Ex-FBI Agent Named Head of Iran-Contra Panel Staff

John Patrick O’Hara, director of corporate security for Los Angeles-based Flying Tiger Line Inc., was named Thursday to head the staff of the newly formed House committee that will investigate the Iran- contra controversy.

The 55-year-old O’Hara, who will be the executive director of the committee’s Democratic majority staff, is a former FBI agent who joined Flying Tiger last year. He previously had been staff director and chief counsel of the Public Works and Transportation subcommittee on investigations.

His appointment was announced by Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) after the committee’s first organizational meeting. The panel, which was established officially by the House Wednesday, will not swing into full operation until later this month. Its first public hearings are expected in mid-February.

“We’re going to push hard,” Hamilton said. He added, however, that he did not know whether the panel could wrap up its work before October as the House has said it should.

Top Staff Members

Other top staff members will include John W. Nields Jr., a Washington attorney who will be the Democrats’ chief counsel; GOP counsel Thomas R. Smeeton, a former CIA official who serves in the same capacity for the House Intelligence Committee, and George Van Cleve, a former White House aide who will become the Republicans’ deputy counsel. Van Cleve is now Republican counsel for the House Interior subcommittee on water and power resources.

As executive director, O’Hara will be responsible for the “overall direction” of the panel’s day-to-day operations, Hamilton said.

O’Hara joined the Public Works and Transportation Committee in 1962.

While he was assigned to the FBI’s Baltimore office in the late 1950s, he earned his law degree at night from the University of Baltimore Law School.