The Iran-Contra Affair: Why I Love the 80's

 

This article originally appeared on Popandpolitics.com.

 

Editor's note:
Exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, the supposed sale of Nigerian uranium which was a justification for the Iraq War, former Iraqi Ambassador and current Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, weapons in Iran... what does any of this have to do with Nicaragua?

Get ready for a quick 80s flashback, where we give you a history lesson on what the U.S. was doing in Central America in the early 1980s. It may seem crazy, but what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq has ties to what the Reagan administration was doing in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

 

While hip-hop was emerging on the streets of New York, Madonna was making her debut on the airwaves, and leg warmers were all the rage, the U.S. government was attempting to overthrow Nicaraguan Sandinistas in a shadowy network of arms dealers, Islamic terrorists, and lying politicians.

 

I love the 80s!
==========
Managua, the sleek capital of Nicaragua, was shattered December 23, 1972, by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake that left 10,000 people dead amidst a sparkling rubble of crushed lives and Christmas decorations. Donations poured in from around the world, moved to tears by the holiday devastation.

 

Most of that aid never arrived. President Anastasio Somoza, third of a dynasty which began in a brutal, US-backed 1937 coup, blatantly diverted international aid to his family and friends. He was already considered a repressive dictator; this stunt diplomatically isolated Somoza’s regime and legitimized an increasingly militant rebellion at home.

 

Revolution and Rebuilding a Nation

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was the largest and best armed of several groups opposing Somoza. At first aided by communist Cuba, they gained broad international support throughout the 1970s, and by 1979 most governments (with the notable exception of the United States) had cut ties to the Somoza regime.

 

In July 1979, Somoza fled the country, and Managua’s ruined downtown erupted in a sea of red-and-black Sandinista flags. Most world leaders -- including, eventually, U.S. President Jimmy Carter -- sent their congratulations. Two hours south of the Nicaraguan border, however, Costa Rican observers had already videotaped the first U.S. troops arriving. The U.S. may have been congratulating the FSLN publicly, but secretly was worried and threatened by the victory of the Sandinistas.

 

The Sandinista-led transitional government initiated several remarkably successful programs, notably literacy and rural health care campaigns that the World Council of Churches said offered the “Nicaraguan people a modicum of justice for all.”

 

Others programs, like the nationalization of several hundred companies, were disruptive and reinforced suspicions that the FSLN had communist leanings. Nicaragua was receiving aid from Cuba and the Soviet Union, but also Sweden, Norway and the United States, among others.


In January 1981, three days after taking office, conservative U.S. President Ronald Reagan cancelled Nicaragua’s aid package. He instead committed his administration to helping Somoza’s National Guard regroup along the Honduran border. They were called The Contras. On July 1981, conservative, charismatic Edén Pastora resigned from Nicaragua’s transitional government to lead the Contras.

 

The Cold War Comes to Nicaragua

Lauding the Contras as the “moral equivalents of our founding fathers,” Reagan initiated the construction of Contra bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, massively increasing aid, much of it military, to both countries.

 

Reagan also increased aid to Guatemala’s military dictatorship, which was still fighting the bloody civil war that began with the 1954 CIA-backed coup of democratically elected president Jocobo Arbenz. Also in 1981, Reagan re-instated funding to El Salvador’s right-wing dictatorship, which was cancelled by President Carter after government death squads raped and murdered four U.S. nuns. By 1983, Central America was almost completely militarized.

 

The U.S.-funded Contras systematically targeted literacy workers and community leaders, using rape, torture and kidnapping to intimidate civilian populations. Not to be outdone, the Sandinistas displaced 20,000 Moskito Indians from the Honduran border, after murdering dozens of people involved in their decades-old separatist movement.

 

After winning the 1984 elections, FSLN President Daniel Ortega declared a state of emergency and shut down the national newspaper, La Prensa. Contras were now targeting the food supply, and over half the year’s crops had been lost. In 1985, the United States put a full economic blockade on Nicaragua. Contra activity increased.

 

Ortega responded by expanding the military, graciously retooled by the Soviet Union, and instituted a draft, Servicio Military Patriotico (SMP). As the 1980s dragged on, year after bloody year, young men began calling it “Seremos Muertos Prontos.” Soon we will be dead.

 

Peace & Reconciliation

Nicaragua had been at war for more than a decade when Costa Rican President Oscar Arias asked five Central American presidents to sign a desperate 1987 peace plan, which precluded military aid from the superpowers. All, including Ortega, signed. Reagan criticised the treaty as “deeply flawed” but by 1993, Central America would be at peace for the first time in generations.

 

Ortega entered talks with the surprisingly cordial Contras in 1988. Both sides truly thirsted for peace, plus both sides were having problems with their arms dealers. The USSR, months away from collapse, was mired in its own political upheaval, while the Reagan administration had just been busted: From 1983-1986, the most intense years of the Contra War, Congress had forbidden the Reagan administration from aiding the Contras.

Congressional hearings that played out intermittently between 1986 and 1992 revealed (at least partially) a shadowy network that included Saudi arms dealers, Cuban exiles, the Israeli military, Islamic terrorists, Colombian drug lords and several Reagan administration officials who have recently returned to the world stage. It was known as the Iran-Contra Affair.


Iran-Contra Affair

Like most European and Latin American governments, the U.S. Democratic Party strongly opposed Reagan’s support of the Contras. In October 1984, after learning that the CIA had illegally mined Nicaraguan harbors, House Democrats banned all spending “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.”

Unbowed, Reagan instructed National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane to “help these people keep body and soul together.”

McFarlane and Colonel Oliver North began soliciting third parties for Contra aid, collecting $25 million from a Saudi royal, $5 million from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and allegedly $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei -- even after Secretary of State George Schultz warned that such activity could be “an impeachable offense."

And it still wasn’t nearly enough money.

 

Body and Soul

In spring 1984, Islamic terrorists in Lebanon took seven hostages, including the CIA’s Beirut station chief, William Buckley. That July, North and McFarlane were approached by Iranian businessperson Manucher Ghorbanifar, who said the Islamic government of Iran could arrange the hostages’ release -- in exchange for HAWK anti-aircraft and TOW anti-tank missiles.

 

President Reagan approved a plan to ship missiles to Iran through Israel, which hoped to win diplomatically isolated Iran as an ally. After 1500 missiles had been delivered, one hostage -- not Buckley, who was already dead -- was released. Ghorbanifar suggested sending more missiles.


“America will never make concessions to terrorists,” said Ronald Reagan on February 18, 1985. “To do so would only invite more terrorism.”

 

The missiles continued flowing to Iran until May 1986, when North and McFarlane met with Iranian officials. The officials were surprised -- they hadn’t realized that they were expected to negotiate for the hostages. Ghorbanifar had lied. At least, North quietly noted, the profits were being funnelled to the Contras.

 

“Oh shit,” thought McFarlane.

 

Busted

Sandinistas shot down a U.S. Contra supply plane in October 1986, capturing an American pilot. Two weeks later, Lebanese newspaper Al-Shiraa broke the story about McFarlane’s trip to Iran.

 

President Reagan vehemently denied that the meeting had occurred, then recanted a week later, but still denying that there had been an arms-for-hostage deal. Polls showed that 14% of Americans believed him.

 

At the highly publicized congressional hearings, one official after another took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. Reagan could “not recall” authorizing arms sales to Iran, a possibly impeachable offense. Although Israel had documentation, investigators -- including ranking House Republican Dick Cheney -- felt an impeachment trial “wouldn’t be good for America."

 

Reagan left office in 1989 with astronomical popularity ratings. 12 tapes from the White House computer disappeared afterward. North and former National Security Advisor John Poindexter both had multiple felony convictions overturned on technicalities. Newly elected President Bush refused to testify -- to Congress, that is.

 

In what conservatives call “The Interrogation,” Dan Rather ambushed the presidential candidate, grilling him mercilessly. “Our findings led us to the possibility not only that George Bush knew from the start, and was kept informed, but that the diversion actually ran through the office of the Vice President,” explained Rather.

 

When Bush finally turned over his diary in 1991, it justified re-opening the case. “On…the question of the hostages,” he wrote in 1986, “I’m one of the few people who knows the details.” The revelations helped cost him the 1992 elections.

 

On Christmas Eve 1992, days before Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s conspiracy trial, Bush pardoned Weinberger, McFarlane and four other key Iran-Contra figures, effectively ending the investigation. He, along with key figure General Colin Powell, who had signed off on the missiles headed to Iran, would therefore never testify.

 

“George Bush’s misuse of the pardon power made the cover-up complete,” wrote Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.


Resurrection: The Iran-Contra Crew Returns

During eight years of Clinton-imposed exile, most Iran-Contra alumni found jobs in the private sector. Today, many have returned to public service under President George W. Bush.

 

Among the most controversial is John Negroponte, who as Ambassador to Honduras (1981-1985) ignored reports of systematic human rights violations by Contra soldiers. When a Honduran legislator complained, Negroponte replied, “What you are proposing is to let communism take over this country.”

 

Hurriedly confirmed as United Nations Ambassador on September 14, 2001, and later appointed Ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte is now the first Director of National Intelligence, overseeing 15 intelligence agencies. This replaces John Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office, shut down by Congress as unconstitutional in 2003.

 

Manuchar Ghorbanifar also resurfaced in 2002, with intelligence that Saddam Hussein was purchasing yellowcake uranium from Nigeria. Ghorbanifar’s contact? Michael Ledeen, former Reagan National Security Advisor strategist. When no uranium was found in Iraq, Ledeen blamed the CIA for the mistake.

 

But CIA agent Joseph Wilson had indeed investigated and reported that no such sale had taken place -- first to the CIA, and later to the media. A “senior official” subsequently revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent, endangering her life.

Wilson suspects that this was retribution for going public with proof that the US government knew, prior to the Iraqi invasion, that Saddam Hussein was not trying to build nuclear weapons, despite former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s insistence to the United Nations that Ghorbanifar’s version of the story was correct. (On a side note, the journalists who revealed Plame’s identity have refused to name their sources, despite a rare unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit demanding that they do so.)

 

Political gossips attribute the leak by an unnamed “Bush administration official” to Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, lucky recipient of one of Bush’s Christmas Eve pardons. Guilty or not, Abrams has long been criticised for justifying human rights abuses by the Contras, Angola’s Unita, and others as necessary to win the war on communism. He is now developing America’s “Global Democracy Strategy,” which will help shape the new Iraq.

 

It’s like déjà vu all over again.

 

Play It Again, SAM-7

The FSLN, today Nicaragua’s major center-left party, is also staging a comeback. After losing the 1990 elections, Ortega peacefully transferred power to La Prensa publisher Voileta Chamorro, incidentally the hemisphere’s first female head of state. Ortega has since lost the presidency twice, to the right-wing Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC).

Today, however, the PLC is struggling: Current President Enrique Bolanos jailed his successor on corruption charges, a perceived disloyalty that has split the party. FSLN rising star and moderate former Managua mayor Herty Lewites is favored for the presidency, particularly after a Sandinista sweep in November 2004 civic elections.

 

A week after the FSLN upset in the civic elections, Donald Rumsfeld joined President Bolanos in Managua for a joint press conference, showing U.S. support, but also pressuring Bolanos on a long-term U.S. goal: the destruction of about 1200 Soviet-made SAM-7 missiles provided by China during the Contra War.

 

The anti-aircraft guns could certainly be used to bring down commercial jets. But in Nicaragua, which allows international observers to monitor its arsenal, the SAM-7 stockpile has become a sovereignty issue. Any politician, right or left, who calls for their destruction is branded a traitor. Regardless, Bolanos agreed to Rumsfeld’s demands, adding that “the destruction of the SAM-7s is…the total sovereign will of Nicaragua.” A week later, the PLC-dominated National Assembly made it illegal for the President to decommission any military equipment.

 

Washington backed off until a January 2005 sting operation by Nicaraguan police purchased a SAM-7 for “several hundred thousand dollars.” (The guns-for-cash program in Iraq pays $500 each.) A U.S. official explained to the Washington Times that “Sandinista elements within the military…are corrupt and are selling weapons."

 

An interesting assessment, considering that the sting was run out of the Sandinista offices of then-Mayor Herty Lewites; the missile in question wasn’t even part of the government stockpile. The Sandinistas, once accused of being communists, are today being linked to terrorism with only circumstantial evidence.

 

If a moderate FSLN candidate wins the 2006 presidential elections, it would provide convincing evidence that Reagan’s support of the Contra War was, indeed, unjustifiable and futile -- despite all the money and aid that was funneled to the Contras, in the end the FSLN was still voted into office.


Could the Iran-Contra crew, today more powerful than ever, accept this democratic condemnation peacefully? That’s a question all Central America, looking nervously northward, is asking.


Sources and further reading:

Confused about the Iran-Contra Affair? So is everyone else. So set your decoder ring to “crack cocaine,” all you Junior Independent Counselors out there, and review these sites at your leisure.