Poindexter Not Called as Witness for Defense : Iran-Contra: The surprise move deprives the trial of the drama of a hammering cross-examination.

The defense, in a stunning surprise, rested its case Tuesday without calling defendant John M. Poindexter to the witness stand in the last of the major Iran-Contra affair trials.

The decision, clearly a gamble, deprives the trial of one of its most anticipated dramas--former National Security Adviser Poindexter defending his veracity against the hammering questions of prosecutor Dan K. Webb. The trial will now go to the jury, either Friday or next Monday, without this encounter.

Defense attorney Richard W. Beckler, walking swiftly from the courtroom, told reporters he had decided to keep Poindexter off the stand because “the government didn’t prove its case, as far as I’m concerned.”

Poindexter, a retired rear admiral, is charged with five counts involving a conspiracy to destroy documents and obstruct and lie to Congress in the worst scandal of the Ronald Reagan Administration.

The defendant himself, when asked “if it was over,” replied only: “It’s over for a while.”

The surprise came quietly. Retired Adm. James L. Holloway III, a former chief of naval operations and a longtime friend of Poindexter, testified that the former White House official was “a man of unassailable character as far as truth and veracity.” Then Beckler, speaking more softly than usual, told U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene: “The defense rests its case.”

That left it up to prosecutor Webb to decide whether to call rebuttal witnesses. But Webb stood up quickly and without hesitation told Greene: “The prosecution rests its case.”

The judge scheduled final arguments by Webb and Beckler for Friday and told the jurors that they would probably begin their deliberations either late Friday or early Monday.

The most damaging testimony against Poindexter in the first 17 days of the trial came from former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the National Security Council aide who had organized the Iran-Contra affair.

In the first phase of the scandal, North directed the sale of arms to Iran in hopes of winning the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iran-influenced Islamic fundamentalists. In the next phase, he diverted the profits of these sales to an undercover operation supplying military aid to the Contras fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, even though Congress had ordered a cessation of military help for the Contras.

Under relentless questioning by Webb, North acknowledged that, at the behest of Poindexter, he had lied to Congress about his activities with the Contras and that he had seen Poindexter tear up the only copy of a presidential document authorizing the first sale of arms to Iran.

In the final day of defense testimony, Beckler touched on other matters related to the charges against Poindexter. A member of his defense team read into the record a stipulation about “highly reliable intelligence information” gathered during the Iran-Contra affair by the highly secret National Security Agency.

The stipulation stated that two congressional staff members, Richard Giza of the House Intelligence Committee and Edward Levine of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had reviewed this intelligence information--reportedly NSA intercepts of conversations by Iranians involved in the arms sales--on Nov. 20, 1986.

Poindexter is charged with lying to members of both committees the next day by telling them he did not know about the first shipment of arms to Iran in November, 1985, until several months later. During the trial, Beckler has hinted that he will argue that some members of Congress had advance knowledge of the Iran sales details, and thus Poindexter could not have been misleading the senators and congressmen when he briefed them.

One defense witness, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), caused some problems for Judge Greene and Beckler with his expansive answers to questions about his feelings about North and aid to the Contras.

The judge muttered about the relevancy of the testimony and called the lawyers to the bench for a conference out of the hearing of the witness. Beckler then asked Dornan to try to confine his answers to a brief reply to the specific point of the questions.

Dornan said that, despite a congressional ban on aid to the Contras, he and other congressmen had asked North not “to let the Contras be crushed.” He said his own trips to Central America in 1985 and 1986 convinced him that military aid was still reaching the Contras.

After Greene thanked him for appearing on the witness stand, Dornan pointed to a map of key towns and airstrips in Central America and said loudly, “I’ve been to two-thirds of those places on the map.” Then, in an obvious reference to the recent elections that defeated the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, he added, “Freedom has won, and I couldn’t be happier.”

Staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this story.