Iran Contra: A New Introduction from Leon Neyfakh

Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's Leon Nefak. Before we get into the show, I wanted to say a few introductory words about the Iran-Contra scandal and about this season of Fiasco, which originally came out five years ago. It was February of 2020, the final year of the first Trump administration. It was also right before COVID hit. And once it did, I remember thinking that the events of Iran-Contra felt a little remote. The Cold War, Ronald Reagan, the Ayatollah Khomeini. In the midst of a pandemic, it felt like a dispatch from a different universe. And it just didn't hit the same as, say, a podcast about Watergate released at the height of the Mueller investigation. I hadn't re-listened to this season since we turned it in. And when I started working with Pushkin on this new edition, I was a little nervous to revisit it. But then I did, and to my surprise, what I heard made so much more sense to me in 2025 than it did the first time around. Now, if you've listened to any of my other history podcasts, you know I don't like to lay it on super thick when it comes to pointing out the echoes between then and now. It's usually unnecessary, at least if you're doing it right. But after going back and listening to these eight episodes earlier this year, I was moved to try and sound out what it is that makes this story feel so deeply familiar in this moment. One thing is that the events that make up Iran-Contra moved both incredibly fast and slow. The whole thing unfolded over the course of more than a decade. It wasn't fully put to bed until 1993. A long time. But I think you'll agree as you make your way through this season that the daisy chain of cause and effect that got the Reagan administration from point A to point B involved a lot of quick cuts. It was one thing after another. It was hard to keep up. Even people who lived through it are often fuzzy on the details. If you're one of those people, or if you're younger and you've heard of Iran-Contra but you've never really known who did what and why, this is the podcast for you. At the same time, I think there's a lot here for the history junkies too. In part because we interviewed so many of the actual people who hatched the Iran-Contra plot and carried it out. John Poindexter, Bud MacFarlane, Richard Seacord, George Schultz, all of whom, except Poindexter, died in the years since we spoke to them. All those names will mean something to you soon, if they don't already. And I will warn you, there are a lot of names in this one, and a lot of different countries and several government agencies with three-letter acronyms. I'll just say, you don't have to remember every name. There's no other way to put this. As a story, Iran-Contra is kind of a bitch. In fact, we made a whole episode, it's the one called Hollywood, about the rush to try and make a movie out of the scandal after it first broke. The problem was no one could really explain the scandal simply enough for audiences to follow it. Which is why there was no All the President's Men about Iran-Contra. I don't mind telling you, someone tried to make a TV show out of this podcast. But spoiler alert, it didn't make it past a couple pilot scripts. Iran-Contra was a relay race of ideas and money turning into action at the hands of so many different government officials, so many middlemen, so many random private citizens. It's that last category of characters that really jumped out at me when I re-listened to this show. You meet one right off the bat in episode one, Kevin Katke, a department store maintenance guy from Long Island who got politically activated by the Cold War and kind of enlisted himself along with a bunch of friends in the cause of anti-communism. Kevin Katke was just a guy, but he wanted to defend America and to be involved in its foreign policy. And what's crazy is he got pretty far. Again, I don't want to lay it on too thick, but we're living through a time now when extremely motivated, politically engaged eccentrics have had amazing success penetrating the halls of power. I remember when this season first came out, even before COVID. We struggled a little bit to articulate what it told us about the moment we were living through. We thought maybe it was an interesting corollary to Trump's Ukraine scandal because they both involved, let's say, foreign policy shenanigans and the sale of weapons. But five years later, we are in a different moment. That Ukraine scandal, even though it got Trump impeached, feels almost quaint. I think you'll agree that Iran-Contra doesn't. As you'll hear, the stakes were unmistakably high, and the decisions being made had consequences around the world. More than anything, that's what makes Iran-Contra feel particularly resonant in 2025. It's a story about a bunch of guys moving the levers of history in a way that seems like it really shouldn't be allowed. But apparently it is.