Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans & The Iran-Contra Arms Dealing Scandal (Part I)

Summary

SNAFU with Ed Helms

Episode: Behind the Bastards’ Robert Evans & The Iran-Contra Arms Dealing Scandal (Part I)

Release Date: May 20, 2026
Guests: Robert Evans (Behind the Bastards podcast)
Main Theme: A deep dive into the origins of the Iran-Contra Affair—a tangled web of Cold War paranoia, covert operations, and U.S. foreign policy misadventures.

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Ed Helms welcomes Robert Evans to unravel the first part of the Iran-Contra scandal—one of the most infamous U.S. political and foreign-policy disasters. Together, they blend historical storytelling with witty banter, exploring why these "screw ups" fascinate us and what this particular SNAFU reveals about U.S. attitudes, institutions, and recurring mistakes.

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1. Introduction and Guest Exchange

(02:02 – 05:12)

• Ed Helms describes SNAFU’s mission: exploring major historical mistakes and what they say about humanity.
• He introduces Robert Evans, highlighting his background in investigative journalism and podcasting about “history’s worst people.”
• The hosts compare their show concepts—SNAFU covers major blunders; Behind the Bastards examines notorious villains.
• Why do we love stories of screw-ups and bad actors?
  • Evans: “If somebody else screws up in a major way, you want to pay attention to see…it’s like if you see a car wreck.” (04:02)
  • Helms: On schadenfreude, “It can be soothing to just know we’re not alone in our pain and misery in this world.” (05:12)

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2. Robert Evans’ Path to Reporting on Extremism

(05:28 – 09:00)

• Evans details how he got into investigative journalism by observing the rise of online extremism and reporting on radicalized internet communities.
• Discussion about the skills crucial to investigative journalism—relentless curiosity, willingness to slog through tedious research, and commitment to clarity.

Notable Quotes

• Evans: “It was a mix of accident and, I guess, happenstance.” (06:29)

• Helms: “Investigative journalism is tedious. It is incredibly time consuming. It can be dangerous a lot of times. And that thirst for the truth or for knowledge or for clarity on something is really powerful.” (06:33)

• Evans shouts out organizations doing “nuts and bolts” investigative work, including Bellingcat, NYT’s Visual Investigations, and BBC Africa Eye.

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3. Setting the Stage: What Was the Iran-Contra Affair?

(09:46 – 12:41)

• Helms introduces the episode’s SNAFU: the Iran-Contra affair, describing it as “peak Reagan era Cold War insanity…A true international pickle of the extra spicy variety.” (10:02)

• Evans and Helms joke about guesting on each other’s shows and inventing a new portmanteau: “Snasterds.” (09:59)

• The Iran-Contra Affair is presented as a confusing web involving different U.S. enemies and crises in totally separate hemispheres—a knot created by U.S. covert operations.

• Evans: “It really says a lot about how widely we were screwing around with the rest of the world in those years…Nicaragua and Iran wind up tied together in a scandal through us.” (12:04)

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4. Nicaragua: The First “Front”

(12:41 – 15:46)

• The podcast shifts to Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution, driven by socialist Sandinistas overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Somoza.
• U.S. reaction: The new leftist government in Nicaragua is seen as a pressing Cold War threat on America’s doorstep.
• The Reagan Doctrine: Roll back communism using all means, including CIA-backed paramilitaries (the Contras).

Key Insight

• Helms: “To many Nicaraguans, this felt like liberation. But to Washington, it basically felt like Karl Marx had just moved into the guest bedroom.” (14:17)

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5. U.S. Anti-Communism as Ideological Crusade

(16:49 – 22:11)

• Discussion on how deeply the anti-communist paranoia ran in the U.S. psyche during the Reagan era.
• Evans unpacks the “domino theory” and how actual outcomes often failed to match the rhetoric or fears (“Cost Rica did not become a communist state…” (18:51)).
• They reflect on the difference between ideological propaganda and the practical interests (oil, power) motivating U.S. interventions worldwide.

Notable Quotations

• Evans: “People were playing with a different set amount of information at the time too…a lot of people did believe this is like a life and death thing as opposed to like, well, this is a country that’s…geopolitically opposed to ours.” (19:00–20:21)
• Helms: “There's a really fun sort of open debate: how much was this an ideological crusade, and how much was it about controlling geographic pockets?” (20:24)

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6. The Contra War and Boland Amendments

(22:11 – 28:56)

• Reagan’s CIA builds the Contras from exiles and former National Guardsmen; reports emerge about Contra atrocities and death squads.
• Newsweek exposes the CIA’s involvement, spurring Congress to act.
• The Boland Amendment (1982) forbids funds for overthrowing Nicaragua’s government; enforcement is rare for its unanimity: 411–0.
• Despite the law, the Reagan administration (via the NSC) continues to fund and direct the Contra war, including mining Nicaraguan harbors. Congress escalates with stricter amendments.
• Both hosts joke about Congressional censure as a “strongly worded letter.”
  • Helms: “I guess Congress has just become a strongly worded letter apparatus, right?” (27:07)
  • Evans: “It’s a bad Yelp review for the President.” (27:12)

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7. Legal Loopholes and the Role of the National Security Council

(28:56 – 30:33)

• The NSC claims the Boland Amendment doesn’t apply because it is not “technically” an intelligence agency, exploiting legal semantics to keep operations going.
• The hosts marvel at the creativity and “bullshit-ability” of U.S. policy and legal wriggling.
• Evans: “All of the rules that govern what our leaders have the power to do are like the monopoly rules...The name of the game is to get away with what you can get away with.” (29:24)
• Helms: “There’s something so incredible about how bullshitable our legal system is.” (28:56)

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8. Enter Oliver North – And How Iran Gets Involved

(30:33 – 37:55)

• Introduction to Oliver North: U.S. Marine veteran brought onto the NSC, unusual for its traditional civilian makeup.
• The hosts pose a crucial transition: How does Iran become entangled in a Nicaraguan anti-communist operation?
• The 1979 Iranian Revolution ousts the U.S.-backed Shah, leading to Ayatollah Khomeini’s hardline regime and the infamous Iran hostage crisis (444 days).
• Evans offers historical perspective: why Iran’s history of externally propped-up autocrats and internal repression made the revolution (and U.S.-Iran hostility) inevitable.

Notable Quotations

• Evans: “I tend to look at especially stuff with, like, our relationship to Iran that way… it’s a problem we never fixed. And so that’s why the problems seem similar every time they crop up.” (35:32)

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9. American Patterns of Swinging Between Extremes

(37:55 – 39:28)

• Ed Helms reflects on how societies often swing from one extreme to another, rarely settling in the center.
• Evans: “The priority was never that Iran would have a stable, functional government that, like, worked for most Iranians. The priority was, well, we need a lot of fuel and we want to make sure the Soviets don’t wind up having too much influence here.” (37:17)

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10. The Hostage Legacy and Iran in the 1980s

(39:28 – 40:44)

• The Iran hostage crisis cements Iran’s place as a U.S. adversary; the story gets a Hollywood treatment in Argo, which both hosts discuss briefly.
• The NSC is now worried about a repeat hostage debacle, especially with Hezbollah taking hostages in Lebanon.

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11. Reagan’s Dilemma: Hostages, Embargoes, and Secret Operations

(39:28 – 40:44)

• Reagan, fearing another hostage catastrophe, asks Oliver North to bring U.S. hostages home.
• Problem: dealing with Hezbollah (Iran-backed, designated terrorists) is illegal, and Iran is under embargo. Yet desperation grows.

Notable Quote

• Evans (mocking pop culture/official lines): “The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. There’s like five different fake presidents told me in action movies as a kid.” (40:44)

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12. Tease for Part 2

(40:53 – End)

• The episode stops just as it builds toward the arms-for-hostages dealings.
• “We’re going to bring you the final part, the grand conclusion of the Iran Contra affair next week.” (40:53)
• Listeners are encouraged to tune in for the rest, as the scandal becomes even more convoluted.

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Memorable Moments

• The running joke about Congress’s impotence, “All the gravitas of a bad Yelp review.” (11:00, 27:12, 27:18)
• Ed Helms’s comparison of U.S. legal logic to “a casino saying, ‘we’re not a massive gambling operation, we’re just a little mom and pop motel with some card games.’” (27:54)
• Robert Evans’s metaphor for U.S. power politics: "All of the rules that govern what our leaders have the power to do are like the monopoly rules..." (29:24)
• The portmanteau-fixing session: "Snasterds." (09:59)
• The pop culture nod: “I grew up on enough 90s movies to know the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.” (40:44)

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Key Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 02:02 – Welcome and introduction of Robert Evans
• 05:28 – Evans on entering investigative journalism
• 09:46 – Introduction to the Iran-Contra Affair & SNAFU's overlap with Behind the Bastards
• 12:41 – Nicaragua, Somoza, and the Sandinistas
• 14:16 – Reagan Doctrine: why Nicaragua mattered to Cold War policy
• 16:49 – The U.S. Red Scare and domino theory
• 22:11 – Building and backing the Contras
• 24:14 – News breaks on CIA involvement, Boland Amendments begin
• 27:07 – “Strongly worded letter” and “bad Yelp review” jokes
• 28:56 – How the NSC finds loopholes
• 30:33 – Oliver North joins the NSC; introduction to Iran’s 1979 revolution
• 35:32 – U.S.-Iran relations as an “unfixed” recurring drain clog
• 39:28 – The Iran hostages and the movie Argo
• 40:44 – Reagan's dilemma with hostages and embargoes
• 40:53 – To be continued; next week’s episode preview

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Tone & Delivery

The episode is characterized by witty, self-aware banter, gallows humor, and clear, accessible historical storytelling. Both hosts balance lightness (“Snasterds,” Yelp review jokes) with pointed criticism of U.S. government duplicity and international cynicism.

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Summary for New Listeners

This episode is an essential primer on how the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded: from Cold War anxieties in Central America and the Middle East, to Congressional attempts at control, to the White House’s audacious workarounds. Ed Helms and Robert Evans make the complexities digestible, exposing both the ideological fervor and legal gamesmanship driving one of America’s most unbelievable political SNAFUs. Stay tuned for Part II, where the real arms deals and diplomatic mayhem go down.

Transcript

[Ed Helms]

I guess Congress has just become a strongly worded letter apparatus, right?

[Robert Evans]

It's a bad Yelp review for the President.

[Ed Helms]

Yes, it carries all the gravitas of a bad Yelp review.

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Ed Helms]

Welcome to SNAFU, the show about history's greatest screw ups, where we delve into all the messy mayhem and then try to figure out what it says about us as human beings. And spoiler alert, it's usually not very good things. I'm Ed Helms, your host, and today I'm joined by the host of the insanely popular and entertaining podcast behind the Bastards, which examines the lives and legacies of history's worst people. After first establishing his writing chops at humor website Cracked, this guest worked for the investigative journalism group Bellingcat. He also reported from conflict zones around the world, including Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, writing extensively on extremism, disinformation and political violence. In addition to his podcasting work, he is the author of the novel after the Revolution, a speculative story about a fractured future America. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the incomparable Robert Evans.

[Robert Evans]

Ed, that was such a nice introduction. Thank you.

[Ed Helms]

That's the Whole podcast.

[Robert Evans]

After all the terrible things I've told

[Ed Helms]

you, all I do is just give these lovely, glowing introductions and then we call it a day. No, I'm so glad to have you on. I of course have been a guest on your podcast behind the Bastards, not once but twice. That's right. I'm still waiting for my third invite. Not gonna hold it against you yet, but just putting that out there. Happy to have you back, but I'm super excited to play host to you this time.

[Robert Evans]

I'm excited to be on snafu. I've been listening since season one. And yeah, I'm glad to get to actually participate in the show now. I can't wait to hear what you're gonna tell me about.

[Ed Helms]

You are in it now. It's funny, our show, some thematic similarities. You focus on bad people throughout history. I focus on bad events or incidents or mistakes throughout history. Why are we so drawn to the dark side, Robert Evans?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I think part of it's just this little piece in all of us that's encoded by evolution to where if somebody else screws up in a major way, you want to pay attention to see. It's like if you see a car wreck, it's like what happened there? Can I avoid that? Can I make sure I don't get into that kind of problem?

[Ed Helms]

It's funny you put it that way because I feel like that's a well intentioned or it's sort of a positive spin on why we're drawn to these things. I feel like there's a darker impulse in all of us, like why we look at car crashes. It's not because it's like we're looking for ways to avoid that. It's because I think what? What is it? It makes us feel safer to see other people injured or something.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. That is a good one. Cause like one of my favorite ways to relax. Like when my friends and I a couple years ago we all got laid off at the website we'd been working for and I had everyone over to the house and I just hours worth of footage of like people injuring themselves trying to cut down trees. Because it'll be like a guy and his kid and like a 300 year old oak tree and he's got like a $40 saw that he bought from Home Depot and he's like, I can take this tree. And I just love watching like the hubris meet with physics. But there is a darkness to it as well.

[Ed Helms]

I think we all have a sort of schadenfreude gene in us that's sort of like, it can be soothing to just know we're not alone in our pain and misery in this world. Yeah, it's pretty universal.

[Robert Evans]

And someone always has it worse than you do. Pretty much.

[Ed Helms]

Now you have a background in investigative journalism with some pretty serious chops in that area. What drew you into that space?

[Robert Evans]

You know, I've always been fascinated by conflict. I came into it sort of as like a military history nerd, someone who was interested in that. But really what kind of like broke me into, like a significant role in media was I just happened to be paying attention to these weird little corners of the Internet, right As, like, the alt right erupted and, you know, 8chan 4chan kind of like became major things in terms of, like, people were carrying out attacks and stuff based on, you know, having been radicalized in these little fascist corners of the Internet. And I just kind of been watching them for a couple of years. And so I realized at a certain point, like, oh, there's not a lot of other people who understand how these communities work should probably explain them to people because members of those communities are now killing people. Right. It was a mix of like, accident and, I guess, happenstance.

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Sure.

[Ed Helms]

Well, it was a product of your own curiosity.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Ed Helms]

And I think, I feel like that's one of the traits of the great journalists out there, is like this relentless curiosity and that it's coming from a genuine place. It's not just like, how do I get the next big scoop? You know, it's like, I really. My sense, and I'm not a journalist at all, but my sense of it is that the journalists, the great ones, really have a personal, unquenchable thirst to know and this curiosity that drives through. Because investigative journalism is tedious. It is incredibly time consuming. It can be dangerous a lot of times. And that thirst for the truth or for knowledge or for clarity on something is really powerful. I think it's such an admirable space to be in. Do you see great investigative journalism happening today? Like, who are the people that you think are really standing out or doing great work? Besides Tucker Carlson, of course.

[Robert Evans]

Of course, Tucker. You and I are both big fans of Tucker. My old colleagues at bellingcat continue to do great work. The New York Times Visual Investigations desk has done some really impressive open source reporting on conflicts, I mean, all over the world over the last several years. I find myself really interested in BBC Africa Eye, which is their kind of open source covering, particularly war crimes in places like Cameroon. So There's a lot of really interesting nuts and bolts work being done by folks who are willing to do things like spend hundreds of hours combing through footage that we know is a war crime, but we don't know what militia was responsible or where it was done. And labor, like, you can kind of see a mountain in the background. And so they'll just spend weeks going through Google Maps, and they're like, it's this mountain. And because of where it is in the frame of the shot, we can, like, now locate this exact point geographically. And we know that these militant groups were active. Like, that's really impressive work to me. And it's so much more of a pain in the butt than what I did, you know, when I was covering that stuff. So I have tremendous admiration for that. And anybody who's doing, like, financial crimes investigative journalism, the wonkiness required. The ability to dig deep into the financials of a company that's doing something wrong is so labor intensive, I can

[Ed Helms]

barely balance my checkbook. I can't even wrap my head around that stuff. And then it's not only the digging into it and the figuring it out. It's then the ability to translate it into English in an interesting way that laypeople can understand. Well, kudos to you and your colleagues and all the people out there doing great investigative journalism. So let's dig in. For today's snafu. I chose something that I think is kind of in both of our wheelhouses because it features both bad people and bad events, which makes it, you know, it's kind of a. It's a mashup of behind the bastards and snafu.

[Robert Evans]

I like it.

[Ed Helms]

What would we call that?

[Robert Evans]

Behind the snafts? No, that doesn't.

[Ed Helms]

I feel like there's a good portmanteau with snafu and bastards, and I want to call it Snasterds.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. Printing.

[Ed Helms]

That's the best.

[Robert Evans]

There we go. There we go.

[Ed Helms]

We're gonna cut all that. All right. Today's episode is peak Reagan era Cold War insanity. A true international pickle of the extra spicy variety. This is the Iran Contra affair.

[Robert Evans]

Beautiful.

[Ed Helms]

Do you remember anything about this? I think I'm a little older than you. I'm not sure.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I was born in 88, so I don't, like, have firsthand memories of it, but I do remember. I remember my first because I grew up in a very conservative household, and we watched Fox News a lot, and Oliver north had a television show during the Bush years, War Stories, which I thought We Norfolk.

[Ed Helms]

Cnn.

[Robert Evans]

Was it on cnn?

[Ed Helms]

I think his show was on cnn. Yeah. He had like a war history show.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I forget which network it was on, but I know it was on a lot. And I asked my parents like, who's that guy? They were like, well, he got in some trouble a few years back, but it was totally the thing. Yeah,

[Ed Helms]

yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That was my parents attitude.

[Ed Helms]

We'll learn a lot about Oliver north today. It's funny, I remember, I feel like. And maybe it's just cause I've read so much about it, but I. I feel like I remember seeing these hearings and news coverage as a kid. I was born in 74, so this was all sort of. I was around 10, 12 when a lot of this stuff was breaking. But let's get right into it. So I think it's important to start any conversation about the Iran Contra affair with a quick warning, which is that this can get a little confusing. While the name sounds like one neat, tidy little package, the Iran Contra affair is actually a very complicated web of deceit and absurdity involving completely different American adversaries into completely different crises in completely different hemispheres. And they all get tangled up in a beautiful knot, as we'll see. These crises were initially so fundamentally unrelated that it's hard to fathom how they mix up. That's part of the fun of this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it really says a lot about how widely we were screwing around with the rest of the world in those years that like.

[Ed Helms]

Great point.

[Robert Evans]

Nicaragua and Iran wind up tied together in a scandal through us.

[Ed Helms]

Exactly. Yes. These two countries, so far apart, couldn't

[Robert Evans]

have less to do with each other.

[Ed Helms]

The United States manages to just tie them into this beautiful Gordian knot, which we're gonna try to unravel a little bit. So let's begin our snafu in the summer of 1979, a famously chill, uneventful period in global history.

[Robert Evans]

That's what I remember.

[Ed Helms]

Just kidding. Not at all. The Vietnam War had end just four years prior. The psychic wounds were still very fresh in America. Jimmy Carter was president. And the year's headlines included Vietnam invading Cambodia, China subsequently invading Vietnam because of course, Margaret Thatcher becoming the UK's first female prime minister. And the Iranian revolution, which will become very important later in our story. Now let's jump to a tiny country in Central America called Nicaragua, roughly the size of New York State, nestled right between Honduras and Costa Rica. Their leader was dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had spent decades running the country with corruption, repression and a lot of Support from good old Uncle Sam.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, really? Weird.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah, we were just propping this dictator right on up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

But on July 19, 1979, Somoza was overthrown by Nicaragua's socialist Sandinistas almost immediately. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980, and good old Ronnie had a very clear worldview. Communism wasn't something to manage, it was something to beat. This became known, of course, as the Reagan Doctrine, which basically said we're not just going to try to contain communism around the world, we're going to actively try to roll it back. And one of the ways that we're going to do that is, is by supporting anti communist forces around the world. As we'll soon see, by pretty much any means necessary.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

So when Nicaragua's socialist Sandinistas overthrew a US backed dictator in 79, to many Nicaraguans, this felt like liberation. But to Washington, it basically felt like Karl Marx had just moved into the guest bedroom.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. We went to all this trouble to give you guys a nice dictator and prop him up with rocket launchers and machine guns and this is how you repay us?

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Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

For giving this guy guns to kill you with. Exactly. Yeah. What the heck?

[Ed Helms]

Come on.

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[Ed Helms]

So yeah, these Sandinistas are socialists. Communism adjacent. Close enough that, that it just was not feeling good. Because this wasn't communism bubbling up in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, you know, oceans away. This was Central America. It's basically a nine iron chip shot from Texas. And now add in the Sandinistas explicit ties to the Soviet Union and suddenly Reagan's team is looking at Nicaragua like it's the Cold War's new front line.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And that's very much like the attitude they had at the time, right? This like if it spills over into one country, it will inev spread into the neighboring countries. And even though we saw during the Korean War you've got a communist North Korea after the war or after the ceasefire, you have South Korea which is not a communist state. And North Korea didn't inevitably spread to its neighbors. This kind of domino theory already had proved to be not totally accurate. But they still really. It's the easiest justification for doing whatever you want, right. If you're just like, if we don't take a handle on this, they're gonna spread everywhere. There will be commun marching into Texas.

[Ed Helms]

Well, I really think that getting into the national psyche a little bit at that time there was a genuine sense that communism was just evil, explicitly evil. And I mean, I think there still is in some various corners, but it was not seen as just a sort of competing system of government or sociological experiment of some kind. It was seen as like a very evil enterprise. And also in that way, it was also perceived as kind of a contagion to your point, like something that could catch hold or sort of corrupt people's minds and then take hold. I don't know if you're a regular American at this time, Robert. Are you sort of buying the Red Scare or are you a little more skeptical?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I would hope that I would be skeptical. You know, as a kid, I certainly wasn't. And my parents were very much big Reaganites and very much bought in to this whole idea that like communism is, this is inherently different from any other kind of system of government around the world and so much worse even than any kind of other authoritarian we might back. Right. Because there's something inherently extra dangerous about communism. And obviously I would say, like looking at the history of this period of time and looking at the history of from like the 50s up through the 70s to the 80s, I don't actually think the evidence is there to say that like these communist regimes were any kind of, in any way inherently worse than any other, like flawed authoritarian regimes that existed around the world. Right. Like there's upsides and there's downsides. There's things they did well, there's things that they did badly. We can now know that, like, yeah, the idea that communism, if it was allowed to spread to one country, would inevitably spread to all of its neighbors. Just untrue. It didn't happen in a bunch of places. Right. Costa Rica did not become a communist state. Right. But I also, you know, people were playing with a different set amount of information at the time too. And I'm not surprised that given what folks were learning in school and what organizations like the John Birch Society was spreading in terms of like anti communist propaganda, that a lot of people did believe this is like a life and death thing as opposed to like, well, this is a country that's like, these are regimes that are geopolitically opposed to ours.

[Ed Helms]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

But that doesn't mean they're inherently the devil, you know.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah. I grew up sort of inculcated with a sense that the Soviet Union was evil. That sort of was a sweeping opinion of just sort of the entire population, which seems kind of crazy, but extremely common. Yeah. What's really interesting to parse here is how much of the anti communist activity on the part of our government at the time was more of an ideological sort of crusade, or was it more just about trying to control and influence various sort of geographic pockets around the world. We'll learn a little bit more, but that's a really fun sort of open debate to tap into.

[Robert Evans]

And I think it's kind of worth looking back on previous great power clashes that had happened not that long previously, including the great game between Russia and the British Empire and kind of the early chunk of the early parts of the 20th century, very end of the 19th century, where you had a lot of the same language, oh, tsarist Russia is this inherently destructive, spreading force that we have to counter as the British Empire or they'll be right in our backyard. A lot of the same kind of rhetoric, hype and whatnot. That obviously goes away the instant we wind up ally or the instant that Great Britain winds up allied with Tsarist Russia in a war. But it's this, I think a lot of it just is great power conflict. As if you were a great power. And if you're seeing yourself and very much are in fact fighting this kind of Cold war against this other great power, they're gonna be the devil right within your own country, within sort of the attitude of the ruling class in your country. That's just like the norm historically, whether they're communists or an imperial power, whatever you wanna call it, you know.

[Ed Helms]

Amen. The Reagan Doctrine, in a situation like this, the playbook was pretty straightforward. Find the Sandinistas enemies and back them. Support the people fighting the Sandinistas. So in 1981, Reagan authorized the CIA to build and train a paramilitary force of Nicaraguan exiles to destabilize and ultimately topple the government. These counter revolutionaries, la Contra revolucion, or what became in Washington shorthand. The Contras initially included former members of Somoza's National Guard. Over time the CIA bulked them up with mercenaries and disillusioned ex Sandinistas who'd broken with the revolution. Quick gut check. Do these interventions ever go according to plan or is it just kind of like a we'll fix it in post foreign policy?

[Robert Evans]

You know, it depends, I guess because like when we for example, during like Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, the initial stage of that like goes pretty well for us in that like we back the Mujahideen to an extent and they really do do a lot of damage to the Red army and to just to the USSR's ability to. It's a contributing factor to why the Soviet Union collapses. Right. Is this disaster in Afghanistan. And so to that extent like our intervention in Afghanistan worked exactly the way US war planners thought it would. Then there were other knock on effects of us messing around in Afghanistan that didn't work out so well in the long run. Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

And this Maduro situation with Venezuela is very interesting and I think the jury's very much still out on how that,

[Robert Evans]

see what happens there, how that's gonna shake out.

[Ed Helms]

But, but yeah, this is something we like to do as a country. So as this program ramped up, reports trickled back to the US that Contra paramilitaries were forming death squads and committing atrocities throughout Nicaragua. Atrocities, of course, is not a word you want associated with your team.

[Robert Evans]

Neither are death squads. Yeah, and there's death squads. Death squads.

[Ed Helms]

In November 1982, Newsweek exposed the CIA's role in all of this, which removed, of course, any semblance of plausible deniability. The article landed on the desk of Democratic Senator Edward Boland, who was, to use a technical term, extremely pissed off. The thing is, Congress generally likes to be told about war stuff, and Reagan had just kind of skipped that step here. So with Boland leading the charge, Congress passed the Boland amendment, restricting U.S. intelligence, intelligence agencies by prohibiting any funds, quote, for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua, end quote. The vote was unanimous, 411 to 0. Which is pretty.

[Robert Evans]

That doesn't happen anymore. No, I mean, it's like that anymore.

[Ed Helms]

It was pretty rare then, and that was supposed to be the end of it. Which, historically speaking, is exactly the kind of sentence that guarantees it wasn't the end of it.

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Right.

[Ed Helms]

Interesting question here. Do you think that Congress's outrage was more about the human rights abuses going on in Nicaragua or more about being sort of cut out of the decision making process?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know enough about Boland, so I don't want to say that like, oh, he didn't give a shit about the human rights. But I think Congress, on the whole, it was more, they're coming for like, this is our bag. We're supposed to have influence here. You're not supposed to be able to just do this and not talk to us. Right? Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

I mean, the right answer, I'm sure, is a little bit from column A and a little from column B. But the. But really, this is a standoff between congressional and executive branch powers. And Congress put their foot down, which was kind of badass.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it doesn't happen a lot anymore with that kind of stuff Congress is getting really okay with. Letting the President use Mike Johnson is just.

[Ed Helms]

They just grin and give high fives, basically. So, surprise, surprise, Reagan's CIA did not follow this new law. In fact, they just doubled down on what they were already doing. In early 1984, they helped lay undersea mines at three Nicaraguan ports. This resulted in two people being killed and 15 wounded. And this time the Wall Street Journal swooped in, exposing the whole thing. And Congress was like, seriously, we just told you not to do this. So in 1984, they came back with an even stricter, more explicit law. And they're like, guys, we really mean it. This Time. No more meddling in Nicaragua.

[Robert Evans]

Stop it.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah. I mean, at this point, are they really doing anything than just writing a strongly worded letter?

[Robert Evans]

No, this is a series. Destroyed. The Bowling amendment. Amendment, like, yeah, yeah, this is.

[Ed Helms]

I guess Congress has just become a strongly worded letter apparatus. That's kind of all they did.

[Robert Evans]

It's a dope review for the President.

[Ed Helms]

Yes, it carries all the gravitas of a bad Yelp review. Well, Q. Reagan's team finding a loophole yet again. The National Security Council, or nsc, basically said, hey, the Boland Amendment only restricts intelligence agencies. And we're not technically an intelligence agency, which is a bit like a casino saying, like, we're not a massive gambling operation. We're just a little mom and pop motel with some card games in the lobby.

[Robert Evans]

This is a bar with slots.

[Ed Helms]

Quick little bit of context. The National Security Council is the President's inner circle on foreign policy. Usually it will contain the Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, national Security Advisor, all the heavy hitters coordinating military intelligence and diplomacy. So they're kind of overseeing the intelligence agencies. But their technique, I guess they're sort of excusing themselves. Like, we're technically not an intelligence agency, so the wording doesn't apply here.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right, right.

[Ed Helms]

But if there is a giant global move on behalf of the United States, like, it's because of this group.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. And there's certainly, like, orders are going out to intelligence agencies as a result of stuff the NSC is doing.

[Ed Helms]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

But by declaring themselves not an intelligence agency, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, they effectively sidestepped the law and kept on covertly operating in Nicaragua and beyond. There's something so incredible about how bullshitable our legal system is.

[Robert Evans]

It really is.

[Ed Helms]

Or not just our legal system, but, like, our system of laws or bills, amendments, congressional sort of mandates and so forth. Like lawyers who have mastered the, like crawling between the cracks of language in order to justify and carve out things. It's really a wild way that our. It's almost like our language fails us because it doesn't address the most obvious and intellectually honest take on something.

[Robert Evans]

I think part of the problem is that, like, we're raised and we grow up in schools, we're educated with this understanding about, like, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the way in which, like, separation of power works. That is very much taught to us as, like, and these are, like, the pillars of our society, and these are, like, hard rules about how things are supposed to work. And the reality is that like, all of the rules that govern what our leaders have the power to do are like the monopoly rules in that, like, yeah, there's rules and if you catch someone doing something wrong, sometimes you can make them like, put the money they stole back in the bank or whatever. But the name of the game is to get away with what you can get away with. There's people who spend their whole lives figuring out how much can we get away with? And some of those people happen to now be Supreme Court justices, so they're getting away with a lot more. But like, yeah, that's. Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

Oh boy. All of this brings us to a man named Lieutenant Colonel Oliver north. And he's the one who's going to sort of rope in Iran to this mess.

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[Ed Helms]

So who is Oliver North? He was born in 1943 in San Antonio, Texas and raised in a middle class family in New York. He entered the Naval Academy in 1963 and graduated as a second lieutenant in the U.S. marine Corps in 1968. After serving in Vietnam, he continued his military career in various roles. And by June 1981, Reagan assigned him to the National Security Council staff. Now this was a bit unusual. The NSC is typically staffed by civilians to keep the military from getting too entangled in shaping foreign policy. But Reagan blurred that line, bringing in military officers like Oliver north, who wound up serving as an aide to Deputy National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. Okay, so how does Oliver north drag Iran into a story that started in Nicaragua? Well, let's take a little detour and then we'll sort of circle back. Remember when Nicaraguan revolutionaries were overthrowing a US backed dictator in 1979?

[Robert Evans]

I should do okay.

[Ed Helms]

Well, it turns out that kind of the same thing was happening at the exact same time in Iran. So in 1979, we're back. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution overthrew the U.S. backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and of course brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, turning Iran into an Islamic republic which was openly hostile to the United States. This is the same rupture still driving U. S. Iran tensions today. It's what Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are relentlessly referring to as they are beating their war drums. It's so crazy to me that we're talking about 1979 revolutions and cold War fears. And it's all knotted up in today's headlines, right? Is this history repeating or is it just sort of a story that has never finished, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's a story that's never finished. Cause people like to. I think history repeating is certainly a way you can look at it. I tend to think of it as like, if you have like an issue with like your pipes and like you have to like get the plunger in or whatever, like snake your drain. But you don't actually like, clean it all the way. You just get it enough to get it working again. They're like, it's good for now, I'll fix it later. And then you don't fix it for years and you have another like, that's like I tend to look at especially stuff with, like, our relationship to Iran that way, because, like, a lot of what's happening. The guy who, like, the father of the Shah who gets overthrown in 79, was, like, an aggressive, violent secularist to where, like, he was saying, okay, we're doing away with, like, all the religious. You know, the headscarves and stuff that women wear, all of the religious and traditional clothing that people have worn. But not in, like, a. Now you can wear modern clothes if you want, but in a. My cops will beat you up on the street if they see you, like, wearing the stuff you used to wear.

[Ed Helms]

Right, right.

[Robert Evans]

And so people get, like, really angry about that. And, like, likewise, you get this chunk of the country that is really angry because from the. Previously, the British and then the United States are just kind of extracting oil wealth from Iran and bribing these authoritarian leaders who are then, like, brutal to the populace. And it creates. Creates a lot of fuel for reaction. And then once Khomeini takes over and once you get this Islamist hardline government in Iran, because there's so much anger and because they're so hostile to the west, you get this horrible hostage situation, which is a big part of why Carter loses power.

[Ed Helms]

We're about to get there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And it starts to relate. So I think it's like, it's a problem we never fixed. And so that's why the problems seem similar every time they crop up. Right. Like the conflict you're getting at.

[Ed Helms]

This other thing that I'm so fascinated by, which is that as a population, we never settle into the sort of calm center of things. We just always go. We just swing back and forth. So, like, the reaction to an oppressive religious government is like an oppressive secular government. It's not just sort of like, hey, can we just chill? And I do think that that is America at its best, is when we're sort of at our most, like, let's all just chill. Chill. Let's just be chill. And that's sort of where I don't know that, to me, is how I interpret the origin of America as being like, hey, everybody's too extreme. We're gonna figure out a way to kind of dial in and codify a government that stays in the middle. And it'll swing, but it's not gonna go to these extremes.

[Robert Evans]

Right. We're supposed to avoid that. Like, that was at least part of the idea. But I think part of the problem is that when it comes to these countries where we're a leader, we don't care about, like, the priority was never that Iran would have a stable, functional government that, like, worked for most Iranians. The priority was, well, we need a lot of fuel and we want to make sure the Soviets don't wind up having too much influence here. So we didn't, like, we never cared about the Iranian government, like, functioning well. And so it's the same thing with Somoza, right, in Nicaragua, like, when we were supporting him, it was not because. Because, well, this guy's legitimately the best pick for the Nicaraguan people. Right?

[Ed Helms]

All right, well, we're. We're near the end of 1979 and things are getting extra spicy. Iranian militants stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52American hostages. They held them for 444 days. It dominated the news, it wrecked Jimmy Carter politically, and it cemented Iran in the collective American psyche as a full blown adversary. Right, this is all, everything you were referring to a minute ago. Now, this is kind of cool if you've seen the movie Argo, you know, a very wild slice of this story about a fake sci fi movie production that was created as a cover to help extract six US diplomats from Tehran.

[Robert Evans]

Crazy story.

[Ed Helms]

I loved that movie. I thought it was so cool. Part of what I loved about it, obviously, it was just a beautifully executed movie with tons of humor and tension and drama. But it's also, to me, sort of Hollywood at its best when there's a great collision of storytelling and history. Who knows how accurate it was? But anything that kind of sparks public interest in history is so fun and exciting.

[Robert Evans]

It's a perfect piece of history for Hollywood to cover because it's also inherently a very Hollywood story. The whole reason that plan worked is because. Because everywhere has an understanding of what Hollywood is, even these places that we're in massive conflicts with. So, yeah, it provided this. It's a fascinating story.

[Ed Helms]

Anyway, go watch Argo on your own time, listeners, and then circle back. So we're gonna flash forward now once again back to 1984. If you remember, we left the Nicaraguan story in 1984 with the Boland Amendment and all of that fallout. And now the NSC has decided, of course, that it is not an intelligence agenc. And Reagan was eager to avoid any repeats of this hostage situation that ruined Carter's presidency, which is why he did not respond well to the news that Hezbollah, which was supported by Iran, had now taken 25American hostages in Lebanon in 1984. Now, eager to protect his reputation, Reagan tasked our friend Ali Norman with figuring out how to bring those Americans home. The problem? The Iran backed Hezbollah militants were designated terrorists, right? Which makes them off limits to direct contact or negotiation. What's more, the US had placed Iran under an embargo because they sponsored Hezbollah. So negotiating or directly dealing with Iran in any way was supposed to be a huge no, no.

[Robert Evans]

I grew up on enough 90s movies to know the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. There's like five different fake presidents told me in action movies as a kid.

[Ed Helms]

That is so. That's so great. That's so true. I feel like it emerged in some actual presidential addresses as well. But yeah, no, the 90s movie discourse nailed that. We're gonna hit the brakes right there and we're gonna bring you the final part, the grand conclusion of the Iran Contra affair next week on snafu. So keep an eye out. Robert Evans will be returning to hear out the rest of this. And thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with Robert Evans next week for part two of this insane story. SNAFU is a production of iHeart podcasts and SNAFU Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electronics Picture Company. Post production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbow, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Harris Logo and branding by Matt Gossen and the Collected Works Legal review from Dan Welch, Megan Halson and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book SNAFU the Definitive Guide to History's Great Greatest Screw Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com thanks for listening and see you next week.

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The Second World War is the largest event in human history. A 20 part documentary series with Tom Hanks. No part of the globe was untouched, no life unchanged. Experience. The ultimate account of World War II. Every single person had a story. These are the stories that make us who we are. World War II with Tom Hanks premieres Memorial Day at 8. Part of history honors 250 only on the history Channel.

This is Osvaloshin from Tech Stuff and I want to tell you about Keeper security because unlike built in password managers, Keeper works across platforms, which allows you to secure, securely share information with your family, with your colleagues, with your friends. And I personally store things like passport and credit card details so I'm not scrambling every time I travel, which makes my life more efficient. And when you're busy, but also focused on security like I am, that is absolutely critical. Keeper is offering a 50% discount on personal or family subscriptions using the promo code [e-mail] at checkout.

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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Guaranteed Human.