The Contra rebels were the insurgency the Reagan administration backed against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Origins
John Kiriakou sets the sequence out from the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza in the late 1970s and his replacement by the Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega — “Ortega was a communist he called himself a socialist but he was pro-soviet and pro Cuban and received a great deal of aid from both of those countries.” Reagan, “absolutely obsessed with Communism”, promoted the domino theory and announced support for the Contras in response.[1][2]
The Contras themselves he describes as “conservatives right-wingers and some cases even fascists or Military Officers who were disgruntled with the with Ortega”, who “decided to take to the jungles with American weapons and fight the new communist government.” The difficulty was legal: a Democratic-controlled Congress passed an amendment forbidding the government from spending any money to provide them weapons, ammunition or weapon systems.[3] Elsewhere he dates the prohibition to 1983.[4]
Going around the law
That prohibition is the hinge of the whole story, because in Kiriakou’s account nobody in the executive branch treated it as binding. Colonel Oliver North, the Pentagon’s designate to the National Security Council, “decided to um just go around the law” — and the mechanism he chose was the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.[4]
The scheme Kiriakou lays out runs in a circle. The United States would sell arms to the Iranians, which was itself against the law, and would do it through Khashoggi; Khashoggi took payment for the weapons into his own bank account in Cyprus, kept ten per cent for himself — “he was Mr. 10%” — and transferred the rest to accounts controlled by North, by John Poindexter, and by a third National Security Council figure the captions render as “Admiral Richard Cord”. That money then bought arms on the grey market to send to the Contras.[5][6]
His summary of Iran–Contra’s aftermath is two sentences long and mostly about impunity: “It was all illegal. Everybody was indicted. Nobody really was punished even though they were indicted.” Khashoggi “just took his money and smiled and got back on the yacht and steamed around the Mediterranean.”[6]
North and south
The distinction that later decided the Gary Webb affair is that the Contras were not one force. In Kiriakou’s telling there were “two separate groups of Contraore rebels. one in the north and one in the south. The US was arming the group in the north. In the south, they were selling cocaine and they were using the money from the cocaine to arm themselves.”[7]
He puts the same split in agency terms when he is arguing rather than narrating: there were two different groups of Contras in Nicaragua, “one, the CIA was working directly with. The other, the CIA was working tangentially with” — and it was the second group that was sending cocaine to the United States in exchange for cash and for arms, “even if it was indirectly, from the CIA.”[8][9]
The agency’s role sits precisely in the gap between the two: “The CIA allowed the trans shshipment of the cocaine through the north and into the United States. So, was it the CIA’s cocaine? Not really. Not technically, but the CIA still allowed the cocaine to come into the United States. totally immoral and illegal. It’s actually a death penalty case to import large amounts of drugs like that.”[10]
Meanwhile the United States was “mining the harbors of uh of managa the capital of Nicaragua to put pressure on the sandinistas” while the fighting continued in the jungle.[11]
Answering the denial
The two-group distinction is also Kiriakou’s reply to the CIA’s flat public denial. Put to him was a former colleague, the well-known Jack Devine, insisting without equivocation that the suggestion was “absolutely 100% nonsense” and that the CIA “never ever transported drugs into the United States.”[12][13]
Kiriakou’s answer was a question about a different country: “Did he forget that Manuel Noriega, one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere, was a paid CIA source for decades?” He does not defend the record — he calls it “a dark time in the CIA’s history” — but he says the agency needs to address the issue truthfully, and then supplies the truthful version, which is the northern and southern groups.[8]
Crack
The consequence Kiriakou attaches to the traffic is a specific, dated claim about a drug. There was no such thing as crack cocaine in the United States, he says, until the CIA allowed cocaine into the country in the mid-1980s, where it was turned into crack in a chemical refining process.[9] He files the episode alongside the assassination programme and extraordinary rendition as things that took decades to come out — “the real story as to what happened uh uh with the Contra rebels and the arrival of of cocaine in the United States that ended up leading to the crack uh epidemic” — and draws the same conclusion from all three: these came out of White House actions, it does not matter which party controlled the White House, the executive overstepped, and neither Congress nor the courts pushed back.[14][15]
He recommends the dramatisation. Snowfall, he says, is about how crack was invented in Oakland in the early 1980s and picked up by an up-and-coming cocaine importer in Los Angeles “but with the help of the CIA. The CIA was providing the coke so that it could be sold in Los Angeles and they took the money and used it to buy weapons for the Contra rebels.”[16][17]
What amuses him is the agency’s response to a television programme. When Snowfall came out the CIA “denied and denied and denied that this is not true. This is just Hollywood make believe” — which prompts his standing complaint about institutional memory: “you guys forgot that Gary Webb proved all this was true and then committed suicide.” There is so much turnover in the jobs, he says, that they do not remember the lies they told three years ago, and then they contradict themselves.[16][18]