Off and Galloping

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III began asking Reagan Administration officials last weekend what they knew about the secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. One of those he talked to was Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the National Security Council staff. On Monday, Meese was able to tell President Reagan that profits from the Iranian arms sales had been channeled into a Swiss bank account used by Nicaraguan contras fighting the Sandinista regime. On Tuesday, Reagan fired North, allegedly a central figure in the profit-diverting scheme. Not until Wednesday, though, did Meese order the FBI and its investigative specialists into the case. In the meantime North had gone to his White House office and destroyed certain files. What was in those files? For all anyone knows, they may have been this Administration’s equivalent of the Watergate tapes.

If the investigation of the Iran arms deal had been conducted from the beginning by dispassionate professionals, as it should have been, North would have been barred from his office the moment he came under suspicion. Instead, after being alerted by last weekend’s questioning, he had 36 hours to dispose of whatever papers he wanted to. Do copies of these documents exist elsewhere in the bureaucracy? Perhaps. It may also be that because the Iran operation seems to have bypassed normal channels, North alone held the paperwork.

There is no telling yet how far guilty knowledge of the Iran arms scandal may extend. What is evident is that the impartiality and thoroughness of an investigation presided over by political appointees, loyal to the President who chose them, inevitably generates suspicion, and with the bungling that allowed North continuing access to his files that suspicion is off and galloping. The ethics-in-government law allows an attorney general to request appointment of an independent counsel if a political conflict of interest arises. A President determined to expose the whole truth as soon as possible would order that done now.