
Is the President lying?
Speaker 13 (06:59):
They may think there was no quid pro quoll. I
can't believe that the Iranians didn't think there was any
quid pro quoll.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
This was not how people usually talked about Ronald Reagan.
It cut against everything that was appealing about him as
a politician.
Speaker 7 (07:13):
In Watergate, Nixon was always seen as a schemer. You know,
his nickname was tricky Dick. Reagan was the opposite. He
was sort of sunny, and he didn't seem like the
type would be able to come up with this incredibly
complicated scheme and lie to the American public.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
In the wake of Reagan's speech. White House communications director
Pat Buchanan Yes that. Pat Buchanan decided to reach out
to a former colleague he thought might have some advice.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
And he called up Nixon himself and asked Nixon for
his advice. What should they do?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yes that Nixon.
Speaker 7 (07:54):
Nixon said, don't do the cover up. Get out the
facts as much as you can, and say you've made
a mistake, and the public will accept that.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Buchanan brought Nixon's advice to the White House, but Reagan
was not prepared to admit that he had made a mistake.
There wasn't anything to apologize for. He insisted he hadn't
done anything wrong. I'm leon Nyfok from Prologue Projects and
Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco, Iran Contra.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
The country is being asked to believe some things that
are hard to swallow.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
Something's happening here that looks a lot like Watergate, that being.
Speaker 14 (08:34):
A complete orgy of shredding.
Speaker 7 (08:36):
I realized that I'd missed the whole story.
Speaker 11 (08:38):
I directed the Attorney General, who wanted to take a
review of this matter.
Speaker 13 (08:41):
The President knew nothing about it until I reported it
to him. I alerted him yesterday morning Boo.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
In the administration knew what was going on, and when.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Episode five all out how the Reagan White House tried
to stop their Iran problem from becoming a second Watergate.
We'll be right back after the President's speech from the
(09:14):
Oval Office, the White House schedule the follow up press
conference about the Iran issue. Maybe his first speech had
just been too confusing.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
It is argued to this very political city that President
Reagan's televised news conference tonight in the midst of the
Iran affair, will be the most important of his presidency.
There are many unanswered questions about the most visibly difficult
problem since.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
He was elected once again, Reagan's aides were divided over
how he should present the facts within the next Should
he say as little as possible and keep insisting that
everything had been above board, or should he admit that
the missile sales were part of an arms for hostages
deal and apologize. One of the people advocating for the
come clean approach was Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz.
Speaker 10 (09:57):
Get it all out, as I said, Morts and all,
and then they'll graduate get behind you.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Schultz died in twenty twenty one at the age of
one hundred. When I interviewed him, he was ninety eight
and living in californ And though he served under Nixon,
he insisted to me that his advice to Reagan wasn't
informed by his experience of Watergate.
Speaker 10 (10:19):
No, I wasn't really thinking about Watergate. President Reagan's standing
was totally different from Richard Nixon's. People loved Reagan and
respected him a great deal, and they knew he was
a man of principle.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
As Secretary of State, Schultz had strongly opposed the idea
of selling missiles to Iran. He had advocated against it
during multiple meetings with the President.
Speaker 10 (10:42):
I was opposed to it from the beginning, and I
always felt somehow it would wind up leaking out. My
fear was that we were selling arms to Iran and
Iran was up to no good. It was a mistake.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Clearly, pushing back against the arms deals in private had
not worked. Now that the story was out, Schultz was
surprisingly willing to push back in public too.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Secretary of State Schultz continued distancing himself from the trading
of weapons or hostages.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Shultz said he thought that not negotiating with terrorists is
the right policy asked about official silence on the reports
of dealings where Iran. Schultz later said, I don't particularly
enjoy it. I like to say what I think.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
As the scandal intensified, Schultz went unfaced the nation. In
an interview with Leslie Stall, he made clear that he
was out of sync with other members of the administration.
Speaker 15 (11:35):
Will there be any more arm shipments to Iran, either
directly by the United States or through any third parties?
Speaker 16 (11:42):
Under the circumstances if Iran's were with Iraq, its pursuit
of terrorism, its association with those holding our hostages, I
would certainly say, as far as I am concerned, No.
Speaker 15 (11:53):
Do you have the authority to speak for the entire administration?
Speaker 14 (11:58):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Schultz's interview enraged his colleagues in the administration and set
off another round of speculation about chaos in the White House.
You're not going to resign, are you?
Speaker 3 (12:09):
For the State Department? They're saying the Secretary wants a
firm commitment no more arms will be sent to Iran,
and shows will be included in future deliberations.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Now, Reagan wouldn't just have to clear the air about
arm shipments. When he gave his press conference, he would
likely face questions about whether his administration was coming apart
under the weight of the scandal. To prepare, the President
enlisted the help of some of his top aides, including
National Security Advisor John Poindexter.
Speaker 17 (12:38):
We knew from the beginning it would be difficult to
explain to the American people the detailed rationale. The problem,
in my mind, was associating the arms with the hostages.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Poindexter wanted the President to explain that the missiles weren't
really a ransom payment for the hostages. They were part
of something bigger. As you'll remember for Episode four, Poindexter
believed that the ultimate goal of the initiative was to
make inroads with moderates in the Iranian government. The point
of the missiles was to show the Iranians that the
US was operating in good faith. The release of the
(13:17):
hostages was supposed to show the US that the Iranians
were too.
Speaker 17 (13:21):
Our sale of arms to Iran was an indication, we thought,
to Iran that the President was serious about this, and
there causing the release of hostis by proxy was an
indication of honesty and earnestness on their part.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
One problem with Poindexter's explanation was that Reagan cared a
lot more about the hostages than he did about the
broader geopolitical strategy. Another problem was that the president didn't
seem to have a firm grasp on what had happened
or what he had personally approved.
Speaker 17 (13:56):
Before the president's press conference, what we called a murder
board in the White House theater.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
The murder board was essentially a rehearsal for the press.
Speaker 17 (14:09):
Conference, and at one of these murder boards, the president
would be on the podium, the Press Secretary would play
the role of the media, asking questions.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
As Poindexter watched Reagan practice his answers, he became very concerned.
Speaker 17 (14:25):
That was when I first noticed that the President's memory
was failing, because the President would give an answer and
he would not have remembered the details of what had transpired.
So I would correct the president, tell him, this is
what I think you ought to say, and the President
(14:46):
would say right, and then he would come back to
the first question, and the President would not remember what
I had suggested to him to say. So at that
point I knew it was going to be difficult.
Speaker 11 (15:08):
What do you mean, I have a few words here
before I take your questions some brief remarks.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
At eight pm on November nineteenth, the President walked out
to a podium in the East Room of the White House.
He delivered a brief statement in which he echoed Poindexter's
talking points about the diplomatic opening to Iran. Then he
opened the floor to questions from the press.
Speaker 12 (15:31):
If I can call up, if your armed shipments had
no effect on the release of the hostages, then how
do you explain the release of the hostages at the
same time that the shipments were coming out?
Speaker 11 (15:42):
Now, I said that at the time, I said to
them that there was something they could do to show
their sincerity, and if they really meant it that they
were not in favor of backing terrorists, they could begin
by releasing our hostages.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Even as he pushed Poindexter's high minded rationale for the
arm sales, Reagan struggled to explain how the hostages fit
into it, and who exactly the US had been dealing
with in a.
Speaker 13 (16:10):
How did you know that you were reaching the moderates
and how do you define a moderate in that kind
of a government.
Speaker 11 (16:17):
Well, again, you're asking questions that I cannot get into.
With regard of the answers, but believe me, we had
information that led us to believe that there are factions
within Iran, and many of them with an eye toward
the fact that they think sooner rather than later, there
is going to be a change in the government there,
and there is great dissatisfaction among the people.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Something else happened during the press conference, too. Reagan repeatedly
denied any US involvement in the two arms shipments that
took place in nineteen eighty five. These were the shipments
that had started at all, the ones in which Israel
had served as the middleman. George Schultz, the Secretary of State,
knew the president's remarks have contained inaccuracies. The next day,
(17:02):
he confronted Reagan about it face to face.
Speaker 10 (17:05):
I always had a pattern with him, whenever he gave
a speech or a pres we'd have a talk afterwards,
and I'd give him my reactions. And my reaction was,
you told a lot of things that weren't true. You
think they're true, and they've been fed to you by
your staff, and they're not true. And if you would like,
I will come over to the White House and go
(17:26):
through them with you. And he invited more.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Over Schultz met with Reagan in the White House residence.
Speaker 10 (17:32):
And I went through specific things that he said and
then pointed out why they weren't right. And he was
baffled because he thought his staff had given me his
factual information and he assumed they were right, which it
wasn't true. I never thought I'd talk to a President
of the United States that way.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
While the President tried to contain the scandal in public,
his administration was trying to take control of it behind
the scenes. The effort was led by Reagan's Attorney General,
ed mess. Mee was a longtime member of the president's
inner circle. He had been at Reagan's side back in
the sixties when Reagan was the governor of California, and
(18:17):
he'd followed him to the White House in nineteen eighty one.
Mess's decades of experience as a Reagan whisperer made him
a uniquely powerful adviser Reagan's alter ego.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
It is true that first and foremost he's loyal to
Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 11 (18:32):
Ed Mees, whether by instinct or by design, is Ronald
Reagan's man.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Here's journalist Jane Mayer again.
Speaker 7 (18:39):
He was kind of the keeper of the flame. Of
the kind of conservative values that Reagan served and supported.
He was a loyalist extraordinaire.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Toward the end of Reagan's first term, he nominated Mees
to be Attorney General. It was a controversial choice, what
if mess ended up having to investigate his friend.
Speaker 15 (18:59):
Meies came under sharp questioning from members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, concerned whether he would be the president's or
the people's lawyer.
Speaker 9 (19:07):
We have learned the evil lesson of Watergate.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Drshowitz, Professor of Criminal law at Harvard University.
Speaker 9 (19:13):
When you have a political operative in the position of
Attorney general, it creates an inherent conflict of interest.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
After more than a year of questions about that and
other controversies, Meis was confirmed by the Senate, and the
closest vote for an Attorney general in sixty years.
Speaker 15 (19:29):
Edwin mess was finally sworn in today as the new
U s Attorney General. The Senate voted sixty three to
thirty one to confirm MEAs on Saturday. The vote came
after a filibuster.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
In January of nineteen eighty six, shortly after the first
two weapons shipments to Iran, Meis was asked to provide
a legal opinion about the initiative. Some of the president's
advisors have been preparing a so called finding for the
president to sign. A finding was a kind of document
that formally authorized covert actions, in this case, the secret
(20:03):
arm sales. According to law, the White House had to
notify Congress whenever the President signed a co overt action finding,
and they had to do it in a quote timely fashion.
But Meis concluded it was fine to hold off on
telling Congress about the arm sales until after the hostages
were released. Nearly a year later, Congress still had not
(20:24):
been informed. Two days after Reagan's press conference in the
East Room, mess undertook an internal investigation to figure out
the facts. The president could not afford to keep making
public statements based on incomplete information. It would be Miss's
job to cross reference everyone's stories and brief Reagan on
what he learned. Meeces would later testify that he conducted
(20:46):
the investigation on an informal basis as Reagan's counselor and friend,
rather than as the attorney general. Nevertheless, he staffed the
project with officials from the Department of Justice that included
Charles Cooper, a thirty four year old attorney who oversaw
the Office of Legal Counsel.
Speaker 18 (21:04):
It was not a publicly known or announced investigation. It
was in fact, very much in keeping with the fact
that the material of the investigation, that is, the essential facts,
the transactions, the subject matter of the investigation, remained classified.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
It came to be called the Weekend Investigation. The idea
was that Meice and Cooper would do some digging and
be ready to present the facts to the President the
following Monday.
Speaker 18 (21:34):
And the mission was to just get the facts, get
the truth. The worst thing that the administration could do
was advance a false narrative about all this. Once the
truth did come out, it would be exponentially worse politically
and otherwise legally for the President.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
For his administration, the plan was to interview the people
most intimately involved in the arm sales and look through
memos and other documents that could shed light on how
the initiative had evolved. Meanwhile, two of the people closest
to the Iran weapons program, John Poindexter and Oliver North,
set about getting their affairs in order. Poindexter was concerned
(22:20):
about the earliest covert action finding that Reagan had signed
to cover the arm sales. The document had plainly stated
that the purpose of the initiative was to rescue American hostages. Later,
Reagan would sign other findings that listed other reasons for
the ARM sales, reasons that were more in line with
Poindexter's talking points about improving US relations with Iran. But
(22:41):
Poindexter still had the first version, and he was worried
that it would become a political liability.
Speaker 17 (22:47):
I decided that the first version of the finding, which
was not a complete explanation of what we were doing,
was not important, and so I personally destroyed it.
Speaker 19 (23:00):
How did you destroy it?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Earned it outside out in the back, like a coffee
can or something.
Speaker 17 (23:06):
Essentially it was a coffee can. Did that feel momentus momeatish? No,
not really. I hadn't liked that version of the finding
to begin with, and it was good riddance.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Oliver North had similar instincts. He had been informed that
DOJ officials working with Edmeice and Charles Cooper were planning
to come to his office to look through his files.
Here again is Jane Mayer.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
Mees didn't just rush in and seize their files as
the FBI might have, which gave them notice that if
there was anything in there, maybe they better take care
of it.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
North would later testify that his priority during this time
was to protect government secrets. One of those secrets was
the diversion of profits from the Iran arm sales to
the Contras. As part of his effort to conceal some
of his activities, North asked his secretary, Vaughn Hall, to
help him alter documents, like retype them with entire sentences deleted.
(24:04):
But some documents were apparently beyond redemption.
Speaker 7 (24:08):
They fed so many into the shredder that was in
the NSC that it jammed. It was just, you know,
just a complete obstruction of evidence party taking place as
they shredded everything in sight.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
The next day, two DOJ staffers working on Edmes's weekend
investigation came to North's office. North himself wasn't in yet
when the staffers, Brad Reynolds and John Richardson arrived and
started going through a stack of folders. Here's Ann Roe,
an editor at The Economist and author of Lives Lies
and the Iran Contra Affair.
Speaker 14 (24:51):
They're trying to be very quiet. Actually, they imbibed this
air of sort of high secrecy that goes around North
I mean they're behaving a bit like secret agents themselves,
these two officials that they're writing notes to each other,
they're not actually speaking to each other or just whispering.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Reynolds and Richardson planned to go through the folders and
North thought flagging important documents. They wanted a photocopy as
they went.
Speaker 14 (25:13):
So they're looking through the folders and they're about three
folders in and they've suddenly come upon this Manila folder
with wh written on it. It's quite a thin folder,
not much in it and a close type document, no spacing,
and they have a look at it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
The document was a five page memo titled Release of
American Hostages in Beirut.
Speaker 14 (25:36):
There's a paragraph in there that says residual funds allocated
as follows twelve point two million dollars to supply the
Democratic Nicaraguan resistance.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
The document would come to be known simply as the
Diversion Memo. It laid out how millions of dollars generated
by the arm shipments to Iran could be diverted to
the contras in Nicaragua. Reynolds and Richardson were taken aback.
Speaker 14 (26:04):
They both had the same reaction to this, that it's
too spectacular, that it's too extraordinary to think it ever happened.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Reynolds hid the memo in the stack of papers he
intended to copy.
Speaker 14 (26:15):
You might wonder at this point why North was so
happy to leave these two folks in his office where
there was something as explosive as a diversion memo just
sitting there. The reason was that there being a complete
orgy of shredding going on in this office.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Reynolds and Richardson hurried to tell ed Meice what they
had found. On their way out of the office, they
ran into Oliver North and told him they were about
to take a break for lunch. Then they met mess
and Charles Cooper at the old Ebbitt Grill about a
block away from the White House. Here's Cooper again.
Speaker 18 (27:01):
We were in a booth, Our voices were lowered. We
took care to make sure that our conversation wasn't overheard.
Vividly remember ed Mees's reaction, because as we all listened
to him, we immediately understood the potential import of what
Brad was telling us, and so we were all wide
(27:26):
eyed and jaws dropped. Ed simply said, oh shit.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
The next day, mis met with North the Department of
Justice to confront him with the smoking gun.
Speaker 14 (27:40):
Meats had been a prosecutor for years and he knew
how to do this, and so they go all over
the arms sells and chat about this and that and
so on. The North he's very relaxed and answering the questions,
and then miss suddenly says what about this and hands
him over the diversion memo.
Speaker 18 (27:59):
And Ali was taken aback that Ed knew about it.
His demeanor just betrayed the fact that he wasn't expecting
that question.
Speaker 14 (28:07):
He says something like I missed one. So Mey said,
well did this happen? And all said yes.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
After his meeting with Mees, North tried to call Poindexter
to tell him the diversion had been discovered, but Poindexter
wasn't reachable. North then returned to his office, where he
stayed until four fifteen in the morning, shredding more documents. Meanwhile,
Ed Mee and Charles Cooper knew they were holding a
time bomb.
Speaker 18 (28:34):
The most important implication of this, and ed Mees grasped
it immediately, was that this information is something that the
president must number one know immediately, and Number two that
the President must disclose publicly. It was inevitable that something
(28:58):
like that was going to surface into the public domain
that this had happened, and if it surfaced through any
other means other than the president's public disclosure, it would
be denounced as a cover up, regardless of what the
real facts were.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
On Monday, November twenty fourth, Mess went to the White
House to tell Reagan what his weekend investigation had uncovered.
He told the President that Oliver North had been taking
money from the Iran weapons sales and giving it to
the Contras.
Speaker 18 (29:29):
Ed made that report in a very tightly controlled meeting
with the President and his firm recommendation that this information
be made public as quickly as it reasonably could be.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Reagan wrote about the meeting in his diary. That night,
Ed m told me of a smoking gun our Colonel
North gave the money to the Contras. North didn't tell
me about this. This may call for resignations. It soon
became clear that John Poindexter North, supervisor the National Security Council,
had been in on the diversion two. Reagan and Mess
(30:08):
agreed that the situation was so radioactive that the only
option was to announce it publicly and force Poindexter and
North out of the White House. It would be a
huge news story no matter what, but maybe they could
control the narrative. The next day, John Poindexter was asked
to resign.
Speaker 17 (30:26):
I knew that it would be controversial that I had
approved the use of the excess profits without telling the president.
I wanted him to have some distance from that decision,
and I thought the way to put emphasis on that
was to resign. You know, I had taken a risk,
(30:49):
and I had lost.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
North drafted resignation letter too, but before he could leave
on his own terms, he was fired from the NSC
staff and reassigned to another job in the Marine Corps.
It was decided that Reagan would deliver yet another public
statement on the scandal that was now being called Iran Gate.
This time it would be a press conference including both
Reagan and Mees, and they would disclose the results of
(31:14):
mesa's weekend investigation. Just before the press conference began, Richard Seacord,
the retired Air Force general who had worked on both
the contrary supply effort and the Iran weapons sales, called
Poindexter on the phone. Seacord begged Poindexter not to give
up and resign, telling him he should force the President
to step up to the plate and take responsibility for
his actions. But Poindexter told him it was all over.
(31:38):
You don't understand, he said, According to the Sea Coords memoir,
it's too late. They're building a wall around.
Speaker 17 (31:43):
Him to isolate him from the use of the excess province,
which again we didn't think there was any illegal about it,
but it would be controversial. One of the problems that
I saw at the time was that I was beginning
to question whether the President could really defend the initiative,
(32:06):
whether he could explain it to the American public.
Speaker 19 (32:15):
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen, the President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
On November twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six, Ronald Reagan gave
a press conference to make public what he'd learned. He
kept things pretty vague.
Speaker 11 (32:40):
Last Friday, after becoming concern whether my national security apparatus
had provided me with a security or a complete factual
record with respect to the implementation of my policy toward Iran,
I directed the Attorney General to undertake a review of
this matter over the weekend and report to me on
Monday and yesterday Secretary Meice provided me in the White
(33:03):
House Chief of Staff with a report on his preliminary findings,
and this report led me to conclude that I was
not fully informed on the nature of one of the
activities undertaken in connection with this initiative, This action raises.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
When he was finished speaking, Reagan stepped aside and Edmeese
took his place at the microphone, why don't.
Speaker 17 (33:23):
I tell you what is the situation?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And then Jane Mayer was covering the White House for
the Wall Street Journal at the time, and she was
watching the press conference as it happened.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
It was an unusual thing to see this tubby barrel
of a man come in with his pink face, and
he goes up to the podium and he kind of
matter of factly lays out this completely astounding story.
Speaker 13 (33:47):
Certain monies which were received in the transaction were taken
and made available to the forces in Central America. The
President knew nothing about it until I reported it to him.
I alerted him yesterday morning we still had some more
(34:07):
work to do, and then I gave him the detail
that we had yesterday afternoon.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Who in the NSC was aware that this extra amount
of money was being transferred to the so called contras
or under their control.
Speaker 13 (34:19):
The only person's in the United States government that knew
precisely about this, The only person was Lieutenant Colonel North.
Speaker 7 (34:30):
I mean, it was unbelievable. It was the craziest thing,
and he was just sort of matter of factly running
through it. We realized that, at least I realized that
I'd missed the whole story.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Charles Cooper, the DOJ official who had worked with me
on the weekend investigation, was watching the press conference with
Secretary of State George Schultz.
Speaker 18 (34:48):
I was in the kind of the control room, just
off the briefing room, and I was watching it on
a monitor in that control room, and I remember vividly
after that was done, George Schultz basically turning from the
TV monitors, standing right next to me and looking at
(35:09):
me and saying good job, and then walking out.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Things moved very quickly after that. On Thursday, November twenty seventh, Thanksgiving,
the Los Angeles Times reported that Oliver North had shredded
reams of documents that could have been used as evidence.
It was starting to feel a lot like Watergate.
Speaker 9 (35:32):
Reporters attempted to ask Oliver North at his home today
about published stories that he had destroyed documents which may
have shed light on the Iran arm scandal.
Speaker 20 (35:42):
At the appropriate time and in the appropriate forum, I
will make a full exposition, and I will do so
on the advice of my attorney. I would suggest that
you all go home and thank God for the blessings
of the beautiful country.
Speaker 9 (35:55):
North later tried to visit the White House, but was
told he could not enter under any circumstances.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
On December first, Reagan announced the creation of the Tower Commission,
a group of three former political leaders who would investigate
what went wrong in the White House chain of command. Then,
on December twod Reagan convinced Edmeese to request the appointment
of an independent council, a move enabled by reforms that
were enacted after Watergate.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
The twenty General Niece's turning over the case to an
independent council.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
Lawrence Walsh, a former judge and former Deputy Attorney General,
will be the man to search for any criminal wrongdoing.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
In appointing a special prosecutor and in ordering his senior
staff members to appear before it or Congress, Reagan was
doing what President Richard Nixon did not during Watergate, sweeping
away all suspicion of a cover.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Up between the Tower Commission and the Independent Council. The
White House was under scrutiny on multiple fronts. Congress was
starting up its own investigations too, and reporters were beginning
to ask questions about Edmee.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Mees may be the Attorney General, but he is also
one of President Reagan's oldest and closest associates, and what
he says will be weighed here.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
With that in mind, one of Mesa's colleagues of the
Department of Justice complained that the Criminal Division and even
the FB should have been involved in the fact finding mission. Later,
Mece would testify that his goal after the Iran story
broke had been to quote limit the damage. And when
you look at the way he went about the investigation,
giving people an opportunity to destroy documents that could never
(37:25):
be recovered, it's hard to feel like his top priority
was to get the full truth. I asked Charles Cooper
about that, whether the inquiry had been a good faith
effort or just another attempt at damage control.
Speaker 18 (37:38):
I don't think there's a difference between getting to the
truth and controlling the damage at least in my view,
and I know ed me shares it. The one thing
that would be most damaging and most inevitably discovered, would
be an effort to present a false narrative to Congress
about something like this. So, to my mind, you know,
(38:01):
damage control and finding the facts were synonymous. You know,
I reject very firmly the skepticism about the genuineness I
guess of an effort to find the truth and to
disclose the truth. That was our mission.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
In any event, the administration's attempts to minimize the scandal
seemed to have the opposite effect. Within a month of
the story becoming public, Reagan's approval rating had dropped by
twenty one percent. One poll found that ninety percent of
the American people believed he was lying about what he knew. Meanwhile,
from his home in Virginia, cut off from the job
(38:44):
he had loved so much, Oliver North was adjusting to
life as a public figure.
Speaker 9 (38:49):
Just two blocks from the White House. After meeting with
his new criminal lawyer, North again refused to answer questions.
Speaker 20 (38:55):
I would refer those questions to my attorney.
Speaker 9 (38:57):
The questions set on reports confirmed by.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
North was optimistic that once everything was out in the open,
people would see that his actions have been justified, maybe
even heroic. He said as much in a letter he
sent to John Poindexter the night before he was fired.
I remain convinced that what we tried to accomplish was
worth the risk, he wrote. We nearly succeeded. Hopefully when
the political fractricide is finished, there will be others who
(39:21):
will agree warmest reguards Semper Fidelis Oliver North. On the
next episode of Fiasco, Ali Mania.
Speaker 7 (39:41):
She's coming off great on TV.
Speaker 17 (39:43):
We're getting flooded with calls.
Speaker 7 (39:45):
People love him, and that's when they basically stopped asking
foocal questions.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used
in our research, follow the link in the show notes.
Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. Shows produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan,
Ulla Kulpa, and me Leon Mayfock. Our editor was Camilla Hammer.
Our researcher was Francis Carr. Additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas.
(40:15):
Our music is by Nick Filvester. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips n Y Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright council provided by Peter Yassi
at Yass Butler Plc. Thanks to Sam Graham Felsen, Sorea,
Shockley and Katchick and Kova. Special thanks to Luminary and
(40:39):
thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco
Iran Contra ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus, sign
(41:01):
up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can
access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus
content for all Pushkin podcasts
Pushkin. On Thursday, November thirteenth, nineteen eighty six, Ronald Reagan
opened his maroon leather bound diary and jotted down a
few thoughts about his day. He was in the middle
(00:38):
of a firestorm, he wrote, caused by the ridiculous falsehoods
the media has been spawning. The firestorm had been ignited
by two separate scandals. First, there was Eugene Hasenfuss, the
former marine whose plane had been shot down over Nicaragua
by a Sandinista soldier.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It has all the makings of a major new uproar.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
The US may have violated a ban on a to
the Contras.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
The Hasenfuss crash seemed to confirm that the Reagan administration
was yet again evading the law that prohibited the US
government from funding the Contra rebels.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
The White House has had full knowledge of this Contra
cargo plane operation for more than a year.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Then, about a month later, the White House was hit
with a seemingly unrelated story about arms trafficking in a
different foreign country. According to an article in a Lebanese magazine,
the US was selling missiles to Iran. Subsequent reports alleged
that the arrangement was part of an arms for hostages swamp.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
Iran has helped the United States free hostage from Lebanon,
and the US is helping Iran in its war with Iraq.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
In his diary, Reagan referred to the controversy as the
Iran incident that was a lot more innocuous than what
people outside the administration were, calling.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
It a very dangerous precedent negotiating with terrorists.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Escapades, and I think that is the word is simply
a misreading of Iranian political realities, and therefore it's dumb.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
The Iran news instantly eclipsed Eugene Hasenfuss and Nicaragua. It
just wasn't that surprising that Reagan still wanted to support
the contras. The arms for hostages story, on the other hand,
seemed to come out of nowhere, and it flatly contradicted
Reagan's stated policies of not negotiating with terrorists and opposing
the sale of weapons to Iran. The outcry was unlike
(02:23):
anything the Reagan White House had ever faced.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
For six years round Reagan was the Teflon president.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
That's Peter Wallson. In nineteen eighty six, he was serving
as White House counsel, a job that involved advising the
president on what was and wasn't legal. Wallison says that
scandals just didn't seem to stick to Reagan through most
of his presidency, but the Iran story was different.
Speaker 6 (02:46):
There was so little official information coming out, only leaks
from various places and people who had some knowledge of it,
either abroad or in the United States. So it was
an enormous media firestorm.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Initially, Reagan tried to just ride it out, even as
advisers urged him to publicly address the controversy. Finally, a
week after American media picked up the arms for hostages story,
Reagan agreed to deliver a televised speech. First order of business,
he wrote in his diary, I will go on TV
at eight pm tonight.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
President Reagan is addressing the nation this evening to set
the record straight as the White House put it on
relations where they ran, and efforts to free you as hostages.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Peter Wallason is one of the White House staffers responsible
for writing the speech.
Speaker 6 (03:33):
We were supposed to explain what all these newspaper reports
were about, all this media coverage. But the idea was
to try to explain, I suppose what it was that
happened in a way that showed that it was innocent.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
But as Wallason and the other speechwriters discovered, the facts
of the arm shipments were not easy to nail down.
Here's Jane Mayer, a reporter at The New Yorker and
co author of the book Landslide.
Speaker 7 (04:06):
What becomes clear is that the as that are most
involved in this scandal are conspiring with each other to
come up with cover stories that will get themselves off
the hook. But in order to do that, they need
to kind of get the President to lie for them.
Speaker 8 (04:27):
Some sources within the administration tell us somewhat different story
than the one the president will tell tonight. One such source,
familiar with the president's speech, said, we are now engaged
in rewriting history.
Speaker 7 (04:38):
This is all putting the president in great peril, and
it rings a familiar bell to at least a couple people.
They remember Watergate.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Here's Peter Wallason again.
Speaker 6 (04:52):
After Watergate, we all understood that the cover up could
be worse than the crime itself.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Reagan's speech was going to be an opportunity to send
a clear signal he was not trying to cover anything up.
Speaker 9 (05:10):
NBC's regular Thursday night schedule beginning with the Cosby Show
will be seen immediately following President Reagan's address on most
of these stations.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
At eight p m. On November thirteenth, Reagan sat down
at his desk in the Oval Office, looked into the camera,
and tried to explain himself.
Speaker 10 (05:29):
Good evening.
Speaker 11 (05:31):
I wanted this time to talk with you about an
extremely sensitive and profoundly important matter of foreign policy. For
eighteen months now, we have had underway a secret diplomatic
initiative to Iran. That initiative was undertaken for the simplest
and best of reasons, to renew a relationship with the
nation of Iran, to bring an honorable end of the
bloody six year war between Iran and Iraq, to eliminate
(05:55):
state sponsored terrorism and subversion, and to effect the safe
return of all hostages.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
There it was confirmation of the arm sales to Iran
to effect the safe return of all the hostages. Except
a minute later, Reagan also said this.
Speaker 11 (06:12):
The charge has been made that the United States has
shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release
of American hostages in Lebanon. Those charges are utterly false.
The United States has not.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
The speech did not play well with viewers.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
It is a new experience for the president. He goes
on television to tell the nation he has never sent
any arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, and
twenty four hours later, the country is far from convinced.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
An ABC News poll found that fifty six percent of
Americans thought the President was lying when he said there
had not been in arms for hostages deal. Suddenly, Reagan
was in an unfamiliar position. People just didn't trust him.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
There was criticism of the President's explanations from both Republicans
and Democrats in Congress.
Speaker 12 (06:58):
Is the President lying?
Speaker 13 (06:59):
They may think there was no quid pro quoll. I
can't believe that the Iranians didn't think there was any
quid pro quoll.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
This was not how people usually talked about Ronald Reagan.
It cut against everything that was appealing about him as
a politician.
Speaker 7 (07:13):
In Watergate, Nixon was always seen as a schemer. You know,
his nickname was tricky Dick. Reagan was the opposite. He
was sort of sunny, and he didn't seem like the
type would be able to come up with this incredibly
complicated scheme and lie to the American public.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
In the wake of Reagan's speech. White House communications director
Pat Buchanan Yes that. Pat Buchanan decided to reach out
to a former colleague he thought might have some advice.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
And he called up Nixon himself and asked Nixon for
his advice. What should they do?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yes that Nixon.
Speaker 7 (07:54):
Nixon said, don't do the cover up. Get out the
facts as much as you can, and say you've made
a mistake, and the public will accept that.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Buchanan brought Nixon's advice to the White House, but Reagan
was not prepared to admit that he had made a mistake.
There wasn't anything to apologize for. He insisted he hadn't
done anything wrong. I'm leon Nyfok from Prologue Projects and
Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco, Iran Contra.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
The country is being asked to believe some things that
are hard to swallow.
Speaker 6 (08:30):
Something's happening here that looks a lot like Watergate, that being.
Speaker 14 (08:34):
A complete orgy of shredding.
Speaker 7 (08:36):
I realized that I'd missed the whole story.
Speaker 11 (08:38):
I directed the Attorney General, who wanted to take a
review of this matter.
Speaker 13 (08:41):
The President knew nothing about it until I reported it
to him. I alerted him yesterday morning Boo.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
In the administration knew what was going on, and when.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Episode five all out how the Reagan White House tried
to stop their Iran problem from becoming a second Watergate.
We'll be right back after the President's speech from the
(09:14):
Oval Office, the White House schedule the follow up press
conference about the Iran issue. Maybe his first speech had
just been too confusing.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
It is argued to this very political city that President
Reagan's televised news conference tonight in the midst of the
Iran affair, will be the most important of his presidency.
There are many unanswered questions about the most visibly difficult
problem since.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
He was elected once again, Reagan's aides were divided over
how he should present the facts within the next Should
he say as little as possible and keep insisting that
everything had been above board, or should he admit that
the missile sales were part of an arms for hostages
deal and apologize. One of the people advocating for the
come clean approach was Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz.
Speaker 10 (09:57):
Get it all out, as I said, Morts and all,
and then they'll graduate get behind you.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Schultz died in twenty twenty one at the age of
one hundred. When I interviewed him, he was ninety eight
and living in californ And though he served under Nixon,
he insisted to me that his advice to Reagan wasn't
informed by his experience of Watergate.
Speaker 10 (10:19):
No, I wasn't really thinking about Watergate. President Reagan's standing
was totally different from Richard Nixon's. People loved Reagan and
respected him a great deal, and they knew he was
a man of principle.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
As Secretary of State, Schultz had strongly opposed the idea
of selling missiles to Iran. He had advocated against it
during multiple meetings with the President.
Speaker 10 (10:42):
I was opposed to it from the beginning, and I
always felt somehow it would wind up leaking out. My
fear was that we were selling arms to Iran and
Iran was up to no good. It was a mistake.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Clearly, pushing back against the arms deals in private had
not worked. Now that the story was out, Schultz was
surprisingly willing to push back in public too.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Secretary of State Schultz continued distancing himself from the trading
of weapons or hostages.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Shultz said he thought that not negotiating with terrorists is
the right policy asked about official silence on the reports
of dealings where Iran. Schultz later said, I don't particularly
enjoy it. I like to say what I think.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
As the scandal intensified, Schultz went unfaced the nation. In
an interview with Leslie Stall, he made clear that he
was out of sync with other members of the administration.
Speaker 15 (11:35):
Will there be any more arm shipments to Iran, either
directly by the United States or through any third parties?
Speaker 16 (11:42):
Under the circumstances if Iran's were with Iraq, its pursuit
of terrorism, its association with those holding our hostages, I
would certainly say, as far as I am concerned, No.
Speaker 15 (11:53):
Do you have the authority to speak for the entire administration?
Speaker 14 (11:58):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Schultz's interview enraged his colleagues in the administration and set
off another round of speculation about chaos in the White House.
You're not going to resign, are you?
Speaker 3 (12:09):
For the State Department? They're saying the Secretary wants a
firm commitment no more arms will be sent to Iran,
and shows will be included in future deliberations.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Now, Reagan wouldn't just have to clear the air about
arm shipments. When he gave his press conference, he would
likely face questions about whether his administration was coming apart
under the weight of the scandal. To prepare, the President
enlisted the help of some of his top aides, including
National Security Advisor John Poindexter.
Speaker 17 (12:38):
We knew from the beginning it would be difficult to
explain to the American people the detailed rationale. The problem,
in my mind, was associating the arms with the hostages.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Poindexter wanted the President to explain that the missiles weren't
really a ransom payment for the hostages. They were part
of something bigger. As you'll remember for Episode four, Poindexter
believed that the ultimate goal of the initiative was to
make inroads with moderates in the Iranian government. The point
of the missiles was to show the Iranians that the
US was operating in good faith. The release of the
(13:17):
hostages was supposed to show the US that the Iranians
were too.
Speaker 17 (13:21):
Our sale of arms to Iran was an indication, we thought,
to Iran that the President was serious about this, and
there causing the release of hostis by proxy was an
indication of honesty and earnestness on their part.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
One problem with Poindexter's explanation was that Reagan cared a
lot more about the hostages than he did about the
broader geopolitical strategy. Another problem was that the president didn't
seem to have a firm grasp on what had happened
or what he had personally approved.
Speaker 17 (13:56):
Before the president's press conference, what we called a murder
board in the White House theater.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
The murder board was essentially a rehearsal for the press.
Speaker 17 (14:09):
Conference, and at one of these murder boards, the president
would be on the podium, the Press Secretary would play
the role of the media, asking questions.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
As Poindexter watched Reagan practice his answers, he became very concerned.
Speaker 17 (14:25):
That was when I first noticed that the President's memory
was failing, because the President would give an answer and
he would not have remembered the details of what had transpired.
So I would correct the president, tell him, this is
what I think you ought to say, and the President
(14:46):
would say right, and then he would come back to
the first question, and the President would not remember what
I had suggested to him to say. So at that
point I knew it was going to be difficult.
Speaker 11 (15:08):
What do you mean, I have a few words here
before I take your questions some brief remarks.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
At eight pm on November nineteenth, the President walked out
to a podium in the East Room of the White House.
He delivered a brief statement in which he echoed Poindexter's
talking points about the diplomatic opening to Iran. Then he
opened the floor to questions from the press.
Speaker 12 (15:31):
If I can call up, if your armed shipments had
no effect on the release of the hostages, then how
do you explain the release of the hostages at the
same time that the shipments were coming out?
Speaker 11 (15:42):
Now, I said that at the time, I said to
them that there was something they could do to show
their sincerity, and if they really meant it that they
were not in favor of backing terrorists, they could begin
by releasing our hostages.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Even as he pushed Poindexter's high minded rationale for the
arm sales, Reagan struggled to explain how the hostages fit
into it, and who exactly the US had been dealing
with in a.
Speaker 13 (16:10):
How did you know that you were reaching the moderates
and how do you define a moderate in that kind
of a government.
Speaker 11 (16:17):
Well, again, you're asking questions that I cannot get into.
With regard of the answers, but believe me, we had
information that led us to believe that there are factions
within Iran, and many of them with an eye toward
the fact that they think sooner rather than later, there
is going to be a change in the government there,
and there is great dissatisfaction among the people.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Something else happened during the press conference, too. Reagan repeatedly
denied any US involvement in the two arms shipments that
took place in nineteen eighty five. These were the shipments
that had started at all, the ones in which Israel
had served as the middleman. George Schultz, the Secretary of State,
knew the president's remarks have contained inaccuracies. The next day,
(17:02):
he confronted Reagan about it face to face.
Speaker 10 (17:05):
I always had a pattern with him, whenever he gave
a speech or a pres we'd have a talk afterwards,
and I'd give him my reactions. And my reaction was,
you told a lot of things that weren't true. You
think they're true, and they've been fed to you by
your staff, and they're not true. And if you would like,
I will come over to the White House and go
(17:26):
through them with you. And he invited more.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Over Schultz met with Reagan in the White House residence.
Speaker 10 (17:32):
And I went through specific things that he said and
then pointed out why they weren't right. And he was
baffled because he thought his staff had given me his
factual information and he assumed they were right, which it
wasn't true. I never thought I'd talk to a President
of the United States that way.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
While the President tried to contain the scandal in public,
his administration was trying to take control of it behind
the scenes. The effort was led by Reagan's Attorney General,
ed mess. Mee was a longtime member of the president's
inner circle. He had been at Reagan's side back in
the sixties when Reagan was the governor of California, and
(18:17):
he'd followed him to the White House in nineteen eighty one.
Mess's decades of experience as a Reagan whisperer made him
a uniquely powerful adviser Reagan's alter ego.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
It is true that first and foremost he's loyal to
Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 11 (18:32):
Ed Mees, whether by instinct or by design, is Ronald
Reagan's man.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Here's journalist Jane Mayer again.
Speaker 7 (18:39):
He was kind of the keeper of the flame. Of
the kind of conservative values that Reagan served and supported.
He was a loyalist extraordinaire.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Toward the end of Reagan's first term, he nominated Mees
to be Attorney General. It was a controversial choice, what
if mess ended up having to investigate his friend.
Speaker 15 (18:59):
Meies came under sharp questioning from members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, concerned whether he would be the president's or
the people's lawyer.
Speaker 9 (19:07):
We have learned the evil lesson of Watergate.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Drshowitz, Professor of Criminal law at Harvard University.
Speaker 9 (19:13):
When you have a political operative in the position of
Attorney general, it creates an inherent conflict of interest.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
After more than a year of questions about that and
other controversies, Meis was confirmed by the Senate, and the
closest vote for an Attorney general in sixty years.
Speaker 15 (19:29):
Edwin mess was finally sworn in today as the new
U s Attorney General. The Senate voted sixty three to
thirty one to confirm MEAs on Saturday. The vote came
after a filibuster.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
In January of nineteen eighty six, shortly after the first
two weapons shipments to Iran, Meis was asked to provide
a legal opinion about the initiative. Some of the president's
advisors have been preparing a so called finding for the
president to sign. A finding was a kind of document
that formally authorized covert actions, in this case, the secret
(20:03):
arm sales. According to law, the White House had to
notify Congress whenever the President signed a co overt action finding,
and they had to do it in a quote timely fashion.
But Meis concluded it was fine to hold off on
telling Congress about the arm sales until after the hostages
were released. Nearly a year later, Congress still had not
(20:24):
been informed. Two days after Reagan's press conference in the
East Room, mess undertook an internal investigation to figure out
the facts. The president could not afford to keep making
public statements based on incomplete information. It would be Miss's
job to cross reference everyone's stories and brief Reagan on
what he learned. Meeces would later testify that he conducted
(20:46):
the investigation on an informal basis as Reagan's counselor and friend,
rather than as the attorney general. Nevertheless, he staffed the
project with officials from the Department of Justice that included
Charles Cooper, a thirty four year old attorney who oversaw
the Office of Legal Counsel.
Speaker 18 (21:04):
It was not a publicly known or announced investigation. It
was in fact, very much in keeping with the fact
that the material of the investigation, that is, the essential facts,
the transactions, the subject matter of the investigation, remained classified.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
It came to be called the Weekend Investigation. The idea
was that Meice and Cooper would do some digging and
be ready to present the facts to the President the
following Monday.
Speaker 18 (21:34):
And the mission was to just get the facts, get
the truth. The worst thing that the administration could do
was advance a false narrative about all this. Once the
truth did come out, it would be exponentially worse politically
and otherwise legally for the President.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
For his administration, the plan was to interview the people
most intimately involved in the arm sales and look through
memos and other documents that could shed light on how
the initiative had evolved. Meanwhile, two of the people closest
to the Iran weapons program, John Poindexter and Oliver North,
set about getting their affairs in order. Poindexter was concerned
(22:20):
about the earliest covert action finding that Reagan had signed
to cover the arm sales. The document had plainly stated
that the purpose of the initiative was to rescue American hostages. Later,
Reagan would sign other findings that listed other reasons for
the ARM sales, reasons that were more in line with
Poindexter's talking points about improving US relations with Iran. But
(22:41):
Poindexter still had the first version, and he was worried
that it would become a political liability.
Speaker 17 (22:47):
I decided that the first version of the finding, which
was not a complete explanation of what we were doing,
was not important, and so I personally destroyed it.
Speaker 19 (23:00):
How did you destroy it?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Earned it outside out in the back, like a coffee
can or something.
Speaker 17 (23:06):
Essentially it was a coffee can. Did that feel momentus momeatish? No,
not really. I hadn't liked that version of the finding
to begin with, and it was good riddance.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Oliver North had similar instincts. He had been informed that
DOJ officials working with Edmeice and Charles Cooper were planning
to come to his office to look through his files.
Here again is Jane Mayer.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
Mees didn't just rush in and seize their files as
the FBI might have, which gave them notice that if
there was anything in there, maybe they better take care
of it.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
North would later testify that his priority during this time
was to protect government secrets. One of those secrets was
the diversion of profits from the Iran arm sales to
the Contras. As part of his effort to conceal some
of his activities, North asked his secretary, Vaughn Hall, to
help him alter documents, like retype them with entire sentences deleted.
(24:04):
But some documents were apparently beyond redemption.
Speaker 7 (24:08):
They fed so many into the shredder that was in
the NSC that it jammed. It was just, you know,
just a complete obstruction of evidence party taking place as
they shredded everything in sight.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
The next day, two DOJ staffers working on Edmes's weekend
investigation came to North's office. North himself wasn't in yet
when the staffers, Brad Reynolds and John Richardson arrived and
started going through a stack of folders. Here's Ann Roe,
an editor at The Economist and author of Lives Lies
and the Iran Contra Affair.
Speaker 14 (24:51):
They're trying to be very quiet. Actually, they imbibed this
air of sort of high secrecy that goes around North
I mean they're behaving a bit like secret agents themselves,
these two officials that they're writing notes to each other,
they're not actually speaking to each other or just whispering.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Reynolds and Richardson planned to go through the folders and
North thought flagging important documents. They wanted a photocopy as
they went.
Speaker 14 (25:13):
So they're looking through the folders and they're about three
folders in and they've suddenly come upon this Manila folder
with wh written on it. It's quite a thin folder,
not much in it and a close type document, no spacing,
and they have a look at it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
The document was a five page memo titled Release of
American Hostages in Beirut.
Speaker 14 (25:36):
There's a paragraph in there that says residual funds allocated
as follows twelve point two million dollars to supply the
Democratic Nicaraguan resistance.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
The document would come to be known simply as the
Diversion Memo. It laid out how millions of dollars generated
by the arm shipments to Iran could be diverted to
the contras in Nicaragua. Reynolds and Richardson were taken aback.
Speaker 14 (26:04):
They both had the same reaction to this, that it's
too spectacular, that it's too extraordinary to think it ever happened.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Reynolds hid the memo in the stack of papers he
intended to copy.
Speaker 14 (26:15):
You might wonder at this point why North was so
happy to leave these two folks in his office where
there was something as explosive as a diversion memo just
sitting there. The reason was that there being a complete
orgy of shredding going on in this office.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Reynolds and Richardson hurried to tell ed Meice what they
had found. On their way out of the office, they
ran into Oliver North and told him they were about
to take a break for lunch. Then they met mess
and Charles Cooper at the old Ebbitt Grill about a
block away from the White House. Here's Cooper again.
Speaker 18 (27:01):
We were in a booth, Our voices were lowered. We
took care to make sure that our conversation wasn't overheard.
Vividly remember ed Mees's reaction, because as we all listened
to him, we immediately understood the potential import of what
Brad was telling us, and so we were all wide
(27:26):
eyed and jaws dropped. Ed simply said, oh shit.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
The next day, mis met with North the Department of
Justice to confront him with the smoking gun.
Speaker 14 (27:40):
Meats had been a prosecutor for years and he knew
how to do this, and so they go all over
the arms sells and chat about this and that and
so on. The North he's very relaxed and answering the questions,
and then miss suddenly says what about this and hands
him over the diversion memo.
Speaker 18 (27:59):
And Ali was taken aback that Ed knew about it.
His demeanor just betrayed the fact that he wasn't expecting
that question.
Speaker 14 (28:07):
He says something like I missed one. So Mey said,
well did this happen? And all said yes.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
After his meeting with Mees, North tried to call Poindexter
to tell him the diversion had been discovered, but Poindexter
wasn't reachable. North then returned to his office, where he
stayed until four fifteen in the morning, shredding more documents. Meanwhile,
Ed Mee and Charles Cooper knew they were holding a
time bomb.
Speaker 18 (28:34):
The most important implication of this, and ed Mees grasped
it immediately, was that this information is something that the
president must number one know immediately, and Number two that
the President must disclose publicly. It was inevitable that something
(28:58):
like that was going to surface into the public domain
that this had happened, and if it surfaced through any
other means other than the president's public disclosure, it would
be denounced as a cover up, regardless of what the
real facts were.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
On Monday, November twenty fourth, Mess went to the White
House to tell Reagan what his weekend investigation had uncovered.
He told the President that Oliver North had been taking
money from the Iran weapons sales and giving it to
the Contras.
Speaker 18 (29:29):
Ed made that report in a very tightly controlled meeting
with the President and his firm recommendation that this information
be made public as quickly as it reasonably could be.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Reagan wrote about the meeting in his diary. That night,
Ed m told me of a smoking gun our Colonel
North gave the money to the Contras. North didn't tell
me about this. This may call for resignations. It soon
became clear that John Poindexter North, supervisor the National Security Council,
had been in on the diversion two. Reagan and Mess
(30:08):
agreed that the situation was so radioactive that the only
option was to announce it publicly and force Poindexter and
North out of the White House. It would be a
huge news story no matter what, but maybe they could
control the narrative. The next day, John Poindexter was asked
to resign.
Speaker 17 (30:26):
I knew that it would be controversial that I had
approved the use of the excess profits without telling the president.
I wanted him to have some distance from that decision,
and I thought the way to put emphasis on that
was to resign. You know, I had taken a risk,
(30:49):
and I had lost.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
North drafted resignation letter too, but before he could leave
on his own terms, he was fired from the NSC
staff and reassigned to another job in the Marine Corps.
It was decided that Reagan would deliver yet another public
statement on the scandal that was now being called Iran Gate.
This time it would be a press conference including both
Reagan and Mees, and they would disclose the results of
(31:14):
mesa's weekend investigation. Just before the press conference began, Richard Seacord,
the retired Air Force general who had worked on both
the contrary supply effort and the Iran weapons sales, called
Poindexter on the phone. Seacord begged Poindexter not to give
up and resign, telling him he should force the President
to step up to the plate and take responsibility for
his actions. But Poindexter told him it was all over.
(31:38):
You don't understand, he said, According to the Sea Coords memoir,
it's too late. They're building a wall around.
Speaker 17 (31:43):
Him to isolate him from the use of the excess province,
which again we didn't think there was any illegal about it,
but it would be controversial. One of the problems that
I saw at the time was that I was beginning
to question whether the President could really defend the initiative,
(32:06):
whether he could explain it to the American public.
Speaker 19 (32:15):
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen, the President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
On November twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six, Ronald Reagan gave
a press conference to make public what he'd learned. He
kept things pretty vague.
Speaker 11 (32:40):
Last Friday, after becoming concern whether my national security apparatus
had provided me with a security or a complete factual
record with respect to the implementation of my policy toward Iran,
I directed the Attorney General to undertake a review of
this matter over the weekend and report to me on
Monday and yesterday Secretary Meice provided me in the White
(33:03):
House Chief of Staff with a report on his preliminary findings,
and this report led me to conclude that I was
not fully informed on the nature of one of the
activities undertaken in connection with this initiative, This action raises.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
When he was finished speaking, Reagan stepped aside and Edmeese
took his place at the microphone, why don't.
Speaker 17 (33:23):
I tell you what is the situation?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And then Jane Mayer was covering the White House for
the Wall Street Journal at the time, and she was
watching the press conference as it happened.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
It was an unusual thing to see this tubby barrel
of a man come in with his pink face, and
he goes up to the podium and he kind of
matter of factly lays out this completely astounding story.
Speaker 13 (33:47):
Certain monies which were received in the transaction were taken
and made available to the forces in Central America. The
President knew nothing about it until I reported it to him.
I alerted him yesterday morning we still had some more
(34:07):
work to do, and then I gave him the detail
that we had yesterday afternoon.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Who in the NSC was aware that this extra amount
of money was being transferred to the so called contras
or under their control.
Speaker 13 (34:19):
The only person's in the United States government that knew
precisely about this, The only person was Lieutenant Colonel North.
Speaker 7 (34:30):
I mean, it was unbelievable. It was the craziest thing,
and he was just sort of matter of factly running
through it. We realized that, at least I realized that
I'd missed the whole story.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Charles Cooper, the DOJ official who had worked with me
on the weekend investigation, was watching the press conference with
Secretary of State George Schultz.
Speaker 18 (34:48):
I was in the kind of the control room, just
off the briefing room, and I was watching it on
a monitor in that control room, and I remember vividly
after that was done, George Schultz basically turning from the
TV monitors, standing right next to me and looking at
(35:09):
me and saying good job, and then walking out.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Things moved very quickly after that. On Thursday, November twenty seventh, Thanksgiving,
the Los Angeles Times reported that Oliver North had shredded
reams of documents that could have been used as evidence.
It was starting to feel a lot like Watergate.
Speaker 9 (35:32):
Reporters attempted to ask Oliver North at his home today
about published stories that he had destroyed documents which may
have shed light on the Iran arm scandal.
Speaker 20 (35:42):
At the appropriate time and in the appropriate forum, I
will make a full exposition, and I will do so
on the advice of my attorney. I would suggest that
you all go home and thank God for the blessings
of the beautiful country.
Speaker 9 (35:55):
North later tried to visit the White House, but was
told he could not enter under any circumstances.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
On December first, Reagan announced the creation of the Tower Commission,
a group of three former political leaders who would investigate
what went wrong in the White House chain of command. Then,
on December twod Reagan convinced Edmeese to request the appointment
of an independent council, a move enabled by reforms that
were enacted after Watergate.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
The twenty General Niece's turning over the case to an
independent council.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
Lawrence Walsh, a former judge and former Deputy Attorney General,
will be the man to search for any criminal wrongdoing.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
In appointing a special prosecutor and in ordering his senior
staff members to appear before it or Congress, Reagan was
doing what President Richard Nixon did not during Watergate, sweeping
away all suspicion of a cover.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Up between the Tower Commission and the Independent Council. The
White House was under scrutiny on multiple fronts. Congress was
starting up its own investigations too, and reporters were beginning
to ask questions about Edmee.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Mees may be the Attorney General, but he is also
one of President Reagan's oldest and closest associates, and what
he says will be weighed here.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
With that in mind, one of Mesa's colleagues of the
Department of Justice complained that the Criminal Division and even
the FB should have been involved in the fact finding mission. Later,
Mece would testify that his goal after the Iran story
broke had been to quote limit the damage. And when
you look at the way he went about the investigation,
giving people an opportunity to destroy documents that could never
(37:25):
be recovered, it's hard to feel like his top priority
was to get the full truth. I asked Charles Cooper
about that, whether the inquiry had been a good faith
effort or just another attempt at damage control.
Speaker 18 (37:38):
I don't think there's a difference between getting to the
truth and controlling the damage at least in my view,
and I know ed me shares it. The one thing
that would be most damaging and most inevitably discovered, would
be an effort to present a false narrative to Congress
about something like this. So, to my mind, you know,
(38:01):
damage control and finding the facts were synonymous. You know,
I reject very firmly the skepticism about the genuineness I
guess of an effort to find the truth and to
disclose the truth. That was our mission.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
In any event, the administration's attempts to minimize the scandal
seemed to have the opposite effect. Within a month of
the story becoming public, Reagan's approval rating had dropped by
twenty one percent. One poll found that ninety percent of
the American people believed he was lying about what he knew. Meanwhile,
from his home in Virginia, cut off from the job
(38:44):
he had loved so much, Oliver North was adjusting to
life as a public figure.
Speaker 9 (38:49):
Just two blocks from the White House. After meeting with
his new criminal lawyer, North again refused to answer questions.
Speaker 20 (38:55):
I would refer those questions to my attorney.
Speaker 9 (38:57):
The questions set on reports confirmed by.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
North was optimistic that once everything was out in the open,
people would see that his actions have been justified, maybe
even heroic. He said as much in a letter he
sent to John Poindexter the night before he was fired.
I remain convinced that what we tried to accomplish was
worth the risk, he wrote. We nearly succeeded. Hopefully when
the political fractricide is finished, there will be others who
(39:21):
will agree warmest reguards Semper Fidelis Oliver North. On the
next episode of Fiasco, Ali Mania.
Speaker 7 (39:41):
She's coming off great on TV.
Speaker 17 (39:43):
We're getting flooded with calls.
Speaker 7 (39:45):
People love him, and that's when they basically stopped asking
foocal questions.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used
in our research, follow the link in the show notes.
Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. Shows produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan,
Ulla Kulpa, and me Leon Mayfock. Our editor was Camilla Hammer.
Our researcher was Francis Carr. Additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas.
(40:15):
Our music is by Nick Filvester. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Chips n Y Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright council provided by Peter Yassi
at Yass Butler Plc. Thanks to Sam Graham Felsen, Sorea,
Shockley and Katchick and Kova. Special thanks to Luminary and
(40:39):
thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco
Iran Contra ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus, sign
(41:01):
up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can
access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus
content for all Pushkin podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.