Selling arms to Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels: the Iran-Contra affair explained
While publicly urging the world not to arm Iran, senior Reagan administration officials were secretly selling it weapons, partly to win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon, and channelling money to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua despite a congressional ban. A Lebanese magazine exposed the scheme in November 1986.
Two policies collided. After the 1979 embassy hostage crisis, the United States embargoed arms to Iran, and from spring 1983 it ran Operation Staunch to persuade other countries to do the same. Yet a secret internal study in July 1981 had already argued the embargo was futile and risked pushing Iran toward Moscow. Meanwhile the administration was determined to topple Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government by backing the Contras, rebels operating out of Honduras.
Congress blocked the second goal. Between 1982 and 1984 it passed three Boland Amendments restricting aid to the Contras, and from October 1984 a total ban applied to any intelligence agency. Reagan nonetheless told the National Security Council to keep the rebels together body and soul. Its staff built a network nicknamed the Enterprise, run by retired Air Force officer Richard Secord and funded from sources outside the government budget. The legal argument turned on whether the NSC counted as an intelligence body; most constitutional scholars say it did.
The Iranian arms sales, originally proposed by Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, were justified as a way to free seven Americans held by Hezbollah. When the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa published the story, Reagan first denied trading arms for hostages. In March 1987 he accepted full responsibility and conceded that a strategic opening had degenerated into exactly such a trade. Investigators were hampered by destroyed and withheld documents.
Neither Congress nor the Tower Commission found proof that Reagan knew the full extent of the operations. Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's inquiry led to indictments of several dozen officials, among them Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and eleven convictions, some overturned on appeal. George H. W. Bush, vice president during the affair, pardoned the remaining defendants in his final days in office; only one person served prison time. Walsh, who filed his final report on 4 August 1993, accused senior officials of a pattern of deception and obstruction.
Source: Iran–Contra affair
