Robert W. Jackson

Based on a broad gag order issued to prevent the seven people charged with stealing the F-14 fighter parts from the Navy and smuggling them to Iran from discussing the case, Congress decided to seal Jackson's allegations and kept the story hidden from public. Only one year after Jackson's testimony, on November 3, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the existence of a secret agreement between the US Government and the Islamic Republic of Iran to illegally sell weapons to the latter, in what later was known as the Iran-Contra affair. The Iranian government confirmed the Ash-Shiraa story, and, on November 13, President Reagan appeared on national television, stating:

Nevertheless, the full scope of the operation was more complex than merely selling weapons for hostages. On October 5, 1986, one month before the Ash-Shiraa article, a transport aircraft delivering weapons via clandestine airdrop to the Nicaraguan Contras was shot down over Nicaragua by a surface-to-air missile. Two U.S. pilots – Wallace "Buzz" Sawyer and William Cooper – were piloting the Corporate Air Services HPF821 and died on the crash. The pilots were transporting weapons into Nicaragua, and the Nicaraguan government accused the US of using the CIA to aid the opposition guerrillas, the so-called "Contras." That would constitute a direct violation of the Boland Amendmentt, which prohibited the American government from intervening in Nicaragua. So, that accusation was largely denied by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the US Government.

On October 1, 1985, Jackson testified before the House Sea Power Subcommittee, sharing 2,000 pages of Navy documents that showed evidence of fraud, forgery, and kickbacks aboard the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. The panel was chaired by Rep. Charles Bennet. Testifying along with Jackson were Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) and Commodore James B. Whittaker, the Navy's assistant commander for inventory and systems integrity.

In August 1985, US District Judge Earl B. Gilliam issued a broad gag order to prevent the seven people charged with stealing the F-14 fighter parts from the Navy and smuggling them to Iran from discussing the case. But the gag order was also applied to defense attorneys, federal prosecutors, and potential witnesses, which sealed Jackson's allegations and kept the story hidden from public.

Receiving death threats and being ignored by Navy authorities, Jackson decided to blow the whistle and took the case to the press. His story was published in the LA Times by the journalist Glenn F. Bunting (https://www.gfbunting.com/), in a series of pieces printed from July 1985 to February 1986. Initially, the Navy denied the accusations. Like many whistleblowers, Jackson's motivations were publicly questioned, and his integrity was challenged. He was labeled as "a zealot" and a "troublemaker," with news articles smearing his reputation and exposing details about his troubled marriage, religious beliefs, work ethics, and even his high school grades.

A .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}3+1⁄2-month Navy investigation of incidents on board the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk produced a 12-inch-thick report, where the Navy concluded that "$10-million inventory was missing because of accounting errors and computer problems." Nevertheless, the Navy report stated that there was no evidence of "fraud, waste or mismanagement." According to People magazine, in July 1985, the Navy announced that it could not account for about $14 million worth of Kitty Hawk supplies.

Following the incident, Petty Officer Jackson quit the Navy in September 1985. On October 1, 1985, he testified before the US Congress with Congressman Jim Bates. Bates presented his findings to a Congressional Subcommittee. He reported that $10 million parts were missing from the USS Kitty Hawk and that another $10 million could not be accounted for, in a total of $20 million. On that occasion, Bates raised the suspicion that an espionage ring was using the USS Kitty Hawk to dispatch F-14 parts to Iran and called it a spy scandal. Bates also stated that the Naval Investigative Service seemed to be doing more covering up than uncovering the problem.

In the spring of 1983, the United States launched Operation Staunch, a wide-ranging diplomatic effort to persuade other nations all over the world not to sell arms or spare parts for weapons to Iran. To all effects, Iran was still considered a hostile country in the 1980s. This arms embargo took place during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), a war in which the US sided with Iraq. On the record. the US could not, and was not, selling any weapons or military equipment to Iran.

In September 1983, Petty Officer Jackson reported to the Kitty Hawk's antisubmarine warfare division. During his time on board, he became the division's bookkeeper. After several months of intense study, Jackson had the Kitty Hawk's arcane bookkeeping system fully deciphered. In his evaluation for June to December 1984, Jackson was given a 4.0 rating, the Navy's highest mark. “Petty Officer Jackson’s high levels of initiative and personal performance,” the Navy report stated, “far exceed those expected of a junior petty officer.” He was given increasing accounting responsibilities until the incident. By late December 1984, he was overseeing more than 250 bookkeepers.

Jackson's father, Jim Jackson, was a self-employed petroleum engineer who served three years in the Navy. His mother died of brain cancer in 1980, when Robert was in his early twenties.

In 1980, after leaving the Navy, Jackson began selling life and health insurance in Jacksonville and at Mutual of Omaha. After a troubled marriage and a divorce that left him broke, he re-enlisted in the US Navy as a third-class petty officer. After advanced training, Jackson was stationed on the USS Kitty Hawk, in September 1983. At the time, the USS Kitty Hawk was homeported in San Diego, California.

In the 1980s, the F-14 aircraft served as the U.S. Navy's primary maritime air superiority fighter. Curiously enough, F-14s were also used as land-based interceptors by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force during the Iran–Iraq War, where they saw combat against Iraqi warplanes. Iranian F-14s reportedly shot down at least 160 Iraqi aircraft during the war, while only 12 to 16 Tomcats were lost. Considering that the US was supposed to be allied with Iraq – and having in mind that it was against the US foreign policy to sell any weapons to Iran at that time – Bates' accusations were pretty serious.

The Iran-Contra affair was one of the biggest arms scandals of the 1980s. It resulted in indictments involving authorities as such as the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger; Oliver North, member of the National Security Council; Alan D. Fiers, Chief of the CIA's Central American Task Force; Clair George, Chief of Covert Ops-CIA; Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Adviser; among others.

Before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the United States was the largest seller of arms to Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Because of that, the vast majority of the weapons that the Islamic Republic of Iran inherited in January 1979 were American-made.

In November 1979, a group of Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line took over the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. After an initial release, fifty-two diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days, in what became known as the Iran hostage crisis.

In consequence of the hostage crisis, US sanctions were imposed in 1979 by Executive Order 12170. The set of US sanctions included a trade and arms embargo. Part of these sanctions was lifted in January 1981 as part of the Algiers Accords, a set of agreements between the United States and Iran to resolve the Iran hostage crisis. By these accords, the US pledged that it "is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs."

Robert William Jackson (born March 18, 1959) is a US Navy veteran who served as a second class petty officer on the USS Kitty Hawk and became a whistleblower. In the eighties, Jackson denounced the use of the USS Kitty Hawk to sell F-14 parts and missiles to Iran illegally. Later, it was discovered that this ring of smugglers was part of a wider operation involving three different US Navy carriers, and an essential part of a more significant conspiracy, later referred to as the Iran–Contra affair.

Jackson was born on March 18, 1959, in Bakersfield, California. He is the fourth child down in an eight-child family. After graduating from Highland High School in 1977, he joined the United States Navy. Jackson served in the US Navy from August 1977 to April 1983, and later from August 1983 to August 1985.