Haig Leaves His Dirty Tracks All Over American Policy

There is a specter hanging over the Iran- contras affair, a familiar apparition of gravel voice and craggy good looks whose haunting significance in the scandal has scarcely been noticed. The ghost in the Reagan rafters is Alexander Meigs Haig Jr.--one-time National Security Council staff deputy to Henry A. Kissinger, White House chief of staff for Richard M. Nixon and, in 1981-82, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state.

Haig apparently played no direct role in the seamy sale of weapons to the Iranians and the raking off of the deal’s excess profits to arm the Nicaraguan rebels. Having resigned from the Administration in a huff more than four years ago after a stormy tenure in the State Department, he is busily running for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 and solemnly deploring what he calls a lack of foreign-policy “discipline.”

Yet to look beneath the public surface of the scandal is to find Haig as an early co-conspirator at almost every turn. The outspoken, ever-ambitious general accounts for much of the personnel, the bureaucratic style and the dubious policy behind the debacle. Understanding the connection ought to raise questions not only about Haig’s presidential candidacy but also about the deeper history and meaning of the unfolding crisis.

To begin with, Haig is the patron, in spirit and in fact, of the can-do, tragically uninformed military officers who have been at the center of the Iran-contra imbroglio. In 1969-70 Al Haig was another obscure military officer in the bowels of the NSC. In rising shrewdly from intelligence briefer and clerk to become Kissinger’s deputy and Nixon’s favorite house soldier, from colonel to four-star general, he paved the way, made the White House West Wing safe, for the military caste that has so largely usurped civilian authority and dominated the NSC’s crucial advisory role ever since.

Haig brought Marine Col. Robert C. McFarlane into the inner circle of Reagan’s foreign policy--first as counselor at the State Department, then as NSC deputy. From there McFarlane went on to be the President’s national-security adviser and an author and emissary of the Iranian arms deal. McFarlane’s successor at the NSC, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, was another shadow protege of the general, with ties dating back to Poindexter’s tenure in the Pentagon during the Nixon years, and Haig’s still unexcavated role with the White House Plumbers.

Even the ubiquitous Lt. Col. Oliver L. North owes his now-tarnished celebrity in part to Haig, whose ally and confidant, Navy Secretary John Lehman, snatched the zealous North out of Marine staff obscurity in 1981 and arranged his assignment to the NSC staff. Not least, there is a key civilian in the story, Georgetown academic Michael Ledeen, who played a crucial and yet-to-be-explored role in the disastrous overtures to Tehran. Ledeen first came into the drama under the cachet of--you guessed it--Alexander Haig.

Haig’s influence hardly stops with the new old-boy network of former cadets running the Reagan foreign policy, important as that society has become in Washington. The very style of the scandal is vintage Haig as well. If there were ever a prototype for the escapades of Ollie North, it was Alexander Haig in the 1970s, sallying forth from the NSC to help select targets for the bombing of Cambodia, dispense military aid and other largess to foreign governments, and alternately mollify or bully troublesome clients like South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu.

At home, Haig--along with Kissinger--was an architect and expert practitioner of the bureaucratic furtiveness and rivalry that long ago poisoned the relationship between the NSC and the rest of government. And as Reagan’s secretary of state he brought to the Administration of this genial if distracted President the added in-fighting and back-biting that finally propelled the NSC out of control. In very real ways the structure of foreign policy now collapsing around Reagan’s head was built by Haig.

Finally, and more subtly, we also are witnessing the awful toll of Haig’s own policies in the Middle East and Central America. His approving wink if not active connivance in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, his willingness to leave U.S. diplomacy and intelligence hostage to Israeli policy and perspective, set in motion the whole tragic sequence from the dispatch of the Marines to Beirut to the catastrophic attack on their barracks, the U.S. shelling of Muslim positions in the city, the seizure of American hostages, the weapons ransom to Iran, and on and on. It was Haig who in 1981 reportedly gave the first green light for the Israeli shipment of military parts to the government of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Meanwhile, back in this hemisphere, it was Haig who at the outset formed and fixed the Administration’s obsessive hostility to the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran rebels, instigating the CIA proxy wars that the Iranian arms deal was to bankroll.

The redoubtable general did not open the Swiss bank accounts himself, did not dicker with the xenophobic priests in Tehran, did not somehow coerce all his former colleagues into the folly and scofflaw habits that they practiced so ardently after his departure. But his belligerent, cynical view of the world, his methods of government, his mien of shared anger and ignorance are strewn about the landscape of Reagan’s calamity. The congressional investigative committees will be missing much of the point of it all if they do not summon the general-candidate as well as his acolytes. He was, after all, as he once proclaimed, the President’s vicar in foreign policy.