UPDATE : Ollie North Turning Into a One-Man Conglomerate : A key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, he is now offering a variety of enterprises--from speechmaking to bulletproof vests.
Former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North is demonstrating the same ingenuity and initiative outside government that he showed at the White House during the Iran-Contra affair. He has recently transformed himself into something of a one-man conglomerate.
“Ollie Inc.” includes a unique variety of enterprises, including speechmaking--at $25,000 an appearance--a weekly public service radio broadcast and a tax-exempt foundation known as Freedom Alliance (aimed at encouraging Americans to register to vote). His newest endeavor is a company that manufactures bulletproof vests.
In the firm’s advertising, North, who as a White House aide claimed he was marked for death by international terrorist Abu Nidal, says he depends on the vests for his own protection.
North’s entrepreneurial flowering reflects what seems to be a pattern these days: former government officials involved in scandals over the last few years show a remarkable facility for landing on their feet.
By all accounts, former Speaker Jim Wright, former House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and former White House National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane also are thriving.
But North, the boyish-looking, gap-toothed ex-Marine who stole the show at the Iran-Contra hearings, has far surpassed all expectations.
He not only has overcome his initial financial difficulties, but he also has cultivated support for what some conservatives believe may be a promising career in politics in the future though North himself denies any such ambitions.
As a National Security Council aide to then-President Ronald Reagan, North played a key role in creating what came to be known as the Enterprise, a secret organization that covertly sold U.S. weapons to Iran and diverted some profits to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua.
For his actions relating to the Iran-Contra scandal, he was sentenced to two years’ probation, 1,200 hours of community service and $150,000 in fines. He also lost his military pension, which initially caused his family considerable economic distress.
The conviction has since been overturned.
North is not in demand as a public speaker quite as much as immediately after the 1987 House-Senate televised hearings into the Iran-Contra affair, but he still makes frequent appearances before conservative groups, where he is something of an idol.
“It has tapered off from the first year,” Ben Hart, executive director of the Freedom Alliance, explains, “but he’s still in pretty heavy demand.”
Hart says most of North’s speaking fees still go to pay his legal expenses.
At the same time, North receives a salary of about $50,000 from the Freedom Alliance, which he founded and which claims 120,000 dues-paying members.
The organization, which focuses its efforts on increasing citizen participation in American democracy, also raised $2.3 million earlier this year to send care packages to U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.
Guardian Technologies, the manufacturing company that North founded two months ago with Joseph Fernandez, a former CIA agent who also was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, is headquartered in the same building in Sterling, Va., as the Freedom Alliance.
According to one source, the firm recently received a contract from the Kuwaiti royal family.
Not only does North appear to be making a success of his current enterprises, he is also likely to have his pension reinstated soon if the Supreme Court rejects the request by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh to reinstate the conviction.
Meanwhile, Wright, who was forced to resign as Speaker in 1989 as the result of an ethics investigation, is living comfortably on his congressional pension in Ft. Worth, making speeches for as much as $10,000 each and writing a book about Central America.
Coelho, who resigned in 1989 after he admitted benefiting from an unusually favorable investment opportunity provided for him by Columbia Savings & Loan, is now earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as an official of Wertheim Schroder & Co., a New York finance firm.
“He seems happy beyond description,” a former aide says.
And McFarlane, who lost his position as a scholar at the prestigious Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies after his early role in the Iran-Contra affair was revealed, now runs an active international consulting firm, McFarlane Associates.
