For Secord, Clandestine Shipments an Art Form

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord specializes in the clandestine movement of men and equipment around the world. If you need an aircraft with no identification, an out-of-the-way airfield and pilots who keep their mouths shut, then Dick Secord is your man.

He is the best at what he does and it was for that reason that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North turned to him for help in shipping arms to Iran. Secord’s role in the Iran affair has been consistently underestimated. According to a U.S. intelligence source involved in the plan, Secord ran much of the operation from a hotel room in London, shuttling between Washington, Beirut and Tel Aviv, organizing aircraft, pilots and air fields to ship the planeloads of arms to Tehran.

Swiss bank accounts set up by Secord and his Iranian-born American business partner, Albert A. Hakim, were used to channel the $30 million-$35 million generated by the arms sale. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and congressional investigators allege that Secord, North and Hakim were instrumental in trying to pass roughly $12 million of that money it to the contras.

Although Secord has pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions about the affair, he has been telling friends the allegations that money was passed to the contras are lies. He has assured those involved in the Iran deal with him that no money went to the contras and any missing cash was either stolen by middlemen or remains in the Swiss bank accounts, which were frozen at the U.S. Justice Department’s request.

Much has been made of the circumstantial evidence against Secord. His business partner, Hakim, was involved in arms dealings with Iranian officers during the shah’s time and Hakim’s habit of doing all normal business through Swiss bank accounts seems unusually cautious. But many of Secord’s close associates seem to believe his story. Freezing the Swiss accounts cut off his sources of income from his daily business and Secord claims to be broke. A defense fund is being started in case Secord is tried in connection with the scandal.

A West Point graduate, Secord came to the notice of the Central Intelligence Agency and covert warfare specialists in 1964, during a CIA operation to evacuate Americans and Belgians from Stanleyville in Zaire. White inhabitants, including nuns and missionaries, were stranded in the middle of Zaire’s civil war and the only way out was by air. The evacuation was successful but Secord returned late--a door on his aircraft had blown open in flight and a life raft had automatically inflated, wrapping around a wing. He landed the plane safely and received the first of many decorations for a smart piece of flying.

With that foray into covert operations he developed a liking for the high-risk, low-profile missions, according to an intelligence source, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam provided just the opportunity to gain more experience. He continued his steady upward progress, although Vietman was also the site of one of his less successful missions for the CIA.

The agency, in its continuing effort to block Viet Cong supply routes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, decided to try to make it so slippery it would become impassable. Secord led the daylight bombing mission (the CIA insisted on photographs): A fleet of C-130s deposited hundreds of bags of Calgonite soap powder on the trail. The soap flakes were supposed to turn to liquid in the rain and make the Viet Cong slide down the trail. This extraordinary plan did not work.

After flying in Laos in the CIA’s secret war, Secord was promoted to colonel and given a desk job as the Pentagon’s officer for Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. In South Asia and in the Pentagon, Secord helped plan operations with the CIA for Southern Air Transport, then an agency front. It was to Southern Air, now a private corporation, that Secord turned for aircraft and pilots to ship arms to Iran.

In 1975, when only 43, Secord was sent to Iran as the first head of the Air Force’s military advisory group, responsible for multibillion-dollar military equipment sales to the shah. There he met Edwin P. Wilson, ex-CIA trouble-shooter and at that time arms supplier to everyone from terrorists to Col. Moammar Kadafi. Wilson was working for Stanford Technology Trading Corp., Hakim’s company, and tried to use Secord to sell surveillance systems to the shah. No deal resulted--but this connection is what destroyed Secord’s promising Air Force career six years later.

Wilson was arrested and convicted in part on the evidence of a former associate, Douglas M. Schlachter, who was given a new identity under the federal witness protection program. Schlachter alleged that during his time in Iran, Secord had helped Wilson sell arms to the shah and had taken some of the profits. Secord, by then deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Near East, Africa and South Asia, was suspended while the Justice Department began an investigation. No evidence against him was found and he was reinstated on the personal orders of Frank C. Carlucci, then No. 2 in the Defense Department and recently appointed President Reagan’s new national security adviser.

Secord sued Schlachter for libel and won a $1-million judgment by default. But he was unable to collect because Schlachter was in hiding under federal protection. The mud thrown at Secord stuck and, realizing his rapid climb up the Air Force ladder was over, he resigned and joined Hakim at Stanford Technology.

Shortly before his resignation, according to intelligence sources, the Carter Administration gave Secord a special assignment. After the failure of “Desert One,” he was asked to oversee a second mission to rescue the American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Code-named “Operation Honey Bear,” this second rescue attempt was ultimately canceled. But the lessons learned by Secord in trying to organize “Honey Bear” made him highly critical of the structure of U.S. Special Operations Forces. His criticisms were passed on to the newly elected Reagan Administration, which was convinced new investment in Special Operations Forces was needed. Over the next five years the SOF budget increased from $400 million to $1.7 billion annually and personnel doubled.

Once officially outside the military, Secord became the perfect man for any work that could draw on his covert operations experience. In 1983, just after he left the Air Force, Secord was asked by the Defense Department to join the newly formed Special Operations Advisory Group (Sopag). The six-member panel advises senior U.S. officials on ways to improve covert capability. This key position insured Secord would maintain close ties with the intelligence community and the National Security Council.

His work with Sopag--which lasted until 1986--brought Secord into regular contact with North, who would later describe him as a “close personal friend.” North, ebullient and aggressive, was a marked contrast to Secord, who looks like a nightclub bouncer but is a cautious and thoughtful operator. What united the two was a fundamental anti-communist philosophy and a “take that hill” attitude, where ends justified often dubious means.

After Congress cut off aid to the contras in July, 1984, Secord helped fill the shortage of cash and arms. He bought three short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft from a U.S. company using Swiss funds. The aircraft were flown to Honduras and handed over to the contras. The U.S. Customs Service is investigating that shipment to see if the aircraft can be classified as “instruments of war” and were illegally exported. Telephone records from El Salvador show that the phone in a safe house used by Eugene Hasenfus, the U.S. mercenary captured in Nicaragua last October when his contra supply plane was shot down, was regularly used to call Secord at his home and office in Virginia. Four congressional committees are also investigating these arms shipments to the contras.

Swiss bank accounts were also used to funnel private money from Saudi and U.S. sources for contra aid. It was allegedly Secord who arranged for guns to be shipped from American and Israeli suppliers to Honduras.

Secord now sees himself as a victim of unwarranted allegations by an associate of Wilson and then by unjustified allegations about his role in the Iran affair. Others see him as just one of a growing body of unscrupulous men who, in the guise of being patriots, blacken America’s name.