The Iran-Contra Hearings Halfway
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Iran-Contra Hearings Halfway In 1950, the dawn of Congressional trial by television, gangster Frank Costello walked out of a Senate hearing...
...When Angleton and I would have lunch, a dozen years ago, the ground rules were that he would arrive at the restaurant after me and leave before me, and that he would be seated with his back to the wall, with a full view of the dining room...
...He offered heroically to shoulder responsibility for actions he had been only dimly aware of at the time...
...Poindexter's predecessor in the post of White House National Security Adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, emerged from the hearings as not so much innocent or guilty of the principal misdeeds as irrelevant to them...
...Angleton, a Christian (his middle name was Jesus), was a great friend of Israel and had close ties to the Mossad, its intelligence agency...
...Colonel North's recommendation to Rear Admiral John M. Poindexter was that the President "approve the structure depicted" and the "terms of reference" for the mission to Tehran, but there is no indication whether that happened...
...It was primarily Casey who made the Reagan Doctrine operational, arranging for the arming of guerrillas from Afghanistan to Angola, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, the efforts to destabilize Libya's Muammar el-Qadaffi...
...Pathetic in retrospect was McFarlane's invitation to North, after the Tehran trip, to join him in creating a nongovernmental covert action facility for projects like Iran and the contras...
...Casey was the Reagan alter ego, the activist lieutenant to a passive President, the surrogate Rambo who knew how to make things happen...
...Long before Reagan became Chief Executive, he would listen by the hour while Casey regaled him with stories of derring-do from his OSS days in World War II...
...They consist of: 1. The cadre of military and intelligence veterans of failed anti-Communist ventures from Cuba's Bay of Pigs lo Vietnam, who rallied around the banner of the Reagan Doctrine out of mixed motives of patriotism and profit...
...What has come into focus is a series of subsurface networks that have profoundly affected governance in America over the past quarter century...
...That campaign was touched off by Angleton's denunciation of Wilson in 1970as a possible KGB agent...
...The real chain of command for the Iranian and contra operations ran from Reagan to Casey to North...
...Summarizing the state of relations with the Iranians, it suggests that diversion had been in progress for some time...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Iran-Contra Hearings Halfway In 1950, the dawn of Congressional trial by television, gangster Frank Costello walked out of a Senate hearing on organized crime chaired by Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver and went to jail for contempt...
...Damfi Schorr is currently the.senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...It was Casey's credentials that opened up CIA doors for North and made him the world's most powerful lieutenant-colonel...
...Embassy in Moscow...
...The last time I saw him was leaving a synagogue on Rosh Hashanah...
...It was a world where Soviet defectors were likely "moles" and where high officials were possible traitors...
...He knew nothing about Carl Channell's tax-exempt organization raising money from rich conservatives...
...He was wearing a yarmulke and said, "Shanah Tovah" (Happy New Year...
...Angleton said he knew this from another Soviet defector whom he trusted more...
...The Administration's approach to Iran for release of hostages started from Casey's concern about William Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief, kidnapped and reportedly tortured to reveal secrets...
...He came up behind me and tapped me gently on the shoulder...
...The Angleton Angle In the same week as Casey, James H. Angleton died...
...Probably classified," said a CIA veteran as we filed out...
...2. The partly overlapping web of international arms merchants, knowledgeable about the logistics of secret arms deliveries, caterers to Third World wars and dictators, and skilled in the manipulation of governments...
...With Reagan's support, Casey went outside channels and set up his own lines of authority—in effect, conducting a covert operation against the government...
...In 1975, he was hauled before a televised hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Democrat Frank Church ofldaho.Two years later, he saw himself mocked in a novel by Aaron Latham, Orchids for Mother (the title refers to his code-name, "Mother," and his flower-raising hobby...
...Those words have only formalistic meaning, though...
...For many years, because he distrusted the pro-Arab proclivities of the CIA's Middle East division, he insisted on running the "Israeli Desk...
...He knew little of General Secord's "enterprise" supplying arms to Iran and to the contras, and he was shocked when told by North, on the way back from Tehran, how money was diverted from the one to the other...
...If President Reagan had dreams, William J. Casey was the one who turned them into plans...
...3. And finally, overlapping both, the corps of Reaganites who are frustrated with Congressional and bureaucratic obstruction, already committed to the dismantlement and privatization of governmental functions, and thus open to other schemes for the execution of secret policies...
...Casey could have had almost any job in the Reagan Administration but they agreed that Central Intelligence was his manifest mission, and for that purpose he got an unprecedented seat in the Cabinet and an office in the White House complex...
...McFarlane's testimony made clear that he did not know how deeply Colonel North was involved in fund-raising for the contras...
...In those days he sought to convince me that Yuri Nosenko, the KGB defector who had told the FBI the Soviets were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, was a plant...
...This was totally out of channels, and a source of friction with other parts of the agency...
...It was Casey, in the end, who persuaded the President to say "yes" to arms for Iran when Secretary of State George ?. Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger counseled "no...
...But the old covert warrior, the best mumbler in the business, probably wouldn't have told us anyway...
...The Casey Connection Meanwhile, in early May, the man who had been the shadow national security adviser died...
...Ithink," said McFarlane, "thatBill Casey, a man of enormous self-confidence and conviction about right and wrong, may well have recognized, as long as two years ago, that he didn't have many years left...
...The world of Jim Angleton, the legendary counterspy, was what he once called "a wilderness of mirrors...
...The battle over defectors tore apart the CIA for a decade...
...Since then, in all the investigations from Joe McCarthy to Watergate, we have been alert for surprises that could upset the best-laid plans of committee staff and counsel...
...He told me in an interview, "I cannot be sure that I know today all the things that went on, but even that is an error of my own...
...He would have been ready to testify before a Congressional committee on the weaknesses of American counterintelligence today...
...At Angleton's funeral, in a suburban Congregational church, there were hymns, but no eulogy was spoken...
...Britain is still rocking over the revelation of a campaign by MI5, British counterintelligence, against former Prime Minister Harold Wilson...
...He stoutly defended superiors and subordinates, especially the President, who had clearly been making key decisions behind his back...
...But he has continued to insist that the one thing he did not know about, until it was discovered by the Justice Department last November, was the diversion of Iranian arms profits to supply the Nicaraguan contras...
...McFarlane told me that only recently had Casey's role fully dawned on him...
...Secord was way ahead of him...
...So the question is still open, and will be at least until the Admiral has testified in public...
...Often McFarlane and Poindexter would have the uncomfortable sense that North was getting his orders from elsewhere, and elsewhere usually would turn out to be Bill Casey...
...I found myself borrowing from preliminary observations for midway conclusions...
...But Angleton also lived long enough to feel vindicated by recent espionage scandals and the penetration of the U.S...
...Angleton was not allowed to fade into oblivion...
...I think there's a real possibility that the last testament for Bill Casey was a very, very driven one that some of us may not have fully understood...
...The question has narrowed, because the President has acknowledged that the basic policies were his...
...But the first phase of the Iran-contra hearings—beginning with retired Air Force Major General Richard V. Secord's testimony last May and ending with Fawn Hall's on June9—produced no real surprises, only a deepening of previous perceptions...
...The famous "diversion memo," drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North in April 1986, in preparation for what was intended to be a climactic mission to Tehran the following month, remains the only known documentary evidence on this point to have escaped the shredder...
...The first six weeks of the Iran-contra hearings produced no conclusive answer to the question on the minds of most Americans: How much of the fabric of intrigue and deception did President Reagan himself weave...
...And with that knowledge confirmed for him, he determined that he wanted to do one or two things for which he knew he would have to accept history's judgment...
...Angleton, who blamed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his discharge from the CIA by Director William Colby in 1974, once called Kissinger "objectively a Soviet agent," because of his détente policies...
...Bill Casey could really have told us what the President knew and when he knew it...
Vol. 70 • June 1987 • No. 8
