Bush Seen Fully Briefed on Iran Sales, Hostages

Vice President George Bush watched the secret arms sales to Iran unfold step by step and--because of his regular attendance at President Reagan’s morning national security briefings and other meetings--was more informed of details than he has acknowledged, according to his statements to the Tower Commission, other Iran-Contra documents and interviews with former Administration officials.

One participant in the daily 1986 Oval Office national security briefings estimated that Bush attended several dozen such briefings that touched on the Iran initiative. Records of the briefings show specifically that on at least six occasions Bush attended meetings from May to October, 1986, when the National Security Council’s executive secretary made notes of a discussion of Iran and the Americans held hostage in Lebanon.

Bush, who has said that he might have had a different view of the secret arms-for-hostages deal if he had known about the opposition of Secretary of State George P. Shultz and then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, “knew basically as much as the President” about national security matters, including the Iran initiative, said this regular participant in the morning national security briefings who refused to be identified by name but described himself as a Bush admirer.

The participant, who attended most of the meetings in 1986, said: “Iran came up about a third of the time in these meetings . . . next to U.S.-Soviet relations, it was the most frequent topic.” Records from Bush’s office show that the vice president was out of town on 113 working days in 1986 and, therefore, could only have attended about half of the morning Oval Office meetings, although a Bush aide said Wednesday that it is possible Bush was present for as many as three dozen briefings when Iran and the hostages were discussed.

According to one participant in the morning meetings, the vice president “never voiced reservations. He was not pro. He was not con.” When the vice president spoke, the participant said, he “kind of echoed the President.”

Bush’s Dec. 18, 1986, interview with the presidential commission headed by former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), tends to support the view that he knew more about the secret arms deal than he has stated. According to the commission’s 11 pages of typed notes from its interview with the vice president that are still classified top secret, Bush “did have a general knowledge of the arms sales to Iran as a result of attendance at various briefings on the hostages and the so-called 9 a.m. meeting with the President.”

The notes, which provide the earliest and perhaps fullest account so far of Bush’s understanding of the Iran-Contra scandal, show that the vice president also told the Tower Commission that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s “judgments were never checked. Mr. Bush stated that the President and he must accept responsibility for this failure.”

At one point, the vice president spoke of the informality of the decision-making in the Iranian arms deal and of the fact that the operation violated normal procedures. He characterized it as “more up and down with the hostage problem blended in.”

In public statements over the last 14 months, Bush has attempted to distance himself from firsthand knowledge of the initiative. In his recent autobiography, “Looking Forward,” Bush wrote: “What I knew was that, working through the Israelis, an effort had been made to ‘reach out’ to one of the Iranian factions, that there had been a weapons sale and that in some way the hostage issue had become part of the project.”