Word: contra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...support evaporated when the Iran-contra scandal broke last year, says Hull, and now el Patron is the target of major investigations and a controversial lawsuit in the U.S. "In the news media and absolutely nowhere else, I have been accused of being a CIA agent, a drug smuggler and an assassin," declared Hull in a statement he says he made last summer to the office of Iran-contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. "I can assure you that if the assassination charge were true, there are people walking the streets today that would have long since been six feet under...
...latest inquiry into Hull's activities began two weeks ago, when the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Affairs opened hearings in Washington to probe U.S. Government loans to Hull and examine charges that contra suppliers operating from Hull's ranches had been flying shipments of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. Said Subcommittee Special Counsel Jack Blum: "We will continue hearings into the question of how the ((contras')) war was used as a cover for narcotics operations...
Hull admits the CIA warned him that certain contra leaders were involved in the drug trade but maintains he knew nothing about his land being used for narcotics trafficking. He angrily disputes allegations by Senate investigators that his motive for helping the contras was to make a profit. If the Sandinistas are not overthrown, he wrote in a position paper forWalsh that he provided to TIME, "Central America will be lost and North America will cease to be a world power and eventually fall under the yoke of Communism." To Hull, Senate Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry and his colleagues...
...congressional investigators expect their probe to tie up some of the loose connections of the Iran-contra affair. Hull greatly admired former National Security Council Aide Oliver North, the contras' aggressive champion. When North's associate Robert Owen appeared before Congress's Iran-contra committees last spring, he read a treacly ode to the Marine colonel penned by none other than John Hull. The contras gain sustenance, the poem read, from the "knowledge that on this troubled earth there still walk men like Ollie North . . . In our lifetime, you have given us the legend...
Both Owen and North, however, suspected that contra suppliers were dealing in narcotics. After a conversation with Owen on Aug. 9, 1985, North scribbled a message in the spiral notebook he used as a diary: "DC-6 which is being used for ((contra supply)) runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into...