Iran-Bosnia Arms Pipeline Draws New Fire

The Clinton administration came “perilously close” to engaging in an unauthorized covert action when it secretly gave a green light to Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia in 1994, a Senate committee said in a report Thursday.

The report--accepted by ranking committee Democrat Bob Kerrey of Nebraska as well as by majority Republicans--conflicts with the administration’s claim that its Iranian arms initiative qualified as “traditional diplomatic activity” and was therefore free of the legal restrictions placed on the secret intelligence activities of the executive branch after the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the administration’s decision in April 1994 to signal to Croatia that the United States would not object to the creation of an Iranian arms pipeline through Croatia to supply the beleaguered Bosnian Muslim government.

A White House official responded: “We stand behind our Bosnian policy, which has brought peace to the region. . . . We agree with the [finding] that there was no covert action, which was our contention all along.”

Also Thursday, the House select panel on Iranian arms transfers said it is sending a 26-page letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno detailing what it charges are “potential criminal violations” by senior administration officials stemming from the Iranian arms controversy. Those charges include perjury, obstruction of Congress and conspiracy.

The House panel said it is asking Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought, focusing on the actions and statements of U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith and former U.S. Ambassador Charles Redman, who was U.S. special envoy to the Balkans in 1994.

The letter to Reno was approved in a party-line action by the panel’s Republican majority over the objections of Democratic members, who issued a statement saying that the charges were “without merit.”

The Senate committee report stopped short of accusing the administration of violating national-security or intelligence-oversight laws, but it was sharply critical of administration officials for conducting a major policy initiative and then scrambling to keep it secret from the CIA, the Defense Department and Congress.

The excessive secrecy led to concerns among CIA officials, including then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey, that an unauthorized covert action might be underway behind their backs.

At the time, President Clinton agreed to have two U.S. diplomats tell Croatian President Franjo Tudjman that they had “no instructions” when he asked how the United States would respond to the Iranian arms shipments.

The “no instructions” message came at a time when the United States was supposedly helping enforce a United Nations arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia. The signal that the United States would not try to interfere with Iranian arms smuggling also came as the administration was publicly pursuing a policy of isolating Tehran globally because of its support for terrorism.

When the secret policy was revealed this year, congressional leaders were angry that Clinton had given the green light at a time when he was threatening to veto congressional efforts to lift the arms embargo. Clinton had said that he opposed lifting the embargo because it would prompt European nations to pull their peacekeeping troops out of Bosnia, increasing pressure to send U.S. troops there long before a peace settlement was reached.

Republican critics also have charged that Clinton’s policy needlessly gave Iran a “foothold” in Europe, increasing the terrorist threat to U.S. troops now on peacekeeping duty in the Balkans. But administration officials have stressed that the covert arms shipments were critical to helping the Bosnian Muslims stave off defeat at the hands of their Bosnian Serb enemies.

Some Republicans on the intelligence committee concluded that the Clinton team broke laws governing covert action, but the committee chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), made it clear that he did not push that view because he was eager for a report that could win bipartisan support.

Specter refused to say whether he personally believes that the administration mounted an illegal covert action. Instead, he noted that the report “is a primer as to how perilously close they came.”

“I personally conclude that the ‘no instructions’ policy was not covert action, but neither was it traditional diplomatic activity,” Kerrey said. “It was a contradiction of U.S. policy toward Iran. . . . A message of such contradiction, ordered to be kept secret and not even written down, is far from [diplomatic] tradition.”

Four other Democrats on the panel issued dissenting statements, arguing that the administration had simply engaged in traditional--if secret--diplomatic activity and did not even come close to violating intelligence-oversight laws.

After the initial “no instructions” message was delivered, there were other incidents in which U.S. officials may have helped facilitate Iranian arms shipments into Bosnia, which the committee also found troubling. One such incident occurred in September 1995 when the United States sent personnel to Croatia to inspect long-range rockets bound for Bosnia after Croatian officials warned that they might include chemical weapons. After U.S. officials determined that the rockets were not equipped with chemical warheads, they did not object to allowing them to enter Bosnia.