NSC Rejects Prosecution Offer of North’s Iran-Contra Notebooks

A custody battle has begun over notebooks kept by former National Security Council staff member Oliver L. North during the Iran-Contra affair: The NSC will not take them, despite an assertion by North’s prosecutors that it is the rightful owner.

Prosecutors were rebuffed by the Bush Administration when they attempted to turn over the copies to the NSC staff last month, Administration and congressional sources say.

The Administration is concerned that once the security council regains possession, Congress can move to have the long-sought-after documents declassified, an Administration source acknowledged.

The Justice Department is looking at legal questions surrounding a possible transfer of the spiral-bound notebooks, department spokesman David Runkel said. North still holds the originals.

Independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh assured Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) in a letter June 23 that the prosecutor would send copies of the notebooks to the NSC so they might be made available to Congress.

The Senate panel has been trying since April, 1988, to subpoena the notebooks, which North took with him the day he was fired from the NSC on Nov. 25, 1986. His lawyers blacked out portions of 1,269 of the 2,848 pages of copies supplied to the Iran-Contra investigating committees.

The books contain North’s hand-written, daily records of meetings and phone calls about the Iran arms sales and secret assistance to the Contras. They also contain references to allegations of narcotics trafficking in connection with various arms dealers who were supplying the Contras.

During Walsh’s investigation, North invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in initially refusing to turn them over. But North had to submit them three months ago when he decided to testify near the close of his criminal trial.

Runkel said there has been “no determination about what should be done” with the prosecutors’ copies “or whether we should seek to get the notebooks back from North himself.”

At Walsh’s office, spokeswoman Mary Belcher declined to comment on the notebooks.

One question is whether U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell intended to restrict the independent counsel’s authority to turn its copies over to someone else, one Bush Administration official said.

“If they are presidential records, they probably belong to the (Ronald) Reagan Administration and would go to the Reagan library in California,” another Bush Administration source said.