How the US began funding white supremacist mercenaries
Our penultimate ep!
Off to Nicaragua we go, subscriber!
Maybe you’ve heard of the Iran-Contra scandal, maybe you haven’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Either way, the US’ secret support of mercenaries in Nicaragua and the continued ramifications today might come as something of a surprise:
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This week’s story comes from Bring the War Home, by Kathleen Belew; The End of the Myth and the updated, expanded version of Empire’s Workshop (gotta love expanded footnotes!), by Greg Grandin; and Landslide by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus.
Next time on Skipped History…
We wrap up Season 2! And explore the dissonance between lofty justifications for US activity overseas and what the actual results tend to be. It all dates back to a conference in 1893...
Next week, divine paying subscribers will receive a few more juicy, unbelievable tidbits about the Iran-Contra scandal. Joseph Coors and Maurice Sendak may or may not both make an appearance.
Interested? Sign up below! Otherwise, see you in two weeks with our season finale!
Your Skipper,
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the US-backed Contra war in Nicaragua and the rise of private military companies. I read about it in Bring the War Home, by Kathleen Belew; The End of the Myth and the updated, expanded version of Empire’s Workshop, by Greg Grandin; and Landslide by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus.
To start, let’s discuss our favorite subject on Skipped History: white supremacy! Recall from our last episode how after the Civil War, the military served as a fertile breeding ground for racism, and US soldiers proceeded to kill thousands of people of color in wars in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central America. After returning home, many soldiers joined the KKK. And after Vietnam, where the racism that permeated the military remained unaddressed, radicalized vets returned home to continue fighting Communists, Jews, and people of color in places like Greensboro.
So entering the 1980s, the US was in desperate need of a leader who would turn down the temperature on this simmering stew of hate. Yet instead of hiring a Masterchef, we went with Guy Reaganierii, whose staff created new opportunities for bigoted vets to fight in foreign countries, notably in Nicaragua, while also transforming the way that the government unleashed white supremacists abroad.
To see what I mean, let’s go back to Nicaragua in 1979. Then, the Sandinistas, a people’s movement consisting of socialists and left-wing Christians, overthrew the 50-year-old US-supported dictatorship and set about combating widespread poverty and high infant mortality by providing health care, passing land reform, and supporting education. This was a welcome change for the family members of the thousands of people whom the previous regime had tortured, assassinated, and “disappeared.”
But to members of the so-called “cowboys,” a war-hungry faction in the Reagan administration, the Sandinistas represented a new communist threat. For example, the new CIA chief, William Casey, wanted to topple them and restore the agency to its “earlier, good days” under Cold War warrior Allen Dulles. And when another cowboy, Oliver North, who’d participated in the Phoenix program, a covert operation in Vietnam that led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, was asked what he saw as the difference between Vietnam and Nicaragua, North replied, “10,000 miles,” then took out a piano and added, “and you know I’d walk every single one...”
So in late 1981, per the cowboys’ urging, Reagan instructed the CIA to organize Nicaraguan exiles into a counterrevolutionary army called the Contras, and with US support, the Contras began mining Nicaraguan harbors and bombing bridges. But due to the widespread resistance to further US interventions after Vietnam, when Congress learned the scale of the operation, they passed amendments prohibiting sending further military aid to the Contras.
Undeterred, the cowboys sought alternative, illegal ways to continue arming and training the contras.
Enter people like Thomas Posey, member of a loosely organized network of veterans and National Guardsmen and a supporter of the KKK. Posey was so excited about the Reagan administration’s push to roll back communism that he set out gallon pickle jars in stores asking for donations “to stop the communists in their tracks.” When that didn’t work—and, next time, I recommend using kimchi jars—Posey joined with fellow vets and Ku Kluxers to form a paramilitary group called “Civilian Military Assistance.”
Soon, CMA, along with a handful of other mercenary groups and mercenary training schools that also formed around this time, came to the attention of the cowboys. And using money that the Reagan officials secretly raised from conservative donors and by selling missiles to Iran, US mercenaries set up shop in Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras. From there, they trafficked arms to the Contras in neighboring Nicaragua and trained them in tactics that included, as one high-level Contra official reported, arriving at undefended villages where they would “assemble all the residents in the town square and then proceed to kill… all persons suspected of working” for the government. Another Contra leader confessed that this “was a premeditated policy to terrorize noncombatants” and to scare people away from supporting the Sandinistas’ leftist reforms. Meanwhile, Posey described the mercenaries’ work as, “For his boys, something like a well-deserved vacation,” a statement even more euphemistic as when Guy Fieri called this monstrosity a dinner cannoli.
Now, the operation came crashing to a halt—literally, when in September 1984, the Sandinistas shot down a helicopter that turned out to be carrying CMA mercenaries. The crash revealed the Reagan administration’s “private pipeline to the Contras” in an episode that infamously became known as the Iran-Contra Scandal. Congress launched investigations of a variety of Reagan officials, including Reagan himself, who in an interview with investigators read aloud from a memo saying he had nothing to do with the operation; then, inadvertently, also read the reminder from his aides to tell investigators he had nothing to do with the operation—which seems a little suspicious, and at best, recklessly clueless, but hey, even the greatest heroes sometimes read the stage directions.
Whatever Reagan’s level of culpability, clearly, the government had a lot of damage control to do, and the Reagan administration ended its funding of mercenaries in Nicaragua. But in many ways, the damage had already been done. The civil war they sparked would continue until 1990, during which 50,000 civilians would die, mainly at the hands of US allies. And in the process of using mercenaries to support the Contras, Reagan officials also helped create a new industry where veterans could be hired out to fight abroad. As one of North’s aides noted, “The war has become a business,” and that business would steadily grow in the following years. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, for example, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was a US civilian under contract; during the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in 1996, the number was one in 10; by the peak of the Iraq War in 2007, the number was closer to one in three, with the 48,000 mercenaries employed by the US working for a smattering of companies like Blackwater in a new industry whose value had ballooned to hundreds of billions of dollars. And who continued to staff these private military companies?
Well, according to one study, “mostly White men in their 40s” and “mostly veterans,” and if you look at Blackwater, its founder, Erik Prince, who’s close friends with Oliver North, intentionally deployed men who shared his “vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis.” Unsurprisingly, Blackwater “contractors,” would go on to carry out atrocities such as when they “killed 14 Iraqis without cause.” President Trump later pardoned them for these actions, just as mercenaries like Thomas Posey were exonerated for their atrocity-abetting activity in Nicaragua.
Now, I’m not saying all vets are bad. They’re not! And only a small percentage become contractors or join hate groups. But I am saying that with the help of private companies, the pattern of the US unleashing white supremacists abroad who carry out atrocities with impunity continues, and I’m left feeling like this.
In our season finale, we’ll explore how the myth of American exceptionalism not only endured but flourished along the way. Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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