Selects: Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s, Part 2

25:12And there were four crew aboard, William J. Cooper, Wallace Buzz Sawyer, Freddie Vilches, and a guy named Eugene Hassenfuss, who, and again, this sliding doors thing, Hassenfuss is the only guy who had a parachute. He borrowed it from his brother, a skydiver, because, you know, he thought it might be smart to take a parachute. Right. No one else had parachutes. No. Had he not had a parachute, this may have turned out differently. It may have for sure. He was the only one that survived this plane crash because he was the only one who borrowed the parachute from his brother. And he jumped out, landed, made it safely into the jungle.

25:46And I think he actually survived and evaded the Sandinistas for maybe a day or something like that before he was captured. And when he was captured, they led him out of the jungle with a rope around his neck, just about as big of a prisoner as you can imagine. Super publicized. There were billboards of him being led around by Sandinistas. And they started asking him questions. And he was like, what do you want to know? Yeah, he sang like a canary. He really did. He said, this is my 10th supply mission. I presume that the CIA is running this. I don't know. And he would know. This would be something that he could legitimately guess at at least because he had actually worked on CIA airdrops over Vietnam or Cambodia for Air America back in the Vietnam War.

26:39Yeah, but he wasn't like – he sings like a canary because he's not very high up on the totem pole. Like his job was to get up there and shove this stuff out of the back of the plane for three grand a month. Right. He wasn't even a CIA operator. He was just a former Marine who had a background working with Air America years before. But by this time, by the time he joins on doing this for the Contras, he was like working as a construction worker part-time in Wisconsin back home. So this was like pretty good money. I think he was getting seven grand in today's dollars a month for basically kicking AK-47 crates out the back of a plane over Nicaragua.

27:20Yeah, so he's not the kind of guy that's going to take the fall for anyone. So he's singing like a canary. Even if he had kept his mouth shut, it wouldn't have mattered, it sounds like, right? Yeah, because all the other guys, including Hassan Fuss, had their wallets on the plane. They had all their employee ID cards. In fact, I don't think we mentioned in episode one that the company that was set up to do these drops was set up called Southern Air Transport out of, I guess, Miami. So they all had their Southern Air Transport ID cards, which was the CIA front. Like everybody knew Southern Air Transport was the CIA front.

28:00So they might as well have had like CIA junior badges or something. Right. Or like Michael Keaton in Out of Sight when he has the big FBI T-shirt. I haven't seen that one. Oh, you haven't seen Out of Sight? No. Is that the one where he— That's George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Is he a bad guy in it? No, he's a good guy. He walks in. He plays Ray Nicolette, who played the same character in Jackie Brown, FBI guy. Okay. But it's funny because he walks in with an FBI t-shirt on and Dennis Farina is Jennifer Lopez's dad. And he's a former cop. And he goes, hey, Ray, let me ask you. You got one that says undercover?

28:34Dennis Farina, man. Class ad. I mean, you've got to see Out of Sight. That's classic. All right. I'll check it out. Like one of the better movies. I mean, I know exactly the movie you're talking about. Steven Soderbergh. I avoided it like the plague. It's so good. Okay. You would love it. All right. So, Southern Air Transport, CIA Front. There's also a log book that connected this flight and all the other flights. And then Hassanfuss, in his wallet, had a business card to Robert W. Owen. This is a big one. Who was working with Oliver North in Washington. Right, so that provided a direct line between Oliver North and some guys who were kicking Kalashnikovs out of the back of a plane over Nicaragua.

29:12So that was a really big deal when this guy got captured and told the Sandinistas as much as he knew. Because the Sandinistas were like, attention world. Listen to what we just found out. The CIA has totally been funding these Contra rebels who are trying to overthrow the sovereign government. and we think you guys should know about it. Yeah, and it wasn't like you could totally discount that even though it was from the Sandinistans. Like Congress and the American media were like, what? I'm sure Congress was like, wait a minute. Right. This reeks of like something that had been happening that we tried to shut down.

29:50Yeah, because remember, even if the CIA was briefing Congress, it was either Bill Casey or Dewey Claridge and they were doing a really obtuse job of this, keeping Congress at arm's length. So anytime something like this came out, almost none of Congress knew the full extent of this and it was always in flagrant violation of whatever Congress wanted or whatever Congress had agreed to. Yeah, and this was sort of the straw that broke it all open or that broke the camel's back. Broke the camel's back wide open. Oh God, that's gross. Poor camel. Things have been unraveling for a bit There was a party in 1985 In Virginia I can't wait Thrown by Soldier of Fortune magazine Can you imagine?

30:37No What's that party like? I don't want to know I can't imagine I used to read Soldier of Fortune When I was in my ninja training As like a 10 year old boy And even then I was like This magazine makes my stomach hurt And it's in 1985 Like can you imagine the amount of like blow being secretly done in the bathroom at that party? Sure, but also they were making snuff movies in the living room, and there's no telling what was going on in Soldier of Fortune. We can tell you at the very least there was a lot of boasting going on openly about this Contra operation. And again, this is a time when people don't know about this stuff.

31:13Yeah, but you know what happens is like you get enough people and enough years, and people start talking, people start bragging, And all of a sudden you have a couple of gin and tonics at a soldier of fortune party. Sure. You're like, hey, guess what? And that's what happened. Somebody goes, what? Yeah. And you go, here it comes. Yeah, and they drop the bomb that what's been going on, a concerned citizen hears this. I guess he must have been mistakenly invited to the soldier of fortune party. I don't know how that guy got invited. They just happened to talk to the wrong guy or whatever. Probably that.

31:46He was like, I am really fearful of my life for saying something about this, but I feel like somebody should know. So he went to a lawyer, a human rights lawyer named David Sheehan, and he said, you go tell everybody. You put your life on the line. And he did. He submitted an affidavit to federal court, started doing interviews, talking to journalists, drumming up support. White House was like, we don't know what you're talking about. You're a crazy man. Like, this is all 100 % made up. And finally, it took a Lebanese newspaper, Al-Shirah, that reported on this deal, this arms for hostage deal, like in a legitimate newspaper.

32:26Right. So now both stories have been blown open. You've got Eugene Hassanfuss captured and the Contra operation is blown open. And now Al-Shirah is reporting on the Iran arms for hostage deal. And really, crazily enough, these two separate arms of this one scandal came out within a month of each other. Yeah. Which is, it's bizarre. But that's what happened. And now it was like, there's, it's on the table. America's media knows about it. Congress knows about it. Heads are about to roll. All right. We'll take our final break and we'll come back and talk about the aftermath of Iran-Contra. Well, now we're on the road driving in your truck.

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36:43All right, Chuck, you promised after math, let's hear it. All right, so... Jerry just LOL. Everything is exposed. Oliver North was no longer in business doing his thing. No, he shut down shop real quick. He did, but not before, very famously, he and his very 80s haired secretary, Fawn Hall. I forgot. I was like, Fawn Hall? I looked her up, and as soon as I saw her, I was like, right. Fawn Hall. Sure. Who can forget that hair? She could barely walk through a door. No, it was ginormous for sure. It was so great. I would be fearful around a shredder if I were her. But she was not fearful at all. She and Oliver North spent a day, they call it a shredding party.

37:31I mean, we will never know the full truth behind this because of all the evidence that they shredded. Yep. As far as anyone knows, Oliver North decided on his own to shred every document he had on it. That's right. And yeah, that's it. Now it's the official narrative that has been written into the history book, which you can just guarantee is not anywhere near the full story. Right. So it all comes out. The Reagan administration start looking around, and they're like, well, who's going to be the patsy for this one? And Oliver North could not escape it. No. But they're like, he's small potatoes.

38:11He'll go down. Well, I think he was even willing to take the fall. Like he knew he was going to be the fall guy and was like, okay, that's part of the job. Right. But they knew that it had to, the American public and certainly Congress wasn't going to be satisfied with just Oliver North. Right. So who did they land on? So the official line became this. Poindexter, and I guess McFarlane would have started it, became fully aware of just how badly Reagan wanted to help the Contras and said, I'm going to do something about this. and tapped Ali North and said, we need to help the Contras out. Go help them out.

38:47Figure it out. And North went off and basically went rogue on his own and set up this whole operation, created this entire network with Secord, decided to do the Iranian arms deal, all this stuff basically on his own. Right, like Reagan and Bush knew nothing about it. Nothing about it. And that the buck stopped at Poindexter ultimately. It didn't go any further. William Casey being CIA, He was basically out of the loop. That was the official story they came out with. That's right. And America went, you're kidding, right? This is a joke? Yeah, I mean, I remember these hearings, even as a little kid, like watching these and then watching the news coverage of it.

39:26And like we mentioned, Oliver North strolling in there with his dress uniform and, you know, by all accounts being a pretty stand-up guy. Like he didn't rat anyone out. He didn't, but he also, he was like, Like, there's no way the president didn't know about this. He said, I don't have any direct evidence that the president did know about it, but it's my understanding that the president was fully aware of what was going on. Yeah, what was the deal with this missile supply shipment, though? That's the one thing I didn't quite get. So, there was—North got rid of all the documents that he could, right?

39:58Right. Well, North didn't have any control over CIA documents. And at that first missile resupply, where they were resupplying Israel, Yeah. He had a CIA. He basically said, hey, CIA, do you know anybody I can use to ship these things? I've got an emergency here. I need to get these to Israel fast. Yeah. And the CIA, being the CIA is still a bureaucracy, they had to document this event. Right. So there was a document out there now. Right. That was not shredded. Right. That he couldn't get his hands on, that he couldn't shred. And so this led to Reagan taking responsibility for saying, okay, I was aware of this Iran missile deal by backdating an order to William Casey saying, I order you not to tell Congress about this even though you're supposed to.

40:47So Reagan basically said, on paper, I know about this Iran, this one missile transfer to Iran. Had no idea about the Contras. Right. Okay. And at first they started out denying everything. Oh, yeah. Like after this Al Shira story that we talked about, he went on television, Reagan did, and denied everything. He said all this is just total BS. Yeah, exactly. Now let's stop talking about it, everybody. Ten days after that, Reagan had another press conference where he talked about the Iran operation. And he acknowledged it but said what we're really doing here is just trying to sort of send a signal to Iran that we want friendlier relations.

41:26Right. And it was not Arms for Hostage. Exactly. And then, so that was 10 days after the first deny. Right. And then four months after that, because the reporting would not stop, he basically said, okay, yeah, whatever it started out as, I admit that it devolved into an Arms for Hostage deal. That's right. Which even that, even that admission, which is the closest he ever came to admitting, you know, responsibility for it. Yeah. Even that's just total BS and fantasy. It was from the outset an Arms for Hostages deal. Right. The whole thing was set up to get hostages released, and that was it. So there was no other way to put it.

42:03But he denied that to his dying day. As far as fallout, Poindexter resigned. Oliver North was fired. Casey died in a hospital not too long after this whole thing was exposed. I mean, like weeks. Yeah. So the press was all over the president. He appointed the Tower Commission to look into this. The president appointed a commission to investigate the president's own administration's wrongdoing. That's right. And it was determined that Reagan's disengagement from the management of his White House created conditions such that it was possible that he did not know about this. Which is the absolute best official finding he could have hoped for because it basically says Reagan didn't know.

42:53He had a rogue guy working for him, a true believer, a patriot. But Reagan didn't know about this. And, yeah, he should have had a closer watch on his executive branch, but he didn't. What are you going to do? Let's get Mr. T in here for a photo op with Nancy. There was a criminal investigation, and what they were really honing in on was the$18 million in profits that were made. And what happened to that money, where it went? 14 people were charged. Oliver North was tried and found guilty on three counts. Yeah. One of the counts was for getting a$16 ,000 security system installed in his home, courtesy of Secord, with that money.

43:37There was a rumor that there was a bounty on his head from terrorists. Right. Secord hooked him up. Right. Now, that was a big problem for North because North's whole bag was, I was following orders that I assumed were coming from the president, ultimately, and I was doing it out of my patriotic duty and a sense of, you know, I was a true believer that we need to get rid of communism. And the American public loved it. They were like, great, make this man a saint. Congress started to love it, too, and he got off. But that was a real problem because it's saying, well, you took this gift from funds from this illicit arms sales.

44:15Right, but it was a gift of a security system to help protect his family. So it's not like, you know, it was a gift of 10 pounds of blow and like... Right. And a Nicaraguan sex worker from the Sandinistan government. Exactly. Secord was convicted of one count of lying to Congress and the investigators. He basically denied that North received any funds from any of this. So it still kind of hinged on that security system, I guess. Right, right. So everybody went to jail forever after that point, right? No, that's not true at all. What? Hakeem got two years probation, a$5 ,000 fine. Secord got two years probation.

44:53Is that what he got? Yep, both of them. Two years probation? So the two guys who were actually running the company that ran this whole thing, each got two years probation. North's conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush, the senior Bush, on Christmas Eve, and this was Christmas Eve as he was leaving office, right? Yep. He issued six pardons, basically let everyone off the hook, including Casper Weinberger, who hadn't even gone to trial yet. No, and neither had Duane Claridge. Dewey Claridge was going to stay on trial too. Both of them received preemptive pardons. And a lot of people are like, that was about the shadiest set of pardons anyone's ever issued.

45:32Because there's a lot of people out there who say, Bush really walked away from this scot-free, but there is no way he wasn't even more involved in this than Reagan was. Yeah, I mean, George Bush withheld his subpoenaed diary entries that basically indicated that he had full knowledge of this the entire time. Eventually, in 1992, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh asked for these again, and Bush said, I asked you for these diary entries, and Bush was like, I didn't. You did? I didn't fully understand. And it was inadvertent. Like you asked me for a lot of stuff. I didn't know you asked me for the diary entries.

46:11Right. And Walsh was really upset. And he said the Iran-Contra cover-up has now been completed. And George Bush is a president who has such a contempt for honesty and arrogant disregard for the rule of law. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean the forestalling that the Reagan White House and then later on the Bush White House did in allowing these investigations to go forward and trying to keep Congress at arm's length after everything came out, it worked because there were articles of impeachment introduced in the House against Ronald Reagan, and they managed to stave him off to where it was like, well, he's leaving office anyway, forget about it.

46:52This investigation took years and years and years, And then finally, when Bush pardoned everybody, that was it. There was nothing else to do. Everybody who was involved was off scot-free. And then the fact that Oliver North had shredded all those documents, they were all lost to history. Like the actual truth is lost to history. Yeah, Reagan, his reputation took a hit, a temporary hit. But for a while there, he went from 63 % in the span of a couple of months to 43 % to 47%, depending on which poll you looked at, on his approval rating. And he would get it back, though, despite in the 1990 deposition, the very, very famous deposition where Ronald Reagan said, I don't remember or I don't recall, 88 times.

47:40That was a very big deal. It was all over the news. Yeah, it was. Almost as famous or just as famous as Bill Clinton's very famous. Depends what your definition of is, is. Right, exactly. But Reagan rebounded. He did, man, to the most popular presidency since FDR, right? Yeah, upon his exit, his approval rating had bounced all the way back up to the early 60s. Mr. T famously carried him out of the White House on his shoulders on his last day in office. Oh, man. So that's Iran Contra, man. What a story. A heck of a story. Where's this movie? I don't know. Hopefully we'll get some rights to it after this episode.

48:19I want to play Fawn Hall. Awesome. That's great. You get Jerry to play Fawn Hall. That'd be great, Jerry. Well, in the meantime, while we find a suitable wig for Jerry, you can find out more about Iran-Contra by going and reading contemporary articles on it. I'm telling you, it's really awesome. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this follow-up on the moon landing thing. Hey, guys. In my opinion, the Apollo missions and moon landings are the most significant events in the history of life on Earth. On the question why the command module and lunar lander were launched separated, I think the reason was to allow the command module to be ejected in case of an emergency.

49:02At the very top of the Apollo stack was the launch escape system, like an ejector seat on steroids. I imagine they had to keep things as light and nimble as possible for the LES to be effective. I don't think you mentioned something that's really significant. The Apollo 8 mission was the very first time humans went to the moon, on top of being the first time we broke free of Earth's gravity. Like 11, the stakes were incredibly high. They had to first insert the correct trajectory to make it to the moon, then do a burn to enter the orbit around the moon, then perform another burn to break free of the moon's gravity and head back toward Earth.

49:34If any piece was not in place, those astronauts would have spent the rest of their lives either orbiting the sun or orbiting the moon. Apollo 8 also gave us the Earthrise photo. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've been hearing a lot about Apollo 8 lately, too, so this person is hats off to you. Jim Lovell was on both Apollo 8 and Apollo 13. He traveled to the moon twice but never had the opportunity to land. That is so sad. Signed, a space geek, Noah Aloy. Nice work, Noah Aloy. Aloy Aloy. Great name, too. Thanks a lot for getting in touch with us. We love space geeks. We love to put you guys in headlocks and rub your heads with our knuckles until you go stop.

50:16It's called a noogie here on Earth. That's right. If you want a noogie from me and Chuck, send us a space geeky or any kind of geeky thing. We love that kind of stuff. You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and follow our social links, and you can send us a good old-fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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