Four Mormon Guys Involved in Iran-Contra
The Iran-Contra affair probably doesn’t need an introduction. The complicated series of backroom dealings to fund the Nicaraguan right-wing contras through diverting funds from Iranian arms deals that were themselves intended to free a handful of political hostages became the defining controversy of the second Reagan term. While it’s a well-known event, the actual series of decisions are a tangled web. Written in 1989, Landslide by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus provides a comprehensive exposé of the affair — I highly recommend it. Much of the information below comes from this book.
The Reagan presidency saw the religious-right forming together into one voting block, making groups like the evangelicals and Mormons into uncomfortable allies in their desire to fight equal rights and remake America in their theological image. Having grown up from their isolationist days on the frontier, the Mormons were now flexing their muscle in the Reagan administration, shaping the church into the overt right-wing political force it is today.
It should come as no surprise then that members of the Mormon elite found themselves involved in the Iran-Contra affair. While reading Landslide, I picked out four examples, so let’s dive in.
Richard Wirthlin
No matter what one thinks about the accuracy of opinion polls, it is inarguable that they have become an integral part of political science. From the gamified 538 meter to the less respectable practice of watching betting pools to suss out political trends, everybody wants to find the most accurate way to predict the future. It’s hard to remember that this sort of ultra-subdivided polling landscape is a relatively new phenomenon, one that owes its birth to Richard Wirthlin and his work with Ronald Reagan.
Unlike other people in this list, Wirthlin was with Reagan from the beginning, running opinion polls for the future president’s 1968 gubernatorial race. When The Gipper tried to unseat Gerald Ford as the Republican presidential candidate for the 1976 election, Wirthlin was right alongside him, running hyper-specific opinion polls to help Reagan craft his message. While 1976 didn’t pan out, 1980 did, partially due to deft message-crafting driven by Wirthlin’s analytics. When Reagan entered the White House, he took his numerical seer with him.
Wirthlin came from a large Mormon family. In the 60s he served as the BYU Economics Department chair. After that stint, he founded Wirthlin Worldwide in 1969, embarking on his polling career.
Immediately it proved lucrative. To quote Jane Mayer and Dolye McManus in Landslide:
Wirthlin was a formidable backstage presence at the White House, a private businessman whose services cost the Republican National Committee, which shared the polls with the White House, an estimated $1 million per year — far more than had ever been paid to a pollster before. The father of eight children, Wirthlin was a devout Mormon; but, as his yellow Porsche suggested, he also had a taste for the temporal things in life…. Not surprisingly, Wirthlin was resented by his competitors, some of whom derided him as ‘Old Numbers’ and begrudged him for his high fees. They also questioned his political acumen… he had been the chairman of the economics department — not the political science department — at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Whatever reservations the rest of Reagan’s staff had about Wirthlin, the President loved him. Wirthlin's polls were not just reflections of political opinion, they were used to craft the President’s policies. In 1976, when his polls showed that voters thought Reagan was too militaristic, the campaign refocused on social issues. When opinion polls showed support for firing the air traffic controllers during the 1981 strike, Reagan did exactly that.
What made Wirthlin’s polls so compelling was the high technology the pollster was using to generate results. The computer age had dawned, and Wirthlin was one of the first to recognize that it offered a new way to sort through people’s psyches and generate data. Using sensitive computer dials, Wirthlin would run tests where he would have participants record their emotional responses to presidential phrases. Every reaction was tabulated and used to drive Reagan’s speeches. Wirthlin, according to himself, was not just analyzing Reagan’s messaging in general, he was monitoring the emotional resonance of every single word, ensuring that not a single sentence went by without engendering a sugary-sweet, feel-good reaction. Reagan’s reputation as The Great Communicator was built on using these polls to give the people exactly what they wanted, regardless of the content or its complexity.
The technique was so effective that White House Speech Writer Tony Dolan effused:
Was anybody more important to the Reagan Revolution than Dick Wirthlin? Like Reagan himself, Dick Wirthlin was a man of personal gentleness and goodness who was also insightful, wise and talented.
The direct feedback loop of polling information came into play during the Iran-Contra Affair. Wirthlin’s polls had been critical to crafting Reagan’s foreign policy in regards to Lebanon and Panama. They were also the key way that Reagan judged the correctness of his engagement with the Iranians when it came to rescuing hostages, and the contras when it came to his Nicaraguan anti-communist crusade.
The problem was that the public didn’t really like the whole Nicaraguan affair, if they even knew enough about it to have an informed opinion. The National Security Council staff had been funding and training the contras secretly, and the American public were only getting bits and pieces about the covert operations, especially after the Boland Amendment — a Congressional mandate to stop funding the contras — was passed into law. Still, enough details were leaking out that the American people had developed a decidedly negative opinion of Reagan’s secret war, and it was showing up in Wirthlin’s polls.
Reagan wanted to continue to message hard on the anti-communist beat, but Wirthlin was able to talk the President down. Rather, he pushed the President to talk about positive issues in his second term, stressing uncontroversial positions like “reducing the national budget.” In practice, this meant that the NSC officers like Ollie North could continue Reagan’s Central American policies, they just had to be sneakier about it.
Still, more information was leaking out, and questions were being asked. By 1986, the Reagan team was thin on policy, but faced a competitive midterm race for Senate and House control. With questions mounting about what exactly the NSC was up to, Wirthlin pushed Reagan to adopt a hardline anti-drug stance during the midterm campaign to draw attention away from Nicaraguan policy. It became one of the main issues for Republicans during the election cycle, but was still not able to undo the damage caused by increasing mistrust in the Reagan administration’s capabilities.
Ultimately the affair came to light, and no amount of opinion polling could shield the administration from the fallout. That didn’t stop Wirthlin’s career though. After the administration ended, he continued to run Wirthlin Worldwide until it was bought out by Harris Interactive in 2004.
At the same time, Wirthlin returned to his Mormon roots. His brother, Joseph, had been called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1986, the top governing body of the Mormon church. In 1996, Richard was also given a position of authority when then-President Gordon B. Hinckley called him to serve in the Quorum of the Seventy, the next most powerful organization down from the Twelve. Gordon B. Hinckley, incidentally, was a cousin of the Wirthlin boys. The three — Gordon, Richard, and Joseph — all even shared the same middle name: Bitner, the maiden name of Hinckley’s mother.
There is a sort of weird synchronicity between Wirthlin’s polling techniques and the way the Mormon church started presenting its message starting in the 90s. Ex-Mormons will often complain that the General Conference — the semi-annual all-church conference where the leaders of the church address the fold — is a dull, simplistic affair. This is especially pronounced when compared to General Conferences of the past. Before the 90s, they were more dynamic, with the apostles giving more complex speeches and expositions of theological issues. Now that’s not to say that it was better — it’s definitely a good thing that they aren’t accusing the civil rights movement of being a communist plot over the pulpit — but it did make the meetings more lively.
Specifically, the complaint among ex-members is that the messages seem to be resorting more and more to repeating trite phrases and thought-terminating cliches, bland words meant to elicit a positive emotional response but without substantial content. It’s very similar to what Wirthlin had Reagan do. Most likely, the leaders, being the staunch Republicans that they are, had subconsciously started to copy what had obviously worked for Reagan. But, this means they were only a step away from emulating what was pioneered by Wirthlin.
Richard S. Beal
Early in the Reagan era, the National Security Council flexed its muscles. The directors of the NSC wanted their council to take a more active role in shaping American foreign policy, and even start conducting the spooky covert operations that had earned organizations like the CIA their reputation. Ultimately, this bureaucratic power grab was what led to the NSC conducting its secret war in Nicaragua under the leadership of Ollie North.
Before that could happen though, the NSC needed the sort of intelligence gathering equipment that the Pentagon and CIA had. The intelligence gathering arms of the government had already entered the computer age, building sophisticated systems to collate incoming intel. The NSC had nothing. One NSC aide, quoted in Landside, lamented:
... the average newspaper office had more robust communications capabilities than the federal government.
Presumably by “the federal government,” the aide meant the NSC staff.
As National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane took a more active role in shaping policy within the administration, he began shopping around for new equipment to match the increasing power of his council. Richard Wirthlin knew just the guy, a BYU professor that had worked for Wirthlin’s polling operation in 1980, Richard S. Beal. During the campaign, Beal had developed the computer systems Wirthlin would later use to analyze the word-by-word impact of Reagan’s speeches and policies.
Oddly, Beal was not a computer science professor by trade; he worked in the international relations department. However, his interests were interdisciplinary. As he studied and taught international relations, he proposed ways to use computers to revolutionize American foreign policy. For example, he advised a BYU student’s research into using artificial intelligence to predict future conflicts.
When hired by the NSC, Beal went about revolutionizing their systems. Instead of simply giving them the technology to match the CIA, he developed a network that would take the raw data flowing into the servers of these organizations and route it into the NSC computer banks, giving the NSC staff access to a synthesized view of all the intelligence resources of the United States.
The new equipment required more space. Beal took over unused floor space in the Old Executive Office Building and renamed the facility the Crisis Management Center. More often it was simply known as Room 208.
With banks of computer terminals, glowing maps, and an array of phone lines, the NSC staff could now plan covert operations without having to work around the CIA or Pentagon. This helped the balance of military bureaucratic power shift towards the NSC. Even better, Beal had outfitted the NSC with PROFS, a secret communication system that allowed McFarlane, North, and other staff members to communicate between themselves without having to worry about other White House functionaries intercepting their communiques. It was within Room 208 that the invasion of Grenada was planned.
At this point in the Reagan administration, Congress had blocked the president’s private mission to supply the contras. Putting aside bureaucratic infighting, CIA director Bill Casey approached North with a plan: Congress might be able to stop the CIA from getting involved in Nicaragua, but they’d have a harder time stopping an Executive Branch organization like the NSC. North agreed, and requisitioned hardware from Room 208 for his own private copy of the Crisis Management Center, from which he led the Iran-Contra operation. Unfortunately for him, those PROFS messages were a lot less secure than he thought. When the Iran-Contra house of cards came tumbling down, investigators discovered that the system had actually been caching all the secret communiques, spelling out the NSC’s operations in clear binary detail.
David Fischer
While the diversion of profits from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras — the maneuver that gave the whole Iran-Contra affair its name — has taken center stage in the public’s recollection of events, the contra funding operation was a much more complex web than this trade.
Project Democracy, as the NSC staff euphemistically named the project, relied on many different funding sources, including mainstream Republican donors. With Congress barring federal funding through the Boland Amendment, the Reagan team sent out its top fundraisers to open up conservative wallets and privately fund the covert Nicaraguan war. One of the best fundraisers was David C. Fischer.
A graduate of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Fischer proved to be one of Reagan’s most loyal aides. From Landslide:
Fischer, a young lawyer from Utah, had been the president’s personal assistant from 1980 through 1985, a job that put him in closer daily contact with Reagan than any other aide. He was the president’s coat carrier, pen finder and Oval Officer doorkeeper; he traveled around the world with Reagan, and when the president was in the hospital, Fischer slept on a cot in the room next door.
In 1985, Fischer returned to the private sector, landing a job as a senior vice president at the Huntsman Chemical Corporation, but was still within the Reagan orbit. Ollie North was looking for any funding sources to support Project Democracy, and had found an eager backer in Spitz Channell, a longtime Republican donor. Working through Chief of Staff Don Regan, North conspired to get even more money from Channell by sending Fischer to loosen the purse strings.
Channell and Fischer met. Together, they signed a deal to introduce Channell to top administration officials — and eventually the president — in exchange for a $480,000 ($1.3 million today) payout for Fischer.
As the relationship between the two men deepened, Channell’s organization agreed to spend a total of $6 million ($17 million today) on conservative television commercials. Behind the scenes though, North was intending to use the money to support a military airlift operation to supply the contras. In exchange, Channell got a personal meeting with Reagan.
When the details of Project Democracy came to light, Channell was charged with conspiracy to use his nonprofit to secretly fund the contras. He received a plea deal in exchange for testifying against North.
Likewise, Fischer was eager to save his own skin. Before he could even be charged with a crime he cut a deal with the prosecution team for immunity in exchange for his testimony. From the New York Times:
''He appeared voluntarily at the office of the independent counsel to cooperate with them before he was required to appear,'' Mr. Work said. ''Dave has never had anything to hide.''
Traditionally, immunity is offered to a witness if he has information that could lead to the prosecution of others. Often it is granted only when a witness refuses to cooperate without a promise of immunity; Mr. Work said that was not the case with Mr. Fischer. ''Mr. Fischer came forward to cooperate without having been asked,'' he said.
Whether or not Reagan fully understood what his former aide had done, he seemed to have not soured on Fischer, since in December 1988 he met the aide’s family and did a photo-op with them. See around the 11:50 mark in this video from the Reagan Presidential Library.
Ronald H. Hinckley
In the second Reagan term, Richard Wirthlin had become something of an oracle, with his polling information a highly desired resource among the White House officials. Unfortunately for people like Ollie North and the NSC staff, officials above them in the leadership hierarchy — like Don Regan — took up most of Wirthlin’s bandwidth, leaving them without the real-time feedback loop the Reagan administration was relying on for policy decisions. And they needed data. By 1986, the NSC was running covert operations around the world, but the one thing they didn’t want to do was poison the American people’s opinions of the boss. To keep a finger on the pulse, they need polls that specifically ask the public for their opinion about the NSC, Ollie North, and their foreign operations, including in Nicaragua.
If the NSC couldn’t have access to Wirthlin, they’d make do with another pollster. While Wirthlin was considered the best, there were other people running similar operations. With a Department of Defense grant of $400,000 ($1.1 million today), the NSC hired Ronald Hinckley to conduct opinion polls. These polls were instrumental in convincing the NSC to bomb Libya — as soon as the pulse shifted in favor of an attack, they pulled the trigger. This sort of thing seems to have been Hinckley’s specialty. Many of his books, papers, and presentations revolve around using opinion polling to shape foreign policy. Or – in some cases such as his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative – how to use polling to shape messages that could sell otherwise unpopular policies and programs to the country’s hesitant citizens.
Was he Mormon? Probably. With the last name Hinckley, and being involved in the Reagan administration, I had a suspicion. Unfortunately, the most direct reference is hidden behind a Washington Post paywall for a 38 year old article about Clarence Leake, a disgruntled church member that broke into the Washington D.C. temple and held hostages at gunpoint in 1986. The Google Snippet view mentions Ronald H. Hinckley was a Mormon bishop who was attending the temple as the hostage situation broke out.
Another good piece of evidence is the obituary of his stepmother, Jane Hinckley. He is listed as her stepson. Jane and her husband seems to have been quite well connected in Mormondom:
She and her husband Bill, who served as Stake President in Omaha, had the opportunity of hosting many church General Authorities in their home including Pres. Spencer W. Kimball and his wife, Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson and many others.
Ronald himself seems to still be alive, so his records are not available in FamilySearch, the church’s vast genealogical database. That would provide more direct answers.
(Edit, 12/19/2024: turns out Hinckley quoted the Book of Mormon in one of his books, so that settles things I think.)
The moral of this story: when you get up into the higher echelons of Mormon leadership, it’s basically a big family; one with a lot of political power.