Introducing... Fiasco: Iran-Contra

New from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries: it's a new edition of Fiasco: Iran-Contra, widely available for the first time ever. New episodes of Fiasco release Mondays, available wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin+ subscribers can listen to the full season of Iran-Contra, ad-free, now. Find Pushkin+ on the Fiasco show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. As some of you may know, reading the intro to 54 is not my full-time job. I also make my own podcasts, among them Fiasco, a show about political history in which every season, we take a deep dive into a single incredible story, like the Bush v. Gore election and the 1984 subway vigilante shooting. Today, I'm inviting you to take a listen to our season on the Iran-Contra scandal, which is being released on all podcast platforms right now for the first time ever. Iran-Contra is one of those historical events that a lot of people only kind of understand. I very much include myself in that. It was only after talking to dozens of people, including the architects of both the Iran

• 0:50Speaker 00

  part of the scandal and the Contra part, that I finally got my mind around it. My hope is that our version of this story is as entertaining as it is clear. And my gut is that if you like learning about the past from 54, you'll be into this too. I hope you check it out. And if you like what you hear, you can find the Fiasco feed wherever you listen to podcasts. Enjoy.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  On October 13th, 1983, a Long Island dad named Kevin Katkey spent his day at work dealing with bullshit. Katkey was a maintenance engineer at a Macy's department store in Bay Shore, a down-on-its-luck hamlet about an hour and a half east of New York City. Katkey came home exhausted from a series of disasters at the store. First, the escalator had broken down. Then, someone poured a vat of grease down a drain, which caused the pipes to back up all over the building. Then, the elevator stopped working.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  He was really tired and in a terrible mood when he got home, and his wife was making a racket in the kitchen.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  This is Nita Renfrew, a former journalist who got to know Kevin Katkey while reporting on the Iran-Contra scandal.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  He said it was the worst day he'd ever had at Macy's.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  As Renfrew later wrote in a story for New York Magazine, Katkey walked into his house that night to find his wife mad at him for being late for dinner, and his 10-year-old daughter doing her homework in front of the TV. Then, a little after 7:30, the phone rang. On the line was Katkey's other life.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, he got this phone call from, from the White House.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  The person calling from the White House was a career CIA officer who had recently joined the staff of Ronald Reagan's National Security Council.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And he says to Kevin, "I'm turning you over to Colonel North." And he gives him North's number, and he says, "Call him in the morning. He's waiting to hear from you."

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Colonel North was waiting to hear from him. Now, if you know anything about Iran-Contra, it's probably the name Oliver North. But back in October of 1983, North was not yet the star witness in an international scandal. He was not yet a poster child for unencumbered American patriotism. He was just an obscure figure in the White House bureaucracy. Neither Kevin Katkey nor anyone else had ever heard of him. Still, Katkey was excited at the prospect of making himself useful to someone so high up in the government. He had been trying to make himself useful in this way for years. As documented in Nita Renfrew's New York Magazine story, as well as pieces in Newsday and Mother Jones,

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Katkey was the leader of a kind of homegrown anti-communist club. It was him and three friends, a stockbroker, a building inspector, and a carpenter, all from the same part of Long Island. They weren't vigilantes, exactly, and they weren't quite spies. They were more like intelligence-gathering volunteers. They traveled abroad, they made contacts with people who gave them information about foreign governments, and they tried to get important people in Washington to listen to their findings.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  They were like a troupe of Boy Scouts. You know, they were out there, they wanted to have an adventure and do positive things while they were doing it. You know, that's what Boy Scouts do.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Oliver North would later tell Iran-Contra investigators that Kevin Katkey was a right-wing ideologue and compared him to a rogue CIA agent. I doubt Katkey would have taken it as an insult. He was a self-professed patriot, an enthusiastic foot soldier in America's Cold War with the Soviet Union. When Nita Renfrew interviewed him, Katke told her that if there was ever anything he could do to set the Soviets back a peg, he would do it no matter what.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  He believed that communism needed to be defeated in the world and that we had pulled out of Vietnam and when we should have won the war. He felt that the government needed a lot of help, that we as citizens of the country needed to help the government.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Kevin Katke and Oliver North, his new contact at the National Security Council, had a lot of that in common. North had been an unwavering believer in the Vietnam War since his days at the US Naval Academy in the late 1960s.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Each man who wears the academy ring embarks upon a splendid, worthwhile career in the highest traditions of the United States Navy.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  He had looked forward to deployment, and when he was injured in a car accident during his first year, he worried that it would delay his graduation and cause him to miss the war entirely. During his recovery, North was so focused on getting better in time that, according to a neighbor, he took to jumping off the roof of a garage over and over again in an effort to strengthen his legs.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  In the war today, American B-52 bombers dropped tons of explosives on dense jungles near Cambodia.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  North ended up fighting in Vietnam for about a year. While overseas, he wrote letters home to his parents, expressing his frustration with Washington lawmakers who were unwilling to fully get behind the war. "Most of all," he wrote, "I wish the politicians would get off their fat, soft posteriors and come through with something, one way or the other, to clear this mess up."

• 6:11Speaker 04

  I think that reflects a frustration common among military guys with Congress or the administration for tying their hands in battle.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  That's journalist Ben Bradley Jr. He's the author of Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North, which was published in 1988, two years after North became a household name as a result of the Iran-Contra scandal.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  And, you know, these guys would typically feel, you know, shit, if they could just unleash us, we'd have this thing wrapped up sooner rather than later.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  The Vietnam War dragged on for years after North returned home. Finally, after losing nearly 60,000 men, the United States pulled out its troops in 1973.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  In Saigon today, the last of the American troops got on airplanes and flew out of Vietnam, ending the longest military involvement in the country's history.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  As far as North was concerned, the politicians who had ordered an end to the war had committed a grave sin, both against American forces, who had been prevented from fulfilling their mission, and against the soldiers in South Vietnam, who had been counting on the US in their struggle against communism. The politicians had caved to pressure from an uninformed public.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  They raised their voices, their placards, and they marched against the government.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  As North later put it, "America lost the war in Washington, not in Vietnam."

• 7:45Speaker 00

  When North went to work for President Ronald Reagan in 1981, he carried with him a single-minded resolve to never let his country abandon its values again. And though he was part of the government now, he was not going to be precious about accepting help from like-minded outsiders. It was that openness to collaboration, not just with department store engineers, but with arms dealers, mercenaries, and shady international fixers that would later drive North and the rest of the Reagan White House headlong into Iran-Contra.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  But first, North needed to talk to Kevin Katkey. He wanted his help overthrowing a communist regime.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  I'm Leon Nafok, from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is Fiasco: Iran-Contra. The story of a secret war, a secret deal, and a scandal that threatened to destroy Ronald Reagan's presidency, until it didn't.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Washington's still in shock over the secret diversion of funds to the countries. The shocker about secret sales of missiles to Iran.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Questions of illegality and cover-up. I don't use the word "cover-up." I would use the word "protect." They were lying to the press. They were lying to the public. They lied incessantly to each other. They did it out of loyalty and anti-communism. That's why the government of the United States...

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Gave me a shredder. How could the president not have known?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Episode one, Get Me Kevin Katkey. The first tremor of the Iran-Contra affair. In which Oliver North and a gang of amateur spies helped the Reagan administration turn the page on Vietnam.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  We'll be right back.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Kevin Katkey's wandering path into Oliver North's orbit began in the early 1970s, when an eccentric neighbor clocked him as a fellow anti-communist and started bending his ear about the political situation in Jamaica, which at the time was governed by a socialist prime minister. Katkey's neighbor said he knew some right-wing dissidents who were trying to overthrow the left-wing government. Maybe Katkey wanted to help? Here again is Nita Renfrew.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Kevin was very charismatic. So he could get people to do things that nobody else could get them to do. You know, it's like, he could walk into places and, you know, it's like, he just had an air about him that he was in charge.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Katkey was intrigued by the Jamaica opportunity. He started taking time off from work so that he could make regular trips to the island with his neighbor. They hung out on the beach, developed relationships with dissidents, and gathered intel. Eventually, Jamaica elected a right-wing prime minister and no longer needed Katkey's help. But spending time on the island had activated him politically. When Iran was taken over in 1979 by religious extremists who professed to hate America, Katkey went to Wall Street and sold T-shirts that said, "Iran sucks." He spent the money organizing an anti-Iran rally on Long Island.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Then, in 1981, Katkey turned his attention to the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Grenada, Carriacou, and Petit Martinique make up a small country in the Caribbean Sea.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Grenada had a population of about 100,000 people. Since 1979, it had been run by a political party of young Marxist revolutionaries.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  They took control of their lives and their future through a revolution on March 13, 1979, or the first revolution in the English-speaking Caribbean.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Despite its small size, Grenada was a top concern for the Reagan administration.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  They were aware that the Marxists who ruled the island had sought the help of Fidel Castro, the communist leader of Cuba. Together, they were building an ambitious new airport in Grenada. The theory in the White House was that this airport would be used as a base for Soviet reconnaissance planes. To Reagan, Grenada was part of a red triangle that included Cuba to the north and Nicaragua to the west. In March of 1983, Reagan gave a televised address from the White House advocating for an expansion of the defense budget. In making his case, he emphasized the emerging communist threat in the Western Hemisphere.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  On the small island of Grenada, at the southern end of the Caribbean chain, the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building an airfield with a 10,000-foot runway. Grenada doesn't even have an air force. Who is it intended for?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  By the time Reagan gave that speech, Kevin Katkey was already in contact with several Grenadian dissidents who had emigrated to New York. Among them was a lawyer who had worked for the Grenadian government before the revolution in '79. The lawyer told Katkey that he wanted to get the Marxists in Grenada out of power. And Katkey, along with his neighbor and two of their friends from town, decided to help him in his quest. Together, they created a think-tank-style organization that they christened the Grenadian Movement for Freedom and Democracy. Katkey also let the lawyer live in a boat docked behind his house.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And they went and they bought clothes at thrift shops for him. So he'd have some nice suits and ties and so on. And then they would drive him and other people down to Washington to talk to the Congress and so on.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  It was during one of these trips to Washington that Katkey met the man who would later call him at home at the end of his very bad day at Macy's and put him in touch with Oliver North. His name was Konstantin Menges, and he was an ideal audience for a group of guys advocating for the overthrow of the left-wing government in Grenada.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Konstantin Menges was, he was an idealist, very much like Kevin was. You know, like Kevin, I mean, he believed that communism was taking over and that they had to combat this for the good of those people.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  The night Menges called Katkey and connected him with Oliver North, the White House was keeping an especially watchful eye on Grenada. There's a real power struggle going on tonight in the tiny Island country of Grenada in the Caribbean. It appeared that a radical faction of the Grenadian government had staged a military coup in the capital city of St. George. These radicals seemed to be closely aligned with the Soviet Union, and they had placed Grenada's prime minister, who was comparatively moderate, under house arrest.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Diplomatic sources warn that the situation in Grenada is still confused and uncertain. They say it's still not clear exactly who will emerge as the new prime minister of Grenada.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  The coup in Grenada touched off a series of meetings within the National Security Council. You've almost certainly heard of the NSC, but it's worth stopping to provide a bit of background on it, because it ended up becoming the central staging ground for the Iran-Contra affair. Basically, the NSC was created after World War II as an arm of the executive branch that advised the president on foreign policy. Its members included the head of the CIA, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. It also included the national security adviser, who oversaw a staff that worked specifically for the National Security Council. For the most fervent anti-communists on the NSC staff, like Konstantin Menges and Oliver North, the coup in Grenada required immediate attention.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  If the radical leftists who had started the coup were allowed to take over, it would only be a matter of time before Moscow started using Grenada as a base for its planes and nuclear submarines. But first, there was a more immediate problem to deal with. Grenada was home to about 1,000 American citizens, the majority of whom were students enrolled at the St. George's University School of Medicine.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  There is concern for some 1,000 Americans already there.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  It seemed possible that amid the chaos, the communists would take the medical students hostage.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Medical students like Jonathan Beck, whose mother has not been able to reach him by telephone.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  I have no knowledge exactly of what is going on, and I'm quite apprehensive.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Jeff Geller, who had enrolled at St. George's after getting waitlisted at med schools in the US, remembers the first indication that a military coup was underway.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  One day, we're in anatomy class, in fact, we're having anatomy exam, and the exam finishes, and we're all ready to go back to the dorms, and the bus doesn't come. So we wait a while, and they announce it's going to be a little late, they don't tell us what's going on. Finally, the bus does come, and we're headed back to the dorms, and a tank comes by us. And another tank, and another tank, and another tank, and we're all going towards St. George's, the capital.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  The tanks cut through the lush tropical paradise where Geller had just started school a few weeks earlier.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  We were ordinary college students. And so, you know, seeing a tank up close, you know, not in a parade and not, you know, as a museum exhibit was very different for us. You know, we could barely fit the bus and the tank on the road. These are very small country roads. They're just earth.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  It was against this backdrop that Kevin Katkey got the phone call from NSC staffer Konstantin Menges. Menges had been working with Oliver North on a plan to intervene in Grenada ever since the prime minister's ouster a few days earlier. Menges and North had two goals. One, get the medical students home. And two, turn the crisis into an opportunity by restoring democracy in Grenada. Menges thought Katkey and his contacts within the Grenadian exile community could be of some use, and he wanted Katkey to call North the following morning in order to receive his marching orders. Nita Renfrew describes this as the moment Katkey had been waiting for.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Well, he was elated that he was being taken seriously, that he could really help the government now. Because he had all the Grenadian contacts. The White House didn't have them. He felt, you know, that what he'd been doing was bearing fruit, you know, that somebody had listened to him, you know, after they'd been working so hard.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  After the conversation with Menges, Katkey called his friends and told them to come over the following morning. He wanted them to be there when he spoke to North so they wouldn't think he'd gone crazy when he told them the White House wanted their help. I get why he was concerned. When I first read Nita Renfrew's story about Katkey in New York Magazine, my first question was, why on earth did anyone in the government give this random guy the time of day? It was something Katkey himself wondered about. In one of his interviews with Renfrew, he said, "You know there's something wrong if the government has to use us."

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Even so, Katke seemed to make a consistently good impression on the government officials he came into contact with. In an article published in Newsday after the Iran-Contra affair became public, an unnamed intelligence staffer described Katke as "an idiot savant on foreign affairs." The staffer said that even though Katke had no background and no training, he consistently stumbled onto interesting things.

• 18:50Speaker 07

  Unlike lots of other people who've drifted across the stage in these investigations, everything Kevin said, more or less, checked out.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  This is Jack Blum, a lawyer who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before getting hired by then-Senator John Kerry to investigate Iran-Contra. Blum got to know Katke in the course of that investigation, and he came to rather like him.

• 19:14Speaker 07

  There are people who get involved in things like this who are evil. There are people who get involved in things like this where you have a sense that the motivation is ugly. None of that applies to Kevin. What you get is what you see, and that's that.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Blum told me I shouldn't be so surprised that Katke could be useful to someone in Washington on the subject of Grenada. "If you were looking for intelligence in the Caribbean in 1983," he said, "you could do a lot worse than spending time in New York."

• 19:47Speaker 07

  Brooklyn has any number of these expat communities from places all over the world. And frequently, if you want to know what's going on in one of these places, the best place to go is a saloon in Brooklyn, where there are expats who are talking to the family back home, who are communicating, and who know, you know, this is what's happening.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Blum said there was another, even more important reason why foreign policy officials in the Reagan administration might have found Katke to be an appealing collaborator. His very anonymity and the vast distance separating him from the corridors of power were exactly what made him valuable.

• 20:27Speaker 07

  So when you have people like Katki and company, they're kind of perfect people to put to work on the project because they're motivated, they go in, they think they're doing the right thing, yet they're not government employees, they're strictly volunteers, and that makes it just perfect because there's no attribution, no fingerprints left on whatever they do.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Later, when Katki's adventures in foreign affairs came to light amid the Iran-Contra scandal, they were written about both as a comic diversion and as a tragic sign of the times. On one hand, Katki and his crew were "oddball operatives" and "a bunch of nutcases." On the other hand, they were a symptom of the Reagan administration's privatization of foreign policy.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  On the morning of Friday, October 14th, Katki and his friends crowded around a phone and listened as Oliver North told them what he wanted them to do. It turned out that the medical school in Grenada was headquartered on Long Island. In fact, its offices were in Bayshore, the same town as the Macy's where Katki worked. North wanted Katki to go over to the medical school office and ask the administrators to formally call back their students from Grenada, essentially to put it on the record that an evacuation was needed. Katki wasted no time before showing up with one of his friends at the St. George's office and requesting a meeting with the school's chancellor, Charles Modica. Here is how Modica remembers it.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Two visitors came in to the US headquarters of the school and ended up speaking with our attorney and professed to be involved with the United States government, but it never got to the level where I even wanted to meet them. We thought there was something fishy about the whole thing, frankly.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  And so Katki and his friend were turned away. They had failed to complete their first mission for Oliver North. But that did not stop North from coming back to them with another task when the situation in Grenada took a turn for the worse.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  This is NBC Nightly News, reported by Tom Brokaw. Good evening. There's been a brutal and bloody coup on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  On October 19th, six days after the Grenadian prime minister was put under house arrest, he was executed by a firing squad, along with several members of his cabinet. Then, the leader of the coup announced the 24-hour curfew, warning that anyone who was caught violating it would be shot on sight.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Grenada has shut down its airport to all visitors. Military troops are patrolling the streets with orders to shoot to kill.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  The violence was a turning point in the crisis. It convinced Reagan administration officials, once and for all, that the American medical students had to be evacuated, or else they really might be taken hostage by the communists. And while it's hard to assess how much danger the students were actually in, they could hear gunshots outside their windows, and the feeling inside the compound where they were staying was tense and fearful. Here again is Jeff Geller.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  You know, it's progression. First, you're like, what's going on? Everyone's worried. You know, you're, again, you're in a foreign country, you have no idea. You can't call up Joe down the road and say, hey, what's happening? You know, there's not 20 apps on your phone telling you the news every five seconds like we have now. And you get progressively worried. First, you hear the shots, and then you're quarantined in your area. And initially, you can speak on the phone. Then, all of a sudden, you can't speak on the phone, so you're completely isolated. And then you hear gunshots in the distance. And then you hear that, you know, people that you knew were being wished out of the house and not heard from, that the government was completely toppled. And we didn't feel protected at all.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  The day after Grenada's prime minister was killed, Konstantin Menges, Oliver North, and other members of the NSC staff met to discuss their options. Menges made the case for invading the island, getting the students to safety, and permanently removing Grenada's communist government. After the meeting, Menges went to North's office. There, they worked with North's secretary, Vaughn Hall, on a proposal to Vice President George H.W. Bush, as well as the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA. According to Menges's memoir, North was relieved that the invasion seemed to be coming to fruition. Menges quotes him saying, "When you showed me the plan last week, I never thought it would get this far. Maybe we'll really do something for a change."

• 25:07Speaker 00

  The invasion of Grenada would be the first major US military operation since the Vietnam War. And if it was successful, it would be the first instance of the US actually ousting a communist regime. As Menges and North envisioned it, the mission would set an inspiring example for other anti-communist freedom fighters throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. At least, that was the plan. We'll be right back. On Saturday, October 22, two days after the NSC meeting about Grenada, North once again enlisted Kevin Katkey in a covert operation.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  This time, he asked Katkey to do something more substantial than just meet with the administrator of a medical school. Here again is Ben Bradley Jr.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Another assignment that North gave Katkey was to see if he could organize a government in exile among the Grenadians living in New York. So that if and when the invasion proceeded and, obviously, anticipated success, a government would then be ready to step in.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  The idea was that Katkey could call up his Grenadian associates, including the lawyer living on the boat behind his house, and have them form a political body that could swoop in once the radical leftists in Grenada were removed from power.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  When the US government wants to get rid of a government overseas because we don't like it, you know, we get a group of exiles to declare themselves a government, you know, to sort of agree with themselves, okay, so-and-so is going to be the president or the prime minister or something, and these other three people are going to be whatever, you know. And then you fly them into the country and make a coup.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Katke gamely said he would do it. And according to Renfrew, he succeeded at gathering a group of Grenadian exiles in Brooklyn the next day. But in the end, Katke once again couldn't deliver. In part because he couldn't take time off from his job at Macy's.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Kevin had to be at work that day, so he couldn't be there. So they couldn't agree on anything. So they didn't inform the government an exile. And Kevin felt really badly because he knew that if he'd been there, he would have told them how to do it and they would have done it.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  When Katke called to inform North of his latest failure, North sounded frustrated. But by this point, he had other things on his mind. Reagan had signed off on the invasion. And a fleet of ships, including an aircraft carrier, was streaming toward Grenada carrying nearly 2,000 soldiers.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  10 American warships are sailing toward Grenada. Onboard are 2,000 combat Marines.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  The ships and Marines left their East Coast ports earlier this week, bound for Lebanon, but were given a change of orders out of concern for the safety of the 1,100 Americans on the island of Grenada.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Operation Urgent Fury had been set in motion in total secrecy. In fact, when reporters who were hearing rumors about the invasion asked the White House spokesman about it, he passed on a comment from Deputy National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who called the idea "preposterous." The ships that had been sent toward Grenada, the White House said, had "no intentions to land." They were, quote, "just swinging by in case a rescue operation to save the Americans on the island became necessary." This misdirection was paired with a total media blackout of the invasion itself, which one critic later called "unprecedented in modern American history." That weekend, Oliver North once again spoke to Kevin Katke by phone.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  He asked his fellow anti-communist to take on his most high-stakes mission yet. With the American landing imminent, North wanted Katkey's contacts in Grenada to distract local authorities by lighting a bunch of fires. North referred to it as "sky red."

• 29:07Speaker 04

  "Sky red" was North's term for a diversion that he wanted Katkey to help create. North had this idea to have operatives on the island who were secretly supporting the United States to set a series of fires in order to create chaos throughout the island, which would divert the official attention away from, you know, the beaches where the Marines and other US soldiers started to land.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  The invasion was scheduled for the early morning hours of Tuesday, October 25th. Konstantin Menges worked late the night before. On his way out, he stopped by Room 208 of the old executive office building, where he and North had spent a very long week planning for the invasion. According to his memoir, Menges found North asleep on the couch, and before heading home, he covered him with an overcoat. Meanwhile, Katkey got in touch with a Grenadian autoworker in Brooklyn, who had a lot of contacts on the island. Katkey told him about North's idea for "sky red," and the guy seemed confident that he could make it happen.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  But the next morning, as helicopters carrying American troops flew over Grenada, the sky was not red. No one had set any fires.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  "The invasion started before dawn this morning. About 1,900 US Army Rangers and Marines this morning assaulted the small island. "Our paratroopers have fanned out and are now in St. George's, the capital, and other communities around St. George's and the Port Salinas Airport."

• 30:46Speaker 00

  How the invasion of Grenada went depends on what you emphasize. On the one hand, the Americans made relatively quick work of the Communist resistance, setting the stage for elections to be held about a year later. On the other hand, the operation was marred by abysmal intelligence. According to a Miami Herald reporter who was able to make it onto the island despite the media blackout, a marine platoon leader asked him during the first hours of the invasion whose side the Grenadian army was on. Later, there were reports that the mapping agency, the Department of Defense, had not been asked to provide maps of the island until the absolute last minute, which meant that some troopers arrived carrying photocopies of maps intended for tourists.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  In the end, the invasion cost 19 American soldiers their lives. It also resulted in the accidental bombing of a Grenadian mental hospital that left 18 civilians dead. The US Army did succeed in getting the American medical students off the island. Here's Jeff Geller again.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  You know, you get a bang on the door, open up, this is the US Rangers, you know, we're like, what? We couldn't believe it, you know? And they basically got us back into the lecture halls and got us all together, woke everyone up. They were treating the wounded in our library, you know, so they converted the library into a little medic area, you know, and they took over the place, basically. And we were very, very, very happy about that.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  35 minutes from now, by our clock, the first plane loads of Americans who have chosen to leave Grenada are expected to arrive in Charleston, South Carolina.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  When Geller's plane landed on the tarmac, he and several other students got on their knees and kissed the ground in an apparent show of gratitude for being back on American soil.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  There's somebody kneeling down and kissing the ground. A number have done that as they begin to get on buses to go and be debriefed, in part, by the State Department before they make their way to their homes.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Later, Oliver North regaled a group of Reagan aides with the dramatic story of the students' rescue, specifically about how he had been nervous that the students would get off the plane and say something damaging to the press about how the invasion had been unnecessary. But, North said, when he dropped by the White House living quarters to bring his concerns to Reagan, the president wasn't worried.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  Reagan flipped on the television and there was live coverage of the students' landing. And the first kid got off the plane and kissed the ground. Reagan looked at that and said, "See, Oliver, there's nothing to worry about. You have to trust Americans."

• 33:16Speaker 00

  As Bradley discovered, there was just one problem with this story.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  President Reagan's press secretary told me that North never set foot, never set foot in the private White House residence, and the story was bullshit. It never happened.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  There's one other funny thing about that moment when the students kissed the ground. Jeff Geller told me that at least his performance on the tarmac had been partly tongue in cheek. For him, the gesture was about 60% spontaneous expression of patriotism and about 40% the punchline to a joke that he and the other students had started making while in lockdown. Gallows humor, basically.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  The joke for the whole time was, you know, if I ever get off this rock, I'm going to kiss the goddamn ground.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  If it was a joke, no one watching on TV could tell.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  The Grenada invasion was a huge political victory for the Reagan administration. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in early November of 1983 found that 71% of respondents approved of Operation Urgent Fury. 63% approved of Reagan's overall job performance, his best rating since his first year in office. In their book about the Reagan years, Landslide, journalists Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus described the invasion as a metaphor for nothing less than the country's willingness to overcome the paralysis that had followed the Vietnam War. Oliver North embodied that willingness. Later, when newspapers started writing about him in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal, North's role in the planning of the Grenada

• 34:56Speaker 00

  invasion was typically listed as his first major contribution to Reagan's foreign policy agenda. Here again is Senate investigator Jack Blum.

• 35:06Speaker 07

  When he actually persuades people to get in line and they're doing the Grenada invasion, he's the hero of the day. And that puts him in position to be the guy who says, and this is what I think we ought to do next. And that's where the fun began.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Kevin Katkey and his friends came out ahead, too, despite their repeated failure to carry out the missions Oliver North assigned them. North didn't seem to hold it against them. A week after the Grenada invasion, he invited the gang to Washington and thanked them personally for their efforts.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  And Kevin, from that point, he thought that North was his hero. He thought that North was Lily White, that he was a complete idealist and that he wanted to help the world and so on. And I think North was what Kevin would have wanted to be.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  I've been trying to put my finger on what I find so ominous about the story of Kevin Katkey falling in with Oliver North. There's something about it that just feels wrong, like it's not how the government is supposed to work. Ben Bradley's theory is just that Katkey had something the White House didn't.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  In some ways, he seemed to be the only game in town. He was down on the CIA, North, and didn't think that they really had any reliable, on-the-ground intelligence of what was happening in Grenada. So I think it was a question of Katkey filling a vacuum, as North saw it. So therefore, he came to be reliant on him.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Jack Blum put it slightly differently.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  I think it was a time when lots of deranged things were happening inside the US government. I think it was a time when people who came into the administration, the Reagan administration, believed that the world was their toy and you could do anything, as long as it was all covert and anti-communist, you could go play. And I think there were people who, you know, liked that idea and ran with it.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Iran-Contra is a story about running with it. It's a complicated story that spans the globe. And if you've gotten through life not knowing exactly what it was all about, or what the Iran part has to do with the Contra part, or what the Contra part even refers to, you're not alone. Compared to Watergate or the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, Iran-Contra is a relatively obscure scandal. Most people just don't have a firm grasp on what happened. And there aren't that many big iconic moments associated with it. In this season of Fiasco, we're going to take a shot at rectifying that. Over eight episodes, we're going to look back at the tangled narrative of Iran-Contra. And in addition to reconstructing in a straight line what exactly happened and why,

• 38:03Speaker 00

  we're also going to try to figure out why this scandal failed to leave a bigger mark on American culture. Why did a story propelled by so many audacious decisions and tied into a knot by so many high-stakes lies end up being so easy to forget? It's a good time to remember it. Whether you support the current administration or not, it has shown Americans in dramatic fashion that the government, at the end of the day, is really just a bunch of people. The fact that they've been temporarily put in charge of institutions that are much bigger than them doesn't change that. If anything, it reinforces the need to understand them as individuals, men and women who act on their obsessions, their ambitions, and their delusions.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  The story of Kevin Katkey and his friends in this context feels to me like a parable in which all the themes of the Iran-Contra scandal were on full display. The use of non-governmental actors to carry out government policy. The secrecy, the improvisation, the logistical gambles undertaken in the name of sincere, but possibly misguided ideologies. I should add, by the way, that I tried really hard to get in touch with Kevin Katkey. I called, I emailed, I couldn't find him. And when I reached people who knew him, they declined to help me get to him. The best I got was a former neighbor who told me Katkey once encouraged him to Google his name. There are quite a few search results. Katkey remained very much in the mix after Grenada,

• 39:32Speaker 00

  and he continued cultivating relationships with people he thought could help the US eradicate communism.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Heading into Reagan's second term, that meant raising money for the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, the right-wing fighting force known as the Contras. So when Katkey and his friends met a wealthy Saudi prince who said he wanted to donate $14 million to the Contra cause, Katkey was over the moon.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  You know, the guy was wearing these robes and he had a ring with a lot of diamonds that he described as being like his royal ring. And he started taking them to dinner all the time. And he wanted to give money to the Contras. And of course, North was running that operation.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  When Katkey told North about the prince, North was apparently so excited that he discussed the prospective donation with Ronald Reagan himself. But the donation never came. It turned out that Katkey's prince was a con man. He wasn't a prince at all. He wasn't even from Saudi Arabia. And he didn't have $14 million for the Contras. And that meant Oliver North would have to find the money somewhere else. On the next episode of Fiasco, the Iran part of the Iran-Contra. How and why Ronald Reagan authorized a plan to secretly provide weapons to one of America's greatest enemies.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  I reminded him again that, look, this may not work. And he said, well, we don't know until we try.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  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 Projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan, Ula Kulpah, and me, Leon Nefak. Our editor was Camilla Hammer. Our researcher was Frances Carr. The 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 Chips NY. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfield, and Johnny Vince Evans. Copyright counsel provided by Peter Yasi at Yasi Butler, PLLC.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Thanks to Jodi Avrigan, Carrie Baker, Chris Berube, Nina Ernest, Stephen Fisher, Emily Gaddick, Alice Gregory, Ellen Horn, Kelly Jones, Latif Nassar, Mike Pesca, Bruce Wallace, as well as Sam Graham-Felsen and Surya Shakhri. Special thanks to Luminary, and thank you for listening.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  That's it for this preview of Fiasco: Iran-Contra. Thanks for listening. You can find the rest of the show wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are coming out week by week, but if you want to hear the full story right now, you can binge the entire season ad-free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.