THIS ISN'T WATERGATE- BUT THE MORAL IS THE SAME

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 25, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 1, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340001-2
WASHINGTON POST
1 March 1987
This Isn't
Watergate
But the Moral
Is the Same
By David Ignatius and Michael Getter
????????????.1.1?
WE KNOW THE SCENARIO by heart: The
president wins reelection in a landslide: As he
begins his second term, the president seems
invincible. Some overzealous aides, led by an autocratic
chief of staff, plot strategerns to deal with the presi-
dent's perceived enemies at home and abroad. As the
plans become more elaborate and dubious, the White
House becomes obsessed with keeping them secret.
The secrets begin to leak out, as they inevitably do in
a democracy, and the president's men try to cover thenc'
up. But the truth emerges anyway, in bits and pieces, it!,
a way that is disastrous to the president's credibility,.
He fires a few aides who were most closely involved in;
the scandal. Then he fires his chief of staff. The gossip.'
in Washington shifts to whether the president himself
intends to resign.
The Iran affair isn't Watergate, of course. There
isn't the same kind of clear criminality, and Ronald Rea-
gan isn't Richard Nixon. But this past week, in the af?
termath of the Tower Commission report, the two
scandals seemed eerily alike. There was the same fas-
cination and dread, the same sense of tawdry spectacle,
the same sadness at watching a group of self-important
White House aides put the rest of the nation through
the wringer and turn a seemingly successful presidency
from trilunph to tragedy with astonishing speed.
And it coukkget worse. By the time the Iran affair
runs its course many months from now, it may prove to
be even more debilitating than Watergate. That's be-
cause there areeo few people left in the administration
who aren't tarnished in some way.
Watergate had its villains, to be sure, but it also had
heroes, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaui
chose to resign rather than fire Special Prosecutor Ar
chibald Cox. Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger.
shielded national security policy from the tempest. And
Gerald Ford was waiting in the wings to calm the natio',
after Nixon's resignation. ..
Who are the comparable heroes in the Reagan admin...
istration? Unfortunately, there are none. The Towel:
report notes that even though Secretary of Statl
George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberg'
ger disagreed strongly with the Iran arms-for-hostagai
deal, "they simply distanced themselves from the pol;
icy," rather than resigning in protest.
Indeed, when an American cargo plane carrying Eu-
gene Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua last Octo-
ber?an event that began to lift the curtain on the ex-
tent of secret foreign policy?figures such as Shultz
and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams fairly
boasted that such private air forces were none of their
business and need not be looked into because there was
nothing illegal about them. In other words, a private
foreign policy was fine.
Beyond Shultz and Weinberger, the administration is
largely in ruins. Donald Regan, the chief of staff, is. out.
Michael Deaver, one of the president's closest advisers
during the first term, is on the verge of in-
dictment. William Casey. the CIA director
has resigned because of a brain tumor. Rob-
ert McFarlane, the former national security
adviser, has tried to commit suicide. Edwin
Meese, the attorney general, faces questions
about whether he conducted a prompt and
thorough investigation of the Iran affair. Of
the president's senior advisers, only the
Treasury Secretary, James Baker, seems un-
touched by the fallout. The arrival of former
senator Howard Baker as the new chief of
staff will help, but probably less than the
WhiteHouse hopes.
The tragedy for the Reagan administra-
tion is that no one remembered the
lessons of Watergate that had been so
painfully learned by the nation and another
administration less than 15 years ago.
Watergate demonstrated that there are
clear limits to executive authority, and in par-
ticular to the ability of a president to conduct
covert operations on questionable national-
security grounds. You can't act secretly for
very long in a democracy, even if you're as
energetic as Oliver North. You can't put tape
over a door at the Watergate apartment com-
plex in 1972 and expect that it won't be dis-
covered.
Similarly, you can't create a private air
force?with six planes, dozens of support
people and a private air strip in Costa Rica?
to drop weapons into a country that we are
not at war with and expect that nobody will
find out about it. And you can't sell millions of
dollars of weapons in secret to an avowed en-
emy of the United States and expect to get
away with it. Reversing the political laws of
gravity in that way was beyond the powers
even of Ronald Reagan.
The Tower Commission report opened a
curtain on what can only be described as the
fantasy world inhabited by some of the mil-
itary men who served the president on the
National Security Council staff: Marine Lt.
Col. North, Vice Adm. John Poindexter, and
McFarlane, a former Marine lieutenant col-
onel. It offered the nation a disturbing por-
trait of these men, plotting together in se-
cret, seemingly oblivious to the values their
own president had espoused, and to the laws
and traditions of the nation they had pledged
to serve.
4
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340001-2
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340001-2
Thanks to the Tower report, we can all
look over Oliver North's shoulder and read
his self-dramatizing message traffic in the
NSC computer system. We learn-that North
told extraordinary tales to the Iranians about
how Reagan went off for a whole 'weekend
and prayed in deciding whether to authorize
North to say to Tehran: "We accept the Is-
lamic Revolution of Iran as a fact." Another
North story had Reagan saying he wanted an
end to the Iran-Iraq war on terms acceptable
to Iran and that it was the Iraqi president
who was causing the problem. Reagan later
told the Tower Commission such descrip-
tions were "absolute fiction."
North emerges in these computer mes-
sages as both vain and a workaholic, a man so.
exhausted by his dedication to causes that he
seemed to have no time left for thinking. He
talks about his fatigue in so many of these
messages that, when read together, they'
sound almost like a cry for help.
"Warm, but fatigued regards," is the way
North signs off a Feb. 27, 1986 note to
McFarlane. "Am going honie7?if I remember
the way:_ writes North, mIVIcFarlane on .414_
ril 7, 1986. "I am not complaining, and you
know that I love the work, but we have to lift
some of this onto the CIA-iii-thaft6ii get
more thiii 2-3 hours of sleep at night," North
writes to Poindexter on May 16, 1986.
"What we most need is to get the CIA re-en-
gaged in this effort so that it can be better
managed than it now is by one slightly con-
fused Marine LtCol . . . . At this point, I'm
not sure who on our side knows What. Help,"
wrote North to Poindeiter7SirliirieT0-11B6.
The cable traffic would be funny, if it
weren't so sad. What it reveals most clearly
is that North?who ironically used the name
"Project Democracy" to describe his private'
(and perhaps illegal) network of airplanes,
ships, money, cars, warehouses, communi-
cations equipment and a 6,500 foot run-
way?didn't really seem to have a good un-
derstanding about how democracy is prac-
ticed in the United States. More importantly,
those above North didn't seem to understand
it, either.
Oliver North is undoubtedly a smart and
tireless officer, the kind you want on your
side in a fight. What the Tower Commission
shows is what can happen when such persons
are without supervision by officials with a
firm understanding of how this country must
work. What both Watergate and the Iran-
contra affair also demonstrated in the end,
fortunately, is that questionable behavior that
seeks to circumvent established American in-
stitutions is likely to get uncovered before
even worse damage is done.
As with Watergate, the riddle at the cen-
ter of the Iran scandal is what the president
knew about the misdeeds of his subordinates.
Most of the initial accounts of the Tower re-
port portrayed President Reagan as an al-
most pathetic figure?aloof, inattentive, un-
able to remember dates and details, manip-
ulated by his subordinates, a "remote and
confused man," as one newspaper put it.
But the most significant truth embedded
in the Tower report may be that the
Iran affair was Ronald Reagan's policy.
The Reagan administration decided to trade
arms far hostages, despite strong opposition
from the secretaries of state and defense, be-
cause the president wanted it that way. Each
time his senior advisers thought they had
squelched the policy, the president revived it.,
Indeed, the Tower report suggests that for
Ronald Reagan, freeing the hostages became
a personal goal?something that he favored
so deeply and passionately that the views of
his advisers became irrelevant.
The discussion of the president's role has
focused almost entirely on whether he did or
didn't orally approve the first delivery of U.S.
weapons to Iran by Israel. "I don't remem-
ber?period," the president told the Tower
Commission. Fair enough. But there is con-
siderable evidence that Reagan approved?
indeed, urged?subsequent shipments of
arms to Iran because of his commitment to
freeing the hostages.
The hostages were the sort of foreign-pol-
icy problem, involving individual Americans
in danger abroad, that directly engaged Rea-
gan. The Tower report, citing McFarlane,
says "the President inquired almost daily
about the welfare of the hostages." And the
president is said to have asked Poindexter at
each morning's intelligence briefing: "John,
anything new on the hostages?"
As with Watergate, the nightmare of the
Iran affair was that once the arms dealing
started in August 1985, it developed its own
momentum. As early as December 1985,
North wrote to Poindexter: "We are . . . too
far along with the Iranians to risk turning
back now." Shultz and Weinberger strongly
disagreed, but their arguments didn't seem
to influence Reagan. Instead, North and
Poindexter continued to push ahead on the
advice of a cluster of Iranian, Israeli and Sau-
di Arabian intermediaries and arms mer-
chants who seem more suitable as characters
in a class-B movie.
Each time the Iran program seemed about
to collapse of its own weight, the president
helped rescue it. For example, a consensus
seemed to have emerged among the presi-
dent's top advisers at a meeting on Dec. 7,
1985 that the arms-for-hostages dealing
should be stopped. When McFarlane deliv-
ered this message the next day in London to
Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian interme-
diary warned that if. the weapons trading
stopped, "one or more of the hostages would
be executed."
President Reagan, egged on by North, ap-
parently was moved by this threat. At a
meeting on Dec. 10, according to a memo
written by CIA Director Casey, "The, Pres
ident argued mildly for letting the operation
go ahead.. . . He was afraid.thaLtPrminat-
ing the ongoing discussions. . . could lead to
eIrTy-k0iiiiatainst the hostages."
Reagan's optimism seems to have carried
the day. He was "disappointed" at that De-
cember meeting that all the hostages weren't
yet free, "but always looking for the bright
side or the possibility that it could be sal-
vaged," according to McFarlane. Regan re-
called the president's concern that "we were
going to spend another Christmas with hos-
tages there, and he is looking powerless and
inept as President because he's unable to do
anything to get the hostages out."
The same Micawberesque spirit?a con-
viction that "something will turn up"?pre-
vailed in January 1986 when Reagan decided,
over protests from Shultz, to ship arms di-
rectly to Iran. Shultz told the Tower Com-
mission: "I recall no specific decision being
made in my Presence, though I was well
aware of the President's preferred course,
and his strong desire to establish better re-
lations with Iran and to save the hostages."
Because of growing doubts about Ghor-
banifar, there was a new effort to kill the pro-
gram in March 1986. But according to a
statement by the CIA's chief of operations
for_ILie Near East, North "kept it alive be-
cause of the President's personal and emo-
tional interest in getting the hostages
out. . . ." -
As in Watergate, the president seemed
driven by political anxieties which, in retro-
spect, make little sense. The CIA's Near
East director described the mO-Od_ to th
_
Tower Commission: ". . the real thing_ that
wis?aiiving this was that there was in early
'86, late '85, a lot of pressure from thetos-
tage families . . . and there were a lot of
things_ being said about the US. Government
isn't doing anything. . . . And there is a lot of
fear about the yellOW-ribboisvgatnrbarlrup."
There aren't any "smoking guns'iri the
Tower report about Reagan and the diver-
sion of funds to the contras. But there is
some evidence that he knew, at least in gen-
eral, about North's private fund-raising ef-
forts for the Nicaraguan counter-
revolutionaries. In a May 16, 1986 memo to
Poindexter, North said: "I have no idea what
Don Regan does or does not know re my pri-
vate U.S. operation but the President obvi-
ously knows why he has been meeting with
several select people to thank them for their
'support for Democracy' in CentAM."
The most refreshing comment in the Tow-
er report may be a remark from Assistant
Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, who
said he told North in November 1985, as the
Iran fiasco was beginning: "I don't think my
boss knows anything about this. I doubt that
Secretary of State Shultz knows anything
about [this]. I think your ass is way out on a
limb and you best get all the elephants to-
gether to discuss the issue."
David Ignatius is an associate editor of The
Washington Past. Michael Getter is assistant managing
editor for foreign news.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302340001-2