Inouye Says He Wonders Whether Poindexter Told the Whole Truth

The chairman of the Senate Iran- contra committee voiced doubts today that John M. Poindexter told the whole story in his five days as a witness, despite Poindexter’s contention that what the committee and the nation heard was “the absolute truth and the whole truth.”

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) said Poindexter, the former national security adviser for President Reagan who wound up his testimony today, had given the inquiry “selected recollections.”

Lecturing Poindexter on his final day in the witness chair, Inouye said that instead of bragging to the President about the “neat idea” of using Iranian arms sales money to help the Nicaraguan contras, “you made a decision, you and you alone, to set up a very elaborate scheme of keeping this secret.”

“You decided not to tell the President because it would result in a political explosion,” said the senator, ticking off a list of others whom Poindexter said he didn’t tell: the director of the CIA, members of the Cabinet, the secretaries of state and defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--the nation’s highest military officer.

“With that type of testimony, some of us are justified in asking ourselves, and in this case I will ask you this . . . can you tell us whether information is being withheld from us today or during the past week?” Inouye asked.

“Mr. Chairman,” Poindexter said, “absolutely not. I have not withheld any information from this hearing that I can accurately recall. . . . What I testified, as I swore at the beginning of these hearings, is the absolute truth and the whole truth.”

‘Many Empty Spaces’

In an interview with public television, Inouye said that because of Poindexter’s spotty memory on important matters it is likely that “we’ll clean up the investigation with many empty spaces. It will not be a complete record.”

He added: “Therefore there is this gnawing question that all of us have, ‘Is he withholding any information from us at this moment?’ ”

Poindexter was asked extensively about a lunch he had with the late CIA Director William J. Casey last Nov. 22, a day after Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III began an investigation into the arms sales to Iran. But Poindexter remembered few details about the meeting.

“It seems to me . . . that this was an enormously important meeting with you and Director Casey,” said Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). “And yet, you seem not to recall anything about it, except that you had sandwiches.”

At the same time that that Saturday luncheon was going on, two blocks distant, Meese was learning over lunch from two of his top aides that they had, that morning, discovered the most important piece of paper for the investigation: a memorandum that spelled out the money diversion, in Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s files.

During his five days in the witness chair, Poindexter several times was at odds with the White House and differed on key points with the testimony of North, his former aide at the National Security Council, and that of Robert C. McFarlane, his predecessor as Reagan’s adviser.