The Iran Deception: Reagan’s Greatest Crisis

Each abduction takes just minutes. The cold barrel of a gun to the neck. A shove into the car. The squeal of tires. Silence. Back home, at the highest level of government, a compassionate man wishes to free the victims of these abductions.

Quickly the compassion of this man, the President of the United States, is linked to other concerns: starting a dialogue with Iran; stopping what he considers to be a threat in Central America. All, he feels, ought to be pursued in secret. But secrecy breeds deception.

Two of the President’s men, on a clandestine mission to Tehran, walk across the Tarmac at Mehrabad Airport. Success is on their minds and missiles are aboard their plane. They will talk to Iranian “moderates” who seem to be able to influence the Muslim fundamentalists holding the hostages. The weapons the Americans brought are intended for these “moderates.” Above the Mehrabad terminal flies a banner: “America Cannot Do a Damn Thing.”

Planes fly guns and ammunition into the rugged green mountains of central Nicaragua. The weapons are bound for contras trying, with the American President’s blessing, to bring down Nicaragua’s Marxist government. Some contra money, it turns out, comes from the missile sales to Iran--to ransom, however indirectly, the hostages.

Disclosure stuns the nation. Did the arms sales violate the law? Did the secrecy? And how much of this happened at the President’s bidding? How much of it was done by his agents? Had he directed them or let things get out of hand--his hands? In a hearing room at the Capitol, the men who know the answers to these questions offer their response: “I must decline to testify on grounds. . . . “

Ronald Reagan and his presidency have been hurt.

If one possibility is that the 75-year-old President did not know everything that happened, and another possibility is that he has forgotten, then a third is that he is stopping short of telling the truth.

And for the first time since Watergate, polls show that a substantial number of Americans think that this, indeed, is the case.

Apart from a paralyzing preoccupation with the entire affair, these things have resulted:

--Three hostages have been freed; three more have been abducted. As many are in captivity now as before the overture to Iran began.

--Attempts to open talks with Iran have ended.

--Further American aid for the contras is in jeopardy.

And there is talk of congressional curbs on the President’s men, particularly the men in his National Security Council, where much, if not all, of this was born.

Finally, there is talk of tougher legislation forcing presidents and their intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, to inform Congress, without fail and without any possibility to the contrary, about each and every one of their secret operations.

For now, the story of President Reagan and the Iran-contra scandal is a story of causes and compassion, hostages and hubris, danger and defeat.

The full report, The Iran Deception: Reagan’s Greatest Crisis, appears in Part 1-A.