THE IRAN--CONTRA HEARINGS : Excerpts: Casey (Told Me) I Should Be Prepared to Take My Own Life

Following are excerpts from testimony Wednesday by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North before the congressional committees investigating the Iran-contra affair. North was questioned by the John W. Nields Jr., the House committee’s chief counsel:

Conversation With Reagan

Question: Yesterday, you testified about a conversation which you had with the President of the United States on Nov. 25, 1986. And I believe you said that he told you: “I just didn’t know.”

Answer: Or words to that effect, yes, sir.

Q: Now, following your conversation with the President, did you happen to run into Robert Earle (a deputy to North at the National Security Council) later that day?

A: I’m sure that I did. . . .

Q: And you mentioned, did you not, the conversation that you had with the President?

A: Yes, I recall that Lt. Col. Earle was in the office and he had known that the President had called. . . .

Q: . . . Did you say to him in words or substance that the President had said to you: “It’s important that I not know”?

A: Counsel, I don’t recall the conversation that way. . . .

Ghorbanifar’s Proposal

(Nields asked whose idea it was to send surplus proceeds from the Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras. North said that Iranian arms broker Manucher Ghorbanifar proposed it in a conversation in a bathroom somewhere in Europe in January, 1986.)

A: And I saw that idea, of using the Ayatollah (Ruhollah) Khomeini’s money to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, as a good one. . . . And I came back and I advocated that and we did it . . . on three occasions. . . . And in each one of those occasions . . . we got three Americans (hostages) back. And there was no terrorism while we were engaged in it, against Americans. . . .

Recruiting Secord

(North was asked about his recruiting Richard V. Secord, a businessman and retired Air Force general, to help with secret efforts to resupply the Nicaraguan contras.)

Q: How much . . . was he to take from the proceeds of the sale of arms to Iran (as compensation for his efforts)?

A: . . . When he said, you know, “I’m being taken from my other activities,” and I said, “Fair and just compensation is appropriate,” I trusted that he would do so. . . .

Q: . . . How much money, according to your understanding, did Mr. Secord take from the sale of arms to Iran?

A: I still don’t know. I don’t even know that he did. . . .

Q: . . . Would it have surprised you in November of 1986 to learn that Gen. Secord had used $4 million--the proceeds of Iranian sales for the contras--and had $8 million remaining in the pot?

A: I was surprised, and I--I want to take note, I still don’t understand that, and I’m not willing at this point to accuse anybody, but I--I was surprised.

Personal Benefit

(North was asked about allegations that he benefited personally from the Iran-contra operation.)

Q: There has been testimony . . . that a death benefit account was set up by Mr. Hakim (Albert A. Hakim, business partner of retired Air Force Gen. Richard V. Secord) with the name Button, for the benefit of your family in the event of your death. Were you aware of any such account?

A: No. Totally unaware of it. First I heard of it was through these hearings. I have never heard of it before and it was a shock. An absolute shock.

Q: There is a testamentary document which has been introduced in evidence, relating to a particular $2-million sub-account set up also by Mr. Hakim, which provides that in his death Gen. Secord can control the use of the funds and in the event of his death, you can control the use of the funds and it also contains a provision that if everybody dies, it will be distributed to their estates. Were you aware of such a document?

A: No. I never heard of it until these hearings started. I still don’t believe it. I was shocked. . . .

Q: . . . There’s been testimony that several thousand dollars was spent on a fence, security system that was put in at your residence, and that the monies to pay for it came from Gen. Secord. . . .

A: . . . The issue of the security system was first broached immediately after a threat on my life by Abu Nidal (a Palestinian terrorist). Abu Nidal is . . . the principal, foremost assassin in the world today. . . .

(North said he was told that the FBI , which alerted him to the threat, was not permitted to provide protection, and he said it was not feasible to move his family to the safety of the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He said he was told by several private security companies that it would take months to install a security system. Then he mentioned the threat to Secord, who introduced him to Glenn Robinette, a former CIA technical expert who owned a security company. Robinette estimated a system would cost from $8,000 to $8,500 and could be put in immediately. North continued:)

I’ll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world. OK? There’s an even deal for him. But I am not willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu Nidal or his organization on his terms. And I want you to know what was going through my mind. I was about to leave for Tehran. I had already been told by (CIA) Director (William J.) Casey that I should be prepared to take my own life. I had already been told that the government of the United States, on an earlier proposal for a trip, might even disavow the fact that I had gone on the trip . . .

Gentlemen, I have an 11-year-old daughter, not perhaps a whole lot different than Natasha Simpson (an American child killed by an Abu Nidal terrorist in Rome), and so, when Mr. Robinette told me, on or about the 10th of May (1986), that he could immediately install a security system, I said: “Please try to keep it to the $8,000 to $8,500. I am, after all, a Marine lieutenant colonel, and I live on my salary.” And he installed that system. . . .

(North said that when he did not receive a bill, he figured that “an accommodation was worked between Mr. Robinette and Gen. Secord to make a gift out of that security system.” Not until months later, after he had been fired from his White House job, did he realize that “there was one thing that just didn’t look right.” He continued:)

And that was that for the first time in my life, I had accepted something that I hadn’t paid for. And even though I honestly believe that the government of the United States should have paid for it, should have put it in, I then picked up the phone and asked for a bill. I got a bill. . . . I did probably the grossest misjudgment that I have made in my life. I then tried to paper over that whole thing, by sending two phony documents back to Mr. Robinette . . . (to conceal that the system already had been paid for).

Traveler’s Checks

(North was asked about the use of traveler’s checks that he kept in his office to help finance contra resupply operations and “other activities.” He said that Casey had suggested setting up the “operational account” into which flowed more than $100,000 in traveler’s checks supplied by contra leader Adolfo Calero and between $50,000 and $75,000 in cash supplied mostly by Secord.)

All of the transactions were recorded on a ledger that Director Casey gave me for that purpose. . . . And when he told me to do so, I destroyed it, because it had within it the details of every single person who had been supported by this fund, the addresses, their names, and placed them at extraordinary risk. . . .

(Responding to previous testimony that he had cashed $2,400 in traveler’s checks for snow tires and other personal items, North said that all such transactions were to reimburse contra expenses he had paid from personal funds when the operational account was empty.)

I’d cash a check, for example, at Miami Airport and hand the money to a resistance person who I met with there. Or I flew myself off to someplace. Because we were trying to avoid the use of (congressionally) appropriated funds, we used this account to live within (the Boland amendment, banning government aid to the contras) and to hide the fact that NSC (National Security Council) travel was being conducted. . . . Every single penny on the checks that you saw that came to me was used to pay an operational expense on the scene or to reimburse myself. I never took a penny that didn’t belong to me. . . .

And I realize that it--that this hearing is a difficult thing. Believe me, gentlemen, it isn’t as difficult for you as it is for a guy that’s got to come up here and tell the truth, and that’s what I’m trying to do. And I want to make it very clear that when you put up things (on the wall as exhibits) like “Parklane Hosiery” and you all snicker at it, and you know that I’ve got a beautiful secretary (Fawn Hall), and the good Lord gave her the gift of beauty, and the people snicker that Ollie North might have been doing a little hanky-panky with his secretary, Ollie North has been loyal to his wife since the day he married her. And the fact is I went to my best friend and I asked her, “Did I ever go to Parklane Hosiery?” And you know what she told me? “Of course, you did, you old buffoon, you went there to buy leotards for our two little girls.” And the reason I wrote the check to Parklane Hosiery, just like the checks at Giant (supermarket), is because I was owed my money for what I had spent in pursuing that covert operation. You gentlemen may not agree that we should have been pursuing covert operations at the NSC, but we were. We had an operational account, and we used the money for legitimate purposes within that covert operation.

Full-Service Operation

(North testified that aiding the contras was “a full-service covert operation,” supplying food, clothing and medical supplies in addition to arms.)

Q: And I take it one of the ways you got the leaders to unify was to send substantial amounts of cash down to them?

A: People who are going to give up their lives and their livelihoods to join a resistance movement need to feed their families. And so when it becomes necessary to help them eat and put a roof over the heads of their families to join a political and military opposition to the Communist regime in Managua, we sent money, yes.

Q: And, in one case, you sent a total of $225,000 to one leader.

A: I give up. Who?

Q: We have been avoiding mentioning particular names, but there is a particular leader (identified elsewhere as Alfonso Robelo) who was sent $225,000 over approximately a year-and-a-half period out of the Swiss bank accounts under Gen. Secord’s control.

A: . . . The amount may be $225,000. It might well be higher. But I don’t think the committee ought to be left with the impression that he was bribed or she was bribed into joining this movement. . . . I don’t know anybody who was ever bribed to join the Nicaraguan resistance. . . . And, yes, I sent money to that man. And I know, because I saw the product of it, that he helped form a southern front with that money. And if it helped him to live and to feed his family, good. And there’s nothing wrong with that, counsel, nothing.

Misled Congress

(Under questioning, North admitted th a t he repeatedly misled Congress when various members inquired about press reports on the secret contra operation.)

Counsel, in each and every case, I advocated this philosophy in answering the Congress. There was no executive privilege exercised and, instead, answers were sent to the Congress that were clearly misleading. . . . The preferred answer would have been no answer at all, and I believed then, and I believe now, that the executive was fully legitimate in giving no answer to those queries. . . .

Q: . . . You made false statements (to the House Intelligence Committee at a meeting) about your activities in support of the contras?

A: I did. Furthermore, I did so with . . . the purpose of hopefully avoiding the very kind of thing that we have before us now and avoiding a shut-off of help to the Nicaraguan resistance and avoiding an elimination of the resistance facilities in three Central American countries wherein we had promised those heads of state . . . of our absolute and total discretion.

Q: We do live in a democracy, don’t we?

A: We do, sir. Thank God.

Q: In which it is the people, not one Marine lieutenant colonel, that get to decide the important policy decisions for the nation.

A: Yes. And, I--

Q: And part of the democratic process--

A: And I would point out that part of that answer is that this Marine lieutenant colonel was not making all of those decisions on his own. As I indicated in my testimony yesterday, Mr. Nields, I sought approval for everything that I did.

Q: But you denied Congress the facts--

A: I did.

Q: You denied the elected representatives of our people the facts upon which they needed--

A: I did.

Q: --to make a very important decision for this nation.

A: I did because of what I have just described to you as our concerns, and I did it because we have had incredible leaks, from discussions with closed committees of the Congress . . . I mean, those kinds of things are devastating. . . .

Q: . . . You and others put out a false version of facts relating to the 1985 Hawk (missile) shipment (to Iran). You altered documents in official NSC files. You shredded documents shortly after you heard that representatives of the attorney general of the United States were coming in to your office to review them. You wrote false and misleading letters to the Congress of the United States. The government lied to the American people about the connection of the (Eugene) Hasenfus plane (resupplying the contras). You received a personal financial benefit from operating funds of the covert organization without knowing where it came from. . . . Eight million dollars of operations funds was handled in a manner that you didn’t know what had happened to it or whether it existed. My question to you is whether . . . these things are inevitable consequences of conducting covert operations or whether these are things that happened because of . . . these two particular covert actions? If you have an answer.

A: . . . I sincerely believe that I did everything within the law. I made serious judgment errors and I have admitted those. But I tried and I don’t regret having done it.