Reagan Officials Wage War Over Iran-Contra : Weinberger: ‘Bud’ Misled President

Headlines about the Iran-Contra affair have subsided, but questions of responsibility for the fiasco have not. In a new book, former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger places the blame squarely on former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane. An angry McFarlane, in a magazine article to be published this week, says there is enough blame for all to share. Here are excerpts from the book and the article.

The Iran hostage activity was the one serious mistake the Administration made during the seven years I served as secretary of defense. It was the one time that the President, misled by some who had full access to him, followed advice that led him away from his sure instincts. The President’s motives were the best, and completely understandable for anyone who knew, as I did, his warm and compassionate nature, and the revulsion he felt over Americans’ being held against their will by a group of fanatical terrorists. The fact remains, however, that the President was misled and badly served by Robert McFarlane and some of his staff who should never have been appointed to the White House staff.

“Bud” McFarlane is a strange, withdrawn, moody former Marine lieutenant colonel who had worked around the fringes of the security field, and been part of Henry Kissinger’s staff some years before. McFarlane is a man of evident limitations. He could not hide them, but he did attempt to conceal them, by an enigmatic manner, featuring heavily measured, pretentious and usually nearly impenetrable prose, and a great desire to be perceived as “better than Henry”--a difficult task at best.

The military, and certainly I, felt that McFarlane and a few others, with no responsibility for the safety and well-being of our troops, were always eager to use the military for political or “diplomatic” purposes whenever that fitted their personal agendas.

There was considerable ground for those worries of our military about McFarlane. On one of his earlier trips to Lebanon as special Lebanon negotiator, he warned Washington that “Beirut was about to fall,” because he experienced one of the more-or-less normal shellings on that capital of anarchism. He demanded that we commit more troops and military resources, presumably to “save” Beirut. Since Beirut had long since “fallen” as far as it could go, that McFarlane cable became known among the military as the “McFarlane’s ‘sky is falling’ ” cable.

In early 1984, as members of the National Security Council staff later told the so-called Tower Commission, they were becoming concerned as to what might happen in Iran after Khomeini’s death. As a result, on Aug. 31, 1984, McFarlane formally requested “an interagency analysis of American relations with Iran after Khomeini.” The detailed study, completed in October of 1984, correctly reported that the United States could do little to establish any influential contacts within the Iranian government, in view of the kind of government and the kind of groups that led Iran.

The NSC staff members and McFarlane, who had their own agenda, which was to establish contacts with Iran, did not accept that as an answer. It is the habit of government officials with their own agenda, that if they do not get the answer they want on the first try, they try again. This time, as I found out later, they took the tack of “updating” and paraphrasing and rephrasing intelligence estimates for the President, to make sure their estimates demonstrated that the Soviets--but not the United States--could take advantage of any chaos that might develop in Iran.

In any event, on June 17, 1985, McFarlane transmitted a draft National Security Decision Directive to Secretary George Shultz and me. In that paper the suggestion was made that we should now explore the possibility of better relationships with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. Here is the key policy option from that NSDD:

Encourage Western allies and friends to help Iran meet its import requirements so as to reduce the attractiveness of Soviet assistance and trade offers, while demonstrating the value of correct relations with the West. This includes provision of selected military equipment as determined on a case-by-case basis.

Inasmuch as Iran was responsible for the taking and holding of a number of our citizens as hostages, was continuing to pour out the most venomous anti-American, anti-Western propaganda and had demonstrated its basically barbaric conduct in Lebanon and elsewhere, I felt that this was one of the more absurd proposals yet to be circulated, and so noted in the margin of my copy of the proposed NSDD, adding, with reference to our then current problems with Libya, that this would be similar to “asking Kadafi over for a cozy lunch.”

I did not know then (and I doubt that very many others knew of it), that the entire McFarlane initiative arose from meetings he had been holding with various representatives of Israel, with whom some Iranians were in close contact. The Israelis were trying to secure, in a clandestine way, American approval and participation in a complex scheme to satisfy Iran’s great need for spare parts and equipment for Iran’s enfeebled air force and army. In return, the Israelis told McFarlane, Iran would consider freeing some of the hostages they had kidnaped many months, and in some cases, years, before.

Iran knew that we supplied a very large number of weapons of all kinds to Israel, and Israel of course knew that if we learned that it was diverting some of those shipments to Iran for any purpose, we would have to suspend shipments to Israel--as required by the Arms Export Control Act, and as we had done earlier when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear power plant.

Israel had long had a running and well-understood feud with Iraq, but it also had a close, secret association with Iran. The real consideration to Israel for its help in securing United States arms for Iran was to be protection for both the Israelis and the Iranian Jews living in Iran.

In early May, 1985, McFarlane employed as a consultant a Michael Ledeen to meet with Israeli leaders, and in June, Israeli government officials met with McFarlane at the White House to talk about a possible “dialogue” between the United States and Iran, which dialogue, from Israel’s point of view, would lead to a sale of weapons to Iran in return for the “protection” of persecuted Iranian Jews in Iran; from Iran’s point of view, that arrangement would produce the weapons from the United States and Israel that Iranians urgently needed in their war with Iraq.

The inducement to the United States, which McFarlane foisted on the President at many of his daily meetings with him, was to be promises for the return of some of our eight hostages who had been held by the Iranians for many months. Actually, the NSC staff at that time said that they were only trying to peddle the idea that we needed to cultivate a “strategic relationship” with Iran, and we were not actually to get the return of any hostages, but instead promises that Iran would “consider” helping us get the hostages back. It was that murky background that spawned McFarlane’s memorandum about the importance of our establishing better relationships with Iran.

In short, McFarlane took the bait and willingly went along with this Israeli-Iranian plot.