Bank Data Tying Iran Funds to Planes for Contras Told

Newly discovered bank records suggest that at least $1.5 million in profits from the Reagan Administration’s secret arms sales to Iran were used to buy and service airplanes for the Nicaraguan rebels, investigators said Monday.

The bank records show that a Swiss company that is believed to have handled money from the Iranian arms deal transferred funds to a dummy company in Panama, which then paid for planes for the contras ‘ secret airlift, they said.

The records do not prove conclusively that the money came from the Iranian deal; theoretically, it could have come from some other source. Nevertheless, investigators say they believe that the money did come from Iran--and that the bank transfers are a key link in showing how the diversion occurred.

“We think this is the real thing,” a source close to one of the federal investigations said. “But we aren’t at the point where we can prove it yet.”

Panamanian Firm

The bank records, disclosed Monday by the Philadelphia Inquirer, are for a company called Amalgamated Commercial Enterprise Inc., a Panamanian firm that was set up to handle funds for the secret contra airlift at a time when Congress had prohibited official U.S. military aid to the rebels.

ACE’s bank account at the Banco Iberoamericana in Panama received $1,544,325 in wire transfers, mostly from Swiss banks, during 11 months between November, 1985, and October, 1986, sources close to the investigations said.

One of those transfers came from the Compagnie de Services Fiduciaires S.A., or CSF, a Geneva firm that investigators believe helped to manage the financial network organized by fired White House aide Oliver L. North. Several others came from accounts at Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank that North’s associates used.

Organizational charts of the secret network found in North’s office after he was fired last November included ACE and “CSF Investments Ltd.”

Airplanes Bought

Much of the money was used to buy airplanes--including two DHC-4 Caribou cargo planes--for the contra airlift that was organized for North by three retired Air Force officers, Richard V. Secord, Robert C. Dutton and Richard B. Gadd, the investigators said.

Other funds from the account were used to pay Southern Air Transport of Miami for maintaining the aircraft or to pay the wages of crewmen in the airlift, they said.

The money from CSF was transferred before January, 1986, one source familiar with the records said. If those funds were diverted from Iranian arms sales, they would probably have been from the Reagan Administration’s initial, indirect weapons deals through Israel, he said.

Panamanian government records show that ACE was incorporated in 1984 and was bought in 1985 by Robert Mason, a vice president of Southern Air.

‘Just a Bank Account’

An attorney for Southern Air, David M. Kirstein, confirmed that the firm had helped to set up the dummy company as a service to Gadd. “ACE was just a bank account for other companies,” he said. “It was never under the control of Southern Air. . . . It was under the control of Gadd or Dutton or somebody like that.”

Southern Air was once owned by the CIA but says it now has no ties to the agency.

The elusive trail of the money from the arms deals is being pursued by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh and by investigative committees of the Senate and the House. Sources familiar with the probes agreed to speak on condition that they not be identified.