You’ll keep saying ‘I’m sorry, did I hear that correctly?’: Fiasco reviewed

Kevin Katke was quite a man. He had no military training, no political background and no espionage experience. Nonetheless, his hatred of communists and can-do attitude made him the pre-eminent idiot savant of private American intelligence throughout the Reagan administration. It was a peripatetic career that culminated with him spearheading a bungled plot to oust a leftist regime in Grenada while holding down a full-time job at Macy’s. Call it the American dream.

I learnt this — along with dozens of other things to make you say, ‘I’m sorry, did I hear that correctly?’ — listening to Fiasco (Luminary), a political-history podcast whose second season retells the bizarre and shambolic story of the Iran-Contra scandal. For the show’s writers, Katke is a symbol, an emblem of the cocksure amateurism that characterised so many of Ronald Reagan’s foreign dealings.

Iran-Contra was originally two scandals. In October 1986, a plane was shot down over war-torn Nicaragua: the crash’s only survivor told the media that he had been dropping covert shipments of American weapons into the country to aid the Contras, a group of bloody-minded right-wing rebels. A month later it emerged that the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran, its sworn enemy, as part of an attempt to free the American hostages taken by Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The dénouement arrived, as our narrator explains, when the world learnt how the two were connected: money from the covert sale of arms was being funnelled into Nicaragua to fund the Contras. One secret had been stitched into another.

Everyone gravitates towards the visionary gleam of American politics. I can’t imagine a podcast like this being made about a British scandal — the near-identical Arms-to-Iraq affair, for instance.