With American politics in a state of flux epitomized by the transition from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, and both the economy and the national spirit rebounding from a prolonged post-Vietnam malaise, the 1980s promised to be a time of great transitions.
In Washington DC in 1981, Major Oliver North, USMC, was appointed a Deputy Director of the National Security Council (NSC); his duties came to include preparations for the continuance of US government functions following an extreme disaster such as nuclear war, an area known since the 1960s as Continuity of Government (COG) operations.
Three years later, John. H. "Jack" Hoagland, Jr. (Yale '51), a CIA alumnus whose father had held the same position in the 1940s, became Manager of the Christian Science Publishing Society. For the Christian Science Church in America, the transitions mentioned above came harder and faster than for most institutions.
Faced with declining membership and readership for its flagship outreach vehicle, the highly respected Christian Science Monitor, Hoagland used his position with the Publishing Society to convince Church leadership to make dramatic moves into new media which cost, in the end, not only several hundred million dollars, but left the Church's new electronic media empire in ruins by the early 1990s.
By the start of the 1990s, meanwhile, Oliver North was convicted of obstructing a Congressional investigation, fined, and given hundreds of hours of community service.
As interesting as their respective stories might be, it is in the juncture of North's and Hoagland's activities in the 1980s that a truly incredible tale can be found: How an out-of-control Intelligence Community (IC) conspired with Oliver North and his associates in and around the NSC to sell arms to the radical Islamic regime in Iran, help drive America's savings and loan industry into the ground (in many cases aiding and abetting known Mafia figures), fund the Contra movement in Central America (introducing crack cocaine in the process into poor black neighborhoods across America), and, least-known of all, empty the coffers of a small but cash-rich religious movement in America in order to, inter alia, establish state-of-the-art COG communications facilities without alerting an aroused Congress.
All these steps were undertaken without the knowledge or consent of the serving President, although it appears clear that several groups of actors who circled close to the pinnacle of American power – as high, perhaps, as the office of Reagan's Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush (Yale '48) – took it upon themselves to further these operations, even as they helped hide them from then-President Reagan.
(The parallels to modern-day America cannot be ignored, as the CIA continues to operate beyond the bounds of its legal limits – and occasionally at cross purposes with its Commander-in-Chief – within and outside of the US. This book will examine the 2016 election campaign and aftermath to draw out the parallels with the 1980s events noted above.)
The book's author has undertaken extensive research, and in the process invoked his personal experience as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State from 1985-2011. His sources include interviews with: Veterans of the Iran-Contra affair and U.S. Continuity of Government (COG) operations; Christian Science Church members intimately involved with the events portrayed; and shortwave radio experts from several countries. He has also consulted Church records and histories, technical and historical references on shortwave radio, and the biographies of all the major figures in the Iran-Contra period of the Reagan and Bush 41 presidencies.
This is a story told between two towers: Literally, they are the vast shortwave radio tower which arose, incongruous, from the quiet woods outside Scotts Corner, Maine; and the Tower Commission, constituted by Congress to investigate the Iran-Contra abuses.
(Metaphorically, of course, the two towers in question were God and Mammon, with the latter apparently winning the competition for the Christian Science Board of Directors' loyalties hands down.) This book's findings, while sure to be controversial, underline the total disregard with which the CIA treated the Constitution during the 1980s and '90s – and point out that things have clearly not improved much since then.
Whatever one may think of Mary Baker Eddy and the church she founded, its treatment at the hands of John H. Hoagland, Jr., his cronies, and organs of the American IC and "Continuity of Government" programs, constitutes a shameful story of, inter alia, the undermining of a sitting President, the further degradation of trust in public institutions, and not least, government interference with the free exercise of religion.
