I'm Michael Azagov, Chief Investigator of Correspondent for Yahoo News.

And I'm Dan Clyde, Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo News.

And a quick reminder that you can follow us at SkullDuggeryPod.

And by the way, if you've got any questions, thoughts, ideas you want to share,

tweet right at us. Now let's get on with the show.

I knew that his preoccupation with the safety of the hostages would lead him to start this

process up again. And it was with doubt, in fact,

high prospect of it being renewed that I nonetheless

tabled my resignation and left. And I shouldn't have done it.

I considered that I had failed our country and retiring at that point.

The only person that could have stopped it was me.

And I didn't do it.

That was Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, Robert McFarland,

speaking in a fascinating new podcast called Fiasco.

The operation he's talking about, the one he says he could have stopped, but didn't,

was the sale of weapons to Iran in an effort to free American hostages.

It was a wild scheme sanctioned at the highest levels of the White House, involving shady arms

dealers and international fixers that ended in disaster, forming one half of a year's long

scandal known as the Iran Contra affair. Although the details are barely remembered today, Iran

Contra was, as many critics sought, an epic abuse of power by a White House that skirted the law

and conducted a secret foreign policy in defiance of Congress. It is a tale that has more than a few

echoes to events today, and it's vividly recreated in Fiasco. We'll talk to the host of Fiasco,

...