Reagan had no desire for a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. When Poland declared martial law in an effort to suppress the Solidarity movement and it looked as if the Soviet Union and its allies might militarily intervene, Reagan did not move to directly involve the United States. Like all presidents since Eisenhower, he tacitly acknowledged Eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. But in other parts of the world, Reagan aggressively confronted leftists and Soviet allies in a series of proxy wars and clandestine operations.
Central America, where left-wing movements were challenging the oligarchies that, except during brief populist interludes, had controlled the governments and wealth of the region since World War II, became a testing ground for Reagan’s policies. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were trying to consolidate their power. In El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla movement, with aid from the Sandinistas, had launched an offensive against the military/landowner-dominated state.
Conservatives saw Central America as an ideal place to establish a new tenor to U.S. foreign policy, an arena in which to reintroduce the use of force to achieve American goals and to send a message to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and left-wing movements that they would face sharp opposition if they attempted to extend their reach. The very strategic and economic insignificance of the region to the United States (with the exception of the Panama Canal) made it a well-suited battleground, for it really mattered little to American policymakers or business interests what type of societies emerged there or what price would have to be paid by the local populations in a war against the left. The United States had a long tradition of intervening in Central America, while the Soviet Union never had displayed much interest in the region, making it unlikely that American action would lead to a dangerous superpower conflict. Reagan could indulge the desire for aggressive anti-left action among Christian rightists, neoconservative intellectuals, mainstream conservatives, and intelligence and paramilitary veterans without risking a confrontation that could threaten the United States itself.
At first, the Reagan administration concentrated on El Salvador, increasing military aid, sending more military advisers, and training Salvadoran soldiers in an effort to hold off the FMLN. The United States promoted the Christian Democratic Party of José Napoleón Duarte, a Notre Dame graduate who came to power following a 1979 coup. Duarte presented a much more attractive image than the far-right ARENA party, which had close links to death squads and ultimately proved dominant.
The Reagan administration portrayed itself as a promoter of democracy, but it simultaneously adopted the view that sometimes the road to democracy—or at least the best interests of the United States—lay in supporting anticommunist dictatorships. This was far from a new position for the United States, which over the years had allied with dictatorial regimes in Spain, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and other places in the name of fighting communism and keeping the door open for the eventual emergence of democratic governance. An astringent critique of Carter administration foreign policy by political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which restated this view, greatly impressed Reagan and won her appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman to hold the position and the only woman and only Democrat in Reagan’s initial cabinet. Kirkpatrick took to task the Carter administration for naïveté and hypocrisy in abandoning pro-American autocratic leaders like Somoza and the shah of Iran while remaining passive toward left-wing regimes and movements. Ousting “traditional autocracies,” she argued, rather than leading to democracy, often led to left-wing totalitarian governments that made the lives of ordinary people more miserable and were less likely to evolve into democratic regimes than the dictatorships they replaced. Kirkpatrick’s disdain for what she saw as the simple-minded belief that “it is possible to democratize governments, any time, anywhere, under any circumstances” ran counter to the rhetoric Reagan routinely employed but informed the policies that in practice he pursued.
In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration supported a decidedly undemocratic group, exiled former members of Somoza’s National Guard, who came together in 1981 to fight the Sandinista regime. Hoping to use the Contras—short for “counterrevolutionaries”—to disrupt Nicaraguan support for the FMLN and oust the Sandinista government or at least force it to make concessions, in late 1981 Reagan approved $19 million of covert aid to the group, the beginning of what ultimately grew to over $300 million of funding. Unlike in El Salvador, where the Reagan administration was attempting to keep an established government in power, in Nicaragua it was backing an armed group seeking to overthrow a government that had wide international recognition, including from the United States itself. The Reagan administration tried to keep the funding secret, but word of it soon leaked out. At first the United States paid the Argentine military, which in its own country had installed itself in power and fought a brutal “dirty war” against the left, to train and advise the Contras at bases in Honduras. The CIA took over the effort after the Argentine defeat in the 1982 Falklands War led to the collapse of the military regime.
Reagan’s anti-Sandinista program never gained much support either on Capitol Hill (though Congress initially voted limited aid for the Contras) or with the public. Two events in 1984 eroded what backing it had. First, the Wall Street Journal revealed that sabotage operations in Nicaragua that the United States claimed had been done by the Contras actually had been the work of the CIA. Journalists uncovered a CIA training manual distributed to the Contras that encouraged assassinations, a violation of an executive order Reagan had signed early in his presidency. Second, under pressure from the United States, Nicaragua held its first national election since the overthrow of Somoza, in which Sandinista Daniel Ortega easily won the presidency. Rather than fighting to spread democracy, the United States seemed to be trying to subvert it through covert military force. Perhaps in compensation, Reagan’s rhetorical support for the Contras became increasingly extravagant, as he called them “freedom fighters” and “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.”
Congress, unswayed by Reagan, in October 1984 placed tight restrictions on aid to the anti-Sandinista forces. Anticipating that step, the Reagan administration already had moved to circumvent it, secretly soliciting aid to the Contras from allied governments. Saudi Arabia began contributing a million dollars a month (later upped to two million), while other countries and private contributors chipped in lesser amounts. To funnel the money to the Contras and buy them arms and equipment, CIA director William Casey had Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, a midlevel NSC staffer, set up a network of former military and intelligence officers, arms dealers, and private businessmen. White House officials repeatedly lied to Congress and the public when they denied that the administration was still involved in supporting the Contras.
Elsewhere, too, the Reagan administration worked to reintroduce the use of force in pursuit of foreign policy goals. In Afghanistan, it increased the Carter administration funding of the anticommunist insurgents, working out an arrangement with Saudi Arabia for it to match, dollar for dollar, CIA spending. American policymakers saw their primary interest in Afghanistan as making the Soviets suffer militarily, politically, and financially, with little concern about who would take over if the communists were forced out. That left the field open for Pakistani-backed Islamic militants and warlords, many of whom had deep contempt for American society. In 1986, the United States began giving the Afghan mujahideen fighters ground-to-air Stinger missiles, which proved highly effective against Soviet airpower.
In Lebanon, the United States introduced its own forces in what initially was meant to be a peacekeeping role but which morphed into combat. In 1978, Jimmy Carter had brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which led to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai Peninsula and Egyptian diplomatic recognition of Israel, greased
by the promise of massive U.S aid to both countries. But Israel and Syria remained in a tense standoff, with Israel refusing to give back the Golan Heights (which like the Sinai it had captured in the 1973 war) and Syrian forces threatening Israel from bases in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, attacking Syrian positions in the Bekaa Valley and moving to the outskirts of Beirut, hoping to destroy the exile forces of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). With Israel bombarding Beirut, causing high civilian casualties, and threatening a full-scale battle to seize the city, the United States, France, and Italy sent in troops to separate the parties and supervise the removal of the PLO, the Syrians, and the Israelis. After the multinational force successfully oversaw the evacuation of PLO leaders and their supporters to Tunisia, U.S. troops withdrew. But then everything started to go wrong. The Israelis and the Syrians refused to leave Lebanon, and someone assassinated its conservative Christian president, Bashir Gemayel. In retaliation, his supporters, operating under the protection of the Israeli army, massacred hundreds of civilians in Palestinian refugee camps. The Reagan administration sent a reorganized multinational force back into Beirut, but the American Marine contingent soon came under attack from Muslim forces, which saw it as bolstering the Christian-led government, now headed by Gemayel’s brother Amin. Skirmishing escalated, with an American battleship stationed offshore firing massive sixteen-inch shells at Druze militia positions and American aircraft joining the fighting.
Hezbollah, a newly formed Shiite group with Syrian and Iranian backing, found a devastating, low-tech way to respond to the high-tech American forces. On April 18, 1983, a pickup truck with two thousand pounds of explosives crashed into the lobby of the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people, including all six members of the CIA’s Beirut station and a high-ranking agency official who happened to be visiting. Six months later, on October 23, a Hezbollah fighter drove a dump truck filled with twelve thousand pounds of explosives into the Marine barracks near the Beirut airport. The massive explosion destroyed the building and killed 241 Americans, including 220 Marines, the highest single-day death toll for the Corps since Iwo Jima. Reagan declared after the bombing that keeping U.S. troops in Lebanon was “central to our credibility on a global scale.” But within months, recognizing that there was little popular support for the Lebanon mission, he pulled out the Marines.
The president managed to avoid paying a political price for the Lebanon fiasco because of another military action two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks, the invasion of Grenada. A small island in the eastern Caribbean, Grenada had been a British colony until 1974. In 1979, a bloodless coup led by the leftist New Jewel Movement overthrew the increasingly autocratic prime minister, installing in his place Maurice Bishop. The new regime failed to capitalize on its initial popularity by holding elections, instead suppressing opponents as it allied with Cuba and the Soviet bloc. The Reagan administration charged that a new airport, being built with Cuban help, was designed to accommodate Soviet aircraft, not large tourist jets as Grenada’s government claimed.
In October 1983, a hard-line group within the New Jewel Movement ousted Bishop, who seemed to be considering easing relations with the United States. On October 19, Bishop’s opponents executed him and members of his cabinet, leading to chaotic conditions. Eight hundred Americans attended medical school on the island. In the name of protecting them, and with a formal request from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the United States invaded Grenada using thousands of Marines and Army troops. The American force met stiffer resistance than expected, particularly from armed Cuban construction workers, but it soon prevailed. Nineteen Americans died in the invasion, as did forty-five Grenadians and twenty-four Cubans.
Though the invasion did not go completely smoothly, it received strong support back home. The military kept reporters away from the fighting, so television coverage of medical students returning home dominated the imagery of the Grenada events, rather than pictures of combat or casualties. Though absurdly lopsided in the size and strength of the adversaries, the Grenada invasion, coming just after the Beirut Marine disaster, bolstered the image of the military and the Reagan administration and served as an argument for the efficacy of the use of force. The military, in an extreme exercise of patting itself on the back, gave out 8,612 medals to officers and service members involved in the invasion, including some who never left the Pentagon.
Early in his second term, Reagan’s failed Middle East policy converged with his Central American policy through an off-books NSC operation that constituted one of the gravest breaches of constitutional government since World War II. The U.S. role in propping up the Christian-led government in Lebanon and its support for Israel incited Iranian-backed terrorists to kidnap seven Americans in Lebanon, including the CIA man sent to rebuild the Beirut station. Although as a candidate Reagan had been highly critical of Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis, his administration had no clear policy of its own to deal with the problem of hostages. Repeatedly, its spokesmen proclaimed that the United States would not bargain or make deals to release hostages, but privately Reagan encouraged or at least acceded to efforts to bargain for their release. When in 1985 terrorists hijacked an airplane, flew it to Beirut, murdered an American sailor on board, and threatened to kill the other thirty-nine American passengers, the Reagan administration did not object when Israel freed hundreds of prisoners in response to the hijackers’ demands in a tacit deal that brought the release of the hostages.
During the summer of 1985, an arms dealer with ties to Iran approached the Reagan administration with a plan for it to sell weapons to Iran, then locked in a long, devastating war with Iraq. In return, he claimed, Iran would arrange for the release of the seven hostages held in Lebanon. With support from the president, the NSC approved Israel’s sale of U.S.-made antitank missiles to Iran, with the understanding that the United States would replenish the Israeli stockpile. Once the missiles arrived, one hostage—not the promised seven—was released, with the Reagan administration falsely claiming that it had made no deal in exchange. In November 1985, the administration engineered a second Israeli sale of U.S.-made missiles, but the Iranians did not arrange the release of any hostages in return, claiming that the wrong model had been sent. In spite of having been taken twice, administration officials plunged ahead with a third arms sale to Iran. This time, instead of working through Israel, NSC staffer Oliver North took direct charge, running the operation through the network he and William Casey had put together to supply arms to the Contras.
By mid-1985, the Contra support operation had grown into a major endeavor. To run it, Casey and North had tapped retired Air Force major general Richard Secord, who set up dummy corporations, opened secret Swiss bank accounts, and contracted with arms dealers and paramilitary air transport firms. Secord, who paid himself well for his efforts, called his operation “the Enterprise,” while North referred to it as “Project Democracy.” At the beginning of 1986, North shifted the Iran operation to the Enterprise as well. He added a twist, using some of the money Iran paid for weapons to support the Contras, a clear violation of the congressional ban.
In May 1986, North and former national security adviser Robert McFarlane secretly traveled to Tehran to again try to arrange for the remaining hostages in Lebanon to be released in return for arms. McFarlane also hoped he could initiate a broader rapprochement with Iran. No agreement could be worked out, but two months later the Iranians engineered the release of another hostage, leading Reagan to approve a shipment of missile parts in return.
It took one lucky missile shot and a news leak to halt Reagan’s covert Central America–Middle East policy. In October 1986, a nineteen-year-old Sandinista soldier on patrol in Nicaragua shot down a Contra resupply plane with a shoulder-fired missile. Nicaraguan troops captured American crewman Eugene Hasenfus, who told his captors that the CIA had coordinated the resupply operation. Reagan and other t
op U.S. officials denied government involvement, but journalists soon uncovered information that corroborated Hasenfus’s story. Even as Casey and North began destroying files to cover their tracks, the Reagan administration tried to keep trading arms for hostages with Iran, pressuring Kuwait to release prisoners Iran wanted free and securing the release of one more hostage in Lebanon. But in November, a Middle Eastern newspaper published an account of McFarlane’s trip to Tehran. Soon more details of the arms-for-hostages operation leaked out. Top Reagan administration officials began intertwined processes of investigation and cover-up. When an assistant attorney general discovered a memo in North’s files—overlooked in his massive shredding of documents—that described the diversion of Iranian arms sales money to the Contras, the Enterprise reached its end. In short order, Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed the Iran-Contra connection, and Reagan fired North and his boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter (though he kept on praising them). Administration and congressional investigations began that revealed the operations Reagan had approved, his administration’s blatant disregard for the law, its repeated lying to Congress and the public, and its secret pursuit of policies—like making deals with terrorists—that it denounced in public.
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