Iran Contra: Bonus - Intermission

Summary

Fiasco: Iran-Contra – Bonus Episode: Intermission
Host: Pushkin Industries
Release Date: April 28, 2025

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Introduction

In this special bonus episode of Fiasco, host Leon Neyfakh delves deeper into the labyrinthine Iran-Contra scandal by featuring an exclusive conversation with Martha Honey and Tony Avrigan, a dedicated husband-and-wife journalism team. Their firsthand experiences reporting from Costa Rica during the mid-1980s provide a unique and intimate perspective on one of America's most controversial political episodes.

Martha and Tony’s Reporting in Costa Rica

Martha and Tony Avrigan were stationed in Costa Rica, a nation renowned for its abolition of the military and emphasis on infrastructure and education. While Costa Rica remained peaceful, neighboring countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala were engulfed in conflict, making Costa Rica an ideal yet complex base for reporting on the Contra war.

Martha Honey discusses the initial challenges in convincing their editors about the presence of Contras in Costa Rica:

“The official story was that all of the infrastructure and the war against Nicaragua was out of Honduras, the northern front, and we moved to Costa Rica, which became known as the Southern front...we very quickly began to develop sources who told us much more.”
— [04:33]

The Contras in Costa Rica, led by Eden Pastora, were distinct from their northern counterparts. Pastora, a former Sandinista, commanded forces that were perceived as less brutal and more locally motivated, comprised largely of peasants disillusioned with Sandinista reforms.

The Assassination Attempt on Eden Pastora

A pivotal moment in their reporting career occurred during a press conference intended to mark Eden Pastora’s public break from CIA support. Tony Avrigan recounts the harrowing experience:

“...the bomber, the person who came to the press conference with 4 pounds of C4 plastic explosive... put that down underneath the counter... and then went outside and set it off by remote control... it killed three journalists and left nearly 20 people injured.”
— [19:16]

This tragic event not only resulted in significant personal injuries for Tony but also became a catalyst for Martha and Tony's subsequent investigations into the true nature of Contra operations and possible CIA involvement.

The Investigation and Lawsuit

In the aftermath of the bombing, Martha and Tony partnered with the Committee to Protect Journalists to uncover the bomber’s identity. Their investigation uncovered ties between the Contras and drug trafficking, suggesting that covert operations often blurred ethical lines.

Martha Honey reflects on the difficulties they faced:

“...there was the CIA operatives or contract employees in the field... the central question... how far up the line of command did profiting from the drug operations go? And I don't think we know that.”
— [12:44]

Their persistent efforts led to a lawsuit filed in June 1986 by lawyer Danny Sheehan, alleging a conspiracy involving American figures like John Hull and Major General Richard Secord. Although the lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, it shed light on the extensive and clandestine networks supporting the Contras.

Martha Honey on the lawsuit’s impact:

“...it did help to dismantle the Southern front... [and] led to the growing awareness of the Iran Contra scheme.”
— [34:11]

Drug Smuggling and CIA Involvement

A significant aspect of the Iran-Contra scandal revolves around allegations of drug smuggling facilitated by the Contras with possible CIA complicity. Martha and Tony's investigations revealed that covert operations often provided cover for illicit activities, such as the smuggling of cocaine into the United States.

Tony Avrigan explains the connection:

“The CIA had this problem that they had to move arms in through these very small airstrips... they would fly back with drugs that started to come up from Colombia...”
— [11:39]

Despite the lack of concrete evidence linking high-level CIA officials directly to drug trafficking, the pervasive nature of these operations made it challenging to obtain definitive proof.

Martha Honey elaborates on the difficulties in establishing these connections:

“...the whole drug connection was very hard... we never had the real hard evidence.”
— [37:27]

Conclusion and Insights

The narrative woven by Martha and Tony Avrigan underscores the convoluted and shadowy nature of the Iran-Contra affair. Their experiences highlight how clandestine operations, political ambitions, and illicit activities intertwined to create a scandal that remains partially obscured by secrecy and conflicting accounts.

Leon Neyfakh encapsulates the episode’s essence:

“The deeper you dive, the more reason you have to doubt every story you hear, and the harder it gets to pin anything down.”
— [35:04]

This bonus episode not only enriches the overarching narrative of Fiasco but also serves as a testament to the relentless pursuit of truth by journalists in the face of danger and deception.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Martha Honey on the hidden Contra presence:
  “...our regular group...Contras had a reputation for being less brutal...” — [05:00]

• Tony Avrigan on his injuries:
  “I didn't think I was going to die, but I thought if I did die, it was going to be because of this.” — [19:02]

• Martha Honey on the complexities of the investigation:
  “...there was so much money behind it and so much interest in keeping a lid on it.” — [38:06]

• Tony Avrigan on the challenges of reporting:
  “...the supply of arms to the Contra, the connections between the CIA and drug trafficking, it's much more involved and it just doesn't fit into a fast news story.” — [36:12]

Final Thoughts

Martha and Tony Avrigan’s account provides a nuanced understanding of the Iran-Contra scandal, emphasizing the perilous intersection of journalism, politics, and covert operations. Their story is a crucial piece in unraveling the complexities of this historical fiasco, offering listeners an engaging and informative deep dive into a pivotal moment in American history.

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Subscribe to Pushkin+ to access the entire season of Fiasco: Iran-Contra ad-free. Visit the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm to join.

Transcript

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Pushkin.

[Tony Avrigan]

I had all the skin was burned off my face and my left hand was all the skin was burned off and the bones were sticking out.

[Martha Honey]

I mean, we kept saying our interest is what's the identity of the bomber and who was the paymaster. That's what we want to track.

[Narrator]

Hey Fiasco. Hello listeners. We are now halfway through our season on the Iran Contra scandal, which feels like the perfect time to take a break from our regular episodes and share something a little different. It's a conversation with two reporters, Martha Honey and Tony Avregan, a husband and wife team who covered the Contra war in Central America in the mid-1980s. Martha and Tony were living in and reporting from Costa Rica. Costa Rica, which is located just south of Nicaragua, was a peaceful country that had abolished its army and was using the money on infrastructure and education. For Martha and Tony, it was an ideal place to raise their kids, but it was also a good place for a couple of reporters.

[Tony Avrigan]

Although Costa Rica was nice and peaceful, there were wars going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala, and Costa Rica was not in those wars, but close enough that we could report on them.

[Martha Honey]

Except what we didn't realize at the time was that just about the time we relocated there, the CIA was also in the process of tripling the size of its operations in Costa Rica, as.

[Narrator]

You may remember from episode three. And it's okay if you don't. The Contras were not one unified army. There were several leaders and factions fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And the war was being waged on two frontsthe north and the south. So far this season, you've been hearing mostly about the northern front, where the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, known as the fdn, was operating out of Honduras. In Costa Rica, Martha and Tony were close to the southern front of the war. There, the Contras were led by a man named Eden Pastora. Pastora was a former Sandinista who had grown disillusioned and alienated from the leftist movement. The Contra forces under Pastora's command had a reputation for being less brutal than the fdn. As you'll hear in this interview, Martha and Tony's time in Costa Rica came to be defined by one incident, an assassination attempt against Eden Pastora. It happened during a press conference that Tony was covering for ABC News. A bomb killed four people and left Tony seriously injured. The incident turned out to be the beginning of an ordeal that would drag on for years as Tony and Martha set out to figure out the bomber's identity and ended up as the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a number of Americans involved in Iran Contra. But before we get into all that, let's start with Martha and Tony talking about how hard it was to convince their editors that the Contras even had a presence in Costa Rica.

[Martha Honey]

The official story was that all of the infrastructure and the war against Nicaragua was out of Honduras, the northern front, and we moved to Costa Rica, which became known as the Southern front. And because Costa Rica had abolished its army, didn't have an army, and was officially neutral, the Costa Rican government and the US Government both denied that there was anything going on in Costa Rica.

[Interviewer]

When you arrived, could you see Contras around you? Was it obvious that they were there?

[Martha Honey]

Well, that was the interesting thing, that when we would call our editors in, particularly in Washington, and say, we've seen this or that, and they'd say, oh, no, no, no, no, it can't be. We're told by the State Department, we're told by the White House that there's nothing going on in Costa Rica, but there would be journalists from the local press who would go up to see to the Contra camps, and they always had to say that they went deep inside Nicaragua. In fact, when we first, a few months after we arrived, we were taken up to a Contra camp. It was in Costa Rica. And so that was becoming better known. And there were reports of hospitals in private homes right in our neighborhood that were hospitals for wounded Contras that they were being brought down to San Jose for recuperation. Sometimes that would be exposed by neighbors or whatever and would make it into the local press. So it was just anybody who opened their eyes would see what was going on. And then we very quickly began to develop sources who told us much more. I mean, there was at that point, the government of Costa Rica was really very much in collaboration with the US and the deal was that they were getting enormous amounts of economic aid in return for the creation of the Southern.

[Tony Avrigan]

Front or allowing the presence.

[Martha Honey]

Allowing the presence of it.

[Interviewer]

And just to be clear, like this is 83, 84, is there anything in the public realm about the US using Costa Rica as a base for Contra activity?

[Tony Avrigan]

Well, there was much more attention to what was going on in the north from Honduras, because that was where the FDN and the main Contra force was. And just about all the news was about that. And it was hard to convince our editors and people especially, especially Americans. It was a much harder sell trying to convince them that there was something important happening on the southern front. Cause it just wasn't nearly as developed as what was going on in Honduras.

[Interviewer]

But did you manage to file stories that got published?

[Martha Honey]

Yeah, well, I think one of the early really big ones, Tony was filming for ABC Television and I was writing for the New York Times as a stringer, so it never had my byline, but was writing for them. And we actually uncovered what was Eden Pastora's secret radio station that he always said was broadcasting from the hills of Nicaragua. In fact, it was broadcasting from the hills of San Jose.

[Interviewer]

Tell our listeners real quick, who is Eden Pastora?

[Martha Honey]

So Eden Pastora was the main contour anti Sandinista leader on the southern front. And there were a number of different sort of small armies that were under his coalition, which was known as ardi. And he officially denied he was getting CIA For a long, for the first period of time that we were there, he denied that he was getting any CIA helped. The fiction was that he was running his own war.

[Narrator]

And it was so important to him.

[Interviewer]

And others to conceal his location, not just for like military strategic reasons because, but because Costa Rica was officially not.

[Martha Honey]

Supposed to be involved in the war. That was the condition under which he was allowed to operate there.

[Interviewer]

And did that story sort of establish as fact that there was in fact a Contra operation being run out of Costa Rica.

[Martha Honey]

Yes, it did. And there were other, there were beginnings to be other reports. As I recall, there was an expose in Newsweek that had also talked about it and there were, you know, there were beginning to be reports, but this was one of the early sort of real, you know, we sort of caught them.

[Interviewer]

What do you think accounts for the difference between the character of the Contras in the north and the seemingly gentler, less brutal Contras you're describing in the south?

[Tony Avrigan]

In the north, I mean these were, you know, Somoza's National Guard and they continued to commit atrocities. They would go into villages and just shoot everybod body and things like that. None of that was happening on the southern front. I mean they, the people in the south were much different. They were peasants from southern Nicaragua who didn't like the heavy handed reforms being made by the Sandinistas. There were some people from the Atlantic coast who didn't like the imposition of a Spanish based culture. They were generally not Catholic, they were Moravian or other Protestant groups. So the Sandinistas were trying to change their schools and change their culture and they rebelled against that. And militarily they were not very competent. I mean, they didn't have a lot of military experience or very good military training. The arms they were getting from the US were like the dregs of the arms. They were, you know, just sort of the leftover stuff. And they would complain that even the uniforms they were getting, their camouflage uniforms were made for like six foot tall Americans. These enormous boots and the pants that dragged down on the ground, shirts that were reached their knees and stuff. So they were ill equipped and ill suited to really do any real fighting.

[Interviewer]

Despite aid coming from the U.S. yes.

[Martha Honey]

There were periods of time when money was flowing and arms were supposed to be coming in. And still the Southern front was always the stepchild and one of the questions was, was money being ripped off? And I think, you know, some of the work that we did in Miami and really looking deeper into the drug trafficking and so on, it was apparent that some of the Contra leaders were ripping off money and there was just no priority given to either training or equipping the sort of the cannon fodder on the southern front.

[Narrator]

Okay, so you just heard Martha reference drug trafficking. I get asked a lot about the drug angle of the Iran Contra story. Is it true that the Contras were smuggling cocaine into the U.S. is it true that American officials put a blind eye to it? According to Tony and Martha, the answers to these Questions are gauzy and unsatisfying at best.

[Martha Honey]

One of the things that I think we know, I mean, we've learned looking at drug trafficking in a number of parts of the world, is that it tends to thrive where there are covert operations. So I think that the operations out of Costa Rica, based out of the north on these airstrips that were sort of a classic cover for moving drugs. It was at the time when first marijuana and then cocaine was coming in from Colombia and they needed sort of stopover places in Central America. A lot of the countries in Central America, Guatemala and so on, became bases for drug stopping. But the Contra operations provided, you know, particular ability to move the drugs.

[Tony Avrigan]

The CIA had this problem that they had to move arms in through these very small airstrips carved out of the jungle. And they needed pilots willing to do that. And there's not too many pilots are willing to land on these very short landing and takeoff Runway airstrips. And the only, the most experienced people at doing that were drug pilots. So they ended up recruiting a bunch of these pilots. And these people had a background in drugs. So they were figuring, well, they're flying these planes down full of arms, unloading the arms and flying back empty, that's a waste. So they would fly back with drugs that started to come up from Colombia or other places in South America and they would fly them back into the States, often with actually the COVID of the CIA.

[Interviewer]

So just as a table setting question, what would have been in it for the US or the CIA to put a blind eye towards this or to encourage it?

[Martha Honey]

It's sort of what level are you talking about? Because there were the CIA operatives or contract employees in the field, the pilots and these various other sort of lower level officials who were clearly profiting from it. The CIA operation, the Southern Front, needed this kind of pilots and so they kind of turned, at least they turned a blind eye. The central question, or one of the central questions we have never been able to fully resolve, is how far up the the line of command did profiting from the drug operations go? And I don't think we know that.

[Narrator]

If you're curious to learn more on the drug smuggling aspect of Iran Contra, it's worth looking up the findings of a Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry that looked into the issue in 1987. In their official report, Kerry and his investigators concluded that there was no evidence that Contra leaders were personally involved in drug smuggling. However, there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling on the part of individual Contras as well as Contra suppliers. Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region. The report also found that US Officials working in Central America failed to address the drug issue out of fear that doing so would jeopardize the war effort against the Sandinista government. We'll be right back.

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[Martha Honey]

The.

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[Narrator]

The drug trade was not the only murky story that Martha Honey and Tony Avrigan came across during their time in Central America. At one point, Tony and Martha got word about a dramatic new development on the southern front of the Contra war. It involved Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista who was now the primary Contra leader in Costa Rica. Pastora was going to hold a press conference at one of his bases in the Nicaraguan jungle.

[Martha Honey]

We had developed some very good sources.

[Interviewer]

This is 1984, by the way.

[Martha Honey]

This is 1984, this is May 1984. But leading up to that, we had developed particularly one intelligence officer within the Contra movement who became a very important source. And we later learned that he was Costa Rican and he was actually had infiltrated to try to find out for pro neutral Costa Ricans what was going on inside. And so one of the things that Andres said was that the CIA was really putting pressure on Pastora to align the southern front with the northern front with what was known as the fdn, Somoza's old National Guard, in the northern front. And Pastor was under a lot of pressure. Pastora at that point had never said that he was getting CIA money. But in the.

[Interviewer]

What does it mean to align? What does it mean that they wanted him to align?

[Martha Honey]

So they wanted, for instance, Pastora to take all of his military orders out of Honduras, rather than just being under.

[Tony Avrigan]

The command of the fdn, so that.

[Martha Honey]

He would no longer really be the general in the south, but he would be taking his orders from, from the north and basically from the CIA that they would be directing it. And so one of the things that I was told a few days before the press conference was that the CIA had given Pastora an ultimatum, a 30 day ultimatum that was up May 30, 1984, that he had to by then publicly say that he was aligning with the FDN in the north. And Pastora basically called the press conference to say publicly for the first time that he was getting CIA support and that he was announcing that he was breaking his ties with the CIA and going to basically run his own operation out of the south. So that was the purpose of the press conference, because.

[Narrator]

Wow.

[Interviewer]

So this was no routine press conference?

[Martha Honey]

No, no, no, no. And because I knew this, I decided not to go to the press conference. And I wrote a story for the New York Times that was a front page story the next day saying that the CIA had put ultimatum on Pastora. I didn't know that the bombing was going to happen.

[Interviewer]

You said the CIA, you were able to say that it was the CIA.

[Martha Honey]

Yes, yes. And so I stayed home.

[Tony Avrigan]

I was stringing then for ABC television and you know, I had to go there because we needed actually tape of Pastora saying it. So we had a Toyota Jeep and we used that and a bunch of others to go up, travel up to the north and then get into these small boats to go down to the San Juan river that separates Nicaragua and Costa Rica and up to the place called Le Penka. But there was one person there who was not part of our regular group. He wasn't one of the Costa Rican journalists or the foreign journalists that were regularly doing these, these trips up to the Contra camps. I went and talked to him and he said that he was a Danish photographer and was going to cover the press conference. And I, I mean that wasn't so unusual. I didn't think that was anything alarming about that. Anyway, we got up to the. The Concho camp, known as Lepenca, just after sundown. And it was just really a one room shack piled high inside there were just piles of rice bags that people were using as seats. And there were various contras with AK47s or M16s over their shoulders milling around and like a high table in the center. And Pastora got behind that. So just as he began speaking, he motioned to a young woman who was part of his force, a woman named Rosita, to bring him a cup of coffee. We found out later that the bomber, the person who came to the press conference with 4 pounds of C4 plastic explosive in a Halliburton camera case, was this very. The Danish journalist who I had said hello to early in the morning. And he put that down underneath the counter on which Pastora was leaning and talking and then went outside and set it off by remote control. But this young woman handed him a cup of coffee and as she did so, her foot hit the camera case, knocked it on its side. So then when the blast went off, it went up and down and made a huge hole in the floor and blew the roof off the building. Finally I realized that everything was black and there was this moaning and crying and there was all this dust in the air and everything. Well, it killed three journalists in Rosita and there were nearly 20 people injured and some very people lost arms and legs and eyes. And I had. All the skin was burned off my face and I had a big cut on the side of my face and then my left hand was. All the skin was burned off and the bones were sticking out and I Had a big hole the size of a tennis ball, a little bigger than that in my side. I didn't think I was going to die, but I thought if I did die, it was going to be because of this. So I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the. Into the hole. And then there was only one boat there. And the people who were least injured ran down to the boat and left the most injured behind. And I ended up being on the ground for nearly 12 hours before any. The boat had to make a four hour round trip to go down to the nearest rural hospital from there. And, well, Martha was there and she can tell you about what happened that and how, but go ahead.

[Martha Honey]

So just backtracking a little. So I hadn't gone to the press conference because I already knew what Pastora was going to say. So I wrote a story for the New York Times, filed it, and was sitting at home with our daughter and the phone rang and it was another American journalist. And I said, oh, I thought you were at the press conference. He said, no, I overslept. I didn't go, but do you have the radio on? I said, no. He said, well, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but there's been a bomb that's gone off at the press conference and they're reporting that at least one American has been killed and they haven't said who it is. And so it was kind of like, you know, my world fell apart. And I began calling everybody I could think of in the Contras, in the US Embassy and the Costa Rican government. And everybody said, yeah, we're hearing these reports, you know, some people have died, including an American. And we. But we don't have any names. So of course I thought the worst. And eventually good Canadian friends of ours came over and the woman stayed with our kids. And I went to the hospital in San Carlos where they were bringing in the people. And while I was standing there, I noticed that there was someone sitting outside in a hospital garb, but sitting in a wheelchair with a beard, just sitting there very quietly outside the hospital. And at one point one of the nurses came over to me and said, are you the woman who has come to collect? And she pointed to this guy and I said, who is that? And she said, oh, he's a Danish journalist and he wasn't injured. And he says that a woman's coming to collect him and he's waiting for her. I said, no, no, it's not me, and didn't think anything more of it. I remember when Tony finally arrived in the last ambulance I was following Tony in through these swinging doors and I remember glancing and seeing that the wheelchair was empty, that this guy had been sitting in that we learned two days later was the bomber and he managed to get himself out on his own and then he disappeared.

[Narrator]

More with Martha Honey and Tony Avrigan After a quick break.

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[Narrator]

After the bombing at Eden Pastora's press conference, Tony Avragan had to be flown to an American hospital where he was treated by a world class hand specialist. After two months in the hospital, Tony recovered and kept his hand. But the episode would consume Martha and Tony's lives for years to come.

[Martha Honey]

I was contacted by the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York and they had put together, you know, very modest fund and they said could you undertake an investigation and find out who responsible? And I said, sure. You know, I thought it would be pretty easy. And so you thought it'd be easy? I thought it'd be easy. Thought a couple, you know, a couple weeks, couple months, we'll nail this down.

[Interviewer]

And was it easy as you thought?

[Martha Honey]

No, no, it was a nightmare. And it still is. You know, we're not, we don't. There's still unanswered questions, but we initially started out, you know, the investigation. So I went back to meet with this Quantra guy in Costa Rica, in San Jose, and set up a meeting with Andres, the intelligence officer within Pastora's operation who was really reporting for the Pro Neutrality folks. And I said, okay, who did it? And he said, well, it was either the extreme right or the extreme left. I said, that's helpful, thanks. Yes, he said, yeah. But he said, but that started us on that path. And because of the 30 day ultimatum, we assumed that the CIA was responsible.

[Interviewer]

The assumption would be that the CIA was trying to stop the press conference from happening or.

[Martha Honey]

Right, right. I think that our view was that we just wanted more information on, we wanted a good investigation of the bombing. And clearly the US wasn't helping. In fact, the US had taken the one piece of the bomb that remained, which was the detonator. And someone from the Southern Command in Panama, an American came to the Costa Ricans and said, oh, we'll examine that and figure out who made the bomb. And they took it away and it disappeared. No report was ever given so systematically. The US was trying to block a serious investigation. The Costa Ricans at that point were not doing a serious investigation. They did subsequently. And so we, a year later we published our report on the Lapanka bombing, which we had just a rich array of sources who were reporting, you know, sort of confirming what our hypothesis was. And so we published this report a year after the bombing for the Committee to Protect Journalists and also published a Spanish edition in Costa Rica.

[Interviewer]

Was your central allegation that the bomber, like the identity of the bomber? It is what it is. But was your central allegation that he had ties to the US government and that he had been ordered to carry out the bombing by the CIA?

[Martha Honey]

Yes, yes. We were given the name from some of our sources in Miami and sources in Costa Rica who were mainly Contra sources. And we knew that he wasn't the Danish journalist. I mean, that was, he was traveling on a stolen passport and so on, and that was all we had. So, you know, for a long Time, our leads all seemed to point to the CIA. We still did not know the real name of the bomber. And we had this other nom de guerre, but we assumed that wasn't a real name and we didn't know his real identity and we didn't know how, where the bomb had been put together. We didn't know those details. Who's the paymaster? So we began talking about, okay, could we bring a lawsuit that would help to get more information through depositions, would be able to do a serious investigation. So we began calling. I mean, we had some lawyer friends in the States, and they all said, this is a really difficult case. You're Americans. The journalists who went to the press conference left from Costa Rica. It happened in Nicaragua. You know, just jurisdiction is a huge issue. Plus you're up against it looks like the US Government and national security issues and so on. And so it's going to be very, very hard. And we really couldn't find anyone who would take the case.

[Narrator]

In June of 1986, the Public Interest lawyer Danny Sheehan filed a sprawling lawsuit on Martha and Tony's behalf. The suit alleged a conspiracy involving an American farmer living in Costa Rica named John Hull, as well as a group of Cuban Americans who worked with him. Later, it was confirmed that Hull's ranch had been used as part of the American government's secret effort to aid the Contras. Sheehan's lawsuit also targeted multiple individuals who would later become implicated in the Iran Contra scandal. Among them was Major General Richard Secord, whose story you heard in episode four. Martha and Tony say the sheer scale of the lawsuit caught them off guard.

[Martha Honey]

We had, you know, just because we were so overwhelmed with things going on in Costa Rica, we hadn't paid a lot of attention to what he was putting together. We had no idea it was going to be 28, 29 people and so on. I mean, we kept saying to him, our interest is what's the identity of the bomber and who was the paymaster? That's what we want to track. And suddenly it was this lawsuit with, you know, all of these different people, a lot of names we don't even know. Charge of scarcity, charging a broad conspiracy with Lipanka being, you know, sort of one. One piece of it, but a much broader conspiracy going back both many years and involving just this vast network.

[Tony Avrigan]

He never showed us anything before it was filed with the court. We never. He kept us away from every court appearance he went himself, and he really kept us marginalized. But he kept saying, I have more information about the people you were interested in. And I'll. You know. But he never. He never produced that information. And we started complaining about the nature of the lawsuit. He kept saying, well, nobody cares about the bombing.

[Interviewer]

He had to make it about the secret government that was running the war.

[Tony Avrigan]

Right.

[Martha Honey]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So. And so he named Richard Secord, Robert Owen. Right. Who was one of North's people.

[Martha Honey]

He did not name North. And we said, why? And he said, because he is the one person working for the government. And if we name someone working for the government, they'll throw it out on national security grounds, which is probably a correct legal decision. Even though for us, you know, Hull and North were the centerpieces of what we were looking at other people.

[Interviewer]

You knew North's name at this point?

[Tony Avrigan]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

And you understood him to be the person who was directing the southern front?

[Tony Avrigan]

Yes.

[Martha Honey]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Did anything good come out of the lawsuit in your mind? Did any information shake loose as a result of.

[Martha Honey]

Yes. At the end of the day, you know, it did help to dismantle the Southern front. The whole investigation that not only we began, but then other people began looking at Hull and the Cuban Americans and so on, and that definitely had a huge impact. And then the secret airstrip, the Santa Helena airstrip, and the Hassenfuss plane and so on. So all of that Hassenfuss plane came.

[Interviewer]

Down a couple months after the lawsuit was filed.

[Martha Honey]

Yeah. And so all of that began this whole process that eventually unraveled the. The southern front or help feed into this whole growing awareness of the Iran Contra scheme. Yes.

[Interviewer]

You lost the lawsuit.

[Martha Honey]

We lost the lawsuit. Yes. But there was a lot of good information that was turned up, which eventually led to what we believe is the truth, that the bomber was actually working for the Sandinistas.

[Narrator]

The Sandinistas. Despite all their suspicions about CIA involvement in Eden Pastora's attempted assassination, Martha and Tony concluded that it was most likely the Sandinistas who were responsible. For me, the confusion around this incident underscores just how tangled and bewildering the Iran Contra story is as a whole. How many moving parts it involved, how many different fault lines and alliances there were. It was really convoluted. And I think that's also why the allegations of CIA complicity and Contra drug smuggling have never been fully fleshed out or definitively proven. The deeper you dive, the more reason you have to doubt every story you hear, and the harder it gets to pin anything down.

[Interviewer]

Why do you think these allegations are so hard to, well, prove is one thing. It's obvious why they're hard to prove.

[Narrator]

But why are they hard to believe?

[Interviewer]

Why is it hard for people to sort of accommodate the notion that the CIA might have a network of airstrips that are being used to run guns and drugs?

[Tony Avrigan]

You know, there's the shooting down of Hassanfus plane. That's a straightforward, simple story. Everybody can understand that in a few paragraphs that the plane was carrying arms, you have evidence and it was shot down. The story of the supply of arms to the Contra, the connections between the CIA and drug trafficking, it's much more important involved and it just doesn't fit into a fast news story. It's just not an easy thing to explain. It takes a while to explain.

[Martha Honey]

I think it's something more than that. I think that the press did, over time and over a lot of objections from U.S. officials and Costa Rican officials did come to understand and accept that how Branch was being used as a southern front for the Contras and that there were these Cuban Americans involved and so on. They were able to understand that. And for a long period of time and still today in Central America, there was, you know, there's been a strong feeling that it was the CIA that did it. In fact, the Costa Ricans, under the next President, launched an investigation which we had nothing to do with. But I think that the whole drug connection was very hard. We never had a drug plane that fell from the sky, you know, with Contras on it or c. This is such a hard story to report and oftentimes you don't have hard evidence. And so it's piecing together from stories, you know, and it's the kind of thing that can be discredited because there's so much money behind it and so much interest in keeping a lid on it. And so I think that that piece of it has not been fully either acknowledged or accepted because we didn't have the hard, you know, we just never had the real hard evidence.

[Narrator]

That's it for our interview with Martha Honey and Tony Avragan. Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of Fiasco. Iran Contra. Coming up, episode five, in which members of the Reagan administration try to stem the fallout of Iran Contra going public After Watergate.

[Tony Avrigan]

We all understood that the COVID up could be worse than the crime itself.

[Narrator]

Fiasco is a production of prologue projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Ula Culpa with editorial support from Andrew Parsons and me, Leon Naifak. Our music is by Nick Sylvester. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations and our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chipsny Audio Mix by Rob Byers, Michael Rayfiel and Johnny Vince Evans. Special thanks to Luminary and thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco Iran Contra ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus Pushkin subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges and bonus content for all Pushkin podcasts.

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