Heather Cox Richardson Quotes
When Ronald Reagan's administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning - yet defended the principle behind the scheme.
Richardson, Heather Cox. To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. Basic Books, 2014.
Wilson had been successful in getting money and arms to the Muslim Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians who had invaded and occupied the country. But the Russian armed helicopters gave the Russians control of most of the company. Wilson wanted to send Stingers to the Mujahedeen, but the agencies were worried that the missiles might fall into the hands of anti-American radical Muslims. It turned out that the agencies were correct and after the defeat of Russia, many of the Mujahedeen then, buoyed by their great victory over a Superpower, came after the United States and Western nations who were “occupying Islamic land”. The terrorist tactics, that the United States ignored when the Russians were the victims, became the major military and foreign policy problem of America and the West.
Alluding to the many scandals of the Reagan administration:
He was not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.
The poet was a close friend of Iranian Principal Leader Ali Khamenei. See {637008} for an example of the lasting effect of this coup.
If Casey had listened to Sofaer as the State Department did, President Reagan would have been spared the worst Scandal of his Presidency—Iran Contra. Casey had a great antipathy to lawyers. See {637470}.
At the time, the key British Ambassadors were diplomats and espionage agents at the same time. The Dutch Monarch William V, Prince of Orange, was in a very precarious position and might be deposed. Officially Harris and the British were supporting him and Harris was giving him money to firm up his regime, but their great fear was that the French would support and control the Patriot Revolutionary movement, then quite active. So, secretly, Harris was providing money to the patriots through a few leaders, to have a strong and influential relationship with the Republic if William were deposed. At the same time he was officially supporting William. The British wanted William to maintain his rule and were helping him to do so, but if he couldn’t, they wanted to keep the French out. It was this double dealing that prompted this quotation when Harris was asking the Prime Minister for more secret money for his covert operations.
Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
