Weinberger Says He Fought Sale of Arms

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, the last public witness in the long Iran- contra hearings, testified Friday that he strongly opposed selling arms to Iran even after President Reagan had decided to proceed.

But he said he complied with Reagan’s wishes and made weapons available for the sales after National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter told him “there is no more room for argument.”

“I have regret that I wasn’t more persuasive” with the President, Weinberger said in the 40th and next-to-last day of public hearings. He will return Monday.

Just as Senate committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) was declaring the hearings in recess for the day, two women in the back of the room began shouting, “Contras kill families,” and were hustled out by police.

Kept in the Dark

The defense secretary, like other senior Reagan Administration officials, said he was kept in the dark on major details for many months, hampering his efforts to stop the sales.

The effort to deceive him, he said, even included an order issued to an unidentified agency in the Defense Department to withhold sensitive information from him and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Asked who gave the order, Weinberger said he assumed it originated in the National Security Council.

“I made it very clear to the defense agency involved that they took their instructions from us and they certainly under no circumstances ever were to accept an instruction that we were not to be on the distribution list for any of this important intelligence material,” he said, without elaborating.

The congressional committees also heard from former White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, who testified that the President last December “shot down right away” any thought of a pardon for Poindexter and North, telling aides that neither man had been accused of a crime.

‘Haven’t Heard a Word’

The President was asked about pardons again on Friday, during a picture-taking session in the Oval Office.

“I haven’t heard a single word that indicated, in any of the testimony, that laws were broken,” the President said.

In that case, he was asked, does he think North, Poindexter and others deserve pardons to prevent prosecutions?

“I’m going to speak out on that whole subject, and the subject of this whole affair, when the hearings are over,” the President said.

Final Public Acts

At the White House, presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Reagan does not plan to hold a news conference until sometime in the fall.

The back-to-back appearances of Weinberger and Regan were the final public acts in the drama that has been playing before television audiences for 11 weeks--the House and Senate investigations into the diversion of profits from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras.

The congressional panels are expected to interrogate several CIA officials privately next week, and then spend August writing an official report on the affair that has dealt heavy political damage to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

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

Subject Raised Again

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 of national security adviser.

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 presidential approval of 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.

Returned to Pentagon

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 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.

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

‘President Has Ordered’

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. The spy agency then facilitated sale of the arms to the Iranians.

Weinberger said he was kept in the dark about a number of major events in the scheme, including McFarlane’s trip to Tehran with a planeload of Hawk missile parts in May last year and the opening of a “second channel” to make contact with Iranians.

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

“The continued objection was made all through that year with my repeatedly calling attention to the fact that it wasn’t working, we were getting the usual violent anti-American statements out of Iran, nothing was happening, we weren’t getting any hostages, nothing was working, and it should be stopped,” he said.

‘Bare Minimum’

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer, was not told about the proposed sale in early 1986, Weinberger said, because the orders were to carry out the arms transfer with the “bare minimum of people.”