Strongly Against Arms Sales, Weinberger Says

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, the last public witness in the long Iran- contra hearings, testified today that he strongly opposed selling arms to Iran even after President Reagan decided to go ahead and John M. Poindexter said “there is no more room for argument.”

Weinberger said he and Secretary of State George P. Shultz first argued against any sale of arms to Iran when it was proposed in the summer of 1985.

The subject was raised again, he said, in a White House meeting on Dec. 7, 1985, attended by the President, Vice President George Bush, Shultz and Robert C. McFarlane, who was then about to leave his job as national security adviser.

Sales Authorized

According to Poindexter’s testimony before the committees, the President had already authorized the arms sales two days earlier, on Dec. 5, by signing a “finding”--a term for a presidential approval for a covert operation.

“The general discussion was now more specific than it had been in August,” Weinberger said of the Dec. 7 meeting. “I made a very strong objection to the whole idea, as did the secretary of state.”

His reasons were, he said, that the United States was asking other countries not to sell arms to Iran, that there was no one reliable to deal with and that if it were an arms-for-hostages deal, the government was laying itself open to blackmail.

Only McFarlane

Weinberger said he left the meeting feeling that only McFarlane favored the transaction, that the President had decided against it. He said when he returned to the Pentagon he told his military aide, Maj. Gen. Colin Powell--now a lieutenant general--that “I believed this baby had been strangled in its cradle, and that it was finished.”

But on Jan. 7, 1986, at a meeting that included the late CIA Director William J. Casey, the subject was raised again and Weinberger said Casey “seemed to feel that there would be an intelligence gain from the operation if it succeeded.” He said that he and Shultz again fought against the decision but that the President seemed to be leaning toward it.

On Jan. 17 or 18, Weinberger said, he received a call from Poindexter, who by that time had succeeded McFarlane as national security adviser.

No Arguing

“He said the President’s decided this and there’s no more room for argument, something along that line,” Weinberger said. “I accepted Adm. Poindexter’s word. . . . I’d made all the arguments that I could think of at the two meetings.”

He said he then told Powell: “We’ll have to go through with this. The President has ordered.” With that the Defense Department transferred 500 TOW anti-tank missiles--and later, 500 more--to the CIA for shipment to Iran.

Weinberger said that after that, “I made the point repeatedly” to Poindexter that the arms-sale plan “was an extremely bad way to go about anything” but that he doesn’t know whether the President heard of his comments.