Reply #1: A couple

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

Lawrence Walsh was the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation & his book Firewall is an excellent and personal history investigating the right. (His report, btw, is available online via the FAS website.)

The National Security Archive put out a great book on "Iran Contra" (called, I think, just that) which is worth it if you dig source documents, but otherwise I wouldn't worry.

I've not read it, but Peter Dale Scott wrote a book on Iran-Contra with a couple of others. That might be worth a look.

Robert Parry (an ex-AP reporter) is an excellent 80's historian. His "Lost History" is about Contra drug-smuggling. I'd also recommend having a poke around his website - www.consortiumnews.com - for stuff.

There is an online project called "Namebase" created by Daniel Brandt (whose origin was a DOS-based computer program). He inputted the index to several hundred books and magazines allowing cross referencing of names & titles. For eg. here are the books Ghorbanifar is in:

http://www.namebase.org/main3/Manucher-Ghorbanifar.html

- a word of caution -- be skeptical of some of Brandt's sources. He's a defender of "Spotlight" - a neo-nazi (now defunct & replaced by "American Free Press" magazine produced by Willis "what Holocaust" Carto), along with books in the conspiratorial deep-end.