Iran-Contra Presentation One of the Last Major

Iran-Contra Presentation

One of the last major events of the Cold War in the Americas was the so-called Iran-Contra affair, which occurred under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. My approach to the Iran-Contra affair is to examine the American domestic ideology and strategy which underlay this late, and complicated, episode in the Cold War.

The basic starting point, however, is to look at the investigation of Iran-Contra from the U.S. Senate. When Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North finally did testify in the Senate hearings in 1987, there was a crucial phrase that was used both by North and by the lawmakers who interrogated him. That phrase was "plausible deniability." And indeed "plausible deniability" is my basic subject here.

What is "plausible deniability"? In short, it is the concept that an American President would be able to order some specific action -- possibly military -- in such a way that the President could later "plausibly deny" having any knowledge or role in the action. The obvious example would be the assassination of a foreign leader.

In reality, "plausible deniability" was a concept that had been invented by the CIA at the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, when John F. Kennedy was President, the CIA would make detailed plans -- which ultimately did not succeed -- to assassinate Fidel Castro, which shows the centrality of "plausible deniability" to the operation of the Cold War in the Americas.

The difficulty, of course, is that while the CIA was pursuing this strategy, the American public did not know about it. In fact, the phrase "plausible deniability" only became public knowledge in the middle of the 1970s, when Senator Frank Church led an investigation into possibly illegal CIA activities at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, the Church Committee issued their report, in which the practice of "plausible deniability" was condemned completely.

But it is also worth noting that the 1970s was a critical period overall in the Cold War. This decade is what is usually referred to as "detente" -- the moment in time when Presidents both Republican and Democrat (Nixon, Ford and Carter) softened their hard-line stance against the Soviet Union, and instead tried to find a policy of peaceful coexistence. Detente led to several arms treaties, normalization of relations with China.