An Unfair Fight
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
An Unfair Fight Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes By Elliott Abrams Free Press. 242 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history,...
...I would deal with Latin presidents, with the Defense Department and the CIA, and with the White House and the National Security Council (NSC), regularly...
...If so, the courtrooms of America would be littered with prominent Cabinet members??mainly liberal Democrats??who thought they were doing their jobs...
...How could he plead such ignorance...
...When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, Abrams was named Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs...
...It is time for the Democrats, in particular, to weigh the pros and cons of Walsh's six-year operation in a very careful way...
...The evidence just wasn't there...
...What the new Assistant Secretary learned about these activities, and what he tried to cover up, would thrust him to the very center of the Iran-contra affair...
...One of these allowed the State Department to solicit contributions for the contras from foreign governments, with the money to be used for "humanitarian" purposes...
...The problem, though, was that the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) could not prove that Abrams was lying...
...Ambitious and well-connected, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former Democrat who worked for Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, Abrams had followed the neoconservative tide of the 1970s as it moved from the intellectual fringes of think tanks and opinion journals to the very center of political power in the United States...
...As the Reagan Administration's point man on both fronts, Abrams became an instant celebrity...
...North's private secretary, Fawn Hall, had mixed up two digits...
...In 1986, Secretary Shultz directed Abrams to find a patsy willing to fork over big dollars to the cause...
...But Abrams had an explanation...
...After fessing up about the Sultan's donation, he took a pounding from Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D-Mo...
...My staff would grow from 25 to 200," he recalls in Undue Process...
...What happened to Elliott Abrams may soon become a Democrat's fate...
...I take your point...
...Abrams did not see any problem with his testimony...
...Senator Eagleton: I've heard it and I want to puke...
...His critics??and they were legion...
...It now was Abrams' turn to confess...
...Senator Eagleton: Takemypoint...
...It was the classic Catch-22, said the Wall Street Journal...
...He "had learned of it, with everyone else, when the story broke...
...Abrams has a point...
...In Central America that policy revolved around two explosive issues: open support for government forces battling Left-wing insurgents in El Salvador, and covert support for Right-wing insurgents battling government forces in Nicaragua...
...Within days, a panel of three Federal judges named Lawrence Walsh, a prominent Oklahoma attorney, to the post...
...Abrams was delighted...
...pegged him as a professional liar, a latter-day McCarthy in yuppie garb...
...Senator Eagleton: Were you then in the fundraising business...
...They are "dirty, despicable bastards," "lying, cheating sons-of-bitches,'' and "filthy, rotten animals" who took over Abrams' life, disrupted his family and soiled his reputation...
...And, in response to a question from Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Mass...
...helping to supply the contras...
...None...
...The bitter debate over contra aid quickly overshadowed everything else...
...By the time Abrams took over as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, members of the White House NSC, led by John M. Poindexter and Oliver L. North, were raising huge sums for the contras, in direct violation of the Boland Amendment...
...government involved in "intelligence activity" from providing funds for military operations in Nicaragua...
...Assuming that the Sultan would say yes, Abrams went to see Oliver North about the best way to move this "gift" from Brunei to the contras...
...Abrams had been the point man on Reagan's Central American policy, directing the efforts of the State Department, the National Security Council and the CIA...
...Abrams, of course, knew nothing about the mix-up...
...Undue Process is filled with rage against Walsh and his associates...
...What mattered most, by the mid-1980s, was one's public position on a dirty little war in a former banana republic between two thoroughly repugnant sides...
...Surely, Congress had the right to ban contra aid and to know whether its laws were being violated...
...However, North and Fiers had not told him about their illegal activities, Abramssaid, "precisely because they all knew I would tell Secretary Shultz, from whom they were carefully concealing it...
...He had sparred with the senators and shaded the truth...
...Located on the South Pacific island of Borneo, Brunei, a former British possession, had been granted its independence in 1971...
...A check of his phone logs, for example, showed a string of calls to Oliver North, sometimes two, three, four times a day...
...Plead guilty to something and ruin your reputation, or spend millions defending yourself and probably lose...
...in an exchange that is wisely omitted from Undue Process, Abrams' often poignant, always self-serving "diary" of political war and judicial hardball in Washington, D.C...
...Some viewed him as an arrogant climber who played fast and loose with the facts...
...The Sultan's 1,800-room palace in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan barely put a dent in his budget...
...the correct number was 386-430-22-1...
...Abrams: You've heard my testimony...
...Senator Eagleton: Oh, Elliott, you're too damn smart not to know...
...In 1985, a grateful Secretary of State George P Shultz rewarded Abrams with a "promotion" to Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, one of the most important and visible posts in Foggy Bottom...
...How could he not have known...
...Meeting with the Sultan's adviser in London a few weeks later, he made a successful pitch for $10 million in cash...
...The story seemed hard to believe...
...I would be responsible for the three dozen U. S. embassies in Latin America and the Caribbean...
...As a result, the Sultan's $10 million went into the wrong account...
...To accomplish this, he had directed the CIA to shape, train and supply the contra forces...
...Eagleton was hardly alone...
...Elliott Abrams operates on a policy that [says] supplying weapons to people reduces violence, deception leads to truth, warmaking is peacemaking, and torturing, raping, and burning produces tranquillity, " wrote the Washington Post...
...That few tears were shed for him in public was hardly a surprise...
...neutrality in the war or backed the Sandinistas in the odd belief that Marxist rule would provide the antidote to Nicaragua's Right-wing colonial past...
...Nobody seemed to know, or care, about the other Elliott Abrams??the one who had pressed the White House to distance itself from Pinochet in Chile, Noriega in Panama, and Marcos in the Philippines...
...Abrams: I don't agree with that, Senator...
...But Abrams had a serious problem??Brunei...
...Period...
...It was a rare week in 1986 that did not find him sparring with Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline about aid to the Nicaraguan rebels or reports of government death squads in El Salvador...
...Understanding all too well the implications of his earlier testimony before Congress, he rushed back up there to set the record straight...
...Walsh and his staffers never doubted that Abrams was hip deep in illegal activities because the "signs" were everywhere...
...After numerous conversations with other regional assistant secretaries, Abrams found his man: Omar Ali Saifuddin, Sultan of Brunei...
...Senator Kerry: Are you aware of any [foreign] deal [for] supplying weapons or assistance to the contras on our behalf...
...President Reagan desperately wanted the Sandinistas out of power...
...Should we have prosecuted those who told less than the whole truth about, say, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the fall of China, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident...
...True, he had seen North and Fiers on a regular basis...
...Based on the Sultan's rights to gigantic reserves under the South China Sea, money poured in to him on an almost unimaginable scale, making him nothing less than the richest man in the world, with a personal fortune estimated in the mid-1980s at $25 billion...
...Abrams had come to be considered a Reaganite with sharp elbows...
...I had not been told the things North and others did not want Shultz to know, for they knew I was reporting to him faithfully and would blow the whistle on any activity that might be illegal or even too close to the line...
...The OIC is more than simply relentless, he adds...
...In December 1986 Reagan and Meese reluctantly agreed to appoint an "independent counsel" to investigate the Iran-contra affair...
...I would not write about policy, I would help formulate it and implement it...
...There was a small problem...
...The New York Times described him as "the man much of Washington loved to hate...
...A month later, Attorney General Edwin Meese III shocked the nation by disclosing the Iran arms-for-hostages deal and the diversion of profits to the contras...
...government involvement in that flight...
...Abrams: I would say [now] we were in the fundraising business...
...North and Fiers had already admitted their involvement in Iran-contra...
...Abrams' supporters portrayed him as a champion of liberty, determined, as the Wall Street Journal put it, to "create a new world order of democratic self-determination across Latin America...
...True, they had pooled a lot of information relating to Central America...
...He seemed to relish such attacks as a sign of his growing importance on the national scene...
...This was not the worst of it...
...He spent his time espousing "a conservative theory of human rights" that translated, liberals felt, into a full-fledged apology for Right-wing thugs and murderers around the globe...
...Abrams supported the contras, an inept band of "anti-Communist" cutthroats who were trying, without much success, to overthrow the "revolutionary" Sandinista regime...
...The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, a longtime CIA operative, was captured and jailed in the capital city of Managua...
...But the Democratic Congress had quickly blocked the President by passing the so-called Boland Amendment, which prohibited any agency of the U.S...
...And did it cross a dangerous line by attempting to criminalize "policy differences" between the Executive and Legislative branches of government...
...Abrams was "stunned.' He knew nothing about the scandal, he said...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" In the fall of 1991, Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty in a Washington courtroom to withholding information from Congress about his knowledge of certain events relating to the Iran-contra affair...
...I think I can say that while I have been Assistant Secretary, which is about 15 months, we have not received a dime from a foreign government...
...Who...
...It was a terribly unfair fight...
...The OIC had dozens of lawyers, an enormous budget, unlimited time, and no clear precedents to restrict its scope...
...You were opening accounts, you had account cards...
...If Abrams chose to fight it out, he could be tied up in litigation for years...
...Though his Republican credentials were both soothing and impressive, he quickly surrounded himself with a young, largely liberal staff of prosecutors, "motivated," in Abrams' words, "by a nasty mix of personal ambition, ideology, and animus...
...It is politically-motivated and totally out of control...
...Surely, Abrams had the responsibility to tell them the truth...
...In October 1986 the Sandinistas shot down a private plane in Nicaraguan air space carrying five tons of ammunition and three American crewmen, two of whom were killed in the crash...
...Before leaving town, he gave the adviser an index card listing North's Swiss account number: 368-430-22-1...
...In addition, Abrams and North had met regularly with Alan Fiers, head of the CIA's Central America Task Force, during these crucial months...
...I don't imagine that Majority Leader George Mitchell and House Speaker Tom Foley will be reading Undue Process over the New Year's recess...
...But he had a remarkably thick skin...
...The move was characteristic of the British Empire's rotten luck in this century," wrote Jeffrey Toobin, one of the prosecutors of Iran-contra, "because almost as soon as it severed its colonial ties to Brunei, the oil boom of the 1970s exploded, and Brunei turned out to be a leading beneficiary...
...He was sentenced in Federal court to 100 hours of community service and placed on two years' probation...
...What, thought Abrams, was a few million bucks to this guy...
...There is little doubt that his conservative politics and abrasive personality played a role in his demise...
...Even a staunch Reagan supporter like Senator Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire marveled at Abrams' "incomprehensible lack of curiosity" about the activities of those he was supposed to monitor...
...In a few months, the statute to renew the OIC will come to a Congressional vote...
...Well, I don't agree with that...
...Can we remember a time when members of the Executive branch did not tailor their testimony before Congress to suit their particular view of the national interest...
...You were in the fundraising business, you and Ollie...
...During the debate on Boland, Democratic leaders had made a few minor concessions to get the legislation passed...
...Where...
...Under oath, my friend, that's perjury...
...One of their schemes involved the skimming of profits from a secret sale of arms to Iran to reclaim American hostages...
...That," said one Walsh staffer, "is the smartest 'dumb' man you will ever see...
...He kept waiting for money that would never arrive...
...He had told them less than they were entitled to know...
...But two basic questions must also be addressed...
...And there is no doubt that his case represents a major departure from the past...
...Walsh, 74, had been aprosecutor under Thomas E. Dewey in New York, a Federal judge, and a Deputy Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration...
...about foreign assistance to the contras, Abrams, who was not under oath, withheld vital information relating to Brunei...
...He was bright, shrewd and devilishly hard working...
...North suggested a Swiss bank account that he himself had been using for such purposes...
...In rather accurately describing his adversaries, Abrams has unwittingly described himself as well...
...Abrams left the hearing room in a confident mood...
...After months of agony, Abrams chose the former...
...For another, the money had not been received at that point because it had gone into the wrong Swiss account...
...But no one doubted his loyalty to Reagan or his devotion to the President's anti-Communist world crusade...
...Did the OIC set new standards for prosecution in the Abrams case...
...at age 33, the youngest assistant secretary in this century...
...But it wouldn't be a bad idea...
...So the staffers took another road??pushing an indictment of Abrams for "withholding" information from Congress about "the nature and extent" of contacts between the United States government and those??mainly the Sultan...
...In the following days, he said much the same thing to a number of Congressional committees investigating the shoot-down...
...When news of the incident reached Washington, Abrams rushed forward to assure the media that there was no U.S...
...Eleven months later Abrams became Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, a high-profile position seen by most Reaganites as an unfortunate (but politically untouchable) relic from the Jimmy Carter years...
...His liberal critics either demanded U.S...
...Abrams: No...
...Senator Eagleton: That's slammer time...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...What they did to him, says Abrams, they can do to anyone, because they make up the rules as they go along...
...For one thing, he says, he had promised the Sultan that he would not divulge the details of his perfectly legal donation...
Vol. 75 • December 1992 • No. 16
