The Iran-Contra Affair: Secret Arms, Secret Money, Shredded Files (1985-1987)

ARCHIVE FILE · Event years: 1985-1987 (exposed November 1986). This is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

Imagine pitching this as a conspiracy theory in 1985. The White House is secretly selling missiles to Iran, a country under a U.S. arms embargo, to free hostages held by an Iran-linked group. The profits secretly go to a rebel army that Congress has banned the government from funding. A Marine officer in the basement runs it, and when the story breaks, his secretary helps shred the files until the shredder jams. Every part of that turned out to be true.

CASE FILE · RW-ARC-HIS-008
Subject: The Iran-Contra affair
Administration: Ronald Reagan
Key figures: Lt. Col. Oliver North (NSC staff), National Security Adviser John Poindexter
Exposed: Ash-Shiraa (Lebanon), November 1986
Investigated by: The Tower Commission, Congress, and Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh
Status: Confirmed
Office equipment casualties: One shredder

The setup

The U.S. had banned arms sales to Iran since the 1979 embassy hostage crisis. Then, in the mid-1980s, Hezbollah held seven U.S. hostages in Lebanon. Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar proposed trading weapons for their release. A plan to have Israel deliver 100 TOW missiles to Iran was discussed with Reagan on 18 July and 6 August 1985. At the second meeting, Secretary of State George Shultz warned Reagan that “we were just falling into the arms-for-hostages business.”

Meanwhile, in Central America, Congress had used the Boland Amendments to bar U.S. intelligence agencies from funding the Contras, the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The administration kept funding them anyway, secretly, with money Congress hadn’t appropriated. Some of that money came from the Iran arms sales.

How it unraveled

In November 1986, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa reported the arms deals. Reagan went on national television to say the transfers had happened but that the U.S. had not traded arms for hostages.

Then the cleanup started. Between 21 and 25 November 1986, North destroyed or hid documents. His secretary, Fawn Hall, later testified at his 1989 trial that she helped him alter and shred National Security Council documents. According to The New York Times, so many went into the shredder that it jammed.

On 25 November 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted that profits from the Iran sales had been made available to the Contras. That same day Poindexter resigned and Reagan fired North.

The reports

The Reagan-appointed Tower Commission delivered its report on 26 February 1987, the moment in our featured photo. On 4 March 1987, Reagan addressed the nation:

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Neither the Tower Commission nor Congress found evidence that Reagan knew the full extent of the programs. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, appointed in December 1986, saw several dozen officials indicted, among them Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and North. That led to eleven convictions, some vacated on appeal. In his final days in office, President George H. W. Bush, who had been vice president during the affair, pardoned the rest of those indicted or convicted.

Footage

We’re not embedding video for this case. Reagan’s 4 March 1987 address is held by the Reagan Library, but we haven’t verified an official upload yet. (Description method: National Archives photo metadata via Wikimedia Commons; facts and quotes from Wikipedia’s sourced article, which cites the Tower and Walsh reports; no footage viewed.)

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