Stuff You Should Know - Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s, Part 1

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

When Ronald Reagan was president, America got involved in some deeply shady stuff, not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal – a convoluted operation that managed to combine an illegal covert war in Nicaragua with secretly selling arms to Iran. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, and we're coming to see you guys. Some of you, some cities, just listen up. That's right, because we just did Chicago and Toronto, and it went great.

And I think our topic of bleep went really well. Sure did. And everyone loved hearing about bleep. That's right. So if you're in Boston, you can come see us on August 29th at the Wilbur. Portland, Maine, Maine? At the State Theater on August 30th, I can't wait.

I'm gonna it's Labor Day weekend. I'm gonna stay the whole weekend. I'll be all over Maine. That's great, man. Where else? We're gonna be in Orlando on October 9th, and then on October 10th, we're gonna be in New Orleans, man. And then later on that month, we're doing a three-night stand,

the 23rd, 24th, and 25th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. That's right. 25th is sold out, but you can still get tickets for the 23rd and 24th, and we will see you then. Check it out at sysklive.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there eating with chopsticks, as a matter of fact. You know, when Jerry pulls up the chopsticks. It's time to record. That's right. Yeah.

She's got Facebook open, and she's sitting there with her chopsticks, so we're recording now. Jerry's been fork-free since 83. Speaking of 83. Your shirt? I guess it's kind of 83-ish. Looks very Thomas Magnum.

It does, Chuck. It does, not just the shirt, the whole outfit. Look at the jeans, the shoes. Yeah? Yeah. You got the Ferrari out back? Thank you for noticing, man. I look like a chubby Thomas Magnum.

It's funny because I just finished Stranger Things 3, and saw that there was a, have you seen it yet? Are you into that? No, I like the first season. I never really got back into it after that. No offense to anybody. Sure. The main, the sheriff guy.

Yeah. Hopper wears a shirt, kind of like that, through most of the season. Is that right? And so someone did a cut of like a Magnum PI intro, and had him running around and shooting things, and jumping into cars, all set to the Magnum thing. Very cool.

And it really fits, so all you got to do is throw that song with a guy with a shirt like that, and it's Magnum. Yep. Of course, he has some mustache, too. Well, I'm a mustache-less chubby Magnum. You should wear a mustache. That looks interesting. I don't know.

It do solve a lot of mysteries, though. Nothing can change a look like mustaches. Oh, dude. Instantaneously. Right, especially a fake mustache, because you just put it on, and bam, you're done. That's right. So I tried, I'm going to go back to the 83 segue.

Yeah, we're here, right in the middle of the 80s. Yeah, like this was super 80s. This is as 80s as it gets, the Iran Contra affair. That's what we're talking about. Some people call it Iran Gate. I poo poo that name. Iran Contra. Sure.

I remember this going on at the time. Me, too. I remember watching Oliver North testify. Me, too. And my sister was like, he's so dreamy. Look at how much poise he has. He got his dress greens on, all those medals. He had his Boy Scout three fingers up, swearing.

I really think he did do that. But even as an adult, everything I knew about Iran Contra, until researching this, it was just the glossiest version. Well, I mean, I was 10 and 11, so you were seven and eight. Sure, sure. But I mean, still, over time, as you age, you're like, oh, that's what was going on. Or, oh, I understand that.

Even as an adult, my conception of it was not very thorough at all. And as I dug into it, I'm like, this is one of the shadiest things America's ever done, ever. Yeah, and it was really great to do this. And now I know it. Now I have a full understanding of what happened. And if it ever comes up at a party and people are like,

what was that all about anyway? I'm going to be like, wow. Please sit down for an hour. And I'll just pull up my smartphone and play our episode. Right. Actually, maybe an hour and a half. We'll see how this goes. Yeah, by the way, everyone, this is a two-parter.

Yeah, buckle up. And so this is part one. I figured we'd start with the beginning. I think that's a really good idea. That reminds me of my friend in college. Watched the movie. Oh, which one was it? Weekend at Burnish.

Shortcuts. Weekend at Burnish. It was a movie that was on two video cassettes. What? It was so long. You know, they had to split them up. Was it Magnolia? The bridge too far.

I can't remember. My friend in college, very famously among our friends, watched the second tape first. And then watched the first tape second and didn't really put it together. She was just like, I thought it was a little confusing. Really? So it was accidental.

Oh, yeah. And then she was like, and then she showed up in the second part and I was like, she's already dead. She was kind of country. This is kind of funny. This movie is one of them inachronisms. Well, this is not an anachronism because we're going to be normal, smart, sane people

and start at the beginning. That's right. And there's really no better place to start than the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Ronald Reagan, if you weren't familiar with him already, when he was president, he had already been governor of California. But even before that, he had a pretty extensive career

in Hollywood. And while he was a pretty big star in Hollywood, at least B plus list, if not A list actor. Yeah, I mean, he was a medium-sized star. Sure, but definitely way more famous as president than he ever was as a movie star. Sure. He learned to detest communism.

And at the time, communism was a really big thing in Hollywood. It was very fashionable, especially among the intellectuals of Hollywood. And he learned to hate it so much so that by the time he got to be president, he had this idea that it was impossible for capitalist democracy and communism to coexist even peacefully on Earth. You couldn't have both.

You had to have one or the other. And by God, Ronald Reagan was going to see to it that the one that we had was a capitalist democracy. Yeah, he wanted to stamp out communism wherever it reared its head. And it was rearing its head close to home, which we'll see here in a second, but all over the world.

Oh yeah, for sure, it was called the Reagan. Yeah, bits and pieces of it were. Right, and he came up with the Reagan doctrine. And the Reagan doctrine was we will aid any opposition to communism wherever it sprouts. Like if you're fighting against a communist revolution, we'll support your country. If you're a rebel fighting against a leftist communist

government, we'll help you overthrow. That's the Reagan doctrine. Yeah, via money, via arms, via training, via covert operations that we carried out ourselves. There were all kinds of ways that we could and did help stem the flow of communism. So there was, as you were saying, there was a place pretty close to home

where communism had sprouted up. And that was Nicaragua, down in Central America. And in Central America in the 30s, the Sandinista government had taken power and had held on to power well into the 70s and by this time the early 80s. And it drove Ronald Reagan nuts that there was a communist power right there

that was being supported by the Soviet Union through Cuba ostensibly. I've never gotten the impression that this was ever conclusively proven. They definitely got support from Cuba. But whether it was the Soviet Union who was really calling the shots of Nicaragua or not, I don't know. Yeah, and I think to go even further back

and draw the lines a little even more clear, the Sandinistas were named for Augusto Sandino, who led the Nationalist Rebellion against what? The U.S. occupation of Central America. Oh, that's where it started, huh? That's where it all started. And from 19, the U.S. occupied, this is all part of the banana wars.

So we occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, for a lot of reasons. But one was like, hey, no one's gonna build a canal here unless it's us. That was sort of one of the main reasons. And that all ceased in 1933 with Roosevelt's good neighbor policy, which is basically like, we're gonna pull out of Nicaragua.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. But we had our fingers all over Central America for many, many, many years. And that's why when people forget or choose not to remember when people flee horrible situations in Central America to come to the United States now,

like kind of where all these horrible situations started years and years ago because of things that we did. Right. Well, when Reagan became president, intervening in Nicaragua, man, I'm gonna have a hard time if I can't say Nicaragua, intervening in Nicaragua became like a,

first and foremost priority for him. Yeah, for sure. Almost immediately they started funding the Contras, the Contra Rebels or the groups who were fighting against the San Anista government. They were right-wing groups and they were funding them. They were training them like you were saying. And they were doing all this secretly.

There was an operation called Operation Black Eagle. Man, that one. That was something else. Yeah. So we were already funding them. And at the time, Congress was on board. Congress was on board, especially at first, because the Republicans controlled the house.

Well, you know how when somebody comes in and just steamrolls over the other party, usually in a presidential election, very frequently there's, in the midterms, the congressional midterms, there's like a backlash against that. Yeah, like a house flip. Believe it or not, that happened to Ronald Reagan in 1982.

Yeah. And the house did flip. They flipped over to the Democrats. And that Democrat-controlled house, combined with the Newsweek cover story that came out, kind of turned the tide against Reagan's policy on helping out in Nicaragua. Yeah, there was a CIA director named William Casey,

who was kind of telling Congress what they needed to hear here and there. You have been here vague briefings. That was probably a generous way to say it. Sometimes Casey would send another guy though, named Dwayne Dewey-Claridge. And this is where things really went south, because Claridge did not present well to Congress.

And anytime Congress feels like they're being subverted or ignored or like kept out of the loop, or like not able to offer their checks and balances on the executive branch, they really get mad. They do. Like we're seeing that today. This is like, history just repeats itself over and over again.

Exactly, yeah. And in this particular case, the place where the administration, the Reagan administration and Congress just started butting heads over Nicaragua, it was Dwayne Claridge. Yeah. You know, he just, that's how poor a job he did.

But in his defense, he was coming from a place where he was a CIA man through and through. And this is less than 10 years after Congress had just basically rooted out the CIA, held public hearings. That's when like the MK Ultra came out and the fact that they'd been dosing, unsuspecting Americans with LSD.

Yeah, so in his defense, he was mad because they uncovered all the awful things that he'd been doing. Right, true compassion, Chuck. That's true compassion. So Congress is starting to get a little unhappy with this. And there was one congressman in particular named Edward Boland, I believe.

And he was from Massachusetts. And he said, hey, I just read about this cover story in Newsweek. It has a title, America's Secret War, colon Nicaragua. Seems like they should have flip-flopped that, Nicaragua colon America's Secret War. I think they both have the same end goal.

That's fine, right. But he was like, wait, why am I reading about this in a magazine? Yes. And I'm a member of Congress. Right, because at this time, like Congress is like, well, okay, we think we're just kind of funding things. We're maybe helping out a little bit.

This Newsweek magazine was like, no, no, no, it's way more than that. Like there is way more American involvement down in Nicaragua than you've been led to believe Congress. Like actual covert CIA ops, like blowing up bridges and blowing up buildings and direct saboteur type ops. Yeah, not just here's some arms. And then you close this one eye,

but leave this eye open when you're shooting. There was way more involved than that. Or we could just do the shooting. Basically, here, just let me do it. So Congress in the guise of Edward Boland said, nope, we're not doing that. And they passed the Boland Amendment, which basically said, if you cannot use CIA funds

or Defense Department funds to aid the Contras in Nicaragua, it's done good night. That's right. And Congress went to sleep. And so that should have been the, that's the end of it, right? Because Congress passed a, what was it, a law? No, passed an amendment.

Inact. Inact. And so everyone just stopped, right? That's how it works. All right, what's part two gonna be about? We're just gonna see here quietly. So this did not stop anything. Here's what happened in 1983.

The CIA had this one operation where they went into the commercial shipping harbors of Nicaragua. Oh boy. I know, it's contagious. I said it right in my head all morning, Nicaragua. Thank you. And they put mines there, you know,

I was about to say land mines, but they were sea mines. Yeah, mines. Floating mines. Right. And the idea here was we're gonna plant these mines, that we're gonna whip up our own press releases for the Contras, where they take credit for it. Like we don't even trust them to ride a good press release.

Right, the CIA wrote the press release for them. So where the Contras are saying that they did it, and the overall effect it's gonna have is they're not gonna be able to ship arms via the seaport at least, into Nicaragua. Plus it also makes the Contras look way more together. Sure. And with it than they actually were.

Right, like all we need to do is give them some money and they got it covered. Right, so the CIA does this, and they're thinking, okay, so shipping in the Nicaraguan harbors is gonna stop. It does not stop. No. As a matter of fact, there was damage, so they used a little firecracker mines,

which make a big blast and a lot of water everywhere, but if it's a big ship, it's not gonna hurt the ship. Well, it sunk a lot of small fishing vessels, but it also damaged ships from the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, and the USSR, commercial ships. So the Wall Street Journal broke this story and said, hey, you guys, Congress, you remember how you passed this amendment saying

there could be no CIA involvement in Nicaragua? Well, they mined the harbor of the sovereign nation and it blew up a bunch of other countries ships. And Congress, once again, it's like, man, you keep doing secret things behind your back that really makes us mad. Right. Should we take a break?

All right, let's take a break. י On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey, Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey, Dude as our jumping off point,

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Stuff you should know. Okay, let's keep going. So what does Congress do? They're like, all right. They're mad. We passed one bowl in amendment, which I don't think we said, Chuck, that first bowl in amendment was passed 411 to zero.

Yeah. Unanimously saying, do not mess around in Nicaragua anymore. That's when you know Congress is mad. Right, when they unanimously agree on something. And then the Wall Street Journal breaks the story about the harbor mining long after the bowling amendment was passed. And now Congress is even madder.

Right, so they passed two more amendments, bowling amendments, because there were loopholes basically that allowed, you know, the U.S. to sort of do these things semi-legally. So it was like, well, here's a loophole, so it wasn't really fully illegal that we did this stuff. Yeah, that's like the Reagan administration's way. All right, they close these loopholes.

And now this was like, it was pretty ironclad. I don't know about ironclad, but it was pretty tight amendment-wise. At the very least, Congress walked away thinking, it's done, it's settled. We made ourselves quite clear. Right. Ronald Reagan signed these into law.

Yeah, he didn't veto them. Nope, he accepted these things. I think he even said like, yeah, this is a good idea, great way to go Congress and signed it. I'm not gonna do a Reagan impression. But so Congress thought that the matter was settled, but it wasn't settled. Like this is how laser-focused Reagan was

on overthrowing the Sandinista government down in Nicaragua. He just took a CIA operation and took it even further underground than it had been before. Basically, he was like, okay, if you guys are gonna outlaw this stuff, we're just gonna have to get even more illegal.

Yeah, so there were a couple of factions here at work. One was this continued operation underground, deep underground now. And then there was Reagan's public. Like he still wanted to get real money from Congress. So he didn't have to do this stuff. So he kept up this public PR campaign, beating this drum about communism at our doorstep.

He said that the contras were the moral equals of our founding fathers. That's a big one to pull out. Like that's a direct quote of our founding fathers. And started in with the... And again, you see this stuff kind of repeating itself. The campaign of fear where he basically said, unless we do something tough here,

then there will be a tidal wave of feat people. I don't even know what that means, but that just seems super offensive. Swarming into our country, he meant refugees. Feet people. Seeking a safe haven. It was one word even, I think. One word.

It's funny because I looked up feet people and that's a company that I think makes shoelaces. And they're like, yes, say it again. Say.com. So this is all going on. And on the down low, all the operations are going on. And on the public facing side, Reagan's just continuing this PR push.

Right, basically saying like Congress, look at these heartless old gas bags turning off the funding to these founding father, moral equivalent to our founding fathers, go vote these guys out of office and vote in some people who will turn the funding back on. Yeah, and while the Contras may have been fighting communism, they were doing so through means

that the founding fathers probably would not have approved of, like murder and torture and rape and mutilation, kidnapping and not, you know, I mean, it wasn't so widespread that it was like that's all they were doing, but they would resort to those tactics. Right. And that's not founding father stuff.

No, it's definitely not as far as I've ever learned. No, I don't think so. And I mean, it's had a few hundred, a couple hundred years to come out. Yeah. And it still hasn't, so yeah. I read some of the stuff too, like some of the affidavits were like just brutal.

Oh yeah, dude, the war down in Nicaragua, the civil war that the US basically fomented and supported, it went on for a decade. Like it was, it went on into the 90s and it was like, not just like countrymen against countrymen, like civilians were getting murdered by the scores and just they would get kidnapped and tortured and killed.

And like, it was a really brutal time in Nicaragua and the, the regular administration was right in the middle of this, like providing as much aid as they can to one side. Yeah, and it was, one of the big problems was that the Contras back then were a bunch of different factions and they didn't answer to a single leader and the one thing I got

out of the affidavits, one of which this woman described them taking her children and her finding their mutilated bodies the next day, it was brutal. One of the leaders said that there's, there's no disciplinary system at all within the Contra groups. So like, yeah, like there's no accountability. So you could do anything you wanted

and there's no discipline set up. So it was just, they were fractured and no one, you know, was talking to each other and it was just a big mess. Right. But Reagan was doing his best to, to paint everything in black and white. Right.

Contras good, San Anista is bad. So anything that Contras did was good and stuff that couldn't be painted as good would just be denied or glossed over and not reported on. That's right. So while, while Reagan's out running around trying to drum up public support for the Contras and thus congressional aid being turned back on.

And also saying, don't do drugs. He, yeah, that was a big one. Even though we're shipping a lot of drugs back and forth. It's awfully rich now that you know all that stuff, you know. He's also secretly supporting them, going in flagrant violation of what Congress has said that America can do. He tells his people, he wants the Contras movement

to be kept alive, body and soul is how we put it. Which, and he basically said, do it. This is what history has told us, is that Reagan basically said, keep the Contras movement alive, body and soul. I'm gonna go work on Congress. I'm putting my hands over my ears from now on. Whether that's true or not, we will probably never know.

Right, because it's all been trusted. As far as the history books is concerned, that's what happened. Right, so here's what they did. They said the CIA has a bad rap for a lot of reasons and Congress is not super friendly with them. Well, they expressly forbade the CIA from operating there. Right, so he said, here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna use the National Security Council. And the CIA chief, William Casey, he's around. He's gonna just like advise here and there. And William Casey was like, oh no, I really gotta be involved, because this is really good stuff. They're like, no, no, no, we're talking like officially. Here's, oh, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, sure.

Exactly. So at first, National Security Advisors, Robert McFarlane, and then he was succeeded by John Poindexter. Very important, you remember that name. And then Casey's still there, like you said, doing his thing on the download, unofficially. Right, I think even in some cases,

kind of stepping on toes or whatever, he was like an additional boss to the main guy, the guy everybody's heard of, the guy whose name jumps to mine. When you hear about this, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Ollie North. And in retrospect, especially if you live through

the Iran Contra hearings and you're familiar with Ollie North, like you would guess that when Ollie North was tapped to head up this extraordinarily difficult secret operation to go against Congress and keep the Contra movement alive and kicking, that Ollie North was a bad A covert operator to the ninth degree, right? That is not at all correct. No, career Marine, very highly decorated Marine,

served in Vietnam, won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts, devout Catholic, and by all accounts, a standup guy, and to many, many Americans, he is still like a top notch American hero. Sure, well, he was like the president of the NRA until I think recently. I think there's some scandal that just happened where it came out that he tried to depose

Wayne LaPierre or something like that. I don't know. I don't either, but even beyond that, like even beyond whether he's a standup guy or not as far as patriotism is concerned, just job experience, he had like none. He had no experience whatsoever, as far as I could ever tell, in covert operations.

He did a pretty good job for a while. He did an amazing job. He was basically the White House's operations and intel arm of the shadiest stuff it was doing. Stuff that was so shady, the CIA was even kept in the dark about it. That's how shady the stuff Ollie North was doing, and he had no experience, he was learning as he went,

just making it up as he went along. And he really did do a pretty good job of it if you look at it from that angle. Just as far as like getting her done. Right. So what they basically decided was, all right, if we can't get the real taxpayer money and like official funds, we'll just go and raise funds

on the side and secret through business people that we can have these big parties and dinners and say, hey, listen, communism is knocking at a door. This wouldn't be good for America. It wouldn't be good for your company. Right. And why don't you give us some money? Open up the checkbook.

Right. Reagan's here, you want a photo? Yeah, sometimes he would show up to these secret fundraisers. And it really worked. Like they raised a ton of money from the business elite of America to stop the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

So they actually forget this. They founded, they had two private citizens found a nonprofit, the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty. It's sole purpose was to get these illicit funds to send to the Contras. Which means that the people who are donating to the president's illegal secret proxy war

could write their donations off on their taxes. That's right. It's just mind boggling and hilarious in some senses. Yeah, but they were not the most stand up nonprofit because as you point out, they raised $6.3 million through that organization during 85, 86, about 3.3 million made it to the Contras. And so that means a 52% program expense rate.

That's pretty bad. Yeah. That's not good at all. About $3 million it took supposedly to run to run that nonprofit. Those fundraising breakfasts for a year. Yeah, pretty bad. Good omelets though.

So, yeah, we have the best. Top notch. Yeah. So from this idea like, okay, this is probably kind of legal. We're just fundraising. Right. We're not giving any American taxpayer funds.

We're just getting other people to donate. Private citizens, Saudi Arabia was a big one. And it was all to stop communism. So like, I think their intentions were that. Oh, definitely. Theirs were. Yeah. But there was a definite and justifies the means

kind of thing. And really, isn't the president really the most powerful person in the world? Right. Can Congress really tell the president what to do as far as foreign policy goes? Yeah. That was kind of the idea, I think.

So Saudi Arabia donated a bunch of money. There's all these private citizens donating money. And here's the thing. The Contras found themselves flush with cash. Yeah, many millions of dollars. Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated 32 million to the Contras. This is a couple of loosely affiliated factions fighting

in two spots of Nicaragua that suddenly have $30 plus million at their disposal. The problem is, they don't have the contacts in the international arms trade to buy arms with this money. They had a bunch of money, and they're like, who wants this? Right. And they were getting crickets in return. He's got some bombs.

Right. You know, the cartoonish black kind, the round ones that are shiny? Take 15 of those. This is before Craigslist, too. Right. So their only avenue was to go back to the Americans and all over North.

And he began working with a guy named Richard Secord. He was a retired, forced retired. We'll get into that in a minute. Air Force Major General. And he had a lot of experience. There was this group of dudes in the 1970s and 80s that were former CIA or current CIA, former CIA, former and current American military who were all

had their fingers in the illegal arms trade. Right. So exactly what you can imagine a Hollywood writer would come up with, this is the real life version of it. Yeah, for sure. So they would, you could farm out assassinations to them. They could rustle up mercenaries. They could carry out sabotage operations.

They could find whatever gun, bomb, anything you needed. You want some money laundered? Done. Right. Anything that is extraordinarily illegal and deals in death, like these guys could get their hands on. You want some poison? Done.

Sure. A bomb disguised as a briefcase? We got it, buddy. And they would, here's the other thing, too. They were an illegal black market arms ring. But they were also even more illegal in that they would sell to whoever. Whether you were an enemy or a friend to America,

it didn't matter. These guys were operating well above any sort of national loyalty or anything like that. Yeah, this was about making money. Sure. Like many millions of dollars. Yeah, you're right. So especially a guy like Secord, he wasn't,

he was in it to make dough. Definitely. Whereas an Ollie North was seemingly in it to stop the communism. Right, so that's an important point. But the fact that they contract with Secord to kind of swoop in and help hook the contras up with arms means that the Reagan administration

is contracting with this extraordinarily illegal black market arms ring. Yeah, one of which, they took down some of these dudes over the years. One of them, one of the founders of this group was a CIA op named Edwin Wilson. He was sentenced, he served 22 years, 12 of which were in solitary confinement, but was sentenced to 52 years

for illegally arming Libya with 10,000 machine guns and 20 tons of C4 that he hid in barrels of mud and flew on a chartered jet to Libya. Right, himself. It's like Hollywood stuff. I know, it really is. Like this really happened. It's crazy.

And it wasn't just Libya. This guy was funding or outfitting Momar Gaddafi. Oh yeah. Idi Amin was another customer. Like whoever, if you need to keep a stranglehold on power in your country, we're the people that help you do that. Yeah, and when I teased earlier about Richard Secord

being forced into retirement, that was due to his connection with Edwin Wilson. Right. So he was forced to retire from the Air Force. They couldn't pin anything on him, but there was enough of a connection there where he had to step down. Yeah, they're like, you can do this the hard way

or the easy way, we're going to give you the option. And he took the easy way. And then he went on to make a lot of money. Right, he was like, OK, well, I'll just do the arm stealing thing full time now. Right. And he did. So when they brought him in, at first,

Secord was basically acting as a very laissez-faire intermediary. He was basically the guy who, on behalf of Ollie North, was like, yeah, I can introduce the Contras to my friends in the Arms Ring. Yeah, in Canada of all places. Yeah, he introduced the Contras to some Canadian arms dealers.

So now the setup was this. The friendliest arms dealer. Right, they're like, oh, these bullets will really put a hole in somebody, eh? Yeah, oh, sorry, I meant to include rocket launchers on that order. Sorry, sorry. That was pretty good.

So Secord was just there to make some introductions, make sure things went smoothly. And then it was up to the Contras to use these funds that were coming in from other people and to buy weapons from the Canadians. Easy peasy, right? You'd think, OK, that's fine, that's done. It still has a slight veneer of arms length legality

as far as America is concerned. Yeah, and we should mention, too, that to do this, he set up a shell company, the Stanford Technology Trading Group, with an Iranian-American businessman named Albert Hakim, who knew how to get around certain official procedures and stuff like that. He's another guy who could get things done. So he set up Swiss bank accounts, untraceable accounts,

because that's what you do. To run the funds through. And this became known as the Enterprise. Yeah, the Stanford Technology Trading Company, or Group. Trading Group, AKA the Enterprise. Yeah, that was like everybody called it that, because they're like, this sounds way cooler, the Enterprise. All right, but like you were alluding to,

you think it would have been going great. But the Contras in the North, who was the FDN, they were the largest by far, the largest group. They were the better organized from what I understand. Yeah, they were doing a pretty good job. But in the South, they were not doing a very good job. No, somehow, they were like, we don't have the arms and equipment, they're like, what are you talking about?

You have the same amount of money, you have the same contacts. Just buy the weapons, and they're like, oh, no. So, Ollie North is like, OK, all right, here's what we're going to do. He called the leaders of the FDN and the FSLN to Miami to meet with them, and he said, here's how it's going to be from now on. Any veneer of legality is going out the window.

From now on, I'd like you to meet your new boss, Richard Secord. Not only is he going to make sure you have arms, he's going to take the funneled money himself by the arms himself, and then he's going to have it kicked out of a plane over your camps. So now America is directly involved in supporting and arming and training

the Contra rebels in the North and the South of Nicaragua, and if there was any, again, if there's any kind of legality, it's totally gone at this point. Yeah, and in the meantime, Secord and Akeem were marking up their stuff as much as, like, 300%. Dude, they made a lot of money off of this. Yeah, they made a ton. But they put a lot back into the enterprise.

I mean, they took this job very seriously. Oh, yeah, it was a company. If you were Ollie North, you were quite happy with the work you were getting from Richard Secord and Albert Hykeem, because the shipments went out on time. They got everything they needed. They had so much money, they had it left over.

But they were also investing it into the enterprise. They bought planes. They rented airstrips. They hired employees. They contracted with other, like, airlines, like a CIA front. I can't remember the name of it right now. But they were doing the work, for sure. Great health care.

Yeah, the best benefits. All of the Contras had really nice teeth after Richard Secord took over. Work from home? Yeah. All right, so let's take another break here. And we'll come back and bring it home for part one with a little bit about the propaganda machine

that was set up. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Lush and sharp. Woo! ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

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Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you should know. All right, Chuck. So things are in full swing. America is unknowingly totally hooking up the Contras. Now, basically running this proxy war that the Contras are fighting against the Sandinista government.

Right. The enterprise is working full bore. And if it couldn't get any more illegal, if you thought it couldn't get any more illegal, prepare to just be knocked right over. Yeah, so here on the home front, it was decided that there needed to be a pretty massive and dense propaganda campaign.

And we're not talking about Reagan just going on the news, talking about communism being at our doorstep. We're talking about a real deal propaganda campaign. And they even set up an office, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, that was founded and managed by a Cuban-American named Otto Reich. And this was all exposed later on by the Miami Herald,

by the reporting of a guy named Alfonso Chardy. Yeah, I just want to interject here real quick. So do you remember when we've done historic stuff in the past and I'm like, go read the contemporary articles? There was some really good reporting going on, because the story was so huge and multifaceted. Oh yeah, I mean, Newsweek broke it before Congress knew. Yeah, right.

The Washington Post broke it. Yeah, Wall Street Journal. Yeah, Wall Street Journal and then the Miami Herald. Yeah, LA Times did a lot of really good reporting. It was going on like in Miami's backyard. But it was back when it wasn't like, oh, think piece, think piece, think piece, actual article, think piece, think piece.

You know, it was like real reporting. And even then it still wasn't up to snuff in the end, but there were actual journalists like actually paying attention and writing about this stuff and informing the public about it. And this is when you and I were kids and I think like maybe even the seeds of us, because we both kind of had desires

to be real deal journalists in our lives at one point. Look at us now. Speaking of RIP, Mad Magazine. Oh yeah. What a shame. Yeah, they tried that reboot, didn't work. Yeah, it's tough. It is, it's tough biz these days.

And I got friends that worked for them too. Like in this recent re-iteration. Oh really? Yeah, or iteration I guess. I know one of their illustrators is stuff you should know fan from years back. Yeah, it's very sad to see it go. Yeah.

So it was very 80s reference though. It was. It really was an uptrack. So all right, this is going on. They set up this office run by Otto Weich. And this whole thing was designed and orchestrated by the CIA, but here's the deal. The CIA wasn't supposed to be doing this.

They were barred from doing this. Yeah, there was a long standing prohibition on the CIA from operating in the US. Basically like, we know who you are and we know you're so good. You can't use that stuff on us. You can only use it overseas. It's fine if you go overthrow other countries.

On your mind tricks. Yeah, use those on other groups, but you can't use them here in the States. And actually Reagan himself also had his own executive order explicitly banning the CIA from, let's see, doing any activity that was intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion or media.

This is Reagan's executive order, 12333. And he, at least his administration was like, forget about that, we'll just get around that. Yeah, and who was this? It says here that the CIA's like biggest foremost psychological warfare expert retired from the agency officially and then was hired as a consultant, I guess, to this office of public diplomacy.

Was that Otto Reich? Was that someone else? I don't know. Oh, well, maybe that's the whole point. Right, yeah. But that was how, that's why I was saying earlier, like Reagan, that's the Reagan administration way. Just like, here's the letter of the law.

Well, let's change this letter in our sentence and now we're following the letter of the law. Right. And that's what they did. So the CIA's psychological warfare guy retired, came on as a consultant and said, oh, here's what you do. You need to basically start setting up some sting operations because the point of this is to,

I can't remember who said this, but to paint or to glue black hats on the San Anistas and white hats on the Contras in the public mind. Right, so when you say sting operations, we mean literally the United States and all over North smuggling cocaine into Nicaragua, photographing Sandinista officials with this shipment and then smuggling the cocaine back to the United States.

Back to Florida. Back to Florida. They're like, we told you we'd bring it back. Chill, man. Unbelievable. Give us our driver's licenses back. So this photo was published. This is during the middle of the just say no movement,

championed by Nancy Reagan. Yeah. So it all fit on the surface, but what was going on behind the scenes is just unconscionable. It is unconscionable. Unconscionable. Both.

But this gave Reagan this photograph that got published all over the place. Oh yeah, and he's like, look what's going on. Look what these guys are doing. They're bringing this stuff into America, killing our kids. Exactly, right? So these are the people that were fighting or the Contras are fighting.

How can you keep the funding turned off for the Contras Congress? You jerks. And that was the only evidence too. Yeah, the DNAs somehow came out and said, by the way, I don't know if anybody cares or not, but we have no evidence whatsoever that this Sandinista official has ever engaged

in drug trafficking aside from this photograph. But this was a follow up probably weeks after the big splash of the original photograph came out. So that was one sting operation. There's another one that involved Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who actually was selling drugs to America's youth. But he was also a friend of the CIA.

Exactly, so much so that he was a CIA operative for a very long time. Yeah, I don't know about a friend, but he was at least an asset. Right, so this sting operation was, they were going to, through Panama, have Panama arranged for a shipment of arms to be seized in Honduras.

El Salvador. El Salvador, on its way to Honduras or maybe just in El Salvador, ostensibly arms from Nicaragua. Yeah, basically saying you're arming Salvadorians, you're arming Hondurans. You're exporting your revolution. This is exactly the kind of thing

that Ronald Reagan has been saying we need to contain, we need to pluck this sprout of communism out from Nicaragua, because they're trying to spread out of the region. Totally made up, complete sting operation, and it didn't even work because Manuel Noriega was like, I didn't like that New York Times piece

you guys just published about me. I'm gonna keep this shipment of arms for myself. Yeah, but I love it first, he was like, I can do that. Oh yeah. He's like, sure, send me the arms. And then we were like, oh, okay. There would be, I think it's from the Iran-Contra

investigation, the description of Manuel Noriega was that he ran a narco kleptocracy. That was the government that he ran. He was about to just break down that word. He was as shady as they come. That just means drugs, favorite. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So this is what's going on in the United States

in the mid-80s. Yeah, and here's the deal. If you were a reporter at the time and you were reporting on this stuff, the NSC didn't like that very much. So they would meet with editors and reporters themselves and be like, hey, can you report on the Sandinistas that they're really not good people?

Can you help us out a little bit? Well, but here's the thing, if you didn't play ball, then didn't they cook up some story that they would send like Sandinistas and sex workers there to pleasure the reporters? That was the rumor was that if you were a journalist who reported favorably on the Sandinista government, the reason you reported favorably on them

was because the Sandinista government was furnishing you with sex workers. Right, that was directly from the Office of Public Diplomacy. And I read the thing about it and they said, the guy was like, and we're not just talking women either. If they were gay men, then we would send gay sex workers. Right, so totally discredit them.

It's like a complete page right out of the Edward Bernays playbook. It's orchestrated by the CIA's foremost expert on psychological warfare. And this was the state of America in the mid-80s. But that was just one dimension of this whole thing. And I say, this is the end of part one. What do you think?

I think that's great. And we're gonna make this a cliffhanger. That's right. And as per tradition, we are not going to do a listener mail, but instead we'll do a call, which we rarely do, a little marketing call everyone. If you like stuff, you should know.

We've been doing this so long, we're so bad at this, yet we've managed to grow anyway. It's crazy. Tell a friend, share an episode with a friend, now that they don't have to, you don't have to explain what a podcast is. Right. It's a lot cleaner now.

Let's start with the good one, like ballpoint pens or something. Yeah, tell a friend about the show, leave a nice review, or just any kind of review at all, on iTunes, that would help us out. Yeah, yeah. That's how classy Chuck and I are. He even corrected himself from good review

to just any review. Whatever you wanna leave, we're not gonna try to influence you. No. Like the rig in White House. That's right. So yeah, we'd really appreciate it. Spread a little love,

try and turn one person onto our podcast this week, and that really helps us out. Nice, Chuck. How about that? That sounds like a good pyramid. We like to do this once every five or six years. Well, thank you for joining us this week. If you wanna get in touch with us,

you can go on to stuffyshouldknow.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.