Reagan’s Iran-Contra Role Clearer, Mitchell Says

Senate Democratic leader George J. Mitchell of Maine, asserting Sunday that the Oliver L. North trial has indicated that former President Ronald Reagan was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal more than was known previously, called it probable that “history will render the final verdict” on his role.

Recalling investigations by Congress and the presidential commission headed by former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), along with the just-concluded trial testimony, Mitchell said that “at each stage of the process in which more information has been made available, President Reagan’s involvement becomes clearer and more deep.”

Mitchell dismissed the Tower board’s portrait of Reagan as a benign, uninvolved figure. “That was clearly in error,” he said, “viewed now with the benefit of hindsight.”

Mitchell stopped short of calling for reopening the congressional investigation into the scandal but cited “serious questions about the document-producing process,” repeating his vow to seek a congressional inquiry to find out why the 1987 congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra scandal did not see certain White House documents that showed up at North’s trial.

“We ought to look into it and will,” said Mitchell, who was on the Senate’s Iran-Contra panel.

Mitchell’s comments, made during an interview on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” came as jurors in the North trial took Sunday off. They resume deliberations today.

North, a former Marine and former White House aide, faces 12 felony counts centering on charges that he lied to Congress about secret efforts to aid the Nicaraguan rebels and blocked investigations of his activities.

Mitchell complained that versions of documents provided to the committees did not contain handwritten and typed notations by President Reagan linking him to the illegal aid efforts.

For example, one North memo to Reagan outlined what the President should say about a “quid pro quo” during a 1985 telephone call to Roberto Suazo Corazon, then president of Honduras. Reagan’s handwritten notes on the memo indicated that Suazo agreed to support the Contras in exchange for secret U.S. aid.

Another document, Mitchell said, bore the typed notation, “Carbon copy to the vice president,” a reference to George Bush. “That notation did not appear on the documents provided to the committee.”

President Bush has contended that the committees did not get the documents because the FBI failed to deliver them.

Mitchell allowed that “anyone can make human error” but he added: “It’s difficult, however, to understand how oversight could account for the receipt by the committees of documents in one form and then another form that is a more detailed form going to the court.”

Despite all his misgivings and dissatisfactions, Mitchell acknowledged in response to a question that the matter of Reagan’s involvement may be closed.

“Oh, that may be the ultimate result,” he said. “Sure, and history will render the final verdict.”