A Profoundly Disturbing Silence

By Richard Curtiss

"Because Israel's leaders are extremely worried about Israel's image in the affair, the fix is already in with some of Israel's most obedient servants in Congress...It's harder to turn off the news-hounds in full cry however, because if the lobby's journalistic collaborators drop out of the pack, their newspapers and networks get scooped."—the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January 1987

We were only half right when we wrote those words predicting a half-successful cover-up of Israel's seminal role in inspiring, implementing, and continuing the Reagan administration's arms sales to Iran. In fact, the cover-up both in Congress and the media of this basic truth about the greatest foreign policy scandal in American history has been awesomely successful and profoundly disturbing. Pundits proffer morals to be drawn from the blunder itself, the deception of Congress by the president, and the practical consequences now unfolding in the Persian Gulf, but no one cites the obvious lesson: George Washington was right when he warned against "passionate attachments" among nations.

When the scandal broke, Israel apologists predicted an administration attempt to duck responsibility for its own actions by "scapegoating" Israel. Pro-Israel leakers in the Department of State and the CIA turned on the faucets after each White House damage control meeting and, as a chastened president tripped over his tongue in clumsy efforts never to mention the word "Israel," the public almost lost sight of the fact that the reprieved "scapegoat" was, in fact, guilty.

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said that using arms sales to find Iranian moderates was an idea "almost too absurd to comment on." Weinberger also noted that the arms sales were kept alive by people "with their own agenda."

The report of the Tower Commission (former Senator John Tower, former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft) documented the Israeli origin and persistent Israeli role in keeping the initiative alive in a mismanaged White House as Secretaries Weinberger and Shultz and, belatedly, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane counseled against it. So did the Jan. 29, 1987, preliminary report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was issued then because conscientious members knew that, after the takeover of both houses of Congress by Democrats, there would be little congressional stomach for learning more about the Israeli role. However, although it was in the report texts, there was little mention of Israel in available news accounts.

What still worried the Israeli lobby, however, was the plan for live television and radio coverage of the hearings by the joint congressional investigative committee. Although it was chaired by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), one of Israel's most abject and groveling apologists, for safety's sake he visited Israel just before the hearings opened. Predictably, as the drama unfolded, Congress, in the words of syndicated columnist Robert Novak, "danced away" whenever it came across "Israel's footprints...all over this affair."

Congressional Committee Looks the Other Way

In some testimony Israel became "country no. 1" or "banana," but for those who had the time and interest to watch or listen to the hearings in their entirety, all of the evidence was there:

• A description of President Reagan complaining that by their precipitate action in sending arms to Iran without a real go-ahead from the US, the Israelis were "forcing my hand."

• Oliver North describing how Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, said by the CIA to be an Israeli agent, offered North in January 1986 a million dollar bribe to keep the sales going and, when that didn't work, hooked him by promising to divert some of the profits to the contras, the "neat idea" which North brought back to ruin Admiral Poindexter.

• Caspar Weinberger describing the origin in early 1985 of an idea "almost too absurd to comment on" of using arms shipments to find Iranian moderates, which, he said, was kept alive by "people with their own agenda," and warning, at a November 10, 1986, White House damage control meeting, that "we have given the Israelis and the Iranians the opportunity to blackmail us by reporting selectively bits and pieces of the total story."

• George Shultz, according to Donald Regan's notes, explaining at the same meeting that "Israel suckered us into this so we can't complain of their sales."

For the great majority of interested Americans who could not listen to or watch the hearings in their entirety, very little of this was revealed in press accounts or radio and television news programs. Whenever Israel was mentioned—because congressional investigators clumsily asked the wrong questions—twinkle-toed journalists nimbly danced away from the answers.

Queries by Sen. McClure, Rep. Brooks Not Pursued

There were exceptions in both congressional and journalistic categories. Senator James McClure (R-ID) doggedly cross-examined virtually every witness on the issues of Israeli involvement, which the staff lawyers had so skillfully skirted. His questions, and the answers, were revealing. But readers of the New York Times or Washington Post will never know it. Although both journals printed at least two pages of transcripts daily, McClure's contributions made two paragraphs in one of them once—and those questions and answers did not concern Israel. Even the news accounts in those two "newspapers of record" reflected virtually nothing of the courageous McClure attempts to get at the unanswered, and unasked, questions. Instead, committee member McClure became virtually a non-person. Even more astonishing was media omission of an astute question by Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) which, had it been pursued, might have built a strong circumstantial case that $1 million of the Iran arms sales proceeds, passed from Israel to Richard Secord to Syrian arms dealer Monzer Al-Kassar on August 30, 1985, may have financed the Oct. 7, 1985, Achille Lauro hijacking by Al-Kassar's associate, Muhammad Abul Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front.

When it came to the role of Israel, most journalists treated their fellow Americans like mushrooms, giving them all the ordure they wanted while keeping them in the dark. Exceptions included Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. His insistence on saying clearly what Israel had done must have taken courage because, under new editors, the Times seems even more monotonously supportive of the US-Israeli relationship than it was under A.M. Rosenthal. The Christian Science Monitor also overcame its occasional timidity of recent years to make some important points about the Israeli origins of the arms-for-hostages deal.

Top honors for candor, however, go to redoubtable columnist Robert Novak, who managed to insert some reference to Israel's responsibility into every discussion of the affair on NBC's "The McLaughlin Group" for several successive weeks. With a little help from the moderator, he was so successful that another panelist, New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, scoffed after one such reference to the Israeli origin of Iranscam, "We know all that Bob."

That was a reassuring admission from Kinsley, whose New Republic, owned by the fanatically pro-Israel Martin Peretz, has never let on to its readers that it knows anything like that. Perhaps, despite the abysmal failure of the mainstream American media to reveal how the most pro-Israel president in American history was used and then destroyed by a conspiracy involving top leaders of both the Labor Coalition and the Likud Bloc in the state he trusted, there now are many Americans who can also admit, "we know all that."

Richard Curtiss is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.