The charter company also worked for the U.S. government. Through 1986 the Military Airlift Command used eight SAT L-100s (civilianized versions of the C-130) daily for shuttles among bases in the United States. With the State Department, SAT had contracts for monthly flights to Havana to service the American Interests Section there, plus an arrangement to deliver humanitarian assistance to Nicaraguan rebels in Honduras.

  Southern Air Transport remained strong through the 1980s. Its fleet expanded from three in 1983 to eight Boeing 707s plus 17 L-100s by 1986. At that time SAT employed 540 persons, including 96 pilots. The worst setbacks were two fatal crashes, the first in its history, on October 4, 1986, and April 8, 1987, both of L-100s flying for the Military Airlift Command. By way of comparison, as of 1982 only four private corporations (Standard Oil of California, Tenneco, Rockwell International, and Mobil Oil) possessed air fleets larger than SAT’s.

  In 1979 a former Air America chief pilot and hero of Desert One, James Rhyne, started a company called Aero Contractors. Over more than two decades, with a series of interlocking directorates and subsidiaries, it accumulated more than twenty aircraft and a major stake in an airport in Johnston County, North Carolina. Later investigation revealed corporate directors with fictitious names traced to post office boxes in Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., or Maryland, plus a complex web of corporate cutouts. Research has yet to establish the operational role of Aero Contractors during this early period, though Rhyne advised some of the pilots recruited by private benefactors to work with the contras.

  Another possible proprietary, or at least a company that provided services to CIA, worked out of a field at Middletown, Delaware. Summit Aviation specialized in aircraft brokerage and modification. Even former employees were uncertain of its status. During the Nicaraguan revolution of the late 1970s, Summit trained pilots for dictator Anastasio Somoza. In the eighties Summit Aviation was linked to aircraft the CIA used in El Salvador and Honduras, with planes prepared for the rebels fighting for CIA from Honduras, and with aircraft modifications for Southern Air Transport. In 1984 Summit received a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration to improve its airfield, enabling it to work on large multi-engine aircraft.

  Caribbean-based St. Lucia Airways owned or leased two Boeing 707s and an L-100. One of its aircraft carried the shah from Egypt to the United States in 1978, the event that catalyzed the Iran hostage crisis. Revelations of secret U.S. arms deals with Iran brought new attention to St. Lucia with disclosure that a Boeing 707 making one of the deliveries bore company markings. St. Lucia denied involvement, but press investigation uncovered additional details. Another St. Lucia plane in fact carried U.S. weapons to Israel for transshipment to Iran. In 1985 an apparent St. Lucia L-100 was destroyed in Angola. The company denied any role in Angola, but its careful statement did not mention Zaire. Between January and April 1986 alone there were four flights from an American military base to an airfield in Zaire identified as a CIA supply point for UNITA rebels. These reportedly used a type of plane that exists solely in U.S. military inventories. Like SAT, St. Lucia did contract air work for the U.S. Military Airlift Command.

  In 1984 a Honolulu investment adviser, Ronald Ray Rewald, charged with securities fraud, defended himself with the claim that his company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, had been working for the CIA. The Rewald case, which may have been spurious, represented only the bare tip of the iceberg in terms of CIA corporate covers. Edwin Wilson’s import-export operations are an example of the kinds of covers used to move arms and equipment, as is Associated Traders Corporation, which the CIA reportedly set up in 1969. Tetra Tech Corporation, brainchild of retired secret warrior James Critchfield, did security-related work in Middle Eastern nations where Critchfield had labored at the agency. During the first Bush administration a major scandal over a rash of bank failures revealed possible links between the CIA and no fewer than twenty-two savings banks, according to the Houston Post. In all these cases the CIA denied any role. Data remains too scanty to treat the issue of corporate covers with the depth it deserves. But the fact remains that, like the movie company CIA created to further operations in Iran during the hostage crisis, activities there and elsewhere depended on the use of these techniques.

  The Reagan administration inherited a program, or at least a problem, in Iran. The hostages came home on Inauguration Day, but now there were plenty of expatriate Iranians in touch with the CIA, not least the shah, who wished nothing better than to return to Teheran. Reagan’s behavior was “extremely schizoid,” in the opinion of Iranian Mansur Rafizadeh, a former intelligence officer who worked with the CIA until 1983. Rafizadeh believes that American policymakers decided very early on to throw in their lot with the Ayatollah Khomeini, expecting that Muslim fundamentalism would be the best defense against communism in the Middle East.

  Rafizadeh recounts that Bill Casey went to Ronald Reagan in September 1981 with a dual-track program. The president approved a yearlong tryout. The CIA would fund disparate Iranian exile groups while simultaneously the United States would overlook Israeli arms shipments to Khomeini. On both tracks, gathering intelligence became the object. There is no evidence that the CIA itself sold arms to Iran at this stage. On the other hand, Langley proved quite adept at getting information from the exiles by putting them in competition with one another. Langley’s controller was George Cave, fluent in Farsi and former station chief in both Teheran and Saudi Arabia.

  Six or seven main exile circles were active, and the CIA developed them all. The German-based group of Adm. Ahmad Madani, commander of the former Imperial Iranian Navy, reportedly received several million dollars but insisted on complete control of its operations. The CIA, regarding Madani as too independent, eased him out. Many of the exiles were too busy squabbling to do much, but in 1982 the CIA reportedly began paying $100,000 a month to the Front for the Liberation of Iran, under Ali Amini in Paris. This included $20,000 to $30,000 for a new “radio,” Radio Liberation (Radio Nejat), which broadcast four hours a day of anti-Khomeini programming from Egypt and became active in October 1982. The shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, cooperated with the FLI and appeared on an eleven-minute broadcast that overrode two Iranian domestic TV channels on September 5, 1986, probably FLI’s greatest achievement. The CIA evidently provided miniaturized transmission equipment that made the disruption and substitution possible.

  At the same time Langley curried favor with Khomeini. In late 1982 a Russian agent in Iran defected to the British, soon to be debriefed by CIA. The Russian spy, Vladimir Kuzichkin, provided data on the Communist Tudeh Party in Iran, including names of organizers. Langley passed the list to the Iranians, who executed most of its members before outlawing the Tudeh on May 4, 1983. According to Rafizadeh, the CIA did the same to some of the exile groups, passing their contacts in Iran to the Khomeini security services. As a result, Rafizadeh reports, more than a thousand persons were arrested or executed.

  It is not clear that these diametrically opposed actions represented purposeful execution of a two-track policy. Mansur Rafizadeh believes this was the case, but an administration source saw U.S. actions as “groping through a maze,” a series of actions without a policy.

  The incoherence of U.S. policy comes into sharp focus when the question of relations between Washington and Iran is juxtaposed with the Islamic government’s support for terrorists in Lebanon. Shiite Muslim militiamen in Beirut began a campaign of terror against the West, particularly the United States, when in 1983 Reagan abandoned neutrality in Lebanese factional infighting. The Shiite militia had close ties with Teheran; there was no détente with the “Great Satan,” the United States. In a suicide attack on April 18, 1983, fanatics loaded a panel truck with explosives, rammed their way into the heavily defended U.S. embassy in Beirut, and blew it up. At that instant a CIA regional conference was going on inside; among the seventeen dead Americans (of sixty-three overall) were Robert C. Ames, the agency’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, the station chief, his wife, and his deputy. Ames’s hand would be found in the Mediterranean a mile offshore, still bearing his wedding ring. The blow energized Langley. The U.S. government began to crack down on arms shipments to Iran in Operation Staunch.

  An even more ambitious dual operation, parallel truck bombings of the U.S. Marine and French military compounds in Beirut, followed on October 23, 1983. The toll mounted with 58 French and 241 American Marines dead plus another hundred injured, many grievously. Bombings continued—of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait, an Israeli military headquarters, and, on September 20, 1984, the American embassy in Beirut again, this time with a truck bomb that left 14 more dead. The Shiites also struck directly at the CIA again on March 16, 1984, kidnapping William Buckley, recently arrived station chief in this tough Middle Eastern city. Despite protective measures, the station chief was seized right off the street in Beirut and held by his captors for a year. He became the first of six American hostages taken in Lebanon.

  Washington had a vital interest in all the hostages, and the CIA in Buckley even more. The continued captivity of his station chief amounted to an affront to Bill Casey. It was harder still for Clair E. George, now the DDO, himself the station chief in Beirut when two American diplomats were killed there during the Ford years.

  Thoughts in Reagan’s White House turned toward getting Khomeini to influence the Lebanese Shiites. An interagency study completed in October 1984 concluded that a new relationship could be forged only by Khomeini’s successors. In April 1985 the NSC adviser learned from a consultant of Iranian interest in buying American weapons. The CIA entered the picture in May when Graham Fuller, Ames’s successor, sent Bill Casey a memo that argued for “a bolder and perhaps riskier policy” on Iran that would at least ensure a greater U.S. voice in unfolding events. Casey sent the Fuller paper, intended for internal circulation, to the White House. But the CIA’s official position, contained in a May 1985 update to the Iran Special National Intelligence Estimate, remained pessimistic: “Improvement of ties to the United States is not currently a policy option.”

  Israeli Foreign Ministry official David Kimche approached national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane two months later to ask if the United States might sell weapons to Iran. When McFarlane replied he thought not, the Israeli asked whether Washington would have any objection if Israel sold some of its American weapons, and if Israel could then replenish its stocks from the United States. The Kimche request led to an NSPG meeting at the White House on August 8 which appears to have given the Israelis a go-ahead.

  A morass of deals with Iran followed, related both to reopening ties with Teheran and to recovering American hostages in Lebanon. Some used Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man with a shadowy past of dealings with various security services, including Iranian, American, and Israeli. There were two Israeli arms deals, in September and November 1985, and the second time the Israelis bungled their shipment (routing it through Portugal without appropriate clearances) and appealed for U.S. help. This compromised the White House—McFarlane personally intervened with the Portuguese while the CIA had to provide an aircraft through Southern Air Transport.

  Deputy Director John McMahon agonized over this use of CIA services without a presidential finding. Meanwhile McFarlane resigned in December, to be replaced by Adm. John M. Poindexter. At Christmastime Langley asked Poindexter for a finding to cover arms activity. Stanley Sporkin, CIA’s top lawyer, wanted the finding to approve the CIA’s November involvement retroactively. The CIA and NSC together drafted a document that Reagan approved on January 17, 1986. The finding contained orders that Congress not be informed and that it be carried out by private citizens as authorized agents of the United States. Such a private individual—Gen. Richard V. Secord—attended a meeting in the White House on January 11. There Secord met the CIA principals.

  Through 1986 Secord negotiated deals, organized shipments, and supported the operations in progress. McFarlane, called back to go along on one mission in May, thought he could talk directly to the Iranians. He never did. A divergence developed: U.S. officials assumed that all the hostages would be released while the Iranians had no such idea. Secord’s team spent the summer trying to open a second channel to Teheran, bypassing the Ghorbanifar link, now fully discredited.

  A second channel was eventually opened and one further arms transaction arranged, but Ghorbanifar learned of it and struck back by blowing the operation’s cover. The McFarlane visit to Teheran was revealed in a leaflet distributed there, and a few weeks later the story appeared in the Lebanese magazine Al Shiraa. The Iran arms deals, together with events simultaneously occurring in Nicaragua, ignited a firestorm in the United States that threatened the Reagan presidency.

  Three hostages were released: the Reverend Benjamin Weir, Father Lawrence Jenco, and David P. Jacobsen. Reagan sold more than two thousand anti-tank missiles to Iran, plus spare parts and HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. But on the streets of Beirut the terrorists grabbed four more Americans plus British mediator Terry Waite. The CIA station chief, poor Bill Buckley, tortured for months to extract information, expired in the summer of 1986, leaving what is reputed to be a four-hundred page debriefing. Langley suffered grievous wounds. Meanwhile the NSC staffer managing the arms sales, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, had given the Iranians a sample of intelligence that might be available in a cooperative relationship with the United States.

  The CIA strove to rebuild a network in Iran, running its operation through Frankfurt, Germany, where the steady flow of Iranian workers and migrants made it possible to access the expatriates without arousing suspicion. Some hold this to have been strictly an espionage ploy, others claim that the CIA attempted to set up a “stay behind” group to function against the ayatollahs as well as in case of Soviet conquest. A number of Iranians were recruited. As early as 1986 there were warnings that their communications with the agency had been compromised. Stephen W. Richter, the forty-four-year-old DO officer in charge, relied upon secret writing, an older method rather than the latest technology. Teheran had indeed penetrated his scheme. Beginning in 1988 Iranian authorities arrested more than thirty persons it convicted as CIA agents. Richter could do nothing. The Iranians blew the cover on this disaster in April 1989. The worst that happened to Richter was that he got chewed out during a meeting at headquarters.

  Angola returned as a covert action during the Reagan years. The United States had been out of that country since the failure of Project Feature, but the Reaganites saw the United States as the patron of anti-Soviet action worldwide, a stance elevated to the “Reagan Doctrine”—and Angola remained frozen in the image of a Soviet satellite. Jonas Savimbi and UNITA had gone on fighting the MPLA with help from South Africa, and Savimbi certainly wanted to get the Americans back on board. He hired a high-powered Washington firm, Black Manafort Stone and Kelly, to do public relations. Despite the opprobrium of working alongside the South Africans, whose internal divisions were even sharper than in the 1970s, the Reaganites could not resist the lure. President Reagan told an NSPG meeting on November 12, 1985, “We want Savimbi to know the cavalry is coming.” The main difficulty was a dispute between the administration and the intelligence committees over whether U.S. assistance ought to be covert or given openly, with Congress favoring the latter.

  In early 1986 Savimbi made a highly publicized visit to the United States. The initial covert program provided $10 to $15 million, and UNITA received fifty Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The materiel moved through an airfield at Kamina in southeastern Zaire, forwarded on CIA proprietary aircraft. Weapons shipments began in March 1986. In May the IAS-Guernsey company, managing flights by CIA proprietaries, protested that UNITA had fired on and damaged one of its C-130 aircraft. A couple of months later a delegation of Senate intelligence committee staff people visited, conferring with the CIA station chiefs in Zaire and South Africa. In December 1986 the MPLA announced that its forces had captured Stinger missiles from Savimbi’s rebels.

  The UNITA forces, spurred by renewed CIA aid, fought on. As early as 1984 Chester Crocker, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Africa, by dint of talking to all interested parties, had begun a move toward a negotiated settlement to include a Cuban withdrawal, but Savimbi resisted a settlement. The CIA project to help him extended past the Reagan administration. Project budgets rose to about $50 million. Robert Gates claims that Secretary of State George Shultz supported the Angolan covert operation as a means of keeping the pressure on the Angolan (MPLA) government to come to agreement. Shultz himself writes that the CIA effectively posed an obstacle to settlement. In December 1988 the parties reached a pact that featured Cuban withdrawal, eventually completed in 1991. By that point a hundred thousand Angolans are believed to have died.

  Among the other projects Reagan’s secret warriors carried out, one of the least savory has to have been the project in Cambodia. This supposedly assisted only the non-Communist opposition, a tiny faction allied with the Khmer Rouge monster Pol Pot, with nonlethal aid sent through Thailand. In fact the play amounted to a shell game. Money given the non-Communist resistance eased the situation of the Khmer Rouge while simplifying China’s problems as it backed Pol Pot. Initially only small amounts were involved, starting at $5 million and rising by only about half, though one account has Casey contemplating up to $12 million at a later stage, not far from initial funding for the Nicaragua project, after careful budget combing by CIA comptroller Daniel Childs. Media accounts put the Cambodia fund as high as $24 million. But little opposition existed in Cambodia. War had begun in 1978 when the Vietnamese invaded the country, outraged that the Khmer Rouge were massacring ethnic Vietnamese. The Cambodian resistance was attractive to the Reagan administration merely because it fought a Vietnamese-backed dictatorship. This project effectively put the United States in league with Pol Pot and Communist China, fueling the efforts of a political movement that had slaughtered two million of Cambodia’s citizens. It did nothing for America’s reputation as a bulwark of democracy.