The ‘Why’ of Iran-Contra Affair Is Unanswered : Months of Hearings Fail to Solve Puzzle

Congress began poking into the Iran- contra affair last December in search of what Rep. Jim Wright (D-Tex.) called a “complete and comprehensive” assemblage of the facts. It found facts in eye-glazing abundance.

By common agreement, what is still lacking is the truth.

In three months of public hearings that ended Monday, the “what” of the decade’s worst political scandal was laid bare, annotated by hundreds of interviews, reams of documentary evidence and a White House computer with a silent and flawless memory.

The “why” remains a conundrum, a first-rate mystery on the order of the 1972 Watergate burglary. “We may never know, with precision and truth, why it ever happened,” said Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate investigating committee.

Although President Reagan appears to be relieved of direct criminal involvement in the scandal, other puzzles raised during the hearings were left unexplored for now--and maybe forever.

The lawmakers did not pursue two references by former White House aide Oliver L. North to shredded documents that North described as even more politically explosive than the recovered memo outlining the diversion of arms sale profits to Nicaragua’s contras.

Nor has anyone explained a scribbled reference by one of Vice President George Bush’s advisers to “a swap of weapons for $” to aid the contras.

On a host of basic questions, virtually all the first-hand witnesses are in conflict with each other, with the written record or, sometimes, with themselves.

“Obviously, human memory is such that different people can and frequently do recall the same events differently, particularly with respect to minor details,” said Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), a member of the Senate committee. “But as the number and importance of conflict in testimony increase, so also does the likelihood that someone is not telling the truth.”

Many of the 26 members of the Iran-contra panels have said that they believe a key witness in the proceedings, Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, lied in testimony last month. Poindexter, as Reagan’s national security adviser, was North’s boss until he resigned and North was fired last Nov. 25.

The admiral, once lauded by the Navy for his photographic memory, was less than convincing at times. An official recorded that Poindexter said “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember” no fewer than 184 times in five days as a witness, prompting a national pizza-parlor chain to base a radio advertising campaign on the well-worn phrases.

Poindexter aside, there is no shortage of conflicts in testimony by other critical witnesses and lawmakers have little more than instinct to suggest who may have lied under oath and who told the truth. Consider:

--North, the telegenic Marine lieutenant colonel who was in the eye of the affair, swore to lawmakers that he never informed Reagan of the diversion of $3.5 million in Iran arms sales profits to the contras.

Secord Account Differs

Richard V. Secord, the retired Air Force major general who ran North’s secret arms airlifts, swore to another story: North joked to him two or three times that the President had been told that the Ayatollah’s millions were helping the contras.

--North also swore that, in a parting conversation with Reagan, the President told him that he “just didn’t know” about the diverted millions. But that’s not what a former North aide, Lt. Col. Robert Earle, said North told him last November. According to Earle’s quoted testimony, he was told that the President said “it’s important that I not know” about the money.

--Poindexter told Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and the President last fall that the diversion occurred because he wasn’t monitoring North closely enough and failed to stop what he “generally” knew was happening. Yet last month, he told the committees something completely different: that he personally authorized the diversion, and assumed responsibility for it.

--William J. Casey, the late CIA director, told House and Senate intelligence committee members last winter that he was unaware of the diversion and of North’s secret arms airlift to the Nicaragua rebels. North testified last month that Casey knew of and encouraged virtually every facet of those projects and recommended Secord to manage the contra arms pipeline.

Documents Show Warning

--Meese, who held several private meetings with Casey the weekend before North left the White House, also swore that Casey never mentioned either the diversion or the secret contra arms pipeline. CIA documents also attest that Casey was warned of a possible diversion of Iran arms profits a month earlier.

--Robert C. McFarlane, Poindexter’s predecessor as national security adviser, swore that he was ignorant of North’s Central American projects and of his efforts to raise money for the contras from foreign rulers. North swore that McFarlane authorized them both.

--McFarlane insisted that the President personally approved the first arms shipment to Iran, in which Israel acted as a proxy for the United States, in August, 1985. But Donald T. Regan, the former White House chief of staff, stuck to the increasingly lonely assertion that the President didn’t know about the first arms shipment to Iran--and in fact, uttered an angry oath when he found out.

The argument that Reagan didn’t know about the first arms shipment, which may have violated arms-export laws and intelligence regulations, was central to an apparent White House plot to cover up facts about the Iran initiative last November.

Later evidence suggested that Reagan was fully informed of the shipment. Reagan himself dropped arguments to the contrary in February, in a final statement to the commission headed by former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), which he had appointed to investigate the affair.

Rectifying any one of those contradictions would bolster the credibility of key witnesses and clear up critical unresolved questions about White House conduct during the 2 1/2-year history of Iran-contra events.

Among other mysteries is the meaning of a cryptic handwritten phrase scribbled by the national security adviser to Bush last August, as he interviewed one of the operatives of North’s Central American arms airlift.

The operative told the Bush adviser, Donald P. Gregg, tales of greed and corruption within the contra resupply movement. The cryptic phrase in Gregg’s notes is seemingly a revelation of the diversion of Iran arms profits, months before the rake-off was revealed.

“A swap of weapons for $ was arranged to get aid for contras,” Gregg’s notes read. Despite a flurry of headlines about the notes, the committees never pursued the matter in its public hearings. Gregg’s sworn testimony, to be made public later, may resolve the question.

The most pressing questions, however, center instead on the infamous document-shredding sessions of last November, when North and his secretary removed, destroyed and altered a sheaf of critical papers.

Central to Mystery

What was shredded or altered--and what was not--now emerges as the central mystery of the Iran-contra conundrum. The mystery is all the more frustrating because its solution relies on the testimony of North and Poindexter, two figures often judged “not credible” by the Iran-contra lawmakers.

A key dispute concerns so-called diversion memos supposedly sent last year from North to Poindexter, seeking Reagan’s handwritten “RR” or check mark on proposals to rake off the Iran arms profits for the contras. North said he wrote five such memos and sent them all to Poindexter for bucking up to Reagan.

North said he shredded as many of the memos as he could find when the scandal began to unravel last November. But he missed at least one; Justice Department officials found it, absent the usual cover papers indicating its destination, when they scoured North’s files last fall.

Poindexter’s testimony differed from North’s. “I don’t recall seeing any of the memos until (Nov.) 25th,” he insisted. “I did see the one that survived. . . . I do not believe there were any more than that one.”

North swore that he had “absolutely no recollection” that Reagan had initialed any of the diversion memos that he destroyed.

“You’re telling us that you do not remember whether the documents that you shredded included one with a check mark on it?” the House committee’s majority counsel, John W. Nields Jr., asked North.

“That is correct,” North replied.

Also puzzling, and likely to remain so, is the issue of what other papers North and his aides destroyed or altered in the waning days of the Iran-contra operation.

Remark Stuns Lawmakers

Atty. Gen. Meese, in a remark that visibly stunned some lawmakers, last month asserted that North “probably” destroyed some papers that were irrelevant to his investigation. In fact, North claimed that he shredded a variety of documents not dealing with Iran or the Nicaraguan rebels out of fear that they would fall into the wrong hands.

What those documents covered remains unknown, although North gave the Iran-contra panels two chances to find out during his first day as a witness.

“Can you think of any document in your files that you were thinking about shredding which would have caused him more domestic political damage than one of these diversion memos?” Nields asked.

“I suppose so,” North replied, “and I suppose those had already been destroyed.” North later repeated the statement that he had destroyed other, more damaging documents. But he was never asked to explain what those documents were or why he shredded them.

North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, freely admitted altering four White House documents to delete evidence of North’s secret military airlift to the contras and other controversial Central American actions.

Rumors persist that other, more explosive documents also were altered by North but were never detected by the Iran-contra investigators. The rumors so far remain unverified.

Staff writers Karen Tumulty and Sara Fritz contributed to this story.