North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras.
In late 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council diverted a portion of the proceeds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the Contras, a group of anti- Sandinista rebels, in their insurgency against the socialist government of Nicaragua. Some within the Reagan administration hoped the sales would influence Iran to get Hezbollah to release the hostages. The idea to exchange arms for hostages was proposed by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by government appropriations had been prohibited by Congress, but the loophole was to use non-appropriated funds. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group, in Nicaragua.
Between 19, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The Iran-Contra affair ( Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا Spanish: Caso Irán-Contra), often referred to as the Iran-Contra scandal, or simply Iran-Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration.
Reagan administration, particularly Robert McFarlane, Caspar Weinberger, Hezbollah, Contras, Oliver North, Manucher Ghorbanifar, John Poindexter, Manuel Antonio Noriega
McFarlane affair (in Iran), Iran-Contra scandal, Iran-Contra, Irangate, Reagangate Reagan meets with (left to right) Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese and Chief of Staff Don Regan in the Oval Office
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