All three officials were eventually indicted for providing false testimony to Congress. Fiers and Abrams pleaded guilty to reduced charges. Clair George was found guilty on two of ten counts in a second trial after a hung jury. George’s testimony of October 14, a specific focus of the guilty findings, amply condemned him. A count of perjury for the December testimony was dismissed.

  Meanwhile telephone records tied North explicitly to the action. Inquiries in El Salvador quickly revealed the pseudonym Max Gomez and then led to Donald Gregg in the Office of the Vice President. As if this weren’t enough, the Iranian side of the Enterprise’s activities simultaneously surfaced. Finally the discovery of a North memorandum discussing diversion of Iran arms funds to benefit the contras triggered the first of numerous investigations.

  The revelation of the Iran side of the affair, beginning with articles in the Middle Eastern press, further busted administration efforts to keep the lid on. By November 10 the need for official acknowledgment had become so plain that President Reagan held a White House meeting to discuss a response. Several days later Reagan spoke to the nation in a televised address from the Oval Office, attacking “wildly speculative false stories” and characterizing the Iran arms sales as “small amounts of defensive weapons” that could fit in a single airplane—another untruth. And on November 19 at a news conference Reagan affirmed the accuracy of more claims that were false: that the United States had not traded weapons for hostages, that no third countries had been involved, that only two shipments had been made. He continued to minimize the sales, claiming that the weapons sold had been only about half the actual number, repeating the falsehood regarding the single aircraft load.

  With the administration rushing to prepare for more congressional briefings and fresh CIA testimony—directly from William J. Casey—the hours now ticked too quickly for the secret-war wizards. James McCullough headed the DCI’s executive staff at the time, with formal responsibility for drafting Casey’s testimony. He believes the DCI might have muddled through had it not been for Casey’s exhaustion and the brain tumor rapidly draining him. When the Iran revelations began, Casey, on a trip to Central America, had been out of pocket and unprepared. Clair George assigned two DO officers to make an initial review of the Iran side, which George briefed to Senate intelligence committee staffers on November 18, three days ahead of Casey’s scheduled appearance.

  McCullough and David Gries, Langley’s congressional liaison, sat in on the briefing and came away amazed. They had known nothing of this. McCullough really hit the roof, however, when he found two of George’s staff muttering about how he had not told the Senate intelligence people anything about the November 1985 arms shipment, which (as noted earlier) had not been supported by any presidential finding at all. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Bob Gates had ordered that everything be included in the brief, and everyone thought it would be. No one understood why George had avoided telling Senate staff about this part.

  Even as Langley’s Seventh Floor went through gyrations trying to square testimony that might correct the record, differences developed on the accuracy of the proposed Casey testimony. The director, not a great moderator on his best days in McCullough’s opinion, did a poor job reining in CIA barons who wanted to march off in many directions. Casey also proved ineffective at editing his testimony. George Shultz, who felt he was manfully battling the forces of darkness in this crisis for American democracy, had no confidence in CIA testimony that Langley would not permit him to see. Shultz demanded and received a penultimate draft the evening before Casey made his final changes and presented it. Shultz believed his main fight to be with an NSC staff that had developed an operational role, but Casey’s CIA formed a mighty distraction. When Shultz finally saw the document it was laden with things he had not known—that the agency had kept from the State Department. For his part, Casey sent an “eyes only” letter to President Reagan, objecting to the secretary of state’s “public pouting,” demanding a “new pitcher,” recommending that Reagan replace Shultz with someone like Jeane Kirkpatrick. At Langley Jim McCullough, dismayed when he saw the letter, objected to sending it. Casey’s secretary told the staff director he held a copy—the original had already gone out.

  That afternoon McCullough was startled again by White House chief of staff Don Regan, who came to Langley for an unprecedented visit to Director Casey in his Seventh Floor office. Unknown to McCullough, Attorney General Edwin Meese’s investigators now had evidence that Oliver North had diverted Iran arms money to the contras. Shortly after Regan’s one-on-one with Casey, the director, who had already spoken to Meese, left for home. He stopped at the White House for an NSPG. George Shultz found that session bizarre—officials spouting fantasy, talking of the Iran scheme as a correct policy that needed to continue, adding in for good measure a tilt toward Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War. Shultz quotes the president: “We are right!” Reagan pounded the table. “We had to take the opportunity! And we were successful!”

  Reagan held a news conference on November 25 where Edwin Meese proceeded to tell the world of the diversion. The Iran-Contra affair had burst into the open. The controversy forced Reagan into a new clarification of procedures for approving and implementing covert operations, embodied in a directive issued on October 15. Its main point was to ensure that NSC staff had no role in carrying out these activities.

  Iran-Contra also called into question the system of presidential findings. One arms sale had been completely unauthorized, justified only after the fact in a “retrospective” finding. Another action, Attorney General Meese would aver, had been authorized by a “mental” finding. Existing regulations already provided that all findings had to be written. Some Iran arms deals were not briefed to Congress for months, effectively an escalation of Casey’s high-handed practices at the time of the Nicaragua mining. Through the remainder of the Reagan presidency there would be a frustrating dialogue between the White House (and CIA) and the oversight committees on the nature of findings. Congress succeeded in setting criteria for the information to be included in an MON, but the White House stonewalled on “timely” notification. Legislation to put into law a requirement that Congress be informed of any covert action within forty-eight hours passed the Senate in 1988 but stalled in the House. The issue was left for Reagan’s successor.

  If Bill Casey had survived he would surely have been prosecuted. Instead, on December 15, 1986, Casey suffered a seizure. Over the next few months he was in and out of hospitals. In May 1987 William J. Casey died. He never saw the final denouement. President Reagan would make many apologies, and Iran-Contra effectively turned him into a lame duck. Poindexter and North resigned. There would be congressional hearings aplenty, joint investigations, special prosecutors, trials. By the time Clair George had been convicted and Caspar Weinberger indicted, George H. W. Bush was president. On Christmas Eve 1992 Bush suddenly pardoned a series of figures, including Weinberger, George, Dewey Clarridge, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, and Alan Fiers. That marked the end of another broad season of inquiry.

  Project Democracy never existed in a vacuum. The purpose had always been to reach the bright future when the CIA would fight again. Bill Casey wanted that, even if he sometimes played coy with Secord’s operatives. The CIA did nothing to stop the benefactors, helped when it could, and did everything to get back into the action. The man supposed to mastermind the new age, James L. Adkins, CIA’s latest project chief in Tegu, arrived on the scene in the summer of 1986. That rarity in the Nicaraguan war—a paramilitary man with Latin America experience—Adkins knew the political and legal dangers of the program and had tried to avoid this assignment. Eventually superiors had virtually put him on the plane, handing the fifty-two-year-old operations officer orders and a ticket. It must have appealed to Fiers, a former college football star, that Adkins had been an aspiring baseball pitcher, playing for a Milwaukee Braves farm club in the late 1950s. He had gone home to West Virginia and been a state trooper—an affinity point with Joe Fernandez, a detective sergeant with the Miami-Dade police department. Adkins had gone to college, then joined the CIA. Langley sent Adkins to Laos where he became an adviser to Vang Pao’s armée clandestine. There he acquired a reputation, playing a key role in an offensive on the Plain of Jars.

  By 1970 Adkins had had enough. He transferred to the Western Hemisphere Division of the DO and learned Spanish. He and Fernandez had been tag teamers, rising in the division, occupying increasingly senior posts at CIA stations throughout South America during the 1970s. Adkins had served in Santo Domingo and Pinochet’s Chile. He emerged as station chief in Guyana—still under Forbes Burnham’s dictatorship—in 1978. That proved fateful—the cult murder of a visiting congressman and mass poisoning called the Jonestown Massacre occurred on Adkins’s watch, and the hearings that followed left him leery. The Nicaraguan war smelled of the same. Adkins rejected an early offer to participate, but he could not avoid temporary duty as a trainer in Honduras during the year of the mining. The ensuing controversy confirmed all his fears. Adkins joined the agency’s Counterterrorism Group, about as far from Latin America as he could get, but even there superiors tagged him for the revamped secret war.

  Jim Adkins arrived in Honduras in time to see the Secord operation establish itself, witness the increasingly tenuous relationship between the United States and Honduras, and get the flavor of the severe restrictions of the Boland Amendment. After just a week in Tegu, Adkins told CIA station chief Vincent Shields, “This is the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever worked on!”

  The Honduras relationship had become a major headache, though far above Adkins’s pay grade. The Hondurans wanted much more economic and military aid than Reagan was willing to give. They pressed for jet aircraft, harping on the same intelligence about Nicaraguan MIGs that the Reaganites trotted out when the CIA program fell on hard times, a threat that never seemed to materialize. The Hondurans played the intel back at Washington. American diplomats tried to change the subject, focus on regional security, and enlist Tegucigalpa in a joint effort to train and teach both Honduran and Salvadoran army units. The first center had barely become active when the Hondurans stopped the program. That too they held hostage against more aid. The $100 million CIA aid program dwarfed everything the United States gave to the entire country surrounding the contra camps. Tegucigalpa constantly harped on the dangers posed by the camps on its territory, which contained the twin threats of encouraging a Nicaraguan invasion by their presence, or of an armed contra force that might intervene in Honduran politics. By this time John Negroponte had left Honduras. His successors, James A. Ferch and E. Everett Briggs, equally dedicated, never developed the same close relations with the Hondurans because the generals who collaborated with the United States during the early days had been swept away by political storms in Tegu.

  Adkins fell afoul of both Honduran sensitivities and CIA legal prohibitions. Many contra camps were in a small area along the Nicaraguan border called the Las Trojes salient. CIA rules stipulated that everything entering the salient had to go overland. Only about twenty miles from Aguacate, the roads were so poor and the rains so bad it could take days to reach the camps. Visiting one of them in January 1986, Adkins found the freshly dug graves of children felled by an outbreak of measles. The victims could easily have been his own kids, living in a Tegu safe house. The agency could get vaccine in Tegucigalpa, but the overland route would take too long and the Nicaraguans regularly shelled the access road. The Boland restrictions prohibited helicopter flights within twenty miles of the border unless for intelligence gathering.

  A few months earlier Langley had ordered Adkins to organize a rescue mission into Nicaragua, a deliberate violation of Boland to bring out American Indian activist Russell Means, engulfed in the war while visiting the Miskito. Means had gotten out under his own steam. The mission was scrubbed, but the contradiction remained—CIA had been willing to violate the law for political reasons but prohibited a humanitarian medical mission. Adkins decided to break the rules. He sent in medical supplies, and his helicopters brought out badly wounded contras for treatment at Aguacate or Tegu. Then he began to divert scout flights to the camps on their return, bringing back more wounded. On one occasion in November 1986 a flight transported military supplies.

  For months the issue remained submerged. But in early 1987, after the CIA reentered the battle, Clair George and Alan Fiers came down to survey the new activity. They learned of the helicopter flights. Under the microscope of Iran-Contra, George and Fiers felt obliged to bring the matter up in legal channels. Adkins told CIA Inspector General David Doherty that he would do the same thing again. Placed on leave, Adkins ended up going to ball games with Joe Fernandez while they both waited to learn their fates. They received reprimands and were fired by a new CIA director.

  Political action remained a core of Langley’s work throughout this period. To help make the contras more palatable to Congress, the agency brokered deals among UNO factions and between Calero’s group and the Miskito. It is reported that several million CIA dollars supported UNO offices in Europe and Latin America, subsidized contra officials, and paid for their trips abroad. In early 1986, when the question was how to get Reagan’s new contra aid through Congress, Langley was quite willing to help. A twelve-page CIA intelligence report in January tried to defend the contras against charges of human rights abuses by discrediting such allegations. Yet as early as February 1985 official Honduran government investigations had confirmed contra rights violations back to the beginning of the secret war. The result was that Congress earmarked $3 million of the new money specifically for a contra human rights independent prosecutor who would soon be bringing up contra commanders on atrocity charges.

  Of course Langley had its own ideas for a renewed secret war. Those owed everything to Adkins. His operational plan envisioned a two-year effort divided into phases. Contra forces would form larger units, open new camps, and try to divide Nicaragua by cutting communications routes. The program included $70 million for military and $27 million for humanitarian aid. Activity would be coordinated by a renewed Nicaragua Operational Group under army Col. William C. Comee, Jr. A panel would oversee the CIA-military program. For one of its three members, President Reagan appointed Jeane Kirkpatrick.

  Because of the proximity of Aguacate to Nicaragua and the restriction on flights close to the border, air missions were carried out from Swan Island, previously the location for the CIA’s black radio during the Bay of Pigs. The air branch supervised procurement of Spanish aircraft, for which the agency hired former Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) pilots. One of the early endeavors involved a presumptive violation of restrictions on CIA domestic activity, when a hundred contra officers were sent for special training at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Meanwhile the contras lost Juan Gomez, their air force chief, and three more aircraft—a C-54, a C-47, and a twin-engine Beechcraft.

  On the ground the issue remained in doubt. Calero claimed sixteen thousand troops, but the war went nowhere. A series of sabotage strikes in March 1987 by a commando group specially trained by the CIA only demonstrates the point. Arturo Cruz resigned from UNO. The Sandinistas mobilized upward of sixty thousand regulars and militia. Despite Elliott Abrams’s promise that the contras would change the facts on the ground, the Sandinistas contained them. But with their big-budget support the contras were much stronger. In March 1988 the last major battle ended with the rebels stalemating a Sandinista offensive. Five years of paramilitary action and $300 million had not unseated them, and the administration spoke of a $105 million request for 1988. Still dissatisfied, Congress rejected the money. On February 3, 1988, the CIA operation permanently ended.

  By then negotiations for a settlement of the Central American crisis were well under way. Managua signed a general agreement, as did the sides in the Salvadoran conflict, and reached a specific accommodation with the contras. Rebels regrouped into a number of zones, and UNO candidates won the next election. The Sandinistas were and remain the main political opposition. Integration of the former rebels into society continued to be problematic throughout the 1990s. The United States has essentially abandoned Nicaragua. What this says about Washington’s commitment to democracy is an open question.

  Bill Casey presided over a revitalization of the CIA’s covert action capability. He was proud of that. But no one claims Nicaragua as a victory for covert operations. The many questions raised by Iran-Contra actually tightened controls over the agency. In his first appearance before the joint congressional committee investigating the affair, Richard V. Secord was led into an admission that the old Hughes-Ryan controls were appropriate. Casey’s legacy would be the releashing of the CIA.

  The worst aspect of direct White House involvement in a covert action was the squandering of a president’s political capital on a marginal issue. The prestige of the presidency, openly committed to an effort at the very margins of legality in international relations, left Ronald Reagan damaged. Project Democracy muddied the waters further by skirting the law of the land. There are many wise reasons for eschewing such a policy.

  President Reagan’s campaign for contra aid came a far way from the days when Dwight Eisenhower refused even to meet with the Dalai Lama for fear of appearing to take sides. Even so, the new wave of paramilitary operations produced similarly indifferent results.