THE IRAN-CONTRA HEARINGS : Does Poindexter--Not North--Hold the Key?

Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, billed as the man with the keys to the Iran- contra scandal, weathered his first day before congressional panels Tuesday after surrendering almost no new answers to the affair.

North’s testimony came as no surprise to Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), co-chairman of the Senate Iran-contra panel.

“It proves what I’ve been saying all along--that Adm. (John M.) Poindexter will be the key witness, not Oliver North,” Rudman said at day’s end. North “was not a policy-maker” in the mold of Poindexter, he said, and may not know the roots of key events in the affair.

To Testify Next Week

Poindexter, who was North’s boss and President Reagan’s key foreign policy adviser from January through November of last year, will follow North’s appearance before the inquiry as early as next week.

North, who had said last December, “I don’t think there is another person in America that wants to tell the story as much as I do,” nevertheless appeared to end the day with his own shaky credibility in potentially deeper doubt.

The former White House aide readily admitted to spectacular but well-documented deeds, including his command of a clandestine contra-arms pipeline and his shredding of incriminating documents. He repeatedly claimed he had “the approval of my superiors for every one of my actions.”

But in six combative hours of testimony, he seemed loath to name any of those superiors beyond two men already well soiled by the scandal, former National Security Advisers Poindexter and Robert C. McFarlane.

Pressed to recall who gave orders--to prepare a fake history of the Iran arms deal, to divert Iran arms sale profits to the Nicaraguan rebels--North was forgetful.

No Recollection

“Again, I do not have a specific recollection” of who ordered the falsified arms sale chronology, North told John W. Nields Jr., majority counsel for the House Iran-contra committee.

“I don’t recall Adm. Poindexter asking me” to prepare memoranda seeking President Reagan’s approval to divert Iran arms profits, North said, although he assumed that the diversions were approved.

And even though, by North’s account, at least five such memos were written and later shredded, he said he had “absolutely no recollection” that Reagan saw or initialed any of them.

“I came here to tell you the truth, to tell you and this committee and the American people the truth,” North said at one point. “And I’m trying to do that, Mr. Nields, and I don’t like the insinuation that I’m up here having a convenient memory lapse, like perhaps some others have.”

Memory ‘Shredded’

Stopped short by another memory lapse, he later said: “My memory has been shredded.”

North’s memory lapses came as no surprise to one of his former co-workers at the White House National Security Council.

“We’re going to be more confused on Tuesday afternoon than we were on Monday,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be identified. “We aren’t going to know what to believe.”

What the bemedaled Marine did remember tended almost exclusively to support a single contention, made early in the day’s testimony. “I don’t believe that anything I did while at the NSC was a violation of the law,” he said. “I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.”

Some examples:

--On whether he ran a secret arms pipeline to the contras, he replied plainly: “I tried.” He described it as a covert operation in support of White House foreign policy.

North recounted a meeting last summer of the so-called Restricted Interagency Group, or RIG, in which he purported to have outlined the entire contra-resupply operation to high State Department and Pentagon officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage.

But he failed to recount details of what he told the RIG, and an Abrams spokesman said: “I don’t think there’s anything to respond to.”

--On whether he helped doctor the Iran arms sales chronology, he said: “I came to believe there were good and sufficient reasons why that version had to go forward.” But he disputed a previous witness’s testimony that he had suggested inserting at least one deliberately false statement in the history.

--On whether he shredded documents, North admitted destroying secret papers on the contra arms network as early as last October, when the downing of a supply plane over Nicaragua signaled the unraveling of his private operation.

One effect of such candor was to suggest that the shredding was not a criminal effort to obstruct justice because it began before a criminal inquiry was under way.

But North’s memory was less exact on the crucial weekend of Nov. 21, when, facing an inquiry by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, he shredded so many papers that he jammed the electric destruction device in his office, according to other testimony.

North at first could not recall any shredding that day and could not recall telling McFarlane of the need for a “shredding party” earlier in the day. He later said he did “not preclude” that some papers may have been destroyed so that they would not be found by the Justice Department.

In what may be a harbinger of the week’s testimony, most of North’s revelations were firecrackers, not bombshells.

Names Two Officials

Near the end of his testimony, North gave in to Nields and named two high U.S. officials who, he said, were “most closely aware” of his clandestine network to ship arms and money to the Nicaraguan rebels.

One was former CIA Director William J. Casey. The other was Vice Adm. Arthur S. Moreau, a former aide on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most recently commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe.

Moreau died last December. Casey died in May.