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Shredding the Evidence: The Cover-Up That Nearly Buried Iran-Contra
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When the Iran-Contra scandal began to unravel in 1986, Oliver North's secretary Fawn Hall fed classified documents into a shredder — and stuffed the rest into her boots. This is the story of the cover-up that almost worked.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What would make a person walk into a government office, feed classified documents into a shredder, stuff others down her boots and into her clothing, and walk out past federal investigators? Not fear, exactly.
To understand what Fawn Hall was doing with those documents, you need to understand what Oliver North was doing in the basement of the White House. North was a Marine lieutenant colonel.
What made this possible wasn't just North's nerve. It was the structure of the NSC itself.
The operation came apart in the fall of nineteen eighty-six. A Lebanese newspaper published a story about the arms sales to Iran.
It's worth being clear about who she was, because she's sometimes reduced to a footnote in this story. Fawn Hall was twenty-seven years old.
The nineteen eighty-seven congressional hearings were extraordinary television. Dozens of witnesses.
John Poindexter was North's superior. As National Security Advisor, he was the senior official most directly connected to the operation's oversight.
Then there's Reagan himself. The Tower Commission, established to investigate the NSC's management failures, was a three-person panel: former Senator John Tower, former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.
Lawrence Walsh spent eight years building cases. He charged fourteen people.
Fawn Hall's choice to shred those documents wasn't just a crime, it was a statement. It said that the people inside this operation believed the normal rules didn't apply to them.
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