BOOK MARK : The Untold Iran-Contra Story--the Great Typewriter-Ball Caper

By Thursday morning, the beginning of the fourth day of the cross-examination, John Keker, the chief trial prosecutor, realized that this confrontation with the defendant had gone on long enough. There was, he thought, only one last piece of business to complete.

“Good morning, Col. North.”

For the seventh and final time--in four morning sessions and three afternoon--Oliver L. North gave an almost imperceptible nod in response to Keker’s greeting. The courtroom, particularly the press, had come to look forward to North’s twice-daily show of petulance, and there were audible titters this last time. Sitting again in the well, I saw the first alternate shake his head in disgust at North’s failure to return Keker’s good morning.

Keker reminded North what he had said, under lead defense counsel Brendan V. Sullivan’s questioning, that when he learned on the day he was fired that some of his actions might be considered criminal, it was “one of the most shocking things I had ever heard.”

Keker said, “I would like to ask a few more questions and then I will be finished, about what you did after you heard this shocking news that somebody could consider, or might look into, any of your conduct as criminal.”

Keker wanted to conclude with North’s two phony letters to Glenn Robinette about the security system Robinette had built for North, and he planned a little theater to fix the scene in the jurors’ minds. Sullivan had tried to take some of the sting out of the letters by asking North about them on direct. North called the fake letters the “stupidest thing I had ever done,” but persisted in his assertion that he did not believe any of his actions were “unlawful.”

Keker wanted to exploit our scientific report that in the second of the two letters North wrote, the typewriter ball had been intentionally defaced. Keker summoned me to find him an expendable typewriter ball from our office, and he asked team member John Barrett, a home do-it-yourselfer, to bring his tool kit to the courtroom. Keker was going to have North submit to the degrading spectacle of showing the jury how he hacked at the typewriter ball to advance his bungled deception scheme.

But Keker never had the chance. After he placed the first of North’s two letters to Robinette on the overhead projector, the colonel volunteered a different and even stranger version of the letters story than the one we thought we knew.

“My recollection,” North said, is that “I typed the two letters separately. My recollection is that this letter was typed first, and the other was typed second, because the ball, the wheel on the typewriter, was broken. . . .”

Keker then asked, “You didn’t type them at the same time and then try to change the typewriter ball to make it look like it had been done at a different time?”

“No,” said North, “my recollection is that this one was done, I believe, first and when I went back to the store to the second one, the little wheel . . . was broken.”

The store? What store? I turned to Barrett in the last row, and we exchanged puzzled looks. Keker, too, was confused. “You say you went to a store to type it?”

Yes, he said, “a Best or a Bell store in Tysons Corner--about 10 miles down the road from our house. . . . It was a display. . . . They had a whole series of display typewriters.”

Keker usually did a good job of controlling his emotions in the courtroom, but now he yielded to an almost voyeuristic sense of curiosity about this newest North tale. Why type the letter in a store?

“Well, one, I don’t recall we had a working typewriter at home at the time, and, number two, I didn’t want to do it at work. I didn’t want the Marine Corps, which is where I was, involved in that kind of cover-up. And I went and did it at a store.”

So why did the second letter have a damaged typeface?

“My recollection is that that was prepared several days later, when I went back to the store. . . And the typewriter that I had used before was by now inoperable--someone had damaged it. And so I looked for another typewriter that had a similar type.” But the first one “was all that was available, and it wasn’t working properly.”

North blew our carpentry demonstration, but he replaced it with a story that incriminated him every bit as much. By his own account, North wandered the shopping malls of suburban Virginia looking for a display typewriter to type a full-page, single-spaced, back-dated, cover-up letter to his friendly CIA agent, Robinette. And he did it twice .

Or, as Keker put it to North, after writing the first letter to Robinette, “you went back to your house, and you thought about it for a few days . . . and then you decided that you would add to it the second back-dated letter?”

“That’s how I recall it now.”

Keker gazed at North with a mixture of wonder and contempt--and perhaps even a touch of regret. Then he addressed Judge Gerhard A. Gesell: “I don’t have any further questions, Your Honor.”

1991 by Jeffrey Toobin. Used by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.