Weinberger ‘Horrified’ by Iran-Contras Deal

Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said Tuesday that he was horrified when informed, a little more than a week ago, of the covert transfer to Nicaraguan rebels of money realized from the sale of arms to Iran.

In what seemed like an attempt to discredit the National Security Council staff, which organized the operation, Weinberger expressed delight at President Reagan’s appointment of Frank C. Carlucci as the new White House adviser on national security.

Weinberger said Carlucci will run the White House security staff “the way that it should be.”

He said he was first informed about the transfer of funds a day after Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III told Reagan and a day before the President announced the resignation of John M. Poindexter as national security adviser and the dismissal of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, a member of the National Security Council staff, for their part in the operation.

“I was horrified,” Weinberger said, describing his reaction to news of the transfer of funds. “It was a totally, totally wrong thing to do, in my opinion.”

Praises Carlucci

Weinberger, who spoke with Washington correspondents accompanying him and with American correspondents based in Paris, praised Carlucci--a former associate of Weinberger at the Department of Defense. Weinberger depicted Carlucci as an executive who would run the security staff so that it would be “concerned with sorting out and presenting to the President differing views and giving the President expert staff advice on these matters, and working extraordinarily well with all the elements of the security community.”

Weinberger, in his vision of the security staff under Carlucci, conspicuously omitted any reference to operational activities of the kind attributed to North.

Asked if he agreed with Reagan in describing North as “a national hero,” Weinberger replied that “the President was referring to his (North’s) war record” when he made that comment.

Weinberger, who is spending two days in Paris discussing defense matters with President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Jacques Chirac and other French officials, said the French have discussed the matter of the Iranian arms sales in a general way and have expressed a great deal of understanding for the President’s motives. He said he had not detected any apprehension on their part.

Details Pentagon’s Role

Discussing the Pentagon’s role in the sale of arms to Iran, Weinberger said that as far as he knows, no Pentagon official has violated the law in any way. He said the Pentagon, after being informed last January or February of the President’s decision to send the arms to Iran, transferred the arms to the CIA and, as required by law, received payment for them.

He did not say whether he personally approved of the decision to ship arms to Iran, but associates have reported that he was opposed to the plan.

Weinberger told the reporters that he did not know why the Defense Department’s intelligence sources had not detected any transfer of funds to the contras, as the Nicaraguan rebels are known.

“I testified to Congress and told many people in urging them to vote for contra aid that the contras were, as far as our calculations were concerned, running out of money, as indeed they were.”

But he said he has to assume that Meese’s report about money going to the contras is true.

SALT II Link Denied

Weinberger also denied that Reagan’s decision to break out of the limitations of the second strategic arms limitation treaty, known as SALT II, was prompted by a need to divert attention from the Iranian arms deals.

He said that the decision to stop adhering to the limits of SALT II--which he called a “fatally flawed, expired, never-enacted yardstick”--was made in May and that there was no connection with the Iranian arms controversy.

Weinberger, an old friend of Reagan, said that “I can’t measure” the damage that the controversy is doing to the Administration and to the ability of the President to carry on for the next two years. But he added: “I think what the President is doing is exactly right. . . . Everything he is doing indicates to me his own surprise and anger and desire that he get at this, to the bottom of this completely, so that the public will know that this kind of assistance to the contras is not what we have in mind at all.”