The Iran Deception : REAGAN’S GREATEST CRISIS : CHAPTER 5 : Reagan Called Ollie North ‘My Marine’

After six years of magic, President Reagan broke the spell. By deceiving the nation, he and those around him badly damaged his presidency. This traumatic tale is still unfolding, with no end in sight. This is how it developed.

There was at least one more shipment of arms to Iran in 1985. And it got help from a man who, at first glance, seemed to be an unlikely conspirator. People called him Ollie.

Tousle-headed Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North occupied the sort of bureaucratic closet in the status-obsessed National Security Council that his comic nickname suggested would suit him forever.

In a staff of 63, North occupied one of the lower ranks. At the top was Robert McFarlane; below him were fully 14 special assistants to the President. North, by contrast, was merely the deputy director of the political-military affairs office. He did not have the privilege of eating in the “White House mess”--the dining room for presidential aides. Until late 1984, he parked in a first-come, first-served space in back of the White House.

He was the White House equivalent, one could say, of a bank teller.

At least that was what it looked like on the flow chart. Next door to the White House, in the halls of the Old Executive Office Building where North put in long hours of work, however, the view was different. North was the President’s man on the contras. And by early 1984, this unheralded bureaucrat in his quiet office had become a very important person indeed.

The contras were perhaps the President’s fondest cause. Others called them rebels or even mercenaries. Reagan called them freedom fighters. They were guerrillas bent on overthrowing Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. And they needed help, especially money to buy guns and ammunition.

Reagan asked Congress to send them $21 million in 1984, in addition to the $24 million that had been appropriated in 1983. But Congress, angry that the CIA had mined Nicaragua’s harbors and carried out other covert operations without notifying the intelligence committees, said no. A year later, Congress appropriated $27 million for so-called humanitarian aid--such items as boots, clothing, food, medical supplies and transportation--but explicitly rejected sending weapons.

So it became North’s job to encourage private Americans to funnel aid to the contras. He got help from, among other places, a loose network of contra supporters in the United States, such as retired Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, who operated a private pro- contra organization.

The contras were not North’s only adventure. He helped plan the 1983 Grenada invasion, the 1986 bombing of Libya and the 1985 interception of the Egyptian plane that carried the terrorists who had hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Like nature abhoring a vacuum, North had rushed in to handle all available assignments. By one account, he was much like a younger brother to McFarlane--and a son to Reagan, who called him “my Marine.”

North could be disconcerting. Some said he had a taste for the dramatic. He told colleagues, for instance, that his family dog had been poisoned in retaliation for his contra support. But one source said: “The dog died of cancer. It got old and died. Ollie told everybody that it was poisoned for effect.”

Perhaps not all of this was for effect. North took the trouble, for example, to move his family out of their home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington and onto a military base for a time in 1984 because of anti- contra picketing and what he said were threatening telephone calls. And the White House finally gave him a parking place in a garage to prevent vandalism to his car.

In 1985, McFarlane gave North a momentous additional assignment: to help with the Administration’s efforts to free the American hostages in Beirut. Eventually, this would generate the Oliver North story that would remind National Security Council colleagues of a tale from a Ken Follett novel. When news leaked in late 1986 about an arms-for-hostages swap, North burst into one colleague’s office and denounced the stories as “disinformation.” The real plan to free the hostages, he said, was to trade them for Iranian government officials’ relatives whom he had ordered kidnaped and held in cages throughout Europe.

One source said North’s tale came from an impulse to cover exposure of the truth with an even more dramatic fantasy. But another said North had “crossed the line from truth into fantasy long ago.”

As North’s role increased last year, so did the trappings of his job. Although his immediate boss, Howard J. Teicher, sat in an office that had no view, North was assigned Room 302 in the Old Executive Office Building, which offered the same commanding vista of the Ellipse, the Mall and the Washington Monument that Ronald and Nancy Reagan enjoyed from their White House living quarters. Most National Security Council offices bore single locks, but North’s had a double combination lock. And he sat at a desk festooned with enough gadgets to delight any modern spymaster.

It was not the office safe that made other National Security Council officials envious. Almost everyone had one of those. Nor was it even North’s electric paper shredder, though far fewer people had them. It was North’s computer terminals that caused some of his colleagues to be envious. He had three, all clustered around his leather chair like servants around a throne. The computer terminals were wonders to behold.

All of them were TEMPEST secure--the highest level of protection against foreign snoops that the CIA could offer. One, an IBM, gave him instant access to the major news services and the messages and the electronic documents that move along the National Security Council’s PROFS computer network. A second terminal, a DEC, was linked to a mainframe that offered a menu of the secret cable traffic between Washington and diplomatic posts around the world. But the third computer was the most prized. It tied him to the counterterrorism operation center at the government’s National Security Agency, a super-secret intelligence-gathering agency in suburban Maryland.

This terminal had a bell. It rang when National Security Agency communications intercepts turned up any hint of terrorist activity anywhere.

Next to North’s computers were three telephones. The black-and-silver one, an ordinary telephone for everyday talk, almost seemed out of place. The beige one, more secure, was used for the discussion of secrets with other government officials around Washington. The third, called the “gray line,” was linked to officials at National Security Agency headquarters.

It was not unusual, co-workers say, to see North buried at his desk with his secure telephone in one hand and his “gray line” in the other--and occasionally with his National Security Agency computer sounding a dire ding-ding-ding about a bomb-thrower at work halfway around the globe.

Sometime in November of 1985, North picked up his secure telephone and rang CIA headquarters. Who answered is uncertain. CIA Director Casey has told investigators that he was in China and was not consulted, but congressional officials say privately they are skeptical of that claim.

What is known is the crux of North’s message: The White House urgently needed the CIA’s quiet help in securing a plane and pilot. A planeload of equipment--oil-drilling parts, North is reported to have said--had become stalled in Lisbon. The White House wanted the supplies transferred to Iran.

The request could hardly have been viewed as routine, one intelligence official later said. But the CIA responded by putting North in touch with an air-freight firm. At the Lisbon airport, an innocuous looking jet freighter taxied over to an equally nondescript jet that had just arrived from Israel--a jet loaded not with oil equipment but with U.S.-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles.

The Hawks were a prime catch for the Iranians, for the missiles had been the workhorses of the Shah’s air defense system, and they were badly needed to shield Iran from assaults by the substantially more powerful Iraqi air force. The need was greatest at Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal on the Persian Gulf, where 1.5 million barrels of oil were loaded onto tankers for export every day. And oil paid for the war with Iraq.

According to the latest accounts in the Israeli press, McFarlane sent retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord to Israel to coordinate a shipment of 80 Hawk missiles that was to lead to the release of all the remaining U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

But the Hawks almost did not make it to Tehran. To maintain secrecy, the missiles were supposed to be flown from Israel to Lisbon, where they would be transferred to a second aircraft. But Secord failed to obtain a Portuguese landing permit for the plane carrying the Hawks, and the craft had to return to Israel.

A smaller shipment of 18 Hawks was then dispatched in mid-November. But when the Iranians unloaded the Hawks from the CIA jet, they found they had not gotten the newer model of the missiles, called I-Hawks, that they had demanded. Instead, the Israelis had apparently rummaged deep into their inventories of U.S. weapons and produced the oldest and most outdated Hawks they had on hand.

The Iranians were so infuriated that they confiscated the aircraft and detained the pilots. Only when arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar hastily arranged to return the Iranian payment for the Hawks did the Iranians release the pilots and plane, although they kept the 18 obsolete Hawks until several months later, when arms shipments were renewed in early 1986.

Whether deliberate or not, the Israelis’ apparent bait-and-switch maneuver appears to have scotched another secret attempt at an arms-for-hostages swap. Church of England envoy Terry Waite began the first of his well-publicized shuttle-diplomacy efforts to free U.S. hostages on Nov. 13, and he lobbied fruitlessly for weeks before finally giving up on Christmas Eve.

In Israel, according to sources there, the whole affair had taken on a sour odor. According to one senior government official, Peres, angered by Iranian deceit over hostage Buckley, complained: “These guys can’t be trusted. They take your arms and then they don’t deliver.”

Defense Minister Rabin was worried that delays in the arrival of American replacements for weapons already sent to Iran would leave Israeli stockpiles depleted. “Hold it!” the senior government official quoted him as saying. “With the Syrians and everything, I can’t afford this.”

And in the United States, McFarlane was increasingly discouraged by the Iranian courtship. “By November,” he later said, “it seemed to me that the purpose of the undertaking was not being fulfilled. We were not dealing with the Iranians directly at all, and such dealings as were taking place were being skewed toward the hostages alone.”

And McFarlane had his own bureaucratic problems: White House Chief of Staff Regan was insisting on looking over the national security adviser’s shoulder, even to the point of attempting to break into meetings with the President. It had become intolerable, many officials said.

In the first week of December, McFarlane quit. One of his farewell duties was to fly to London, where he met face to face with Ghorbanifar and other Iranian intermediaries and told them that the arms-and-hostages arrangement was not working out.

It was not a pleasant three hours, by all accounts. Whether there was shouting is in dispute. But McFarlane claims to have left Heathrow Airport without any doubt of the future of the Iran initiative.

He later said: “I then left the government assuming that the matter was closed.”

He was wrong.

That month, the Israeli prime minister’s adviser on counterterrorism flew to Washington. Amiram Nir was in some ways a lot like his U.S. counterpart North. A controversial former television reporter, Nir was rather dashing. He held the same rank as North--lieutenant colonel--in the Israeli army reserve. He let some believe his glass eye was a badge from a past war, although in fact he lost the eye in a car accident.

What Nir did in Washington is not entirely clear. American newspapers have reported that he met with Casey, passing along a message that the Iranians were again ready to deal on the hostages, that one more arms shipment could turn the trick.

The Israeli version is very different. According to one senior Israeli official, Nir was told before his trip that Israel was willing to aid in Iran arms deals on a vastly diminished scale, but basically “wants out of the arms business” as a go-between to Iran. By that account, he left for the United States believing the operation was dead.

“Then Nir came back with a report (that) the Americans want to continue, and they accept that Israel should be out of the money and out of the arms,” that official said.

One U.S. official with some knowledge of the month’s events said Nir did indeed meet with Casey. But Israel, while seeing some benefit for itself in the U.S.-Iran link, did not necessarily pressure a reluctant Casey or Reagan to turn around and begin arms dealing again, he said.

He added cryptically: “That presumes that Reagan needed to be turned around.”