Word: embargo
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Throughout 1981 and 1982 Israel provided Iran with modest amounts of spare parts, jet-plane tires and brakes, ammunition and radar equipment. The Israelis reportedly set up Swiss bank accounts to handle the financial end of the deals. Despite its embargo, the U.S. appeared to look the other way. Administration officials seemed interested in Israel's notion that the arms sales would help foster ties with leaders in the Iranian military who might topple the regime of the Ayatullah Khomeini. But by mid-1982 the U.S. was pressuring Israel to comply with the ban on weapons sales. Israel said...
...President was especially confusing on the question of how the U.S. could urge other nations not to ship arms to Iran when it had violated its own proclaimed embargo. "The embargo still stays, now and for the future," said the President; he had authorized only "isolated and limited exceptions" that he believed to be in the U.S. national interest. But, asked a reporter, "why ; shouldn't other nations ship weapons to Iran when they think it's in their interests?" Reagan's weak reply: "Well, I would like to see the indication as to how it could be in their...
...handful of hostages at the cost of America's standing throughout the Middle East. We are all going to pay a heavy price." In Italy, newspapers printed accounts of heavy arms shipments to Iran, prompting questions in Parliament as to why the government had failed to enforce its embargo on such sales. Though the squabble was primarily domestic -- most of the weapons were supposedly sold by Italian arms merchants -- the U.S. came under suspicion too. Rino Formica, Minister of Foreign Trade, grumbled in a newspaper interview that "when one talks of arms sales, one needs also to mention the NATO...
...real problem facing the President, however, was that the shocking stories that so upset him were not, in fact, misinformation. They were basically true. The Administration, acting on his orders, had secretly shipped military equipment to Iran even as it was waging an international crusade for a strict arms embargo against that country for promoting terrorism. Worse yet, the shipments, which broke the spirit and perhaps the letter of U.S. law, had become entangled with murky efforts to barter for the release of American hostages, even as the U.S. was proclaiming that it would never deal with terrorist kidnapers...
Reagan conceded that the shipments amounted to a waiver of his policy of retaining an arms embargo...