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| category | tags | summary | born | died | location | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Political Figure |
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After the Iran-Contra Affair scandal broke, Tower was appointed to head a presidential commission of inquiry into the affair. | 1925-09-29 | 1991-04-05 | Houston, Texas |
John Tower was a United States Senator and a prominent figure with connections to Central Intelligence Agency circles. He served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.1
John Tower was introduced to Rafael Eitan, then counterterrorism adviser to Menachem Begin, in 1978. Eitan sought to build a network within the United States to obtain information about Palestinian terrorists. John Tower and his senior aide, Robert McFarlane, developed a close relationship with Eitan, and much information reaching the Senate Armed Services Committee found its way to Eitan's desk.1
John Tower was involved in the secret negotiations concerning the Iran-Contra Affair. He was present at a meeting in Santiago, Chile, in late 1986 with Carlos Cardoen, Robert Gates, and Pieter Van Der Westhuizen (South African Military Intelligence), where the United States reaffirmed its intention to maintain arms channels to Iraq.1
Robert Maxwell claimed that when George H.W. Bush was head of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976, John Tower approached Maxwell to connect him and Bush secretly with various Soviet Union intelligence people. Maxwell delivered, and John Tower became his friend for life, later being appointed a director of Maxwell's Macmillan publishing company in the United States.1
John Tower approached Robert Maxwell to market the PROMIS software on behalf of the Robert Gates group. He also personally gave Yitzhak Shamir permission to use United States funds as a guarantee for Maxwell's publishing empire.1
After the Iran-Contra Affair scandal broke, John Tower was appointed to head a presidential commission of inquiry into the affair. The Tower Commission's conclusions were largely seen as a cover-up, focusing only on a minor part of the sales and making no mention of the ongoing original arms channel. George H.W. Bush later nominated John Tower for defense secretary, but he was not confirmed by United States.1
John Tower died in a plane crash in Georgia in early 1991.1
Footnotes
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Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. Sheridan Square Press, 1992 (TrineDay reprint, 2015). ↩︎