Word: iranscam
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...national exercise in self- flagellation. Many Europeans, who also never fully understood why Americans became so upset by the Watergate affair in the mid-1970s, feel that such a crisis could never happen in their own countries. TIME's Paris bureau chief Jordan Bonfante examines the European bewilderment concerning Iranscam...
Imbot's unheeded alarm showed how the European political conscience can be very different, and far less exacting, when it comes to conspiracy in high places. That is one reason why Iranscam has had limited impact in much of Europe. Government officials and the general public are not shocked by the facts of Iranscam so much as by its mismanagement and the extent to which the scandal is traumatizing the Reagan Administration...
West Europeans believe that an Iranscam-style scandal is unlikely in their countries for institutional and psychological reasons. In Britain, for example, there is no government equivalent of the National Security Council, only a benign advisory appendage to 10 Downing Street known as the Cabinet Office. Insists Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a former Chief of the General Staff: "The idea of a bunch of military cowboys running their own foreign policy out of the Cabinet Office is too absurd to contemplate." On the Continent, a widespread feeling exists that if anything like Iranscam were uncovered, it would not have...
...really recovered from the uproar after his close aide Gunter Guillaume was discovered spying for East Germany. The long-running Flick affair, swirling with allegations about illegal campaign chests and influence peddling, tormented the Christian Democratic government of Helmut Kohl for years. Quips one political observer in Bonn: "If Iranscam were ever replayed here, the odds are that the Germans would be more scandalized by the missing millions and the sloppy accounting than the arms transactions...
...which two teams of French secret service frogmen blew up a trawler belonging to the environmental organization Greenpeace in Auckland harbor. The resulting international uproar shook Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government and forced the sacking of its intelligence chief and the resignation of its Defense Minister. Unlike Iranscam, however, that was the extent of it. Parliament never pursued it further. Indeed, the two French agents jailed by New Zealand until last July are now regarded as heroes...