Panels Wrap Up Iran-Contra Hearings

The congressional Iran- contra committees quietly wrapped up their formal hearings in private on Thursday, three days after the last public hearing faded from television screens.

The committees questioned Clair George, the CIA’s chief of covert operations, ending three days of private testimony from CIA officials.

Since Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger completed his testimony on Monday and committee leaders summed up the hearings in closing statements, the panels have been behind closed doors interviewing George, CIA Central American Task Force chief Alan D. Fiers and agency counterterrorism head Duane (Dewey) Clarridge.

Transcripts of those sessions are to be made public next week, after classified information is removed from the texts by the White House.

House committee Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) said the testimony from the CIA officials had not clarified the role of former agency Director William J. Casey in the affair. Lt. Col. Oliver L. North portrayed Casey as instrumental in the Iran arms deals and the contra resupply effort, but Casey himself denied any detailed knowledge before he died on May 6.

“We have not clarified Mr. Casey’s role to the extent we’d like to,” Hamilton said at a breakfast meeting with reporters.

Hamilton said that if he had been asked last November or December, “I would have answered that it probably was not a central role. Today my sense is that it very much was a central role.”

In another development, the Washington Post reported that a federal judge has decided that independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh must submit questions to the court for determination on whether two Israeli figures will be compelled to answer them in the special prosecutor’s investigation.

Israel objects to subpoenas by Walsh’s grand jury, which is seeking to question Adolph Schwimmer, an Israeli arms dealer, and David Kimche, a former foreign ministry official, about the arms sales.

The hearings included 44 days of testimony from 32 witnesses. There are no plans to call further witnesses before the full House and Senate committees, but Hamilton did not rule out that possibility.

“There are lots of leads that have not been pursued as fully as we could,” Hamilton said. Unanswered questions remain for “almost every single witness,” he added. And he said he was “not at all satisfied with” the depth of the financial investigation.

A committee spokesman, Robert Havel, said investigators would continue to take depositions and “clean up loose ends.”