UNDER FIRE
by
Oliver L. North


HarperCollins Publishers
Zondervan Press

For information address HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
ISBN 0-06-018334-9
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
     Writing a book is never easy, and writing one in secret poses a
special challenge.  To avoid any possibility of leaks along the way, my
publishers decided to treat this book as a covert operation.
     To complete it, William Novak and I worked together by phone, by
fax, and during a series of long meetings in a hotel room at Dulles
International Airport.  Just about every Monday, Bill would fly in with
his laptop computer and book a ground-floor room with a back door
opening onto the parking lot.  Once he was settled, I would
surreptitiously drive over to meet him.  We always ordered lunch and
dinner from room service, and when the waiter arrived with our meals, I
hid in the bathroom.  The poor guy must have concluded that this strange
Mr. Novak, who always seemed to end up in the same room, was
entertaining an imaginary friend.
     The work was hard, but my sessions with Bill were both productive
and fun.  I appreciated his thoughtful attention to detail, his
insightful questions, and perhaps most of all, his fine sense of humor.
     I'm also grateful to Linda Novak, who put up with our hectic
schedule, offered many helpful suggestions, and even managed to produce
a baby while her husband and I were finishing this book.  Who says there
are no more miracles?
     Special thanks must go to Nicole Seligman, one of my lawyers at the
firm of Williams & Connolly, whose help was essential.
     And there were many others who helped me get this story out of the
courtrooms and into the word processor.
     My mother waded through old family albums and stacks of letters,
and sat down with Bill and me to recall tales of my youth that I had
long since forgotten or tried to.  My brothers, Jack and Tim, and our
sister, Pat, pitched in with tidbits from our childhood.
     Dick Bonneau, Mildred Johnson, Tom Gibbons, Bob Bowes, and Russ
Robertson began contributing to this book more than thirty years ago,
and helped me more than they can know.
     A steadfast cadre from the Naval Academy supported me in ways too
numerous to recount: Emerson Smith, Reid Olson, Bob Eisenbach, Bob Earl,
and classmates Dewey Beliech, Jay Cohen, Mark Treanor, Phil Hough, and
Tom Hayes.
     From a long-ago war, several comrades-in-arms sought me out years
later: Paul Goodwin, Bill Haskell, Richmond O'Neill, Bud Flowers, Art
Vandervere, Eric Bowen, and John Rappuano.  Of those who called
themselves "Blue's Bastards," Wendell Thomas, Everett WhippIe, Ernie
Tuten, Randy Herrod, and Jim Lehnert helped me survive battles past and
present.
     Generals Lew Wilson, Robert Barrow, P. X. Kelley, and Tom Morgan
gave new meaning to the phrase "band of brothers," as Marines like to
call themselves.  So, too, did Brigadier General Mike Sheridan,
Lieutenant Colonel Pete Stenner, Major Gil Mackiin, and Colonels Jack
Holley and Larry Weeks.  They were, in every sense of the phrase, Semper
Fidelis.
     When I left a quarter century of military service behind and
started to hack my way into the civilian jungle, there were a handful of
local guides who kept me on the path: Harry Rl,odes and Bernie Swain of
the Washington Speaker's Bureau; Ben Elliott, who helped me behind the
scenes; Duane Ward, who got me to where I was supposed to be; and Jerry
Dimenna and Dave Valinskl, who kept me alive in the process.
     This book could not have been finished without the help of
Lieutenant General Ed Bronars and his wife, Dot, and Major General John
Grinalds and his wife, Norwood.  The Reverend Brian Cox helped me
examine my Christian faith with clear eyes and a better understanding of
how He is glorified when we persevere in adversity.  And Thad Heath
showed me how to live that kind of life.
     I would have liked to thank David Jacobsen, Andy Messing, Ellen
Garwood, and Ken deGraffenreid fiom my days at the NSC, and Joe
Fernandez, Dewey Clarridge, George Cave, and several others from the
CIA.  But if I did, they would surely suffer for it.
     Foreward
     For better or worse, most people's lives seem to turn out rather
differently from what they had expected.  Certainly mine has.  When I
first signed on with the Marine Corps in 1961, I never dreamed that I
would ever serve in the upper echelons of government.  And I surely
never imagined that I would one day find myself at the center of a
raging political controversy of historic proportions.
     This book is my personal story.  I will leave to others the task of
producing the definitive history of Iran-contra-assuming that's even
possible.  The congressional investigators filled many volumes with
reports and testimony, but I doubt that any one individual could
possibly know the whole story.  I was right in the middle of these
events, and there are still things I don't know.
     Although I refer often to "Iran-contra" in these pages, that phrase
is really a misnomer.  To be precise, "Iran-contra" covers five very
different secret operations that were carried out by the Reagan
administration in the mid-1980s.  One of these was an attempt to develop
an opening to the revolutionary government of Iran, an initiative that
included the sale of arms to the Iranians, and a partially successful
attempt to gain the release of the American hostages in Beirut.  The
other operation was a concerted effort to maintain American support for
the Nicaraguan resistance after the United States Congress had forced
the CIA to abandon the contras.  These five projects were eventually
linked by a financial connection, and also by the fact that several
individuals, myself included, were involved in both operations.
     In the chapters that follow, I portray certain episodes in my life
that strike me as significant, and which surely affected my later
activities at the National Security Concil.  I know, for example, that
my experiences as a platoon commander in Vietnam colored my feelings
about Central America in general and the contras in particular.  And the
way I was raised, and the values that were imparted to me over the
years, certainly influenced my attitude about the American hostages in
Beirut.
     I don't ask the reader to endorse everything I did or failed to do.
     In the five years since I was fired, my detractors have often
dramatized and exaggerated what really happenedeciate their endorsement,
I am neither a saint nor a hero.  I look back with pride on much of what
we accomplished, but I also did things that I came to regret.
     Although most of the events I describe took place within the past
decade, the world began to change dramatically during the late 1980s.
     Most of Eastern Europe has now embraced the ideals of freedom and
democracy, and Communism has shown itself to be the fatally flawed
system that Ronald Reagan always insisted it was.  I remember watching
on television as the Berlin Wall came down.  I had tears in my eyes, and
Dornin, our youngest daughter, ran upstairs to say, "Mom, what's wrong
with Daddy?"
     Daddy was fine, of course; I was just overwhelmed by the moment.
While I had known that these changes would come, I didn't really expect
to witness them in my lifetime.  I felt that way again in 1990, when,
for the second time in eleven years, the people of Nicaragua rejected a
brutal and corrupt regime.  And yet again in August 1991, watching Boris
Yeltsin stop a Soviet tank during the second Russian revolution.
     During my five and a half years on the staff of the National
Security Council, I spent much of my time working for the release of the
American hostages held in Beirut.  I have done some difficult things in
my life, but nothing I've ever been involved with was as trying, or as
painful, as this.  Because of the obvious risks to the hostages and to
certain individuals in other countries, most of this work was done in
almost total secrecy.  As I worked on this book and described some of
these efforts, I prayed that by the time I was finished, all these men
would be back with their families.
     Those of us who served in the Reagan administration were privileged
to be part of great changes.  I fervently hope that these developments
are permanent, and that the extraordinary events unfolding in Eastern
Europe, Central America, and what we used to call the Soviet Union will
soon be visited upon places like Cuba, Iraq, Iran-and even Lebanon.
     Much of this book portrays the individuals I worked with, both in
and out of our government.  Although I am critical of a few, most of
those I am blessed to have known over the years are good and decent men
and women.  Like me, they were caught up in momentous events.
     And like me, they were sometimes less than perfect in responding to
them.
     Yet many of these people risked their lives and some lost them.
     Most can never be thanked publicly, honored for the contributions
they made, or recognized for the incredible perils they faced.  And
though I have had to omit or change some of their names in this book, it
is nonetheless a tribute to them.
     O.L.N.
     Narnia
     September 16, 1991
     CAST OF Characters
     Abrams, Elliott: Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs.
     Allen, Charles E.: National Intelligence Officer for
Counterterrorism,CIA.
     Australian, The Code name for Iranian official affiliated with
Ghorbanifar.
     Bandar, bin Sultan: Saudi prince, nephew of King Fahd and
Ambassador to the United States.
     Barnes, Michael: Democratic member, House of Representatives;
Chairman of Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs.
     Bermudez, Enrique: Military leader of the Nicaraguan resistance,
Northern Front.
     Boland, Edward r: Democratic member, House of Representatives.
     Buchanan, Patrick J.: Director of Communications, White House.
     Buckley, William A.: CIA Station Chief in Lebanon.  BucKley was
seized in Beirut in 1984.  He died, presumably under torture, in 1985.
     Bush, George: Vice President of the United States, 1981-88.
     Calero, Adolfo: A leader of the FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Force),
and Oliver North's primary contact among the Nicaraguan resistance.
     Casey, William I.: Director of Central Intelligence and Director of
the CIA, 1981-1987.
     Cave, George: Former CIA officer who participated in negotiations
with the Iranians.
     Channell, Carl R (Spit): Founder of National Endowment for the
Preservation of Liberty; filnd raiser on behalf of Nicaraguan
resistance.
     Clark, William P.: President Reagan's National Security Adviser,
1982-83.
     Clarridge, Duane (Dewey): CIA Clandestine Services Officer.  Chief,
Latin American Division, 1981-84; Chief, European Division, 1984-85;
Chief, Counterterrorism, 1986-87.
     Cline, John: Member of Oliver North's defense team.
     Dutton, Robert C.: Retired Air Force colonel who worked for Richard
Secord.
     Eiers, Alan: Chief, Central American Task Force, CIA.
     Eurmark, Roy M.: Associate of Adnan Khashoggi and friend of William
Casey.
     Gadd, Richard: Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for
Richard Secord.
     Gates, Robert M.: Deputy Director of CIA, 1986.
     George, Clair: Deputy Director for Operations, CIA.
     Gesell, Gerhard A.: U.S. district court judge who presided at the
trial of Oliver North.
     Ghorbanifar, Manucher (Gorba): Iranian-born intermediary in arms
sales to Iran by Israel and the United States.
     Goode, William P.: Oliver North's U.S. government alias.
     Grinalds, John, Major General, VSMC: Oliver North's battalion
commander, 1978-79.
     Hakim, Albert: Iranian exile, business partner of Richard Secord.
     Hall, Fawn: Oliver North's secretary.
     Hall, Wilma: Robert McFarlane's secretary, Fawn Hall's mother.
     Hamilton, Lee: Democratic member, House of Representatives;
Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
     Hasenfus, Eugene: American crewman shot down over Nicaragua on
October 5, 1986.
     Hussein, Saddam: Iraqi dictator.
     Inouye, Daniel: Democratic senator from Hawaii.
     Jacobsen, David: American hostage in Beirut, former director of
American University Hospital in Beirut.  On November 2, 1986, he became
the third hostage released in the Iran initiative.
     Jenco, Lawrence: American hostage in Beirut, Catholic priest.  On
July 26, 1986, he became the second American released in the Iran
initiative.
     Kelley, P. X.: General, VSMC: Commandant, United States Marine
Corps, 1982-86.
     Khamenei, Ali: President of Iran.
     Rhomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah: Theocratic leader of Iran, 1979-89.
     Kimche, David: Director General of Israeli Foreign Ministry,
1985-86.
     Kirkpatrick, Jeane: United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
     Kissinger, Henry: Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of
State; head of President Reagan's National Bipartisan Commission on
Central America, 1983.
     Ledeen, Michael: Consultant to the National Security Council.
     Mctober 1983 to December 1985.
     Meese, Edwin: Counselor to President Ronald Reagan, 1981-84;
Attorney General of the United States, 1985-86.
     Monster, The: Code name for Iranian official affiliated with Second
Channel.
     Moreau, Arthur: Admiral, USN: Special Assistant to the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1984-85.
     Mousavi, Mir Hussein: Prime Minister of Iran.
     Nephew, The Code name for the key Iranian in the Second Channel.
     Nidal, Abu: Terrorist, head of Ai Fatah Revolutionary Council.
     Nir, Alniram: Adviser on counterterrorism to Israeli Prime Minister
Shimon Peres.
     O'Donnell, Terrence: Member of Oliver North's legal defense team.
     Ortega, Daniel: President of Nicaragua, 1980-90.
     Poindexter, John M., Vice Admiral, USN: Deputy National Security
Adviser, 1983-85; National Security Adviser to President Reagan,1986.
     Qaddafi, Muammar al-: Libyan dictator.
     Quintero, Raphael (Chi Chi): Former Cuban freedom fighter; former
CIA officer; employee of Richard Secord, 1984-86.
     Rafsanjani, Hashemi: Speaker of the Iranian Parliament.
     Reagan, Ronald: President of the United States, 1981-88.
     Regan, Donald T.: White House Chief of Staff, 1985-86.
     Robinette, Glenn: Former CIA employee who installed security system
at Oliver North's home.
     Secord, Richard V., Major General, USAF (Retired): Head of contra
resupply effort, 1984-86.
     Seligman, Nicole: Member of Oliver North's legal defense team.
     Shultz, George: Secretary of State, 1982-88.
     Simon, Barry: Member of Oliver North's legal defense team.
     Sullivan, Brendan: Not a potted plant.
     Walsh, Lawrence: Special Prosecutor, 1986-.
     Weinberger, Caspar: Secretary of Defense, 1981-88.
     Weir, Rev. Benjamin: First American hostage in Beirut released as
part of the Iran initiative (September 15, 1985).
     CONTENTS
     Acknowledgments ix
     Cast of Characters xiii
     Foreword 1
     1. "Relieved of His Duties" 5
     2. The Secret Within a Secret 19
     3. AnotherWorld 35
     4. Coming of Age 64
     5. Combat 88
     6. ANew Life 120
     7. Dyzantium on the Potomac 150
     8. Close-up 172
     9. "We Bag the Bums" 196
     10. The Contras 218
     11. Body and Soul 239
     12. Image Problems 263
     13. The Second Channel 277
     14. Endgame 307
     15. Lights, Cameras... 330
     16. Circsis Mrtxi~ffs 350
     17. A Smoking Gun in the Closet 376
     18. Looking Back 405
     Postscript 412
     Appendix 417
     Index 431
     Chapter 1
     "Relieved of His Duties"
     Being fired is never a pleasant experience, which is why it's
normally done behind closed doors.  My own firing was handled rather
differently.  The room was packed, the doors were open, and millions of
Americans were watching on television.
     I was one of them.
     On November 25, 1986, at five minutes past noon, President Ronald
Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese marched into the crowded White
House briefing room to face the press and the TV cameras.  As I watched
from my office in the Old Executive Office Building, the President
explained that he hadn't been told the whole story of our secret arms
sales to Iran, and that he had asked the Attorney General to look into
the matter.  He then announced that Admiral John Poindexter, his
national security adviser, had resigned, and that Lieutenant Colonel
Oliver North had been "relieved of his duties on the National Security
Council staff."  What?
     Before I could catch my breath, the President turned over the
microphones to Attorney General Meese and left the room.
     Then Ed Meese dropped the bomb: "In the course of the arms
transfer, which involved the United States providing the arms to Israel
and Israel, in turn, transferring the arms-in effect, selling the arms
to representatives of Iran, certain monies which were received in the
transaction between representatives of Israel and representatives of
Iran were taken and made available to the forces in Central America who
are opposing the Sandinista government there."
     In plain language, some of the profits from the arms sales to Iran
had gone to the Nicaraguan resistance, also known as the contras.  It
took a moment before the reporters figured out what Meese had said, and
the White House press corps actually fell silent for a second or two.
Then the barrage began.
     Did the President know about this?
     Meese: The President knew nothing about it until I reported it to
him.  What?
     Well, then, who did know?
     Meese: The only person in the United States government that knew
precisely about this, the only person, was Lieutenant Colonel North.
What?
     Meese: Admiral Poindexter knew that something of this nature was
occurring, but he did not look into it further....  CIA Director Casey,
Secretary of State Shultz, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, myself, the
other members of the NSC-none of us knew.  What?!
     "What Colonel North did," somebody asked-"is that a crime?  Will he
be prosecuted?"
     Meese: We are presently looking into the legal aspects of it as to
whether there's any criminality involved.  Criminality?!
     For the past three weeks, ever since our Iran initiative had been
exposed in Al-Shiraa, a Beirut magazine, the administration's strategy
had been unspoken but unmistakable: this must not become another
Watergate.  Although Watergate had involved several violations of the
law, most Americans believed that the most serious offense of all-and
the one that eventually led to President Nixon's resignation-was not the
burglary itself, but the cover-up.  And so in November 1986,
somebody-probably Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff, and
Nancy Reagan-decided that whatever had or hadn't happened in this case,
there could not be even the hint of a cover-up.  Before the news media
could cause any damage, the White House itself would disclose the story.
It is a fundamental rule of politics that whoever gets his side of the
story out first is usually able to set the agenda for the ensuing
discussion.  While the effort to realize the benefit of this "rule" was
certainly true here, the administration did not reveal the "diversion"
(as it soon came to be known) solely for strategic reasons.  They
disclosed it because three days earlier, when the Attorney General
learned about it from a memo that was found in my office (and which I
thought I had destroyed), he was terrified that if this story came out
first in the press, like Watergate, it could lead to extraordinary
political problems for President Reagan.  Like impeachment.
     The administration chose to focus almost exclusiot to be gained by
presenting it that way.  This particular detail was so dramatic, so
sexy, that it might actually-well, divert public attention from other,
even more important aspects of the story, such as what else the
President and his top advisers had known about and approved.  And if it
could be insinuated that this supposedly terrible deed was the exclusive
responsibility of one mid-level staff assistant at the National Security
Council (and perhaps his immediate superior, the national security
adviser), and that It wasn't until my trial in 1989, when he was
questioned by Brendan Sullivan, my lawyer, that Attorney General Meese
revealed how seriously he had taken the possibility of impeachment:
     Sullivan: In fact, your assessment of the time was that unless
something was done, a strong response, that the merging of those two
factors [Iran and the contras] could very well cause the possible
toppling of the President himself correct?  Meese:Yes.
     Sullivan: There was discussion, in fact, on the days November 23rd
and 24th that unless the administration, unless you and the president
himself, put out to the public the facts of the use of residuals for the
Freedom Fighters, unless you got it out the door first, it could
possibly lead to impeachment by the Congress, correct?
     Meese: Yes.  That was a concern, that political opponents might try
that kind of tactic.
     Judge Gesell: And you discussed that with the President?  He is
asking you.  Meese: I believe I discussed it with the President.  I
certainly discussed it with others in high-ranking positions such as the
chief of staff....  I don't know whether the actual word "impeachment"
was referred to, but I certainly discussed the tremendous consequences
for the President personally and for the administration.
     this staffer had acted on his own (however unlikely that might be),
and that, now that you mention it, his activities might even be
criminal-if the public and the press focused on that, then maybe you
didn't have another Watergate on your hands after all.  Especially if
you insisted that the President knew nothing about it.  I immediately
called my wife, but she wasn't home.  As with so many other episodes in
this long ordeal, Betsy learned about my firing on the car radio.  I
tried to get through to my mother in Albany, but her line was busy.  She
had seen the press conference on television, and she was trying to call
me.  But by then the phone lines in my office were jammed.
     This was not the way it was supposed to be.  I had expected to
leave, and maybe even be fired-but not quite so publicly.  Still, I'd
had plenty of warning that my days at the National Security Council were
numbered.  I was, after all, deeply involved in two major, secret, and
politically explosive projects, the Iran initiative and the contras, and
both had begun to unravel a few weeks earlier.  The secret Iran
initiative was pretty much over after that report in Al-Shiraa, which
was immediately picked up by the Western media.  About a month before
that, a plane full of supplies for the resistance fighters had been shot
down over Nicaragua.  Eugene Hasenfas, an American crew member, was
captured by the Sandinista army, and documents were found that led to a
safe house in El Salvador whose telephone records listed several
American phone numbers-including mine.  This only confirmed what many
congressmen and journalists already knew: that while large segments of
our government were explicitly prohibited from actively supporting the
contras, several of us, including the President, were quietly involved
in a host of other efforts to keep them alive.
     Once both initiatives were exposed, it was only a matter of time
before I would be forced to leave my job at the NSC.  During those final
days I worked harder than ever to limit the damage and to protect the
lives of people who had risked so much to help us on both fronts.  (Some
are still at risk, which is why their names do not appear in this book.)
We were also making a last-ditch effort to rescue the remaining American
hostages in Beirut.  One hostage, David Jacobsen, had been freed in
early November as part of a deal with the Iranians; he was the third one
to be released in this way, and we were desperately trying to extricate
the others before the whole thing collapsed.
     The contra initiative had ended even before David Jacobsen's
release.  Shortly after the Hasenfas shootdown, William Casey, the
director of the CIA, had told me to "shut it down and clean it up."  It
was clear that somebody's head would have to roll, and I was prepared to
be the victim.  Offering me up as a political scapegoat was part of the
plan, although Casey believed there would be others.  "If it comes out,"
he had told me, "it will go above you, buddy."  And when it did come
out, he said, "It's not going to stop with you, either."
     By the time of the press conference I was certainly prepared to
leave the administration, and in some ways I actually looked forward to
it.  I had come to the National Security Council five and a half years
earlier on what was supposed to be a two- or three-year assignment from
the Marine Corps, and had ended up staying twice as long as I ever
wanted or expected.  I was eager to return to Camp Lejeune, North
Carolina, the home of the Second Marine Division, where I would once
again do what I really enjoyed and what I did best: commanding and
leading young Marines.  I hoped to take some leave, get to know my
family again, and take them back to North Carolina to begin a new
assignment.  Betsy and I had talked this over at length.  Of all my duty
stations, Camp Lejeune was her favorite, and she looked forward to
returning there as much as I did.
     But now-not so fast, fella!
     I had just been fired by the President on national television.  If
that was really necessary, I could live with it.  But what was that the
Attorney General had said?  That there might be criminality involved?
Was he serious?  I knew we were facing a political disaster, and that
there would be political consequences.  But never in my darkest
nightmares did I imagine that anything I had done in the service of the
President, my commander-in-chief could lead to criminal charges.
     I wasn't part of the President's inner circle, but one thing I
knew: Ronald Reagan was in no danger of being impeached.  For one thing,
nobody wanted to go threnough, thank you.  For another, President Reagan
was loved and trusted by a vast majority of the American people.  With a
few exceptions, even his critics did not want to see him impeached.
Although the President's approval rating underwent a sharp decline, the
word "impeachment" was rarely spoken in public-not even by congressional
Democrats.  Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
used the dreaded "I" word as part of a hypothetical response to a
question on ABC's "This Week with David BrinKley."  And on March 5,
1987, Congressman Henry Gonzalez introduced a resolution of impeachment
in the House of Representatives, which went nowhere.  But these were
isolated exceptions.
     In the fall of 1986, President Reagan was still so popular that he
and Nancy could have invited Fidel Castro to a testimonial dinner at the
White House for Ayatollah Ehomeini without suffering overwhelming
political damage.  People would have shaken their heads, they would have
wondered, but Ronald Reagan would have remained popular.  If the
Constitution had allowed him to seek a third term, I have no doubt that
he would have run again in 1988.  And, just as in 1984 against Mondale,
he would have been reelected in a landslide.  Iran-contra would have
hurt him, certainly, but it wouldn't have been fatal.
     By going public so quickly with the "diversion," the President's
top advisers were essentially trading one risk for another.  They could
have decided to batten down the hatches and weather the storm while we
made one final effort to get the hostages out.  But when our government
announced, in effect, that the Iranians had been overcharged for the
arms they had purchased, and that Iran had been subsidizing the
Nicaraguan resistance without even knowing it-what about those political
damages?  Who knew how the government leaders in Tehran, or the
hostage-takers in Beirut, might react to this humiliation from
Washington?  Wasn't it possible that this announcement might lead to
further recriminations against the hostages or other acts of violence
against the United States?
     President Reagan could have handled the whole thing very
differently.  He could have said, "The buck stops here.  I knew about
the diversion.  I approved it because I would have done just about
anything to get our hostages out of Iran, and to avoid abandoning the
contras in the midst of their life-and-death struggle.  It's the
President's mandate to determine our foreign policy, and as your
President, I accept responsibility for everything that happened on my
watch."
     If the President had said that, what would Congress have done?
     Sure, many Democrats would have been angry, but were they any less
angry when the President said he didn't know?
     As soon as the press conference was over, everybody's favorite
Watergate question began to reverberate around the nation like a battle
cry: what did the President know, and when did he know it?  There were,
of course, many other questions that could have been asked-especially
about our foreign policy.  Was it a good idea for the United States to
hold secret talks with the Iranians?  And if our government really was
neutral in the Iran-Iraq War, as we often claimed to be, why were we
secretly supplying military intelligence to Iraq?  And why, for that
matter, did several top administration officials, including Secretary of
State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (who
rarely agreed on anythin) both favor the Iraqis?  Not only had Iraq
started the war, but the Iraqis were more deeply involved in
international terrorism than the Iranians ever hoped to be.  Meanwhile,
Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons-not only against Iran, but
even against his own people.
     The press became so focused on the "diversion" that they neglected
to ask what President Reagan had known about other critical issues: Did
the President and his advisers knowingly mislead Congress with regard to
aiding the contras?  Did they knowingly mislead Congress and the public
with regard to selling arms to the Iranians?  How was the President
supposed to maintain a consistent policy in Central America when
Congress kept changing its mind about whether we would help the contras?
And why were so many members of Congress hostile to the Nicaraguan
resistance and seemingly untroubled by an aggressive Communist
government in Nicaragua?
     These and other questions were there for the asking, but the one
about the President and the "diversion" kept bouncing back: what did he
know and when did he know it?  It just wouldn't go away, not even when
the President himself said that no, he hadn't known about it, or later,
during the congressional hearings, when Admiral Poindexter The press
seemed to focus on little else.  "We were all children of Watergate,"
wrote ~u Cannon, the veteran Washington reporter, on the subject of
Iran-contra.  "My editors at The Washington Post and most of my
colleagues in the press corps were from beginning to end more tantalized
by the Nixon question-what did he know and when did he know it?-than by
any other issue."  (Ie'u Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a
peacetime [New York, 1991], p.  706.)
     backed him up.  When the admiral maintained that he hadn't told the
President about the "diversion," that lowered the temperature.  But it
didn't end the speculation.  "No smoking gun," said the press, extending
the Watergate analogy.  But the American people still found it difficult
to believe that the President didn't know.  According to the polls, a
majority believed that President Reagan did know.
     I thought so, too.
     And now, five years later, I am even more convinced: President
Reagan knew everything.
     True, he didn't learn about the "diversion" from me-at least not
directly.  In all my time n Washington, I never met alone with him, and
the only time we talked privately on the phone was the day I was -
fired.  John Poindexter insisted that he didn't tell the President
either, because Poindexter wanted him to have "plausible deniability."
At the hearings, Poindexter said, "I made a very deliberate decision not
to ask the President, so that I could insulate him from the decision and
provide some future deniability for the President if it ever leaked
out."
     Even if that's true, I find it hard to believe that the President
didn't know.
     Here's why The contras were not the only beneficls were to be used
for other projects, including several counterterrorist operations and
various plans involving the release of the hostages.  Because these
activities were so sensitive, I made sure to get explicit permission for
each one.  Every time one of these projects came up, whether or not the
particular plan was actually carried out in the end (and not all of them
were), I wrote a memo or a computer message to Admiral Poindexter
outlining how the money would be used.  It was always my belief that
these memos were passed up the line to the President, because documents
of this type generally were.  In fact, it was a copy of one of these
memos, from April 1986, that made the Attorney General aware of the
"diversion" three days before the press conference.  For all my
celebrated shredding skills, I had missed that one.
     I was a little surprised when Admiral Poindexter said he hadn't
told the President.  But is it really possible that nobody else did?
Robert McFarlane, Poindexter's predecessor, had left government, but he
still had unique access to the Oval Office.  He could have told the
President.  And is it possible that Bill Casey never once mentioned the
"diversion" to Ronald Reagan, his longtime friend, in one of their many
private meetings?  I find that unlikely.
     Casey and I had discussed the "diversion" on several occasions, and
he loved the idea.  He praised it effasively, and called it "the
ultimate covert operation," which from him was high praise indeed.  He
once referred to it as the ultimate irony, because Iran had been
providing arms to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.  Casey would
have enjoyed sharing this story with the President, and I believe he
did.  It's also quite possible that the President discussed the
"diversion" with one or more other high-level officials.  If any of them
were not aware of how the residuals from the arms sales were being used,
it's only because they went out of their way not to know.  A substantial
amount of money-well in excess of what the U.S. government was receiving
for the arms-was generated from these transactions, and intelligence
material circulated to people like Cap Weinberger and Colin Powell made
that clear.  Even before I became involved in the operational aspects of
the Iran initiative, our government made extensive efforts to gather
information on Manucher Ghorbanifar and his fellow arms dealers.  These
very sensitive intelligence reports were distributed to a handful of
cabinet-level appointees, including the Secretary of Defense, the
national security adviser, the director and deputy director of the CIA,
and the director of the National Security Agency.  None of them could
reasonably claim ignorance of the existence of residuals, although, in
the end, nearly all of them tried.
     President Reagan, meanwhile, was understandably devastated when,
for the first time in his political career, the public didn't believe
him.  Don't they trust me?  he asked.  Do they actually think I'm a
liar?
     I don't believe the President was necessarily lying.  I realize, of
course, that in view of what I've just written this must sound like a
contradiction.  If the President claimed he didn't know about the
"diversion," and he actually did know, doesn't that mean he was lying?
     Not in Reagan's case.  Granted, for most people, and certainly for
most presidents, these two suppositions could not both be true.  For
Ronald Reagan, however, they weren't necessarily in conflict.  For all
of his achievements, this President didn't focus much on the details.
     President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.  I believe he was
told about the transfer of funds to the contras, but that doesn't mean
he paid attention to it or remembered it.  Early in 1987, the President
made clear to his own Tower Commission that he wasn't really sure what
he recalled about the Iran initiative, or whether he had approved a
November 1985 arms shipment by the Israelis.  He testified that he
didn't know anything about the early TOW shipments to Iran, although by
the time he wrote his memoirs he apparently remembered again.
     The 1989 videotape of his testimony at the Poindexter trial showed
us a terribly sad portrait of an aging and confused man which appeared
to recall astonishingly little about his own administration But even in
his better years, President Reagan preferred to concentrate on broad
policies and values.  He was never very inquisitive or curious, and he
generally left the details to his subordinates.  It seemed to me that he
sometimes wanted to ask a question, but then didn't do so because it
would have seemed to be a "stupid question," and he didn't want to
appear not to know something others would think he should have known.
     Admiral Poindexter has said that, hypothetically speaking, if he
had discussed the "diversion" with the President, the President would
have okayed it.  "I was convinced," the admiral testified at the
hearings, "that I understood the President's thinking on this, and that
if I had taken it to him that he would have approved it."  I agree.
Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with
both the Iranian initiative and the private support effort on behalf of
the contras, and he received regular, detailed briefings on both topics.
He met on several occasions with private donors to the resistance, and
at least once, it appears, he personally solicited a foreign leader-King
Fahd of Saudi Arabia-and asked him to double his contribution.
     At the time, King Fahd was already supporting the contras.  After
his meeting with the President, he more than doubled his commitment.  In
all, the Saudi contribution came to thirty-two million dollars.
     no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the
contras, and that he approved it.  Enthusiastically.
     There is, of course, an additional possibility: that people around
the President, and perhaps even President Reagan himself, were involved
in an effort to protect the highest office in the land-and the man who
occupied it.
     In his memoirs, Ronald Reagan wrote that "we sent word to the
lawyers representing Oliver North and John Poindexter, who knew what had
happened, that I wanted them to tell the entire truth and do nothing to
protect me."  I was surprised to read that, and I asked my lawyers if
they ever received such a message.  They hadn't.
     In fact, nobody fromThe only message I heard was: exonerate the
President.  And I heard it from at least three different people.
     At the end of January, Paul Laxalt, one of Ronald Reagan's oldest
and closest political friends, called a member of my legal defense team
at Williams & Connolly to say he was sending over a memo.  The document,
which arrived within a few days, was a legal memorandum that argued that
I would not waive my Fifth Amendment rights if I chose to state publicly
that the President did not know about the "diversion."  My lawyers
rejected this proposal out of hand.
     The previous month, on December 17, I had received a visit from one
of the military aides to Vice President Bush who was also a member of
Bush's national security affairs staff.  He and I were both military
officers, and he approached me on that basis.  In the presence of
Brendan Sullivan, my lawyer, he suggested that I waive my Fifth
Amendment rights and absolve the President of any responsibility.
     Naturally, we wondered.  Had this officer come on his own?  Had he
been sent?  I still don't know.  A few days before this visit, we had
heard a similar message from H. Ross Perot, the celebrated Texas
entrepreneur.  I knew Perot and admired him.  (In the early 1970s, when
I was thinking of leaving the Marines to join the corporate world, Perot
had talked me out of it.  And in 1981, he had helped us during the
kidnapping of General James Dozier by the Red Brigades in Italy.)  On
December 11, he came to Williams & Connolly, where he met with Brendan.
"Look," he said, "why doesn't Ollie just end this thing and explain to
the FBI that the President didn't know.  If he goes to jail, I'll take
care of his family.  And I'll be happy to give him a job when he gets
out."
     That's just like Ross, I thought when I heard about his offer.  He
thinks money can buy everything.
     Six days later, Perot was back.  This time he met with Brendan and
me together, but the message was the same: I should forfeit my Fifth
Amendment rights and make a statement that "cleared" the President.
     I find it hard to believe that Ross Perot was acting on his own.
     But if anyone sent him, they left no fingerprints.  It's also
possible that these three approaches were part of a pattern that began
even earlier, with President Reagan himself.  A few hours after the
November 25 press conference, a White House operator tracked me down in
a suburban Virginia hotel, where I had gone to avoid the press.  The
President wanted to talk to me about the firing.  During our brief
conversation, he called me a "national hero," a phrase he repeated to
Time magazine the next day.  He used it again on March 25, 1988, a year
and a half after I was fired, and nine days after I was indicted: "I
still think Ollie North is a hero," he said.
     I knew what he meant by those words, and I was grateful for his
appreciation.  President Reagan was well aware that in addition to my
work on the Iran initiative and on behalf of the contras, I had also
been involved in a variety of antiterrorist activities.  On a couple of
those occasions he had even sent me letters of commendation.  That's why
I was so surprised to read the account of that phone call which appeared
years later in Reagan's memoirs.  When he referred to me as a national
hero, the former President wrote, "I was thinking about his service in
Vietnam."
     What?!
     I found that very hard to believe.  For one thing, during my tenure
at the NSC I don't believe that anyone at the White House was even aware
of my Vietnam war record.  For another, I don't believe the President
had ever seen me in uniform until the hearings began, which means he had
no idea that there were medals on my chest or what they were for.
Moreover, it wasn't until well after I was fired that my military record
was requested by the White House and delivered to Don Regan's office.
     The day after the firing, the President was interviewed by Hugh
Sidey of Time magazine.  "I have to say that there is a bitter bile in
my throat these days," he said.  "I've never seen the sharks circling
like they are now with blood in the water."  But despite his bleak mood,
President Reagan went out of his way to praise me.  "I do not feel
betrayed," he said.  "Lieutenant Colonel North was involved in all our
operations: the Achille Laxro, Libya.  He has a fine record.  He is a
national hero."
     That made it clear, I think, that the President was not referring
to my war record when he called me a hero.  When I read his memoirs, I
was sorry to see his transparent attempt to rewrite history.  It also
made me wonder about something else he had said during that phone call.
     That other remark was a lot more ambiguous, and in the five years
that have passed since that night I have turned it over in my mind more
than once.  When President Reagan came on the line, I expressed my
regret for what had taken place, and the fact that the Iran initiative
had blown up in our faces.  "I certainly hope this doesn't hurt your
presidency," I told him.  "I can only tell you that I did my best to
serve you and our country.  I never wanted anything like this to
happen."
     "Ollie," said the President, "you have to understand, I just didn't
know."
     In the heat of the moment I took him literally.  Today, looking
back, I wonder why he phrased it quite that way, and whether he was
implying more than I realized at the time.  There were other ways he
could have said it.  He could have said, "Ollie, why didn't you tell me
about the diversion?"  Or "Ollie, believe me, I didn't know what was
going on."
     Instead, it was "You have to understand, I just didn't know."  I
now wonder whether he was alone when he made that call.  Was Don Regan
standing beside him?  Or Nancy?  Maybe what the President was really
trying to tell me was: Look, Ollie, you and I know better, but the line
we're putting out is that I didn't know, so please go along with it.
     It's possible, of course, that President Reagan meant exactly what
he said.  On the other hand, he was almost always scripted, and he did
tend to rely on those famous file cards.  I don't have to stretch very
hard to imagine Donald Regan giving careful thought to the language the
boss should use.
     Many of my friends and supporters believe that Ronald Reagan
betrayed me.  "You did everything you could for him," they say.  "You
knocked yourself out carrying out his policies, and you were wounded, he
abandoned you on the battlefield.  Don't you feel betrayed?"
     Sometimes I do.  But I'm like a yo-yo on the subject of Ronald
Reagan.  In terms of the difference he made in the world, I'm glad he
was President for eight years.  And yet I can't ignore the fact.  that
he could have ended years of suffering for me and my family either by
granting a presidential pardon or by shutting down the office of the
special prosecutor before leaving office.
     Is that betrayal?  Well, it sure as hell wasn't supportive.  In
November 1986, responding to pressure from both sides of the aisle in
Congress, President Reagan called for the appointment of special
prosecutor.  This allowed the actions that I and others had taken to
support the President's policy to be treated as criminal.  Meanwhile, he
kept changing his story.  At first, he told his own Tower Commission
that he hadn't even known that the NSC staff was helping the contras.
Not surprisingly, almost nobody believed him.  Later, on May 15, 1987,
he was considerably more candid when he addressed a group of
broadcasters and newspaper editors.  "As a matter of fact," he told
them, "I was very definitely involved in the decisions about support to
the freedom fighters.  It was my idea to begin with."
     Chapter 2
     The Secret Within a Secret
     The "diversion" did not originate with me.  Frankly, I wish it had,
because I'd love to take the credit.  But it wasn't my idea.
     The notion of using Iranian money to support the Nicaraguan
resistance first came up during a January 1986 meeting in London with
Manucher Ghorbanifar and Amiram Nir, the adviser on counterterrorism to
Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel.  Ghorbanifar, an expatriate
Iranian, was a businessman and commodity trader who was based in Paris.
During most of the Iran initiative, he was our only contact with
government officials in Tehran.  Gorba was a dark-eyed and hefty man who
obviously enjoyed most of life's pleasures.  In addition to being a
gregarious, fast-talking self-promoter, he was also a world class
bullshooter, wheeler-dealer, and manipulator.
     We were meeting to discuss an upcoming shipment of TOW missiles to
Iran.  Occasionally, these talks were held in Ghorbanifar's suite at the
Churchill Hotel-a luxurious setting with thick Persian carpets on the
floor and tapestries and paintings on the wall.  At other times, we met
at the Penta Hotel at Heathrow Airport.  During a break in one of the
discussions, Gorba stood up and motioned for me to follow him into the
bathroom.  He must have suspected that these talks were being recorded
(which they were), because he ran the water in both the sink and the
bath to muffle the sound of our voices.  "Ollie," he said softly, as if
he were my oldest an< closest friend in the world, "if we can make this
deal work, there's a million dollars in it for you."
     I had never been offered a bribe before, but I wasn't surprised by
his offer.  Everybody knew that Ghorbanifar operated in societie where
bksheesh was common.
     "That's out of the question," I snapped.  "Don't bring it up again
or the whole thing is over."
     But Gorba was a master salesman.  If you didn't bite at his first
proposal, he always had another one ready.
     "Never mind," he said.  "I understand.  I know what you've been
doing in your spare time.  Maybe we can make some money available to
your friends in Nicaragua."
     Hmm, I thought, now you're talking.  It was clear to me that the
Israelis, with whom he was working at the time, kept Gorba generally
well informed.  He obviously knew, from them or some other connection,
that I was involved in helping the Nicaraguan resistance.  Also that
Congress had cut off their support from the CIA, the contra were
receiving funds from private sources, including foreign governments and
several American philanthropists.
     When I returned to Washington, I went to see John Poindexter in his
office.  "Admiral," I said, "I think we've found a way to support the
Nicaraguan resistance."  When I told him what Gorba had suggested,
Poindexter agreed with me that this was a perfect way to have two of the
President's policies work together.  That evening, the admiral called me
on the secure line and told me to "proceed along the line of our
discussion."  And I did.
     Because the "diversion" became the central focus of the
Iran-contra; affair, I want to explain exactly what it was-and wasn't.
     I use quotation marks around "diversion" because that word usually
suggests something shifty, shady, or devious-which was one rea son why
the "diversion" quickly became the symbol of the entire Iran contra
episode.  It was inflammatory.  It implied something illegal or immoral.
It suggested that money was stolen.  In an enormously complicated story,
it was relatively easy to understand.  And perhaps most important, it
provided the crucial link between separate initiatives Iran and the
contras-which had little else in common.  For all its hostility to the
administration, Congress was surprisingly willing to accept the idea put
forward by the White House that the "diversion" was really the key
issue.  The press and the public accepted it, too.  But from my
perspective, the transfer of funds from one project to another was not
the central point.  It was more like gift wrapping that fit around two
separate packages: it tied everything up nicely, and made the whole
parcel seem more alluring.  But it wasn't nearly as significant as what
was actually inside.
     Despite everything that's been said or implied, the "diversion" was
not illegal.  You could argue that it was a bad idea-that much is
certainly debatable-but despite all the allegations, the transfer of
funds did not violate any laws.  After five years and tens of millions
of dollars spent on investigations, prosecutions, trials, and tribunals,
no one involved in Iran-contra was ever tried for "diverting" anything.
Now, that the United States government had sold arms directly to Iran,
and someone in our government had decided on his own to take the money
from those arms sales and send some of it to the contras instead of
returning it to the Treasury, that would have constituted a diversion.
But that's not what happened here.  Our government had no direct
communication with the Iranian government, and the Israelis didn't,
either.  The Israelis relied on third-party intermediaries to deal with
Iran, and we roved by American government officials who understood the
need for middlemen, and who recognized that once the U.S. government had
been paid, any remaining money the middlemen received belonged to them.
In January 1986, President Reagan even signed a secret "Finding" that
not only authorized the Iran initiative, but specifically noted this
reliance on third parties in carrying out the transactions.
American-made weapons reached Iran in two ways: from Israeli stockpiles,
which we eventually replenished, and from U.S. military warehouses.  In
both cases, the weapons and the money moved through various
private-sector American, Israeli, and Iranian intermediaries, including
Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, Yakov Nimrodi, Al Schwimmer, and, of
course, Ghorbanifar.  These men purchased arms from the governments of
Israel and the United States, and then, with the approval of those
governments, sold them to the Iranians.  Like all brokers, they were in
this to make a profit.  And part of that profit was to be sent to the
contras to support their struggle against the Sandinistas.
     That was the so-called diversion.  To the extent that money was
"diverted," it was diverted from the pockets of Ghorbanifar and the
other middlemen.
     They could certainly afford it.  According to our intelligence
reports, Gorba, and possibly others, were making tremendous profits on
these deals.  But not at the expense of the U.S. government.  The
Department of Defense established its own price for every item, and
received full payment in advance.  The fee for the weapons was up
considerably by the intermediaries who bought them, but that's another
story.
     Our government sells its property all the time.  Take used
computers, for example.  A computer dealer buys a used machine at a
government auction and pays the government's asking price of say, ten
thousand dollars.  A month later he sells that computer to a small
business for thirteen thousand dollars.  Does that mean there was a
diversion?  Does the dealer now owe the government three thousand
dollars?  Of course not.  That's his profit, and he can do anything he
likes with it.
     Admittedly, a missile is very different from a computer.  But the
financial principle is the same.
     I have already mentioned that Ghorbanifar did not exactly have the
endorsement of the Better Business Bureau.  Some accounts of Iran-contra
have suggested that Bud McFarlane was the only one who could really see
through him, and that the rest of us were naive.  Baloney.  With the
exception of Michael Ledeen, a consultant to the NSC, nobody trusted
Gorba.  Even the Israelis, who brought him to us in the first place,
didn't trust him completely.  As Ami Nir once told me, Gorba's loyalty
had a price that had to be paid.  For a long time, he was our only
conduit to the Iranian government.  But we also knew that he had failed
three CIA polygraph exams, where he had reportedly dissembled about
everything except his name and nationality.
     Later, during the congressional hearings, the question came up
repeatedly: how could we work with somebody like that?  The answer was
simple: until we could find somebody better, Gorba was our only option.
Right from the start we looked for a more dependable go-between.  And
when we finally found one-the so-called second channel-Gorba was
history.
     But he did get us started, and with Gorba's help we managed to get
two hostages out of Beirut.  Ghorbanifar may have been corrupt, but he
didn't pretend to be anything other than what he was: a wealthy merchant
who was trying to make a great deal of money.  And it's not as if there
were other candidates with good contacts in Iran who were lining up for
the job.  It would have been wonderful if Mother Teresa had volunteered
to approach the Iranians on our behalf, but she wasn't available.
     When I first became involved in the Iran initiative, I knew next to
nothing about the specialized world of arms dealers.  But I now
understand that by the standards of his profession, Ghorbanifar was
fairly typical.  I assume that's what General Dick Secord had in mind
when he recalled, during the hearings, that McFarlane had once called
Ghorbanifar one of the most despicable characters he had ever met.  "I
found that kind of an interesting comment," Secord said, "because he was
far from the most despicable character we ever met."  Whatever his
faults, and they were legion, nobody ever said Ghorbanifar was a fool.
He couldn't have missed the fact that we didn't trust him, and that we
were eager to replace him as soon as we could find someone else with
equally good access.  Although Gorba was the first to suggest the
"diversion," I doubt that it was his own idea.  Many in our intelligence
agencies believed that Gorba was in the pocket of the Israelis.  That
doesn't necessarily mean he was exclusively theirs; it could be that he
used them, just as they used him.  But it was probably no coincidence
that the Israelis had recently come up with their own "diversion" plan,
which was very similar to what Ghorbanifar suggested.
     Shortly after this whole thing had landed in my lap, the Israelis
contacted me about having our government replenish their initial
shipment to Iran of five hundred TOW missiles during the summer of 1985.
As they understood it, McFarlane had approved their shipment and
promised we would replace the missiles quickly, and at no charge.  But
Bud remembered it differently.  He claimed he had told the Israelis that
these missiles would be replaced in the course of their normal arms
purchases.  The Israelis, including Prime Minister Peres and Defense
Minister Yitzhak Rabin, insisted they would never have agreed to that.
     In the long, ongoing war between Iran and Iraq, with a million or
more soldiers on each side, five hundred TOWs didn't amount to much more
than a fart in a hurricane.  But to Israel, surrounded by enemies and
with limited war reserves, even the temporary loss of these missiles had
serious implications for her national security.
     Early in 1986, Amiram Nir arrived in Washington to keep the
initiative moving, and to ensure that Israel would receive its
replacement missiles as soon as possible.  One option was to have the
Israelis walk into the Pentagon and buy five hundred TOWs, but there was
no way to do that discreetly.  Then Nir came up with an intriguing
possibility-in essence, the same plan that Ghorberent purpose.  For the
February shipment to Iran, the Israeli arms dealers would charge the
Iranians a high-enough price to cover not only the cost of this shipment
of TOWs to be sent to Iran, but also to pay the U.S. government for the
cost of five hundred additional TOWs to replenish the Israelis for the
shipments they had sent to Iran in the summer of 1985.
     Nir's plan, then, was the antecedent of Ghorbanifar's.  Assuming
the idea originated with the Israelis, Gorba's version was merely a
safe, arm's-length way of introducing a more attractive variation.
Gorba, of course, had his own reason to offer us an incentive: if we
stopped using him, he wouldn't make any money.
     To this day I don't know exactly how our contacts with Iran began,
because I wasn't involved at the very beginning.  But by all accounts it
started with the Israelis.  Later, some members of the congressional
committees would attempt to gloss over the Israeli role, while others,
especially in the executive branch, tried to exaggerate it, or even to
blame the whole thing on Israel.  Both interpretations are ridiculous.
     From everything I know, the Iran initiative began when David
Kimche, the director general of Israel's foreign ministry, approached
Bud McFarlane in mid-1985.  Like us, the Israelis had enjoyed good
relations with Iran before the Ayatollah came to power, and they were
eager to resume contact with the Iranians with a view TOWard influencing
the now-hostile revolutionary government.  The Israelis also cared
deeply about the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War.  Although both Iran and
Iraq were now sworn enemies of Israel, the Israelis recognized that Iraq
was a far more dangerous threat-not only to Israel, but to the entire
Middle East.  Iran, by contrast, was less harmful than its rhetoric
implied.  For all the Ayatollah's anti-Israel talk, Iran was not part of
the "Arab world" and had no recent tradition of malice TOWard the
Israelis.  Iraq, however, was another story.  Saddam Hussein had more
than once sent troops to join the Arab armies allied against Israel, and
the Israelis took the Iraqi threat very seriously.  In 1981 Israeli
planes bombed an Iraqi facility that was involved in manufacturing
nuclear weapons.  At the time, virtually the entire Western world
condemned the Israeli raid-at least publicly.
     The Israelis had another motive in moving closer to Iran: they were
eager to free some thirty thousand Jews who had been unable to escape
from Iran when the Ayatollah came to power, and whose lives were now
endangered by the militant Islamic regime.  Although the Jews of Iran
were not locked up and under guard like our hostages in Lebanon, they
were all under the strict control of the Ministry of Internal Security,
and their passports included a seal that prohibited them from traveling
to "occupied Palestine."  Given the level of violence against
non-Islamic groups in Iran (where thousands of Baha'i adherents were
imprisoned, and several hundred had been executed), the prospects for
the Jews of Iran were not good.  Finally, Israel was also interested in
rescuing two Israeli soldiers being held in Lebanon by Shi'ite
terrorists who had pledged their allegiance to the Ayatollah.
     In the summer of 1985, when Kimche came to Washington, he
apparently told McFarlane that the Israelis had made contact with
Iranian officials whom the Israelis believed to be moderate.  Kimche
suggested that if the United States wanted to join Israel in developing
these contacts, this might result in the release of our hostages in
Beirut.  But he also warned McFarlane that these particular Iranian
officials would sooner or later ask for arms, which would give them
credibility with both their own military and the revolutionary guards.
     McFarlane signed on and discussed the Israeli overture with the
President.  Exactly how President Reagan responded is not clear, and
McFarlane himself has given differing accounts of their meeting at
Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the President was recovering from
surgery.  The Israelis told me later that they had asked for and
received specific assurances that the President had authorized
replacements for the missiles they would be sending to Iran.  According
to McFarlane the President had indeed given his approval, although Bud's
version differed as to exactly how the replenishment would occur.
     Nothing would surprise me more than if Bud McFarlane had moved
forward on this initiative without the explicit approval of President
Reagan.  But despite everything that's been said, I find it
inconceivable that Bud McFarlane, who was educated at the U.S. Naval
Academy, would ever act without the President's permission.  Yes, you
take initiative, but you always check with your superiors.  You'd have
to be an idiot not to.  And whatever our flaws, none of us involved in
this were idiots.
     My own operational involvement began three months later, when on
the afternoon of November 17, 1985, the phone rang in my office.  The
caller was General Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's defense minister and the
military genius behind his country's dramatic victory in the 1967 Six
Day War.  I had never met him, and I wondered why he wanted to speak to
me.
     Rabin got right to the point.  "We have a problem," he said, "an
McFarlane said you could help."  He then started to outline the detail
of an Israeli shipment of American-made TOW missiles to Iran which had
been refused landing rights at the European airfield, where it was
supposed to be transferred to another plane.  He asked me how soon I
could be in New York.
     Rabin's call had come out of the blue, and we were talking on an
open line, and he was a little too explicit for my comfort.  Before I
agreed to anything I needed to check with McFarlane.
     "We can't talk about this on this phone," I told Rabin.  "Give me a
few minutes and I'll call you back."  I knew the Israelis were shipping
weapons to Iran, and that these shipments had led to the freeing of the
Revz~ Benjamin Weir, one of the American hostages in Beirut.  I also
knew that at that point, our own government had no operational
involvement in this whole process other than to recover any of our
hostages who might be released.  Until now, my own role had been to
monitor these transactions, and at McFarlane's instructions I had
initiated a major intelligence collection operation so that we could
carefully track what was g help, and I wasn't about to provide any
without McFarlane's explicit approval.  Bud was in Geneva for the
President's first summit with Gorbachev, and just as I reached for the
phone to track him down, a call came in on my secure line.  It was
McFarlane, who said, "You're about to hear from the Israeli defense
minister."
     "I just did," I said.  "What's going on?"
     "Did he tell you?"
     "He tried, but we were talking on an open line."
     "Listen, the Israelis are trying to ship some TOW missiles to Iran.
The whole operation is being handled by a couple of private Israeli
citizens.  They've run into some logistical problems.  Get back to Rabin
and take care of it.  Just fix it.  Go up to New York and see Rabin."
     Over the next few days, McFarlane and I had several more
conversations about this new arrangement.  He gave me the go-ahead for
direct U.S. involvement, and assured me that the President had approved
it.
     This marked a major change in the U.S. government's role in the
arms sales to Iran.  When McFarlane first told me that the Israelis were
selling arms to the Iranians with the tacit approval of our government,
he had instructed me simply to monitor these transactions-to watch and
to listen.  Until now, it had been a hands-off operation on our side.
But we had watched carefully as the Israelis shipped 504 TOW antitank
missiles to Iran in 1985, which was followed by the release of the
Presbyterian missionary, Benjamin Weir, after well over a year in
captivity.
     As soon as Weir arrived in the U.S., McFarlane and Casey had sent
me in a CIA plane to a military airfield in Virginia to deliver a
personal letter from President Reagan along with a request that he
cooperate with us in a debriefing.  It was not a pleasant experience.
Weir was openly hostile to the United States and to Israel, and despite
everything he had gone through, including an entire year of solitary
confinement, he clearly sympathized with his captors.  Banging on the
table, he let me know that he emphatically refused to provide us with
any information that might result in the use of military force to rescue
his fellow hostages.  He showed no hostility toward the hostage-takers;
all his anger was directed at us.
     While I was disappointed by his attitude, I wasn't altogether
surprised.  Weir had been through hell.  He was chained up and abused
for eighteen months, and it must have seemed to him that we hadn't done
anything to help.  But this wasn't a case of the much-discussed
Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages come to identify with their captors.
Weir had lived in Lebanon for thirty-one years, and he had apparently
held these views well before he was taken.  But he was so hostile and
uncooperative after his release that some of those who had tried to
debrief him started referring to him as the Reverend Weird.
     By the time of Weir's release it was fairly clear to us that the
American hostages weren't the only point of interest in the Israeli arms
shipments to Iran.  About a month before Rabin called me, I had come
across a hint that these transactions had another dimension.  In the
fall of 1985, the intelligence I had been told to collect produced a
report from CIA and FAA channels that a chartered transport aircraft had
run into unusual problems over Turkey.  We learned later that this
flight had been operated by a private network in Israel, that it had
carried arms to Tehran, and that arrangements had been made to allow the
plane to overfly Turkey on its way back to Israel.  But apparently an
air traffic controller in Iran had dropped the ball, and neglected to
convey the message to his counterpart in Turkey.  The Turkish air
controller spotted the unregistered plane on his radar and immediately
asked it for identification.  When the pilot responded with his
prearranged cover story, the Turks, being out of the loop, sent up
interceptors to deal with a possible intruder.  The pilot of the charter
then took evasive measures and eventually declared a midair emergency
over the Mediterranean.  He was instructed to land in Tel Aviv,
whereupon the Israelis rolled the plane into a hangar, closed the doors,
and declared that the entire incident had never happened.
     Our intelligence services had begun looking into it until McFarlane
told me to have the investigation called off because the Israelis had
things under control.  We learned later that this chartered plane had
not returned to Israel empty.  Inside were sixty Iranian Jews.  These
exchanges had apparently been going on ever since the fall of the Shah:
Israel was redeeming captives by sending arms.  With this background and
little else, I flew to New York to meet with Rabin at the
Waldorf-Astoria.  I had met a number of prominent people since coming to
the National Security Council, but I was genuinely excited to be meeting
Rabin.  Like most infantry officers, I had read about him and studied
his tactics.  In American military circles, Yitzhak Rabin is considered
one of the great generals of all time.  When he planned and executed
Israel's bold air/armor/airborne strike against Egypt in 1967, Rabin had
actually saved the life of his country.  How many military men could say
that?
     Although he had a reputation for being cold and aloof, Rabin turned
out to be far more personable and engaging than I expected.  I've always
considered a subordinate's perspective to be a pretty good measure of
the man, and Rabin's small staff clearly revered him.  He was low-keyed
and direct with them, rather than arrogant.  I could see that this was a
man who had led other men in dangerous circumstances, and had earned
their respect.
     I spent about an hour with Rabin, who explained that Israel had run
into major problems in trying to ship TOW missiles to Tehran.  Because
of the incident over Turkey a few months earlier, the Israelis had
concluded that direct flights were too dangerous.  Instead, they had
arranged to move the shipment through several other intermediate points,
disguised and manifested as oil drilling equipment.  But at the last
minute they had run into problems with landing rights and other
clearances.
     "Can you find us an acceptable airline that can move this stuff?"
Rabin asked.
     "I don't know," I replied.  "Why don't you send it by sea?"
     "Too slow," he said.  "This is all about credibility.  We've got to
get it there fast."
     "It sounds like an operational nightmaets sitting around."
     "Don't worry," said Rabin.  "Our people will take care of the
logistics.  We just need an airline."
     When I returned to Washington, I called McFarlane on the secure
phone patch to Geneva, and suggested that we enlist General Dick Secord
to help straighten out this mess.  I picked Secord for several reasons.
First, I knew that he could get the job done.  Second, he was especially
well connected in the places in Europe the Israelis wanted to use as
waypoints for Iran because Dick was using the same locations as points
of departure for supplies and arms being shipped to the contras.  Third,
he was an expert on fixing aviation problems.  Finally, he had spent a
good deal of time in Iran.  In a perfect world, I would have chosen
somebody else.  Although Secord was an excellent candidate, he was
already absorbed in another covert operation-helping the contras-and his
involvement in a second clandestine activity violated a cardinal rule of
covert operations.  I mentioned my concern to McFarlane, and later to
Poindexter, but none of us could think of anyone who was better suited
for the job.  The message was clear: just take care of it, Ollie.  So I
did.  I called Dick, and although he was, as he put it, up to his ass in
alligators, he agreed to meet with the Israelis to see what could be
done.  I also called Dewey Clarridge, who was then the CIA division
chief for Europe, to ask if he could help the Israelis get landing
rights in various places, and if he could also recommend an airline they
could charter.  Clarridge checked with his staff of experts, who
suggested a CIA proprietary airline.  I passed that information on to
Dick, who arranged for one of the proprietary's planes to carry what was
supposed to be the first of several shipments to Tehran.  Shortly after
arriving at the European pick-up point chosen by the Israelis, Dick
concluded that the headaches, chaos, and visibility of trying to ship
through this airport just weren't worth it.  He promptly flew to Israel
to arrange for shipments directly out of Tel Aviv.
     But even so, things went from bad to worse.  Only eighteen missiles
were able to fit on that first plane, and when they finally arrived, the
Iranians were furious.  Somebody presumably Ghorbanifar-had assured the
Iranians that these missiles were capable of shooting down high-flying
Soviet reconnaissance planes and Iraqi bombers.  But the HTOW is a
low-altitude air defense system.  Moreover, some of the missiles still
carried Israeli markings, which infuriated the Iranians.  Because their
feelings ran so high, we would later do everything possible to make it
seem as if the United States had absolutely no involvement in this
particular transaction.
     The Iran initiative was never a screaming success, but after this
unbelievably screwed-up operation, things could only improve.  And they
did at least for a while.
     Initially, I was brought in just to handle the logistics; the
policy decisions had already been made.  But while I had nothing to do
with our original decision to get involved, I eventually got to the
point where I had considerable input into our policy.  I'm certainly
willing to accept responsibility for my part in the operation, and there
is no doubt that it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
     I believe it made sense to open a dialogue with Iran.  It also made
sense to search for pragmatists or moderates in their government.  And
despite everything, I still believe there are such people in Tehran.
This doesn't mean they're about to salute the American flag, but they
might at least be less inclined to burn it.  Moreover, the Israelis kept
assuring us that some officials in Tehran had a relatively pro-Western
perspective.
     At the time, it seemed that selling a small amount of arms to Iran
was worth the risk to try to make it all work.  But to get involved in a
quid pro quo arrangement of arms for hostages?  This placed all of us in
a moral quandary.  On the one hand, human life is sacrosanct.  On the
other, making what people would inevitably see as concessions to
terrorists was a terrible idea especially since it violated our
prohibition on arms sales to Iran.  The decision to proceed was made
well above my level, but I became a willing participant.
     I could have resigned in protest.  But I didn't do that, either,
despite the fact that I had once questioned another man for a similar
decision.
     During 1980-81, when I spent a year at the Naval War College in
Newport, Rhode Island, each of the Joint Chiefs came up to give an
address.  General Robert H. Barrow was the commandant of the Marine
Corps, and during his presentation, he said he had been opposed to
Desert One, President Carter's ill-fated mission to rescue our embassy
people who were held hostage in Tehran toward the end of his presidency.
     Later that evening, at a private reception for the Marines, I went
up to him and asked, "General, if you were that strongly opposed to the
plan, why didn't you resign?"  He replied: "I thought that by staying I
could prevent other mistakes of that type."
     In 1985, I found myself in a similar position, working to carry out
a policy about which I had serious doubts.  I certainly could have
resigned, but I didn't.  And while there have been days since then when
I thought I should have, I also remember how it felt to sit and talk
with the men whose freedom we bought, and who otherwise might still be
hostages in Lebanon.
     It was one thing to monitor the Israeli arms sales to Iran, but
when McFarlane called me and said, "Fix it," I could have challenged him
and said, "Wait a minute, what are we really talking about here?  Does
this make any sense?  Doesn't direct American involvement in this
operation violate two of our basic principles?"  But I already knew the
answer, which is why I didn't ask the question.  I was intimately
familiar with the administration's tough policies regarding terrorists
and the governments that supported them.  I had personally written a
number of the President's statements on the subject.  Later, as the Iran
initiative progressed, I had growing doubts as to whether it was a good
idea.  But I did nothing to bring it to a halt.
     Although General Barrow did not resign over the decision to proceed
with Desert One, another member of the Carter Administration did.  There
was a lot I didn't like about the policies of Cyru always respect him
for acting on his convictions.  When Vance objected to what Carter and
Zbigniew Brzezinski were planning, he resigned with great dignity,
citing personal reasons.  Only later was it revealed that he had quit in
opposition and in protest, and by then it was too late for the President
he had served to suffer any damage from the resignation.  For me, the
most difficult aspect of the endeavor was accepting that we had
established a price for a human life; five hundred TOW missiles.  To
this day, I find this part of our Iran initiative to be the most
troubling.
     But there were other problems as well.  We did not adequately
consider the consequences of a leak.  Any premature disclosure of our
dealings with Iran might not only harm the hostages, but would also
damage American prestige abroad and the President's political
effectiveness at home.  When it did leak, it certainly did the latter.
     And while the Iran initiative could have worked-and did work to
some extent there was also the danger that dealing with the kidnappers,
even through intermediaries, would merely whet their appetites and
encourage them to take more hostages.  Another problem was the hypocrisy
of providing arms to Iran while we prohibited other nations from doing
the same.  There may have been good reasons for us to sell arms to Iran,
reasons that were not necessarily related to the hostages, but it wasn't
right for us to be doing so while we were telling the rest of the world
not to.
     Other countries, including France, Germany, and Italy, were willing
to sell arms to both sides in the conflict, and to do so secretly, while
denying it to the world.  The difference was that they weren't screaming
at everyone else not to do it.
     Despite all these negatives, for me the moral issue here was still
a very tough call.  It's easy to condemn the trading of arms for
hostages, but the State Department had achieved absolutely no success In
trying to free our hostages through diplomatic channels.  Given the
alternatives, I'm not sure it was morally wrong to do everything in our
power to free innocent Americans who were literally chained to the wall
in Beirut.  Though I wasn't there when McFarlane and President Reagan
first discussed the Israeli proposal to have us join their Iran
initiative, Bud should have said something like this: "The Israelis are
selling arms to the Iranians in order to build an alliance with any
moderates they can find, and because they see Iraq as a threat, and
because they'll do whatever they have to to rescue their own people.
They're inviting us to get involved.  This could yield some big
benefits, both in terms of the Soviet threat and our hostages in Beirut,
but it could also backfire.  I'm inclined to go along with it, but it's
dangerous, and we must be aware of the risks."
     I don't know exactly what McFarlane told the President.  I do know
that he told me that the President had approved our involvement.  "Fix
it," McFarlane had said, and that's all I needed to hear.  It was the
kind of challenge I thrived on, and I jumped right in.  I can do it, I
thought.  I'm a Marine.  This whole deal is screwed up, but I can take
care of it.  I could have followed the example of Cyrus Vance.  When I
found myself engaged in a process that so thoroughly compromised the
antiterrorist policies I had helped to put in place, I could have quit.
     Instead, I jumped in with both feet.  Which is why, in the spring
of 1986, I found myself on an airplane with Bud McFarlane, heading
toward Tehran.
     Chapter 3
     Another World
     I had been on covert missions before, but this one was truly
dangerous.  As we started our descent into Tehran, I prayed that our
disguised Israeli 707 wouldn't be shot down by some trigger-happy pilot
who wouldn't know what to make of this unscheduled aircraft without a
flight plan, and might conceivably take us for an unmarked Iraqi bomber.
Iran, after all, was a country at war.
     It was May 25, 1986, a Sunday morning, and several high officials
were expecting us.  Or so we hoped.  But when we penetrated Iranian
airspace, a pair of aging F-4s flew up to check us out.
     This mission was so secret that Casey had urged us not to tell our
wives where we were going.  Bob Earl in my office had a detailed
itinerary, and he was in constant contact with us on the trip.  Before I
left, I told Betsy that in an emergency she should call Bob, whom we had
known for years.  Betsy wanted to know when I would be back, because our
house was on the market and she would need my signature on a sales
contract.  I tried to reassure her that I wouldn't be gone too long and
added a silent prayer that this would be true.  President Reagan had
authorized our trip, and so had Admiral Poindexter.  There were others
in our government who knew we were going, although it's been fascinating
to see how many of them seem to have forgotten all about it.
     Even assuming we landed safely, there were still reasons to worry.
Before I left Washington, William Casey had summoned me to his office in
the Old Executive Office Building, where he calmly handed me a strip of
six white, triangular pills sealed in a plastic wrapper.  "Take these
with you," he said.  "You may need them if things get bad."
     It was right out of a spy novel.  But for Casey, I realized, this
was almost routine.  He must have provided this same morbid going-away
gift to dozens of men and women, not only at the CIA, but decades
earlier, too.  During World War II, Casey had been in charge of secret
intelligence operations for the Allied forces in Europe, and I had no
doubt that some of Casey's capsules had been used by brave agents in
Nazi Germany and Occupied France.
     The head of our little delegation was Bud McFarlane, my former
boss, and a man for whom I had held considerable respect and affection.
Although McFarlane had resigned as the President's national security
adviser almost six months earlier, he was flying to Tehran as Ronald
Reagan's personal envoy.  The other members of the group were George
Cave, a former CIA officer who had been stationed in Tehran before the
Ehomeini revolution, and who spoke fluent Farsi; Howard Teicher, my
colleague on the staff of the National Security Council: Amiram Nir, who
was in charge of counterterrorism for the Israeli government; and a CIA
communicator.  A second communicator remained in Tel Aviv: he would
receive ohere they would be deciphered both at CIA headquarters and in
the White House Situation Room.
     No mission from the land of the Great Satan could expect to be
greeted with flowers by the immigration officials at Medrabad Airport,
which is why we were traveling under phony names and false
passports-courtesy of the CIA, and much to the chagrin of those who
issue the real passports, who were not amused when this particular
detail became known.  McFarlane was Sean Devlin.  George Cave, traveling
as Sam O'Neill, had grown a mustache and changed his hairstyle to avoid
being recognized.  Nir was presented as an American named Miller, while
I was John Clancy.  To complete the fiction, our Israeli Air Force 707
had been repainted with the marking of Air Lingus, the Irish airline.
     It was a long trip.  We couldn't fly directly from Tel Aviv to
Tehran, as this route would have taken us over Jordan, Iraq, or Saudi
Arabian exactly friendly territory for a clandestine flight out of
Israel.  Instead, we took off west over the Mediterranean, then turned
around, flew back over Israel and down to Eilat, and continued south
along the Red Sea before eventually turning back north to Iran.  There
was an anxious moment or two when we overflew the Soviet fleet off the
coast of Ethiopia, but they left us alone.  Even getting to Israel to
begin our mission had been done covertly, and involved several stop
overs and changes along the way.  I had gone earlier, by way of Cyprus,
while my fellow Americans made their way to Frankfurt, where they
boarded a special charter for Tel Aviv.  Don't ask me why, but this
particular aircraft had apparently been used the previous day to haul a
load of chickens.  The plane was filled with chicken feathers, dust, and
Lord knows what else, and my traveling companions arrived in Israel in
well, a foul mood.  Our flight to Tehran was the culmination of several
previous meetings in Europe and elsewhere with both private individuals
and Iranian government officials.  But when we finally landed and walked
into the terminal, nobody was there to greet us.  A bored airport
official showed us into a holding area, which George Cave recognized as
the former VIP Reception Center.  "They used to receive Americans here,"
he whispered.  Whether it was congressional delegations or visiting
firemen from Ohio, he added, Americans had always been welcome.  This
room had once been an ornate hall, with opulent Persian carpets on the
floor, and huge color portraits of the Shah and his family.  Today, that
was hard to imagine.  Except for three or four hard chairs and a couple
of unpainted wooden benches, the room was barren and stark.  It reminded
me of Nicaragua and other revolutionary regimes, where everything of
value has disappeared long ago-either stolen by the government or ripped
off by corrupt officials.  Even the light bulbs were missing.
     It was a scorching day, the white sun so hot you could see the heat
shimmering off the roads and runways.  George and I parked ourselves in
front of the building in the hope that somebody would eventually appear
to claim us.  In the distance, a huge portrait of the Ayatollah glowered
at us.  A couple of young men with rifles walked back and forth, but
they left us alone.  After half an hour of waiting, George persuaded an
immigration official to make a phone call on our behalf.  A few minutes
later, we were assured that somebody was coming to meet us.
     That wait at the airport was a real anticlimax after the long,
tense flight.  I felt especially bad for McFarlane, who was pacing back
and forth like a caged lion.  He clearly saw this as a deliberate snub.
     I wasn't so sure.  From my previous dealings with the Iranians, I
saw this delay as having more to do with incompetence than politics.
Maybe Ghorbanifar had told the Iranians we were coming, and his contacts
knew him well enough to say, "Yeah, sure they are."  Or maybe he hadn't
told them anything, figuring we'd never actually show up.  In any case,
there was nothing to do but wait.
     Medrabad had once been a busy civilian airport, but most of the
action was now on the military side.  We spotted a number of American
F-4 Phantoms, still flying from the days of the Shah.  But many more
deadlined aircraft sat on the ground, including Huey helicopters in
various stages of disrepair-missing engines, doors, and blades.  The
Iranians were cannibalizing half their fleet to keep the other half
flying, and their parking aprons had been turned into parts bins.  An
entire fleet of C- 130 cargo planes lay idle, covered with dust.
     Finally, after about an hour and a half, Ghorbanifar showed up with
an Iranian official whom George and I had met before and whom we called
the Australian.  The Australian had absolutely no government experience
before the revolution, but now he was near the top of the Iranian power
structure.  He was harmless enough, except for his breath-which, as
George put it, could have curled the hide of a rhinoceros.  He certainly
wasn't one of the high-ranking officials we were hoping to meet, but by
then we were glad to see anyone.
     Ghorbanifar, charming as ever, was full of apologies, and he
presented an elaborate excuse as to how he hadn't expected us to arrive
until later.  McFarlane, taciturn and formal, made a little speech about
how we were bringing greetings from the President of the United States,
and how we hoped these talks would be productive, and so on and so
forth.  But he also insisted, quite properly, that we were there to meet
high government officials-the implication being, Listen, we didn't come
all this way to see you, Ghorbanifar.
     Gorba, who speaks perfect English, said, "Don't worry, the
Parliament's in session," as though that made everything all right.  But
he
     was clearly nervous.  He looked like a man who was bluffing and had
just been caught.  Ghorbanifar had assured us that we would be meeting
with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who was
reported by the Israelis and other intelligence services to be a
"moderate."  We also expected to meet President Ali Khamenei and Prime
Minister Mousavi.  A meeting with the Ayatollah himself was apparently
out of the question, which was probably just as well.  According to our
intelligence reports the old man was pretty much out of it, and there
were rumors that he spent much of the day sitting in front ofAustralian
were accompanied by about a dozen young, bearded, and armed
Revolutionary Guards who had arrived in a caravan of some of the oldest
run-down cars I had ever seen.  It looked as if somebody had bought out
a small used-car lot in a bad section of town.
     "Please, out to the cars," somebody said, and we all piled into
this unlikely motorcade for the half-hour drive to the hotel.  It was
quite a scene-men brandishing guns were hanging out the windows, and
most of the cars were belching blue or black smoke from their exhaust
pipes.  This was a country with almost unlimited oil, but apparently
nobody knew how to refine it.
     On the drive into town we could see the crumbling infrastructure of
Tehran, the old bridges and the broken roads.  I looked around for signs
of war damage, as some of the buildings at the airport had clearly been
hit by the Iraqis.  But from what little I saw of the city, its problems
were the result of neglect rather than bombs or missiles.  Nearly
everyone on the street was dressed in black, and I noticed a lot of
bicycles-a common sight in countries at war, where gasoline is rationed.
Nir and I had brought our cameras, and nobody seemed to mind when we
took pictures.  Several of the guards even posed with their guns.
     We drove past what had once been the Shah's giant victory arch,
which was now covered with revolutionary graffiti, and past the
notorious Evin Prison, where Khomeini's prison guards were busily
exceeding the worst abuses of the Shah's secret police.  Finally, we
pulled up to the front entrance of the Tehran Hilton, which was now
     known as the istiglaithe Independence.  An entire outer wall was
riddled with bullet holes, which didn't strike me as a particularly
encouraging sign; it looked like somebody had opened up on it with a
fifty-caliber machine gun.  Some of the windows had been blown out, but
I was surprised to see that the old Hilton sign was still up.  We were
given the entire top floor, where we were something between guests and
captives.  Don't leave the building, we were told, because "we don't
want others to know of your presence, which wouldn't be good for you or
for us."  Everything was phrased as though it were for our benefit; the
team of Rev Guards ensconced in a suite near the elevator was
ostensively there to "protect" us.  From what?  I wondered.  Even if we
were foolish enough to leave the hotel, where did they think we might
go?  Into downtown Tehran to form an American-led counterrevolution?
     These were presumably the finest accommodations available in all of
Iran, but the water pressure was low, the lights would often dim, and
the elevators worked only sporadically.  Every time a new shift of
guards came on, you could hear them trudging up the stairs.
     And yet our hosts did what they could to be hospitable, and it was
clear that they wanted these talks to succeed.  Every day they sent up
baskets of fresh fruit to our rooms.  The fruit itself was dreadful, and
wouldn't even have made it to the shelves in an American market.  But
this seemed to be the best they had to offer.  For meals we were
entirely dependent on room service, which featured a Western-style menu.
You couldn't actually order any of these items, but at least the meals
you couldn't get were in English.  We did, however, end up with some
tasty Iranian dishes.  Some of them practically cried out for a cold
beer, especially in that heat, but under Ehomeini even that was
forbidden.
     At mealtimes, our little delegation would gather in McFarlane's
suite, where we passed notes back and forth because the rooms were
undoubtedly bugged.  Somebody had placed a huge bouquet of flowers in
the middle of the table, and each of us, from time to time, made a point
of speaking directly into it, remarking with a smile on the great beauty
of Tehran, or the outstanding generosity of our hosts.
     When we wanted to talk among ourselves, we stepped out on the
balcony and spoke in hushed tones, looking out at a spectacular view of
the mountains on one side, and the city's smog, dusty skyline on
     the other.  We could also talk in the communications room, where
our satellite system was installed and where we had taken steps to make
eavesdropping more difficult.
     But we did no bugging of our own.  Normally, whenever we met with
the Iranians, I arranged for concealed tape recorders or other
monitoring devices to record our talks.  But not here.  If you were
caught with something like that in Tehran, you could spend the rest of
your life regretting it.
     Shortly after we arrived at the hotel, Nir and I walked down the
hall to see if we could get things moving.  Near the elevator was a room
filled with Rev Guards.  Their guns were stacked in the corner, and
their feet were up on the furniture.  They reminded me of the Iranian
"students" I had seen on television, and I wondered if any of their
older brothers had been involved in the seizure of our embassy in 1979.
These guys weren't friendly, but they weren't threatening, either.
Several spoke English and were very proud of it.  We clearly aroused
their curiosity; most had never been out of the country, and they
obviously didn't get to meet many Americans.  If nothing else, we
represented a diversion from their normal routine-and certainly an
agreeable change from life at the Iraqi front.
     Looking around the room, I noticed that several of the guards were
playing with the matched sets of pistols we had brought along as gifts.
They must have gone through our plane and emptied it.  I also noticed
that they were eating the cake.
     In November 1986, when the world learned of our visit, it was
widely reported that our payload included not only electronic parts for
HAWK missiles, but also a Bible signed by President Reagan and a cake in
the shape of a key-to symbolize our desire to open a new relationship
with Iran.  The report about the Bible was wrong.  I did bring a Bible
to Tehran, but it belonged to me and I always traveled with it, and I
brought it home with me.  Several months later, however, I did present a
different Bible, inscribed by President Reagan, to another group of
Iranians.
     But we did bring a cake.
     Because that cake has become one of the best-known details of the
entire Iran-contra story, let me set the record straight.  It was not in
the shape of a key.  Moreover, it had no real connection with our
mission.  When Ghothe arrangements" for our trip to Tehran, he had asked
Nir to pick up a chocolate cake as a gift for his aging and widowed
mother, who lived in Tehran.  It was a touching story, although on the
flight over, George and I wondered aloud whether Gorba even had a
mother.  But it was true that such delicacies could no longer be found
in the local stores or bakeries.  Tehran had become like so many other
revolutionary capitals, where almost everything other than the bare
necessities was exported for hard currency.  Because the cake was one of
Gorba's easier requests, Nir and I had driven to a kosher bakery in Tel
Aviv, where we bought a large, rectangular chocolate layer cake.  When
we boarded the plane, I carefully laid the cake box on the sink in the
galley.  Several hours into the flight, George and I got up to make some
coffee.  As I opened the cabinet above the sink to look for the cups, I
noticed that someone had stowed the pistols on the same shelf as the
dishes.  Each set of pistols was packed in an elegant, lined
presentation case with a handsome brass key.
     Unfortunately, I had left the cake box uncovered, and when I
reached up to take out the coffee cups, one of the keys fell onto the
cake, making a sizable indentation.  When I saw how deeply the key had
fallen, I carefully rearranged it to conceal the groove, and left it
there, hoping it would look like an intentional decoration.  "Well,
George," I said, "we can always tell Mrs. Ghorbanifar that this is the
key to our hearts."  As it turned out, Ghorbanifar's gift never reached
his mother.  We had arrived in Tehran during Ramadan, when Moslems eat
only after sundown.  Apparently the Ramadan fast does not apply to
hungry Revolutionary Guards who are starved for chocolate cake.
     Our trip to Tehran was a symbolic show of trust, a way of saying to
the Iranians, Okay, despite everything your people did to our embassy
staff in 1979, and despite your anger at us for supporting the Shah,
we're willing to put our bodies on the line to show that we're sincere
about developing a new and better relationship between our two
countries.
     Beyond that, we were there for several other reasons.  One reason
was William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut
     who had been captured more than two years earlier by radical
Lebanese Shi'ites.  When Casey handed me those pills before I left
Washington, he may well have been thinking about Buckley.  I know I was.
Buckley was intimately familiar with CIA operations throughout the
Middle East, and from everything we knew he had been violently tortured
and eventually died in captivity-after his captors had compiled a
four-hundred-page transcript of his interrogation.  From the moment
Buckley had disappeared into the trunk of a white Renault on March 16,
1984, Casey and the entire CIA had gone to enormous lengths to get him
back alive.  Now, by all accounts, he was dead.  But the Agency was
still working to retrieve his body and a copy of his "confession"which
Casey feared had ended up in the hands of the Soviets through their
connections with Palestinian terrorist groups.
     We were also hoping to retrieve the American hostages in Beirut:
Father Martin Jenco, director of Catholic Relief Services in Beirut;
Terry Anderson, a correspondent for the Associated Press; David
Jacobsen, director of the American University Hospital; and Thomas
Sutherland, director of the School of Agriculture of the American
University.  A fifth hostage, Peter Kilburn, the former librarian at the
American University in Beirut, had recently been "bought" by agents of
Muammar al- Qaddafi of Libya, who had murdered Kilburn in retaliation
for the recent American raid on their country.  His death was a graphic
reminder that the hostages could be killed at any time, and it gave
additional urgency to our mission.
     We knew the Iranians had some leverage over the kidnappers in
Beirut, although we didn't know how much, or exactly how that influence
worked.  In any case, we regarded the release of the hostages as an
early goal in a much broader strategic initiative.
     At least that was our intention.
     But it sure didn't work out that way.  While we never wanted our
Iran initiative to degenerate into a straight arms-for-hostages deal,
the truth is that it did.
     President Reagan could never accept this, even after he left
office.  In his memoirs, he again pointed out that we were not dealing
directly with the kidnappers themselves-the Hezballah-but were selling
weapons to the Iranians in return for their intervention in Beirut.
Reagan wrote that he told Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of
Defense Weinberger that it was as if one of his children had been
kidnapped-which is a pretty good indication of just how strongly he
felt.  "I don't believe in ransom," the President recalled telling them,
"because it leads to more kidnapping.  But if I find out that there's
somebody who has access to the kidnapper and can get my child back
without doing anything for the kidnapper, I'd sure do that.  And it
would be perfectly fitting for me to reward that individual if he got my
child back.  That's not paying ransom to kidnappers."   On a literal
level he was right.  But George Shultz had already warned the President
that this was too subtle a distinction, and that our dealings with the
Iranians would invariably be seen as trading arms for hostages.  I was
often critical of George Shultz, but on this point he was certainly
right.
     Throughout our dealings with the Iranians, our position with
respect to the hostages went something like this: "You folks want
American technology and you need our trade - You'd like us to buy your
oil.  You're dying to get your hands on more American arms to help you
in your war against Iraq, where you're getting creamed.  You also know
that the Soviets would like nothing better than to roll in here, which
would be a disaster for both of us.
     "Well, we're willing to talk.  We realize who's in charge here, and
we accept that the Shah is gone forever.  We can move forward-just as
soon as we get over this one hurdle.  We know you have some influence
over the hostage-takers in Beirut, so let's get the hostage problem out
of the way so we can move on to the really big issues."  Even before we
had begun talking directly to the Iranians a few months earlier,
Benjamin Weir had been freed.  By the time we left for Tehran, we expec.
We were wrong about that.  But before the Iran initiative finally
collapsed at the end of 1986, two additional hostages did get out:
Father Martin Jenco and David Jacobsen.
     While the hostages were certainly on our minds, the real reason,
the best reason we had come to Iran had to do with the broader concerns
of American foreign policy.  Today, of course, it sounds positively
old-fashioned to speak of a Soviet threat, but in the spring of 1986
that danger seemed very real-especially in the Persian Gulf.  Iran had
always been vulnerable to a Soviet invasion.  Even before there was a
Soviet Union (or an Iran, for that matter), the Russians had gazed
longingly at Persia.  Iran's warm-water ports, which could be sed
year-round, were enormously appealing to the Russians.  A second
enticement, which became far more important after World War II, was
-huge quantities of oil.  Iran is thought to contain 10 percent of the
world's known oil reserves, plus huge quantities of natural gas.
     These incentives alone might have been enough to tempt the Soviets
to enter a country that was just sitting there on their
twelve-hundred-mile-long southern border, and would have given them
access to the entire Persian Gulf.  But by the mid-1980s there were two
additional factors that made the Soviet threat to Iran even more
menacing.  One was the Iran-Iraq War, which not only weakened Iran but
also strengthened the ties between Iraq and Moscow, its chief supplier.
The other threat to Iran was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  The
Russian bear was now closer than ever, which was why the Iranians were
quietly transferring some of the arms we had sold them to the Afghan
rebels.  In geostrategic terms, Iran was a treasure.  While we no longer
had any influence there now that the Shah was gone, so far, at least,
the Soviets had overtly kept their distance.  But with Russian troops in
Afghanistan and Soviet weapons powering the Iraqi assault on Iran, they
had the place surrounded.
     There was another, more subtle reason that made a relationship to
Iran especially attractive to Casey.  Until the fall of the Shah, Iran
had been one of our key listening posts for monitoring the Soviet space,
missile, and nuclear war-fighting programs.  Casey was deeply concerned
about restoring these lost capabilities, and he saw the Iran initiative
as a possible means of rebuilding this intelligence-gathering link.
     The Soviet threat was why we wanted access to Iran, and why at
least some members of Iran's government were willing to deal with us.
Even before I became operationally involved in this initiative,
President Reagan had quietly approved efforts to create an approachement
with Tehran.  Not everybody in the administration shared the President's
goal, or even knew about it, and a parallel situation prevailed.  Iran
also accepted more than two million Afghani refugees, and provided more
support for the Afghan rebels than any other country in the region
except Pakistan.
     on the Iranian side.  But for all their anti-American feeling, and
it was considerable, most of the Iranian leadership understood that they
had far more to fear from the Soviets than they did from us.  When the
Shah fell in 1979, the one group in Iran that had expected to prosper
was the well-established Tudeh Communist Party.  But instead of being
rewarded for their opposition to the Shah, the Iranian Communists were
butchered.  Under Khomeini, they were reduced to conducting isolated
acts of terrorism that Americans rarely heard about.  We all saw footage
of the American embassy being taken over, and of anti-American
demonstrations in the streets, because that's what the Iranian
government wanted us to see.  They took a special pleasure in
humiliating us.  But they were equally determined to root out the
Communists and fend off the Soviets.
     Would Iran become a second Afghanistan?  There was a time when that
seemed possible, and maybe even likely.  Whether the Soviets tried to
subvert the Islamic revolution for their own purposes or decided to wait
for it to collapse, it would not have been a great surprise to our
intelligence planners if the Russians had come in.  For the potential
spoils of victory in Iran were far, far greater than in landlocked,
resource-poor Afghanistan.
     In the end, however, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan may have
been precisely what saved Iran.  Here was the world's largest military
power getting their butts kicked by a primitive but determined guerrilla
uprising.  The Afghan resistance was fragmented and ill-equipped, but
there's nothing like an invasion to turn the locals against you.  In
February 1989, when the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan and
returned home, the American media reported their retreat just as Moscow
presented it-as the result of Gorbachev's goodwill.  But goodwill had
nothing to do with it.  The Soviets left because of all the coffins
coming home to Mother Russia, and because Gorbachev was desperate to
save the foundering Soviet economy.  He needed economic support from the
West, and he knew he couldn't get it as long as his occupying army
remained in Afghanistan.  This was the Soviets' Vietnam, but without the
protests in the streets and the nightly news reports.  For Gorbachev,
Afghanistan was a disaster.
     It would have been even worse for the Soviets if they had gone into
Iran, with its mountainous terrain and much larger population.  But
that's not to say they wouldn't have tried.
     n early 1986, when we first began talking directly to the Iranians,
it was by no means clear that the Soviets would be forced to leave
Afghanistan.  In retrospect, a lot of things weren't clear to us about
the middle East things we probably should have known.  Incredible as it
seems, we were completely unprepared not only for the collapse of the
Shah but also for the rise of the Ayatollah's theocracy and the spread
of his radical Islamic fundamentalism.
     I'm not one of those who blames Jimmy Carter for every problem he
faced, but the devastation of our intelligence capabilities did take
place on his watch.  True, the process had begun earlier, during the
Ford administration, when the 1975 Senate and House committee hearings
chaired by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis weakened the
Agency's ability to carry out covert activities.  But President Carter
never really understood the need for covert actioerful.  In his zeal to
cut the Agency down to size, he had Stansfield Turner fire hundreds of
experienced intelligence officers.  Incredibly, they were dismissed
through a computerized form letter!
     Morale in the CIA was so low that scores of other experienced
officers resigned.  Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Turner
didn't appreciate the importance of human operatives, and tried to
substitute high technology for experience and common sense.  In the
process, they virtually emasculated the CIA's clandestine abilities.
     Although many of the consequences were not felt until the Reagan
administration, President Carter became the ironic victim of his own
actions.  After our embassy in Tehran was overrun by the Ayatolah's
young militants, we didn't have a single CIA operative on the -scene who
could give us the necessary information we needed to plan a successful
rescue.  Had President Carter been able to end the hostage crisis
earlier, he might have been reelected.
     In the spring of 1991, there were numerous reports of a 1980 deal
between the Republican presidential campaign and certain Iranian
authorities whereby the release of our hostages in Iran would be delayed
until after the election.  I don't believe it, and I have yet to see an
iota of evidence to suggest that anything like this ever happened.  If
it did, why didn't Casey or George Bush, both of whom were alleged to be
engaged in this effort, ever tell me whom to deal with on the Iranian
side?  Surely they would have known of somebody more effective than
Ghorbanifar or the Australian.  Further, no Iranian ever mentioned this
supposed 1980 initiative, or even hinted at it.
     Now it's true that our intelligence agencies don't rely only on
case officers and spies.  They also make use of some truly amazing
technology, some of it available nowhere else in the world.  The people
involved in these efforts used to say that they could detect a Cuban
general coughing in his car outside Managua, or a Soviet pilot breaking
wind forty thousand feet over Syria.  They were exaggerating-but not by
much.  But there are no machines that read the human heart, and no
instruments that measure hope, ambition, or even ideology.  Trying to
compile useful information about another society without agents on the
ground is like a doctor who treats a patient solely by consulting the
charts.  He can learn a lot, but unless he can also ask, "Tell me.  how
do you feel?  Where does it hurt?"-and get real answers-there are limits
on what he can accomplish.  It takes years to train agents and install
them, which is why all through the Reagan years we found ourselves
facing big problems in places that surprised the hell out of us.  Iran.
Panama.  Nicaragua.  Angola.  Mozambique.  Egypt.  Somalia.  Suriname.
Grenada.  Not to mention Cuban agents all over Central America.
     If we'd had sufficient intelligence assets in these countries, they
would have flooded Washington with warnings.  And no matter who was
running the CIA, this information would have been disseminated around
the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, Congress-until
somebody said, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?"
     Instead, we were shocked when the Shah was overthrown and our
embassy was captured.  We were devastated when our Marine barracks were
bombed in Lebanon.  We were dumbfounded when Sadat was gunned down,
although his assassins had been planning to kill him for months.  The
Israelis had learned about the plot, and had issued a warning both to
the Egyptians and to us, but Sadat's people were emotionally incapable
of accepting that information from their former enemy.  And we didn't
have the assets to confirm it independently.
     Our intelligence failure in Iran had another cause, too.  Although
the Shah enjoyed our complete support, he was terrified that the CIA had
a secret plan to replace him, and he hadn't wanted the Agency to track
the activities of the religious opposition.  The CIA believed that if
the Shah caught us looking too closely at his internal adversaries, he
     might conclude that we were actually supporting them.  Meanwhile,
intelligence analysis being done in Washington also underestimated the
religious opposition in Iran, which, in turn, further decreased the
incentive for the CIA to keep a close eye on it.
     **skip**And so by 1985, when it came to taking the political
temperature
     n Iran we were completely in the dark.  It seemed reasonable to
assume, as the Israelis believed, that some members of Iran's government
were, by our standards, more rational than the Ayatollah, more moderate
and pragmatic.  We knew, for example, that certain Iranian officials
were allowed to leave the country to deal with foreign intermediaries.
And on mundane matters, such as international airline schedules, the
Iranians were generally cooperative.  Surely some people n their
government could see that a relationship with the United States, or at
least an open channel of communication, was in their best interest.  But
with nobody reporting to us from Tehran, we didn't know for certain
whether a moderate faction even existed alone who might be part of it.
     We were fairly certain that the Ayatollah's government was not
monolithic, if only because dictators going back to the days of Julius
Ceasear have always tended to promote factions usually to deter their
underlings from uniting in opposition to the boss.  In the case of Iran,
ere were persistent reports that Rafsanjani himself was relatively
moderate.  Surely not everyone in Khomeini's government was as phanatic
as the old man, even if they all had to keep up the pretense.
     Were our expectations valid, or were we the victims of our own
fantasies?  Even today, I can't say for sure.  But I believed then, and
still o, that there were at least some moderates in their government.
Despite what we didn't know, a couple of things were clear.  First,
hadn't been all that long since America and Iran had been friendly.  The
United States had done a lot for the Shah-at least until the end, when
Carter abandoned him-and despite all the hostile rhetoric manating from
the Khomeini regime, there was still a reservoir of goodwill toward
America in some sectors of Iranian society, including e military.  From
defector reports and other intelligence sources, we knew that the
radical changes at the highest levels were not totally effecteds very
old.  And despite what ome of his supporters believed, we were prepared
to go out on a limb
     and assume he was also mortal.  And so the inevitable question
arose: What happens when he dies?  Doesn't it make sense for us to try
to achieve some kind of alliance with pragmatists or moderates in the
government so we'll have some leverage when a new regime takes over?
And if no regime emerges, and the Ayatollah's death is followed by
absolute chaos, wouldn't that be a powerful inducement for the Soviets
to step in?
     And wasn't it shortsighted of us to let past hostilities between
our two countries be the sole determining factor in whether we would
have anything to do with Iran?  Germany and Japan had inflicted a
thousand times more damage on us than the Iranians ever dreamed of, and
they became our allies.  By early 1986 we had begun warming up to the
Soviets, and we were even kissing the Chinese on the cheek.  We couldn't
blame everybody in the Iranian government for what had happened six
years earlier at the embassy.  An approach to Iran was certainly
politically risky, but didn't we have a lot to gain by at least making
an effort?
     Our first meeting in Tehran took place in McFarlane's suite at 5:00
P.M., a few hours after we arrived.  Once again we were disappointed by
the absence of any high-level officials from the other side.  Instead of
showing up with Rafsanjani or the prime minister, Gorba and the
Australian trotted out a short, stocky man in his middle fifties with
graying hair.  Dr.  No, as we referred to him, was their spokesman for
Western affairs.  He was higher in rank than the Australian, but he
wasn't one of their top people.
     He was, however, fluent in English, and very articulate, which we
certainly appreciated.  When Gorba was translating, you had the feeling
he was making it up as he went along.  You could practically see him
thinking, Hmm, I can't put it quite that way; so let me soften it a
little.
     Dr.  No welcomed us to Tehran, and apologized for the mix-up at
     the airport.  He talked on for a while, and more or less told us to
lower our expectations.  Essentially, his message boiled down to
"Please, we're trying to make this work, but I can't guarantee that the
next guy through the door will be Rafsanjani.  After all, we still
remember the meeting in the spring of 1980 between Mehdi Barzagan, our
first
     prime minister, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's
national security adviser.  A few days later, because of that one
meeting, Barzagan was deposed.  Our people are interested in meeting
with you, but we have to move very slowly and carefully."  When Dr.  No
was finished, McFarlane responded with an opening statement of his own.
"We in the United States," he said, "recognize that Iran is a sovereign
power.  We have had some disagreements over the past eight years, but we
should deal with each other on the basis of mutual respect."
     Mutual respect?  It sure didn't feel that way.  Before the day was
     out McFarlane fired off a cable to Washington with a graphic
assessment of the situation we were dealing with.  Back in Washington,
Bud was routinely mocked for his impenetrable prose and obfuscation, a
circuitous dialect that was affectionately known as "McFarlanese," that
was deemed evasive even by the standards of diplomacy.  But this time
his words were colorful, clear, and accurate.  Imagine, he wrote, "what
it would be like if, after nuclear attack, a surviving Tatar had become
vice president, a recent grad student became secretary of state, and a
bookie became the interlocutor for all discourse with foreign
countries."  Bud was especially angry that the Iranians seemed
completely unprepared for our visit.  I was afraid this might happen,
which is why I had repeatedly argued that before an American of
McFarlane's stature came to Tehran, there ought to be an advance trip at
the staff level to ensure that both sides were in agreement on exactly
why we were coming, and what we all hoped to accomplish.
     The ultimate goal, although we weren't sure it was possible, was
     to arrange a secret meeting between Rafsanjani and Vice President
Bush, presumably on neutral ground in Europe, the Orient, or even the
Middle East.  This would have let the Iranians know that we were serious
not only about recovering the hostages but also about resuming some kind
of relationship between our two countries.  While such a meeting seemed
unlikely, it would have been easier to set up than a similar meeting
between Rafsanjani and George Shultz.  Shultz loved being visible, and
it was hard to imagine him going anywhere without the press.  Bush, on
the other hand, was the former head of the CIA, and he was comfortable
with covert operations.  As Vice President, he
     was the official American mourner at state funerals all over the
world.  As he wended his way from one funeral parlor to another, it
might have been possible for him to meet discreetly with his Iranian
counterpart.
     It never happened, in part because Casey was strongly opposed to
     an advance trip.  Sending McFarlane to Tehran was risky enough, he
said, but for an American delegation to go over there without a high
official in the group was simply too dangerous.  We could all disappear,
and the Iranians might claim that we never showed up.  Even our own
government might be forced to disavow any knowledge of our visit.
     Casey may well have been right in assessing the dangers of an
advance trip, but not going carried its own risks.  Even with friendly
governments, it's almost impossible to hold a productive diplomatic
meeting without advance work.  Whenever a senior American official
traveled to a foreign country, we would always try to arrange in advance
whom they would be meeting with, and when, and what was likely to be
decided.  This was part of the routine of diplomacy.
     But in the case of Iran we knew very little, and much of what we
surmised we knew turned out to be wrong.  Our intelligence services kept
a close eye on Ghorbanifar, and most of the time we knew what he was up
to.  But whenever he traveled to Iran, the lights went out.  When he was
there, we had no idea what he was telling the Iranians, or what
commitments he was making in our name.
     Only after we arrived in Tehran did it become clear that
Ghorbanifar hadn't prepared the necessary groundwork for these meetings,
and that he had been telling diffhe Iranians didn't seem to have much
respect for him, either.  Well, I thought, at least we have that in
common.
     Looking back on it now, I don't believe the Iranians had really
been expecting us.  No wonder Ghorbanifar had looked so upset at the
airport.  When he finally showed up, he was almost speechless-which was
highly unusual for him.  When he saw us standing there-Bud, Nir, Howard,
George, myself-his jaw dropped.  Maybe he was shocked to see Nir,
because an Israeli who came to Tehran was taking an enormous risk.  But
more likely it was the whole group of us that spooked him.  Perhaps he
had planned to go back to his contacts in the government and say, "See,
I knew they weren't coming.  Send me back with a better deal."
     And all the while he had been telling us, "You must come to Tehran,
and the hostages will be freed."
     We should have realized that despite everything Gorba had told
     us, direct contact between us and the Iranians was probably the
last thing in the world that he wanted.  For once that happened, he
would become irrelevant.  By coming to Tehran, we had called his bluff.
     We had been told that if we came to Tehran, the hostages would
     be released.  Then, with that hurdle out of the way, we would move
on to discuss the larger issues.  But by the end of the first day we
could see that nothing was going to happen quickly.  To signify his
displeasure, and his frustration at not meeting high-level officials,
McFarlane spent the next day holed up in his suite.  Since the hostages
are central to this story, it may be worth explaining why they were
kidnapped in the first place.  The question may seem obvious, and yet it
was seldom discussed.  Plain and simple, the truth is that American and
other Western hostages were taken to get Americans and other Westerners
out of the Middle East, and to discourage their fellow citizens from
coming in.  The only thing the kidnappers had against their victims was
that Weir, Jenco, and the other Americans carried blue passports.  The
purpose of the kidnappings was to humiliate us and to instill fear into
the hearts of any Americans who were thinking of traveling in the
region.
     It's terribly hard for Americans to accept the fact that some
people
     just don't like us.  Don't like us?  They should love us.  Look at
how much we're doing to help them.  We're the good guys, aren't we?
     That's not how the radical fundamentalists in Beirut see it.  They
hate us, and everything we stand for.  They despise our Judeo-Christian
value system, our reverence for individual liberty, and the role America
plays in the world.
     President Reagan was obsessed by the hostages, and he repeatedly
made it clear to all of us who worked on this issue that we should do
everything possible to get them home.  Many Americans shared his
concern, but others felt that the hostages had been given sufficient
warning to leave, and had made their own free choices.  I understand
that argument, and I certainly don't support the idea of a paternalistic
government.  But what about those brave people who stayed behind in
Beirut to fulfill a humanitarian mission and did so as Americans?  David
Jacobsen was the director of the American University hospital.
     He was helping to save lives, and his presence was an admirable
symbol of American values.  While each of us must take responsibility
for his own decisions, I believe the President was right to care so
deeply about the hostages.  When you get right down to it, what is the
American government for if not to protect the rights and the lives of
individual American citizens?  The same is true of Israel, which was one
reason Nir had come to Tehran: he was determined to rescue two Israeli
soldiers who were being held in Beirut.  Nir and I had become friends,
and he once cited an old Jewish proverb: he who saves a single life is
as if he has saved the entire world.  I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan
felt the same way, and I find it difficult to fault him for trying so
hard to get the hostages home.  The Iran initiative had a chance of
working, and to some degree it did work.  But it wasn't the only effort
our government made.  During this same period, our State Department
undertook a wide variety of diplomatic and other initiatives to achieve
the same purpose.  All of them were worth trying, but none of them
succeeded.
     On our second day in Tehran, with McFarlane remaining in his room
to show his indignation, Cave, Teicher, Nir, and I continued the
meetings.  Iii Bud's absence, I became the interim negotiator.  "We're
very disappointed," I told the Iranians.  "President Reagan has sent
over his special emissary, and with all due respect, he hasn't met
anybody on his level since we arrived.  This is contrary to all our
expectations.  It was our understanding that Mr. McFarlane would meet
with Prime Minister Mousavi, or President Khamenei, or Speaker
Rafsanjani."
     Dr.  No seemed genuinely surprised.  "Who told you these things?"
     "Ghorbanifar," I replied.
     Dr.  No just sighed.  By now we couldn't avoid the fact that both
sides had come to this meeting with completely different expectations.
We assumed we would be meeting with high-level officials, and that the
release of the hostages was only a phone call away.  The Iranians didn't
expect that either event would occur soon.
     Moreover, they had expectations of their own.  They evidently
believed that if we showed up at all, we would be bringing along a
shipment of HAWK antiaircraft missile parts that they had ordered
     and already paid for.* In fact, we had brought less than 10 percent
of the total order.  The HAWK parts that the Iranians had purchased had
been discreetly collected from American military warehouses by the
Defense Department, and flown to Israel shortly before we arrived.  The
bulk of the consignment had been loaded onto a second Israeli 707 that
was sitting in Tel Aviv and was prepared to take off for Tehran the
moment we gave the signal.
     Dr.  No assured us that he was doing everything possible to get the
hostages released.  "We have already sent a man to Lebanon," he said.
"We expect to hear from him tomorrow.  Meanwhile, let us continue
talking.
     "But you must keep in mind," he repeated, "that not everybody in
our government looks with favor on this dialogue.  We must move slowly.
When Brezhnev died, we sent a delegation to his funeral, and the
leadership was attan is not a dictatorship.  Sure, I thought, and I
     bet there's a bridge over in BrooKlyn that you'd like to sell us.
But the Iranians were also disappointed.  "We expected much more
equipment than we found on your plane," Dr.  No said.
     I explained that we had specific orders from Washington not to send
the second plane until the hostages were released.
     In fact, even the parts we brought with us were supposed to remain
on the plane until the Iranians had fulfilled their end of the bargain.
Our pilots had been given strict instructions to stay with the aircraft
the entire time-not only to guard the parts, but also to prevent
saboteurs from installing listening devices, or possibly even
explosives.
     But on our first night in Tehran, the pilots showed up at the
hotel.  They were accompanied by a contingent of Rev Guards.  "We know
what you told us," they said, "and we didn't want to leave the plane.
But see these guys?  See their guns?"
     *The HAWK antiaircraft system comprises sophisticated electronic
detection, identification, target-acquisition, and guidance equipment,
and the associated missiles that home in on enemy aircraft.  It was
originally sold to the Shah as a means of defending
     key locations in Iran.  The electronic components of the system had
deteriorated considerably since khomeini had come to power, and the
revolutionary government was desperate to rehabilitate it for its
original purposes.
     A line had been crossed and we were furious.  There was a great
commotion in the hallway, with everybody yelling at once and waving
their hands.  I hit the roof, exaggerating my genuine anger for dramatic
effect.  "Our pilots must stay with the plane," I yelled, "or else we're
all leaving right now!"
     Soon the air was fall of apologies.  "Oh, there has been a
misunderstanding, we're so sorry, we thought they'd be more comfortable
in the hotel."  The pilots were returned to the airport, but by now the
plane had been stripped.  While we continued meeting with the Iranians,
the pilots went through it inch by inch to check for sabotage.
     Back at the Hilton, the talks ground on.  Even if Ghorbanifar
hadn't lied to both sides, there was still an enormous culture gap that
had to be bridged.  "We can begin the process," Dr.  No kept saying,
"but you must understand, these things take time."  This wasn't just
rhetoric.  We come from a society where things unfold quickly, and by
     fast to begin with, and now, with Khomeini in power, it was as if
the our standards, the pace in Iran gas painfully slow.  It had never
been entire country had slipped back into the eleventh century.
     In an attempt to salvage something from this trip, I told the
Iranians that at the very least we wanted to continue the dialogue.
"There are those in our government, too, who would prefer that we have
nothing to do with Iran.  But we think it is important for our two
countries to communicate.  Even if we can't reach an agreement today, we
must continue talking."  But even that plan sounded ambitious to our
hosts.  "You did a great thing by coming here," said Dr.  No.  "But
there has been a misunderstanding.  When we accepted your visit, we did
not mean that a direct dialogue between our two governments would start
immediately.  It will take time.  There are still problems to work out,
but there is an old Persian saying-that patience leads to victory.  We
can talk, but how can we be assured that your country can keep a
secret?"
     I explained that we were prepared to send them a satellite
communications device, similar to the one we were using to stay in touch
with Washington, and that we were willing to dispatch it along with a
communications team to ensure quick and secure communications between
our two governments.  Casey had been especially interested in this
arrangement.  If the Iranians agreed to it, the American technions sent
in to operate the system could serve as well-connected sources of human
intelligence.
     The situation looked hopeless, but I decided to give it one more
     y.  "As soon as your government can arrange the release of the
Americans being held in Beirut," I said, "we will send the second plane
full of HAWK missile parts.  Then, as we have already discussed, we will
also sell you two radar units, and deliver them to the port of Bandar
Abbas.  After that we can talk farther about your military needs.  But
if e leave here without overcoming the obstacles"-by which I meant
freeing the hostages"then our visit will have created new and additional
obstacles."
     On the third day, McFarlane joined us again.  But the talks quickly
went from bad to worse when Dr.  No reported that he had finally heard
from his emissary in Beirut.  Apparently a deal was still possible, ut
the hostage-takers had now come up with a new and expanded list f
demands.  We listened incredulously as Dr.  No spelled them out: Israel
had to withdraw from South Lebanon and the Golan Heights.  And Kuwait
had to release the seventeen Da'wa terrorists who had been arrested for
bombing embassies and other buildings in Kuwait city in 1983.  We had
heard that one before, perhaps because one of the prisoners in Kuwait,
who had been sentenced to death, was the brother-in-law of Imad
Mughniyah, the leader of the Islamic Jihad, the umbrella organization
that included the Hezballah, the group responsible for the Lebanese
kidnappings.
     And as if these terms weren't already laughable, there was a
preposterous kicker: the hostage-takers wanted us to reimburse them for
their expenses!  As McFarlane put it in his message back to Poindexter,
'How's that for crazy!!"
     It wasn't easy, but we tried to remain polite.  What did these
people take us for?  I felt like a customer in a used-car lot, where the
salesman comes back and says, "Listen, I just went back and checked with
e manager, and he said I could offer you a very special price.  If
you're willing to pay cash, we'll let you have that '85 Ford for five
hundred thousand dollars."
     Later that day, Dr.  No reported that the hostage-takers had educed
their demands.  They were no longer asking for the Israelis to withdraw
from South Lebanon and the Golan Heights, or even to be
     reimbursed for expenses.  Suddenly, the only remaining condition
was the prisoners in Kuwait.  In other words, "I've gone back to the
manager, and he agrees
     that the initial price was a little high.  He's now willing to let
thet of tires."
     McFarlane, trying valiantly to control his anger, replied that his
instructions were clear: unless all the hostages were released, with no
additional conditions, we were going home.  "As soon as they're free,"
he said, "you'll have the remaining parts within ten hours.  As for the
Da'wa prisoners in Kuwait, there's not much we can do about that.
That's between you and the Kuwaitis.  But we would be willing to make
every effort to persuade the Kuwaitis to wait.
     After a few more hours of haggling, we seemed to be making some
progress.  We even agreed on a six-point plan, which I typed up on the
word processor attached to our encryption device.  Assuming Dr.  No
could sell this plan to his higher-ups, the Iranians would arrange for
the release of the hostages and of William BucKley's body on the
following day.  Meanwhile, we would launch the jet from Israel with the
remaining spare parts.  But if the hostages were not released as
promised, the second plane would be instructed to turn around and go
back to Israel.  There were also provisions for the delivery of two
radar units, and for a satellite communications system with American
operators.
     When the Iranians left the hotel, I took McFarlane aside and said,
     "If this thing is going to end up as we hope, we've got to launch
that plane tonight."  (The plane, laden with extra fuel, had to be
airborne before the heat of the day made takeoff impossible.)
     "Okay," he replied, "but don't let it pass the turnaround point."
Because the flight was so long, once the plane passed a certain point it
would no longer have enough fuel to turn around, and would be forced to
land in Iran.  There had been hours of planning with regard to that
plane, and we had tried to anticipate anything that might possibly go
wrong.  What if the plane lost an engine?  What if it had to abort over
another country?  What emergency radio frequency would the pilot use?
With McFarlane's permission, I sent a coded message to Dick Secord, who
was awaiting instructions in Tel Aviv: "Launch at 0400.  If you don't
hear from me again by 0800, turn it around."
     Early the next morning the Iranians came back.  "Give us more me,"
they said.  "We think we can get you two hostages.  We don't are what
Ghorbanifar promised you.  We've told you before: we have ome influence,
but we don't control things in Beirut.  We can't just make things
happen.  We can't get all the hostages out.  This is the best e can do."
This was exactly what McFarlane had feared: that the Iranians would
offer a partial deal.  Admiral Poindexter had foreseen this possibility
several weeks earlier, and had instructed us not to consider it.
     But having participated in those long, drawn-out meetings, I no
longer believed the Iranians were negotiating for a better deal.  They
ere now making the only offer they could.  The choice had come own to
half a loaf or nothing at all.
     I went to Bud and said, "For God's sake, we can save two of em."
     But he wouldn't hear of it.  "The only authority I have is all or
nothing."
     "Bud, I know that," I pleaded.  "But at least ask."  Our
communications system gave us instant access to Washington, and I
believe that f Bud had presented the dilemma to the admiral, Poindexter
would ave taken it to the President.  And the President, wanting above
all to ave lives, would have said yes.  But McFarlane wouldn't even
consider it.  "Forget it," he said.  'I've got my instructions, and
you've got yours.  They've had their chance."
     We had started the conversation out on the balcony of his suite,
     ut now we were discussing it openly and loudly in the living room.
oh hell with the Iranian bugs.
     "I don't like this kind of dealing.  It's not right," he said.
With our entire trip going down the tubes, and only a short time
remaining before the second plane from Tel Aviv reached the turn around
point, I was getting emotional.  "That's true, Bud, it's not light.  But
this isn't the time to get holy.  Let's not kid ourselves.  What
     Poindexter note to North, April 16,1986: "You may go ahead and go,
but I want several points made clear to them.  There are not to be any
parts delivered until all the hostages are free in accordance with the
plan that you laid out for me before.  None of is half shipment before
any are released crap.  It is either all or nothing....  If they ally
want to save their asses from the Soviets, they should get on board."
     do you think we've been doing all this time?  You started this
process, and we've been dealing ever since."  At a level considerably
above mine, President Reagan and Bud McFarlane had already decided to
trade arms for hostages.  And now, given the alternatives, I thought it
was more important that we try to salvage the lives of two poor bastards
who were chained to a wall than to try to preserve the purity of a
policy that had already been violated.
     Nir, too, went to Bud and made an impassioned appeal to consider
the Iranian proposal.  Bud threw him out, and he later chastised me for
"sending" Nir.  But I didn't send Nir; when Ami saw the whole thing
collapsing, he was devastated.
     Hearing nothing from us at the midpoint of its flight to Tehran,
     the second 707, with the parts aboard, dutifully returned to
Israel.  A few minutes later, Bud stormed down the hall, threw open the
doors, and said, "We're leaving.  Pack up.  We're out of here in five
minutes."
     McFarlane's rush to leave was so sudden that at first I thought he
     was bluffing.  He wasn't.  But the elevators weren't working, the
cars weren't ready, and the Iranians were clearly panicked because the
whole deal was about to go down the tubes.  They tried to delay us, but
Bud was too angry.  "We're going home," he snapped, "even if we have to
walk down the stairs and find taxis to take us to the airport."
     I was sick at the idea of returning home empty-handed.  Not only
could we probably save two hostages, but we would have set the stage for
even bigger gains.  But I had given it my best shot, and now it was time
to carry out my orders.
     Would it have made any difference if we had stayed a few more
hours, or even another day or two?  I believe that two hostages would
have been released, but who knows?  Given the fact that they were
totally unprepared for our visit, and unaware of our expectations, the
Iranians had been jumping through hoops to make things work.  In true
Americed to leave the hotel, they continued to plead with
     us.  "Give us a few more hours and we'll get two of them released."
CIA headquarters had already reported over our satellite link that Rafiq
Dust, Iran's deputy foreign minister, had left Tehran for Damascus, as
he had in previous cases when Western hostages were actually released.
Later, when the French hostages came out, Rafiq Dust was
     gain in Damascus, which would indicate that if anybody was
controlling the kidnappers in Beirut, it was probably not the Iranians
but the Irans.
     Eventually the cars pulled up in front of the hotel to take us to
the airport.  I went in and told our communicator to send the
prearranged departure message to Tel Aviv and Washington, and, once it
was knowledged, to pack up the equipment.  I prayed that our precipitous
departure would not mean that the waiting cars would be taking straight
to Evin Prison.
     Outside the hotel, the Australian begged me to go with him, and
     ir and I climbed in his car.  The Australian himself drove,
grinding very gear as he continued pleading with us to stay just a few
more ours.
     At the airport, as we climbed out of the cars and walked toward
     e plane, Ghorbanifar was still begging us to reconsider.  The
Australian actually walked up the stairway to the plane to make one
last, desperate appeal, with tears in his eyes, until McFarlane said,
"Close e door."  I appealed to Bud one last time before we took off.
There was still me; he could have asked for guidance right there, on the
runway.  All he had to do was tell the communicator to open his
briefcase, and in less than a minute we would have been talking to
Washington.  But McFarlane wouldn't budge.
     The flight back to Tel Aviv was very quiet.  We were all completely
rained and enormously disappointed.  We had come to Tehran expecting
real and dramatic progress on the hostages.  We even had people standing
by in Beirut and Cyprus to coordinate their travel ome.  And now we were
returning empty-handed.
     But we were also immensely relieved-more so than we had expected-to
be out of Tehran.  On the long flight back to Tel Aviv, george mentioned
that earlier that morning, back at the hotel, he too ad worried that the
Iranians might be so frustrated with our visit that ey would prevent us
from leaving.  We didn't know at the time how lose that possibility
really was.  Nine months later, the Tower Com"The most serious problem
we must address," George Cave later told the Tower Commission, "is
whether the Iranians can gain control of the hostages.  The French don't
think they can.  This could be our real problem.  The Iranian side may
be most willing, but unable to gain control."
     mission report noted that a group of Revolutionary Guards had come
to the hotel to arrest us, but that our own guards had turned them back.
     We had all set aside our fears during those four days, when we were
preoccupied with the meetings.  It wasn't until we had cleared Iranian
airspace that we admitted to ourselves that things could have ended a
lot worse.  "You were lucky," Casey told me later, when I gave him back
the pills.  "For all you knew the radicals in that government could have
decided to put you up against the wall and shoot you."  Now I don't
believe in luck, but I do believe in Divine Providence and the power of
prayer.  I'm convinced that God answered my prayer that morning, and
delivered us from a very unpleasant experience.  Tom Hemingway, a Marine
friend of mine, has a sign over his desk: "God doesn't promise a smooth
passage-just a safe landing."  We made ours in Tel Aviv later that day.
     When we touched down, we immediately set up our satellite
communications equipment and called Washington to tell them we were
safe.  Nir said good-bye, and went home to his family.  The rest of us
flew back to Washington in a tiny Lear jet, with everybody jammed into a
plane so small that we had to stop three times to refuel.  When we
finally landed at Dullas Airport, Bud, Howard, and I drove straight to
the White House for a meeting with the President.  During the Oval
Office meeting I said nothing about my disagreement with McFarlane, but
later I unloaded my frustrations on the admiral.  To this day, I'm angry
that Bud wouldn't even ask for permission to accept the Iranian offer
for two hostages.  The admiral didn't commit himself, but I'm still
confident that the President would have said yes.
     Just before we reported to the President, I called Betsy from my
office to tell her I was back.  "And not a moment too soon," she said.
"I've just sold the house and you've got to sign the papers."  She had
told the buyer and the agent that her husband was away on a trip, and
she didn't know when he would be back.  It wasn't clear whether they
believed her, and she had already postponed the closing twice.  "This is
it," she told me on the phone.  "We're closing today.  If you don't show
up, the deal is off."
     I was wiped out after that terrible flight home, and terribly
disappointed, and it would have been nice to have a shower and change my
clothes.  But I did make it to the closing in time.
     The previous day, as McFarlane and I had stood on the tarmac at Ben
Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, we had a moment alone to digest what had
happened in Tehran.  We had disagreed about the process, but we were
equally disappointed at the outcome.  "Well, Bud," I said, trying to
cheer him up, "it's not a total loss.  The one bright spot in all of
this is that part of the money from these transactions is going to help
the Nicaraguan resistance."
     McFarlane gave me one of his inscrutable looks.  He didn't ask me
to elaborate.
     Chapter 4
     ~~~Og~ of Age
     Whenever I tell our kids about my nearly idyllic childhood, I get
the feeling that deep down, they suspect Dad is making the whole thing
up.  It's not that their lives are so dramatically different from mine,
or that they've experienced especially hard times.  Tait~, Stuart,
Sarah, and Dornin~ have all grown up with God's abundant blessings-good
health, good values, and good friends.  They have all been active in our
church and our family Bible study groups.  But they're certainly growing
up in a different world than the one I used to know.  In my entire high
school there were only two or three guys who drank beer or smoked
cigarettes.  And while we certainly talked about girls, nobody I knew
actually did anything.  Myltered, but they all know teenagers who have
had abortions, and others who have been arrested for drugs, and still
others who were victims of violence, parental abuse, and even suicide.
     And this was in the suburbs of Virginia.
     I was born in Texas in 1943, in the midst of the war that America
won for the world.  I was named Oliver Laurence~ North, and until I was
eighteen everybody called me Larry to distinguish me from my
     father, Oliver Clay North-who was known as Clay to distinguish him
rom his father.  My father, a major in the Army, had grown up in
hiladelphia~.  My mother, Ann Clancy~, was a teacher from Oswego,
ewYork~.
     When Dad returned from the war in 1945, we moved to hilmont~, New
York, a small mill town about thirty-five miles south f Albany where
people didn't bother to lock their doors at night.  It ounds~ corny, I
know, but Philmont~ was the epitome of small-town
     enca~.  We had it all-a baseball diamond, empty fields, trout
treams~, and plenty of woods where we could play capture the flag, ops~
and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and anything else a childhood
magination~ allowed.  Main Street, clean and peacefal~, was lined with
mall, locally owned businesses like Mr. Carney's~ hardware store.  The
ocal~ grocery store, an A & P'~ operated under the company's majestic Id
name-the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.  We had a octor~ who
made house calls, and a tiny movie house where we saw lack-and-white
Buster Crabbe~ and Tarzan~ films and other serials on ainy~ Saturday
afternoons.
     Everyone in Philmont~ knew everybody else, so you couldn't get way
with any savage crimes of passion-like throwing a tomato at the zd~ down
the block-because your parents would invariably hear bout it within the
hour.  There was no anonymity.  Our graduating lass at Ockawamick~ High
School consisted of thirty-six kids, and the nly~ reason it was that big
was that the school served the entire gion~.
     Except for my front teeth, which were blessed with a large gap,
erfect~ for squirting water across a swimming pool, I wasn't a badoking~
kid.  When I was in high school, our family dentist said, "You ow,
Larry, we could certainly do something about the space etween~ your
teeth, but you probably don't want to bother with that.  '5 not as if
you're planning to be a movie star or on television, ght~?"  I wonder
what Dr.  Link was thinking during the Iran-contra earings~ in the
summer of 1987, when millions of Americans decided at I reminded them of
the "before" picture in a commercial for rthodontia~.
     I grew up as the oldest of four kids: My brother Jack was followed
our sister, Pat.  Tim, our youngest brother, was born years later,
     when I was already at the Naval Academy.  Jack and I were less than
eighteen months apart; we were best friends, and virtually inseparable.
With two older brothers, Pat had to endure a lot of teasing and a little
jealousy, too, because she had her own room.
     Like all the youngsters in Philmont~, we pretty much had the run of
the place.  There was no such thing as a bad neighborhood, and we walked
or rode our bikes everywhere.  Bicycles were our oxygen, and we were
continually tinkering with the gears and adjusting the handlebars.  Mom
didn't worry where you had gone after school-uuless~ someone snitched
and told her you had been speeding down Suicide Hill on Summit Street,
where we'd go screaming onto Main Street.  But Suicide Hill couldn't
have been all that dangerous, it occurs to me now, because Main Street
didn't even have a traffic light.  Mom used to hate it when the other
mothers in our neighborhood would stand out on the porch at suppertime~
and yell at the top of their lungs, "Billy!  Peter!  Time for dinner!"
The woman across the street had a better idea: a whistle that she blew
twice when it was time to come in.  My mother bought her own whistle,
and our signal was three toots.
     For real excitement, we'd ride over to the train tracks, about a
mile or so from our house on Maple Avenue.  When the railroad police
weren't around, we'd sneak into the switching station shed (which was
never locked), take out a few signal flares, and lay them across the
track.  That was the emergency signal for the engineer to stop the
train.  Then we'd climb up on the hill and wait for him to jam on the
brakes, just to see how long it took that train to grind to a halt.
During a long summer afternoon we might hop a slow-moving freight train
as it slowly chugged up the long slope heading north out of Philmont~.
We'd ride for a couple of miles and jump off near the house of a family
we knew, but it was a long walk home so we didn't do it often.  Our
parents knew nothing about it, but in case my own kids are reading this,
let me make one thing clear: don't even think of trying anything like
that.
     I suppose you could say that my childhood was like a Norman
Rockwell painting.  I had a paper route, and on Saturdays, after
collecting from my customers, I went down to Palen's~, the local ice
cream shop, and spent my tips on a chocolate malt and a package of
Nabs-cheese crackers filled with peanut butter.  In warm weather we went
fishing, using empty Campbell's Soup cans for worms.  Dad
     aught us how to open the can without removing the lid; if you bent
e lid just a little, you could hang the can on your belt loop.  That was
bout as high-tech as things got in Philmont~.  Jack and I learned to
hoot a.22 rifle before we could drive a car, and not a season went by
hen we didn't save up a few dollars for the mandatory hunting and shing~
licenses.
     Our family used to rent a small summer cottage on Copake~ Lake,
     nd early in the morning we'd go out in the rowboat to catch
breakast~, which consisted of two filleted~ sunfish over toast.  At
night I'd sit n the floor and listen to the radio exploits of the Lone
Ranger, the hadow~, and Sergeant Preston~ of the Yukon and his dog,
King.  Every ergeant~ Preston~ episode ended with the line, "Well, King,
this case is losed~," whereupon King would bark in agreement.  I sat
there transixed~, and vowed to become a Mountie when I grew up.  It was
easy to isualize~ what these radio heroes looked like.  Years later,
when I saw em on television, I was terribly disappointed by how ordinary
they ere.
     Betsy~ has sometimes asked me whether my childhood was really as
erene~ or as happy as I remember it.  Maybe she's right; I do have a ay~
of puttingng th my brother, and all brothers fight.
     After 1 was more or less grown up, our family gained a new memer~.
I was home on leave from the Naval Academy when Mom nnounced~ to the
family that she was pregnant.  She was well into her rties~, and in
those days pregnancy at that age was virtually unheard f.  I thought it
was wonderfal~.  I don't remember Pat's response, but ck~ was shocked: I
guess he didn't believe our parents still did that znd~ of thing.  Tim
was born in 1963, when I was twenty.
     It wasn't until I myself became a parent that I realized just how
uch~ my mother did for us when we were young.  As a father and a
usband~, I can see how busy Betsy~ is, how her life is controlled by our
zds'~ schedules and the countless miles of driving with a howling mob f
gremlins in the back seat.  Maybe you can't appreciate these things til~
you grow up, but I sure do now.
     e may have been innocent and carefree, but we weren't totally
oblivus~ to the outside world.  My parents followed the news avidly, and
I member hearing the grown-ups talk about the Army-McCarthy
arings~-never imagining, of course, that thirty-three years later I
     would spend six days in that very same Senate hearing room as the
guest of another congressional committee.
     Mom is a devout Catholic, and every Sunday our whole family went to
the Sacred Heart Church.  I was an altar boy, and sometimes Father
Dwyer~ would invite me to go along with him on pastoral visits.  He
drove a very old Buick which had a penchant for getting stuck in the mud
and the snow, and I began to suspect that the real reason he asked me to
come along was to help push him out.
     As an altar boy, I had to memorize the liturgy and the
responsorials~ of the Mass-in Latin, naturally.  It was a good way to
start the day, and I continued going almost every morning until I
graduated from the Naval Academy.  Later, of course, I had to learn the
Mass all over again-this time in English.  I still miss the Latin Mass;
I liked the idea that you could attend Mass anywhere in the world and it
would always be the same.  These days, although I have a much more
personal relationship with my Savior, I still have fond memories of that
ancient liturgy.
     Nearly every Sunday after church we had a big family dinner with
     my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, and my paternal
grandfather, who came for dinner nearly every night after my Grandmother
North died in 1959.  As I remember it today, the Sunday menu was always
the same: roast beef, mashed potatoes, homemade gravy, green beans, and
Yorkshire~ pudding, spiced with plenty of talk about politics and world
events.  My parents rarely argued, but what I remember most clearly
about the Chinese attack on the islands of Quemoy~ and Matsu~ in 1958 is
that my mother wanted to shut off the radio while Dad insisted on
listening to the news, even during dinner.  They had a similar
disagreement two years later, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in
a U-2 plane over the Soviet Union.  These weeKly dinners were the North
family version of the Sunday morning TV talk shows.
     My father, who owned a wool mill, was a staunch Republican.  Some
people have tried to portray our family as unusually patriotic, but in
small-town America during the 1950s~, just about everyone believed in
God, country, and motherhood.  My mother had been a registered Democrat,
but she eventually changed parties and later ran as a Republican for the
town board.
     I was very close to Dad, and although he was quiet and
seupossessed~,
     e had no trouble communicating.  When I moved away fiom~ home, I
ote~ to him oftenfiom~ the Naval Academy and from Vietnam, knowg~ that
whatever I wanted to tell him, he'd understand.  He loved to read to us,
and I grew up listening to classic chilen's~ fare: Grimm's~ Fairy Tales,
T'easisre~ Island, Robin Hood, and the llected~ prose and poetry of
Rudyard~ Kipling~.  Our house was filled zth~ books and newspapers.
When we went off to college, Mom and ad refased~ to send us any spending
money uuless~ we wrote them gularly~.
     Dad was far from a stereotypical military man.  He had a passion
growing roses, and he loved the ballet.  He'd see several perforances~
each summer when the New York City Ballet performed in ratoga~.  We
weren't too far from Tanglewood~, the summer home of e Boston Symphony
Orchestra, and on summer afternoons we'd sit the lawn and listen to
their rehearsals.  Occasionally, our parents uld~ take us to New York.
I loved the skyscrapers, but they couldn't mpare~ to the greatest wonder
of allthe~ Horn & Hardart~ tomat~.
     Dad was a history bulf~, and we must have visited every museum
     d battlefield on the Eastern Seaboard.  His heroes were the
Revolunary~ War generals, and I believe we hit every revolutionary
battleld~ from Saratoga~ to Yorktown~.  Dad was a terrific guide,
pointing exactly where Benedict Arnold was wounded, or explaining the
ategic~ importance of this hill or that river.
     In 1969, when Jack and I were both serving in Vietnam, Dad ok it
upon himself to arrange a reunion for us.  Without telling us, wrote a
letter to Melvin~ Laird, the Secretary of Defense (whom he n't~ know),
pointing out that both his boys were serving in Vietm~, and that it was
only right that they should be able to see each er over there.
     Years later, in my file, I found the Marine Corps response to his
uest~, which simply read: "Second Lieutenant Oliver North is igned~ to a
Marine combat unit and is unavailable for such a visit at 5 time."  In
other words, buzz olf~, Dad, he's got a war to fight.  But Army was more
receptive.  Jack was yanked out of his unit with ers~ to report to
Saigon, and from there to Da Nang~-and nobody 70 / OLIVERL. NORTH
     told him why.  As he was being pulled out of the field, his
helicopter was shot up, which is a little more excitement than you want
to have on an average day, even in Vietnam.  Jack wasn't hurt, but
months later, when he returned home, he raised the roof with Dad.
     Dad's response was classic.  "Well," he said softly, "you were both
over there, and you hadn't seen each other in a while, and it made your
mother happy to know you'd be together."
     It was hard for him to express the affection he had for his sons,
     but deep down, this tough guy was all heart.
     Dad was always active in community affairs.  He founded the local
Rotary Club, and as president of the school board, he tter education for
youngsters growing up in this rural setting.  These days, the phrase
"community service" denotes a form of punishment, but I grew up thinking
of it as a responsibility and a privilege.  I didn't join the Marine
Corps because my father was a military man.  I signed up because he
taught us all that anyone who is blessed to live in this great country
ought to give something back to it.  And he must have taught us well,
because all three of his sons served in combat~ne each in the Army,
Navy, and Marines.  He probably would have preferred that I join the
Army, but he mentioned this only once.  "I know the Marines are looking
for a few good men," he said, "but remember, the Army has a whole lot
more of them."
     As a civilian, he wasn't one to sit on the sidelines and criticize.
"If
     you don't like the way things are," he'd say, "don't complain about
them.  Work to make them better."  He gave his time to a whole slew of
committees, causes, and charities.  He was especially generous to the
Salvation Army.  He used to say that during the war, the Salvation Army
volunteers were always there to give a doughnut and a cup of coffee to a
soldier.
     For all their civic involvement, my parents also knew how to have
     fan.  They were active in the local theater group, where Mom acted
in most of the plays and Dad worked backstage with the lights and the
scenery.  On weekend afternoons, they'd bring us along to the rehearsals
at the D.A.R Hall.
     My parents believed in discipline, and by today's standards, at
least, they were fairly strict.  If one of us misbehaved, we would lose
a
     zvilege, like dessert.  My parents didn't believe in sending us to
our oms, because they knew we'd have too good a time with all those oks,
Erector sets, model airplanes, and an enormous old RCA ortwave radio.
     They insisted that we live by all of the Ten Commandments, ough I
seem to recall a special emphasis on number flve-"Honor
     y father and thy mother."  Heaven help the North youngster who lked
back to Mom, although my brother Jack took a little longer an I did to
figure that out.  I can remember only one occasion when y father
actually hit me: he took off his belt and let me have it for ing rude to
Mom.
     ad served during World War II with the Ninety-fifth Infantry Divin,
part of General Patton's Third Army.  In 1944, just after D-Day, unit
landed in France.  Dad served as an operations officer, and er on as a
logistics officer, with the Third Army.  He returned home zth a Silver
Star and a Bronze Star, but he rarely talked about the ar.  Once in a
while an old army buddy would drop by, and the two them would sit out on
the patio or on the porch and talk about old es.  Jack and I used to sit
on the steps and listen in.  He kept his decorations in the bottom
drawer of his dresser, and er he died, I found the blue boxes with the
medals inside, along zth brittle, yellowed copies of his citations.  He
had been decorated
     heroism during the battle for Metz, a German fortress.  I also und
the journals from his unit, which described the fierce fighting e men
had experienced.  They had even liberated a Nazi concentran camp-which
my father had never mentioned.  I always knew that he had been part of
something historic, but he lked about the war only in general patriotic
terms: the United States d this, and our unit was part of it.  There
were pictures of him in unirm in our family album, and that was
certainly part of his identity.
     the main things I learned from my father were how to be a man,
     d how a husband ought to love his wife.  I took that first gift
early, d used it in ways that pleased him.  Unfortunately, it took me
far too ng to open the second one.
     Shortly after the war, Dad and his father had started the wool
prossing business where Dad worked until his retirement in 196S.  en he
began a second career: teaching a course in transportation at
     Hudson Valley Community College in Troy.  He had finally found his
calling.  "I will always regret making you go into the wool business,"
Grandfather North told my father on his deathbed, "because I can see how
happy you are as a teacher."
     My grandfather had come to this country from England in 1895.
     By the early 1920s he had become extremely successfal in the
textile business, with household servants and even a chauffeur to drive
him around.  He lost almost everything in the Depression, but he
recovered.  That was his lesson to me: that you can suffer a great
adversity and still persevere.  He didn't sit around feeling sorry for
himself or waiting for some government grant.  He picked himself up and
started all over again.
     Grandfather North was a man of great dignity, with a British
accent, white hair, and a mustache.  Like many English immigrants to
America, he was uncomfortable with the casual nature of our society.  He
could never understand how Americans could be, in his terms, so
"disrespectfal" of their leaders as to refer to the President, for
example, as "Eisenhower," rather than President Eisenhower.  Some of
that same feeling carried over to me; even today, I'm not comfortable
referring to high government officials by their last names.
     He was proper, punctual, and more than a little rigid.  He refased
to eat in a restaurant that didn't have tablecloths.  Once, when my
parents took him out to dinner, the waitress said, "Please keep your
forks for dessert."  He was horrified.  "I certainly will not," he
replied, and I'm sure he never entered that place again.  He and Mabel,
his wife, lived on a farm in nearby Ghent.  I spent many happy days
there with Jack and Pat, and I still have a distinct memory of being
chased by a gaggle of geese.  I must have been awfally young, because
the geese were as big as I was.
     As we did at home, Jack and I shared a room at the farm, where
     we played for hours with a set of hand-painted lead toy soldiers
from England which had belonged to my father when he was growing up.
They were divided into British and German companies from World War I,
and we used to stage mock battles on the double bed with the help of a
fine set of wooden blocks.  Both the soldiers and the blocks were kept
in a great wooden toy chest, and although they actually belonged to my
father, they weren't allowed to leave the farm.  But that only made the
place more special.
     Because Jack and I were so close in age, and got along so well, it
     as We played ogether constantly, and worked together, to-delivering
newspaers, shoveling snow, raking leaves, or cutting the grass for
families in ur neighborhood.  But even though we grew up side by side,
we were very different es.  Jack was always more outspoken, more
contentious, and more zlling to argue than I was.  Like a lot of younger
brothers, he learned o defend himself.  We had a rule in our family: if
you didn't eat all our vegetables, you didn't get dessert.  When that
happened to Jack, e would loudly proclaim that he had spit in his
dessert so that I ouldn't eat it.  But that never stopped me; he was my
brother.
     Jack was always going to Carney's Hardware Store on Main Street o
buy whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and other weapons of mischief.  was
wonderfal to have a brother who could always be counted on
     o get in trouble; I could enjoy his antics without having to pay
the nce.
     Jack attended Niagara University, and until the day he graduated I
orried that he might be the type who decided it was "fan" to go ver the
Falls in a barrel.  Jack's willingness to seek adventure led him o the
Army, where he became a paratrooper, a ranger, and a special rces
officer.  He served for twenty years, and now works in New ngland as an
engineer.
     In the summer of 1984, while Jack was still in the Army and I was
the NSC, Dad's emphysema took a decided turn for the worse.  I as on a
trip to Africa and was in Nairobi, Kenya, when the Red Cross abled the
American embassy to advise me that the end was probably ear.  I flew
home immediately, and arrived just after Dad had come ome from the
hospital.  He knew he was dying, and had asked to end his final days in
his own bed.
     I spent the weekend at his side.  He was so weak that I carried him
to the bathroom and bathed him.  We prayed together, and read gether
from the Bible: Psalms, Proverbs, Paul's Letter to the omans, and the
Gospel of John.  He had been raised as an Episcoalian and had gone to
church regularly, but that weekend, on his eathbed, I believe that he
came to know his Savior personally.  Father obert Hart, a great old man
of God from my mother's neighborood church, came and gave Dad communion
and the Last Rites.
     By the next morning he had improved dramaticallyso much so that I
returned to Washington to file a report on my trip to Africa.  The next
morning, Mom called to say he had died in his sleep.  The end came
quickly and peacefally, and I was gratefal that we'd had that last
weekend together.  Today, I'm glad that he didn't have to suffer through
the anguish my mother has experienced during the protracted Iran-contra
investigations.
     I always knew that I would go to college; the only question was
where I would be accepted, and what we could afford.  Holy Cross and
Notre Dame both said yes, but without a scholarship, so in the fall of
1961 I ended up at Brockport State near Rochester, about two hundred and
fifty miles lrom home.  The dean of students at Brockport, Dr.  Harold
Rakov, had gone to college with my mother.  Rakov's parents were Jewish
immigrants from Russia, and their son had made a success of himself
through determination and hard work.  When he saw that I was undecided
about the fature beyond a vague desire to become a teacher, he pushed me
to consider either the Naval Academy or medical school.  He urged me to
load up on math, physics, and chemistry courses, which would be helpfal
at either place.
     He also encouraged me to think about the Marines.  Russ Robertson,
our high school coach, and Bob Bowes, one of my history teachers, had
already suggested the Marines when I left for college.  Rakov suggested
that I consider the Platoon Leader Candidate Program, which was open to
college students and required two summers at the Marine Officer
Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia.  If you successfally completed
the two summers and graduated from college, you would be commissioned as
an officer and enter The Basic School as a lieutenant.  There was
something about men who had served in the military-Robertson, Rakov, my
father-that made them seem more self-assured and a little more confident
about dealing with life.  I admired these men, and I wanted to follow in
their footsteps.  After discussing it with Russ Robertson, Dr.  Rakov,
and Dad, I signed up for the PLC Program during my first year at
Brockport.  The moment I got to Quantico I loved the place.  This was
the most intense and challenging thing I had ever done, and I was
surrounded by tough, hard-working, motivated men.  I wasn't a bad
athlete to begin with, but at Quantico I learned that I could stretch
myself a lot farther than I had expected.  I enjoyed the discipline, but
     en more than that, I loved being in an environment where everydy
got up in the morning headed in the same direction.  "If you don't like
Quantico," Rakov had told me, "you sure won't
     e Annapolis.  If you do like it, it will help you get in."  After
that first summer, I knew I wanted to be a Marine.  During
     y second year at Brockport, I spent the first few weeks working on
y application to the Naval Academy, which was just about the ggest
bureaucratic challenge I have ever encountered.  I was thrilled hen they
accepted me.
     When I arrived in Annapolis in June 1963, the first thing I did,
ong with about a thousand of my new classmates, was to get the ortest,
fastest haircut in the history of man.  How short?  How fast?  about
eleven seconds flat, you're practically bald.  I also learned that e
military's prejudice against civilians begins right there, in the
barshop.  Nobody says so explicitly, but you soon come to understand
     at most civilians are inferior beings whom you can identity first
by e length of their hair, and then by the absence of shine on their
oes, the lack of a close shave, and their generally flabby and slovenly
pearance.
     I have never felt comfortable with military arrogance, but I ven't
been immune to it, either.  "Do you want to be a Marine, Prite Johnson,"
I have yelled on more than one occasion, "or would u rather be"-sneer"a
civilian?"  It's easy to forget that your other is a civilian, and so
are your wife and your kids.
     Underneath that arrogance, however, is a well-deserved pride.  at
swaggering, macho attitude, the confidence that comes with ing part of
an elite group like the Marines, that lack of patience with
     civilian counterparts-these qualities were ean easily be taken too
far.  From the day we arrived the Naval Academy, we were repeatedly told
that we were the best, at we had been chosen from thousands of
applicants, only a handfal whom were good enough to make the cut.
Naturally, a lot of idshipmen believed this.  Later, as a Marine
instructor at Quantico, I w hundreds of Annapolis graduates come through
the rigorous Offir's Basic Course that prepares new lieutenants for
command.  Usualthe men from Annapolis were either among our best
students or ong our weakest.  The worst were those who swallowed the
flattery
     and concluded that they didn't have to work very hard.  In those
days, being at Annapolis was a lot like living in a combination
monastery and prison work camp.  Not only were there no women around;
you were insulated from the outside world and totally consumed by your
day-to-day duties and the strict requirements of the Academy.  This was
especially true for plebes, as freshmen were known.  We weren't allowed
to do anythina: watch television, listen to the radio, go out with
girls, ride in a car, go into town, enjoy a beer, or even drink coffee.
It was often said that the Naval Academy took away all your God-given
rights and then gave them back to you, one by one, and called them
privileges.
     Even after you made it past your plebe year, you were still part of
     that insular world, where you were awakened before dawn six
mornings a week by the loud clang of the bells in Bancroft Hall, the
world's largest dormitory.  By the time they stopped ringing, you had to
be out of bed and on your feet.  The entire day was controlled by bells,
which marked every class, every meal, everything.  You were always
rushing to the next activity, because being late for anything was a
reportable offense.  You were constantly busy.  There were many reasons
why a student might choose to leave Annapolis, but boredom wasn't one of
them.
     One result of this busy, sheltered environment was that we didn't
really know what the rest of the country was thinking.  And to the
extent that you're not aware of another position, it's easy to assume it
doesn't count.  It was at Annapolis that I came to believe that the
media were exaggerating the growing antiwar sentiment among the American
public as the Vietnam War heated up.  The closest we ever came to
witnessing such sentiments was when we marched to Memorial Stadium for
athletic events.  On the way to the stadium, we would pass by St.
John's College.  By 1967 the brigade was being treated to shouts of
"Warmongers!"  and the occasional egg or tomato.
     We would return from Memorial Stadium informally, but we rarely
encountered any problems on the way back.  It was the formation itself
that provoked the animosity, because it symbolized the institution.  It
would be several more years before antiwar protesters began to insult us
as individuals.
     The Academy included young men from every social and economic
class, and a handfal from religious and racial minorities.  But even in
     e late 1960s there was still a fair amount of prejudice at
Annapolis.  wo classmates I was particularly close to at the Academy
were well are of this.  Jay Martin Cohen was Jewish, and Frank Simmons
was lack, and both had suffered harassment, especially during their
plebe ears.
     By June 1968, when our class graduated, most of this prejudice
     ad melted away.  You could actually see people change their
attitudes d become more tolerant after a couple of years of attending
the same asses and living together, elbow to elbow, twenty-four hours a
day.
     This was no accident.  Throughout history, military organizations
ave been used not only for combat, but also as educational tools for e
larger society.  Sometimes it was blatant indoctrination.  Lenin idn't
create the Red Army for the sole purpose of defending Russia.  e also
wanted to institutionalize the revolution by immersing young eople in
the philosophy of Communism.  They would serve for severyears, and after
being thoroughly indoctrinated they would then turn to the larger
society to indoctrinate others.
     Our own military has served a parallel purpose by teaching milons
of young Americans about democratic ideals and tolerance-the eed to rely
on somebody regardless of his color, his religion, or his ackground.  In
1947 President Harry Truman integrated the armed rces by Executive
Order.  For the first time, a white soldier from eorgia would have to
use the same latrine and sleep in the same om as a black soldier from
Mississippi.
     In 19S4, when civil rights legislation became a major issue, one
ason it succeeded was that there were increasing numbers of white ected
officials who had served in the military alongside blacks.  It has een a
long, slow struggle, but without the military it would have een a lot
longer.  Surprisingly, President Truman has never received uch credit
for one of his greatest accomplishments.
     But no matter what your background, to be a plebe at Annapolis
     as to endure a long string of harassments by the upperclassmen.
aving spent two years at Brockport and a summer at Quantico, I was
little older, a little more experienced, and perhaps a bit wiser than
ost of my classmates, which made my plebe experience somewhat sier.  The
upperclassmen at Annapolis could be petty, but at QuantiI had already
been harassed by real Marines.  Their harassment at ast had a purpose,
whereas at Annapolis you might be sent out in the
     middle of the night to polish the brass balls of Bill the Goata big
statue of a charging goat that symbolized the Navy's fighting spirit.
Or you might be ordered to "bring around everything in your room that
moves," which meant you had to empty your room of everything that was
portable-including your roommates.  I don't mind this kind of thing
during the first summer, before the academic year really begins.  It
helps to weed out some of the students who might crack under the tough
pressure of the Academy, or later on, in combat.  There's probably
something to be said for learning how to endure these annoyances,
because it helps you develop a kind of protective coating that serves
you well in war-and even in civilian life.  But I still resent the guy
across the hall who would walk into my room for no reason at all and ask
for fifty push-ups.
     All plebes were required to memorize a set of responses to specific
questions from a little book called Reave you been in the Navy?"  there
was only one acceptable answer: "All me bloomin' life, sir!  My mother
was a mermaid, my father was King Neptune.  I was born on the crest of a
wave and rocked in the cradle of the deep.  Seaweed and barnacles are me
clothes.  Every tooth in me head is a marlinspike; the hair on me head
is hemp.  Every bone in me body is a spar, and when I spits, I spits
tar!  I'se hard, I is, I am, I are!"
     At any given moment, a plebe might be asked to recite that day's
menu, or the names of the movies playing in Annapolis, or the number of
days before the Army-Navy game, or the main headlines of the New Tork
Times and the Washington Port
     During meals you had to sit straight up on the edge of your chair
without bending over or looking down.  "Are your eyes on the boat?"
you'd be asked, reminding you to look straight ahead.
     "North, is the cow heavy?"
     "No, sir!"  You'd be holding a half-gallon milk carton at arm's
length, and an upperclassman, wanting to know how much milk was left,
would ask, "North, how's the cow?"  And you'd answer: "Sir, she walks,
she talks, she's fall of chalk.  The lacteal fluid extracted from the
female of bovine species is highly prolific to the third degree!"  In
other words, there were about three glasses of milk left in the
container.
     The only relief from all of this was the prospect that our football
team would win the annual Army-Navy game, which is always played
     n neutral ground (usually in Philadelphia) during the first weekend
f December.  Whenever Navy won-as we did during my plebe earthe hazing
of plebes would come to an early end, and we were lowed to "carry on."
We could actually talk during meals, and we no nger had to "double-time"
everywhere we went.
     But hazing was the least of my problems.  In February of my plebe
     ar my whole world almost came to an end when I was involved in a
rrible car accident.  It happened during Washington's Birthday weekd,
when a group of us were driving to upstate New York to go skig.  It was
midnight, and the snow was falling heavily as we proached the
intersection of Route 11 and Route 15 in Horseeads, New York, not far
from Corning.  Everyone in the car had fall asleep-including the driver.
We had stopped for hamburgers a uple of hours earlier, but nobody had
been drinking.  I can still member opening my eyes and seeing the
headlights of a truck that as almost on top of us.  That was just before
impact.  Nobody wore seat belts back then, and the carnage was just
awfal.  obby Wagner was killed outright.  Tom Parker suffered major
brain amage.  Mike Cathey, in the so-called death seat, ended up with a
roken pelvis, and a broken arm, and burns.  Billy Mullens broke his ack,
and to this day he's paralyzed from the waist down.  Compared my
companions, I was relatively unscathed: cranial injuries, crushed
rtebrae in my lower spine, a broken nose, broken jaw, a broken leg, d a
badly damaged knee.  I remember crawling out of the car into the cold,
and hearing ices say, "Lie still, don't move."  I was shivering, even
after someody covered me with a coat.  The survivors were taken to
Corning ospital, where I was put in a body cast.  When I complained that
I ad no feeling in my legs, and couldn't control my bladder or bowels, e
of the doctors gently explained that I might never walk again.  Even
then, I didn't realize how badly I was hurt until my parents owed up.  I
couldn't even talk to them, and it was painfal just breathe.  I don't
recall much about the Corning Hospital except at one of the nurses was
named Lolly, and that we eventually recoved enough to sing to her from
our beds, "Hey Lolly Lolly Lolly"use for a breath-"Hey Lolly Lolly Lo."
     For the next few months, my life was a blur of pain and operaons.
After we were stabilized, we were flown to Bethesda Naval Hos
     pital, and then transferred to the naval hospital at the Academy.
It was located in the middle of the Academy cemetery, which created a
real incentive to get better.  By the summer I could be taken out in a
wheelchair to sit in the sun.
     My fondest memory of that period is that Bob Eisenbach, my best
friend, came to see me every day.  The worKload at the Academy was
grueling, and I don't know how he ever found the time.  But he always
showed up, even if it was only long enough to stick his head in and
yell, "God, North, you really stink today!"  When I first got up after
several months in bed, I couldn't even sit up-much less walk.  They put
me in a hydrotherapy tank to get me to move my arms and legs, and it was
terrifting.  I started sinking, and I thought I was about to drown.  The
physiotherapist, one of the cruelest-and kindest-men I've ever known,
made me move, although my joints and muscles had begun to atrophy.
     By summer I was well enough to take medical leave and go home.  I
had been surveyed, and was found to be medically unfit for farther
service.  I was supposed to return to Annapolis in September-but only
for medical treatment until I was well enough to be discharged.
     My parents suggested that I sleep on the foldout couch in the
living room so I wouldn't have to climb the stairs to my bedroom, but I
refased.  I had worked too hard to get into Annapolis, and I was
determined to get back.  Dad reinforced the handrail on the stairs, and
I slowly made my way up and down.  It was during these months that I
came to understand the importance of persistence.
     With Dad's help I filled out the mountain of paperwork that was
necessary to appeal the decision to survey me out of the service.  I
still remember sitting on the patio that Jack and I had built with Dad,
watching him trim his beloved roses when the letter arrived: my appeal
was denied.
     But I refased to give up, and Dad reinforced my determination to
fight the decision and to return to Annapolis.  He worked with me on my
therapy and helped me graduate from crutches to a cane although my right
leg was withered and thin.  Russ Robertson, my old high school coach and
a former Marine who had been badly wounded in the leg during World War
II, stopped by periodically to encourage me.  The accident, the surgery,
and the hospitalization taught me a lot about how much I could endure.
They also taught me about the heal
     g power of prayer.  When I returned to the naval hospital, I made a
abit of wheeling myself down to the chapel every day.
     Being hospitalized certainly w, either.  There were a lot of us in
one big ward, and we ad some good times talKlng together and flirting
with the nurses.  ne of my fellow patients was Roger Staubach, the
celebrated quarerback of our football team, who had been injured in the
Notre ame game.  Later, he went on to become a star for the Dallas
Cowoys.
     When the nurses left the ward, those of us confined to wheelchairs
ould occasionally hold jousting tournaments.  With a crutch for a nce,
and a garbage-can lid for a shield, you'd wheel yourself as fast as
ossible down the middle of the ward toward your opponent.  Our ard was
the scene of so much mayhem that it was probably just as ell that we
were already in the hospital.  I was eventually accepted back at the
Academy on probation, but nly ifI was willing to repeat my plebe year.
Willing?  I was gratefal to e there at all, and would have done almost
anything to come back.  I nally didalmost a year after the accident.  I
was determined to build p my strength, and every morning, while the rest
of Bancroft Hall as still sleeping, I'd go out for a run along the
seawall.  By the time y classmates woke up, I was already in the shower.
I don't want to leave the impression that I was in love with the aval
Academy.  It was a challenging place, but very restrictive.  It's
esigned to give you more than you can hope to accomplish, which rces you
to establish priorities.  You could strive for perfection, but ou never
had enough time to achieve it.  Right from the start, I saw the Academy
as the means to an endcommission in the Marine Corps.  Ever since that
first summer at uantico, I was determined to be a Marine.  But after my
accident, I ew I would have to fight especially hard to get there.  And
I did-literally.  Every midshipman at the Academy has to be volved in a
sport during all three seasons of the academic year.  ecause of my
injuries, football, soccer, lacrosse, and crew were now ut of the
question.  That pretty much limited me to sailing in the fall nd the
spring, and boxing during the winter.  I especially liked boxing,
because you're really on your own: if you
     se the fight, there's no one to blame but yourself.  I was far from
a
     natural fighter, but I could take a punch, and I was in excellent
shape from my morning runs.  Coach Emerson Smith, a legend in boxing
circles, used to tell us that boxing could be reduced to three basic
rules: keep your hands up, your feet moving, and your ass off the deck.
     I was a welterweight, and after two years of violating Smith's
third commandment I eventually fought my way up to the brigade
championships.  That was a big deal at the Academy, and the entire
brigade of midshipmen-close to four thousand men-showed up at MacDonough
Hall to cheer on their favorites.  My opponent that night was Jim Webb,
a good fighter who went on to become Secretary of the Navy and a
well-regarded novelist.  As each pair of fighters entered the ring, the
band would strike up "The Look Sharp March"-better known as the famous
Gillette commercial.  Webb and I were about evenly matched.  I had a
good left, but against another lefty like Webb that wasn't much help.
He was quick on his feet, so my goal was to back him into a corner to
neutralize his speed advantage.  It was a close fight.  We both went the
distance, but I beat him on points.
     A year later, a medical review board had to decide whether I had
recovered enough from the accident to get a commission in the Marines.
I met with them and made my best case: "You people have invested
thousands of dollars in training me," I said, "and I'm going to graduate
with honors.  I even won the brigade boxing championship.  Are you
seriously thinking of sending me off to be a civilian?  I'll make a fine
Marine officer if you'll only give me a chance."  Emerson Smith offered
to show the film of my fight against Webb as evidence of my fitness and
mobility.  But just in case, I also applied to the CIA.
     During my final summer as a midshipman, I went off to Jump School
for parachute training with the Army in Fort Benning, Georgia.  When I
took the physical, one of the doctors noticed that several bones in my
face and nose had still not set properly from the car accident three
years earlier.  Not only would I have to stop boxing, but I would also
require additional surgery on my nose and face if I wanted to become a
Marine pilot, which was my intention at the time.
     Not wanting to miss Jump School, I postponed the surgery and
     ent off to parachute out of airplanes in Georgia.  During previous
mmers I had gone to Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion hool in
Nevada, and Underwater Swimmers School in California.  I issed a few
vacations, but these programs kept me in shape and lped prepare me for
the Marines.
     The final year at Annapolis is normally the best.  Not only can you
ally see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you get to pick the
rvice you're going into, and the location and the date for reporting
your new command.  By the spring of 1968, however, Vietnam was king a
heavy toll.  Our service selection happened to coincide with e Tet
offensive, and more and more names and faces of dead arines and naval
officers we had gone to school with only a year or o earlier appeared on
the memorial boards at the entrance to Banoft Hall.
     zrst classmen (seniors) were allowed to have a car and to park it
on e Yard, as the campus was known.  And having a car made it a lot sier
to get a date.  Otherwise, your date had to drive over and pick is upan
awkward situation for the typical American male in that acho
environment.
     Having a car also made it easier to see family and friends.  My
cle, John Finneran, a Navy commander, and his family lived near e
Academy, and I used to spend occasional weekends at their house.  is
daughter Kathy, my cousin, was a college student with a part-time b at
Hecht's, the department store chain.  Shortly after Christmas, athy
mentioned that she thought I should meet her boss, a very tractive young
lady named Betsy Stuart.  Then she showed me etsy's picture, which was
all the encouragement I needed.
     The next weekend, my brother Jack, who was now a second lieunant in
the Army, met me at the Finnerans'.  He and Kathy encoured me to drive
to Montgomery Mall, where Betsy worked, so that I uld meet her.  Jack
and I jumped in my green Shelby Cobra and ared off.
     As we rode up the escalator aWhen she smiled at us, I was smitten.
She was tall and ender, with wide blue eyes and very long blond hair
that she wore in o braids down her back.  She realized immediately that
this little
     visit had been arranged so I could check her out, and I suddenly
became embarrassed by the transparency of it all.  Betsy seemed to enjoy
my obvious discomfort.
     "Hi," I said.  "I'm Kathy Finneran's cousin.  You must be Betsy
Stuart."
     "I am.  Kathy told me you might be dropping by this afternoon to
     do a little shopping.  But this is pretty far from Annapolis.
Don't they have any stores down there?"
     "Yeah, well, you see, Jackoh, this is Jack, he's my brother-you
     see, Jack's going to Vietnam pretty soon and we thought we would
pick up a few things he might be needing."
     "Of course.  So you came here, to ladies' accessories."
     "Well, not exactly here, but well, you know, we were just kind of
looking around and Kathy had told us that you might be here, and it
seemed like-say, have you had lunch yet?"
     "Oh, yes.  About three hours ago."
     "Of course, sure, it's almost time for dinner.  Well, we've got a
lot to do, all that shopping and all, and you seem to be busy.  It's
been nice to meet you.  Maybe I could give you a call some time?"
     "Ifyou like.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have customers to attend
to.,' It was awfal.  On the way out of the store, Jack patted me on the
shoulder and said, "Well, big brother, you sure have a way with girls.
Do they teach that technique at the Academy, or is it something you
picked up on your own?  I just hope it's not genetic!  But don't feel
too bad about not asking for her phone number, though, because you never
even bothered to give her your name."
     Kathy gave me Betsy's number, and during the next few weeks I
started burning up the phone lines between Annapolis and Annandale,
Virginia.  But Betsy was never home, and the few times she was, she
always seemed to be busy on the days I suggested-usually with another
date.  I ended up having countless conversations with her roommate, Dana
Hanshaw, who had such a sexy voice that I was ready to date her.  But
Dana kept encouraging me to try, so I continued calling.  Finally,
perhaps because my sheer persistence had worn her down-or possibly
because another date had canceled-I got to take Betsy to dinner.  Later,
some of our friends concluded that Betsy was enchanted by
     my uniform.  Jack swears that the only reason she ever went out
with
     me was because he was standing there when we met.  Years later,
Betsy told me the truth: the uniform had nothing to do with it, and
neither did Jack.  She was attracted to my car.  Betsy Stuart was the
youngest of three sisters.  She was a farm girl from western
Pennsyivania, and like me, had grown up in a clean-cut, rural,
common-sense small-town environment.  She had already graduated from
Penn State University, where she majored in retailing.  Although her
father, Jeb, was a direct descendant of his namesake, General Jeb
Stuart, the Confederate cavalry officer, Betsy had no experience with
military types.  She married into a Marine Corps career with a sense of
wide-eyed innocence, and even years later she still couldn't tell the
difference between a corporal and a colonel.
     Our first date was at an Italian restaurant that just happened to
overlook the Marine Memorial in Arlington.  I must have done something
right, because before long we were seeing each other almost every
weekend.  One beautifal spring Sunday, about a month before graduation,
love triumphed over duty: I spent the day with Betsy and literally
forgot what time it was.  By the time I returned to the Academy I was
half an hour late for the evening meal formation.  In many parts of this
land, being fashionably late for dinner is considered almost a virtue.
But not at the Naval Academy.  Showing up twenty minutes late without a
valid excuse is a Major Offense for which the perpetrator is put "on
report."  The punishments can include demerits, restriction (being
grounded), and a tour of E.D.  (extra duty)-which consists of the
privilege of carrying your rifle around in small circles for many hours
at a time.  In extreme cases, being late can even lead to expulsion.
     Coming into Bancroft Hall, I was greeted by a Marine captain who
had just inspected my company and found me missing.  I was the company
commander, so my absence was hard to ignore.
     "Welcome back, Mr. North.  Where were you?"
     "I was with my girlfriend, sir."
     "Did your car break down?"
     "No, sir."
     "You know what this means, don't you?"
     "Yes, sir."
     "You're on report, Mr. North."
     My punishment consisted of being restricted from that moment
     all the way through graduation week.  It was only due to the
intervention of Major Reid Olson, my company officer, that I was allowed
to keep my command.  Olson also arranged for me to serve as a supervisor
for various social events during graduation week, which allowed me to
spend a little time with Betsy.  By then, she and I had already started
discussing our fature.  Shortly after graduation, I would be entering
the Marine Officer's Basic Course at The Basic School in Quantico,
Virginia.  But that wasn't a major hardship, as I would still be within
an hour's drive of Betsy's apartment in Annandale.
     Midway through the five-month course at Quantico, which was
abbreviated on account of the war, I asked Betsy to marry me.  There's a
tradition at the Academy that you give your fature bride a miniature
version of your class ring.  I liked that custom, but I wanted to do it
my way.  One night, before taking Betsy to dinner, I presented her with
a single rose on whose stem I had carefally threaded the ring.  I also
had her birthstone, an aquamarine, set into my own ring.  We planned the
wedding for the day I graduated from Basic School, and here, too, we
were following a naval service tradition.  Graduation day at Annapolis
is the occasion for scores of weddings at the chapel, and back in June,
at the Academy, Betsy and I had been to half a dozen ceremonies in a
single day.  We were married in the chapel at Quantico on November 13,
1968.  My parents were there, but just barely.  There had been a nasty
snowstorm the previous day, and they were turned back on the New York
Thruway.  They ended up flying in on a chartered plane, along with my
brother Tim, who was now five.  Betsy's family and mine, along with our
frieo.  One guest I was especially overjoyed to see was my friend Bob
Eisenbach, who had been terribly wounded in Vietnam on July 4 the
previous year.  Bob had been shot in the head and given up for dead.  He
was still in a coma when he returned home, and had undergone several
brain operations.  By the time Betsy and I got married, he was in a
wheelchair.
     Betsy wore a beautifal white gown with a veil, and I wore my dress
blues.  Both our maternal grandmothers made it to the wedding.  As the
ceremony ended, eight of my classmates formed the traditional arch of
swords for the newly married couple to pass through.  The
     Reverend Peter John Carey, the Catholic chaplain, performed the
marriage.  He must have liked the idea because a few years later, he got
married, too.
     Those final weeks at Quantico had been a blur, with tactics,
classes, and final field exercises.  Within weeks, many of us would be
shipping out to Flight School, Artillery School, or Armor School.  But
for all of us who were infantry officers, the next stop was Vietnam.
     Chapter 5
     Combat
     With thirty days of leave before my flight to Vietnam, Betsy and I
started out on a leisurely cross-country drive.  We had already taken a
short honeymoon trip to Puerto Rico, but now we had a chance to spend
some real time together before our thirteen-month separation.  One of
the colonels from Quantico was moving his family to San Diego, and we
volunteered to drive his car to California.  We planned the trip so that
by the time I was due to leave for Vietnam, I could catch a flight to
San Francisco and make my way to Travis Alr Force Base, while Betsy
would fly back to Virginia.
     After dropping off our wedding gifts with Betsy's parents in
Pennsylvania, we headed north to see my folks, and then west to Michigan
to visit my sister and her husband.  From there we drove south, planning
to drive west along the old Route 66.  It was only mid-November, but we
soon found ourselves racing against a series of early winter storms.  To
avoid the snow, we abandoned our planned route and kept driving south.
     We had been gone for about a week, and were pulling in to a motel
in Amarillo, Texas, when a highway patrol officer drove up behind me.
"Excuse me," he said, "are you Second Lieutenant North, U.S.  Marines?"
     "Yes, sir."
     "It's a good thing we tracked you down," he said.  "Patrolmen all
over the state have been watching for your car.  Your father gave us
your plate number in the hope that we could find you and tell you to
call home.  He says it's urgent."  I rushed inside to a pay phone.  "Bad
news," said Dad.  "Your orders have been modified.  You're supposed to
report to Travis in three days."
     Three days?  Betsy and I had been planning on another three weeks!
I called Marine headquarters to check.  "I'm not even near an airort," I
explained.
     "Then you'd better get to one," they said.  "You need to be on
     at flight."  I didn't want Betsy to drive to California alone, so
we jumped ack in the car and headed straight to San Diego.  It was
awfal: she ried and I felt terrible.  I knew it wasn't my fault, but I
was filled with uilt about leaving her so soon.  We drove in shifts,
just ahead of a lizzard that seemed to be following us, and barely
stopped as we aced through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and into
California.
     We arrived in San Diego just as the sun was coming up on
hanksgiving Day.  I was exhausted, having driven all night with Betsy
urled up beside me in the front seat.  I was due at Travis that same
     vening.
     We stopped at a Denny's for breakfast.  Because of the holiday, the
lace was deserted.  My haircut must have given me away, because the
aitress came over with coffee and asked, "Are you on your way to
ietnam?"
     "Yes, ma'am," I said.
     "Then I guess you won't be having any Thanksgiving dinner.  Let
     e bring you some."  Betsy drove me to the airport, where we said a
long and tearfal ood-bye.  I flew up to San Francisco and took a cab to
Travis.  She elivered the car and flew back to Washington.  We had been
married or less than three weeks.
     he first thing I learned when I arrived at Travis was that for all
the ush to get there, I wasn't going anywhere for a long time.  There
was ton of paperwork to complete, but with thousands of men passing
     through each day, at least the place was organized.  But it was
also depressing to sit there and wait for hours in those pale green and
red fiberglass chairs with nothing to do except listen to a steady
stream of announcements.  They blared out from a PA system that was so
scratchy it could have been built by Thomas Edison himself, and
obviously hadn't been updated since.  "May I have your attention in the
terminal, your attention in the terminal, please.  Travis Alr Force Base
announces the departure of World Alrways government contract flight
Hotel Twenty-five for Da Nang, Vietnam.  You are reminded to retain one
copy of your orders on your person at all times.  Please extinguish all
cigarettes at this time.  No photographs are permitted on the flight
line.  May I have your attention in the terminal, your attention in the
terminal, please.  Travis Alr Force Base announces the departure..."
     Finally our flight was called.  As I climbed the stairs and entered
     the plane, I couldn't help but notice a steel plate next to the
door, with a printed message that read something like this:
     This aircraft is operated by the Far East Airway Corporation, which
has leased it to the Inter-American Airway Consortium on a lien from the
Greater East Asian Bank of Pakistan for the purpose of transporting
sheep from Phnom Penh to Tehran.  The company accepts no liability.
This aircraft was last inspected on April 12,1959.  Whatever the exact
wording, this message didn't strike me as particularly reassuring.  Nor
did the chief stewardess, who had all the charm of a grizzly bear, with
a physique to match.  As soon as she picked up the microphone, we knew
this was no ordinary flight.  "Listen up," she began.  "I've made this
trip fourteen times, and I'm not going to take any crap from you guys,
understand?  Everybody reach down and check under your seat for your
life jacket.  There will be no smoKlng on this plane until I say so.
There are call buttons above your seat.  Don't even think about pressing
them."
     She was the flight attendant from hell.
     "One more thing," she added.  "Anyone gives me a hard timed.
"What's he gonna do?  Shave my head and send me to 'Nam?"
     We were a high-spirited group, ready to take on the world.  And
     one of us had any doubt that we would eventually be coming home
live.
     It seemed like a week later when the pilot finally announced that
     e were landing: "Gentlemen, we'll be touching down in Da Nang,
ietnam, in about fifteen minutes.  The local time is five minutes past
oon, and the ground temperature is a hundred and two degrees.  lease
extinguish all cigarettes and fasten your seat belts.  We've njoyed
having you with us on World Alrways government contract ight Hotel
Twenty-five, and we hope to see you again next year on our way home.
Good-bye and good luck."
     At Da Nang we were ushered into a huge, tin-roofed building at was
covered with sandbags.  Together with several other brandew second
lieutenants, I was assigned to the Third Marine Division.  few hours
later, we boarded a muddy C-130 transport plane for the ort flight north
to Dong Ha, in Quang Tri province, the combat ase in northern South
Vietnam that was home to the Third Marine ivision Headquarters.  We took
off into the afternoon sun, and when e reached Dong Ha the pilot dove
right in, engines roaring, and me to a screeching halt.  The plane
hadn't even stopped rolling hen the crew chief screamed, "Everybody
off!"
     As we ran off the ramp, somebody motioned for us to jump into a
ndbagged trench beside the runway.  A moment later the plane was rborne
again as rocket fire came crashing down on the far side of the eld.
     Welcome to Vietnam.
     Those of us who had disembarked from the C-130 filed into a
ndbagged bunker to await pickup by our respective units.  After an hour
or so, a Jeep came by for me.  At least I think it was a ep.  It was
hard to tell, because the fenders were bent, the windshield as gone, and
the back seat was missing.  I was feeling sorry for the Jeep until I got
a look at the guy climbg out of it.  He was tall and absolutely
emaciated.  His face was thick ith stubble, his helmet cover was
tattered, his flak jacket was ripped, d the heel was flapping on his
boot.  He was carrying a pistol, but e holster was rotted out in the
bottom.  His filthy uniform seemed be welded to his body.  His eyes were
bloodshot, and he obviously dn't been near a shower in weeks.
     "Lieutenant North?  Sorry I'm late, but the friggin' bridge was
     blown up and a convoy was ambushed."  Taking a map from his jacket
pocket, he pointed out Con Thien, the northernmost Marine combat base in
Vietnam.  "That's where we're headed," he said.  "By the way, I guess I
forgot to introduce myself.  My name is Bob Bedingfield.  I'm the
chaplain."  If he's the chaplain, I thought, this must be one hell of a
neighborhood.
     Bedingfleld took me to the headquarters of the Third Battalion,
Third Marine Regiment, and to the supply building where I drew my gear,
including ammunition and a holster for the.45 pistol I had brought with
me.  (The pistol was a prize from the Naval Academy for the greatest
academic improvement over four years, which I always regarded as kind of
a backhanded compliment.) I climbed into the back of the Jeep and sat on
the fender, next to a box of hand grenades.
     We joined up with a convoy and roared out of the base.  Once we
passed Cam Lo, the last major checkpoint, the road wasn't much more than
a ditch.  A mile or so outside of Con Thien, the entire convoy came to a
screeching halt.  Dusk was falling, and there was jungle on either side
of us.  Bedingfield checked his watch.  "We have to wait here," he said.
"It's almost time for the Hanoi Express."
     Every evening at exactly six o'clock, the gunners north of the
Hanoi Kiver would fire rockets and artillery into Con Thien.  You could
count on it.  It was as regular as the nightly news, and about as
friendly.  You definitely did not want to be driving in while that was
going on.
     Con Thien, our battalion's forward headquarters, had been built
     by the French back in the 1950s.  It was originally constructed to
house only a regiment, but had long since been expanded by the Marines
and Navy Seabees (navy combat engineers).  It looked like a huge bald
circle on a hilltop, and was surrounded by miles of barbed wire,
machine-gun positions, artillery and tank revetments, and thousands of
mines.  The original French fort had been demolished and replaced by a
warren of underground bunkers which housed troop billets, operations
centers, and even an aid station.  Con Thien sprouted radio antennas
like whiskers, and was used as a strongpoint from which we launched
operations along the northern border of South Vietnam.  For the next
year I thought of it as home.
     Con Thien was also a vital observation post.  Just north of us was
a efoliated swath known as the "trace "-an open strip of land about a
zlometer wide, running along the DMZ and stretching from the seaoast on
the east to the base of the mountains west of us.  From the ooden
observation towers at Con Thien, artillery and air spotters ould monitor
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units heading south.  ur job was to prevent
their combat and supply units from crossing e seventeenth parallel into
South Vietnam.  This was Marine country, commonly known as Leatherneck
quare after the old slang name for Marines.  (In the old days, Marines
ore a high leather collar on their tunic to protect them against nemy
swords.) There were probably more Marines killed and woundd on a
day-to-day basis in the area surrounding Con Thien than anyhere else in
Vietnam.  The officers called it Leatherneck Square.  The oops called it
the Meatgrinder.
     wasn't until much later that I came to realize there were actually
o Vietnam wars.  Those of us who fought in the northern regions of outh
Vietnam were part of an entirely different experience than that f the
great majority of American troops, who were based farther outh.  Our war
was more straightforward: if we set up an ambush and potted the enemy,
we could be reasonably sure it was the enemy.  We idn't have to deal
with that terrible problem of Vietnamese civilians ho weren't always
civilians, or with Viet Cong guerrillas who would elt off into the
countryside and disappear.  We were fighting against A
regulars-well-disciplined troops with reinforcements close ehind-and
when you were engaged with these guys, you were really ngaged.  Except
for occasional woodcutters and the Montagnaruare was virtually evoid of
noncombatants.
     Maybe this was why we didn't see many morale problems in eatherneck
Square.  I never knew of anyone using drugs, for example.
     0st of the Montagnards in Northern I Corps were Bru, an
aboriginelike tribe of all and primitive mountain people.  Some had
served as mercenaries with the rench, and many of them were helpful to
us, especially as intelligence gatherers.  The ru men loved to go out on
patrols with us, and afier one successful ambush they prered a victory
feast where the Chef's Special featured the brains of a freshly killed
onkey in its original container.  I didn't want to insult our hosts, but
I begged off.  u have to draw the line somewhere.
     I'm not saying it didn't happen, especially during R & R or at the
rear.  But I sure didn't see any of that going on in the field, and I
lived on top of those guys.  Another thing I never saw was fragging,
where enlisted men killed their own officers.  I never even heard of it
until I was back in the States.  The war in the north, in what was
called the I Corps Tactical Zone,
     was fought mostly by Marines who took pride in being lean and mean.
We were trained to get the job done quickly, with the lowest possible
loss of life.  If the Army sent out nine helicopters, we'd do the same
operation with three.  Because there were fewer of us, we relied
extensively on air, artillery, and naval gunfire support from ships off
the coast.
     We were a proud bunch, with plenty of bravado.  It wasn't uncommon
to see a guy who had written on his flak jacket, "Yea, though I walk
through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, because
I'm the meanest mutha' in the Valley."  Nobody else could criticize us,
but we had no hesitation about deriding our own institution.  There was
a swaggering nonchalance that came up whenever a resupply was late, or
some anticipated development failed to occur as planned.
     Combat stimulates a special kind of profane camaraderie in the men
of any unit, and my platoon was no exception.  Shortly after I took
command, I heard one of the squad leaders tell his menz that "Blue"
wanted a night ambush at a certain location.  Not wanting to question
the squad leader in front of his men, I asked Jim Lehnert, my radio
operator, who "Blue" was.
     Lehnert chuckled.  "That's you, sir," he said.  "Why Blue?"  I
asked.
     "Because that's this month's brevity code on the radio.  Blue is
North, Gray is South, Silver is East, Gold is West."
     The name stuck, and within a few weeks the men in my platoon were
calling themselves "Blue's Bastards."
     When we weren't actually in combat, we were on the move, always
with enormous packs on our backs.  To carry something was to "hump" it,
and we built up our trapezius muscles from carrying so much for so long.
After a long day of humping through the thick, sharp brush, you could
barely move your arms and shoulders.  When it rained, which was often,
the load was even heavier.  Even on days where not a shot was fired you
went through hell, climbing steep hills
     n terrible heat, or staggering through fields of razor-sharp
elephant rass that cut into your elbows and knees while you carried
eighty ounds of equipment on your back.  We were supposed to be "light
nfantry," which sounded to me like somebody's sick joke.
     In addition to wearing boots, a heavy steel helmet, and a flak
jackt, every man carried a web belt with ammo pouches and a large, eavy
pack which carried several dozen items, including an E-tool (E or
entrenching), a folding shovel used to dig a fighting hole or a atrine;
a folding metal can opener; a pocket knife, to cut thread, emove
splinters, cut patches for the holes in your uniform, and to lice the
green stuff that came in a can and was officially known as 'meat."  A
surefire way to get a laugh was to ask some new guy to read loud the
list of ingredients on the label of one of these cans.
     We also carried a hammock, an air mattress, water-purification
ablets, malaria pills and flares, and heat tabslittle foil-wrapped vals,
like solid Sterno, to heat food.  Plus bug juice (military-issue osquito
repellent); it smelled like death and burned your skin, but it orked.
Salt tablets, because we sweated so much.  A sewing kit, ecause your
clothes got ripped, and a first-aid kit, because your body id too.  A
poncho and a poncho liner, because nights were chilly, even n the
summer.  Fifteen M-16 magazines with rounds.  Six hand renades.  Three
or four fall canteens.  A half dozen rations.  One morar round.  Half a
bag of plastic explosives.  Everybody carried letters from home.  Most
men had pocket ibles, courtesy of Chaplain Bedingfield.  Big Dan Doan,
the tallest of e forty-three men in our platoon, humped a handmade
machete hose blade was made from a car spring.  It was heavy, but Dan
was trong enough to swing it as he hacked through the brush.
     Everyone carried some small personal item: cigarettes, paperback
ooks, a lock of your girlfriend's hair, photographs, homemade cookes,
extra socks.  I carried laminated photographs of Betsy, my parents, y
sister, and my brothers.  I wore a St.  Francis medal that Grandma lancy
had given me, along with a crucifix from my father, and his amilton
watch from World War II.  The watch made it all the way rough Vietnam
until just before the end, when the crystal was shatered by the
concussions of a mortar round hitting near my hole.  I lso carried a
strobe light to signal helicopters and air strikes at night.  Jim
Lehnert, Smitty, and the other radio operators humped PRC
     25 radios with three or four extra batteries~ach one the size and
weight of a brick.  The medical corpsmen, like Doc Conklin, carried a
canvas satchel called a Unit One, filled with morphine, saline solution
for treating shock, malaria tablets, battle dressings, tape, gauze pads,
antibiotics, an eye kit, a breathing tube, and a large needle to poke a
hole for a tracheotomy.  Machine-gunners like Randy Herrod and Ernie
Tuten carried a basic load plus their M-60 machine guns and ammo.  M-79
grenadiers like Ev Whipple carried eighteen pounds of additional
ammunition on top of the standard load.
     There was no such thing as a fat Marinenot only from all that
exercise, but because we didn't eat very much.  We generally ate only
twice a day, because if you stopped for lunch you might not be around
for dinner.  A guy could break out his ra his weapon at the ready.
Wendell Thomas, a typical infantryman, lost eighteen pounds in a matter
of weeks.  I dropped down to 140.
     There were four items you carried everywhere: your weapon, ammo,
grenades, and hot sauce.  An experienced field Marine could take a few
cans of C-ration chow and turn it into something almost edible.  Food
was incredibly important in Vietnam, and when time allowed, some guys
would spend twenty or thirty minutes preparing a little feast.  It
became a ritual, a small, special moment of pleasure.  You'd take an
onion from a care package, dice it carefally with your pocket knife,
pour the liquid out of a can of beef stew, add in some cheese and onions
and hot sauce and a little black pepper, and voilathe frugal gourmet.
My own favorite was turkey loaf, which was one of the few items
     you could eat hot or cold.  My idea of heaven in Vietnam was a can
of turkey loaf and a warm Black Label beer.  (Cold beer was unheard of.)
More often, though, you'd end up with a dish known as ham and
mutha's-lima beans covered in a greenish sludge that had to be heated.
I don't want to get overly graphic here, so let's just say this was not
high-quality meat.  Within a few weeks, the three lieutenants in the
company-Rich O'Neill, Bill Haskell, and I-became very close.  Before
long we had all become a little too casual, in part because our resupply
situation was terrible.  I was carrying a Swedish submachine gun after
the one I was issued was run over by a tank.  I humped an NVA-issue
pack, and
     ome of my guys were even wearing NVA trousers.  By January I was
lso sporting a fairly impressive handlebar mustache.  That all ended one
afternoon when I was out on a patrol and askell called me on the radio.
"Blue," he said, "you better get your 55 back here right away."  When we
returned to the camp, an officer I had never seen before
     as addressing the rest of my men.  He was a well-built,
mean-looking uy with closely cropped reddish-blond hair who didn't look
like a appy camper.  When I got a little closer, I noticed he was a
captain.  e was walking up and down, banging his helmet against his leg
and elivering some sort of lecture.  I walked up behind him and saluted.
'Captain," I said, "Lieutenant North."
     He turned around slowly, just like in the movies, and then glared
me.  "Maybe you didn't notice, Lieutenant, but I was addressing my
oops."
     "I beg to differ, sir," I replied, "but I believe these are my
troops."
     "Come over here, Lieutenant," he said.  We walked around behind
     e formation, where he leaned right into me and said, "My name is
oodwin.  I'm the new company commander.  You've got fifteen mintes to
take a shower, cut your hair, and get a shave.  Then get your utt over
to my hooch."
     "A shave?"
     "The mustache goes, Lieutenant."
     At first, O'Neill, Haskell, and I were dismayed that this
toughalking big shot had rolled in and taken over our happy band of
wariors.  But once we saw Goodwin in action, we quickly changed our
inds.  Within a day or two, the supplies we had been requesting for eeks
suddenly materialized: new uniforms, boots, ammo, grenades, rst-aid
kitsthe whole works.  This quickly endeared Goodwin to all f us as a guy
who really knew his stuff.
     "He knows his stufl" was the greatest compliment you could give guy
in combat.  It didn't just refer to his fighting abilities, but cluded
his technical and logistical skills.  A lot of men could fight, ut
Goodwin could also arrange a resupply when you needed it, bring an air
strike in the nick of time, or get a med-evac quickly for a ounded man.
I learned a lot from him, and from the close attention paid to details:
how to place a claymore mine, how to maintain dio discipline, how to use
every spare moment for training.  Vietnam
     has been portrayed as an ad hoc war, but in the north, at least,
the units that performed well worked their butts off.  With Goodwin, you
never just sat on your pack to wait for the next order.
     A memory of Goodwin: We were on a routine patrol, slowly making our
way up a steep mountain trail.  The platoon paused for a moment, and I
stood there, idly pulling leaves off a bush, and deep in thought about
the wonderfal letter I had just received from Betsy: the doctor had
confirmed that she was pregnant.
     By now Goodwin and I were close friends.  He came up behind
     me and said, "How's it going?"
     "Fine."
     "What's new at home?"
     "Lots," I whispered, not looking up.  "Betsy's going to have a
baby."
     Goodwin leaned over my shoulder and said, "You can tell that from
the leaves?"
     If I seem to be focusing on the lighter side of my war experience,
that may be because so much of what we did in Vietnam was an exercise in
frustration.  You'd take a hill and move on, and three days later you'd
have to come back and fight again over the same piece of ground because
there weren't enough troops to occupy it.  It wasn't like World War II,
where each battle had a distinct beginning and an end.  This war had
little sense of movement or progress: it began when your plane landed in
Da Nang, and it ended when you left the countrypreferably not in a body
bag.
     We were angry at the politicians back in Washington who set the
rules, who made us risk our lives while putting up with enormous
obstacles.  One of our biggest frustrations was the DM~the socalled
demilitarized zone on either side of the Ben Hai River, which marked the
border between North and South Vietnam.  Despite its name, the DMZ was
probably the least demilitarized place in all of Vietnam.  Although the
area was crawling with soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army, we were
allowed to fire into the DMZ only if fired upon.  We were occasionally
allowed to pursue the enemy inside, but this required written permission
from God and several of the Apostles.  Shortly after I arrived
in-country, and before Goodwin became
     our company commander, our unit was shipped south to An Hoa, a
     arine base west of Da Nang.  Here, too, our mission was to cut off
emy supply lines, only this time in the mountains along the Laotian
order.  It was the same story as the DMZ.  All the enemy had to do as
pull back across the border, and we weren't allowed to follow em.
     This operation, known as Taylor Common, took place along the ge of
the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Despite its name, the Ho Chi Minh rail was
anything bxt a trail: it was actually a large and complex loopg
netighways.  ven with constant bombing attacks, we were never able to
destroy ore than a small part of it.  And regardless of the damage our
planes ere able to wreak, most of the men, weapons, and supplies contind
moving through to the south.  The enemy made good use of Sovi-supplied
radar and antiaircraft weapons, and to avoid them, our anes had to fly
either very high or very lowand very fast, too-all which made most
bombing missions less than accurate.  There was such thing as a surgical
air strike.
     It sounded so simple: if we dropped enough bombs on the Ho
     hi Minh Trail, the NVA wouldn't be able to continue the war.  But
thing the American public never really understood was that the orth
Vietnamese, with the help of their Soviet-bloc allies, had a ork force
of something like three hundred thousand men and omen who did nothing
but repair the railroad tracks, roads, and zdges that we bombed.  Ifa
dirt road was destroyed, they'd rebuild it thin hours.  If we hit five
trucks during the night, they'd push them f the road so fifty more could
drive by.  Sometimes we could actually hear the NVA trucks at night, but
was almost impossible to stop them.  Even a five-hundred- or
ousand-pound bomb, the most common ordnance dropped on the o Chi Minh
Trail, makes a crater not much bigger than a double d.  It knocks down a
few trees and blows the leaves off a few more, that's about it.  Ten
minutes later, fifteen guys would show up
     th shovels to fill in the hole, and the trucks kept rolling.
During the Tayior Common operation, each action began with 52 strikes on
the area we were moving into.  Then a reconnaissance m would go in to
ensure that the hilltop in question was clear.  ly then would our
seventy-man unit rappel out of helicopters and ake down a rope with a
sixty-five-pound pack on our backs.
     We had two days to prepare a landing zone for the troops that
followed.  We'd start with a chain saw and demolitions, and as soon as
we had cleared enough space we'd call in a CH-53 helicopter which
brought in a small bulldozer.  We'd flatten the hilltop and dig little
revetments all around the edge for artillery pieces and a small
communications trench.  It was hard, fast work because another unit was
on the way and was counting on us to finish by the time they arrived.
As soon as we were done, the helicopters would come in to get us so we
could move on and do the very same thing all over again on another
hilltop, farther west.  We'd leave behind little signs reading NOW THAT
Y0U'BE HEEE, THIS IS THE REAlc-an irreverent dig at those with the
easier jobs.
     At first there was no sign of the enemy.  Then the rains began,
creating a fog as thick as the clouds.  Now we had to operate without
air cover or helicopter support, which meant that we soon ran low on
food, ammunition, and medical supplies.  At one point it got so bad that
we went five days with nothing to eat except crackers, candy bars, and
bamboo shoots.  On the fifth day, one of Bill Haskell's men ambushed and
shot a wild boar.  Despite the monsoon downpour, we managed to build a
fire and cook it over a spit.  But while the meat solved the hunger
problem, the smell and the smoke gave away our position.  And that
wasn't all: several of the men, including Haskell, came down with
trichinosis and were eventually evacuated.
     We needed almost everything, including new uniforms; ours had been
worn through at the knees and elbows.  Our boots were in such bad shape
that we had to use medical adhesive tape to hold them together.  Going
more than a few days without an airdrop of the basic necessities of life
was a new and alarming situation, and it demoralized us all.  John
Rappuano, our commander at the time, tried his best, but there was
nothing he or anyone else could do about the weather.  Resupply was
something we had always taken for granted, but suddenly we were on our
own.
     It was during this dismal period on the Taylor Common operation
that Johnson got killed.  I didn't actually see him get shot; that
happened in the confased darkness as two listening posts clashed with an
NVA probe of our little mountaintop perimeter.  I heard the crack of
Marine M- 1 6s, the deeper, slower firing of NVA AK-47s, and then the
     der bursts from our M-60 machine gun.  In the midst of the
shootcame the scream-like the cry of an animal-when Johnson was followed
by that blood-chilling call, "Corpsman!  Corpsman up!"  It took only a
few minutes for Doc to crawl forward, but it felt
     e forever.  Then came the quiet fary as they peeled off Johnson's
flak ket and cut away his uniform.  The bullets had struck him in the
est and the shoulder, and he was soaked with blood.  Using a poncho to
hide the glare of his flashlight, Doc tried to p the flow of blood and
the gurgling from the sucking chest und.  He also started an IV for
shock before pulling Johnson back farther treatment.  Meanwhile, the
enemy withdrew to the west, ving the soaking jungle fall of night sounds
and blackness.  They pulled Johnson to the closest fighting hole inside
the imeter-mine.  Doc was working fariously to save him, until he ned to
me in total frustration and said, "Lieutenant, unless we get a d-evac in
here fast, he won't make it.,'
     As I got on the radio to call for help, it started to rain again-a
ady downpour from the clouds hanging low over the treetops.  Baton
called back and said the bird would try, although the weather de it
doubtfal.  The airfield, twenty miles to the east, was completeockedin.
     I crawled back into my hole, and with my back against the radio Jim
Lehnert's back, I sat with Johnson's head cradled in my lap.  chopper
had to turn back even before we heard its rotor blades.  pilots did
their best, flapping around in the soup for close to half hour, but it
was impossible.  When they called on the radio with the news, I cursed
them, along with the clouds, the rain, the enemyrything.  I prayed that
God would spare Johnson's life.  It took him almost an hour to die.  At
one point he seemed to ken, and looked up at me.  He shuddered a few
times, and I pped my poncho liner around him to keep him warm.  I
caressed cheek and kept whispering to him, trying to encourage both of
us: e'll get you out, hang in there, this is your ticket home, God won't
ou die."  But He did.
     When a man dies in your arms it makes you feel very small.  Maybe
tors and pastors eventually get used to twas pressed up against me, with
no th, no heartbeat, no tears, nothing, I felt ashamed to be alive.  I
what he could no longer do.  I cried.
     He died right in front of me, lying there in the rain.  It was one
of
     the very worst moments of my life.  I almost got sick-with fear,
with shock, and undoubtedly with gratitude that I had survived.
     Johnson wasn't from my platoon.  His listening post had been in
     the line of fire from our own machine guns.  His team leader,
confased in the darkness, had placed the listening post in the wrong
location.  When the enemy probed our position, Johnson was right in the
path of the designated fire from our M-60 machine gun.  The bullets that
hit Johnson had been made in America; he was hit by friendly fire.  For
the rest of my time in Vietnam, and in the Marine Corps, Private First
Class Johnson served as a constant reminder to me.  I used to tell my
sergeants (and later on, my lieutenants and junior officers), "If you
don't understand what you're supposed to do, ask!  War is confasing
enough.  If you keep me informed as to what you're doing, where you're
doing it, and how it's going, we can get the job done and prevent a lot
of casualties."  We carried Johnson's body in a poncho, along with
several wounded men who normally would have been flown right out of
there, and whom we transported in litters made from ponchos and trees.
It's awfal to carry your wounded-awfal for them, because they aren't
getting proper treatment, and awfal for the rest of the unit, because it
slows you down terribly and makes you more vulnerable to the enemy.  You
get old very fast.  And yet the extraordinary thing about Vietnam was
how quickly a wounded man could get medical attention-most of the time.
Most Marines who were hurt were treated within minutes, and you'd have
an IV in your arm even before the helicopter arrived.  It wasn't
uncommon for an injured man to find himself in surgery in less than half
an hour, and because we all knew that, it helped morale tremendously.
The doctors, corpsmen, and nurses did a heroic job in Vietnam, saving so
many men who would have died, who did die in other wars.
     This was one area where I had enormous admiration for the North
Vietnamese Army.  Most of our sick or wounded were evacuat*While I was
working on this book, I watched several episodes of the magnificent PBS
documentary on the Civil War.  I was struck by the number of soldiers on
both sides who died from lack of medical attention and medical
knowledge.  Just about anyone who received more than a superficial wound
during the Civil War was dragged off the battlefield, tossed into a
wagon, and lefi to die.  within half an hour, but their soldiers were
weeks away from any rious medical treatment.  Inside the DMZ they had
built formidable derground bunker complexes, including hospital
facilities.  But they eren't equipped for major surgery, and they didn't
come from a edically sophisticated society to begin with.
     Still, they went through hell to get their people treated.  You
uldn't help but admire their bravery, bringing the battle to us while
owing their casualties would not be treated for weeks, and that any of
their wounded would die.  Even in the shock and violence of ambush, the
NVA always made a noble effort to drag their woundor dead off the field.
     When we captured wounded enemy soldiers, they were treated in same
hospital as our troops.  There were occasional incidents of use, when
NVA prisoners were turned over to the South Vietnatnese.
     these were the exception, not the rule.  Captured enemy troops
     ere given a choice: they could remain in POW camps or they could in
us as scouts.  Many of them decided to defect.  One of our best scouts
was Phu, a former NVA corporal who had en wounded and captured near Khe
San in 1967.  Phu spent a lot of with my unit, and taught me a lot about
our enemy.  I hadn't realed, for example, that when NVA troops came
across the DMZ, or ossed the border from Laos, they weren't even told
they were in South zetnam.  As far as they knew, Vietnam was all one
country, and we were e aggressors.  When we captured a prisoner, Phu
would often begin the interrotion.  We had to keep an eye on him,
though, because he had a tenncy to be cruel.  There were some critical
questions that had to be ked immediately: are you alone, or are there
two hundred more A just over the ridge?  Are there any mines in the
area?  Is there an bush waiting for us?
     I never witnessed any brutal treatment of prisoners, although I'm
re it happened.  But to a large extent the NVA themselves made it
necessary.  They had been told such ludicrous and hideous stories out
what would happen if they were captured that this alone gave em a big
incentive to cooperate.
     en Taylor Common ended, we were ordered back north to conct
operallons to push back enemy units who were moving into
     Leatherneck Square.  We began an aggressive series of
reconnaissance and combat patrols to keep the enemy off guard and to cut
off their infiltration routes.  We went out looking for trouble, and
more often than not, we found it.
     On one of these patrols, my platoon left Con Thien with two tanks
and four M- 111 armored personnel carriers that the Army had loaned to
us.  About five kilometers out, one of the tanks lost a tread, so I left
two ofthe APCs and some ofthe men to guard it.  With the other tank and
the two remaining APCs, we proceeded east.  Early in the afternoon we
received an order to turn back due to heavy enemy movement ahead and
increasingly bad weather.  As we headed back, the tank was in the lead
and I was riding on the back; behind us were two APCs and the rest of
our troops.  Suddenly, a lone NVA soldier appeared out of nowhere and
started hosing down the back of our tank with his AK-47.  The men in the
APC right behind us couldn't fire at him without the risk of hitting
those of us on the back of the tank.  I grabbed my shotgun and started
shooting.  Just then, dozens more of the enemy opened up with smallarms
fire and rockets, hitting our tank and both APCs.  I don't think they
had intended to ambush us here, but once this guy started firing they
all opened up.  Almost instantly one of the APCs struck a mine and came
to a halt.  From the back of the tank I directed the men to set up a
defensive perimeter in the brush around the three armored vehicles.  As
I stood there directing elp on the radio, the front of the tank was hit
by an RPG.  The two or three men who were with me quickly jumped off.  I
was reloading my shotgun when the turret swung around and batted me into
the air like a baseball.  I landed in the bushes, badly hurt, with the
radio handset still in my hand.  Unfortunately, the rest of the radio
was back on the tank.
     The pain was just terrible.  Four of my ribs were cracked, and my
     left lung was filling with blood.  The next thing I knew, Doc
Conklin was on top of me, trying to rip off my flak jacket to find the
bullet hole.  I kept trying to get up, but Doc kept pushing me down.
Every time I tried to talk, all I got was a mouthfal of blood.
     "It must be a fragment," he kept saying.  But Doc didn't realize
     that I hadn't been hit, and I wasn't able to tell him.  Besides, we
were
     danger of being overrun.  We had rolled right into an NVA perimer,
and they were shooting us from all sides.  Somehow I had to get back to
the tank to retrieve the radio.  I entually made it, and started calling
in artillery and air strikes.  We established strong enough fire support
to break the ambush,
     d after about forty minutes, the enemy withdrew.  But we had sufred
substantial losses.  Out of fifteen men, two were killed and twelve ere
wounded.  But under the circumstances, our guys had performed credibly
well.  We had practiced drills on what to do if we were bushed, and the
men had handled themselves just as they were ained.  The only thing we
hadn't rehearsed was what to do when the utenant ends up as a deep line
drive into right field.  I had lost a fair amount of blood, and was
drifting in and out of nsciousness.  Conklin was beside himself with
worry until an army licopter came to pick me up.  At the time I was more
concerned out my men.  I wasn't trying to be a hero, but there were
other sualties and I didn't yet realize how badly I was hurt.  I was
flown to the medical station at Dong Ha and taken immediely to triage, a
large open area in a tin-roofed hut where doctors and rpsmen made
life-and-death decisions as wounded men came off e helicopters.  As I
lay there on the stretcher, I could hear the docrs talking: "Take this
guy to surgery, give that one morphine, don't ther with him."  Suddenly
I saw a familiar face: Father Jake Laboon, ho had been our chaplain at
Annapolis, and who used to visit me er the car accident.  He was now the
chaplain for the Third Marine egiment.
     "Listen up," he told me.  "I want you to look real perky."  Taking
a sweat-covered handkerchiel, he wiped the blood off my face.  en the
doctor came to see me, Laboon piped up, "Looks pretty od, Doc, but I
think he should be looked at right away."
     "Okay, take him in."
     Laboon used to kid me afterward that he saved me from being left
there to rot.
     Instead of operating, the doctors inserted a needle between my ng
and my rib cage, and hooked it up to a vacuum pump until the ng was
worKlng again.  Then they wrapped me up and put me on ugs for a few
days.
     Soon I found myself in a hospital ward, lying in a bed with real
     sheets on it.  Sheets!  A pillow!  There was even an air
conditioner.  This was an inflatable field hospital, which is a great
idea unless the generator quits and the roof slowly collapses in on you
like a gigantic balloon with a tiny leak.  I got plenty of sleep in the
hospital, and enjoyed hot water showers and real food.  You can bounce
back pretty quickly when you're young and eager, and I was back to the
platoon a few days later.  Normally they send injured men back to the
rear, but my unit was on perimeter security duty at Con Thien, which
wasn't too strenuous.
     Les Shaeffer, who was killed in that same operation, was
posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for taking over a machine-gun
position after he was wounded on the lead APC.  Doc ConKlin was given a
medal for saving several lives.  Pete Rich, the tank platoon commander,
was given a Bronze Star, and so was I.  There is a tendency in war to
pray to God that you'll survive in
     the middle of the battle, and to blame Him afterward if one of your
buddies didn't make it.  After Shaeffer died, a lot of the men were
terribly upset.  Les had been a respected and extremely well-liked squad
leader, and we all felt his loss.  A few days after he was killed, one
of our men was just lying there, staring off into space, while a couple
of others were sitting on the ground with their packs up against ammo
crates, talking softly and tossing pebbles in front of them.
     I walked over and sat down.  "What's wrong?"  I said, although I
already knew.
     "Shaeffer.  Man, there's no reason for that."
     These guys had been in his squad.  They had counted on each other
day and night.  Why him?  they wanted to know.  Why not some other jerk?
Why anybody?
     "He's in a better place now," I said.
     "F--k, man, don't give me that.  If there is a God, why does this
happen?  Just look at all this shit.  He was wasted."
     I believe in a mercifal God, but I didn't have an answer.  And
although I know Him better today, I still don't.  The only true response
I could give at such a moment was to say, "I don't know.  All I know is
that God is ultimately in control, and that you can't let this make you
lose your faith in Him."
     Certainly the Scriptures helped.  We often read the Twenty-third
     salm, which is a comfort in so many terrible situations.  And a
passage om Psalm Ninety-one seemed especially pertinent in Vietnam.
Years ter it again took on special significance:
     You will not fear the terror of night,
     nor the arrow that flies by day, Nor the pestilence that stalks in
darkness
     nor the plague that destroys at midday.
     A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand;
but it will not come near you.
     ccasionally one of the men would say, "Maybe God doesn't want us be
over here.  Wasn't Jesus the Prince of Peace?"  If I had a Bible handy,
I would open it to Matthew 8:5-13.  Otherzse, I'd tell the ~~~ry in my
own words.  A Roman centurion approaches sus.  "My servant is dying," he
says.  "Can you help him?"
     "Yes," says Jesus, "I'll come and heal him."
     "No," says the soldier, "don't come to my house.  I'm a military
an, and I'm not worthy of your visit.  Can't you say the word and al him
from here?"  Whereupon Jesus announces to His followers, "I have not
seen ch great faith in all of Israel."  And the servant is healed.
"Notice wn't tell the centurion, 'I'd really love to help, but I don't
do solers.' He doesn't say, 'Before I heal your servant, I want you to
lay wn your sword and renounce Caesar.' Instead, Jesus says, 'This guy
mes from the occupying army, and yet he's the one with faith.  at's
wrong with the rest of you characters?"'
     Don Dulligan, another chaplain, had taught me this passage after
terrible incident west of Con Thien, where one of our engineers had zed
to remove an unexploded white phosphorus mortar round from e edge of our
perimeter.  As he carefally picked it up, it detonated his hands-burning
the skin off the entire front of his body.  It as by far the most
gruesome thing I saw in Vietnam.  As the medac chopper came down to get
him, he turned to us and said, ow you all pray for me, because I'm not
going to make it."  He
     showed no bitterness or rancoronly an acceptance of death, which
came, as he knew it would, later that day.
     The worst battle of all was the night Captain Mike Weunch was
killed.  It was July, and we were on a big armored sweep west of Con
Thien.  The night air was chilly when Captain Goodwin sent out First
Platoon to ambush the approaches to the hilltop.  Third Platoon went
north, while my men were ordered to establish a perimeter with the
company of tanks under Captain Weunch.
     A little after 0230, one of my men awakened me to report that
     our listening post had detected movement.  I climbed up on the tank
with Mike Weunch and we both looked through his starlight scope to see
half a dozen NVA troops silently ascending on the north side of the
draw.  Those we could see were less than fifty yards away, and others
were undoubtedly close behind.  I had to alert my men immediately before
the enemy launched its attack.
     I never got the chance.  Just as I turned away from Mike, an RPG
round hit the tank's cupola and detonated.  Mike was killed instantly
and I was blown off the tank.  Had I waited just one more second, I
would have been a goner.
     As it was, the blast threw me about ten feet, shredding the back of
     my flak jacket and peppering my legs, buttocks, and neck with
fragments.  Even my ears had little holes through them.
     I blacked out.  The next thing I knew, somebody was dragging me
     on my back.  Randy Herrod, the machine-gun team leader, had climbed
out of his hole and was risking his life to drag me to safety.
     Despite the explosions around me, and the sky ablaze with orange
     and yellow tracer rounds, and the roar of the tank cannons and
fiftycaliber machine guns, everything seemed to be happening at low
volume.  My eardrums, which had almost healed from a previous injury,
were blown out again.  Herrod threw me into his hole and stood over me,
firing his machine gun as the NVA swept up the side of the hill behind a
barrage of mortar fire and a hail of RPGs.  I tried to push him off so I
could get out and recover the radio.  The only reason I succeeded is
that Herrod left his hole again-this time to remount the M-60, which had
been blown off its mount by an exploding grenade.
     The air was thick with fire and smoke.  Two of our tanks were
burning, lighting up our position and silhouetting the infantry
positions between them.  With two tanks out of action, the west side of
the
     rimeter was vulnerable.  The only reason they hadn't broken rough
was Herrod's steady hand on the machine gun.  I climbed out of the hole
and dashed to the back of the command k.  The radio was a shattered
wreck, so I sprinted to the next tank d got on the infantry phone.  The
tank commander rotated his turand adjusted his fire across our front,
cutting down the first wave the NVA attack.
     There was a sudden lull as the tank's volley did its brutal job.
The emy fell back momentarily, regrouped, and fired another salvo of
rtars and RPGs.  An incoming round landed beside me and blew into the
air.  For the second time in half an hour, Herrod left the tection of
his fighting position, grabbed me by the remnants of my
     k jacket, and again dragged me to safety.  The second NVA wave
broke off under fire from Herrod's chine gun and the remaining tanks.  I
crawled out again, found hnert and a working radio, and started trying
to adjust the air suprt that Goodwin had already summoned.  Because I
couldn't hear a ng, Lehnert passed the instructions to the aircraft and
shouted to as the pilots rained death from the heavens to break the
third and al attack of the night.
     It was over before dawn.  Our line had held, but just barely.  The
nage was awfal.  The tankers suffered our highest casualties; tricted to
a fixed perimeter, they had been unable to maneuver.  For enemy it was
far worse.  Despite their strong initial assault, only a ndfal had
survived.  They had died in heaps from our tanks and chine guns.  Before
the sun rose over the battlefield, the survivors d melted away to die
elsewhere, to be buried in unmarked graves, to fight another day.
     Shortly after first light, our choppers came in to evacuate the
unded and remove the dead.  We stacked the weapons of the dead o nets:
AK-47s and RPGs from the enemy, and M-16s from our e.  These were flown
out last.  Then we buried the enemy dead and ced thermite grenades in
the two most damaged tanks, abandoning m to the rust and the elements.
     I put Randy Herrod in for a medal, and he was later awarded the er
Star.  During the attack, he had saved our entire position.  tead of
hunkering down in the hole, he remounted the M-60 and nt the better part
of the night repelling concerted attacks against
     Us.  He was a tall, scrawny kid from Oklahoma, a brave and natural
leader who saved my life twice that night.  I owed him a tremendous
debt, and before the war was over I would have a chance to repay it.
     Not all of Vietnam was chaos, carnage, and cries for help.  There
were some wonderfal moments as well.  One of mine occurred when we were
out in East Boondock and a message came in over the radio:
"Congratulations, Lt.  North.  You have just become the father of a
seven-and-a-half-pound baby girl."  Goodwin arranged for a helicopter so
I could fly back to the rear and call Betsy on a MARS telephone.
     It took hours, but I finally got through.  It's strange to talk to
your
     wife in that situation, because although you've been apart for
months, there's no privacy.  The operators have to listen in, and I bet
those guys have heard some of the deepest emotions ever.
     Betsy was still in the hospital, because in those days new mothers
were allowed to stay more than a few hours after the delivery.  The
conversation was a little stilted, not only because of the operators,
but also because we each had to say "over" whenever we finished talking
so they'd know when to stop transmitting.  And every time Betsy said
"over," she started laughing.
     The happiest days of my tour came near the end of my year in
Vietnam, during a week of R & R with Betsy in Hawaii-which was as far
east as military personnel were allowed to travel.  Betsy had left our
baby daughter with her sister, and we must have had the highest hotel
phone bill in Honolulu as she called home every day to check on little
Tait, this new member of my family whom I hadn't even met.  Betsy cried
a couple of nights because this was her first separation from the baby.
I couldn't really understand her tears.  Betsy was already a mother, but
I wasn't yet a father; at the time, I only barely knew what it meant to
be a husband.  It didn't occur to me then that Betsy had already spent
far more time with Tait than she had with me.
     Looking back on that fantastic week, I remember macadamia nut
pancakes.  Showers.  Milk.  Swimming.  Real bread.  Milkshakes.  Fresh
vegetables and real salads.  More milk.  Fresh fruit.  More milkshakes.
     zMABS (Military Affiliated Badio Station) is a network of ham
operators who use their shortwave radios to broadcast messages on behalf
of military personnel overseas.
     ry socks.  Sleeping in a real bed.  Newspapers!  A radio.  More
milk.  hoes instead of boots.  No uniforms.  Clean clothes.  More milk.
No osquitoes.  More milk.
     Somebody told me later that the weather in Hawaii was awfal,
     ut I didn't even notice.  We walked on the beach and drove to see a
olcano, but mostly we spent hours just sitting quietly together and
alKlng, sharing memories all the way from our tearfal and premature
rewell in San Diego until our reunion that very week.  I read rough a
big pile of letters from everybody in my family, and looked stacks of
pictures of Tait.  It finally began to dawn on me me that I as a father.
I had received a few baby pictures in the mail, but Betsy rrived with
hundreds more, and she brought them to life with her tories.  She also
brought a picture of my pal Bob Eisenbach, still ecovering from his war
wounds and wearing a football helmet to rotect his head.  He was sitting
in a wheelchair, in his bathrobe-and olding my little girl.
     It was a glorious time, with no phone calls to return, no errands
run, and no plans except being together and trying to catch up on ach
other's lives from the past few months.  But oh, what a tearfal arting.
It was one thing to go off to war having never seen combat.  ut to
return to the war, having seen men die in front of you-that as hard.
     ormally, all communication between home and Vietnam came rough the
mail, which was why we lived and died for letters and ackages.  The
great occasions in the field were when a resupply mison brought in not
only food and ammo, but those red and yellow ail sacks.  Mail was our
link to home, and we treasured it.  I used to read each letter at least
five times, and that wasn't nusual.  You'd break out a letter and read
it again at the oddest times, ying to squeeze out an extra drop of
information or affection.  Even the news wasn't all good, at least the
mail gave you something to cus on aside from your wet boots.  A letter
might be filled with the 0st trivial, mundane details, and your mother,
your wife, or your rother might apologize for having nothing
"interesting" to say, but ey couldn't imagine how wonderfal it was to
receive a letter, any tter, and to know that somebody back home was
thinking of you d wanted you back.
     Letters were so vital to the morale of the troops that if any of
our guys weren't receiving mail, I'd noti~ the chaplain.  When a guy got
hit and you went through his gear for inventory, it wasn't unusual to
come across a huge wad of forty or fifty letters.
     A care package was always welcome.  Betsy used to send M&M candies;
I don't recall having any special fondness for them before Vietnam, but
I have loved them ever since.  Homemade cookies were a great treat,
along with birthday cakes.  Occasionally, these cakes even arrived in
one piece, but regardless of their condition, they disappeared
instantly.
     Sending letters was almost as important as receiving them.  Not
     that we needed any encouragement, but it was a good feeling to
write FREE where the stamp would normally go and know that your letter
was on its way.  We usually wrote home in the late afternoon, after
digging in for the night.  I wrote many a letter with my poncho pulled
over my head, especially if the mail bird was coming early in the
morning.  Often the paper was so wet you had to write very lightly, so
it wouldn't tear.  If you didn't have paper you used the back of a
C-ration carton.
     Our letters home were filled with plans for after the war, which
was a way of focusing beyond our immediate concerns, such as whether the
resupply would arrive in time, or whether we'd be ambushed, or whether
we'd stay alive until tomorrow.  I wrote often to Betsy and my parents,
although I didn't tell Betsy about my various injuries because I didn't
want her to worry.  That was a serious mistake, and I still haven't
heard the end of it.
     We used to refer to home as "the world," as in "He's gone back
     to the world."  It was as if we were living on a different planet,
and I suppose we were.  My unit was in Vietnam during the 1969 moon
landing, and while we certainly heard the news, I didn't get around to
seeing the television pictures until ten years later, during a visit to
the Alr and Space Museum in Washington.  It's fanny, the things you
remember.  I don't think of myself as a complainer, or as being
especially susceptible to fear.  And I've already noted my marvelous
ability to recall the good parts of life and blot out the bad.  But in
writing this book, I looked through some of the letters I sent home to
my parents from Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, and a few of the lines jumped
out at me:
     z "Last night I spent six hours just waiting for the firing to
stop.  Of course it was our own counter-battery 1ire~utgoing!  Who was
the new Lt.  with a red face?"
     z "I don't really know how much more of the John Wayne stuffI can
take.  ish the politicians would get off their fat, soft posteriors and
come through with something one way or the other to clear this mess up."
     z "Don't worry.  I have not yet begun to write."  "I am writing
this on an ambush out west of Con Thien.  Rather strange in a way, to be
sitting out here in the weeds, waiting for Charlie to come along so that
we can kill him, and writing to my father while I'm waiting."
     z "I sent Betsy a letter explaining this whole operation.  The only
thing I didn't say is how much of a mess this whole thing really is.
We've had two killed and five wounded to date~ne guy that got it was
right next to me.  I never even got scratched."
     z "Last night we had two killed when we went out with special
forces.  It's sickening because they are such good boys and there is so
damned little else that can be done."
     z "Believe me, I pray every day.  Not just for myself, but for
getting these Marines home safe."
     z "We haven't had any mail for almost two weeks and I think I can
understand how Betsy and you all must feel when the letters are sparse
in the other direction."
     z "I'm glad to be leaving.  Not just because it is an escape from
the hell of warbut an escape from the particular hell of this war.  An
escape from the indecision of fighting an enemy that is allowed a safe
harbor from the power of our storm.  An escape from the haunted looks of
men who have seen their friends and brothers die because they were
collectively hamstrung by political gestures and spineless
decision-makers.  Oh, but it's been a swell war!  A grand and glorious
reversal of that war almost two hundred years ago when we lost all the
battles but won the war, for here we've won all the battles but lost the
war."
     z "What's all this fass now?  They're half a world away.  Let 'em
help themselves.  And anyway, we only gave our word and 37,000 lives."
     The scariest part of combat is to be under "incoming," when you're
being hit with indirect fire: artillery, rockets, or mortars.  With a
mortar, the first thing you hear is the distant sound of something
popping in a hollow tube, which means you'd better dive for cover in a
hurry.  Then, shhhh-boom!  The time between that first sound and that
shhhhboom feels like the longest moment of your life.  All you can do is
wait to see where it hits-and pray that it doesn't find you as you
crouch deeper in your hole and pull the helmet tightly over your head,
trying to make yourself as small as possible while you're screaming into
the radio for return fire.
     That is fear.  And that's why we wore two sets of dog tags: one
around our necks, the other laced into a boot.  That way, if your head
got separated from your body, you could be identified from your foot.
If your foot was missing, well, hopefally your head was still attached.
But there were plenty of times when a body could not be identified in
the field, and had to wait until the lads in the morgue matched the
remains with the medical and dental records.
     Commanders had their own fears: you could never be sure that
     you weren't inadvertently leading your men into a trap or an
ambush.  We were hunting the enemy, but they were also hunting us, and
you never forgot that every maneuver or patrol might be the last for any
number of your men.  The very worst thing that could happen to a
lieutenant in Vietnam was that all his men could be killed and he would
be left alive.
     I dealt with my fears through my faith.  Trusting in God doesn't
mean you take foolish risks; every time somebody shot at me, I ducked.
And you've got to have a healthy respect for the consequences of being
hit by a bullet, or blown up by artillery.  But there's also a lot of
truth to the old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes.  As a
group, Marines are an irreverent lot.  And yet there's a real spiritual
depth to many of them-and not only when the bombs are falling.
     I urged my men to attend chapel services, although most of them
didn't need much encouragement.  And I developed a lot of respect for
the chaplains who worked with us.  They would give the Last Rites to a
dying Marine, or provide solace for the man who had just lost his
     est friend and who was desperate to find some meaning amid all the
ears, blood, and chaos.  And they were the ones who had to answer at
most difficult of all questions: if there's a God, how can He let is
happen?  One of my tasks as a leader was to help the men separate the
legitmate fears from the trivial ones.  One night a radio call came in
from a quad leader on an ambush.  "I've got movement," he said.
     "You know what to do," I whispered.  A moment later, like clockork,
we heard the rifles, the claymore mines, the machine guns, and e
illumination round.  Then a long silence.  Finally, from way down
     n the valley, a voice rang out: "Oh, shit!  Call the lieutenant."
     They had killed a bear, and the new battalion commander made em
bring it back.  He said he wanted proof, but the men all believed at he
wanted to make a far coat for his wife.  They were so angry after ugging
the animal back to base that they gutted the bear and buried its ntrails
next to his bunker, about an inch deep.  The stench was awfal.
     at I'm proudest of from Vietnam are not the decorations for herosm,
but the fact that I led seventy ambushes and that most of my men ame
home alive.  "I have one goal here," I'd tell the troops, "and at's to
get the job done and get you guys back home safely."  The key to good
military leadership is to make the men feel like ey're working with you
rather than for you.  Instead of sitting back nd issuing orders, you've
got to know every one of their jobs at least well as they do.  No matter
how charismatic you might be, nobody
     n uniform will follow you unless they're convinced that you know
hat you're talking about.  Each member of your platoon has to elieve
that if he does what you tell him, he will survive an otherwise
nsurvivable experience.
     To improve the odds, I became a stickler for detail and discipline.
made my men get frequent haircuts so they'd have a better chance of
potting leeches, slugs, ticks, and wounds.  I insisted they brush their
eeth, because you didn't want a guy lost for three days because of ental
problems.  They washed their socks once a month, whether they eeded to
or not.  When we came to a stream, we'd set up security so verybody
could bathe; the men were in enougto heaven was to get
     back to Con Thien, where somebody had set up a primitive shower
which consisted ofa hose coming out ofa fifty-five-gallon drum.  After
thirty seconds you'd feel like a new man.
     I insisted that my men wear their helmets and flak jackets on all
operations and keep them at arm's reach even back in base.  Some
commanders felt that the troops could move more easily without this
heavy armor, and while that was certainiy true, some of those men died.
My own life was saved several times by my flak jacket when grenades,
RPGs, and mortars exploded nearby.  In my platoon you even had to sleep
with your helmet and flak jacket on.  It was hot, it was sweaty, and you
stank.  But you also lived.  Each man had to carry his gear packed
exactly the same way: mortar rounds on top, canteens in the same place
on the belt, grenades in the same pocket.  I inspected the troops before
each patrol and every ambush, and if I saw anything extraneous in a
guy's pocket, out it came.  A guy who stood out for any reason could end
up as a target for snipers.
     No chin strap?  Get a new helmet.  Grenades on your belt?  Not in
     this platoon.  Just came off an operation?  Clean your rifle.  Rest
stop?  One man cleans his weapon while his partner stands watch.
     Training was continual.  We'd go back to a fire base, and instead
of resting, we'd practice combat formations or ambush drills.  Americans
are not a patient people, and it takes extraordinary discipline to lie
perfectly still on the ground for hours while staying alert.  There were
times that the enemy was so close that I told the men to be sure they
covered up the luminous dials on their watches.  It didn't matter if
they had been up all night: I was always running drills.
     Sometimes I went too far.  There were times when I demanded
     too high a standard from men who couldn't always live up to it.
Sometimes I pushed my men too hard, and made them walk a little farther
and dig a little deeper and carry a little more than was necessary.  And
there were times when I was too controlling, when I drove my men crazy
by insisting there was a right and a wrong way to do everything.  "If
you took a leak," one guy complained, "North would critique the way you
held yourself."  He was exaggerating, but not by much.
     I was blessed with the ability to motivate people, and I spent
     ountless hours counseling, cajoling, and convincing-talking to the
en in twos and threes, and sometimes one at a time-not because ey were
shirKlng, but because I was asking so much.  The greatest ompliment I
ever received came after a firefight, when one of the arines turned to
Goodwin and said, "Captain, you should have seen y lieutenant.  He was
magnificent."  It wasn't the word "magnifient" that meant so much.  It's
what he called me-not "the lieuenant," or "Blue," or "Lieutenant North,"
but "my lieutenant."  That as probably the kindest thing anyone ever
said about me.  I was warm and supportive when a man was hurt or in
trouble,
     ut I could also be a nasty s.o.b.  if he screwed up.  Jones might
have orked twenty hours that day, but if he was supposed to be guarding
ur position at 0200, he had damn well better be awake.  If I came cross
a man who was asleep in his hole, I'd stand right behind him, ndo my
chin strap, and bang my helmet against his.  That usually did e trick.
"You should be real glad I'm not an NVA soldier," I'd tell im when he
stopped trembling, "because I would have cut your roat."
     If I didn't witness it personally, I might confront the man
privately
     e next day and say, "Smedley, I understand you fell asleep last
night.  you do that again, somebody might drop a hand grenade in your
ole, and I'll have to send a letter to your mother.  Or somebody ight
drop a hand grenade in Jackson's hole, and it will be your fault, nd
you're the guy who's going to write that letter to Jackson's other."
     The company gunnery sergeant had a slightly different approach.  he
found a man who was sleeping on the perimeter, he would pee to his
foxhole.  Whereupon the guy would wake up and say, "Hey, what are you
oing?"
     This was what the gunny was waiting for.  "You awake, Smedley?"
     "Yeah."
     "So tell me, Smedley, would a guy who's awake let another guy
     iss on him?"
     "I guess not."
     "That's right," the gunny would say.  "So either I didn't piss on
u, or else you were sleeping.  If you were, I'll have you court
     martialed, and you'll spend six months in the brig.  Now, then, did
I piss on you?"
     "I guess not, Gunny."
     Of all my memories of Vietnam, there was one incident that remains
as vivid as anything I have ever experienced.
     It was after a successfal ambush, where we killed three enemy
soldiers.  We always searched the bodies quickly, grabbing weapons and
radios, looking for documents, and collecting the enemy I.D.  tags so
the Red Cross could noti~ their families.  Then we'd get the hell out
This time one of my men yelled, "Hey Blue, ~~~~~ got an ~ffi~~~~~)
     He could tell by the man's insignia, and by the fact that he'd
carried a pistol.  I inspected the body myself.  Officers were more
likely to carry documents, and I wanted to be sure we found everything.
     He had been a young, dark-haired, good-looking guy, probably around
my own age.  The Soviet-made pistol was still in his hand.  He had taken
a burst of fire in the chest, which killed him instantly.  In addition
to documents, he was carrying a whole slew of letters wrapped in
plastic, just like we did.  Later that day, after I had called in a
report on the ambush and everybody dug in for the night, I looked
through his pack.
     Among other things, I found a map and a notebook with names of men
in his unit.  During my final semester at Annapolis I had taken an
optional course in Vietnamese, and my roommate at The Basic School was a
Vietnamese Marine lieutenant.  I could read the language well enough to
see that the dead NVA soldier had also been a lieutenant.  There were
letters from his wife and his parents, along with a photo of him in his
dress uniform and a big smile, posing with his wife and two little kids.
He also carried a book of little drawings he had evidently been making
for them.  There were no scenes of combat, only pictures of mountains,
birds, and trees, and little poems he had written to go with them.
     It occurred to me-and how could it not?-that had things gone
     just a little differently a few hoursck, looking at pictures of
Betsy and our litde baby.  He became real to me at that moment, as it
struck me that
     his family would never see him again, and would probably never even
know the circumstances of his death.
     I have thought about him a few times since, and while I don't
recall crying that day, I still find it hard to tell this story without
a lump in my throat.  Whenever one of our men was killed, the troops
would say he got "wasted."  What an appropriate word.  There are some
deep truths embodied in the slang and jargon of war, and that's ertainly
one of them.
     I was tempted to keep some of the materials from his pack, and en
decided no, it was better to make sure it all got back to his wife.  I
rote up a report on what happened, adding a few more details than sual
in the hope that when it was filed with the Red Cross, his family ight
eventually learn that he died bravely and quickly, without pain
suffering.  I slowly replaced all of his personal material in the pack,
ncluding a letter he had started writing to his family, describing how
uch he missed them.  I could have written that letter myself.  I have
always wondered about the kind of man who glorifies comat, or who could
even consider going to war for money, or advenure.  The bravest military
men I've known have all hated war, and it as a great general who uttered
that famous remark-that war is hell.  ar changes you forever, and I
can't believe that anyone who's ever een to one is eager to go again.
     Chapter 6
     A New Life
     After Vietnam I returned to Quantico as a tactics instructor at The
Basic School, where I had been a student just over a year earlier.  I
was now preparing young lieutenants who would soon be on their way to
Vietnam to lead platoons of their own, just as I had.  My specialty was
patrolling and counterinsurgency tactics for small infantry
unitseverything from rifle squad combat formations to platoon-sized
ambushes.
     We would start the course with a few classroom sessions, using
slides, films, and a blackboard to explain the theory and dynamics of
the operations.  To stress the importance of surprise in battle, we
instructors would occasionally charge into a classroom without warning,
firing blanks ftom an M-16.  This was intended as a graphic reminder
that in the war these men would soon be fighting, they and their troops
could find themselves under fire at any moment.
     After the introductory classroom work, we moved outside for field
demonstrations.  Some of the training areas at Quantico were remarkably
similar to the terrain in Vietnam, which enabled us to replicate
authentic battlefield conditions.  As the students observed from the
bleachers, we would organize a group of enlisted Marines into the
appropriate formations for combat, reconnaissance, or ambush
     atrols.  Then we'd take the students on demonstration exercises and
alk them through these same maneuvers.  We concluded with several ays of
field training, where we tested the men in a variety of skills.  It as
hard work, but this was the one place a lieutenant could screw up zthout
getting anyone hurt or killed.
     My goal was to turn every mistake into a constructive learning
xperience.  Whenever possible, I'd begin with a positive comment: You
did a good job on that operations order.  You deployed your oops well,
and your use of supporting arms was excellent."
     When it came time to point out the errors, I changed the focus
ightly by shifting from the active voice to the passive: "Overall, ones,
you did an excellent job.  But during the final objective, the first uad
was deployed too far to the left.  The base of fire for the achine guns
should have been moved farther to the flank."  The lesn I wanted the men
to remember was not that Jones screwed up, ut that the base of fire
should have been shifted.  This technique of personalizing the praise
while maintaining a cerin distance around the criticism was something I
had learned from y father, who spoke this way not only with the workers
at his wool ctory, but also with his children at the dining room table.
Later on, hen he became a college instructor, he continued this
practice.  "You ok care of the first section perfectly," he would tell a
student.  "But is is how we should handle the ending."
     "We"-as if the whole class uld have made that same mistake.
     I loved teaching, and I enjoyed getting to know the students.  here
were instructors at Quantico who really knew their stulf, but ver
bothered to learn the names of the men in their classes.  I still n't
understand that.  The military is fall of wonderfal leaders, but it so
has its share of brusque, impersonal automatons.  (And so, I have arned
since, does business and government.) I served under some these types,
and they rarely inspired me to do my best.  There's so much that a
teacher or a coach can accomplish with
     st a little personal effort.  At the end of a long day, before I
went me to my family, I'd sometimes walk through the Bachelor Offirs'
Quarters just to say hello.  "Hi, there, Smedley, how'd it go, day?"
People respond to an instructor who cares about them.  If a dent feels
you know him personally, or is aware that you took the uble to learn his
name, he'll usually try a little harder and perform a
     little better.  Granted, I was teaching under ideal circumstances.
These guys were' all highly motivated and talented volunteers, and it
was a joy to work with them.  Because nearly all our students were
headed for Vietnam, we kept a close eye on the latest developments in
the war.  If a new weapon was introduced or a new tactic was tried, we
knew about it within days from reading "after action" and "incident"
reports from the war.  I had been back at Quantico only about three
months when I read a particularly gruesome account of a Marine corporal
who had been charged with murder in the deaths of sixteen Vietnamese
civilians in a village near Da Nang.  When I read the defendant's name I
practically fainted: the alleged killer was Randy Herrod, the machine-""
who had saved my life in Vietnam.
     As if Herrod wasn't in enough trouble, this incident took place
shortly after the infamous My Lai massacre was revealed, with its
devastating effect on the public's perception of the U.S.  military.
The killing of innocent civilians was terrible, but what really
infariated the American public was that several Army officers were
accusand a half until the event was exposed in the press.  The facts in
Randy Herrod's case were in dispute, but with My Lai still fresh in the
public mind, the Marine Corp' lost no time in making it public.  I
couldn't believe Randy was guilty.  For one thing, I had trainec him
better than that.  For another, only a coward would murdei unarmed
civilians, and Randy Herrod was certainly no coward.  Hc had proved that
time and again in my platoon, and twice during a sin gle battle he had
risked his life to drag me to safety.  But even if Herrod had acted
wrongly, which I doubted, I stil wanted to help him.  Randy Herrod had
saved my life, and you don' forget something like that.
     In a letter to Gene Stipe, Herrod's defense attorney, I explaine<
that I had been Randy's platoon commander in Vietnam, and that knew him
to be a brave and responsible Marine.  If Stipe and his col leagues
thought it might help, I added, I would be willing to retur to Vietnam
to testi~ at Herrod's trial.
     Stipe contacted me the following week to accept my offer.  Som of
my fellow instructors were less than delighted that I was going t
abandon them in the middle of a particularly busy training perioc
     ot only would I be going against the Marine Corps hierarchy, at
east implicitly, but these guys would have to take over my teaching
ssignments.  The commanding officer of the Basic School called me own
and pointedly asked why this trip was so important.  "Okay," he aid when
I explained the situation.  "If you're convinced it's the right ing to
do, I'll authorize it."  (I needed his permission because millary
personnel could not return to Vietnam on their own.) Betsy wasn't
exactly thrilled, either.  For one thing, she was now regnant with our
second child.  For another, the prospect of her husand returning to the
war at his own expense, and using his leave time o do it-all this did
not strike her as a particularly brilliant course of ction.  We had been
married a year and a half, and I had already spent o-thirds of that time
in Vietnam.
     When I returned to Vietham in August 1970, I found that Herod's
situation was even worse than I expected.  The My Lai incident ad
traumatized the entire military, and the word was out all over the ase
that there would be no cover-up in this case.  (This wouldn't be e last
time in my life when those around me were motivated less by e facts of
the case than by the threatening memory of a previous over-up.)
     A number of the officers I met thought I was crazy.  "What?  You
ctually returned to 'Nam on permissive orders?"  When I explained hat I
had flown over to testi~ at the trial of Private Herrod (he had lready
been demoted from corporal), the hostility was palpable.  One vening I
conducted an informal survey among some of the officers, nd nearly every
man told me the same thing-that Randy Herrod idn't stand a chance.  A
few days later, I was shocked when Herrod's efense counsel cited my
unscientific opinion poll as evidence that a ir trial was not possible.
But as I would eventually discover for yself, a good defense lawyer will
do everything within the law to rotect his client.
     Other than what I had learned about courts-martial at The Basic
chool, I had no experience with legal procedures.  But I spent hours a
sweltering hut overlooking Da Nang harbor, discussing Herrod's ase with
his lawyers.  I urged them to object to anyone assigned to e court (the
military equivalent of a jury) who wasn't a combat offier or NCO,
because only men who had served in combat could preciate the pressures
that Herrod must have been under.  In the
     end, every member of that court was a decorated combat Marine.
     Inevitably, there were differing accounts of what had actually
transpired on the night of February 19,1970.  According to Herrod, he
had been leading a small ambush patrol into the village of Sonthang in
the southern part of the First Corps Tactical Zone, which was known to
be a Vietcong supply area.  When the enemy opened fire with an M-60
machine gun, he ordered his men to shoot back.  Several civilians were
caught in the cross fire, and others were shot when they appeared to be
reaching for weapons.
     In my testimony, I explained that the charges of murder against
Herrod were totally inconsistent with the qualities I had seen less than
a year earlier.  I also pointed out that he had been trained in a
different war.  We saw very few civilians in the northern part of the
First Corps Tactical Zone, where the rule of thumb was: it's either us
or the NVA, and if it moves in the killing zone of an ambush-shoot!  In
a night ambush, nobody asked questions.  But I also recalled an incident
on a daylight patrol where Herrod had ordered his machine-gun team not
to fire because he wasn't 100 percent sure that what they saw was
actually the enemy.
     I explained how Herrod had demonstrated his courage again and
again, and I described the battle for which he had been awarded the
Silver Star.  It takes forever for an award to be processed in the
Marine Corps, and Herrod's had only just come in.  It was now being held
up farther, pending the outcome of the trial.
     When my testimony was finished, I flew back to California.  When I
landed in San Francisco, I learned that Randy Herrod had been acquitted.
     By now a large segment of the American public had turned against
     the war.  We could feel the hostility whenever we left the base at
Quantico, and the resentment was particularly strong in and around
Washington.  It get to the point where the C.O.  of The Basic School
issued an order that officers going off base should no longer wear their
uniforms.  Over at Marine headquarters in Arlington, they were now
wearing civilian clothes to work.
     But even without uniforms, young Marines and other military men
were easy to identi~: their age, their build, their haircut, and their
posture all made them conspicuous during an era when so many of their
contemporaries wore long hair and colorfal clothes.  My stu
     ents would occasionally tell me of being spit on in Washington, and
specially in Georgetown.  They used to drive there on weekends in e hope
of getting a date, but the antiwar sentiment at most of the ocal
colleges was so strong that many of these guys couldn't even get o talk
to a woman.  I felt bad for them.  I was only a few years older an they
were, and while there was plenty of antiwar sentiment when graduated 968
and the early 1970s.
     In March 1971, the reputation of the American military took a zrect
hit when Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of the My ai murders.
From the reaction in some circles, you'd have thought is sort of thing
was almost routine in Vietnam, rather than an aberation.  At Quantico,
West Point, Annapolis, and every other military hool in the country,
instructors spent hours discussing the proper eatment of civilians in a
war zone.  I can remember being asked bout the Calley incident in class,
and telling my students that if the ories we heard were true, Calley
deserved the harshest sentence that ould be meted out.
     In the summer of 1971, Seymour Hersh, the reporter who first roke
the My Lai story, came out with a book about the incident in hich he
suggested that war crimes were commonplace in Vietnam.  er Hersh
appeared on William F.  Buckley's "Firing Line," three of who taught at
Quantico-John Bender, Don Carpenter, and Irote a letter to Mr. 'BucKley,
expressing our outrage at Hersh's insinations.
     Not only did BucKley write back, but he invited us to appear on
iring Line," to discuss the issue.  We showed his letter to Col.  Bill
avis, our commanding officer, who took it to the commanding genal at the
base, who took it to Marine headquarters, who said, "Okay, hy not?"  We
taped the show at American University in Washington.  I was uck by
BucKley's posture: he slouched so badly that I thought he as about to
fall off his chair.  I have never been nervous about speakg in public,
and the prospect of appearing on any other television ow would not have
bothered me.  But to be interviewed by William Buckley was more than a
little intimidating.  Should I bring along a ctionary?  Not having gone
to Yale, I was not incontrovertibly cerzn that I would comprehend the
copious elongated locutions he was
     inclined to approbate.  In the end, I managed to understand most of
Buckley's vocabulary and all of his questions.
     On the air, the three of us explained that it would be a terrible
injustice if everyone who served in Vietnam came home under suspicion of
being a "war criminal."  We were not there to defend William Calley, or
to suggest that war crimes had never occurred.  But all three of us had
served in Vietnam, in different units and diverse areas, and none of us
had even heard about anything like this until we came home.  In fact,
the vast majority of American units went out of their way to avoid
harming civilians, even to the point of endangering their own men.
     We taped the show in front of a live audience, and while their
questions were tough, only a few were hostile.  It was a highly
satis~ing experience: we had been able to present a different view of
our servicemen in the war, and had helped to defend the honor of the
milTwo years later, I came very close to leaving the Marine Corps.  I
had originally joined up with the intention of becoming a pilot, but at
Quantico in 1968 I had opted for the infantry so that I could serve in
Vietnam before the war was over.  (Little did I imagine how long the
conflict would last.) By the time I applied again to Flight School, in
1973, the war was winding down and the maximum age for new pilots had
been lowered by two years.  Now that I was too old to realize this
particular dream, I started looking around for other opportunities.
     I applied for a job with EDS, the Texas-based company headed by
Ross Perot.  EDS had a wonderfal reputation, and people said it was the
closest you could come to a military environment within the private
sector.  After submitting my resignation request from the Corps, I
received a call from Colonel Dick Schulze, my old battalion commander
from Vietnam who was now the aide to the Secretary of the Navy.  "We
hate to lose you," he said, "but I understand you're interested in EDS.
Ross Perot is coming in next week to have lunch with the Secretary, and
I'd like you to join us."
     I remember being pleased that Schulze wasn't trying to pressure
     me to remain in the Corps.  Or so I thought.  At lunch, Dick
Schulze sat with a quiet smile as Perot gave me a thirty-minute lecture
on why I should remain in the Marines.  He
     threw in everything: the value of serving your country, patriotism,
mom, apple pie, the works.  I found him enormously compelling.  He ould
have made a terrific recruiter.
     When he was finished, Perot turned to me and said, "Well, what
     re you going to do?"  By then I was feeling pretty selfish for
wanting to leave.  "I guess
     'm staying," I said.  "Good," he said.  "If that's the way you
feel-" And here Perot urned to Schulze, who handed him my letter of
resignation.  Perot ave it to me and said, "Why don't you just tear this
up?"  Schulze had et up this meeting to keep me in the Marines, and it
worked like a harm.
     en I look back on my career in the Marines, one of the
accomplishents I'm proudest of had nothing to do with combat.  In the
mid970s, when I was working at Marine headquarters, I played a major le
in helping to do away with "dependent restricted" tours.  This rogram,
in which Marines used to leave their families for an entire ar to serve
in units in the Western Pacific, had started after World ar II as a
means of ensuring that Marine units overseas were always ady to deploy.
Thirty years later, it was still an integral part of the orps.  Men in
other services were allowed to bring their wives and milies on extended
overseas tours, but Marines were supposed to be ugher than anyone else,
and combat-ready.  We also had the highest vorce rate in the military.
     Over the course of his career, a professional Marine could end up
th as many as four or five of these tours, any one of whIch could eck
his marriage.  That's why Marine wives, who had to hold the ilies
together, deserved their own medals.  But thousands of marges were
ruined, and many men, including some of our finest and st caring
officers, left the Corps because of these tours.  My marriage to Betsy
survived my dependent-restricted one-year
     y in Oklnawa-but just barely.  In 1971 I had been promoted to
captain, and in late 1973 I was in charge of the Northern Training Area
on Okinawa.  I soon had son to be gratefal to Ross Perot, because I
couldn't have been hapin my work.  In addition to the challenge and the
responsibility I craved, I now had the chance to do all the exciting
things the
     Marine Corps depicts in its rthe process.  We conducted
mountain-warfare training, ran jungle-warfare tactics, taught amphibious
nighttime raids in rubber boats launched from ships and submarines,
rappeled from helicopters, and parachuted with Army and Marine
reconnaissance units.  We taught survival skills to pilots and air
crews, ate snakes and other jungle delights just to impress the new
arrivals, and had an absolutely glorious time.  It was exhausting and
occasionally dangerous, but it was also the most fan I ever had as a
Marine.  Most of the time I was too busy to think about how much I
missed home.  Our mission was to train the combat units on Okinawa in
the various warfare skills they would be needing to fight in the jungles
of Asia.  Although American troops were being withdrawn from Vietnam,
our task was to train those who might be called upon to go back in, or
worse yet, to conduct evacuations.
     The Northern Training Area was a sixty-square-mile tract of rugged,
mountainous terrain at the remote northern end of the island, more than
thirty miles by dirt roads from any other base.  My small, virtually
autonomous training detachment lived at a tiny base camp of Quonset huts
and primitive shelters in a clearing hacked out of the jungle.  All
communication was by radio.  Everything about the place was
sporadic-electricity, supply and mail deliveries, and even time off.
Training continued around the clock, seven days a week, so the only
breathing space was when there was no unit aboard.  Even then, most of
the day was taken up repairing rubber boats, climbing lines, and safety
gear.
     My staff consisted of former drill instructors.  Everyone in the
unit
     was handpicked, and all the lieutenants on Okinawa were men I had
trained at The Basic School.  Our austere and challenging facilities
were practically inaccessible except by helicopter, and we were the
toughest guys on the block.  There were few complaints about the long
hours or the spartan conditions because we were doing the things Marines
signed up to do in the first place.
     By the late summer, things were running so smoothly that I was
     able to take some leave.  I actually had a chance to fly home and
see my family, but like a jerk, I didn't even consider it.  Instead, I
encouraged Betsy to come to Okinawa so we could spend some time on the
island followed by a few days in Tokyo.
     Betsy arrived in Okinawa just ahead of a major Pacific typhoon, ich
meant that we had to postpone and shorten the trip to Tokyo zle I
returned to the NTA to supervise damage repair from the rm.  She came
with me, and watched from a distance as we taught e men how to rappel
out of a helicopter and down the side of a untain-a procedure that
involves suspending your life on a length nylon line seven-sixteenths of
an inch thick.  It was always interestto see how a tough Marine could be
reduced to a quivering mass jelly by the mere prospect of dangling a
hundred and twenty feet in air by nothing more than that thread.
     My staff included some of the most talented NCOs in the entire
arine Corps, all of whom were terribly proud of the fact that they re
surviving in this remote place, braving the wild boars and the isonous
Habu snakes, scaling mountains and jumping out of heliters and
persevering in the wilderness.  Until this woman showed up.
     Somehow, one of the lieutenants convinced Betsy to try rappeling.
thout letting her see how high she was, two of the instructors ped her
tie in and started her over the cliff, talking her through the cedure.
As she stepped over the side, she looked down for the first e.  Her
voice was remarkably calm.  "I don't want to be doing this," said.  It
was then that Lieutenant Vince Norako explained that
     ce you began, the only way to go was down.
     To provide some encouragement, I tied on the cliff next to her slid
down beside her.  This wasn't the ideal time for conversation, Betsy
wondered aloud if I could possibly understand why the ther of two small
children, a woman who hadn't seen her husband months, might not think of
this as the perfect vacation.  Besides,
     could I be so sure that she was going to make it alive to the
botofthe cliIll?
     I gave Betsy the same answer I had given to so many Marines who
wondered the very same thing: "Trust in the Lord and use good ipment."
     When it was over, Betsy said she had found my comment less than
vincing, coming, as it did, just as she was wondering exactly how h she
would bounce if she slipped off that rope and plunged to her th.  I had
obviously been gone too long, because I was about to ask if she wanted
to try it again.  Instead, I assured her that even one
     such descent was a real accomplishment.  But for years afterwards,
Betsy continued to bring it up, saying, "I can't believe you would let
me do something like that."  Fortunately, one of my fellow instructors
had taken a picture of Betsy rappeling down that cliff.  From then on,
whenever a trainee faltered, I would pull out that photograph and show
it to him, saying, "Well, if this woman can do it, you probably can,
too.',
     When we finally got to Tokyo, we were the guests of a close
childhood friend of Betsy's mother.  I had looked forward to this trip,
and had imagined it would be a lot like that marvelous week of R&R in
Hawaii, just the two of us hidden from the world.  We stayed at the
Sanno Hotel, the former headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur during
the military occupation of Japan after the war.  It was now a military
billeting facility, but any hope of conjugal bliss and relaxation was
completely sabotaged by our hostessa sweet and well-meaning old lady who
turned out to be tougher than most of the Marines I had left behind on
Okinawa.  Every morning at dawn she showed up to take us sightseeing
until midnight, which turned our brief vacation into an endurance
contest.  Betsy had traveled halfivay around the world, and we hadn't
done much more than say hello.
     Throughout Betsy's visit I was preoccupied by the rapidly
deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia.  It was becoming increasingly
apparent that unless the United States intervened, as we had promised to
do, the Republic of Vietnam would cease to exist.  Back on Okinawa we
reoriented our training to focus more on evacuation operations, survival
skills, escape and evasion, and the like.  By this time, all Marine
combat units had been pulled out of Vietnam, along with the bulkrine
Division was making preparations in case we were sent back in.
     I was given orders to select a team of men from the NTA detachment
who would train with the Army's Special Forces.  Although my own tour of
duty was winding down, I included myself on the roster.  I was eager to
see my family again, but I was also obsessed with developments in
Vietnam.  Entire Vietnamese units were being overrun, and the Armed
Forces Radio Network news was fall of foreboding.  American citizens and
advisers were already being evacuated from Saigon.
     It was against that background that a call came in from Lieutenant
lonel Chuck Hester on the other end of the island.  Hester was out to
take command of First Battalion, Fourth Marines-the next -alert unit-the
first to go if the Third Division sent units back to etnam.  He was
looking for additional company commanders, and asked ifI was interested.
     "Sure," I said.  "When do you want me?"
     "Get down here as soon as you can," he said.  A couple of days
later I said good-bye to my men in the Northern aining Area, and
reported to Camp Hansen in the central part of znawa.  I was now the
commanding officer of Company A, First ttalion, Fourth Marines.
     As soon as I arrived, I sat down and wrote a letter to Betsy.  I
lained that I had just taken over a rifle company, and that our bation
would soon be on air alert, ready for instant deployment to etnam (or
Cambodia, or Laos) at any moment.  Although my tour duty was about to
expire, I wrote that I didn't think it was right for se Marines to take
on a new commander who would abandon m when they were facing the
imminent prospect of combat.  A year earlier, I had left for Okinawa
just two weeks before Christs.  And now I was telling Betsy that I
wouldn't be home this Christs, either.  She was normally a faithfal
correspondent, but it took ch longer than usual before I received an
answer to my letter.  en it finally came, it read something like this:
     Dear Larry,
     I now realize that the Marine Corps is obviously more important to
you
     n I am-or our children.  You've made that very clear over the
years, and I uldn't have taken so long to see it.  Stay over there and
do whatever it is need to do, and don't forget to keep in touch with the
children.  But I've enough.  I want a divorce.  Here's the name of my
attorney.
     The worst part about receiving Betsy's letter was that I more or
accepted it.  I believed that what I was doing really was more ortant
than my family.  I was worrying about the two hundred and Marines whose
lives I was responsible for, not to mention the fate e free world.
Betsy would just have to wait.
     I kept myself so busy during those weeks that I barely thought
about her.  And when I did, my reaction was always the same: this will
keep until I get back; I'll take care of it later.
     In early December I came down with a very bad case of bronchitis.
I was out in the field one night with my company, acting as the
aggressor force for a major field exercise.  Chuck Hester was there as
an evaluator, and he turned to me and said, "What's the matter with
you?"
     "Me?  Nothing.  I'm fine."
     "The hell you are.  You're sick and you're exhausted.  What's your
rotation date?"
     "I was supposed to leave next week, but I put in my extension
request."
     "What about your family?  What do they have to say about all this?"
     My eyes filled with tears.  I couldn't speak.
     "Go home, Ollie.  It's not worth it.  You care about these guys,
and I appreciate that, but nobody else does.  The politicians in
Washington have thrown away the lives of so many young men.  They don't
care if your family gets ruined, or your kids grow up without you.  The
war is over anyway; it's only a question of when the shooting stops.
Your giving your life over there won't change a thing.  Go home to your
family."
     In my heart I knew he was right, but I still wasn't ready to admit
     it.  I finally decided to take his advice and return to the
States-after two old friends and former classmates, Pete Stenner and Bob
Earl, ganged up on me one night and told me what a dope I was.  They
convinced me to withdraw my request to extend, and I left Okinawa a few
days later.  By the time the plane landed in Los Angeles I was really
sick.  I was already on antibiotics, but I was still coughing up blood.
There was also blood in my urine.  When I called Betsy from the airport,
I could hear the chill in her voice.  "I meant what I wrote in that
letter," she said.  "I'm sorry, but I can't live like this anymore.  If
you want to see the kids, call my lawyer."
     I was farious.  I had just returned from a year in Okinawa,
training
     rd to save lives (or so I thought), while she was enjoying life in
the ety of our nice house in Virginia.  Meanwhile, the government of
etnam and the South Vietnamese Army were collapsing.  Everything ad
fought for and worked for was coming apart.  And now she pected me to
walk away from my Marines.  Okay, I had.  But it didn't ke any
difference.  I accused her of being ungratefal, unrealistic, d
unilateral, but she wouldn't budge.  "If that's the way you want it,
fine," I said.  "It doesn't bother me."  And then I said the stupidest
thing of all: "I ~~~~~ care."
     "I know," said Betsy.  "That's the whole point.  Tow don't care.
at's why it's over."
     I flew to Washington, still sick, and feeling very sorry for
myself.  ristmas was only a few days away, and I couldn't even visit my
wife kids.  Tait was now five, and Stuart was four, and neither of them
lly knew who I was.  The truth is that even before Okinawa I didn't nd
much time with them.  I left for work early in the morning ore they got
up, and came home late, when they were already ep.  I hadn't been around
much on weekends, either.  I called Betsy's lawyer and ended up speaking
to his secretary.  "He for the holidays," she told me.  "Why don't you
call back in Jany, and we'll try to work out some way for you to stop by
and see kids.  By the way, who's your attorney?"  That's when it really
hit me that Betsy was serious.  I moved into the BOQ (Bachelor Officers'
Quarters), the only porary officers' billeting available in the Quantico
area.  With ristmas approaching, the place was emptying out and becoming
n more desolate than usual.  There was a TV in my room, and en I turned
on the evening news that first night, it was all about impending fall of
South Vietnam.  Marines, my Marinions up and down coast of Southeast
Asia.  Within days, Colonel Chuck Hester and battalion I had just left
behind deployed to rescue the American of the Mayaguez, a freighter
hijacked off the coast of Cambodia.  ead of being with them, I was
sitting alone in Virginia with what eared to be an unsalvageable
marriage and two children whom I ldn't even see on Christmas.
     The weather outside was damp and cold, and I felt the same way.
     When I had decided to leave Okinawa, I had convinced myself that I
would be able to make everything all right with Betsy as soon as I got
home.  But she didn't even want to see me.
     This was devastating.  Until now, I had never failed at anything.
Everything I had ever set out to do I had been able to accomplish by
dint of hard work and persistence.  At least that's what I thought.
What a fool I had been to give up command of a rifle company in order to
come home tc'-nothing.
     I was hurt, angry, and confased.  Physically, I was in miserable
shape with a terrible cough that wouldn't go away, no desire to eat, and
for the first time in my life, an inability to sleep.  For years I had
exercised hard every single day, but now I could barely drag myself out
of bed.  Today, I can look back on that period and recognize the
fall-blown symptoms of depression.  Back then, I wouldn't have admitted
it even if I had recognized it.  Real men didn't have that kind of
problem-and I knew I was a real man.
     A day or two later I decided to drive to Maryland to visit Bill
Haskell, my old friend from Vietnam, who was now a CPA.  Driving north
on Route 95, the interstate highway right outside the base at Quantico,
I was overwhelmed by the greatest sense of despair I've ever felt.
Betsy and I had driven back and forth on this highway scores of times
when we were dating.  The day we were married we drove up this road to
begin our new life together.  Now I was driving alone to see an old
friend and talk about old times.  As I raced up the highway, another
coughing spasm struck and I nearly went off the road.  I pulled off to
the side and stopped the car to pull myself together.  The fresh air
from the open window allowed me to stop coughing long enough to catch my
breath.  I had to do something for this cough!  I turned the car around
and drove back to Quantico, where I headed straight for the dispensary.
     There, sitting in the waiting room, was Colonel Dick Schulze, my
     old battalion commander from Vietnam and the man who had introduced
me to Ross Perot.  Dick had just been promoted to brigadier general, and
he was there for his promotion physical.  He greeted me with a bear hug,
and then stepped back to look me over.  "Blue?  You look terrible," he
said.  "What's the matter?"
     I was in tears.  This made twice in one month, and I wasn't a guy
who cried often.  And certainly not about anything personal.
     When the door opened to the doctor's inner office, Schulze rabbed
me by the shoulders and vectored me right in.  "Before you ok at me," he
told the doctor, "check this guy out."  After giving me a complete exam,
the doctor said, "You're a reck.  You've probably got parasites, you're
anemic, and you have uid in one of your lungs.  I'm putting you in the
hospital today."
     "Not today," I said.  "I just got back, and I've got a million
things take care of."
     "They'll all keep, Captain.  Besides, from what you've told me,
ere's nobody waiting for you, anyway."
     That same afternoon, Schulze drove me up to Bethesda Naval ospital
and stayed with me while I was admitted.  Dick Schulze was e of those
great military leaders who can get personally involved zth their men.
With his deep, sad, blue eyes, he looked like Abraham incoln without the
beard.  Everybody who dealt with him came to ve him.  He was the kind of
guy who could take a young Marine who ent bad, bust him two ranks, fine
him six months' pay, confine him
     a month in the brig, and the kid would almost be gratefial.  How
uld such a gentle man be successfal in such a violent business?  I reale
that this goes against the popular image of the military, but the best
aders I have known were all men of kindness and compassion.
     I spent the next few days lying in bed, trying to read every book I
uld find.  But I couldn't concentrate; I'd put the book down after e
minutes, with no memory of what I had read.  I have never atched much
television, but I did then~ven in the daytime, which ould have been
truly alarming if I had been able to pay attention.  e only thing I
could focus on was news from Vietnam and Camboa, and all of it was bad.
Other than the news, nothing seemed to atter except feeling sorry for
myself.  I tried desperately to avoid inking about Betsy or the kids,
although Christmas was growing ser by the minute.
     And yet I retused to admit that I was depressed.  I knew I was gry
at Betsy, and I was convinced that all of this was her fault.  On p of
that, the war I had fought in and trained for, and trained so any others
to fight, was ending all wrong.  I was in trouble, but I dn't know it.
     When Schulze came back to see me a few days later, we went into
     e solarium, a sun-filled room dotted with green vinyl couches.
"I've been talking to the doctors," he said.  "You don't have pneumonia,
or liver disease, or anything like that.  But you're still sick.  You've
got this terrible cough, there's blood in your urine, and you don't seem
to be getting better.  They tell me you're agitated and irritable.
Frankly, it sounds to them like you don't care about much of anything
anymore.  And you certainly don't care about getting any better.  They
think that you'd benefit from psychiatric help."
     I like to see myself as calm and in control, but when Dick Schulze
     said those words, I blew up at him-which was totally out of
character.  I must have looked ridiculous as I sat there, yelling at
him, "I'm hne.  There's nothing wrong with me!  I am very calm!  I don't
need that kind ofhelp!"
     All I wanted was to get out of there.  A decade earlier I had spent
eleven months in hospitals after my car accident, which was enough to
last me a lifetime.  I hated hospitals, from the moment they woke you up
at four in the morning to make sure you were asleep to the time they
came in at night to wake you for your sleeping pill.  "Listen," he said.
"In combat, I've seen you take the worst kinds of pressures that can be
put on a man.  But this is d was far more dangerous than this, and
you've got to trust me now.  I feel strongly that you need psychiatric
care, and so do the doctors.  But it won't happen unless you agree to
it."
     This was humiliating.  Me, in a psychiatrist's care?  Psychiatrists
were for crazy people.  Maybe I had a couple of problems, but even ifI
did, I could solve them myself.  I certainly didn't need the help of a
shrink.
     Schulze and I had been to hell and back together.  I loved the man.
How could he say this to me?
     "Don't decide yet," he said.  "Take a couple of hours and think it
over.  I'll come back later.  You know I wouldn't be suggesting this
unless I thought it was the right thing to do."
     In the midst of my anger and frustration, I began to realize that
maybe Schulze was right.  Maybe the treatment I needed couldn't be found
in antibiotics.
     When Schulze returned, I said, "Okay, I've decided to do it."
Alter all, it was a place to be for Christmas.
     "I figured you would," he said.  "I've already made the
arrangements."
     He returned to visit me every one of the eleven days I was there.
Now this was something really new.  I don't know what I expected: drugs,
electroshock therapy, straitjackets, padded cells.  But there was none
of that.  Instead, I was put on a regimen of "milieu therapy"hours of
group discussions and one-on-one sessions with a battery of doctors.  I
hated it.  It was humiliating even to be there.  I kept looking around
and asking myself, Who are these people, and why am I here?  (This was
the same question I would ask myself in 1987, at the Irancontra
hearings.)
     The doctors asked if I felt guilty about not being back with my
unit.  They asked me what seemed like thousands of probing psychiatric
questions: Do you hate your father?  Your mother?  How do you feel about
your wife?  Your children?  The Marine Corps?  Your friends?  Et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera.
     Looking back, I'm sure that my answers reflected my deep-seated
sense that this was none of their business, and I recall being hostile
and sarcastic.  That was a mistake.  These people were trying to help,
and they did help.  During the group therapy sessions I was overwhelmed
by some of
     e stories I heard.  Many of the men described bouts of heavy
drinkzng and acts of violence in their homes.  I had never even seen a
man trike a woman in anger, and I was shocked as some of my fellow
atients recalled how their mothers had been abused or how they emselves
had been violent to their own wives or children.  No woner these guys
have problems, I thought.  I've got nothing to match is.  My father was
always home for dinner.  My parents loved each ther.  How weak I must be
if I'm being bothered by something as 'vial as my marriage falling
apart.
     And so I concluded that my own problems weren't so serious, hich I
was all too inclined to believe anyway.  I was too fall of pride nd ego
to admit that anything serious was really wrong and that I eeded help.
I had accepted that idea on a superficial level by agreeing o stay in
the hospital, but I didn't really believe it.
     When one of the doctors suggested that Betsy and I might want
     o see a marriage counselor, I just laughed.  (Just about every
sugges
     tion the psychiatrists offered was phrased in terms of "might."
Coming from over ten years of a military environment, fall of black and
white rules and certainties, I found it hard to accept the idea that
life was a series of options.) Besides, marriage counseling didn't seem
to be a realistic option.  Even if Betsy accepted the idea (which didn't
seem likely at the time), I didn't like it.  If we had a problem, we'd
work it out ourselves.
     WhatajackassIwas.
     Finally, one of the younger doctors got through to me by being
kind, blunt, and persistent.  "You've told me so often that you don't
care, but I think you do.  You care very much about what happens to your
wife and your kids.  You don't really want this divorce, do you?"
     "I already told you, I don't care.  Neither does she."
     "How can you be so sure?  Have you ever tried counseling?  Have
     you tried working it out?"
     "She's not interested.  I told you that.  She told me to call her
lawyer."
     "Maybe she's not interested because you two are so angry at each
other that you can't even discuss it.  Why don't I call her?"
     "No, I won't go crawling back.  I refase to beg.  Besides, I don't
have to stay here.  I can leave at any time."
     "Yes, but where would you go?"
     "Back to work.  I've got my orders."
     "You can leave at any time, but I don't think you're ready.  You've
     still got a lot of anger and bitterness to work out."  He was very
skilled, and he badgered me without mercy.  But I liked him, and that
made all the difference.  Eventually, when he brought up marriage
counseling for the third or fourth time, I relented and agreed to his
calling Betsy.  I wasn't ready to accept any responsibility for what had
happened, but at least I knew I was angry.
     "I've got a couple of things to tell her," I said.  "You won't be
telling her anything," he said.  "Not yet.  First I'm going to talk to
her."
     After meeting with Betsy, he came back to see me.  "Let me tell
     you what I learned," he said.  "You've always been a faithfal
husband.  And you've been a wonderfal fatherwhen you're around.  You'll
do anything for the kids and for her.  You've worked hard to provide for
     m on a Marine salary.  It broke Betsy's heart that the Marine Corps
more important than she was."  When I heard this, I was too moved to
speak.  "I think you're ready to leave," he said.  "General Schulze
knows a plain at Quantico who's an excellent marriage counselor.  I'll
put on outpatient status, and I'd like you to call in every day and tell
how you're doing."
     I was gratefal for what I had learned at Bethesda, but I was even
re gratefal to be out of there.  It had been less than two weeks, but
eemed like much longer.  And I guess I showed my ambivalence by silly
things I said on the telephone when I checked in every day.  i.  I'm
calling from Mexico where I've just robbed a bank.  Just Kldg.
     There was a lot I hadn't liked about the psychiatrists at Bethesda,
uding what seemed like a strong push to get the patients to blame ir
problems on other people~nd especially our parents.  To me seemed like a
way of avoiding responsibility.  Another thing I n't care for was the
way some of the therapists played out a psychwas helpfal, not as
effective as the marriage counseling would become.  But for it was a
crucial first step, and I shudder to think what would have ome of my
life ifI hadn't been there.
     During my stay at Bethesda, I had concluded that whatever probI had
stemmed from Vietnam.  I felt angry and betrayed over the y lives that
were wasted over there while our political leaders kept ting restraints
on how we could respond.  I still feel that way, but ay I understand
that this wasn't the singular cause of my depresMy hospitalization
forced me to think about things that I had ays been able to avoid-like
the real nature of my relationship with sy.  In the past I was too busy
being the tough guy to see into my heart.  But now I knew what I had
denied in Okinawa and in the ks after my return-that I loved her, and
that I wanted her back, that the prospect of losing her was the basis of
my depression.  doctors at Bethesda had helped me realize that I could,
indeed, ive without her.  But now I wanted to survive with her.  When I
left Bethesda, it was by no means clear that Betsy and I Id be able to
get back together.  Nor did I know what effect my
     hospitalization was going to have on my career as a Marine.  Nobody
ever stood up and announced that a Marine couldn't seek psychiatric
help.  But it was understood that a "successfal" officer has never
experienced emotional problems.
     The Marine Corps was not unique in clinging to this prejudice.
There is a deeply ingrained belief in our society that if you've ever
suffered from depression or any other kind of emotional illness, you're
never really cured.  I hate to think how many people suffer from
emotional ailments and don't know what to do about it, or are too afraid
or embarrassed to seek help.  It's not hard to get someone to a doctor
for pneumonia or a broken arm, but it can be enormously difficult to get
that same person to seek help for emotional distress.  Until recently,
the prevailing wisdom in many institutions, and
     especially in the military and in government, was that anyone who
has had psychiatric help, or marriage counseling, or who has overcome an
addiction, is automatically suspect.  It wasn't until the 1980s that a
Marine could check himself into a hospital for an alcohol problem and,
after treatment, return to his unit.
     As a result of my own experience, I became far more attentive to
signs of emotional problems in other people, and over the years I
advised a number of young Marines to seek treatment or to at least talk
to counselors.  In the military it's often the chaplains who assume this
role; a young soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine can often unload on a
chaplain in a way that would be impossible with his commanding officer.
And a well-trained chaplain can also offer something special to a
troubled person-an awareness of God's power and love.
     That certainly helped me.  While I was still at Bethesda, I began
to visit the small hospital chapel to ask God for His help directly, as
in "Please, God, help me to get out of here, and help me save our
marriage."  By the time Betsy and I finished marriage counseling, I more
fUlly understood how powerfal prayer could be in healing-whether it's
broken bodies, minds, or marriages.  By the time I checked out of the
hospital, Betsy and I had, over
     the phone, set up a joint appointment with Larry Boyette, a Navy
captain and one of the chaplains at Quantico.  I arrived early for our
first appointment, and as I sat in the waiting room, I picked up a book
that was lying there called Dare to Discipline, by James Dobson, a
profes
     sor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School
of Medicine.  I didn't yet know Dobson's name, and from the title of his
book I probably assumed it had something to do with the Marine Corps.
It was, instead, a book of advice for parents, as I learned when I
opened it to a random page and started reading: "I hope to give my
daughter a small gold key on her tenth birthday," Dobson had written.
"It will be attached to a chain to be worn around her neck, and will
represent the key to her heart.  Perhaps she'll give that key to one man
only-the one man who'll share her love for the rest of her life."
     Those words hit me like a bolt of lightning.  I, too, had a
daughter at home, although I hadn't seen her in a very long time.  If
this counseling didn't work out, if this marriage didn't work out, what
Klnd of gift would I be able to give my own daughter, whom I barely
knew, hen she turned ten?  What kind of example was I providing her
about the kind of man she should seek as a mate?  How could I ever do
something as beautifal as this James Dobson had done, and had written
about in that book?  And for the third time in this whole ordeal, I
ried.
     Betsy still hadn't arrived when Chaplain Larry Boyette opened the
oor, and I ended up attending most of that first session without her.
he had been even more reluctant to come than I was, perhaps ecause
Boyette wore a uniform and had been recommended by Genral Schulze, which
meant that he came from my world.  When she did how up, she was on her
guard.  "I'll come a few times," she told oyette, "but I hope you won't
be bringing in any of this God stuff."  ome chaplains might have taken
offense, but Larry just leaned back nd said, "You don't have to worry
about that, Betsy.  He's already ere."
     The counseling eventually helped us, but it took a long time efore
things got better.  In one of our early sessions, Betsy blurted ut that
the only reason she had bothered to show up at all was ecause she felt
sorry for me.  That really got to me.
     After several weeks of counseling, I moved back home.  Betsy and
were each seeing Larry separately as well.  (My appointments were on
onday evenings; heaven forbid I should miss an hour of work at arine
headquarters!) I still remember the session where I told Larry was
living with Betsy again.  I expected to be congratulated, but he
     wasn't impressed, and I was disappointed by his reaction.  But he
knew how much work still lay ahead, and he wasn't especially interested
in superficial changes.
     On Friday afternoons, Betsy and I would see Larry together.  Then
we'd spend an hour or two together, sometimes doing errands, or
shopping, or just going out for coffee.
     I was beginning to understand that my wile was a helpmate, and that
a helpmate isn't there to take orders, but o talk to each other clearly
but without hostility, and how to express ourselves directly, as in: "It
really hurts me when I call the office and I don't get a call back."
Don't tell her how she feels, Larry would say, tell her how you feel.
Don't tell each other what you're doing wrong; instead, be clear about
what you want and what you need.  Instead of "You didn't take out the
garbage," try, "I need help with the garbage," or, "I really appreciate
it when you take out the garbage."
     It wasn't just the long separations that led to so many divorces in
     the Marine Corps.  It was also the striking contrast between
military culture and the requirements of a marriage.  As a Marine
officer, I was used to giving orders and telling other people what to
do.  But a marriage is a partnership, not a platoon, and being a father
is entirely different from being a commander.
     Moreover, Betsy had changed enormously during my year in Vietnam,
and again while I was in Okinawa.  I returned from Vietnam saying, in
ef[ect, "I'm back, and here's how we're going to do things."  But Betsy
had been living without me for a year, being mother, father, and keeping
house and home together while working part-time as an executive
assistant at a translation service.
     So many military spouses go through that same experience.  In the
case of the wives, while their husbands are away for long periods of
time, they have to take care of everythingnot only the kids, but the
house, the mortgage, the car, the finances, and all the rest.  When the
men come back, ready to reassert themselves in their traditional roles,
they discover that everything is different, and that their wives have
grown stronger and more independent.  In our case, all of this took
place against the backdrop of enormous changes in the roles and
relationships of men and women~hanges so profound they permeated even
the military.
     Another thing I came to understand was that in addition to the
     two of us, there was a third entity-the relationship itself-that
had to be nurtured.  I started spending more time at home, and although
my tendency is to fall back on old work habits, Betsy became more
tolerant, and the time we spent apart was no longer as great a source of
ension between us.
     I began to see Betsy not ouiy as my wife, but as my friend, too.  I
     ad never thought of a woman as a potential friend before.  When I
as growing up, my friends were exclusively male.  Girls were people ou
dated, and held the door for, and occasionally even kissed.  Larry
Boyette spoke often about responsibility, and how I ouldn't fiilfill my
commitment to Betsy and my children if I wasn't round-either because I
was determined to be SuperMarine or ecause we were divorced.  He spoke
of our children, Tait and Stuart, being gifts, on loan from God.  And he
helped us understand that hen you really need help, there is only one
place you can always, ways, find it-from Him who made us all.
     The recovery process took time.  It began the moment I turned ound
on Interstate 95 on that bleak December day, and it required e help of
several people.  There were ups and downs along the way, by the time
Saigon fell at the end of April, I was able to watch it television with
Betsy.  I cried unashamedly, and Betsy had her arm ound me.  She
understood.
     With the amazing grace of God and plenty of hard work, we gradlly
put our marriage back together again.  Now, I'm certainly not vocating
that marriage repairs need to start with psychiatric treatnt.  But in
our case, if I hadn't ended up in the hospital and gone m there to
marriage counseling, I doubt that our marriage would ve survived.  We
might have patched things up temporarily, but we uldn't have reached a
real resolution.
     As I worked to repair my relationship with Betsy, there was one re
relationship left to work on, although I didn't realize it at the e.
And here, too, my growth was helped along by a man in unim.
     When I left Bethesda I was assigned to work in the Manpower artment
of Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.  It was my -and, I hoped,
my last-desk job as a Marine, but for a career cer these assignments are
unavoidable.  There was little, however,
     that made a tour at the Marine headquarters attractive.  The
building is an old warehouse across the street from Arlington Cemetery,
and old hands would point out the window and tell newcomers like me,
"See those graves?  They're reserved for action officers who miss their
deadlines."
     It was during this assignment that I worked on replacing individual
dependent-restricted assignments with a new system called the unit
deployment plan.  Instead of sending individual Marines overseas for
twelve or thirteen months (or eighteen months in the case of bachelors),
we started sending entire units for six months at a time.  The tours
were shorter, morale was higher, unit integrity was far better, and a
lot more marriages survived.  A year later, I was actually awarded a
medal for my work on this project; I hadn't even known you could get a
medal for administrative work.  It was at Marine headquarters that I met
a man who would lead
     me to change my life.  Major John Grinalds worked at a desk across
a partition from mine.  Highly decorated from his two tours of duty in
Vietnam, he was a graduate of West Point who went on to become a Rhodes
Scholar and White House Fellow, and to earn a Harvard M.B.A.  He was
enormously respected in the office: whenever there was an important
decision to be made, people would ask, "What does Grinalds think about
this?"
     He was also in terrific physical shape, which wasn't true of
everyone at headquarters.  There were a number of chubby Marines
floating around in 1975, probably because of the commandant, who was
known affectionately as "Fat Bob" Cushman.  The standing joke was that
the physical fitness test consisted of three laps around old Bob.  John
Grinalds was on the fast track.  While we were at headquarters, John was
deep-selected-selected early-for lieutenant colonel.  (Around the same
time, I was deep-selected for major.) But this wasn't the only thing
that made John Grinalds different from other officers.  Instead of the
training and administration manuals that most officers kept on their
desks, John kept a Bible, and from time to time I would see him reading
it.  He was known to be a "born-again" Christian-a term I didn't really
understand on his sleeve.  Even after we had come to know each other
fairly well at headquarters, about the most he ever told me
     about his personal belief was to point to his Bible and say, "You
might want to know a little more about this."
     In 1978, when John was named to become a battalion commander in the
Second Marine Division, based at Camp Lejeune, he asked if I wanted to
come along as his operations officer.  I was delighted with the
prospect, but before Betsy and I moved the family to North Carolina, we
drove down there so she could see what I hoped would be our new home.
We left Virginia on a Friday afternoon, and pulled into Jacksonville,
the town outside the sprawling base at Camp Le jeune, around midnight.
Betsy had fallen asleep, and when she opened her eyes and looked around
she almost died.  "Tell me it's oniy a nightmare," she said, for
Jacksonville in 1978 was like the towns outside most large military
bases.  The main street was lined with seedy bars, strip joints, pawn
shops, fast-food joints and used-car lots~ach with its own flashing neon
sign.  It looked like a poor man's Times Square.  It's better today, but
back then it was a shocking, garish, and depressing sight, made all the
more so by its contrast with the nearby base.  When we drove through the
sentry post onto Camp Lejeune, the difference was simply amazing.  The
base was beautifal and immaculately maintained, with miles of forests
which double as training areas for the twenty-five thousand Marines
assigned there.  Betsy also discovered one of the military's best-kept
secrets: Camp Lejeune has a world-class recreational beach.  We spent
the weekend there, looked at where our new quarters would be, and
returned to Virginia to sell our house, pack up our belongings, and move
to North Carolina.
     It was very hard to move from our house in Stafford, and not just
because of all the "stuf[" we had accumulated by then.  (On my first
military move, from Annapolis to Quantico in 1968, everything I owned
fit in the back of my car.  Now, ten years and three children later, we
needed a forty-foot moving van.) This house was also the setting for so
many memories ~s well.  This was the first home we owned, and we had
watched it being built.  It was the scene of our neardivorce, and the
rebuilding of our marriage.  We brought our little Sarah home to this
house from the Quantico base hospital where she had been born.  Here,
Tait and Stuart had built fast friendships with eighboring children.  We
had laughed, loved, and cried together in at house, and leaving it was
wrenching for all of us.
     As the operations officer of the Third Battalion, Eighth Marines, I
     was responsible for the training and the preparation of a
two-thousandman unit as it prepared to deploy to the Mediterranean~r, if
necessary, the Middle East or even the Pacific.  One of the great joys
of this job was that I could see the early results of the new policy I
had worked to implement at headquarters: because Marine units were now
kept together longer, there was a speedy decline in what we called
personnel turbulence, and a visible improvement in both proficiency and
morale.
     One morning, about two weeks before we were due to leave for
     our six-month deployment to the Mediterranean, I jumped off the
back of an armored amphibious vehicle and reinjured my back, exactly
where I had broken it during the car accident in 1964.  This had
happened once before, during a parachute accident in 1973 which had
landed me in the hospital for a week, followed by another week or so of
bed rest, the only time since Vietnam that I missed a day of duty.  Now
I was lying on the ground, writhing in pain, and wondering how I was
ever going to recover in time to ship out to the Mediterranean with my
unit.
     This was not a routine deployment: we were about to become the
Landing Force for the Sixth Fleet~ne of the most critical assignments in
the Marine Corps.  As I lay there, I didn't even want to contemplate
sitting in traction while the battalion that I had trained with for
months deployed without me.  Someone ran off to find the battalion
commander and a corpsman.  Grinalds got there first.  He helped me up to
a sitting position, and knelt down beside me.  Placing his hands on my
legs, he said, "I'm going to pray for you."
     This wasn't exactly the kind of help I had in mind.  I'm lying here
in agony and he wants to pray?  This guy must be nuts.
     Then John Grinalds called out in prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, You
     are the Great Physician.  Heal this man."  Suddenly the pain
disappeared.  Slowly, the feeling came back in
     my legs.  I didn't know what to say beyond a muttered "Thank you."
     "Don't thank me," said Grinalds.  "Thank your Lord and Savior.
     He is the Great Physician.  You have to turn to Him."  Sometimes,
if you're too thick to get the message any other way, God has to hit you
over the head with a two-by-four.  He'd certainly
     sent me the message before, but I wasn't paying attention.  In the
car accident in 1964, everyone I was with was either killed or terribly
injured.  Yet I was not oniy able to recover, but to win a boxing
championship at Annapolis, and to graduate, and to get a commission in
the Marines.  When the doctors told me I might never walk again, I
refased to believe them.  I took a lot of pride in my recovery, and with
all my persistence and hard work, I wanted to believe I had done it on
my own.  Later, in Vietnam, there were times when nearly everybody
around me was either killed or grievously wounded, and I escaped
relatively unscathed.  There were times when I was painfally hurt, but
was able to recover quickly and return to duty.  After the war, when I
received two early promotions in the Marine Corps, I wrote it off to
being a good officer.  When the Lord blessed us with our first two
children, I didn't see His hand in it.  When my life was coming apart,
and I was sitting in the chaplain's office at Quantico, there were any
number of books or magazines I could have picked up in the waiting room.
Time and Reader's Digest were right there, but I started reading a book
by Jim Dobson.  Betsy already had a copy in our house, but I didn't even
know it was there.  And I had no idea that Jim Dobson, the founder of an
organization called Focus on the Family, would later become an important
person in my life.  What struck me so powerfally about John Grinalds's
pjeune that morning was that for so long I'd had it all wrong.  I had
been taking credit for all the things I had been able to do over the
years, but I didn't deserve it, any of it.  The message He had been
sending was putyourfaith in Me.  Not in yourself, not in others, not in
the things of this earth, but in Me.
     The profound faith of John Grinalds had a powerfal effect on me.
It made me realize that I was a little like the military radios I was so
familiar with.  They have two modes: transmit and receive, and they work
on many different frequencies.
     But I had been too busy transmitting to receive.  I had transmitted
a lot of prayers over the years, but I hadn't stopped long enough to
acknowledge that my messages had been received and that He was
answering.  I came to see that He had been sending a message back: trust
in Me.  And more.  "I don't do these things to glori~ you," He
     had been telling me.  "I do them that others will glori~ Me.  You
must become an instrument by which others come to understand that.  You
can't take credit for healing yourself.  Everything that happens to you
happens because of My grace.
     "If you have succeeded, give Me the credit.  If you prevail in
adversity, bear witness to My power.  Let others see My hand in your
life that they might come to know Me.  And by the way, get to know Me a
little better in the process.  I am the God of the Universe, but I'm
also your personal Savior."  I was profoundly humbled by this
understanding.  I now knew what others meant when they described John
Grinalds as being "born again."  Over the months to come, this
understanding led me to a much deeper relationship with my Maker.
     I had been raised to know who my Lord and Savior was.  I knew about
Him, but I didn't know Him personally.  It was like reading about some
important world figure, seeing him on television, reading things he had
written and said, but never actually meeting him.  That, to me, is the
clearest way I know of explaining how that relationship has changed.
Today, I've met Him and I know Him personally.  Later that month, after
we'd deployed, I sat with John and our chaplain, Bruce Jayne, as they
led Bible studies on Sunday evenings in the ship's wardroom.  While we
were at sea, I managed to read the entire Bible from cover to cover, and
by the time we returned from the Mediterranean, I felt comfortable in
leading a few Bible studies myself.  For me, John Grinalds's
extraordinary expression of faith was the '~rst step in a long walk.  By
the time I was fired in November 1986, I knew that with God's help, I
could withstand any pressure.  In the months that followed my firing, I
suffered a number of disappointments.  Terrible things were said about
me in public.  People I had thought of as close associates, colleagues,
and even friends became sources for absurd and ugly newspaper articles,
media stories, and accusations.
     And yet I never felt alone, and never doubted that the outcome
would be positive.  And while I didn't need a reminder, I got one
anyway.  On July 7, 1987, on the very first morning of my testimony
before the Joint Congressional Committee, an elderly woman whom I had
never seen before broke out from the crowd of reporters and onlookers
and through the throng of security guards, and handed me a little card.
During those days my lawyers wouldn't allow me to read anything except
specific materials relating to the inquisition, and Brendan Sullivan, my
lawyer, snatched the card from my hand even before I looked at it.
     By the time we walked into the hearing room, I had forgotten all
about it.  But just before we sat down, Brendan put the card on the
microphone stand in front of me.  Every time we stood up to leave during
a recess, Brendan picked it up and took it with him, and every time we
returned, he put it back.  The reporters who crowded around us tried to
get a glimpse of what was on the card, but Sullivan wouldn't let them.
     Imprinted on the card was a biblical verse:
     They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
     They shall mount up with wings as eagles.  They shall run and not
be weary.  They shall walk, but not faint.
     -Isaiah 40:31
     As I went through an extraordinary experience with the whole
country looking on, that card was in front of me the whole time.
     Chapter 7
     Byz~um on the Poto~~~
     All my life I have struggled to strike the right balance b~M4~n my
work and my family.  Mostly, I failed.  But there was one ycar when I
got it right.  In 1980, after two years in the Second Division and two
sixmonth deployments to the Mediterranean from Camp Iejcu~~, I was one
of about twenty Marine officers selected to spend thc 1~~081 academic
year in the Command and Staff course at the Nasa War College in Newport,
Rhode Island.  This was easily the bet t~inily tour of my Marine Corps
career.  The classes were stimulating, the setting was idyllic, and the
hours were civilized: classes ran fiofiii eightthirty to three, and I
was home for dinner every night.
     I probably spent more time with my family during that ~~,~e year
than in the rest of the 1980s combined.  We went skiing ii, winter, and
toured Boston and a good bit of New England in the spring Iii,!  fall.
Betsy and I even got to see a couple of shows in New York.  Whenever the
weather was decent, we went sailing.  I had learned t,~ sail at
Annapolis on Chesapeake Bay, where the bottom was so si>tt you could run
aground without even knowing it.  But Narragansett Ray, off Newport, is
flaIl of rocks, and I must have hit every one of tlieiii.  There were
five of us when we moved to Newport, and si': when
     we left.  As I look back on the birth of our children, it's almost
as if I had been acting out some broad sociological trend of the
deepening involvement of fathers.  I was in Vietnam when Tait was born
in 1969, and I didn't even see her until months later.  In 1970, when
Stuart appeared, I was reading a book in the hospital waiting room.  The
door opened, and a nurse came out.  "Congratulations," she said.  "You
have a healthy baby boy.  You can see him through the window at the end
of the hall, and you can see your wife [unspoken but implied message:
that poor woman whose terrible s~ferin~ is all yoisr JawIt] tomorrow."
     In 1976, when Betsy was pregnant with Sarah, we enrolled in a
Lamaze class at the clinic in Quantico.  Betsy went into labor during a
family dinner at .  When Dornin came along in the spring of 1981, Betsy
and I were in a hospital room in Newport when everything seemed to
happen at once.  I yelled for help, and a male nurse came running in.
By the time the doctor showed up, our third daughter was already in my
arms.
     When our year in Newport was up, I had hoped to return to the Fleet
Marine Forces-preferably back at the Second Marine Division at Camp
Lejeune.  But the Marine Corps had other plans.  One afternoon in early
February, I was pulled out of class and told to report to Washington for
a series of interviews that might lead to my next assignment-as a staff
member at the National Security Council.  I didn't even know the NSC was
an option, and when I learned that it was, 1 made clear to everybody
that I wasn't interested.  I didn't want another desk job, and I
certainly didn't want one in Washington.
     But in the military you go where you're sent.  One of my interiews
was with General Robert Barrow, commandant of the Marine Corps.  Barrow,
tall and thin as a rail, stared at me from across the desk here he stood
with his hands behind his back.  "Majuh," he said in is long Iriuisiana
drawl, "Ah understand that you'd prefer not to go o the National
Security Council."
     "Sir," I replied, "I'll go where I'm sent, of course, but I'd
rather eturn to the fleet."
     "Brotha' North," he said, "'tisn't like you to whine.  Carry out
yo' rders."
     Although I had groused like hell about being sent to the NSC, I
     did appreciate the compliment.  Whenever the Marine Corps picks you
to go "outside the service"-whether it's to the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the CIA, the White House, embassy duty, or anywhere else where you're
serving in the presence of other services, or among civilians, it's
considered an honor.  This is especially true in Washington, because
that's where the major decisions on roles, missions, and budget are
made; issues that affect the entire Marine Corps.  Later, I was told
that another reason I was selected was that John Lehman, Secretary of
the Navy, had liked a paper I wrote at the War College in which I argued
that there was still an important role for battleships in modern
warfare.
     Even so, I had no business being assigned to the NSC.  And 1 ended
up there for a relatively trivial reason.  Ronald Reagan had been
elected, in part, because he promised to shrink the size of the federal
government.  His advisers soon discovered that one of the easiest ways
for the White House to reduce overhead was to replace political
appointees on the government payroll with military officers detailed
from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.  Because our salaries were
paid by our respective branches of the armed services, we were a source
of cheap labor.
     I was over my head at the NSC, and I knew it.  The problem wasn't
my military background, because there were military officers at the
White House who certainly belonged there.  But most of them had advanced
degrees in foreign studies or political science, while the bulk of my
experience was in military units and combat training.  I was wellversed
in battlefield tactics and intelligence, and I certainly believed in the
goals and policies that President Reagan had articulated in the 1980
campaign-especially his promises to rebuild America's military and to
restore a sense of confidence to our economy.  His views matched my own:
smaller government, an emphasis on entrepreneurship, and a strong
America.
     But none of that was especially helpflal when it came to dealing
with Congress, the State Department, or the other gargantuan
bureaucracies in Washington.  And just because in previous assignments
you had worn a uniform to work didn't mean you were familiar with the
inner workings of the Pentagon.
     I started out as a gofer, working on the reams of paperwork that
were necessary to get congressional approval for the sale of Airborne
     Warning and Control System planes (AWACs) to Saudi Arabia-the same
planes that were used so successflally in our war with Iraq in 1991.
Because I was unprepared and inexperienced, the only way to keep up,
whether the subject was AWACs, terrorism, Iran, or Central America, was
to read like crazy and to get my hands on every possible bit of
information-books, articles, monographs, intelligence reports, and
whatever else I could find.  I spent just about every night and weekend
studying, and talking to people from the State Department and the CIA
who could teach me the things I needed to know.  I was in the office by
seven each morning, skimming through newspapers and poring over
intelligence cables and State Department reports.  I worked like a dog,
right up until the day I was fired.
     The National Security Council had been established in 1947, during
the Truman administration, "to advise the President on all matters
relating to national security."  It was intended as a cabinet-level
coordinating body, a bridge between the President's political goals and
various implementing arms of the government, including the departments
of State, Defense, Commerce, Treasury, and Justice, as well as the CIA.
The NSC's mandate is to synchronize the work of the various federal
bureaucracies with the President's national security objectives.
     It sounds simple enough, but in practice it's enormously
complicated.  For unlike the larger, entrenched agencies in Washington,
the staff of the National Security Council pretty much comes and goes
with each new administration.  For that reason, and because of its
relatively small size (a few dozen staff members and a budget of four
million dollars when I arrived), the NSC staff is generally close to the
political sentiments and views of the President.  In this respect it
differs markedly from the larger agencies, like State, the Pentagon, and
the CIA.  These organizations are far too big and cumbersome to reflect
serious political shifts within a short period of time-particularly when
the shift is as dramatic as the one between a liberal Democratic
President and his conservative Republican successor.  The permanent
bureaucracies of government tend to change slowly, and are attuned to a
longer-term mentality.  They don't have much respect for political
appointees-a perspective I came to understand a little more clearly the
day I heard a mid-level State Department official dismiss the cabinet as
"the Christmas help."  This attitude is especs been some friction
between the State Department and the NSC, but these tensions tend to be
particularly pronounced during a conservative Republican administration,
probably because most conservatives avoid government work in favor of
the private sector.  The State Department tends to attract idealistic
and well-meaning liberals, and, like the other bureaucracies of
Washington, is composed mostly of Democrats, with a handflal of liberal
Republicans.  This was true even during the Reagan administration.
     While that certainly wasn't the only reason Alexander Haig didn't
     last very long as President Reagan's first Secretary of State, it
wasn't irrelevant, either.  "I found no great enthusiasm in the
Department of State for the Reagan administration," Haig noted in his
memoirs.  I noticed the same thing.  But that was okay, because the
feeling was mutual.
     Although the State Department exists as an instrument to carry
     out foreign policy, it has evolved into an institution of foreign
relations.  This difference is more significant than it sounds.  State
Department officials who deal with a particular country often seem more
concerned with that country's perception of us than with our policy
toward them.  Later, when I became involved in implementing the
administration's counterterrorism policies, working with the State
Department was often a nightmare: if we had a problem with country X or
country Y, the first instinct over at State was not to convey our real
views, but to avoid offending the other side.  I found a discernible
corporate culture at the State Department, where many of the officials
subscribed to an almost unconscious set of values, although they were
never discussed or spelled out.  Part of it was a tendency to assume
that in just about every conflict between the United States and the
Third World, the Third Worlders were right and the U.S.  was wrong.  The
unspoken but pervasive rule was that we had been so shameflal in our
past treatment of these countries that we always owed them the benefit
of the doubt.  There was a standing joke that what we really needed at
the State Department was an American embassy-to represent the views of
the American people.
     There was certainly a State Department perspective on Israel.
Again, nobody ever said so aloud, but it seemed to me that many
officials at State were automatically opposed to whatever it was the
Israelis favored.  There were times, of course, when the White House,
too,
     disagreed with particular Israeli policies, and certainly the
Israelis were not pleased about those AWACs going to Saudi Arabia.  But
within the State Department there seemed to be a constituency that
actually relished any antagonism that could be fostered between us and
the Israelis.  Some of this came from a long-standing and barely hidden
pro-Arab tilt at State, which I'm hardly the first to notice.  Another
large chunk, I believe, is the result of an ingrained streak of
anti-Semitism in our government.  Many mid-level government
officials-and not only at the State Department-are the sons and
grandsons of the great elite American families, where a genteel,
discreet anti-Jewish prejudice was often taken for granted.
     In early 1983, an adviser to a senior government official sent me a
weird magazine clipping about an Israeli conspiracy to dominate the
world-and suggested that I might want to look into it.  When I went to
see him, he showed me the publication where the article had appeared; it
was put out by Lyndon LaRouche and his followers.
     While this incident was certainly not typical of our government as
a whole, I noticed a distinct anti-Israeli bias in some circles.  This
sentiment had been growing since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, after which
many Americans (including some conservatives) blamed Israel for the Arab
oil embargo, and the devastation that followed in our economy.  This
hostility grew more pronounced in 1981, when Israeli planes destroyed
Iraq's nuclear facility-which really infiiriated the State Department.
It wasn't until early 1991, when the Israelis were repeatedly attacked
by Iraqi SCUD missiles during Operation Desert Storm and did not
retaliate, that Israel once again enjoyed widespread support in
Washington.  Unfortunately, it took a situation where Israel was once
again a victim to bring about this change.  This bias did not seem to be
shared by President Reagan or Vice President Bush, but Caspar Weinberger
was another story.  Weinberger seemed to go out of his way to oppose
Israel on any issue and to blame the Israelis for every problem in the
Middle East.  In our planning for counterterrorist operations, he
apparentiy feared that if we went after Palestinian terrorists, we would
offend and alienate Arab
     *In his recently published memoirs, Clark Clifford recalls "a group
of Mideast experts in the State Department who were widely regarded as
anti-Semitic."  Clifford was referring to 1948, but things change slowly
in Washington.  (Clark Clifford with Kichard Holbrooke, Counselor to the
President [New York, 1991], p.  5.)
     governments-particularly if we acted in cooperation with the
Israelis.
     Weinberger's anti-Israel tilt was an underlying current in almost
every Mideast issue.  Some people explained it by pointing to his years
with the Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco engineering firm with
contracts in many Arab countries.  Others believed it was more
complicated, and had to do with his sensitivity about his own Jewish
ancestry.
     For all our proximity to the President and his senior advisers, the
NSC, too, was a bureaucracy, and much of our work was routine and
tedious.  Every time the United States conducted a military exercise or
deployment in the vicinity of the Soviet Union or its allies, we would
prepare a paper summarizing the activity which outiined how the Soviets
responded to our last exercise, and what we might expect this time.  If
an American destroyer sailed into the Black Sea, this required a
memorandum.  We wrote countless letters on behalf of the President, and
memoranda to the national security adviser, the secretaries of State and
Defense, foreign heads of state, and the Congress on every conceivable
matter affecting our national security.  An average day consisted of a
long stream of phone calls, two or three hundred pages of reading, a
dozen or so pages of writing, and a minimum of three or four
seventhirly
     In the summer of 1981, when I first came to work at the NSC, I
     was struck by how old-fashioned the place was.  The Marine
headquarters in Arlington was widely perceived to be light-years behind
the rest of the military, but it seemed almost space-aged compared to
our creaky offices in the Old Executive Office Building.  The OEOB had
been built just after the Civil War, and was said to be the largest
solid granite structure in the world.  It had been designed in the
French Renaissance style, but while the outer fit~ade is beautilitl and
ornate, some of the offices were downright dangerous.  One of my
colleagues was sitting at his desk when a two-hundred-pound block of
plaster fell from the eighteen-foot ceiling and landed on his desk, just
missing his chair.
     Some people swore that the electrical wiring in the OEOB had been
installed before the invention of electricity.  The lighting was
positively medieval, and the heating system was so antiquated that some
staff members would bring in their own portable heaters, which often led
to some blown flases in the neighborhood.
     And this was, at least technically, the White House!  The State
Department had the latest telecommunications equipment, but we barely
had secure telephones.  Initially, the NSC secretaries all left at
four-thirty, and to get a secretary to work overtime you actually had to
submit a memorandum-assuming, of course, that anyone was still around to
type it.  Half of our flarniture was broken, and the drapes looked like
they had been hung by Dolley Madison the year before the British burned
the city in the War of 1812.  The other government agencies loved the
fact that the NSC was
     so antiquated and therefore ineffectual.  For years, the State
Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA were the only ones with instant
communication links to American installations and armed forces around
the world.  But when Judge William P.  Clark came in as national
security adviser in eariy 1982, he had Tom Reed and Admiral Poindexter
design a major upgrade of our facilities, putting the NSC on an equal
footing with the larger agencies.  Unknowingly, and certainly
unintentionally, I played a role in the early departure of Bichard
Allen, Judge Clark's predecessor.  When I arrived at the NSC, I was
assigned an office* on the third floor of the OEOB that I was to share
with two army lieutenant colonels: Dick Childress and Alan Myer.  We
were also given a safe to keep classified documents.  The first time we
opened it, we were amazed to find several watches, a couple of
gift-wrapped bottles of liquor, and an envelope containing ten
one-hundred-dollar bills.  I had heard about government perks, but this
was ridiculous.
     I reported our discovery to Jerry Jennings, the NSC Security
Officer, who dutiflally informed the FBI.  The FBI determined that the
contents of the safe had belonged to Ilichard Allen, the national
security adviser.  Unbeknownst to me, Allen had used this same office
during the transition period between the election and the inauguration,
and apparently the money and the watches were gifts from Japanese
journalists who wanted to arrange an interview with Nancy Reagan.
Although Allen was later cleared of any wrongdoing, the press had a
field day, and he was soon replaced by Bill Clark.
     Clark came in amid his own storm of controversy.  The press
attacked him for his lack of knowledge about foreign affairs, and made
     *According to the local lore, this had been Henry Kissinger's old
office.
     much of the fact that during his earlier confirmation hearings for
Deputy Secretary of State, he had been unable to recall the names of the
leaders of Zimbabwe or South Africa.  Bill Clark was a man of
considerable modesty who didn't pretend to be a foreign policy expert.
But he was very close to Ronald Reagan, and he understood what the
President wanted and how to achieve it.
     Judge Clark was tall, thin, and soft-spoken; Mike Ledeen, a
consultant to the NSC, once described him as the Jimmy Stewart of the
Reagan administration.  Maybe so, but Bill Clark was a lot smarter than
people gave him credit for.  He passed the California bar exam without
ever graduating from law school.  He eventually became a respected
justice on the California Supreme Court, but when Ronald Reagan became
President, Clark left a perfectly good lifetime appointment to come to
Washington to serve a man he greatly admired.
     With his cowboy hat and his boots, the judge cut an unusual figure
in Washington.  He kept a low profile, and insisted on walking to work
from his apartment near Foggy Bottom.  He hated any signs of pretension,
but I was finally able to convince him that in light of the terrorism
threat, he ought to consider a more secure form of transportation.  With
the help of Ed Hickey, head of the White House Military Office, I
persuaded him that a driver and an armed guard were good ideas.
     Back in the 1970s, when I worked at Marine headquarters, Betsy and
I would occasionally drive into Washington to catch a show, or to take
the kids to one of the city's magnificent memorials and museums.  But my
job at the NSC marked the first time I had ever worked in the District,
and for a military man making his first foray into the civilian world
there was a lot to get used to.
     The reverse was also true, as very few White House staffers had
     any idea of what the military was all about.  They were pretty sure
that the Navy had something to do with ships, that the Air Force flew
some planes, and that the Army was somewhere off in Europe, holding back
the red tide at the Iron Curtain.  But the Marines were a complete
mystery, except that whatever it was that we actually did was thought to
involve an extraordinary degree of violence.
     In the military, of course, we wore our rank on our uniforms.  At
     the White House, everybody wore business suits to work.  At first I
     concluded that rank didn't make much difference in civilian
lifewhich is roughly equivalent to the naive assumption that people
living under Communism have no interest in money or material objects.  I
soon discovered that rank and status were terribly important in
government, except that in Washington such things were designated not on
your uniform but through a series of perks.  If you were really
powerflal, you had an office in the West Wing of the White House.  The
next level down was an offi White House.  If you were a drone like I
was, you were lucky to have a window at all.  I had one, which provided
a truly breathtaking view ofa dark blue dumpster.
     Status was also conferred by your telephone style, and I soon
learned that military officers at the NSC had created their own special
rank-the telephone colonel.  Nine times out of ten, LieutenantColonel
Smith's secretary would answer his phone by saying, "Colonel Smith's
office," thereby giving her boss an instant promotion.  Not wanting to
lie, but also not wanting to burden my secretaries with three
unnecessary sjllables, I instructed them to answer the phone by saying,
simply, "NSC."  When I answered my own phone, I said, "Ollie North."
     Now that I was part of the upper atmosphere of government, I
     had to learn a new form of telephone etiquette.  When my secretary
called someone on my behalf, she had to remember to put me on the line
before he picked up.  In Washington, as I soon learned, talking to a
"mere" secretary is considered demeaning to the deputy assistant to the
under-assistant to the deputy assistant secretary.  The junior official
always defers to the senior one by coming on the line first, the reason
being, presumably, that the senior official's time is more valuable.  So
you had to know whether the Deputy Secretary of X was higher than the
Under Secretary of Y, and woe unto you if you got it wrong, because
people took these things very seriously.  We were all given a protocol
list which explained the various levels of appointments in the
administration, and most people kept it taped to the slide shelf on
their desk so they could refer to it when the phone rang.
     Once you got through to the person you were trying to reach, your
problems had only begun.  For now you had to try to accomplish something
in the peculiar language of Washington, where almost nobody communicated
directly and to the point.  Only on rare occa
     sions, for example, would anyone actually admit, flat out, that he
or his agency was "opposed" to a particular plan or proposal.  Instead,
he would say "we don't concur."  If he knew he was going to get
steamrolled but still wanted to register his displeasure, he would
"interpose no objection."  You could live with this, but the phrase you
really wanted to hear, and rarely did, was "we concur."  In other words,
even though this wasn't our idea, we're willing to go along with it.
     The OEOB was considered part of the "White House Complex,"
     and for security reasons we were all given either a blue White
House staff pass, or a red OEOB pass, which most people hung around
their necks on a chain.* I kept my badge in my pocket, but I noticed
that many of my colleagues wore theirs all over town, as if to announce:
"I'm important.  I work at the White House."
     The White House staff badge was certainly a biggie, but the real
status symbol was a parking pass for West Executive Avenue, next to the
West Wing of the White House.  After that, just about the only honor you
could aspire to was to be appointed Secretary of State.  But then, of
course, you wouldn't need a parking pass at all, because you'd be driven
to work.  We junior dogs parked along the lower half of the Ellipse,
about
     half a mile away, and even there you needed a special White House
parking pass that you hung on your rearview mirror.  But this was a
mixed blessing, because you'd sometimes find that somebody had decided
to express his First Amendment rights by letting the air out of your
tires, or even smashing your windshield.  My colleague, Alfonso
Sapia-Bosch, left the office very late one night and came back half an
hour later, claiming that his Volkswagen was missing.  "Come on," I
said, "you forgot where you parked it.  How could it be stolen?  That
area is guarded by the Secret Service, the Metropolitan Police, and the
Park Police.  Look again.  I'm sure you'll find it."
     Al's car turned up a few days later.  In Pennsylvania.  There were
fewer parking spaces than passes, so you got to work early and didn't
dare move your car once you arrived.  This, in turn, led to another
perk-the use of a White House car and driver.  This
     *I was never able to tigure out the criteria for who got which
pass.  My badge was blue, but why?  Was it based on height?  Weight?
Astrological sign?  I still wonder.
     ne was normally above my level, but Ed Hickey, the head of the
     ite House Military Office that ran the White House Motor Pool, as a
former Marine, and he put me on the access list.  I used these ars to
attend meetings in other parts of the city, or to get out to drews Alr
Force Base to catch a plane.
     There was a tremendous infatuation with perks.  Were you invited o
a state dinner?  (I never was.) Did you fly with the President on Air
orce One?  I did twice, and that was enough, thank you.  At the time, zr
Force One was an old and noisy 707 that dated from the Kennedy
dministration.  But everybody who flew on it, or on Air Force Two,
eceived a certificate testing that he or she had really been there.
hese souvenirs were greatly valued.
     So, too, were photographs of oneself shaking hands with the
resident or Vice President, along with letters or notes from highevel
officials.  Most of the staff plastered their office walls with these
ementos.  The walls of my office were decorated with pictures of my
amily, drawings done by my kids, maps of Central America and the iddle
East, and several posters.  One of the posters depicted a icaraguan
freedom lighter and said, "For 53 Cents a Day You Can eed a Contra."
Another was a photograph of a female commando ader from the Nicaraguan
resistance, holding a machine gun.  It said, big letters, THIS MUTHA'
wEARS C0MBAT aooTs.  A third poster was a ke movie advertisement for a
film called The Retisrn of Walter Monale, which promised to be "more
boring than ever!"  There was one hotograph of me with the President
hanging in my office.  Fawn had fted it from the west wing of the White
House.
     I also displayed a handflal of souvenirs that were a little
unusual: a anteen cup that had been shot off my hip in Vietnam, an FLMN
eckerchief with a hammer and sicKle that had been found on a Comunist
guerrilla in El Salvador, a liir hat with a red star from the Chiese
People's Liberation Army, a Cuban military helmet with a bullet ole
through the side-a gift from Jonas Savimbi in Angola, and a uban
officer's belt bu about government life was the xtent to which the
entire city of Washington seemed to shut down
     lunch every day.  At noon the traffic was almost as bad as during
     e morning rush hour.  I rarely ate lunch, and often used that time
to
     go for a run, or to work out in the Secret Service gym-another of
Ed Hickey's favors.  When I did go out to lunch, it was usually at the
McDonald's at Seventeenth and Pennsylvania.
     I burned out several secretaries before I hired Fawn Hall.  They
were perfectly competent, but my hectic pace, late hours, and all too
frequent weekends took their toll.  My third secretary was so exhausted
at the end of the day that I often had to drive her home, and when she
left, there were several applicants for the job.  My requirements were
simple: I was looking for someone who could type like a banshee and
didn't mind working overtime.
     When Fawn came in for her job interview, she had been working in
the office of the chief of naval operations.  She struck me as
articulate and efficient, and she was willing to work overtime.  Her
mother, Wilma Hall, was Bud McFarlane's secretary, but one thing that
impressed me about Fawn was that she didn't try to use that connection
to get the job.  And no, I didn't ask her if she knew how to operate a
shredder.  And yes, I did notice that she was attractive.
     It certainly wasn't Fawn's fault that she became famous around
     the same time as Donna Rice and Jessica Hahn.  The media coverage
implied that these women were all pretty much alike, which was terribly
unfair to Fawn.  She understood the prejudice she was up against, which
was why her opening statement at the congressional hearings included a
line that read, simply, "I CAN TYPE."*
     She certainly could.  "Just talk," she'd say, and about six seconds
after I was finished, the memo would be completed, and in the right
format.  Fawn was one reason I was so productive.  She was terrific at
keeping my hectic schedule straight.  She always knew how long a meeting
would take, and even how much time it would take to get there and back.
She was great on the phone, and was adept at protecting me from
conversations that weren't really necessary.  Maybe these qualities are
inherited, because Fawn's mother was
     the consummate executive assistant.  Gregarious, outgoing, bright,
and cheerflal, Wilma Hall was Bud McFarlane's alter ego.  She had first
     *"My hours were long and arduous," she said in her testimony, "but
I found my job to be most tulfilling.  I was a dedicated and loyal
secretary, and performed my duties in an exemplary manner."  I'll vouch
for that.
     et Bud when he was a White House Fellow, and over the years she ad
worked for several national security advisers, including Kissinger.  n
every case, but especially with McFarlane, she helped optimize her oss's
effectiveness.
     Fawn Hall wasn't much older than my own daughter Tait.  Like any
young people, she had enormous energy, and even after a elve-hour day
she could go on to one of her occasional modeling bs.
     After Fawn started working for me, I noticed that some of the en
who had previously dealt with me only by telephone were now opping by
the office.  One of them was Arturo Cruz, Jr., a handsome oung man and a
real charmer whose father had been induced to join e leadership of the
Nicaraguan resistance.  Arturito, as the son was own, began showing up
fairly often, and he would always stop in e outer office to chat with
Fawn.  I didn't realize how close they had tually become until I
received a report from the CIA that Fawn had een seen with Arturito in
Miami.
     I called her in and said, "Listen, you've got to make a decision.
his guy is a foreign national.  He used to be a Sandinista adviser.  We
ink we can trust him, but he also had a relationship with Cuban
telligence, the DGI.  You have the highest security clearances in the
nd, and your association with him offers the potential for comproise.
You'll have to make a choice between this man and your job.  If u really
love him, just give me two weeks notice, marry him, and ve lots of
kids."
     Fawn was embarrassed that I had to speak to her about it, and I
     It awkward for intruding in her personal life.  But several weeks
later, hen I received another call, this time from the FBI, I had to
speak to
     again.  Fawn eventually broke off with Arturito, whereupon I
troduced her to Major Gil Mackiin, a young Marine who had once orked for
me.  Everything seemed to be going great for them until was sent to
Okinawa-and I've already explained what that can do a relationship.  In
the months after I was fired, there were all kinds of stories and mors
about the "cowboy colonel" and his blond secretary, and the fice they
supposedly shared in the White House basement.  Innuenwere even raised
during the hearings.  These kinds of stories, variably based on
anonymous sources, are routine in Washington,
     but in my case there seemed to be no limits.  According to one
account, I used Iran-contra money to buy Fawn Hall her red Fiero sports
car, and to pay for an island in the South Pacific to which the two of
us were planning to flee.  That story set me off like a rocket, and I
stormed in to see Edward Bennett Williams.  Ed, who had founded the law
firm that represented me, was a grand old man of the law and a strong
believer in "no comment" when it came to the news media.
     "That does it," I said.  "I know you don't like clients to respond
to
     the press, but this thing has to be answered.  My wife will see it,
and so will our friends.  And what about our kids?"
     "Sit down, Ollie," he said.  "You're getting to be like a dog
chasing fleas.  You're not going to get rid of the fleas until you take
a flea bath, and son, you'll be taking a couple of them.  You also have
to understand that the people telling these stories actually believe
they're true."
     I was dumbfounded.  "How can you say that?"  1 asked.  "Listen," he
said, "if the people writing these stories and spreading these rumors
had the chance to abuse their position, steal millions of dollars, and
have an affair with a beautifiil secretary, they would have done it.  So
they have to believe yow did.  Otherwise they couldn't face themselves
in the morning."
     My first major assignment at the NSC came out of the blue.  One
autumn afternoon, shortly after the Senate voted to supply AWACs to
Saudi Arabia, several boxes of paperwork were delivered asking me to
look through all of this material and to brief him on it the following
week.  I'm still not entirely sure why it ended up on my desk, but I
started reading through the various papers and documents, which turned
out to be fascinating-and highly classified.
     During the final year of the Carter administration, the President
     had been trying to conclude a major disarmament agreement with the
Soviets.  Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, had
convened a group of scientists and former senior government officials to
consider various scenarios of war and peace, including what would happen
in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.  One
result would be enormous bursts of electromagnetic energy
     which could immediately disable our electronic communications
equipment.  If that happened, the scientists wanted to know, how could
we ensure that the President could continue to lead the country and
assert his role as Commander-in-Chief if he couldn't communicate with
either the citizens or the military?  We knew that the Soviet Union had
made plans for its leadership to survive a nuclear war by having them
whisked off to a network of secret tunnels under Moscow.  But what would
oisr leadership do?
     I put together a summary of the papers, and was summoned to
     e Oval Office to brief the national security adviser and the
President.  This was the first time I briefed President Reagan.) My
recommenation was that the work of the "Wise Men's Group," as this
outside eam of advisers was known, was so important that the group ought
to e reactivated.  Judge Clark asked me to take charge of this effort,
and or the next year and a halfI did little else but work on this
undertakng, which we called The Project.  As the de facto administrator
of The Project, I arranged meetings f the Wise Men, wrote up the
minutes, and brought back their ideas or implementation.  Initially The
Project was headed by Tom Reed, a ormer Secretary of the Air Force and a
confidant of Judge Clark.
     During these meetings, I sat there in awe as this incredibly
brilant collection of people discussed electromagnetic pulses and other
cientific topics about which I knew next to nothing.  I had taken
engieering courses at Annapolis, and had completed a course in nuclear
eaponry in the Marine Corps.  But there were terms thrown around that
room that I'd never even heard before.
     As a result of the work done by the Wise Men, a permanent
govnment-wide working group was formed to address a number of diffilt
questions pertaining to a possible nuclear attack.  Suppose, for ample,
that the President does not survive the attack, the Vice Presient has
been killed in his helicopter, and the Speaker of the House has llapsed
and died of a heart attack.  Suppose ftirther that the highestnking
member of the cabinet who is alive and accounted for is the cretary of
the Treasury, who had gone out to Wisconsin to give a eech.  The rest of
our government, the American people, and particurly the military must be
informed that the Secretary is now the constitional President, but it's
still too dangerous to announce his exact cation.  In the absence of
normal channels of communication, how
     does the new President assert his authority?  How does he stop the
war, or continue it, or take whatever other actions may be necessary?
     Years later, as the Iran-contra hearings began, a particularly
bombastic and outrageous article appeared in the Miami Herald and
several other newspapers, claiming that during my years at the NSC I had
been involved in drawing up plans "to suspend the Constitution in the
event of [a] national crisis such as nuclear war."  This story was not
only wrong, but offensive.  The whole point of The Project was to
protect our constitutional system even under the worst imaginable
conditions.
     During my work on The Project, I wrote several directives which
President Reagan signed, authorizing flarther steps to be taken to
ensure that our government could not be rendered impotent by enemy
action or an extraordinary disaster.  This was also where I came to know
Vice President Bush.  As the first in line to succeed the President, he
took an active interest in this program.  I briefed him often, and he
asked detailed and penetrating questions about how things worked, and
how they could be improved.  It was obvious that his interest was more
than a formality.
     And because The Project also involved the Congress-both on matters
of succession, and for flanding-I also briefed two of the Reagan
administration's strongest political adversaries: Speaker Tip O'Neill
and Congressman Ed Boland.
     Even at the NSC, only a handtul of people were aware of The
Project.  But for me it was enormously satis~ng.  The Project enabled
our government to safely conduct arms-reduction talks with the Soviets,
secure in the knowledge that the United States would never be
decapitated.
     In 1983 I was given another fascinating opportunity.  When the
Kissinger Commission was established to study the situation in Central
America, Judge Clark asked me to serve as the NSC liaison.  As part of
its work, the commission invited each of the three living former
presidents to appear before it and present his views on the
deteriorating situation in the region.  It was my job to make sure they
all had access to the appropriate classified information.
     I soon discovered how different each of these men really was.  We
began with President Carter, who didn't want to be briefed and
     showed no interest in the documents we were prepared to send hitn.
"Don't bother," he told me on the phone.  "I have my own sources."  When
he appeared before the commission, he brought along close to forty pages
of notes, which he delivered in a familiar monotone.  Within about
twenty minutes, several members of the commission appeared to be
snoozing.  Even the Democrats were clenching their teeth, trying to
suppress a yawn.
     President Carter's analysis consisted of an extended diatribe
against the administration's policies in Central America.  Despite his
suspicions about the Sandinistas, he had obviously never envisioned that
the United States would support a covert war against them.  And no
wonder.  In his meetings at Camp David with Menachem Begin and Anwar
Sadat, he had succeeded in one of the most difficult negotiations ever.
It was hard to blame him for believing that similar fashion.
     President Ford, by contrast, was delighted to be briefed, and
together with another staff member I flew out to Colorado to bring him
back in a White House jet.  We briefed him during the flight to
Washington, and President Ford's presentation more or less matched the
administration's view.  President Nixon was an altogether different
story.  About two weeks before his appearance, I began talking on the
phone with him and an aide.  He'd plow through the material I sent in a
day or two.  Then he'd call me to say, "Okay, now send me the current
analysis of the economic conditions between Colombia and the Rio
Grandetrade, employment, refiigees, everything."  I would put together a
package and shoot it up to him by White House courier.  Later that same
day, he would call again: "Have you got anything else?  That second
paper you sent me wasn't deep enough."
     "I'm sorry to hear that, sir."  (I neglected to mention that I had
written that paper myself.)
     "Well, don't give me that pablum.  Send me a more detailed
analysis."
     President Nixon had an insatiable appetite for information, and
     his questions were always incisive.  When he appeared before the
commission, he took off his watch and set it down on the podium.  "I
have exactly an hour and a half," he said.  "I'll talk for forty-five
minutes,
     and then take questions for another forty-five before Major North
takes me back to the airport."  Then, without a single note or index
card, he proceeded to review all of Central and South America from the
Rio Grande down to Tierra del Fuego.  He knew every head of state, every
political movement, and every economic trend.  Without missing a beat,
he spoke for exactly forty-five minutes, and then answered questions.
His performance was absolutely dazzling.
     While President Nixon was talking, I looked over at Kissinger, who
was grinning like a Cheshire cat.  Maybe we have it backward, I thought.
Maybe Kissinger was really Nixon's student.  That day, at least, it
seemed that the real mastermind behind the foreign policy of the Nixon
administration was Richard Nixon himself.
     I missed a lot of family dinners during my years at the NSC, but in
spite of the incredible hours and far too many weekends in the office,
our family managed to sneak away for a few camping trips and short
vacations in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.  In 1986 I took the
whole gang to Costa Rica, where I had planned to meet with several of
the contra leaders, and with Joe Fernandez, the CIA station chiel, whom
I had come to know in Washington before he was posted to Costa Rica.  We
visited Ambassador Lew Tambs and stayed with the Fernandez family.  Over
a weekend, our two broods-with a combined total of eleven kids-all went
to a beach house on the Pacific coast, just south of the secret airfield
that Dick Secord had built at Santa Elena.
     I rarely worked on Sunday mornings, and unless I was away,
ourfamily normally attended church together.  But I've had an easier
time loading up an entire battalion on ships than getting the six ofus
into one car and arriving at church on time.  Stuart and I would usually
end up sitting around and waiting for the girls, and he'd use the
opportunity to tease me: "Way to go, Dad.  Let's hear it for that
ironclad milItary discipline."  All through my years at the NSC, our
family was part of a weekly Bible-study group.  This was something we
had started during our year in Newport, where we normally began each
session with children's Bible stories and songs.  Then one of us would
take all the kids over to a neighboring house while the rest of the
parents studied together.  We took turns leading the sessions, and we'd
prepare for that evening's topic by reading various biblical
commentaries, looking
     p the appropriate scriptural references, and integrating them with
ur own interpretations.  One of my favorite study sessions was on the
marriage relationship described in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, which
includes the wellown verse, "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the
)Lord.  For the usband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of
the church...."
     A lot of men use that verse to justi~ an authoritarian,
male-domiated household, but that's not what the verse says to me.  It
comares the husband's role to that of Jesus, and His style was to lead
zth love.  I think the real message of this verse is directed not to the
zfe at all-but to her husband.  Because Stuart is my only son, I've
probably spent more time with
     im than with my daughters.  We have hiked along the Appalachian
rail, paddled canoes on the Shenandoah and Potomac, and scaled a w
heights in Yosemite.  During that idyllic year in Newport, I even ad
time to coach his soccer team.  Our three girls are consumed with
horses-an interest that began the base stables when we were living at
Quantico.  Horses are comletely foreign to my experience, and I've
learned that I'm not the nly father in that situation.  At horse events,
the dads are the ones aning on the fence with their hearts in their
throats as their offspring ke thousand-pound animals over fences and
jumps.  From talking to ese other dads, I've learned that their
involvement, too, is limited to vo specific tasks: mucking out the
stables, and driving our daughters nd their horses to and from these
events-"but slowly, please, Daddy."  's gotten to the point where
several of us show up in T-shirts that ad, "They ride, I provide."
     Today, when I think back on my job at the NSC, all I can see is
     e work.  But there were some perks, too.  We got to bring the kids
to e Easter Egg roll on the White House lawn, and to the White ouse
staff Christmas party, where they got to see the President and e First
Lady.  And occasionally, Betsy and I were given free tickets to e
Kennedy Center.  When foreign diplomats come to town, a memer of the
White House staff generally escorts them to the Kennedy enter, where the
entire party sits in the President's box.  Sometimes
     oreover, the previous verse (5:21) reads, "Submit to one another
out of reverence Christ," which makes it clear that submission goes in
both directions.
     these tickets went to Bud McFarlane, and every few months, Wilma
Hall, his secretary, would call and ask if Betsy and I were free to go
as escorts.  This invariably happened at the last moment, but we jumped
at the chance whenever we could.
     Now wl Gorbachev; the most socially desirable visitors were quickly
snapped up by higher-ranking officials.  By the time it got down to my
level, these events invariably involved emissaries from countries nobody
else was interested in-nations at the lower end of the alphabet, or with
hyphenated names, or governments whose major industry consists of
issuing colorfiil postage stamps.
     Betsy and I would greet our guests in a little anteroom just behind
     the presidential box.  As the host and hostess, we'd get there
early enough to unlock the telephone, and to ensure that the little
refrigerator was stocked with small bottles of California champagne from
the White House Mess.  These bottles were emblazoned with the White
House seal, and most of our guests took them home as souvenirs.
     I joke about it now, but Betsy and I got to see some terrific
shows,
     and we met some fascinating people from countries we had barely
heard of.  (I would always do a little research on these places so as
not to appear totally ignorant.) Before the curtain, the audience would
often look up toward the box, wondering who was occupying it that night.
Just before the show began, there would be an announcement: "Ladies and
gentlemen, viewing from the President's box tonight is Ambassador
Zlygbat and his wife, Eirwox, from the dictatorship of Epidermos."
     But these intersections of work and family were all too rare.  As
far as my kids were concerned, I might have been working on another
planet.  "How come you're never home, Dad?"
     "Because I've got a lot of work to do, honey."  Poor Daddy.  How
smart could he be if it takes him that long to finish his work?
     But while I couldn't talk to my kids about the details of the job,
     we did discuss the general issues of American policy.  Tait and
Stuart were both in high school, and I visited each of their classes to
talk and show slides about the situation in Central Amenca.
     Betsy knew the general outline of what I was working on, but not
     e details.  She was aware that I used to travel to Central America
on SC work and that the administration was backing the Nicaraguan
sistance, but she didn't know what country I was going to, or why.
uring some of the busiest times she even met me at the airport with
couple of clean shirts.  And while she knew in a broad sense that I as
working on the hostages, she didn't know who I was meeting th, or that I
had gone to Tehran.  It wasn't until the congressional arings in 1987
that Betsy learned exactly how I had been spending y time.  When it was
all over, she turned to me and said, "I'm glad I me.  Now I know where
you were all those nights."
     Chapter 8
     Close-up
     During my five and a half years at the White House, I had a fairly
close-up view of several high officials in the Reagan administration.
     I don't pretend to know Ronald Reagan well, and I have to admit
     that my negative feelings about him are the direct result of what
has happened to me since I left the White House in 1986.  Before I was
fired, I was with him at scores of meetings during my five and a half
years at the NSC, which was certainly enough to get a good sense of the
man.  The first thing I noticed is that he worked a lot harder than
people gave him credit for.  While he undoubtedly knew how to enjoy
life, it was equally clear that he plowed through a huge amount of
paperwork and attended innumerable meetings.  I also found him to be a
far more involved President than he was portrayed in the media, and
while I don't know whether that was true across the board, it was
definitely the case in the areas I worked in-counterterrorism, the
hostages, and the Nicaraguan resistance.
     He was a great storyteller, and in my experiences the anecdotes he
told were generally relevant to the issue at handor to the atmo
     phere in the room.  Sometimes he'd come up with a reminiscence to
efttse tension and make the participants in the meeting feel more at
ase.  And sometimes he used humor to build a consensus between emocrats
and Republicans.
     He could also laugh at himself.  Although he was the leader of the
0st powerfiil country on earth, and was reelected by an overwhelmng
mandate, he still had an aw, shucks attitude that endeared him to eople.
Part of it was an act, of course, but underneath the act he was till
amiable and unassuming.  He was the same way with visiting dignitaries.
In October 1983, n the midst of the Grenada operation, the President
hosted a series of eetings with the leaders of the Caribbean island
nations that had articipated with us in the rescue mission.  One of
these visitors was rime Minister Compton of Turks and Caicos, a small
former British ependency, who showed up with his very attractive wife.
The meetg in the Oval Office was all business-until the end, when she
interupted the good-byes to say she had brought a message from her
peole: "Mr. President, our people think that you are very brave to do
hat you have done in Grenada.  They say that you have"-and here e thrust
out her cupped hands, palms up, and groped for the right ord-"big
balls."
     In this formal setting, the scene of countless historic moments,
     ou could just about hear the strains of barely suppressed laughter
the President's senior advisers strove to choke back their natural
sponse.  As for the President, he just smiled, blushed a little, and
wered his head.  "Well," he said in his inimitable manner, ell..."
     I have already discussed my personal disappointment in Ronald
eagan.  Politically, my regret is that instead of strengthening the fice
of the presidency, he actually weakened it.  He just wasn't forceI
enough when it came to fighting for the constitutional prerogatives the
Executive Branch.  He could have opposed the appointment of a ecial
prosecutor, and he could have challenged the War Powers Resotion when he
decided to use military force in both Grenada and zbya.  Instead, the
President acquiesced by calling in the congressionleadership and
informing them of his intentions.  The War Powers esolution, which was
passed in 1973 over President Nixon's veto, eatly expanded the power of
Congress at the expense of the presi
     dency.  Once you give away that authority, it's almost impossible
to get itback.*
     The same thing happened with the Boland Amendments, which severely
restricted American support for the Nicaraguan resistance.  When
Congress started to obstruct the President's authstood up to them and
announced, "If you send me a bill that includes that amendment, I just
won't sign it.  It's unconstitutional.  If necessary, the government
will come to a screeching halt until you send me a bill I can sign."
Future presidents may well be constrained by an imperial Congress
because Ronald Reagan, one of the most popular presidents in American
history, did not reclaim the original powers of his office.
     My attitude toward President Reagan was also affected by
disclosures that have come out since we both left Washington.
     As the whole world knows by now, both the President and the First
Lady consulted astrologers.  For the life of me, I can't understand how
a man who purports to be a Christian can believe in that malarkey.  I am
aware that millions of Americans say they believe in the God of the
Universe and in the stars.  But the idea that a man could get up in the
morning and let an interpretation of the great sidereal movement guide
his day is simply beyond my understanding.
     Ultimately, however, I think of Ronald Reagan in terms of my four
children and their fiiture, which is why I can't stay angry at him.  I
remember what the world was like in 1980.  The man whom Ronald Reagan
defeated in that election liked to tell us that our best days were
behind us.  President Carter believed that the only hope for America lay
in more and bigger government, and that we had to start scaling back our
expectations.  He left us with a failing economy, an emasculated
defense, and a sagging spirit.
     Then Ronald Reagan came along and showed us another way, and
     the American people responded to him as a revolutionary of the
right.  People living under Communism saw it, too.  They regarded Ronald
*No President has ever signed a bill restricting constitutional
presidential authoriry to deploy military forces.  But every President
since Gerald Ford has complied with the provisions of the War Powers
Itesolution before committing Asnerican troops.  Itonald Beagan was the
first President popular enough to challenge the Congress on what many
scholars believe is an unconstitutional restriction on the presidency.
Unfortunately, he failed to do so.
     Reagan almost as a spiritual figure who inspired them to reject the
system they had known and hated all their lives.  The worid we live in
today is a far better place than it was in 1980.  Time magazine gave the
credit to Mikhail Gorbachev, their "man of the decade."  But it was
Ronald Reagan who transformed the world in the 1980s.  It was he who
made the changes under Gorbachev possible-and even necessary If Karl
Marx provided the stimulus for the rst Russian Revolution in 1917, it
was Ronald Reagan who inspired e second in 1991.  And it was he who
revitalized America's power nd its economy, and led the whole worid a
few steps closer to freeom and prosperity.  For the better filture he
offered my children, I Il always be gratefill.  Unfortunately, Reagan's
policies were not always shared by the eople around him.  Some of his
priorities, such as helping the contras nd reducing the size of our
government, could not be accomplished y one man.  And several of his top
advisers, like Richard Wirthlin and ike Deaver, seemed to be more
interested in Reagan's popularity an in his programs or policies.
     Some people maintain that Ronald Reagan's finest speech was his 964
television address for Barry Goldwater.  That one certainly hanged
Reagan's life, but as far as I'm concerned, his greatest oment as a
communicator did not occur in the United States at all, ut in the Soviet
Union, of all places.  On May 31, 1988, he stood eneath a gigantic bust
of Lenin and spoke to the students at Moscow tate University about the
real meaning of liberty.  "Freedom is the ght to question and change the
established way of doing things," he Id them.  "It is the continuing
revolution of the marketplace.  It is e understanding that allows us to
recognize shortcomings and seek Iutions.  It is the right to put forth
an idea, scoffed at by the experts, d watch it catch fire among the
people.  It is the right to dream-to Ilow your dream or stick to your
conscience, even if you're the only ne in a sea of doubters."  The
greatness of Reagan wasn't just that he gave that speech, hich was
written for him by Josh Gilder.  It was that he had made it ssible for
that speech to be given in the first place.  As far as I'm ncerned, that
marked his finest moment.
     The tragedy of Ronald Reagan is that he will not be remembered
     for that speech in Moscow.  Instead, what lives on in the public
mind and on the airwaves is the President's pathetic videotaped
deposition at John Poindexter's trial in 1990.  Ronald Reagan deserves
an honored place in the history of the world, but millions of people
will always think of him as a confiised and muddled old man.  I always
assumed that Ronald Reagan had good attorneys, but I just can't
understand why they allowed him to make that tape.*
     I had relatively little direct contact with Secretary of State
Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, but like everyone else in
the national security community, I couldn't help being aware of the
persistent, continual squabbling between them.  Part of their rivalry
was institutional: in every administration the Defense Department tends
to be more suspicious of the Soviet Union, for example, while the State
Department, by its very nature, is more inclined toward compromise and
reconciliation.  But this conflict was personal, and the hostility
between Shultz and Weinberger inevitably spilled down into the
bureaucracies, and undermined relations between lower-level officials at
both State and Defense.
     I used to see them in action during meetings of the National
Security Planning Group in the White House Situation Room.  Whenever
Shultz spoke, Weinberger would slouch down in his chair and close his
eyes.  When Shultz was finished, Weinberger would usually speak up in
disagreement.  Sometimes-especially with regard to Central America-he'd
talk as if Shultz had never spoken.  They fought constantly-in front of
the President, in meetings,
     and through their public statements.  Sometimes you had the feeling
that one of them took a more extreme position just to annoy the other
guy.  Their quarrels were so frequent, and so out of keeping with their
position, that I sometimes wondered whether Weinberger and Shultz had .
     They had apparently been at each other's throats for years-ever
since 1970, when Weinberger worked for Shultz in Nixon's Office of
Management and the Budget.  According to the local lore, their con*One
of the most astonishing statements in the deposition was Beagan's
testimony that "to this day, I don't have any information or knowledge
that...there was a diversion....  I, to this day, do not recall ever
hearing that there was a diversion."
     flict had continued at Bechtel, where Shultz was president and
Weinberger was general counsel.
     It was also reflected in their very different personalities.
Shultz was certainly the more interesting of the two.  In public, he
always tried to portray himself as the cautious, behind-the-scenes
conciliator, struggling hard to stay out of the limelight.  But he
struck me as just the opposite: a man who loved the attention of the
media and wanted to be seen as being in charge of foreign policy.  In
private meetings he was contentious, especially with Weinberger and
Casey, and he frequently contradicted them in meetings with the
President.
     He also struck me as the more ambitious of the two.  Later, in
preparing for my trial, I learned that Shultz had confided to one of his
aides that he hoped to use the Iran-contra fiasco as an opportunity to
become national security adviser while maintaining his position as
Secretary of State.  Whenever I think of him, I'm reminded of that
marvelous titie of John Dean's book on Watergate: Blind Ambition.
     Weinberger, on the other hand, was clearly uneasy in front of the
media, where he would often stutter and stammer his way through a press
conference.  He was far more effective when he held forth in the
Situation Room, where his perspectives were clear and concise.  He knew
that in order for the United States to have credibility, we had to have
military strength.  Shultz, however, didn't seem to care deeply about
any particular foreign policy issue-so long as he got to negotiate it.
Shultz's lack of a clear philosophy was most evident when it came to
dealing with the Soviets, where he turned into Mr. Nonconfrontation Man.
He didn't want to confront them over their arms deliveries to Nicaragua,
and it was common knowledge that his State Department was willing to
sacrifice the Strategic Defense Initiative in order to conclude a new
arms treaty with the Soviets.
     Just about the only thing that Shultz and Weinberger seemed to
agree on was that they were both strongly opposed to our dealings with
Iran.  They said so loudly and often-mostly after the fact.  Their
opposition was real enough, but in Shultz's case, especially, I believe
he made sure to cover all his bases.  If the Iran initiative failed, he
could credibly claim he had opposed it.  After I was fired, Shultz
insisted that the State Department be placed in charge of fiirther
contact with the Iranians.  If they succeeded, he would be able to share
in the credit.
     During the firestorm of publicity on Iran-contra, the story came
     out that Shultz had threatened to resign in protest over the
arms-forhostages policy.  I don't believe it.  I'm confident that if the
Secretary of State had walked into the Oval Office and said, flat out,
"Either this Iran business stops or I'm leaving," the entire initiative
would have been stopped dead in its tracks.  As much as President Reagan
cared about the hostages, after Alexander Haig left, the President
simply couldn't afford to lose a second Secretary of State-especially
one whose personal relationship with Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze mirrored Reagan's own rapport with Gorbachev.  For in the
final analysis, everything else in the foreign policy arena was seen as
secondary to the main issue, which was U.S.-Soviet relations.
     Had Shultz and Weinberger been as strongly opposed to the Iran
initiative as they later claimed, it would never have continued.
Secretary Weinberger simply could have forbidden the shipment of U.S.
military equipment from our stockpiles.  And consider the impact if both
men had gone in together to see the President and said, "Hey, boss, we
finally found something to agree on.  Either this thing stops or we're
both out of here."  Instead, as pragmatic politicians, they kept their
options open.
     Although his major batties were with Weinberger, Shultz was no
great fan of Bill Casey either.  The feeling was mutual.  Casey believed
that Shultz had his own private agenda, and regarded him as working for
the benefit of all Shultzkind.  "Shultz thinks every problem can be
negotiated," Casey once told
     me.  "And the longer he negotiates, the more powerfiil he becomes.
If Shultz had his way, no problem would ever be solved.  All we'd do is
keep negotiating."
     Casey wasn't merely being sarcastic.  He sincerely believed he had
     real solutions to problems, while Shultz was content just to talk
about them.
     They sparred frequently-especially over Nicaragua, where Shultz
favored a multilateral negotiating process while Casey was a passionate
supporter of the armed resistance.  It wasn't that Casey couldn't accept
a negotiated end to the conflict, or that he believed that a purely
military solution was likely.  But he was convinced that the pressure of
the Nicaraguan resistance was essential for negotiations to succeed, and
he
     turned out to be right.  It was military pressure which eventually
forced the Sandinistas to accept open elections, which led to the defeat
of Daniel Ortega in 1990.
     The Casey-Shultz conflict was considerably more dignified than
     the Shultz-Weinberger rivalry, and was more along the lines of the
traditional tensions between secretaries of state and national security
advisers.  While Shultz's view of the world was hard to discern, Casey
had already formulated what later became known as the Reagan Doctrine,
which encouraged active American support for anti-Communist movements
around the world.  Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola became its most
vivid manifestations, but Casey wasn't merely antiCommunist; he was
enthusiastically pro-democracy.  One of his greatest frustrations was
that few Americans seemed to know that many new democracies around the
world had emerged (or in some cases, reemerged) during the Reagan years,
including Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Venezuela,
Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Korea.
     Casey felt strongly abouhat the United States was an unreliable
ally and a fair-weather friend.  He understood why this image was so
widespread, and he would cite the consequences for those who had been
gullible enough to take America at its word: from the Bay of Pigs to
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to the Shah, and to Latin American leaders
who had believed President Carter when he assured them that the
Sandinistas would be better for them than the Somoza regime.  In short,
he was determined to restore our credibility.  I admired Casey
enormously, and I came to know him well.  After
     his death in the spring of 1987, the nature of our association
became the subject of intense speculation.  According to some reports, I
was like a son to him, while others swore that I barely knew the man.
Our relationship was close, and yet it wasn't especially personal.
     We often spoke on the secure telephone, and we met regularly at one
of his offices, or occasionally at his house in Northwest Washington.
He had three offices that I knew of, but knowing Casey, there may well
have been others.  I admired him, and he knew it.  But I was never
Casey's protege,
     and I don't believe he saw me as the son he never had.  We were not
     buddies.  He never picked up the phone to say, "Come on over and
let's have drinks tonight."  Casey had friends, but I didn't count
myself among them.
     And yet we were more than colleagues.  He was somebody I could turn
to and say, "What's going on here?"  I could talk to him about wanting
to return to the Marines, and I often asked him for advice.  He gave it
eagerly: "Here's who you should be dealing with on Nicaragua.  But stay
away from so-and-so; he's no good."
     I knew nothing about covert operations when I came to the NSC,
     but Casey taught me a great deal.  In 1984, when McFarlane told me
that one of our allies was about to contribute significant hinds to
support the Nicaraguan resistance (only later did I learn it was Saudi
Arabia), and instructed me to set up a procedure by which the money
could be delivered, it was Casey who told me what to do.  Later, people
seemed to assume that a Marine infantry officer somehow just knew how to
set up an overseas bank account to receive wire transfers, but I didn't
have a clue.  To me, a bank was a place where they gave you a toaster
when you opened a new checking account, and where you applied for a
mortgage.  I had never even heard of a wire transfer, and I certainly
didn't know how to arrange one.  But Casey, among other things, was a
financial genius.  He had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission during the Nixon years, and before that he had actually
invented the concept of the tax shelterand even gave it its name.
Casey's habitual mumbling obscured the fact that he was incredibly
bright and knowledgeable.  He was trained as a lawyer, and had
apparently been a good one, as he often reminded people.  He saw
himsell, justifiably, as an intellectual, and he gravitated toward
people who were interested in big ideas and in painting a broad
panorama.  He had an especially good rapport with Jeane Kirkpatrick, and
on two separate occasions-first, when Judge Clark left as national
security adviser, and again when McFarlane resigned-he lobbied hard for
Jeane to take over that job.  Although both Casey and Weinberger
supported her, her appointment was blocked on both occasions by George
Shultz.  I believe that the reason Shultz didn't want Jeane Kirkpatrick
to be any closer than the U.N.  was that he felt threatened both by her
formidable intelligence and her strong anti-Communism.
     I got to know her fairly well when I worked with the Kissinger
     ommission on Central America.  She had been Bill Clark's first
hoice as a commission member, and she clearly knew more about hat was
going on in the region than anybody else in that group.  It asn't just
book learning; she had been to the area, and she knew any of the leaders
personally.  Her obvious grasp of the issues and the ersonalities made
other members of the commission~ven zssinger-uncomfortable.  She was
sometimes acerbic when she xplained the folly of a particular proposal
or idea, and those who idn't appreciate her found this grating.  I
thought she was terrific, nd I could see why Casey admired her.  Casey's
mind was always processing new data.  He was relentlessly urious, and he
often broke into a machine-gun burst of questions:
     y?  What makes you believe that?  What's the prooP How do you ow?
     I often had the feeling that his mumbling was at least partly an
act, ecause when he wanted to speak clearly, Casey rarely had trouble
eing understood.  And he was actually easier to understand on the hone,
which struck me as odd.  In some of the high-level meetings I ttended,
it seemed as if Casey was mumbling to force other cabinet embers to lean
forward to listen to him.  He didn't speak loudly, but e had a way of
commanding attention.  Caspar Weinberger, who ften appeared to sleep
during these meetings (a result, people said, of is arthritis
medication), always woke up for Casey.  And Washington's most notorious
mumbler certainly knew how work a crowd.  I was sometimes sent out to
address new intelligence fficers at CIA training centers, and I was
always surprised by how any of them said they decided to apply to the
CIA after hearing asey give a speech at their college or university.
Casey loved young eople for their energy and enthusiasm, and it showed.
     The one word he could never pronounce was the name of the ountry
that was always on his mind.  He called it Nica-wog-wa, and at eetings
people would go out of their way to try to get him to say it.  ome
congressional Democrats joked that they would never vote to ndermine the
government of any country that the director of Central telligence
couldn't pronounce.  And yet Bill Casey spoke several forzgn languages
and paid attention to detail.  Was he putting us on?  He was always
reading.  I was with him on a flight to Panama hen I saw him start in on
the paperback edition of Modern Times, by the British author Paul
Johnson.  This tome is nothing less than a history of the world from the
end of World War I to the 1980s, and it runs to over eight hundred
pages.  I was sitting behind him, across the aisle, and as we landed he
turned around and said, "Have you read this?  It's really good."  Then
he tossed it to me.
     Modern Times is one of then.  It took me weeks to plow though it,
but Casey had devoured it during a single flight.  Ar Mayknoll, his
family home on the long Island shore, books were stacked up from floor
to ceiling.  Wherever he traveled, he told his advance team to find two
things: a Catholic church and a good bookstore.  He was always buying
more books-and giving them away.  "Have you read this yet?"  he'd say.
"This guy knows what he's talking about."  One book that influenced him
enormously was The Terror Network, by Claire Sterling, a free-lance
American journalist living in Italy.  Sterling described an
international terrorist fraternity, a collection of groups who received
extensive support from the Soviets and their Eastern European allies.
"The KGB's role was not a matter of guesswork," she wrote, "but
documented fact."  And she excoriated Western governments for refiising
to acknowledge this fact in the face of overwhelming evidence.
     Casey was highly impressed with Sterling's work, and concluded
     that she had great sources.  But his praise for Claire Sterling was
not shared by Washington's intellectual elite.  When The Terror Network
was published, the critics dismissed it as right-wing propaganda.  But
only a few years later, when Communism began to crumble all over Europe,
Sterling's allegations and Casey's convictions were vindicated again and
again-mostly by the guilty parties themselves.
     *In East Germany, for example, the interior minister revealed that
his government had allowed PLO operatives to use their nation as an
operations base, and had knowingly given reiuge to Carlos, one of the
world's most notorious terrorists.  The authorities in East Berlin
admitted that they had not interfered when a Libyan-Palestinian terror
group planned the bombing ofa disco in West Berlin that killed two
American servicemen and wounded over two hundred people in April 1986.
The Hungarian Interior Ministry revealed in 1990 that his country, too,
had given sanctuary to Carlos and thirty-tive of his men.  The Czechs
had provided training and explosives to terrorist groups, while
Yugoslavia was a major base of operations for Abu Nidal, the master
terrorist who was responsible for the massacres at the Rome and Vienna
airports.  In short, most of Sterling's charges turned out to be true.
     Casey somehow found the time to write several books of his own,
including one on Allied espionage in World War II (about which he
obviously knew a great deal) and another on early American history.  He
carried a yellow legal tablet everywhere, and would scrawl in pencil in
huge script, using up three or four lines at a time.
     He had remarkable energy, and even in his seventies he routinely
put in a twelve-hour day.  He realized he wouldn't live forever, and he
was determined to accomplish evetyhting in the time he had.  Despite his
age and a grueling schedule, I never once recall him dozing off, not
even on airplanes.  An assistant would always be getting him something
to work on-another file to look over, another book to read.  When his
plane returned to Andrews Air Force Base, his exhausted aides would
drive home, desperate for sleep.  Casey would head right back to the
oflice.
     This hectic pace led to a certain gruffness, and with Bill Casey
there were never a lot of pleases and thank-yous.  If, during a meal, he
could finish some paperwork, read a book, or interview somebody (or
ideally, all three at once), so much the better.  Somebody once said
that when Bill ate, he dripped.  It isn't polite to disparage other
people's table manners, but in Casey's case there weren't any.  If he
invited you to lunch, you rarely had the chance to enjoy it: he would
gobble down a few mouthfills while he gave out advice and fired
questions.  Throughout the meal he would be playing with his tie, and
would occasionally use the back of it as a napkin.
     He was always fidgeting, his hands constantly in motion.  Usually
he'd be playing with a paper cli~bending it or poking the straight end
between his teeth.  After a while he would appear to nod off, like a
crocodile sunning himself One eye would be closed, and the other would
be open just a little.  Then, just when you thought the other eye was
closing-snap!  Those jaws would go into action and suddenly the air
would crackle with questions.  Why do you think that?  How do you know?
What are your sources?
     He was a more sociable man than he appeared, and despite his
prodigious work habits there was room in his life for golf and other
enjoyments.  He liked to hold forth at parties, and he got a kick out of
tossing out ideas-sometimes just to see what kind of reaction he'd get.
     He was usually amenable to a good laugh~ven at his own
     expense.  When a severe hurricane damaged his Florida beachfront
home, I sent him a note of apology, ostensibly from something called the
CIA Weather Control Office.  The storm was supposed to have hit Cuba, I
explained, but the weather control satellite had veered off target at
the last minute.  Casey liked to joke about members of Congress, and he
was well aware of their private peccadilloes.  Although the world's most
impressive intelligence resources were at his command, when it came to
the private lives of senators and congressmen, he relied on an even more
impressive network-the Washington rumor mill.
     He loathed what Congress had become, and believed that the sport of
preference on Capitol Hill was exposing covert operations.  He hated
testifiing before the congressional oversight committees, where he was
expected to reveal the intimate details of a covert operation merely to
satis~ what he called their "prurient interests."  In the belief that
members of Congress couldn't be trusted to keep secrets, he told them as
little as possible.  He died in the spring of 1987, at the beginning of
the congressional hearings.  I wanted to be at the fiIneral, but by then
my presence would have been embarrassing for the President, who was also
planning to attend.  The night before the filneral, at the suggestion of
Sophia, his widow, I flew up to New York with another of his close
colleagues, and we had a drink at Bill Casey's wake on Long Island.*
While we were there, one of Bill's relatives told me that during his
final days, Bill had looked up at her from his bed and said, "He'll
never get away with it."  I've always wondered if he meant the
President.
     Bud McFarla disappointment.  But it wasn't always that way.  He
sought me out soon after he arrived at the NSC, perhaps because he saw
in me some of his own past-the young Marine who had served in Vietnam,
and
     *The day of Casey's wake, I had been held in contempt for resisting
a grand jury subpoena on the grounds that the special prosecutor had no
constitutional legitimacy.  The judge had ordered me jailed as soon as I
returned from long Island.  While I was in New York, my attorneys
successfully prevented my incarceration until the case could be heard by
the Court ofAppeals.
     who later found himself as a major assigned to the White House.  We
grew to be close, and remained close even after he resigned.  At his
farewell party in December 1985, he hugged me and cried on my shoulder.
There were tears in my eyes, too.
     Although Bud was only six years older than I, he seemed to belong
to another generation.  Maybe it was his gray hair, or his long
experience in Washington that gave him that older demeanor.  Or perhaps
it was because he had first come to the NSC back in 1973, when the
Vietnam War was still going on.  There were many late nights when I
would be working in the Sit Room, preparing paperwork for a meeting the
next day, or for the President's morning briefing.  Bud would often stop
by to say good night, or to give me what Marines call a "howgoesit?"
     Sometimes he would call my office at eight or nine in the evening.
"You got a few minutes?"
     "Sure, I'll be right over."
     Some incident had occurred in the world that needed to be written
Up, or there was an intelligence report he wanted to show me.  Although
nobody ever described McFarlane as the life of the party, he wasn't
quite as stiff and reserved in private as he appeared to be in public.
He would tell the occasional joke, and he did a terrific imitation of
Henry Kissinger.  We had a professional relationship, but he was a boss
in whose presence I could lean back in my chair and say, "lord, isn't
this a mess!"
     He was kind to me beyond the call of duty.  In November 1983, when
I was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel, Bud decided to turn it
into an event.  "Wear your uniform tomorrow," he told me.  "This calls
for a promotion ceremony, and we're going to have one."  Without telling
me, he had asked Wilma, his secretary, to arrange for Betsy and our
children to be there.
     "Come on, Bud," I told him.  "I'm pretty busy, and besides, it's
     not necessary."
     "Don't give me that.  And I don't care what you have scheduled.
     Just be there."  The ceremony was held in the ornate Indian Treaty
Room at the OEOB, and Bud administered the oath, reciting it from
memory.  Ron Hall, Wilma's husband, took pictures.
     This turned out to be my fifth and final promotion.  I still
remember the first one, when I was commissioned as a second lieutenant
upon graduation from Annapolis.  And I remember this last time, when Bud
presided.  It was a warm and generous act, and I was moved that he
thought to include my family, especially since they sacrificed so much
while I was at the NSC.  In keeping with a great old tradition of the
Corps, Bud, after administering the oath, pinned one of his own oak
leaves on my epaulet.  Betsy pinned on the other, and she kissed me.
Bud shook my hand.  Although Bud and 1 are very different types, there
are some similarities in our backgrounds.  Like me, Bud was a graduate
of the Naval Academy, where he had taken his commission in the Marine
Corps, and he, too, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.  We had both
served in Vietnam, although he had been there a few years earlier, and
had participated in the earliest landings of American troops at Da Nang.
And we both remembered all too well that the American military
withdrawal from Vietnam was based on what turned out to be a false
assumption: that the United States would continue to support the South
Vietnamese even after our troops were gone.  The similarity of these
events to the Nicaraguan situation was hard
     to ignore, and we both felt strongly that the tragedy of Vietnam
should not be repeated in Central America.  As Bud once put it, "The
people who went through Vietnam came away with the profound sense that a
government must never give its word to people who may stand to lose
their lives, and then break faith."
     Unlike me, Bud had come to his current job with considerable
experience in both government and foreign policy.  He had been a
military aide to Henry Kissinger in 1973, and when Kissinger became
Secretary of State, Bud remained at the NSC under Brent Scowcroft.
Later, after retiring from the Marines, Bud joined the staff of the
Senate Armed Services Committee under the tutelage of Senator John
Tower.
     After Reagan was elected, Bud's career really took off.  When Al
Haig became Secretary of State, he brought McFarlane to the State
Department.  Bud had been one of the leaders of the administration's
push to get Congress to approve the sale of AWACs aircraft to Saudi
     Arabia, which was when 1 first met him.  Shortly afterward, when
Bill Clark replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, Bud came
over from State as Judge Clark's top deputy.  In 1983, when Clark left
to become Secretary of the Interior, the President named McFarlane as
national security adviser.
     While other candidates had been suggested, most people thought
McFarlane was a good choice.  Bud had earned a fine reputation as a
bright and talented man who worked hard and got the job done.  He was
also known to have excellent relations with the Congress, a highly
prized asset in the Reagan administration.
     I respected and admired him.  Some people came to see Bud as too
ambitious, but he was so adept at covering his ego that I didn't even
notice that side of him.  He occasionally admitted to a desire to become
Secretary of State, but I believe that his aspirations went even
fiirther.  I think he wanted to be President.
     And yet I never had the impression, as some observers have
suggested, that McFarlane was trying to outdo Henry Kissinger, his old
mentor.  On the other hand, I have no doubt that Bud was influenced by
Kissinger, and that he hoped to emulate some of Dr.  K's
accomplishments.  Kissinger had been applauded around the world for
making a secret trip to China and creating an historic opening to that
country during the Nixon years.  I believe that Bud saw our trip to Iran
as .  But Bud McFarlane was no Kissinger.  From my contact with
Kissinger, who headed the President's Commission on Central America, I
could see immediately that he was a man of enormous self-confidence.
     en Kissinger was insulted in a meeting with the Sandinista
leaderhip in Managua, he was strong enough not to let it bother him.
Bud McFarlane was less secure.  He once stormed out ofa meeting n
Honduras because of a minor mistake in translation that he pereived as a
slight.  There was an element of this in all of Bud's trips: 'm Robert
McFarlane, the emissary of the President of the United tates, and I'm
not going to be pushed around by any tinhorn official.  his attitude
surfaced several times in Tehran, when Bud perceived iplomatic insults
in what was merely incompetence.
     Unlike Kissinger, who was a strategic thinker, Bud was primarily a
     synthesizer of other people's views.  Some of us on his staff would
encourage Bud to stand up to Weinberger or Shultz, but his natural
inclination was to avoid confrontation.  He looked for a way to work
with everybody.  He wanted people to like him, and most of us did.
     He was reserved-almost to the point of being mysterious.  He kept
his own counsel, and preferred to meet with staff officers individually
on issues of substance.  The regular morning meetings in the Sit Room
and the weekly meetings of the entire NSC staff were usually
perfitnctory events.  Rarely did we have meetings-as I had expected when
1 first came to the NSC-where a group of us would sit around and discuss
the wisdom of various options.  McFarlane was well aware that he was
never really "one of the boys," which put him at a real disadvantage
within the President's inner circle.  The rest of the President's top
advisers were either wealthy, self-made men or gregarious locker-room
buddies; one or two, like Don Regan and Bill Casey, were both.  Bud
mentioned on several occasions that Ronald Reagan preferred the company
of these affluent, outgoing guys over the reserved Washington types like
himself.  That was true, although it shouldn't have come as a surprise
after Bud's many years in government.  Like most politicians, Ronald
Reagan disliked government bureaucrats, and McFarlane's great
frustration was that he was usually perceived as just that.  And
perceptions are everything in Washington.  Some foreign policy
officials, like Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Kirkpatrick, were valued as
intellectuals or academic experts.  Others, like Al Haig and John
Poindexter, were respected as military officers.  Then there were the
self-made types, like George Shultz, Jim Baker, and Bill Casey.  A
fourth group of inner-circle advisers consisted of the king's own
friends, like Bill Clark, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver.
     McFarlane didn't fit into any of these categories, and it must have
rankled him terribly to be relegated instead to the ranks of the
despised but essential bureaucrats.  He deserved better.  He was both a
Marine and a scholar, and had probably written a good deal of what
Kissinger was credited with.  Many of Ronald Reagan's positions on the
big foreign policy issues of the day-arms control, Soviet-American
relations, and the Middle East-had emanated from McFarlane's pen.  But
while McFarlane was a good writer, in person he often came
     across as pretentious-assuming you could understand what he was
saying.  Everyone made fitn of his language, which was oblique and
indirect even by Washington standards.  Some people thought he was
putting on airs and deliberately trying to be incomprehensible.  Perhaps
the most famous example of McFarlanese occurred when he testified under
oath before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on December 8, 1986.  In
response to a question about third-country support for the Nicaraguan
resistance, McFarlane replied, "The concrete character of that is beyond
my ken."
     I still don't know why Bud resigned.  He said he was leaving to
spend more time with his family, but nobody in Washington believed that,
probably because almost nobody in Washington does spend much time with
his family.  (And I, alas, was no exception.) In addition to the
constant feuding between Shultz and Weinberger, Bud had numerous run-ins
with Don Regan, who generally made life miserable for him.  Some people
thought that Bud was leaving his job in order to un for Congress or the
Senate.  His father had been a Democratic ongressman from Texas, and Bud
had grown up in Washington and as at home inside the Beltway.  But I
don't think he seriously enterained that possibility.
     Well after he resigned as national security adviser, Bud continued
     o wield considerable influence over the course of American foreign
olicy.  Although he no longer worked at the White House, he still had
secure White House phone system and PROFSt terminal in his ome, both of
which were maintained by the White House Commuications Agency and
protected by a security system installed by the ecret Service.  And he
kept his blue White House pass, which allowed im to come and go whenever
he pleased.  After he left, we stayed in touch through the PROFS and the
secure elephone.  He continued to be interested in what I was doing,
both to ssist the contras and to pursue the Iran initiative, and at the
time, he learly approved of both projects.  In the spring of 1986 he
even proosed that I join him in his new position at the Center for
Strategic and
     This statement was one reason that Bud pled guilty to a charge of
withholding inforation from Congress.
     Professional OftIce System, an IBM electronic mail network.
     International Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington.
     On February 8, 1987, just prior to his third meeting with the Tower
Commission, Bud McFarlane took an overdose of Valium in an apparent
suicide attempt.  He was found unconscious, and was rushed by ambulance
to Bethesda Naval Hospital.  "I thought 1 had failed the country," he
said later.
     1 heard about it on the radio, and I was shocked.  By then I had
learned to check with my lawyers before taking any action, and they
asked me not to visit him in the hospital.  They did, however, permit me
to write him a letter.  In it, 1 told Bud that I, too, had once suffered
despair but had come to know that God never allows us to be burdened
with more than we can bear-as long as we stick with Him.  Having spent
most of the previous five years with Bud, I thought I cuch to lose, and
he lost it all.  Iran-contra was his undoing, and his apparent suicide
attempt undid him fiirther.  When I left the White House, I had expected
that of all the people who might have defended me from the absurd
allegation that I had been off on my own, Bud was the most likely to
step forward and say, "That's ridiculous.  Ollie always told me what he
was doing, and I always told him to go ahead."  1 hoped that Admiral
Poindexter, too, would say that, and he did.  But from Bud I expected
it.
     But the Bud McFarlane who testified at the hearings, and again at
     my trial, was a different man from the one I thought 1 knew.
Ironically, backnp copies of thousands of computer messages that
McFarlane, Poindexter, and I had written to one another were discovered
just before Bud was taken to the hospital.  According to one theory,
this discovery precipitated his overdose of Valium.  But although the
PROFS notes and scores of memos taken from my office by the Irancontra
investigators provided documented evidence that he had approved of my
activities, Bud continued to maintain that he knew *PBOFS message,
McFarlane to North, March 11, 1986: "Frankly, I would expect the heat
from the Hill to become immense on you by summer.  Consequently, it
strikes me as wise that you leave the White House.  At the same time,
there will be no one to do all (or even a small part of what) you have
done.  And if it isn't done, virtually all of the investment of the past
tIve years will go down the drain.  How's this for a self-serving
scenario: 1.  North leaves the White House in May and takes 30 days
leave.  2.  July 1, North is assigned as a fellow at the CSIS and (lo
and behold) is assigned to McFarlane's otIice.  3.  McFarlane/North
continue to work the Iran account as well as to build other clandestine
capabilities so much in demand here and there."
     very littie about what I had been doing for the resistance.
     And that's what he claimed at the hearings.  But a year later, when
     he appeared as a prosecution witness at my trial, the fiill nature
of his approval for my involvement with the contras was exposed during
the cross-examination by Brendan Sullivan.  Bud's statements were so
muddled and incoherent that the judge called the lawyers up to the
bench.  "This man has told so many stories since he has been on direct
[examination]," said the judge, "that there isn't any way to know what
he believes or what he knows.  He is an intensely unreliable witness in
almost every respect of his testimony.  Naturally, I felt betrayed by
Bud's version of events.  But even more than that, I felt sorry for him.
     When McFarlane resigned as national security adviser, Admiral John
Poindexter took over.  1 liked him then, and I like him now.  He brings
to mind a scene in a movie I once saw, where a British sergeant major
and his men are attacked by a tribe of Zulu warriors.  As the air is
filled with spears and arrows and the defensive line begins to waver,
the sergeant major calmly tucks his baton under his arm and walks along
the trench line.  Showing no hint of anxiety and not a trace of fear, he
circulates among the troops saying, "Steady lads, steady now."
     That's how I think of John Poindexter-steady.  Those of us from
military backgrounds tend to judge others by whether or not we would
want to have that person next to us during a firefight.  John Poindexter
is just the man I would want at my side when the shells are coming in.
     Poindexter, too, had attended the Naval Academy, and it was well
known (although he never mentioned it) that he had graduated first in
his class of nine hundred.  He was also the midshipman brigade
commanderan appointment of extraordinary honor, and a tribute to his
leadership ability.  (The only other man I know of who was awarded both
such distinctions was Douglas MacArthur, at West Point.) Poindexter went
on to earn a doctorate in nuclear physics from Cal Tech.  From 1976 to
1978 he served as executive assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations,
and was promoted to rear admiral
     *"I'm not at all sure that it's intentional on his part," Judge
Gesell added.  4I'm not at all sure he isn't a victim, a physical
victim, of what he has been going through.  But the fact of the matter
is, he is not a reliable witness."
     in 1980.  A year later, he came to the White House as a military
assistant to Richard Allen.  In 1983 he became Bud McFarlane's deputy,
and little more than two years later was appointed national security
adviser.
     When McFarlane recommended Poindexter for the job, he informed
President Reagan that the admiral had already been offered the
prestigious job of commander of the Sixth Fleet.  The President approved
Bud's memorandum recommending Poindexter's appointment as national
security adviser, and added an eerily prescient notation in his own
handwriting: "I hope this doesn't hurt his ltiture career."
     Contrary to popular myth, John Poindexter was more than an aloof,
balding, pipe-smoking automaton.  He was also capable of brief forays
into anger or humor, although he didn't remain long in either place.
More than any man I've ever known, the admiral kept his feelings to
himself.  He actually made McFarlane seem colorfitl.  Some people found
him almost unbearably taciturn.  Certainly he
     was reserved and formal.  Even in private, he always referred to
President Reagan as "the President."  I was never at his home, but I
knew that his wife, Linda, had been ordained an Episcopal priest, and
that they had five fine boys, four of whom were in the Navy.  By his
standards, we were on a first-name basis: he called me Ollie, and I
called him Admiral.  He would use his pipe as a way to mull over a
thought before he spoke.  1 can see him now, measuring the competing
views of his staff officers as he filled the pipe with tobacco.  When it
was finally lit, he'd send up a thick cloud of smoke-a signal that he
was about to weigh in with his decision.
     When you came to him in busy situations, he gave you only as much
time as it took to clean the pipe, fill it, and light it.  If you hadn't
stated the gist of the problem and offered a recommendation by the time
the smoke appeared, you might as well go back to your office to think
things through in greater depth.
     He was a tireless worker and a classic introvert-reserved,
thoughtfitl, and carefitl.  Later, at the hearings, he described
himtement.  As he put it, "I don't feel that I need a lot of
acknowledgment in order to get any
     sort of psychic income."  That's true.  John Poindexter was a man
with no hidden agenda.  He simply wanted to serve wherever he was sent.
He hated politics.  Unlike McFarlane, who had excellent connections on
Capitol Hill, the admiral seemed to have no friends in Congress, and
certainly none in the media.  He was reclusive, which was unusual in
high government circles, where most people clamor to be visible.  There
were days when he took all three meals in his office.  He was once asked
why he ate breakfast and lunch at his desk, but moved over to a table in
the corner for dinner.  His reply was classic: "Because variety is the
spice of life."  He meant it, too.
     Next to his family, his great love was technology.  Once, during a
     trip to Central America, he asked me what my hobbies had been when
I was a kid.  I told him that I used to build and fly model airplanes,
hich was how I had learned the virtue of patience.  Then I asked him
bout his hobbies-assuming he had any.  The conventional wisdom round the
NSC was that other than going to church and spending zme with his
family, John Poindexter did nothing but work.
     He thought for a moment, and then distantly allowed as to how, n
his "off-duty" hours, he had built several televisions and personal
omputers.
     I was impressed.  "You build them all from kits?"
     "No," he replied.  "I build them from scratch.  It's more fitn that
ay.
     I should have known.  Back in 1982, when Poindexter was a miliary
assistant to Judge Clark, he had initiated a massive upgrade of our
elecommunications capabilities.  One part of this project was the
nstallation of PROFS, which ran on a mainframe computer that was
nstalled and maintained for the NSC by the White House Communiations
Agency.  When you keyed into the system by typing in your assword-and
you had better have gotten it right the first time-a arning message
would appear on the screen to remind you the sysem was classified.  It
was also protected against electronic emissions at could conceivably be
read from outside the building.  The PROFS system was a godsend, for it
saved us countless hours
     at would otherwise be taken up with meetings and phone calls.  It
lso meant that if Fawn Hall had already left for the evening and I anted
to draft a memorandum for the State Department, I would
     compose the memo and transmit it directly to her terminal.  The
next morning, when she came in, it would be waiting for her to convert
into the appropriate format and print on letterhead stationery.  But the
PROFS went far beyond convenience.  It also reduced the amount of paper
floating around the NSC, most of which was highly sensitive and
classified.  Less paper, in turn, meant less risk of a security breach.
     For many of us, the PROFS terminals became a free and uninhibited
means of communication, just like a secure telephone.  Not only was it
private and easy to use, but nobody, apparently not even the admiral,
suspected that the messages were permanent.  We were all under the
impression that once we deleted a PROFS message, it disappeared forever.
It turned out, however, that the "delete" button wasn't as powerfitl as
we believed.  Our correspondence might be gone from our screens, but it
was hardly forgotten.  The computer kept it in its memory.
     Early in 1987, during the Tower Commission's investigation, a young
military technician with the White House Communications Agency suspected
that copies of our PROFS messages might still be retrieved from backnp
tapes and the main computer.  He turned out to be right.  My lawyers
were overjoyed at this discovery.  I had described my many written
exchanges with McFarlane and Poindexter, but until now the lawyers were
missing what lawyers really crave-documentary evidence.  The PROFS
notes, along with my office files that turned up shortly before my
trial, verified my claim that what I had done was known and approved by
my superiors.  Even so, I never imagined that the White House would
allow so much of this highly classified material to be published.
     Unlike McFarlane, who had extensive experience in foreign affairs,
John Poindexter came to the job without much background in the upper
echelons of government.  And yet he made a vital contribution to our
national security, although few people are aware of it.  Poindexter
accompanied the President to the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, where
President Reagan was on the verge of capitulating on the Strategic
Defense Initiative in order to achieve a breakthrough in arms-control
talks with the Soviets.  John Poindexter was far too modest to say so,
but to my knowledge he was the only high-level Ameri
     an official at the summit who held firm in the face of enormous
presure from Congress, the State Department, the media, and many in e
scientific community, all of whom thought that SDI should be egotiable.
     The Soviets were more realistic.  They understood that their
techology was light-years behind ours, and that they couldn't afford
even o try to catch up.  Because John Poindexter convinced the President
at SDI was not negotiable, the summit appeared to be a failure.  But was
shortly after the Reykjavik summit that the Soviets agreed to zthdraw
their intermediate-range missiles from Europe, pull out of ghanistan,
and enter into serious negotiations on limiting nuclear eapons.  Even if
John Poindexter had accomplished nothing else in is tenure as national
security adviser, he deserves America's gratitude r that alone.  He
served his country loyally and well, and what was his reward?  hree
concurrent six-month sentences.  It made me sick when I heard e verdict,
and sicker still when I heard about the sentence.  He never ould have
been charged to begin with.  Breaking the law was the fiirest thing from
his mind.
     I'm not the only one who feels that way about him.  As I travel
ound this country, people are always coming up to ask, "How's the
miral?"  They respect him, and they have a great deal of compassion r a
man who served his boss, did his job, and was then punished by liticians
who were out to get the President.  What happened to John indexter was
an outrage.
     ChThere were only two occasions when I saw President Reagan get
reallj angry, and they both had to do with Beirut.  The first time was
or October 23,1983, just after the terrorist bombing of our Marine bar
racks at the Beirut airport.  The President was in Georgia on a week end
golf trip, and when the news came in he flew back immediately He was in
a white rage as he walked into the Sit Room, but he wa also as alert and
as purposefiil as I'd ever seen him.  "We'll make then pay," he said,
and he clearly meant it.
     The second time was in June 1985, during the hijacking of TWA
flight 847 between Athens and Rome.  The hijackers flew to Beirut where
they killed Robert Stethem, an American Navy diver, ant dumped his body
on the runway.  For seventeen days there was livi coverage of the
hijacking, with those unforgettable pictures of tht American pilot
peering out of his cockpit window while a terroris with a mad grin held
a gun to his temple.  The terrorists wanted us t< look impotent, and
they certainly succeeded.
     During the crisis, the President convened several meetings of hi
National Security Planning Group (NSPG) in the Situation Room.  A we
were leaving one such meeting, Bill Casey said to McFarlane, "I'vi got
something to show you.  Can we talk?"  When we got to McFar
     ne's office I turned to leave, but Casey said, "If you don't mind,
I ink Ollie should see this."  Bud nodded, and Casey handed McFarne a
sheet of paper on which he had outlined plans for a new CIA titerrorism
unit.  "I've talked to Cap about this," he said.  "He'll pport it if you
do."
     McFarlane read the proposal and handed it to me saying, "Do up a
     ew NSDD and a Finding to cover this."  I ended up writing three
sepate National Security Decision Directives for the President to sign.
ne created a task force chaired by Vice President Bush to develop ew
ideas.  The second outlined new security measures for
U.S.-operataircraft and domestic airport security.  The third document
formaled an improved structure for dealing with the terrorist threat,
and ficially sanctioned a secret entity with a mandate to coordinate our
vernment's response to international terrorism-preemptively if posble,
reactively if necessary.  I became its first chairman, which made me e
de facto counterterrorism coordinator.  Despite my deep involvement with
the contras and on the Iran itiative, I actually spent more hours
working on counterterrorism an on anything else.  My appointment was
never made public, but henever a terrorist event took place-and minor
incidents occurred r more often than the media reported-I was the guy
who got the Il.
     The Task Force was established as an offshoot of the Terrorist
cident Working Group (TIWG), a government-wide committee rmed in 1983.
But for a variety of reasons, the TIWG just hadn't rked.
     Among other things, it was simply too large to be effective.  "It
es far too long to get nothing accomplished," said Admiral Art oreau,
the representative from the Joint Chiefs of Stalf, before he pped
attending.  The very size of the TIWG created an obstacle to
nfidentiality.  The representatives from the CIA, the FBI, and the
ntagon often sat at these meetings like mummies, unwilling to disss
classified details about their counterterrorism capabilities for fear e
information would leak.  But the biggest obstacle to an effective
response was that terrorwas seen as an "international" problem, which
therefore required eign policy "expertise."  For that reason, all TIWG
meetings were aired and hosted by the State Department.  But a committee
chaired
     at State and by State was inevitably regarded by the other agencies
as being for State.  And the State Department was itself so large that
practically every major terrorist event touched off an internal
bureaucratic battle over exactly which bureau at State would have the
honor of sabotaging an effective response.  After one Palestinian
terrorist attack in which Americans, Europeans, and Israelis were
killed, a dispute raged for hours as to which bureau-European, Middle
East, or Counterterrorism-would chair the meeting and then draft a
message or prepare a press statement.
     Whenever terrorists attacked an American embassy, the typical TIWG
response was to build a higher wall around the complex and review the
security procedures.  Going after the perpetrators was rarely even
considered.
     The T1WG continued to exist after the Task Force came into being,
but operational responses to terrorist threats or attacks were now
coordinated by this small group, which met at the White House.  My
associates on the Task Force included Noel Koch (and later Richard
Armitage) from Defense, Dewey Clarridge and Charlie Allen from the CIA,
Buck Revell and Wayne Gilbert from the FBI, Bob Oakley from State, and
Art Moreau (and later General Jack Moellering) from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.  These were highly placed men with excellent access to the heads
of their respective agencies.  They were cool under pressure, and they
knew how to move quickly.  If a proposal was absurd, they'd say so.  But
if it was imaginative or bold, they wouldn't block it merely because of
"NIH" syndrome-Not Invented Here, the recurring disease ofWashington's
bureaucracies.
     The members of the Task Force were all linked by secure phone
lines, fax machines, and a computer network.  While the Task Force was
designed to be action-oriented, much of our work was devoted to
planning.  One of our first projects was to start building an all-source
classified data base that could be used in a crisis.  This data base
included information essential to resolving terrorist incidents around
the world.  The idea was to have this information available to those who
needed it at a moment's notice.
     Although the data base itself was classified, much of the
information it contained was derived from open sources.  But one of its
more sensitive areas was a detailed description of what kinds of
information could, and could not, be revealed to specific countries.
     Rod McDaniel, a Navy captain who later became executive secretary
of the NSC, was given the thankless task of building these data bases
and coordinating the effort with the appropriate agencies of our
government.  His small, supersecret team worked out of a highly secure,
restricted space directly below my office, and was linked to it by
scores of cables drilled through the floor.  Mocess of collecting and
updating
     is information when I was fired in 1986.  Except for times of
crisis, which had their own momentum, the ask Force normally met three
or four times a month to discuss ongong covert initiatives aimed at
frustrating terrorists before they could trike.  At Buck Revell's
urging, we drafted, and the T1WG supported, ew legislation that extended
the authority of the Justice Department o apprehend international
terrorists who harmed Americans or Amercan property overseas.  But
operations of this kind took time.  One of hem, initiated in mid-1986,
was aimed at capturing Fawaz Younis, a alestinian hijacker who had come
to my attention through the Drug nforcement Agency during our hostage
recovery efforts.  The Task orce coordinated a remarkably effective
effort among the alphabet oup of government agencies-the DEA, the CIA,
and the FBI-and ounis was eventually captured.  Ironically, he was tried
in Washington n the same courthouse and at the same time as I was.
     By no stretch of the imagination were we always successfitl.  But
     n several occasions we succeeded in our ultimate goal of preventing
a errorist attack before it occurred.  And sometimes we were able to
ngineer an effective resolution to an ongoing event.
     he most famous of these, and certainly one of the most successftil,
llowed the hijacking of an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Laisro.
     It began on October 7, 1985, a Monday, and my forty-second irthday.
The ship, which had left its home port of Genoa four days arlier, had
dropped off most of its passengers that morning in the gyptian city of
Alexandria, where they began a bus tour of the Pyraids.  They were to
board the ship again that night in Port Said, and om there they would
sail on to Israel.
     The Achille Laisro was thirty miles from Port Said when it was ken
over by four Palestinian terrorists who had come on board with lse
passports.  It had been twenty-five years since a cruise ship was
     last hijacked, and like most ships, the Achille Laisro had no
security procedures, not even a metal detector.  As a result, the
terrorists had been able to bring aboard all the tools they needed:
weapons, ammunition, and hand grenades.
     We learned later that they hadn't actually intended to hijack the
ship.  Originally, the terrorists had planned to carry out an attack on
land when the Achille Laisro docked at the Israeli port of Ashdod.  But
when one of the ship's stewards found them cleaning their weapons in a
cabin, the terrorists panicked.  They rushed into the ship's dining room
and rounded up about a hundred passengers.  They then demanded the
release of fifty Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails.
     The following day, off the coast of Syria, they murdered Leon
Kiinghoffer, a retired American citizen who had suffi:red a stroke and
was confined to a wheelchair.  They announced his death to the Syrians
over the radio, and threatened to start killing other passengers unless
their demands were met.
     I had just arrived at my office that Monday morning when I was
called by the Senior Watch officer in the Situation Room.  He had
received a "heads up" from CIA headquarters, but no hard intelligence.
"Something is going on with an Italian cruise ship somewhere in the
Med," he told me.  "They're sending a mayday.  It could be terrorists.
I'll get back to you as soon as I hear more."
     I immediately called Charlie Allen, the CIA's expert on terrorism.
Charlie knew the name of the ship, and told me it had been seized with
some Americans aboard.  We both did what by now had become routine
during terrorist events: we turned on CNN.  The admiral called after
seeing the first alert: "Why don't you get your group together and come
up with some recommendations?"  I quickly typed up a computer message
for the Task Force members, calling them to a meeting in the Sit Room
later that morning.
     At the meeting, we immediately agreed that the President should
authorize the dispatch of a JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) team
to the Mediterranean.  In addition to a highly mobile headquarters
element, JSOC also has several special ops teams.  These small, highly
trained military units use the latest equipment and just about every
possible type of technology.  They have the ability to get to the scene
of action by almost any conceivable means, and are ready to deploy to a
trouble spot at a moment's notice.
     Recommending that the President deploy JSOC forces was not
something we did lightly.  It meant that the United States was about to
commit American military forces to possible hostile action.  But it was
essential to start planning for a possible military operation in case
the hijacking could not be resolved peacefillly As more and more
information arrived, the group began to explore a wide range of options,
zncluding some that were right out of James Bond stories and others that
were somewhat less preposterous.  The main challenge facing JSOC was how
to board the ship and subdue the terrorists without hurting the
hostages.  After several conersations between Admiral Art Moreau and
General Carl Stiner, the SOC commander, it was agreed that we should
position a special ops eam near the scene so that it could quickly move
to the ship.  By noon on that first day, we knew the terrorists were
heavily armed.  And while
     e ship's captain had reported only four of them, he might have been
saying that with a gun to his head.  There could also be additional
terorists on board who hadn't yet shown themselves.
     The uncertainty about the size of the terrorist force on the ship
delayed the JSOC deployment.  They could accomplish this mission in a
number of interesting ways, but they wanted to make sure that they ook
with them everything they might possibly need.  Once they took If, they
would be ten to twelve hours from their U.S.  base.  You might have
thought that by this time, with all the terrorist zncidents that had
occurred during the 1980s, the United States ould have had several
counterterrorist units stationed overseas and eady to strike.
Incredibly, we didn't.
     In the Task Force, we had done everything we could to make that
appen, but we hadn't succeeded.  The State Department didn't want 5 to
position counterterrorist units overseas covertly, because this ould
anger our allies when they eventually learned about it.  The CIA nd the
Joint Chiefs didn't want us to do  the host governments might not pprove
of a particular mission.
     And so nothing happened.  Despite the obvious need to move uickly
in an emergency, we never succeeded in getting the upper echIons at
State and Defense to agree to this crucial preparation for a criis
before it occurred.  I used to wonder: how many dead Americans zll it
take before we do something?
     The Israelis had time and again offered to make their own bases
available for such prepositioning, but Cap Weinberger wouldn't hear of
it.  And the State Department was totally uncooperativealthough Shultz
was usually the first to complain when we didn't have forces on the
scene.  The Air Force had hundreds of transport planes, but the Pentagon
refitsed to leave two of them sitting on a runway unless a crisis was
already in progress.  But by then, of course, the whole world can see
what you're up to.  The press gathers at the end of the runway at Pope
Air Force Base in North Carolina, just waiting for the planes to take
off.
     At midnight on Monday, the special ops team finally took off for
     the Mediterranean.  Meanwhile, the job of the Task Force was to
look for other solutions.  Working out of the Crisis Management Center
at the OEOB, we drafted a flurry of cables to our embassies in Egypt,
Syria, Italy, Algeria, Greece, and even the Soviet Union.  It was my job
to draft cables from Robert McFarlane to his British counterpart.
     The biggest challenge in drafting these messages wasn't putting
     the words on paper; it was coordinating those words within the U.S.
government-where it seemed that practically everybody had a "need to
know" and a comment.  By comparison, my later dealings with the Iranians
were relatively easy.  The Iranians we met with didn't always tell the
truth, but at least their numbers were limited.  By Tuesday afternoon,
the Achille Lawro was approaching Tartus, Syria, where the terrorists
requested political asylum.  We drafted several urgent cables for State
to send on to our embassy in Syria.  The U.S.  ambassador was instructed
to immediately ask the Syrian government, in the strongest possible
terms, to deny the terrorists' requests.
     It was during this Syrian standoff that Leon Klinghoffer was
killed.  We later learned that the terrorists shot him in the head and
ordered two crew members to dump his body and his wheelchair into the
ocean.  But all we knew at the time was what the hijackers told the
Syrians over the ship's radio.  They bragged about murdering an
American, and threatened to kill additional passengers unless they were
granted asylum.  Although we had no way of knowing for sure that the
terrorists' claim was true, we were all stunned as we read the reports
of the murder and the threat to kill more of their seaborne hostages.
Art Moreau went into the Situation Room Watch Officers' area, picked up
the handset to the satellite radio, and had a long con
     rsation with General Stiner, who was now on the ground at an allied
se in the Mediterranean.  Moreau signed off by saying, "We've got get
those bastards."
     The Syrians refiised to give in to the hijackers' demands-not m any
lack of sympathy for the terrorists, but because by now the ole world
was watching.  We also suspected that President Assad ished the
opportunity to undermine Yasir Arafat.  And we were fairly e that
despite Arafat's fervent denials, he was up to his ears in this nt.
     When the Syrians turned them down, the terrorists ordered the zp's
captain to return to Egypt.  Night had fallen, and the weather in
eastern Med was rapidly deteriorating.  As the storm intensified, lost
track of the ship.  Until now, our intelligence agencies had en tracking
the Achille Laisro by satellite, Navy aircraft, and the p's own
navigation reports.  For a while, the captain had continued normal
practice of announcing his exact location during his calls to ship's
home office.  But when the terrorists caught on, they quickly a stop to
it.
     Despite our advanced technology, it is extremely difficult to
pinint a single vessel among many in a big ocean, especially in bad
ather.  If you're forced to rely on ships and aircraft for surveillance,
re's a risk that the terrorists might notice, and could retaliate by
ling passengers.  After several anxious hours and long discussions
     the CIA and other agencies, I called Major General Uri Simhoni,
military attache at the Israeli embassy in Washington.  Back in e, we
had worked together on the hijacking of TWA flight 847, we trusted each
other.  I gave Simhoni the last reported position had for the Achille
Laisro, and asked if his people could help.  out a half an hour later,
he called me back with the ship's exact ation.  From his prompt
response, I surmised that the Israelis had n following the ship ever
since the hijacking began.  Israel's ability gather human intelligence
in the Middle East was widely respected, even our own government often
underestimated their technical lities.
     We spent a long, sleepless night in the Situation Room, watchand
waiting as the ship sailed back to Egypt.  Early Wednesday rning we lost
the ship again.  Once again, Simhoni put us back on ck.
     Meanwhile, looking through the intelligence traffic, Charlie Alle
noticed that Abul Abbas, the head of the Palestine Liberation Fron and a
member of the PLO executive committee, had suddenly bee granted
diplomatic clearance into Egypt.  Charlie, who had been work ing nonstop
in the Crisis Management Center and the Sit Room sinc Monday, had
returned to his office for a change of clothes and a brie rest.  He
called us on the speakerphone and pointed out that Abba was a key Arafat
lieutenant with a history of brutal but poorly execut ed attacks on
Israeli citizens.  "Let's watch this guy," he said.  wouldn't be
surprised if he planned the whole thing."
     As soon as Abbas arrived in Egypt, he began to play the role of
neutral peacemaker dispatched by Arafat to help "resolve" the hijack
ing.  But when the Achille Laisro came within radio range of Alexan
dria, and Abbas started "negotiating" with the terrorists, they greete
him with the words, "Commander, we are happy to hear your voice.  That's
when we knew Charlie was right.
     But what we didn't know was that Arafat and Abbas had struck
     deal with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.  Over the ship's radic
Abbas explained to the terrorists that if they surrendered to the Egyp
tians they would be y evening, a tugboat sailed out of the harbor to
bring th terrorists ashore.  When they heard about this, Art Moreau and
th JSOC planners were both relieved and disappointed.  Earlier that dab
the President had approved the plan to put the special ops tear aboard
the ship that night.
     Shortly after the Achille Laisro arrived off Alexandria, Nic
Veliotes, our ambassador in Cairo, boarded the ship.  With the help the
Egyptians, the terrorists had fled just prior to his arrival.  "leliotes
first words on the ship-to-shore radio came just after he had learne
from the traumatized passengers and crew about the brutal murder Leon
Kiinghoffer: "You tell the foreign ministry that we demand thi they
prosecute these sons of bitches!"
     Ambassadors don't normally talk this way, and to the exhauste
handfitl of us in the Task Force, these words came as a shock.  But the
were also a refreshing breath of air in the diplomatic fog.
     With the murder of an American citizen confirmed, we sent series of
messages to the Egyptians-both to their embassy in Wash
     ington, and through our diplomats in Cair~asking them to turn over
the hijackers.  Together with Jim Stark, a Navy captain on the NSC
staf[, I drafted a strongly worded personal message from President
Reagan to President Mubarak, asking that the Egyptians turn the
terrorists over to us-or at least to the Italians.  Following the usual
rocedures, the document went from the NSC staff to McFarlane.  hen, with
clearance from State, it went to the President and on to ubarak.
     But with the hijackers safely ashore, the Egyptian government
uddenly clammed up.  Veliotes was unable to deliver the message to e
Egyptian foreign minister, who was conferring with Mubarak and e defense
minister.  By now I was thoroughly exhausted, and on Wednesday night I
rove home for the first time since the hijacking began.  The passeners
were out of danger, and we had reason to hope that Egypt might ven allow
the terrorists to be extradited to the United States and put n trial for
their crimes.  This had never happened before, which was hy Buck Revell
had wanted the new anti-terrorist legislation extendng the reach of the
FBI.  But now it was up to the diplomats.  Our art was over~r so we
thought.  Early Thursday morning, after a few hours' sleep, I returned
to
     e White House.  For the first time in days, the Crisis Management
enter was quiet and empty.  The room was littered with empty coffee ups
and cigarette butts-signs of intense activity and fatigue.  With a up of
coffee in my hand, I went down to the Sit Room to look rough the
overnight cables before the morning staff meeting.  here, in the stack,
was a cable that indicated the Egyptian governent had let the four
terrorists leave Egypt.  There was also a cable eporting Mubarak's
public statement about their departure.  "I don't ow where they went,"
he had said.  "Possibly to Tunis.  When we ccepted their surrender, we
hadn't known about the murder."
     I was stunned to read that the terrorists had left Egypt.  Mubarak
ight not have known for sure about the murder of Leon Kiinghoffer hen he
cut the deal with the PLO, but he certainly knew about it by e time he
let the terrorists go.  And President Reagan had practically egged him
to hold them.
     From the Sit Room, I called Simhoni's office at the Israeli
     embassy.  Uri wasn't in yet, so I told one of his colleagues that
the hijackers had left Egypt.
     "I saw that, too," he said, "but 1 don't believe it, and you
shouldn't either."
     "What do you mean?"  I asked.  "They're still there."
     "How do you know?"
     "Believe me, we know."
     1 called Charlie Allen.  He couldn't confirm whether the terrorists
were still in Egypt, but he hadn't seen any evidence to indicate they
had left.  Just before the morning staff meeting, 1 told McFarlane what
I
     had learned from Simhoni's colleague.  "He could be right," Bud
said.  "Check it out with all our sources."
     When the morning staff meeting ended, I was back on the phone
     to the Israeli embassy.  Simhoni was in.  "Uri," 1 said, "where are
the four thugs?"
     "Still in Egypt," he replied.
     "Please keep an eye on them," I said, although they were
undoubtedly doing that anyway.
     Jim Stark was standing next to me when I hung up.  "They're still
there, aren't they?"  he said.
     I nodded.  "Why don't you call around and see what else you can
     find out?"  A few rrinutes later, Jim brought in additional
confirmation that the terrorists were still in Egypt.  He had also
learned that the Egyptians were planning to fly them out of the country
that night, and by now it was already late afternoon in Egypt.  Jim
called Art Moreau and Charlie Allen while I ran upstairs to grab
McFarlane.  Bud was about to leave for a trip to Chicago with the
President, who was scheduled to give a speech on tax reform.  I found
him just as he was leaving to board the helicopter for the trip to
Andrews.  Admiral Poindexter was with him.
     "Our friends say the terrorists are still in Egypt," I said, half
out of breath from running up the stairs.  "We've confirmed it.  They're
flying out tonight.  Do you remember Yamamoto?"  Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto was the man who had led Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.  During
World War II, after our intelligence
     ad uncovered his flight plans to visit a naval base in the Solomon
slands, we ambushed his plane and destroyed it in the air.  The idea at
we might try something similar had just occurred to me.  "We can't just
shoot them down, Ollie," said Poindexter.  "No," I said, "but we can
intercept them and force them down at friendly base, transfer them to
one of our planes, and fly them back ere for trial."
     "It's a possibility," said Bud, as he ran off to board Marine One
     n the White House lawn.  "Work out the details," he called back.
Call me in Chicago."
     Over the next few hours, Jim Stark and I were on the phone
connually-with the Israelis, the Pentagon, and our own intelligence
rvices.  With remarkable speed, Art Moreau began to pull together a an
for the Navy to intercept the hijackers.  Meanwhile, we had only a w
hours to learn exactly when, where and how they were leaving gypt.
     By mid-morning in Washington, we knew that the Egyptians had epared
a commercial airliner to fly the terrorists to Tunis that night.  nce
again the Israelis came through, providing us with the takeoff e, the
tail number of the EgyptAir 737, the air base (Alght plan would be ed
for Algiers.
     While Jim worked with Admiral Moreau, who was in touch with
     e Sixth Fleet through the Joint Chiefs' Communications Center, I
afted a message for President Reagan to send to President Habib urguiba
of Tunisia, asking him to deny landing rights if the plane me to Tunis.
Similar messages were drafted for Athens and Beirut, d the Sit Room
readied all three for transmission after the Egyptian ne was airborne.
     In the Mediterranean, Sixth Fleet ops officers, working directly th
Admiral Moreau, had already come up with a plan for the intert.
Meanwhile, the Israelis called with dramatic news: Abul Abbas,
     e mastermind of this whole event, was flying out of Egypt with the
rorists!
     Poindexter called Bud McFarlane in Chicago, and found him with
President at a Sara Lee bakery plant in Deerfield, Illinois.  Bud had
eady briefed the President on Moreau's plan: F- 14 Tomcats from U.S.S.
Sarato~a, backed up by E-2C surveillance/command and
     control planes, would intercept the terrorists' plane and force it
down either at Alcrotiri, the British base on Cyprus, or at Sigonella, a
joint Italian-NATO base in Sicily.
     "The President likes it," McFarlane said.  "Keep working on it."
Stark and I were euphoric.  Although there were still many details to
work out, at least we had a chance.
     In approving the plan, the President had made clear that no
innocent people could be hurt.  The rules of engagement had to be
airtight.  But what if the Egyptian pilot refttsed to obey the
instructions to land at Sigonella?  Shooting down the plane wasn't an
option.  Even if the terrorists didn't deserve to live, there was a
pilot, a copilot, and possibly a flight attendant on board.  Innocent
people should not have to die in order for the terrorists to be
punished.
     Somehow we had to make the pilot believe he had no choice but
     to land at Sigonella.  And so one of the rules of engagement that
Moreau developed allowed the Tomcats to fire warning shots across the
nose of the Egyptian plane.  Stark and I were utterly amazed that Moreau
was able to get the intercept plan through the Pentagon without Caspar
Weinberger's coming unglued.  We learned later that Weinberger had
objected, and had tried to talk the President out of the operation on
the grounds that it would harm our relations with Egypt.  But the
President wasn't buying it.
     Nothing happens in government without paperwork, and at Admiral
Moreau's request, Jim and I quickly prepared a directive for the
President to sign.  This document, which was faxed to Air Force One,
ordered the intercept of the EgyptAir flight and outlined the rules of
engagement that Moreau had drafted.  President Reagan was flying back to
Washington, and as soon as he signed it, he called Secretary Weinberger
and told him he had ordered the intercept.  Weinberger, who was en route
from Ottawa to his summer house in Maine, called Admiral Crowe at the
Pentagon and confirmed the order.
     As the Navy jets scrambled off the darkened flight deck of the
Sarato~a, Moreau, Poindexter, Stark, and I began working out the final
details.  Our Special Ops forces, already in the air and headed for
home, were diverted to Sigonella.  We hadn't yet informed the Italian
government of our plans for fear that the information would leak, but
     we would soon need permission to land.  With Simhoni's help we had
worked out a backup plan: if Sigonella couldn't be used, the plane would
be diverted to an Israeli military base.
     The EgyptAir plane took off at 11:15 P.M.  Cairo time.  By midnight
it was just south of Crete, where the F-14s were waiting in an ambush.
With their lights off and their cockpits dark, the four Tomcats
throttled back to follow the Egyptian airliner.  About a hundred miles
behind them sat Commander Ron Sims (a pseudonym) in his E2C Tracker.
When it was time to make radio contact with the Egyptian plane, Sims
would do the talking.  As Sims listened in, the Egyptian pilot requested
landing rights
     in Tunis.  Permission was denied.  He tried Athens-same answer.
With no place to land, the pilot, unaware that he was now flanked by two
F- 14s, requested permission to return to Cairo.  That's when Sims made
contact with him.  "EgyptAir 2843.  This is Tigertail 603, over."
     There was no answer.  Sims repeated the message three more times
before he received a reply: "Tigertail 603.  EgyptAir 2843.  Go ahead."
     "EgyptAir 2843.  Tigertail 603.  Be advised you're being escorted
by two F- 14s.  You are to land immediatelyimmediatelyat Sigonela,
Sicily.  Over."
     The Egyptian pilot must have been astounded.  "Say again.  Who is
aIling?"
     "Roger.  This is Tigertail 603.  I advise you are directed to land
mmediately, proceed immediately to Sigonella, Sicily.  You are being
scorted by two U.  S.  Navy interceptor aircraft.  Vector 280 for
igonella, Sicily.  Over."
     The pilot tried to radio Cairo for instructions.  But Art Moreau
     nd the Sixth Fleet planners had anticipated this, and had directed
ims's plane to jam him up and down the radio frequency spectrum.  ow the
only communication the pilot had was with Sims.
     "You are to turn immediately to 280," Sims repeated.  "Head 280
mmediately."
     The two F-14s turned on their lights and flew close enough to eer
into the cabin.  They dipped their wings in the aviation symbol or
"follow me."  And to show they meant business, they blasted the gyptAir
plane with their afterburners.
     The pilot got the message.  "Turning right, heading 280," he
     reported, and followed through.  The poor guy must have been scared
witless.  "I'm saying you are too close!  I'm following your orders.
Don't be too close!  Please!"
     "Okay, we'll move away a little bit."  Sims spoke as if he himself
were flying one of the F-14s, rather than trailing them miles behind in
the slower E-2C.  By now the four original Tomcats had been airborne for
hours and were running low on fiiel.  On another frequency, Sims
requested new planes to replace them.
     There was quite a parade heading for Sicily: in addition to the
Egyptian plane, the four replacement Tomcats, and Sims's Tracker, there
were also a couple of C-141s carrying General Stiner and the special ops
unit.  Once the EgyptAir plane was on the ground, our plan was to remove
the hijackers and Abul Abbas, transfer them all to one of Stiner's
C-141s, and continue on to the United States.  It was finally time towas
in place, and Poindexter, Stark, Moreau, and I were elated that it all
seemed to be working.  But now that we had to noti~ Prime Minister Craxi
in Italy, our embassy in Rome was unable to locate him.  An officer at
our Rome embassy finally found him, but no one from the State Department
could get through.
     I remembered that Michael Ledeen and Craxi were old friends.
Frantically, I called Mike at home.  "We need your help," I said.
Violating all kinds of security precautions, I quickly brought him up to
speed.  "You've got to get hold of Craxi," I said.  "Otherwise those
planes can't land."
     Ledeen asked the White House switchboard to put him through to the
Hotel Raphael, where Craxi lived.  One of the prime minister's aides
picked up the phone.
     "He's not here," Ledeen was told.
     "You'd better find him," Ledeen said in Italian.  "I'm calling from
     the White House, and lives are at stake.  If anyone dies because
you won't put me through, tomorrow morning your picture is going to be
on the front page of every newspaper in the world."  Unlike all the rest
of our government agencies, Mike knew the right button to push.  Prime
Minister Craxi was on the line in less than a minute.
     "Why Sicily?"  Craxi wanted to know.
     "Well," said Ledeen, thinking fast and taking quite a risk, "No
     ther place in the world offers such a combination of beautifiil
weathr, history, tradition, and magnificent cuisine."  Craxi laughed and
said he would arrange it.  But it wasn't that simle.  Connections
between Rome and the base on Sicily were less than fficient, and Craxi's
order was late getting through.  The Italian air affic controllers
didn't give permission for the planes to land until e Navy aircraft
declared a midair emergency.  Then, in quick succesion, the Egyptian 737
and the American C-141s touched down on e airfield.  The Egyptian plane,
still buttoned up and with one ngine still running, was quickly
surrounded by General Stiner's speial ops unit.  At first the pilot
refiised to open the doors or even turn off the ngine.  Then General
Stiner had a portable stairway brought over.  tiner, one of the braver
men on this planet, laid down his weapon, limbed up the stairway, and
opened the door.
     He was met by an Egyptian commando officer who pointed his bmachine
gun straight at the general.  "I don't want you," Stiner said.  "I want
them."  After a few moments of hesitation, the commando lowered his
eapon.  Down the stairway came the four terrorists, together with eir
ringleader, Abul Abbas.
     This is where the story should have ended, but events rarely turn
     ut exactly as planned.  While Stiner's men were surrounding the
plane, they, in turn, ere surrounded by a team of Carabinieri-the
Italian national olice-who now demanded custody of Abul Abbas and his
terrorists.  rom the Sit Room, we listened in on a live, running account
of the ents at Sigonella, including the confrontation between Stiner's
men d the Italian police.  Reluctantly, Admiral Poindexter made the only
ssible decision-that we couldn't risk a shootout with the Italians.
Over the course of the next few hours, the Craxi government sured us
that the terrorists in their custody would be brought to zal.  We, of
course, wanted them to be extradited to the United ates, and we
continued pressing that point.  The White House sent raxi a strongly
worded message, reminding him of the extradition eaty between the United
States and Italy, which spelled out that a spected terrorist could be
held for up to forty-five days while evince was collected against him.
     The Achille Laisro incident ended in a tremendous anticlimax.  In
order to put the four terrorists on trial, the Italians needed evidence
of their crimes.  For the past three days, the Task Force had worked
this operation from the seat of its pants.  It had succeeded
brilliantly, and we were exhausted.  But the legal battle had only
begun.  Artorney General Meese and a deputy from the FBI came down to
     the Sit Room to help us prepare the necessary paperwork for a
warrant to be drawn up.  The Justice Department had to show a federal
judge that there was enough evidence against the terrorists to present a
reasonable case.  But most of the evidence consisted of extremely
sensitive intelligence that had been gathered by our own agencies as
well as the Israelis.  The Israelis were willing to help us in a variety
of practical ways, but they weren't willing to expose their sources and
methods-and neither were we.
     But with the help of the Israelis, we were able to collect enough
evidence to take before a judge.  It was during the process of building
this evidence for extraditing the terrorists that I had extensive
contact with Amiram Nir, Prime Minister Peres's coordinator for
counterterrronsm.  Over the next fourteen months, I would get to know
Nir much better.
     Not everyone was as euphoric about the outcome as we were in
     the Task Force.  George Shultz was angry about the damage that had
been done to our relations with Egypt and Italy.  Despite his pique, the
State Department was helpfiil in the extradition work, and by early the
next morning we had the paperwork in order.  Although the situation
required haste, we took care to abide by both the letter and spirit of
Italian and American law.
     But we didn't succeed.  In the end, the four terrorists were tried
     and convicted in Italy.  Although the state prosecutor bravely
asked for life sentences, the terrorists got off with terms of twenty to
thirty years.  Yussef Molqi, who admitted to killing Leon Klinghoffer,
was so gratefttl for the lenient judgment that he called out in the
courtroom, "long live Italian justice, long live Palestine."
     And what about Abul Abbas?  Incredibly, the Italians actually
helped him escape!  After bringing the five men to Rome, they separated
him from the others, dressed him in a pilot's uniform, and put him on a
plane to Yugoslavia.  We immediately prepared extradition papers
     and had them served in Belgrade, but by then the battle had been
lost.  Yugoslavia had diplomatic relations with the PLO, and Abbas was
protected under diplomatic immunity.  (No, I'm not making this up.) In
the days that followed, we tracked him as he fled from Belgrade to
     Baghdad, where he became a permanent guest of that great human
rights advocate Saddam Hussein.  As far as I know, he's still there.
     Not that there was any doubt, but eed planned the entire operation.
He nd three of his lieutenants were tried and sentenced in absentia to
life erms.
     But the big fish got away.  Compared to Abul Abbas, the four
terorists who had carried out the hijacking and the murder were just
o-bit trigger men.  We knew we'd never make a dent in the worldde
terrorist threat simply by capturing a few foot soldiers.  We had to et
the ringleaders.  It was infiiriating to lose Abbas.  Despite the
brilliant success of
     zs dramatic operation, we were unable to convince the Italians to
let have the main criminal-or even to prosecute him themselves.  The
talians knew fitll well that Abbas was the mastermind of the entire
peration, but they apparently wanted the rest of the world to believe at
he just happened to be on that unscheduled EgyptAir flight.  It was an
enormous betrayal, but in retrospect it isn't all that surrising.  The
Italians, like the Egyptians, lacked the resolve to fight terorism,
because they feared the consequences of capturing and trying e terrorist
leaders.  Although we could never confirm it, I believe at both
governments had made commitments to the PLO that bbas would be released.
That way, the operation couldn't be linked ireclly to Arafat.
     Five years later, Abul Abbas surfaced again.  In the spring of 1990
     e planned an operation in which Palestinian commandos would land n
a Tel Aviv beach and start shooting everyone they saw.  The terrorts who
intended to carry out this act were captured by the Israelis, nd no
civilians were hurt.  In March 1991, there was more news about the
Achille Laisro terorists.  Abdulrahim Khaled, one of Abul Abbas's
lieutenants, was rrested in Greece in connection with a planned
terrorist event in thens.  Khaled was originally on the Achille Laisro,
but he apparently left the ship in Alexandria just before his comrades
seized it.  When his true identity was revealed, the Italian government
asked Greece to turn him over.
     Although we were bitterly disappointed about losing Abul Abbas, the
American people were jubilant when the intercept was reported.  "wE BAG
THE BUMS," wrote the New York Daily News in a banner headline.  In an
amusing footnote to the whole event, I was in Pat Buchanan's office,
working with him on the President's announcement that the terrorists had
been captured, when a call came in from Niles Latham, an editor at the
New York Port.  "We need a great headline," Niles said.  "We'd like to
use 'YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE.' If you can get the President to
use it, we'll put the whole line in quotes."  It was a little unusual
for a journalist to suggest language for the President, but Pat and I
had to acknowledge that this was a much better conclusion for the
President's remarks than the ending we had written.  The President used
the new line, and the reaction was terrific.  Niles has been telling
that story for years; maybe now people will believe him.
     A lot of people have given me the credit for our success in the
Achille Laisro affair.  I'm proud to have been part of it, but the
praise belongs to the Navy flight planners and pilots, and a host of
others.  Bud McFarlane should be acknowledged for authorizing the
planning for the capture, and getting the President to override
Weinberger's objections.  But the bulk of the credit should go to Art
Moreau.  He hated the Washington bureaucracy, but he was a master at
cutting through it.  A few months later, he was named commander of
NATO's naval forces in the Mediterranean.  As soon as he arrived he was
targeted by the Red Brigades and several Palestinian terrorist groups.
He and his wife spent that year under heavy guard.  Art Moreau died of a
heart attack the following year without ever being recognized for the
enormous contribution he had made to the fight against terrorism.
     As the old saying has it, no good deed goes unpunished.  Angry
voices were raised in Egypt, where Mubarak was attacked both by
moderates, who thought he should have apprehended the terrorists, and by
Muslim fiindamentalists who were convinced he had tipped us off and
enabled the capture to succeed.  In Italy, Prime Minister
     Craxi's coalition suffered the fate of so many previous Italian
governmenU: it collapsed.
     With all of this diplomatic fallout, our Secretary of State must
have felt a fair amount of pressure.  One afternoon, shortly after the
fall of Craxi's coalition, George Shultz was leaving McFarlane's office
as I was coming in.  He looked up, glared at me, and muttered, "So
here's the man who brought down the Italian government."
     "Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary," I replied with a smile.  On
Capitol Hill, there were others who objected.  Senator Dave Durenberger,
the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was
apparently upset that the President had supposedly violated the War
Powers Resolution!  Other members were outraged that we didn't consult
with them before committing our Special Ops units.  If we had, we'd
still be looking for the killers of Leon Klinghoffer.  But these were
exceptions.  All over America, the response was overwhelmingly positive.
The cooperation had been marvelousamong various branches of government,
our intelligence services, and etween us and the Israelis.
     successfiil as it was, the Achille Laisro episode did not end the
roblem of terrorism.  Libya, the prime sponsor of international terorist
activity, showed no inclination to stop.  On the contrary: when ther
supporters of terrorism closed down their training camps, addafi moved
in to fill the gap.
     In late December 1985, Qaddafi was linked to Abu Nidal's deadly
errorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports.  Over the winter, we
atched as Qaddafi planned other terrorist events aimed at the United
tates.  Within the administration, there was a growing sentiment in vor
of a military response against Libya.
     On March 28, 1986, Qaddafi made a statement calling on "all ab
people" to attack anything connected to the United States, "be an
interest, goods, ship, plane, or a person."  Around the same time, ur
intelligence sources picked up instructions from Tripoli to various
ibyan People's Bureaus-the Libyan equivalent of an embassy-to epare for
action.  We didn't know what target they had in mind, but ese were the
same kinds of instructions that had been given to zbyan offices abroad
prior to Libya's 1984 killing of anti-Qaddafi otesters inent off at La
Belle discotheque in West Berlin, a popular gathering place for off-duty
American servicemen.  Although we had compelling proof of Libyan
complicity, there was no way to disclose the evidence without revealing
sensitive details of our intelligence-gathering operations.  Critics of
the administration charged that we were inventing the Libyan role, but
several years later, after the Berlin Wall came down, the East Germans
admitted what we had claimed all along: that the orders for the bombing
had come from Tripoli.
     On April 14, American planes responded by bombing terroristrelated
targets in Libya.  As with the Achille Laisro incident, the Task Force
coordinated the various bureaucratic requirements for the raid.  But,
because this action was going to be significantly more prolonged in its
planning, the chair shifted from Bud to Don Fortier, by then deputy
national security adviser.  The strike was one of several possible
responses we had considered against Libya.  But it wasn't our first
choice.  Unfortunately, our "allies" were unwilling to support us in
other measures against Qaddafi.
     The action against Libya was essential in our fight against
terrorism, but it wasn't undertaken lightly.  There were numerous
discussions about the bombing targets, and we made every effort to avoid
killing innocent people.  But we also knew that civilian casualties were
probably unavoidable.  A surgical strike is a nice concept, and while it
may be achievable under test conditions when nobody is shooting at you,
it rarely works as well when the air is fitll of antiaircraft fire.
When a pilot is dodging antiaircraft missiles at six hundred miles per
hour, pinpoint accuracy is an illusion.
     In the old days, the United States would have found a way to
assassinate Qaddafi.  But despite what Seymour Hersh and other
journalists have claimed, killing him was never part of our plan.  On
the other hand, we certainly made no attempt to protect him from our
bombs.  By law, we couldn't specifically target him.  But if Qaddafi
happened to be in the vicinity of the Azziziyah Barracks in downtown
Tripoli when the bombs started to fall, nobody would have shed any
tears.
     While no single military strike can end the problem of terrorism,
     our bombing raid on Libya destroyed Qaddafi's command post and
     communications center.  But its greatest effect seemed to have been
psychological.  Qaddafi immediately went into hiding in the desert, and
for over a year he initiated no terrorist action of any kind.  While he
is still in no danger of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, it appears that
the bombing raid on Tripoli taught him a lesson.
     Chapter 10
     The Contras
     I rarely met a contra I didn't like.  And I never met one at all
until 1983, when I was introduced to Juan.  Like many members of the
Nicaraguan resistance, Juan was a former Sandinista officer who had
fought for years against the hated Somoza regime.  This is the story he
told me of how he joined the resistance.  In July 1980, on the first
anniversary of the day the Sandinistas came to power, an enormous
victory parade was held in Managua.  In honor of the occasion, the old
cathedral and the square around it were draped in red and black, the
Sandinista colors.  An enormous poster of a hammer and sickle was
flanked by huge portraits of Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Augusto Cesar
Sandino, the legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the U.S.
Marines in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
     Juan was marching in the parade along with his men, and he was
shocked by what he saw.  After all, the Sandinistas had always denied
they were Communists.  He turned to his commanding officer and asked,
"iQxe es e:te?"  ("What's all this?")
     "Es verdad" ("It's the truth"), said the officer.  "No por mio"
("Not for me"), Juan replied.
     That night, Juan and eleven men from his unit started walking north
to Honduras to join the resistance.
     He was one of thousands who became what the Sandinistas called
~0ntrarevo1ffcionario5counterrevolutionaries~r contras.  The resistance
never liked that term, because it implied that they wanted to restore
the old Somoza regime.  In fact, most of the contras had supported the
revolution against Somozoa.  They just weren't willing to live in the
totalitarian society that the Sandinistas were building.  But the name
stuck~ne of many public relations victories for the Sandinistas.  The
administration preferred to call them freedom fighters, but "contras"
was so widely known that even their supporters ame to use that word.
     To this day, I still hear it said that the contras were a creation
of
     e CIA.  Not true.  And they certainly weren't created by me, or
Dick ecord, or Dewey Clarridge.  To the extent that anyone "created" the
ontras, it was the Sandinistas.
     When the Sandinistas came to power, it was with the support of
     e United States.  The Carter administration was so intent on
getting id of the brutal Somoza regime-which was certainly a worthy
oal-that nobody wanted to look too closely at how that was being one,
who was doing it, or where it might lead.
     The Sandinistas came to power with grand declarations of freeom and
democracy.  They promised a society marked by free enterrise, free
elections, a free press, freedom of religion-and just about verything
else the United States wanted to hear.  In return, our govrnment became
their main source of support.  During the first few onths of the new
regime, we sent Nicaragua thirty-nine million dolrs in emergency food
aid-a considerable sum for a country of three illion people.  Just stay
out of El Salvador, we told them, and we'll eep those dollars flowing.
In 1980 our contribution to Nicaragua as raised to seventy-five million
dollars.  But as soon as they came to power, the Sandinistas began
breaking eir promises.  Within months, anyone who wasn't a "scientific
socialt" was driven out of the leadership.  We know today that the
Sandinas had no intention of creating a free society-and every intention
trying to overthrow the governments of El Salvador and Honduras.  In the
face of irrefiitable evidence, President Carter came to have
     second thoughts about the Sandinistas.  In the final weeks of his
presidency he suspended all U.S.  aid to Nicaragua and resumed support
for the government of El Salvador, which was now fighting for its life.
By the time 1 became involved in Central Amerirecognize the Sandinistas'
true colors.  In July 1980, at their first-anniversary celebration, the
guests of Nicaragua's new regime had included Fidel Castro and Yasir
Arafat, and delegations from suc* freedom-loving states as Vietnam,
North Korea, and East Germany.  Meanwhile, the glowing promises of
freedom had turned to dust.
     Instead, the Sandinistas began organizing Nicaragua along the same
lines as Cuba.  President Daniel Ortega even named his younger brother
Umberto as defense minister, just as Castro had done with his own
brother, Baul.  And like the Cubans, the Sandinistas began searching for
opportunities to export what they themselves called a "revolution
without frontiers."
     Before long, they had replaced Somoza's dictatorship of the right
with their own dictatorship of the left.  They seized radio and TV
stations.  They herded farmers into state-run farms.  They created an
elaborate system of block wardens-or neighborhood spies.  They censored
La Prensa, the country's largest newspaper, and shut down the Catholic
radio station.  They fought against the Church, and forbade broadcasts
of the Mass on radio or television.  They established a secret police
force and began confiscating private property.  They killed, jailed, and
exiled their political opponents.  They started a nationwide
conscription, drafted children into their youth movements, and sent the
"elite" off for indoctrination in the Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany,
and Bulgaria.
     And like their mentors in other Communist dictatorships, the new
rulers of Nicaragua set themselves up in the finest houses, which they
stocked with the best French wine and Russian caviar.  It's a cliche,
but that doesn't make it any less true: even the most ardent capitalist
would be hard-pressed to match the material appetites and amenities of a
privileged Communist.  On my first trip to Managua, one of the regime's
few remaining internal political opponents passed on a joke that became
popular when Tomas Borge, the son of a peasant family, was named
interior minister.  Like many of his fellow Sandinistas, Borge had
appropriated the enormous mansion of a former Somoza
     official.  When his mother came to visit, he proudly showed her
around: the swimming pool, the huge kitchens, the visitor's suite, the
fountains, the patio, the splendid gardens, the maids, the butlers, and
all the rest.
     HalWay through the tour, she turned to her son in tears.  "~ Ma ma,
he said, "gxe pasa?"
     "Oh, Tomas," she replied.  "It's so beautifitl!  But tell me-what
     will happen to all this when the revolution comes?"
     When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he offered the
Sandinistas one last chance to withdraw their support for the rebels in
El Salvador and to make the promised democratic reforms at home.  The
Sandinistas didn't even blink.  By now they were supported by a long
list of governments: Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Communist bloc in
Eastern Europe, Iran, and even France.  And let's not forget Libya.
During the Ortega years, the Libyans gave Nicaragua several hisndred
million dollars in economic assistance, not to mention technical
support, weapons, and military assistance.
     In March 1981, President Reagan authorized the CIA to begin
supporting the growing army of Nicaraguan rebels, mostly in Honuras, who
were opposed to the Sandinista regime.  Congress provided nding to
enable these fighters to interdict weapons and supplies on
     - eir way from Nicaragua to the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador.
     In the summer of 1981, Casey appointed Duane Clarridge, an
xperienced clandestine service officer and former CIA station chief, o
be the CIA's link to the resistance.  Officially, Clarridge's new title
as head of the Agency's Latin American Division.  "I told Casey that
sounded fine," Dewey told me later.  "Then I
     ot out my atlas to see what countries we were talking about."
Dewey Clarridge was a master spy who had been almost everyhere and done
nearly everything.  His experience in the clandestine ervice was so
extensive that it was rumored that his resume consisted f his
name-followed by three blank pages.  He had a great sense of tyle, and
was known around Washington as an elegant dresser.  One f the few times
I saw Dewey get really angry was when a reporter escribed him in print
as having shown up at a congressional hearing a polyester suit.  You'd
have thought he had been called a Commuist.
     Clarridge and Casey had a lot in common, including an unmistakable
lack of affection for the Congress.  But unlike most people who had to
testi~ on Capitol Hill, Dewey didn't even try to hide his attitude.  I
was with him on several occasions when senators, congressmen, and
staffers asked inane questions based on farfetched newspaper stories
about what the CIA was allegedly up to.
     Washington is a city of rituals, and the ritual response is to say,
"Thank you for the question, Senator.  I'm not aware of any indication
of that, but I can assure you, sir, that I will look into it closely as
soon as I return to my office.  I will be sure to give you a fiIll
report by tomorrow morning.  You can be confident that we at the CIA
share your concern about that article."
     Dewey Clarridge's answers were more succinct: "That's absolute
bullshit."
     In the summer of 1981, Bill Casey asked Dewey to come up with some
recommendations about Central America.  "We can try to interdict the
Nicaraguan arms shipments to El Salvador," Dewey said.  "But we won't be
able to cut it off completely.  If the resistance can create a backfire
to keep the Sandinistas busy, that will make it harder for them to
concentrate on El Salvador.  In other words, we've got to take the war
to Nicaragua."  When Casey heard that, he knew he'd found his man.  At
the time, the fledgling anti-Sandinista resistance movement along the
Honduran-Nicaraguan border was being supported by a small group of
Argentine officers and senior enlisted men.  The Argentine military had
just fought a particularly brutal war against the Montoneros, a
Communist insurgency.  Some of the rebels had taken refttge in
Nicaragua, which had already become a kind of World's Fair for
terrorists from all over the planet: the Red Brigades from Italy, M-19
from Colombia, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang from Germany, Libyans,
Chinchoneros from Honduras, the Sendero Lisminoso (Shining Path) from
Peru, the IEA, and several factions from the PLOdescribed a firefight
between two rival Palestinian terrorist groups.
     Casey met with General Leopoldo Galtieri, head of the military
junta that ruled Argentina, and suggested that the United States join in
supporting the anti-Communist guerrilla activity.  Galtieri was
delighted.  But he was wary of America's reputation for abandoning its
friends,
     nd he gave Casey a prescient warning: "Don't get involved in this
nless you're prepared to see it all the way through."
     A month later, President Beagan signed a top-secret Finding that
uthorized the CIA to begin helping the rebels directly.  In 1982,
priarily because of the war in the Falklands, Argentina withdrew its
upport.  From then on the Nicaraguan resistance was in the hands of e
CIA.  Even so, nobody in our government was under any illusions about
     e Nicaraguan resistance.  After all, the Sandlnista military was
larger an all the other armies in Central America put together.  And the
oviets were equipping them with tanks, attack helicopters, longange
artillery, armored personnel carriers, and sophisticated commuications
equipment.
     Later, as the resistance grew, the administration's goals for the
esistance grew with it-to the point where we believed they could xert
enough pressure on Managua to bring about a democratic outome.  And in
the end, that's exactly what happened.
     y own involvement with Central America began in the spring of 982,
when Roger Fontaine, who headed the Latin America section f the NSC,
asked me to provide a military perspective for an NSC olicy paper on
Central America.  Bill Clark liked the results, and he sked me to start
attending a Saturday morning study group on Cenal America.  These
informal meetings were held at the CIA, and were osted by Bill Casey in
his conference room on the seventh floor of e Agency's headquarters.
Jeane Kirkpatrick used to attend, along ith Dewey Clarridge, Fred Ikle,
General Paul Gorman, Tom Enders rom the State Department, and several
others.  1 knew little about entral America when I arrived at the NSC,
but I had been reading ike crazy and paying close attention to the
speeches and writings of eane Kirkpatrick and others.  The more I
learned, the more reason I aw for our involvement.  I wasn't shy, and at
the Saturday meetings I started asking queszons and making occasional
comments.  Some of my ideas must have ad merit, because I was soon
invited to other meetings and events, ncluding seminars at various CIA
sites on the training of anti-Comunist resistance movements.
     Early in 1983, when Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit Cen
     tral America, I was asked to serve as a liaison from our government
and to provide information on potential death threats.  The Pope was not
harmed in Nicaragua, but when he addressed a crowd in Managua, a
"spontaneous" demonstration drowned him out.  For the Sandinistas, this
turned out to be a domestic and international public relations disaster.
     Events like the Sandinistas' treatment of the Pope convinced Casey,
Kirkpatrick, Clark, and Weinberger that the situation in Central America
required more from the United States than mere containment.  It was
clear to them that the Soviets and the Cubans were using Nicaragua as a
secure base for the attack on their next target: El Salvador.
     It was also apparent that a strategy of using an indigenous
resistance movement to reverse the Communist gains in Nicaragua was
going to take time.  In the interim, El Salvador was in jeopardy of
succumbing.  Judge Clark had me prepare several position papers and
legislative requests in support of increased American military presence
in the region-specially El Salvador.
     At the time, El Salvador was squeezed between the Communist
guerrillas on the left and brutal death squads on the right.  Under the
guise of anti-Communism, the death squads terrorized the entire
countrymurdering nuns, teachers, labor organizers, political opponents,
and thousands of other civilians.  Some officials, both in Washington
and in San Salvador, preferred to sweep this problem under the rug, and
tried to dismiss reports of the death squads as Communist propaganda.
But a lot of it was real.
     I made several trips to El Salvador, and in the summer of 19831
wrote a paper about the death squads.  From talking with our ambassador,
our military liaison personnel, and with CIA people who knew the area,
it was clear there were numerous allegations that the murders were
connected to a leader of the right-wing Republican National Alliance
Party, also known as ARENA.  Back in Washington, I met with those who
were lobbying the Congress on behalf of El Salvador.  "Stay away from
this guy and his cronies," I'd tell them.  "Don't try to whitewash the
problem.  The death squads are real, and they must be stopped.  Yes, we
have to support the fight against Communism, but our ultimate goal isn't
just to prevent Central America from going Communist-it's to help these
countries become real democracies."
     I made the same point in briefings to congressmen and senators,
     d to their staffs.  Most of them were open to the evidence,
although o or three congressional staffers advised their principals that
I was ft on Communism.  I've been called a lot of things, but that was a
St.
     n Capitol Hill, the prevailing view was that the way to combat the
ath squads was to withdraw the American military presence in El
lvador-which consisted of only fifty-five advisers.  I disagreed.  I ve
always resented the view that the American military contributes an
atmosphere of violence and repression.  Are American soldiers own for
engaging in criminal acts against the civilians of other untries?  Is
the United States so fiill of human rights abuses that our ldiers are a
menace to other countries?
     In places like El Salvador, American military advisers are a
moderzng influence.  There are ways to defeat a Communist insurgency
zthout killing innocent people, but the Salvadoran military was lackg in
both discipline and experience.  At the time, this was an army at was
used to doing only two things: marching in parades on tional holidays,
and organizing palace coups.  My son's Boy Scout op had been on more
camp-outs than some of these guys.  The administration's opponents in
Congress argued that we ouldn't be training the Salvadoran military
because it was so undislined.  But one reason it was so undisciplined
was that we were to be the NSC representative a trip to El Salvador by
Vice President Bush.  It was clear that less something was done to stop
the death squads and to guarantee e long-promised transition to
democratic rule, U.S.  military aid to Salvador would soon be
terminated.
     The Vice President was given the unenviable job of delivering this
ssage, and along with Tony Motley, the new Assistant Secretary of te for
Inter-American Affairs, I was tagged to accompany him.  om Andrews we
flew straight down to Argentina for the inauguran of Paul Alfonsin,
Argentina's democratically elected president.  en we headed north, to
Central America.  During the flight, Tony d I typed up the talking
points for the Vice President's scheduled eting with President Alvaro
Magana in El Salvador, and we briefed Vice President on the situation
there.
     On the way to El Salvador we stopped in Panama, where Mr. Bush held
a brief airport meeting with President de Ia Espriella and General
Manuel Noriega.  The Vice President reminded Noriega that he had just
returned from a democratic transition in Argentina and urged that same
thing had to happen in Panama.
     Noriega sat there like a sphinx.  In retrospect, it was clear that
he didn't get the message.
     I had met with Noriega before, and I would meet him several times
more.  Whenever I accompanied a high-level visitor to the region,
whether it was Casey, Weinberger, or another senior official, we would
invariably stop in Panama for a meeting with Noriega.  The message from
our side was always the same: democracy must prevail.
     I once met with him in London after an intermediary told us that
Noriega wanted to help the Nicaraguan resistance.  But that meeting went
nowhere.  We were looking for tangible support for the contras, while he
was more interested in things like bribery and murder.  Sitting in the
lobby of a London hotel, I admonished him that despite our antipathy to
the Sandinista leadership, we could not get involved in assassinations.
But if he were willing to help train contra units, provide logistical
support, and even use his assets to destroy Sandinista targets in
Managua, we would certainly compensate him for his efforts.
     In arranging for this meeting, the intermediary had emphasized
     that Noriega wanted our help in "cleaning up his image."  But I was
blunt with him.  There were reports that he was involved in drug
trafficking and murder, and had ties to Cuban front companies operating
in Panama.  This had to stop.  The best thing he could do, I told him,
was to step back and allow a real democracy to emerge in his country.
But he didn't listen to me, or to anyone else with that same message.
For me, one of the ugliest aspects of the whole Iran-contra affair
     was the way my meetings with Noriega were described in some
quarters as though the two of us had some kind of alliance.  We didn't.
Noriega was probably the single most despicable human being I ever had
to deal with.  After a meeting with him, you just wanted to go home and
take a shower.
     After the meeting with Noriega, the Vice President's plane flew
directly to San Salvador, where we landed right after a rainstorm.  The
air was oppressively hot, and the humidity felt like 150 percent.  We
stood
     attention, dripping with sweat, as the band played what seemed like
two hundred verses of the Salvadoran national anthem.  Then it was to
the President's residence, where the meeting rooms were right of a
movie-ark and cool, with high ceilings and slow-turning s.
     At his initial meeting with Vice President Bush, President Magana
ed if Vice President Bush would object to giving President Reamessage on
human rights directly to the Salvadoran field comnders.
     The Vice President agreed.
     During a break, everyone except the two leaders went upstairs, ere
we guzzled down glass after glass of Coca-Cola with lemon.  anwhile, the
Vice President met alone with Magana.  This was tage Bush: long before
he became President, he had a knack for eloping a personal, effective
working relationship with foreign ders.
     As the two men talked in the conference room, we could hear a
motion in the hallway below.  I was standing beside Admiral Dan rphy,
the Vice President's chief of stalf, when the head of the ret Service
detail came running upstairs.  "The commanders are e," he said.  "And
they are armed.  We can't let them go in with s.
     The Secret Service agent was right to be worried.  Latin America
n't the most stable place on earth, and the Vice President of the ited
States was about to have an unscheduled meeting with about ty armed
field commanders.  It was possible that some of these had connections to
the death squads, and that they wouldn't be happy with the message that
Bush was about to deliver.  It got so noisy outside the conference room
that the Vice Presicame out.  "What's the problem?"  he asked.  "We're
trying to talk ere.
     "These guys have guns," said Murphy.  "It would be dangerous for
meeting to take place."
     "look," said Bush.  "This meeting is absolutely necessary.
PresiMagana wants to hold it, and we're going to do it the way
'veasked."
     The Vice President spoke bluntly, without notes and without any
omatic cushioning.  He made it clear that if El Salvador had any inter
     est in receiving additional American aid, the death squads had to
stop and the murders of American nuns and labor leaders had to be
solved.  Although it was very tense in that room as Bush delivered his
message, he came across as calm, strong, and determined.  Some of the
commanders who met with him that day were angry and defensive.  They
felt humtllated that a senior American ofiicial was telling them what
was wrong in their own country.  This was not what they had expected to
hear.  The Grenada operation had occurred a few weeks earlier, and some
of these guys hoped that American troops would be sent to help them
fight the guerrillas, or their Sandinlsta sponsors.  But Bush's message
was very dI[ferent: unless you clean up your act, it's all over.  Later,
during the 1988 presidential campaign, when George Bush
     was called a wimp, I would look back on this moment.  I know a wimp
when I see one, and George Bush was no wimp.
     The effect of the Bush visit to El Salvador was mixed.  Though
death squad activity did not stop completely, the State Department was
able to begin an important judicial reform program to train and protect
judgesopened into a number of previous murders.  And, perhaps most
important, the elections were held as planned.  Over 80 percent of the
population voted, and Napoleon Duarte became El Salvador's
democratically elected president.
     Although I began working on Central American issues in 1982, my
involvement increased dramatically the following year when Bill Clark
asked me to serve as the NSC liaison on the Kissinger Commission.  He
obviously respected my abilities, but one reason I was picked was that
NSC staff members were not exactly standing in line to work on Central
America.  This was a no-win issue, because the government was deeply
divided as to how to help the nations of Central America
     *In addition to Dr.  Kissinger, who chaired it, the members
included Jeane Kirkpatrick; Jim Wright, the democratic congressman from
Texas and iuture Speaker of the House; Pete Domenici, Republican senator
from Arizona; Michael Barnes, Democratic member from Maryland;
Republican congressman Jack Kemp; John Silber, president of Boston
Universiry; William Walsh, head of Project Hope; Bill Clements, former
(and iuture) governor of Texas; Robert Strauss, Democrat-at-large;
retired Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart; and several others.
     ove toward democracy.  Amidst all the turmoil and infighting, by
983 only one thing was clear and steadfast: Ronald Reagan's support or
the Nicaraguan resistance.  Henry Kissinger headed the presidential
commission on Central erica, and my initial encounter with him was
downright embarrassng.  At one of the commission's first meetings, which
was held at the SC, I was asked to deliver a briefing on anti-Communist
resistance ovements around the world.  I often used slides to enhance a
briefng, and in preparing for this one I must have picked up a slide
arousel that wasn't completely empty.
     As the slides were projected behind me, I cheerftilly began my
resentation without bothering to look over my shoulder at the creen.
Everything went smoothly until a familiar voice with thick erman accent
boomed out from the back of the darkened room.
     "Major North," said the voice.  "I vas unavare of anti-Soviet
resisance movements in Norvay."
     I slowly turned around to face the screen, which indeed showed a
uge color map of Norway.
     "Oops.  Sorry, sir, wrong slide."
     I was apparently forgiven, because when the Kissinger Commision
traveled to Central America and Mexico, I went with them and elped
arrange meetings with opposition groups.  One of our stops as Managua,
which by then was a very depressing place.  After forty ears of plunder
by the Somozas, a terrible earthquake, and four years f Sandinista
"economics," Nicaragua had become the second poorest ountry in the
Western Hemisphere.  Only Haiti was worse.
     Our meetings with the Sandinistas were a complete waste of time.
hey would expound for hours on their grievances against us, and we ould
ask them embarrassing questions about human rights, freedom, nd their
support for the guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador and onduras.  We
were clearly talking past each other, and we couldn't en agree to
disagree.
     During one of these sessions, Miguel d'Escoto, Nicaragua's foreign
inister and a former Catholic priest, harangued us at length about the
any heinous crimes the United States had committed against icaragua and
the rest of the Third World.  He had just said something out Nicaragua's
being a peace-loving countryl don't recall exactly
     what, because 1 had stopped paying attentionwhen Senator Pete
Domenici, who was sitting next to Kissinger, jumped to his feet with
such energy that his chair fell over.  Pete virtually exploded.
     "You lying s.o.b.!"  Pete yelled, which immediately woke up several
members of the commission.  "When you came to see me in 1978, you were
wearing your collar.  You said you were a persecuted priest.  I took you
to meet my colleagues, and you swore to us that you and your buddies
only wanted to get rid of Somoza.  We helped you, and now look at what
you've done.  You're arresting your opponents.  You're threatening your
neighbors.  You're building up an enormous army.  You're nothing but a
damned hypocrite!  You lied then, and you're lying now!"  D'Escoto went
white.  As he sat there with his hand on his chest, he seemed to be on
the verge of a heart attack.  It wasn't until Pete stormed out of the
room that d'Escoto began to regain his color.
     Sitting just behind d'Escoto and not even batting an eyelash during
Pete's tirade was the infamous Nora Astorga.  She was a household name
in Nicaragua, and a heroine among the Sandinistas for her role in
killing one of Somoza's top generals.  She had lured him into her
bedroom, where he was ambushed and brutally murdered by Sandinista
guerrillas.  According to the story, after slitting his throat, they cut
off his genitals and stuffed them into his mouth.  She had actually been
proposed as ambassador to the United States, but the Beagan
administration had relused to accept her credentials.  This became the
subject of some nervous laughter among a couple of the Sandinistas'
supporters in the Senate, with whom Nora Astorga was said to be on very
close terms.  This was the same woman who later became the Sandinistas'
human rights advocate at the United Nations.
     We also met with Danny Boy himself, who unrolled his own litany
     of complaints about the evils of American imperialism.  Ortega
struck me as a dull and humorless little clerk, hunched over his papers.
As he droned on from his prepared text, it was hard to imagine him as a
former guerrilla leader.  He reminded me of the joke about the man with
"negative charisma": when this guy enters the room, it feels like three
people just left.
     But he sure knew how to work a crowd.  When his followers were
     ut in force, leading the chants"Orrega, Ortega, Orte~a~,he ecame a
different man: proud, self-confident, and fillly in charge.
     though the Reagan administration had the right approach with egard
to Nicaragua, we did a lousy job of selling it.  In view of the
resident's rock-hard commitment to the contras, why couldn't the reat
Communicator rally the public to join him?
     For one thing, not everybody in the administration shared the
resident's views.  George Shultz believed the problem could be olved
through negotiation.  Richard Wirthlin, the White House pollter, saw
Nicaragua as a no-win issue, and encouraged the Pr of Casey and Clark,
most f the President's inner circle viewed the contras as a political
liability, indeed they were.  Others just didn't believe Nicaragua was a
serious reat-despite the fact that the Soviets were pumping in two and a
alf billion dollars in military aid.  Over at the State Department,
there were those who couldn't ntirely give up their earlier sympathy for
the Sandinistas.  They fiised to admit that the Sandinistas were
Communists, and contined to insist, long after the evidence was in, that
the new rulers of icaragua were merely democratic socialists and land
reformers.  They It that almost any government in Nicaragua was
preferable to the thless and corrupt regime that the Sandinistas had
overthrown.  And ey were right: almost any government was.  But not this
one.  American voters had little interest in Nicaragua, especially when
ey were told repeatedly by the news media that the contras consisted f
thugs, drug dealers, and former members of Somoza's National uard.
Besides, Central America was seen as far away, unstable, and angerous.
One survey showed that 38 percent of the American public elieved that
Nicaragua was in the same part of the world as Vietnam.
     And for many Americans it was.  President Bush was correct when
     e declared, following the war with Iraq in early 1991, that the
Vietam syndrome had finally ended.  The specter of Vietnam was so
powrfiil during the Reagan years that many people-including some in e
administration-believed that any help we gave the Nicaraguan sistance
would only bring us closer to sending our troops into a proacted jungle
war.
     Opponents of the resistance preyed on this fear, and brought up
Vietnam at every opportunity.  We have no business interfering in other
countries, they said.  Nicaragua has a population of three million, so
how could it possibly be a threat to the United States?  Even a minimal
amount of support to the contras is dangerous.  Remember this was how
we8ot started in Vietnam.  Those were scary words, but they just weren't
true.  On the contrary: supporting the contras was the best possible
guarantee affainst our ever having to send American troops to Central
America.  Alfonso Robelo, one of the resistance leaders, said it best
when he met with President Reagan at the White House.  "All we want is
your support," he told the President.  "This is our country we're
fighting for, and we're willing to shed our own blood to get it back."
     Most of the contras never wanted us to send troops, and nobody
     in the administration who had the President's ear ever had that in
mind.  But there were some right-wingers who cynically suggested that it
might be best if we let the Sandinistas prevail so that the left could
be blamed for "losing Central America."  Then we would send in the
Marines.
     On the left, there were those who came to a similar conclusion
through a different route: we shouldn't help the contras, they don't
deserve it, and if things get bad enough down there we can always send
in the Marines.
     No matter which side it came from, I was horrified by this
attitude.  Send in the Marines?  I was a Marine, and this sounded crazy
to me.  Sure-if war is the only alternative, send me.  I'm good at it.
But as long as Nicaraguans themselves were willing to risk their lives
by taking on the Sandinistas, and all they wanted from us were the
resources to do it, wasn't that a far better option?
     Today, when support for Marxism is confined to a handltil of
povertystricken countries and certain American college professors, it's
difficult to understand the popularity of the Sandinistas among American
opin*Neither did President Reagan, despite the belief among many
congressional Democrats that he was continually looKing for a pretext to
invade Nicaragua.  At a news conference in February 1982, the President
was asked about the possibility of sending American troops to Central
America.  He replied: "Maybe if they dropped a bomb on the White House,
I might get mad."
     n leaders.  But in some circles the equation was simple: if the
United ates government opposed the Sandinistas, then the Sandinistas
must the good guys.  Moreover, the Sandinistas were revolutionanes.  ey
appeared to be idealistic.  Some had been imprisoned by the moza regime
and had been treated terribly.  Many were good-lookg, and most of them
were young.  They had glamour and sex appeal.  n their visits to the
United States, Sandinista officials, and especially rtega, were the
darlings of the Hollywood and New York jet sets.  El esidente liked to
go on shopping sprees along Rodeo Drive and fth Avenue, buying up that
great staple of revolutions everywheresigner sunglasses.
     With few exceptions, the Sandinistas received unusually gentle
atment in the American press.  Very few reporters took the trouble
examine the truth behind their claims, especially their allegations of
man rights violations by the contras.  Certainly there were some, as ere
are in any war.  But the Sandinistas frequently circulated outright
rications, and reporters who were normally skeptical would report ese
stories as if they were true.
     The public relations effort on behalf of the resistance could have
en far more successfill if the contras had produced a charismatic
lead(ideally, with a beard or a mustache) who could have effectively
symlized their struggle as an anti-Communist Ho Chi Minh, or Fidel, or
e.  The resistance offered up several candidates who were brave hters
and fine leaders, but none of them could command a large folzng.  One
possibility was Mike Lima.  He was a fierce combat leader o had been
wounded halfa dozen times.  Mike was young and hande, and with the help
of a friendly reporter in Honduras, we were
     e to set up a press conference for him.  The first question was
harmless enough: "When did you join the istance?"
     "Well," said Mike, "when I was at the National Guard AcadeCUT!
Mike Lima had been fighting the Sandinistas for five years, that was the
end of his brief media career.
     The most persistent rap against the contras was that they consisted
former members of Somoza's National Guard.  In the early years of
resistance, there was some truth to that claim.  When the Somoza ime
collapsed, somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred
     Guardsmen escaped to Honduras, where they formed a government in
exile that nobody recognized.  This group became the formativertainly
there were some bad men in the National Guardjust as bad as the dictator
they supported.  But not all of them fit that profile.  There were also
young officers in the Guard, including some who graduated from West
Point and other American military academies, who cared about democracy
and believed in it.
     Besides, former Guardsmen were ouly one segment of the resistance.
By early 1983, there were around ten thousand contras, which meant that
the Guard consisted of no more than 15 percent of the total.  They were
easily outnumbered by disenchanted Sandinistas-like Juan, who brought
his entire unit to Honduras to fight against his former colleagues.
Most of the contras were young campesinos, simple farmers who had fled
from Communism and wanted land and freedom for themselves and their
families.  By the end of 1984 they had become the largest peasant army
in Latin America since the Mexican revolution.
     The American public may have been apathetic about Nicaragua
     and the contras, but it was a hot issue in Congress all through the
Reagan years.  This was especially true in the House of Representatives,
where the Democrats formed a strong majority-and held some strange views
on the fiinding of anti-Communist resistance movements.  The farther
away the insurgency, the more willing Congress was to fttnd it.  It was
relatively easy to get support for resistance forces in places like
Cambodia and especially Afghanistan, which were halfivay around the
globe.  Angola was a little closer, and therefore more problematic.
Central America, right next door, was nearly impossible.
     In the fall of 1983, after lengthy and acrimonious debate,
     Congress narrowly approved an allocation of twenty-four million
dollars for the CIA to spend on the Nicaraguan resistance.  But this
money didn't go as far as we had expected.  Much of it went to the CIA
itself, for salaries, travel and living expenses for their trainers,
logistics personnel, technicians, communicators, and other employees who
were involved with the resistance.
     Meanwhile, the contra base camps along the Honduran border were
being overwhelmed with volunteers-far beyond the CIA's fondest hopes.
And these volunteers rarely came alone.  Often they
     howed up with their entire extended families: a wife, three kids, a
ouple of grandparents, an uncle, and two cousins.  All of them had to e
fed, clothed, and cared for, which meant that a lot of money went or
food, shelter, clothing, blankets, medicine, baby formula, and aining.
That didn't leave as much as we'd hoped for guns and mmunition.
     So early in 1984, the administration went back to Congress for an
dditional appropriation.
     It was around this time that Dewey Clarridge came up with his
     Ian to mine the harbors of Nicaragua.  The contras had already hit
sevral Sandinista bridges, warehouses, oil facilities, and power
stations, ut they hadn't yet matched the damage done to Nicaragua's
economy y the Sandinistas' own policies.  Dewey's mandate was to
increase the ressure on the Sandinistas-particularly their
state-controlled ecoomic infrastructure.  But so many volunteers had
joined up that he as quickly running out of money for the insurgency.
Mining the harbors was Dewey's way of getting more bang for the uck.
The idea came to him late one night while he was reading about e
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.  The Japanese had enjoyed reat success
in mining some of the Russian harbors, and Dewey proosed that the CLA
could do the same with Nicaragua.  Except that nstead of a real mining
campaign, which would lead to foreign and ivilian casualties, Dewey
suggested using "firecracker mines," which reated a loud explosion but
caused little damage.  Our hope was that loyd's of London and other
insurers would stop insuring ships that ere bound for Nicaragua, which
would make it difficult for the Saninistas to receive oil and other
supplies necessary to keep their enorous army in the field.
     Casey loved the idea, and so did the President.  Even George hultz
went along.  Bill Casey and Dewey Clarridge went up to ongress to meet
with the relevant committees, where they menzoned the mining plan as
part of their review of covert operations in icaragua.
     In terms of damaging the Nicaraguan economy, the mining proram was
only a limited success.  But the political damage in Washingon was
enormous.  When details of the mining were revealed in the all
Streetjournal, all hell broke loose in Congress.  Normally, when e
President signs a Finding authorizing a covert operation, the con
     gressional intelligence committees are briefed on it in detail
within a matter of days.  But most committee members swore they knew
nothing about the mining.  Their memories were so selective that even
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, no friend of the resistance, rebuked
his colleagues for their deceit.  One classified report to the
intelligence committees had spelled it out in plain English: "Magnetic
mines have been placed in the Pacific harbor of El Blulf, as well as the
oil terminal at Puerto Sandino."
     It got so bad that Bill Casey actually went up to the Hill to
apologize to the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He must
have gagged on his words, but he would have done anything to protect the
CIA.  "You shouldn't be here to apologize to us," said Senator Jake Garn
of Utah.  "We should be apologizing to you for pretending we weren't
briefed."  When Casey left the room, Garn exploded at his
colleagues-using such colorfiil language that it raised a few eyebrows
when word got back to his constituents in Salt Lake City.
     The mining led to a spate of hearings.  When Tony Motley was called
before the House Intelligence Committee to answer questions about the
mining, the congressmen jumped all over him.  "This is terrible," one of
them said.  "We're involved in illegal, covert actions, and we're
killing innocent sailors from other countries."
     "Just a minute," Tony replied.  "Let me put this thing in context.
Fewer people were killed by these mines than died at Chappaquiddick.  "
     Maybe that's why Tony didn't last too long in the job.  As good as
     he was, you can't talk like that and stay very long at the State
Department.
     For many in Congress, the mining of the harbors was the last straw.
Instead of providing additional money for the resistance, the House of
Representatives gave us a new Boland Amendment.
     Ipassed by the House between 1982 and 1986.  These became an annual
rite of summer in Washington: the cherry blossoms would come out, the
administration would ask for more fiInding for the resistance, and
Congress would respond with another Boland Amendment.
     The Boland Amendments were named for Edward Boland, chairman
     of the House Intelligence Committee, who proposed them.  Although
each of the amendments was different, all of them were restrictions on
the use of appropriated fiInds, and were therefore attached to large
appropriations bills.  None of the Boland Amendments was by any stretch
of the imagination a criminal statute, and none of them included any
civil or criminal penalties.  And despite what some Democrafland even
Bud McFarlane~laimed later, none of them applied to the President, or to
his stalf at the National Security Council.  Shortly before Boland One
came into being, several members of Congress had tried to ban aid to the
contras from every branch of the government, including the White House
and the National Security Council.  This amendment, proposed by
then-Congressman Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, would have prohibited any
government agency from "carrying out military activities in or against
Nicaragua."  This was very different from the language of any of the
Boland
     endments, and especially from Boland One.
     The administration hit the roof when it heard about Harkin's
proosal.  It was obviously unconstitutional, because Congress has no
ight to limit the President's authority to carry out foreign policy.
The resident let it be known that if Congress approved the Harkin
     endment, which was unlikely anyway, he would promptly veto it.  was
then that Congressman Boland offered his own amendment as
     The first Boland Amendment (or Boland One, as it came to be known),
covered the eriod from December 1982 to December 1983, and outiawed the
use of hinds by e CIA or the Department of Defense for the purpose of
"overthrowing the Governent of Nicaragua."  Boland Two (which covered
the period from December 1983 to October 1984) pecilied that no more
than $24 million could be spent "by the CIA, the Department f Defense,
and any other agency or entity of the United States involved in
intellience activities" to support military operations in Nicaragua.
     Boland Three (which covered the period from October 1984 to
December 1985)
     as the most restrictive.  It specified that "no appropriations or
finds made available" the CIA, Defense Department, "or any other agency
or entity of the United States volved in intelligence activities" could
be spent to support "directiy or indirectiy, ilitary or paramilitary
operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, ovement or
individual."
     Boland Four (covering the period from August 1985 through March
1986) outned the same restrictions on military assistance, but allowed
$27 million in "humanirian aid, communications support, [and]
intelligence sharing."
     Boland Five, which ran to October 1986, allowed the Nicaraguan
resistance to ceive a very specitic and limited amount of CIA support,
and authorized the State epartment to solicit humanitarian aid for the
resistance from other countries.
     a compromise.  Boland himself called the Harkin Amendment "not
necessary," and "a bad precedent."
     Later, there would be an enormous controversy as to the exact
meaning and scope of the various Boland Amendments.  I don't pretend to
be a legal authority, but common sense tells me that if a Congress that
was known to be deeply divided on this issue nevertheless voted for
Boland One by a marffin of 411 to zero, there's no way on earth that
this amendment could have been understood as forbidding all aid to the
contras.
     Not that everybody was happy with Boland One.  It was criticized
     in the Senate-not by supporters of the contras, but by Senator
Christopher Dodd.  He complained that it gave a "green light" to
continued support of the resistance-and indeed it did.
     The mining operations in Nicaragua left us with Boland Three, which
forced the CIA to withdraw all of its support for the resistance.  If
the Reagan administration was going to continue lllnding the contras, we
would have to find another way.
     Chapter 11
     Body and Soul
     en Congress cut off the CIA's support for the contras, a lot of
peole expected the resistance to wither on the vine and disappear.  But
resident Reagan had no intention of abandoning the contras, and he ade
that clear in both word and deed.  He compared them to the ounding
Fathers and the French Resistance.  He met with their leadrs at the
White House.  "I'm a contra, too," he announced.  As he ter wrote in his
memoirs, "I wanted the contras maintained as a rce, to the fiillest
extent that was legal, until I could convince ongress to appropriate new
fiinds for the freedom fighters."
     Within the administration, there was no doubt that the resistance
ould continue to be supported.  The only question was how.
     Even before the spring of 1984, when congressionally appropriatends
for the resistance began to run out, there were serious disssions within
the administration, and even on Capitol Hill, about king foreign
governments to help support the contras.  Later on, this proach would be
referred to contemptuously as "tin-cup diploma."  But Casey, McFarlane,
and others saw it as a logical way to broadthe anti-Communist coalition.
The Reagan Doctrine, after all, ent beyond mere "containment."  It also
meant enlisting the help of
     allies-not only against Communism itself, but against the entire
     Communist empire.  This was already being done in Afghanistan,
where several other governments had quietly joined us in supporting the
rebels.  Casey believed the Nicaraguan resistance deserved a similar
effort.
     Back in the fall of 1983, McFarlane had asked me to draw up a list
of countries that might conceivably be approached.  My nominations
included the United Kingdom, West Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, Saudi
Arabia, and Israel.  But when I gave the list to Bud, he pointed out
that we had to rule out Israel, as well as any other nation that
received American aid.  If a country we were helping then turned around
and sent money to the contras, it would look as if we were simply
laundering our foreign aid.* Besides, although almost nobody knew about
it, Israel was already helping the contras in a very different way.
     Operation Tipped Israelis had captured vast quantities of PLO arms
in Lebanon.  much of it was Soviet-bloc weaponry that was intended for a
guerrilla army, and the Israelis had little use for it.  But if these
arms could somehow be passed on to the contras, it would be a godsend.
     The Pentagon sent a team of experts to Israel to examine the
captured supplies and to make the appropriate arrangements.  Twice-in
May 1983, and again the following year-the Israelis shipped hundreds of
tons of PLO weapons to Department of Defense warehouses.  From there,
most of the weapons were transferred to the CIA and distributed not only
to the contras, but to anti-Communist resistance movements in other
countries as well.
     Operation Tipped Kettle came off without a hitch or a leak.  One
reason it succeeded so brilliantly was that the man in charge of the
Pentagon team really knew what he was doing.  He was a major general in
the Air Force with extensive experience in covert operations.  His name
was Richard Secord.
     After McFarlane asked me to draw up a list of potential supporters,
I heard little more about the idea until the following spring.  But Bud
must have been discussing it with Bill Casey, because in late March
     *I learned later that McFarlane had asked my colleague Howard
Teicher to approach the Israelis to help.  They declined.
     1984, Casey sent him an EYES ONLY memo telling Bud that he, Casey,
was "in hill agreement" that McFarlane should "explore hinding
alternatives with the Israelis and perhaps others."
     It wasn't long after he received the Casey memo that Bud made a
     rare visit to my office.  As 1 rose to greet him, he came in and
quietly closed the door.  Sitting on a chair next to the coffee table
across from my desk, Bud said, "I want you to have the resistance open
up an offshore bank account so that a foreign contributor can make
deposits directly into it."
     Naturally, I wondered who that foreign contributor might be.  But
McFarlane clearly didn't want to tell me, and I knew better than to ask
He knew I would be going to Casey for advice on how to set this up,and I
assumed he didn't want to put the CIA director in an awkward position.
Casey was continually being called up to Capitol Hill to answer
questions, and life was a lot easier if he didn't know those kinds of
answers.
     I walked down the hall to Casey's office in Room 345 of the OEOB.
     "I've been told to have the resistance set up an offshore account,"
I told him, "and I could use some help."
     Casey leaned back on his chair.  He was chewing on a yellow wooden
pencil.  "Is it the Saudis?"  he asked.
     "I don't know."
     "Come on, don't bullshit me.  It's the Saudis, right?"
     "Honestly, I don't know."
     Casey smiled.  "Well, it must be.  How much are we talking about?"
     "I don't know that either."
     He peered at me skeptically over his glasses.  Then he picked up
     the secure phone and asked for a number.  When somebody picked up
at the other end, Casey asked, "If a third party wanted to help our
friends down south, who can we trust to handle the money?"
     When Casey hung up the phone, he looked at me and said, "Calero's
your man."
     Adolfo Calero was a prominent figure in the resistance, and we
     had already met a couple of times.  "Go see Calero," Casey said.
"He should set up an offshore account if he doesn't have one already.
The money shouldn't come all
     at once.  Have it arrive in regular payments, every month.  That
will give us more control."  Casey got up and motioned for me to join
him over in the sitting area.  Then he held school.
     "Here's what to do," he began.  I took out a notebook.
     "Put that away," he said.  "If you have to write everything down,
     you don't belong in this business.  The money should go directly
from a foreign account into Calero's offshore account.  It shouldn't
come into this country at all.  Do it with a wire transfer."
     "What, exactly, is a wire transfer?"
     Casey sighed before explaining.  He had spent most of his life in
     the financial world, and had even served as chairman of the SEC.
Asking Bill Casey about a wire transfer was a little like going up to
Einstein and saying, "Excuse me, Professor, but what is a square root?"
     "Why does it have to be an offshore account?"  I asked.  "Two
reasons," he replied.  First, he explained, all Nicaraguan bank accounts
in the United States had been frozen.  Second, the Treasury Department
monitors large transfers of lUnds in and out of American banks.  Someone
was bound to notice these transactions and start asking questions.
     It wasn't until months later that I learned that Casey was right
about Saudi Arabia.  On the afternoon of June 25,1984, the Presid.ent
and his top national security aides met in the Situation Room to discuss
ways to keep the resistance alive.  Casey spoke in favor of soliciting
contributions from other countries.  Shultz opposed it, but suggested
that the Attorney General look into whether it was legal.  Ed Meese
agreed to check with the Justice Department.  Everyone agreed that the
matter had to be handled with great discretion.  "If such a story gets
out," President Reagan said as the meeting ended, "we'll all be hanging
by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did
it."*
     Shultz didn't know it at the time, and neither did I, but the
President had already authorized McFarlane to see Prince Bandar bin
Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, to ask for a contribution
     *From the declassified minutes of the National Security Planning
Group meeting, June 25, 1984,zp.  14.
     rom his government.  The first deposit, in the amount of one
million ollars, arrived in early July, and over the next seven months
the Saud's continued helping the contras at the rate of a million
dollars a onth.  While this wasn't enough to cover all that an army
needed, it id help buy food, clothing, weapons, and ammunition.  It was
enough, in other words, to do what the President had told cFarlane he
had wanted done-to hold the resistance together 'body and soul" until
Congress could be persuaded to change its ind and allow the CIA back in.
     In February 1985, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia arrived in Washingon on
a state visit.  During his meetings with the President at the
     ite House, he agreed to provide additional hinds to the resistance.
wasn't there, but Bud McFarlane said later that he gave the Presient a
note card on the matter.  Knowing how Presit he'd be willing to ask King
ahd outright for another donation.
     Later, there were those who concluded that the Saudis' generosity
ame in return for an expedited delivery of Stinger antiaircraft missiles
at was being held up by Congress.  While the missiles may have figred
into it, this explanation ignores the honest-to-God affection that
     - e Saudis, like many of our allies, had for President Reagan.
They uly liked him, and they also liked what he stood for-especially
after our years of Jimmy Carter.  If Ronald Reagan cared about
supporting e contras, they were happy to help.  In addition, the Saudis
have always been strongly anti-Commuist.  They knew what it meant to
have a Communist presence in the eighborhood, which is why they were
already supporting the Afghan esistance to the tune of hundreds of
millions of dollars.
     med with McFarlane's instructions and Casey's advice, I flew down
     o Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to meet with Adolfo Calero.
     Calero, who looked like a silver-haired bear, was easily the most
isible leader in the resistance.  He had a law degree, and had been a
uccessfitl businessman in Managua, where he had run Coca-Cola's
perations.  He had a special rapport with Americans, and had even one to
college in the United States.  After graduating from Notre ame, he
returned to Nicaragua committed to both free enterprise nd
American-style democracy.  His political views got him in trouble
     with the Somoza regime, and he was jailed more than once.  But when
the Sandinistas came to power, Calero's public opposition to Somoza
didn't stop the new government from seizing his property and sending him
into exile.  I thought Space Mountain at Disney World was a pretty good
ride until I flew into Tegucigalpa.  The airport's only runway is
stretched between a mountain on one end and the edge of a cliff on the
other.  In order to land, the pilot has to fly in over the mountain;
then he makes a sudden, deep dive, pulling up just as he hits the
runway.  He practically has to stand on the brakes until they smoke.
You find yourself praying that the plane will be able to stop before it
drops off the cliff and into the ravine-which is littered with the
wrecks of planes that didn't stop in time.  I had pretty much stopped
shaking by the time 1 got to the contras' safe house, which was located
in one of the city's residential neighborhoods.  About a dozen senior
people from the resistance were waiting for me, including Enrique
Bermudez, who was wearing his fatigues.  From the way they greeted me,
it was clear that even a visit from a relatively junior White House
official meant a lot to them.  In addition to the standard contra fare
of black beans and rice, Adolfo proudly served chicken, which he had
barbecued on the back porch.
     Most of the table talk centered on recent cross-border operations
     by the Sandinistas, and on the inevitable topic that marked almost
every discussion about the contras-the deplorable conditions in the
camps.  When the meal was over, I spoke to the group with the help of a
translator and delivered the message that McFarlane had instructed me to
communicate: "Our goals and yours are the same.  Like you, we want to
see a democratic Nicaragua.  Although the Congress has cut off the CIA,
President Reagan wants you to know that we will find a way to help you.
I can promise you that you will not be abandoned."  We finished dinner
around ten.  When most of the others had left, Calero motioned for me to
step out on the porch.  He tried not to show his disappointment, but it
was clear that he felt let down.
     "Colonel," he said, "I was led to believe that you would be
bringing us something more than promises."
     "I am," I said.  "But I couldn't talk about it in front of the
others.  There is a benefactor."
     "Who is it?"
     "I can't say.  I've been told to tell you to set up an offshore
bank account.  I'll need the account number, a telex code, and a wire
transfer address."
     "How much will be deposited?"
     "A million dollars a month."
     Adolfo was silent for a moment, and I wasn't sure whether he was
pleased by this figure or disappointed.  Finally he said, "Yes, that
will help."
     "You can't let anybody know that I am involved in this," I said.
"And we'll also need carefiil records of how the money is spent."
     We talked on for a while.  As I was leaving, Adolfo said, "We
appreciate this help.  I'll come up soon with the information you want.
Some day, I'd like to thank President Reagan in person."
     1 spent that night at the ambassador's residence and flew back to
Washington the next morning.
     Calero came to town about a week later.  McFarlane was nervous
     that somebody would learn about our arrangement, so instead of
having Adolfo come to the White House, we met in a town house
overlooking Lafayette Park.  Without referring to notes, Calero gave me
the information I asked for: The account was in the name of Esther
Morales, a member of the resistance directorate.  The number was 541~8
at the Miami branch of BAC (Banco America Central) International Bank in
the Cayman Islands.  As I jotted down the details, I noticed that Adolfo
was smiling.  He must have been amused that this American who was
supposed to be an expert in covert operations had to put it all in
writing.
     Calero returned to his hotel, and I went back to my office, where I
typed the information on an index card for McFarlane.  Then I called Bud
to let him know I had the information he was waiting for.  "As long as
Adolfo's in town," I said, "would you like to meet him?"
     "Sure.  But not here."
     "Why don't I pick you up in the Military Office station wagon?
     You two can talk in the back."  (I could have used my own car, but
it was parked on the Ellipse,
     half a mile away.  Besides, I didn't want to surrender a parking
space unless it was absolutely necessary.)
     I arranged to pick up McFarlane on West Executive Avenue, and then
turned right on Pennsylvania, where Calero was waiting in front
     of the Treasury.  While I took them on an impromptu tour of the
city's monuments, Bud and Adolfo talked in the back.  Bud seemed to get
a real kick out of meeting this way.  This wasn't exactly high
adventure, but it must have been a welcome break from the endless
mundane meetings and paperwork he had to deal with.  He reminded Adolfo
that the monthly payments from the anonymous benefactor were meant as a
bridge changed its mind and resumed fttnding the contras.  He mentioned
the need for regular accounting and stressed the importance of secrecy.
No one at the CIA or the State Department, or anywhere else in the U.S.
government, was to know the details of this arrangement.  When the Saudi
money began to arrive, Calero used it to buy weapons and supplies for
the resistance.  He often called me for advice, which inaugurated a
deepening level of confidence and contact between us.  As time went on,
we conferred about almost every aspect of the resistance movement-from
where the contras could buy surface-to-air missiles to the need for more
obstetricians in the base camps.
     One afternoon, Casey called me from his office at the Intelligence
Community Staff Building on F Street.
     "Can you come over and see me right now?"  I threw on my coat, ran
over to F Street, and took the creaky old elevator to Casey's office.
This old building, with its high ceilings and peeling paint, was a relic
from another era.  Every time I entered it I was reminded of the dingy,
cramped offices in London where George Smiley and his colleagues worked
in the novels of John le Carre.
     Casey was alone in his office.  When I sat down, he said, "You're
talking too much."
     "What do you mean?"
     "On the phone.  How often are you talking to your pal in Honduras?
Three, four times a week?"
     "Something like that."
     "All in the clear, right?"
     "Yes."
     "Well, it's got to stop," he said.  I already knew that both U.S.
and foreign intelligence services spent most of their time watching each
other.  Casey emphasized that these telephone calls made it too easy for
the Soviets to listen in on my conversations with Calero.
     He handed me a small black book.  "Have you ever used one of these
before?"
     1 opened it.  Inside was a series of little pockets.  "No.  How
does it work?"
     He shook his head, as if to say, Do I have to explain everylhin~?
"It's a code book," he said.  "You get one, he gets one.  You change the
code numbers on a set pattern.  Now you can talk to each other without
giving away the store."
     It was a simple, do-it-yourself encoding/decoding device.  All you
     had to do was enter the relevant words-Honduras, Nicaragua, guns,
ammo, medicine, planes, whatever-and then line them up with the code
numbers in the book, which could be changed every day.  It was low-tech
but effective.  Even if somebody was listening in, he'd have virtually
no idea what you were talking about.
     These black books, a variation of a "onetime pad," were the first
of several efforts on Casey's part to improve the security of our
contacts with the resistance.  Later, when more people were involved, he
called me in again.  "What are you doing about security?"  he asked.
"Your COMSEC [communications security] stinks."
     Casey was concerned about the Soviets' ability to monitor telephone
calls from their listening post in lourdes, Cuba.  What had begun as a
simple link between Adolfo and me soon involved over a dozen people on
at least two continents.  Adolfo and I were still using the original
code books, but that didn't protect the rest of the group.  Casey
suggested the Phillips PX-1000, a European-made encryption device, but
when that turned out to be inadequate, he recommended a brand-new
American-made device manufactured by T1lW, called the ]KL-43.  I didn't
even know these incredible machines existed until Casey had a few of
them sent to my office.
     The KL-43 resembled what later became known as a laptop computer,
except that it came equipped with an encryption chip.  You'd type in
your message, which would appear on the tiny screen in plain English.
After reviewing what you had written, you'd push the "encode" button on
the keyboard, whereupon everything on the screen would turn to
gibberish.  Then you'd call the person to whom ou intended to send it.
After confirming that you were both using e same code, you'd put your
telephone receiver in the modem.  At e sound of the beep, you would push
"transmit," and another beep would sound, locking both machines into
sync.  Within seconds, the recipient received the encoded message.  For
added security, he would hang up the phone before decoding the text with
the push of a button.
     In open conversation we referred to these machines as typewriters.
Once a month, an intelligence officer would deliver a new cassette of
codes, which looked like a tape dispenser.  Every day you'd tear out
another code, enter it into the machine, and burn the previous day's
code strip.  Even if a KL-43 fell into the wrong hands, there was little
risk; the code would be obsolete within hours.  The KL-43, which came
with its own little printer, was completely portable.  I rarely left
home without it.
     The code books and secure communications equipment may have
     helped keep the Soviets and the Cubans from knowing the details of
what I was doing to support the resistance, but it didn't keep the
secret from spreading within our own government.  Over time, the circle
of knowledge inevitably expanded beyond Casey, McFarlane, Poindexter,
and the President.
     In part this was because of the Restricted Interagency Group, or
BIG, which acted as a "compartmented" coordinating body for U.S.
diplomatic, military, and covert activities throughout Central America
and especially for the actions we took to deal with the growing threat
posed by the Sandinistas.  The BIG, which was chaired by the Assistant
Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, reviewed and cleared
scores of covert operations proposed by the CIA, including the mining of
key harbors, attacks on strategic targets inside Nicaragua, and measures
to improve the support the contras received from the neighboring
governments.
     The process filnctioned reasonably well until late in 1984, when
     the BIG was caught up in the Washington game of musical chairs.  By
the middle of 1985, Tony Motley had been succeeded as chairman by
Elliott Abrams, and the CIA's Dewey Clarridge was replaced by Alan
Fiers.  Eventually, Admiral Art Moreau from the Joint Chiefs of Staff
was replaced by General John Moellering.  Throughout this period, I
remained as the BIG's NSC representative.
     Like their predecessors before them, Abrams and Fiers became key
players in the administration's effort to sustain the resistance.  They
were both enthusiastic about the need to keep military pressure on the
     ctive bosses, Shultz and Casey.  We met frequently, traveled
together to the region, and talked almost daily on the phone.  Elliott
Abrams became the front man for the resistance, speaking
     out finrcefiilly and articulately to Congress, in the media, and
within the administration.  Fiers, although less visible, was also very
helpfill.  Inevitably, both men came to know more and more about what I
was doing to support the resistance, in part because they had separate
and accurate reporting channels from Central America.  I came to count
on them as allies in the struggle, and they were, at least until I was
fired.
     The personnel changes in the BIG also meant increased exposure
     for the various actions that the BIG reviewed.  In all, there must
have been well over a hundred people in our government (including State,
Defense, CIA, the White House, and Congress) who knew at least some of
what was being done to support the Nicaraguan resistance.  As the CIA
phased out its involvement and I became the focal point for the
resistance, we tried to tighten that circle.  But it could never be
closed completely.
     By 1986 a number of individuals, both in and out of government,
were actively seeking me out to provide help, offer advice, ask
questions, or request that I provide specific assistance to one or
another of the resistance factions.  Senator Jesse Helms urged me to do
more for Eden Pastora and his group.  Congressman Dave McCurdy prodded
me to arrange for additional deliveries to the Atlantic Coast Indians.
Bernie Aronsen, who replaced Elliott Abrams as Assistant Secretary of
tate for Latin America, suggested several new leaders for the resisance.
Don Gregg, Vice President Bush's national security adviser, uggested
Felix Rodriguez as a good contact in El Salvador.  For a overt
operation, there sure were a lot of people who knew about itleast until
the great plague of amnesia that hit Washington in the
     all of 1986.
     soon became apparent to everyone that simply replacing the CIA's
nding wouldn't be enough to sustain the resistance.  For one thing, e
initial Saudi contribution was quite modest.  For another, the CIA ad
provided the resistance with far more than money.  They had also ound
the weapons, bought them, and delivered them, and had pro
     vided training, communications, intelligence, command and control,
and various other administrative services.  Critics of the resistance
have argued that when the CIA pulled
     out, the contras should have been able to manage these tasks on
their own.  Ideally, that's true.  But the CIA had never been
particularly eager for the contras or any other resistance movement to
learn these skills.  For it was precisely by providing various support
services that the Agency was able to maintain control and encourage a
certain amount of unity among competing factions within the same general
movement.  As one clandestine services officer told me in Honduras, "I
taught them everything they know.  But I didn't teach them everything
1know."
     With the CIA out of the game, the contras had to learn how to
     run their own show.  But for now they needed people who knew how to
do these various jobs.  In most aspects of life, OJT-on-the-job
training-is a great way to learn.  In war, however, it's a great way to
get killed.  It wasn't until the CIA started pulling out that both the
contras
     and their supporters in Washington came to appreciate just how much
the Agency had been doing.  The CIA had provided everything from
standard propaganda techniques like running a radio station and dropping
leaflets to far more delicate tasks, such as providing liaison between
the resistance and the governments of neighboring countries.  These
governments were willing to help, but only if they could do so
discreetly.  They, too, were threatened by the Sandinistas, and they
insisted on deniability.
     As the CIA began to withdraw, Calero and other resistance leaders
began calling on me for everything from intelligence and communications
support to weapons and liaison with neighboring governments.  It wasn't
hard for the contras to buy most of their nonmilitary requirements, such
as food, clothing, and some medicines.  But without the CIA, they didn't
have the necessary contacts to purchase Sovietbloc weapons and
ammunition.  In a guerrilla war, it's always better if the insurgents
use the same weapons as the government they're fighting.  Anything else
creates logistical problems, and prevents the guerrillas from
effectively using and integrating whatever weapons and ammunition they
manage to capture.  As the summer of 1984 came to an end, I felt like I
was straddling
     a canyon.  On one side was the resistance, always expanding, always
needing more.  On the other was the CIA, which was steadily withdrawing
its support.  The canyon was growing wider by the day.  Unless I had
help, and soon, I was going to fall in.
     But Casey could see what was happening, and he asked me to come out
to Langley on a Saturday morning to discuss the state of the resistance.
He was wearing his golf clothes, and he looked a little incongruous in
his bright yellow sweater.
     I described the long list of problems that were developing in the
wake of the CIA's withdrawal.  "Money alone isn't enough," I said.
     He nodded.  "I know.  And it'll only get worse in October, when
     all our people will be gone.  You need somebody who can help you
out."
     He leaned back and looked up, as though the answer was written
     on the ceiling.  Whenever he did this, it was all I could do to
restrain myself from looking up there with him.
     "Do you know Dick Secord?"  he asked.
     "The Air Force general?  I know who he is.  I talked to him a coule
of times during the AWACs project."
     "That's the guy," said Casey.  "He's got the right experience for
     his sort of thing.  He knows the right people, he gets things done,
nd he keeps his mouth shut.  Why don't you call him?"  At the time,
practically all I knew about Secord was that he had een a major general
in the Air Force, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of efense, and a key
player in getting the AWACs package through ongress.  In fact, he had a
much wider reputation than I realized.  He as known as an expert in
unconventional warfare and a master of overt operations.
     In the early 1960s, Dick Secord had been a key player in the CIA's
ecret war in Laos.  People said he had ice water in his veins,can easily
picture him ading a squadron of aircraft through enemy flak without
breaking ut in a sweat.  Later on, all kinds of people came forward to
allege that Dick Seord was unsavory and nefarious, and that despite his
high position in e Department of Defense, he was somehow "shadowy."  But
I sure idn't hear any of that at the time.  Not only did Casey recommend
im, but Bud McFarlane was more than happy to have him involved.
     As I recall, the only person who raised any objection to Secord at
the time was Clair George, Casey's deputy director for operations.
     "What are you using him for?"  he asked me.
     "Because he was recommended by the director," I replied.  Objection
overruled.  Later on, the press raised Secord's previous association
with the notorious Edwin Wilson, a renegade CIA officer who was jailed
for selling arms to Qaddafi.  But Secord had never been charged with any
wrongdoing, and Casey, who yielded to nobody in his hatred for Qaddafi,
did not seem troubled by any of this.  But as I would eventually learn
for myself, once you're under suspicion, evidence has nothing to do with
it.  If you're in the government and someone thinks you're guilty, you
can kiss your job good-bye.
     Dick had retired in the spring of 1983, leaving in disgust over the
derailment of what had been a brilliant career.  Albert Hakim, a
businessman who had known Secord when Dick served in Iran, brought him
into Hakim's trading company-Stanford Technology Trading Group
International.
     When I first met with Secord and asked him to become involved with
the resistance, he wasn't especially eager.  When he finally agreed, he
made it clear that the only way he could help was if he set aside his
other business activities.  Casey, McFarlane, Secord, and I all agreed
that he would be compensated from the proceeds of his activities.  He
had many contacts, and to the extent that he called upon them to help
the contras, they, too, would have to be paid.  Let me be absolutely
explicit on this point: by the time we involved Dick Secord in helping
the contras, he was a businessman.  He came in on that basis.  While he
genuinely believed in the cause of the Nicaraguan resistance, he was not
coming to us, or to them, as a volunteer.  Everybody understood that he
would be making a profit.
     I didn't know how much money Dick Secord made-if any-and I still
don't.  But I do know this: everything he was asked to do, he did.  In
retrospect, Secord and I should have agreed then and there on a set fee
for his work.  We never discussed exactly what fair and just
compensation would entail-an omission that eventually led to major
problems for both of us.
     When Iran-contra erupted, critics of the operation pointed to this
administrative failure as one of my major shortcomings.  And it was.  If
     the CIA had still been running the show, and Dick Secord had come
in, they would have set him up with accountants, lawyers,
communicators-a whole support staff We didn't have this kind of help,
and given the restrictions of time, secrecy, and budget, and the
desperate needs of the contras, the choice I faced was between helping
the contras imperfectly or not helping them at all.  To me, the answer
was obvious.*
     Perhaps I should have gone to McFarlane and said, "look, either I
get five or six people to help me, or we'll have to stop.  God simply
did not put enough hours in the day for me to do everything necessary to
supervise this."  But I was a junior staff officer, and the circle was
supposed to be small, and nobody was eager to create a bureaucratic
structure that would be dismantled when the Congress turned the CIA
money back on.  Besides, I loved the work, even if it was a little
overwhelming.  I was constantly on the phone-with McFarlane, Secord,
Casey, and Calero and other contra leaders, as well as the State
Department, our ambassadors in Central America, and our friends around
the world.  All this was in addition to the counterterrorism projects
with the Task Force, and, starting in November 1985, the Iran
initiative.
     I had some reservations about the Iran initiative, as I have
explained.  But I had absolutely no qualms about doing all I could to
sustain our commitment to the Nicaraguan resistance.
     After Dick Secord agreed to help the resistance, he sent Baphael
"Chi Chi" Quintero, a former Cuban freedom fighter who had once worked
for the CIA, down to Honduras to meet with the resistance leaders.
Quintero visited the contra camps, wrote up a detailed analysis of what
the guerrillas needed, and provided a report back to Secord.  As Dick's
involvement grew, he started hiring more people.  In addition to
Quintero, he brought aboard several men with whom he had worked in
Southeast Asia: Tom Clines, Richard Gadd, and Bob
     *There were times when I was simply overwhelmed by all that had to
be done.  On June 10,1986, I sent a PROFS message to Admiral Poindexter
in which I expressed my frustration that I couldn't possibly accomplish
all that the CIA had done for the resistance: "An extraordinary amount
of good has been done, and money truly is not the thing which is most
needed at this point.  What we most need is to get the CIA reengaged in
this effort so that it can be better engaged than it now is by one
slightiy onfused Marine Lt.  Colonel."
     Dutton, along with pilots, air crews, logisticians, and maintenance
technicians for airdrops into Nicaragua.
     Following the CIA's standard practice for a far-flung covert
operation, Secord and his people set up shell corporations in Portugal,
Switzerland, Panama, and elsewhere.  Using the money that went from the
Saudis to Calero, they bought weapons, planes, ammunition, and just
about everything else the resistance needed.  They hired pilots, leased
and bought planes, paid foreign agents, and built warehouses and even a
runway-all of this in several different countries.  Much of this
activity was simply an attempt to replicate what the CIA had been doing
since 1981.  Some of it was frustrating and wastefiil, because the CIA
had already created an infrastructure that Dick and his people weren't
allowed to use.  Several warehouses and other facilities in the region
were just sitting there, gathering dust.  But because of the Boland
Amendment, everything the CIA had built up to help the resistance had to
be done all over again.  Working within the private sector, but with
only a fraction oeate a mirror image of the CIA's earlier support.
     Obviously, they couldn't do it all.  One job they couldn't handle
     was the liaison and coordination that was necessary with government
officials in neighboring countries.  That task became mine.  In order to
base Secord's "private benefactor" planes at the Salvadoran Air Force
Base at Ilopango, I met with President Duarte and received his personal
permission.  I had similar meetings with other leaders in the region.
     Ilopango was a risky place to conduct such operations because
American officials were always coming in and out of the base, while the
resistance support aircraft, warehouses, and maintenance facilities were
just sitting there, in plain view.  Later, when the congressional
inquiries began, the collective amnesia was amazing.  Suddenly, almost
nobody could remember that the resistance airplanes had been based at
Ilopango.  American officials throughout the region somehow forgot that
I had been there often, and had even stayed in some of their homes and
met there with resistance leaders.
     Lewis Tambs was an exception.  He and I had known each other at
     the NSC, and we stayed in touch when he served as the American
ambassador to Colombia.  After he was threatened with assassination,
     he was reassigned to Costa Rica.  Even before he moved to San Jose
we had talked about the need for a southern front against the
Sandinistas.  Lew Tambs believed in the resistance, and he also believed
in the power of prayer.  He insisted that Joe Fernandez, the CIA station
chief, noti~ him of every resupply mission.  Every night there was an
aircraft on a run over Nicaragua, Lew Tambs would light a votive candle
at a little shrine in the embassy for the success of the mission and the
safety of the crew.  And with one exception, his prayers were answered.
     Over time, Dick Secord was called upon to do more and more-both by
me and by the resistance.  When contra leaders came to me with their
requests, I often put them in touch with Dick, who made purchases from
arms dealers all over the world.  By 1986 his operation had a small air
force delivering supplies, a ship called the Erria to make overseas
pickups, a construcuon company building a secret runway in Costa Rica,
warehouses in El Salvador and Honduras, and communications and
maintenance facilities around the region.  Without Dick Secord, the
resistance would have ceased to exist.
     Dick wasn't the only retired general who helped the resistance.
General John Singlaub came to me several times and asked what he could
do for the contras.* When I described some of the problems they were
having, Singlaub contacted a European arms broker and obtained several
thousand Polish AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition.  The price was
terrific, much lower than what Secord was charging, but Casey was
ftIrious at the amount of "noise" that the sale generated.  For Casey,
control and discretion were more important than price, and at Casey's
direction, my active involvement with General Singlaub came to an end.
     Throughout this period, I kept reporting to McFarlane to make
     *John K.  Singlaub was a retired army major general, a short,
tough-talking hero from both World War II and Korea.  He had been the
commanding general of U.S.  Forces in Korea until President Carter
decided to withdraw our troops.  Singlaub made a statement in
congressional hearings saying, without quite using these words, that the
President's plan was just about the stupidest idea he had ever heard.
President Carter didn't think it was so stupid, and although Carter
later changed his mind, Singlaub decided to retire.  In 1984, when
Congress pulled the plug on the contras, Singlaub was iurious.  He felt
so strongly about maintaining our commitment to the resistance that he
volunteered to do whatever he could to make sure they were not
abandoned.
     sure he was comfortable with both my own expanded mission and with
Secord's increasingly prominent involvement in providing arms and
services to the resistance.  On several occasions he made it clear that
both he and the President were more than satisfied with the results.
     The hardest part of supplying the contras wasn't buying the
weapons, but delivering them to the resistance forces inside Nicaragua.
After the CIA pulled out, the entire contra "air force" consisted of
half a dozen aging, rundown transport planes flown by former National
Guard pilots.  They had neither the training nor the equipment to make
nighttime drops, which are absolutely essential in this kind of war.
Although this was Secord's area of expertise, it wasn't a problem that
could be fixed overnight.
     The people and the planes that Dick Secord brought in were the same
kind he had used years earlier in Laos.  Many old C-7s and C-123s were
still around, collecting dust in desert boneyards.  But it took months
to find the necessary parts and to get the planes-and the pilots-back
into shape.  Everything took longer and cost more than we expected, but
I wasn't about to second-guess a renowned Air Force general with
Secord's experience.
     looking back on it now, however, it certainly looks as if the
airsupport team that Dick assembled was still fighting the last war.
Moreover, they were trying to do so without the extensive infrastructure
that the CIA had provided in Laos-and not even Dick Secord could
replicate that.
     Invariably, there were problems.  During a flight to El Salvador,
     one of the C-7s developed engine trouble.  As it lost altitude, the
crew started pushing out anything that wasn't alive.  It must have been
a hell of a sight, with suitcases, boxes, and even a refrigerator
tumbling out of the sky.  The plane made an emergency landing on a
road-and then sat there for days until somebody came out to fix it.
Nobody was hurt, but this little episode became widely known among the
small circle of people who were involved in supporting the resistance,
and was the subject of considerable laughter.  It was a textbook case in
how not to run a covert operation.
     To be fair to Dick, the team he assembled flew many dangerous
missions over Nicaragua, and made numerous airdrops to resistance
     nits.  It's easy to dwell on the problems, but if I had to do it
all over gain, Secord is still the man I'd call.
     Alrdrops are inherently difficult, especially at night.  If you
were ropping eight bundles, you'd consider yourself
fortunateever-widening circles as the ilot looked for bonfires on the
ground.  But if the ground was wet, or e plane was half a mile olf, the
drop might never occur.  The contras idn't have the kind of
sophisticated electronic equipment that would ake this process easier,
and the airdrops didn't always go smoothly.  Before Secord came in, all
of this had been handled by the CIA.
     ut even they had screwed up a few times.  To the bewilderment of e
contras, one drop had consisted of nothing but sanitary napkins.
ortunately, the resistance was able to use them as battle dressings.
     This brings to mind a story I heard years later from a CIA official
ho had convened a strategy meeting in Florida with some of the esistance
leadership.  The Agency had booked a hotel suite in Coral ables, which
had been paid for in cash.  When everybody was assemled, the group
decided to order lunch from room service.  One of the IA officers picked
up the phone and called down to the kitchen.  What's that?"  he said.
"No room service?  I1'hat?  Because we're CIA?  ou're kidding me,
right?"
     By now every man in the room was on his feet, scooping docuents
into briefcases and heading for the door.
     "Wait a minute," the officer called out.  "Come back!  They just
     Id me that CIA stands for 'cash in advance."'
     ilitarily, the biggest challenge the contras had to face occurred
when e Soviets introduced HIND helicopters into the region.  These
devtating attack helicopters were armed with gun pods, rockets, and
frared sensors that could detect movement on the ground.  The viets used
them in Afghanistan, too, where the rebels referred to em as flying
tanks.
     A normal helicopter is vulnerable to small-arms fire from the ound,
but the armor-covered HINDs were virtually indestructible.  developed a
variety of plans to deal with them.  We even printed handbills, which
were circulated all over Nicaragua, offering a ward of a million dollars
to anyone who would fly one to Panama,
     where the CIA and the Pentagon could take it apart and have a good
look.
     One response to the HINDs was suggested by a brave, former British
SAS officer who had provided several discreet services to Her Majesty's
government.  After looking into the problem, he concluded that the best
solution was to attack these helicopters on the ground.  We finally
agreed on a plan to attack the military air facility where
     the helicopters were assembled.  But this was an extremely
complicated arrangement, and we never did work out all the details.
Sending in a group of commandos to do the job wouldn't have been all
that difficult, but getting them out again was another story.
     As the Soviets delivered more of these attack helicopters to
Nicaragua, the resistance implored us to help them with portable
surface-to-air missiles.  There were three possibilities: American-made
Stinger, or Red-Eye missiles; British Blowpipes; and Soviet-bloc SA-7s.
American missiles were politically impossible.  Besides, the Sandinistas
might retaliate by providing Soviet antiaircraft missiles to the rebels
in El Salvador.  After a filtile effort to obtain Blowpipes, we finally
settled on the SA-7s which we bought from China-of all places.
     Officially the missiles would be shipped from China to Guatemala,
     and I flew down to Guatemala to make the arrangements.  (In order
for the Chinese to have deniability, Guatemala had to issue end-user
certificates for the missiles.) Back in Washington, I met with a Chinese
military officer assigned to their embassy to encourage their
cooperation.  Before our meeting, I made sure that the FBI was aware
that our discussion was sanctioned by the national security adviser.
The last thing I needed was for anyone on our side to wonder if the
Chinese were trying to recruit me as a spy.
     The Chinese officer was a short, gray-haired man who, according
     to our records, had fought against the U.S.  Marines in the Korean
War.  Only now, instead of meeting as adversaries on a frozen hilltop
overlooking the Chosen Reservoir, we enjoyed a fine lunch at the
exclusive Cosmos Club in downtown Washington.  Most of the conversation
centered on "Soviet hegemonistic designs" on the Third World-one of the
few subjects we could agree on.
     Oddly enough, the Sandinista government had never bothered to
establish diplomatic relations with China.  Despite all their revolution
     ary rhetoric, they maintained the old Somoza government's
connection to Taiwan.  While there may have been some intricate
explanation behind it all, I suspect it had less to do with politics or
ideology than with simple bureaucratic ineptitude.
     On the surface, it was certainly odd for us to be asking a
Communist government to help us in supporting an anti-Communist
resistance movement.  But for the Chinese, this was another way to stick
it to the Soviets.  The sale of the missiles served two of their
interests at once: better relations with the United States, and worse
relations with the Soviet Union.  They certainly weren't doing it for
the money, which in this case was fairly trivial.
     The shipment of missiles took so long to arrive in Guatemala that
Calero started referring to it as "the slow boat from China."  Like any
covert operations that go on too long, this one began to generte reports
in CIA cable traffic.  Several reports specifically referred to ick
Secord's role in the delivery.  So many cables were coming in that asey
ordered his stations to stop reporting on this shipment.
     When the boxes containing the missiles and their firing mechaisms
finally reached the military port of San Jose, Chi Chi Quintero as there
to receive them.  The twenty-truck convoy rolled through uatemala,
protected by an army contingent, complete with heliopters, to guard
against an ambush by Salvadoran guerrillas.  After all, ow would it look
if a shipment from a Communist country ended up n Communist hands?
     But like so many other aspects of supporting the resistance, what
hould have been the easiest part became the most difficult.  When the
hipment finally reached Honduras, where the Honduran army was upposed to
deliver it to the resistance, they diverted the missiles to a ilitary
base and refiised to release them.
     This was just another example of the terrible bind that the strugle
over Nicaragua had created for the Honduran government.  Emozonally and
philosophically, they supported the contras.  But they were lcrossed the
order at will to strike at the resistance.  Whenever this happened,
onduran civilians ended up getting killed.  And so officially, as far as
e Honduran government was concerned, the contras in Honduras id not
exist.  Because Honduran support was so critical to the resistance, I
had
     several meetings over the years with President Roberto Suazo
Cordoba.  Suazo was a popular politician who was widely revered for his
medical work in the Honduran back country and his strong opposition to
Communism.  He was an enormous fellow, who seemed to gain weight before
your very eyesln spite of the fact that he was also a physician, who
presumably understood the risks of obesity.  He was a man of prodigious
appetites who reportedly didn't hesitate to indulge them.  1 can still
picture him in his huge sombrero, sitting on the veranda with his feet
up and his hands stretched over his ample stomach.  When the Chinese
missiles arrived in their country, the Honduran military was
dumbfounded.  "For years we've been begging you for surface-to-air
missiles," they said.  "The whole world knows you're providing them to
the Afghan resistance.  Now you're sending them to the contras.  Why
don't you have any for us?"  This shipment of ammunition and weapons had
come hallway around the globe, but now it was being held up just a short
drive from the contra camp along the border.  We needed action-and
quickly.  I wrote a memo to McFarlane, urging that President Reagan call
President Suazo in Honduras to ask him to release the shipment at once.
     President Reagan made the call that very afternoon, and I monitored
their conversation from the Sit Room.  The weapons and ammunition were
released that same day for delivery to the contras.
     The Hondurans exacted a price for allowing the contras to remain
     in their country, and in 1985 the Reagan administration agreed on
several incentives: the prompt release of thirty-five million dollars in
economic support fitnds, and an expedited delivery of military
assistance, including trucks, boots, radios, and weapons.  We also
agreed to supplement our CIA Honduran programs.
     In 1989, when some of these details were documented at my trial,
there were various claims and counterclaims as to whether there had been
any quid pro quos for the Honduran help.  There is no doubt about that.
Prior to a meeting that President Reagan had with President Suazo on May
21, 1985, a routine NSC "meeting memo" for the President included the
following paragraph: "In your meeting it will be important to reiterate
to Suazo the importance we attach to his continued cooperation in
enabling the FDN [the contras] to remain a viable element of pressure on
the Sandinistas.  Without making the linkage too explicit, it would be
usefiil
     to remind Suazo that in return for our helpln the form of security
assurances as well as aidwe do expect cooperation in pursuit of our
mutual objectives.  In this regard, you could underiine the seriousness
of our security commitment, which the Hondurans seem to regard as the
main gu id pro guofor cooperating with the FDN."  (Italics added.)
     Later, at my trial, the story of American efforts to entice
Honduran assistance to the contras became a key element in my defense.
Following public disclosure of the Iran-contra operation, I had been
described repeatedly as a loose cannon who acted pretty much alone.
While I certainly got things done, reports of my "power" were greatly
exaggerated.  Obviously, there was no way that I could have helped get
those missiles all the way from China to the Nicaraguan resistance
without both the knowledge and the extensive help of senior officials in
the United States government.  At one point, when the Chinese were
dragging their heels on the missile delivery, General John Vessey, Jr.,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked to "encourage" them to
speed it up, which he did.  The story of the Chinese missiles, together
with the extensive documentation that exists on this and other efforts
by the administration to help the contras, was more than enough to
destroy the myth that I was a lone, unsupervised cowboy, off on my own.
     Despite the enormous workload, my efforts on behalf of the contras
were extremely satislying.  My original project was by now well under
way and I had begun counting the months until I could leave the NSC and
return to the Marines.  But when I began working with the resistance, I
started feeling productive again.  Whether it was watching Secord find
the right Soviet-bloc weapons for the resistance forces, or arranging
for medical supplies to be delivered to the contra camps, the feeling of
actually accomplishing something was enormously gratising.  At last I
was doing something more usefitl than pushing paper from one side of my
desk to the other,
     There was, however, a heavy price to pay.  Although I spent almost
all my free time with my family, there wasn't that much of it to begin
with.  At home, the phone would ring at all hours of the night.
Sometimes it was the White House calling about a terrorist attack.
Occasionally, Adolfo or Dick Secord or one of my contacts in Central
     erica would call to discuss an operational problem.  Or it might be
     Ami Nir in Israel, who could never seem to remember that Tel Aviv
and Virginia were located in different time zones.  Ami was a captain in
a reserve armor unit, and one night, during a particularly sensitive
negotiation with the Iranians, he actually called me from his tank.  He
simply drove up to a telephone pole, hooked up to the line, and placed
the call.
     When I first came to the NSC our telephone was on Betsy's side of
the bed, but as these nocturnal interruptions increased she put her foot
down.  "I know you like sleeping on that side," she said, "but if your
friends are going to be calling you in the middle of the night, you'll
have to answer it yourself."  And so, after fifteen years of marriage, I
started sleeping on the other side of the bed.  It sounds trivial, but
that little change took me months to get used to.
     Chapter 12
     Image Problems
     My enduring memory of the contra base camps is the savory smell of
wood smoke.  Fires were burning constantly-not only for cooking, but for
warmth, too, especially on chilly mornings in the mountains.  Yamales,
Las Vegas, Las Trojes, Bocay, Cifiientes, Las Manos, El Paralso, Rus
Rus, Aguacate-I visited t was going on there, and what the people
needed.  Looking back, it was probably these visits that motivated me to
put so much energy into supporting the resistance.  You couldn't help
but be moved by the plight of these people, who had left their homes,
their modest farms, and the land they were born on to make the long trek
north to Honduras.  During the day, the camps were a hub of activity.
As the men trained for incursions back into Nicaragua, the women washed
clothes in the river, collected wood for the fire, and carried water
from the purification system.  They also prepared the meals-black beans
and rice in the morning, and then, for variety, rice and black beans at
night.  The dining area was often no more than an open pavilion with a
plastic sheet overhead to keep out the rain.  By the end of the day,
everyone was exhausted from the spartan labor of survival.
     When times were good, the soldiers had boots.  For everyone else,
it was bare feet, sneakers, or sandals.  The fighting men wore whatever
would pass for a uniform: it wasn't unusual to come across a formation
that included Honduran army fatigues, Guatemalan khakis, U.S.  Army-type
camouflage outfits, and even Cuban army clothes, captured from a
warehouse in Nicaragua.  Some of the best uniforms were dark-blue work
suits that Calero had ordered from Sears-right out of the catalogue.
Many of the camp residents wore clothes donated by American
philanthropic organizations, and I would see kids wearing the most
incongruous T-shirts: Alcatraz Prison, Minnesota Twins, Esprit, Harvard
University, even "Kiss me, I'm Irish."
     No matter how often I visited the camps, the resistance fighters
were always younger than I expected.  At Yamales, the largest of the
camps, I met a dark-eyed ten-year-old named Tomas who had arrived at the
camp with his teenage brother.  Their parents were described as
"missing"-probably detained, or worse, by the Nicaraguan authorities.
Tomas had a child's eagerness for what his older brother was doing, and
when he insisted that he, too, wanted to fight the Sandinistas, the
officers allowed him to tag along with his brother during the training.
He was quite a sight with his heavy AK-47, which was almost as big as he
was.
     When his brother's unit left the camp and went back into Nicaragua,
Tomas had to be restrained from going with them.  He was crushed: the
only real connection he had left in the world was leaving, and Tomas
knew that his brother might never return.  That night, Tomas ran away
from the camp.  They found him in the morning, safe-but still fiIrious
that his brother had gone off without him.
     In one respect, however, Tomas was fortunate.  At least he and his
brother were fighting on the same side.  As in any civil war, there were
families in Nicaragua where brothers were actually shooting each other.
     The White House and the State Department's Office of Public
Diplomacy did what they could to make Americans aware of the conditions
in the camps, but it was never easy.  In 1991, when the Kurds starting
fleeing Iraq, I was reminded all over again of what the contra camps
were like.  Americans are a generous people.  We send relief to
earthquake victims and refugees all over the globe.  But the contras,
     0st of whom were refiigees from Sandinista oppression, were largely
nored.
     The ignorance among Washington's decision-makers included an lmost
willlul denial of the true size of the resistance movement.  From
handfitl of former Guardsmen in 1980, the resistance had grown teadily.
By the time U.S.  government finds were running out in the pring of
1984, there were thousands of fighters spread out in half a ozen camps
along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border.  By then, a mall southern front of
the resistance had sprung up along the icaraguan-Costa Rican border.
     In most guerrilla wars, if ten men go out on an operation, they
onsider themselves fortunate if nine come back.  With the contras, a
roup of ten would disappear into Nicaragua, and two months later ey'd
return with a net gain of two or more men.  They didn't have to ork very
hard to round up volunteers; when a contra unit moved to an area,
disenchanted Nicaraguans would almost invariably seek it ut and join.
But while actual numbers might have been in dispute, there was no
uestion that the resistance was still conducting major operations deep
side Nicaraguawithout any apparent support.  Naturally, the surival of
the resistance after the Boland cutoffs led many people to woner where
the support was coming from.  The Saudi finding, which tarted in 1984,
was a well-kept secret, as was a gift of two million dolrs that General
Singlaub solicited from the government of Taiwan.* The invisible support
for the resistance solved the most pressing roblem: survival.  The
people in the camps were hungry, but they eren't starving.  The
guerrilla army needed more arms and better eapons, but at least they had
rifles and some ammunition.  The cona "air force" was a joke, but at
least there were planes.
     ater on, the resistance received a third foreign contribution,
although this one never tually reached the contras.  In the summer of
1986, afier being approached by the ate Department, the Sultan of Brunei
(whose iull name was Haji Hassanal Bolkiah u'izzaddin Waddaulah) gave
ten million dollars to the resistance.  In a rare mistake, awn Hall
accidentally reversed two digits while typing the account number of Lake
esources in Geneva: the money went to account number 368-430-22-1
instead of 86-430-22-1, and never reached its intended destination.  By
then, however, the sistance had two additional sources of income:
private money raised by the National ndowment for the Preservation of
Liberty (NEPL), which was headed by Spitz hannell, a conservative
activist; and the "secret within a secret"prolits from the le of arms to
Iran.
     On Capitol Hill and in the press, the question kept coming up: who
was paying for all of this?  There was a lot of speculation about
third-party support, and reports of donations coming in from Israel,
South Africa, and elsewhere.  There were also rumors that the Saudis
were involved, as indeed they were.
     Some people, who disliked the contras to begin with, concluded
     that the resistance was being supported by the drug trade.
"They're not getting any help that we can see," people said.  "They've
got to be running drugs."
     We healegations and their origins and acted on them as best we
could.  When the CIA believed that two associates of Eden Pastora, the
colorfitl but erratic southern front commander, had ties to the drug
trade, word was put out to have nothing more to do with them.  Aside
from that, however, we found no evidence of any drug connection.  There
was enough animosity among the various contra factions that if drugs had
been involved, somebody would have blown the whistle.
     Bill Casey believed that the drug rumors constituted a classic case
of disinformation.  He was convinced that these stories originated in
Cuba and circulated from Havana and Mexico City to Capitol Hill, where
they were eagerly spread by opponents of the resistance.  There was
irrefiitable evidence that the Cubans themselves were involved in the
drug trade, and what better way to deal with the issue than to focus
attention on the other guys?
     The Sandinistas, too, were involved with drugs.  In 1984 I helped
coordinate an elaborate interagency sting operation which involved a
convicted drug dealer named Barry Seal.  In return for a reduced
sentence, Seal agreed to help the DEA.  Part of his mission involved
flying from Colombia to Nicaragua in a special plane that was equipped
with hidden cameras and microphones.  In April he flew to an airfield
north of Managua, where he was met by Federico Vaughan, an aide to Tomas
Borge, Nicaragua's interior minister.  Vaughan helped Seal load seven
hundred and fifty kilos of cocaine-an operation that was documented by a
series of vivid black-and-white photographs.  In July, Seal returned to
Nicaragua.  He again met with Vaughan, who agreed to set up a cocaine
processing center in Nicaragua.  Based on various intelligence sources,
we believed that the Sandinistas were setting up a program to process
Colombian cocaine in
     icaragua and ship it to drug dealers in the United States.  The
Saninista regime was going to help by providing security, personnel,
airelds, and transportation support.
     We had hoped to use Seal to run this operation long enough to
apture Pablo Escobar, the infamous Colombian drug lord (who later
urrendered to Colombian authorities after being assured that he ouldn't
be extradited to the United States), as well as any Sandintas who might
be working with him.  But this plan had to be termiated when a story
about the operation and Sandinista involvement zth Colombian drug
dealers appeared in the Wzshin~ton Times.  The peration was immediately
shut down.
     Barry Seal then became a government witness against the drug ealers
who had received his shipments.  But he refiised to accept the deral
protection available to a witness in these circumstances.  In ebruary
1986, he was ambushed outside a hallway house in ouisiana, and he died
in a hail of bullets.  The three-man hit team was aught, convicted, and
sentenced to life without parole.  The C-123 ansport plane that Seal had
flown on his covert missions to icaragua was later purchased by General
Secord, who used it to help e contras.  Stripped of its surveillance
equipment, this was the same lane that was shot down by the Sandinistas
in October 1986, with ugene Hasenfiis on board.
     No matter how hard we tried to disprove the rumors about the ntras
and drugs, the stories never really went away.  Some are circuting to
this day, despite the fact that all of us involved with the conas did
everything we could to identi~ any possible violators.  Very little in
my life has angered me as much as the allegations
     at I or anyone else involved with the resistance had a drug
connecon.  I hate to put it in these terms, but since December 1986, the
fice of the special prosecutor has spent tens of millions of dollars
vestigating us-and me in particular.  If there was even a grain of uth
to these stories, it surely would have come out.
     part of the effort to unit the Nicaraguan resistance, Casey asked
     e to bring together the various factions in a single umbrella
organition.  Adolfo came up with the name: the United Nicaraguan
Oppozon-UNO.  (Fortunately, the Spanish version yielded the same inils.)
     To help UNO become a reality, Casey wanted Dick Secord's role
expanded.  Until now, Secord had simply served as a foreign purchaser of
arms, ammo, and military materiel that the resistance was unable to
purchase locally.  Casey wanted Secord to become the sole provider of
supplies to all the factions, not just Calero's FDN.  In retrospect, we
probably should have gone this route from the start, rather than putting
the whole burden on Adolfo.  It would have made it easier to implement
the unity effort, and it would have prevented Adolfo from becoming the
target for wild rumors.
     During an all-night meeting in Miami with Adolfo, Enrique Bermudez,
Dick, and others, we agreed on the need to encourage the departure of
some thirty or forty American soldiers of fortune, whose increasingly
conspicuous presence was unacceptable to the Honduran government.  We
also discussed the need to end the involvement several Central American
arms dealers who were selling weapons the contras.  Although their
prices were generally good, and occasionally very good, most of these
dealers had unsavory reputations, and one of them was suspected by the
CIA of having been involved in the transfer of restricted American
technology to the Soviets.
     From now on, Secord would be the only source of arms.  "Tell the
resistance to stop dealing with these other guys," Casey had told me.
"They have enough problems.  I gave you the name of a reliable man.  Use
him."  And so Dick Secord emerged with a greatiy enhanced role.
     was now charged not only with the purchase of weapons, but with
entire resupply effort.  Later on, congressional investigators and press
referred to this operation as "the Enterprise"; we knew it as Project
Democracy.  It consisted of airplanes, a ship, warehouses, flight
crews-the works.  The financial side of the operation was run from a
master account called Lake Resources, a shell corporation in Geneva that
was controlled by Dick Secord and Albert Hakim.  When money was raised
for the contras, this was where it was sent.
     As a result of that meeting, Secord created an airlift operation '
could deliver supplies to resistance units deep inside Nicaragua
regardless of which faction they were from.
     When I wasn't traveling in connection with the contras, or the Iran
ber of briefi
     about Central America.  These talks, which were essentially
narrated slide shows, were normally held in Room 450 of the OEOB, where
the audiences ranged from a small handfiil of people to several hundred,
and usually consisted of church groups or grassroots political
organizations.
     I would reveal as much as I was allowed to say about the Soviet and
Communist bloc involvement in Central America.  I described how the
Soviets and their Cuban and bloc allies intended to create turmoil in
the Caribbean basin to divert our attention and resources away from
NATO, and from various Third World trouble spots.  I pointed out that
the Soviets were outspending us by a ratio of four to one in our own
hemisphere.  Early in the presentation, I showed a series of slides in
which we tracked the movement of a single weapon, a rocket-propelled
grenade launcher that was manufactured in China.  During the Vietnam
War, the Chinese had sent it to Hanoi, where it was stamped by the North
Vietnamese Army inventory control system.  The weapon was subsequentiy
captured by American forces in Vietnam, and left behind when we
abandoned Vietnam in the spring of 1975.  The grenade launcher was once
again in Vietnamese hands.  From Vietnam it went to Cuba, and from Cuba
to a warehouse in Grenada, and from Grenada to the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua-who passed it on to the insurgents in El Salvador.  The
Chinese grenaoupapocher was subsequently captured by the Salvadoran
Army, which was how it ended up in our hands.
     Sophisticated Americans used to snicker at any reference to an
international Communist conspiracy.  But documents found in Grenada, as
well as our own intelligence reports, made clear that many weapons, like
this BPG lapocher, had definitely been around the bloc.
     In these briefings, I would also describe the 1983 Grenada rescue
operation.  Here was a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean where
we discovered enough guns to arm every man, woman and child three times
over.  We also found an enormous archive of documents that was brought
back to Washington to be analyzed.  It offered the first detailed case
study of a Soviet takeover of another country that we had ever seen.
One of the experts assigned to study these documents was Michael Ledeen,
which was how I met him.
     Among other things, the Grenada documents revealed a massive
indoctrination program for the island's population.  Selected individu
     als from Grenada were sent to study and train all over the Soviet
empire: Moscow, East Berlin, Ho Chi Minh City, Prague, Sofia, Havana.
Could anybody honestly argue that there was no evidence of an
international Communist connection?
     The Grenada documents also included an item that McFarlane would
not allow me to mentionnot because it was classified (it wasn't), but
because Bud didn't want to risk antagonizing the Congress.  The document
in question was a letter from a top aide of Congressman Ron Dellums of
California to Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada.  (Bishop was a
protege of Castro who was assassinated in 1983 by an even more extreme
group, which precipitated `Chapter 13
     The Second Channel
     en the McFariane delegation returned from Tehran in the spring
     f 1986, one thing was certain: Ghorbanifar had to go.  Although he
ad been helpfitl in opening up the connection to the Iranians, and ad
played a major role in the rescue of two hostages, Gorba had also iven
us plenty of evidence-more than he knew-that he couldn't be usted.  As
soon as the Tehran meetings began, it was obvious that he ad been
overstating to each side what the other was willing to do.  ow it was
more important than ever that we find a replacement.
     It was Albert Hakim, Dick Secord's partner, who made the conection
to the man who replaced Ghorbanifar and became known as e Second
Channel.  Hakim and Secord are one of the all-time great dd couples.
Whereas Dick is a grulf, cold, aggressive, straight-to-theoint military
man, Albert is a warm and filzzy, courteous and courtly ranian Jew who
fled Iran shortly before Khomeini took over.  They ad met in Tehran
during the mid-1970s, when Secord was stationed ere as head of the U.S.
Air Force programs.
     My first encounter with Albert occurred under somewhat ridicuous
circumstances.  In February 1986, Secord and I were in Frankfiirt or a
two-day meeting with Ghorbanifar and the Iranian government
     official known as the Australian, who later played a major role in
our Tehran meetings.  These talks, at the airport Sheraton Hotel, were
the first direct contact in years between American and Iranian
representatives.
     The meeting had been convened fairly quickly, and the CIA officer
who was with us couldn't speak Farsi.  Nor could the Agency come up with
a Farsi-spealdng translator on such short notice.  Gorba could have
handled the job, but we had already spent enough time with him to
realize that we couldn't rely on him in this role.  It was Secord who
suggested that we bring in his partner, Albert Hakim.  (Secord himself
spoke Farsi, but not fluently enough to be the translator.)
     When Ghorbanifar learned that Hakim would be translating, he
     was outraged.  "We know who he is," Gorba said.  "Hakim is an enemy
of the state.  He opposed the revolution, and we cannot accept"
     Halcim was our orily choice.  But what if Gorba recognized him?
And what if the Australian did?  We hadn't yet met the Australian, and
we weren't even sure exactly who he was.  This was one of the great
fiustratlons in dealing with the Iranians.  With virtually every other
nation in the world, you could pretty well assume that one of today's
junior men would emerge as tomorrow's leader.  When Gorbachev came to
power in the Soviet Union, the whole world was surprised.  But at least
he had been part of the political establishment.  Iran was different.
Khomeini's revolution resulted in a government without a history, and a
regime led by men with no political background.  Assuming the Australian
really was a high government official, as Gorba had insisted, it was
possible that in an earlier incarnation he was Hakim's barber, or his
car mechanic.  In fact, he turned out to be a former tailoralthough not
HaKlm's.  Albert's version of how we solved this problem is simply
irresistible:
     AIld so I'm sitting there and said to the group, "I certainly would
remember Ghorbanifar.  There is no reason that he would meeting?
     So they turned to the CIA official and said, "Do you have somehody
     that can disguise Albert?"  And the guy said, "By the time I go
through the bureaucracy it will be the end of the meeting."
     So Oliver North turned around to me and said, "I've heard from
     zchard [Secord] that you're very resourcefiil.  Why don't you go
and disuise yourselP"
     I said, "Thanks."
     So I lefi the hotel, came down to the concierge, and said "I need
to buy a
     ifi for my father and I want to get a wig for him.  Where is the
best place to o?"
     So a lady is looking at me, gave me a couple of addresses,
recommended
     ne.  I got a cab.  I went to the place and the lady started to go
through all znds of salesmanship to sell me the best wig and if I wanted
to swim, I idn't want to swim, and I'm sitting there knowing that the
meeting is going start very soon and I cannot-"Lady, let's get on with
it, I don't give a amn, just give me a wig."
     So she goes and brings me a number of wigs to select from.  This
has that Vantage, this one this.  Finally, to make a long story short, I
said, "This is eautihil, just let's try it on."  And so we tried it on
and I looked at myself, I id, "Oh, this is not good enough."  I said, "I
don't like the style of this.  Do u have a barber?"  They sent me to the
basement.  There was another lady.  I id, "I would like my hairdo in
this form."  We managed to shape it in such a ay that it doesn't look
like me.  And I normally don't wear eyeglasses, but I have a pair of
folding eyeasses that I carry in my briefcase.  I put that on and walked
into the room d those three guys were just shocked, amazed.  They didn't
think that there a chance for Ghorbanifar to know who I was.*
     He certainly had me fooled.  Hakim is nearly bald, and if I hadn't
en expecting the disguise I would never have recognized him.  At e
meeting, we introduced him to the Iranians as Ibrahim Ibrahimia
Farsi-speaking Turk of Armenian descent.  They didn't have a
     e as to his real identity.  Later, I was asked whether Albert did a
od job as our translator.  I think he did-but then, how would I ow?
     onths later, following our trip to Tehran, two of Hakim's business
ociates put him in touch with one of Speaker Hashemi ]Rafsanjani's ny
nephews in Tehran.  The Nephew, as we called this young man, came the
so-called Second Channel who eventually replaced Ghorifar.
     eposition of Albert Hakim in Appendix B of the Report of the
Con~rrssionql Cornees Inve,tsffatin~ the Iran-Contra Affair, B-13, pp.
591-92.
     In late August, 1986, the Nephew flew to Brussels to meet Secord
     and Hakim.  Dick called me right afterward, and for the first time
in months he sounded enthusiastic about the Iran initiative.  He was
convinced that we had finally broken out of a web of duplicity.  He was
also impressed with the Nephew, in part because the Nephew had been
candid in acknowledging that Iran did not really control the Hezballah
hostage-takers in Beirut.  Those of us who had gone to Tehran had
already heard this, but Dick saw it as a positive sign.
     Back in Washington, the conventional wisdom was that the Iranians
did control the hostage-takers.  Ghorbanifar certainly encouraged us to
think so, and at first, I too had believed this.  But the more
intelligence reports I read, the more I began to believe that the link
between the two groups was less a matter of control than of influence,
especially on financial and religious matters.  Although the question is
still open, this wasn't a simple case of a division commander in Tehran
sending orders to his officers in Beirut.
     Months before the Second Channel came along, Gorba had told us that
some of the money from the earlier arms deals had gone to pay off
Hezballah officials in Lebanon.  The Nephew said the same thing and
added that while the Iranians couldn't actually order the release of the
hostages, they had been able to bribe the Hezballah leaders to gain the
freedom of both Weir and Jenco.  Unlike Gorba, the Nephew conceded that
his contacts could not arrange what we really wanted, which was to get
all the remaining hostages released together.
     In just about every respect, the Nephew was a pleasant and welcome
contrast to Ghorbanifar.  Whereas Gorba was a fat cat who lived in
Paris, the Nephew was a family man living in war-torn Iran with a
brand-new baby.  While he wasn't part of the government, he apparently
had good connections.  He had fought with the Rev Guards in the war
against Iraq, and he struck both Secord and me as someone who wanted to
improve his country's situation and to give his children a better and
more peacefll life.  In short, he was idealistica quality I had
certainly never observed in Ghorbanifar.
     And while Gorba never hid the fact that he was in it for the money
(although he certainly tried to hide how much he was making), the Nephew
didn't appear to have a financial motive.  That, at least, was my
impression; it's entirely possible that Hakim had warned him not to
mention money in my presence.  Albert knew that what I cared about was
freeing the hostages and trying to achieve an opening with Iran.  While
Albert was certainly willing to work toward those ends, he was primarily
a businessman who saw the initiative as an opportunity to make money.
     It didn't take long for Gorba to discover that we were trying to
open a second line of communication with Iran that would exclude him.
Not surprisingly, he was fiIrious.  By this time, his incessant wheeling
and dealing had apparentiy caught up with him.  He had been dealing with
the French, trying to deal with the British, and
     hoping to deal with the Irish-all of whom had hostages in Beirut.
He was also angry that we still hadn't delivered the second shipment
from our May visit to Tehran.  Gorba maintained that he'd had to finance
this one himself, and was therefore in debt.  As he described it, he'd
had to raise the money in short-term loans from various sources while he
was simultaneously working any number of deals with other governments,
ranging from soybeans to oil wells.  He said he owed money to several
parties, including Adnan Khashoggi, the flamboyant Saudi businessman.
     While we waited to see if the Second Channel would work out,
Charlie Allen from the CIA remained in touch with Ghorbanifar.  Charlie
had already called to warn me that if we dropped Gorba without either
delivering what he had paid for or ation dollars, we ran the risk of
having Gorba expose the entire initiative.  In other words, we should
make sure to buy him out before dropping him.  Charlie was right, and we
should have taken his warnings more seriously.  But the trouble with
someone like Ghorbanifar is that you're never really prepared for when
he might be giving it to you straight.  In retrospect, two of
Ghorbanifar's statements turned out to be all too accurate.  He had
warned us that if he wasn't handled properly, the whole Iran initiative
would come crashing down.  He had also promised us that as long as he
was involved, there wouldn't be any more kidnappings.
     We should have paid more attention to that one.  Soon after Dick
made contact with the Second Channel, two more American hostages were
seized in Beirut: Frank Reed, an educator, and Joseph Ciccipio,
     the comptroller at the American University in Beirut.  1 was sick.
Throughout the Iran initiative, our worst fear was that the Hezballah
would send around a videotape of the hostages being executed.  Our
second worst fear was that additional hostages would be taken-and now
that fear had been realized.  While the Iranians couldn't necessarily
get all the hostages released, until now they had at least been able to
discourage fiirther seizures.
     The two new kldnappings led to a number of meetings in Washington,
where we seriously considered shutting the whole thing down.  But while
there was a risk in continuing, there was also a risk in stopping.  We
decided to go ahead.
     I suspected that at least one of these new kidnappings had been
rchestrated by the Australian's faction.  He and his cronies must been
fit0rious when they learned of the Second Channel, which presumably left
them on the sidelines, and they surely knew that the Nephew had been
authorized to leave Iran to meet with us.  Later the Nephew confirmed my
suspicions.
     Shortly after Secord returned from his first meeting with the
Nephew, we invited the young Iranian to Washington to meet with George
Cave, Secord, Hakim, and myself.  This was a quick way to determine
whether the Second Channel was real: if the Iranians let this guy visit
the land of the Great Satan, they probably meant business.  Besides, we
had already been to Tehran, and we weren't all that eager to go back.
On September 19, 1986, the Nephew arrived at Dulles Airport with two
escorts.  One was Hakim's business contact who had made the
introduction, and the other was the Nephew's keeper, a combination of
bodyguard and commissar.  Unlike the Communist world, where the
commissars reported to their political bosses, the Iranian keepers
answer to the religious authorities.
     When the Iranians landed, they were met by officials who had been
sent by the CIA, and who sped them through customs and immigration and
delivered them to their hotel.  The previous day, I had run around
Washington getting the necessary authorizations to conduct surveillance
on them while they were here.  These things are not done casually.
Surveillance on foreign nationals in the United States requires very
senior level approval, the request for which had to
     be submitted with the signatures of four government officials or
their principal deputies: the head of the FBI, the director of the CIA,
the Attorney General, and the national security adviser.  After
collecting the necessary signatures, I had a courier deliver the request
for final
     approval.
     Throughout the time they were here, the surveillance was
maintained-just as the Iranians had undoubtedly done for our visit to
Tehran.  One good turn deserves another.
     I liked the Nephew as soon as I met him.  He was a cheerfiil and
friendly guy who had obviously put on a littie weight since his time on
the Basra front.  He had lost several friends in the conflict with Iraq,
and he seemed to be truly disgusted by what the war was doing to his
country.
     Despite the fact that Gorba had always shown up with fine Iranian
caviar, the talks with the Second Channel were far more pleasant than
our meetings with Gorba's group-if only because we didn't have to sit
through hours of revolutionary diatribe.  For the most part, however,
the issues were not new.  The actors had changed, but the script was the
same.  Unfortunately, the Second Channel didn't move any faster than
     the First Channel.  These meetings, too, lasted for hours at a
stretch, and continued (at intervals) over a period of months.  Our
negotiations with both groups of Iranians were so interminable and
frustrating that I actually developed some empathy for employees of the
State Department.
     Later, people who read or heard about the Iran initiative couldn't
quite understand why it took us so long to accomplish so little.  It's a
good question, and there are several answers.
     First, our goals were extremely ambitious: not only to recover the
hostages, which was difficult enough, but also to reopen a relationship
with a closed and hostile society.  Second, there were years of acrimony
and layers of distrust that had to be overcome.  Third, everything had
to be done through translators.  Fourth, the Iranians have a different
concept of time than we do, and life moves much more slowly in their
world.  Finally, it's clear, at least in retrospect, that there was an
enormous gap between what each side wanted and what was actually possi
     ble.  They wanted us simply to turn on the spigot of American aid;
we wanted them to snap their fingers and get the hostages released.
Neither feat was possible for either side.  During the Nephew's
three-day visit to Washington, we met both in my office at the OEOB, and
at Secord's in suburban Virginia.  As always, we spent a lot of time
discussing the hostages.  I explained yet again that the hostage problem
had to be resolved before there could be normal relations between our
countries, that this was a hurdle to be overcome before we moved on to
bigger issues.  Ar the same time, I didn't want the hostages to seem
overly important.  "We want them out," I said, "but let me put this
problem in perspective.  Fifty-two thousand Americans die each year in
highway accidents.  Well over a hundred thousand die of lung cancer.  In
a country of our size, five hostages are not very many.  But the
American people would be outraged if President Reagan helped Iran
without
     11 first resolving this obstacle."
     In reality, the hostages were on my me Second Channel, I had been
to any number of meetings with the hostage families.  (The hostage
problem fell under the rubric of counterterrorism, and McFarlane had
asked me to meet with the families of the men who were held in Beirut.)
A few family members, like Peggy Say, the sister of Terry Anderson, and
Eric and Paul Jacobsen, the sons of David Jacobsen, came to my office
regularly.
     These visits would increase whenever there was news of any kind
about the hostages.  From time to time, the hostage-takers in Beirut
would release a videotape or a letter from the hostages in an effort to
put more pressure on our government.  I can't speak for the rest of the
administration, but they sure worked on me.
     On one occasion, David Jacobsen's sons brought me a letter from
their father that the captors had allowed to be smuggled out.  Despite
the deplorable conditions and the terrible uncertainty he was enduring,
Jacobsen's letter was ltill of love for his family and concern for his
welfare.  long before I finished reading it, my eyes had filled with
tears.  The hostage-takers also sent out occasional photographs of their
pnsoners, who were usually portrayed holding a contemporary periodical
to show that they were still alive.  These photos reached us from
various sources, but we never made them public unless they had
     already been released to the press.  The successive photos of Terry
Anderson, Ben Weir, Father Jenco, and David Jacobsen were graphic
illustrations of the effects of stress, poor diet, lack of sunlight, and
the general debilitation caused by their confinement.  For me, these
pictures always provided additional incentive to push on, no matter how
exhausted or disillusioned I might have been.
     When the family members met with me and other government officials,
they were understandably angry and impatient, and they demanded answers.
"What have you heard?  What are you doing to get them out?"  They were
dying to know what we were up to, but I couldn't reveal anything.  They
were convinced that our government wasn't doing enough, and I couldn't
tell them otherwise.  Despite everything I knew, part of me agreed with
them.
     And yet our government was actually doing a great deal, far more
than we could ever make public.  There were many unsung heroes in this
effort: officers of the CIA, DEA, and our embassy staff in Beirut had
all risked their lives in efforts to recover the hostages.  None of this
could be revealed to the long-suffering families, and the Iranian
initiative, too, was a well-kept secret.  Meanwhile, both the State
Department and the White House were quietly working through a variety of
other channels to gain access to the hostage holders.
     Poindexter and I had several meetings with foreign diplomats both
in Washington and in Europe to seek their help in the name of the
President.  We traveled to France and England to try to determine hether
there might be other approaches that could work.  Our govrnment had
several other diplomatic initiatives under way, any one of hich could
have become that rare long shot that actually paid off At east four
other heads of state were actively and energetically trying to elp, and
so were the Vatican and the Anglican Church.  Although one of these
approaches succeeded, they were all time-consuming nd emotionally
exhausting.  For the most part, these foreign governments were acting in
their wn self-interest.  Governments are made up of people, and
generally ehave like people.  Favors are expected to be reciprocated: If
Harry nds me his lawnmower today, I shouldn't be surprised if he wants
to orrow my pickup truck next Saturday.  If our government asks for
other country's help on the hostages, nobody is shocked when they k us
for our vote in the U.N., or some military hardware, or even a
     new economic aid package.  These terms are rarely articulated up
fiont, and they're generally negotiable.  But eventually the chits are
called in.
     The Nephew appeared to be well briefed on what had transpired with
the First Channel, and he arrived in Washington with a long list of
military hardware that Iran wanted to buy.  But guns weren't the only
items on his agenda.  He wanted medical equipment and supplies for
Iranian soldiers and civilians who had been wounded in the war.  He was
also desperate for chemical decontamination equipment for the Basra
front, where the Iraqis were using chemical warfare weapons.  And, just
like the First Channel, he asked for our help in freeing the seventeen
Da'wa prisoners in Kuwait.
     Another topic on our agenda was Ghorbanifar, who was complaining
that he was in debt to the tune of millions of dollars, sometimes he
said as much as fifteen, sometimes as little as four.  He said he
couldn't even afford the interest payments.  Although we believed that
the figures were inflated, we urged the Nephew to keep him quiet by
paying him off.  Presumably, we weren't the only ones who wanted to keep
Gorba happy; the Iranians, too, had a lot to lose if the initiative
became public.  But when it did, they certainly made the most of it.
     Durihg one of our Washington meetihgs, the Nephew brought up a new
topic: getting rid of Saddam Hussein.  I regret that there wasn't more
wi1hngness within our government to take that one seriously.  I said
flat out that we couldn't make any commitments about Saddam, but he
brought it up again the next day.  "The Arab nations can do it," he
said, "and the United States can use its influence to make that happen."
     In subsequent meetings, 1 assured the Nephew that the United States
recognized that Saddam was the real problem in the region.  "President
Reagan told me that he thinks Saddam is a shit," I said.  Albert Hakim,
who was translating, couldn't bring himself to render that line into
Farsi.  "Go ahead," I told Albert.  "That's the President's word, not
mine."
     Unfortunately, everything I told the Nephew about our attitude
toward Saddam Hussein was a lie.  I say "unfortunately" not because I
lied to the Iranians, which I did whenever I thought it would help, but
because our government's attitude toward Saddam Hussein should have been
more along the lines I described.
     Despite our loud declarations of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq
conflict, our government was quietly siding with Iraq.  It wasn't just a
diplomatic tilt, either; we took affirmative steps to ensure that Iraq
would not lose this .  diplomatic effort to stem the flow of weapons to
Iran, and with the obvious exception of the secret Iran initiative, it
was quite effective.  Iraq, however, continued to receive a steady
supply of arms from the Soviets, the French, the Chinese, and anyone
else who wanted a piece of the action.  The Kuwaitis helped Saddam pay
for what he bought in the international arms bazaar-an act of generosity
they would later regret.
     When Operation Staunch proved insufficient, President Reagan
authorized our intelligence services to pass military information to the
Iraqis.  And even after the war was over, our pro-Iraq tilt continued.
In the summer of 1990, just days before the invasion of Kuwait, the
State Department was still trying to convince Congress to grant
financial credits and other aid to Iraq.
     The American tilt toward Iraq and antipathy toward Iran were
     two of the few things that Shultz and Weinberger ever agreed on.
"We wouldn't want to see" an Iranian victory, George Shultz told a news
magazine in 1984, and so "we have been deliberately working to improve
our relationship with Iraq....  We have been cooperating with the Iraqis
to a certain extent."* While that was certainly true, it was also an
understatement.  Back
     in 1982, Shultz had instructed the State Department's Near East
Bureau and our embassy in Baghdad to offer "incentives" if Saddam
renounced terrorism.  Eager to obtain American computer technology and
other embargoed machinery, Saddam informed the State Department that he
had "expelled" Abu Nidal.  In fact, Abu Nidal and his henchmen had
simply departed to work for a higher bidder-Muammar al-Qaddafi.  Despite
the objection of the State Department's own Office for Combating
Terrorism, and several of us at the NSC, State's Near East Bureau
prevailed and Iraq was removed from the list of states sponsoring
terrorism.
     Weinberger showed similar leanings.  Toward the end of his tenure
     at the Pentagon, he told a network television interviewer that he
     * U.s.  News er World Report, March 12,1984.
     looked forward to a "totally dlfferent kind of government" in Iran,
and called the Khomeini regime "irrational" and "fanatical."* What
disturbs me about the positions of Shultz and Weinberger is
     not that they were necessarily wrong about Iran, but that they were
so totally wrong about Iraq.
     "I felt strongly then and do to this day," Weinberger wrote in his
memoirs, "that the conduct of the kind Iran exhibited during the seizure
of our embassy completely disqualified it lrom any civilized intercourse
with other nations.  "t
     It's fi:tnny, but I don't recall Weinberger saying anything like
     that about Yasir Arafat, or Saddam Hussein.  And yet it was Iraq
that had started the war by invading Iran.  And it was Saddam Hussein
who was using chemical weapons against his own people, and who
"accidentally" fired an Exocet missile into the U.S.S.  Stark, and who,
despite his disclaimers to the contrary, continued to provide a haven to
some of the world's most notorious terrorists.
     I certainly don't excuse the Iranian seizure of our embassy in
1979.  But every new administration in Washington brings with it the
memory of the worst catastrophes that affected its predecessors.
Weinberger and Shultz were so obsessed with how Iran had humiliated us
under Carter that they ignored the sins of Iraq, which were less
visible, but in many ways, far worse.  As this book goes to press, the
United States is making a similar mistake by cozying up to Syria.  Hafez
al-Assad is cut lrom the same bolt of cloth as Saddam Hussein.  He, too,
is a brutal leader with dangerous delusions of grandeur who imagines
himself as a modern-day Saladin.  This is another "fiiendship" that may
well come back to haunt us.
     In one of our early meetings, the Nephew came up with a startling
and dramatic proposition to flee the hostages: he would learn, and then
pass on to us, the details of exactly where in Beirut they were being
held.  We, in turn, would be free to mount a rescue operation to free
them.  While I thought the idea had possibilities, the dangers were
immense.  I remembered Desert One, when President Carter's attempt
     *On uTh;5 Week with David Bririkley," September 27,1987.  1Caspar
Wethberger, Fiffhtin8for Pcacc (New York, 1990), p.  354.
     to rescue our hostages in Tehran had turned to dnst and ended in
death.
     Secord was more optimistic.  "Think about it, Ollie," he said.
"They're giving us a gift.  Imagine what a successfiil hostage raid
would signal to the worid.  If we could get some collateral
intelligence, Beirut is a beautifiil place for something like this.
It's perfect for helicopters at night."
     I dutifiilly circulated the proposal to the Task Force, but it was
     met with a decided lack of enthusiasm.  Even General Carl Stiner,
the hero of the Achille ~uro operation, said, "Forget it, Ollie, it's a
nogo."  I'm not necessarily averse to taking risks, but on this one I
agreed with Stiner.
     Both Casey and Poindexter told me to keep the idea alive with the
Second Channel, if only to see what would come of it.  But I knew that a
raid was extremely unlikely.  Nobody wanted our rescuers to get caught
in a trap, and there was no sure way to eliminate that threat.
     Then Nir came up with an intriguing variation.  If the United
States didn't want to take this risk, maybe the Israelis could.  Nir
even suggested an insurance plan.  To "facilitate" the Israeli rescue,
which ould include the two missing Israeli soldiers, Nir would arrange
for sraeli intelligence agents to grab the Nephew, together with any
ther Iranian officials who might be wandering around Europe.  To ard
against the possibility of a double cross, they would all be held til
the rescue was completed.
     "Now you're talking," said Casey.  And no wonder: if anything ent
wrong, the Israelis would take the blame.  But the idea of an med raid
into Beirut never got past the talking stage, and it was robably just as
well.  The Nephew was too nice a fellow to throw into dungeon.  Besides,
none of us could be sure just how much affection zs uncle ]Rafsanjani
had for him, anyway.  several points during his visit to Washington, the
Nephew asked for brief intermission so he could pray.  He hadn't brought
his prayer g, so one of my colleagues offered his multicolored gym
towel.  All spraying led me to make several references to Abraham, the
biblical therm.  I also essed that President Beagan was a man of God,
but I apparentiy shed the religious comments a littie too far.
     At one point, the Nephew's keeper took Secord aside to complain
about me.  "General," he said, "what's with this guy?  We just left a
country fttll of mullahs.  And what do I find here but another lousy
mullah!"
     Someone in the delegation must have been looking forward to his
brief escape from the strict religious environment of Tehran, because
that night, when the Iranians returned to their hotel, there was a
concerted effort to scare up a little female companionship from local
escort services.  Someone ended up making dozens of tries, not only
because the hotel was well Out of the city, but also because the
Iranians could barely speak enough English to order room service-let
alone ladies of the evening.  These efforts went for naught, and our
visitor spent the night alone.
     The next night I took the Nephew on a tour of the White House, with
Albert Hakim as our translator.  Later, people wondered how I could
possibly bring a secret Iranian contact into the White House, as if this
somehow compromised national security.  But it wasn't all that different
from taking my cousins from Oswego, or visiting firemen from Oshkosh, or
old classmates from Annapolis.  I had taken dozens of visitors through
the White House-including my parents, my brothers, my sister, my kids,
and even the cousin of the secretary who worked down the hall.  In the
evening, especially when the President was out of town, such tours were
actually encouraged, and the West Wing was always bustling with staff
members showing people around.  As for secrecy, I simply wasn't
important enough for anyone to wonder whom I was with.  Foreign visitors
were part of the atmosphere.  At the request of a CIA colleague, I once
took a group of Afghan resistance fighters on a White House tour,
although I don't think they had the slightest idea where they were.
After hours, and on weekends, when the President and First Lady were at
Camp David, there were visiting pooh-bahc wandering through the White
House from every planet in the solai system.
     The Nephew brought along his camera, and he asked Albert and
     me to take a few pictures of him in the White House-presumably tc
show the folks back home that junior had made it to the top.  Thai
night, I took him through the West Wing-the Press Room, the Cabiz net
Room, and up to the doorway of the Oval Office, which is alway.'
     guarded by a Secret Service agent and is closed off with a rope
whenever the President isn't there.  But what I really wanted to show
him was President Theodore Roosevelt's Nobel Prize, which is displayed,
appropriately enough, in the Roosevelt Room.  "This is the Nobel Peace
Prize," I explained.  "It's the first one ever awarded to an American.
It was given to President Roosevelt for his success in ending the war
between Russia and Japan in 1905.  Although that war had no direct
impact on the United States, and took place thousands of miles from
here, President Roosevelt brought the leaders of these two countries to
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where they negotiated an end to the fighting.
     "President Reagan feels the same way about the war your country is
fighting with Iraq," I added.  "He wants to do whatever he can to bring
peace."
     Before the Nephew left Washington, he asked if the United States
could issue some kind of public signal that would prove to his contacts
in Tehran that he had indeed been meeting with high-level Americans.
Obviously, I couldn't get President Reagan or Secretary Shultz to stand
up and say anything nice about Iran.  What we needed was an American
statement that would satis~ the Iranians, but which nobody in our
country would even notice.
     Once again, history provided an answer.  I recalled that during
orld War II, the Free French government in london used to broadast coded
messages to the French Resistance in their occupied homeand by inserting
previously agreed-upon phrases in routine radio roadcasts.  I wondered
if we could arrange something analogous rough the Voice of Atnerica.
Perhaps the United States could thank ran for its help in resolving the
recent hijacking of a Pan Am plane.  The Iranian "help" had consisted of
not allowing the plane to land in ehran, but even that was appreciated.)
The Nephew and I agreed on e wording, and he wrote it down.  With the
permission of Admiral oindexter, I asked the Voice of America if they
would include our rief insert in an upcoming Farsi-language editorial,
and they agreed.  hortly after the Nephew returned home, the phrase was
used in our roadcasts.
     As soon as the Nephew left Washington, I sent a summary of our lks
to Admiral Poindexter.  He responded with an enthusiastic PROFS
     message to Bud McFarlane at home.  "Your trip to Tehran paid olf,"
the admiral wrote.  "You did get through to the top.  They are playing
our line back to us.  They are worried about the Soviets, Afghanistan,
and their economy.  They realize hostages are an obstacle to any
productive relationship with us.  They want to remove the obstacle....
If this comes olf, may ask you to do second round after hostages are
back.  Keep your fingers crossed."
     The following day, October 4, McFarlane responded in kind: "If
     you think it would be of any value, I might be able to take a
couple of months off and work on the problem," he wrote.  "No guarantees
and no need for any sponsorship (except for airfares and hotels) but I
might be able to turn something up.  Think about it."
     McFarlane claimed later that after our May 1986 trip to Tehran he
     had wanted nothing more to do with the Iran initiative.  But in the
fall of 1986, he evidently still shared our belief that a strategic
opening to Iran was both important and possible.  Admiral Poindexter was
suggesting a "second round"-meaning another trip to Tehran-after the
release of the hostages.  Cynics may scolf, but our goals with Iran went
well beyond the hostage problem.
     The optimistic sentiments expressed by McFarlane and Poindexter
were apparently felt in Tehran as well.  After hearing the VOA
broadcast, the Iranians agreed to have the Nephew meet us again, three
weeks later, in Frankhirt.
     As always, this meant that we had to arrange for the meetings to
     be recorded.  Because it wasn't always possible to have the hotel
rooms where we met wired in advanceto the KL-43 encoding device, I
normally traveled with two machines that had been provided by the
Agency: an audio recorder that was hidden in a briefcase, and a tiny
video camera concealed in a gym bag.  (Both recorders utilized special
long-lasting batteries and tapes.)
     I tried to make sure that all our meetings were taped.  After all,
I often promised the Iranians far more than we were prepared to deliver,
and I told them things that clearly were not true.  I wanted my
superiors and anyone else with a need to know to be aware of exactly
what each side had said.  Secord urged me to run my tape recorder even
when the room was already bugged.  "Just in case," he would say.  I
didn't share his worries, but I went along with his request.  Just in
case.
     Shortly after the Iranian initiative began, Casey had told me to
get
     n alias identity to provide an added layer of security.  I had been
ssued a black diplomatic passport, but he was concerned that my ame was
becoming too well known, and that an alias would provide eniability in
the event that my missions were detected.  I was issued a tandard blue
passport with my photograph, in the name of William P.  oode.  I was now
a businessman.
     To authenticate Mr. Goode's identity, I was provided with
approriate "pocket litter"-business cards, receipts, and credit cards.
While e credit cards couldn't be used to charge anything, the business
ards were slightly more fiinctional: the phone number listed on them as
supposed to ring somewhere in the bowels of Washington, where would be
answered by somebody who would veri~ that Mr. Goode as indeed who he
claimed to be.  Like me, Mr. Goode worked for the NSC.  But whereas my
NSC ood for the National Security Council, his NSC was a private busiess
known as the National Security Company.  When anyone asked, r.  Goode
explained that he sold a line of security equipment to comanies in
Europe which required special machinery to protect their cret work on
the Strategic Defense Initiative.  That would explain e two recording
devices.  My only regret is that William Goode never bothered to sign up
in frequent-flyer program.  When I think of the places he could have ken
his wife and family, assuming he ever had the time...
     Each time I left Dulles, I carried the two hidden recorders and my
-43 secure communications device.  To my surprise, the concealed corders
would pass right through the security X-ray machines with a flicker of
concern on the part of the guards.  I had my cover ry all prepared, but
nobody asked.
     Except once.  And then all the pocket litter and false identity
pers and even my cover story still weren't enough for the skeptical
thorities at london's Heathrow Airport.  When I landed overseas, I
normally met by an embassy official who would clear me through stoms.
But this flight had arrived early.  Passing through customs, I
     stopped by the ever-vigilant and humorless British customs offils,
who asked me to explain, and then demonstrate, all the electronequipment
I had with me-and that I was supposedly offering for e.  George Cave,
who had gone through in another line, waited for
     me a few yards away, trying in vain to suppress his glee as I tried
to talk my way out of this one.  The customs officials were fascinated
by all this unusual equipment.  I believe they knew very well that I was
an American government official trying to pass as a businessman, but
they insisted on hearing my entire cover story-several times.  Why was 1
there?  With whom would I be meeting?  What were these toys I had
brought along, and how did they work?  Exactly what is the National
Security Company?  What other equipment does your company make?
     It was awfitl.  I had carefiilly memorized my story, but I soon had
sweat rings from my armpits down to my belt loops.  I felt like I was
onstage as part of an improvisational theater troupe where the rest of
the cast had been working together for years.  Although Mr. Goode's
performance did not quite live up to his name, after about twenty
minutes of filn our man from the embassy finally showed up, and they let
me go.  George and I flew on to Frankfiirt, where we were met by
somebody from our embassy in Bonn in plenty of time to alleviate the
need for another song-and-dance routine from the inexperienced (but not
altogether untalented) Mr. Goode.
     In Frankflirt, the Nephew showed up with a new keeper, whom Cave
and I had already met in Tehran.  Although we weren't able to confirm
it, we believed he was an intelligence officer with the Rev Guards.  But
here again, we never learned exactly who he was or where in the power
structure he fit in.
     But one thing was clear: the new keeper was obviously more
     important than the guy who had accompanied the Nephew to
Washington.  He was also a lot less friendly.  Because of his gaunt,
severe appearance, and the intense, scowling way he looked at us, Secord
and I referred to him as the Monster.  Hakim called him the Engine,
because he also seemed able to make things happen and keep them moving.
     Prior to the Frankftirt meeting, the Nephew had told us he would
     be bringing along a Koran, a gift for President Reagan.  To
reciprocate, I brought an elegant, leather-bound Bible for Speaker
Rafsanjani.  I had thought it would be appropriate ii, in addition to
signing the Bible, the President would also write out a suitable
biblical verse in his own hand.  Recognizing the Khomeini government's
prejudice not
     oniy toward Israel but also toward Jews, I chose a passage from the
New Testament.  With the help of a concordance, I turned to Galatians,
which includes several references to Abraham as the progenitor of three
different faiths.  I selected Galatians 3:8, which reads: "And the
Scripture, foreseeing that God would justi~ the Gentiles by faith,
preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations
shall be blessed in you."' I asked Admiral Poindexter to have President
Reagan inscribe the Bible with this verse and his signature, and it was
done.  When I presented the Bible to the Iranians, I said that President
Reagan had authorized me to tell them that the United States accepted
their revolution.  Throughout our discussions with the Iranians, it
seemed terribly important for them to hear that.  We had already made it
clear in Tehran, and I thought it would have been obvious from the fact
that ever since Khomeini had comng at the International Court of Justice
in the Hague about the disposition of Iran's frozen assets.  But these
men hadn't spent many years in government, and perhaps they felt
insecure in their new identities.  Whatever the reason, they needed to
hear of our acceptance again and again.  The Nephew never did bring that
Koran he had told me about.
     But at our next meeting he offered me a gorgeous, deep red Persian
carpet that must have measured at least ten feet by fifteen.  "I would
like you to have this," he said.  "I believe you are sincere, and that
you want to help your country.  I know that as a military man, you could
never afford something like this."
     He was certainly right about that.  But there was no way I could
accept his gift, and I tried to explain that as politely as I could.
     Later on I asked George Cave, "How on earth was he able to bring
that huge rug out of Tehran?"
     "It probably came out years ago," George replied.  Shortly after
     the revolution, he explained, the new government of Iran had
removed an enormous quantity of valuables~arpets, gold, silverware,
paintings, and even chandeliers-from the Shah's palaces in Iran, and
shipped them to warehouses in Frankfiirt.  Periodically, the Iranians
would sell off some goods to raise hard currency.
     By the end of the first day in Frankfiart, it looked like the
Second Channel might lead to some real movement on the hostages.  But
     what I didn't know was that thousands of miles away, the entire
contra initiative had just come crashing down.  Literally.
     I didn't learn about this until we broke for dinner, when I went to
     my room and turned on CNNJust in time to see a disheveled-looking
American being paraded past the wreckage of a C-123 transport plane.
His hands were tied behind his back, and he was guarded by a Sandlnista
soldier.  looking straight at the camera, the American said: "My name is
Eugene Hasenfits.  I come from Marinette, Wisconsin."
     My heart stopped.  I didn't recognize the name, but I certainly
knew what this meant.
     I immediately called my office, where Bob Earl responded with a
KL-43 message that he'd already drafted.  Bob confirmed everything CNN
was saying, and gave additional details.  This flight, as I already
knew, was part of Project Democracy's aerial resupply to the resistance
deep inside Nicaragua.  Three other men on that plane had been killed,
including Buzz Sawyer, whom I had come to know and admire, and Bill
Cooper, the chief pilot, whom I had met.  I did not know the third man,
who was a young communicator and logistician from the resistance.
Hasenfiis was the "kicker," the crewman who rigged the parachutes on the
payloads and literally kicked them out of the plane during an airdrop.
Like the other two Americans, he had been recruited by Secord's team.
     Their plane had taken off from Ilopango, El Salvador, and was
carrying a fiill load of supplies for the resistance: rifles, grenade
launchers, medicine, and boots.  At 12:45 in the afternoon, it was hit
by a Sandinista antiaircraft missile and had exploded in flames.
Hasenftis was the only one with a parachute, and as he floated to the
ground, he watched the plane crash and burn.  It must have been a
terrible experience, and I can't blame him for talking.  When he was
captured a few hours later, the poor bastard must have thought it was
all over.
     The Hasenfiis episode gave the Sandinistas what they'd been hoping
for: concrete proof that American mercenaries had been flying over
Nicaragua.  They had been claiming for months that American planes were
dropping bombs on their country, and while they were wrong about the
bombs, the rest of it was true.
     I immediately left Frankftirt to return to Washington.  Dick left,
too, to deal with the firestorm.  Cave, who was under orders from
     angley not to carry on discussions with the Iranians without me,
flew ack to the States.  That left only Albert to stay behind with the
Iranins, which was a big mistake.  We left Albert behind not to
negotiate, but to stay with the Secnd Channel and hold the fort until I
returned.  When I left Frankfitrt, naively expected to return in a
couple of days.  But I had no idea hat awaited me in Washington, and it
turned out to be three weeks efore I came back.
     Meanwhile, Albert continued the negotiations.  During the next
     ay or two, he made concessions that the rest of us would never have
greed to.  Among other things, he promised the Iranians that we ould
approach the government of Kuwait and urge them to release ome of the
Da'wa prisoners.  He also agreed to sell five hundred more OW missiles
to Iran-at a considerable discount from previous prices.
     When Nir learned about that, he was beside himself.  "It makes us
ook terrible," he said, referring to his own government.  "And where oes
it leave Ghorbanifar?"
     Nobody was pleased with Hakim's negotiation.  But it wasn't such
big deal at the time, and none of us could imagine just how unhappy
would make Congress nine months later, during the hearings.  though I
didn't like the so-called Hakim Accords, I went along with em because I
would have promised the Iranians just about anything
     o free more hostages.  "You want the next ride on the space
shuttle?  t's yours, baby."  Later, in the midst of all the
inquisitions, I was asked whether I
     ad any qualms about lying to the Iranians.  The answer is no.  My
only eservation was that one of my lies might be discovered, and that
the ostages would pay the price.  I lied to them not because they were
ranians, but because lives were at stake.*
     As soon as I returned from Frankfilrt, Casey asked me to come
     ut to his office in Langley for a long, serious talk.  The
administration as denying any link to the Hasenfils flight, but sooner
or later the eal story was going to come out.  "It's over," Casey said,
referring to roject Democracy.  "Shut it down and clean it up.  Bring
everybody ome.  We're going back in."
     In the Bible, in the second chapter of Joshua, Rahab lies to the
authorities in order to ve the lives of the two Israelite spies.  I
don't recall reading about her trial.
     Fortunately for the contras, Congress had finally approved the
allocation of one hundred million dollars for the CIA to resume helping
the resistance, and soon the money would begin to flow.  The Hasen~s
flight went down less than two weeks before the CIA began resuming its
support for the resi mind.  He also described a disturbing conversation
he'd had with an old friend named Roy Furmark.  Furmark, who was said to
be a business partner of Adnan Khashoggi, told Casey that Ghorbanifar
was deeply in debt to Khashoggi and two Canadian investors.  Gorba had
threatened to go public with both the Iran initiative and the
"diversion" unless he recovered his losses.  But Ghorbanifar was only
part of the problem.  Casey was also unhappy to hear that Furmark, an
outsider, had detailed knowledge about Lake Resources, the use of the
residuals, and my own involvement in all of this.  Casey's admonition to
"clean it up" meant more than just bringing back the pilots and others
who had worked for Secord.  Between the Hasenfits problem and Furmark,
we were facing the strong possibility of the imminent exposure of all
our operations, including the hostage recovery effort.  My office was
littered with files and documents that, if exposed, would jeopardize the
lives of people we had worked with in Nicaragua, Europe, and Iran.
Among other things, I had detailed financial statements from Adolfo
showing how the Saudi money was spent-which included sensitive payments
to individuals still inside Nicaragua.  If there were leaks, these
people would be in real danger.  And so I began to shred more than the
routine excess paperwork from the office.  A paper shredder is an
essential piece of equipment in any office that deals with classified
material.  These papers can't be disposed of in the regular trash; they
must be destroyed to protect legitimate secrets.  Casey's warning got my
attention.  Although I normally shredded every day, during my final
weeks at the NSC I shredded more than ever.
     It wasn't a matter of staying late at the office and shredding
documents into the wee hours, although at the very end I did that, too.
I tried to destroy all documents that mentioned the "diversion," or the
names of people who might conceivably be at risk.  I also destroyed the
ledger that Casey had given me the previous year, in which I had
     pt records of all the money and traveler's checks flowing in and
out my office.  The ledger, too, was filled with names of individuals
and ganizations whose public exposure would have been a disaster.  It
took three weeks before the Frankfitrt meeting with the Second hannel
was resumed.  We met again on October 29, this time in ainz, a
university town outside of Frankfiirt.  I arrived in an optiistic mood:
although the contra project had come unraveled at the d, at least we had
been able to keep the resistance together until the IA could get back in
the game.  And now the Second Channel emed to be leading somewhere: we
seemed close to a deal that ould result in another hostage release in
Beirut.
     But the Nephew and the Monster arrived in Mainz with alarming ws.
Pamphlets were being circulated in mosques in Tehran and um which
disclosed both the arms sales and the McFarlane trip to hran.  Although
several of the key details about the trip were wrong, were horrified to
learn that any news of that visit was being disssed openly.
     According to the Nephew, the pamphlets had been distributed by
rival faction in the government which wanted to stop the initiative.
     the source hardly mattered.  No matter where the pamphlets had me
from, we were now living on borrowed time.  We figured it ight take as
long as a month for the stories circulating in Tehran to picked up in
the United States.  In fact, it took about a week.  I immediately sent a
KL-43 message to Admiral Poindexter, ling him the news and recommending
that we press on and do erything possible to get out more hostages
before the Iran initiative
     the same end as Project Democracy.  In his reply, the Admiral ayed
what would be our final transaction.
     It was later alleged that my frantic attempts in late October and
ly November to get the remaining hostages released were related to
upcoming midterm elections.  There was a connection, but it sn't what it
seemed.  Nobody in Washington ever told me to get the stages out by
Election Day.  Had this been a presidential election, a ely release of
the hostages might have had some effect.  But the tcome of these races,
for the House, the Senate, and for governor, uldn't have been changed in
the slightest by a hostage release.  The Iranians saw it differently.
They assumed, with some justifican, that the seizure of hostages from
our embassy in Tehran had led
     to the defeat of President Carter in 1980, and they thought that
our hostages in Lebanon were similarly important to this campaign.  I
knew better, but because of Hasen~s and the pamphlets, I didn't want to
set them straight.  If anything was going to develop, it had to happen
soon.  I went along with their premise, and insisted that we had to get
the hostages out before Election Day, November 4.  "We've got to move
quickly," I told them.  "If the Democrats win
     big on Tuesday, we won't be able to send you any more shipments."
It could have been the elections that finally made them move.  It could
have been the pamphlets.  Perhaps it would have happened anyway.  But
before we left Mainz, the Nephew promised us that by the end of the
week, in return for five hundred TOWs, two or three hostages would be
released in Beirut.
     I passed on the good news to John Poindexter, who directed me
     to go to Cyprus to make the necessary arrangements with our
embassy.  I then flew back to Washington-losing Bill Goode's luggage in
the process (but, than~lly, not the KL-43 and the recorders)-to await
word from the Iranians.
     On Friday afternoon, I heard from Hakim that a hostage release
     was imminent.  When Charlie Allen at the CIA confirmed that at
least one hostage would be released on Sunday, I immediately flew to
London, where, as William Goode, I boarded a British Air flight to
Cyprus.
     I couldn't fly directly to Beirut.  The Beirut airport is in West
Beirut, the Moslem section of the city, and just about the only
Westerners who end up there have been hijacked from somewhere else.  My
plan was to fly into Cyprus and then make the rest of the trip in a U.S.
Army helicopter.  And while a long overwater helicopter flight into a
city fttll of gunfire was not my idea of a good time, it was still safer
than flying into the Beirut airport.
     On Saturday night, when I landed at Larnaca Airport in Cyprus,
     the place was teeming.  I looked aroundstanding in line to get
change for a phone call when I finally noticed Harry standing near the
exit.  He nodded, and I followed him out to the car.
     Harry was already in the vehicle when I came out.  "Hurry up!"  he
yelled.  "Get in!"  I looked up to see three men running toward me.
They were all carrying something, but I couldn't tell what it was.  I
ran
     for the car.  I stood there, trying to open the right rear door at
the same time that the driver was trying to unlock it for me.  For a
long moment or two the door was stuck as both of us kept fiimbling with
it.  When it finally opened, I tumbled in as the driver hit the gas.
     As we pulled away, I looked back at the men who had been coming
toward me.  They weren't a hit team after all.  They were a film crew,
and their camera was still running.
     Later that night, Harry turned on a local news broadcast.  To my
orror, I saw myself falling into the car like a scared rabbit.  Harry
had is face in his hands.  "I can't believe it," he said.  "They've just
identied you as being from the CIA.  They said you're working on the
ostage release."
     I immediately wrote up a detailed account of the incident and sent
     to Admiral Poindexter on the KL-43.  To this day, I still don't
know ow the film crew knew I was coming in.  We learned later that they
ere associated with a PLO news organization.  There had been umors in
Beirut about an imminent hostage release, and Harry and I ssumed that
the camera crew had simply been waiting at the airport.  ut that still
didn't explain why they had focused on me.  Had they ailed Harry's car?
Or was there a security leak in our communicazons?
     Late that night, I called John Kelly, our ambassador in Beirut, to
     ell him that we expected a hostage release the following day,
although e still didn't know who it would be-or how many.  I asked him
to rrange for a pickup and a quick medical check, and not to tell
anyne-not even the State Department.  Those were Poindexter's
nstructions.
     I spent that night on Harry's couch.  Early Sunday morning, I poke
to Ami Nir in Tel Aviv.  He, too, had seen the film of my little ance
recital at the Cyprus airport.  "Nice going, North," he said.  'Real
nice."
     That morning, I got the word from Bob Dutton, Secord's man, ho was
in Beirut, that David Jacobsen had just been released.
     The Second Channel really worked!
     "Keep a lid on it," I told Dutton.  "Keep it quiet."  If Jacobsen's
elease was announced too early, it could prevent the other hostage we
xpected from getting out.
     I spent that day pacing in a room at the Golden Bay Hotel outside
     Larnaca as Chi Chi Quintero and I waited for additional good news.
It never came.  As the hours passed, it became increasingly clear that
it was Jacobsen-and only Jacobsen.  Talk about mixed feelings!  1 was
elated and depressed at the same time.  I returned to the embassy and
called the admiral to tell him what had happened.
     "Okay," said Poindexter.  "Go get him."
     Early Monday morning, before dawn, I boarded a U.S.  Army
helicopter for the flight to Beirut.  It was cold, damp and windy at the
airfield, and I could see we were in for a rough trip.  But I didn't
know the half of it.  We tried to avoid several line squalls blowing in
from the west, but it was impossible to dodge them all.  The weather was
so bad that the two helicopters couldn't see each other, and the "chase"
bird had to turn back to avoid a possible collision.  Our pilot, a young
Army warrant officer, took a compass fix in the general direction of
Beirut, which was somewhere off in the distance, beneath the clouds.
     We landed at the provisional embassy compound in the hills above
East Beirut.  Fortunately, there was no gunfire to welcome us, although
in Beirut that was always a possibility.  When we touched down, the
security team rushed us off the Landing Zone-a scene vaguely reminiscent
of Vietnam.  Once we were safely inside, I was introduced to the man we
had worked so hard to recover.
     David Jacobsen was skinny and pale, but he looked to be in
reasonably good health.  He was, to say the least, enormously gratefill
to be free.  As the helicopter was being refiieled, he told me how he
had been released the day before.  At about nine in the morning, his
guards had driven him through the pockmarked streets of West Beirut to
the old American embassy, which we had abandoned in 1983 after a car
bomb destroyed the building.  I apologized for keeping him waiting an
extra day, and explained that we had been anticipating the release of
another hostage.  He brushed it aside.  He couldn't stop praising the
convoy of volunteers from the embassy who had driven into West Beirut,
risking their lives to pick him up.  The small sitting room was crowded
with men who had prayed along with Jacobsen for this moment: Ambassador
John Kelly, who held the least-wanted post in the entire diplomatic
corps; the Deputy Chief of Mission, who had led the convoy of cars to
recover Jacobsen; Bob Dutton, who had flown to Beirut a couple of days
earlier; and
     Terry Waite, the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Terry had risked his life to gain the release of all the hostages, but
not long afterward, in January 1987, he too would become a hostage.
     As soon as the helicopter was ready, we climbed aboard.  David
     was dying to talk, but it was simply too noisy.  He settled for
writing a note in which he made clear that despite everything that had
happened to him, his sense of humor was still intact.  "Is it true," he
wrote, "that the in-flight movie will be Bcdtimefor Bonzo?"
     The flight back to Larnaca was nor much smoother than the flight
into Beirut, although at least we were flying in daylight.  When we
landed, Jacobsen was greeted by an official American delegation.  Having
already been spotted by one news team, J remained in the helicopter as
Jacobsen, Waite, and our ambassador to Cyprus met with the press.  As
soon as the cameras were turned around to cover the ress conference, I
got out and boarded the waiting Lear jet that Secrd had leased.  In a
few minutes we would be taking off for Wiesaden, West Germany, where
Jacobsen would be debriefed and hecked over by the doctors.  His two
sons would be meeting him ere, and he couldn't wait to see them.
     I could hear Jacobsen's press conference from the plane.  When avid
described how he had taken comfort in the words of Psalm wenty-seven,
eball cap, and I took it off and wrote a passage from that psalm on he
bill: "I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
soon as David came on board, I gave him the cap.  On the flight to
Wiesbaden, we finally had a chance to talk.  The oor guy was so starved
fi:r human discourse that the words just oured out of him.  While he was
angry at those who had taken him, e was even more gratefiil to be free.
He also accepted the fact that he ouldn't know all the details that led
to his release.
     He told me the whole story, which he repeated again, more than nce,
in Wiesbaden.  On May 28, 1985, he had been kidnapped and oved into a
small, hidden compartment under the floor ofa van.  He ought he was
about to be killed.  Instead, his captors brought him to cold basement,
where he was chained to the floor and blindfolded.
     Over the next year and a half, David was moved to several
differlocations.  These were no ordinary prisons: there were many times
hen his guards ~uldn't even let him use the bathroom.  At one
     point they forced him to make a videotape, and then beat him
severely when an American network anchorman speculated that David might
be using the opportunity to send coded messages.  (He wasn't.) On
several occasions his captors told him he was about to be released.  It
was pain~l to learn that one of those times had coincided with our May
visit to Tehran.  He told me he survived the ordeal through his faith.
They let him have a Bible, where he found great comfort in the patient
message of Ecclesiastes, and in Psalm Twenty-seven, whose opening line
is "The lord is my light and my salvation.  Whom shall I fear?"
     He also described some of the mental exercises that helped pass
     the time and keep him sane.  In his imagination, he drove slowly
down the main street of Huntington Beach, California, his hometown.  He
recalled every store, every cross street.  He spent hours thinking about
his past, including his brief tenure as director of Beirut's American
University Medical Center.
     Later in his captivity, he was held in a room with other American
hostages.  They prayed together, talked, and argued, too, as they often
took out their anger and frustration on each other.  There were also
moments of levity, like the day they composed a handy phrase book for
travelers in Lebanon: Fekr c~bul cardan dav~t p~eh bush di~ar.  I am
delighted to accept your
     Kind invitation to lie down on the floor with my arms above my head
and my legs apart.  Auto arrare~h davqteman mano sespaheh-hast Thank
you.  It is exceptionally kind of you to allow me to travel in the trunk
of your Mercedes.  It is so much nicer than other trunks I have been in.
     In sharp contrast to Benjamin Weir, Jacobsen was eager to share
every bit of information he could recall that might conceivably help us
know more about the hostages.  He was terribly disappointed when I told
him that Weir had refilsed to answer our questions.  He angrily pointed
out that he and the other hostages had been kept in the same location
for twenty-nine days after Weir was released.  He was anxious about the
fate of the remaining hostages, and was determined to say nothing to the
press that might possibly add to their danger.
     On November 7, three days after the midterm elections, David
     Jacobsen arrived at the White House to meet with President Reagan.
I brought him into the Oval Office for what became a very emotional
meeting for both of them.  The President wanted to know firsthand what
the experience had been like, and David described his confinement in
vivid detail.  It was incredibly moving and satisfting to see these two
men talking together after all this time.  Weir and Jenco had also met
with the President, but it just wasn't the same.  When President Reagan
took Jacobsen out to the Rose Garden
     for a photo opportunity, the press was in an uproar.  The story of
McFarlane's trip to Tehran had just been reported in the United States
after appearing in Al-Shiraa, a Beirut magazine.  But even so, the way
they went after Jacobsen was unbelievable.  Although he had just been
through a long and terrible experience, the reporters were shouting at
both him and the President, demanding answers to their questions.  I
stayed behind in the Oval Office, watching from the window as the
assault began: "How did you get him out, Mr. President?  What truth is
there to these stories out of Lebanon?"
     One reporter asked, "Why not dispel the speculation by telling us
exactly what happened, sir?"
     "Because," the President replied, "it has to happen again and again
and again until we have them all back."
     The whole scene infiiriated Jacobsen.  He knew all too well that
     this speculation could cause the terrorists to harm the hostages,
and he pleaded with the press to show restraint.  When a reporter asked
a particularly delicate question about the details of his release,
Jacobsen let him have it: "Irresponsible speculation like your question
nearly resulted in my death," he said.  "You have endangered the lives
of hostages remaining in Lebanon.  I don't want that to happen and I
don't think you want that on your conscience.  So in the name of God,
ould you please just be responsible and back of(?"
     I have no doubt that David was speaking for the President, too.
     e was certainly speaking for me.  When the two of them returned to
the Oval Office, Jacobsen was zncredulous.  "They really don't care, do
they?"  he said to the Presient.
     President Reagan gave one of his famous headshakes.  "Well-" he
egan.  Then he stopped himself.
     I know how I would have finished that sentence.
     David was so angry at the press that I recommended that we leave
via the ground-floor portal to the West Wing, and that we stop by my
office long enough to let the press corps filter out through the
northwest gate.  I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to introduce him to
some of my coworkers who had done so much to gain his release.  Bob
Earl, Craig Coy, Fawn Hall, and Barbara Brown had all worked long hours
for months, and here, at last, was a hostage who genuinely appreciated
their efforts.  It was a joyous experience for us all.
     Later that afternoon, the admiral and I talked about the
possibility
     of continuing the initiative.  Although Bafsanjani had confirmed
the details of McFarlane's visit to Iran, and had even added some new
distortions of his own, the Nephew made ite next morning.
     While I was angry at the Nephew for not delivering what he had
promised, I was still hopeltil that we could work something out.
     "What happened?"  I asked him.
     "Please," he said.  "We did the best we could.  You know that we
don't control these people.  We offered to tell you where the hostages
are being kept."
     "So tell us."  He never did.
     "Get them out now," I pleaded with him.  "We'll do everything we
can," he said.  I have no idea whether he was telling the truth.  The
meeting ended inconclusively, with promises on both sides.
     But nothing came of it, and I returned to Washington to face the
music.  I never saw the Nephew again.
     In December, several weeks after I was fired, there was one last
meeting in Frankiitrt between American negotiators and the Second
Channel.  Charles Dunbar, a State Department official, and George Cave
represented the United States.  The Monster represented Iran, but the
Nephew didn't show.  When the Monster brought up the Haklm Accords,
Dunbar replied that the United States was no longer interested in
selling arms to the Iranians.
     The Iran initiative was finally over.
     Chapter 14
     Endgame
     en I returned on November 11 from the final meeting with the econd
Channel, Washington was in an uproar.  The wreckage from e Hasenfiis
shoot-down had spread well beyond the immediate roblems of trying to
recover the bodies of the downed airmen, payg their death benefits, and
negotiating the release of Hasenfits himelf.  On Capitol Hill, the
Democratic leadership was howling for olitical blood.  In El Salvador,
inquisitive reporters-possibly, as Bill asey believed, with help from
the Cuban intelligence service-had een provided with phone records that
linked the house in San Salador where the air crews lived to the CIA
station in Costa Rica, my ffice in the OEOB, and Secord's office in
Virginia.
     Meanwhile, both the FBI and the Customs Service were investiating
Southern Air Transport, the Miami-based company that hanled the
maintenance on the planes belonging to Project Democracy.  ars earlier,
Southern Air had been a CIA proprietary, and it still ovided contract
services to several U.S.  government agencies-and Dick Secord's
operation.  Now questions had been raised as to hether Southern Alr had
been shipping weapons from the United ates to the contras, as some in
the media had claimed.  While they dn't done that, they had transported
TOW missiles from U.S.  Army
     depots to Tel Aviv, where they were transferred to Israeli planes
and sent on to Iran.  We were hoping to stop this connection from being
exposed.
     And that wasn't the half of it.  By mid-November the press was
fiIll
     of stories, leaks and speculations, not only about the contras, but
about the Iran initiative, too.  My name was starting to show up a
little too often, and I knew I was in trouble when the ABC evening news
named me "Person of the Week."  I missed the original broadcast, but
Dornin, our youngest daughter, who was five, told me about it with great
excitement.  "Daddy, I saw you on television.  You were the week ofthe
man!"
     Sarah, who was ten, and old enough to read the newspapers, was
similarly confiised.  After seeing a reference to the religious tensions
in Lebanon, she said, "Dad, what's the difference between the Sunis and
the Shitties?"  The disclosures in Al-Shiraa about the meetings in
Tehran became even more interesting when Rafsanjani himself held a press
conference in Tehran to discuss the McFarlane visit.  He confirmed that
an American delegation had indeed arrived in Iran, but his account of
the trip was as colorfiil as a Persian carpet.
     As Bafsanjani described it, McFarlane and four other Americans
     had flown to Tehran illegally, disguised as members of an airline
crew.  The five of us were then supposedly locked up in a hotel while
the Ayatollah was consulted on what should be done with us.  "Iman
Khomeini instructed us not to talk with the Americans and not to accept
their gifts," Rafsanjani said, adding that these gifts included a cake
that was decorated with a key, to symbolize the new opening to Iran.
Unfortunately, he said, the cake was eaten by the security "boys."
Rafsanjani also displayed the Bible inscribed by President Reagan that I
had given to the Nephew in Frankfiirt just a month earlier, claiming
that this, too, had been brought to Tehran by our little group.  The
visit ended, he said, when the American intruders were expelled from
Iran by the Revolutionary Guards.
     Other than the fact that the security guards really did eat the
cake, virtually nothing else in Rafsanjani's announcement was true.  Yet
some of the details he cited are still accepted as the conventional
wisdom about our trip to Tehran.
     Back in Washington, the administration did its best to put a more
     positive spin on the McFarlane visit.  Several high-level officials
provided both on- and off-the-record interviews with key members of the
press, and at Admiral Poindexter's request, I did, too.  On November 13,
following a speech by President Reagan, Bud McFarlane appeared on ABC's
"Nightline" with Ted Koppel.  In sharp contrast to Rafsanjani's version,
Bud explained that the Tehran trip had consisted of "four days of talks
that went reasonably well."  He added, "We were received hospitably and
treated with the normal practice that surrounds meetings like this."
     "Did you bring in a cake?"  Koppel asked.
     "I didn't have anything to do with a cake," McFarlane replied.
True.  The cake was for Gorba's mother.  It's possible that Bud didn't
even know about it.
     "Bible?"
     "No Bible."
     "Pistols?"
     "I don't operate that way, Ted."
     Bud may have forgotten about the pistols, but the rest of his
account was generally accurate.  I think it's sad that the American
press was more willing to believe Rafsanjani than the President's former
national security adviser.  But for once I couldn't really blame them.
From the President on down, the administration was putting out so many
versions of the Iran initiative that nobody knew what was coming next.
And in case things weren't confiising enough, just a week after
Rafsanjani's disclosures, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations came
out and backed President Reagan's position by denying that his country
had been involved in any arrangement with the United States to trade
arms for hostages.
     Meanwhile, Secretary Shultz took it upon himself to Face the
Nation."  This was hardly the time to break ranks with the President,
and some of Shultz's cabinet colleagues were outraged.  Rumors were
flying that hultz was about to resign, and that his job would be given
to one of he Baker boys-probably James, but maybe even Howard.  Things
ot so bad that Larry Speakes, the White House press secretary, felt
ompelled to go out and assure the press corps that the President idn't
want Shultz to resign.
     Weinberger, who had also opposed the initiative, at least had the
     decency to say nothing.  But Cap was in an awkward position,
because it was his own Pentagon that had shipped the weapons and sold
them to the CIA for the explicit purpose of having the Agency sell them
again, through private channels, to Tehran.
     Casey was fiirious, and thought Shultz was being disloyal to the
President.  A few days after Shultz appeared on television, Casey sent a
personal letter to President Reagan recommending that Shultz be fired
and replaced by Jeane Kirkpatrick.  "Dear Mr. President," he wrote.  "On
Friday I spent over five hours discussing and answering questions for
the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on our effort to develop a
relationship with important elements in Iran....  The public pouting of
George Shultz and the failure of the State Department to support what we
did inflated the uproar on this matter.  If we all stand together and
speak out I believe we can put this behind us quickly.
     "Mr. President," Casey concluded, "you need a new pitcher."  But
Shultz had no intention of leaving the game.  In fact, as I learned
while preparing for my trial, the Secretary of State was hoping to play
two positions at once: he wanted to replace John Poindexter as national
security adviser while continuing to serve as Secretary of State.
     On November 13, President Reagan had gone on television to
     give his version of events.  In the wake of all the leaks and
unattributed sources, he promised to tell the whole story.  "You are
going to hear the facts from a White House source," he promised.  "And
you know my name."  He continued: "The charge has been made that the
United States
     has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of
American hostages in Lebanon; that the United States undercut its allies
and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with
terrorists.
     "Those charges are utterly false.  The United States has not made
concessions to those who hold our people captive in Lebanon, and we will
not.  The United States has not swapped boatloads or planeloads of
American weapons for the return of American hostages, and we will not.
     "We did not-repeat, did not-trade weapons or anything else for
hostages, nor will we."
     As I explained earlier, President Reagan wasn't exactly lying, but
     he wasn't telling the truth, either.  He believed what he said, and
he still thinks we didn't trade arms for hostages.  After all, he
reasoned,
     e people we were dealing with were Iranians, not the hostage holdrs
themselves.  Technically, he was correct.  In his speech, the President
insisted that the arms we shipped to ran could have fit in a single
cargo plane.  He took a lot of heat for lat remark, but it wasn't wrong.
Before the speech, Admiral oindexter had asked me to determine whether
what we had shipped ould, in fact, have fit into a single plane.  I
called the Pentagon to heck on the size and the weight of two thousand
TOWs, plus the lectronic parts, and I calculated that yes, they would
have fit in a CA, the largest cargo plane in our Air Force.  Regardless
of how it was ortrayed, this was not an enormous quantity of arms.
     Hindsight is always easy.  But I still wonder how events would have
urned out if, having decided to put aside the ongoing rescue efforts nd
address the nation, President Reagan had made a somewhat diferent speech
that evening-which might have gone something like his:
     My fellow Americans: The charge has been made that the United
States
     as shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of
American ostages in Lebanon.  Let me tell you what we did-and why.
     In an effort to open a relationship with the revolutionary
government of ran, we sold two thousand TOW missiles and some electronic
parts to ehran.  We had reason to believe there were moderate, or
pragmatic, individals in the government of Iran who were not hostile to
the United States.  In n effort to reach these people, we worked
secretly through two different hannels.  We also worked to free the
American hostages in Lebanon, and ree of them were in fact released.
     Two members of my cabinet were opposed to this initiative, but they
     ere willing to see it through.  All of us understood that this was
a very highsk venture, but we believed it was a risk worth taking.  As
you now know, our effort to open a relationship with the current
govnment in Iran did not succeed.  Tonight, I call upon the government
of an to begin an open dialogue with the United States-a dialogue that
could ad to a better relationship between our two countries, and,
possibly, an end the fruitless war between Iran and Iraq.
     We know that the government of Iran has some influence over those
     who hold the American and other Western hostages in Beirut.  I call
upon Iran to use its influence so that the hostages are released.  In
other words, President Reagan could have tried to make a virtue out of a
necessity.
     Although it was true as far as it went, even this speech would not
have revealed the whole story.  It would have made no mention of the
"diversion," for example, or of the American role in the 1985 HAWK
shipments from Israel to Iran.  It's possible that this speech might
have revealed enough to contain the damage and make a constructive
difference, but not necessarily.  As things turned out, nothing we did
during those days made much difference at all.  We only made things
worse.
     Shortly after the Al-Shiraa revelations, Admiral Poindexter asked
     for a chronology of the Iran initiative.  He assigned the task to
my office, and gave instructions to work with the CIA, the Pentagon, and
anybody else who could help in preparing it.
     Because my own operational involvement in the Iran initiative had
     not begun until I heard from Babin in November 1985, I relied on
Michael Ledeen, Bud McFarlane, and Ami Nir for some of the earlier
details.  Invariably, people remember thingsir recollections that had to
be talked through and synthesized.  The chronology started out as two
pages, but it soon expanded into twenty.  On Tuesday, November 18, at
about eight in the evening, Bud McFarlane came to my office to "lend a
hand" in reworking a draft of the President's opening remarks for the
press conference scheduled for the following night.  In a PROFS message
to Admiral Poindexter, he proposed several changes in the text,
including a denial that the United States had approved of any shipments
to Iran before the January 1986 Finding.  When he had finished working
on the President's remarks, Bud turned to the chronology and made these
same changes on my draft.  By now, President Reagan, Admiral Poindexter,
and Don Regan
     had met with various congressional delegations to discuss the Iran
initiative, and all of them had studiously avoided any mention of our
involvement in the 1985 shipments.  On November 12, when President
Reagan and his senior foreign policy advisers met with the con
gressional leadership at the White IIouse, the President pointedly
omitted any reference to his okay for the Israeli TOW shipments in the
summer of 1985 or to his December 1985 Finding retroactively authorizing
the Iranian initiative activities.  And although the senior government
officials who were present knew about it, no one mentioned our
involvement in the November 1985 HAWK shipment.
     From then on, the President and his senior advisers were committed
to this version of events.  In his speech to the nation from the Oval
Office on November 13, the President made no mention of U.S.  government
approval for or involvement in these early shipments.
     By the time McFarlane sat down at my computer to type his rendition
of the 1985 events, his account coincided with the President's.  In his
description of the HAWK shipment from Israel to Iran, Bud totally
altered the facts about the delivery and our role in facilitating it,
and made it appear that we didn't even know about it at the time.
     To this day I don't know McFarlane's reasons for these changes.  I
have mine, and at the time, that was enough; we knew from our
intelligence and from meetings with the Iranians that the HAWK shipment
of November 1985 had inhin.ated the Iranians.  They had been led to
expect a long-range system that could shoot down high-altitude Soviet
and Iraqi aircrafi.  But HAWK is a low-altitude, relatively close-in,
antiaircrafi system.  To make matters worse, there was the awkward
problem of the Israeli markings on several of the missiles when they
arrived in Iran.
     When the Iranians had confronted us with these problems, we had
assured them that we'd had nothing to do with that particular shipment.
With the agreement of the Israelis, we presented ourselves as the good
guys.  "Deal with us from now on," we said.  "You can return those
HAWKs, and we'll help you get what you need."
     Now, in November 1986, I still didn't want us to reveal our
connection with that 1985 shipment.  I was concerned that if the United
States was perceived as having played any role in that transaction, the
hostage-takers in Beirut might take out their anger on the hostages.  As
David Jacobsen had told me earlier in the month, that sort of thing
really did happen.  We also worried that additional hostages might be
seized.  That had happened when we switched from the First to the Second
Channel, which had apparently intun.ated somebody in the Iranian
government.
     We were also concerned that any revelation of our role in the 1985
shipment could harm the Nephew.  He might end up being targeted as the
fall guy in Tehran, especially if it was revealed that even the most
recent shipments to his country had gone through Israel.  Although by
that time I ltilly expected to lose my job at the NSC, at least I had a
career in the Marine Corps to look forward to.  The Nephew might find
himself in a more difficult situation.  In Iran, after all, the word
"firing" was often followed by the word "squad."  There was still
another reason for not disclosing the American role in the 1985 shipment
from Israel.  The original Presidential Finding which Reagan had signed
in December 1985, authorizing the covert shipment of arms to Iran, had
been worded in such a way as to make the Iran initiative sound like
nothing more than arms for hostages:
     Scope: Hostage Rescue-Middle East.
     Description: The provision of assistance by the Central
Intelligence Agency to private parties in their attempt to obtain the
release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East.  Such assistance
is to include the provision of transportation, communication, and other
necessary support.  As part of these etforts certain foreign materiel
and munitions may be provided to the Government of Iran which is talting
steps to facilitate the release of the American hostages.
     Any disclosure of this Finding would have been enormously
embarrassing for the administration, especially since the President had
insisted in his speech, and continued to insist, that the Iran
initiative was not about arms for hostages.  On the afternoon of
November 21, John Poindexter and I sat in
     his office and discussed the problem.  In January 1986, the
President had signed a second Finding, which made clear that the Iran
initiative was much broader than simply arms for hostages.  This second
Finding spelled out the President's goals: to create an opening to Iran,
to help bring about an end to the Iran-Iraq war, and to recover the
hostages.  The admiral believed that the poorly worded first Finding had
been effectively superseded by the second Finding.
     If that first Finding was ever revealed, the President would be
humiliated.  The admiral asked Paul Thompson, his lawyer, to bring in
the signed original 1985 Finding.  Admiral Poindexter then tore it in
     half and placed it on the coffee table.  This was one of the
charges on which the admiral was later indicted and convicted.
     In changing the chronology and in destroying the superseded
Finding, Bud and the admiral had taken steps to preserve lives and to
protect the President.  But there were other matters, too, that we
didn't want anyone to know about.  No version of the chronologies
mentioned the secret within a secret.  We were trying to avoid the
political explosion that such a revelation would entail-and we were
certainly right about that We also knew that the Irbeen taken to the
cleaners, and charged enough for the weapons to hind the Nicaraguan
resistance and other projects as well.  If it was revealed that these
hinds were used to support the contras, the Iranians might well go
ballistic.  After all, they had been supporting the Sandinistas.  While
the government of Iran had no great sympathy for Communism, they
apparently believed that the Sandinistas qualified for that old Middle
Eastern proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
     Meanwhile, back in my office on the night of November 18: When
McFarlane finished making the changes in the President's press statement
and the chronologies, he pushed himself from my computer terminal.  As
he stood up, he said, "What did you do about that stuff from the NSA?"
He was referring to a PROFS message he had sent me a few days earlier,
in which he had stated his hope that certain National Security Agency
intelligence files on the Iran initiative had been purged.  Bud, it
seemed, believed history could be rewritten by deletions and
alterations.  When I explained that these files were in various
government agencies, and probably could not be recovered, he changed the
subject.  "Did you ever take care of that other stuff-way back then?"
     "Other stufl?"
     "What did you do with that?"  He gestured toward my computer.
There, taped to the monitor, was a list of six NSC document control
numbers that Bud had written out and given to me more than a year
earlier.  The numbers referred to memos I had written to Bud back in
1984 and 1985, seeking his approval for some of my efforts in support of
the Nicaraguan resistance.  In the fall of 1985, Bud had directed me to
change these memos, removing any reference to my support activities and
his knowledge of them.  But I still hadn't done it.
     In the summer of 1985, after a number of stories had appeared in
     the press about secret support for the Nicaraguan resistance, two
prominent members of Congress started asking questions about the NSC's
involvement in the resistance.  Congressman Michael Barnes, chairman of
the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, was a leading opponent of the President's policies in Central
America.  Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, was less vocal than Barnes, but he too was opposed to
military aid for the resistance.  After the news stories appeared, both
Barnes and Hamilton wrote letters to McFarlane, asking whether the NSC
had indeed been supporting the resistance.  The letter from Barnes
specifically asked about press reports of contact between me and the
contra leaders.
     There are two ways to protect a secret when you're asked about it
directly.  One is simply not to answer.  The other is to lie.
     I preferred the former, and I argued with Bud that we shouldn't
answer these letters.  As I saw it, this was precisely the kind of
situation that executive privilege was invented for.  After all, the
Executive Branch is not compelled to answer every question that Congress
asks.
     Bud disagreed.  He said he had talked to the President about it,
     and that my approach was too confrontational.  McFarlane rehised to
accept my input.  Instead, Bud invoked his own form of executive
privilege.  He lied.  In letters* to Barnes, Hamilton, and others-and in
meetings with still other congressmen-he flatly denied that the NSC in
general, and Oliver North in particular, were involved in these
activities: "Dear Mr. Chairman," he wrote to Barnes,
     I can state with deep personal conviction that at no time did I or
any member of the National Securiry Council staff violate the letter or
spirit of the law.  At no time did we encourage military activities.  We
did not solicit itinds or other support for military or paramilitary
activities, either from Americans or third parties.
     At the hearings, Bud would describe responses such as this as "too
categorical."  That's putting it mildly.
     On September 30,1985, Barnes again wrote to McFarlane.  This
     *Because of these letters, McFarlane pled guilty to withholding
information from Congress.
     time he specifically asked to see NSC documents.  I again argued
that we should simply tell Barnes that we weren't going to answer his
questions.  I even went up to the law library on the top floor of the
OEOB to research the history of executive privilege.  When I returned to
my office I drafted a letter for Bud to send:
     These internal documents are the appropriate purview of the
Executive Branch, which must abide by its commitments to other
governments not to compromise sensitive information.  The Executive
Branch cannot delegate this responsibility to the Congress and maintain
its credibility with those entrusted to govern in other countries.  The
right of the Executive to maintain confidentiality of information
important to the conduct of our foreign policies must be sustained.
     This principle dates back to the time of our first President,
wherein he refiised to lay before the House of Representatives the
instructions, correspondence, and documents relating to the negotiations
of what came to be known as the Jay Treaty.  This long-standing
principle has been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court in a number
of cases, including the United States versus Cisrtiss- Wrz8ht sport
Corporation.
     Whether simply to placate me, or to get a second opinion from a
real awyer, Bud forwarded my letter to Fred Fielding, the White House
ounsel, for his comments.  But Fielding, too, preferred not to confront
ongress, and as far as I know, the letter was never passed on to the
Presdent-the only person who could actually invoke executive privilege.
     McFarlane knew that Barnes and his allies were not going to stop
eir fishing expeditions, and he was worried that Congress would omehow
succeed in getting its hands on our documents.  When the rst letters had
arrived from Barnes and Hamilton, an NSC security fficer had gathered
our permanent record files dealing with aid to the ontras and delivered
them to Bud's office.  Now, months later, Barnes as demanding to see
them.  Apparently confident that Barnes ouldn't summon the energy to do
any of the hard work himself, Bud nvited Barnes down to his office.
With the pile of memos sitting in lain view, he invited Barnes to review
them on the spot.  Barnes ehised, and asked for copies to be sent to his
staff for their review. t a memThe Curtiss-Wright case was decided in
1936, when the Supreme Court upheld the ght of the President to prohibit
the shipment of arms to Bolivia and Panama.
     ber of Barnes's staff who was close to the Sandinistas, and
McFarlane had no intention of allowing these papers out of his office.
After Barnes renewed his request to see documents, Bud called me
     in.  "Ollie," he said, "some of these need to be fixed."  Bud
explained that the memos, all of which I had sent to him, were
inconsistent with what he had said and written to Congress, and that
they were "problematical."  He handed me a piece of paper on which he
had written the numbers of six NSC documents.  He also cited several
other documents whose numbers I wrote down on the back of that same
piece of paper.  In "fixing" them, Bud said, I should remove all
references to my operational role, and make the memos consistent with
what he had said and written to Congress.  If these memos ended up on
Capitol Hill, the resistance would be finished.  Any hope of restoring
CIA hinding for the contras would evaporate and sensitive operations
would be jeopardized.  We knew that Congress had two ways of dealing
with something they didn't like.  They could legislate against it-and
with the Boland Amendments they had already gone about as far in that
direction as they could.  Or, in the case of a secret operation, they
could leak it.  Still, I didn't understand why McFarlane had selected
only certain memos, when I had written dozens of memos that were equally
"problematical.
     "Just take care of it," McFarlane said, showing me a document he
     had already changed.  "And from now on, no more memos with this
kind of detail.  And no more PROFS notes about it, either."
     Now, I'm not norinaliy a procrastinator.  But until Bud came to
     my office on November 18, 1986, I still hadn't gotten around to
revising these papers.  With so many other NSC memos that revealed
similar information, I just didn't see the point.  But that Tuesday
night, when Bud brought it up again, I dutihilly started changing the
memos to make them appear more benign.  Specifically, I removed
references to my operational role, and to McFarlane's knowledge of it
just as he told me to.  But it was too late.  I was still working on
these papers when I was
     zOne of these memos described my meeting in Washington with a
Communist Chinese official in our effort to obtain antiaircratt missiles
for the Nicaraguan resistance.  Another outlined my proposals to take
action against the iffonim&o, the Sandinista arms ship.  The rest dealt
with specific resistance activities and operations, and the support we
were providing for them.
     fired.  Later, they were published ror the whole world to see,
which was an odd way of shutting down a covert operation.  It wasn't
until 1989, during my trial, that I finally understood why Bud had
selected these particular documents.  Whether or not there were other
memos in the same category, Bud knew that these six documents all
revealed his detailed awareness and approval of my activities, and
perhaps, to his way of thinking, the President's as well.  By November
1986, it was far too late to hide my role By then, ambassadors, military
officials, CIA officers, members of Congress, and scores of individuals
in foreign governments all knew what I had been doing.  But that night,
when McFarlane told me again to change those memos, I did.
     This was the third time in the space of a year and a half that the
NSC in general, and I in particular, had become the focus of attention.
The first spate of press reports, in the summer of 1985, had prompted
congressional inquiries and McFarlane's subsequent letters to Barnes,
Hamilton, and others, leading to Bud's directive that I
     change the six memos.
     The third, and by far the most serious, was the current imbroglio.
But there had also been a second go-round with the press and Congress in
the summer of 1986, a few months after Bud had resigned.  Following
another spate of news stories about the NSC and the contras, the House
of Representatives took the highiy unusual step of drafting a Resolution
of Inquiry, specifically directing the President to tell Congress what
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L.  North had been doing on behalf of the
resistance.  To my knowledge, this was the only proposed resolution in
the history of the United States that directed the Commander-in-Chief to
do anything about a lieutenant colonel.  The Resolution of Inquiry was
offered on the House floor by Representative Ron Coleman of Texas.  But
word quickly spread that the real originator was his congressional
colleague Michael Barnes, who was evidently trying a little covert
operation of his own.
     Like all proposed legislation, this draft resolution was submitted
     to the White House legislative affairs office for comment.  They,
in turn, passed it on to the NSC legislative office.  When Ron Sable,
senior director of legislative affairs at the NSC, told me he wasn't
sure what the administration was going to do about the resolution, I was
livid.  I went to the admiral and said, "I certainly hope we're going to
     oppose it!  And since I'm the one who's named, you ought to let me
write the response."
     "Come on, Ollie," the admiral replied.  "I know what you'll say.
     The whole world knows how you feel about this.  You'll just want to
cite executive privilege and tell them to go to hell."  That was
certainly true.
     "Well, that's not going to work," he said.  "If we start throwing
up roadblocks, that will only make things more difficult."  As it turned
out, the admiral was right.  At the time, we didn't know that one of the
congressional staffers had written a memo explaining that the Resolution
of Inquiry was designed solely to embarrass the administration by
forcing the President to invoke executive privilege.  But we didn't
learn this until three years later, during preparations for my trial.
     After several days of bureaucratic wrangling, Sable's office
drafted letters for the admiral's signature, telling the appropriate
committee chairmen that the administration opposed the Resolution of
Inquiry.  Unfortunately, Sable also wrote that the admiral was standing
by McFarlane's 1985 responses to Barnes and Hamilton.  For signing these
letters, which included the references to McFarlane's earlier
correspondence, the admiral was later indicted and eventualtwo letters
to Congress, and two other men are indicted for what's in his letters.
The ways of justice can be very strange.  Congress was less than
satisfied with the admiral's letters.  In July 1986, Congressman
Hamilton called the admiral.  "We need to talk to North about this
Resolution of Inquiry," he said.
     "No, you don't," said Poindexter.  "The White House isn't in the
business of sending its staff up there to testi~ and we're not going to
start now."
     But Hamilton insisted it all could be handled much more casually.
Instead of appearing before a congressional committee, I could simply
sit down with some of the members of his intelligence committee and
answer their questions during an "informal off-the-record" meeting in
the White House Sit Room.  Calling it a meeting instead of a committee
appearance and moving it over to our turf certainly made it more
palatable.  So did the fact that, as I understood it by the time we met
the Resolution of Inquiry was dead anyway; because the House Armed
Services Committee had
     voted it down.  But I still didn't think it was a good idea, and I
said so to the admiral.  We both knew that there was a great deal of
information that I couldn't reveal, including the Saudi donation to the
resistance, my role in the delivery of military supplies, and, of
course, the fact that by then, the Ayatollah was unwittingly helping us
to hind the resistance.
     "You can take care of it," the admiral said.
     The Sit Room meeting took place early on the morning of August
     6, 1986.  The President was in California, and the admiral had
taken some well-deserved leave.  Congress usually isn't around during
August, either, but unfortunately for me, several members of the
intelligence committee were in town and attended the meeting along with
two of their staffers.  Some of the congressmen had never been to the
Sit Room before,
     nd I could see them looking around in astonishment, just as I had
hen I first arrived at the NSC.  Entering the Sit Room for the first
zme, I had expected to find something ultramodern and high-tech, ike the
situation rooms depicted in movies, and I was disappointed at this place
seemed so ordinary.  For a moment it had actually ccurred to me that
maybe this wasn't the Sit Room after all.  Maybe his room was nothing
more than a gigantic elevator, and when someody pushed a hidden button
on the wall, it would lower us down to e real Sit Room, in the seventh
sub-basement, hundreds of feet
     nderground.  If that's what the congressmen expected, they were
disppointed.
     I, too, was disappointed that morning.  I had been hoping that the
ommittee members who supported the contras would be able to teer the
conversation away from the really tough questions.  I was rong.
     Somebody asked if I had ever given military advice to the icaraguan
resistance.
     My answer was something like, "Look.  Enrique Bermudez is a olonel.
I'm a lieutenant colonel.  It's inconceivable to think that a ouple of
military guys sitting down to talk about a war they both feel ongly
about won't also talk about military things.  But do I give him ilitary
advice on day-to-day operations?  Even if I thought I could, e both know
that you can't run this war from Washington.  The war being fought and
planned right down there in the region."
     At best, this was a nonanswer.  It was meant to be evasive, and it
was.  While it was true that this war, like all guerrilla wars, was
being planned and fought at the small-unit level, that wasn't the whole
truth.  In fact, I had given the resistance all kinds of advice.
     That morning, in the Sit Room, I tried to avoid telling outright
     lies.  But I certainly wasn't telling the truth.  I knew that hill
and truthhil answers would have destroyed the Nicaraguan resistance.
And some of the congressmen knew that, too.
     By the time this meeting was held, the House and the Senate had
each appropriated one hundred million dollars in covert CIA military
support for the resistance.  We all knew that it was just a matter of
time before Speaker O'Neill would have to "conference," or reconcile,
the two bills, and nobody in the administration-least of all me-wanted
to rock that boat.  The admiral and I also wanted to avoid the kind of
political firestorm that would hit us with hill force less than four
months later.
     Despite my anxieties, the Sit Room meeting was surprisingly
cordial-perhaps because I wasn't the only one there who knew I was
avoiding direct answers to their questions.  I had already given
numerous briefings about the resistance to several of these men and to
dozens of their congressional colleagues.  Many of them had been to the
region, visited the camps, met with resistance leaders, and seen the
close quarters at Ilopango Air Force Base, where the resistance planes
were stationed.  For years, they had been asking CIA briefers about the
sources of contra support, and they had all seemingly accepted the
Agency's claims of ignorance.  One of the committee members, Dave
McCurdy of Oklahoma, had even called me late one night to ask that
supplies be provided to the Atlantic Coast Indians.  I had done as he
asked.  I was certain that McCurdy didn't want me to talk about that,
and I didn't.  I look back on that meeting today knowing that what I did
was wrong.  I didn't give straight answers to the questions I was asked.
When the admiral sent me a PROFS note a day or two after the meeting, he
wrote, simply, "Well done."  But I didn't feel that way then, and I
don't now.  I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can
tell good from bad.  But I also know that the more difficult decisions
come when we have to choose between good and better.  The tough
     est calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.
That was the choice I was faced with on August 6 in the Sit Room.
Later, I was indicted for lying to Congress during that meeting.
Although I admitted what I had done openly in the hearings, and again
during my trial, I was not convicted.  Maybe that's because in two
hundred years of sparring between
     the Executive Branch and Congress over the control of foreign
policy, no one else has ever been charged with such a "crime."  Until
special prosecutors came along, these kinds of informal, unsworn
exchanges between the Executive and the Congress had always been treated
as part of the political process.  Regardless of whether it inly never
imagined that anything I was doing was a crime.
     Looking back on it today, it's clear to me that the best thing I
could have done was not to have gone to that meeting at all.  I should
have said, "Admiral, I can't do it.  You and I both know what these guys
are going to ask, and we also know that I can't answer those questions
without destroying the resistance."
     But I didn't say that to the admiral, and I don't blame him for
what happened.
     After McFarlane left my office on that Tuesday evening in November,
I had less than a week left at the NSC.  I didn't know it at the time,
but I could sure see where things were headed.  I began to expedite the
process I had started in October of "cleaning things up," and every
evening that week I went through more of my personal files.  It took
days to go through the scores of individual files from which I ulled a
memo here, a letter there, and various notes that could put eople at
risk.  The documents that I removed from my files included e names,
addresses, and phone numbers, and in some cases account umbers, of
people who had worked with our government in both e hostage initiative
and the contra support project.  In a number of ases they were people
who had received money from me in support fthese efforts.
     These were people who had trusted us in general, and me in
paricular, to keep their names and identities secret.  I shredded these
apers, along with letters and reports that I had received from them,
etailing what was going on in a particular operation or event.  Despite
     all the jokes and accusations, the amount I actually shredded was
far, far less than people imagined.  Most of the "shredding" time was
spent looking through my files.
     Later on, the investigators asked whether the "risks" I had spoken
of included political risk.  And I can't deny that I also tried to find
documents like the "diversion" memo that would not only endanger lives,
but also put the President at risk.  But there wasn't a wholesale effort
to destroy everything.  I knew that even if I wanted to, I couldn't
change the record.
     Within weeks, those who survived the blowup of late November, 1986,
started a wholesale declassification and exposure of the files in my
office.  As the Tower Commission, the congressional panels, and the
special prosecutors pressed their inquisitions, nearly everything in my
office was laid open for anyone to read.  I watched in horror as a
top-secret presidential Finding was reproduced in dozens of American
newspapers.  Publishing the text of classified documents was bad enough,
but in the case of the Finding, and numerous other documents, it wasn't
just the text.  These were photocopies, which revealed the jormar of
these documents-allowing the KGB or any other adversary to know exactly
what a classified presidential document looked like.  From now on,
anyone could create an authentic-looking presidential Finding, and could
use it as "proof' that the U.S.  government was involved in some alleged
misdeed or another.
     As the week wore on, press speculation about what had been shipped
to Iran, how it had gotten there, and why it had been sent became even
wilder.  On several occasions, Ami Nir and I talked and confirmed that
both governments, as we had previously agreed, were going to stick with
"no comment" when we were asked about U.S.  Israeli cooperation in the
Iran initiative.  Nir reaffirmed that the U.S.  role in the 1985 HAWK
shipment should be "protected" because of possible harm to the hostages
in Beirut.  Understandably, he was still concerned about the two Israeli
soldiers.
     On Thursday afternoon, November 20, several of us sat with Bill
Casey in the admiral's office to discuss his upcoming testimony on the
Iran initiative.  His staff at the CIA had been preparing various drafts
of what he would say.  But as usual, Casey, who had been on a secret
visit to Central America until that morning, insisted on preparing his
own testimony.
     After the meeting in the admiral's office, Casey and I walked back
     to the OEOB together.  As we stepped up the ramp that led into the
building, he said to me, "It's over.  You know that, don't you?"
     I nodded.  When we got to his office, we talked for a few minutes
about the testimony he would be giving the next day on the Iran
initiative.  As I started to leave, he said, "It's going to be okay down
there."
     I gave him a puzzled look.
     "You know, Nicawogwa.  You did a good job.  We're back in.  But
     you kept them going."  Although I saw him briefly later that week,
this turned out to be
     the last real conversation we ever had.  On Friday, November 21,
both Casey and the admiral met with members of the congressional
intelligence committees.  The admiral, meeting with a handhil of
legislators at the White House, apparently stuck with the cover story
that the administration had adopted over the preceding weeks: that the
United States had not learned of the 1985 HAWK missile shipment from
Israel to Iran until January 1986.  Casey, giving testimony on Capitol
Hill, claimed that the CIA hadn't learned until sometime in 1986 that
their proprietary airline had transported HAWK missiles from Israel to
Iran.  Neither statement was true.
     What was true were several references that Casey volunteered about
me in his testimony.  Although this hearing was about the Iran
initiative, Casey pointedly suggested three different times that the
cornrnittee rni8ht be fascinated to know what Oliver North had been
doing operationally to help the Nicaragisan resistance.  By bringing
this up, Casey was doing what he and I had already discussed: he was
ready to throw me out of the boat in the hope that the rest of the
administration would stay afloat.  But at the time, the committee wasn't
interested in this particular diversion.  Because of all the conflicting
stories, the President asked Ed Meese to "pull the facts together" and
produce a coherent account of hat had happened, and when, in the Iran
initiative.  Admiral Poindexter told me about the Meese mission on
Friday afternoon.  He entioned that Don Regan wanted this information by
Monday afteroon, and that some of "Ed's guys" would be coming by on
Saturday.  ould I come into the office to give them a hand?
     I assured him I would.
     When I arrived at my office on Saturday, two men from Meese's
office-William Reynolds and John Richardson-were already there, look
left out for them.  I showed them how to work the copy machine, and they
continued reading through documents and copying some of them.  I went to
work: taking and making phone calls, reading cables, and generally
taking care of business.  On several occasions I got up and shredded
some of the papers I was finished with.  Later on, the press accused
Meese's aides of incompetence (or worse) for allowing me to use the
shredder while they were there.  That's unfair.  Shredding was a
standard part of our office routine.  Besides, this wasn't a raid, and I
hadn't been accused of anything.  They were working on their projects; I
was working on mine.
     Shortly before two o'clock, Reynolds and Richardson left for lunch,
where they met with Ed Meese and Charles Cooper, another of Meese's
aides, at the Old Ebbitt Grill on Fifteenth Street.  I went upstairs to
the admiral's office, where I found Poindexter and Casey having lunch.
When I mentioned that two members of Meese's staff were going through my
files, Casey said, "That's not so bad.  We've got congressional staffers
all over the place, poking into things that are none of their business."
Richardson and Reynolds returned to my office around threeforty-five.  I
assumed they wanted to ask me some questions, but no, they said, they
were only there to review documents.  Although I didn't know it then, I
would be seeing them again the following afternoon, when I went to meet
with Ed Meese.
     I arrived at Meese's office in the Justice Department shortly after
     two o'clock on Sunday.  Reynolds, Cooper, and Richardson were with
him.  Ed opened the meeting by asking me to try to recall everything
that had happened on the Iran initiative.  "Don't worry about trying to
protect the President or anyone else," he said.  "Just tell me the
story."
     This may sound strange in view of what happened at this meeting,
     but the tone of our discussion was friendly and casual.  I had
known Ed for more than five years.  I first met him in connection with
the sensitive project at the start of my tour.  We worked together on
counterterrorism and in several other areas.  He personally detailed two
     DEA agents to help me with hostage recovery efforts, and when I had
to arrange for wiretaps and FBI surveillance of foreigners, he was one
of the officials I had to call.
     I didn't expect this meeting to be especially dramatic.  I thought
     we were still trying to put the best possible face on what
happenedto reveal enough to satisry Congress and the press, but not so
much as to endanger the hostages.
     About an hour into the meeting, Meese said, "Is there anything
     else that can jump up and bite the President on the ass?"
     "Not that I can think of," I replied.
     "How about this?"  he said, handing me a nine-page document.  It
     was an April 1986 memorandum from me to Admiral Poindexter, which
detailed a planned arms shipment to Iran and included a specific mention
of twelve million dollars in residuals from the arms sale that would go
to the Nicaraguan resistance.  Oh' shit, I thought.
     This was precisely the kind of document I had shredded.  Or so I
thought.
     "Where did this come from?"  I asked.  "That's not important," said
Meese.  "Did this happen?"
     "No, that particular shipment never took place," I said.  This was
true, but the next question was inevitable.
     "Well, did anything like this ever take place?"  I paused.  This
was the secret within a secret that was never supposed to be revealed.
But there was no way I was going to lie to Ed Meese.  After what seemed
like an eternity, I said, "Yes."
     Nobody screamed.  The earth didn't shake.  The walls didn't come
crashing down.  Nobody fell out of his chair.  Nobody said, "Get out the
handcuffs!  This man has violated the Boland Amendment!"
     *The critical part of the memo read as follows: "$2 million will be
used to purchase replacement TOWs for the original 508 sold by Israel to
Ira" for the release of Benjamin Weir.  This is the only way that we
have found to meet our commitment to replenish those stocks.
     "$12 million will be used to purchase critically needed supplies
for the Nicaraguan Democratic lesistance Forces.  This material is
essential to cover shortages in resistance inventories resulting from
their current offensives and Sandinista counterattacks and to 'bridge'
the period between now and when Congressionally-approved lethal
assistance (beyond the $25 million in 'defensive' arms) can be
delivered."
     Ed Meese was certainly interested, but there was no hint in his
reaction of what was to come just two days later, at the November 25
press conference.
     "Was there a cover memo?"  I asked.  A cover memo would have
indicated whether this particular document had been forwarded to the
President-and I still didn't know where this memo had been found.
     "No," said Reynolds.  "There was no cover memo."
     "Should we have found a cover memo?"  said Meese.  "Not
necessarily," I said.  "I was just wondering."  Meese and his assistants
asked a number of other questions.  Had I ever discussed this
arrangement with President Reagan?  No, I said, but if anyone had, it
would have been Admiral Poindexter.  The meeting ended shortly before
six o'clock, when Meese left to
     pick up his wife at the airport.  As he was leaving, I expressed my
concern about the safety of the hostages.  "I certainly hope this won't
be made public," I said.
     Famous last words.
     After the meeting, I drove to the White House to find Admiral
Poindexter.  He wasn't in his office, or at home, either.  The Sit Room
watch officer told me he was at BFK Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys
were playing the Washington Redskins.  "Do you want us to beep him?"  he
asked.
     "That's all right," I said.  "It can wait."  I thought I'd let him
get home before I gave him the bad news.
     When I finally reached the admiral, at home that evening, I told
     him that Ed Meese and his people had shown me a memo from April
which was explicit about the "diversion."
     The admiral was silent for what seemed like a long time.  "Well,"
     he finally said, "what did you tell them?"
     "I told them the truth," I replied.  "I explained that this
particular transaction hadn't occurred, but that other transactions
had."
     Another long silence.  "You did the right thing," said the admiral.
I stayed in my office very late that night.  I knew it wouldn't be long
now, and I had stacks of material to strt a farewell letter that I had
previously prepared for Admiral Poindexter:
     There is that old line about you can't fire me, I quit.  But I do
want to make it official so that you know I sincerely meant what I said
to you over the course of these last several difficult weeks.  I'm
prepared to depart at the time you and the President decide it to be in
the best interests of the Presidency and the country.  I am honored to
have served the President, you and your predecessors these past five and
a half years.  I only regret that I could not have done so better.  My
prayer is that the President is not harther damaged by what has
transpired and that the hostages will not be harmed as a consequence of
what we now do.  Finally, I remain convinced that what we tried to
accomplish was worth the risk.  We nearly succeeded.  Hopefilly when the
political fratricide is finished there will be others in a moment of
calm reflection who will agree.
     Warmest regards, Semper Fidelis, Oliver North I sent that letter on
Monday.  By Tuesday I was gone.
     Chapter 15
     Lights, Cameras...
     I have always been an early riser.  The morning after I was fired,
I left the house, as usual, at six o'clock, and held the front door open
so that Max, our Labrador retriever, could go out for his morning
ritual.  It was still dark, and at first I didn't notice anything out of
the ordinary.  But as soon as I closed the door behind me, all hell
broke loose: klieg lights lit up the yard, cameras flashed, and dozens
of reporters started shouting to me from the fence along the road in
front of our house.
     Max was not amused.  He's a tough-looking dog, but he's actually a
wimp.  He didn't even object when Dornin climbed on his back and rode
him like a horse.  But Max has one great talent: a ferocious bark that
belies his basic cowardice.  And that morning, as soon as those lights
came on, Max let loose.  The press panicked.  "Run for it, Bob!  It's an
attack dog!"  Light stands came crashing down, car doors slammed, and
reporters scrambled for their cars.  Poor Max just stood there,
quivering in fear with his tail between his legs-but barking like crazy.
But when they really want to, journalists learn fast, and it didn't take
them long to break the code on Max.  He was a pushover for a 7-Eleven
doughnut, and over the next few months that dog must have gained about
twenty pounds.  But for those first couple of
     ornings after the firing, there was only very brief footage of
Oliver orth leaving his house.
     From November 26,1986, until after the hearings the following uly,
the press was at our house every morning at five o'clock.  They ame on
Sunday.  They showed up on Thanksgiving.  They were even ere on
Christmas.
     Christmas!  That really shocked me.  With four children, we get up
arly on Christmas morning.  First we take pictures of the kids sitting n
the stairs.  Then we sing "Silent Night."  After the kids open their
hristmas stockings, we all go into the kitchen, where Daddy makes
lueberry pancakes.  When breakfast is over, we gather around the tree o
hand out the presents.  That's when I noticed that Dornin, our
fiveear-old, was missing.
     Just then the front door opened, and in walked Dornin with an
mptytray.
     "Where were you?"  I asked.  "It's time for the presents."
     "I went outside to give the 'porters some Christmas cookies,"
orninsaid.
     "I thought I told you never to talk to them," I said.  "But Daddy,"
she said.  "It's Christmas, and they were cold."  Only months later,
when I looked back on this incident, did it ccur to me that Dornin's
Christmas spirit was a lot better than mine.  realized that those
reporters and cameramen had been sent there by eir editors and
producers.  I'm sure it wasn't their choice to spend hristmas morning
standing outside our house.  At least I hope not.
     But even today, nearly five years later, I can't quite get over the
     ct that the press showed up on Christmas morning.  They also came n
Easter and on Passover.  The only morning they missed was New ear's Day.
Was that their religious holiday?
     Thark:s to these daily visitors, I must have been the most
phographed commuter in America.  Anyone with a television must have
ought I lived in my car.  Soon Johnny Carson was doing routines where
     e put on a uniform and answered questions through a car window:
     Reporter: "Colonel North, sir, is it true that you secretly sold
arms to Iran and used the money to help the Nicaraguan resistance?"
Carson (looking isp at his qisestioner): "Say, did you know you had a
very long hair growing in your left nostril?"
     By then, of course, I was no longer driving to the White House.
     The night I was fired, I received a call from General P.  x.
Kelley, commandant of the Marine Corps.  "You've been reassigned," he
said.  "Put on your uniform and report to headquarters tomorrow
morning."  General Kelley posted me to the Plans and Policies division
at headquarters, and I appreciated his vote of confidence.  He could
have assigned me to some far less visible job, or even asked me to
resign.  Instead, he had me working right down the hall from him.  I
offered to leave the service, but he wouldn't hear of it.  "Come in
tomorrow," he said.  "If anyone doesn't like it he can talk to me."
Late that night, I got out my uniform and dusted it off.  I had rarely
worn it at the NSC, probably no more than half a dozen times in five and
a half years.  At one point, somebody at the White House had decided
that every Wednesday, all the military people on the White House staff
should wear their uniforms.  This lasted about a month, until some of
the civilians started looking around and muttering, "My God, there are
so many of them!"  And there were.  It wasn't long before we were back
in civvies.
     That first morning after I was fired, the reporters chased me all
the way to Marine headquarters in Arlington, following me in vans, cars,
and motorcycles.  Every morning thereafter, the press was waiting as I
left the house.  They descended on us like a plague of locusts, intent
on devouring our privacy and scouring the neighborhood for tidbits of
information about our family.  We couldn't go to the store, or to
church, or the gas station without being watched.  We couldn't get the
newspaper, fetch the mail, wash the car, or mow the lawn without being
observed, filmed, videotaped, photographed, tape-recorded, or written
about.  The house.  They chased our children to the bus stop and pumped
them with questions.  When Betsy and I started driving them ourselves,
they interviewed the neighbors' children.  When my pickup had a flat
tire on the way back from the dump one Saturday, they stopped and jumped
out of their "chase car"-not to help me change the tire, but to him me
doing it.
     We soon developed a morning routine.  I'd get into my car, and as I
drove out to the road, a flock of reporters and photographers would be
standing there, blocking the driveway.  I'd wave them aside with a
     mile.  They'd shake their heads.  I'd slowly ease forward, always
keepng in mind the admonition of Brendan Sullivan, my lawyer: "Whatevr
you do, don't run them over."
     They'd signal for me to roll down the windowmy ticket out of
     e driveway.  As soon as I did, they'd start shouting questions:
'Colonel North!  What do you have to say about reports in the press at
you sold pieces of White House china and silverware to raise oney for
the contras?"
     Brendan and his colleagues had given me strict orders to remain
ilent, and no matter how provocative the questions, I did everything
could to comply.  Although I chafed at this restriction, I knew there
ere good reasons for it.  When you're facing the kind of inquisition I
as, anything and everything you say in the press can, and probably Il,
be used against you.  Unlike some of the attorneys who representd other
Iran-contra defendants, my lawyers maintained a strict code f silence.
They didn't talk about the case with anybod~and they xpected the same
from me.
     Every day, Brendan would be given a pile of phone messages from
     e press, but he never returned the calls.  As he came in and out of
the aw firm, reporters continually asked him questions.  But he rehised
to onfirm or deny anything, no matter how absurd the allegation.
     "How did it go this morning, Mr. Sullivan?"
     "No comment."
     "Are you worried about this case?"
     "No comment."
     "How's the weather today?"
     "No comment."
     I didn't have quite as much will power, and there were a couple of
zmes when I surrendered to overwhelming temptation.  One morng, a
reporter from CBS asked me how I felt about people like Maueen Reagan,
who had said publicly that I should stop "hiding" ehind the Fifth
Amendment and start telling my story.
     "I don't believe the President really wants me to abandon my
dividual rights under the Constitution," I said.  "How many of you re
willing to give up your First Amendment rights?"  Then somebody asked:
"How do you feel about some of the ings your erstwhile friends are
saying about you?"
     "On that one," I replied, "I would refer you to Psalm Seven, verse
ne."
     "What does it say?"  somebody shouted as I drove off.  "Look it
up!"  I yelled back.  "It'll be good ior you."  That night, on the "ABC
Evening News," Peter Jennings actually read the verse on the air: O lord
my God, I take refilge in you;
     save and deliver me from all who pursue me,
     Or they will tear me likealion and rip me to pieces with no one to
rescue me.
     Okay, I thought, this isn't a total disaster.  At least I was able
to get a verse of Scripture onto the network news.
     Despite everything, I tried to retain some of my morning routine,
which normally included reading at least a few verses from the Bible
before I left for work.  Occasionally, if I came across a line that
seemed especially appropriate, I would quote it.  The reporters liked to
tease me about this, and sometimes I teased them back.  "I try to read
two things every morning," I told them.  "The Bible and the Washington
Port That way I know what both sides are thinking."
     My father had died in 1984, but my mother, living alone in upstate
New York, was besieged by the press.  Reporters used to ring every
buzzer in her apartment building until somebody finally let them in.  TV
cameramen stood outside her door for hours, and there were times when
she didn't dare leave.  When the press couldn't get to her, they started
in on her neighbors: "Do you know Mrs.  North down the hall?  Tell me,
how often does her son come to visit?  Does she have any strange
habits?"
     I had tried to prepare my own family for what was about to happen,
but none of us could begin to imagine the hill scope of it.  The night I
was fired, we all assembled on the living room floor where we normally
played Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.  "I have been reassigned back to
the Marine Corps," I said.  "Although I haven't done anything wrong,
there may be a lot of negative stories about me on television and in the
newspaper."  I didn't go into much detail, and I couldn't foresee then
how brutal all this would be.
     Looking back, I can see how much this whole thing has intruded
     the lives of our children.  In addition to the teasing, the
questions,
     e rumors, and the wild allegations, the kids have also suffered on
a ore basic level.  They were no longer allowed to be just Tait North,
Stuart North, or Sarah North, or Dornin North.  From now on ople would
see them as Oliver North's kids.  Even today, wherever ey go, they start
out either bigger or smaller in other people's eyes, pending on how
those people feel about me.  No matter what they complish on their own,
it can never compete with Daddy's famehis notoriety.  They don't deserve
that, and I feel terrible about it.  Each of our children has reacted
differently to these pressures.  it, a senior in high school, a
cheerleader, and head of the honor ciety, was filrious when I was fired.
She blamed the President and whole administration.  As she saw it,
Ronald Reagan abandoned me er I had worked so hard for his policies, and
to this day she is bitter out him.  She and I have had some long talks
about Iran-contra, and role in it, and I have tried to put my own
situation in a larger cont.  "Keep this in mind," I told her.  "In many
other countries, if mething like this happened, your father could well
have left for rk one morning and you'd never have heard from him again."
Stuart, a sophomore in high school, responded with questions.  I uld
answer some of them, but much of the information was either ssified or
had been declared off-limits by the lawyers.  Naturally, this hard on
Stuart.  Try telling your sixteen-year-old boy: "I'm sorry, I just can't
talk to you about that."
     "What do you mean?"  he'd say.  "I'm your son!"  He was reading
these articles in the paper, and watchin kids in class ask me questions
about the things you did?"
     "Just tell them that you know your dad is a good Christian who
uldn't knowingly break the law," I told him.
     Fortunately, Stuart was in a relatively protected environment at
oodbury Forest School in Orange, ~rginia, where he was surroundby
supportive friends and teachers.  But the long arm of the investition
reached him there, as federal agents showed up at the school to termine
how Stuart's tuition bills were paid.  (He was on scholarip.) Stuart
knew generally what was going on, but Emmett Wright, e headmaster, made
every effort to shield him from it.
     Sarah, who was ten, probably suffered the most.  She developed a
     rash on the back of her hands from nervously rubbing them together.
She was hounded at school-not only by her classmates, but even by a
couple of the teachers.  She once asked one of her teachers what to do
with a paper she had written.  "Why don't you shred it?"  the teacher
replied.  "If you don't know how, just ask your father.  He's an expert
at it.
     But most of her teachers were far more supportive.  One of them
gave Betsy a pair of notes that she had confiscated from Sarah and one
of her friends in class.  Sarah's note breaks my heart: "Dennis says,
'Your dad's going to jail,"' she wrote.  "And I was like, 'No, he's
not.' I wish my dad was normal.  You know what I mean?"  But even in
this there was a ray of sunshine.  The response from her friend Cindy
read, "No he won't.  God won't let that happen."
     Five-year-old Dornin, fortunately, was too young to fiilly grasp
the content of what was being said and written about her father.  We had
established a family rule about not watching the news, but sometimes
Dornin would see my face on television.  She'd run up to Betsy and say,
"Mommy, Daddy's on television.  Again!"
     "Cover your ears, child," Betsy would say, "and turn that thing
off."
     The avalanche of publicity brought the two younger girls much
closer together.  But even with a new and far less demanding job, I was
rarely around to spend much time with them.  I would arrive at Marine
headquarters around seven-fifteen.  At four in the afternoon, I'd drive
over to Williams & Connolly to spend the next six to eight hours with
the lawyers.  It was like working two jobs.  Had Betsy not been a
strong, devout, God-fearing woman, I shudder to think what would have
happened to our family.  But somehow she managed to keep us relatively
sane, which was itself a fiilltime job.  Every morning, for example, she
would go through the Post and perform surgery on it, cutting out every
article about Daddy and his legal problems so the kids wouldn't see
them.  During those difficult months, Betsy and I went through a wide
range of emotions.  She was extremely supportive, but there were moments
when the strain got to us both.  "What have you done to my children?"
she blurted out one night.
     "Wait a minute," I said.  "Toisr children?"
     Obviously, the conversation didn't end there.  Some of the stories
in the press were just ludicrous.  That Fawn Hall and I had planned to
run off together to a desert island.  That a private jet had stood by
all through 1986, waiting to take me wherever I wanted to go on a
moment's notice.  That I was involved with drug-running for the contras.
That I was behind an assassination attempt on Eden Pastora.  That I was
a compulsive liar.  That I was, above all, a loose cannon on the gundeck
of state.  A number of leaks clearly came from the White House.  Once it
became obvious that my lawyers wouldn't allow me to respond to any
allegation, no matter how absurd, it seemed that a few individuals
worked overtime in an attempt to divert attention away from the White
House and other administration officials who had been involved in, or at
least aware of, my activities.  Story after story detailed operations I
had supposedly conducted all on my own.  "Anonymous sources made a
concerted effort to portray me as an unreliable renegade, and the press
lapped it up, never stopping to ask how I could possibly have done all
this on my own.  Even now, many Americans believe that I sold arms to
the Iranians by rnyself, and that no one in the U.S.  government knew
what I was doing in Central America!  I believe that many of these
stories originated with Don Regan's staff.  He had apparently put out
the word that my credibility was to be destroyed, and that I was to be
depicted as some kind of deceitfiil wild man.  (That way, nobody would
believe me if I implicated the President.) Strangely, I didn't hear any
of these accusations before I was fired.  In fact, some of these same
anonymous sources used to come up to me and tell me what a great job I
was doing.
     Many of the negative stories about me were based on true events,
     but were twisted to cast them in a nefarious light.  I had indeed
been
     supporting the resistance and meeting with Iranians, and had even
used traveler's checks from the contra account in supermarkets, tire
stores, and to buy leotards for my daughters at Parkiane Hosiery.
Because of this, it was implied that I had violated the Arms Export
Control Act, broken neutrality laws, stolen money, and carried on an
affair with Fawn Hall.  There were also stories about my hospitalization
in Bethesda, including one report that I had been found running round
nakedwaving a gun!
     Almost all of these articles and news stories were attributed to
unnamed or anonymous sources-mostly government insiders with their own
axes to grind.  But the media dutifillly and uncritically carried them.
There was a real mob mentality, and some people said things about me
that they later came to regret.  A couple of them even apologized.
     Certainly I had made mistakes.  But I had been a good staff
officer.  I was loyal to the President and his policies, and I bitterly
resented allegations that I wasn't.  I had worked my tail off at the
NSC, and had kept my superiors informed every step of the way.
     For me, the most offensive accusation was that I supposedly saw
myself as being above the law, or that I "shredded the Constitution."
That was terribly hurtltil, because it was contrary to the way I was
raised and educated, not to mention everything I had learned at
Annapolis and as a Marine.  Each time I was promoted, I had taken an
oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.  I
meant those words, and I rhaps the most disturbing story of all appeared
on February 20, 1987, when it was suggested in the Washington Post that
I had passed top-secret intelligence data to the Iranians without the
permission of my superiors: "If he was acting entirely on his own," the
article said, "North may have violated federal espionage laws, which for
military personnel convicted of spying in peacetime carry the death
penalty."
     In reality, every bit of information we gave to the Iranians was
prepared specifically for that purpose by the CIA and passed to the
Iranians with the knowledge and approval of senior government officials.
But that didn't seem to make much difference.  On a Saturday morning,
two days after the article appeared, Sarah and I got into the pickup
truck and drove out to get some firewood.  "Colonel North," one of the
reporters shouted.  "How do you feel about the article in the Post that
said you might get the death penalty for treason?"
     "If there's going to be an execution," I replied, "we ought to hold
it in Yankee Stadium.  That way we can sell tickets and send the
proceeds to the contras."
     As I was spouting off out the window, I couldn't see the shock
     and the tears on Sarah's face.  It wasn't until we were hallway up
the hill that I noticed she was crying.
     I pulled over, put my arm around her, and said, "Don't worry,
honey.  It's going to be all right."
     "Daddy," she said, "they can't give you the death penalty.  It's
unconstitutional."
     Some of the worst stories came from the congressional investigators
and the Office of the Independent Counsel, where scores of attorneys and
their agents had begun probing every aspect of my life.  The
investigators were especially interested in my financial situation, and
they left no stone unturned.  They even sent agents out to California to
interview a friend of Stuart's who had helped us paint our fence.  I had
written him a check for the whopping sum of thirty dollars.  His father
called me one night and said, "Boy, it's nice to know you've got friends
in Washington who care enough to come all the way out here to talk about
you."  Our tax dollars at work.  The congressional investigators and
special prosecutors went after every single business and individual to
whom I had written a check.  They even interviewed our baby-sitter.
     One Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the gas station to fill up
     the pickup truck.  When the owner spotted me, he came out and said,
"Well, your buddies were here this week."
     "What do you mean?"
     "You know, the G-men.  They took my business records, my tax
records, everything."
     The same thing happened at the little sawmill where I used to buy
     slab wood for our wood stove, and again at the local hardware
store.  They went after our plumber and the electrician.  They even sent
agents down to Kentucky, because our tax return had included several
hundred dollars from the estate of Betsy's father.
     Nothing was off-limits.  They actually tried to interview a pastor
about our past contributions at church.  "I'm not totally familiar with
the law," he told them, "but isn't there some provision for a pastoral
rivilege?"  The agents left without answers.
     Even if your neighbors like you, and ours were great, enough vists
from enough investigators inevitably throw a little sand into the ears.
It makes people wonder: if they're that interested in this guy, aybe
there is something wrong with him.  I might react the same ay: when a
federal agent knocks on your door and flips out his adge, it makes an
impact.  (It's snpposed to.) We've all seen it on TV:
     the Feds are the good guys, right?  And so, inevitably, people
begin to ruminate: You know, he was gone a lot.  He was a little
secretive.  Maybe there is something wrong....
     Before the investigations were over, every one of our friends and
neighbors was either interviewed or subpoenaed by congressional
investigators, or the Office of the Independent Counsel, or both.  I'm
surprised they didn't bump into each other as they went around asking
questions.  Do the Norths ever fight?  Do they go away on trips?  Do
they live beyond their means?  Betsy's sister was asked, "How much does
it cost to feed the horses, dogs, and cats when the Norths are away?"
Later, they went after Betsy-fingerprints, mug shots, handwriting
sample, grand jury, the whole bit.  It was just awftil.
     It was a very strange situation, with the government I had worked
     for these many years now using its filll bureaucratic firepower
against me.  The IRS called: they wanted to send three agents to my
house for "three or four days" to conduct a "ftill field audit."  I had
better things to do, but I was about to say, "Sure, come on over.  I've
got nothing to hide."
     By then, however, I knew enough to check with Brendan, who
     just about had a cow.  "Not on your life," he said.  "You're not
letting anybody from any agency of the government on your property, and
you're not giving them anything.  Tell them to call me."
     The congressional inquisitors and special prosecutors weren't the
only ones after me.  Early in 1987, the FBI learned that certain Libyans
in the United States were collecting information on my location, travel
routes, and work habits with the intention of making an attack or an
assassination attempt on me and/or my family.  But when the FBI called
Brendan, they weren't nearly so forthcoming.  I was with him at the
time, and the conversation went something like this:
     FBI: We have information that leads us to believe that your client,
Colonel North, may be in some jeopardy.  Sullivan: You're telling me?
     FBI: This has nothing to do with the Congress or the Independent
Counsel.  We have some information about the possibility that someone
may be trying to kill him.  Sullivan: And who might that be?
     FBI: I can't give you that information.  Sullivan: Then why are you
calling me?
     FBI: Because Colonel North ought to have some protection.
Sullivan: I agree.  Can I count on you to provide it?  FBI: We're not in
the business of providing protection.  All we can do is noti~ you.
     Sullivan: Exactly what is the threat?  FBI: I'm sorry, that's all I
can tell you.
     Sullivan: That's really great.  What are we supposed to do?  FBI: I
would suggest that you contact the Department of Defense.  Your client
is in the military, and they have people who can deal with this sort of
problem.  Sullivan: Can you clearances.
     Sullivan: Okay, let me get this straight.  North is the target of
an attempt to kill him.  You can't tell us when or where, or who it isor
anything more about it.  And we're supposed to get hold of somebody I
don't know at the Pentagon who might be able to get more information
from you?  FBI: You've got it.
     Well, by the end of the afternoon, Brendan had tracked down the
right people at the Naval Investigative Service.  We soon learned that
certain members of a group called the People's Committee for Libyan
Students (PCLS), based in Virginia, were planning their first annual
commemoration of the American antiterrorist bombing raid on Libya in
April 1986.  After my involvement in that operation, I had been
threatened with death by Abu Nidal, one of the world's most dangerous
terrorists.  But it seemed that Abu Nidal wasn't moving fast enough for
Colonel Q., because now some of his own boys were trying to speed up the
timetable.  That evening, the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) assigned
a small protective detail at our house that they coordinated with the
Fairfax County Police Department, the state police, and the Loudoun
County Sheriff's office.  Nobody said so directly, but I had the feeling
that they hoped to catch these guys in the act.  (I would have tried the
same thing in my old counterterrorist job.)
     One morning, shortly after the security detail was posted, I
planned to stop by Tait's school on my way to work.  As we left the
house, the agent who was riding with me jotted down the license numbers
of the cars parked along our street, most of which belonged to
reporters.  While I was at the school, a report came back that one of
the cars parked in front of our house had apparently been stolen.  The
agent with me was immediately concerned, because he had noticed that the
woman driving that car appeared to be of Arab descent.  He quickly
alerted the local police.  "Quick," he said to me, "out the back door.
We've got to get you out of here."
     "Where are we going?"  I asked.
     "To Marine Corps headquarters.  You'll be safe there."
     "No, we're not," I said.  "If there's a problem at home, that's
where we're going."
     From the car, I used his portable phone to call Betsy, who was home
alone.  There was no answer.
     We raced back to the house.  The red car was gone, but there were
     two police cars in the drivewayand a third one parked on the
street.  Betsy was in the kitchen, and a very apologetic police officer
was standing out front.  After I had left, Betsy had gone out to the
barn to feed the horses.  She was out there with her coat thrown over
her nightgown when the officers showed up.  When they saw someone moving
in the barn, they did what any police officer in that situation would
have done.  They drew their guns and shouted, "You there!  Freeze!"
     I went nuts.  "That's it!"  I told the agents.  "You guys please
leave.  Call off the helicopters, the dogs, the police cruisers.  It's
not your fault.  I'm just gratefttl that nobody sneezed when that gun
was pointed at my wife.  But that's it, gentlemen.  Good-bye."  The
mysterious red car turned out to be driven by a reporter from a
newspaper in Philadelphia.  It belonged to her boyfriend, and it hadn't
been stolen after all.  Somebody had copied down the license number
wrong, which shows that you don't have to work at the NSC to make that
kind of mistake.
     When I finally got to work, there was a note on my desk telling
     me to report immediately to General Tom Morgan, assistant
commandant of the Marine Corps.
     "What happened this morning?"  he asked.
     I told him the story.
     The general reminded me that this protection had been put in place
by the government, and that nobody had any interest in having a Marine
assassinated.  He agreed that there had to be some changes made, and he
told me that this could best be done with our family quietly out of the
area until the improved security arrangements were in place.  We were to
report to Camp Lejeune within twenty-four hours, where we would be
sequestered for a few days.  This wasn't a suggestion or a request.  It
was an order.
     It could have been worse.  Someone filrther up the line in the
Pentagon actually suggested that I should be issued
permanent-changeof-station orders to a secure military facility in the
AIeutian Islands off the coast of Alaska!  Brendan thought it might be
difficult to defend a client four thousand miles away.  General Morgan
agreed, and the orders were never cut.
     The next morning we loaded up the car and drove down to North
Carolina with a security escort.  As soon as we left, agents from the
NIS moved into our house and began installing sophisticated security and
surveillance systems.  Later, I was indicted for having accepted a
$13,000 security system in 1986.  At that price, it couldn't have been
Il that good.  The federal government spent close to a million dollars
rotecting my family and me from February 1987 until October of at year,
when pressure from angry congressmen forced the Departent of Defense to
cut off the security.
     At Camp Lejeune we were sequestered in a beach house on a emote
corner of the base.  Unfortunately, late winter in North Carolia is not
the best time to enjoy the beach.  I read stories to Sarah and ornin,
and we played board games for hours.  (Stuart remained at chool, and
Tait stayed with a friend so she wouldn't miss classes.) We ad some good
times, but I felt like a caged lion.  After the NIS had secured our
house in Great Falls, we returned
     o a totally new situation.  We were now guarded by up to thirty
rmed security men in three eight-hour shifts.  And I do mean men.  'm a
little old-fashioned when it comes to accepting women in tradizonal male
jobs, but as a man with a wife and three lovely daughters, seemed to me
that our security team wasn't particularly well balnced.  I know how
young men think, and when Tait got in the car, ome of these guys were
watching her instead of the road.  It was also
     getting just a little ridiculous: Betsy and the girls would all go
shopping, and they'd be followed by five husky young men with bulging
pockets, all of whom looked to be about seven feet tall.
     "Can you send some female agents?"  I asked General Morgan.  A few
days later, five very attractive women showed up to join the security
team.  Stuart was ove~oyed.  Unfortunately, the male agents became even
more dive security team who met on the job later got married.
     Having guards around me all day took some getting used to.  I liked
these people.  They were professionals, good at their job, and I
appreciated the safety they provided for Betsy and the children.  They
were also extremely considerate-or so I thought.  If I had to drive to
the grocery store for a gallon of milk, or to the laundry to pick up the
dry cleaning, one of the agents would always volunteer to do it for me.
"Please, Colonel, don't trouble yourself.  You stay here.  I'll take
care of it."  It made me uncomfortable, but these guys were on their
feet and out the door in no time.  At first I assumed that these were
simply favors, perhaps inspired
     by a "servant's heart," as the Christian phrase describes it.
Being new to the security routine, it took a while before it finally
dawned on me that something else was going on here.  It wasn't just that
nobody on our security team wanted anything to happen to me; it was that
they especially didn't want anything to happen to me on their watch.
After all, if you're in the security business it doesn't look all that
great on your resume when you're forced to mention that the last guy you
were protecting is unable to provide a recommendation because he was
gunned down while picking up his dry cleaning.
     Looking back on it, I can only laugh at my reaction to all the
early publicity in the months after I was fired.  Kid, you ain't seen
nothing yet!  Once the hearings began, everything that happened until
then seemed trivial.  It was one thing to be a household name, but after
I appeared on television all day for six days, I became a household
face.  The July 9 issue of the Washington Post contained twenty-three
pictures of me.  Suddenly there were Oliver North T-shirts, buttons, and
bumper stickers.  There were even Oliver North dolls.  Someone told me
later on that after the dolls stopped selling, the manufacturer took the
same mold, stuck on a new head, and replaced the Marine uni
     form with a fancy Italian suit.  Voilathe Mikhail Gorbachev doll.
Say it ain't so!
     There were Oliver North look-alike contests.  In People magazine a
celebrity dentist in Beverly FIills explained what was wrong with my
teeth.  On television, a plastic surgeon to the stars explained how my
broken nose could be straightened and my ears pinned back so that I
wouldn't look like Howdy Doody.  (The shocking part about it was that my
kids had no idea who Howdy Doody was.) There were cardboard cutouts,
videotapes, and hundreds of editorial cartoons.  There were even
Ollieburgers, made of-what else?-shredded beef covered with shredded
lettuce and shredded cheese.  There must have been a million jokes about
shredding.  At least Advertising Aae was a little more original when
they suggested that I'd make a good pitch man or-warning, bad pun
follows-contraceptives.
     Newsweek, which never said anything nice about me, nonetheless
     an a billboard ad showing me at the hearings, with the caption "Few
ings in life are as feisty as Newsweek."  A company that made frames or
eyeglasses ran an ad depicting me "wearing" their glasses, with the
aption, "I've been framed."  And a British bank ran a flaIl-page ad in a
ondon newspaper, with a photo of me and the caption, "With a few otable
exceptions, no one can transfer your money round the world ore
efficiently than us."
     The circus atmosphere eventually died down, but the memory ingers
on.  To this day, I'm still recognized wherever I go.
     "You look an awtul lot like Oliver North," people will say.  "You
know," I reply, "people tell me that all the time."  Sometimes I
actually get away with it.  But usually they'll say, "You eally are
Oliver North, aren't you?"  When I hear that, I reach for ypen.
     People often have a preconceived idea of what I should look like,
     nd they're not shy about telling me.  "I expected you'd be taller,"
hey'll say.  Or a complete stranger will come up to me and say, You've
put on a little weight, Colonel."  (The fact that it's usually ue
doesn't make me feel any better.)
     At first I naively thought I could avoid being recognized.  When
     ur family went to Disney World, I wore a huge pair of sunglasses
and n oversized hat.  I even kept my head down so people wouldn't see y
face.  It worked, to~lor about ten minutes.  We were coming out of Space
Mountain when a woman waiting in line called out, "Look, honey, it's
Ollie North.  Hey, Ollie, what's with that ~nny hat and the stupid
glasses?"  I spent the next forty minutes signing autographs while Betsy
and the kids went on to the next ride.
     In the summer of 1990, afier sailing in an ocean race with
Brendart, I showed up in Bermuda with a beard and long hair, happy in my
imagined anonymity.  But as soon as I walked into the hotel, somebody
called out, "There's Oliver North.  Nice beard, Ollie!"
     One time, when I wanted to slip into Williams & Connolly with out
being identified by anticontra demonstrators outside the building, I
donned an old gray wig that had once belonged to Betsy's mother.  With a
leather jacket and old jeans, I looked like an elderly Berrigan brother.
Even my own lawyers didn't recognize me.  When I bounded into Barry
Simon's office, he jumped up and yelled, "How did you get in here?"
     The biggest consequence of being recognized is that everything
takes much longer than it used to.  Whether it's leaving church, getting
a haircut, or watching Stuart play football, people are always coming
over to me, shaking my hand, taking pictures, asking for autographs.  It
got to the point where Betsy started asking me not to show up at certain
events she was going to because it took Us so long to leave.
     Sometimes, when we're out together, Betsy has to remind me to
     be nice to all the people who come up to me.  Somebody will ask for
my autograph when I'm in the middle of a conversation.  "I'm sorry,"
I'll tell them, "but I don't have anything to write on."  Then Betsy
kicks me hard on the ankle.  "Wait a minute, I might have a card right
here in my pocket."
     "I realize how tiring it must be," she'll tell me later.  "But the
people who ask for your autograph have no idea that you've already been
stopped fifieen times in the past hour."  And of course she's right.
Without the kindness, generosity, and prayers of so many ~ericans, we
would never have been able to mount a defense.  There's just n everybody
who comes up to me is supportive and kind.  I'm aware, of course, that
lots of Americans disapprove of everything I did-or at least everything
they think I did.  But since the day I was fired, with the exception of
congressmen and pros
     ecutors, not more than half a dozen Americans have been unkind
enough to say anything nasty or critical to my face.  About the only
time I encounter any hostility is when I'm out making a speech,
especially at a political event.  But even when people don't approve,
they're usually polite.
     Sometimes, on the street or in an airport, they'll say, "I watched
your show," as though the hearings were some kind of soap opera or
variety show.  Or "I watched your trial," although the trial, which took
place almost two years alter the hearings, was never on television.  But
I can understand that, because the hearings certainly looked like a
trial.  I've even had people come up to say, "I read your book,"
although until now I had never written one.
     When the news media showed up at our house every morning, they were
able to capture-totally against our will-little vignettes of ordinary
family life at our home in suburban Virginia: leaving for work, cutting
the grass, or going out to buy a Christmas tree.  People who saw these
scenes on television started to think of us as a TV family and came to
feel as if they knew us.  It's still an odd feeling to have a perfect
stranger come up and ask me about Betsy, or one of our kids, by name.
They still ask me if Betsy still has the blue-and-white polkadot dress
she wore for one day at the hearings.  People we have never met before
invite us to stay at their houses.  Maybe I'd feel differently if I were
a rock star or a politician.  While I certainly appreciate the support,
I have never become comfortable with all the attention.
     It happens at church, too, and a few people actually started
attending our church because they wanted to talk to me.  Several years
back, I wasn't very sympathetic when President Reagan announced that he
and Nancy had stopped going to church because their presence was simply
too disruptive to the service.  Today, alter seeing the disruption even
at my level, I can appreciate why he said that.
     I miss having a free and totally spontaneous conversation with
     people I don't know.  I used to enjoy talking to my seatmate on an
airplane, or trading stories with the father standing next to me at a
horse show where our daughters are participating.  But these days,
people usually ask questions or make comments about my activities, and
when they don't, it's only because they're going out of their way to
treat me as "normal."
     To this day, our family receives a good deal of mail from people
     fill
     we have never met, who send us anniversary" :=ar.': I.l'.
especially Christmas cards.  Some of these ~'l'I.5 Iii ordinary
American," or with some other ar1lI.'i I' yi"iiI 1 are signed by name,
and each December, rt.1[,'!/ I I.' "Il I thousands of cards in an
attempt to figure [))[Jf I)]]' people we actually know.  Several
correspozi'.i e:['1 1:.  (1 "(i tographs of the house ii, l'hilmont
where I I)I,.,'.',1'e'OI' I wool factory.  People send us cookies anci
I.".;]k.]I.!',.  I 'II II".  team tries to keep us from eating.
     Let me add, however, that fame is not "[hI.' J.  I One of the great
benefits of this whole fiasc::i:: is I: I touch with many of the men I
served with iI.  Vi, I;' II' letters, and some of them show up at my
'.']'~,~I..' ::.  0'~::':~: steadfast in their support, and they knew
1th It ~I"I I ',.,:":: I reading in the papers and hearing on
televisi'::i J'i'.:',]' I
     It's great to see these guys again, but: ii I:]],', I> I '1:.' time
we were together, well over nventy ye-I.I.'s a[.,i,(: 'I I;'.',';':':II
'I and I was twenty-five.  Since then, all of us 1'i NIl;'.' I
Ill.Iii.Il and older.  They don't look quite as sharp 5 iIi: Ii ['I I '1
think how I must appear to then'.  Still, it'.) ~r~;' I iI['.'Iji.'I II
and to meet their families.  ~ catch up as I.ts '~ I':','.II.I: I] talk
about the war.  Another advantage to being known is Ill'I ;IJt '1]i1'JI
' :: 'i II'!  I ly about a particular subject, I can usuaJ].j.' [Sell I
I.  'I..']']] I: spoken out on a number of issues, but 0Ifl1..!  oIl" t'
about is the need to limit the number ~~' JeI"I'r ' [:]][~III" I
Congress can serve.  Most members of the: 'T:"J'l)iII I.t: I 'I"I]I..'.'
'I Washington with good intentions.  They dit't iI 1' II."  I: trust, or
to pillage the public treasury.  But "~1'!I" professional politicians
whose overriding ci:i'n c1::iI']' I I I.'!  II:: : again and again and
again.  'The President':' J eI'I I' 1 I:' : we should have a similar
limit for Congress.  Yet another benefit of fame is that, 'iJ'i:i:iii::
iJ I I]II,I'I.!  I: exposure has actually strengthened my cc 'i fll:I!II
I' 1111.  There have been some very difhcult times, ["LIt 'II/I I iI
II'i"]III I I I that experience closer than ever.  I'm home' J'>r o,:I'I
I'), III I' I I spend more time with our children-wh.'Ii::h III ' I:'
I'llII] I' many special times I missed with our two oJ.Jt:r 1111]'
     Finally, there's a certain financial advantage to fame.  I'm not
referring to my speaking fees, most of which go to cover my enormous
legal and security bills.  I have in mind something far more 'modest:
these days, when I write a small check, there's at least some chance
that the person I give it to may decide to keep it as a souvenir.  This
has messed up my checking account more than once, but I can live with
that.
     The first time it happened, I thought back to an anecdote about
General Moshe Dayan that I once heard from Ami Nir.  The story may well
be apocryphal, but I'll tell it anyway in honor of Ami.  Dayan was a
well-known collector of antiquities, and he loved to poke around in
little Arab shops in Israel.  If he saw an artifact he needed for his
collection that was selling for, say, a hundred Israeli pounds, he would
always pay for it by check.
     But the merchant wouldn't cash Dayan's check.  Instead, he'd frame
it and put it on display, with a note: "Check signed by Moshe Dayan.
Two hundred pounds."
     Before long, Dayan's check would be bought by an American tourist.
As Nir explained it, everybody was a winner from this transaction.
Dayan got the artifact for free.  The Arab shopkeeper made twice what he
expected.  And some dentist from Milwaukee would be  his den.
     Chapter 16
     Ci~Ks M~i~Ks
     It was the noise that took me by surprise.  Alter watching the
Irancontra hearings on television for seven weeks before my own
testimony began, I thought I knew what to expect.  But when I finally
arrived at the Senate Caucus Room, the scene that greeted me was a lot
more raucous than the calm and orderly image portrayed on TV.
     Directly in front of me, in the narrow space between the witness
table and my congressional inquisitors, well over a dozen photographers
and cameramen were snapping and shooting like crazy.  Alter so many
months of the press hanging around "Scapegoat Central," as some of them
referred to our house, I was amazed that anyone still wanted to take my
picture.  But on that first morning, the clicking and whirring of
motor-driven cameras continued nonstop for what seemed like half an
hour.  Eventually the photographers settled down, but every time I
shilted in my chair or scratched my ear, it was like stirring up a nest
of insects.  There were times when the commotion was so loud that I had
trouble hearing the questions.
     Just beyond the photographers, on an elevated, double-tiered dais,
sat the twenty-six members of the Iran-Contra Committee and their
innumerable staff.  Peering down at me, they were closer than they
appeared to be on television.  This sea of faces was in constant
     motion, with senators, congressmen, and staffers walking in and
out, whispering to each other, shuffling papers, and passing notes.
     Directly behind me, seated at several long tables, were scores of
reporters and commentators, like a crowd of jackais waiting for the
flesh to come flying their way.  They kept up a constant chatt"r,
buzzing about everything from baseball and the, weather to their
opinions of my latest answer.  Behind them were four rows of chairs for
Executive Branch officials as well as the handfifl of American citizens
in whose name all of this was ostensibly being done.
     From watching the earlier witnesses, I had expected that the
hearing room would resemble a theater, with everybody paying rapt
attention and looking in the same direction.  But this was more like the
crowd at a sporting event.  The only thing missing were the hot dog
vendors and souvenir stands as you entered the stadium-although I was
told that all of that and more could be found right outside the building
on Constitution Avenue.
     Circiss M~ximiss.  The hearing room, which looked so much larger
     on television, reminded me of a miniature Colosseum when the lion5
were about to be released.  The committee members sat there proudly on
their high platforms, like corpulent and powerfiil Roman potentates.
They looked down their noses at the solitary gladiator while the crowd
awaited the ritual slaying.
     A lot of political blood had been spilled in this room.  Back in
1912, the hearings on the sinking of the Titanic had taken place beneath
these very chandeliers.  Teapot Dome, the Army-McCarthy Hearings,
Watergate-these walls had heard it all.  Twelve months earlier, if
anyone had suggested that I, too, would end up testifying here, I would
have asked him what planet he was visiting lrom.
     As I entered the arena on the morning of Tuesday, July 7,1987, I
     had a fleeting thought: Who are these people, and what am I doing
here?  Taking my place at the witness table on that first morning, I was
acutely aware that my mother was watching on television, that Betsy was
watching at home, and that our kids would probably be seeing this, to-at
least on the evening news and in the papers.  (Other than that, it
didn't even occur to me-on that first morning, at least-that millions of
others might well be watching, too.j I was grateflil that our family had
just enjoyed a relaxing Fourth of July together: we had all gone sailing
with Brendan Sullivan and his family, which was a lot
     more ~n that sitting in his conference room and wading through
documents.  But little did I realize that our lives would never again be
the same.  Even today, wherever I go, I meet people who "know" me from
watching the hearings on TV.  They're olten surprised to find that I'm a
"real" person-a fairly casual guy who loves a good laugh, and who turns
out to be very different from that serious and confrontational Marine
they saw on television.  Alter six days of testimony, most people
assumed that this must be my normal disposition.  Actually, I'm not like
that at all.  But this was a special situation.
     For months I had heard little but lies, distortions and innuendos
about myself and my activities.  No wonder I was angry.
     I was well aware that some of the committee members were already
convinced that I was the villain, or, as N~:sis'eek put it in a
colorlhil summary of the conventional wisdom, "the Rambo of diplomacy, a
runaway swashbuckier who had run his own private foreign policy from the
White House basement."
     But if they believed the worst about me, that was fine, because I
wasn't too crazy about some of them, either.  To me, many senators,
congressmen, and even staffers were people of privilege who had
shamelessly abandoned the Nicaraguan resistance and lelt the contras on
the battlefield, exposed and vulnerable to a powerfial and wellarmed
enemy.  And now they wanted to humiliate me for doing what they should
have done!  But our differences were broader than that.  Many of these
people
     had done little in life but run for political office.  They were
supposed to be public servants, but far too many, in my view, were
simply running reelection machines.  They had turned Congress into a
retirement home for professional politicians.
     Unfortunately, some of my attitude seeped through in my answers.
Toward the end of the hearings, one of the members said that I obviously
held Congress in contempt.  I don't.  I have great respect for Congress
as an institution, and I certainly acknowledge its right to gather
information in a fair and honest manner.
     But that's not what happened during the hearings.  Few members came
into that room with an open mind, and few questions were asked simply to
elicit information.  Despite all the pretense, this was not an open
forum in search of the truth.
     This was politics.  Viewed in a larger perspective, these hearings
were one more battle in a two-hundred-year-old constitutional struggle
between the Legislative and Executive branches over the control of
America's foreig sanctioned way for Congress to try to nail the
presidency, and even to humiliate a particular President.  But to force
the public testimony of witnesses who were also facing a special
prosecutor created a whole new dimension.  Taken together, the hearings
and the special prosecutor became a way for the two branches of
government-legislative and executive-to avoid resolving the broader
issues of who would determine our foreign policy.  By the summer of
1987, the White House was willing to give up just about anyone or
anything that would permit the upper echelons of the administration to
survive.  By allowing the actions of those who had served the
administration to be criminalized, the administration itself was able to
back away from the real issues involved.  This was fine with Congress,
and a gilt for the press.
     In the hearings, as in the media, the same question kept coming up
in
     variety of forms: what did the President know, and when did he ow
it?  But even this was a sham, for the committee members
     lready knew the answers.  Shortly before my public testimony began,
rendan had agreed that before I testified publicly, the committee ould
ask me one question in private.  Not surprisingly, their most urning
question was whether I had told the President about the 'diversion."  I
explained that while I had never discussed it with Presient Reagan, I
had always assumed that he was aware of what I was oing, and that he
had, through my superiors, approved it.
     The committee's infatuation with the "diversion" continued
hroughout the hearings.  It served to distract attention from many ther
things that the President and his administration had done to upport the
contras during the Boland prohibitions.  And it kept all e attention
focused on me-which appeared to be just what the ommittee and the
administration wanted.  It was a very cozy relationhip that persisted
throughout-and it lelt John Poindexter and me ut in the cold.  From the
Tower Commission through the hearings, and later, the zals, the
administration's approach was to give the investigators just bout
everything they asked for.  The White House turned over tens of
     thousands of pages of my notes, records, and files to the committee
and to the prosecutors, but wouldn't provide any of it to my attorneys.
And there was a disturbing willingness on the part of the
administration, the Congress, and the special prosecutor's office to
spell out the intimate details of secret operations undertaken by our
government while the entire world press was looking on.  It didn't seem
to matter that lives were at risk.  Both the committee and the special
prosecutor developed a charade of assigning numbers and letters to
various countries and individuals, but this was merely an open
invitation for the press to step in and clear up the ambiguities.  One
possible victim of this process was General Gustavo Alvarez,
     the former commander of the Honduran armed forces who had been
helpfial to our government in supporting the contras.  In January 1989,
he was assassinated near Tegucigalpa.  His direct connection to our
government was certainly known by some of his own people.  But until his
support for American measures to aid the resistance was made public, he
had been relatively safe.
     Alvarez wasn't the only casualty.  Several other individuals in
foreign governments were hounded, harassed, and even purged because
their numbers came up.  Benjamin Piza, the public security minister in
Costa Rica, was threatened with both violence and legal action because
he had helped us build a secret airfield.  In Israel, Ami Nir, who had
risked his life in going to Tehran with us, was fired from his job in
the prime minister's office.  General Rafael Bustillo, the head of the
Salvadoran air force, was humiliated by the special prosecutors, who had
him grabbed and dragged before a grand jury when he arrived in the
United States for medical treatment.
     I was alarmed by the committee's willingness to reveal secrets.  My
inquisitors knew fi:>,ll well that on several occasions I had been sent
to Central America to talk with heads of state and other senior
government officials about support for the contras.  I had promised
these individuals that we would protect both their identities and the
fact of their support.  They didn't ftllly trust the United States to
keep secrets, but we continually assured them that they could count on
us.  The hearings made a mockery of these promises.  What happened
     was tantamount to taking the secret archives of the NSC and dumping
them out in the street.
     * * *
     People olten ask if I was afraid during the hearings.  I was
certainly angry, disgusted, embarrassed, and occasionally contentious,
but fear didn't enter into it.  The one time in my life when I had
experienced real fear was in Vietnam, which may explain why I didn't
feel it in the Senate Caucus Room.  Once you've been shot at and hit in
combat, everything else tends to pale by comparison.  What was the worst
these people could do to me?  As far as I could see, none of them had
any hand grenades.  I wasn't counting on enjoying my days ii, that room,
but I fiilly expected to survive the experience.  The opening question
came from John Nields, the arrogant, longhaired chief counsel for the
House committee members:
     Nields: Colonel North, were you involved in the use of the proceeds
of sales of weapons to Iran for the purpose of assisting the contras in
Nicaragua?
     [The answer, of course, was yes.  But first there was a prearranged
ritual to be played out:
     North: On advice of counsel, I respectfiilly decline Lzo answer the
question based on my constitutional Filth Amendment rights.
     A buzz of anxiety shot through the room, which I took to mean: ait
a minute-does this mean that alter seven months of silence, and e entire
country watching on television, this guy isn't going to talk?  Months
earlier, I had almost gagged when my lawyers had told me
     'd have to take the Filth Amendment.  "What are you talking about?"
said.  "The Filth Amendment is for criminals.  It's for cowards.  It's
antamount to pleading guilty!  I've seen mafia types take the Filth on
elevision.  I've got nothing to hide.  I'll go in there and tell them
verything.  I'm proud of what I did."
     "I know you are," Brendan calmly replied.  "But that's not what
ou're going to do."
     "Listen," he said, when I continued tojungle behind enemy lines,
and we were rtunate enough to survive, I'd rely on you to get us out of
there live.  Well, today you're in a different kind of jungle, and
you've got
     rely on me.  You may not like everything I tell you to do, but as
ng as I'm your lawyer, that's the way it's going to be."
     I still don't feel comfortable about taking the Filth Amendment,
     but as usual, Brendan was right.  From the very beginning, he and
his legal team were looking ahead to the possibility ofa criminal trial.
They wanted to make sure that if Congress compelled me to testify, none
of my answers could be used against me in court if I was later charged
with a crime-as indeed I was.  This arrangement is known as "use
immunity."  To put it into effect, I had to begin by publicly and
formally claiming my constitutional protections against
self-incrimination.
     Senator Inouye, chairman of the Senate select committee, then
spelled out the terms: that I was here because of subpoenas issued by
the Senate and House committees, that I was being compelled to testify,
and that "no evidence or other information obtained under the oath or
any information directly or indirectly derived from such evidence may be
used against you in any criminal proceeding."
     I probably should have known better, but I believed him.  Later,
during my trial, the very first witness for the prosecution was Lee
Hamilton, the cochairman of the Joint Iran-Contra Committee.  But all
that was yet to come.  Now that the formalities were completed, the
hearings could proceed.
     The Filth Amendment wasn't the only issue where I disagreed with my
lawyers.  We also had a brief but spirited argument over whether I
should wear my uniform to the hearings.  I was against it.  I was a very
unpopular person on Capitol Hill, and if I was dressed as a Marine, it
wasn't hard for me to imagine that Congress might decide to "modify" the
Corps' budget request.
     My lawyers saw it differently.  "You're still a Marine," they said.
"You spend every day at the Marine headquarters, wearing a uniform.  You
ought to wear it to the hearings."  When I persisted, Brendan urged me
to ask General Kelley, the commandant, for his opinion.  "When I go up
to testify," the general told me, "I always wear the uniform.  All my
Marines do, and you should, too."
     That settled it.  Here, too, Brendan turned out to be right.  I had
thought that the hearings were essentially political, and to a large
extent, they were.  But they were also about something even bigger.
     Television.
     Later on, people would come up to congratulate me, or to applaud my
lawyers, for "putting the hearings on television."  In some respect, the
TV coverage worked in my favor, and it certainly helped
     e raise money for my defense.  On the other hand, it also made it
uch easier for the special prosecutor's office to use my immunized
estimony against me because so many people had heard it and seen it.  ut
regardless of whether it helped or hurt, it wasn't my decision.  his was
the committee's call, not ours.
     From the beginning, Brendan took the position that because of
     e special prosecutor's investigation, and the possibility of
criminal harges, I shouldn't have to testify before Congress at all.
Although e fiilly recognized that Congress could force me to appear, he
told em in a twenty-seven-page letter that they had no statutory
authorito make me testify more than once.  "You have a choice," he told
e committee.  "You can question Colonel North in a closed session,
     r you can do it in public.  It's up to you."
     The Joint Iran-Contra Committee chose to have me testify in ront of
the cameras-a decision they surely came to regret.  But from eir point
of view it made sense.  Because I had given no prior testiony, and
hadn't granted a single interview to the press, there was, to ay the
least, a great deal of public interest in what I was going to say.  or
the committee members, the prospect of appearing before tens of illions
of people on network television was apparently irresistible.  hey all
remembered Watergate, when several relatively unknown oliticians rose to
national prominence, including Howard Baker, owell Weicker, Peter
Rodino, Sam Ervin, and, of course, Daniel K.  nouye.  You couldn't buy
that kind of publicity, which was why the ompetition to serve on the
House and Senate Iran-contra commites had been so fierce.  By March,
when these two committees were merged into one anel for joint hearings,
twenty-'six members had already been pointed.  But while almost
everybody in Congress agreed that the int committee was far too large,
not a single member volunteered to ep down.  Their goal, of course, was
"face time"-a chance to pontificate efore the cameras.  The committee
members didn't really want to ask
     early three-quarters of the nation saw at least part of my
testimony on television.  cording to a New Tork Time~CBS survey at the
end of the [irst week of my testimo'43 percent of the public gave me a
favorable rating.  In a similar survey back in arch, only 6 percent
rated me favorably.  (TJ.S.  News ~ World Report July 20,1987, 19.)
     the questions; they preferred to make speeches.  And so they lelt
the detailed questions to their two "designated hitters"-John Nields and
Arthur Liman.
     As chairman, Senator Inouye retained a major role.  But h ruled
against us at every turn, and millions of Americans concluded that he
was unfair.  The hearings didn't help his career, either.  He was later
defeated for Senate majority leader by Senator George Mitchell, who at
least appeared to be far more reasonable.
     Nields and Liman did not have an easy time of it.  With the other
wttnesses, they had a script to follow.  They or their staff had spent
days in depositions, interviews, and private hearings, going through
questions and producing a transcript.  Brendan wouldn't allow that in my
case.  As a trial lMer, he knew there was nothing more powerfill in the
hands of a cross-examiner than prior testimony taken under oath.  My
lawyers wanted me to go in there with a clean slate.  Without their
usual road map to show them the way, Nields and Liman were forced to
think on their feet and to improvise.
     For weeks before I testified, Brendan and his team had tried to
prepare me for what the hearings would be like.  Nearly every alternoon
alter work, I would drive from Marine headquarters in Arlington to
Williams  and half the night being grilled.
     Typically, the lawyers would show me the text of one of the
documents that had been referred to that day in the hearings; "Tell us
about this memo."
     "I sent that to McFarlane shortly before the trip to Tehran.
Apparently I made a few typing errors.  Is that the problem?"
     "Come on, Ollie, don't be a wise guy.  You have a natural tendency
to joke around, but don't do that during the hearings.  They will expect
you to be apologetic and serious.  At least be serious."
     But the lawyers never asked me to apologize, and I had no intention
of doing so.  "You don't have to be defensive," Brendan said.  "The way
you explain things to us, minus the wisecracks-that's how you should
talk to the committee.  Just tell the truth."  It's hard for me to
describe how close I feel to my lawyers, and especially to Brendan.  I
have spent so much time with Brendan and his team that they have come to
know me better than anybody' else
     except Betsy.  As we worked together month alter month, we
developed an intensely personal relationship.
     For them, this wasn't business as usual, and I ran up well over a
million dollars before I could pay them anything.  But it was clear from
the start that my lawyers weren't in this for the money.  They believed
with a passion that what was happening to me was wrong, and there were
times when they were even more outraged than I was.  I came to admire
and appreciate them so much that I almost stopped telling lawyer jokes.
     Brendan's team of five was up against more than eighty lawyers
     and agents on the special prosecutor's stalf, and over a hundred
staff members and lawyers attached to the congressional committees.  But
each member of the Sullivan team brought a special gilt to the party.
They reminded me of a crack military unit, where each member has his own
MOS-military occupational specialty.  Brendan, the field marshal, is a
master of legal tactics and an expert at cross-examination.  Later, at
my trial, even the judge and the prosecutors conceded that he did a
brilliant job with some of the witnesses.  Brendan's face reveals
nothing.  I have watched him sit through the most difficult moments of
the hearings and the trial without changing his expression.  (He is
considerably younger than he looks; he was only forty-five at the time
of the hearings-just two years older than I.) Although I trusted him
completely, he still checked every decision with me, and always allowed
me to voice my opinions and occasional disagreements.  Once or twice he
even listened to me.
     Barry Simon, who has worked closely with Brendan for years, is an
expert on the law.  He is also the smartest man I've ever met.  (Barry
is partly bald, and it wouldn't surprise me if he had burned off some of
his hair by thinking so hard.) He's a former chemistry major who
graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Law
Review.  While Brendan reminds me of an inscrutable elder statesman,
Barry is far more direct and confrontational.  He has a phenomenal
memory, and I wouldn't dare contradict him unless I was actually holding
a document in my hand that proved I was right-and sometimes not even
then.  It didn't take long before he knew more about Iran-contra than I
did.
     Nicole Seligman is a brilliant negotiator.  She was also the
youngest
     member of the defense team, and at one point was actually mistaken
for my daughter.  Nicole is a master of the art of the possible; where
others see only problems, she sees possibilities and finds solutions.
She is blessed with an unusually clear and logical mind, and a terrific
sense of humor.  She's also a fine writer--which may have something to
do with her previous career as an editor on the Asian edition of the
Wall Streetjournal.
     John Cline joined the team alter I was indicted in 1988, and
brought in a remarkable talent for research.  Barry would cite (from
memory, of course) half a dozen cases that might apply, and John would
research them.  He'd write a dralt of the motion or the brief under
discussion, and send it on to Barry for a quick review.  Barry would
send it back to John, who would revise it again and deliver it to
Brendan.  Brendan would make a few last-minute changes, and would send
it to John, then back again to Brendan for a final review before a
courier delivered it to the courthouse.  They never missed a deadline.
     Terry O'Donnell, the filth member of the team, was an expert on
     the inner workings of government.  He had served in the Ford
administration, and he understood the intricacies and the legal aspects
of covert operations.  He also appreciated the mentality of many of the
government officials we had to deal with in the bureaucracy.  When the
FBI alerted Brendan to the Libyan threat, it was Terry who found the
right office to call in the Pentagon.
     The case made tremendous dernands on all of the lawyers, and on
their families, and on the two paralegals and three overworked
secretaries who struggled along with the rest of us.  One young man,
Chris Capozzi, gave up a year of law school to stay on the case.
     I learned a great deal from my lawyers, and some of their advice is
indelibly etched in my memory.  During my very first meeting with
Brendan, he said, "We have a few rules here that you're going to get to
know and love.  The most important ones are these: Always tell the
truth.  Don't create anything, and don't destroy anything.  Don't
confirm or deny anything to the metlia, and don't talk to the press or
anybody else.  And that means anybody else-with the possible exception
of Betsy.  "
     He continued: "If one of your former colleagues contacts you,
here's what you should tell them: 'First, tell the truth.  Don't lie to
     anybody about anything-even if you think it will help me.  Second,
don't create anything and don't destroy anything.  Third, get yourself a
lawyer.  If you don't know a lawyer, call Brendan Sullivan and he'll
recommend one."'
     "Make absolutely sure your answers are truthfiil," Brendan told
     me early on.  "You haven't broken any laws yet.  Don't start now.
Nobody will go to jail for what they did in this affair.  But they might
for what they do now.  People could be indicted for perjury as the
result of their testimony.  Tell the truth~ven about things you may have
done wrong in the past.  Call us crazy, but we have a little policy here
at Williams & Connolly: wwho saw my testimony on television will recall
that Brendan was at my side throughout the proceedings, sitting next to
me at the witness table, or, as he called it, the bicycle built for two.
One difference between a hearing and a trial is that at a hearing, the
witness is allowed to consult with his lawyer at any point, which led to
a number of quick, whispered conversations between us.  The subject of
these whisperings, I learned later, inspired all kinds of guessing
games-and a few jokes, too.  "If you keep giving him the answers,"
quipped one
     comedian, "how will he ever learn?"
     On the alternoon of my first day of testimony, Brendan received
     an urgent message from a colleague back at the office.  This
lawyer's mother, who was partially deaf, had called her son to say that
when Brendan covered the microphone and started whispering to me, it was
possible to read his lips.  From then on, Brendan held up his hand
whenever we spoke.
     Sometimes he reminded me to slow down.  Once he pointed out
     that I had answered only the first half of a two-part question.
Occasionally he suggested that I had not fillly responded to a question,
and should expand my answer.  He pointed out a few traps.  Once or
twice, when he could see I was losing my temper, he actually told me a
joke.  But my favorite interruption was the time he leaned over and
said, "Hi.  It's been a while since you and I have had a chat, so I
thought I'd just say hello.  Look serious.  If you smile now, I'll kick
you so hard your ankle will bleed."
     This was no idle threat.  As we sat there at the witness table, our
faces were scrutinized by a hundred cameras.  But because the table
     was covered by a long red cloth, nobody could see our feet.  Every
time I said something dumb or sarcastic, Brendan would kick mehard.
     "I came here to tell you the truth," I told Nields that first
morning.  "The good, the bad, and the ugly."  Ouch!
     And later:
     Nields: Where are those memoranda?  North: Which memoranda?
     Nields: The memoranda that you sent up to Admiral Poindexter
seeking the President's approval.
     North: Well...I think I shredded most of that.  Did I get 'em all?
     Ouch!
     And a few minutes later:
     Nields: Sir, do you remember the question?  North: My memory has
been shredded.
     Ouch!
     I was far too insolent that first morning, and by the time we broke
     for lunch my ankle was killing me.  The hearings must have been
terribly frustrating for Brendan.  As a
     trial lawyer, he's used to making arguments before a judge and a
jury.  But during the hearings his visible role was reduced to
occasional whisperings and periodic objections when the committee's
unfairness became too flagrant-all of which were overruled by Inouye.
     Late in the alternoon of the third day, things came to a head when
Arthur Liman asked me a hypothetical question.
     Sullivan: Those kinds of questions, Mr. Chairman, are wholly
inappropriate, not just because of rules of evidence, not because you
couldn't say it in a court, but because it's just dreamland.  It's
speculation....  Come on, let's have, Mr. Chairman Inoisye: I'm certain
counsel  Sullivan-plain fairness, plain fairness.  That's all we're
asking.  Inouye: May I speak, sir?  May I speak?
     Sullivan: Yes, sir.
     Inouye: I'm certain counsel realizes that this is not a court of
law.  Sullivan: I-believe me, I know that.
     Inouye: And I'm certain you realize that the rules of evidence do
not apply in this inquiry.
     Sullivan: That I know as well.  I'm just asking for
fairness-fairness.  I know the rules don't apply.  I know the Congress
doesn't recognize attorney-client privilege, a husband-and-wife
privilege, priest-penitent privilege.  I know those things are all out
the window Inouye: We have attempted to be as lair as we can.
Sullivan:-and we rely on just fairness, Mr. Chairman.  Fairness.
Inouye: Let the witness object, if he wishes to.  Sullivan: Well sir,
I'm not a potted plant.  I'm here as the lawyer.  That's my job.
     Who could have guessed that a throwaway line about foliage ould
capture the imagination of the American public?  That alteroon, we
returned to the law firm to find dozens of potted plants.  By e next
day, there were potted plants everywhere-in the lobby, in e corridors,
and especially in Brendan's office, which now resembled terrarium.
     This botanical generosity represented just a fraction of an
unimagable outpouring of public support.  At Williams & Connolly, the
hones were ringing off the hook.  On the building across the street,
ccupied by a staid old bank, the occupants of an upper story posted a
oreboard that changed each day.  By the end of my testimony, it ad,
0LLIE 6, C0NGRES5 0.  In our neighborhood in Great Falls, my eighbors
hung banners and flags from the trees on the road that ran ast our
homes.  During the hearings and shortly alterward I received over a miln
pieces of mail from people who had been watching on television.  me of
the envelopes were simply addressed to: Oliver North, Ameran Hero.  They
reached me anyway.  Eventually, all of the mail ended at Williams &
Connolly, where it filled the mailroom and overwed into the basement.
The firm's regular mail was buried in the alanche, and some of it wasn't
found for weeks.  Edward Bennett Williams, who had established the law
firm that
     bears his name, asked me if the security team could process the
mail a little faster so that the place could resume some semblance of
normalcy.  But by then there was far too much for one bomb-sniffing dog
to go through.  To speed things up, the security guys arranged to bring
in a few dogs from other agencies, including the Metropolitan Police,
and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  But nobody thought to
stagger their schedules, and when four huge German shepherds arrived
within a few minutes of each other, there was one hellacious dog fight
in the basement of Williams & Connolly.  And I thought the hearings were
noisy.
     Many letters included donations for my defense fiInd, which my
former classmates at Annapolis had established right alter I was fired.
Some correspondents enclosed a single dollar, with a note saying, "I
want to help, but this is all I can afford."  A few older people even
signed over their Social Security checks, which we tried to return.  The
support was simply overwhelming, both logistically and emotionally.
     A surprising amount of mail came in from people it, "I may not like
everything you stand for, but what you said at the hearings made a lot
of sense.  And it's obvious that the big guys have thrown you off the
boat."  As if to confirm that sentiment, actor Lee Majors sent me the
jacket he had worn in his TV show, "The Fall Guy."
     Then there were the telegrams-hundreds, thousands, and eventually
tens of thousands alter Western Union advertised a discounted price and
set up a special toll-free number.  Almost all of them were favorable;
     NEIIT MALE CHILD WILL BE NAMED OLIvER.  GOD LOVE YoU.  M0NEY TO
FoLLoW.
     C0NGRATULATI0N5 BUT QUIT QU0T1NG THE C0N5TITUT10N AND THE LAW.  IT
IS CONFUSING THE COMMITTEE.
     I CONGRATULATE YOU ON YOUR DECORUM IN THE FACE OF THOSE ILL-BRED
HYENAS PUTTING YOU THROUGH THIS HELL.  YOUR'RE DOING WONDERFULLY.  CHIN
UP.  KISS YOUR WIFE, CHILDREN.  PET YOUR DOG.  I'M 81.  FRIENDS HERE
BELIEVE YOU.  I CROWN YOU SIR OLIVER, SLAYER OF TOADS.
     CONGRATULATIONS ON TAKING CAPITOL HILL.  HOLD POSITIONS UNTIL
RELIEVED.  AMERICAN PEOPLE ON THE WAY.  SEMPER FI.
     My biggest supporter was Betsy.  She sat behind me during the
questioning, and with me during the breaks.  Sometimes we held hands and
prayed together.  She would rub the back of my neck to help me relax,
and would lighten things up with a smile or a joke.  Betsy knows me so
well that she could spot the occasional moment where I was groping for
the right word so I could avoid using profanity on national television.
     For the first two days of my testimony she had watched the hearings
at home.  We had some idea of what the sessions would be like, and
Brendan and I agreed that there was no need for Betsy to suffer through
this long and demeaning process.  But on the second day, when I finally
got home well alter midnight from my daily posthearing stint at Williams
& Connolly, Betsy was waiting up for me.  She had saved some dinner,
although I had already eaten at the law firm, where Brendan had ordered
in yet another Domino's pizza.
     "This isn't right," she said.  "I should be in there with you."
     "Do you really want to go?"
     "I do.  My place is with you.  I wouldn't want anyone to think I
don't support you."
     It was two in the morning, but I called Brendan at home.  "Can
Betsy come with me tomorrow?
     "Sure, if she wants to.  Now get some rest."
     But there wasn't much time for sleep.  We had to get up at five to
make it to the law firm in time for the brief morning meeting before we
drove over to the hearings.  Betsy got the children ready for day camp,
fixed their lunches, arranged for them to go to a neighbor's in the
alternoon, and reviewed their revised schedules with the security team.
     I was running on adrenaline, but by the time we got to the Caucus
Room, Betsy was exhausted.  And for some inexplicable reason, unless you
were sitting on the dais you weren't allowed to have coffee.  At one
point during the alternoon I noticed the cameras zooming in over my
shoulder, but I couldn't figure out why.  Was there a fly crawling on my
ear?  Only later did I learn that their target was Betsy-who had fallen
fast asleep.  When we returned to Brendan's office, the networks were
still showing scenes from the hearings.  Betsy was mortified.  She began
to
     apologize to Brendan, but he assured her it was no problem.  "In
fact," he said, "when you come tomorrow, I want you to fall asleep
again.  It's the best thing you could have done.  It shows that you're
so confident in your husband that you don't even have to pay attention
to all of this garbage."
     During breaks in the hearings, the witnesses and their lawyers were
allowed to take refitge in a small hideaway office across the hall from
the Caucus Room that belonged to Senator Edward Kennedy's staff.  There
were French doors that opened up on a balcony, where somebody hacl set
up a chaise longue and some deck chairs.  During the lunch break on that
third day, Brendan urged Betsy and me to step out on the balcony and
wave to the crowd of supporters gathered on the street below.  I didn't
feel comfortable doing that, but Brendan literally pushed us out the
door, saying, "These people came down here to see you and encourage you.
They'll never get into the hearings.  Let them know you appreciate their
support."
     Until that moment I had no real sense of what was going on outside
the building.  But as soon as we stepped out onto the balcony, a
tremendous roar went up.  I had expected to see a few dozen people, but
there were thousands, and many of them were carrying huge banners
supporting me.  It was overwhelming, and I was too choked up to say a
word.  What a dramatic contrast to what was going on inside.  This
extraordinary reception did not go unnoticed by the Senate authorities.
The next morning, when our little group arrived in the holding room, we
noticed that the doors leading to the balcony had been bolted shut with
headless screws.
     The visible signs of support weren't limited to the streets.  As we
walked down the long corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building on
our way to and from the Caucus Room, staffers and secretaries got up
from their televisions and stood in the doorways with applause and words
of encouragement and support: "Keep it up.  Hang in there.  Great job!"
     On the third day, one of the congressional staffers started
something that quickly became a daily lunchtime ritual.  There would be
a knock on the door of the holding room, and I would be asked to go back
across the hall into the now-empty hearing room to pose for photographs
with staffers, pages, and even some of their family mem
     bers.  The line grew to include the Senate and House security
personnel, the Capitol Hill police, and few committee staffers.  Even
the Sergeant-at-Arms, an Inouye appointee who was anything but friendly,
insisted on bringing me to his office to meet his staff and sign
autographs.
     But none of these sentiments penetrated the walls of the hearing
room, where the atmosphere remained tense.  As we expected, Nields asked
me about the testimony of several previous witnesses.  Albert Hakim had
told the committee that he had set up a death benefit account called
"Button" in case I didn't return from my trip to Tehran.  ("Button,"
Albert explained, was short for "Bellybutton"-as if that cleared things
up.) Albert had once assured me that he would make sure Betsy and the
kids would be all right in case anything happened them."
     At his request, I asked Betsy to go to Philadelphia to meet with
Hakim's lawyer.  There was no mention of money, or bank accounts, and no
hinds were ever transferred to our possession.  The lawyer merely wanted
to know how many children we had and how old they were.  Later, alter I
returned from Tehran, Albert's lawyer called Betsy a second time; she
didn't return the call.  But it wasn't until the hearings that I had
ever heard about a hind being set up, or the names "Button" or
"Bellybutton."
     Another topic that came up was the now-famous security system at
our house.  On the evening of April 25, 1986, eleven days alter the
American antiterrorist raid on Libya, I received a call from the FBI's
counterterrorism office.  The news was not good: in Lebanon, a spokesman
for the Abu Nidal organization had announced that several
     erican targets, including me, had been marked for assassination.
The announcement had been recorded on videotape.  My first response was
that it would be best if this announcement
     did not appear on television in Europe or the United States.
Terrorist rganizations olten commit acts of violence simply to get
attention, nd to broadcast this threat would be to play into their
hands.  It could lso attract the attention of unstable individuals who
might see this as n opportunity for notoriety.  During the next few
days, Admiral oindexter, White House press secretary Larry Speakes, and
I made
     an effort to get the American networks not to run this tape on
their news broadcasts.
     When nothing happened for about a week, I assumed we were out of
the woods.  But then Betsy called me at the office to say she had just
seen the videotape of the threat on the "CBS Evening News," which she
had been watching with the children.  They were not amused.  Bob Earl
called down to the Sit Room and arranged to have the broadcast replayed
so that I could see it.  There, on the screen, was Abu Bakr, a spokesman
for the Fatah Revolutionary Council.  My fellow targets were General
Jack Singlaub, Edward Luttwak, a Washington-based consultant on
international affairs, and the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think
tank.  None of them had been involved with planning the attack on Libya,
but curiously, all had in one way or another been publicly linked in the
media to Central America and/or the contras.
     Now, there are death threats and there are death threats.  Abu
Nidal has been called the world's most dangerous terroristand for good
reason.  He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent
people.  Some terrorist groups, like the Red Brigades in Italy, try to
avoid killing women and children.  But Abu Nidal's gang delights in it.
     Among other atrocities, Abu Nidal had planned the Christmas 1985
massacres at the Rome and Vienna airports in which more than a dozen
people were killed and over a hundred wounded by terrorists carrying
hand grenades and assault rifles.  One of their victims was an
eleven-year-old American girl named Natasha Simpson.
     I was deeply concerned about the safety of Betsy and our children.
     In addition to all my usual travel to Europe and Central America, I
was planning to leave for what could have been a very long visit to
Tehran.  One of General Simhoni's officers at the Israeli embassy called
to remind me that they were all too familiar with Abu Nidal's group, and
that this was not a threat to be taken lightly.  They confirmed FBI
reports that Abu Nidal had operatives in the United States, and they
urged me to take steps to protect myself and my family.
     At the suggestion of the FBI, I contacted the Secret Service, my
local police, and the Pentagon.  The Fairfax County Police sent out an
officer who did a site survey, and who briefed our family on the
precautions we should take.  They promised to increase their patrols in
our neighborhood, and suggested that we install a security system
immediately.
     I knew that the Secret Service provided security for several White
House officials including Admiral Poindexter and Bud McFarlane.  I
discussed the matter with the admiral and with Rod McDaniel, executive
secretary of the NSC.  But there wasn't much they could do: I was simply
too junior to qualify for government protection.
     I then called several private security companies, but nobody could
come to our house before I was scheduled to depart for Tehran.  At one
of our planning sessions for the Tehran trip, General Secord asked me
what I had done in response to the death threat.  When I explained that
I was having trouble getting any kind of immediate protection for my
family, he told me not to worry, that he had a friend who might be able
to help.  A few days later he introduced me to Glenn Robinette, a former
CIA employee who owned a security company.  Robinette came out to the
house, did a quick survey, and said he could install a system right
away.  And he did.
     Glenn Robinette never sent me a bill, and I didn't ask him for one.
In the chaos that surrounded our preparations for the trip to Tehran, I
just didn't sit down and discuss the financial arrangements with Dick
Secord.
     I didn't think much more about it until just before I was fired.
Realizing that I had never paid for the security system, I called Glenn
Robinette.  He was off in Central America, and when he finally called me
back in December, I asked for a bill.  In response, he sent me two
back-dated bills.
     And here I did a really stupid thing.  In direct violation of
Brendan's rule of "don't create anything," I continued the charade by
sending two phony, back-dated letters responding to Robinette's
back-dated bills.  What I should have done, of course, was to tell
Brendan what had happened.  But I thought I knew better.  I should have
shouted it from the rooltops: "Dick Secord helped me
     bet a security system to protect my family because there was a
serious death threat and nobody in ourffovernment would help."
     Which was, in effect, what I told the committee:
     North: I admit to making a serious, serious, judgment error in what
I then did to paper it over and I'm willing to sit here and admit to
that.  But I'm also suggesting to you gentlemen that if it was General
Secord who paid the bill...first of all, "Thank you, General
     Secord."  And second of all, you guys ought to write him a check
because the government should have done it to begin with.
     While some of the committee members tain members of Congress had
known a lot more than they let on about my involvement with the contras
while I was at the NSC.  This was especially true of the House and
Senate intelligence committees, who received regular intelligence
reports from the region.  They knew flall well that the administration
in general, and I in particular, had been helping the contras.  They
might not have known exactly how, but they certainly knew about it which
was why they had asked such detailed questions in their letters to
McFarlane in 1985, and to Poindexter in 1986.  Not all the mem1 bers of
the intelligence committees knew all the facts, but there weren't many
people in Washington with an interest in the Nicaraguan situation who
didn't know, at least in general, that Oliver North was up to his ears
in aiding the contras.
     But during the hearings, Nields and Liman questioned me about
     my contacts with Congress during this period on the assumption that
no one in Congress had the faintest idea of what I had been doing.  Not
surprisingly, Nields focused on my August 1986 meeting with the
intelligence committee in the Sit Room:
     Nields: And this was you personally talking to them?  North: It was
on instructions of the national security adviser.  I was instructed to
meet with Chairman Hamilton and, I believe, many of the members of the
Committee.
     Nields: And they were interested in finding out the answers to the
questions raised by the Resolution of Inquiry North: Exactly.
Nields:-your fiind-raising activitiesNorth: Precisely.  Nields:-military
support for the contras North: That's right...
     Nields: The beginning of this memorandum that appears to be a
description of what you said during that meeting, it says "from Boland
Amendment on, North explains strictures to contras."  Is that true?  Did
you explain the strictures to the contras?
     North: I explained to them that there was no U.S.  government money
until more was appropriated, yes.
     Nields: And it says "never violated stricture.  Gave advice on
Human Rights Civic Action Program."  North:Idid do that.
     Nields: But I take it you did considerably more, which you did not
tell the committee about.
     North: I have admitted that here before you today....  I will tell
you right now, counsel, and all the members here gathered that I misled
the Congress.  Nields: At that meeting?  North: At that meeting.
Nields: Face-to-face?  North: Face-to-face.
     Nields: You made false statements to them about your activities in
support of the contras?
     North: I did.  Furthermore, I did so with the purpose of hopefiilly
avoiding the very kind of thing that we have before us now and avoiding
a shutoff of help to the Nicaraguan resistance and avoiding an
elimination of the resistance facilities in three Central American
countries Nields: We  North:-wherein we had promised those heads of
state.  On specific orders to me, I had gone down there and assured them
of our absolute and total discretion.
     Nields: We do live in a democracy, don't we?  North: We do, sir.
Thank God.
     Nields: In which it is the people, not one Marine lieutenant
colonel, that gets to decide the important policy decisions for the
nation.  North: Yes.
     Nields: And, part of the democratic process North: And, I would
point out that part of that answer is that this Marine lieutenant
colonel was not making all of those decisions on his own.  As I
indicated in my testimony yesterday, Mr. Nields, I sought approval for
everything I did.
     There was no changing his mind.  Nields, Liman, and most of the
committee were intent on showing that one renegade lieutenant
     colonel had done all this on his own.  I knew from the outset that
the hearings were going to be anything but fair, and I suppose I
shouldn't have expected otherwise.  Alter all, it was Congress that set
the agenda and made the rules.  It was Congress that called the
witnesses and decided on the questions.  It was Congress that chose not
to investigate itself for its fickle, vacillating, and unpredictable
policy toward the Nicaraguan resistance.
     The whole process, as I pointed out in my "opening statement,"*
     was like a baseball game in which one of the teams was also the
umpire.  It was Congress that called the balls and strikes, and decided
who was safe and who was out.  And it was Congress that added up the
score and in the end, inevitably, declared itself the winner.  As if to
prove my point, the committee did several things during
     my testimony that were just outrageous.  During part of his
questioning, Arthur Liman displayed a huge blowup of the text of one of
the Boland Amendments, making it look as if this had been a separate,
one-page document.  In reality, the various Boland Amendments had been
buried in government appropriations bills that ran well over a thousand
pages each.  But this display, which included the President's signature,
gave the distinct impression that the President had read it over and
said, "Oh, gosh, here's the Boland Amendment.  Quick give me a pen so I
can sign it."  I wasn't the only one who felt this way.  Congressman
Henry Hyde of Illinois took the floor to object to this portrayal.  It
is "deceptive," he said, and he apologized for the way it was displayed.
"If I tried this in a municipal court in Chicago," he said, "phonying up
an exhibit to make a point that was half true-I'd be held in contempt."
     Hyde then made a remarkable statement about the hypocrisy of
     the hearings.  Referring to the Congress, he said: Now, if ~e don't
like a law, Colonel, and you guys ought to learn this as
     the NSC and then the administration, you just exempt yourself.  You
see, we exempt ourselves from 0511A, the Occupational Safety and Health
Act.  We exempt ourselves from the Ethics in Government Act; no special
prosecutors are going after us.  We have our own committee of our own
brethren that'hl take care of that.  We are exempt from equal
opportunity, equal employment
     *Which-talk about fair-I wasn't allowed to give until the third day
of my testimony.
     pportunity; none of that because we're political people.  The
Budget Act; aive it.  Pass it, kid the people, and waive it.  Every time
something comes up at's in excess of the budget, pay no attention to
it....  Now, if we can't ignore the law or exempt ourselves from it, we
play ames with the process.  Do you know how we got our pay raise?..
you know hat we did in the House?er there, the Speaker, until thirty
days had elapsed, until it was vested, could not be unvested and then we
got a vote on it.  We waited until it was ocked in, and then we voted.
And we could all tell our constituents, "I idn't vote for that pay
raise."  That's the way we do things.  So there's much 0 be learned from
watching us.
     It was about then that the committee began to self-destruct.
rendan and I sat there in astonishment as the members turned on ach
other and their lawyers.  Instead of focusing their undivided anger me,
they began to debate each other.  During their internal squable, Brendan
leaned over to me and quoted the famous tag line of ose Sergeant Preston
radio shows we had both listened to as kids: 'Well, King, this case is
closed."  Believe me, it's hard not to smile hen your lawyer says
something like that.
     The Boland Amendment wasn't the only ill-advised exhibit.  though
it was widely known that my family was at risk from terrorsts who had
threatened to kill me, a large blowup of a letter I had ritten was
placed before the cameras, complete with our home ddress.  Thanks,
fellas.
     There was also a farcical flap over the slide shows I had presented
0 various groups in Washington.  Because this was the subject of some
ontroversy, several of the committee members thought it would be
ppropriate for me to give this same briefing, complete with the slides,
or the committee.  The slide show soon became the subject of a ragg
debate by members of the committee, many of whom just ouldn't tolerate
the prospect of my being allowed to say a favorable ord on behalf of the
contras.  And so it was claimed that for "securi"reasons the lights
could not be dimmed for the slides to be seen.  This was plainly
ridiculous.  The place was crawling with police and ecurity agents.
During the hearings, the Senate Caucus room was one fthe best-protected
rooms in the world.
     In an inspired example of lunacy, the committee came up with a
ompromise: instead of showing the slides and giving the briefing, I
     would hold each slide up in the air and discuss it.  This was
absurd, and everybody knew it.  But it was better than nothing.
     I held up a slide of a Soviet HIND helicopter, and described its
lethal power.  I held up a slide of a textbook from a school in
Nicaragua, showing how children learn arithmetic by adding up hand
grenades and machine guns.  I held up a slide showing several Miskito
Indians, and explained how they had been driven out of their ancestral
homelands.  I held up a slide of the leadership of the FDN: of the
sixteen men in that photograph, eleven were former Sandinistas.
     The "slide show" and the two documents were only the tip of the
unfairness iceberg.  The whole proceeding was grossly unfair, which was
one reason the American people responded as they did.  But even the
blatant unfairness that was captured by the cameras couldn't depict the
fiall measure of the tilt.  I can't recall a single instance in which
Senator Inouye granted or sustained any of Brendan Sullivan's
objections.
     The unfairness continued right through to the very end, when it
surfaced in Senator Inouye's shocking closing statement.  Referring to
the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which applies to all men and women
in the armed services, Senator Inouye reminded his audience that the
orders of a superior officer must be obeyed by subordinate members-so
long as those orders are lawfiil.
     This was certainly true.  But then Inouye stepped over the line of
decency and actually compared my responses to those of Nazi war
criminals!
     Inouye: The Uniform Code makes it abundantly clear that it must be
the lawfi::l orders of a superior officer.  In fact, it says, members of
the military have an obligation to disobey unlawfiil orders.  This
principle was considered so important, that we-we, the government of the
United States, proposed that it be internationally applied, in the
Nuremberg Trials.  And so, in the Nuremberg Trials, we said that the
fact that the defendant had Sullivan: Mr. Chairman.  May I please
register an objection Inouye: May I continue my statement?
     Sullivan: I find this offensive!  I find you engaging in a personal
attack on Colonel North, and you're far removed from the issues of this
case.  To make reference to the Nuremberg Trials, I find
     personally and professionally distastefiil, and I can no longer sit
here and listen to this.
     Inouye: You will have to sit there, if you want to listen.
Sullivan: Mr. Chairman, please don't conclude these hearings on this
unfair note....  You may ask questions, but you may not attack him
personally.  This has gone too far.
     Indeed it had.  It's true that the Nuremberg Trials marked the most
famous use of the "authorization" defense.  But even if the reference to
Nuremberg hadn't been disgusting and inappropriate, there was an
enormous difference between then and now.  Those defendants had been
ordered to kill people.  I had been ordered to protect them.
     Chapter 17
     A Smolonzg Gun th the Closet
     "Oyez, Oyez, Oyez.  This honorable court will now come to order.
The United States of America versus Oliver L.  North.  Judge Gerhard A.
Gesell presiding."  That's how it started each morning, day alter day,
week alter week, during my trial.  That phrase sickened me: The United
States v.  Oliver North.  Why not the Congressional Police v.  Oliver
North?  Or Independent Counsel v.  Executive Branch?  Either one would
have been more accurate.*
     I have heard it said that a trial is like war, and for lawyers that
analogy must ring true.  But it's not that way for the defendant.  In
combat, alter all, you're allowed to shoot back.  But in this battle
Brendan and his team did all the shooting for me.  They performed
brilliantly, but I found it agonizing not to be able to respond.  Each
night, the defense team would regroup, replenish, and rearm as they
prepared for the next day's clash.  As soon as the daily transcript
arrived, one member of the legal team would review it for holes in the
enemy's line.  Another would pore over the previous statements
     *I wasn't the only one who felt that way.  As two of the three
Appeals Court judges wrote later in reversing my convictions, "We do not
countenance political trials in this country, and this matter is not
styled Independent Counsel v.  Executive Branch or even Congrees v.
~ecutive Branch."
     of tomorrow's witnesents that were being introduced as exhibits in
the case, while a fourth would focus on the documents and witnesses we
planned to use as a rebuttal to the prosecution's arguments.
     In theory, at least, the defendant is presumed innocent.  But it
sure didn't feel that way while the prosecution was making its case.  As
I had to be reminded again and again, in order to convict me of breaking
the law the prosecution had to demonstrate criminal intent.  "This isn't
like breaking the speed limit," the lawyers explained.  "They'll need to
show that you were thinking and acting like a person in tendin-to break
the law."
     Betsy tried to come to court every day, but that wasn't always
possible.  She was a volunteer teacher's aide in Dornin's and Sarah's
classrooms, and she was also determined to keep our family life as close
to normal as possible.  On days when she could get there, she was
accompanied by Brian Cox, the assistant pastor at our church, or by a
friend.  (Brian came so olten that Brendan arranged for the kitchen at
Williams & Connolly to prepare a sandwich for him, too.) When Betsy
couldn't make it, Brian or one of the men from our family Bible study
group would be there, and during the lunch break we would set aside a
few minutes for a quiet prayer.
     For Betsy the trial was a horror show.  She was getting very little
sleep, and outside of court we saw almost nothing of each other.  In
addition to attending the trial and wondering whether her husband and
the father of her children would be sent to jail, she still had to
manage the house and take care of the children.  If the prosecutors had
their way, at the end of this process she would have no husband, no
income, and millions of dollars in debts.
     People tried to help.  Some of our neighbors and the members of
     our Bible study group pitched in to prepare casserole dishes that
Betsy could heat up when she got home.  But it was terribly difficult to
maintain any semblance of normalcy for the children.
     Not surprisingly, they were confiised by the news reports of the
trial.  Although my story had already come out in great detail during
the hearings, the media were now presenting each charge and every bit of
evidence as though it were being heard for the first time.  I remember
when Congressman Lee Hamilton, the first prosecution witness to testify
at the trial, "revealed" that in August 1986 I had
     1
     met with members of the House Intelligence Committee in the White
House Sit Room, and that he thought my answers were misleading.  All
this had been discussed in detail during the hearings, but here again it
resulted in page-one coverage and lead billing on the evening network
news.
     During Brendan's cross-examination, Hamilton had to admit that
     no one had ever before been charged with lying to Congress in such
a forum, that no transcript existed of the Sit Room meeting, and that I
had not testified under oath.  But these points rarely came out in the
news.  Neither did the fact that Hamilton had sat through my entire
congressional testimony.  When they had forced me to testify, I had been
assured that nothing I said in the hearings could be used against me in
a criminal prosecution.  But here was the chair of the House 1
Iran-Contra Committee, testifying against me at my trial.
     Alter reading a newspaper account of Hamilton's testimony, our son,
Stuart, called me from school late one night to ask if all this meant
that I hadn't told the truth during the congressional hearings.  No, I
explained, this charge had nothing to do with the hearings.  But Stuart
wasn't the only one who was confiased on this point.  To this day, I
hear from people who assumed I was on trial for having lied to Congress
during the hearings.
     One reason for the confiision may be that the special prosecutors
     had their own spin doctors who presided over regular briefings for
the press.  For most public prosecutors-US.  Attorneys, district
attorneys, and so on-a public affairs staff would be thought of as an
unwarranted and inappropriate extravagance.  But the special prosecutor
answers to no one.  At every break, and before and alter each day of
testimony,
     1 the special prosecutor's public affairs officer or one of his
deputies would huddle outside the courtroom with members of the press to
"clarify" prior or upcoming testimony and evidence.  Brendan, still
adhering to his no-comment rule, preferred to argue the case in front of
the jury.
     In addition to being longer than the hearings, the trial was far
more tedious.  As my lawyers already knew but I had yet to learn, a real
trial is very different from the courtroom scenes on "Perry Mason" or
"L.A.  Law," which invariably depict the most sensational or dramatic
scenes.  There are fascinating moments in trials, but
     1
     they're generally overshadowed by the drudgery of paperwork,
procedure, and repetitive testimony.  The congressional hearings were no
picnic, but at least my part was over in six days.
     And during the hearings, I was able to respond to questions and
comments as soon as they were made.  When other witnesses came in to
testify, I could watch them on television or on videotape with Brendan
in his conference room, where I could tell him exactly what I thought of
each answer.
     In the trial, by contrast, I had to sit there mute and impassive,
day alter day, as the prosecutors tried to get each witness to say
terrible things about me.  Just about all I could do was take notes.
"North is scribbling away like a medieval monk," one reporter observed.
With the exception of the jury, which had to sit through it all without
uttering a word, just about everybody else had a specific task.  The
lawyers on both sides were busy examining and cross-examining the
witnesses.  The court stenographers had to type the thousands of words
necessary to prepare the transcript, which ran to more than eighty-five
hundred pages.  The bailiffs and marshals walked around keeping order,
and occasionally waking up a nodding juror.  Even the judge could
interrupt, ask questions, and make rulings.  With so little to do, I
olten felt like a spectator.  For the prosecutors I felt only disdain.
They had sought this job in a politically charged case that would give
them enormous visibility.  Unlike other public prosecutors, who are
required to take cases as they come in, these guys were more like a
lynch mob in pin-striped suits.
     itnesses embarrassed them by saying kind things about me.  Adolfo
Calero was summoned by the prosecution to help make the case against me
for supporting the resistance, and for setting up the operational
account from which, it was alleged, I had stolen forty-four hundred
dollars in traveler's checks.
     During Brendan's cross-examination of Calero, he asked:
     Sullivan: Would you try to tell the ladies and gentlemen of the
jury as best you can who is this guy Colonel North?  What did he do for
you?  Calero: Well, for us he became a sort of a savior, I mean.  We
feltas I said, we felt abandoned, we felt that we couldn't feed our
people and that we had no way of getting support any place and then all
of a sudden we were introduced to this man with whom we became more and
more familiar as time went on....  Our men, even though they were
Nicaraguans and were not Americans, seemed to be as important for him as
Americans, and he worried about us and felt like us.  So we developed a
very-a tremendously human relationship....We are tremendously gratefial
to him, and as I said before Congress, the Nicaraguan people have a
tremendous appreciation for this man-so much so...that we're going to
erect a monument for him once we free Nicaragua.
     I don't know what the special prosecutors had been expecting from
Adolfo, but I doubt they had counted on their witness wanting to put up
a statue in honor of the defendant!
     Later, Brendan came around to the issue of the traveler's checks:
     Sullivan: Do you trust him?
     Calero: Absolutely.  I would say that I trust Colonel North with my
life.  I mean, that's the biggest thing I have.  Sullivan: The
prosecution in this case says that Colonel North stole $4,400 of your
traveler's checks.  Do you believe that that is conceivable?  Calero:
No.
     And still later:
     Sullivan: Did anybody in the United States government indicate to
you that North was not acting properly?
     Calero: Never.  I mean as I said before, and I was showing in the
picture [taken in 1985 in the White Housej, it was Colonel North who
took us to the President.
     Calero wasn't the only prosecution witness whose testimony must
have disappointed my persecutors.  Chi Chi Quintero described my
"devotion to duty" and called it "a work of art."  Dick Gadd called me
     a "national hero."  Joseph Coors, whom Casey had sent to my office
when Coors offered to help the resistance, told the court that I was, in
his view, "a tremendously wonderfiil patriotic American."  When Coors
finished his testimony, he walked over to the defense table, gave
Brendan a pat on the back, and shook my hand.  The prosecutors cringed.
     Had the prosecutors been less politically and personally motivated,
they might have anticipated these problems.  But then, these weren't
regular U.S.  Attorneys from the Justice Department.  They had asked to
be hired by the Office of the Independent Counsel, this strange entity
created by the Congress for the sole purpose of going alter members of
the executive branch.
     In the regular criminal justice system, a prosecutor is normally
presented with a crime-a robbed bank, a murder, whatever.  His task is
to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice.  But in a strange
perversion of that process, a special prosecutor has a much different
task.  First an individual from the executive branch is identified and
chosen as a suspect; then the special prosecutor tries to identify a 1
crime that this person may have perpetrated.  The whole process is
eerily reminiscent of that cynical line from the early days of the
Soviet 1 KGB: "First, bring us the man.  We'll find the crime."
     In theory the special prosecutor is accountable to the Attorney
General, who can fire him only for cause.  In practice, however, it's as
if Congress had its own Justice Department.  The Independent Counsel is
independent, all right: independent of financial restraints, independent
of time limitations, and independent of any obligation to show results
within a given period of time.  The Office of the Independent Counsel
has become a pervasive and powerfiil machine, a legalistic tank that can
roll over and flatten its victims beneath its unlimited size, time, and
money.  It's hard to calculate just how much of the taxpayers' money the
OIC has spent on this case, but as I write these *The position of
special prosecutor was created in 1978, when Congress passed the Ethics
in Government Act.  Since 1982 the special prosecutor has been known as
the independent counsel, but the original term strikes me as more
accurate.  In December 1986, Lawrence Walsh was appointed to the
position by a special panel of judges.  The Attorney General had asked
for an investigation into the use of residuals from the Iran arms sales.
But at the request of Congress, this narrow inquiry was quickly expanded
to include just about everything short of lishing without a license.
     words in the summer Of 1991 the total is probably more than forty
million dollarsand climbing.
     When the congressional hearings began, the special prosecutor
     was already in the midst of his own investigation of the
individuals involved in Iran-contra.  The first victim was Spitz
Channell, and the pressure brought to bear on this poor man was intense.
By April 1987, the special prosecutor had apparently convinced him that
unless he pled guilty to a convoluted charge of conspiring to defraud
the IRS through the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty
(NEPL), a tax-exempt organization, he would face a jail sentence for
personal income-tax violations.
     On April 29, Channell appeared before a judge in a federal
courthouse.
     "You are charged with conspiracy in this case," the judge said,
"and of course it requires two or more persons to have a conspiracy.
Are you prepared to state the names of any of those with whom you
conspired?"
     "Yes, Your Honor."
     "Would you please do so?"
     "Yes.  Colonel North, an official of the National Security
Council."  Brendan called me with the news of this ridiculous charge,
but it wasn't quite the shock that the prosecutors had intended when
they scripted this liNe dialogue.  We were well aware of Channell's
vulnerabilities, including his inability to pay the mounting expenses of
his defense-something the prosecutors certainly counted on.  And so
Spitz Channell became the first of several defendants who, faced with an
overwhelmIng debt and the dlead to a lesser offense rather than continue
fighting the
     *The Iran-contra special prosecutor constitutes the largest and
most unaccountable prosecutorial staff ever assembled in the United
States, and has included more than fifty lawyers, seventy-five
investigators, and scores of support personnel.  It is the only
government office in America that is subject to no oversight and no
budgetary restraints.  lawyers hired by the special prosecutor have been
paid at the top of the federal pay scale-now in excess of $100,000 a
year-including new attorneys right out of law school.  At one point,
Special Prosecutor Walsh had a press office about as large as that of
the Attorney General of the United States.  It's like a whole separate
law firm being financed by the American taxpayers, who are powerless to
limit it or stop it.  The taxpayers are also footing the bill for Mr.
Walsh's living quarters in the Watergate, his chaufleur-driven car, his
air fare for his frequent trips to and from his home in Oklahoma, and
some of the most expensive olfice space in Washington.
     monster.  Although I made a different choice, I can't say I blame
them.
     My next few months had been taken up with preparations for the
hearings, followed by tons of legal paperwork on both sides.  In March
1988, Brendan called me at Marine headquarters and asked me to come to
his office.  "You'd better leave work early today," he said.  "There
have been some developments."
     By now I knew that this phrase did not signal good news.  When I
arrived at Williams & Connolly, Brendan sat me down and explained that
the special prosecutor had decided to indict four of us-Admiral
Poindexter, General Secord, Albert Hakim, and myself-on a variety
ofcounts.*
     This was my worst moment in the entire case, and one of the worst
in my life.  An indictment may sound like the end of the process, but
it's really just the beginning.  Although I should have known better, I
just couldn't comprehend how the same government that Admiral Poindexter
and I had served for so many years could have given birth to this
creature, the Office of the Independent Counsel, which was ruining our
lives.  We had all hoped for months that it wouldn't come to this, and
that fairness and justice would eventually win out.  But the criminal
investigation, like the hearings, was ultimately about politics.
     I had already decided that if I was indicted, I would retire from
the Marine Corps.  Brendan had made it clear all along that he would do
everything within the law to defend me-and that this could well include
a subpoena to the President of the United States, as well as any other
senior government official whose testimony might be necessary.
     That lelt me no choice.  Simply put, I had no intention of being
     the first serving officer in American history to cause the
Commanderin-Chief to appear at a trial of a military oflicer.  I had
spent my entire adult life in an institution where the chain of command
was an essenThe indictments were returned by a federal grand jury on
March 16, 1988.  In all, ere were twenty-three counts, including
conspiracy to defraud the United States, bstruction of justice, false
statements, theft of government property, 'vire fraud, makng false
statements to Congress and the Attorney General, and destruction and
emoval of documents.  Sixteen of the counts applied to me.  By the time
my trial egan, these had been pared down to twelve.
     On June 8, 1988, Judge Gesell ruled that Poindexter, Hakim, Secord,
and I ould all be tried separately, so that in defending ourselves we
could each make use of mmunized testimony that the other three had given
to Congress.  Secord and Haklm ater pleaded guilty to reduced charges.
Admiral Poindexter went to trial and was senenced to six months in
prison.
     tial discipline, and this was a precedent I didn't want any part
of.  Not only was it degrading to the presidency, but it could erode or
weaken the entire concept of the chain of command.  And so I reluctantly
announced my retirement.  I cried that night,
     and so did Betsy, because she knew how much being a Marine had
meant to me.  It had been my identity every day for close to twenty
years, and I had expected it would continue to be true for another ten
or filteen.  I got up every morning as a Marine, and came home every
night as a Marine.  It was hard to imagine being anything else.
     General Kelley was no longer the commandant, and when word went out
that I was leaving the Marine Corps, I could almost hear the collective
sigh of relief from some of the higher-ups.  My retirement was fast and
abrupt; twenty-four hours alter I submitted the paperwork, it was
approved.  Normally it takes weeks to get an appointment for a
retirement physical, but I heard from the dispensary the very next
morning: "Colonel North, we received your request.  We have an opening
this alternoon."
     Today, I realize that it's not the Marine Corps that I miss.  It's
being with Marines.  I loved getting up in the morning and going off to
work with a group of men who were all headed in the same direction.  It
was a very structured life, but it offered enormous responsibilities and
a fitll measure of adventure.  I miss the camaraderie.  I miss the hours
of hard work in the company of tough, talented, and motivated men.  I
miss drinking black coffee in the middle of the night.  And I miss being
part of that society of risk-takers.
     Now, for the first time in my life, I didn't have anywhere to go in
     the morning.  The day alter my retirement, I woke up as usual at
fivethirty, shaved, got dressed-and drove to the offices of Williams &
Connolly, where I spent a lot of time over the next few months.  While
it wasn't exactly like going to Marine headquarters, it wasn't
altogether different, either.  The lawyers worked like Marines, swore
like Marines, and regarded their enemies with about as much compassion.
Only instead of using rifles and grenades to defeat their opponents,
they apparently intended to work them to death.
     zAs things turned out, the President fought having to appear, and
the judge relused to compel him to do so.
     But soon the lawyers, too, had to shilt to a different
battleground.  Shortly alter the indictments, everyone who was working
on my case had to leave the Williams & Connolly building and move to a
special suite of offices on Connecticut Avenue.  Because the lawyers on
of thousands of highly classified documents related to the cases, we
were all required to work out of a Sensitive Compartmented Information
Facility.  The SCIF, as it was known, was a suite of offices that were
protected by sophisticated monitoring and alarm systems, and shilts of
armed guards around the clock.
     The SCIF had to be seen to be believed.  We all were supposed to
wear identification badges.  Document control clerks and classified
information guards kept track of every document that came in or out.
The windows were always closed, and in order to prevent electronic and
visual eavesdropping from surrounding buildings, the blinds were always
drawn.  Although the SCIF occupied most of the fourth floor of a modern
office building, it had all the charm of a subway tunnel.  We began to
refer to ourselves as SCIF rats because we never got to see daylight.
The walls were typical government gray, and we decorated them with
memorabilia sent in by supporters all over the world: AIrican masks,
dolls from the Orient, photographs, and flags.  Chris Capozzi, the
paralegal in charge of collating and cataloging the documents, took an
excerpt from one of my Marine Fitness Report duty station requests and
printed it up on a big chart as a reminder of where I would rather be:
"assigned to a forward-deployed unit at the edge of the empire,
preferably in harm's way."
     While this wasn't the edge of the empire, I was certainly in harm's
way.
     Even so, we had a few laughs.  Barry Simon worked out a way to
protect our defense strategy by having all our witnesses sign into the
SCIF as "Mr. Visitor."  And from the start the lawyers tried to keep
things on an upbeat note.  They even threw a SCIF opening party, where
Admiral Poindexter and I were invited to cut the ribbon.  The lawyers
brought in champagne andwhat else?  a cake in the shape of a key.
     Then we moved in.  For more than a year, we ate nearly every lunch
and dinner in the SCIF.  We ordered in so many Domino's piz
     zas and Chinese takeout deliveries that Brendan finally arranged
for a caterer to deliver a home-style meal one night a week.
     We spent hours poring over the tons of material that the
prosecutors delivered to the SCIF, including some of the documents I had
worked on or written during my five and a half years at the NSC.  It
took us weeks to go through it all, in part because there was so much of
it, but mostly because it was all so thoroughly mixed together.
     I had maintained my office files by subject and, within a subject
     file, by date.  And so, for example, all my files on Palestinian
terrorist organizations were in one drawer of a safe, arranged in
chronological order.  But the files delivered to us in the SCIF were so
jumbled up that they seemed to have been run through a blender.  A 1985
document on the military situation in Afghanistan would be followed by a
1983 analysis of the Sandinista economy.
     Alter several weeks of collating, sorting, and cataloging, I could
     see that we still didn't have it all.  Many documents that I
specifically remembered were still missing, along with tape recordings
of meetings I had held with the Iranians.  "There's more," I kept
telling the lawyers.  "I know there's more."
     And indeed there was.  Thanks to Barry Simon's tenacity and his
constant haranguing, the prosecutors (alter months of denial) suddenly
found what we had been asking for.  They had been working for more than
eighteen months, but had apparently forgotten about this stuff.  At
last, we were allowed to go over to the OEOB.  When we entered the room
where my files were stored, we found ez8hry cartons of material that had
been removed from my office.  Astonishingly, no lawyer from the special
prosecutor's office had bothered to review this material!  Random
documents were marked, and some boxes were identified as having been
reviewed months earlier by FBI agents.  But none of the highly paid
lawyers from the enormous prosecution staff had taken the time to look
through my files.  Barry, Nicole, John, and I sat there for days, wading
through my files
     and jotting down the control numbers of documents we needed.  Here
were the tapes and transcripts I had been describing to my lawyers.
Here, too, were the so-called Honduras documents, which showed how
widespread the administration's support for the contras had been during
the period covered by Boland.  If I had shredded even half as much as
people said, all of this material would have been long gone.
     Meanwhile, time was running out.  We found these boxes in July 988,
and the trial was scheduled to begin on September 20.  The ighty boxes
of documents were clearly grounds for a postponeentwhat lawyers call a
continuance.  We desperately needed time o review all these documents,
and either get them declassified or eceive permission from the judge to
use them at the trial.
     I had another concern about the schedule: if my trial began in
     ate September, it was almost certain to hurt the Republicans in the
residential elections.  The Democrats had alreadymade that clear: on e
opening night of their national convention, two of the principal peakers
invoked Iran-contra.  The publicity of a trial would only add el to that
fire.  Because the prosecution gets to state its case before e other
side can respond, the defense might be forced to remain ilent until
alter Election Day.  "A trial at the height of the camaign," Brendan
wrote to the judge, "transforms this case even more nto an election-year
issue at the expense of North's right to a fair nd impartial trial."  On
August 5' in light of the eighty boxes of new material, Judge esell
agreed to postpone the trial.  It finally began on February 21, 989.
     Those eighty boxes of documents proved to be invaluable to my
efense.  Among other benefits, they gave us critically needed ammuition
to counter one of the special prosecutor's key witnesses: Bud cFarlane.
     I have already discussed Bud McFarlane's appearance as a proseution
witness at my trial, where he was even more obtuse than usual.  You
don't lie," he told the court at one point.  "You put your interretation
on what the truth is."  Huh?  And when the chief prosecuor asked
McFarlane whether his 1985 letter to Congressman Hamilon had been true,
Bud replied in classic McFarlanese: "As written, o.  In context, I think
so, but it's wrong to write it, I agree.  I'm rong.
     It was painfenormous affection and respect was torn apart.  The
prosecuors, who had made Bud one of their star witnesses against me,
ouldn't resist attacking this unfortunate, broken man.  They derided im
for the letters he wrote at the time of his suicide attempt in early
987, and even the judge joined the offensive as Bud made fiirther
     efforts to distance himself from me-and from what he had asked me
to do.
     Although Bud had already pled guilty to several misdemeanor charges
of misleading Congress in 1985 and 1986, and had even been sentenced, he
still wouldn't admit that he had tried to cover up his knowledge and
approval for what I had done to support the Nicaraguan resistance.
Instead, he blew up at the pro'ecutor.  It was alter one such explosion
on the witness stand that Judge Gesell referred to him as "an intensely
unreliable witness."
     Bud's testimony hurt me personally, and it hurt my case, too.  His
testimony about what he knew in 1985 was painflil to hear.  Brendan's
task was to make clear that McFarlane had known about and authorized my
actions.  He started out by walking Bud through the written record, each
step of which was designed to show the jury that Bud had not only known
what I was doing, but had approved it, too.  Then he had Bud sum up what
I had been doing for the resistance-and why.  Sullivan: You had asked,
indeed you had directed, that Colonel North keep the freedom fighters
alive body and soul, correct?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: And you transmitted to him the direct order of the
President of the United States in 1984 to keep them alive body and soul,
correct?
     McFarlane: Correct.
     Sullivan: And you not only told him it was your order and your
directive, but you told him that it was the President's order and the
President's directive that he do what he could to keep them alive body
and soul, correct?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: And during the period 1984 and 1985, up until the end of
1986, the Congress of the United States was not providing military money
to the freedom fighters, were they?  McFarlane: No.
     Sullivan: And the fact is that the mission of keeping them alive
was accomplished by Colonel North and others during that period of time,
isn't that true?  McFarlane: Yes.
     SullIvan: They stayed alive during the years when Congress had
abandoned them, didn't they?  McFarlane: Yes.
     And a few minutes later: Sullivan: Now, Mr. McFarlane, was the
President angry when the Boland Amendment precluded the United States
from fiilfilling its commitment to the freedom fighters?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: Did he express that anger to you?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: And did you in turn express the President's anger to
Colonel North?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: And what was the reason for the anger?  Was it because
the United States had broken a promise to these people and had abandoned
them?  McFarlane: Yes, in part.  Sullivan: What was the other part?
     McFarlane: The President saw the behavior of the Congress, the
cutting off of support to be not only breaking faith with people who we
encouraged to risk their lives, but he saw an inconsistency between the
Congress that could say yes, let's support freedom fighters in
Afghanistan 12,000 miles away but let's don't do it right here in our
own neighborhood.  It didn't track.  It was inconsistent.
     And still later:
     Sullivan: Mr. McFarlane, you received literally hundreds of
memoranda from Colonel North over the course of the time you worked with
him, didn't you?  McFarlane: Yes.
     Sullivan: I dare say that he might have written more memoranda that
any staff officer you had, is that correct?  McFarlane: It's likely,
yes.
     Sullivan: And I take it that when you carry out your responsibili
     ties as the head of the NSC, that when you get matters of
importance, you do read them, or have other staff officers look at them
and apprise you of what's in them, correct?  McFarlane:Yes.
     Sullivan: And it is also true, isn't it, that Colonel North, based
upon your experience with him over the years, made extraordinary efforts
to keep you advised on the work that he was doing in carrying out his
assignment, isn't that correct?  McFarlane: Yes.  Generally, yes.
     Sullivan: And wouldn't it be fair to say that from your vantage
point it may be that Colonel North gave you too much paper rather than
too little?
     McFarlane: Oh, I wanted to be informed.
     For me, the entire trial came down to two fiindamental issues.  The
first was that everything I had done was known about and approved by
those I had worked for.  Even without the testimony of President Reagan
or Admiral Poindexter (who had not been granted immunity to testify at
my trial), Brendan was able to make this point during his
cross-examination of McFarlane.  The other major theme was that I hadn't
acted with criminal intent.  In other words, I had no intention of
breaking any laws.  In fact, those of us involved in helping the
resistance went to great lengths to avoid violating the Boland Amendment
or any other statute.
     On this question of criminal intent, the prosecutors based much
     of their argument on the testimony of Spitz Channell.  During the
trial, Channell told a story that he had related several times before:
that in September 1985, he had chartered a plane to bring me to Dallas,
Texas, for a dinner with Bunker Hunt, the well-known oil man and silver
magnate.  Channell hoped that Hunt would make another contribution to
NEPL on behalf of the contras, and he had brought me down to describe
the situation in Central America and the needs of the resistance.  Alter
dinner at the Petroleum Club, Hunt, Channell, and I had chatted while
Channell's assistant went to find a cab to take me back to the airport.
But in describing this scene at my trial, Channell added an
extraordinary new wrinkle: a conversation between Bunker Hunt and
     me, which, he now said, "just stuck in my mind."  As Channell
described it, Hunt had asked me, "What are you going to do?  Do you mind
getting in trouble for this?"  To which I had supposedly responded, "No,
I don't care if I have to go to jail for this, and I don't care if I
have to lie to Congress about this."
     Brendan had consistently told me not to show any reaction to other
people's testimony, no matter how bizarre it was.  But when Channell
told this story, I just couldn't help myself, and I looked up at him in
astonishment.  The conversation he had just ight be criminal.  Had it
actually occurred, I would have been in real trouble.
     But this conversation never happened.  I knew it, Channell knew it,
and Sullivan knew it.  If the prosecutors didn't know it, for several
reasons, they surely should have.
     In any event, they certainly appeared delighted to have this new
version from Channell as "evidence" of my criminal intent.  For the past
two years, the poor guy had been living with the prospect of jail
hanging over his head.  But his actual sentence would not be determined
until the prosecution evaluated the decree o/his cooperation.
     When Channell came up with this new anecdote, Brendan saw it
     not as a problem, but an opportunity.  In Brendan's view, if the
prosecutors were willing to put on such testimony in order to "get" his
client, he would expose the lie.
     Why did Brendan believe so strongly that Channell was lying?  For
     one thing, the prosecution had not listed Bunker Hunt as one of
their witnesses, which presumably meant that Hunt couldn't corroborate
Channell's story.  But then, Channell couldn't even corroborate his own
story.  He had spent scores of hours in hearings, interviews,
depositions, and in front of the grand jury, but not until much later,
when the "deal" he would get depended on his testimony, did he mention
this alleged conversation between Hunt and me about lying to Congress or
going to jail.
     Unfortunately, Brendan couldn't simply jump up and point out
     e inconsistencies in Channell's stories.  He had to wait for the
crossxamination, when he would have the opportunity to show why
hannell's testimony was unreliable.  During the break, the lawyers ore
through the box containing the transcripts of Channell's previous
     testimony and quickly pulled out the pages that would show how this
poor, intimidated man, threatened with jail, had finally succumbed to
the pressure.  As we walked back in, Brendan turned to me and said,
"We've got 'em."
     What followed was Sullivan at his finest.  He started out by gently
leading Channell back through the testimony he had just given.  In the
process, he pressed Channell on whether or not he had intended to commit
a crime.  No, Channell said, he hadn't.  The prosecution had basically
convinced him to plead guilty to what had never before been criminal:
conspiracy to use a tax-exempt organization to support the Nicaraguan
resistance.
     Then Brendan reminded Channell of his many previous versions of the
Bunker Hunt meeting, which had included no mention of this alleged
conversation with Bunker Hunt.  As Sullivan began reviewing Channell's
previous testimony about that evening in Dallas four years before, he
confronted Channell with the fact that his testimony had changed
dramatically.  Alter Brendan pointed out several inconsistencies in
Channell's testimony, the judge intervened: The Court: And how do you
explain that you told the jury that this [conversation between Hunt and
North) stuck in your mind and you had no doubt about it?
     Channell: Because it has, and it was very interesting how longThe
Court: You've now got three versions already.  Channell: It has  The
Court: What stuck in your mind when you told the jury it stuck in your
mind?
     Channell: That Colonel North said what he did relating to these two
questions, and it just stuck.
     And now Brendan moved in for the kill:
     Sullivan: What it points out, sir, is it is hard to remember what
was said.  It's hard.
     Channell: Well, I understand that.
     Sullivan: And this is important.  And sometimes when you have such
an urge to cooperate, there is a little danger that you might put words
in somebody's mouth that really don't belong [there)?
     Is that fair to say?
     Channell: Well, I'm sure there is that temptation, of course.
     A moment later, alter chastising poor Channell again, the judge
turned to the jury and said, "My instructions are the same to you,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as to each and every statement that
has been pointed out.  You may consider them in connection with your
appraisal of the credibility of this witness."
     In effect, the judge himself was advising the jury that Spitz
Channell's testimony could not be trusted.  We could only hope that the
jury would be able to do what the judge had instructed.  But the effect
on the prosecution was visible.  For them it was like a punch in the
stomach-not a knockout, but enough to badly damage their argument about
criminal intent.
     By the time I finally took the stand it was almost anticlimactic.
For
     me, this was "Hearings Il-The Sequel."  Only now, instead of
looking up at congressmen, senators, and their aides, I was facing the
special prosecutors.  Judge Gesell was on my lelt, and the jury members
sat in the jury box on my right.  Betsy was sitting in the first row
behind the rail.  Whenever I looked over at her she would smile, and
each time we came back from a break she said, "I'm praying for you.  It
will be all right."
     The courtroom looks different from the witness stand than it does
from the defense table, and I was struck by the contrast in bedside
manner between the chief prosecutor and Brendan.  My antagonist tended
to strut about and posture in front of the jury, much like the courtroom
lawyers in the movies and on television.  Brendan was more subdued and
less affected as he leaned on the podium below the judge's bench.
     During my cross-examination, the prosecutor would begin each
session with "Good morning" or "Good alternoon."  But I just couldn't
bring myself to wish him the same.  I really didn't want him to have a
good morning or a good alternoon, and only a moment earlier I had taken
an oath to tell the truth.  For some observers, the most dramatic point
in a trial occurs when the defendant takes the stand.  For me, however,
the climax occurred during the closing arguments.  The prosecutor closes
first, as he tries to show that he has already proven beyond a
reasonable doubt
     that the defendant is guilty.  Then comes the defense counsel, who
tries to demonstrate just the opposite.  These prosecutors claimed that
they made no use of my testimony at the hearings, and that they hadn't
watched it or even read about it.  But oddly enough, the trial ended on
the same sordid note as the hearings.  In the Senate Caucus Room,
Senator Inouye had ended his final remarks by comparing me to the Nazi
war criminals at Nuremberg.  At the trial, the chief pro done.  I'm not
entirely sure what to make of these comments, but they certainly went
far beyond the bounds of reason and civility.  They remind me of the old
Soviet mentality, where anyone opposed to any element of the state's
domestic or foreign policy was immediately branded a "fascist."  Brendan
was outraged by the prosecutor's effort to link me in the jurors' minds
with Adolf Hitler, and I remember wondering what my father, who had gone
to war to fight the Nazis, would have thought of that reference.  "These
people will stop at nothing," Brendan said.
     Listening to Brendan's close was like watching a master carpenter
putting the final touches on a beautifial house that he had been working
on for months.  Addressing the twelve individuals who would be deciding
my fate, he carefially summarized all that they had seen and heard
during the trial.  He described my Marine Corps career, and my work on
sensitive projects at the White House.  He reminded the jury that there
was ample proof that the people I had worked for had approved what I had
done.  Although I hadn't been able to articulate it well, Brendan was
able to capture and describe my feelings of being abandoned by former
colleagues and higher-ups.
     He recalled the terrorist threats to my fiunily, and pointed out
how the lives of others had depended on what I had or hadn't done.  He
pointed out that criminal intent had never entered my mind.  And in the
end, he urged these twelve citizens to consider carefiilly whether or
not they could convict me beyond any reasonable doubt.
     By the time he was finished I was utterly drained.  I remember
almost nothing of the prosecutor's rebuttal, the judge's instructions to
the jury, or the flurry of final motions that are so essential to a
defendant.  Now it was just a matter of waiting for the verdict.
     With the understanding that we would return to court the moment a
verdict was in, the judge had granted Brendan's request
     that we be allowed to wait at the law firm.  That was a big relief,
although it also meant that reporters and camera teams took up daylong
watches at the courthouse, outside the Williams & Connolly building, and
in front of our home.  Brian Cox and the men from our Bible study group
came by several times for lunch and prayer, and Betsy joined us when she
could.  Each alternoon, when the jury recessed for the day, I was able
to go home and have dinner with the family.
     The jury deliberated for more than eleven days.  Early on the
alternoon of May 14, Judge Gesell's clerk called Brendan to say, "We
have a verdict."  I was on my way out to meet Betsy for lunch at the
nearby Army & Navy Club when one of the security agents gave me the
news.  Brendan had Betsy paged, and a few minutes later she joined us in
Brendan's office.
     As the reporters yelled out questions, we piled into the waiting
     van for the now-familiar trip to the courthouse.  On the way over,
Brendan said, "Remember, if it doesn't go our way on all counts, there
will be an appeal."
     As we entered the courthouse, Betsy spotted David Harper, our
pastor, trying to make his way through the horde of reporters.  She
prevailed on Jerry Dimenna, the head of our security team, to get David
into the courtroom.  Once we were inside, Betsy and I stood together
holding hands, and David said a quiet prayer with us.  Then, glancing
over at the defense table, David asked me to bring over the well-worn
Bible I had brought with me to court each day.
     This Bible had been around.  Morton Blackwell in the White House
Public Liaison Office had given it to me shortly alter I arrived at the
NSC, and I had carried it with me ever since.  I took it with me
everywhere-including Tehran.
     Before I returned to my seat, David opened the Bible to Psalm
Ninety-one and handed it to me.  As we waited for the jury to come in, I
sat there and read: Surely He will save you from the fowler's snare
     and from the deadly pestilence.
     He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will
find reftlge; His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
     Meanwhile, in the hallway outside the courtroom, all order broke
down as the crowd of reporters tried to surge through the metal
detectors and security that the federal marshals had set up for this
trial.
     It was shortly before two-thirty when the jury came in.  I looked
at their faces, but it was impossible to know what they had decided or
what they had been through.  The foreperson handed the verdict form to
the bailil1, who gave it to the judge.
     The room was silent while the judge read the jury's decision.
Alter what seemed lIke a long delay, he started to read in a steady
monotone, like the roll of a drum on some faraway parade field:
     "As to count one, the verdict is not guilty," (Thank you, Lord)
"both of the substantive count and aiding and abetting.
     "As to count two, the verdict is not guilty," (Thank you, Lord)
     "of the substantive count and of aiding and abetting.  "On count
three the verdict is not guilty" (Thank you) "as to the substantive
count and not guilty" (Thank you) "as to aiding and abetting.
     "As to count four the verdict is not guilty" (Thank you) "as to the
substantive count and not guilty" (Thank you) "as to aiding and
abetting.
     "As to count five the verdict is not guilty."  (Thank you.) "As to
count six, the verdict is not guilty" (Thank you) "of the substantive
count, guilty" (Oh God, why?) "of aiding and abetting."
     Later on, I was told that these words from the judge had been
punctuated by a gasp from somewhere in the court.  If so, I didn't hear
it, and it did nothing to slow the judge's steady rhythm: "As to count
seven, the verdict is not guilty" (Thank you) "of the substantive count,
and not guilty" (Thank you) "of aiding and abetting."
     "As to count eight, the verdict is not guilty."  (Thank you.) "As
to count nine, the verdict is guilty."  (Oh God, not another one!)
     "As to count ten, the verdict is guilty."  (Lord, no more, please!)
"As to count eleven, the verdict is not guilty."  (Thank you, Lord.) "As
to count twelve, the verdict is not guilty."  (Thank you, Lord.) The
judge's reading of the verdict lasted little more than a minute.
     It seemed like hours.  I was stunned, elated, crushed, and happy
all at once.
     The judge had said "not guilty" thirteen times and "guilty" three
times.  But there were only twelve counts, and for a moment I couldn't
reto figure it out, a stampede of reporters raced for the door while
Judge Gesell and the lawyers calmly took care of the final procedural
obligations.
     By the time they finished and the courtroom was quiet again, I
     had figured out what the three remaining charges were: helping to
obstruct Congress, something about destroying, altering, or removing
documents, and accepting the security system.  And then it was over.
     As the judge walked out, the courtroom again became chaotic.  I
walked over to Betsy and hugged her.  I embraced David Harper, and shook
hands with Brendan, Nicole, Barry, Terry, and John.  Congressman Henry
Hyde gave me a bear hug and turned to reassure Betsy.
     The prosecutors lelt their minions behind to pack up their papers,
     and rushed out to the dozens of waiting microphones.  As I returned
to the table to retrieve my briefcase, Brendan came up behind me and
gave me a pat on the back.  "Let's go," he said.  "It's not over yet.
We're going to fight this until you are free of it all.  Remember, you
walked into this courtroom with sixteen counts against you.  You went to
trial on twelve, and now we're down to three.  We're headed in the right
direction.  Come on, let's get on with the appeal.  And by the way, are
you having fiin yet?"
     On the way back to Williams & Connolly, Brendan had decided
     that when we arrived, he and I would each give a brief statement as
a way of dealing with the horde of reporters who would be camped Outside
the office.  Both our comments turned out to be prescient.  Brendan
ended his statement by saying, "You can be assured that we will never
abandon Colonel North and his family in this legal battle."  And they
didn't.
     I said, "We now face many months, perhaps years, fighting these
remaining charges.  [Little did I know!] Nevertheless, we are absolutely
confident of the final outcome.  As a Marine, I was taught to fight, and
     fight hard, for as long as it takes to prevail.  We will continue
this battle, and with the support and prayers of the American people, I
will be frilly vindicated."  I didn't know it at the time, but
vindication would be long in coming.  Brendan had already announced that
there would be an appeal, and throughout the case the lawyers had
carefiilly noted each legal issue that might later prove relevant.
     One particularly sensitive point had to do with the jury.  During
the trial, we had all heard murmurings that I was being judged by other
than a jury of my peers.  Some people argued that Sullivan should have
made an issue of the fact that I was a white, male, college graduate who
had served in the military, had traveled extensively, and had worked in
the upper echelons of government; that my background was radically
different from that of the all-black, mostly female jury.
     At the time, I didn't give this much thought.  But a year later, in
     the summer of 1990, a member of the jury that convicted me was
interviewed on television, and what she said came as a shock: "What were
people going to think on the outside if we found him not guilty?  Okay,
what were they going to think of us being as blacks, finding a white man
not guilty?  They're really going to think that we're stupid."
     I was stunned.  Justice is supposed to be blind; the color of a
person's skin should not determine their guilt or innocence.  To this
day, I don't quite know what to make of the juror's statement, which
goes against everything I have ever learned and believed.
     Patience was never my strong suit, but mine would be sorely tested
over the next seven weeks as the judge collected information to use in
determining my sentence.  While we waited, Stuart graduated from high
school and I tried to resume a more normal family life while working
with Brendan to prepare a presentencing report, which would outline all
the reasons why the judge shouldn't send me to jail.
     I was assigned a probation officer, Ralph Ardito, whose task was
     to act as my warden during this period and to make a recommendation
to the judge as to my sentence.  At first I was wary of him; I assumed
he was another member of the prosecution that had been arrayed against
me for so long.  But I soon learned that Ardito was a
     al professional.  He was charged with a difficult task, and he
carried it with great compassion and sensitivity.
     As the day of sentencing approached, Brendan's office was sieged
with calls and offers of help.  People I had known well and en I had
served with sent letters to the judge, asking for leniency.  me of the
most moving letters were from Marines I had served with Vietnam, most of
whom I hadn't seen in twenty years.  On the Fourth of July, the day
before the sentencing, our family joyed a quiet picnic with a group of
our neighbors.  Alterwards, we nt to watch the fireworks at the Great
Falls firehouse.  It was a wonrfiil day: we swam, played, and talked
until alter sunset.  I didn't nt it to end.
     The next morning, I got up even earlier than usual and read from
     e Bible.  As Betsy and I drove into Washington, we didn't know
ether or not we would be riding home together alter court.  As ays, the
reporters and cameras followed us every step of the way.  e Lone Ranger
had Tonto, his faithfial Indian companion.  I had the ess.
     As we walked toward Courtroom Six, one of the reporters ran ng
beside me.
     "You look awI:illy calm for a man on his way in to be sentenced,"
said.
     "That's because I know where I'm going," I replied.  I was thinkg
in terms of a far larger context.  He looked astonished.  "You do?  How
many years are you going get?"  he asked.
     "Eternity," I replied.  He looked totally confiised.  He obviously
     d in mind a very different kind of sentence.  And so did the
special prosecutor.  He pleaded with the judge to nd me to prison.  And
he wasn't alone, either.  The New Tork Times ztorialized in favor of a
lengthy prison term.  And people wonder y I don't like the press.  The
sentencing hearing was as much of an emotional roller coaster the day
the verdict was announced.  Hearing somebody argue in a urt of law that
you deserve to go to prison is an awfiil experience.
     there was also Brendan's eloquent plea for the judge's compasn.
Drawing heavily from letters he had received, interviews he had
     conducted, and everything he had learned about me, Brendan took
almost a fiill hour to explain to the judge why I should remain free.
He began with my milecember 1986 he was named the primary target in the
named request for an independent counsel.  He became the target of the
longest, largest, independent counsel and grand jury investigation in
the history of our country....  Throughout the two and a half year
period [since the firing] he and his family have been subjected to the
greatest and the most intrusive media interest perhaps of any citizen
except a sitting President.  The media generated literally tens of
thousands of articles and op-ed pieces to which he cannot respond....
For months at a time the press camped outside his home and followed him
to work and to the store and to church and to the city dump.  At no time
has he given an interview about the case, respecting counsel's advice
that that's not the proper way in litigation.  He and his family have
also been plagued by the unauthorized books that purport to tell in
intimate detail the story of his and his wife's life, his children's
lives.  They've been subjected to an offensive fictionalized TV
mini-series without authority, without interviews, without permission.
Just like he's some commodity that people use....
     North has been likened to Adolf Hiller, the worst criminal and mass
murderer who ever lived....
     His family has felt the extraordinary impact.  The assassination
threat has
     not abated.  It's been exacerbated by the worldwide publicity
caused by one branch of our government.
     Colonel North didn't ask to become known throughout America.  He
     was thrust upon the TV of every person in the country.  The threat
eats away at a person like a cancer.  It's always there.  It's always
haunting.  You don't know whether it will never happen or something will
happen next month.  Maybe most of all, the thing that I've heard no one
say is, what is his loss as a result of all of this?  It's loss of peace
of mind.  We all go out to the car and we go to work and we don't think
for a minute that we'll be assaulted on the way, much less killed.  The
loss of peace of mind-what a burden.  It's an extraordinary punishment
which he'll carry with him today and into the foreseeable fiiture, which
should be weighed when the court determines today what the appropriate
sentence is.
     What must it be like to wonder about these things?  To wonder
whether
     some group that doesn't think logically wants to even the score
with Asnerica by getting Ollie North, or just some deranged person who
wants to get on the front page of the newspaper by attacking North.
He's suffered enough.  His family has suffered enough.  He's been
punished enough.  A prison term on top of that would be ftindamentally
too harsh, wrong.  It's a time for forgiveness.  It's a time to say it's
over."
     And it almost was.  The judge handed down a three-year suspended
sentence, fined me a hundred and filty thousand dollars, and assigned me
to two years of probation and twelve hundred hours of community service
in an inner-city drug-prevention program.
     There were several points in Brendan's remarks when I had to choke
back tears as I listened to him describe my life.  Even so, Brendan
didn't use everything.  He didn't mention the call I had received late
one night from Billy Graham, or the supportive letters from former
President Nixon.  Nor did he mention three laudatory letters 1 had
received from President Reagan while I was working at the NSCwhich he
hadn't known about.  They turned up two years alter the trial, when we
were moving to a new house.  When I brought them in to show Brendan, he
went bonkers.
     By far the most interesting piece of evidence that Brendan didn't
     use was what we called the "smoking gun in the closet" tape.  (The
title comes from a deliciously mixed metaphor that appears in the first
line of the transcript.) This tape was supposed to be nothing more than
a routinely recorded telephone conversation between employees in two
different Manhattan offices of New York's Citibank on June 17, 1987,
about three weeks before I testified at the congressional hearings.  But
in a coincidence that is almost too bizarre to believe, leaking through
the conversation between the two bank employees was a second dialogue
between two men on the subject of the Irancontra hearings.  Fiom their
discussion, it's clear that one of these men had already appeared before
the congressional committee.  The bank gave the tape to the FBI, and the
lollowing summer, Barry Simon found it in a pile of potential evidence
that was finally rovided to us by the prosecution.  Although most of the
conversation etween the two men was remarkably clear, we were never able
to etermine who they were.  But there was no doubt as to what they ere
discussing:
     A: Yeah, there's a smoking gun in the closet.  Reagan knows.
B:Listen...
     A: I told the committee.  There was no, I told the committee there
was, I had nothing to do with those papers.  Ollie North knows about it.
Reagan knows...Reagan knows about itB: Listen, he ain't testifying.
     A:-and the...and the other-the other people involved do know about
that.
     B: [Unintelligible.]
     A: Well, you have to go to the Committee.  B:
[Unintelligible]...the Committee.  A: You have to go to the Committee,
not me.  B:Listen...
     A: Somebody's got to bring this up.  B: [Unintelligible.J
     A: I think somebody ought to go, somebody's got to be responsible
for this.
     B: [Unintelligible.]
     A: Reagan...Reagan knows.  Reagan has all the memos.  B: He's got
all the memos?  I thought he tore all that stuff up.  A: No.  He's got
all the memos, and there are copies.  B: Didn't you burn that stufl?  A:
No.
     B: Oh, jeez.  I warned you about that.  A: Nobody...no...
     B: It's going to hit the papers like crazy.  A: Nobody told me to.
B: [Unintelligible.] A: [Unintelligible.] No.
     B: What about your secretary?  She couldn't get the stuff copied?
A: Not all of it.
     B: [Unintelligible] about Reagan [unintelligible.] A: Well...  I'm
getting out of this thing, and if somebody comes to me, I'm blowing the
cover.
     B: I'll tell you, if I go down, I'm taking you with me.  A: Well,
me too.
     B: You and your...secretary...  [unintelligible.]
     A: I'd better call you back.  I think we're tapped.  B:Ithinkso.
A: All right.  'Bye.
     When he first heard the tape during preparations for the trial,
Barry
     was flabbergasted.  "Listen to this!"  he called out, and we all
gathered in the SCIF conference room to hear it.  Barry played it oves.
Two of my lMers wondered whether one of the men was Don Regan, but that
struck me as unlikely: it just didn't sound like him.  Regan would have
come across as more arrogant, whereas these men were clearly anxious.
My own
     guess was that one of the participants was Ed Hickey, the
President's military aide, who has since passed away.  Hickey was
interviewed around this time by the committee, and he had been involved,
along with me, in a hostage rescue attempt by the Drug Enforcement
Agency that was fiinded with profits from the Iran arms sale.  But
that's just a guess.  Whoever these men were, it was clear that somebody
was in possession of important documents, some of which had been
destroyed.  But what?  And how, exactly, did all this fit into the
Iran-contra story?  When I was unable to identify the voices, my
attorneys took the tape to the White House.  On July 28,1988, Brendan
and Barry went to the White House to meet with Arthur B.  Culvahouse,
the President's counsel, and one of his aides to seek access to
documents and to ask for an interview with the President.  They took the
tape along.
     As Barry described it later, Culvahouse blanched when he heard
     the tape, and his aide appeared visibly shaken.  Both men denied
any
     owledge of it, and as far as they knew, no other government agency
ad been asked about it either.  And yet the special prosecutors had
eceived this tape months earlier.
     Well, said Brendan, would you help us get to the bottom of this
     nd let us interview the President about it?  Culvahouse told
Brendan he'd think about it.  Two months later
     e answer came back: no.  Apparently the special prosecutor's zeal
in pursuing John Poindexer and me did not extend to finding out who was
on that tape, or hat documents they were discussing.  Nobody at the
White House,
     the FBI, or the special prosecutor's office was interested in
helping us.  And it's safe to assume that nobody on the congressional
committee heard this tape, either.  If they had, it surely would have
leaked.
     Without being able to identify the voices, we were not able to use
     the tape in court.  The special prosecutor might never have given
it to us except that he was required to do so under the rules of
evidence.  But neither they, the FBI, nor the White House ever revealed
its existence.
     Chapter 18
     ~olonzg Bacl<
     cording to the conventional wisdom, Iran-contra occurred because
small group of misfits and renegades, working out of the White ouse
basement, rose above the law and carried out their own foreign licy,
whereupon their superiors where shocked-shocked-to learn at they had
done.
     It makes for a good story, but that's not what happened.  As I see
the causes of Iran-contra lie in several directions, with plenty of ame
to go around.
     I have already described my own mistakes, regrets, and lapses in
gment.  But I never saw myself as being above the law, nor did I er
intend to do anything illegal.  The argument over the meaning d
constitutional legitimacy of the Boland Amendments will continfor years,
but I have always believed, and still do, that these amendnts did not
bar the National Security Council from supporting the ntras.  Even the
most stringent of the Boland Amendments conned clear and substantial
loopholes which we used to ensure that e Nicaraguan resistance would not
be abandoned.  From 1984 on, I did my best to keep faith with two groups
whom ared about deeply, and whose fate President Reagan had put at the
of his agenda: our hostages in Lebanon and the contras.  While I
     worked frantically on behalf of both groups, I can see now that I
was also motivated by my own pride and ambition.  No matter how
difficult or demanding the job was, I was sure I could handle it.  I
knew that if these missions were successfiil, only a very small handfiil
of people would ever know what I had achieved.  Paradoxically, I took
pride in that, too.
     I still have conflicting feelings about the Iran initiative.  It
ended in failure, but that's not to say it wasn't worth trying.  Had we
succeeded, not only would all the hostages have come home, but we would
have opened a new relationship with a country that is still important to
our national security.
     But we didn't succeed.  Not only were we unable to establish a
connection to the moderates in Iran, but we also undermined a valid and
well-established policy of not making concessions to terrorists.
Although we didn't deal directly with the terrorists in Beirut, the
perception that we did was so widespread that it almost didn't matter.
And while we did rescue three of the hostages, two other Americans were
seized.  Moreover, our contacts with Iran ultimately caused great
political damage and embarrassment to the United States, and especially
to President Reagan.
     While I recognize the liabilities of the Iran initiative, I
continue to
     feel that saving a life-or trying this even more important than
preserving a policy.  Earlier, we condemned several European governments
for making that same choice with regard to their hostages in Beirut, but
in the end we did the same thing.  However unwise our actions may have
been in retrospect, I'm glad that I live in a country where the
protection of human life can still outweigh the grand designs of
government.
     Our Nicaraguan initiative was more straightforward, and lor me, at
least, presented no great moral quandary.  Until Congress decided to
resume its fianding for the contras, we succeeded in fiilfilling the
mission assigned by the President: to keep the resistance alive, body
and soul.  Our goal was not military but political: to enable the
contras to exert the kind of pressure on the Sandinistas that could
ultimately lead to a free and democratic Nicaragua.  Early in 1990, our
efforts were vindicated when a coalition of anti-Sandinista groups, led
by Violeta Chamorro, scored a decisive electoral victory over Daniel
Ortega and the Sandinistas.
     "Set your watches," Mrs.  Chamorro had told her audiences.  "Set m
to the same hour as Poland, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.  Set m to the
same hour as Chile, because this is the time of democracy freedom."
     These were lolty sentiments, but almost nobody in the United tes
thought she could win.  And despite everything I knew and ieved, I
didn't either.  I had begun to accept the views of the media erts who
pontificated at length about the inevitable Ortega triph.
     But I of liberty that exists in all of us made the difference in
aragua, just as it did in Berlin, Poland, Romania, and so many er
places.  Although I believed fervently in Ronald Reagan's meses of
freedom and democracy that we had broadcast to the world, had even
helped dralt some of them, I obviously missed the fiill nitude of their
impact.
     With this global shilt toward liberty, Ronald Reagan's presidency
uld have ended on a great victorious crescendo.  But the altermath e
Iran and contra initiatives distorted the real impact of his presicy.
Brendan Sullivan had forecast this outcome when he wrote to sident
Reagan, urging him to pardon me, Admiral Poindexter, Joe nandez, and
others involved in these initiatives.  Brendan's letter signed by the
lawyers representing the government officials zcted in the controversy
and hand-carried to the President.  This r, reprinted for the first time
in the Appendix, was never acknowled.
     Brendan's assessment was correct-the controversy continues to day.
But while some of the blame goes to me, not all of it can be ibed to
those of us who carried out these policies.  Congress, too, bears some
responsibility for what happened.  Its llating support for the contras
not only endangered their lives, but broke faith with our nation's
commitments.
     As we've seen, both the special prosecutor and the hearings me ways
for Congress to criminalize legitimate policy differences een coequal
branches of government.  But why were those differs so great to begin
with?  And aren't there always policy differs between the executive and
legislative branches?  es-but rarely to the extent we saw during the
Reagan years.
     What happened in Washington in the 1980s was the result of changes
in both the legislative and executive branches during the preceding two
or three decades.  Ever since Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over
Barry Goldwater, which was followed four years later by the highly
contentious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the
leadership of the Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the lelt.
These days, when the reelection of Capitol Hill incumbents is now
virtually guaranteed, House members and senators have become more
beholden to their party's leadership than to the voters they ostensibly
represent.  This helps to explain why many have drilted so far from the
center of the political spectrum.
     As Congress was inching to the lelt, the American body politic
reacted in 1980 by electing a true conservative to the White House.  But
unlike the slow and gradual permutation on Capitol Hill, the shilt in
ideology when Ronald Reagan came to the White House was both enormous
and abrupt.  Suddenly, the traditional adversarial relationship between
the President and Congress became more intense than it had in many
years.  And Nicaragua became the battlefield.  More than any of his
recent predecessors, President Reagan came
     into office with clear philosophical goals.  He favored less
government and lower taxes, and he believed that private enterprise
should replace the public sector in providing opportunities for the
American people.  And in case his domestic vision wasn't shocking enough
for the Democratic majority in Congress, Reagan wanted these same
principles to be reflected in our forez8n policy, too.  He insisted that
Amencan foreign policy should exhibit the revolutionary and
antityrannical ideals of our forefathers.  In practical terms, this
meant that the United States would go beyond mere "containment" and
would actively support anti-Communist resistance movements in Angola,
Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.  The Reagan doctrine not only
traumatized the Congress; it also stunned large sectors of Washington's
permanent bureaucracy.
     This was, alter all, a sea change in our international posture.
Since 1945, Communism had prevailed just about everywhere it had tried
its hand.  But Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey insisted that if we could
help an indigenous anti-Communist resistance movement inflict a single
major defeat, the entire Communist house of cards would come tumbling
down.  Alter the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet empire
     was stretched so thin that Moscow simply couldn't afford to
continue supporting all its proxies.
     For the congressional Democrats, the first two years of the Reagan
administration were an unmitigated disaster.  Alter a long string of
defeats on domestic policy issues, they focused their attention on
Central America~ne of the few areas where the President was vulnerable.
Pointing to our long and shamefiil history of backing Latin American
regimes with abysmal human rights records, they portrayed our policy of
backing the contras as simply more of the same.  Here they had some
success, which culminated in the various Boland Amendments, each of
which whittled away at our support for the Nicaraguan resistance.
     Despite all my disagreements with the congressional Democrats, I
     find it hard to believe that most of them really wanted to see a
Communist toehold on the mainland of our hemisphere.  But they were
willing to try almost anything in their fight against Ronald Reagan.  In
the process, they put the final nail in the coffin of Sam Rayburn's
famous dictum that politics stops at the water's edge.
     President Reagan, too, must accept some of the blame for what
happened.  Ironically, his greatest strength was also his primary
weakness.  He always focused on the big picture, and he knew exactly
what direction he wanted to go.  But in the process he neglected the
details.  He knew where he wanted to end up, and he didn't much care how
he got there.  Later, when the whole thing blew up in his face,
President Reagan laimed to accept responsibility for Iran-contra.  But
his professions ang hollow as he evaded real responsibility for what had
happened by laiming that he just didn't know.  It was a weak defense,
and it reflectd badly on him and his presidency.
     ome commentators have tried to argue that Iran-contra occurred
ecause the executive branch carried out both of these operations in
ecret.  But some secrecy is essential in foreign policy.  The problem
sn't secrecy; it's how to protect actions that cannot be publicly
dislosed without cutting Congress out of the loop.
     Alter all, the Constitution reserves for Congress the right to
dvise and consent.  As I see it, the Founding Fathers intended to folow
the biom.  ut the current system of five large committees (including two
intelli
     gence committees) in the House and Senate, each with dozens of
staffers, overseeing American foreign policy is simply too unwieldy.
Protecting secrets has become more difficult than ever, which
discourages the executive branch from revealing important information.
We have gone from the counsel of many to the counsel of too many.
     There is an alternative.  We know from other operations, such as
     the Manhattan Project during World War II, and the subsequent
building of our nuclear arsenal, that Congress can keep secrets if the
relevant committees are small enough.  In the case of intelligence
operations, we would be better off with a very small joint committee of
perhaps five members, consisting of, say, three House members and two
from the Senate, with both parties represented.  This body would have an
equally small professional staff.
     Another lesson to be learned from Iran-contra is that the team of
advisers around the President would more effectively serve him and the
nation if it included members of Congress.  In the past, presidents
usually found a way to work with congressional leaders from both
parties, but in the adversarial atmosphere of Washington in the 1980s,
that just wasn't possible.  And what of America's role in the larger
world?  The Communist threat has subsided, but we still don't live in a
world of our own making.  The resurgence of regional and ethnic
nationalism everywhere from the Balkans to Quebec presents a host of new
foreign policy challenges.  While the broad threat of international
terrorism seems to have diminished, at least for the moment, there are
still leaders like Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein who offer havens
and support for its perpetrators.  And although his days are undoubtedly
numbered, Fidel Castro continues to advocate the export of revolutionary
Marxism.
     The world must also grapple with the rise of radical Islamic
fiindamentalism, which is unalterably opposed to the values of
individual liberty, religious freedom, and democracy that we cherish.
With the twentieth century drawing to a close, Islamic fiindamentalism
poses serious threats to a number of nations: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and even India.  As one of the Iranian
officials reminded us during our visit to Tehran, "The Ayatollah's
picture is in all of these places, and we didn't mail it there."
Although the world we live in is now much smaller, this doesn't
     iminish the role the United States will have to play.  But we must
bandon our old tendency to support the status quo.  In the past, this
zllingness to "deal with the devil I know" has only encouraged the ery
revolutions we hoped to avoid.  For years we tolerated and suported
repressive, right-wing, extremist regimes in places like Cuba, icaragua,
Panama, Vietnam, and the Philippines, merely because ey were
anti-Communist.  Some of the leaders who were advocates f change in
these countries, including Fidel Castro and Ho Chi inh, had come to us
first but were rebuffed.  We shouldn't have been urprised that they
turned to the Soviet Union for help.
     With our history and our ideals, the United States should never ave
allowed revolution and change to become the exclusive domain f the lelt.
The ideals of our own revolution-freedom, tolerance, and dividual
liberty-were inspiring two centuries ago.  They still are.
     Chapter 19
     Postscript
     Brendan and his team kept up the battle alter the trial-right to
the end of this long ordeal.  On July 20,1990, a three-judge panel of
the U.S.  Court of Appeals reversed one of the three outstanding counts
against me and vacated the other two.  If the special prosecutor still
wanted to convict me, he would have to show the judge that none of my
immunized congressional testimony had been used against me by the grand
jury that indicted me, or by the trial jury that later convictedme.
     The special prosecutor chose to appeal this decision by asking the
entire appeals court to reverse its own three-judge panel.  On November
27, 1990, the Court of Appeals again decided in my favor by upholding
the panel's decision.  As a result of the en banc ruling, the Marine
Corps restored my pension and I recovered something even more precious:
my right to vote.
     I had hoped the story would end here, but it was not to be.
Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, decided to take his appeal to
the Supreme Court.  On May 28, 1991, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the
two earlier appeals court decisions by announcing that it would not hear
the special prosecutor's appeal.
     Although Walsh had assured Brendan that he would drop the case if
he lost in the Supreme Court, he changed his mind.  Instead, he
apparently intended to start all over again.  On September 11, 1991,
     only six weeks before this book was due to go on sale, we returned
to court for an extraordinary session.  The first-and only-witness was
Bud McFarlane.  The prosecution had obviously expected Bud to explain
that his testimony at my trial had been unaffected by my congressional
testimony.  But the more the prosecutor pressed McFarlane on this point,
the more Bud insisted that he had been immersed in watching my
appearance at the hearings: "This was very explosive testimony," he
said.  "Tens of millions of Americans were blown away by it....  In
watching four days of riveting testimony by a man who was like a son to
me, how could I not have been affected?"  Clearly stunned by Bud's
emotional outburst, the prosecutors finally conceded that their case had
collapsed.
     It ended very much as it had begun.  On November 23, 1986, when Ed
Meese and his assistants had shown me the "diversion" memo that marked
the start of my legal problems, the Washington Redskins had been playing
the Dallas Cowboys at BFK Stadium.  The ending of my case took place
under remarkably similar circumstances.  On Sunday, September 15,1991, I
was listening to a Redskins game against the Phoenix Cardinals when
Brendan called me at home with the wonderfiil news that Lawrence Walsh
had decided to drop all the charges.  It was finally over.
     The following morning, my family and my lawyers accompanied
     me to court for my last day as a defendant.  The long ordeal that
had begun nearly five years earlier in the Attorney General's office
came to an abrupt but welcome end in less thang the prosecutor's motion
to dismiss and said, simply, "This terminates the case."  From the very
beginning, Brendan had insisted that my compelled testimony to Congress
made it impossible for the prosecution to proceed.  And now, five years
alter it all began, Walsh finally admitted that Brendan was right.
     As I lelt the courthouse, Betsy, Sarah, and Dornin joined me on
     the steps.  As usual, reporters were waiting.  But this time I
spoke to them:
     "For nearly five years, my family and I have been under fire.
Throughout this time we have been blessed to be supported by the finest
attorneys in America, and by the generosity and prayers of the
     American people, and that is what has sustained us through this
ordeal.  Without this support and encouragement, we could not have
prevailed."
     And I meant it, with all my heart.
     As for the other members of our cast: Elliott Abrams, who had
chaired the small, secret interagency group that had reviewed the
activities of the Nicaraguan resistance, lelt government in 1988 to
become a consultant.  As this book was going to press, questions were
again raised about his knowledge of my activities in support of the
contras..
     Charles Allen, with whom I had worked on counterterrorism, is
     still at the CIA.  But rather than being rewarded for his hard
work, he was passed over for promotion because he was too candid with
his superiors with regard to the Iran initiative.
     The Australian is apparently still a government official in Tehran.
Congressman Michael Barnes was defeated in his bid for a U.S.  Senate
seat in 1986.
     Enrique Bermudez, the military commander of the Nicaraguan freedom
fighters from 1981 to 1988, was murdered in Managua in the spring of
1991.  Congressman Edward Boland retired in 1988 alter serving for
thirty-six years in the House of Representatives.
     George Bush was elected President of the United States.  Adolfo
Calero continued to serve as head of the United Nicaraguan Opposition
alter I was fired.  Later, he helped organize the resistance coalition
that nominated Violeta Chamorro as the opposition candidate for
president.  He's returning to Nicaragua.  William Casey died of cancer
and pneumonia on May 6, 1987, during the second day of the congressional
hearings.
     George Cave was asked to participate in one final meeting with
     the Second Channel alter I was fired.  He continues to serve as a
consultant to the CIA.
     Carl (Spitz) Channell was working to establish a new conservative
political action committee in Washington when he was struck by a car on
March 15,1990.  He died on May 7,1990.  Duane (Dewey) Clarridge was
forced to retire from the CIA in 1988 and now works for General
Dynamics.  In the summer of 1991, e special prosecutor named him as a
target of the Iran-contra invesation.
     Joe Fernandez, who served as a CIA clandestine services officer
twenty-one years, and whose last post was chief of station in Costa ca,
was indicted twice by the special prosecutor before all charges ainst
him were dropped.  He is today my business partner in ardian
Technologies International, Inc., the company we founded 1989 to
manufacture protective armor for law-enforcement officers d the
military.  Alan Fiers, chief of the Central American Task Force, retired
from CIA in 1989.  In the summer of 1991, faced with the prospect of
ictment, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and agreed to operate
with the special prosecutor's investigation.  Robert Gates, who served
as deputy director of intelligence of the and then as deputy director of
the CIA itself under Bill Casey, nominated to become CIA director in
1988.  His nomination was drawn in the face of congressional opposition,
whereupon he was med deputy national security adviser to President Bush.
In the sumof 1991, he was again nominated to become director of the CIA,
ich once again resulted in political controversy.  Clair George retired
from the CIA in 1988, where he had been uty director for operations.  In
September 1991, he was indicted the special prosecutor, who alleged that
he had withheld informan from Congress about my activities.  Manucher
Ghorbanifar provided separate and extensive interviews both the special
prosecutor and the congressional investigators.  rba continues to live
in Europe, where he maintains several resices.
     Albert Hakim pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge brought against by
the special prosecutor.  He has since returned to Callfornia, ere he has
established another international trading company.  Fawn Hall lives in
California.  She is regularly required by the speI prosecutor to return
to Washington to testify.  Lee Hamilton completed his six-year tenure as
chairman of the use Intelligence Committee.  He remains a member of the
Demotic congressional leadership.
     Eugene Hasen~s was released by the Sandinistas at the end of 6.
When he returned to the United States, he unsuccessfially
     brought suit against Dick Secord and several other individuals
involved in supporting the Nicaraguan resistance.
     David Jacobsen returned to California, where he wrote a memoir of
his ordeal as a hostage in Beirut.
     Michael Ledeen continues to serve as a consultant in Washington,
     and has written a book about the Iran-contra affair.  Robert (Bud)
McFarlane, who had pled guilty to several misdemeanor charges, was
sentenced to probation and community service and is now a consultant in
Washington.  He was the only witness to be called in September 1991,
during the final proceedings brought against me by the special
prosecutor.
     Admiral Art Moreau, the real hero of the Achille Lauro incident,
became the NATO naval commander in Naples, Italy.  He died of a heart
attack in 1989.
     The Nephew still resides in Iran, and travels on occasion to
Europe.
     Abu Nidal is reportedly living in luxury in Libya.  Ami Nir lelt
his government position, and was killed in a plane crash in Mexico in
1988.  In the summer of 1991, his widow's home was broken into by
thieves who made off with Nir's secret files on the Iran initiative.
Manuel Noriega surrendered to American authorities in 1990.  He now
resides in Miami as a guest of the U.S.  government.
     Daniel Ortega was defeated in the election of 1990.  He remains
head of the Sandinista party in Managua.
     Admiral John Poindexter was convicted in 1990 on six counts,
     and his case is on appeal.  He serves as a consultant to several
Washington compani memoirs.  General Richard Secord is in business in
Virginia, and is writing
     his memoirs.  Brendan Sullivan and his legal team continue to
protect the constitutional rights of those they defend.
     Lawrence Walsh, the vigilante who rode into town in 1986 as the
special prosecutor, remains at large.
     THE WHITE HOUSE WhS11lNOT0N
     November 4, 1985
     Dear Ollie:
     2 have been told that on the door of your office is a passage by
Thomas Merton which reads "We must be content to live without watching
ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love
without instantaneous satisfaction and to exist without special
recognition."  In today's modern world many would challenge Merton's
statement and ask why we must be content to live this way?
     Ollie, you and other great Americans throughout our nation's proud
history have fully understood why some must live this way--it is because
our nation was built by men who dedicated their lives to building our
country for the sake of their children and countrymen, without taking
the time to worry about receiving recognition for their efforts.
     To fully acknowledge your contributions to our country would be
extremely difficult even for those who know you well, because your own
standards of conduct and performance are higher than those which others
apply.  You are a man who has devoted your life in the most unselfish
manner to building our nation.  As a heroic soldier in the field, as a
military planner and as an aide to me on some of the most important
issues of our time, you have proven yourself to be an outstanding
American patriot.  Please let this letter serve to speak to how much the
     2
     1 American people and l appreciate the patriotism and sacrifice of
you and your family.  Z am proud to have LtCol Oliver North, United
States Marine Corps, on my team.
     sincerely,
     LtCol Oliver North Deputy Director for Political-Military Affairs
National Security Council Washington, D.C.  20506
     'I.  ~~'.  ~j.L7' ~ :.szy~::.
     ~~~ oh,~,
     Az ~ 4.~offi r~
     ~~>~zv~~ Z
     O"
     1 1
     P~~~~
     en route to Kennebunkport 11-27-85
     Dear Ollie,
     As I head off to Maine for Thanksgiving I just want to wish you a
happy one with the hope that you will get some well deserved rest.
     One of the many things I have to be thankful for is the way in
which you have performed, under fire, in tough situations.  Your
dedication and tireless work with the hostage thing and with Central
America really give me cause for great pride in you and thanks-get some
turkey.
     George Bush
     November 10, 1988
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan President of The United States The
White House
     1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.  C.  20S00
     Re: Request That You Use Your Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons
as Provided in Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution
     Dear Hr.  President:
     Executive clemency by pardon is requested by three former
government officials: Admiral John Poindexter, USN (Ret.), LtCol Oliver
North, USttC (Ret.) and Joseph Fernandez, CIA Operations Officer (Ret.)
before a trial begins.  These men have devoted their entire adult lives
to the service of their country, but tragically, despite their good
faith, they have been indicted for carrying out foreign policy
objectives of The United States.
     The decision to grant or deny this request is entirely within your
discretion; it is not a decision encumbered by legal technicalities, or
issues about whether you have the power to act or not.  In matters of
clemency there are no such issues.  You have unlimited power which comes
directly from Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.  For once,
there are no judicial decisions limiting your authority to grant
Executive Clemency; no 1 requirement for legal opinions, no
Congressional limitations or notification requirements, and no
obligation to confer with Executive Branch Agencies or Departments.  The
decision is yours alone to make as Bead of State.  It is a decision made
after reflection and prayer; a decision predicated on your sense of what
is right and what is not; a decision which takes into account the
interest of the nation as well as compassion for the
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 2
     November 10, 1988
     individuals and their families who have become embroiled in this
controversy and suffered so much.  */
     1.  The National Interest Is Best Served by Exercisin the Power of
Executive Clemenc
     We believe that it is in the national interest to put an end to the
Iran-Contra controversy after two years of intense scrutiny.  The matter
has been fully and repeatedly investigated.  It has been probed by
numerous governmental groups including the Tower Commission, a joint
committee of Congress, and several Inspectors General.  Tens of
thousands of man hours, and tens of millions of dollars have been
devoted to these inquiries since November 1986.  Enough is enough!  The
trials of several individuals targeted by the Independent Counsel serve
no purpose except to prolong the agony for the country and the people
involved.
     The nation cries out for an end to this matter.  Since LtCol
North's testimony at the Congressional hearings in the Summer of 1987,
millions of Americans have made known their
     I views through polls and petitions that a Presidential pardon
should be granted.  Never before in the history of our country has there
been such a spontaneous outpouring of support and sympathy from the
American people as that which followed the televised hearings.  ffany in
Congress were against the President's policies, but the American people
understood and sympathized with the President's goals.  The victory of
George Bush is significant because he was elected by Reagan supporters
who want a continuation of your
     policies.  It turned out that Iran-Contra was not an issue on which
the Democrats could win the Presidency -- although they tried to make it
the cornerstone of their convention and a major campaign issue.
Clearly, the American people did not disapprove of your
     */ Retired Hajor General Richard V.  Secord and naturalized citizen
Albert Bakim have also been indicted in this matter.  This letter
consolidates the pardon request of the three government officials.  It
is our opinion, however, that if a pardon is granted, it should include
General Secord and Hr.  Hakim.
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 3
     November 10, 1988
     support for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, orur goal of opening a
dialogue with Iran.  Had they disapproved, as the Democrats hoped,
George Bush could not have been elected.
     The Administration of George Bush should be free to build on the
Reagan legacy of peace through strength and economic prosperity; it
should not be preoccupied with protracted trials of former officials
which will consume months and perhaps years.  The new administration
should not have its energies diverted from the accomplishment of its own
objectives.
     Between 1980 and 1988, Congress attempted to usurp the powers of
the Presidency.  In opposing your aggressive support of our national
security interests, the Congress was willing to call the administration
a lawbreaker.  But because you are the most popular President of our
generation, Congress was unable to inflict real harm on you or on the
Presidency.  Instead the attack has focused on others.  The goal of'
your political adversaries was to dismantle the Reagan legacy; and the
indictment of Admiral Poindexter, LtCol North and Mr. Fernandez was but
one of the boldest actions in a continuing confrontation.  But Americans
have a keen sense of fairness.  They see the prosecution of a few
individuals as unjust, and they understand the controversy is kept alive
by anti-Reagan forces who have always been on the other side of the
political fence.
     Further damage to our national security could likely occur if
trials are permitted to go forward.  During their government service
Admiral Poindexter, LtCol North and Mr. Fernandez fought to protect the
National Security and worked hard to guard the secrets of the nation.
Now they find themselves in the bizarre position of being unable to
defend themselves without revealing many of those same secrets in open
court.  Even the Independent Counsel has had to concede that the case
deals with some of the nation's most tightly held top secret, codeword
matters which, if disclosed, would cause severe harm to the national
security.
     The concern about protecting classified material is so great that
defense lawyers were required to move out of their law offices into
another building with a specially constructed Sensitive Compartmented
Information Facility ("SCIF"), protected
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 4
     November 10, 1988
     round-the-clock by armed guards and monitored by additional
government security specialists.  The "SCIF" contains hundreds of
thousands of documents with the highest compartmented classifications.
Court records indicate that exposure of some of these secrets could
result in loss of life.  The nature of a trial is
     1 such that some of this information is bound to become known.  We
were witness to the foolhardy attempt at the Congressional hearings to
designate countries by letters of the alphabet, believing that such a
code would give them the protection they deserved.  While Congressional
probers referred to "Country A" and "Country B," it was not long before
the press published the actual names.
     The exercise of your pardon power would eliminate the possibility
of further harm to our national security interests and would accommodate
the desire of millions of Americans to put this matter behind us for the
good of the country.
     2.  A Trial of Admiral Poindexter, LtCol North and Mr. Fernandez
Would be a Terrible Inzustice
     The proceeding pending in the District of Columbia is nothing more
than a political trial.  It is paid for by a Dem0cratically~controlled
Congress, conceived by a special force of volunteer prosecutors,
supported by the Administration's
     adversaries, and fanned by the media.  The chance of obtaining a
fair trial is seriously in doubt.  Never before has anyone been
compelled to testify on national television and later been prosecuted
for conduct which was the subject of that testimony.  Admiral Poindexter
testified for five days and LtCol North for six days.  Mr. Fernandez
testified for more than two days in executive session.  They were
interrogated by numerous Committee lawyers, Congressmen and Senators.
The Congress assured the widest dissemination of the testimony by
conducting televised hearings over our strongest objections and in the
process "tainted" all of the prosecution's witnesses and, undoubtedly,
the potential jurors as well.  Moreover, any jury in the District of
Columbia (a Democratic Party stronghold) will undoubtedly be hostile to
a Republican Administration.  These former government officials should
not be abandoned to a protracted fight in a criminal courtroom where the
jurors start off with a strong bias against the Reagan Administration
and its policies.
     1
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 5
     November l0, 1988 These men are fighting for their freedom against
an Independent Counsel who has assembled the largest and most costly
prosecutorial force in the history of our country.  It consists of more
than 30 lawyers, 50 investigators, scores of staff members, with offices
in New York, Oklahoma and Washington.  It is the only entity in the
United States Government which has an unlimited budget.  It has spent
significantly more than 10 million dollars of taxpayers' money to date.
The goal of this prosecutorial army is to convict and imprison Admiral
Poindexter, LtCol North and CIA Operations Officer Joseph Fernandez.
Needless to say, these men receive not one ~nle ~ of government money to
defend themselves against this adversary.
     You are known to be a President of strength and of
     courage; a President who does what he believes is right.  The
American people elected you to guide this country for eight years.  They
look to you now to prevent injustice.  These men should not be singled
out for prosecution and subjected to a political trial aimed at
destroying them.
     As President, you demonstrated extraordinary concern for Americans
held hostage and those victimized by terrorists.  The fact that you
cared about the anguish of those citizens and their families endeared
you to the people of this country.  Admiral Poindexter, LtCol North and
Mr. Fernandez are no less prisoners, held captive here in Washington.
Congressional hearings, investigations, and pretrial proceedings have
already consumed two years of their lives.  They have become pawns in a
dispute between the 1 Congress and the Presidency over the control of
the foreign policy of the United States.  Please end this matter now --
before they are subjected ty and Compassion Warrant a Pardon Before
Trial
     The devastating personal and economic impact on these men and their
families cries out for a pardon to terminate the proceedings.
     A.  Im act on Families.  Admiral poindexter has been married for
thirty years and has ive children, ages seventeen to twenty-eight.
LtCol North has been married for twenty years and has four children,
ages seven to nineteen.  Joseph Fernandez has
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 6
     November 10, 1988
     been married for twenty-five years and has seven children, ages
five to twenty-two.  The impact on their families has been devastating
over the last two years.  What must it be like for children to see their
father vilified and attacked on the front page of the newspaper and on
television news shows night after night, accused of criminal wrongdoing
thousands of times?  Perhaps some of the older children can understand
the nature of this dispute which brings their fathers into the criminal
courtroom, but certainly the younger ones cannot.  Several of these
children have observed their fathers under siege for a substantial
period of their lives.  The wives and children of these men have been
permanently scarred by this experience.  No courtroom victory years away
can make amends.  Not even an acquittal can eliminate the pain
     1 they have had to endure; pain which will only be exacerbated by
the lengthy and highly publicized trials they face.  We are confidene
that you understand the torment to which they have been
     subjected.  Only your intervention will allow them and their
families to resume normal lives.
     B.  The Im act on Careers.  Admiral Poindexter served with
distinction in the Unite States Navy for thirty-three years.  Among his
awards was the Legion of Merit.  He worked at the National Security
Council and The White House for five and one-half years, tirelessly
carrying out the goals of your Presidency.  As a Naval officer, he was
suggested for appointment as Commander, Sixth Fleet and was considered a
likely future candidate for Chief of Naval Operations, The termination
of his career fifteen years before mandatory retirement was a tragic
by-product of this case.
     LtCol North's service at the National Security Council during the
period August 1981 to November 1986 was characterized by selfless
devotion to his country, to your administration, and by the expenditure
of limitless energy to achieve the policy goals you
     established.  His devotion to duty and willingness to sacrifice all
in accomplishing an assigned mission has become an American
     legend.  He is a decorated Vietnam war hero having received the
Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and numerous other
awards.  His career goal has always been to simply serve his country by
being the very best Marine Corps officer.  Though he was considered a
likely candidate for promotion to full Colonel and then to General, he
was forced into early retirement by the indictment.
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 7
     November 10, 1988
     Joseph Fernandez is a twenty-year veteran of CIA.  Throughout his
career, Mr. Ferna.ndez served in numerous overseas assignments where he
endured the hardship of working undercover to facilitate the policies of
the United States.  Most recently, he served as CIA's Chief of Station
in Costa Rica where he struggled against great odds to carry out the
policies of this Administration in Central America.  After leaving Costa
Rica, Mr. Fernandez would have attended the prestigious Senior Seminar
at the Foreign Service Institute in preparation for further assignments
at the highest levels of CIA, both overseas and at CIA Headquarters.
Instead, he, too, was forced into retirement.  */
     All of these men served selflessly, often at risk of their lives.
Their careers were ones of family hardship, long separations and
frequent moves -- all for the benefit of this country.  The termination
of their service by indictment and early retirement is a travesty that
will ultimately affect the morale and steadfastness of others in the
service exposed to rigorous demands.  Your pardon will not only help
these three men and their I families who have suffered so much, it will
restore the morale and esprit of their brothers-in-arms.
     C.  The Economic Im act.  None of these men can find normal
employment so long as criminal charges remain pending.  They are simply
unavailable to work because of the enormous amount of time and energy
that must be devoted to the preparation of their defense.  LtCol North
has accepted speaking engagements in an effort to help defray the cost
of legal services and other 1 extraordinary expenses.  Admiral
Poindexter has taken a part-time job and Mr. Fernandez is still seeking
work.  All have had to put their lives and futures on "hold."  Without a
pardon, they will have to spend the next years of their lives in the
fight against this unjust prosecution.
     As a result of the criminal litigation, they have incurred costs
beyond what they could ever hope to pay themselves.  They have had to
deal with this devastation to their lives and to their families'
economic security without any help
     z/ The indictment of Mr. Fernandez was recently dismissed in the
District of Columbia without prejudice.  The Independent Counsel stated
that he will reindict the case in Virginia.
     1
     The Honorable Ronald Reagan Page 8
     November 10, 1988
     from the government they served for so many years.  Simple fairness
justifies your intervention by a pardon to stop this process before
further damage is done to them and their loved ones.
     D.  Safet and Securit of LtCol North's Famil.  In April 1986, LtCol
North's life was threatene y the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, but
the government offered no assistance or protection.  A year later, in
1987, LtCol North and his family were protected by a large contingent of
Naval Investigative Service (NIS) agents because of additional foreign
terrorist threats to his life which were uncovered by the FBI.  His
televised testimony in the summer of 1987 created unsought worldwide
visibility and instant recognition which increased the dangers to him
and his
     ~f~r~av~~laY: His photograph was even distributed on the cover of
______ Despite known dangers, the Congress televised LtCol
     North's home address for the world to see during the hearings in
complete disregard for the safety of his family.  1
     Politilarity after the hearings, resulted in the government
     I protection being withdrawn.  In place of more than a score of
government security specialists, LtCol North now must depend on the
charity of the American people to provide protection.  Even modest
security of this sort is extremely expensive but the government provides
no help.
     The continued visibility caused by a lengthy trial increases the
risk of harm to him and his family.  They should not have to endure
those risks, and he should not have to live in fear that his family
could be harmed.
     1 Conclusion A pardon at this time, prior to trial, is fair,
reasonable, and in the interest of the nation.  The country has had
enough of the Iran-Contra matter.  It is particularly unfair to permit a
legion of prosecutors to single out these former officials.  Each one of
them embarked upon a life of service to his country knowing that he
could be called on to sacrifice his life.  But not one of them could
have anticipated this kind of
     nightmarish, unending turmoil and disruption to normal life, to
families and to careers.  It is too much to ask of even the most
     November 10, 1988 devoted soldier and public servant.  This matter
should be ended, not only for these men but for the good of the country.
     As your eight-year Presidency comes to a close, your impact on this
great Country is clear.  You will always be remembered for renewing our
economic prosperity, for supporting freedom and democracy throughout the
world, and for achieving peace through strength.  You have shown
understanding and compassion for people yet, time and time again,
demonstrated remarkable strength.  People know you as a President who
does what he believes is-ht.
     A pardon of these patriots would put an end to the Iran-Contra
matter after two years of turmoil, would protect the national security,
and would permit them and their families to resume a normal life.  Put
this matter to rest for the nation's sake so that we can build on the
foundation of peace and prosperity you have given to all Americans.
     Respectfully yours, WILLIAMS & CONNOLLY
     v Brendan V.  Sullivan, Jr.
     Counsel for LtCol Oliver L.  North, USMC (Ret.)
     FULBRSGHT & JAWOR ,'r/,.  '/j ~~ Richar W.  Beckler
     Counsel for Admiral John Poindexter, USN (Ret.)
     SEYF , SHAW, RWEATHER & GERALDSON Thomas E. Wilson
     Counsel for Joseph Fernandez, CIA Operations Officer (Ret.)