OLIVER'S TWIST SAVES REAGAN
The Iran gate hearings have been transformed by the an awkward outcome for some, but not for the President
Washington CAN it be that Oliver North has single- handedly turned the tables? After nearly eight months of pious assault by the Democratic Congress, furthered by the equally pious coverage of a Washington press corps chasing the mirage of another Watergate, have Americans begun to twig that they may have been duped, that the Iran-Contra affair is not so much a scandal as a political contest, that the televised committee hearings are a charade, a waste of taxpayers' money, and an attempt, as Oliv- er North put it, to `cri- minalise policy differ- ences between coequal branches of govern- ment'?
It is hazardous to pre- dict. Reagan still has hoops to go through. Oliver North exoner- ated the President on the great red herring of the day, saying he assumed Reagan knew of the diversion of Iran arms profits to the Con- tras but was later told by the President. 'I just didn't know.' Of the three other officials in the plot, two, the CIA director William Casey and Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau from the joint chiefs of staff, have since died. That leaves only the former national security adviser John Poindexter who is about to testify as I write. He briefed Reagan every day, often alone, and Washington is on tenterhooks waiting for his story. He will doubtless drop some bombshells but is expected to corroborate Reagan's denial of the diver- sion. The White House has succeeded in making this narrow point the end-all of the affair, and if Poindexter sticks to his lines hC may in fact end all, or much, by releasing the suspense that has sustained it. Then what? Will it peter out? Or will there by an 011ie-driven backlash? Until Ilow the liberal establishment has suc- ceeded in framing what is essentially a constitutional struggle over control of fore- ign policy as if it were a betrayal of the people, with the administration on trial and the President fighting off impeach- ment. It has worked well. The pusillani- mous conduct of the White House certainly made it easier. True, Reagan had no choice but to apologise for the appease- ment of Iran, but all the rest, the hand- wringing, the changing of stories, the squirming over Contra aid, implied an- n- admission of guilt and has proved as serious a misjudgment as the original offence itself.
Even so, Reagan's opponents could not have kept the country indignant for so long without using the hearings to ridicule the Iran-Contra operations, impugn the mo- tives of those involved, and misrepresent the thwarting of Congress as if it were a breach of law. Some Republicans on the House and Senate committees protested against the prosecutorial tone of the inves- tigation — 'fishing without a licence', said a disgusted Senator McClure — when the sole purpose was to elicit facts. But others, afraid to seem too soft on their own party and president, echoed the fashionable wrath and in doing so gave credibility to the the dog and pony show.
It took about 20 mi- nutes for the committees to lose the sympathy of the American public. In a hot exchange, Oliver North's small, beaky lawyer, Brendan Sulli- van, denounced the pro- ceedings as 'more or less outrageous', said the investigators were working 'hand in glove' with a special prosecutor preparing a criminal case against North, and accused the committees of withholding a six-foot stack of shuffled documents until the last moment. Sullivan was silenced by the chairman, Daniel Inouye, the stoical one-armed senator from Hawaii, and the grilling began. I imagine that House counsel will have nightmares remembering the patronising tone of his first questions. The boyish, long-haired John Nields immediately ex- ceeded his brief by moralising — 'that's not the way we do things in America, is it?. . . You put some value, don't you, in the truth?' — and turned it into a duel, which he lost. To be fair, nothing could have stopped Colonel North's delicious tour de force. On the second morning of testimony NBC's dry commentator, Tom Brokaw, burst out emotionally: 'It's a hole in one, a grand slam, a knockout.' Indeed it was. North answered each accusation of venality with a passion that melted America. Did he steal? 'I would use my own money, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North's own paycheck, his own money that he had earned, and I would use it for an oper- ational expense.' Did he buy silk bras for Fawn Hall at Park Lane Hosiery? 'People snicker that 011ie North might have been doing a little hanky-panky with his secret- ary,' he scolded the committees. '011ie North has been loyal to his wife since the day he married her. And the fact is I went to my best friend and I asked her: "Did I ever go to Park Lane Hosiery?" And you know what she told me? "Of course you did, you old buffoon, you went there to buy leotards for our two little girls." Did he accept the gift of a home security system and backdate two letters to cover it up? Yes but only after the bureaucrats had refused him protection against death threats from the terrorist Abu Nidal. 'I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, OK, as an even deal for him,' he told the electrified audi- ence with perfect suspense and timing. 'But I am not willing to have my four children meet Abu Nidal or his organisa- tion on his terms.' The Washington wisdom is that a good actor, with a cute versatile face and a cracked voice, wearing a marine uniform with six rows of medals, has just pulled a fast one. But his explosive effect is more than theatre. It is not even accurate to say he relishes the limelight. For five years he managed to keep a remarkably low profile for a man executing much of America's foreign policy, and the television networks had trouble finding a photograph of him when he hit the news last November.
ome say he is a throwback to the S patriotic, Christian and family virtues of the 1950s, others that he strikes the Rambo chord, but outside the conservative fraternity that has launched the 'Let 'em have it, 011ie' bumper stickers and the '011ie for President' campaign, I don't see a personality cult. Most of the 55 million Americans that watched his triumph were simply impressed by a man of unusual force and conviction who had been scanda- lously treated. The elected members of the committees are well aware that there has been a sea change in the public mood, and there is nothing more hilarious than watch- ing some of these panicked politicians outdoing each other with flattery of Col- onel North.
Such is the popular frustration with hacks who cannot seem to put together a budget, or keep a secret, or hold to principle, that an astounding 56 per cent of the public now say North was justified in misleading Congress. After such 'incredi- ble leaks from discussions with closed committees', he said, 'we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lies and lives.' It is an argument Americans understand extremely well, though it hap- pens to be nonsense in this instance. Leaks by Congress could hardly endanger lives when half the world already knew exactly what North was doing. The original Contra diversion was even suggested by an outsid- er, the Iranian arms broker Manucher Ghorbanifar, who told North in a bath- room: 'I know what you really do in your spare time: you support the Nicaraguan resistance, don't you?' North went on to say that `Izvestia knew it. . . it had been all over Danny Ortega's [Nicaraguan] news- cast. Radio Havana was broadcasting it. It was in every newspaper in the land.'
Why then didn't Congress know? The answer of course is that it did. Scores of Congressmen visited Managua during this period and were told by the Sandinistas that Oliver North was running the Contra resupply operation. They turned a blind eye, their version of what North likes to call 'plausible deniability'. They made their protest against Contra aid by putting loose restrictions on appropriations bills, but did not try to scuttle the policy entirely, either because they were merely using such leg- islation to cover themselves against re- proach by liberal activists, or because they didn't dare challenge Reagan when he was at the height of his power.
There are two points here. In the first place Congress could not even make up its mind what the formal public policy was to be. 'Plain and simple, the Congress is to blame,' said North, 'because of the fickle, vacillating, unpredictable, on-again off- again policy toward the Nicaraguan demo- cratic resistance. . . . One thing is, I think, for certain: that you will not investigate yourselves in this matter.' Less obviously, there was a tacit agreement that the five different Boland amendments that res- tricted US aid to Contras from 1982 onwards should have no teeth. The 1984 version, which the administration is ac- cused of violating, was passed 411:0 by the House of Representatives. Why did Re- publican Contra supporters unanimously vote for it? Because everybody knew it was hot air, and that Reagan would have vetoed it otherwise.
This Boland amendment, a fudged rider on a spending bill, has now been dressed up as a ban on all US support to the Contras. In fact it makes no reference to the National Security Council. 'If the Congress had decided that nobody in the United States of America should render any support whatsoever to the . . . resist- ance,' said North, 'then it should have passed a law saying that.' In any case it would have been unconstitutional for the Congress to try to restrict the NSC, the President's personal staff, in such a way. North gave a tantalising hint that if in- dicted he will take his case to the Supreme Court, where he will win. 'There is not only an excellent but an iron-clad case that Boland didn't apply,' says Senator Orrin Hatch. It will be interesting to see what the public's reaction is when it learns that months of indignation about the President 'being above the law' was just political horseplay.
The Boland amendment is pivotal to the whole Iran-Contra affair. The director of the CIA, Bill Casey, turned to Oliver North to run the Contra operation because his own agency had been prohibited from doing so. A brilliant tax lawyer and war- time chief of secret intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services, Casey knew how to reconcile covert action with the law. This was a CIA programme at arm's length and North, to whom he spoke several times a week, was his cover. Casey knew about the diversion from the begin- ning, calling it 'the ultimate irony, the ultimate covert operation'. But whether he could resist sharing the secret with his old friend and confidant, Ronald Reagan, we will never know. In the words of Senator Inouye: 'He has taken the information to the grave with him.'
But even if the privatised Contra opera- tion was perfectly legal, it set a bad precedent. By early 1986, funding the Contras may have become the impetus for renewing the arms sales to Iran when most of the cabinet were against it. North testified that only he and Casey were really Pushing the sales by then, and he admitted that Contra funding was one of the sweeteners that kept it going. For Casey, perhaps, the hostages in Lebanon were more of a pretext for getting presidential backing, than the real motive.
Once he had tasted the Contra diversion Casey seemed to get hooked on the method. According to North he planned a sort of 'super CIA', an 'off-the-shelf, self- sustaining, stand-alone' agency for covert action funded by future sales to Iran. North insists it was only 'a short-term project, not something that was going to go Oil ad infinitum', but it is evidence that circumventing Congress was becoming a habit, that what began as a single, and arguably justifiable, scheme to rescue the Contras was becoming a systematic tool of Policy.
Senator William Cohen , called it Perhaps the most serious revelation' of the investigation. To be more accurate, it is the first and only revelation since the bones of the affair were laid out last November. It is ironic that after so much trivia has been Ponderously printed, this weighty matter Should be half lost in the exuberance of "lie's hour. Ironic too that the hearings, expected and intended to doom the Con- tras, have instead become their platform. No question was too arcane. Asked about a shredded document North would lecture extravagantly on communism, or tell of strangled children in the prisons of Nicar- agua. I doubt the Colonel converted any- one who already had a view. On the other hand, North has left a minefield for those above him. Unwilling to play the 'fall guy' once criminal proceed- ings had begun, he said, 'I have never carried out a single act, not one, in which I did not have authority from my superiors.' He went out of his way to repay the Attorney General, Edwin Meese, for throwing him to the wolves last November. North suggested Meese had not been honest about the 1985 arms sales to Iran. He also astonished the committees by describing how he walked past an investi- gating team from the justice department and shredded documents in front of their 'loses. 'They were working on their pro- ject, he grinned. 'I was working on mine.' But on balance he can only help the administration. His cause is the President's cause. He has given an articulate and lively defence of Reagan's covert operations, hitting back where others lamely took the And by cutting the inquisition clOW n to size he has belittled their censure. The same cant will appear in the grand press, but already the editorials are sound- ing a trifle uncomfortable. And the rest of the country, I think, will welcome the chance to smother doubts and give a very Popular old man at least half another chance. Assuming, always, that Poindexter takes the hit.
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