Courage Under Fire

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted September 28, 2004.

There is a general lack of attention to Presidential candidate John Kerry's 20-year record in the Senate in this election. Using his background as a state prosecutor in Massachusetts, Kerry launched his Senate career conducting investigations from his perch as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Commmittee. Kerry spent almost all of his first term (1984-1990) in the Senate investigating the Iran-Contra drug scandal in Nicaragua, the role of the Panamanian government in drug trafficking and the corrupt activities at the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI).

Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry recently highlighted some of Kerry's work in the Contra scandals in his new book, "Secrecy and Privilege," which explores how the two George Bushes have risen to the pinnacle of political power. AlterNet spoke with Parry, who covered the Contra drug scandal in the mid-1980s for the Associated Press, about Kerry's investigative work in the Senate.

There's a passage in your book that details a part of John Kerry's career in the Senate – his investigations into the Central American Contra scandals in the 1980s. You show that Kerry stayed firm under pressure from his colleagues, the White House and the mainstream press. Could you start by painting the background on the Contra affair?

In the early to mid-1980s, the war in Nicaragua was underway, and the Reagan/Bush White House was determined to support the Contras – these insurgents who were fighting against the Sandanistas, the leftist government that had taken power in Nicaragua. The Contras were developing a pretty unsavory reputation for human rights violations, and some of the activities that the CIA made to back the Contras at the time were clearly in violation of international law.

The U.S. Congress, beginning in 1984 and going on for the next couple years, voted to restrict or prevent U.S. military assistance that would go to the Contras in Nicaragua, and Reagan signed on to it with some protest. But the White House tried to circumvent it soon after. They turned to Oliver North who was then a Marine officer, serving on the National Security Council and also working with office of Vice President George H.W. Bush and some of the CIA people that he had surrounded himself with, going back to his days when Bush was CIA director. There was an effort to run a secret operation to provide various kinds of assistance to the Contras — money, in some cases helping them to get guns and other kinds of armaments to carry on the war, which Congress had effectively tried to block.

You were covering this as a reporter at the time?

Yes, I was at The Associated Press at the time, and we were beginning to investigate this. I did an early story mentioning Ollie North in 1985. We were digging into this secret operation which the White House was denying it existed. In doing so, we also began stumbling on to evidence that the Contra units had turned to drug trafficking to help fill the void of money that the CIA had stopped providing.

The only person in the Congress who showed any imagination or strong interest in these criminal activities that were going on underneath the nose of the U.S. government was Senator John Kerry, who was serving his first term. Kerry had heard about this through his family connections in Massachusetts, and he took an interest. He turned his staff loose on looking into the Contras. Working through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they pressed the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide information about this that was available. The Reagan/Bush administration tried to block Kerry's inquiries at every turn.

And the media started to attack Kerry.

Right. Led by South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon's newspaper, the Washington Times, the conservative news media began attacking John Kerry. Some of the allegations were that he was off on some wild tangent, that this was all crazy, that he was wasting government money. Later on, as the evidence built up that there really was something going on, the Washington Times started attacking Kerry with the tack that he and his staff were "obstructing" the investigations of wrong doing that the Reagan/Bush administration supposedly wanted to carry out. Kerry's early investigative work involved piecing together how Ollie North's secret operation was working, and that then spun off into looking at the drug trafficking that was running up through Central America.

Jan Frel is AlterNet's political editor.

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