“MY BROTHER SAYS the government is sending arms to the Contras illegally.”
My legislative director received a call from a constituent recommending we talk to her brother, Jack Mattes, a public defender in Florida. His client claimed to have firsthand knowledge of a secret network with ties to the U.S. government that was illegally supplying the Contras with military aid. If what Mattes was describing was true, the administration was engaging in an illegal war. Perhaps this is why some in the Reagan administration had seemed so determined to stop my early interest in the war in Nicaragua.
Particularly after my dustup with Senator Goldwater, I was determined to get the truth and I wasn’t going to let anyone put me on the defensive again. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I had followed the law but in the purest of politics been sandbagged by Republicans for something I hadn’t done. Now I was looking at evidence that suggested some element of the Reagan administration had overtly broken the law by doing something Congress had specifically forbidden it from doing, which was to aid the Contras.
We quietly began to dig into these allegations. Falling back on everything I’d learned as a prosecutor, we wanted to make sure their research was done precisely and meticulously, almost as if we were going to trial.
All in all, members of our small but energetic team conducted more than fifty interviews over the course of 1986, even traveling to Costa Rica to speak with people who allegedly worked in a U.S.-funded supply network. What we began to uncover was hard to comprehend: mercenaries, drug smuggling, even a fanciful scheme to assassinate a U.S. ambassador and blame it on the Sandinistas.
I encouraged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to launch a more formal investigation. I also pressed the Department of Justice to launch an investigation based on the evidence that the CIA and others may have been deliberately circumventing the congressional ban on Contra aid.
At first, neither did much with my request. Nonetheless, our team, undaunted, continued to work. Through a fascinating set of connections involving modern-day buccaneers, a group of coconspirators who reeked of unreliability, we learned that the trafficking of cocaine into the United States was a primary source of funding for the Contras. The hypocrisy was offensive. As a prosecutor, I’d seen drugs rip apart communities. Nancy Reagan was promoting her “Just Say No” effort. But the trail we were uncovering suggested that the federal government was supporting rebels funded by the same drugs that were killing kids on the streets of New Bedford. You couldn’t say no to drugs but say yes to the Contras and look the other way. I knew that the senator I had to go see was the hard-line conservative senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms of North Carolina. It shocked my staff. Jesse and I were worlds apart ideologically. Jesse regularly referred to gay men as “perverts” and sodomites, while I had picked up where Paul Tsongas had left off, authoring a bill to outlaw workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians. My staff argued Jesse was an extremist who would likely reprise Senator Goldwater’s smears against me. They were wrong. I went to see Jesse one-on-one. He listened as I went through the evidence piece by piece. Jesse hated drugs as fervently as he hated communists. He made it clear that his Republican colleague on the relevant subcommittee, Hank Brown from Colorado, could join me in going wherever the facts led us. Jesse Helms was genuine and consistent in his beliefs. I had learned from Ted Kennedy and others that often in the Senate you must compartmentalize to move forward. Jesse and I saw civil rights issues differently, but on drugs, we could find common ground.
As my team continued to interview people who worked with the Contras, we heard about a network of secret bank accounts, the use of remote airstrips and unmarked planes, and, perhaps most important, the involvement of government officials, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a senior staff member of President Reagan’s National Security Council.
I knew of Oliver North. We were the same generation and had both fought in Vietnam. He had come home from the war a decorated combat vet, with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. I didn’t know what his politics were, but I respected his service and his courage. I wondered how someone with his credentials could be led down a path of illegality. The Marines live by a code. If what we were hearing was true, a Marine should have been horrified.
It was becoming clear that our inquiry wouldn’t be the end of the story. I thought that a full-fledged Senate investigation was warranted, one that would allow for formal depositions and subpoenaed documents, but my recommendations continued to be shrugged off.
That changed suddenly on October 5, 1986. A plane was shot down over southern Nicaragua. Two Americans were killed; one American was captured. The plane was filled with military arms, including seventy AK-47s and about one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.
When President Reagan quickly denied any connection between the plane and the U.S. government, my team and I rushed to release a full report of our findings. We had collected credible evidence that Oliver North and other former military officers had set up a network to ship weapons and ancillary military equipment to the Contras. There was no way the downed plane was a coincidence.
Later that month, both the Senate and the Justice Department announced investigations into whether and how Americans were assisting the Contras with military aid.
In November, thanks to a Lebanese news report, we learned that the Contra scandal was even more complicated. The United States was involved in arms sales to Iran, which was at war with Iraq. Before long, administration officials acknowledged that some of the money from the Iran arms sales had been diverted to support the Contras—under the direction of none other than Lieutenant Colonel North.
Suddenly, seven or eight different committees in Congress wanted to investigate. An orphaned investigation had several fathers claiming paternity. A possible constitutional crisis was on the horizon. The leadership of Congress agreed a special committee would have to be created.
I learned an unmistakable lesson about seniority in the Senate. I had done the digging and laid the foundation for the inquiry—and taken plenty of criticism for it from the Republicans—but was left on the sidelines while the investigation was handed to a series of more senior Democrats. They were distinguished senators: Chairman Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a World War II veteran who had given his arm in battle; George Mitchell, next in line to serve as majority leader; Sam Nunn, the centrist Democrat from Georgia whose relationships with the Pentagon ran deep; Paul Sarbanes, a liberal who had served in the Senate for twenty years, and one of the most respected members of the Foreign Relations Committee; David Boren, a centrist from Oklahoma; and Howell Heflin, a respected judge from Alabama.
I didn’t take it personally since there wasn’t a freshman Democrat on the select committee. It also occurred to me that with the buzzed-about inevitability of a Dukakis presidential bid just a year away, no one was going to appoint his former lieutenant governor to a post where the likely Republican nominee, Vice President Bush, might be under the microscope. But the decision still left me feeling I had poured energy into a fight only to be kept out of its final round.
I learned another lesson. When you’re the first one to pop your head out of a foxhole, you’re in the crosshairs. I had become a lightning rod on the Iran-Contra issue. The Republicans had spent a year arguing that my investigation was a wasteful conspiracy theory. They couldn’t now explain why the House and Senate were convening blue-ribbon joint hearings if I was on a fool’s errand. They would have loved to use me as a convenient whipping boy. By leaving me off the committee, Byrd didn’t give them that chance.
There was an even bigger truth at play, however. Senate Democrats suspected the investigation was unlikely to end in the impeachment of President Reagan. That’s because the institutionalists were in charge.
Chairman Dan Inouye made that clear to me in a private conversation. Dan had led a life of courage. He was the kind of patriot we should all hope to be. Dan had signed up to serve his country despite the internment of his fellow Japanese Americans at home. In battle, he suffered a grievous injury. After prying a live grenade out of his nearly severed right arm, Dan lobbed it into a German bunker, saving the lives of his brothers-in-arms. He was subsequently shot again in the leg, falling to the ground. When he woke up, his men were hovering over him, and he instructed them: “The war’s not over. Get back to your positions.”
During his recovery back in the States, he met a young vet named Bob Dole at the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, and they became fast friends. In the Senate, you could see and feel the connection between them.
Dan had been in the Senate for decades. He had lived and made a lot of history. He confided in me his reaction to living through the Nixon impeachment saga and the resignation of a president. As a member of the Senate committee that investigated Watergate, he had seen the scandal rock the country and fray the national fabric. We might disagree about whether the real source of those divisions was Nixon’s illegality and lies, as opposed to the process charged with addressing them, but those were mere debating points. The bottom line was Inouye had lived through Watergate, and he wasn’t eager to invite a repeat performance.
Nor was Majority Leader Byrd. He and Dan were institutionalists who were unwilling to see an entire Congress and the next election consumed by the impeachment of a president finishing the final years of a second term. While I wasn’t contemplating let alone cheering for impeachment, my prosecutor and activist instincts told me the full story had to be told. The World War II generation was quietly pushing back. My generation was shaped by a very different war, one that taught us that governments can lie and break laws, and when they do, sunshine and accountability are the required disinfectants.
I felt torn. I’d spent capital standing up for my principles, and if I hadn’t, Congress might not have been forced to take the issue seriously. But I was seeing that my activist intensity could also unsettle an institution and its custodians, a valuable lesson in a place that runs on relationships. Ultimately, to shape events in the Senate, I had to find new ways to advance issues while staying true to my core.
Not being stuck in the most junior position on the select committee did present an unexpected opportunity for an investigation of my own. Dan Inouye told me specifically that the Iran-Contra Select Committee would not dig into the rumors that the Contras were awash in illegal drug money. I could take on that issue and see where it led. Some charged that the CIA was purposefully bringing cocaine to the inner cities of the United States to fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua. I didn’t believe that. I believed that the United States was simply looking away from the obvious connections between the Contras and drugs. I had little tolerance for right-wing paramilitary groups dealing in drug trafficking and just as little patience for left-wing rebels, like the FARC in Colombia, doing the same.
I built a team of staffers committed to uncovering the truth, whatever it looked like. They were a great band of idealists and truth-seekers, though there were a few times when I wondered if perhaps we were too zealous. My chief investigator was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal crusader named Jack Blum. Jack was idealistic. He saw the world in black and white. He tugged mightily at the end of the Senate leash. He was joined by David McKean, a brilliant young lawyer educated at Harvard, Duke and Fletcher, a gifted writer with a contagious sense of humor who became invaluable. Jonathan Winer was dogged. He was a whip-smart investigator I’d first met during my 1972 campaign, when he was the earnest seventeen-year-old editor of his high school newspaper and had grilled me. I joked that I hadn’t been able to shake him since. He was highly intelligent and capable. One day I spotted my receptionist nervously standing in the hallway talking to my executive assistant. I asked what was wrong. “Senator, um, why don’t you walk by the reception area? Someone’s, um . . . one of your investigators’ next meeting is there and it’s, uh, making the, uh, tour group from Leominster nervous.”
I walked by the open office door and glanced inside. I could see why the Ladies Auxiliary was getting uncomfortable. On the couch next to the tour group sat a uniformed Bureau of Prisons official accompanying a manacled federal convict in an orange jumpsuit, apparently a potential witness with whom my staff was soon meeting. I made a mental note to tell the team to move some of these meetings to a different Senate building pronto.
Despite such moments, our investigation was all too serious. The drug trail led to something eye-opening. I wasn’t surprised that the Contras were up to their eyeballs in drugs, but I was astonished by just how easily they laundered their illicit gains through supposedly legitimate financial institutions. We discovered a shady and unsavory bank with an innocuous acronym: BCCI. It stood for the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. BCCI was a dream for criminals and money launderers, and it was hiding in plain sight. We discovered that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, a longtime Cold War ally installed by the United States, was personally involved in drug trafficking, and he used BCCI to ship his ill-gotten money out of the country. The prosecutor in me was intrigued.
The next months were almost a redux of the DA’s office: reviewing evidence, taking depositions, examining testimony. BCCI was a $20 billion banking empire. At the time of our investigation, it had branches in more than seventy countries and boasted nearly a million depositors. I sought subpoenas, but the Department of Justice delayed my requests. Someone was protecting something or someone.
By the spring of 1989, it was apparent that my inquiry had rubbed more than just DOJ officials the wrong way. BCCI, I would find out, had friends in high places. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, my friend Claiborne Pell, was hearing that our investigation was cracking, if not breaking, considerable pottery along the way. He didn’t ask me to stop, but he encouraged me to bring it to completion. The message that became abundantly clear: people were uncomfortable.
It was impossible, let alone wrong, to sweep what we’d discovered under the rug. The Department of Justice didn’t care, so we brought our evidence to New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau shared our alarm and succeeded in convincing a grand jury to indict the bank on fraud and bribery charges. We learned that the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports outlining the criminal connections of BCCI. Thankfully, the Department of Justice soon had a new head of its criminal division: my St. Paul’s classmate, a Vietnam veteran and a diligent law enforcement professional named Bob Mueller. Our subcommittee’s two staffers had exposed the perfidy of BCCI, and I felt vindicated when Mueller assigned thirty-seven prosecutors to the case. By July 1991, regulators had seized the bank. BCCI was dead.
There was a reason the law enforcement and intelligence communities had started to call BCCI the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals.” As one U.S. indictment put it, money laundering was the bank’s “corporate strategy.” If you needed to move money quietly, BCCI was the one who moved it for you. The BCCI client list was a who’s who of bad guys: Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal and even, as we’d find out, the early leadership of al-Qaeda, which was dealt a huge blow and had to abandon its base in Sudan when BCCI was shuttered.
Why was it so important to me to pursue it? Because if you start backsliding and trimming on the rule of law, you contribute to the inexorable deterioration of democracy. Corruption is cumulative. I believed the rule of law has to mean something in the United States. If we knowingly turn a blind eye on the rich and powerful, enabling them to escape accountability while two-bit criminals go to jail for years, we create a tiered system of justice. That is no justice at all. Drug money leads to illicit arms sales, human trafficking and money laundering. Terrorists love banks that operate in the shade. For a long time, BCCI was successful in concealing its dirty work from the public in part because, as our investigation helped to uncover, an astonishing number of prominent people seemed to have ties of varying degrees to its operations. It was former defense secretary Clark Clifford whose connections to BCCI brought me the most awkward interactions. He was a legend who had walked the halls of power since the days of Harry Truman. More than one of my Democratic colleagues asked me why I was going after one of their friends. I even received calls from former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pamela Harriman, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser and the widow of New York governor Averell Harriman, asking what I was doing to their good friend Clark Clifford.
I tried my best to explain we weren’t targeting him or anyone else. We were surprised ourselves by what we were finding, but we couldn’t back off. Clark Clifford was pulling out all the stops to obstruct the inquiry, if not end it. Most of my colleagues knew not to push me, but I knew I was once again an outsider in an insider’s city.
In the fall of 1991, Clark Clifford testified before our subcommittee. By that point eighty-four years old, frail and hard of hearing, Clifford claimed that he had never realized that the owners of his bank weren’t who they said they were. He had been fooled. When I questioned him on the details, he essentially repeated several versions of the same point: he couldn’t remember.
My staff lit into me during a break at the hearing, telling me I was pulling too many punches. “He’s an old man,” I told them. “I’m not going to humiliate an old man.”
I was looking for truth, not a trophy. We had gotten all the testimony we needed. Viewers would draw their own conclusions about Clifford, who candidly acknowledged at the hearing that the facts had left him with “the choice of seeming either venal or stupid.” At the same time, I was drawing a conclusion of my own about how I would operate in the Senate. I wasn’t going to let anyone—no matter how powerful—prevent me from doing what was right and seeking the truth. However, I resolved that never would I lose my own sense of decency. There’s a right way and a wrong way to operate. I didn’t care if people called me a crusader, but never was I going to give anyone a reason to call me a bully.
I had learned a great deal as an investigator, both in Iran-Contra and in BCCI. I’d been reminded that when you push hard for truth, people who are invested in lies or in convenient avoidance resist, and they retaliate. But truth is worth fighting for; truth is the American bottom line. On Iran-Contra, while President Reagan finished his term and George H. W. Bush became president in 1989 despite questions about what he had known, justice was carried out. People like Oliver North who had broken the law were convicted in the justice system. Pardons and commutations followed for many, but the courts had validated the truth. On BCCI, despite the enemies I had made, the bank was shut down, and a light shone on a network of illegal and illicit efforts that funded drugs, terror and murder. I was getting things done as a U.S. senator. I was paying a price, but this was why I had come to Washington.