Iran-Contra
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Iran-Contra was the mid-1980s scandal in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. John Kiriakou describes the mechanics as: illegally selling weapons to Iran through a Saudi middleman, laundering the proceeds through Cyprus, and using the money to fund the Contras.

The end of the oversight 'golden age'

For Kiriakou, Iran-Contra is most significant as a turning point in congressional oversight of the intelligence community. He describes a "golden age of congressional oversight from 1975 until about 1982 when Iran-Contra started", the window opened by the Church Committee and Pike Committee and the creation of the House and Senate intelligence committees, populated by "serious people, heavyweights": Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Barry Goldwater.

After Iran-Contra, in Kiriakou's account, that genuine oversight "just kind of went away" and the committees became "cheerleaders" for the CIA, a posture he says has continued ever since. He dates the functional life of real oversight at roughly seven years, from the committees' 1976 creation to the early-to-mid 1980s. He gives a similar account elsewhere: in the aftermath of the Church Committee, once the CIA was supposedly reined in under Director Stansfield Turner, figures like George H.W. Bush and other operatives turned to outside cutouts, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, arms dealers such as Adnan Khashoggi, and even Israeli intelligence, to keep doing what the CIA had always done, just further off the books.

Kiriakou on the U.S.,Israel strike on Iran

Kiriakou stated that the United States partnered with Israel to attack Iran, a country that poses no threat to the United States. 

The second Contra group and crack (Judging Freedom)

John Kiriakou says there were two groups of Contra rebels in Nicaragua: one the CIA worked with directly, and a second it worked with "tangentially", and it was that second group that sent cocaine to the United States in exchange for cash and arms, even if indirectly from the CIA. He argues "there was no such thing as crack cocaine" in America until the CIA allowed cocaine into the country in the mid-1980s, and that the agency should "just come clean" since it is now historical.

Why arm Iran? (JK Podcast)

John Kiriakou frames the logic of the Iran-Contra arms sales: the U.S. secretly sold arms to Iran, then at war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, "because they liked Saddam Hussein even less." Iraq, not the not-yet-nuclear Iran, was seen as the immediate threat to Israel, working with Gerald Bull on a supergun and pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Kiriakou's walk-through of the scheme

In a 2025 explainer Kiriakou laid the operation out end to end. The constraint was statutory: a Democratic-controlled Congress had forbidden any spending on weapons, ammunition or weapon systems for the Contra rebels. The workaround was devised by "a director at the National Security Council at the time by the name of Colonel Oliver North", who "decided to take this thing on on his own he did not report back to his superiors at the Pentagon he worked closely with the CIA."

The plan was to sell weapons to Iran for cash, hand the cash to the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, have him bank it in Cyprus and transfer it onward to the Contras, with a series of arms dealers "mostly in Romania Bulgaria and uh and elsewhere" able to supply weapons without attracting attention.

What Kiriakou stresses is how wide the secrecy was drawn: the operation "was supposed to be secret not just secret from the public of course but secret from the Congressional oversight committees secret from the president of the United States himself secret from the FBI and from the Pentagon nobody was supposed to know about this except Oliver North and the CIA."

The full circuit he describes as: Khashoggi takes Iranian money, banks it in Cyprus, transfers it to international arms manufacturers, takes the arms and turns them over to the CIA, "the CIA puts them on unmarked unlicensed and unregistered planes and sends them to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua." His verdict: "It sounded like the perfect idea in fact it was a terrible idea and it was a violation of the law many many laws."

The end state was self-financing: "the Iranians got weapons they paid cash the cash was used to buy more weapons that were given to the Contra Rebels." Meanwhile the United States was mining the harbours of Managua to pressure the Sandinistas.

See also

- Church Committee
- Pike Committee
- Central American Task Force
- CIA
- John Kiriakou
