This book is way too long but it is just so impressive. I found myself being so bored with the granularity of getting three versions of mundane conversations, while also being so impressed with how detailed Draper's research was. He not only reported on Iran-Contra at the time, but Draper went through over 50,000 pages of primary sources to create this book, which is essentially a reference book for the Iran-Contra Affairs (Draper says they really should be thought of as two separate but connected schemes) told in chronological format.
So why did I read this book? Well, I had some questions about the Iran-Contra Affair. I did not need this many answers. But anyway. This is what I knew. I understood the Iran-Contra Affair to be a scheme in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in order to make money to send to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Ollie North was the fall guy. This was a very incomplete understanding, and it also made me wonder why the Reagan administration would work with Iran, a country/regime that was not Reagan's preferred one. I was also curious to know what Reagan's personal involvement was. What I learned was that the Iran-Contra Affairs were caused by the collision of a vague use of presidential authority with the massive delegation of power to the "imperial presidency." The cumulative effect of growing power to the president made it so that the president was presumed by many bureaucrats to have sole power over foreign policy, and the creation of the National Security Council Staff empowered bureaucrats (Ollie North) to plausibly act with that increased presidential authority.
The NSC, as originally created, meant four members: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, along with two advisory members, the CIA Director and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were originally granted staff, but under Eisenhower, the NSC staff were put more squarely under the sole control of the President through the Executive Office of the President. The National Security Advisor position, created post-WWII, developed over the next four decades to become a rival with the Secretary of State for control of foreign policy. The NSC staff also grew to 1,600 by President Reagan's time, from just 35 under LBJ, who were mostly temporary assignees from the State Department. The Reagan-era NSC was large enough to duplicate many roles in the State Department and operate independently of it. This capacity would allow for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to start his own covert operations outside normal channels.
North gained too much influence as an NSC staffer from staying too long. On assignment from the Marine Corps, it would be typical for North to spend 2-3 years at the White House, North was there for nearly six years, over and over again managing to get the White House to override the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps for him to follow a normal career progression to become an infantry battalion commander.
Before this all happened, Congress passed some laws that the Reagan administration would go on to break. They were the Boland Amendments, passed between 1982-86, which limited US government assistance to the contras in Nicaragua. Moreover, in 1983, the State Department launched Operation Staunch, which was an attempt to stop the flow of weapons from any country to Iran. The Reagan administration would break both of these, one being a violation of the law and an arrogation of power from Congress, and the other being a violation of the administration's own policy, showing the internal divisions between Reagan and his own Secretary of State, George Schultz. Reagan was also just plain confused about what was going on, and also just didn't want to know. He was repeatedly telling his subordinates to do things that were very legally questionable, and then just telling them to "follow the law" over and over.
To get around legal restrictions on aid to the Contras, North started to coordinate funding from third party donors, starting mostly with private individuals. This alone was already pushing the limits. Congress had made clear the government could not send military aid to the Contras, but North was sort of inventing a loophole to send non-governmental money to the Contras. North even acknowledged in letters that he was deceiving Congress and hiding the money from Congress. North was not just doing his job. He was clearly very passionate about the Contras and got carried away- one private funder quoting him as saying, "no, I don't care if I have to go to jail for this and I don't care if I have to lie to Congress about this." Draper acknowledges some kind of post-Vietnam syndrome affecting North, blaming the American defeat in Vietnam on a lack of funding from Congress, and seeing this as a noble opportunity to get around Congress.
The reason why Draper calls it the Iran-Contra AffairS is because he very convincingly shows that they were really two different issues that got combined later on, not a master plan in the slightest. The reason that Iranian money got sent to the Contras was not because it was planned that way, but because the two covert operations were both handled by Ollie North. The Iranian plan really originated outside the US government with Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi and sketchy Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar. They wanted to end the arms embargo on Iran and sell arms to Iran as a business opportunity, since Iran was in desperate need in its years-long war against Iraq. They ended up developing the idea that they would use Israel as an intermediary, which became the reality.
The Contra affair is somewhat straightforward, since it makes sense that Reagan would want to send cash to anti-communists. But Iran makes no sense. SecState, George Schultz, was opposed. SecDef, Caspar Weinberger, was opposed. But analysis out of the CIA and the NSC Staff showed that there was some room for a rapprochement with Iran, which felt threatened by the ongoing Soviet invasion of its neighbor, Afghanistan, which would last until 1989. But there was some confusion about whether it would be weapons sold to the government of Iran for rapprochement or to some opposition group to topple the government. And there was also analysis of different camps in the Iranian government jockeying for power (mostly invented by Ghorbanifar), which confused things more. Ultimately, it seems like Reagan did not know what he wanted out of Iran policy, but wanted to free hostages in Lebanon that he thought Iran could control. But Iran didn't even have these hostages! Hezbollah did! The State Department's policy was still that there was an arms embargo on Iran, but by the late summer of 1985, people in government were explicitly talking about an arms-for-hostages deal through Israel with Iran. Simplified, the plan was for Israel to sell weapons to Iran and for the United States to resupply Israel. Israel thought that new weapons for Iran would prolong the war with Iraq, but official US policy was that it wanted the Iran-Iraq war to end, not stalemate for years.
On August 20, 1985, the first shipment of arms reached Iran from Israel. But no hostages were released. Ghorbanifar explained that these weapons were seized by an "extremist" faction, and did not make it to the moderates for whom it was intended, as if they existed or were separate groups in the government controlling weapons (false). Then, arguments broke out--it turned out that the weapons were mistakenly delivered on an Israeli-marked plane, which could cause huge embarrassment to Iran, and were also of the wrong type. So, the Israelis agreed to send more weapons in exchange for one American hostage, who was the least valuable. The most valuable hostage was a CIA agent who was, unbeknownst to all, already dead in Lebanon. In November, to avoid the earlier embarrassment, Israel planned to ship the weapons to Iran by way of Portugal, so it wouldn't be clear what was happening. But nobody told Portugal, and the Portuguese authorities detained the flight. North became involved at this point and directed retired Major General Secord, who had been privately working on the Contra affair, to go to Portugal to try to get the plane off the ground. The Portuguese were befuddled at why the Americans, whose State Department was proclaiming an arms embargo on Iran, was trying to get them to let a shipment of arms reach Iran. To finally solve the problem, the CIA provided a charter flight from Portugal to Iran for the weapons, for which the Israelis deposited one million dollars into Secord's private account, Lake Resources, which was used for Contra funding, mixing the Iran and Contra funds. This was the first direct use of US government funds to support the Iranians. Critically, CIA covert activities require a finding of their necessity by the President, which nobody did at the time.
As the relationship went on into January 1986, significant profits were made, some of which were due to typos, which resulted in the Army selling the weapons too cheaply to Israel, who marked them up and sold them to Ghorbanifar, who marked them up and sold them to Iran. North, who never ever took a cut for himself from these funds, took the "residuals," $16 million from the arms sale to Iran, and diverted it to the Contras. The US government just got bad deals over and over on the arms shipments. The original goal, hostage release, was not being met, since Iran could not get Hezbollah to release hostages. And the money that the Department of Defense got was miniscule compared to what Ghorbanifar, Secord, and the Contras were getting. I really wish that Draper had more information on the Hezbollah-Iran negotiations, which were impossible for him to get, but that would have revealed a whole lot of information about a whole other side of the negotiations. It was honestly just so funny that in May of 1986, somebody finally asked Hezbollah to release the hostages and they said hell no- we'll release them when Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, Lahad prisoners are returned, Da'wa prisoners freed in Kuwait, and for the United States to pay all of Hezbollah's expenses in holding the hostages. Come on now.
As the scandal was revealed, the nightmare was impeachment, a la Watergate. People in the executive branch reacted so differently than they would in today's much more partisan environment. They were hurt by the fact that they pissed off both liberals and conservatives in both parties. And the public generally didn't believe the administration's explanations. Even Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, said, "I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing." Nowadays, I think the president would just say he can do what he wants and nobody in his party would blink, but then, North was shredding so many documents that the shredder broke, and the Attorney General was investigating his own president for breaking the law.
The fundamental problem that caused the Iran-Contra Affairs was a failure to respect the Constitution. The Constitution empowers three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances on each other. But LtCol North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter made clear in later testimony to Congress and trials that they gave their absolute loyalty to the President. They thought this was they duty, but they were mistaken. While they served at the pleasure of the President, they swore an oath not to the President, but to the Constitution. And it is Congress who the Constitution appoints as the holder of the power to appropriate funds, not the President. North and Poindexter asserted that the President controls foreign policy, but this is not what the Constitution says. While the Constitution grants the President significant affairs over foreign policy, it requires approval of the Senate to approve treaties, and both houses of Congress must be responsible for any funding. Similarly, when North and Poindexter made calls to other government officials from the White House, those officials "snapped to," thinking of doing what the President wanted, but not that what the President wanted may have been against the law. Draper concludes the book by focusing on these constitutional issues. He points out that Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was clear that
The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.
The massive power that rested in the executive by the time Reagan was President, and is even greater today, has proven to be the greatest danger to the existence of the constitutional republic in the United States. None of this power has been taken by force, but has been willingly granted by Congress and the courts. The problems of the Iran-Contra Affairs were not problems unanticipated by the founders and framers of the Constitution. The founders understood that the power of foreign policy could not be solely controlled by the executive. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace in the legislature, and not to the executive department..." and later, in a letter to Jefferson, that
The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.
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