Panel to Question Envoy to El Salvador : Ambassador’s Meetings With North Told

Edwin G. Corr, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, met several times with then-White House aide Oliver L. North last year when North was directing the Nicaraguan rebels’ secret airlift operation at a Salvadoran air force base, State Department officials said Thursday.

However, Corr has told colleagues that he and North discussed only the delivery of non-military aid to the contras, not weaponry, the officials said. At the time, the State Department was administering a congressionally approved program of non-military aid to the rebels.

The Senate committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal plans to question Corr next week about his actions to determine whether they further implicate the State Department in the secret contra arms network.

“We want to know what his role was and what his knowledge covered,” a congressional source said.

Costa Rica Envoy Quit

Lewis A. Tambs, U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, resigned abruptly last year after reports that he helped North’s efforts by pressuring the Costa Rican government to allow a company controlled by North associates to move weapons through that country.

Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for Latin America, also has come under fire for obtaining a $10-million contribution for the contras from the sultanate of Brunei, only to have the money disappear into one of North’s Swiss bank accounts.

Corr, a career Foreign Service officer, met several times with North during 1985 and 1986, when the White House aide was overseeing a secret effort to deliver weapons to the contras.

Corr also met repeatedly with Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban-American ex-CIA operative who directed the clandestine airlift operation at El Salvador’s Ilopango air base, the State Department officials said.

At least one of the meetings included North, Corr, Rodriguez, the CIA’s Central American task force chief and two U.S. military officers stationed in El Salvador. The CIA officer and the military attaches have also been accused of helping to coordinate the contra airlift.

At the time, Congress had banned U.S. military aid to the rebels. North and other officials helped organize an effort to obtain private and foreign aid for the contras instead--reportedly including profits from the Reagan Administration’s secret arms sales to Iran.

Corr, who was visiting Washington Thursday, refused to comment on the meetings. “We’re under instructions not to be discussing these matters,” he said.

But other officials said Corr has contended that, while he may have discussed the State Department’s program of non-military aid to the contras with North and Rodriguez, he never discussed the movement of weapons.

“We were moving humanitarian aid through Ilopango at the same time that these private weapons shipments were apparently going through,” one official said.

Another official said that while Corr was aware of the weapons shipments’ moving through Ilopango, the extent of his knowledge and any possible involvement remain unclear.

Several crewmen in the airlift operation have told investigators that the chief of the U.S. military mission in El Salvador, Army Col. James Steele, had an active role in overseeing the weapons shipments. Steele normally would report on his activities to Corr, but it was not clear whether he did so in this case. Steele, who has since been reassigned, has been questioned by investigators.

North’s clandestine effort used El Salvador as a base for the airlift in part to avoid interference from officials in Honduras, where the contras’ main military bases are located.

An arms-carrying flight that was shot down in Nicaragua last October--killing three crewman and delivering a fourth, Eugene Hasenfus, into the hands of Nicaraguan troops--took off from Ilopango air base.