Indigenous forces and clandestine airstrips…

Searching for the Suriname Connection…

From the book: The Iran-Contra Connection – Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era

The White House decisionmaking center for covert operations and contracting-outstrategy lay within a tiny team of select State, Defense, CIA and NSC officials known as the “208 Committee” or “Policy Development Group.” Oliver North, the workaholic organizer of secret contra supply missions and Iran arms deals, was one ofits most active members.

Meeting in the Crisis Management Center in Room 208 ofthe Old Executive Office Building, surrounded by secure computer data links to the National Security Agency, this group could plan secret operations free from the obligation to report to the intelligence committees of Congress. Its mission was to implement the Reagan doctrine of fighting Soviet influence throughout the Third World, wherever possible by supporting indigenous forces. Its thorough overview of missions and logistics included such details as “which weapons will be shipped, which secret warehouse goods used, which middlemen will deliver them to clandestine airstrips.” For the most sensitive policies, as with the Iran arms shipments, only a few members of even this group took part in policy discussions.

For North and others in this select circle, the guiding principle was power and the task was to expand it without answering to other authorities. As one White House memo from 1982 outlined the mission of “Project Democracy”—the rubric under which the NSC began to undertake foreign policy initiatives of its own—“we need to examine how law and executive order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale.”Contracting-out provided means to subvert the law and stretch the scope of executive orders.

META DATA
Scroll to Top