Iran-Contra Query: Awaiting a Verdict : While Investigation Continues, Key Figures Are Starting Over With New Jobs, Low Profiles

From the halls of the Iran- contra hearings to the shores of the Chesapeake, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North has a new pastime: Sailing with his attorney.

North’s wife, Betsy, has received anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly’s “National Full-Time Homemaker of the Year” award.

Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter has had a street in Odon, Ind., named after him.

Secretary Fawn Hall has hired an agent, told all to Barbara Walters and been ticketed for eating a banana in a subway station.

Robert C. McFarlane has sold his house and declared for his 50th birthday wish that he’d like his wife to have a baby.

And Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, who has had one business go under and started another, says that if he had the Iran-contra hearing testimony to do over “I would have built a paper fox hole with lawyers before I went into it.”

Awaiting Conclusions

It seems all the major figures who testified in the Iran-contra hearings last summer are off television and in a holding pattern, awaiting the conclusions of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh’s investigation.

While they are waiting--most immersed in the daily grind of new full-time jobs and unwilling to comment on any aspect of the situation--they and those closest to them are apparently learning the many ways, big and small, that the hearings have changed their lives, according to friends and observers.

The most pronounced long-term side effect of appearing in what became a long-running real-life television drama is the public recognition. Even the attorneys involved, like Richard Beckler, Poindexter’s feisty counsel, are instantly spotted in restaurants and other public places and asked for autographs by strangers. “Most people come up and say ‘Hey, great job!,’ ” said Beckler.

North, according to his good friend J. Andy Messing Jr., is “basically set for life financially.”

“He’s got millions of dollars worth of offers, endorsements, book offers, movie offers, speaking offers, the list goes on and on.”

Uncertain Future

But Messing, who runs a conservative think tank called the National Defense Council Foundation, said despite the possible financial benefits, North is upset about how the Iran-contra scandal has altered his future.

“He retires (from the Marine Corps) in May of 1988, and he had planned to make the Marines a career,” Messing said. “His life-long objectives were being a Marine general and leading troops, not being a celebrity of conservative America. The services like their officers to be apolitical and anonymous--and he has basically violated both.”

North’s attorney, Brendan Sullivan, refused to answer The Times’ telephone calls. Neither of them has been talking with the press.

The Marines have given North a new job in the service plans and policy branch of the Plans, Policies and Operations department, where he helps analyze the Corps’ readiness, ground combat requirements and mobilization plans.

“He goes to work and then at noon he goes to his lawyers,” Messing said. “He comes home at 8 or 9 and works with his lawyers through many weekends. Occasionally he takes recreation with his lawyers, sailing or going to ballgames with them. He basically is working and playing with his lawyers, as crazy as it sounds.”

Religion also has proven to be a source of strength for North, according to Messing and others. North and his family attend an Episcopal charismatic church, where the ministry has advocated speaking in tongues.

“He had a born-again experience in 1978,” said one North observer who has attended North’s church, “and he’s integrated his religious life with his political life. It adds an element of righteousness to his cause. Religion is a very important thing with him.”

Protection for North Family

A group of guards from the Naval Investigative Service are still providing North and his family security at taxpayer expense because of a death threat that has been made to North by Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.

“He drags the guards along with him, like to the Baltimore Orioles’ game or when he goes sailing the guards go on another boat. It’s very cumbersome,” Messing said. “The guards seem to really like the family, and the Norths think the world of the guards.”

North has “no grandiose ideas” about running for office, Messing said, even though he has received “tens of thousands of letters and is still receiving them.”

North’s former secretary, Fawn Hall, has had her share of headlines, the most recent last week when she was given a $10 ticket for gulping the last bite of her banana after an officer told her to stop eating it in the Washington Metro subway station.

Hall’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, said Hall did not know it was against the law to eat in the subway. “I think it’s a little overdrawn,” he said.

Hall has a new secretarial job at the Department of the Navy and wants to wait until all the Iran-contra legal matters are concluded before plunging into a new career, a friend of hers said.

She has dipped her toe in the water, though, giving a speech at a broadcasters’ convention, filling in for Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” after he canceled. The topic of her speech was why she wanted to become a journalist.

Among the many offers that have come her way, journalist is probably at the bottom of the pay scale. Hall has hired the William Morris agency to help sort out the offers. A friend of Hall’s said Hall has offers “that are so spectacular she’ll have to consider them; really stunning proposals, modeling type offers.”

“She does want to do some stuff for charity, for Bob Hope and the USO or maybe the American Cancer Society. She wants to do something that will utilize her celebrity status to help people,” the friend added.

Hall is stopped in the corridors of the Pentagon by tour groups and asked for autographs, and people turn around in the street and stare at her.

“When you go into a bar with her here,” a friend said, “people start coming up and the beers start coming over. They tell her: ‘You really did a good job in the hearings.’ ”

Poindexter, who resigned under fire as national security adviser when the first news of the Iran-contra scandal broke, has quietly resumed work for the Navy as special assistant to the chief of naval operations for long-range planning. He has extended his retirement date to Dec. 1, but the question of whether he will be promoted to three-star rank--which he held as National Security Adviser--is up in the air until Walsh’s investigation is ended.

Poindexter has, however, had a three-block street in his hometown of Odon, Ind., named after him, and he served as grand marshal of the town’s annual Old Settlers Days parade. At the celebration, he made his only speech since the hearings.

Poindexter Making Adjustment

Poindexter’s mood is “superb, excellent,” said Rear Adm. C. A. Hill, a friend and the administrator of his defense fund. “He is adjusted, secure in his own image and always has been. Most of the stuff about his mood, about him being bitter and that he’s going to reveal all, is made up of whole cloth.”

Hill would not say how much was in the defense fund, saying only that it was substantial, but not enough. Asked if Poindexter were worried about criminal indictments, Hill said: “I would use the word concerned . Professional naval officers are never worried. They never use the word catastrophe . They know to accept the inevitable.”

Poindexter’s future “is an unlimited horizon,” Hill thinks. “I would think lecturing and teaching would be the two he’d be most interested in. Whether or not he would decide to go into a corporate endeavor, we can only wait and see.”

McFarlane continues to work for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, does consulting and gives speeches on global affairs. He attends important Washington social events, such as Katharine Graham’s birthday party.

In addition, a sale is pending on his Bethesda, Md., home for more than $200,000, and he and his wife, Jonda, have bought a house in the fashionable Georgetown neighborhood in Northwest Washington. They have three grown children.

In an interview in the November McCall’s magazine, McFarlane was asked by writer Trude Feldman if he had a wish for his 50th birthday, which he celebrated last July.

“If you really want to know my most outrageous wish,” McFarlane replied, “I’d like my wife to have another baby. That may be a bit too much to ask but I’d enjoy another child.”

Reason Behind Suicide Attempt

McFarlane also said he had “some sense of not having lived up to all I wanted to do, in terms of service to others.” He said his attempted suicide during the early investigation of the Iran-contra affair came after he concluded “that I could never overcome the sense of failure I experienced. I worried that, as a consequence, I’d be this depressed person, casting a pall over my wife’s life, too. She didn’t deserve that.

“I believe I’ve been spared for some constructive purpose. It’s now a matter for me to determine what that purpose is.” McFarlane said he had always been religious and quoted three Scriptures that were meaningful to him for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Secord draws military retirement and has started a new company, consulting on trade. His old company, Stanford Technology Trading Group, “had the rug jerked out from under it as a result of the Iran-contra affair. Its assets were tied up by the U.S. Government, I would say illegally,” said Secord, the only of the major figures who agreed to an interview.

“Worse than that,” Secord said, “is that the people we’re trying to do business with are scared off by the notoriety. This company has nothing to do with covert operations. But business people are very averse to investigators. They’re paranoid.”

Secord said the financial burden imposed on him by the scandal, including legal fees, is “huge. It’s not even calculable yet.”

He said it was “hard to put into words” how he feels at the moment. “I’m somewhat disillusioned, but I’ve always been an optimist.”

Secord said he received $7,000 for speaking to the annual convention of the Texas state bar association about the state of national security.

“Surprisingly enough,” he said, “I’ve been, I believe, very well received. I expected a lot of heckling but have gotten very little of that.

“So my conclusion is that outside the Beltway (a freeway that encircles Washington) the Iran-contra scandal is not viewed as a scandal but as an attempt to do something right for a change.”