Richard Secord

Richard Vernon Secord was born July 6, 1932, in LaRue, Ohio. He died October 15, 2024. He served as a United States Air Force officer, rising to Major General, before retiring under a cloud of controversy and becoming the operational director of the private covert network known as the Enterprise that was at the center of the Iran-Contra Affair.¹

Military Career and Edwin Wilson

Secord’s Air Force career included extensive special operations and counterinsurgency assignments. He served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era in roles involving air operations in Laos and Vietnam. During the 1970s he served in the Pentagon in special operations planning and was involved in programs coordinating with CIA paramilitary networks, a role that brought him into contact with Ted Shackley’s network of CIA officers.¹

In the late 1970s, Secord came under investigation for his relationship with Edwin Wilson, a former CIA officer who had gone into private arms dealing and was selling weapons and training services to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi - transactions that were illegal and represented a serious counterintelligence problem. Wilson was eventually arrested, convicted in 1983, and sentenced to 52 years in prison. Secord was a central figure in congressional investigations of Wilson’s Libya operations because of documented contacts between them; Secord was not criminally charged but the investigation effectively ended his military career advancement. He retired from the Air Force in 1983.¹

Secord had also been assigned to help plan the April 1980 Iran hostage rescue operation (Operation Eagle Claw), which ended in disaster at the Desert One staging area in Iran with eight Americans killed and five aircraft destroyed. He was not responsible for the operational failure but was among the senior military planners involved in the operation’s preparation.¹

The Enterprise

After leaving the Air Force, Secord formed a business partnership with Albert Hakim, an Iranian-American arms dealer and businessman who had extensive contacts in the Iranian military and defense community dating to the Shah’s era. Together they established Stanford Technology Trading Group International (STTGI), which they used as the vehicle for arms transactions. The partnership also operated through Lake Resources S.A., a Swiss financial account maintained by Hakim, into which profits from arms deals were deposited.²

The Enterprise became the private infrastructure for the Iran-Contra operations when National Security Council staff member Oliver North recruited Secord and Hakim to execute what North and CIA Director William J. Casey had conceived as a "self-financing" covert program: sell U.S.-approved weapons to Iran through Israeli intermediaries, charge prices substantially above the American government’s cost, and funnel the markup profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, who had been cut off from direct U.S. military assistance by the Boland Amendment.²

The operations ran primarily from 1985 to 1986. Israeli arms dealers Ya’acov Nimrodi and Al Schwimmer provided the initial Israeli connection; Iranian intermediary Manucher Ghorbanifar was the primary conduit to Iranian buyers. Secord and Hakim managed the logistics, finance, and some direct negotiations. The Enterprise also maintained the Contra air resupply operation at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador through aircraft managed by Felix Rodriguez and others. Monzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer, was paid approximately $1.2 million to move weapons from Israel to Contra forces, documented by the Tower Commission.²

Exposure and Criminal Proceedings

The Enterprise was exposed in October 1986 when a Contra resupply aircraft was shot down over Nicaragua and its crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured by the Sandinistas. Hasenfus described the operation’s infrastructure, and the subsequent unraveling revealed the Iran arms sales as well. The Iran-Contra Affair became the major domestic political crisis of Reagan’s second term.²

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh indicted Secord in 1987. In November 1989, Secord pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to Congress regarding his knowledge of North’s diversion of Iran arms sale profits to the Contras, and to related false testimony. He received a two-year suspended sentence and was not imprisoned.²

Secord later published a memoir, Honored and Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos (Wiley, 1992), in which he characterized himself as a loyal officer carrying out administration policy who was abandoned when the operations became politically untenable.¹