The Good, The bad, and The Ugly : When U. S. Foreign Policy Becomes Covert

“I came here to tell the truth,” Lt. Col. Oliver L. North told the congressional committee investigating the Iran- contra affair last week, “the good, the bad and the ugly.” He did just that.

Bad? “I participated,” North told the committee, “in the preparation of documents to the Congress that were erroneous, misleading, evasive and wrong.”

Ugly? “I did probably the grossest misjudgment that I’ve made in my life,” North said, admitting he falsified documents to cover the illegal gift of a home security system.

Good? Well, when asked if he was the person identified as “Mr. Good” in a coded message, North said, “I was very good.”

He was, indeed, a very good operative and a very good witness. What North did was offer a compelling justification for a covert operation. “This is a dangerous world . . . and (the American people) ought not to be led to believe, as a consequence of these hearings, that this nation cannot or should not conduct covert operations.” There was one big flaw in North’s argument, however. The National Security Council was not conducting a covert operation; it was conducting a covert foreign policy.

There is a difference. A covert operation is an action taken to further an agreed-upon foreign-policy goal. The interception of Arab terrorists escaping from the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking was a covert operation, as was the retaliatory 1986 air strike on Libya. A covert foreign policy, on the other hand, pursues secret objectives. Why should the Reagan Administration pursue a secret foreign policy? Because it couldn’t get political support for policies it wanted to pursue.

If the Congress or the American public knew that we were trading arms for hostages--thereby violating our explicit commitment never to negotiate with terrorists--there would have been a political explosion. As for sending military aid to the contras , Congress, with demonstrable public support, had placed severe restrictions on such a policy. The NSC was not “executing” U. S. foreign policy. It was making U. S. foreign policy--and hiding that policy from the Congress, the American public and the world.

“By their very nature, covert or special activities are a lie,” North told the committee. And so North helped prepare a false chronology of the government’s involvement in arms sales to Iran, thereby, as House committee counsel John W. Nields Jr. put it, “committing the President of the United States to a false story.” (“Yes, that’s true,” North replied.) He helped promulgate the false story that the U. S. government had no connection to the cargo plane piloted by Eugene Hasenfus shot down last fall over Nicaragua. He shredded official documents, including a ledger containing the record of financial transactions to resupply the contras. He helped Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Casey prepare false testimony to Congress.

All that notwithstanding, North insisted to the committee, “I sincerely believe that I did everything within the law.”

North advocated diverting profits from the Iranian arms deal to the contras, a policy that Reagan said raised “serious questions of propriety” when it was revealed last November--and for which he fired North. Last week, however, an unrepentant North said, “I saw that idea of using the Ayatollah Khomeini’s money to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters as a good one. I still do.”

At one point North explained, “I want to go back to the whole intent of a covert operation. Part of a covert operation is to offer plausible deniability of the association of the government of the United States with the activity. Part of it is to deceive our adversaries. Part of it is to ensure that those people who are at great peril carrying out those activities are not further endangered. All of those are good and sufficient reasons” to do what he did.

Those are indeed good and sufficient reasons for a covert operation. But in this case, it was the objectives and not just the operations that were being kept secret. North claimed that the Iranian arms deal had to be kept secret to save lives. “I put great value on the lives of the American hostages,” he explained. “We got three Americans back.” The assumption is that the goal--trading arms for hostages--was obvious and unexceptionable. Yet the President himself refused to admit he was carrying out such a policy until he was forced to do so by the Tower Commission report.

North explained that the diversion of funds “was carried out covertly” to ensure that “the United States was going to meet the commitments of the President’s foreign policy . . . that our support for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters was going to continue.” That might have been the President’s foreign policy, but it was not the foreign policy of Congress or, according to the polls, the U. S. public. That’s why it had to be kept secret.

Perhaps North’s most revealing statement came when he described Casey’s response to the contra operation. According to North, Casey was “very enthusiastic” about the diversion of funds--he described it as “the ultimate covert operation”--but nonetheless felt the operation involved potential risks. “What kinds of risks did he identify to you?” asked the counsel. Answer: “This very political risk that we see being portrayed out here now; that it could indeed be . . . not dangerous so much as politically damaging.” Exactly so.

At another point, North said, “I didn’t want to show Congress a single word on this whole thing.” Repeatedly, North lectured Congress about its abandonment of the contras. “There were other countries in the world and other people in this country, who were more willing to help the Nicaraguan resistance survive, and cause democracy to prosper in Central America, than this body here.”

That is not carrying out a covert operation. It is making foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era when there are fundamental disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, the President and Congress, about U. S. military intervention in the Third World. It is making a secret foreign policy that can be shielded from the risk of “political damage.”

North steadfastly claimed that he was not making policy, that he was not “a loose cannon.” “I have never carried out a single act, not one, in which I did not have authority from superiors,” he said. Whereupon he proceeded to implicate virtually the entire foreign-policy apparatus of the Reagan Administration--except Reagan himself, who North only “assumed” knew about the operation. He attributed detailed knowledge to Casey and Vice Adm. Arthur Moreau, a special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--both conveniently dead. He said former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, an attempted suicide, helped prepare false chronologies. He also named Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III as a cover-up participant, thereby putting Meese on the critical list too. Others who knew some or all of what was going on included Secretary of State George P. Shultz; Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs; FBI Director William H. Webster, and former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, scheduled to testify this week. All were involved in either the operation or the cover-up, North said, “although they may deny it.” Which is what they were busy doing last week.

What North depicted was an organized conspiracy to carry out a deceptive, illegal and politically explosive foreign policy. If his accusations hold up, then the Iran- contra affair is an example of a far more serious political pathology than Watergate. North’s testimony evoked what historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” a “recurrent mode of expression in our public life” marked by obsession with secrecy and conspiracy and where “the feeling of persecution is central.” For those involved in the Iran- contra affair, the enemy is communism, a conspiratorial movement. As Hofstadter wrote, “A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.”

According to Hofstadter, “The paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” U. S. foreign policy has been infused with “fundamental fears and hatreds” since Vietnam--a left that sympathizes with Third World liberation movements and a right that sees these as evidence of Soviet subversion and expansionism. The roots of Ollieology go back to the national trauma of Vietnam--and to North’s personal trauma as a heroic but frustrated and battle-scarred soldier in that conflict.

Early polls suggest that North struck a responsive chord with the American public. Most felt he was telling the truth and admired his aggressiveness. He may well give voice to a backlash among those who feel increasing anger over the “persecution” of Reagan by the news media, the Democrats and Congress. At the very least, he succeeded in capturing the nation’s attention. The editor of Soap Opera Digest reported there was no uproar from fans over the preemption of their favorite television shows. “What,” she asked, “could be more dramatic than Ollie North?”