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.