Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'

Out of the ashes of the Iran-Contra affair comes a new report which details the late Ronald Reagan’s agenda of controlling and manipulating media outlets through CIA propaganda. Once used to sway public and Congressional opinions in favor of the Nicaraguan contras, certain media outlets continue to spout disinformation to the public while remaining on government payrolls.

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

Posted by grady