U.S. Doesn’t Seem to Learn From Its Scandal Disasters

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” --From “The Naulahka,” by Rudyard Kipling.

Clearly the crew running the Iranian arms sales did not read their Kipling, or the law, or the history of mistakes that we, their predecessors, made.

With the names of a dozen ex-Marines and former CIA cohorts sprinkling the news, I wish that I could somehow feel a bit more pride instead of sadness and “ deja vu all over again.” And again. Covert chicanery has, after all, been with us for awhile. Remember Truman’s Ukraine, Eisenhower’s U-2, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs and Nixon’s Watergate? In 1976 I resigned my CIA career because of the debacle of our covert activity in Angola.

The nation does not seem to learn from these disasters, in part because Congress refuses to accept its legal responsibility and insist that the perpetrators be punished. At best our White House/National Security Council is like a college football team that changes players every four years, with new coaches also coming in--some of whom have never even played the game.

If the media are at least trying energetically to cover the current Iran- contra scandal, it seems to me that some obvious principles are being overlooked in the reporting. For example, Secretary of State George P. Shultz seemed at first to be giving us a classical exhibition of “plausible denial.” I was about to conclude that this was the only thing that President Reagan’s team had done by the book, leaving Shultz clean of foreign involvement so that he could, when it blew, distance himself and thereby salvage at least some credibility for Reagan’s foreign policies. Now it seems that Nancy Reagan and others around the President didn’t know about plausible denial, and Shultz has been ordered to get down in the muck or resign.

William J. Casey, on the other hand, managed to reverse the classic process. What is the role of the CIA if not to give the President plausible denial of American skulduggery? Casey set the deal into motion in an effort to ransom his Beirut station chief, William Buckley, who had been kidnaped and was being interrogated by the Iranians. Casey recommended that Congress not be advised. His CIA put up the seed money and supported the operation throughout. But when it all blew he claimed plausible denial, leaving the White House to “twist slowly in the wind.” By contrast, Allen W. Dulles sacrificed himself to protect President John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

“Diversion of funds” is the current euphemism for grand larceny. To deposit returning government money in any private account is a felony. It makes no great difference whether it is then given to the Red Cross, the Catholic Church or the Republican Party. In this case other laws (the Hughes-Ryan amendment that requires the President and the CIA to advise Congress of covert initiatives, the prohibition of arms sales to Iran, the Neutrality Act, the 1984 Boland amendment and the prohibition of perjury) obviously were broken and funds were stolen.

The same and/or other similar laws were broken in 1975-76 by the Angola team that I directed for Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby. We went unpunished, setting the nation up for the current Iran-contra disgrace.

Nothing can be written to clarify the appalling cynicism of the Iranian caper: the mounting evidence that Reagan, Shultz, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and the others are vigorously supporting the contras who are smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States (what does this say about the Administration’s “war on drugs?”); or the U.S. bombing of “terrorist” Libya last spring while we were delivering sophisticated weapons to Iran even after its agents killed hostages, including Buckley, and kidnaped others; or the four Marines’ (former national-security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, Shultz and North) involvement in delivering arms to the country responsible for killing 241 Marines the year before; or the contra program itself, in which 5,000 mostly Catholic Nicaraguan peasants have been killed under the hubris of “anti-communism.”

Certainly the President’s frustration is not pretty to watch. However, the Iranian scandal can hardly be attributed to euphoria from the 1984 elections. The cynicism goes much deeper. Project Democracy began in 1982. It was only part of a program of dramatic change that the President proudly called the “Reagan Revolution,” from which we got such officials as James G. Watt at the Interior Department, Ann McGill Burford at the Environmental Protection Agency, Edwin Meese III as attorney general, and on and on. The sad truth is that North blends right in with the rest of the Reagan revolutionaries.

One tries hard not to think of such leadership in control of 37,000 nuclear weapons.

Now we are faced, once again, with sorting out an incomprehensible mess. One can only hope and pray that the responsible committees and prosecutors will do their duty in such a way that we will not be faced with similar debacles every few years forever.