Iran-Contra
On July 27, 1986, the first article on the Iran-Contra scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner after Gene Wheaton told a lawyer named Daniel Sheehan and two Washington journalists that he had been recruited to use National Air to transport $27 million dollars worth of weapons to Nicaragua (money that Congress had funded for non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua), and that Thomas Clines and Ted Shackley had been running a top-secret assassination unit since the early 1960s. According to Wheaton, it had begun with an assassination training program for Cuban exiles and the original target had been Fidel Castro.
On October 5, 1986, a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras was shot down by a Sandinista patrol. Eugene Hasenfus (a CIA Air America veteran) survived the crash and told his captors that he believed the CIA was behind the operation. It eventually emerged that Clines, as well as Oliver North, Edwin Wilson and Richard Secord, were involved in the conspiracy to provide arms to the Contras, and Clines himself as a key player in the web of business operations founded by Secord and Iranian arms dealer Albert Hakim known as the "Enterprise".
Read more about this topic: Thomas G. Clines