Report Puts Reagan, Bush in ‘the Loop’ : Echoes of Watergate in Iran-Contra include detailed notes and designated scapegoats.

Any time now, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh’s report on his seven-year investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal will be released. And it may make you wonder why our Constitution does not provide for retroactive impeachment.

The report of some 700 pages (there are two additional volumes of rebuttals, documents and annexes) is bound to be an eye-opener for those who believed that President Reagan was detached from his aides’ abuse of power and that Vice President Bush was “out of the loop.”

In fact, the report argues with a wealth of compelling evidence that the President was consulted on each basic decision to trade arms with Iran for American hostages in Lebanon and to supply the Nicaraguan Contras, despite a congressional ban.

To Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s warning that arms shipments to Iran violated the American embargo on weapons exports to terrorist states, Reagan responded (according to Weinberger’s notes) that he “could answer charges of illegality,” but not the charge that “big, strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.”

As documented in the report, Reagan gave specific approval to the changing schemes for shipping arms to Iran, first by Israel, later directly. He even sent three messages to Robert McFarlane and Oliver North while they were in Tehran in May, 1986, giving instructions to guide their negotiation of a missiles-for-hostages deal.

Bush’s assertion that he was unaware of what was going on is contradicted by documents noting the meetings he attended and the missions he performed. One job he was given was to persuade the president of Honduras to permit his country to be used as a channel for supplying the Contras. Bush’s assertion that he was “not in the loop” was made three weeks after he recorded in his diary, “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details.”

As with Watergate, the conspiracy was not a rogue operation, but rested on presidential authority and orders. Irangate bore other resemblances to Watergate. One was the way in which fear of exposure led to plans for a cover-up, which was internally justified as necessary to protect the presidency.

Thus, as President Nixon tried out a false scenario making the CIA responsible for Watergate, so the Irangate conspirators strove to establish a fraudulent version of events for congressional and public consumption. According to the Walsh report, on Nov. 10, 1986, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese outlined in an Oval Office meeting with the President and principal aides a construct that most of those present knew to be false, but none raised a voice against. It suggested that Israel sold missiles to Iran without American permission and that President Reagan believed a shipment of missiles in November, 1985, to be oil-drilling equipment.

As with Watergate, one aspect of the cover-up was to direct attention to one specific area where the President was “clean.” As the Nixon White House tried to divert attention from the larger conspiracy by emphasizing the President’s lack of contemporary knowledge of the Watergate break-in, so Meese paraded President Reagan’s lack of knowledge of the diversion of Iranian arms profits--the one wrinkle he apparently didn’t know about.

And, just as in Watergate, in which fall guys were designated in an effort to protect the President (first John Dean, later John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman), so scapegoats were selected in Iran-Contra. The report lists them as McFarlane, North and Adm. John Poindexter, veterans of the Navy and the Marines who might be expected to take the rap for the commander in chief. Only Poindexter walked the plank without complaint.

As fascinating as anything about the Walsh report is the glimpse it gives is into the moral confusion of people working in the rarefied atmosphere of the summit of power, unsure where loyalty to the President ends and illegality begins.