Of the Abramoff brothers, he said, "This wasn't their profession, what they'd do for the rest of their lives. It was a lark. They wanted to get a message across, but at the same time they were going for exploitation and of course trying to make some money."

Initially, the movie was set to shoot in Swaziland, but at the last minute Abramoff moved the production to Namibia, which was occupied by South Africa's apartheid government. Congress had passed (over Reagan's veto) the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, making it very frowned-upon, when not illegal, to do business with South Africa or its proxies. This did not seem to bother Abramoff, who planned to use South African Defense Force vehicles and equipment on the set and soldiers as extras. By 1988, when shooting started on the film, Abramoff likely had connections in the South African government. For a decade, after all, South Africa had been Savimbi's main backer, and according to Crocker and others, Abramoff would not have been able to put together the Democratic International without extensive help from the SADF.

But Abramoff's plan backfired: it was not long before anti-apartheid activists were protesting at the "Red Scorpion" set, and Warner Brothers, who had signed on to distribute the film, pulled out.

James Glickenhaus, whose company, Schapiro Glickenhaus Entertainment, ended up distributing "Red Scorpion" after Warner Brothers jumped ship, said he was not aware of the help provided by the SADF, but he was aware of the controversy over the location. "Look, had the film been made in Nazi Germany, I wouldn't have distributed it," he said. "But I personally felt upon investigating that the Namibian government was more simpatico than the South African government."

The movie seemed like an opportunity to turn a buck -- if not win any awards. "There's some fish for eating and some fish for buying and selling," Glickenhaus said. "This was a fish for buying and selling." In typical Hollywood tradition, Glickenhaus threw a party for the film at Cannes, his feelings about its quality notwithstanding. The Abramoff brothers came, but, he said, they "looked totally out of place."

The actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the villainous Cuban colonel, said he knew that many of the men playing Russian and Cuban soldiers were actual SADF soldiers. There were also rumors going around the set that some of the funding for the film, not just props and extras, was coming from South Africa.

"We heard that very right-wing South African money was helping fund the movie," Argenziano said. "It wasn't very clear. We were pretty upset about the source of the money. We thought we were misled. We were shocked that these brothers who we thought were showbiz liberals -- Beverly Hills Jewish kids -- were doing this."

But there was a lesser-known connection between the apartheid regime and Abramoff.

In the late 1980s, some conservatives in Washington saw P.W. Botha's apartheid government in Pretoria as the last bulwark against communism in Africa. Certain Reagan domestiques had even gone to work for it. "The South African government was the only one that was, shall we say, anti-communist," said Stuart Spencer, who'd help run Reagan's 1980 and '84 campaigns and later became a lobbyist for Pretoria.

Abramoff seems to have shared the sentiment. In 1986, he founded the International Freedom Foundation, whose stated goal was "to foster individual freedom throughout the world by engaging in activities which promote the development of free and open societies based on the principles of free enterprise." More specifically, among the IFF's aims were to oppose the Anti-Apartheid Act and other sanctions and to urge greater support in Washington for Pretoria and less support for the African National Congress, the party that would come to power in 1994 under Nelson Mandela. At its height, around the time "Red Scorpion" was released, the IFF employed about 30 young ideologues in offices on G Street in Washington, Johannesburg, London and Brussels. Churning out reports and presentations (for one such presentation on the Contras, it borrowed the slide show that North had used to raise money for his arms-deal network, according to Pandin), the IFF attracted notable members such as Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.

"It was meant to be a way to institutionalize the contacts he'd made abroad -- people who were interested in anti-communist stuff, democracy building, that kind of thing," said Pandin, who held directorships at the IFF from its inception until it shut down in the early 1990s. "We were skeptical of the ANC," he went on. "We did not want to see the U.S. imposing sanctions on South Africa."

The IFF, however, could not claim impartiality on the subject. It was, in fact, clandestinely funded by the SADF's military intelligence arm, according to former U.S. officials, ANC documents, and reports published in U.S. and U.K. According to a 1995 Newsday report, the IFF received up to $1.5 million a year from the SADF from 1986 through 1992, as a part of Operation Babushka, a smear campaign meant to discredit Mandela and the ANC by portraying them as allied with communist regimes. An SADF intelligence chief also told the Newsday reporters that the SADF helped fund "Red Scorpion."

"We knew that the IFF was funded by the South African government," Herman Cohen, who ran Africa operations for the National Security Council, told Salon. "It was one of a number of front organizations."

"I would not be shocked if some of the money they were raising in the Johannesburg office was coming from those kinds of channels," Pandin said, referring to the SADF.

Pandin recalled that Abramoff enlisted Russell Crystal, the head of the IFF's Johannesburg office and an advisor to F.W. DeKlerk, to be an informal producer on "Red Scorpion" (whether this meant Crystal helped fund the film, Pandin did not remember). But Pandin says Abramoff refused to compensate Crystal afterward. "It wasn't a good experience," Pandin said of the film. "A lot of people didn't get paid. Russell wasn't entirely enamored of Jack after that."

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