Former CIA Official Fiers Is Sentenced : Iran-Contra: He must do community service for role in scandal. He had pleaded guilty to keeping facts from Congress.

Alan D. Fiers, the former CIA official whose cooperation with prosecutors revived the Iran-Contra cover-up investigation, was sentenced Friday to 100 hours of community service for withholding information from Congress.

In pleading guilty in July to two misdemeanor counts, under which he could have been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $200,000, Fiers was the first former CIA official to admit knowledge of the illegal diversion of funds from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels.

His plea came just as the criminal probe of Iran-Contra appeared stalled.

Fiers won praise for his cooperation and attitude from prosecutor Craig A. Gillen and chief U.S. District Judge Aubrey E. Robinson Jr.

In a statement, he told the court that the caldron of the Cold War and his “abject hate of defeat,” instilled by his Ohio State University football coach, Woody Hayes, had been part of his “guiding beacon over the years.”

At the same time Fiers, the former chief of the CIA’s Central American task force, said: “I accept full responsibility for my actions taken and not taken and stand here fully accountable for them.”

In his July guilty plea, Fiers admitted that Oliver L. North told him of the illegal fund diversion in the summer of 1986. But when asked on Nov. 25, 1986, about the diversion, he told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had learned of it only that day at a presidential press conference.

Gillen said Fiers had been “extremely cooperative” in the independent counsel’s investigation. Information provided or corroborated by him was considered crucial to the subsequent indictment of Clair E. George, the former deputy CIA director for operations, on 10 counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in connection with grand jury and congressional probes of Iran-Contra.

Fiers, 52, said he was proud of his role in “the historic 45-year Cold War struggle, first as a Marine and then with the CIA’s . . . clandestine service . . . I believed then, as I do now, that imperial Soviet Communism constituted a real and immediate threat to our democracy.”

He said that during his CIA service he had faced “tough, controversial decisions,” especially as chief of the agency’s Central American task force, and that some of those decisions resulted in his standing before the court.

Robinson, noting that he had been impressed by letters written on behalf of Fiers, said it was “not often” that a judge had “a person like Mr. Fiers” before him for sentencing. “There is no reason for me to believe that there is any need to further impress upon you the total obligations we have as citizens,” Robinson said.

“We all want to win,” the judge said. “Woody Hayes wanted to win. But you had to win within the rules, didn’t you,” he added, as Fiers nodded.

“I can’t duck this responsibility,” the judge said in placing Fiers on a year’s probation and requiring him to perform the 100 hours of community service in the District of Columbia where, he said, “the need is so great for people of your talent and experience.”

On the courthouse steps, flanked by his attorney, Stanley Arkin, and his wife, Hazel, Fiers was asked about criticism by former CIA colleagues of his cooperation with prosecutors. He said he had followed the dictates of his conscience, adding: “In pursuit of victory, we can’t do violence to the system we are defending.”

Fiers, now a corporate vice president of W.R. Grace & Co. and its chief Washington lobbyist, declined to say whether he was still cooperating in the continuing Iran-Contra investigation by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. The Associated Press reported last week that Army Col. Samuel J. Watson, a former military aide to President Bush when he was vice president, had testified before the federal grand jury that is looking into any knowledge of Iran-Contra by Bush’s vice presidential office.

The grand jury is believed to be focusing on Watson’s then-superior, Donald P. Gregg, former national security adviser to Bush and now ambassador to South Korea. Gregg has denied that he knew then that former White House aide North was leading efforts to supply the Contras with weapons in 1985 and 1986 when such aid had been banned by Congress.