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and antiaircraft missiles—to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran. The purpose of the deal was twofold. Initially, it was meant to help secure the release of six American hostages who were being held by Iranian-backed Shia militants in Lebanon. At the same time, the money received from the sale of these weapons to Iran was used to fund the Contras, a CIA-backed rebel group fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
    Reagan’s approval of a weapons-for-hostages deal was an astonishing act of hypocrisy for a self-styled tough guy who had boasted that he would never “negotiate with terrorists.” Indeed, Reagan had imposed a harsh embargo against Iran because of the hostage crisis, so the news that he was covertly shoveling high-tech arms to the Iranian government was politically shocking.
    But the funding of the Contras—a guerrilla group responsible for brutal atrocities against civilians, widely denounced in many parts of the world as a terrorist organization—was not just shocking. It was a clear-cut crime. In 1982, Congress had enacted and Reagan had signed into law the Boland Amendment, which explicitly banned any government assistance to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. (The law had been prompted by the revelation that the CIA had been funding and providing assistance to those guerrillas without the knowledge of Congress.) The 1986 Iran-Contra disclosures revealed that Reagan officials had done exactly that which the law prohibited: they had funneled millions of dollars to the Contras in order to facilitate the overthrow of the Sandinistas.
    When the covert program was revealed, numerous legal proceedings were initiated. Among them was an action brought by Nicaragua against the United States in the International Court of Justice, charging that the United States had illegally attempted to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The court ruled in favor of Nicaragua and ordered the United States to pay substantial compensation, but the Reagan administration refused to comply with the court’s order and then used the United States’ seat on the Security Council to veto any efforts by the United Nations to enforce the judgment.
    Domestically, the Justice Department appointed an independent prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, to investigate Iran-Contra. Over the next several years, numerous Reagan appointees—including high-level officials at the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the State Department—were indicted, both for the crimes themselves and for lying to federal investigators and to Congress in order to cover up the scandal. In the end, though, not a single one of them would serve even a day in prison.
    Two key Reagan aides—Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter—had their convictions overturned on appeal, on the ground that information they provided under a grant of immunity had been improperly used against them. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor counts of illegally withholding information, but they were pardoned by George H. W. Bush during his last month in office. Yet it was the treatment of the highest-ranking official to be indicted—Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger—that best illustrates the prevailing ethos of elite immunity.
    Weinberger had been charged with multiple felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice after the 1991 discovery of diaries that contradicted much of what he had told investigators. Though he had been required to turn over those diaries to prosecutors, Weinberger had failed to do so. Once the contents of the diaries were publicly revealed, the reasons for his concealment became obvious. Not only did they contradict his own denials of knowledge of the transactions, but the diaries directly implicated other key officials, including President Reagan himself. As Walsh put it,