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Actually, U.S. directors of the humanitarian-aid program feared that cash contributions might easily be diverted from their intended purposes. There were solid grounds for that concern. The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reported last week that the State Department was unable to account definitively for some $17 million of the $27 million that Congress had authorized for the program. The GAO claimed that a small amount was actually spent on military equipment; an Administration source confirmed this but blamed a mistake by a contractor. In another example of undocumented spending, diplomats familiar with the project say that $900,000 had been paid indirectly to officials in Honduras as bribes to win approval to ship supplies through that country. Explained one official: "You can't fight these kinds of wars in the Third World without key people getting greased."
Asked who had financed the military supplies to the contras during the ban on such help from the U.S. Government, Calero replied, "There are things I just don't want to know. My father always said, 'Don't let people confide in you. They will confide in other people too, and you will be blamed.'" As the Iran-contra scandal unfolds, many in the Reagan Administration may eventually resort to the same know-nothing defense.
He knew secret Swiss numbers.
To the U.S., some of the flights were "none of our business."