Iran — the former U.S.-ally-turned-enemy after 1979′s Islamic revolution, now in a war with Iraq and desperately needing military aid — had sway with the hijackers. That gave rise to a hidden network, using unsavory middlemen, of trading arms for the American Embassy hostages.
But the scheme generated extra profits, right at a time when Reagan’s other big foreign-policy frustration was Congress balking at funds for his would-be allies in Central America, including a human-rights nightmare of a right-wing reactionary movement in Nicaragua called the Contras. In fact, during Reagan’s first term, Congress barred aiding the Contras in a measure known as the Boland Amendment — which Team Reagan decided to circumvent by steering the off-the-book profits from the Iranian arms deals to the Contras. It was a brazen, outrageous scheme that unraveled quickly when — on October 5, 1986 — an American pilot named Eugene Hasenfus flying some of that illicit aid to the Contras was shot down, captured, and confessed everything.
The movie, “Kill the Messenger,” is forcing the mainstream U.S. media to confront one of its most shameful episodes, the suppression of a major national security scandal implicating Ronald Reagan’s CIA in aiding and abetting cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the 1980s and then the systematic destruction of journalist Gary Webb when he revived the scandal in the 1990s.
2019-12-04 Reagan’s Forgotten Iran-Contra Escape May Reveal More About Trump’s Fate Than Watergate
2014-10-10 The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga
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