Oliver North ran a secret parallel government from the White House basement, selling arms to Iran and funding Contras illegally

When Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North began work at the National Security Council in 1981, few Americans knew his name. By 1987, he had become the public face of one of the most consequential government scandals in modern history—and evidence showed that much of what critics had alleged about his secret operations was exactly true.

The claim was straightforward but almost too extraordinary to believe: a mid-level Pentagon officer had essentially created a parallel government inside the White House basement. While Congress had explicitly forbidden aid to Nicaragua's Contra rebels and imposed a strict embargo on selling weapons to Iran, North was doing both—simultaneously. He wasn't acting alone, but he was the operational hub, the person who made the machinery work.

The official response, when the story first broke in 1986, was dismissal bordering on ridicule. The Reagan administration initially claimed ignorance. When pressed, officials suggested that if anything unauthorized had occurred, it was the work of overzealous subordinates acting without higher approval. President Reagan himself would later state he had no knowledge of the arms sales to Iran. The suggestion that a Lieutenant Colonel could orchestrate foreign policy decisions of this magnitude without presidential knowledge struck many observers as either impossible or a convenient fiction.

What made the claim impossible to dismiss was the paper trail. The Iran-Contra affair, as it became known, was exposed through multiple investigative channels throughout 1986 and 1987. Congressional investigators and the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General discovered that North had maintained a secret Swiss bank account funneling money from Iranian arms sales directly to the Contra forces in Central America. He had operated with such confidence in his position that he kept detailed notes and records—until the moment he realized the investigation was closing in, at which point he systematically shredded the evidence.