The Iran-Contra Scandal

Surely you’ve heard of this one, but maybe you forgot the details.

To refresh: In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s administration blatantly broke the law to carry out a secret war in Nicaragua. The small Central American nation had recently gone socialist and, since these were the days of the Cold War, we just couldn’t let that slide. The CIA spent the early years of Reagan’s administration trying to overthrow the nation’s leftwing Sandinista government by funding and arming rightwing rebels known as “Contras,” but they did so much creepy stuff (read: distributing a manual on how to murder people with a big knife) that between 1982 and 1984 Congress passed legislation—the Boland Amendment—that forbid the U.S. from providing any more support.

But Reagan, ever the fervent anti-Communist, could not let it go, so top White House officials just ignored the new law and started finding secret ways to send the rebels money and equipment. This ultimately led to a host of deeply illegal activities, the most well-known of which involved breaking a federal arms embargo to sell weapons to Iran (with help from Israel) and then using the illicit cash to buy guns for the war in Latin America. We know that the Contras were also selling drugs at the same time that they were collaborating with the White House and that Oliver North, a top aide, knew about it—which basically made him an accomplice to drug trafficking (at the very least).

There are reports of other, even more unsavory activities being used as cash grabs. Whether those misdeeds ultimately involved the CIA flying planeloads of crack cocaine to the U.S. and then pushing the drugs out into urban neighborhoods to gin up quick profits is up to your own imagination to decide. We don’t know and we will probably never know. The full scope of the illegal activities that helped generate the funding for the war has largely been lost to the sands of time.