North Kept His ’84 Promise to Help Contras

In the summer of 1984, after an angry Congress halted aid to the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s leftist regime, National Security Council aide Oliver L. North journeyed to the contras’ jungle camps to promise that they would not be abandoned.

“I’ve got a commitment to those guys,” he later told a colleague. “I told them I’d come through for them.”

That he did. The money North allegedly arranged to skim from the secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran paid for--among other things--the ill-fated C-123 cargo plane carrying American crewman Eugene Hasenfus, as well as the rest of the clandestine weapons supply line of which he was a part, contras sources say.

“North was the most dangerous man in the U.S. government,” a shaken White House official said Tuesday after President Reagan fired the Marine lieutenant colonel. “He didn’t play by anybody’s rules.”

Yet the Administration’s initial account of North’s activities leaves unanswered a host of fundamental questions.

Chief among the questions: How could one relatively low-level National Security Council aide official set up a funding and supply operation for Nicaraguan guerrillas that stretched from the White House to the Middle East and Switzerland and then to Central America without setting off alarm bells throughout the U.S. intelligence community?

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III said the Justice Department’s three-day-old investigation of the secret Iranian arms deal, in which U.S. officials sold weapons to Iran in hopes of winning the release of American hostages and building ties to Tehran, is still pursuing this and other questions.

Among them:

--Who authorized the first shipment of U.S. arms to Iran in August, 1985, which Reagan did not learn about until months later?

“To my knowledge, nobody (in the U.S. government) authorized that particular shipment specifically,” Meese said Tuesday. But Israeli officials have insisted that someone in the Administration approved it, and a U.S. government official has told The Times that North gave the Israelis a verbal go-ahead despite an earlier decision by Reagan against such shipments.

Some Israeli officials have said that the authority came from then-national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, but they have not made clear whether they meant McFarlane personally or only his office.

--Who knew about the secret shipments and the use of some of the proceeds to fund the contras?

Meese said his inquiry has found so far that only North, McFarlane and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, who resigned as national security adviser Tuesday, were aware that the money was going to the contras. However, Administration sources said the roles of several more officials--and several people outside the government--are also being scrutinized.

--Perhaps most important, how did North--a third-level official on the National Security Council staff--become a one-man covert operations agency?

If America’s national security machinery could shelter a man who had gone, in the words of one colleague, “completely out of control,” are there other secret projects still to be uncovered?

“All of the information is not yet in,” Meese said. “We are still continuing our inquiry.”

Other White House officials said that although Meese’s investigation is now limited to seeking the facts about the secret arms sales to Iran, it could easily widen if evidence of other unauthorized actions comes to light.

Meese insisted that North’s siphoning of funds for the contras started as a solo operation and was not approved in advance by anyone else in the Administration.

“We’re not investigating ourselves,” he said. “We’re investigating certain people within the Administration. There is no question whatsoever, no implication, that anything that was done was Administration policy or was directed by top Administration officials.”

‘Cannot Explain It’

Asked how North, McFarlane and Poindexter could have kept the very existence of the operation to themselves for most of a year, Meese’s response was: “I cannot explain it other than the fact that it happened.”

Other White House and State Department officials, however, said several National Security Council aides and private consultants who worked closely with North could have been aware of at least part of the operation.

They named Howard Teicher, North’s immediate superior on the National Security Council staff; Michael A. Ledeen, a senior fellow at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, who helped set up the first secret contacts with Iran; Robert Owen, a consultant who worked with North on seeking private funding for the contras, and Richard Secord, a retired air force general who helped North with both projects.

Ledeen has acknowledged participating in the initial talks among the United States, Israel and Iran, but he said Tuesday that he did not know that any of the money from the arms sales went to the contras. Teicher, Owen and Secord have all refused to comment on what roles they played, if any.

The basic problem, a senior Pentagon official said, is that the National Security Council under Poindexter was dominated by a small group of officials who preferred clandestine operations to the more conventional mission of coordinating foreign policy.

“This is like a little cell within the NSC, a little nucleus within the NSC staff . . . who delight in this sort of covert activity,” the Pentagon official said. “What disturbs me is that the President can be influenced by a small group of people who don’t see themselves as responsible to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.”

A State Department official agreed and said the trend dated to McFarlane’s tenure as national security adviser, beginning in 1983.

“He never could resist a secret mission,” the official said of McFarlane. “These military guys, with their tight polished shoes, are always itching for action more than civilians.”

Fervently Conservative

North, all agree, was McFarlane’s McFarlane: a highly-decorated Marine officer who had a record of bravery in daring secret operations, a fervently conservative view of the world and a bottomless appetite for work.

McFarlane assigned North to sensitive missions in the Middle East, where the United States had troops committed in Lebanon; directed him to plan the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in October, 1983; made him overseer of the Administration’s covert aid to the contras, and, eventually, made him point man on the secret effort to open contacts with revolutionary Iran and win freedom for the American hostages held in Beirut.

Within the White House, North has fierce opponents--and fiercely loyal friends. “There’s no career involved here,” said one, “only patriotism.”

In 1984, Congress halted the CIA covert fund after the agency mined Nicaragua’s harbors. President Reagan had declared the contra cause critical to U.S. national security--but the Administration had no legal way to give the rebels financial and military support.

The job of finding a way around that dilemma was assigned to North.

Administration officials say he worked tirelessly with contras leaders, private U.S. donors and foreign governments to keep the Nicaraguan war going despite the loss of U.S. aid.

The governments that he contacted, officials said, included those of Honduras, El Salvador and Israel. Israeli sources say their government’s key contras specialist has been David Kimche, the former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the same official who negotiated the arms-for-Iran deal with the National Security Council.

North also helped stimulate a network of private conservative activists in the United States that included John K. Singlaub, a retired army general, as well as Secord and Owen.

Initially, the supply operation was spotty, U.S. and contras officials said. But earlier this year, the contras began receiving more arms and more money. And they acquired an entirely new air-cargo network, based at El Salvador’s Ilopango Air Base, run by a group of former CIA specialists and organized, contras officials said, by Secord.

What paid for most of this, these officials said, was the money earned from the arms sales to Iran--a project in which several sources said Secord was also deeply involved.

The secret air-supply operation sent dozens of flights on air-drop missions over Nicaragua until Oct. 5, when Nicaraguan troops shot down one of its planes. The crash killed three crewmen and delivered Hasenfus into the hands of the Sandinistas.

Sources say the genesis of the Iran affair was a May, 1985, memorandum by CIA analysts that proposed easing the arms embargo against Tehran to curry favor with moderates there.

That was flatly rejected by the White House in the early summer of 1985. But McFarlane and others, one source said, used it to press a more specific proposal: to seek friendship with Tehran moderates secretly and thus angle for a more friendly Iran in the post-Khomeini era.

One way to do so was to sell them weapons.