Without a doubt, it was one of the dumber foreign policy plans the U.S. has come up with in recent years -- and America has not suffered a shortage of dumb foreign policy plans. As some of you might remember, the whole wildly convoluted Iran-Contra Affair landed like a ton of bricks, sending Reaganauts scrambling and firing up a whole round of 80s-style congressional hearings. Your tax dollars at work, 1980s edition.

It turns out that back in 1982, the NSC (National Security Council) acquired an early version of PROFs, which was originally released by IBM just a year earlier. In those days, email at the White House was really a prototype, sort of a beta, in today's terms.

It wasn't until April of 1985 that email became a fully-integrated system among the various departments and in wide use by White House staffers, so it's here that our story really begins to get some traction.

Before we really begin to dig into the details, let's stop for a moment and clarify some references. This article is going to be talking about presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush -- and those dual mentions of Bush father and son are likely to get confusing.

For the purpose of our article, and with all due respect to the Bush presidents, when we mention Bush I or the Bush I administration, we're speaking of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, the father. When we mention Bush II or the Bush II administration, we're speaking of George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, the son of Bush I.

Now that we've got our presidents straight, let's continue this fascinating story.

Iran-Contra began to melt down in November 1986. While printed documents and memos traveled through official government channels and were clearly subject to Presidential Records Act oversight, email was new enough and ephemeral enough to seem like a safe back channel for communication.

Back then, the National Security Advisor was Rear Admiral John Poindexter, a CalTech Ph.D. Weirdly enough, Poindexter would go on to write a multi-tasking symbolic debugger, a BBS, and a pile of PC utility programs in the mid-1990s.

In any case, back in November 1986, Poindexter was working hard with Ollie North to shred all sorts of incriminating Iran-Contra documentation. During this time, while they were doing their best to get rid of their paper trail, they were using email, a process they called "Private Blank Check", to keep in touch. Former National Security Advisor Robert "Bud" McFarlane also participated in this process even after leaving the White House. He emailed White House staffers from a terminal (remember those?) in his house.

Once Poindexter and North were done shredding paper documents, they got to "shredding" digital documents. North deleted 750 out of 758 email messages and Poindexter deleted 5,012 out of 5,062 messages. Poindexter also knew about backups. Backup tapes in the White House were recycled every two weeks, so he knew that if he just kept deleting messages for a while, even the backup tapes would be overwrittten.