Iran Contra: Episode 4 - Diverted

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey there, my name is Jodi Avergan. Have you noticed the present day? It feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians, Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Pushkin. Oliver North had no formal training in covert operations. He had never seriously studied diplomacy either or international relations or political science. He was a soldier. So when he found himself in charge of two top secret foreign policy programs, one in Nicaragua, the other in Iran, he kind of had to make it up as he went along. In Nicaragua, North was counting on contra rebel leaders to allocate the millions of dollars he was raising on their behalf. Remember, the CIA have been forced by Congress to stop helping the Contras. Now, in their absence, it seemed like a lot of money was being wasted or worse stolen. The problem was the Contras didn't know how to run their war. They were very bad managers. This is journalist Doyle McManus. You've heard from him before. He covered the Contra war for the Los Angeles Times and co-authored a book about the Reagan administration called Landslide. The weapons were piling up in warehouses in Miami. The Contras had no reliable way to ship them to the battlefield. And there were persistent reports that there was corruption going on, that the Contras were either taking kickbacks from arms merchants or just skimming money off the top. Oliver North and his superiors needed more control in Nicaragua, and they no longer wanted to rely on people they couldn't trust. So they enlisted the help of someone they could count on and who had the experience that North lacked. His name was Richard Seacord. Richard Seacord had precisely the expertise that Ollie North and the Contras needed. He knew how to move equipment from one country to another in airplanes secretly. Richard Seacord was a retired Air Force general. He was known for his extensive experience with covert operations and as a strong believer in giving the president broad powers to undertake them. For his master's thesis at the Naval War College, Seacord wrote that when it came to covert ops, quote, bureaucratic obstacles should be dismissed out of hand. After carrying out secret missions in Vietnam and Laos, Seacord served in the Department of Defense. Then in 1983, he was forced to retire from government service under a cloud of scandal. When one of his associates was convicted of illegally selling plastic explosives to Muammar Gaddafi. With his career in Washington cut short, Seacord went into the private sector. And while some of his former colleagues in government viewed him with suspicion due to the Gaddafi scandal, there were those who felt he had been unfairly tarnished by it. Among them was the director of the CIA, who suggested to Oliver North that he bring Seacord in to help with the Contra war. I interviewed Major General Richard Seacord in Florida in 2019. He died in 2024. They were next to desperate, you know, they knew that then I knew air and so forth. And so that was the beginning of it. In the summer of 1985, about a year after Congress forced the CIA to stop funding the Contras, Seacord and a business partner created a Swiss bank account to hold money being donated to the Contra cause. Using that money, Seacord set about building a resupply operation for the Contras from scratch. That meant putting together what was essentially a mini CIA, or at least a mini airline. The operation required Seacord to buy a fleet of small planes and organize a network of airstrips near the Nick Rogwin border. He jokingly called it air contra. It wasn't action hero type work, but it was exactly the kind of work Seacord was good at. Logistics of the sinews of war. Military history writers going back, I know, as Maurice Napoleon's time, write about that. But people tend to forget it because it's not very glamorous. Logistics is the chore. It's the long pole in the tent. A few months after Seacord started working with the Contras, Oliver North came to him for help with another matter. The White House's secret program to sell arms to Iran. As you heard in episode two, Ronald Reagan had approved the sale of missiles to Iran as part of an effort to free American hostages in Beirut. The administration was relying on Israel to serve as a go-between, meaning Israel would sell American-made weapons to Iran and then get their stocks replenished by the U.S. Department of Defense. But the Israelis were making mistakes. In November of 1985, a shipment of missiles to Iran had ended in disaster after Israel fumbled just about every aspect of the delivery. Here's Doyle McManus again. The missiles, as they expected, they were the wrong model. And some of the missiles even had the Israeli star of David on them. And so the Iranians erupted in fury and refused to release any hostages at all. Oliver North briefed his boss, John Poindexter, on what had gone wrong. Poindexter was Reagan's new national security advisor. In a memo, North acknowledged that the Iran Initiative was a mess. But he argued, we are now so far down the road that stopping could have even more serious repercussions. In a follow-up memo to Poindexter titled Next Steps, North proposed they cut Israel out of the deal and sell the weapons to Iran themselves, bringing in Richard Seacord as the middleman. So that's what they did. We were running a successful air hop down there. Why not this one? And I guess Poindexter figured that good old Dick Seacord, the can-do guy, he'll get her done. With that, Seacord's responsibilities expanded. In addition to managing money and supplies for the Contras, this private citizen would now also be facilitating the sale of American weapons to Iran. This was the moment when the twin-engine scandal, now known as Iran-Contra, took off. I'm Leon Nefak. From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Iran-Contra. The issue is back, aimed for the Contras fighting the Nicaraguan government. North was very excited. He had pulled it off. His secret visit to Tehran. These kinds of escapades. He had had suicide pills and I had nothing. I was very convinced the president would agree it was the right thing to do. The president has thrown himself into this battle. I was going to go ahead and tell them my story. Episode 4 Diverted. How Oliver North and Richard Seacord put the hyphen in Iran-Contra and how North ended up on a plane to Tehran. We'll be right back. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day it feels pretty rocky? Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past. Silly, surprising, deeply relevant. That feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. In order to build the resupply operation for the Contras, Richard Seacord needed to hire a crew of airmen who could fly planes and knew how to make air drops. In December of 1985, the word reached Ian Crawford, a soft-spoken 29-year-old who had served as part of the Army's elite Delta Force unit. Crawford had recently returned a civilian life in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and he had started a business sewing custom vests, backpacks, and other military equipment. And out of the blue at a New Year's Eve party, somebody is talking to my mother-in-law of all people. And this person said that they needed to find some ex-military people with a parachute background. Crawford just happened to be a certified parachute specialist. So his mother-in-law put him in touch with the guy from the party, who in turn put him in touch with a guy in Washington who worked for Richard Seacord. That guy offered Crawford a job. He told me I was going to airdrop equipment to a newly formed group somewhere in the world. He wouldn't tell me. And that I was being hired for my parachute and airdrop specialties. A few months later, Crawford boarded a southbound plane packed with military fatigues, jungle boots, and tents. When the plane landed, he found himself standing on a dirt airstrip in Honduras. He had arrived at Aguacate, a bare-bones military encampment that was being used as part of Seacord's new resupply operation. When we finally landed in Aguacate, Honduras, we knew that we were in a contra camp. It was a confined primitive and secret base. The Hondurans knew about it, but they didn't want to advertise that they were allowing the Contras to be on their side of the border. When Crawford first got to Aguacate, there was just one plane available to fly missions. It was a C-7 Carabou cargo plane, the same kind that was used in Vietnam. Crawford's job was to help the Contras pack supplies into bundles and load them onto the Carabou. Inside the bundles was a mix of food, ammunition, grenades, rockets, mortar shells, and AK-47s. Crawford would use a forklift to get them into the Carabou, then line them up side by side and attach parachutes to them. Then he would take a seat as the plane took off for Nicaragua. Short, primitive runways hacked from the jungle and desolate terrain make these parts of the world Carabou country. I would fly in the back of the aircraft, would fly for 20 or 30 minutes to a drop zone. The pilot flying the Carabou would get down as low as possible over the drop zones, which were located over sandbars in the Rio Cocoa. Contra forces would then pick up the supplies. If no airstrip exists or it is under enemy fire, a personnel drop may be the only way to reinforce a Special Forces camp. And I'd take a very large knife and cut a nylon strap that was holding these bundles back and the pilot would raise the aircraft nose up and the bundles would roll out back in the aircraft. Sometimes as the Carabou flew over the jungle, Crawford would sit with his legs dangling from the back of the aircraft and watch for Sandinista helicopters. It was dangerous work. The threat of being shot down was real, but Crawford and his crew were also worried about their own plane giving out on them. And there were actually holes in the dashboard where gauges had been taken out and sent back for maintenance and we were all kind of shocked at the level of maintenance that the aircraft actually needed. Crawford chalked this up to penny pinching by the operations top brass and he wasn't happy about it. Management was trying to cut corners, spend the least amount of money to get whatever mission done the cheapest possible. When I asked SeaCourt about this, he flatly rejected the notion that his planes were in poor condition. Those airplanes were well equipped and being operated by professional airmen, you knew what the hell they were doing, which is why we had them. That's at least half true. As SeaCourt's top operations manager would later testify, the Airmen SeaCourt's company had recruited were fortunately the kinds of guys that could put together an operating aircraft with bailing wire and chewing gum. In any event, there's no question that SeaCourt's budget was modest. As far as he was concerned, the resupply operation was only viable as a short-term proposition. At some point, the CIA would have to step back into the role it played before the Bowland Amendment made it illegal. My belief was it was just a short term, a stopgap operation, a bridging operation. It became a bridge too far. Oliver North was feeling the pressure too. I'm not complaining and you know that I love the work, he wrote to John Pointexter, but we have to lift some of this onto the CIA so that I can get more than two or three hours of sleep at night. Unfortunately for North, the CIA could not step back into Nicaragua unless Congress changed its mind about funding the Contras. And that didn't seem like it was in the cards, at least not yet. By the end of 1985, the Contra Aid program and the Iran Weapons Program were being managed by the same group of people. Oliver North was running the day to day with supervision from National Security Advisor John Pointexter. In Richard SeaCourt, the Air Force General turned arms dealer, was overseeing logistics, procuring the weapons, and moving the money. All three of them had their own set of motivations, particularly when it came to Iran. North, by his own account, was dead set on bringing the hostages back from Beirut because he knew how strongly the president felt about it. North declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but here's how he explained himself in 1987. The president very clearly articulated in the meetings I was in with him in the Oval Office on this issue, it was very clear that the president wanted as many Americans home, all of them home, as fast as possible. Richard SeaCourt had more personal reasons for getting involved. One of them was surely financial. He and his partners did to make millions of dollars in commissions. But there was something else too. Remember, SeaCourt's career in the intelligence community had been cut short by scandal. He thought that helping out with the Iran operation could help him get back in the fold. I was thinking about the possibility of taking over the CIA. There's no question about that. I was the right age, dead right background. I would not have taken a job other than the director, but they needed some operator to run that place and not a bunch of shoe clerks. So that's at least part of what was driving SeaCourt. Then there was John Poindexter, who inherited the Iran initiative from his predecessor, Bud McFarland. Poindexter's reasons for continuing to pursue the program have remained remarkably consistent over time. As he told me in late 2019, he saw the decision to sell weapons to Iran as part of the Reagan administration's plan to win the Cold War. I ran from a geographic standpoint, occupies a very important position in the Middle East. This is John Poindexter. There on the east side of the, what used to be called the Persian Gulf. And at the end, the south end of the Gulf are the Straits of Hormuz, which is a very narrow body of water that connects the Gulf to the Indian Ocean. So the Soviet Union has always wanted access to the Indian Ocean. And one way for them to get that is to develop a cooperative relationship with Iran. Poindexter believed that in the long run, Iran would probably end up aligning itself with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Even though the Khomeini regime was fiercely anti-American, establishing a diplomatic opening with more moderate elements in the Iranian government was a way to make sure the United States came out on top in a post-Khomeini world. We always thought that eventually there would be some kind of transition in Iran as Khomeini whenever he died. And it would have been foolish for us to think that the Soviet Union was not also interested in some future transition of the Iranian government. And it has never been in our strategic interest that the Soviet Union would gain that foothold in the Middle East. Later, when the Iran-Contra scandal exploded into public view, Poindexter's high-minded rationale for the weapons sales was buried under the simpler, more unsavory explanation, that the White House had been trying to buy back hostages by paying ransom to terrorists. Which explanation you believe comes down to how much credit you're willing to give the Reagan administration. But as even Poindexter concedes, the person who authorized the arms shipments, the only person who had the power to do so, was pretty clear about what was driving him. The president was probably more interested in the short-term objectives than the long-term objectives. So I'm convinced that he believed in what we were trying to do. But he probably, in hindsight, did put more emphasis on the hostages. This question of who was motivated by what takes on even more significance when you consider how badly the Iran initiative was going by the start of 1986. The White House's key Iranian contact, Manut Shur Gurbanifar, had revealed himself to be erratic and unreliable. The moderates Gurbanifar was supposedly speaking for had given no indication that they even existed. On multiple occasions, the US had sent Iran weapons only to have the terms of the deal change in the middle. And yet, the negotiations continued, just as Bud McFarland had feared they would. From the outside, and with the benefit of hindsight, you look at all these red flags and think, how could this have continued? How could Poindexter and North and Reagan all have convinced themselves that this was a good idea? I think the answer probably lies and would drove each of them to pursue it in the first place. Whatever it was, it seems to have made them all either giddy with optimism or deluded by desperation. Not long into John Poindexter's tenure as National Security Advisor, a determination was made that the US needed to speak directly with the Iranian moderates that Manut Shur Gurbanifar claimed to represent. After months of negotiation, North and Gurbanifar finalized plans for an in-person meeting between senior American officials and a group of high-ranking members of the Iranian government. The meeting would take place in a hotel room in Tehran. Because of the importance of establishing a some kind of a working relationship with Iran, it made sense to send a delegation to Tehran to try to meet with people that we hoped would be moderate and began a dialogue. Poindexter's understanding was that this would be the final exchange of weapons for hostages. As North explained the agreement to Poindexter in a memo, the US delegation would bring a load of spare missile parts to Tehran, and the Iranians would bring about the release of the hostages still being held in Beirut. The American delegation to Tehran would include Oliver North, a CIA officer who could serve as a translator, and, strangely enough, former National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane. McFarlane had been out of government for months at this point, and as you heard in episode two, he had profound misgivings about the Iran initiative. But when Poindexter asked him to go to Tehran, McFarlane accepted. You know, he sort of was a secret emissary. He wasn't in government. He had been a former senior government official, so he had credentials, and it would be clear to the Iranians that this was a presidentially approved mission. So Bud was a logical person to go, and so we sent him. Also along for the trip was a senior staffer from the National Security Council named Howard Teicher, an expert on the Middle East. Like Poindexter, Teicher saw the arms sales as a path to improving relations with Iran in a way that would serve the U.S.'s long-term goal of protecting the Middle East from Soviet influence. Actually, it was exciting. You know, this was a chance to change the course of history and protect American interests in a very fundamental way, and, you know, so this was a risk worth taking. Teicher's wife was more apprehensive. She was a lawyer in the State Department, and based on what her husband was telling her, she suspected that the arms deal might be illegal. She also thought it was possible, if not downright likely, that in their quest to free the hostages, her husband and the other members of the delegation would end up getting kidnapped themselves. You know, and I talked to Colonel North about this, and he said, I want you to know everything's taken care of. And I said, so there's a plan, and all he's would say was don't worry, everything's taken care of. So he did his best to assure me that that was a case, that there was some rescue plan in the event that we were not allowed to leave. And in the circumstances, I later learned that he and McFarland had suicide pills, and I had nothing. So I presume that was the plan, that they would take their lives, and the rest of us would be left to deal with the Iranians. According to Oliver North's memoir, he actually had enough suicide pills for everyone, and he got them directly from the head of the CIA. That underscore is just how big a risk the administration was taking. Who knew what was waiting for North McFarland and Teichir in Tehran? There was no longer an American embassy there. The country was a black box. All the Americans had to go on was the word of Manutcher Gorbanifar, and so far, that had not proven to be worth very much. If we hadn't had any kind of diplomatic approach to Iran up to that point that I'm aware of today, and so it was a momentous to decide to send a mission. The odds were not in our favor of it working out, but we thought because of the importance of returning Iran to a more constructive position, it was worth the risk. As it happened, days before North and his team embarked on their trip, French officials were working to free their citizens who had been kidnapped in Lebanon by Islamic militants. According to news reports, France was negotiating with the Iranians. U.S. officials fear the French willingness to negotiate will only harden the kidnappers' resolve and encourage others to kidnap for ransom. The journey to Tehran began at Washington's Delos Airport on May 23, 1986. It would involve multiple legs, with stops at an Air Force base in Frankfurt and in Tel Aviv. Everyone in the group carried fake passports. The plan was that if anyone asked, they would say they were part of a trade delegation from Ireland. Here's Howard Taitier again. That was the cover they decided, and so I was asked to come up with a legend that I could remember about being born in Ireland. So if somebody in Iran said, so why are you here? I'm Irish trade, where are you from? Oh, you're from Dingle. Oh, I never went to Dingle. What's it like in Dingle? So I became Tim McGahn, and that became the Irish passport. Taitier asked the obvious question. Would they have to use fake Irish accents? The answer was eh. They told us that they didn't think anybody who we were going to encounter would have any idea what an Irish accent sounded like. In Tel Aviv, the delegation would rendezvous with Richard Seacord, who as usual would be in charge of logistics. It was not an easy assignment. Seacord had to ensure that the trip was 100% secret. We borrowed an airplane from Israel. Here's Seacord again. One of their VIP airplanes and sanitized it. We went over every bit of that airplane and anything that would indicate it was Israeli airplane with markings or stars of David or whatever. We got rid of it. Seacord himself was not going to Tehran. He would stay in his hotel room in Tel Aviv, managing the trip remotely and staying in touch with the pilots through a secure communications rig set up in his window. The plane was set to take off at midnight from Ben Gurion Airport. In addition to its human cargo, it would also be carrying some but not all the spare missile parts the Americans had promised the Iranians. As soon as the hostages were freed, Seacord would send a second plane to Iran with the rest of the weapons parts. Before takeoff, North decided he wanted to bring some kind of gift to Tehran. As Tehran understood it, North wanted something that would break the ice and serve as a gesture of goodwill. At one point, North had said to Gorbani Far, what should we bring, you know, as a gift? And he goes, bring the weapons and bring a cake. It is a tradition among Persians when you've had a feud or a fight or a spat with your girlfriend friends, you make up by bringing each other pastries. So, according to Tehran, North boarded the plane carrying a chocolate cake purchased from an Israeli bakery. He had decorated the cake with a key intended to represent the opening of relations between the U.S. and Iran. North was, you know, very excited. Again, you know, he had started this process some months before, you know, and he had had a couple of probably dodgy meetings with, you know, this arms merchant, Manu Sharqor Bani Far, and now he had pulled it off. North's jubilation was premature, which became obvious almost as soon as the plane landed in Tehran. It was a little after seven in the morning on May 25th, but when North, McFarland, and Teicher got off the plane, the only person there to greet them was an airport worker who didn't know who they were. Finally, Gorbani Far showed up, apologizing for the delay. He led the delegation to a caravan of old beat-up cars that were waiting outside the airport. The cars were driven by armed revolutionary guards, and his memoir North described the vehicles belching blue and black smoke from their exhaust pipes. As they drove through Tehran, they passed landmarks once associated with the Shah that were now covered in graffiti praising the Ayatollah Khomeini. After half an hour, the cars pulled up to the entrance of the Independence Hotel, and the Americans were taken to a suite on the 15th floor. Gorbani Far did not make a powerful first impression on Howard Teicher. He struck me as someone in his early 50s, early to mid 50s, very nondescript, balding, no tie, sort of typical Iranian garb, you know, suit, shirt, no tie, overweight. He didn't come across like the people we see in movies of these vicious evil arms merchants, you know, with giant mustaches and bandoliers. I mean, he looked like a business person. It seemed like Gorbani Far just wanted to make everyone happy. At one point, when it turned out the hotel was short on food, he had his mother cook the group an elaborate Persian feast. But hospitality was not what the Americans were worried about. As morning turned to afternoon on their first day in Tehran, there was no sign of any high ranking Iranian officials. Instead, at 5 p.m., a man entered the suite and introduced himself by a name the Americans didn't recognize. He brought a disconcerting message. No hostages could be released until after the Americans handed over the spare weapons parts they had promised. In fact, he said, there was no certainty that Iran would be able to get the hostages released at all. But if all the weapons were delivered, they would be willing to try. We now understood that the Iranian government had not committed to, had certainly not guaranteed, that it was going to bring about the release of the hostages. And yet we had shown up and we had given them a pallet load, half of the load of hawk spare parts. And, you know, we face considerable embarrassment because, you know, we were not going to succeed. Bud McFarlane was furious. It was now clear that the Iranian emissaries who had been sent to meet the American delegation were not nearly as senior as the officials Gorbanifar had told North to expect. North confronted Gorbanifar and he made him tell us. He goes, well, I basically, you know, exaggerated a little bit in order to, you know, get you guys here. And we were appalled. So began a standoff that would last three long days. Over the course of several torturous meetings, McFarlane was uncompromising. There would be no more weapons delivered to the Iranians until the hostages in Beirut were free. McFarlane was just fed up and believed that the appropriate posture to take was you guys have misled us. You did not deliver what you said. You could say whatever you want about what we were going to do. What Colonel North told Gorbanifar we were going to do, we did it. You didn't do what we were told you're going to do. We're out of here. Oliver North had a different read on the situation. He thought there was still a chance for a positive outcome, despite the false pretenses that had brought both parties to the table. He really wanted the deal to work. He and Gorbanifar had similar interests, right? They both wanted it to work. North was patient, right? He had worked months to get to this point. You know, it's like, let's give him a little more time. But McFarlane's patience was running out. We'll be right back. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day it feels pretty rocky? Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. After three days of negotiation in Tehran, Bud McFarlane decided the time had come to cut bait. He made arrangements for the American delegation to be taken to the airport and back to Tel Aviv. One of the Iranian officials McFarlane had been dealing with begged him to stay and work it out. But McFarlane was firm. It's too late, he said, you're not keeping the agreement. We are leaving. When the Americans landed on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, North could tell that McFarlane was disappointed. According to North's memoir, he tried to cheer McFarlane up. Well, Bud, it's not a total loss, North quotes himself saying. Part of the money from these transactions is going to help the Nicaraguan resistance. McFarlane would later testify that the comment left him a little startled. But as they made their way off the plane, he did not ask North to elaborate. It's worth pausing here to talk about that offhand comment Oliver North made on the tarmac. Because the idea of taking money generated by the Iran weapons sales and spending it on the Contra war would end up becoming the single most explosive aspect of the Iran Contra scandal. In fact, without it, there wouldn't be an Iran Contra scandal. The money was the thing that made the Iran Contra scandal. The Iran Contra scandal was the thing that made the Iran Contra scandal. The money was the thing that joined the two operations together. It came to be known simply as the diversion. And there are a few conflicting accounts of when and where the idea originated. But according to Oliver North, it happened in January of 1986, five months before the Tehran trip. In North's version of the story, he was in London for a meeting with Manu Chair Gorbanifar, aimed at getting the arms for hostages deal back on track. During that meeting, as part of a private conversation in a hotel bathroom, Gorbanifar suggested to North that he could use the profits from the arms sales to fund the Contras. Gorbanifar made the comment in an apparent effort to convince North that continuing with the weapons sales would be worth the trouble. And it worked. North was into it. And when he came back to the United States, he put the idea in front of John Pointexter. Oli suggested since Dick was also running the logistics pipeline to the Contras, that Dick use those excess profits to provide funding for the Contras support program. What did you think? I thought it was a good idea. You have to admit there's a certain elegance to it. By combining their two covert operations financially, the U.S. would be able to take money they weren't supposed to be making in Iran and spend it on something they weren't supposed to be spending it on, the Contra war. I knew it was going to be controversial, but I also didn't see anything illegal about it. It was not U.S. government money. The Defense Department was being paid exactly what they asked for for the weapons. So there was no cost to the U.S. government. And so I thought it was perfectly legal, on the one hand, but on the other hand, I knew the Democrats, if they found out about it, would object and claim all sorts of wild theories, which is typical of the Democrat party. Pointexter says this was why he made the decision not to tell the president about the diversion. I was very convinced the president would agree that it was the right thing to do, but I thought it was better to keep him out of that direct loop. It was a judgment call on my part, and I wanted to give the president some deniability of authorizing it. In the end, investigators concluded that at least $3.6 million were diverted from the Iran weapons sales to the Contras. It was a modest sum in the grand scheme of things. But for Richard Seacord, who was struggling to keep the Contra resupply operation going, it was a welcome bit of additional funding at a time when resources were running low. It was May of 1986. About a year had passed since Seacord accepted the Contra aid assignment. And he was getting fed up. One flight to Nicaragua's southern border had ended with a plane getting stuck in the mud, another faltered due to unexpected fog, which caused the pilot to clip the top of a tree and knock out one of his plane's engines. The operation needed more money, and soon. Luckily, the Reagan White House was gearing up to persuade Congress to lift the Boland Amendment and allow the administration to once again start funding the Contras. The issue is back, aid for the Contras fighting the Nicaraguan government. President Reagan reportedly has decided that the CIA should have day-to-day supervision of the renewed and widened undeclared war against Nicaragua. As John Poindexter wrote in a memo to NSC staff in May of 1986, the president is ready to confront the Congress on the constitutional question of who controls foreign policy. The president has thrown himself into this battle, claiming that a defeat will mean the establishment of a Soviet military beachhead within the defense perimeter of the United States. More than a year had passed since Congress forced the CIA to stop helping the Contras. In that time, the situation in Nicaragua had changed. The Sandinista government had become increasingly repressive against suspected Contra sympathizers. The Sandinistas also seemed to be growing closer to the Soviet Union. President Don Yelortega had recently visited Moscow, and the Nicaraguan army was receiving Soviet-made weapons. By the summer of 1986, Congress had become more receptive to the idea of supporting the Contras. Sensing an opportunity, the administration asked for $100 million in aid, and the issue went up for a vote. The stakes for the Contras were high. If the U.S. pumped $100 million worth of guns, grenades, and food to the rebels, it would be a huge boost to the anti-Sandinista movement. Also, getting a green light from Congress would mean the U.S. Contra aid operation could be taken over by the actual government again, instead of a network of private citizens recruited by Oliver North. Just before Congress was set to vote, Reagan gave a televised address from the White House, imploring Congress to back the Contras. My fellow citizens, members of the House, let us not take the path of least resistance in Central America again. Let us keep faith with these brave people struggling for their freedom. Give them, give me, your support. Let us send this message to the world that America is still a beacon of hope, still a light unto the nations. Thank you, and God bless you. On June 25, 1986, the House voted on the president's proposal. The House of Representatives approved $100 million in additional American aid for the Contras. The aid package passed the House 221 to 209, with 51 Democrats voting the president's way. The vote was a political triumph for President Reagan. The era of the Boland Amendment was coming to an end. For Richard Seacourd, that meant he could finally disentangle himself from the mess in Central America. As soon as the new funding was approved, Seacourd started pushing for the CIA to take over the resupply operation he had built. How this handoff was supposed to work is a matter of some disagreement. One of Seacourd's associates testified before Congress that Seacourd wanted the CIA to buy his assets in Central America. The assets were valued at around $4 million, that consisted of five airplanes, an airstrip in Costa Rica, and a ship. It was all stuff Seacourd had bought using money either donated to the Contra cause or generated through the sale of weapons to Iran. Seacourd has always held firm that he was desperate to hand everything over to the CIA as soon as possible, free of charge. We never proposed to sell it to the CIA. I proposed to give it to them. The Boland Amendment was repealed in the summer of 1986. Time marches on. The CIA can't get their act together to take over my operation. They were just dilly-dallying around. If they wanted to, they really motivated, were ordered to. They could have taken over my operation in a day or two. The reason Seacourd sounds upset when he talks about this is that he can still picture an alternate reality in which the CIA did take over the Contra resupply as soon as Congress restored the aid. And in that alternate reality, it's possible that Seacourd and the White House could have avoided what happened next. Whose cargo plane carrying ammunition to the anti-government countries was shot down inside Nicaragua yesterday? On the afternoon of October 5th, 1986, a young Sandinista soldier patrolling the jungles of southern Nicaragua looked up at the sky and saw a plane covered in camouflage paint. He raised his SA-7 rocket launcher, took aim, and fired. The plane went down in flames, killing three of the four people aboard. The lone survivor was taken prisoner by the Sandinistas, who quickly determined that he was an American. American camera crews were taken to the crash site. They were shown the lone survivor who was identified as Eugene Hasenfuss. His name was Eugene Hasenfuss. He was 45 years old, and he was originally from Wisconsin. The man captured by the Sandinistas is from Marinette, Wisconsin, and apparently joined the mercenary operation this summer. Hasenfuss was paraded in front of reporters. My name is Eugene Hasenfuss, and I was captured yesterday. Hasenfuss said that he had been delivering weapons to the Contras, as part of an operation overseen by U.S. government officials. Eugene Hasenfuss said today he was paid $3,000 a month to smuggle arms to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. The Reagan White House categorically denied that Hasenfuss had any connection to the government. They maintained this stance even as the Sandinistas charged Hasenfuss with terrorism and threatened him with a 30-year prison sentence. As American journalists scrambled to find out anything they could about Hasenfuss, the young parachute rigger Ian Crawford received a phone call in his sewing shop in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I pick up the phone, and the guy started asking me all these questions about who I was, how I had a connection to Eugene Hasenfuss, and such like that. I ended up hanging up the phone. Crawford had quit working for Richard Seacourd's resupply operation just a few months earlier. Crawford says Hasenfuss had replaced him, and as it turned out, he'd kept Crawford's business card in his wallet. Soon, more reporters tracked Crawford down, and he came around to sharing with them what he knew. I decided I was going to go ahead and tell them my story. Ian Crawford is a master parachute rigger, a former member of Delta Force, and one of the first men hired for the covert effort to fly guns to the Contras. There were three individuals who I later recognized as being Colonel North and Richard Seacourd, and a third member I still haven't recognized. The shootdown of Eugene Hasenfuss' plane had exposed Ronald Reagan's secret war in Nicaragua. Again. And it had happened just days before $100 million in federal aid money was supposed to start flowing legally to the Contras. But before the issue could provoke yet another round of debate in Congress, something else happened. A month after the Hasenfuss crash, one of the remaining American hostages in Beirut was released. The very next day, a Lebanese magazine called Al-Sharaw published a stunning article. It revealed the U.S. had sold missiles to Iran. And that former National Security Advisor, Bud McFarlane, had recently traveled to Tehran as part of a diplomatic mission. In a bizarre tale worthy of a thriller, Robert McFarlane, President Reagan's former National Security Advisor, recently made a secret visit to Tehran. When American newspapers picked up the Al-Sharaw report, they made no mention of the Contra War, because at this point no one had any clue the two stories were connected. That was about to change. Up next on Fiasco, a special guest reporter, Tony Averian, who found themselves in the crossfire of the Contra War. Anybody who had their mouth closed at the moment the brass went off had their ear-jumps punctured because of the force. For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Privacy, a production of the most popular documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in the show notes. Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan, Oula Culpa, and me, Leon Nefok. Our editor was Camilla Hammer. Our researcher was Francis Carr, with additional archival research from Caitlin Nicholas. Our music is by Nick Sylvester. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY. Audio Mixed by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfield, and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright Council provided by Peter Yasi at Yasi Butler PLLC. Thanks to Malcolm Byrne, Shane Harris, Kathy Hoyt, Richard Murphy, Paul Richter, Ann Rowe, as well as Sam Graham Felson, Sarea Shockley, and Katya Kankova. Special thanks to Luminary, and thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco Iran Contra. Add free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the Fiasco Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access add free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin Podcasts. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.