SOMETHING WORSE THAN IRAN-CONTRA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807540010-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: October 18, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807540010-0
Roger Simon ~e New York Times
e Washington Times
Something Worse
Than Iran-Contra
For a few weeks now, people have been asking me
the same question: Do I think Bob Woodward made up
that stuff about getting into CIA Director Bill Casey's
hospital room?
In his book "Veil," Woodward says he got into the
room and asked Casey if he knew about the diversion
of funds to the Nicaraguan contras.
Casey nodded "a frail yes," according to Woodward.
And when Woodward asked him why he did it, Casey
said: "I believed."
Casey's widow says this is hogwash. She says
Woodward never got into the room and her husband
couldn't speak anyway.
Me, I believe Woodward.
I have never met the guy, but I believe him. Nobody
in this business has greater credibility than Bob
Woodward. His devotion to careful fact-checking is
not only legendary but also is supposed to border on
mania.
I have another reason for believing him: If he was
going to make it up, he could have made up better stuff
than a head nod and two words.
But I do find something tremendously disturbing
about his book and the reaction to it. Everybody is
talking about the wrong chapter.
Everybody is talking about the Iran-contra mess
and not about something far more serious: an act of
terrorism by the United States.
Woodward reports that Casey wanted to create a hit
squad to kill terrorists before they could strike at
Americans.
Casey got President Reagan to sign a presidential
finding authorizing such a unit. He assured the
President that nobody would ever know about it.
But the plan did not go well. The CIA was slow to
train its squad and Casey thought his own agency had
turned chicken. So he turned to Saudi Arabia and
asked that country to fund the squad.
0
Saudi Arabia was delighted. So Casey met with a
Saudi prince in the suburbs of Washington and they
picked out a perfect target: Mohammed Hussein
Fadlallah, a terrorist connected with the killings of
Americans in Beirut, including the bombing of our
Marine barracks in 1983.
The Saudis handled the details. Casey gave them,
according to Woodward, "effective operation control."
And on March 8,1985, the hit squad went to work.
I have looked up the newspaper articles from the
next day. Here is what happened. Here is what a
member of the Reagan Cabinet initiated and helped
organize:
A car was parked on the narrow, crowded streets of
a poor neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The car had been loaded with 550 pounds of explosives.
Just as worshipers were arriving at a neayrby mosque
for evening prayers, the explosives weretset off. The
blast brought down the front of a "t i. -story
apartment building and ignited natural g", finders
stored underground Jagged debris went hurtling
through the packed streets.
The Wail Street Journal
The Chiistian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chica o Tribune
Date _T /9/7
"In one of the apartments the
w
h
'
y
ere
aving a kid
s
mothers were gall hurt, resident
some told eryl badly. Just kids.
Kids!"
A 15-foot-deep crater was left where U *c" hs4
been. Eighty people were killed and hundreds were
injured.
UPI reported: "The Beirut bombing Friday was the
worst act of terrorism in. LebanM Sim*
~_~ IJ4,
servicemen and 58 Frendr'parslop. d
suicide attacks on their militaryl bases on Oct. 23,1986,'
in Beirut."
The target, Fadlallah, escaped without injury by the
way. Afterward, Reagan rescinded his finding.
Woodward writes: "Failure of the Y
mission to kill Fadlallah left Casey despolpfil
C
jeopardy. Even IA role in training the units put the agcy in
service, an organization with close ties to the intelligence
only the comparatively small role of hiring the men to
plant the car bomb, this all tied the CIA too closely to
an assassination plot."
Woodward does not say if Casey was "despondent"
over the murders of 80 men, women and children.
But I am. I am also shocked and depressed that my
country would participate at any level in such a
monstrous act.
If the CIA had sent an assassin to shoot the man who
killed our Marines, I probably would not have lost sleep
over it.
But a car bomb in a crowded residential neighbor-
hood? That's not an assassination. That's a slaughter.
That's a guarantee that innocent people will be killed.
So why isn't anybody now talking about it? Why
isn't this the part of Woodward's book that is now
under discussion?
Could it be that we don't care?
Or could it be that we are too ashamed to face up to
it?
Page 13.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807540010-0