August 8, 2026 • 43 mins
As the operation expands it also begins to unravel. Word starts to leak out of the illegal stuff the Reagan administration was up to, Congress and the press investigate and people start to point fingers. Spoiler alert – they all got off scot free. Find out how it all wraps up in part 2 of this classic story.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, everyone, buckle up for the thrilling conclusion of Iran
Contra Shady in the Eighties, Part two.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles t w Tuck, Brian, there's Jerry over there. And
this is Stuff you Should Know. Iran Contra Part two,
starting now go.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Maybe we should do a quick catch up. Okay, well
we're still going. You act to like I just went
to sleep.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
No, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So what's going on here is the United States is
Congress has decided that we cannot fund the Contras to
fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Shut off funding. So the
Reagan administration makes a deep covert push to continue doing
so right through a bunch of fun and shady ways.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Right, they're fundraising, they're directly arming the Contras, they're training them,
doing all sorts of crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yes, but if you know that this is about Iran
Contra and you're like, what about Iran? What's going on here?
I haven't heard anything about Iran?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Keep your socks on.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, here we go. This is where Iran enters.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
The picture, right, you can take your socks off, all right,
go are your socks on?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I've got on little footy socks.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, I do too cool. Oh, Jerry does too sweet.
It's the way to go.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Jerry has those true footies where you can't even see
him at all. I can see you mind peak out
just a little, which I'm not a huge fan of.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Well, check out my mind.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, noms, no sms.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Okay, enter Iran. We really that was a great intro
and it just went away.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So on the other side of the world from Nicker,
there was another foreign policy disaster simmering that Reagan had going,
and it was in the form of Iran, and specifically,
it wasn't even the form of run. It was in
the form of a problem that America had doesn't really
have much these days, but definitely did in the seventies
(02:17):
and eighties where Americans would be taken hostage around the world,
but specifically, almost exclusively by Lebanese terrorists who were, if
not working on behalf of Iran, were definitely sponsored by Iran.
And regardless of who was president, the fact that there
(02:37):
were hostages being held by another country and there wasn't
anything we could do about it. That was a real
blemish on the presidency. It was not a very proud
thing to think about for America. But that was a
reality for a while there.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, so we ran at the time. This is the
early eighties. This is just a few years removed from
the Iranian Revolution of nineteen seventy nine, and this is
where we talked about it before. Go look up photos
of Iran in the mid seventies pre revolution, right, and
it looks like London in the swinging sixties and seventies. Yeah,
very kind of hit place to be. Iranian revolution happens.
(03:13):
Fundamentalists take control of the government that was previously the
Shaw of Iran, who was friendly to the West, sure,
friendly to America generally, and the Iatola Komeni.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Kohmani I've always heard Kohmane.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Kohmani installed the Islamic theocracy and bad things started happening
pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
But yeah, there was a It was about as quick
a turn about face politically and socially as you could imagine.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, for a whole country, yeah, yeah, but not everyone
in the country, as we'll learn, Like the whole country
didn't just change overnight.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
No, but the the Islamic theocracy was in power, sure,
very much. So. One of the things that happened was
they were not very fond of America or Americans, and
the American embassy was famously stormed and sixty six Americans
working there were taken hostage and held for more than
a year.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Man. That was like, this is stuff I really remember.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Like four hundred and forty days or.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Something, four hundred and forty four days, man, the Iranian
hostage crisis. I remember this as a nine year old
very clearly.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Really, Oh yeah, I have no recollection.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, it was a big deal, yellow ribbons, and it
was on the news constantly.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I remember entering the room and being like, what does
this have to do with Rainbow Bright turn this newscast?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I even remember. So what happened was Jimmy Carter did
not get these hostages free during his his I was
about to say rain, but that was sort of the
opposite Jimmy Carter was during his administration is iron fisted rain.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The days of terror.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
But within a few days, and that may have cast
some election, but within a few days of our hours,
even of Reagan's inauguration, the hostages were freed, and I
remember as a nine year old hearing kids parroting their parents'
conversations like it was really Carter that had him freed
all the work he did up until then, and then
other kids saying, are you kidding me? As soon as
(05:17):
Reagan got in a office, they knew that they were
toast and that Reagan wasn't going to be a patsy
like Carter. And I was like, what's a patsy? Who
are these dudes? No, but I remember very distinctly, it's weird,
like on the playground hearing the stuff that's funny, Yeah,
like a little nine year olds.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I definitely didn't hear this when I was a kid,
but I remember hearing later on as a grown up,
still in the rainbow bright, that it was Reagan's campaign
was somehow in touch with aaran yeah, and that they brokeered.
This also got them to wait to release the hostages
(05:54):
until after Reagan was in office. Well, the timing was not.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
At all hours after his inauguration. There's no accident.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's a little fishy, you know what I mean. But
whether it was that's funny, I'm sure somebody's parents were like, yeah,
it's because they were so scared of Reagan, they knew
that they better release these guys. That's totally not the
case because there were other hostages taken by other by
actual Lebanese terrorists who were probably sponsored by Iran, and
that were they were held throughout Reagan's presidency.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, and that's sort of a big part of this.
The second half of the story was the fact that
that was very embarrassing for Reagan. He didn't like hostages
being held on his watch.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
No, but he had campaigned against negotiating with terrorists under
any circumstances. So he's stuck now, Yeah, because he's basically saying,
if you get taken hostage, I mean, you're on your own. Well,
we'll use our rhetoric and whatever we can to influence
you being released, but we're not going to negotiate for
your release. That's just the way it is.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And that's a longstanding American policy, right, and it makes
sense because if you negotiate with terrorists, then that's just
going to need to more kidnappings. Yeah, because they know
that you're open for business.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Like anywhere in the world. Yeah, there was a kidnapping
of twa Flight eight forty seven, very very famous one,
you know, the picture of like the pilot leaning out
of the cop sure and the guys in the picture
with the gun behind him. That was eight forty seven, right,
And that was I mean, that was I remember that
one that was That was probably nine then, and that
(07:24):
was just scary because they were flying all over the place.
You had no idea what was going to happen. People
were being beaten on the plane. When Navy guy was
beaten in shot and throw his body thrown out on
the tarmac.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. The eighties, like it seems comparatively tame now in
a lot of way as compared to the things that
used to go on. Tank McDonald's hi jackings and kidnappings
and hostages. It's like it was the eighties were nuts.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
They were nuts.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But pac Man, right, you know, pac Man fevers, pac
Man rapping Rodney it was crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Right, rapping Like is that Rodney Piper.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No rapping Rodney Dangerfield his big hit?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Oh yeah, yeah, no respect. What about what about the
Ichy Shuffle? That was a little crazy?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Was that eighties?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Sure? Late eighties, I guess so, okay, I got one
for you.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
The Bears, what was their thing?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Oh? The Super Bowl Shuffle?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Super Bowl Shuffle right, Yeah, that was pretty eighties. I
think they were eighty four.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, we're putting you know, my band every year plays
for sure one gig at Decatur's Porch Best, and every
year we try to do a theme, and this year
we're doing eighties sort of new wave. Nice and I
jokingly suggested pac Man Fever the Raping Rodney.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But oh, you guys gonna do it?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
No, those songs are terrible.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Do you have a synth player playing with you?
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I bought Emily a keyboard and she's learning.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Awesome. Yeah, she's gonna be like wait, hold on, huh,
that's cool man.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Now she's practicing.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've heard her do that, and.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
She played piano when she was a kid, so it's
not the biggest stretch.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I've heard that one that her do. That one Blondie
song that she just brought the house to.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, we might one way or another. Yes, we might
bring that back because that's eighties. Yeah, or was that?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
It was so close on the custom I seriously doubt
anybody's going to throw a beer can at you for it.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Anyway, Porch Best, everyone, I'll publicize it in October. Nice,
So Reagan's hands are tied in every way possible because
he can't on he can't negotiate with Terris. The only
option is to send in a covert Delta Force.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Team, which they Carter tried that, and yeah, work.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Doesn't always work. You could lose your own men. And
I think that's what happened in Carter's case, right, yeah. Sure,
So what he can do though, without anyone knowing, is
totally negotiate with Terras.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, just as long as the American public doesn't no, sure, yeah,
And that's what happened. And he followed that Reagan playbook
where it's like, okay, I said this, well, if I
just changed this one little part, right, it makes it
all fine. That's right, again, as long as the American
public doesn't know. So while Reagan said America will never
negotiate with with hostages, they didn't say Israel will never
(09:59):
nego terrorists for hostages, right, Yeah, So actually Israel had
a long standing policy of negotiating with terrorists. They would
they would kidnap people from the other side, and then
they'd be like, all right, i'll give you five guys.
I've only got two. Let me kidnap a few people, Okay, Now,
I have five like there would be negotiations for hostage
exchanges all the time between Israel and Palestine. Right, They
(10:24):
just knew what they were doing. So they said, okay, well,
if Israel goes to Iran and says, hey, you know
this American over there, why don't you get them released.
We can help you out with some stuff. What do
you think about this?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, So earlier when I mentioned the fact that Iran
as whole cloth did not change overnight as a country.
The government did, but there were still some plenty of
people there that were a little more moderate in their views,
and the Reagan administration had a channel to them. So
he was talking to them, these more moderate factions and
(11:00):
making a little headway. And they were like, by the way,
we'll totally give you these hostages if you give us arms.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, because Iran was fighting the Iran Iraq War at
least half of it.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. And this is just where stuff is just totally crazy,
because we were we were funding both sides.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
At the very least, we were advising both sides.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well, I mean we directly gave money. Oh yeah, no,
you're right, We sold them weapons and we provided training
and intelligence. Right, And this was this wasn't secret. This
was like a real deal thing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
We were publicly supporting Iraq, but then we were secretly
arming Iran.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah. I think what they never proved beyond a doubt
was that we went to Saddam Hussein and said, hey,
why don't you go in there and overthrow Iran?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Really yeah, that was never I don't think that was ever.
There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that that was
the case, but never, like the smoking gun, that we
actually encouraged Saddam Hussein to do so. But it's just, man,
when you look at how all this played out over
the years, it's just maddening.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, you know, yeah, it's a s show.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah. So Iraq and Iran are fighting, we're supplying both,
playing both sides of the coin, right, uh, And we
offered arms to Iran And who are you gonna call?
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Is real?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Not ghostbusters?
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Oh Gorbanaphar?
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Well you're gonna call Ali North?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, I would have gotten there eventually. Yeah,
because okay, so remember Oly North is this total novice
when it comes to covert operations bymore. Yeah, yeah, he's
been running the Nicaragua op for years now. Yeah, just
doing a bang up job of it. So they're like, well, sure,
we'll have him do this incredibly illegal, super sensitive arms
(12:43):
sailed to Iran too, Why don't you come on over here,
Ali and all. He said, well, okay, that's fine, but
I need to go get the lay of the land.
And he actually traveled to Iran with a fake passport
under an assumed name William P. Good with a knee
and when he went, it was it was dangerous enough
that William Casey, supposedly Oliver North later testified, gave him
(13:08):
cyanide pills so that he could take his own life
rather than be tortured by the Iranians. If this were
in fact like some sort of setup.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Again right out of a movie, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
But Oliver North went to Iran with cyanide pills.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And a fake passport Billy Good.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, so everything went great, though it did. He didn't
need the cyanide pills after all.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
He did not. He dealt with, like you mentioned earlier,
this Iranian businessman named Gorbanifar. And this guy was ten
shades of shady, so much so that the CIA wouldn't
even deal with them now.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
They issued a burn notice on him in nineteen.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Eighty three, which is I don't even know what that is.
That means just TV he's dead to us.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
It's basically stay away, okay, it's putting him on blast
to all the other intelligence agencies in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Gotcha PERSONA grade.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I won't even deal with this guy. And so Alie
North is like, yeah, I'll deal with this guy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
All right. So with his help, Oliver North set up
a deal where and it's so simple to look at, like, Israel,
you give them your missiles and then we'll just replace
those missiles for you with our missiles.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
So we're not given the missiles you are.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
And because no American explicitly said to Iran, hey, we're
doing this so that you guys will get these hostages released,
it wasn't in arms for hostages deal, and so Reagan's
vowed and never negotiate with terrorists remained intact.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
That's right. Five hundred and eight tow tow missiles What
does that stand for?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Two blaunched optically tracked wireless guided missile, which is like
it's like the tube launched. There's a tube and it
can be mounted on the ground, mounted on a jeep.
It's super portable. But they are they'll blow some stuff up.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I think I've seen these you have. So five hundred
and eight of these made it from Israel to Iran,
and then in very short order, a couple of days later,
one of the hostages, Benjamin we Are, minister who was
held by Lebanes's Terrists for sixteen months, was released. So
it worked.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It did work, Azah. It was a big deal around
the White House too, but they said, let's try it again,
but this time it seems a little messy to get
Israel involved. Let's just do this ourselves. Alie, you think
you can handle this, and he said, sure, me and
Gerbonifor have this. So rather than Israel giving arms to Iran,
(15:31):
Richard Seacord got brought in, just like with Nicaragua. And
again this isn't like years after Nicaragua. Nicaragua's at full
bore in full swamp, but it's still going yet, and
Olie North is running both operations simultaneously. And so the
news setup was the Department of Defense would sell the
CIA missiles for thirty seven hundred bucks a pop. The
(15:54):
CIA would sell them to Richard Seacord at cost, and
then Seacord would sell them to Garbaniphar for ten grand apiece,
and then Gorbanifhar would go sell them to Iran for
whatever he charged Iran. Can you imagine, I can't. I
guarantee it was more than the ten grand. Yeah, and
this happened multiple times over the course of a little
(16:14):
over a year. America secretly transferred two thousand missiles and
missile parts to Iran in eight shipments.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah. For the release of hostages.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah. Ultimately there were three hostages that got released out
of seven that had been taken hostage total.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, And didn't he say ultimately there were three more
hostages taken, so they netted out at zero at zero.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, So but that was the whole Iran operation.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, but here's the deals. This price markup means that
that shell company and those Swiss bank accounts were making
a lot of money, and so much so that I
think one of them had three million dollars made an
interest alone. So at some point someone's like, hey, this
is a money making operation. Now, why don't we tie
(17:07):
a little bow on all this and use some of
that money to fund the contrast, Because you guys are
doing both of these things and you need money. Congress
won't give it to you. Forget the fundraising omelets. We'll
just use the money from these illegal arm sales to
fund the Contras.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, and that's exactly what happened. So to put in
playing terms, America illegally and secretly sold missiles to Iran,
used the proceeds from those missile sales to secretly and
illegally fund the Contras to help them overthrow their government
down in Nicaragua. That's what the Reagan administration did.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
That's why it's called Iran Contra. That's where they came together.
There was a diversion of funds.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, and the I think it was a by nineteen
eighty six, Congress finally got back on board because of
this drum beat from Reagan over the years of how
much we need to really do this officially, And keep
in mind, Congress still didn't know any of this is
going on right secretly. And then Congress said, all right,
we'll give you a hundred million dollars to aid this cause.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And you're going to say, how take a dog.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
You would think that was the end of all the
covert stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
It wasn't, though, No, No, it's still continued on. But
now it was legitimized and had even better funding. But
that was not the end of the whole thing. Like
everybody didn't just get to walk away and say that
was close, because the whole thing started to come apart. Actually,
and I say that we take an ad break and
come back and talk about it. Great after this.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Amuck?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Stuff you should know? Should all right? Okay, Chuck. So
nineteen eighty six Congress is back on board. I think
(19:08):
it's worth pointing out that that's exactly four years after
the Democrats took control of the House in nineteen eighty two.
So I wonder if the Republicans took control back in
eighty six, and that's why the funding got turned back
onto the Contress.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Me solve this?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I like to speculate instead, So this.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
All might have Who knows if this ever would have
even been found out had it not been for the
sharpshooting of a young Sandinistan soldier named Jose Fernando Canales
Almann Nice in October fifth, nineteen eighty six. It was
a cargo plane, as he won twenty three called the
(19:47):
provider flying seventy Soviet Kalishnikovs, one hundred thousand rounds of AMMO,
rocket grenades and other supplies. And this is one of
those things where you said they would fly over and
kick him out the back of the plane. Sure, this
is one of those runs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah. The problem with this particular run, though, is that
they did this at twenty five hundred feet in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
They got a little lazy o tad bit or maybe cocky.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I don't even know if it's that. I think it
was more like this was just work. It was an
everyday job by this time. They've been doing it for years. Yeah,
you know, and the operation was just humming along so
nicely that it was almost an autopilot.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So yeah, they did this one supply drop on October fifth,
nineteen eighty six, in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
And there were four crew aboard. William J. Cooper, Wallace
buzz Sawyer, Freddy Vilchis, and a guy named Eugene Hassenfuss
who and again this sliding doors thing. Hassenfuss is the
only guy who had a parachute. He borrowed it from
his brother, a skydiver, because you know, he thought it
might be smart to take a parachute, right no one
else had parachutes. Had he not had a parachute, this
(20:54):
may have turned out differently.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
It may have. For sure he was the only one
that survived this plane crash because he was the only
one who borrowed the parachute from his brother and he
jumped out, landed, made it safely into the jungle. And
I think he actually survived and evaded the Sandinistas for
maybe a day or something like that before he was captured.
And when he was captured, they led him out of
(21:16):
the jungle like with a rope around his neck, just
about as big of a prisoner as you can imagine.
Super publicized. There are billboards of him being led around
by Santainistas and they started asking him questions and he
was like, what do you want to know?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
He say, like a canary, He really did.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
He said, this is my tenth supply mission. I presume
that the CIA is running this. I don't know, And
he would know this would be something that he would
he could legitimately guess at at least because he had
actually worked on CIA air drops over Vietnam or Cambodia
for Air America back in the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yeah, but he wasn't like, like he sings like a
canary because he's not very high up on the totem pole.
Like his job was to get up there and shove
this stuff out of the back of the plane, right
for three grand a month.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Right, He wasn't even a CIA operator. He's just a
former Marine who had a background working with Air America
years before. But by this time, by the time he
joins on doing this for the Contras, he was like
working as a construction worker part time in Wisconsin right home.
So this is like pretty good money, I think. Yeah,
(22:31):
he was getting seven grand in today's dollars a month
for basically kicking AK forty seven crates out the back
of a plane over Nicaragua.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, so he's not the kind of guy that's going
to take the fall right for anyone. So he's singing
like a canary.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Even if he had kept his mouth shut, it wouldn't
have mattered what it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Right, Yeah, Because all the other guys, including Hassenfuss, had
their wallets on the plane, They had all their employee
ID cards and in fact, I don't even we mentioned
in episode one the company that was set up to
do these drops was set up called Southern Air Transport
out of I guess Miami. So they all had their
(23:12):
Southern Air Transport IT cards, which was the CIA front.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Like everybody knew Southern Transport was a CIA front, so
they might as well have had like CIA Junior badges
or something right, or.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Like Michael Keaton and out of Sight when he has
the big FBI T shirt.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I haven't seen that one?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Oh, you haven't seen out of Sight? No? Is that
the one where he's George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Is he a bad guy in it?
Speaker 2 (23:35):
No, he's a good guy, but he walks in. He
plays Ray Nicolette who played same character, and Jackie Brown
FBI guy. Okay, but it's funny because he walks in
with an FBI T shirt on, and Dennis Farina as
Jennifer Lopez's dad, and he's a former CUP and he goes, hey, Ray,
let me ask it. He got one that says undercover.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Dennis Farina man class ad.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
I mean he got to see out of Sight. That's
a classic. All right, I'll check it out like one
of the better men.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
I mean, I know the movie. You're talking about avoid
it like the plague.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's so good, Okay, you would love it, all right,
So Southern air Transport caa front. There's also a log
book that connected this flight and all the other flights.
And then Hassenfuss in his wallet had a business card
to Robert w Owen, this is a big one who
was working with Oliver North in Washington.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Right, which so that provided a direct line between Oliver
North and some guys who were kicking Kalashnikov's out of
the back of a plane over Nicaragua. So that was
a really big deal that when this guy got captured
and you know, told the Santonistas as much as he knew,
because the Sandinistas were like, attention, world, Yeah, listen to
what we just found out. The CIA has totally been
(24:46):
funding these Countra rebels who are trying to overthrow this
sovereign government, and we think you guys should know about it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, And it was it wasn't like you could totally
discount that even though it was from the Sandinistans like
and the American media were like what I'm sure Congress
was like wait a minute, right, this reeks of like
something that had been happening that we tried to shut down.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, because remember, even if the CIA was brief in Congress,
it was either Bill Casey or Dewey Clarridge, and they
were doing a really obtuse job of this keeping Congress
at arms length. So anytime something like this came out,
almost none of Congress knew the full extent of this,
and it was always in flagrant violation of whatever Congress
(25:33):
wanted or whatever Congress had agreed to.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, and this wasn't like this was sort of the
straw that broke it all open, or that broke the
camel's back.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Broke the camel's back wide open. Oh god, that's correct,
or camel.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Things have been unraveling for a bit. There was a
party in nineteen eighty five in Virginia thrown thrown by
Soldier of Fortune magazine. Can you imagine? No, what's that party?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Like? I don't want to know, I can't imagine. I
used to read Soldier of Fortune when I was in
my ninja training as like a ten year old boy,
and even then I was like this, this magazine makes
my stomach hurt.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And it's in nineteen eighty five, Like, can you imagine
the amount of like blow being secretly done in the
bathroom at that party.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Sure, but also they were making snuff movies in the
living room, and there's no telling what was going on.
As a soldier of Fortune, we can tell you at
the very least, there was a lot of boasting going
on openly about this contra operation. And again this is
the time when people don't know about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, but you know what happens is like you get
enough people in enough years, and people start talking, people
start bragging. Yeah, and all of a sudden, you have
a couple of gen and Tonics at a Soldier of
Fortune party. Sure, and you're like, hey, guess what, and
that that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Somebody goes what yeah, there you go here it comes.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, and they drop the you know, they drop the
bomb that what's been going on. A concerned citizen hears this.
I guess he must have been mistakenly invited the soldier.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
I don't know how that guy got invited, or they
just happened to talk to the wrong guy or whatever,
but probably that he was like, I am really fearful
of my life for saying something about this, but I
feel like somebody should know. So he went to a lawyer,
a human rights lawyer named David Shean, and he said,
you go tell everybody you put your life on the line.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And he did. He submitted an affidavit to federal court,
started doing interviews, talking to journalists, drumming up support. White
House was like, we don't know what you're talking about.
You're a crazy man, Like this is all made up.
And finally it took a Lebanese newspaper, Al Shira, that
reported on this deal, this arms for hostage deal, like
(27:44):
in a legitimate newspaper.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Right, so now both stories have been blown open. You've
got Eugene Hassenfu was captured and the contra operation is
blown open, and now Al Shira is reporting on the
Iran arms for hostage deal. And really, crazily enough, these
two separate arms of this one scandal came out within
(28:07):
a month of each other, which is it's bizarre, but
that's what happened. And now it was like there's it's
on the table. The America media knows about it, Congress
knows about it. Heads are about to roll.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
All right, we'll take our final break and we'll come
back and talk about the aftermath of Iran condra.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Chuck.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
It's stuff you should know, all right.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, Chuck, you promised that after your math.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Let's hear it, all right, So everything is exposed. Oliver
North was no longer in business doing his thing.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
No, he shut down shop real quick, he.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Did, but not before. Very famously, he and his very
eighties haired secretary, Fawn Hall. I forgot. I looked at
was like, Fawn Hall. I looked her up, and as
soon as I saw it, I was like, right, yeah,
Fawn Hall, sure you can forget that hair. She could
barely walk through a door.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
No, it was ginormous, for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
It's so great. I would be fearful around a shreddervour her,
but she was not fearful at all. She and Oliver
North spent a day they could. They call it a
shredding party. I mean, we will never know the full
truth behind this because of all the evidence that they shredded.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yep, as far as anyone knows, Oliver North decided on
his own to shred every document he had on it.
That's right, and yeah, that's that's it. It's it's now
it's the official narrative that has been written into the
history book, which you can just guarantee is not anywhere
near the full story, right.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
So it all comes out. The Reagan administration start looking
around and they're like, well, who who's going to be
the patsy for this one? And Oliver North could not
escape it, but they're like, he's small potatoes, he'll go down.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Well, I think he was even willing to take the fall,
like he knew he was going to be the fall
guy and was like, okay, that's part of the job.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Right, But they knew that it had to the American public,
and certainly Congress wasn't going to be satisfied with just
Oliver North, right, So who did they land on?
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So the official line became this Poindexter and I guess
McFarlane would have started it. Became fully aware of just
how badly Reagan wanted to help the Contras and said
I'm going to do something about this, and tapped Allie
North and said we need to help the Contras out.
Go help him out, figure it out. And North went
(30:56):
off and basically went rogue on his own and set
up this whole operation, created this entire network with Seacord
decided to do the Iranian arms deal all this stuff
basically on his.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Own, right, like Reagan and Bush knew nothing about.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
It, nothing about it, and that the buck stopped at Poindexter.
Ultimately it didn't go any further. William Casey being CIA,
he was basically out of the loop. That was the
official story they came out with, right, and America when
you're kidding, right, this is a joke.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, I mean I remember these hearings even as a
little kid, like watching these and then watching the news
coverage of it, and like we mentioned all over North
strolling in there with his dress uniform and you know,
by all accounts being a pretty stand up guy, like
he didn't rat anyone out.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
He didn't. But he also he was like, there's there's
no way the president didn't know about this. He said,
I don't have any direct evidence that the president did
know about it, but it's my understanding that the president
was fully aware of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah, what was the deal with this missile supply shipment? Though,
That's the one thing didn't quite get.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So there was North got rid of all the documents
that he could, right, well, North didn't have any control
over CIA documents, and at that first missile resupply where
they were resupplying Israel, he had a CIA. He basically said, Hey, CIA,
do you know anybody I can use to ship these things.
I've got an emergency here. I need to get these
(32:22):
to Israel fast. And the CIA, being the CIA is
still a bureaucracy, they had to document this event. So
there was a document out there now and right that
he couldn't get his hands on, that he couldn't shred.
And so this led to Reagan taking responsibility for saying, okay,
(32:43):
I was aware of this Iran missile deal by backdating
an order to William Casey saying I order you not
to tell Congress about this, even though you're supposed to.
So Reagan basically said, on paper, I know about this Iran,
this one missile transfer to Iran. Had no idea about
the contrasts, right, okay. And at first they started off
(33:06):
denying everything.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Oh yeah, like after this, I'll share a story that
we talked about. He went on television, Reagan did and
denied everything.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
He said, all this is just total bs, yeah exactly.
Now let's stop talking about it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Everybody ten days after that, Reagan had another press conference
where he talked about the Iran operation and he acknowledged it,
but said, what we're really doing here is just trying
to sort of send a signal to Iran that where
we want friendlier relations. Right, there were not arms for
hostage exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
And then so that was ten days after the first denial, right,
and then four months after that, because the reporting would
not stop, he basically said, Okay, yeah, whatever it started
out as, I admit that it devolved into an arms
for hostage deal. Which even that, even that admission, which
is the closest he ever came to admitting, you know,
(33:57):
responsibility for it. Yeah, even that's his total b us
and fantasy. It was from the outset in arms for
hostages deal. Right, The whole thing was set up to
get hostages released, and that was it. So there was
there was no other way to put it. Yeah, but
that's he denied that to his dying day.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
As far as fallout, Poindexter resign Oliver North was fired,
Casey died in a hospital not too long after this
whole thing like was exposed, I mean like weeks. Yeah,
so the press was all over the president. He appointed
the Tower Commission. Yeah, the look into this.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
The president appointed a commission to investigate, Yeah, the president's
own administration's wrongdoing.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
That's right. And it was determined that Reagan's disengagement from
the management of his White House created condition conditions such
that it was possible that he did not know about this.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Which is the absolute best official finding he could have
hoped for, because it basically says rang it didn't. He
had a rogue guy working for him, a true believer,
a patriot. But Reagan didn't know about this, and yeah,
he should have. He should have had a closer watch
on his executive branch, but he didn't. What are you
going to do? Let's get mister t in here for
a photo op with Nancy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
There was a criminal investigation, and what they were really
honing in on was the eighteen million dollars in profits
that were made and what happened to that money where
it went. Fourteen people were charged. Oliver North was tried
and found guilty on three counts. One of the counts
was for getting a sixteen thousand dollars security system installed
(35:40):
in his home courtesy of Seacord. With that money.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
There was a rumor that there was a bounty on
his head from terrorists, and she hooked him up. Right Now,
that was a big problem for North, because North's whole
bag was I was following orders that I assume we're
coming from the president ultimately, and I was doing it
out of my patriotic duty and a sense of, you know,
(36:05):
as a true believer that we need to get rid
of communism. And the American public loved it. They were like, great,
make this man a saint. Congress started to love it too,
and he got off. But that was a real problem
because it's saying, well, you took this gift from funds
from this illicit arms sales.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Right, But it was a gift of a security system
to help protect his family, So it's not like, you know,
it was a gift of ten pounds a blow.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
And Nicaraguans sex worker from the Santa and Eastern government exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Seacord was convicted of one count of lying to Congress
and the investigators. He basically denied that North received any
funds from any of this. So it's still kind of
hinged on that security system, I guess.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
And so everybody went to jail forever after that point.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Right, No, that's not true at all. Hakeem got two
years probation, a five thousand dollars fine.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Secord got two years probation.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Is that what he got? Two years probation.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
So the two guys who were actually running the company
that ran this whole thing each got two years probation.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
North's conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush,
the senior Bush, on Christmas Eve, this was Christmas Eve
as he was leaving office, right, yep, he issued six
pardons basically let everyone off the hook, including Casper Weinberger
who hadn't even gone to trial yet.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
No, and neither had Duyne Clarridge. Dewey Clarridge was going
to stay on trial too. Both of them received preemptive pardons.
And a lot of people are like, that was about
the shadiest set of pardons anyone's ever issued, because there's
a lot of people out there who say Bush really
walked away from this scot free, But there is no
way he wasn't even more involved in this than Reagan was.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, I mean George Bush withheld subpoena his subpoena diary
entries that basically indicated that he had full knowledge of
this the entire time. Eventually, in nineteen ninety two, Independent
Counselor Lawrence Walsh asked for these again, and Bush like said,
I asked you for these diary entries. And Bush was like,
(38:09):
I didn't you did. I didn't fully understand. It was inadvertent,
like you asked me for a lot of stuff. I
didn't know you asked me for the diary entries. And
Walsh was really upset and he said, the Iran contra
cover up has now been completed. And George Bush as
a president who has such a contempt for honesty and
(38:31):
arrogant disregard for the rule of law.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, and I mean the forestalling that the Reagan White
House and then later on the Bush White House did
in allowing these investigations to go forward and trying to
keep Congress at arm's length after everything came out. It
worked because there were articles of impeachment introduced in the
House against Ronald Reagan, and they managed to stave them
(38:56):
off to where it was like, while he's leaving office, anyway,
forget about it. This investigation took years and years and years,
and then finally when Bush pardoned everybody that was it,
there was nothing else to do. Everybody who was involved
was implication was off Scott free. And then the fact
that Oliver North had shredded all those documents, they were
all lost to history, like the actual truth is lost
(39:17):
to history.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah. Reagan, his reputation took a hit, a temporary hit
for a while there. He went from sixty three percent
in the span of a couple of months to forty
three to forty seven percent depending on which poe you
looked at on his approval rating. And he would get
it back though, despite in the nineteen ninety deposition, the
(39:40):
very very famous deposition where Ronald Reagan said I don't
remember or I don't recall eighty eight times. That was
very big deal. It was all over the news. Yeah,
it was almost as famous, or just as famous as
Bill Clinton's very famous. It depends what your definition of
is is right exactly, But Reagan bounded.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
He did, man to the most popular presidency since FDR. Right.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah. Upon his exit, his approval rating had bounced all
the way back up to the early sixties.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Mister t famously carried him out of the White House
on his shoulders on his last day in office. Oh man,
so that's a wrong Contra. Man, what a story. Heck
of a story. Where's this movie? I don't know. Hopefully
we'll get some rights to it after this episode.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
I want to play Fawn Hall.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Welso that's great.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You get Jerry to play Fawn Hall.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
That'd be great. Jerry Well. In the meantime, while we
find a suitable wig for Jerry, you can find out
more about Iran Contra by going and reading contemporary articles
on it. I'm telling you it's really awesome. And since
I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Gonna call this follow up on the moonlanding thing. Hey, guys,
in my opinion, the Apollo missions and moonlandings are the
most significant events in the history of life on Earth.
On the question why the Command Module and Lunar Lander
were launched separated, I think the reason was to allow
the Command Module to be ejected in case of an emergency.
The very top of the Apollo stack was the launch
(41:11):
escape system, like an ejector seat on steroids. I imagine
they had to keep things as light and nimble as
possible for the l S to be effective. I don't
think you mentioned something that's really significant. The Apollo eight
mission was the very first time humans went to the Moon.
On top of being the first time we broke free
of Earth's gravity. Like eleven, the stakes were incredibly high.
(41:31):
They had to first insert the correct trajectory to make
it to the Moon, then do a burn to enter
the orbit around the Moon, then perform another burn to
break free of the Moon's gravity and head back toward Earth.
If any piece was not in place, those astronauts would
have spent the rest of their lives either orbiting the
Sun or orbiting the Moon. Apollo eight also gave us
the Earth Rise photo.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've been hearing a lot about Apollo
eight lately too, So this person is hats off to you.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Level was on both Apollo eight and Apollo thirteen. You
travel to the Moon twice but never had the opportunity
to land.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That is so sad.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Signed a space geek Noah Alloi.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Nice work, Noah Alloi Alloi LOOI great name too. Thanks
a lot for getting in touch with us. We love
space geeks. We love to put you guys in headlocks
and rub your heads with our knuckles until you go stop.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
It's called a noggie right here on Earth.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
That's right. If you want a noggy from me and Chuck,
send us a space geeky or any kind of geeky thing.
We love that kind of stuff. If you can go
on to stuff youshould know dot com and follow our
social links and you can send us a good old
fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
E
Okay, everyone, buckle up for the thrilling conclusion of Iran
Contra Shady in the Eighties, Part two.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles t w Tuck, Brian, there's Jerry over there. And
this is Stuff you Should Know. Iran Contra Part two,
starting now go.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Maybe we should do a quick catch up. Okay, well
we're still going. You act to like I just went
to sleep.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
No, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So what's going on here is the United States is
Congress has decided that we cannot fund the Contras to
fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Shut off funding. So the
Reagan administration makes a deep covert push to continue doing
so right through a bunch of fun and shady ways.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Right, they're fundraising, they're directly arming the Contras, they're training them,
doing all sorts of crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yes, but if you know that this is about Iran
Contra and you're like, what about Iran? What's going on here?
I haven't heard anything about Iran?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Keep your socks on.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, here we go. This is where Iran enters.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
The picture, right, you can take your socks off, all right,
go are your socks on?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I've got on little footy socks.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, I do too cool. Oh, Jerry does too sweet.
It's the way to go.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Jerry has those true footies where you can't even see
him at all. I can see you mind peak out
just a little, which I'm not a huge fan of.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Well, check out my mind.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, noms, no sms.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Okay, enter Iran. We really that was a great intro
and it just went away.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So on the other side of the world from Nicker,
there was another foreign policy disaster simmering that Reagan had going,
and it was in the form of Iran, and specifically,
it wasn't even the form of run. It was in
the form of a problem that America had doesn't really
have much these days, but definitely did in the seventies
(02:17):
and eighties where Americans would be taken hostage around the world,
but specifically, almost exclusively by Lebanese terrorists who were, if
not working on behalf of Iran, were definitely sponsored by Iran.
And regardless of who was president, the fact that there
(02:37):
were hostages being held by another country and there wasn't
anything we could do about it. That was a real
blemish on the presidency. It was not a very proud
thing to think about for America. But that was a
reality for a while there.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, so we ran at the time. This is the
early eighties. This is just a few years removed from
the Iranian Revolution of nineteen seventy nine, and this is
where we talked about it before. Go look up photos
of Iran in the mid seventies pre revolution, right, and
it looks like London in the swinging sixties and seventies. Yeah,
very kind of hit place to be. Iranian revolution happens.
(03:13):
Fundamentalists take control of the government that was previously the
Shaw of Iran, who was friendly to the West, sure,
friendly to America generally, and the Iatola Komeni.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Kohmani I've always heard Kohmane.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Kohmani installed the Islamic theocracy and bad things started happening
pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
But yeah, there was a It was about as quick
a turn about face politically and socially as you could imagine.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, for a whole country, yeah, yeah, but not everyone
in the country, as we'll learn, Like the whole country
didn't just change overnight.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
No, but the the Islamic theocracy was in power, sure,
very much. So. One of the things that happened was
they were not very fond of America or Americans, and
the American embassy was famously stormed and sixty six Americans
working there were taken hostage and held for more than
a year.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Man. That was like, this is stuff I really remember.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Like four hundred and forty days or.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Something, four hundred and forty four days, man, the Iranian
hostage crisis. I remember this as a nine year old
very clearly.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Really, Oh yeah, I have no recollection.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, it was a big deal, yellow ribbons, and it
was on the news constantly.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I remember entering the room and being like, what does
this have to do with Rainbow Bright turn this newscast?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I even remember. So what happened was Jimmy Carter did
not get these hostages free during his his I was
about to say rain, but that was sort of the
opposite Jimmy Carter was during his administration is iron fisted rain.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The days of terror.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
But within a few days, and that may have cast
some election, but within a few days of our hours,
even of Reagan's inauguration, the hostages were freed, and I
remember as a nine year old hearing kids parroting their parents'
conversations like it was really Carter that had him freed
all the work he did up until then, and then
other kids saying, are you kidding me? As soon as
(05:17):
Reagan got in a office, they knew that they were
toast and that Reagan wasn't going to be a patsy
like Carter. And I was like, what's a patsy? Who
are these dudes? No, but I remember very distinctly, it's weird,
like on the playground hearing the stuff that's funny, Yeah,
like a little nine year olds.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I definitely didn't hear this when I was a kid,
but I remember hearing later on as a grown up,
still in the rainbow bright, that it was Reagan's campaign
was somehow in touch with aaran yeah, and that they brokeered.
This also got them to wait to release the hostages
(05:54):
until after Reagan was in office. Well, the timing was not.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
At all hours after his inauguration. There's no accident.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's a little fishy, you know what I mean. But
whether it was that's funny, I'm sure somebody's parents were like, yeah,
it's because they were so scared of Reagan, they knew
that they better release these guys. That's totally not the
case because there were other hostages taken by other by
actual Lebanese terrorists who were probably sponsored by Iran, and
that were they were held throughout Reagan's presidency.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, and that's sort of a big part of this.
The second half of the story was the fact that
that was very embarrassing for Reagan. He didn't like hostages
being held on his watch.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
No, but he had campaigned against negotiating with terrorists under
any circumstances. So he's stuck now, Yeah, because he's basically saying,
if you get taken hostage, I mean, you're on your own. Well,
we'll use our rhetoric and whatever we can to influence
you being released, but we're not going to negotiate for
your release. That's just the way it is.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And that's a longstanding American policy, right, and it makes
sense because if you negotiate with terrorists, then that's just
going to need to more kidnappings. Yeah, because they know
that you're open for business.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Like anywhere in the world. Yeah, there was a kidnapping
of twa Flight eight forty seven, very very famous one,
you know, the picture of like the pilot leaning out
of the cop sure and the guys in the picture
with the gun behind him. That was eight forty seven, right,
And that was I mean, that was I remember that
one that was That was probably nine then, and that
(07:24):
was just scary because they were flying all over the place.
You had no idea what was going to happen. People
were being beaten on the plane. When Navy guy was
beaten in shot and throw his body thrown out on
the tarmac.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. The eighties, like it seems comparatively tame now in
a lot of way as compared to the things that
used to go on. Tank McDonald's hi jackings and kidnappings
and hostages. It's like it was the eighties were nuts.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
They were nuts.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But pac Man, right, you know, pac Man fevers, pac
Man rapping Rodney it was crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Right, rapping Like is that Rodney Piper.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No rapping Rodney Dangerfield his big hit?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Oh yeah, yeah, no respect. What about what about the
Ichy Shuffle? That was a little crazy?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Was that eighties?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Sure? Late eighties, I guess so, okay, I got one
for you.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
The Bears, what was their thing?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Oh? The Super Bowl Shuffle?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Super Bowl Shuffle right, Yeah, that was pretty eighties. I
think they were eighty four.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, we're putting you know, my band every year plays
for sure one gig at Decatur's Porch Best, and every
year we try to do a theme, and this year
we're doing eighties sort of new wave. Nice and I
jokingly suggested pac Man Fever the Raping Rodney.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But oh, you guys gonna do it?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
No, those songs are terrible.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Do you have a synth player playing with you?
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I bought Emily a keyboard and she's learning.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Awesome. Yeah, she's gonna be like wait, hold on, huh,
that's cool man.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Now she's practicing.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've heard her do that, and.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
She played piano when she was a kid, so it's
not the biggest stretch.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I've heard that one that her do. That one Blondie
song that she just brought the house to.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, we might one way or another. Yes, we might
bring that back because that's eighties. Yeah, or was that?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
It was so close on the custom I seriously doubt
anybody's going to throw a beer can at you for it.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Anyway, Porch Best, everyone, I'll publicize it in October. Nice,
So Reagan's hands are tied in every way possible because
he can't on he can't negotiate with Terris. The only
option is to send in a covert Delta Force.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Team, which they Carter tried that, and yeah, work.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Doesn't always work. You could lose your own men. And
I think that's what happened in Carter's case, right, yeah. Sure,
So what he can do though, without anyone knowing, is
totally negotiate with Terras.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, just as long as the American public doesn't no, sure, yeah,
And that's what happened. And he followed that Reagan playbook
where it's like, okay, I said this, well, if I
just changed this one little part, right, it makes it
all fine. That's right, again, as long as the American
public doesn't know. So while Reagan said America will never
negotiate with with hostages, they didn't say Israel will never
(09:59):
nego terrorists for hostages, right, Yeah, So actually Israel had
a long standing policy of negotiating with terrorists. They would
they would kidnap people from the other side, and then
they'd be like, all right, i'll give you five guys.
I've only got two. Let me kidnap a few people, Okay, Now,
I have five like there would be negotiations for hostage
exchanges all the time between Israel and Palestine. Right, They
(10:24):
just knew what they were doing. So they said, okay, well,
if Israel goes to Iran and says, hey, you know
this American over there, why don't you get them released.
We can help you out with some stuff. What do
you think about this?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, So earlier when I mentioned the fact that Iran
as whole cloth did not change overnight as a country.
The government did, but there were still some plenty of
people there that were a little more moderate in their views,
and the Reagan administration had a channel to them. So
he was talking to them, these more moderate factions and
(11:00):
making a little headway. And they were like, by the way,
we'll totally give you these hostages if you give us arms.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, because Iran was fighting the Iran Iraq War at
least half of it.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. And this is just where stuff is just totally crazy,
because we were we were funding both sides.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
At the very least, we were advising both sides.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Well, I mean we directly gave money. Oh yeah, no,
you're right, We sold them weapons and we provided training
and intelligence. Right, And this was this wasn't secret. This
was like a real deal thing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
We were publicly supporting Iraq, but then we were secretly
arming Iran.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah. I think what they never proved beyond a doubt
was that we went to Saddam Hussein and said, hey,
why don't you go in there and overthrow Iran?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Really yeah, that was never I don't think that was ever.
There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that that was
the case, but never, like the smoking gun, that we
actually encouraged Saddam Hussein to do so. But it's just, man,
when you look at how all this played out over
the years, it's just maddening.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, you know, yeah, it's a s show.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah. So Iraq and Iran are fighting, we're supplying both,
playing both sides of the coin, right, uh, And we
offered arms to Iran And who are you gonna call?
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Is real?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Not ghostbusters?
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Oh Gorbanaphar?
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Well you're gonna call Ali North?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, I would have gotten there eventually. Yeah,
because okay, so remember Oly North is this total novice
when it comes to covert operations bymore. Yeah, yeah, he's
been running the Nicaragua op for years now. Yeah, just
doing a bang up job of it. So they're like, well, sure,
we'll have him do this incredibly illegal, super sensitive arms
(12:43):
sailed to Iran too, Why don't you come on over here,
Ali and all. He said, well, okay, that's fine, but
I need to go get the lay of the land.
And he actually traveled to Iran with a fake passport
under an assumed name William P. Good with a knee
and when he went, it was it was dangerous enough
that William Casey, supposedly Oliver North later testified, gave him
(13:08):
cyanide pills so that he could take his own life
rather than be tortured by the Iranians. If this were
in fact like some sort of setup.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Again right out of a movie, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
But Oliver North went to Iran with cyanide pills.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
And a fake passport Billy Good.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, so everything went great, though it did. He didn't
need the cyanide pills after all.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
He did not. He dealt with, like you mentioned earlier,
this Iranian businessman named Gorbanifar. And this guy was ten
shades of shady, so much so that the CIA wouldn't
even deal with them now.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
They issued a burn notice on him in nineteen.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Eighty three, which is I don't even know what that is.
That means just TV he's dead to us.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
It's basically stay away, okay, it's putting him on blast
to all the other intelligence agencies in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Gotcha PERSONA grade.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I won't even deal with this guy. And so Alie
North is like, yeah, I'll deal with this guy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
All right. So with his help, Oliver North set up
a deal where and it's so simple to look at, like, Israel,
you give them your missiles and then we'll just replace
those missiles for you with our missiles.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
So we're not given the missiles you are.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
And because no American explicitly said to Iran, hey, we're
doing this so that you guys will get these hostages released,
it wasn't in arms for hostages deal, and so Reagan's
vowed and never negotiate with terrorists remained intact.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
That's right. Five hundred and eight tow tow missiles What
does that stand for?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Two blaunched optically tracked wireless guided missile, which is like
it's like the tube launched. There's a tube and it
can be mounted on the ground, mounted on a jeep.
It's super portable. But they are they'll blow some stuff up.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I think I've seen these you have. So five hundred
and eight of these made it from Israel to Iran,
and then in very short order, a couple of days later,
one of the hostages, Benjamin we Are, minister who was
held by Lebanes's Terrists for sixteen months, was released. So
it worked.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It did work, Azah. It was a big deal around
the White House too, but they said, let's try it again,
but this time it seems a little messy to get
Israel involved. Let's just do this ourselves. Alie, you think
you can handle this, and he said, sure, me and
Gerbonifor have this. So rather than Israel giving arms to Iran,
(15:31):
Richard Seacord got brought in, just like with Nicaragua. And
again this isn't like years after Nicaragua. Nicaragua's at full
bore in full swamp, but it's still going yet, and
Olie North is running both operations simultaneously. And so the
news setup was the Department of Defense would sell the
CIA missiles for thirty seven hundred bucks a pop. The
(15:54):
CIA would sell them to Richard Seacord at cost, and
then Seacord would sell them to Garbaniphar for ten grand apiece,
and then Gorbanifhar would go sell them to Iran for
whatever he charged Iran. Can you imagine, I can't. I
guarantee it was more than the ten grand. Yeah, and
this happened multiple times over the course of a little
(16:14):
over a year. America secretly transferred two thousand missiles and
missile parts to Iran in eight shipments.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah. For the release of hostages.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah. Ultimately there were three hostages that got released out
of seven that had been taken hostage total.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, And didn't he say ultimately there were three more
hostages taken, so they netted out at zero at zero.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, So but that was the whole Iran operation.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, but here's the deals. This price markup means that
that shell company and those Swiss bank accounts were making
a lot of money, and so much so that I
think one of them had three million dollars made an
interest alone. So at some point someone's like, hey, this
is a money making operation. Now, why don't we tie
(17:07):
a little bow on all this and use some of
that money to fund the contrast, Because you guys are
doing both of these things and you need money. Congress
won't give it to you. Forget the fundraising omelets. We'll
just use the money from these illegal arm sales to
fund the Contras.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah, and that's exactly what happened. So to put in
playing terms, America illegally and secretly sold missiles to Iran,
used the proceeds from those missile sales to secretly and
illegally fund the Contras to help them overthrow their government
down in Nicaragua. That's what the Reagan administration did.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
That's why it's called Iran Contra. That's where they came together.
There was a diversion of funds.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, and the I think it was a by nineteen
eighty six, Congress finally got back on board because of
this drum beat from Reagan over the years of how
much we need to really do this officially, And keep
in mind, Congress still didn't know any of this is
going on right secretly. And then Congress said, all right,
we'll give you a hundred million dollars to aid this cause.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And you're going to say, how take a dog.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
You would think that was the end of all the
covert stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
It wasn't, though, No, No, it's still continued on. But
now it was legitimized and had even better funding. But
that was not the end of the whole thing. Like
everybody didn't just get to walk away and say that
was close, because the whole thing started to come apart. Actually,
and I say that we take an ad break and
come back and talk about it. Great after this.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Amuck?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Stuff you should know? Should all right? Okay, Chuck. So
nineteen eighty six Congress is back on board. I think
(19:08):
it's worth pointing out that that's exactly four years after
the Democrats took control of the House in nineteen eighty two.
So I wonder if the Republicans took control back in
eighty six, and that's why the funding got turned back
onto the Contress.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Me solve this?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I like to speculate instead, So this.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
All might have Who knows if this ever would have
even been found out had it not been for the
sharpshooting of a young Sandinistan soldier named Jose Fernando Canales
Almann Nice in October fifth, nineteen eighty six. It was
a cargo plane, as he won twenty three called the
(19:47):
provider flying seventy Soviet Kalishnikovs, one hundred thousand rounds of AMMO,
rocket grenades and other supplies. And this is one of
those things where you said they would fly over and
kick him out the back of the plane. Sure, this
is one of those runs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah. The problem with this particular run, though, is that
they did this at twenty five hundred feet in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
They got a little lazy o tad bit or maybe cocky.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I don't even know if it's that. I think it
was more like this was just work. It was an
everyday job by this time. They've been doing it for years. Yeah,
you know, and the operation was just humming along so
nicely that it was almost an autopilot.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So yeah, they did this one supply drop on October fifth,
nineteen eighty six, in broad daylight.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
And there were four crew aboard. William J. Cooper, Wallace
buzz Sawyer, Freddy Vilchis, and a guy named Eugene Hassenfuss
who and again this sliding doors thing. Hassenfuss is the
only guy who had a parachute. He borrowed it from
his brother, a skydiver, because you know, he thought it
might be smart to take a parachute, right no one
else had parachutes. Had he not had a parachute, this
(20:54):
may have turned out differently.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
It may have. For sure he was the only one
that survived this plane crash because he was the only
one who borrowed the parachute from his brother and he
jumped out, landed, made it safely into the jungle. And
I think he actually survived and evaded the Sandinistas for
maybe a day or something like that before he was captured.
And when he was captured, they led him out of
(21:16):
the jungle like with a rope around his neck, just
about as big of a prisoner as you can imagine.
Super publicized. There are billboards of him being led around
by Santainistas and they started asking him questions and he
was like, what do you want to know?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
He say, like a canary, He really did.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
He said, this is my tenth supply mission. I presume
that the CIA is running this. I don't know, And
he would know this would be something that he would
he could legitimately guess at at least because he had
actually worked on CIA air drops over Vietnam or Cambodia
for Air America back in the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yeah, but he wasn't like, like he sings like a
canary because he's not very high up on the totem pole.
Like his job was to get up there and shove
this stuff out of the back of the plane, right
for three grand a month.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Right, He wasn't even a CIA operator. He's just a
former Marine who had a background working with Air America
years before. But by this time, by the time he
joins on doing this for the Contras, he was like
working as a construction worker part time in Wisconsin right home.
So this is like pretty good money, I think. Yeah,
(22:31):
he was getting seven grand in today's dollars a month
for basically kicking AK forty seven crates out the back
of a plane over Nicaragua.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, so he's not the kind of guy that's going
to take the fall right for anyone. So he's singing
like a canary.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Even if he had kept his mouth shut, it wouldn't
have mattered what it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Right, Yeah, Because all the other guys, including Hassenfuss, had
their wallets on the plane, They had all their employee
ID cards and in fact, I don't even we mentioned
in episode one the company that was set up to
do these drops was set up called Southern Air Transport
out of I guess Miami. So they all had their
(23:12):
Southern Air Transport IT cards, which was the CIA front.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Like everybody knew Southern Transport was a CIA front, so
they might as well have had like CIA Junior badges
or something right, or.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Like Michael Keaton and out of Sight when he has
the big FBI T shirt.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I haven't seen that one?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Oh, you haven't seen out of Sight? No? Is that
the one where he's George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Is he a bad guy in it?
Speaker 2 (23:35):
No, he's a good guy, but he walks in. He
plays Ray Nicolette who played same character, and Jackie Brown
FBI guy. Okay, but it's funny because he walks in
with an FBI T shirt on, and Dennis Farina as
Jennifer Lopez's dad, and he's a former CUP and he goes, hey, Ray,
let me ask it. He got one that says undercover.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Dennis Farina man class ad.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
I mean he got to see out of Sight. That's
a classic. All right, I'll check it out like one
of the better men.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
I mean, I know the movie. You're talking about avoid
it like the plague.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
It's so good, Okay, you would love it, all right,
So Southern air Transport caa front. There's also a log
book that connected this flight and all the other flights.
And then Hassenfuss in his wallet had a business card
to Robert w Owen, this is a big one who
was working with Oliver North in Washington.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Right, which so that provided a direct line between Oliver
North and some guys who were kicking Kalashnikov's out of
the back of a plane over Nicaragua. So that was
a really big deal that when this guy got captured
and you know, told the Santonistas as much as he knew,
because the Sandinistas were like, attention, world, Yeah, listen to
what we just found out. The CIA has totally been
(24:46):
funding these Countra rebels who are trying to overthrow this
sovereign government, and we think you guys should know about it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, And it was it wasn't like you could totally
discount that even though it was from the Sandinistans like
and the American media were like what I'm sure Congress
was like wait a minute, right, this reeks of like
something that had been happening that we tried to shut down.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, because remember, even if the CIA was brief in Congress,
it was either Bill Casey or Dewey Clarridge, and they
were doing a really obtuse job of this keeping Congress
at arms length. So anytime something like this came out,
almost none of Congress knew the full extent of this,
and it was always in flagrant violation of whatever Congress
(25:33):
wanted or whatever Congress had agreed to.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, and this wasn't like this was sort of the
straw that broke it all open, or that broke the
camel's back.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Broke the camel's back wide open. Oh god, that's correct,
or camel.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Things have been unraveling for a bit. There was a
party in nineteen eighty five in Virginia thrown thrown by
Soldier of Fortune magazine. Can you imagine? No, what's that party?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Like? I don't want to know, I can't imagine. I
used to read Soldier of Fortune when I was in
my ninja training as like a ten year old boy,
and even then I was like this, this magazine makes
my stomach hurt.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And it's in nineteen eighty five, Like, can you imagine
the amount of like blow being secretly done in the
bathroom at that party.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Sure, but also they were making snuff movies in the
living room, and there's no telling what was going on.
As a soldier of Fortune, we can tell you at
the very least, there was a lot of boasting going
on openly about this contra operation. And again this is
the time when people don't know about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, but you know what happens is like you get
enough people in enough years, and people start talking, people
start bragging. Yeah, and all of a sudden, you have
a couple of gen and Tonics at a Soldier of
Fortune party. Sure, and you're like, hey, guess what, and
that that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Somebody goes what yeah, there you go here it comes.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, and they drop the you know, they drop the
bomb that what's been going on. A concerned citizen hears this.
I guess he must have been mistakenly invited the soldier.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
I don't know how that guy got invited, or they
just happened to talk to the wrong guy or whatever,
but probably that he was like, I am really fearful
of my life for saying something about this, but I
feel like somebody should know. So he went to a lawyer,
a human rights lawyer named David Shean, and he said,
you go tell everybody you put your life on the line.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And he did. He submitted an affidavit to federal court,
started doing interviews, talking to journalists, drumming up support. White
House was like, we don't know what you're talking about.
You're a crazy man, Like this is all made up.
And finally it took a Lebanese newspaper, Al Shira, that
reported on this deal, this arms for hostage deal, like
(27:44):
in a legitimate newspaper.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Right, so now both stories have been blown open. You've
got Eugene Hassenfu was captured and the contra operation is
blown open, and now Al Shira is reporting on the
Iran arms for hostage deal. And really, crazily enough, these
two separate arms of this one scandal came out within
(28:07):
a month of each other, which is it's bizarre, but
that's what happened. And now it was like there's it's
on the table. The America media knows about it, Congress
knows about it. Heads are about to roll.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
All right, we'll take our final break and we'll come
back and talk about the aftermath of Iran condra.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Chuck.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
It's stuff you should know, all right.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, Chuck, you promised that after your math.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Let's hear it, all right, So everything is exposed. Oliver
North was no longer in business doing his thing.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
No, he shut down shop real quick, he.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Did, but not before. Very famously, he and his very
eighties haired secretary, Fawn Hall. I forgot. I looked at
was like, Fawn Hall. I looked her up, and as
soon as I saw it, I was like, right, yeah,
Fawn Hall, sure you can forget that hair. She could
barely walk through a door.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
No, it was ginormous, for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
It's so great. I would be fearful around a shreddervour her,
but she was not fearful at all. She and Oliver
North spent a day they could. They call it a
shredding party. I mean, we will never know the full
truth behind this because of all the evidence that they shredded.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yep, as far as anyone knows, Oliver North decided on
his own to shred every document he had on it.
That's right, and yeah, that's that's it. It's it's now
it's the official narrative that has been written into the
history book, which you can just guarantee is not anywhere
near the full story, right.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
So it all comes out. The Reagan administration start looking
around and they're like, well, who who's going to be
the patsy for this one? And Oliver North could not
escape it, but they're like, he's small potatoes, he'll go down.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Well, I think he was even willing to take the fall,
like he knew he was going to be the fall
guy and was like, okay, that's part of the job.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Right, But they knew that it had to the American public,
and certainly Congress wasn't going to be satisfied with just
Oliver North, right, So who did they land on?
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So the official line became this Poindexter and I guess
McFarlane would have started it. Became fully aware of just
how badly Reagan wanted to help the Contras and said
I'm going to do something about this, and tapped Allie
North and said we need to help the Contras out.
Go help him out, figure it out. And North went
(30:56):
off and basically went rogue on his own and set
up this whole operation, created this entire network with Seacord
decided to do the Iranian arms deal all this stuff
basically on his.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Own, right, like Reagan and Bush knew nothing about.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
It, nothing about it, and that the buck stopped at Poindexter.
Ultimately it didn't go any further. William Casey being CIA,
he was basically out of the loop. That was the
official story they came out with, right, and America when
you're kidding, right, this is a joke.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, I mean I remember these hearings even as a
little kid, like watching these and then watching the news
coverage of it, and like we mentioned all over North
strolling in there with his dress uniform and you know,
by all accounts being a pretty stand up guy, like
he didn't rat anyone out.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
He didn't. But he also he was like, there's there's
no way the president didn't know about this. He said,
I don't have any direct evidence that the president did
know about it, but it's my understanding that the president
was fully aware of what was going on.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah, what was the deal with this missile supply shipment? Though,
That's the one thing didn't quite get.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So there was North got rid of all the documents
that he could, right, well, North didn't have any control
over CIA documents, and at that first missile resupply where
they were resupplying Israel, he had a CIA. He basically said, Hey, CIA,
do you know anybody I can use to ship these things.
I've got an emergency here. I need to get these
(32:22):
to Israel fast. And the CIA, being the CIA is
still a bureaucracy, they had to document this event. So
there was a document out there now and right that
he couldn't get his hands on, that he couldn't shred.
And so this led to Reagan taking responsibility for saying, okay,
(32:43):
I was aware of this Iran missile deal by backdating
an order to William Casey saying I order you not
to tell Congress about this, even though you're supposed to.
So Reagan basically said, on paper, I know about this Iran,
this one missile transfer to Iran. Had no idea about
the contrasts, right, okay. And at first they started off
(33:06):
denying everything.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Oh yeah, like after this, I'll share a story that
we talked about. He went on television, Reagan did and
denied everything.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
He said, all this is just total bs, yeah exactly.
Now let's stop talking about it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Everybody ten days after that, Reagan had another press conference
where he talked about the Iran operation and he acknowledged it,
but said, what we're really doing here is just trying
to sort of send a signal to Iran that where
we want friendlier relations. Right, there were not arms for
hostage exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
And then so that was ten days after the first denial, right,
and then four months after that, because the reporting would
not stop, he basically said, Okay, yeah, whatever it started
out as, I admit that it devolved into an arms
for hostage deal. Which even that, even that admission, which
is the closest he ever came to admitting, you know,
(33:57):
responsibility for it. Yeah, even that's his total b us
and fantasy. It was from the outset in arms for
hostages deal. Right, The whole thing was set up to
get hostages released, and that was it. So there was
there was no other way to put it. Yeah, but
that's he denied that to his dying day.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
As far as fallout, Poindexter resign Oliver North was fired,
Casey died in a hospital not too long after this
whole thing like was exposed, I mean like weeks. Yeah,
so the press was all over the president. He appointed
the Tower Commission. Yeah, the look into this.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
The president appointed a commission to investigate, Yeah, the president's
own administration's wrongdoing.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
That's right. And it was determined that Reagan's disengagement from
the management of his White House created condition conditions such
that it was possible that he did not know about this.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Which is the absolute best official finding he could have
hoped for, because it basically says rang it didn't. He
had a rogue guy working for him, a true believer,
a patriot. But Reagan didn't know about this, and yeah,
he should have. He should have had a closer watch
on his executive branch, but he didn't. What are you
going to do? Let's get mister t in here for
a photo op with Nancy.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
There was a criminal investigation, and what they were really
honing in on was the eighteen million dollars in profits
that were made and what happened to that money where
it went. Fourteen people were charged. Oliver North was tried
and found guilty on three counts. One of the counts
was for getting a sixteen thousand dollars security system installed
(35:40):
in his home courtesy of Seacord. With that money.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
There was a rumor that there was a bounty on
his head from terrorists, and she hooked him up. Right Now,
that was a big problem for North, because North's whole
bag was I was following orders that I assume we're
coming from the president ultimately, and I was doing it
out of my patriotic duty and a sense of, you know,
(36:05):
as a true believer that we need to get rid
of communism. And the American public loved it. They were like, great,
make this man a saint. Congress started to love it too,
and he got off. But that was a real problem
because it's saying, well, you took this gift from funds
from this illicit arms sales.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Right, But it was a gift of a security system
to help protect his family, So it's not like, you know,
it was a gift of ten pounds a blow.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
And Nicaraguans sex worker from the Santa and Eastern government exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Seacord was convicted of one count of lying to Congress
and the investigators. He basically denied that North received any
funds from any of this. So it's still kind of
hinged on that security system, I guess.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
And so everybody went to jail forever after that point.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Right, No, that's not true at all. Hakeem got two
years probation, a five thousand dollars fine.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Secord got two years probation.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Is that what he got? Two years probation.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
So the two guys who were actually running the company
that ran this whole thing each got two years probation.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
North's conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush,
the senior Bush, on Christmas Eve, this was Christmas Eve
as he was leaving office, right, yep, he issued six
pardons basically let everyone off the hook, including Casper Weinberger
who hadn't even gone to trial yet.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
No, and neither had Duyne Clarridge. Dewey Clarridge was going
to stay on trial too. Both of them received preemptive pardons.
And a lot of people are like, that was about
the shadiest set of pardons anyone's ever issued, because there's
a lot of people out there who say Bush really
walked away from this scot free, But there is no
way he wasn't even more involved in this than Reagan was.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, I mean George Bush withheld subpoena his subpoena diary
entries that basically indicated that he had full knowledge of
this the entire time. Eventually, in nineteen ninety two, Independent
Counselor Lawrence Walsh asked for these again, and Bush like said,
I asked you for these diary entries. And Bush was like,
(38:09):
I didn't you did. I didn't fully understand. It was inadvertent,
like you asked me for a lot of stuff. I
didn't know you asked me for the diary entries. And
Walsh was really upset and he said, the Iran contra
cover up has now been completed. And George Bush as
a president who has such a contempt for honesty and
(38:31):
arrogant disregard for the rule of law.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, and I mean the forestalling that the Reagan White
House and then later on the Bush White House did
in allowing these investigations to go forward and trying to
keep Congress at arm's length after everything came out. It
worked because there were articles of impeachment introduced in the
House against Ronald Reagan, and they managed to stave them
(38:56):
off to where it was like, while he's leaving office, anyway,
forget about it. This investigation took years and years and years,
and then finally when Bush pardoned everybody that was it,
there was nothing else to do. Everybody who was involved
was implication was off Scott free. And then the fact
that Oliver North had shredded all those documents, they were
all lost to history, like the actual truth is lost
(39:17):
to history.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah. Reagan, his reputation took a hit, a temporary hit
for a while there. He went from sixty three percent
in the span of a couple of months to forty
three to forty seven percent depending on which poe you
looked at on his approval rating. And he would get
it back though, despite in the nineteen ninety deposition, the
(39:40):
very very famous deposition where Ronald Reagan said I don't
remember or I don't recall eighty eight times. That was
very big deal. It was all over the news. Yeah,
it was almost as famous, or just as famous as
Bill Clinton's very famous. It depends what your definition of
is is right exactly, But Reagan bounded.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
He did, man to the most popular presidency since FDR. Right.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah. Upon his exit, his approval rating had bounced all
the way back up to the early sixties.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Mister t famously carried him out of the White House
on his shoulders on his last day in office. Oh man,
so that's a wrong Contra. Man, what a story. Heck
of a story. Where's this movie? I don't know. Hopefully
we'll get some rights to it after this episode.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
I want to play Fawn Hall.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Welso that's great.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You get Jerry to play Fawn Hall.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
That'd be great. Jerry Well. In the meantime, while we
find a suitable wig for Jerry, you can find out
more about Iran Contra by going and reading contemporary articles
on it. I'm telling you it's really awesome. And since
I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Gonna call this follow up on the moonlanding thing. Hey, guys,
in my opinion, the Apollo missions and moonlandings are the
most significant events in the history of life on Earth.
On the question why the Command Module and Lunar Lander
were launched separated, I think the reason was to allow
the Command Module to be ejected in case of an emergency.
The very top of the Apollo stack was the launch
(41:11):
escape system, like an ejector seat on steroids. I imagine
they had to keep things as light and nimble as
possible for the l S to be effective. I don't
think you mentioned something that's really significant. The Apollo eight
mission was the very first time humans went to the Moon.
On top of being the first time we broke free
of Earth's gravity. Like eleven, the stakes were incredibly high.
(41:31):
They had to first insert the correct trajectory to make
it to the Moon, then do a burn to enter
the orbit around the Moon, then perform another burn to
break free of the Moon's gravity and head back toward Earth.
If any piece was not in place, those astronauts would
have spent the rest of their lives either orbiting the
Sun or orbiting the Moon. Apollo eight also gave us
the Earth Rise photo.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've been hearing a lot about Apollo
eight lately too, So this person is hats off to you.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Level was on both Apollo eight and Apollo thirteen. You
travel to the Moon twice but never had the opportunity
to land.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That is so sad.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Signed a space geek Noah Alloi.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Nice work, Noah Alloi Alloi LOOI great name too. Thanks
a lot for getting in touch with us. We love
space geeks. We love to put you guys in headlocks
and rub your heads with our knuckles until you go stop.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
It's called a noggie right here on Earth.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
That's right. If you want a noggy from me and Chuck,
send us a space geeky or any kind of geeky thing.
We love that kind of stuff. If you can go
on to stuff youshould know dot com and follow our
social links and you can send us a good old
fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
E
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Josh Clark
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