The Commerce of Combat : HONORED AND BETRAYED: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos, <i> By Richard Secord with Jay Wurts (Wiley: $24.95; 405 pp.)</i>

When a defensive, truculent retired Air Force major general appeared as the first witness testifying to the Iran-Contra committees in the summer of 1987, few in the packed Senate hearing room, or among those following the hearings nationwide, were prepared to assess his significance in the burgeoning scandal.

Even after three days on the witness stand, Richard Secord remained an enigma. Why was he the first witness called? What had he really done? By whose authorization? And, amid all the confusion, why hadn’t the committee been able to pin down the allegations of outrageous profiteering that various Congressional inquisitors, and their lead attorneys, kept suggesting?

Now, some six years after the White House chose to bail out on the Iran-Contra operation with the notorious (and notoriously inaccurate) November, 1986, explanations by President Reagan and his attorney general, Secord finally has a chance to have his full say. Unfortunately, “Honored and Betrayed” contributes little to what is already known about Iran-Contra and its cast of characters, but it does present quite a portrait of its author--a portrait edged in militaristic attitudes, continual evasions of major questions in Iran-Contra, and the same penchant for self-aggrandizement he exhibited during the days of testimony that brought him into national prominence. (That testimony also won him the same kind of sympathy--if not as much--given to Oliver North after North successfully toyed with his inept committee interrogators.)

Written chronologically, “Honored and Betrayed” traces the 28-year military career, and subsequent seven-year paramilitary supply role, of the now 60-year-old combat veteran. Starting with his days at West Point--where, he tells us, he was one of many educated to “a killer’s mentality”--Secord moves cursorily through his pilot’s training (“We considered ourselves pretty hot sticks, with brass for balls and ice water in our veins”) and on to his role as “Special Forces” operative in the first of his many secret wars, the one fought in 1964 on behalf of the shah’s regime in Iran against the Kurdish population.

That this repressive, bloody, politically driven military adventure, paid for with the tax dollars of the world’s purportedly most democratic country, had “no rules of engagement,” and “as far as the outside world was concerned . . . wasn’t happening,” seems to have been of little concern to Secord then, and is even less of a vexation now. “It was a textbook anti-insurgency war,” he remembers, “and we were determined to make a casebook success of it.”

Such a campaign was perfect preparation for Secord’s deadly work in Southeast Asia, which was to follow. Recruited by the CIA for one of its endless “sheep-dipped” clandestine conflicts around the globe, Secord was one of the elite U.S. “detailees” supplied by the military to the CIA to support operations in Laos. For him, it was a breakthrough role. “As far as I know, I was the first person to more-or-less run a large-scale tactical air campaign covertly.”

While Secord’s “covert” role consisted of flying and commanding extensive sorties against upstart peasant forces, his allies in Laos (whom he calls the “Little Guys”), under notorious general Vang Pao, were engaged in equally “covert” activities to support their efforts--namely the cultivation, harvesting and transportation of large quantities of opium, grown to be processed as heroin and destined to poison the minds and bodies of people worldwide.

That Secord could have been ignorant of this well-documented activity during his three years in Laos is impossible; that he now chooses not to mention it, after so much has been investigated, written and broadcast about it, is absurd. Indeed, the only reference to the notorious cash crop of Gen. Vang Pao and his tribesmen is when Secord recalls a first vision of Laos in 1966, with “a lush valley filled with opium poppies waving scarlet in the breeze.”

The curious omission of the infamous drug-intelligence-combat connection in Laos continues throughout “Honored and Betrayed,” reaching an apotheosis of obfuscation in the Contra-cocaine operation in Costa Rica. If Secord is aware of the scope of the voluminous Congressional and journalistic accounts detailing the intersection of drug profiteers with weapons suppliers in that conflict, you wouldn’t know it from reading this book.

Before he gets to not telling us about that, however, we follow him to his next overseas assignment, back in Iran, after he became “burnt out” and “one of the legion of walking zombies” following too much inconclusive slaughter in Southeast Asia. In Iran, his role was to prop up the shah’s endless dreams of glory and help suck up the almost endless stream of cash that the fading shah was prepared to lavish on suppliers of military hardware.

As the major U.S. weapons-supply adviser for the Defense Security Assistance Agency, Secord tells us he played a major role in arranging $17 billion worth of outfitting for the shah’s forces. That weaponry made a lot of money for a lot of suppliers, but it proved completely inadequate in suppressing the popular uprising that shortly followed Secord’s tour of duty.

Like most American militarists, Secord has a strong streak of obsequiousness toward the powerful, especially toward pretentious foreigners like the shah. He reinforces the shah’s self-proclaimed myth of an “ancient Persian nobility” and of the shah’s “hereditary monarchy.” (In truth, that bloodline had begun just one generation earlier with the shah’s self-crowned father, a military officer who left the country to his son after some unpleasantness about his pro-Nazi sympathies during World War II.)

How out of touch key American military clandestine operatives could be with not only the history but also the political realities of their specialty countries is exemplified by Secord at the conclusion of his stay in Iran. As he ahistorically laments the end of “a long line of Persian kings reaching back 2,500 years to the time of Cyrus the Great,” he informs us that “although I had spent the last three years in Iran, working at the highest levels and in close cooperation with the Near East intelligence community, that fall (when the shah fled the country) was the first time most of us had heard the name Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Such obliviousness clearly qualified Secord for further adventures on the Iranian front, as did his conviction that the United States failed in post-shah Iran because insufficient information and contacts were developed among the “new, post-revolutionary players” based on “meaningful quid pro quos within the Iranian hierarchy.”

Such passing mention of “meaningful quid pro quos” is the closest Secord gets to describing the real nitty-gritty world in which he operated officially, and continued to operate extra-officially in years to come. His explanation of how he was, by his own account, falsely associated with the illegal weapons dealings of rogue CIA officer Edwin Wilson--now serving a life sentence--is completely inadequate. As in other instances, Secord fails to engage the major work on the subject (Peter Maas’ “Manhunt”), preferring to discourse instead on an injurious CBS report about the affair.

It is in the final half of the book, however, that the waters really get muddied. If Secord is familiar with the majority conclusion of the Iran-Contra committee--that he was the designated beneficiary of at least $1.62 million for his work in assisting Oliver North’s clandestine Iran-Contra weapons dealings --he doesn’t show it.

Instead, there are pleadings of poverty and scorn for Senate counsel Arthur Liman, “who seemed to believe the world was composed of people out only to make a fast buck.” Secord says he took only a modest salary and “loans” from his associate in the clandestine effort, Albert Hakim, for such necessities of life as a $31,000 Porsche. (Such financial arrangements were, at the least, a bit unusual. In Secord’s pre-testimony deposition to the Iran-Contra committees he stated that they included no signed notes, no interest due and no principal repaid. There is no explanatory reference to this in “Honored and Betrayed.”)

Like his onetime associate Oliver North’s best-selling “Under Fire,” Secord’s book was released without prior notice to the media, ostensibly because of the promotional value of passing references to George Bush’s having more knowledge of the affair than the President admits. But on the evidence of Secord’s accuracy in other matters, one must question his assertion of that involvement.

“Honored and Betrayed” is one of the most poorly edited books on this or any current affairs topic to be published in a long time. In addition to failing to consider previous books about Iran-Contra (starting with Leslie Cockburn’s 1987 work “Out of Control”), it is riddled with misspelled names, including that of the secretary of state, well-known hostages in Lebanon, the prime minister of Portugal and the prosecutor in the Oliver North case. At least these people are recognizable as actual human beings.

More puzzling is Secord’s account, complete with remembered dialogue, of an appearance before a supposedly hostile closed-door hearing of “the House Subcommittee on Appropriations” chaired by “Baltimore Democrat Theodore ‘Doc’ Price.” There is no such subcommittee, and no such person has ever served in Congress.

Early in “Honored and Betrayed,” Secord is at pains to make clear his advocacy of purely military, “systemic” approaches as “war-winning methods.” His subsequent career in the commercial arms business purportedly is driven more by his interest in “strategic aspects of that industry” than the distasteful “merchants of death” side of that unpleasant but lucrative occupation.

But in combat as in commerce, the image of Secord that emerges in “Honored and Betrayed” is that of someone who tries to believe in what he does, rather than tries to do what he believes in. And, at the book’s end, after a wholly unsatisfying accounting of his indictment by the Iran-Contra independent counsel on multiple felony counts (we’re never told what they are) and subsequent guilty plea to a single charge of lying to Congress, we’re left with the same questions. What did he really do? By whose ultimate authorization?

And, yes, always and perhaps forever, where’s the money?

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Honored and Betrayed,” see the Opinion section, Page 4.