Power Game (110 page)

In mid-November 1986, Reagan told the nation, “We did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages.” But Reagan had signed an order on December 5, 1985, which approved a straight arms-for-hostages deal.
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The hard calculus of the arms ransom was laid out baldly in North’s December 4 memo to Poindexter, giving a schedule of arms-for-hostage exchanges:

In other words, the first Boeing 707 would arrive at “H-hour” with three hundred TOW antitank weapons to exchange for one “Amcit,” (American citizen held hostage). Ten hours later, a second shipment;
six hours after that, a third shipment, a Boeing 747 with TOWs and Hawk antiaircraft missiles; and then a fourth.

Nor was this a deal foisted on Reagan from below. When other advisers favored scrapping the operation in December 1985, the president argued to keep going. Reagan feared reprisals against the hostages if the Iranian channel were broken off. Also as Don Regan told investigators, the president was worried that he would look powerless and inept, with hostages still held in Beirut. Meeting his inner circle on December 7, 1985, Reagan brushed aside objections—including questions of legality—raised by Shultz and Weinberger against the arms traffic with Iran. “The American people will never forgive me,” Reagan declared, “if I fail to get these hostages out, over this legal question.”
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Tunnel Vision: The Hubris of Landslide

There is a special political chemistry at work in the White House of an enormously popular second-term president. Call it the hubris of landslide. The pattern is familiar among landslide winners who get in trouble in their second term: Franklin Roosevelt trying to pack the Supreme Court after 1936, Lyndon Johnson deepening the war in Vietnam after the 1964 election, Richard Nixon covering up Watergate after the 1972 election. Inside the White House, a landslide is often read as a license from the electorate to the president to govern as he wants without interference from Congress. The clear danger is that the White House will overreach. After Reagan’s forty-nine-state victory, his partisans urged: “Let Reagan be Reagan.” The president, stymied on domestic policy, and passionate about his foreign crusades, pursued his instincts and bucked at restraints.

Presidential overconfidence gets reinforced by a zealous, loyal staff, feeling their champion invincible and hooked on the hothouse narcotic of power in the White House. Reagan’s staff tried to give the president what he wanted. His daily anxieties and impulses became their catechism, their commands. Reagan’s NSC staff may have been more susceptible to this virus than most, for it was heavily peopled by military staff officers conditioned to salute the commander in chief and charge the next bunker.

“We Americans have built our President into a sort of demigod,” John Eisenhower observed, recalling his father’s White House. “It seems that the longer a President is in office, the more headstrong he becomes. If in office long enough, he may approach the omnipotent—in his own mind. That condition would not be so serious were it not
for the fact that the hubris spreads like a disease to the President’s associates, both family and staff. The trend seems to be for staff officers to consider themselves powers in their own right. The staff sometimes takes the President more seriously than the Great Man himself.”
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In the Eisenhower era, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, a well-known foreign-policy hawk, worried about the pitfalls of excessive zeal for covert operations, with a president surrounded by policy clones. “In the best of circumstances, it is difficult for a powerful executive to escape the ‘yes-men hazard,’ ” Jackson asserted. “The clear-eyed executive will understand that he should be concerned about the possibility that he may, with the best of intentions, misuse his power—through some lack of sophistication, mistaken judgment, or shading of the truth to protect his personal reputation.”
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In short, tunnel vision is an occupational hazard at the White House. In 1985–86, the aggressiveness and tunnel vision of Reagan’s NSC staff was fueled not only by Reagan’s heady election triumph and by his obsession with the hostages and pursuing the
contra
war. It was also fed by the siege atmosphere at the White House, caused by terrorist bombings, airliner hijackings, and the seizure of the
Achille Lauro
cruise ship. The Reagan team was bent on breaking out of the diplomatic defensive, and it mounted what a congessional report called “the cabal of zealots.”

Tunnel vision left the Reagan team vulnerable on the Iran-
contra
affair—without a plan for political damage control to shield the president, other than the belated firing of North and Poindexter’s resignation. Those actions did not spare the president from public outrage. The scandal came as a cold shower to the public, because the plot was operated—not by the CIA—but right in the White House, under the president’s orders.

The rolling disclosures of the Iran-
contra
debacle rumbled like a political earthquake through the Reagan presidency. Other presidents have been shaken by similar events: Eisenhower by the Soviet downing of the American U-2 spy plane in 1960; Kennedy by the dramatic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Covert operations carry heavy costs when they fail or when their cover is blown. That is why most presidents keep covert operations at arm’s length, buried deep in the CIA. It leaves room for plausible denial about the president’s knowledge and involvement. But by bringing the Iran-
contra
operation into the NSC staff, Reagan had dynamite in his political household. When it exploded, he was too close to avoid serious injury.

The president’s evasions compounded the damage. Three days after
a Lebanese newspaper disclosed McFarlane’s mission to Tehran, Reagan told reporters, “to us it has no foundation”—though Reagan himself had approved the mission. The very next day, he told reporters that Shultz and Weinberger had backed his policies (“yes, we have all been working together,” he said) though Reagan knew they had vigorously-opposed the Iranian deals. Next, Reagan was claiming “the modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.” Actually, many tons of equipment had arrived on at least eight planes. At his news conference on November 19, Reagan denied Israel had been involved and had to be corrected by his staff within minutes. Testimony by Shultz, McFarlane, Poindexter, and Regan showed that Reagan knew the truth
before
he misled the nation on those points.

The real shocker was the monumental deception of Reagan’s engaging in the Iranian operation at all. Having savaged Jimmy Carter in 1980 for allowing Iran to hold American diplomats hostage for fifteen months, Reagan torpedoed his own credibility. He violated his pledge never to make “concessions to terrorists,” and his denunciation of Iran as part of a “new international version of Murder, Incorporated.” He made a mockery of his legal ban against selling arms to Iran and made fools of Shultz and Weinberger for urging the arms embargo on other countries.

The operation exposed the traps inherent in the backdoor-policy game. The joint Congressional Committee investigating the Iran-
contra
operation and the president’s Special Review Board, headed by former Senator John Tower, documented a trail of folly—a scenario of American innocents abroad, gulled by crafty Iranians ever demanding a higher price and stalling on American demands. As the Tower board observed, the Americans proceeded “always apparently with an expectation that the process would end with the next arms-for-hostages exchange,” each time drawn deeper into the morass.
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Don Regan warned Reagan the United States was being “snookered” by “rug merchants.”
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Shultz groaned: “Our guys … got taken to the cleaners. You look at the structure of this deal. It’s pathetic that anybody would agree to anything like that. It’s so lopsided, it’s crazy.”
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Weinberger said the NSC staff had laid Washington open to blackmail.

Initially, the White House was told by the Israeli government that all six American hostages in Lebanon, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, would be freed for just one hundred American TOW antitank missiles. That shipment landed in Tehran on August 30, 1985, and not a single hostage was released. Another shipment of 408 TOW missiles was sent by Israel on September 14, and
one hostage was released, the Reverend Benjamin F. Weir. In November, another Israeli shipment; no hostages. Fed up, McFarlane tried to halt the operation and quit the government on December 11, 1985, but Poindexter and North kept it going.

“We are signaling to Iran that they can kidnap people for profit,” Shultz protested to Poindexter, worried that paying arms ransoms would lead to more hostage taking.

But Reagan did not want to stop, and in his game of Persian roulette, he decided to bet more chips.

In a formal order, or “finding,” on January 17, 1986, the president authorized supplying Iran with four thousand TOW missiles—forty times the original deal. That night, he wrote in his diary, “I agreed to sell TOWs to Iran.”

In a memo to Reagan, Poindexter talked tough, asserting that “if all the hostages are not released after the first shipment of 1,000 weapons, further transfers would cease.”
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Those one thousand weapons went in February in two batches; no hostages were freed, but
still
the shipments went on. In May, McFarlane flew to Iran with more weapons; no hostages. In late July–early August, more weapons; one hostage freed, Father Lawrence Jenco. In late October, more weapons; one more hostage, Peter Jacobsen, freed on November 2. The next day, the whole operation was exposed by a Beirut newsweekly,
Al Shiraa
.

The Iranian middleman was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms merchant branded in 1984 by the CIA as a “talented fabricator.” The CIA had warned its agents not to deal any more with Ghorbanifar, but the NSC staff used him. By January 1986, Casey was so suspicious of Ghorbanifar, regarding him as an Israeli intelligence agent, that the CIA gave Ghorbanifar lie-detector tests. Casey told Reagan that Ghorbanifar had flunked on several counts; but by then, the Americans were so hooked that North championed Ghorbanifar, and strangely, Casey went along.

In all, the Americans and Israelis shipped Iran two thousand TOW missiles, eighteen Hawk antiaircraft missiles, and millions of dollars’ worth of spare parts. In return, they got three hostages—but three additional American hostages were taken, and Buckley was killed. The Joint Congressional Investigating Committee estimated that the Iranian government had paid at least $48 million for the arms. North’s agent, Richard Secord, testified that only $3.5 million of the profits went to the Nicaraguan
contras;
$8 million remained in the Swiss bank account of Secord’s partner, Albert Hakim.
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The back-channel operation betrayed a White House contempt for
Congress, for most of government, for procedure, and for legal processes that might interfere with what Reagan and company wanted to do. The Tower board asserted that the “legal underpinnings” of the Iran initiative in 1985 were “at best highly questionable.” The congressional report accused the administration of “disdain for the law” in numerous instances. The secret funding of the
contras
, it charged, “evaded the Constitution’s most significant check on Executive power: The President can spend funds on a program only if he can convince Congress to appropriate the money.”
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The two arms deals carried out through Israel in the fall of 1985 were of such dubious legality (possibly violating the Export Control Act), that CIA Deputy Director John McMahon pressed for President Reagan to sign a retroactive order in early December to try to legitimize them. Later, on January 17, 1986, as he ordered further Iranian arms deals, Reagan specifically directed the CIA not to notify Congress, although “timely” notification was required by law.

In the whole affair, Reagan comes across as eager to move and impatient with legalities and with warring among his advisers. On three occasions, December 5, 1985, January 6, 1986, and January 17, 1986, Reagan signed findings—or orders—approving the Iranian arms deals and did not inform Shultz and Weinberger, though he had almost immediate opportunities each time to inform them. Like his NSC staff, Reagan was content to leave these two major dissenters in the dark and give ample leeway to the NSC staff to fill the policy vacuum. Obviously, the president knew that Casey and his NSC staff were pushing policy where he wanted to go.

NSC: How To Grab the Action

Even game players who know the great influence of staff aides were stunned by the power Oliver North accumulated. He was like a poker player with extra hole cards. Before the bubble broke, his leverage was incredible. When Israeli planes could not get clearance in Portugal, North got the CIA station chief in Lisbon to pressure the Portuguese government to let the Israeli planes land. In early 1986, high-level CIA officials repeatedly objected to North’s sharing American intelligence with an Iranian middleman, but North overruled them.

Like exploits lifted from James Bond movies, North’s operations had a fictional quality, a touch of fantasy. According to congressional testimony, one North agent picked up rolls of hundred-dollar bills in a Chinese market; North’s network built an airstrip in Costa Rica and
did “black” (disguised) airdrops of weapons; North lined up ships off Cyprus to pick up American hostages from Lebanon after Reagan agreed to pay $2.2 million in ransoms and bribes, to terrorist guards of the hostages; North steered a $10 million donation to the
contras
from the sultan of Brunei, but the money got lost—mistakenly deposited in the wrong Swiss bank account; North’s commercial agent told Iranian officials the United States was prepared to help Iran overthrow the leader of Iraq and “to fight Russia in Iran” if the Soviets invaded.