Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Reagan Without a Script On February 24, President Reagan held his first news conference in four months and, if his aides have their way, his last for a...
...Indeed, says G. Calvin MacKenzie of the National Academy for Public Administration, the departures in recent months may be the most numerous in modern times...
...For a meeting on the INF treaty with a bipartisan group of Senators, for example: "Bob [Byrd], I appreciate you and your colleagues coming down here today...
...Wallach and Rappaport hand-carried these letters between Jerusalem and Washington...
...Because Buckley had been involved in antiterrorist coordination in the Middle East, and was widely known as a CIA officer, there were misgivings in the agency about his receiving the assignment...
...In March 1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was abducted while leaving the hotel where he maintained his office in the penthouse...
...Within a week, he appeared on videotape, apparently under pressure, urging concessions to his captors, blaming President Reagan for "crimes against the oppressed people in the region...
...On several issues he provided work for what Donald Regan, former White House chief of staff, once called "the shovel brigade...
...What made this something more than grandiose scheming was their ability to get Peres and Meese to exchange letters seeming to give the official sanction of both governments to the project...
...Fresh from two years in the office of former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Higgins was assigned last June to command the Lebanon Detachment of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization...
...Today the Reaganites are drifting away from government in numbers much greater than would be accounted for by second-term fatigue...
...Looking back on the Reagan era (and one can begin to), it has been as though the government was captured by an occupying power that ripped it off in the course of attempting to tear it down...
...At Housing and Urban Development, half the executive level jobs were vacant...
...As an officer who had handled highly classified information and attended the Secretary's staff conferences, Higgins would normally have been barred from service in a hazardous country for three years...
...Using back channels to make sure colleagues in government are kept in ignorance-does that sound familiar...
...He carried a poison capsule to be used in case of capture...
...But the government still stands...
...Nevertheless, he won the approval of Director William J. Casey, who knew and admired him...
...A Breach of Security The case of Colonel Higgins suggests a serious breach of security in an administration that professes dedication to guarding America's secrets...
...Early in his confinement, Buckley made a videotape urging concessions to his captors (delivered to the White House, but never made public...
...There was, for example, no Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety, no Assistant Secretary of Interior for Territorial Affairs, and no Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security...
...For a meeting with Armand Hammer: "Thank you, Armand, for coming here to present the report of the President's Cancer Panel...
...This despite the experience of the only other U.S...
...The Iraq-Israel affair was being planned in 1985, around the time the Iran-contra affair was in full swing...
...In his new budget, President Reagan is again urging accelerated privatization...
...A year later the Reagan Administration, as part of the arms negotiations with the Iranians, was still trying to get a copy of the reported 80-page transcript of Buckley's interrogation for purposes of damage assessment...
...This was underlined by a copy of Reagan's script for one day, February 24, that was obtained (if freely given, then Reagan has a "deep throat" problem) by Sam Donaldson, ABC's White House correspondent...
...Subsequently the CIA learned that, under torture by his Iranian captors, he compromised many secrets before his death in June 1985...
...At middle levels, scores of those who got their jobs through the conservative Heritage Foundation are asking it to place them in private enterprise...
...The episode provides additional insight, if it were needed, into the privatization of government functions and the corrosive effects of sanctioning the schemes of international wheeler-dealers...
...The Government Still Stands Fill in "Iraq" where it says "Iran," "oil" where it says "arms," "Wallach and Rappaport" where it says "Secord and Hakim," and you have another foreign policy "initiative" that covered, or degenerated into an "enterprise...
...When Cannon asked if he thought that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was a "different" kind of Soviet leader, Reagan said, "Yes, I do, having met most of them...
...His file contains no "waiver" of regulations...
...Louis J. Cordia, chief head-hunter for Heritage, who claims he placed 250 people in the Administration, concedes that the conservatives have failed to penetrate "the permanent government...
...More and more the President seems to be on shaky ground without a script...
...It seems incredible, therefore, that another officer in possession of sensitive information was able to talk his boss into sending him to Lebanon, where he would be an inviting target...
...He characterized strife in South Africa as "tribal" rather than racial...
...Eventually, just as Iran blew the whistle on the arms deal, Iraq aborted the pipeline deal, leaving American and Israeli officials trying to explain-in Meese's case to a grand jury-what they had been up to...
...Apparently they were too sensitive to be treated as communications that might-God forbid!-fall into the hands of a Shultz or a Yitzchak Shamir...
...He had said this before, and insisted on saying it again even though there is no evidence that he has met any of Gorbachev's predecessors, except, perhaps, on film...
...For a meeting with the 1988 National Easter Seal Child: "Welcome to the White House as you continue your long tradition of service to this country's disabled citizens...
...Which is, perhaps, the point...
...Next day, in an interview with Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, the President was asked whether his view of the world, and of the Soviet Union in particular, had changed in seven years...
...He was known to have boasted of his Weinberger connection to his 75-man detachment, but one could also have read about it in publicly available Pentagon directories...
...Some, like Michael Deaver and Lynn Nofziger, came intending to make a buck after exiting the revolving door...
...He suggested, even while Secretary of State George P. Shultz was in the Middle East trying to persuade Palestinians that their aspirations were being taken seriously, that unrest on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip had been fomented by "outside agitators.' And he expressed confidence that the latest American hostage in Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins, would not yield to pressure and reveal secrets, although Pentagon officials had been doing their best to give the impression the Marine officer didn't know anything very secret...
...In this case, Israel was to fill the role of the Nicaraguan contras and be the beneficiary for part of the diverted profits...
...Meese said he hadn't read, or understood, detailed memorandums describing the arrangement...
...The avowed purpose was encouraging moderation among Israel's neighbors, as the avowed purpose of Irangate was seeking moderates among the Ayatollah Khomeini's possible successors...
...It involved a project for building a pipeline from Iraqi oilfields to the Jordanian Red Sea port of Akaba, requiring an assurance of Israeli noninterference...
...McFarlane himself, only five months after leaving his White House post, flew to Teheran in May 1986 to negotiate with the Khomeini regime...
...government officer kidnapped in Lebanon...
...The script included not only "talking points" on substance, but informal greetings...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Reagan Without a Script On February 24, President Reagan held his first news conference in four months and, if his aides have their way, his last for a long time...
...From the first 10 years of oil revenues, they hoped to secure up to $700 million...
...A Pentagon spokesman said the Lebanon post was designated as "unrestricted" from a security viewpoint...
...Vice President George Bush has said often that concern over Buckley's torment influenced him to support the arms for hostages deal...
...Among Presidential appointees, the Academy found 22 per cent of departmental positions lacking permanent occupants...
...On February 17, Colonel Higgins was kidnapped-the first American in a year, the 11th in four years-in terrorist-infested Lebanon...
...Peres said he had never taken his friend Rappaport seriously when Rappaport talked of profit to Israel, and to the Israeli Labor Party, from Iraqi oil...
...Retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. McFarlane, former White House national security adviser, told me, "This was a case of gross mismanagement, and not by the Marine Corps...
...Some Reaganites, like David Stockman and James Watt, came to Washington to make a revolution...
...He embarked on a long, rambling recollection of what it was like to be Governor of California...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...He had served as a military assistant to the Secretary and, before then, in the executive secretariat...
...But he had lobbied vigorously with Weinberger for the job, which had been an Army " slot" since the creation of the UN force in 1948...
...E. Robert Wallach, whose capital was his Edwin Meese connection, and Bruce Rappaport, an Israeli citizen resident in Switzerland, whose capital was his Shimon Peres connection, merged their assets to offer the Bechtel Corporation protection for the proposed billion-dollar pipeline...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 4
