Powell won a prized White House fellowship that put him inside Richard Nixon’s White House. Powell’s work with Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget brought Powell to the attention of senior Nixon aides, Frank Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger, who soon became Powell’s mentors.
When Ronald Reagan swept to victory in 1980, Powell’s allies – Weinberger and Carlucci – took over the Defense Department as secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense, respectively.
When they arrived at the Pentagon, Powell, then a full colonel, was there to greet them. But before Powell could move to the top echelons of the U.S. military, he needed to earn his first general’s star.
That required a few command assignments in the field. So, under Carlucci’s sponsorship, Powell received brief assignments at Army bases in Kansas and Colorado.
By the time Powell returned to the Pentagon in 1983, at the age of 46, he had a general’s star on his shoulder. Powell was named military assistant to Weinberger. It was a position that made Powell the gatekeeper for the Defense Secretary.
Top Pentagon players quickly learned that Powell was more than Weinberger’s coat holder or calendar handler. Powell was the “filter,” the guy who saw everything when it passed into the secretary for action and who oversaw everything that needed follow-up when it came out.
Powell’s access to Weinberger’s most sensitive information would be a mixed blessing, however. Some of the aggressive covert operations ordered by President Reagan and managed by CIA Director William Casey were spinning out of control.
Like a mysterious gravitational force, the operations were pulling in the Pentagon. This expanding super nova of covert operations began to swallow the Pentagon a few months after Powell’s return.
Yellow Fruit
On September 1, 1983, an Army civilian, William T. Golden, stumbled onto billing irregularities at a U.S. intelligence front company in suburban Annandale, Virginia, which was handling secret supplies for Central America.
The supply operation fell under the code name “Yellow Fruit,” an ironic reference to the region’s banana republics. The billing irregularities seemed modest at first, the doctoring of records to conceal vacation flights to Europe.
But Golden began to suspect that the corruption went deeper. By October 1983, Yellow Fruit had turned thoroughly rotten, and the Army began a criminal inquiry.
“The more we dig into that,” Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, vice chief of the U.S. Army, later told congressional Iran-Contra investigators, “the more we find out that it goes into agencies using money, procuring all sorts of materiel.”
Reacting to the scandal, Thurman implemented new secret accounting procedures for supporting CIA activities. “We have tried to do our best to tighten up our procedures,” Thurman said.
But the muck of the Central American operations was oozing out elsewhere, too. Reagan’s favorite rebels, the Nicaraguan contras, were gaining a reputation for brutality, as stories of rapes, summary executions and massacres flowed back to Washington.
Led by House Speaker Thomas O’Neill, the Democratic-controlled House capped the CIA’s contra funding at $24 million in 1983 and then moved to ban contra aid altogether.
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