Secord in Spotlight: ‘Cold, Blue Steel’

With his clipped tones and matter-of-fact recitation of cash capital and fund transfers, Richard V. Secord could have been a pudgy, conservatively dressed banker delivering a routine business report to his board of directors.

Instead, he was the star witness at the opening of the long-awaited congressional hearings on the Iran- contra scandal and he was discussing the intricate strands of what the committee chairman called “a web of deception” that has shaken the nation’s confidence in its President.

Secord gave a national television audience a glimpse of something they rarely get: a close-up of the cool, calculating professionals who run America’s secret wars and covert operations. He calmly told of international arms deals, of shell companies and secret bank accounts, of code names and encryption devices, of high-level support for efforts to overthrow a foreign government--the stuff of spy novels.

Although he displayed occasional flashes of annoyance--and even a few wisps of humor--Secord’s initial three hours of testimony seemed to fit a friend’s description of the retired Air Force major general who played a key role in both covert operations: “We’re talking cold, blue steel.”

‘Set the Record Straight’

Breaking the public silence he had stoically maintained in the six months since the scandal started unraveling, Secord told the 26 members of the House and Senate select committees that he welcomed the opportunity to “set the record straight.”

“I am now prepared to explain to all of you and to the American public precisely what I did. I am ready to answer all your questions,” the 54-year-old Secord said. “We believed very much in the significance of what we were doing and that our conduct was in furtherance of the President’s policies.”

Testifying without the promise given to a host of future witnesses--immunity from prosecution based on his own testimony--Secord droned through the details of the amounts, names, dates and places involved in establishing and running the secret contra supply effort at a time when Congress had banned direct U.S. government assistance.

He said his involvement in both the contra and Iran arms shipments came at the direct request of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the White House National Security Council aide fired by President Reagan last November. The Reagan Administration, he said, “knew of my conduct and approved it.”

Secord said that he first was approached to handle the sale of munitions to the contras a year after he retired from the military in 1983 after a career that had spanned extensive covert operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Secord also served as Air Force liaison officer with the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran and as deputy assistant defense secretary.

‘Nothing Spooky About It’

“This was a straight commercial-type transaction,” he said of his initial dealings with the contras. “There was nothing spooky about it.”

Although he said that “it was completely legal,” Secord said he subsequently “forswore my profits” in the arms deals because he hoped to return to government. He displayed a glimmer of emotion in discussing why “I left government sooner than I might have” after he was linked to Edwin Wilson, the renegade CIA operative convicted of selling explosives to Libya’s terrorist government.

“I had been falsely accused. . . . The fact that I was cleared didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone,” Secord testified. “A lot of bad publicity fell on me during that time frame. I was in debt. I was unhappy.

“I had a few stitches I hadn’t really taken care of” in government, he continued. “ . . . I felt that I was still young enough to go back and have another try at it. . . . I also believed if I took a share of profit from the arms sales, no matter how legal it is, that it would tarnish me and ruin my chances for going back into the government.”

He laced his testimony about the contra supply network with military terms--the need for a “logistics infrastructure” and the move to set up “a secure main operations base” to get “some operational capability generated.”

Meeting with Casey

There was even a smattering of laughter in the hearing room when he recounted a meeting late in 1985 with then-CIA Director William J. Casey. The meeting began with an extensive discussion of the covert operation--with Casey talking about Iran while Secord thought he was talking about Nicaragua. “We were hemispheres apart for a while,” he said, describing the gruff Casey as “not the easiest guy I ever communicated with.”

Secord displayed a touch of dry humor in discussing his efforts to unsnarl logistical problems with a 1985 arms shipment to Iran. He spent days in Portugal trying unsuccessfully to resolve the problem, he said, but failed. Then he said he was dispatched by North to Israel to work out another logistics snarl: “I was asked to solve that problem (in Israel) since I hadn’t solved the first problem (in Portugal).”