Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans & The Iran-Contra Arms Dealing Scandal (Part I) About this episode Robert Evans is a delightful human. Which makes it so funny that he hosts a hit podcast about the worst people to ever exist! Today, the mastermind of Behind The Bastards Podcast joins Ed to discuss a dastardly scheme in the early 80s involving arms trafficking to Iran, facilitated directly by some of Reagan's top brass. It's the Iran-Contra Affair on part one of this mind-boggling SNAFU. And check out our SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 I guess Congress has just become a strongly worded letter apparatus.
0:05 Speaker 01 Right. It's a bad Yelp review for the president.
0:11 Speaker 00 Yes, it carries all the gravitas of a bad Yelp review.
0:23 Speaker 02 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:28 Speaker 03 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
1:02 Speaker 04 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.
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1:52 Speaker 04 I'm glad I asked for help.
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2:30 Speaker 00 Welcome to Snafu, the show about history's greatest screw-ups, where we delve into all the messy mayhem and then try to figure out what it says about us as human beings. And spoiler alert, it's usually not very good things. I'm Ed Helms, your host, and today I'm joined by the host of the insanely popular and entertaining podcast Behind the Bastards, which examines the lives and legacies of history's worst people. After first establishing his writing chops at humor website Cracked, this guest worked for the investigative journalism group Bellingcat. He also reported from conflict zones around the world, including Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, writing extensively on extremism, disinformation, and political violence.
3:15 Speaker 00 In addition to his podcasting work, he is the author of the novel After the Revolution: A Speculative Story About a Fractured Future America. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the incomparable Robert Evans.
3:29 Speaker 01 Ed, that was such a nice introduction. Thank you.
3:31 Speaker 00 That's the whole podcast.
3:32 Speaker 01 After all the terrible things I've told you.
3:35 Speaker 00 All I do is just give these lovely glowing introductions and then we call it a day. No, I am, I'm so glad to have you on. I, of course, have been a guest on your podcast Behind the Bastards, not once, but twice.
3:50 Speaker 01 That's right.
3:50 Speaker 00 I'm still waiting for my third invite. Not going to hold it against you yet, but just putting that out there.
3:56 Speaker 01 Happy to have you back.
3:58 Speaker 00 But I, I'm, I'm super excited to play host to you this time.
4:02 Speaker 01 I'm excited to be on Snafu. I've been listening since season one, and yeah, I'm glad to, to get to actually participate in the show now. I can't wait to hear what you're going to tell me about.
4:13 Speaker 00 You are in it now. It's funny, our shows have some, some thematic similarities. You focus on bad people throughout history. I focus on bad. Events or incidents or mistakes throughout history. Why are we so drawn to the dark side, Robert Evans?
4:30 Speaker 01 I mean, I think there's, part of it's just like this little piece in all of us that's encoded by evolution to where like if somebody else screws up in a major way, you want to like pay attention to see, it's like if you see a car wreck, it's like, what happened there? Can I avoid that? Can I make sure I don't get into that kind of problem?
4:46 Speaker 00 It's funny you put it that way because I feel like that's a well-intentioned, or it's sort of a positive spin on why we're drawn to these things. I feel like there's a darker impulse in all of us. Like why we, why we look at car crashes? It's not because we, it's like, we're looking for ways to avoid that. It's because I think, what, what is it? It makes us feel safer to see other people injured or something?
5:10 Speaker 01 I don't know. That is a good one because like, one of my favorite ways to relax, like when my friends and I, a couple of years ago, we all got laid off at the website we'd been working for. And I had everyone over to the house and I just put on hours with the footage of like, people injuring themselves, trying to cut down trees. Cause it'll be like a guy and his kid and like a 300 year old oak tree. And he's got like a $40 saw that he bought from Home Depot. And he's like, I can take this tree. And I just love watching like the hubris meet with physics. But there is a darkness to it as well.
5:40 Speaker 00 I think we all have a sort of schadenfreude gene in, in us that's sort of like, it can be soothing to just know we're not alone in our pain and misery in this world. It's, it's pretty universal.
5:53 Speaker 01 Someone always has it worse than you do, pretty much.
5:56 Speaker 00 Now, you have a background in investigative journalism with some pretty serious chops in that area. What, what drew you into that space?
6:04 Speaker 01 You know, I've always been fascinated by conflict. I came into it sort of as like a military history nerd, someone who was interested in that. But really what kind of like broke me into like a significant role in media was I just happened to be paying attention to these weird little corners of the internet right as like the alt-right erupted and, you know, 8chan, 4chan kind of like became major things in terms of like people were carrying out attacks. Based on, you know, having been radicalized in these little fascist corners of the internet. And I've just kind of been watching them for a couple of years. And so I've realized at a certain point, like, oh, there's not a lot of other people who understand how these communities work.
6:47 Speaker 01 I should probably explain them to people because members of those communities are now killing people, right? It was a mix of like accident and, uh, I guess happenstance.
6:57 Speaker 00 Sure. Well, it was a product of your own curiosity, right? And I think, I feel like that's one of the traits of the great journalists out there is like this relentless curiosity and that it's coming from a genuine place. It's not just like, how do I get the next big scoop? You know, it's like, I really, my sense, and I'm not a journalist at all, but my sense of it is that the journalists, the great ones, really have like a personal, like unquenchable thirst to know and this curiosity that drives through. Because investigative journalism is tedious, is incredibly time consuming, it can be, it can be dangerous a lot of times.
7:35 Speaker 00 And, uh, and that thirst for, for the truth or for knowledge or for clarity on something is really powerful. I think it's such an admirable space to be in. Do you see great investigative journalism happening today? Like, who are the people that you think are really standing out or doing great work? I mean, besides Tucker Carlson?
7:57 Speaker 01 Of course, of course, Tucker. You and I are both big fans of Tucker. You know, my, my old colleagues at Bellingcat continue to do great work. You know, the New York Times Visual Investigations Desk has done some really impressive open source, uh, reporting on conflicts, I mean, over, all over the world over the last, like, several years. I, I find myself really interested in BBC Africa Eye, which is their kind of open source covering like particularly like war crimes in places like Cameroon. So there's a lot of really interesting nuts and bolts work being done by folks who are willing to do things like spend hundreds of hours combing through like footage that
8:41 Speaker 01 we know is a war crime, but we don't know. What militia was responsible or where it was done and like laborously matching like you can kind of see a mountain in the background and so they'll just spend weeks going through Google Maps and they're like it's this mountain and because of where it is in the frame of the shot we can like now locate this exact point geographically and we know that these militant groups reacted like that's really impressive work to me.
9:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:05 Speaker 01 It's so much more of a pain in the butt than what I did, you know, when I was covering that stuff. So I have, I have tremendous admiration for that. And anybody who's doing like financial crimes, investigative journalism, this, the wonkiness required, the ability to dig deep into like the financials of a company that's doing something wrong is so labor intensive.
9:27 Speaker 00 I can barely balance my checkbook. I can't, I can't even wrap my head around that stuff. And then it's not, it's not only the, the digging into it and the figuring it out, it's the, it's then the ability to translate it into English and then an interesting way that, that laypeople can understand. Well, kudos to you and your, your, your colleagues and all the people out there doing great investigative journalism. So let's dig in. For today's snafu, I chose something that I think is kind of in both of our wheelhouses because it features both bad people and bad events, which makes it, you know, it's kind
10:10 Speaker 00 of a, it's a mashup of Behind the Bastards and Snafu.
10:14 Speaker 01 I like it.
10:14 Speaker 00 What would we call that?
10:16 Speaker 01 Behind the snaf- no, that doesn't work.
10:18 Speaker 00 I feel like there's a good portmanteau with, with snafu and bastards and I want to call it snastards.
10:25 Speaker 01 Sure.
10:26 Speaker 00 Right? That's the best.
10:27 Speaker 01 There we go. There we go.
10:30 Speaker 00 We're gonna cut all that. All right. Today's episode is peak Reagan era Cold War insanity.
10:39 Speaker 00 A true international pickle of the extra spicy variety. This is the Iran contra affair.
10:46 Speaker 01 Beautiful.
10:47 Speaker 00 Do you remember anything about this? I think I'm a little older than you. I'm not sure.
10:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was born in 88, so I don't like have firsthand memories of it. But I do remember, I remember my, first, because I grew up in a very conservative household, and we watched Fox News a lot, and Oliver North had a television show during the Bush years.
11:06 Speaker 00 Sure. Which I think was on CNN.
11:08 Speaker 01 Was it on CNN?
11:09 Speaker 00 I think his show was on CNN, yeah. He had like a war history show.
11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I forget which network it was on, but I know it was on a lot, and I asked my parents, like, who is, who's that guy?
11:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:19 Speaker 01 They were like, well, he got in some trouble a few years back, but it was totally bullshit.
11:23 Speaker 00 But for doing the right thing.
11:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, that was my parents' attitude.
11:27 Speaker 00 We'll learn a lot about Oliver North today. It's funny, I remember, I feel like, and maybe it's just because I've read so much about it, but I, I feel like I remember seeing these hearings and news coverage as a kid. I was born in 74, so this was all sort of, I was around 10, 12, when a lot of this stuff was breaking. But let's get right into it. So I think it's important to start any conversation about the Iran contra affair with a quick warning, which is that this can get a little confusing. While the name sounds like one neat, tidy little package, the Iran contra affair is actually a very complicated web of deceit and absurdity involving completely different
12:10 Speaker 00 American adversaries into completely different crises in completely different hemispheres. And they all get tangled up in a beautiful knot, as we'll see, these crises were initially so fundamentally unrelated that it's hard to fathom how they mix up. That's part of the fun of this.
12:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it really says a lot about how widely we were screwing around with the rest of the world in those years that like Nicaragua and Iran wind up tied together in a scandal through us.
12:45 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yes, these two, these two like countries so far apart.
12:50 Speaker 01 Couldn't have less to do with each other.
12:52 Speaker 00 The United States manages to just tie them into this beautiful Gordian knot, which we're going to try to unravel a little bit. So let's begin our snafu in the summer of 1979, a famously chill, uneventful period in global history. Just kidding, not at all. The Vietnam War had ended just four years prior. The psychic wounds were still very fresh in America. Jimmy Carter was president and the year's headlines included Vietnam invading Cambodia, China subsequently invading Vietnam because of course Margaret Thatcher becoming the UK's first female prime minister and the Iranian revolution, which will become very important later in our story.
13:35 Speaker 00 Now let's jump to a tiny country in Central America called Nicaragua, roughly the size of New York State nestled right between Honduras and Costa Rica. Their leader was dictator Anastasio Samoza, whose family had spent decades running the country with corruption, repression, and a lot of support from good old Uncle Sam.
13:56 Speaker 01 Oh, weird.
13:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, we're just propping this dictator right on up.
14:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:02 Speaker 00 But on July 19th, 1979, Samoza was overthrown by Nicaragua's socialist Sandinistas. Almost immediately Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 and good old Ronnie had a very clear worldview. Communism wasn't something to manage, it was something to beat. This became known, of course, as the Reagan Doctrine, which basically said, we're not just going to try to contain communism around the world, we're going to actively try to roll it back. And one of the ways that we're going to do that is by supporting anti-communist forces around the world, as we'll soon see, by pretty much any means necessary.
14:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:45 Speaker 00 So when Nicaragua's socialist sandinistas overthrew a US-backed dictator in 79, to many Nicaraguans, this felt like liberation, but to Washington, it basically felt like Karl Marx had just moved into the guest bedroom.
15:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, we went to all this trouble to give you guys a nice dictator and prop him up with rocket launchers and machine guns, and this is how you repay us?
15:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 01 For giving this guy guns to kill you with?
15:11 Speaker 00 Exactly.
15:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:13 Speaker 00 What the heck, come on.
15:16 Speaker 03 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance, it's running out of Reese's cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's cups doesn't need to be.
15:49 Speaker 04 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.
16:05 Speaker 05 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg, the first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.
16:40 Speaker 04 I'm glad I asked for help.
16:42 Speaker 05 Ask your loved one's doctor about.
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17:33 Speaker 00 Between hosting and grabbing something to bring, I love getting the lowest prices. Now I'm ready for Halloween. Are you? Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21. So yeah, these Sandinistas are socialists, communism-adjacent, close enough that it just was not feeling good. Because this wasn't communism bubbling up in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, you know, oceans away. This was Central America. It's basically a nine-iron chip shot from Texas. And now add in the Sandinistas' explicit ties to the Soviet Union, and suddenly Reagan's team is looking at Nicaragua like it's the Cold War's new front line.
18:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And that's very much like the attitude they had at the time, right? This like, if it spills over into one country, it will inevitably spread into, you know, the neighboring countries. And even though like, you know, we saw like during the Korean War, you've got a communist North Korea after the war, or after the ceasefire, you have South Korea, which is not a communist state, and North Korea didn't inevitably spread to its neighbors, right? Like you, this kind of domino theory already had proved to be not totally accurate, but they still really, like, it's the easiest justification for doing whatever you want, right? If you're just like, if we don't take a handle on this, they're gonna spread everywhere. There will be communists marching into Texas.
19:00 Speaker 00 Well, I really think that, you know, getting into the, the national psyche a little bit at that time.
19:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:06 Speaker 00 There was a genuine sense that communism was just evil, explicitly evil. And I mean, I think there still is in some various corners, but, but it, it was not seen as just a sort of competing system of government or, or sociological experiment of some kind. It was seen as like a, a very evil enterprise. And also in that way, it was also perceived as kind of a contagion to your point. Like something that could catch hold or, or sort of corrupt people's minds and then take hold. I don't know, if you're a regular American at this time, Robert, are you sort of buying the red scare? Or are you a little more skeptical?
19:49 Speaker 01 I mean, I would hope that I would be skeptical, you know, as a kid, I certainly wasn't. And my parents were very much big Reaganites and very much bought in to this whole idea that like communism is this, is inherently different from any other kind of system of government around the world. And so much worse even than other, any kind of other authoritarian we might back, right? Because there's something inherently extra dangerous about communism. And obviously I would say like, looking at the history of this period of time and looking at the history of from like the 50s up through the 70s to the 80s, I don't actually think the evidence is there to say that like these communist regimes were any kind of, in any way inherently worse than any other like flawed authoritarian regimes that existed around the world, right?
20:33 Speaker 01 Like there's, there's upsides and there's downsides. There's things they did well, there's things that they did badly. We can now know that like, yeah, the idea that communism, if it was allowed to spread to one country, would inevitably spread to all of its neighbors, just untrue. It didn't happen in a bunch of places, right? Costa Rica did not become a communist state, right? But I also, you know, people were playing with a different amount of information at the time too. And I'm, I'm not surprised that given what folks were learning in school and what organizations like the John Birch Society was spreading in terms of like anti-communist propaganda. A lot of people did believe this is like a life and death thing as opposed to like, well,
21:14 Speaker 01 this is a country that's like, these are regimes that are geopolitically opposed to ours. But that doesn't mean they're inherently the devil, you know?
21:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was, I grew up sort of inculcated with a sense that the Soviet Union was, uh, was evil. That sort of like was a sweeping opinion of just sort of the entire population, which seems kind of crazy, but.
21:35 Speaker 01 Extremely common.
21:37 Speaker 00 Yeah. What's really interesting to parse here is how much of the, of the anti-communist, um, activity on, on the part of our government at the time was more of a, an ideological sort of crusade? Or was it more just about trying to control and influence various sort of geographic pockets around the world? We'll, we'll learn a little bit more, but, uh, but that's, that's a really fun sort of open debate.
22:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:03 Speaker 00 To tap into.
22:04 Speaker 01 And I, I think it's kind of worth looking back on previous great power clashes that had happened not that long previously, including like the great game between Russia and the British Empire in kind of the early chunk of the, the early parts of the 20th century, very end of the 19th century, where you had a lot of the same language. Oh, the Tsarist Russia is this inherently, you know, like destructive, spreading, uh, uh, force that we have to counter as the British Empire, or they'll be right in our backyard. A lot of the same kind of like rhetoric hype and whatnot that obviously goes away the instant we wind up ally, or the, the instant that Great Britain winds up allied with Tsarist Russia in a war.
22:44 Speaker 01 But it's this, uh, I think a lot of it just is great power conflict as if you were a great power and if you're seeing yourself and very much are in fact, fighting this kind of cold war against this other great power, they're going to be the devil, right? Within your own country, within sort of the attitude of the ruling class in your country. That's just like the norm historically, whether they're communists or an imperial power, whatever you want to call it, you know?
23:09 Speaker 00 Amen. The Reagan Doctrine, in a situation like this, the playbook was pretty straightforward. Find the Sandinistas' enemies and back them. Support the people fighting the Sandinistas. So in 1981, Reagan authorized the CIA to build and train a paramilitary force of Nicaraguan exiles to destabilize and ultimately topple the government. These counter-revolutionaries, la Contra Revolución, or what became, in Washington shorthand, the Contras, initially included former members of Simoza's National Guard. Over time, the CIA bulked
23:48 Speaker 00 them up with mercenaries and disillusioned ex-Sandinistas who'd broken with the revolution. Quick gut check, do these interventions ever go according to plan? Or is it just kind of like a "we'll fix it in post" foreign policy?
24:03 Speaker 01 You know, it depends, I guess, because like when we, for example, during like Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, the initial stage of that like goes pretty well for us and that like we back the Mujahideen to an extent and they really do do a lot of damage to the Red Army and to just to the USSR's ability. It's a contributing factor to why the Soviet Union collapses, right, as this disaster in Afghanistan. And so to that extent, like our intervention in Afghanistan worked exactly the way US war planners thought it would. Then there were other knock-on effects of us messing around in Afghanistan that didn't work out so well in the long run.
24:40 Speaker 00 Yeah. And this Maduro situation with Venezuela is very interesting and I think the jury's very much still out on how that will...
24:49 Speaker 01 See what happens there.
24:50 Speaker 00 How that's gonna shake out. But yeah, this is something we like to do as a country. So as this program ramped up, reports trickled back to the US that Contra paramilitaries were forming death squads and committing atrocities throughout Nicaragua. Atrocities, of course, is not a word you want associated with your team.
25:12 Speaker 01 Neither are death squads.
25:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:18 Speaker 00 In November 1982, Newsweek exposed the CIA's role in all of this, which removed, of course, any semblance of plausible deniability. The article landed on the desk of Democratic Senator Edward Boland, who was, to use a technical term, extremely pissed off.
25:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:37 Speaker 00 The thing is, Congress generally likes to be told about war stuff, and Reagan had just kind of skipped that step here. So with Boland leading the charge, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, restricting US intelligence agencies by prohibiting any funds, quote, "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua," end quote. The vote was unanimous, 411 to 0, which is pretty rare.
26:03 Speaker 01 That doesn't happen anymore.
26:04 Speaker 00 No.
26:05 Speaker 01 I mean, it was like that anymore.
26:06 Speaker 00 It was pretty rare then.
26:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:08 Speaker 00 And that was supposed to be the end of it, which, historically speaking, is exactly the kind of sentence that guarantees it wasn't the end of it.
26:15 Speaker 01 Right.
26:16 Speaker 00 Interesting question here. Do you think that Congress's outrage was more about the human rights abuses going on in Nicaragua, or more about being sort of cut out of the decision-making process?
26:27 Speaker 01 I don't know enough about Boland, so I don't want to say that, like, oh, he didn't give a shit about the human rights. But I think Congress, on the whole, it was more, they're coming for, like, this is our bag. We're supposed to have influence here. You're not supposed to be able to just do this and not talk to us, right?
26:41 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the right answer, I'm sure, is a little bit from column A and a little from column B, but really, this is a standoff between congressional and executive branch powers. And Congress put their foot down, which was kind of badass.
27:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, it doesn't happen a lot anymore with that kind of stuff.
27:04 Speaker 00 Boy, does it not.
27:05 Speaker 01 Congress is getting really okay with letting the president use the military.
27:10 Speaker 00 Is just, they just grin and give high fives, basically. So, surprise, surprise, Reagan's CIA did not follow this new law. In fact, they just doubled down on what they were already doing. In early 1984, they helped lay undersea mines at three Nicaraguan ports. This resulted in two people being killed and 15 wounded. And this time, the Wall Street Journal swooped in, exposing the whole thing. And Congress was like, seriously? We just told you not to do this.
27:43 Speaker 00 Uh, so in 1984, they came back with an even stricter, more explicit law. And they're like, guys, we really mean it this time. No more meddling in Nicaragua.
27:53 Speaker 01 Stop it.
27:54 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, at this point, is it, are they really doing anything than just writing a strongly worded letter?
27:58 Speaker 01 No, this is a series of strike the Boland amendment, amendment. Like, yeah.
28:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. This is, uh, I guess Congress has just become a strongly worded letter apparatus.
28:09 Speaker 01 That's kind of all they do. Yelp review for you, review for the president.
28:16 Speaker 00 Yes, it carries all the gravitas of a bad Yelp review.
28:24 Speaker 00 Well, cue Reagan's team finding a loophole yet again. The National Security Council, or NSC, basically said, hey, the Boland Amendment only restricts intelligence agencies and we're not technically an intelligence agency. Which is a bit like a casino saying like, we're not a massive gambling operation. We're just a little mom and pop motel with some card games in the lobby.
28:50 Speaker 01 This is a bar with slots.
28:52 Speaker 00 Quick little bit of context. The National Security Council is the president's inner circle on foreign policy. Usually it will contain the vice president, the secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security advisor, all the heavy hitters coordinating military intelligence and diplomacy. So they're kind of overseeing the intelligence agencies, but they're technically, I guess they're sort of excusing themselves like, we're technically not an intelligence agency. So the wording doesn't apply here.
29:21 Speaker 01 Right, right, right.
29:22 Speaker 00 But if there is a giant global move on the, on behalf of the United States, like it's because of this group.
29:30 Speaker 01 Right, right. And there's certainly like orders are going out to intelligence agencies as a result of stuff the NSC is doing.
29:36 Speaker 00 Exactly.
29:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:37 Speaker 00 But by declaring themselves not an intelligence agency, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. They effectively sidestepped the law and kept on covertly operating, uh, in Nicaragua and beyond. There's something so incredible about how bullshittable. Our legal system is.
29:54 Speaker 01 It really is.
29:55 Speaker 00 Or not just our legal system, but like our system of laws like or bills amendments congressional sort of mandates and so forth, like lawyers who have mastered the like crawling between the cracks of language in order to justify and carve out things. It's really a wild way that our it's almost like our language fails us because it doesn't address the most obvious and intellectually honest take on something.
30:22 Speaker 01 I think part of the problem is that like we're raised and we grow up in schools. We're educated with this understanding about like the constitution and the bill of rights and the way in which like separation of powers works that is very much taught to us as like, and these are like the pillars of our society and these are like hard rules about how things are supposed to work. And the reality is that like all of the rules that govern what our leaders have the power to do are like the monopoly rules in that like, yeah, there's rules. And if you catch someone doing something wrong, sometimes you can make them like, put the money they stole back in the in the in the bank or whatever. But the name of the game is to get away with what you can get away with.
31:05 Speaker 00 Hmm.
31:06 Speaker 01 There's people who spend their whole lives figuring out how much can we get away with? And some of those people happen to now be Supreme Court justices. So they're they're getting away with a lot more, but like, yeah, that's, yeah.
31:18 Speaker 00 Uh, oh, boy. All of this brings us to a man named Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. And he's the one who's going to sort of rope in Iran to this mess.
31:31 Speaker 03 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's cups, things can get scary fast, especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's cups doesn't need to be.
32:05 Speaker 04 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.
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33:55 Speaker 00 Less at Total Wine and More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21. So, who is Oliver North? He was born in 1943 in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in a middle-class family in New York. He entered the Naval Academy in 1963 and graduated as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1968. After serving in Vietnam, he continued his military career in various roles, and by June 1981, Reagan assigned him to the National Security Council staff. Now, this was a bit unusual. The NSC is typically staffed by civilians to keep the military from getting too entangled in shaping foreign policy.
34:36 Speaker 00 But Reagan blurred that line, bringing in military officers like Oliver North, who wound up serving as an aide to Deputy National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter.
34:48 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
34:49 Speaker 00 Okay, so how does Oliver North drag Iran into a story that started in Nicaragua? Well, let's take a little detour, and then we'll sort of circle back. Remember when Nicaraguan revolutionaries were overthrowing a U.S.-backed dictator in 1979?
35:03 Speaker 01 I sure do.
35:04 Speaker 00 Well, it turns out that kind of the same thing was happening at the exact same time in Iran. So, in 1979, we're back in 1979, the Iranian revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, Mohammed Reza Palavi, and, of course, brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, turning Iran into an Islamic republic, which was openly hostile to the United States. This is the same rupture still driving U.S.-Iran tensions today. It's what Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are relentlessly referring to as they are beating their war drums.
35:44 Speaker 00 It's so crazy to me that we're talking about 1979 revolutions and Cold War fears, and it's all knotted up in today's headlines, right? Is this history repeating, or is it just sort of a story that has never finished?
35:58 Speaker 01 You know, it's a story that's never finished, because people like to, I think, history repeating is certainly a way you can look at it. I tend to think of it as like, if you have like an issue with like your pipes and like you have to like get the plunger in or whatever like snake your drain. But you don't actually like clean it all the way. You just get it enough to get it working again. They're like, it's good for now. I'll fix it later. And then you don't fix it for years and you have another like that's like, I, I, I tend to look at especially stuff with like, like our relationship to Iran that way. Because like a lot of what's happening, the guy who like the father of the Shah who gets overthrown in 79 was like an aggressive, violent secularist to where like, he was saying,
36:39 Speaker 01 okay, we're doing away with like all the religious, you know, the, the headscarves and stuff that women wear, all of the religious and traditional clothing that people have worn. But not in like a now you can wear modern clothes if you want, but in a, my cops will beat you up on the street if they see you like wearing the stuff you used to wear.
36:55 Speaker 00 Right, right.
36:55 Speaker 01 And so people get like really angry about that. And like likewise, you get this chunk of the country that is really angry because from previously the British and then the United States are just kind of extracting oil wealth from Iran. And bribing these authoritarian leaders who are then like brutal to the populace and it creates a lot of fuel for reaction. And then once the, once Khomeini takes over and once you get this Islamist hardline government in Iran, because there's so much anger and because they're so hostile to the West, you get this like horrible hostage situation, which is a big part of why Carter loses.
37:34 Speaker 00 We're about to get there.
37:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And it starts to relate. So I, I think it's like, it's a problem we never fixed. And so that's why the problems seem similar every time they crop up, right? Like the conflict.
37:45 Speaker 00 You're getting at this other thing that I'm so fascinated by, which is that as a population, we never settle into the, the, the sort of calm center of things. Just, we just always go, we just swing back and forth. So like the reaction to an oppressive religious government is like an oppressive secular government.
38:05 Speaker 01 Right.
38:05 Speaker 00 It's not, it's not just sort of like, hey, can we just chill? And I do think that that is America at its best is when we're sort of at our most like, let's all just. Chill. Let's just be chill. And, and that's what, that's sort of where, I don't know, that to me is how I interpret the origin of America as being a like, "Hey, everybody's too extreme. We're gonna figure out a way to kind of dial in and like codify a government that, that is, stays in the middle. And it might, and it'll swing, but it's not gonna go to the, these extremes."
38:40 Speaker 01 Right. We're supposed to avoid that. Like, that was at least part of the idea. But I think part of the problem is that when it comes to these countries where we're like backing a leader, we don't care about, like, the, the, the priority was never that Iran would have a stable, functional government that like worked for most Iranians. The priority was, well, we, we need a lot of fuel. And we want to make sure that the Soviets don't wind up having too much influence here. So we didn't like, we never cared about the Iranian government like functioning well. And so, and it's the same thing with Samosa, right, in Nicaragua? Like, when we were supporting him, it was not because, "Well, this guy's legitimately the best pick for the Nicaraguan people," right?
39:17 Speaker 00 All right. Well, we're, uh, we're near the end of 1979 and things are getting extra spicy. Iranian militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages. They held them for 444 days. It dominated the news. It wrecked Jimmy Carter politically. And it cemented Iran in the collective American psyche as a full-blown adversary.
39:42 Speaker 01 Right.
39:43 Speaker 00 This is all the, everything you were referring to a minute ago. Um, now, this is kinda cool. If you've seen the movie Argo, you know, a very wild slice of this story about a fake sci-fi movie production that was created as a cover to help extract six US diplomats from Tehran.
40:03 Speaker 01 Crazy story.
40:04 Speaker 00 I loved that movie. I thought it was so cool. Part of what I loved about it, obviously, it was just a beautifully executed movie with tons of humor and tension and drama. But it's also, to me, sort of Hollywood at its best when, when, when there's like a great collision of storytelling and history. Who knows?
40:25 Speaker 00 How accurate it was, but anything that kind of sparks public interest in history is so fun and exciting.
40:31 Speaker 01 It's a perfect thing, piece of history for Hollywood to cover because it's also inherently a very Hollywood story. Like, the whole reason that plan worked is because everywhere has like an understanding of like what Hollywood is, like even these places that we're in massive conflicts with. So like, yeah, it provided this, this, it's a fascinating story.
40:50 Speaker 00 Anyway, go, go watch our go on your, on your own time listeners and, and then, and then circle back. So we're going to flash forward now, once again, back to 1984. If you remember, we left the Nicaraguan story in 1984 with the Boland Amendment and all of that fallout. And now the NSC has decided, of course, that it is not an intelligence agency. And Reagan was eager to avoid any repeats of this hostage situation that ruined Carter's presidency, which is why he did not respond well to the news that Hezbollah, which was supported by Iran, had now taken 25 American hostages in Lebanon in 1984.
41:33 Speaker 00 Now, eager to protect his reputation, Reagan tasked our friend Ali North with figuring out how to bring those Americans home. The problem? The Iran-backed Hezbollah militants were designated terrorists.
41:49 Speaker 01 Right.
41:50 Speaker 00 Which makes them off limits to direct contact or negotiation. What's more, the US had placed Iran under an embargo because they sponsored Hezbollah. So negotiating or directly dealing with Iran in any way was supposed to be a huge no-no.
42:06 Speaker 01 I, I grew up on enough 90s movies to know the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. Like five different fake presidents told me in action movies as a kid.
42:15 Speaker 00 That is so, that's so great. That's so true. I feel like it emerged in some actual presidential addresses as well.
42:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm sure.
42:23 Speaker 00 But yeah, no, the 90s movie discourse nailed that. We're going to hit the brakes right there and we're going to bring you the final part, the grand conclusion of the Iran-Contra affair next week on Snafu. So keep an eye out. Robert Evans will be returning to hear out the rest of this. And thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with Robert Evans next week for part two of this insane story.
42:50 Speaker 00 Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson.
43:33 Speaker 00 Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
44:08 Speaker 03 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
44:38 Speaker 06 Halloween's almost here, and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share, and I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21.
44:53 Speaker 02 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Previous Cambridge Analytica: Facebook's Big Data Scandal - Part II (with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton) Next Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans & The Iran-Contra Arms Dealing Scandal (Part II) Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated