Here's a link with more on the Contra affair and a link to his work on the BCCI
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20004/
There's a passage in your book that details a part of John Kerry's career in the Senate – his investigations into the Central American Contra scandals in the 1980s. You show that Kerry stayed firm under pressure from his colleagues, the White House and the mainstream press. Could you start by painting the background on the Contra affair?
In the early to mid-1980s, the war in Nicaragua was underway, and the Reagan/Bush White House was determined to support the Contras – these insurgents who were fighting against the Sandanistas, the leftist government that had taken power in Nicaragua. The Contras were developing a pretty unsavory reputation for human rights violations, and some of the activities that the CIA made to back the Contras at the time were clearly in violation of international law.
The U.S. Congress, beginning in 1984 and going on for the next couple years, voted to restrict or prevent U.S. military assistance that would go to the Contras in Nicaragua, and Reagan signed on to it with some protest. But the White House tried to circumvent it soon after. They turned to Oliver North who was then a Marine officer, serving on the National Security Council and also working with office of Vice President George H.W. Bush and some of the CIA people that he had surrounded himself with, going back to his days when Bush was CIA director. There was an effort to run a secret operation to provide various kinds of assistance to the Contras — money, in some cases helping them to get guns and other kinds of armaments to carry on the war, which Congress had effectively tried to block.
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Kerry's report came out in 1988 or 1989, and he was able to lay out that the Contra operations on both the Honduran and Costa Rican sides of the border with Nicaragua had become implicated in the cocaine trade, and that a number of groups that were helping – for instance, the Honduran military, and the Panamanian government – also were implicated in the cocaine trafficking. So his report came out, and it was pretty much buried deep inside the newspapers.
Kerry then branched off from there to do some more work on the Panama element, which were more widely accepted, which showed that Manuel Noriega was involved in drug trafficking involved in various ways. That in turn led Kerry to look at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), on which he also did some remarkable work in terms of showing how this Middle Eastern bank intersected with some of the drug trade, terrorist groups and with intelligence agencies, including the CIA. This exposed this whole arena of influence peddling and accepting corrupt money. The trouble with the BCCI investigation for Kerry was that it was a bipartisan investigation – it was a bipartisan scandal, and Kerry took a lot of hits from both sides, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress were upset with him for looking into some of that.
Editor's note: For more on Kerry's BCCI investigations, read John Baskin and David Sirota's article, "Ahead of His Time."
So Kerry went through these investigations, which were really quite historic in terms of their import, but Kerry got nothing out of it terms of credit from the press or public. It wasn't really until 1998 that the CIA inspector general, Frederick Hitz, did reports about the Contra drug activity – it was in the context of later allegations that emerged about the Contra's involvement with crack cocaine. While Hitz dismissed the more extreme allegations that some were making about the CIA and its involvement in the crack epidemic, Hitz's reports did confirm virtually everything that John Kerry had said back in the late '80s. So, while Kerry was vindicated, no one really noticed, and it didn't help Kerry politically. But these were important investigations.
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