Resurrecting Iran-Contra : One-time national security adviser and chief scandal scapegoat gives his first-person account : SPECIAL TRUST, <i> By Robert C. McFarlane and Zofia Smardz (Cadell & Davies: $25; 389 pp.)</i>

In August, 1993, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh issued his final report on the Iran-Contra scandal. His ultimate findings made the front page of many newspapers, but by no means all, for journalists and citizens alike were weary of the story after seven years of partisan finger-pointing, fragmentary reporting, internecine recrimination and never-ending attempts at spin control. The Walsh report, in theory, should have put Iran-Contra to rest, allowing the participants in the scandal--and the public at large--to get on with their lives.

That hasn’t happened, of course, and in retrospect it’s unreasonable to think that any formal document could do justice, in every sense of the term, to Iran-Contra.

In skeletal summary, the story seems the first draft of a B-movie: U.S. government officials secretly sell state-of-the-art military arms to shady figures in one country in order to procure the release of political hostages in another, with the proceeds sent, again in secret and against U.S. law, to guerrilla fighters in a third country.

Add figures such as Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams and Caspar Weinberger (not to mention Fawn Hall), and you have the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy. Reagan as Caesar in dotage, given to demagoguery but easily swayed by sentiment; a band of advisers displaying various degrees of loyalty--George Shultz a dutiful Kent, Weinberger a frustrated Coriolanus, Alexander Haig an un-shrewd Cassius; North a truly Shakespearean figure, combining Anthony’s public oratorical skills with Iago’s private cunning. Who but Shakespeare could capture the moral contradictions, the misguided patriotism, the inevitable personal treachery, that the Iran-Contra scandal would force these and other characters to face . . . or in some cases, ignore?

There’s one figure even Shakespeare might have trouble with, however: Robert (Bud) McFarlane, decorated Marine, one-time national security adviser, chief Iran-Contra scapegoat, famously failed suicide, and now author of “Special Trust,” the latest, and surely one of the last, first-person accounts of the scandal. McFarlane wants to be the principled Brutus, the good soldier who says (well before agreeing to Caesar’s assassination) that he loves “the name of honor more than I fear death.”

In some ways McFarlane deserves the comparison, being a straight-shooter who fell on his sword in 1987--actually, took an overdose of Valium--as penance for setting Iran-Contra in motion. By the time one finishes this memoir, though, McFarlane seems more like Gloucester in “King Lear,” the attempted suicide whose loyalty earns him virtually nothing. Like Gloucester, too, McFarlane is blind, at least metaphorically; he never saw betrayal coming, failing to understand--then--that the Marine’s motto of semper fidelis is an almost meaningless concept in the political arena, even when voiced by a fellow corpsman.

Oliver North, who stands a good chance of being elected Tuesday to the U.S. Senate from Virginia, has called “Special Trust” “a pitiful and mean-spirited attempt (by McFarlane) to glue his broken reputation back together again.” Leave out pitiful and mean-spirited, and in fact that’s not a bad description; McFarlane’s book, like every other political memoir, is self-serving, taking as its starting point the idea that negotiating with Iranian dissidents during the Khomeini regime was at first a reasonable diplomatic strategy that subsequently took on a life of its own, with terrible consequences.

On the whole, though, “Special Trust” is a responsible and plausible volume, for McFarlane is less interested in generating sympathy and wreaking vengeance than in putting Iran-Contra in context. He eventually levels some very serious charges--near the book’s close he characterizes North as “deceitful, mendacious, and traitorous”--but by then McFarlane has earned the right to call names. It’s hard to believe at times that McFarlane was really so trusting of his political and intelligence peers as he professes, but by the same token it’s easy to see, given McFarlane’s personal history, why he would presume that such trust was fundamental and beyond question.

McFarlane’s passage into the corridors of power was straightforward. He grew up largely in Washington, the son of a New Deal Democrat who became a prominent lawyer in the Justice Department after losing his congressional seat in Texas. Bud McFarlane was a Boy Scout who would later marry his highschool sweetheart. When in the late 1950s he considered dropping out of the Naval Academy--from which a number of his relatives had graduated--it was with the idea of becoming a pastor. McFarlane’s father persuaded him otherwise, however, and after obtaining a commission the son served two tours of duty in Vietnam. There, like so many other soldiers, he got a troubling dose of political and military reality, but that experience was balanced by a much more favorable two-year stint studying international relations in Geneva. In 1971 McFarlane became a White House Fellow, working in an office next to that of Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon’s national security adviser; two years later he was on Kissinger’s staff. From that point onward McFarlane’s ascent, it seems, was assured, for he was good at organizing information and planning for contingencies--here his Marine training shows--if not at generating original ideas.

McFarlane says more than once that his father pressed on his children the idea of public service, and the son uses that counsel to frame “Special Trust.” The title is taken from the charge given to government officials when they accept their positions: that they have been invested not merely with power but also with a “special trust,” each provided by the people in order to help officials advance the general good. This is, obviously, a politically astute way to introduce McFarlane’s story, but it also seems genuine, for McFarlane, unlike many of his colleagues, can’t be accused of using public service as a steppingstone to private riches. He can be accused of high ambition--of trying to give the Reagan Administration the sort of foreign-policy credibility that Kissinger had given Nixon--but that’s hardly a criticism, especially given the well-known personal and policy disagreements between George Shultz at State and Caspar Weinberger at Defense.

It is fair to say, though, that McFarlane’s desire to be a highly successful diplomat, perhaps as venerated as Kissinger, played a role, however minor, in the events that led to his downfall. An Israeli official, responding to diplomatic feelers, reported in 1985 that his government was in contact with moderates in Iran who might be able to overthrow the Khomeini government and also, so they said, deliver the U.S. hostages held by the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon.

McFarlane, national security adviser at the time, was intrigued by the information, knowing how much Reagan wanted the hostages brought home safely. He soon received the presidential go-ahead to pursue negotiations. Eventually, through Israeli intermediaries, the Iranian dissidents insisted that the hostages would be released only in exchange for 100 TOW missiles, at which point negotiations came to a halt. CIA Director William Casey alone among the handful of White House officials consulted on the issue was willing to argue for its legality. But when the Israelis suggested a shell game--that they ship the weapons to Iran and later replace the missiles with a duplicate purchase from the U.S.--the plan was revived. Reagan agreed to it, Shultz and Weinberger remained opposed, and a few months later, after McFarlane had resigned his White House post and become a special envoy to the President, he was in Tehran on the verge of destroying his career.

This is McFarlane’s version of the arms-for-hostages agreement, and it generally coincides with established facts, except for Reagan’s subsequent denials that he knew anything about the plan. McFarlane admits that he at least advanced the deal, if he didn’t precisely father it, and blames Shultz and Weinberger mainly for disavowing any knowledge of the arrangement (knowledge later confirmed through the disclosure of their contemporaneous notes on the affair). The Contra side of the deal hardly comes up at all: McFarlane says he learned of it only on the Tehran airport Tarmac, when the Iranians had again failed to deliver the hostages, despite having already received missile shipments--directly from the U.S., as it turned out--after McFarlane had resigned his White House position. It was on leaving Iran empty-handed, McFarlane says, that North, who was nominally working for McFarlane, told him, “Don’t worry, Bud, it’s not a total loss. At least we’re using some of the Ayatollah’s money in Central America.”

North, of course, says McFarlane not only knew and approved of the Contra-bound money but masterminded the entire scheme, giving his assistant general authority over covert operations in Nicaragua and, later, ordering a cover-up. Both North and McFarlane have been convicted of crimes related to Iran-Contra--McFarlane pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawfully withholding material information from Congress, while North was convicted of destroying official documents and obstructing Congress--but there’s no question which figure has greater credibility. McFarlane’s references to “special trust” might seem like plays to the peanut gallery except for the fact that he alone freely tried to explain Iran-Contra to Congress and the public, refusing to plead the Fifth Amendment (as did Oliver North and John Poindexter) or insist on immunity from prosecution (which North did, and which led to his conviction’s being overturned). Yes, McFarlane was naive to believe that “being accountable, telling the truth and expecting the system to respect that approach would lead to justice being done” . . . but he did the right thing nonetheless.

McFarlane, now head of an international energy-development company, does not come out of “Special Trust” smelling like a rose. The book, first of all, is peculiarly well-shaped; one can’t help feeling that McFarlane’s friend and lawyer, Washington lawyer Leonard Garment, made sure his client’s public account of Iran-Contra jibed well with the existing, uncontradicted record. McFarlane, moreover, is proficient at interpreting events in conveniently agreeable ways; he ridicules the 1967 decision to build a high-tech electronic fence across Vietnam’s DMZ to help monitor enemy movements, but 80 pages later boasts of creating the “Star Wars” (Strategic Defense Initiative) anti-missile system, which would have been an immense high-tech disaster. The SDI discussion also shows McFarlane’s occasional slipperiness; at first he tries to defend SDI on strategic grounds, despite the fact that it upset many U.S. allies, would have militarized space, and very likely reignited the arms race, but eventually justifies it as simply a diplomatic bargaining chip.

The biggest surprise in “Special Trust” is the fact that McFarlane says relatively little about Oliver North. The second biggest is that the book has been produced by a new and unknown publisher, Cadell & Davies. McFarlane charges in the acknowledgments to this volume that the major publisher with whom he orginally signed turned out to be interested only in “sensationalism.” These facts--and there’s no reason to doubt McFarlane’s description of how “Special Trust” came to be--are not unrelated, for McFarlane can no more adapt his views and methods to satisfy a commercial publisher’s view of a “good” Iran-Contra book than he can place Oliver North center stage for the dramatic effect the public seems to require.

McFarlane’s portrait of Iran-Contra defies the one we carry in our heads--of McFarlane, Shultz, Weinberger, and Poindexter overshadowed by the towering figures of Reagan and North (the latter two dressed, of course, as gunslingers). In the end, however, the discrepancy makes his memoir more trustworthy rather than less. It’s ironic that McFarlane was pressured to make this book more “marketable,” for his refusal to hard-sell himself to Congress, the media, and the public--as did, routinely, those masterful, telegenic salesmen, Ronald Reagan and Oliver North--was the chief reason he became Iran-Contra’s fall guy.

In McFarlane’s tableau, North “violated the special trust” placed in him by the American people, and one can’t help but conclude that McFarlane harbors similar thoughts about big-time book publishing. Sad but true, and frightening to boot; it now seems more important in our culture to be able to project an image of integrity and fidelity than actually to possess those qualities, that we measure someone’s credibility, not against the evidence, but by the ability to convince.