politics

The CIA in funding the contras in nicaragua was buying cocaine and selling it to LA street gangs, and taking guns down to south america to sell. They also sold the street gangs some military grade weapons.

This is a VERY interesting aspect of the Iran-Contra Scandal that every administration has wanted to avoid. I've been studying it ever since it happened. I watched the entire Iran-Contra Scandal hearings play out on TV, and I've been tracking it ever since.

Your version is one possibility, but it's a bit simplified, and I think it was more convoluted than that.

Once they had the money from the illegal Iranian arms sales, they really didn't need any more. Don't forget, Iran was our bitterest enemy, having taken American Embassy personnel hostage for well over a year, just a few years before (that was where our adventures with modern Iran began, and why Trump is claiming that they started it 47 years ago). And yet THATS who the Reagan Administration chose to do business with.

Once they had the money, they needed to buy guns, and once they bought the guns, they had to send them to Central America to arm their "freedom fighters." Since the war was officially, Congressionally prohibited, they couldn't use normal military transport, so they hired people with lots of experience surreptitiously flying contraband in and out of hidden American airfields and Central American jungles. Who is uniquely experienced in such flying? Drug smugglers, of course.

So they hired a bunch of drug smugglers, loaded their planes with guns, and they flew them down to Central America, protected by the CIA, where the guns were unloaded, and they were paid in cash. So what does a drug smuggler do when he finds himself in Central America, with an empty plane, a bag full of cash, and CIA protection? Take a wild guess.

So they started transporting cocaine on their return trips, which were many. They were flying small Cessnas, which don't hold a lot of heavy cargo like guns, so many trips were required, both ways.

Before Iran-Contra, powdered cocaine was the drug of the wealthy. So much poured in during Iran-Contra, that the law of supply & demand crashed the price, and it became so cheap that it took over the inner cities of our entire nation. The Crack Cocaine Epidemic was a direct result of the Iran-Contra Scandal, and our nation has NEVER truly investigated it.

Now here's where I separate from your simplified version: Did the CIA know about the cocaine smuggling, AND did they operate it, and create an enormous public health danger, just to get profits for their guns?

It's the CIA, literally anything is possible. They had to have known that their smugglers were smuggling cocaine back. Simple logic and Critical Thinking Skills, something that CIA agents should be good at, should lead them that that conclusion is not only possible, but almost certain.

But were they actively operating a cocaine smuggling operation to find their illegal, unConstitutional war? I doubt that one. They were making crazy money in far fewer transactions by selling weapons to Iran. The money from cocaine smuggling might look like a fortune to a small-time smuggler who got a lucky job, but it's small time to a government trying to fund a war. They ended up with $18 million (1980s dollars) in profits to fund their war, and they couldn't have made that much money that fast with individual cocaine trips. I think the cocaine smuggling was an independent operation by the pilots.

BTW, none of this is speculation or a conspiracy theory (even though it was a bona-fide conspiracy), it was all confirmed when pilot Eugene Hassenfuss was arrested, and the first thing he did was hand over the business card of his CIA handler. ALL of it came out after that - except the admission that the entire crack cocaine epidemic was started by Ollie North, the CIA, and the Republican Reagan Administration. After all, it mostly hurt poor blacks, so who cares, right?