0LLIE'S HOPE...AND THE TOWER COMMISSION
Lane, Charles
In Washington, the Tower Commission report has been analyzed mainly as an investigation of a policy. But there is another interesting way to view the report. Even though Ronald Reagan...
...To date, only one, Lebanon CIA station chief William Buckley, has died in captivity, and it is not clear whether or not he was killed by his captors...
...What Secord, McFarlane, North, and several other players in the administration's secret governmentwithin-a-government have in common is that all of them got their first sense of the meaning of "late twentieth century democracy" in Vietnam...
...Now you are getting emotional again," Poindexter replied...
...And the Tower Commission, presumably, only published the juiciest ones...
...Acting more like a movement than a government, in an eerie echo of some of its enemies on the left, the Reagan Revolution has created its own pantheon of heroes and martyrs...
...One of the most riveting moments of the entire proceedings came when McFarlane reflected on the motives which led North to undertake his covert activities in support of the contras...
...Writes McFarlane: Roger, 011ie...
...In fact, however, he was producing pseudo thought...
...While the risks of proceeding are significant, the risks of not trying one last time are even greater...
...A father does not betray his son...
...It is deeply ironic that the roots of the administration's crusade on behalf of the contras should lie so clearly—so personally—in the Vietnam experience...
...Roger, Ronnie WHAT'S THE CONNECTION TO REAGAN HIMSELF...
...McFarlane himself never put it quite so bluntly, but Richard Secord, the retired air force general who acted as "Project Democracy's" majordomo, once did...
...BUT HOW DID THIS RHETORIC WORK...
...Meanwhile, of course, the chore of dealing with problems that affect ordinary people's lives, a job ordinarily and of necessity reserved for government employees, gets mostly scorn...
...He seemed to want to mount an offensive on behalf of the North mindset, since no administration official had had the nerve to do so when the operation was exposed...
...And it has served to justify other areas of U.S...
...As McFarlane explained his version of this view to the committee, the American demos is chronically indisposed to support risky (or nasty) foreign policy operations that the global struggle with the Soviets often requires...
...North flattered himself that he was a theorist...
...North's hortatory rhetoric accurately captured and expressed Reagan's own mentality...
...foreign policy under Reagan...
...As he gazed at his computer terminal, North must have looked at his words and 277 believed he was producing thought...
...This is where the notion of "special operations"— activity such as North's "Project Democracy" to arm the contras—comes in...
...Reagan never gave that speech, so Secord gave the gist of it himself to the committee...
...For him, too, the practical consequence of optimism is to pursue his policies in plain disregard of the facts...
...And it's not only treaties Reagan feels mystically authorized to brush aside...
...And he relies on the men and women of action who put those beliefs into practice—the heroes...
...North's actions, then, weren't mindless...
...Indeed, in the immediate wake of Attorney General Ed Meese's disclosure of the diversion of funds, Secord drafted a speech for President Reagan to give explaining what was being done secretly in the national interest, and the reasons it had to be done...
...To him, these always outweighed the costs of pushing on...
...Franklin is headed North in attempt to get across the Rama Rd before the Sandinistas can close in on him...
...agency, "probably the National Security Council," should take charge, brushing aside the concerns of the bureaucracy, press, academia, and Congress...
...Indeed, the defiant Secord seemed to have waived his Fifth Amendment rights, which he had previously made liberal use of, in order to defend this point of view in front of the committees and the world...
...And it was a particular brand of pseudo thought, the rhetoric of exhortation...
...He was forever presenting his superiors, McFarlane and Poindexter, with elaborate new plans...
...Sheer hope was central to the whole scheme...
...It's opposing views, contradictory facts, and inconvenient laws, too...
...Thus it was in Vietnam that the North mentality was really born...
...If you can believe in the cause in spite of what your senses tell you is really going on in the world of experience, then you really are a believer...
...There they and their country were defeated, and they attributed the American pullout to the "distempers" of the media, Congress, and the diplomatic bureaucracy, all of which, to varying degrees, opposed U.S...
...Rambos don't write...
...They repeatedly talked about the possibility that they were being strung along by "rug merchants...
...On February 13, North wrote to Poindexter: Operation RESCUE is now under way...
...This lack of public will is reflected in stalemate and lack of consensus in Washington...
...But nor were they exactly mindful...
...where we had made a commitment to people that he could see we were just about to break . . . he couldn't be a party to that...
...If we can find such persons we can not only hold Gene and Sally Hassenfus together (i.e., on our side, not pawns of the Sandinista propaganda machine) but can make some significant counter-attacking in the media...
...There will, no doubt, be a show trial of some kind launched and unless we have an overt, competent legal defense, Hassenfus will become nothing but a tool in their hands...
...Foreign Policy," Secord argued that, in such operations, a toplevel U.S...
...The quality isn't bad, either...
...The Tower Commission's explanation for "What Was Wrong" (as one chapter heading puts it) boils down to the observation that Reagan was so uncomprehending of, and detached from, the inner workings of his own administration, that the operation escaped his control and ultimately went counter to his interests and those of the country...
...policy, they would make you Secretary of State...
...As he went about his covert business, he kept one eye on the historical mirror...
...011ie's hope, as he preached it, functioned to bolster his fellow NSC members' commitment to the operation...
...This implies that if Reagan had known more, things would have been done differently...
...A North memo is characterized by a vocabulary of encouragement masquerading (to itself, too) as a vocabulary of analysis...
...Even though Ronald Reagan didn't request it, the commission didn't intend it, and the Washington opinion industry hasn't made very much of it, the report is also an investigation of a mentality...
...But in private it seems that he (at least while still in government) and many other administrative officials were willing to countenance and/or support other means to get around the lack of will endemic to our late twentieth century democracy...
...Rather, it is the mentality of crusade...
...Or, more frequently, they can be the people Reagan introduces during his State of the Union speeches—a Grenada invasion vet, an elderly mother who cares for the children of heroin addicts in the New York ghetto (to prove that the government doesn't have to...
...lawyers will not want to step up to the task, but for the man (or woman) who steps up to this task, there will be a fair bite of history made in the next few weeks...
...Indeed, it would seem that whenever North was not running around the globe or juggling the various shell corporations that made up his grandiose "Project Democracy," he was tapping away at the keyboard of his word processor, producing plans, memos, and even personal missives for his colleagues on the National Security Council (NSC) staff...
...In his 1972 Naval War College master's thesis, "Unconventional Warfare/Covert Operations as an Instrument of U.S...
...He relies instead on sheer ideological conviction...
...Reagan, too, purveys the rhetoric of exhortation...
...In fact, none of these three hostages was actually killed...
...That notion seems to represent McFarlane's distillation of a whole current of "decline of the West" thinking so popular among neoconservative intellectuals as an explanation for American failures in Vietnam and elsewhere...
...With its abstract nouns and stock phrases, North's writings read like a kind of inter-office party pamphlet...
...North may have been capable of some hardline utterances in public—in his speeches to would-be contra contributors, say...
...For example, when North got wind of an apparent plan by Poindexter to reassign him (a few words about North's contra activities had leaked into the press) he sent Poindexter a long, maudlin memo ("I consider myself to have been blessed to have had the chance to so serve for as long as I did 278...
...Usually the right blames the left for invoking the "Vietnam analogy" to argue against deeper American involvement in Nicaragua...
...North & Co...
...He rarely slept more than two or three hours per night...
...North asserts no fewer than fifteen times that—"hopefully," he "hopes," "God willing,"—there would soon be one kind of breakthrough or another in the White House's dealings with Iran...
...Yet all along the Reagan right was using its own very different Vietnam analogy to justify (largely to itself) a 280 policy of deeper involvement—a secret policy that violated both the law and constitutional norms and, by stirring even greater congressional and public hostility to the contra policy, may have endangered the contras far more than anything the supposedly spineless American democracy ever did...
...I cannot afford to let you go...
...Nonetheless, I believe that we are...
...The language of uplift...
...But such a mood of conspiratorial righteousness, such a frank case for political manipulation, had to be reserved for fellow members of the "Project Democracy" vanguard...
...kept the operation alive, and ultimately took it too far—to the point where it resulted in political disaster for the very man North thought he was serving...
...It is as the study of a mentality that this evidence is most damning, not only of the men involved, but of Ronald Reagan himself...
...In Reagan's world, as in North's, "optimism" means belief...
...if the world only knew how many times you have kept a semblance of integrity and gumption to U.S...
...We're doing it, therefore it's right...
...sic] on Friday...
...Nor did the rest of the preposterous scenario that North, prompted by Ghorbanifar's fibs, had sketched—a scenario that included the Ayatollah Khomeini's resignation and subsequent high-level U.S.-Iranian talks on a new strategic relationship...
...Perhaps the most extraordinary passage of all is from North's note to McFarlane (who by then had resigned from the NSC staff, but continued on in a very active ex officio capacity) after a contra supply plane carrying Eugene Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua: We urgently need to find a high powered lawyer and benefactor who can raise a legal defense for Hassenfus [sic] in Managua...
...Something to pray for at church that day...
...arms sale to Iran—i.e., the first one that didn't involve the replenishment of Israeli stocks transferred to Iran—took place in February 1986...
...There is no reason to suppose Secord has ever changed his mind...
...North seems to have been conscious of himself—accurately—as a character in a real-life spy novel...
...Thus North mongered guilt in his bosses, underscoring his own personal sacrifice, selfless dedication to the cause, and personal loyalty to his commanding officers at the NSC...
...Whirl of Action, Rhetoric of Exhortation IT IS HARD TO TELL WHICH OLIVER NORTH felt more strongly: the love of action or the fear of inaction...
...A thousand TOW antitank missiles went into Iran...
...If we do not at least make one more try at this point we stand a good chance of condemning some or all [of the hostages] to death and a renewed wave of Islamic jihad [sic] terrorism...
...This mentality is not ruthless foreign policy realism, of which Reagan is often, and inaccurately, accused...
...A better interpretation, however, is that the Irancontra operation, however little Reagan knew about the details, was basically true to the president's own political style and conception of the role of government...
...Now there are simple kinds of platitudinous judgments [North mentioned] here and there that losing a war in Vietnam was a matter that was done extremely legally, and that he didn't see the justification for how we could again be party to the same thing...
...Yet, often at North's insistence, they kept on...
...How, in practice, did it keep the operation alive...
...These military men weren't about to see that defeat repeated elsewhere...
...Those rewarded must be volunteers who arrive in a pinch, people who overfulfill their quotas of altruism, never an unusually sensitive welfare caseworker, say, or even a particularly scrupulous vetter of defense contracts...
...Now we have a better idea of the mixed intellectual sources from which this mind-set originates—neoconservative pessimism, military doctrine about covert activity, and, ultimately, the bitter reality of defeat in Vietnam...
...North had no evidence that the hostages were about to be executed, other than information from Israeli antiterrorism specialist Amiram Nir ("He doesn't sleep either," North observed), whose country had its own reasons for pushing the U.S...
...All McFarlane would suggest publicly as a remedy for this crisis of will was tighter parliamentary discipline in Congress and more education about 279 foreign policy in the public schools, to help future generations of Americans be more aware of their true interests...
...Not the other way around...
...Confronted by arguments that early deployment of the Star Wars nuclear missile defense system would violate the ABM Treaty with the Soviets, Reagan reportedly replied: "Why don't we just go ahead on the assumption that this is what we're doing and it's right...
...Obviously, there is the added benefit of being able to do something substantive in the legal system to defend this young man...
...When it was all over, there would be a medal for Richard Secord, a medal for Duane Clarridge, a Nobel Peace Prize for Ronald Reagan...
...This wd [sic] keep our schedule for releasing the Americans on for Sunday, Feb...
...They can be undercover types like Oliver North—Reagan has never retracted his description of North as "a national hero...
...Testimony by Robert McFarlane, the former national security adviser, shed new light on his lament abut the "state of democracy in the late twentieth century...
...involvement...
...I know that this is a tall order and that many U.S...
...But they can't know and would complain if they did—such is the state of democracy in the late twentieth century...
...Yet despite his complaints of fatigue, he couldn't stop moving...
...Such promises, of course, carried the implicit threat of wimp status for anyone who hesitated...
...But as the "God willing" suggests, it was hope in almost a religious sense, a hope that persisted in spite of ample evidence that the Iranians weren't about to fulfill his desire to see the hostages freed...
...0 POSTSCRIPT ON THE HEARINGS, May 13, 1987: The first two weeks of hearings by the joint HouseSenate committee on the Iran-contra affair have produced further evidence of how broadly the North mentality was shared in the administration (and on its fringes), and have amplified the version of that mentality which emerged from the Tower Commission report...
...Almost instinctively, he kept the pot boiling in his writings...
...too far along with the Iranians to risk turning back now...
...As North himself remarked, "The threat to carry out sanctions against us has . . . not ever arisen...
...Frenzied and unreflective though he may have been, it would be a mistake to regard North as an unthinking man...
...If all goes according to plan, Lahad [an Israeli-sponsored militia leader in South Lebanon] will release 25 [proIranian terrorists], hopeful...
...But North did, prolifically...
...For Reagan, the government's job is to urge such heroes on, to sponsor the televised celebration of their deeds—whether it's Liberty Weekend, or a hostage welcome like that which North apparently envisioned...
...He is quite cynical about government . . ." McFarlane said, when it became a matter of association with the contra movement...
...to keep shipping arms to Iran...
...This was in fact the common tongue of what amounted to a small cell of activist cadres: it's pretty clear from their memos that North's superiors were comfortable with this language, too...
...Like you and Bud [McFarlane]," he wrote Poindexter in one especially instructive message from December 1985, I find the idea of bartering over the lives of these poor men repugnant...
...The hostage release never materialized...
...They hope to have it out by dawn...
...This is why there has never been, and probably never will be, any public disavowal of 011ie North by Ronald Reagan...
...on the secret field in Costa Rica...
...you have now been informed that [the contras] safely released the eight West Germans this evening just before dark at the religious commune at Presillas...
...At this point the only liability we have is one of DEMOCRACY INC.'S airplanes is mired in the mud...
...He was always pleading with them for permission to do more ("would love to carry the letter from RR"), often out of what seems to have been a deep, yet unfounded, anxiety about the costs of pausing...
...Super-secret diplomacy and military aid, carried out by a specially trained, elite group, becomes necessary when the institutions of our guilt-ridden democracy—the press, the media, the professional foreign policy bureaucracy, or the Congress—can't or won't muster the will to face foreign threats, or when they show signs of actively opposing such necessary action...
...A central category of North's discourse is "hope...
...North and the CIA knew that Manucher Ghorbanifar, the arms merchant whom the White House, at Israel's suggestion, used as a channel to the Iranian government, was a liar...
...To cite just one example, the first direct U.S...
...As McFarlane told the Tower Commission: "The president was always very hopeful, optimistic . . . always looking for the bright side or the possibility that it could be salvaged...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
