At the outset, it has to be mentioned that Christopher Andrew’s version of the Iran Contra Affair is more extensively researched and documented in detail when compared to Tim Weiner’s. The two striking aspects of Andrew’s text are its portrayals of President Reagan as a weak and confused Commander-in-Chief and the implicating tone with which he describes the hand of National Security Council staffer, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, who according to Andrew “was working on a plan to divert profits from arms sales to Iran to the Contras,” (Andrew, 482). In the text, we find a whole array of allegations directed at Oliver North including perjury charges, manipulating with documentary evidence and his refusal to obey orders from higher authorities. While not absolving Reagan of his executive deviances in the affair, the reader gets the impression that North has been unfairly condemned by the author. Tim Weiner, on the other hand, centers his attention on the role of the CIA and its intelligence officers for the scandal. Weiner seems to suggest that the White House attempted, by applying political pressure, to attribute major responsibilities for the Iran Contra affair on the CIA (Weiner, 478). The Reagan Administration team also distanced itself from the CIA and its head Robert Casey, claiming that the agency had overstepped its authority. In essence, the Weiner account connects the CIA to the Iran Contra Affair, while the Christopher Andrew account seems to suggest that the CIA had an insignificant role to play. Based on other scholarly sources, we can ascertain which of the versions is closer to the truth. In his scholarly work ‘What Uncle Sam Really Wants?’ Professor Noam Chomsky analyzes some of the foreign policy initiatives under the Ronald Reagan Administration, including the Iran Contra Affair. His understanding of the scandal, based on the following passage taken from the book, is consistent with Tim Weiner’s implication of the CIA:
“A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged” (Chomsky, 1992).
The other area of disagreement between the two authors is pertaining to strategic considerations for the United States at the time of the scandal. Christopher Andrew’s version tries to explain the actions of the U.S. government from the stand point of the perceived threat posed by the spread of communist ideology in Latin America. Without mincing words, Andrew points out that “By December 1985 North was working on a plan to divert profits from the arms sales to Iran to the Contras”. He further talks about how Reagan was in privy of this decision right through the episode. In other words, “…led Regan to approve covert operations not by the professionals of the CIA, but by the amateurs of the NSC…” The important word in the above quote is ‘approve’, a clear indicator of the President’s culpability for the scandal. Weiner’s version, on the other hand, centers on the importance of Middle Eastern region for the grand imperial plans of the United States. He also underplays the communist threat in Latin America. Again, secondary references on the topic seem to suggest that the Reagan Administration was too preoccupied with their strategic and material interests in the Middle East to pay attention to the ideological developments to the South. Hence, Christopher Andrew’s mention of radical South American politics being one of the instigators of the Iran Contra affair does not sound persuasive. The following passage from the book ‘Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up’, written by L.E. Walsh in 1997 supports Weiner’s view of events:
“The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran – you could read it on the front page of the New York Times”. (Walsh, 1997)
Andrew and Weiner texts also differ in their evaluation of Reagan’s role in this embarrassing episode in American foreign policy history. While Andrew’s text displays a more ambivalent position on Reagan’s role and his tacit approval of the diversion, Weiner is more critical in his evaluation of the President. According to him, when Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian intermediary for the CIA, sent this message to William Casey, “Hezbollah held the hostages. Iran held sway over Hezbollah. An arms deal with Iran could free the Americans” (Weiner, 464), though much of the internal maneuvering was done by the CIA, they required the President’s signature to “authorize them to carry the arms for hostages operation through” (Weiner, 467). Even though Reagan’s approval in the form of his signature appears no more than a formality, the ultimate responsibility for the diversion of funds to the Contras lies with the President. The following passage from a secondary source concurs with Weiner’s view point much more than that of Andrew’s:
“In this connection, it is worth noting that Poindexter, although he refused to implicate Reagan by testifying that he had told him about the diversion, declared that if he had informed the president he was sure Reagan would have approved. Reagan’s success in avoiding a harsher political penalty was due to a great extent to Poindexter’s testimony (which left many observers deeply skeptical about its plausibility). But it was also due in large part to a tactic developed mainly by Attorney General Edwin Meese, which was to keep congressional and public attention tightly focused on the diversion. By spotlighting that single episode, which they felt sure Reagan could credibly deny, his aides managed to minimize public scrutiny of the president’s other questionable actions, some of which even he understood might be illegal” (Kornbluh & Byrne, 2008).
There is an allusion made by Andrew with respect to the historical significance of the Iran Contra affair and the CIA’s role in it. According to Andrew, the generally accepted notion of Iran Contra arising as an ad hoc operation run by the NSC implies that the oversight of the legislative branch of government and the effective power held by the CIA have both come full circle since the end of the Second World War, when the United States ascended into the position of a superpower. The only reason “NSC ended up the running the operations is due to the fact that the CIA was too tightly monitored by Congress. Iran-Contra represents how much power the CIA has really lost since its establishment” (Kornbluh & Byrne, 2008).
In conclusion, it can be said that Christopher Andrew’s picture of the Iran Contra scandal is broader in scope and in the number of primary references incorporated into the text (including intelligence reports). His version is similar to the commonly understood facts about the scandal, namely that “the Iran-Contra affair was a National Security Council and White House driven ad Hoc operation run by Oliver North with the assistance of the CIA” (Walsh, 1997). This interpretation is what is commonly seen in American history text books and also endorsed by intellectuals from both sides of the political divide. Tim Weiner’s interpretation of the scandal, on the other hand, goes out of the way, at times even beyond the allowed boundaries of academic scholarship, to nail down the CIA and its leadership group as the main culprits. What is also evident in Weiner’s text are several instances of contradictory statements that detriment his position. For example, first he claims that the Central Intelligence Agency is incompetent and too disorganized to undertake successful clandestine operations of the sort that the Iran Contra affair belongs to. Later in the text he undermines the weight of this statement by saying that it is the CIA that is primarily responsible for the unethical commercial transactions that were made through the course of the scandal. The contradiction lies in the fact that if the CIA is so utterly incapable of carrying off operations of this magnitude and significance as initially suggested by him, then how could it have pulled off successfully without any support from the executive branch of the government. He also adds that the Reagan Administration was unable to reign in the rampant and unyielding intelligence agency. Surely, it should not have been so difficult to keep in check a disorganized and inept government agency that was the CIA. In light of this implausible explanation of Tim Weiner, it has to be inferred that Christopher Andrew’s text carries more merit as a result of being more factual, logical and comprehensiveness of research. Added to this is the very scope of the two books. Andrew’s book spans the entire length of American democracy since the days of George Washington and it deals with Secret Intelligence in general not restricting itself to the operations of the CIA. Weiner’s work on the other hand is exclusively concerned with the history of the CIA and to that extent narrower in scope, time-span and scholarship perused for researching the subject.
Works Cited:
Andrew, Christopher M. “For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush”
Weiner, Tim, “A Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”. New York, NY: Doubleday. 2007.
“Iran Contra Affair”, The Encarta Multimedia Encyclopedia Online, retrieved from http://encarta.msn.com/index/concise/0vol2C/05555000.asp on 21st November, 2008.
Kornbluh, Peter and Byrne, Malcolm,. The Iran Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, retrieved from http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/icread/icread.htmloon 21st November, 2008
Chomsky Noam, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, published by Odonian Press in 1992
Walsh, L. E., Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, published by WW Norton & Co, 1997