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.[1]
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.[2]
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.[3][4] 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.[5]
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. [6]
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.[7] 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.[8]
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.[9][10]