Broader CIA Role on Iran Suspected : Inquiries Convince Some That Casey Was Secretly Part of North’s Ventures

A long winter of probing in the White House’s Iran- contra scandal has convinced some government officials that the CIA and its former director, William J. Casey, played intimate and still-hidden roles in the disastrous secret ventures of former National Security Council aide Oliver L. North.

The suspicions mark a turnabout from the early image of North as a “cowboy” running missions that the CIA could not or would not touch, such as funneling military aid to rebels in Nicaragua after direct U.S. aid was banned by Congress.

The new view places North in close contact with a handful of top CIA and White House executives, including Casey and former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, whom he assiduously informed of his secret duties.

Casey’s Involvement

“I think Casey knew more than we know right now about weapons going to the contras,” said Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate select panel looking into the scandal.

“I think we’ll probably find there was more (CIA) activity than any of us are aware of right now in terms of getting military equipment to the contras,” he said.

Cohen charged that although Casey limited CIA involvement in the contra program because a ban on direct U.S. military aid to the rebels was in effect from 1984 through 1986, the CIA director and two subordinates quietly aided North’s efforts to provide weapons to the contras.

Said another knowledgeable Administration official who monitored the scandal from its first days: “Casey was involved from the beginning. He probably worked with Ollie from the very beginning. That explains why everyone snapped to attention when Ollie called out there. It was certainly Casey’s idea to have Ollie in charge of this (Iran) project.”

CIA’s Furious Denial

The CIA furiously denies such reports. One official calls the agency and Casey the sitting targets of “spear throwers” who are spreading rumors about their ideological or political rivals.

In fact, in an affair whose dimensions are more moral than legal, no solid evidence has yet been made public that the CIA--or North--did more than explore the uncharted borders of their legal authority.

But waves of disclosures during the last month--from news leaks, documents and independent news reports--have sometimes shaken that judgment.

The first blow came in a Senate Intelligence Committee report last month which broadly implied that Casey and the agency were more than passingly familiar with North’s aid program for the contras, from which the agency says it has scrupulously separated itself.

Among other findings, the report linked Casey to efforts last September by North and Poindexter to funnel profitable arms deals to retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, a principal North aide in both the contras and Iran-arms operations.

The Times reported on Saturday that the CIA bought a $1.2-million shipload of Soviet Bloc and Portuguese arms last September from a firm controlled by Secord and another North associate, Iranian-American businessman Albert A. Hakim. Sources say the arms are believed to have been acquired at North’s direction, originally for shipment to the contras.

Sources say it also was widely known among top CIA and NSC officials that the freighter used in the arms deal, the Erria, was under North’s effective ownership and available for use in covert operations.

The CIA also has come under fire this month for aiding the movement of arms to Iran in November, 1985, without a required presidential directive, or “finding,” that the secret assistance was in the national interest--and for apparently seeking to misrepresent what it knew about that shipment.

Mundane Operation

Agency officials maintained early in the affair that they believed the arms shipment was in fact a cache of oil-drilling equipment, and that the mundane operation needed no high-level approval. But sources say at least some CIA officials knew at the time that the shipment consisted of weapons and that the oil-equipment tag was but a ruse.

Involvement Limited

The newly designated CIA director, Robert M. Gates, testified in Senate confirmation hearings last week that no finding was necessary in 1985 because the agency’s involvement was limited and no government funds were expended. But he could not explain why the CIA general counsel at the time, Stanley Sporkin, later drafted a retroactive finding if one was not necessary.

“Whether it’s legal or not legal,” Cohen said, “as a policy matter it’s not something we should be contemplating--allowing an agency to do something without a finding and then putting pressure on the President saying . . . give us a finding for our past actions. Then the question is who’s in charge? It’s not just a nice legal distinction. It has fundamental policy implications.”

CIA’s Image Bruised

National Security Council documents given to the Tower Commission, the White House panel studying NSC operations, have further bruised the agency’s image. So have a string of news leaks from the Tower panel and Administration sources.

Those leaks established that misleading testimony on the Iran-contra affair was being compiled for Casey early in the scandal, when the basic facts of the arms sales and diversion were unclear.

The National Security Council documents, including personal computer messages by top NSC officials, forced the CIA to re-examine allegations that its top Costa Rica official helped direct North’s contra arms pipeline. The CIA has said it twice warned that such aid violated policy, and now says no other employees beside the Costa Rica agent aided North.

Yet one source said last week that other NSC documents in the Tower panel’s files indicate North talked on contra matters not just with the Costa Rica official, known by the pseudonym of Tomas Castillo, but with other CIA employees in Central America as well.

‘Project Democracy’

“A lot of the PROFs messages refer to Ollie’s contacts with people in the field,” that source said, using the acronym for the NSC’s internal computer system. That source said the messages suggest North’s wide-ranging covert operations, which he nicknamed “Project Democracy,” were bigger than suspected in that “the agency was more involved in it than has come out so far.”

Cohen said he does not believe Castillo acted at Casey’s direction. “He was acting through the NSC, much as the ambassador over in Lebanon acted without the knowledge of (Secretary of State George P.) Shultz” in aiding North’s Iran arms negotiations last year, he said.

But he remains convinced that the CIA director and other CIA “proteges,” whom he declined to name, were involved in other borderline activities with North.

“With the exception of Casey, I think there were only two or three people who had any active knowledge” of the schemes, he said. “There may be two people who had some knowledge (of the contra resupply effort) . . . maybe having knowledge of what was going on, not saying anything, keeping it all very tight.”

Cohen did not offer evidence to support the allegation. His conclusion meshes with charges made by other sources that North met regularly with Casey on contra and Iran matters and worked through a handful of top CIA Latin American and Middle Eastern officials on both projects.

CIA spokesman George Lauder admits that North was well known among some agency officials. But he said it is ludicrous to conclude from that fact that the officials were privy to such North bombshells as the diversion of Iran arms profits to the contras.