From Iran-Contra to Trump: How Zionism Took Over the Deep State

The most politically prescient movie when it comes to the networks infiltrating our government these last forty years must be Power, director Sidney Lumet’s 1986 vehicle for exploring America’s mechanisms of political control, his informal sequel to the much more famous Network. The main characters in Power are portrayed by Richard Gere, as a political campaign consultant, and Denzel Washington, as his client: a lobbyist representing Gulf State sheiks who want to induce America’s government to sponsor coups in Latin American countries. The sheiks’ first step in this direction is using Gere to engineer the election of a dour Midwestern corporatist running to replace an old line WASP senator whose wife, played by the real-life WASP scion Beatrice Straight, committed a financial indiscretion which put her in Denzel Washington’s pocket.

When Gere starts asking questions about who’s paying whom and for what, Washington gets nervous: suddenly Gere’s threatened by mysterious go-betweens, his plane almost crashes, he loses clients, his phone is tapped (and he’s meant to know it). When Gere confronts Washington in the latter’s sleek and immaculate office in the literal shadow of the U.S. capitol, Washington is unrepentant:    

“We hired you to do a job, and it wasn’t to investigate me or my company…We just wanted you to know, if you really did try and screw us, something bad could happen to you. That was the message we were trying to convey. Now the plane, the phones, merely dramatic illustrations…It’s no fucking game. You are deciding who runs this country. Who runs other countries. My clients deal with the consequences.”

What is most interesting about Power, besides its forensic representation of an influence play distinctly exotic to pre-1980s America but inherently familiar to colonial societies, is how neatly it maps on to another play being run in Washington DC before and during Power’s production: Iran-Contra. This was also a play, a real-life one, in which operators with ties to the Middle East and Latin America infiltrated the capital via a pliant “heartland Republican,” Ronald Reagan, to run an agenda foreign to American interests. Iran-Contra was, famously yet confusingly, a covert effort by the Reagan administration to funnel arms shipments to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages; then to use the proceeds from these arms sales to fund the guerrilla Contras, who were fighting the socialist authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua—all without congressional approval. In the course of this effort by “Reagan’s Junta,” people’s offices were bugged, and strange payoffs and stranger outreaches made. Middlemen like Gere were recruited, then threatened, then frightened, then ostracized, then disposed.

The only Iran-Contra element missing in Power, thanks likely to the Jewish-American Lumet’s well-documented loyalty to Israel, is the people who actually ran it: connected Jewish Zionists for whom Denzel Washington’s character was the stand-in. William Casey, the CIA director who set Iran-Contra in motion, was a product of Wall Street just as Zionists rose to influence there, and it was to a group of these associates including Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and Bruce Rappaport that Casey turned for advice on his White House agenda. He also turned for advice to Zionist fixer Roy Cohn (in 1980, during Reagan’s presidential campaign, which Casey ran, Nancy Reagan said that Casey called Cohn “almost daily”) and it was the Saudi expatriate Adnan Khashoggi, a client of Cohn’s, who ended up running crucial aspects of the Iran-Contra play. Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian expatriate arms dealer who shared top Iran-Contra billing with Khashoggi, was known by Casey to be an Israeli agent. And it was Israel which was the deal’s middleman, sending arms to Iran from America via Ghorbanifar via the ministrations of Michael Ledeen, a Zionist “consultant” with the National Security Council.

Then there were the Zionist-Contra connections. The primary Washington point person for the Contra end of that play was Elliott Abrams, the son-in-law of the late Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz—who, by the 1980s, along with Public Interest editor Irving Kristol, was the most famous Jewish neoconservative in America. The Contra’s primary emissary to Washington was Arturo Cruz, Jr., who got his foot in the White House door by dating Fawn Hall, the famously loyal secretary (and future wife) of NSC official Oliver North, who managed Iran-Contra. Cruz thrived in Washington thanks in part to the support of the magazine The New Republic, which had been founded by Beatrice Straight’s family but, in the 1980s under the ownership of the ardent Zionist Martin Peretz, introduced Zionism to the capital’s media circles. The New Republic backed Cruz to the point where Peretz’s second-in-command, Leon Wieseltier, a “man about town” known for his own dubious sexual power plays, assured The Washington Post for attribution that Cruz’s infiltration of North’s office via his relationship with Fawn Hall was not a play for influence but the product of “real love.”

In geopolitical context, these insider operations make sense. The ultimate aim of Iran-Contra was solidifying American military corporate networks in the Middle East—put formally, to “establish a new US relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout the Persian Gulf region”—to the benefit of Israel, already these networks’ most reliable client. Like Denzel Washington’s play in Power, Iran-Contra failed. But its key project, the “usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group” of seeming renegades, has succeeded over the last forty years in far more dramatic fashion. During this time, Zionist networks run largely though not exclusively by connected American Jews have made themselves into arbiters of America’s military corporate complex. Recently, they have brought new groups of authoritarians and supremacists into that complex, and they have elevated politicians to defend their authority to the highest positions in our government.

Some of this play was well underway when Power was produced and Iran Contra underwritten. Starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Zionists came not just to Washington DC but to New York, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, and, less publicly, to Harvard. Just as old-line WASP financial networks headed by operators like the Rockefellers ceded influence to Zionist ones headed by Michael Steinhardt and the Tisch Family, old-line WASP academics made a similar arrangement. Indeed, as Martin Peretz and Elliott Abrams made Washington hospitable to Zionism, Peretz’s close ally Henry Rosovsky, a Zionist whose wife’s family was a staple of Israeli society, was making Harvard into a Zionist-influenced institution. He did this via his position as Dean of the Faculty under Harvard’s old-line WASP president, Derek Bok.

One culmination of Rosovsky’s work came in the 1990s and 2000s, via major donations from his Zionist allies Les Wexner and Rosovsky’s close friend Jeffrey Epstein. Another came with the accession to the Harvard presidency in 2001 of Epstein confidante Lawrence Summers, an intimate of Peretz, who also taught at Harvard. After Summers flamed out spectacularly with what Harvard professors described as his imperialist designs on the institution as well as his derogatory remarks about women’s intelligence, Zionist influence receded for ten years, but then returned. It did this via Lawrence Bacow, who served as president from 2018 to 2023, and Alan Garber, Harvard’s current president who was installed after Peretz’s former student Bill Ackman helped engineer President Claudine Gay’s defenestration over what he deemed her insufficient Zionism. Garber is cooperating with Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft’s AI-driven surveillance scheme in Foxborough, Massachusetts to detect and police what Kraft calls anti-semitic content online. Supporting Garber in his presidency is a gallery of Zionist academics, many of them quietly influential in the defenestration of Gay. (Until recently, they have included Summers, still a professor at Harvard until November, when he was forced to step back from teaching after emails came to light showing him, as a married man, soliciting Jeffrey Epstein in 2018 for advice about “getting horizontal” with a junior female colleague.)

Harvard is not unique in this regard. In 2020, as Peretz himself stated, five out of the eight Ivy league universities were led by Jews, all of whom identified as Zionists, and, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, donations from Zionist financiers have flowed accordingly. Thanks to the Michael Milken, the “junk bond” king of 1980s Wall Street until his prosecution, George Washington University (GW) in Washington DC received the largest philanthropic gift in its history. Thanks to Black Rock’s Steven Schwarzman and Jeffrey Epstein, MIT has spent two decades awash in Zionist funds—the same MIT that counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a distinguished graduate and where Bill Ackman’s wife, an Israeli Zionist, made her career in a department floating off Epstein’s donations. Ackman, who was not only mentored by Peretz at Harvard but co-owned The New Republic with Peretz at the end of its Zionist run, has also poured his financial gains back into the university. Nor were knowledge-producing institutions the only sites of Zionist takeover. As I have also reported for the Libertarian Institute, artistic philanthropy, too, was an area of these operators’ largesse. The Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Botanic Gardens, the Tisch School of the Arts: all of these flowed from funding of Zionist financiers, among them the Tisches and Michael Steinhardt.

But Harvard was and is the center of this East Coast institutional power play, and it’s from Harvard that Zionists came to Silicon Valley to colonize the new wing of the American military corporate state, defense technology.

To read the second part of this article, visit The Libertarian Institute.