Who Gave Bush His Teflon Coat in the Iran-Contra Scam?

I grind no party ax. Four years ago I was writing about a Democratic candidate’s coziness with organized-crime figures. I am glad that I and other reporters brought out Geraldine Ferraro’s unsavory history before that election. This year I simply find Michael Dukakis unappealing.

But the way George Bush has been let off the hook sickens me--as does the notion that he could be an acceptable candidate for the presidency, let alone leading the polls, less than two years after the Iran-Contra scandal broke.

The Bush-Reagan team rode to office on the issue of terrorism, pledging to halt it by never negotiating with terrorists and stopping others from doing so. For much of their Administration, federal law prohibited waging war on Nicaragua. Yet Bush attended dozens of meetings at which were discussed either our active role in starting and sustaining the Contra war or the secret supply of arms to Iran, which in public he called a leading terrorist state. Bush’s assertion now that he didn’t know of these activities is preposterous. An aide’s minutes show him being briefed on arms shipments to Iran as they were in progress. He says that he misunderstood; he thought that the sales were Israeli. If so, he was muddleheaded on this linchpin issue and lacked leadership, considering our influence over Israel. Alternatively, he is simply lying; records show that he had been told earlier that Israel was acting as our front in the transactions.

In fact, Bob Woodward has reported, and Bush hasn’t (to my knowledge) denied, that Bush was with Reagan when the President signed the Bible that was delivered as a gift to the “terrorist” ayatollah along with a planeload of missiles and other arms.

Nor was Bush just a loyal confidant who kept his mouth shut when Reagan erred. Bush, a former CIA director, hired career CIA officer Donald Gregg as his personal vice presidential adviser. When Contra military aid was banned, Gregg began phoning and meeting with an old CIA pal of both men, Felix Rodriguez, who, allegedly as a private citizen, went to the Salvadoran military base where arms were transferred for shipment in small craft to Contra bases.

Guns, ammo, mines and explosives were collected by men close to White House aide Oliver North and used in a terror war against civilian farm cooperatives in Nicaragua. Rodriguez ran the arms depot, at times talking almost daily with Gregg and meeting at least three times with Bush--whose office says that they only discussed other things, and that the presence of the arms deals on the agenda for one of those meetings was a typing error.

It gets worse. As his own assistant Rodriguez hired, under an assumed name, Luis Posada Carriles, another former CIA colleague who had just been sprung from a Venezuelan jail--with his help, Rodriguez has hinted. Posada was in jail for the mid-air bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner that took 73 lives. That surpasses all the Arab terrorist acts that Bush and Reagan have complained of.

Bush’s office has said that he didn’t know of Posada’s background. Nonsense. Posada bombed that airliner on Bush’s watch, in October, 1976, and Castro’s howls of CIA culpability and U.S. denials were big news. Surely a CIA director worthy of the title would have called for the file on Posada.

Much has been made of the alleged incompetence of Bush’s running-mate, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle. Here, too, the Iran-Contra link has been ignored. When the Administration decided to expand its already illegal war against Nicaragua by secretly opening a southern front in Costa Rica, it used Quayle’s office. Quayle’s staff aide, Rob Owen, put North in touch with another Hoosier, John Hull, who owned vast lands in northern Costa Rica. Hull’s property, with six airstrips, became the secret Contra arms depot and staging base. Owen went further as a facilitator. Hull got a $375,000 U.S. government loan to build a lumber mill (he never built it), and Owen was trying to get him $500,000 more. Officials of the lending agency have testified that Hull’s loan was fraudulently obtained.

Correspondence between Owen and North showed concern that drug-dealing among the Contras could embarrass the operation, and even identified some drug dealers on the Contra team. Nothing was done. I have obtained aircraft-maintenance and -refueling receipts with crew signatures proving that the planes of a convicted Colombian cocaine cartel leader, George Morales--planes carrying Contra leaders as well as drug smugglers--were serviced and refueled at the Salvadoran base where Rodriguez managed the war supplies; Rodriguez reported to the office of George Bush, who supposedly ran the Administration’s anti-drug program.

Contra arms were being supplied through Panama with the help of military strongman Manuel A. Noriega, a major drug smuggler. Bush says he didn’t know that, which could put him in a class by himself among drug enforcers. In fact, when Bush took over the CIA in 1976, the agency had just received a high-level report from the Justice Department citing Noriega’s major role in drug-trafficking; the report mentioned that U.S. drug agents had even suggested Noriega’s assassination. As Panama’s intelligence chief, Noriega was then working with the CIA.

There is much more evidence, which this space can’t begin to accommodate. But it isn’t a new story. Covert U.S. operations aimed at fighting communism were inadvertently responsible, decades ago, for the development of the “Golden Triangle” in Asia and the “French Connection” in Marseilles--until recently the major sources of illegal drugs entering the United States. Over the years our covert actions probably have created and maintained more one-party dictatorships than the Soviet Union has. Under their cover of secrecy, CIA-supported bandits have stolen untold riches from the American taxpayers. And these operations have loosed on the world terrorists like Luis Posada, who might at any given time be acting on behalf of the CIA.

The initial public reaction to the Iran-Contra revelations inspired hope that after 40 years we would finally recognize that covert machinations overseas subvert our stated policy goals. But the hearings and their fallout were damage-controlled by the Administration, and the Democratic Party refused to pick up the challenge.

As long as there is no opposition willing to deal openly with such duplicity in government, the United States itself has, in a sense, become a one-party state.