Secret Reagan Iran-Contra File Located

A secret White House file of former President Ronald Reagan’s communications with foreign leaders was never turned over to Congress during the investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed Friday.

The file, which includes the original copies of White House memorandums suggesting that the Reagan Administration stepped up aid to Honduras in exchange for that country’s assistance to Nicaragua’s Contras, is now being held by the Reagan library in California, the panel said.

Sens. David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and William S. Cohen (R-Me.), the intelligence committee’s chairman and vice chairman, said that contents of the file should have been made available to congressional investigators in 1987. But they said that they had no evidence the file was withheld as part of a deliberate attempt to hide information from congressional investigators about Reagan’s role in the scandal.

May Seek Access

Independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who is prosecuting former Reagan aides Oliver L. North and John M. Poindexter on charges stemming from the scandal, did not know of the file until the Senate committee discovered it and he may seek access to it soon. Poindexter’s defense attorney, Richard W. Beckler, also said: “We’d definitely be interested in seeing what it contains.”

Aides to Boren and Cohen noted that they have not sought access to the file and thus do not know what it contains. But in principle, they said, it should contain copies of Reagan’s correspondence with several foreign leaders involved in the Iran-Contra affair--such as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel and the Sultan of Brunei--as well as related White House memorandums.

The White House clerk who maintained the file told the committee that it included only copies of documents that should have been available to Congress from other White House files, but the panel’s investigators said that they could not be sure of that without looking.

“This file should have been searched long ago,” said Britt Snider, the intelligence committee’s chief counsel.

The discovery of the “heads of state” file was an unexpected result of the committee’s investigation of charges that the Reagan White House deliberately withheld some Iran-Contra documents from congressional investigators. Those charges arose after Walsh’s investigators found several memorandums describing U.S. dealings with Honduras over that country’s assistance to the Contras during the period when U.S. aid to the rebels was prohibited.

The committee concluded that the Honduras documents had not been deliberately withheld but were never turned over to Congress because FBI agents selecting the documents did not believe they were relevant to the Iran-Contra investigation.

“You had FBI agents making individual determinations as to what was relevant and what was not relevant,” Cohen said. “. . .It was very, very haphazard.”

“While you cannot prove without a doubt that someone someplace didn’t choose (to withhold) a document for some reason that is not legitimate, there is certainly no proof that this happened,” Boren said. “And the more likely explanation is just . . . an honest mistake in judgment.”

Boren and Cohen said it is possible that more documents which could shed light on the affair remain buried in White House files or at the Reagan library.

“I think it would be surprising, as we have these trials, if there were not another half-dozen documents that turned up,” Boren said. “There’s many more thousands of pages of documents up in those files that were never pulled. . . . It’s a little bit like the dog chasing the truck.”

Nevertheless, he said, the intelligence committee does not plan to pursue the issue further. “I don’t think, based upon anything that we now have before us, there’s a reason to reopen the matter,” Boren said. “. . . There would have to be a demonstration, at least to me, that you’re going to uncover the answers to questions that are shrouded in mystery.”

However, Cohen suggested that Congress may consider looking into the files after the Iran-Contra criminal trials end.

The documents, most of which are classified as secret, are under the jurisdiction of the National Archives.

It was not clear whether any of Reagan’s aides knew of the file’s existence beyond the clerk who kept it.

In a related development Friday, Walsh formally asked a federal court to narrow the scope of criminal charges against Poindexter to help reduce problems of disclosing classified material in open court.

The independent counsel’s motion asked for dismissal of charges of wire fraud and theft of government property.

In addition, he asked U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene to pare down conspiracy charges.

Staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.