FBI Contra Report Sent to North

Former National Security Council aide Oliver L. North received an FBI investigative report last year on a criminal probe of alleged gunrunning to the Nicaraguan contras, a Justice Department spokesman said Tuesday.

The document was written by an FBI agent working in Miami, said federal law enforcement sources, speaking on condition they not be identified. It allowed North to keep tabs on an investigation that potentially could have revealed his own possible role in assistance to the contras during a two-year congressional ban on U.S. military aid to the guerrilla force.

The sources said the document was found in North’s files at the NSC after the Iran-contra affair was uncovered last November, but spokesmen for the FBI and Justice Department declined to confirm that.

The spokesmen said it is unclear how the document wound up in North’s hands. But it appears to have been supplied to him through the FBI field office in Miami, the sources said.

“It is my understanding that an FBI memo was routed to Col. North at some point earlier last year,” Justice Department spokesman Patrick Korten said.

Korten added that North “did not obtain it from either the main Justice Department or the FBI in Washington and would not normally have been given such material. It is not our policy to make criminal investigative material available to individuals outside the department” except in highly unusual circumstances.