IRAN AFFAIR WAS STANDARD FARE

Document Type: 
Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9
Release Decision: 
RIPPUB
Original Classification: 
K
Document Page Count: 
1
Document Creation Date: 
December 23, 2016
Document Release Date: 
May 22, 2013
Sequence Number: 
57
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
April 1, 1987
Content Type: 
OPEN SOURCE
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PDF icon CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9.pdf109.91 KB
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/05/22 : CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9 UN rAut _.LJU"J1- i April 1987 - -- Iran Affair Was Standard Fare Scandal Wasn't an Aberration, but the Military-CIA Way By ROGER MORRIS The Tower Commission and its rebuke to the President may have been a saving watershed for Ronald Reagan. but it is much less clear what it did for the rest of us, and particularly for the making of American foreign policy-an issue, after all, that lay at the heart of the Iranian arms disaster. The picture that has emerged from the commission's inquiry is of a government that misfunctioned and misfired in often bizarre ways. They were, as the commis- sion was fond of saying, "aberrations" in the system. Presumably the slippage can be fixed. If only it were that simple. Take George P. Shultz and Caspar W. Weinberger, the secretaries of state and defense so conspicuously absent from the Oliver L. North-John M. Poindexter rump government when it was wheeling and dealing in arms and money. Both positioned themselves discreetly clear of the disaster. Both lobbied for and won a formal, public presidential acknowledgement of their innocence. Yet both Shultz and Wein- berger preside over bureaucracies hardly more exemplary than the National Secur- ity Council staff now thought to have run amok (and been duly reined in). Weinberger's Pentagon has been a key player in the secret wars in Central Amer- ica as well as the cynical dealings with Iran and Iraq on both sides of the bloody Persian Gulf war. And we must never forget that North and Poindexter did not wander in off the street to get their jobs and the atten- dant fearsome White House authority. They were, in their arrogant and belliger- ent view of the world, vintage products-of a post-World War II, post-Vietnam pro- fessional officer caste that has dominated so much of U.S. foreign policy from the Defense Department for the past quarter of a century. Shultz's State Department not only knowingly abdicated authority and respon- sibility to a Marine lieutenant colonel of uncertain emotional provenance and diplo- matic expertise, but our Foreign Service then could do no more than point the finger at its fey, befuddled President, whom Shultz has known for years to be present yet absent in the making of foreign policy. By any measure it was perhaps the least finest hour for a Foggy Bottom already legendary for its bureaucratic and political cowardice. Of all the bureaucratic survivors, even beneficiaries, of the Iran-contra scandal, however, the most ironic by far has been the Central Intelligence Agency. True, the nomination of CIA career , deputy Robert Gatettoosucceed the ailing William J Caas . ey had toe withdrawn after it was revealed that Gates, in a 1985 memo to the White House, formally and enthusi- astically favored the arms deal with Iran. But the Gates sacrifice has been the only CIA casualty thus far, and the Tower inquiry itself all but exonerated the agency. "Insufficient attention," the panel conclud- ed, "was given to the implications of the NSC staff having operational control of the initiative rather than the CIA." If only the professionals had been in charge. The salient and sometimes sordid point of this scandal is that this was, from begin- ning to end, classically a CIA operation. It was not only that North's shadowy go- betweens in Europe were old CIA con- tacts, or that the contras were always the agency's proxy guerrillas in Central Amer- ica. They emulated the CIA in spirit and method in their willful evasion of congres- sional restraints, their incurable covert- ness, their recruitment of slightly seedy characters to execute the "scenario," as North's memos called it. If North was a zealous Marine colonel in the White House West Wing by day, he was by night-at the meetings with rebel groups and sympathetic rightist contribu- tors-almost a caricature of the CIA soldier of fortune that we've glimpsed from the Bay of Pigs to Chile to Watergate. The unpalatable fact, as the Tower Commission should have explained far more candidly, is that the NSC staff with its executive-branch immunity has long been a surrogate for the CIA and a focal point for an often lawless, extra-constitutional for- eign policy when legal restraints or con- gressional oversight on the agency proved STAT cumbersome. The NSC's ambitious, can-do young officers have been there to run the errands, manage the payoffs, shred the awkward documents. And if the staff men assigned to the NSC have not been willing and ideologically agreeable military officers from the Pen- tagon, they have often been CIA career- ists whom the agency has always readily offered to national-security advisers- crisp, talented young men who ostensibly serve the President of the moment but whose real politics and real loyalties lie at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. These are the reassuring players in re- serve-the Pentagon, State and CIA-to whom the Tower Commission would now have us turn to heal the wounds left by a renegade NSC. It is a sad and perilous naivete about the complex politics of for- eign policy. Those bureaucracies will be there, large- ly untouched and unreformed. long after Ronald Reagan has gone back to his Santa Barbara ranch for good. And we will have lost in shallowness, in the political sleight-of-hand of the past months, a rare chance to lift the veil on the usually hidden world of foreign policy-to seize in the Iran-contra scandal the truly cleansing moment that it just might have been. Roger Morris worked on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He is completing the first of a two-volume biography of Nixon. Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/05/22 : CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9