Mad AI Simulation Spins Dumb Plot Twist Where Ollie North And Fawn Hall Secretly Marry
If it doesn't work out, they can always just say 'Mistakes were made.'
Iran-Contra coconspirators Oliver North and Fawn Hall are back together again, having gotten married last month in Virginia — yes, really — four decades after he helped run Ronald Reagan’s illegal effort to fund rightwing militants in Nicaragua by secretly selling weapons to Iran, and she, as his secretary, helped him destroy documents detailing the operation.
The story was broken by journalist Michael Isikoff in his SpyTalk newsletter (paywalled), and then picked up by the New York Post (not paywalled). Other outlets followed, confirming the story by also obtaining copies of the couple’s Virginia marriage license, dated August 27. North is 81, and Hall is 65.
Isikoff reported that the two reconnected at the funeral for Elizabeth Stuart North, Oliver North’s wife of 56 years, in December last year, though weirdly the Murdoch paper didn’t bother printing her name. A friend of the couple said, “She rekindled the relationship at the funeral. […] They started spending time together.”
Isn’t it romantic? We can only wonder whether Iranian agents helped the happy couple celebrate by sending them a kosher chocolate cake and a Bible. You should know, going into this, that we are going to have a lot of jokes like that.
Fittingly enough, the two married in secret, according to a friend. None of North’s four children attended the wedding, Isikoff reported. In follow-up reporting, The New York Times interviewed Sarah Katz, one of North’s daughters, who said, very diplomatically, “We were not at the wedding because we didn’t know it was happening. […] And mostly we hope it won’t impact our relationship with our dad because we do love him and we’re still in the process of mourning our mother.”
Oh, that Oliver North. Always so careful about operational security! You never saw him inviting some reporter to a group chat!
It is not known whether, for old times’ sake, Ms. Hall may have smuggled the marriage certificate out of the venue in her clothes.
Look, we warned you.
As you may recall, depending on how stoned you were during the 1980s, Iran-Contra was a plot to secretly and illegally sell embargoed American weapons, mostly missiles and parts, to the government of Iran in order to win the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The funds from those arms sales were then funneled to the Contras, the rightwing paramilitary group trying to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
North, then a staffer on Reagan’s National Security Council, came up with the latter half of the scheme to get around a pesky law forbidding US aid to the Contras. He became a beloved figure on the American Right because he broke the law for the best reason possible, to stick it to the libs and also fight the international communist conspiracy.
I remember any number of angry letters to the editor at the time justifying North’s actions by pointing out that if the commies were allowed to stay in power in Nicaragua, thousands of Russian tanks would then have a staging area to roll right up through Guatemala and along Mexico’s Gulf of America coast, right into Texas. Many of the letters included the exact mileage from Managua to Harlingen (1758 miles), which must have been in some rightwing newsletter since you couldn’t just look it up on your phone back then.
As part of the cover-up, Hall helped North shred documents, and testified that she had hidden documents in her boots and under her skirt, a detail that was so incredibly salacious that lots of people seemed to have thought she was in a sex scandal of some sort, instead of just being a boring accomplice to a plot to destroy evidence in a conspiracy by the Reagan administration to break several laws.
North, who was always a weirdo, addressed the rumors in his folksy aw shucks, I’m just a patriot in a uniform testimony to Congress, for which he was granted partial immunity after he initially took the Fifth. Per the Times,
Mr. North’s testimony, in 1987, included questions about his purchases, with money earmarked for the covert operation, from a store called Parklane Hosiery.
“You know that I’ve got a beautiful secretary, and the good Lord gave her the gift of beauty, and the people snicker that Ollie North might have been doing a little hanky-panky with his secretary,” he testified. “Ollie North has been loyal to his wife since the day he married her.”
As for the purchases at the hosiery store, well heck, that was so wholesome, really. He said he’d had to ask his wife whether he’d ever gone there, and he said she replied, “Of course you did, you old buffoon,” and refreshed his memory: He’d gone there to buy leotards for their two little girls, how dare you think anything else you congressional and media vultures.
Somewhat less heartwarmingly, another witness before the committee, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who also went by the alias “Max Gomez,” testified that North was certain that his closeness with Reagan would protect him from any investigations by Congress, and bragged, “the old man loves my ass.” And now, we guess Ms. Hall can say that of her new husband.
In her testimony, Hall, who was granted immunity, acknowledged she had helped destroy records and explained everything North did was for the highest possible reasons, because there are “times when you have to go above the written law.” She got angry when members of the Iran Contra committee criticized North, and said that he’d been “walking a fine line in an effort to do what was right” while breaking those mere written laws. She also said that her “mistake” in the document destruction was in failing to finish “eliminating traces of altered originals,” so no, not a lot of remorse there.
Following his role in subverting US law, North managed not to go to prison. He was convicted of destroying official documents, accepting a bribe, and writing up a fake timeline of when the arm sales took place. He was sentenced to two years of probation, but the conviction was later overturned on appeal. Independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh decided in 1991 to drop any attempt at a retrial because he wouldn’t be able to prove absolutely that witnesses hadn’t been influenced in any way by North’s televised testimony, which was under immunity.
North proclaimed himself vindicated, which he goddamn well was not, and the Right has pretended ever since that he was an innocent man hounded by Democrats who hated America and wanted Soviet tanks crossing the Rio Grande.
In that spirit, the New York Post’s story on the wedding just plain lied about the outcome of the prosecution, claiming that the case was dropped “after it was determined that prosecutors used testimony he provided to Congress under immunity.” Nope, no such thing. You can look it up.
Hall had a difficult post-scandal life, disappearing from politics and marrying Danny Sugarman, the former manager of The Doors, in 1993. Sugarman introduced her to crack cocaine, and Hall overdosed in 1994, after which she went into rehab. The two nonetheless stayed together until Sugarman died in 2005.
North went on to be a popular rightwing talk radio host and was briefly the president of the National Rifle Association, where he discovered that the whole place was rotten to the core and actually helped expose it, so good for him, there we said it. He drew the line at illegal financial shenanigans that didn’t fight communism, we guess.
Last December, shortly before the funeral where he hooked up again with Hall, North memorialized Elizabeth North on Facebook in the most Jesusy language possible, writing,
We called her, “Mom.” She was bright, beautiful, bountiful, and brave. This wonderful daughter, sister, wife, devoted mother of four, grandmother of eighteen, great-grandmother to one, and devout follower of Jesus Christ is now with our Lord and Savior. She personified Solomon’s description of “A wife of noble character” in Proverbs 31:10-31.
The message, in which North referred to himself as “Dad,” praised Betsy for being a “rock of stability and affection for our family” during the Iran-Contra hearings, noting that she frequently admonished them, “Stop reading the headlines of the ‘Washington Compost!’ Read your Bible instead. This is all going to end well!”
And now you know how it ended! Next year, North and his new wife can give each other the traditional first anniversary gift of shredded paper, the end.
[CNN / NYP / NYT / WaPo (gift link) / WaPo (1987)]
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Wow, hooking up at your dead wife’s funeral and not even telling your kids until after you got married is WILD.
I will absolutely die mad that ol' Ollie got zero jail time for his outrageous lawlessness and interference. Don't worry, there's plenty of grudge-holding room in my psyche for the current batch of assholes.