The Indiscreet Bones of the Iran-Contra Affair

By George Weller

It's safe to assume that Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-contra investigation gave top priority to protecting the president, the Republican Party, and its potential leaders. In this they were supported, with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, by Republican members of Congress. On the other side of the aisle, Democratic members were eager to reveal presidential complicity, Republican duplicity, and incompetence by members of the White House staff.

Working determinedly at cross purposes, adherents of each party have succeeded to some extent. The administration has been permanently crippled, but not yet fatally wounded, and the 1988 election still seems up for grabs.

From the beginning, however, key players in both parties have worked in tandem to obscure the seminal role of Israel, its Iranian-born agents, and its American supporters in the affair. Washington insiders knew, as George Shultz bluntly put it, that Israel "suckered" Reagan's men into the ongoing Israeli arms sales to Iran, and ensured that once enmeshed, the administration did not extricate itself. The goal of Israel's supporters was to keep that knowledge inside the beltway and out of the press.

To a large extent they have been successful. Despite carefully scripted efforts by Israel's American friends in both parties, out-of-bounds references to Israel's role kept popping up in the testimony. But American journalists provided the safety net. Few of these astonishing revelations found their way into the news columns. And virtually no newspaper or network felt obliged to comment on the significance of a nuclear-armed superpower turning over direction of its Middle East policy, and perhaps over world war or world peace, to trigger-happy Israel.

As originally scripted by ardently pro-Zionist Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Iran-contra was to be prevented from becoming an odorous Watergate by a three-phase extinction.

In phase one, an elite of three honorable ordinaries (the Tower Commission), would stake out the terrain in camera, doing its utmost to eliminate both the president and Meese from the top and the Israeli planners and guides from the inside. Reagan could be silent, and the Israelis would flee the scene like the Cubans of Watergate, innocent by absence.

In phase two, the parliamentary scene, both houses would "investigate" a mixed bag of witnesses. No Israelis would be called. Instead, they would be declared irrelevant. Congressman would avenge offended civic honor by finding scapegoats of middle stature, as predicted to Lt. Col. Oliver North by the CIA's William Casey. In so far as possible, public and TV scenes would be blocked out in rough rehearsal to cut down presidential and Israeli content.

Damage Control Sought for Public Hearings

Phase three, the punitive or legal closer, would be unavoidably public, purely American, austere, and boringly litigious. And the Israeli role so banished that AIPAC and Israel could devote themselves to the 1988 election.

This scenario would obviate the possibility of Ronald Reagan ever playing a role like that of Richard Nixon in the little-known final scene of Watergate, which was daringly disclosed by Henry Kissinger deep in the sentimental ending of his self-serving autobiography. Here Nixon, with the chopper whirring on the White House lawn, hands his secretary of state an astonishing, vengeful, final order to terminate all military assistance to Israel.

That was melodrama, but it happened. Kissinger accepted the command without demur, but then ignored it, surfacing it only at the time he wrote his memoirs. His purpose by then was not to reveal how convinced Nixon had become that Israel had crafted his downfall, but rather to demonstrate to American Jews that he, Kissinger, had always ignored Israeli suspicions and ingratitude to do the best he could to save Israel in spite of itself.

Committee Members Didn't Ask the Right Questions

If the Republican Iran-contra scenario was only partially successful in protecting the president, it was nearly totally so in the case of Israel. Particularly so because Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) chaired the investigative committee. Inouye received at least $8,500 from pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) in 1984 when he was not even running, and collected a whopping $48,825 from pro-Israel PACs for his 1986 re-election campaign. He has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel, and in talks to Jewish supporters has revealed that at one time he gave serious thought to converting from Christianity to Judaism. He tried hard not to reveal to the voters of Hawaii, however, that he made a secret trip to Israel just before he convened the Iran-contra hearings.

During the hearings, he stubbornly refused to demand, as he easily could have, that Israel furnish witnesses under immunity. Committee lawyers, and most of the senators, studiously avoided asking witnesses leading questions about Israel's role and, in the words of syndicated columnist Robert Novak, "danced away" whenever witnesses spontaneously brought up the subject. But a few of the congressmen whispered their congratulations to one persistent and conscientious Republican, Senator James A. McClure of Idaho, who repeatedly revealed the Israeli role through the spiny questions he addressed to each witness.

Lt. Col. North, as he predicted in his father-son talks with Casey, emerges as the likeliest candidate for punitive burning in phase three. The distinguished lawyer Leonard Garment—a pillar of the Republican establishment since he changed his registration to join the Nixon campaign staff in 1968 and a pillar of the Zionist establishment for at least as long—has probably saved his client, North's superior, Col. Robert McFarlane. Both colonels, whose inter-office messages prove that they tried in 1985 to shake off Israeli control—established their bona fides with Congress by long expostulations of admiration for the devotion of Israeli fighting men.

Despite his elaborate protestations of fealty to Israeli methods, however, North blasted the most holes in the curtain drawn over its many-faceted role in the Iran-contra scandal. It happened because, although he was predestined for martyrdom, North and his lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, had held out for "immunity". In doing so they escaped the secret rehearsals with the committee lawyers which turned phase two into something as spontaneous as a Moscow show trial in the era of Joseph Stalin. In the case of Robert McFarlane, however, whenever he seemed to veer toward the subject of the Israelis, he was successfully turned in some other direction, with the full cooperation of his lawyer, Garment.

North, having escaped the confines of the script from the beginning, insisted on confessing his guilt in a manner that stressed his patriotism and kept dragging in the Israelis. This insistence on speaking the unspeakable repeatedly embarrassed some of his congressional inquisitors, who are more comfortable with the anonymity with which they receive checks from 80 to 90 pro-Israel PACs, none of which are so gauche as to mention Israel, Judaism, Zionism, or even the Middle East in their cover names.

Investigators Tried to Ignore Nir

When Chief Counsel Arthur Liman, a scowling giant with a Harvard education and a Manhattan accent, tried to find out how much of the proceeds from Iran's arms purchases actually reach the contras, North smoothly guided his adversary to where he least wanted to go: into the elaborate Israeli apparatus supporting the operation to Amiram Nir, assistant to Shimon Peres, Israel's then prime minister. Until then, Nir had been almost non-existent in the records, although Oliver North and friends had twice elaborately disguised him as an American, "Mr. Miller," in order to smuggle him into meetings with Iranians, one of them in Tehran.

Casey, North reminded the investigators, had called the intrepid Nir's presence among the Americans flying to Iran "potentially a suicide mission." Added North: "I think the world of that young man!" North also expressed indignation that Peres' rival, Yitzhak Shamir, should have dared drop Nir on taking over the premiership: "If he has been fired because of my testimony, I regret it."

The more North praised his Israeli adviser and pal, the less the investigators wanted to hear on the subject. "There may have been differences of view and I articulated them to (Nir) and his superiors," North told the committee lawyers. "I think he knew we had to have our own sources of intelligence, that we couldn't be totally dependent on Israel. I don't think the government of Israel has any reluctance to understand that we needed to have our own sources inside Iran."

Whenever Liman went fishing for contra profits, wily North instantly led him deeper into Nir's arms. "I had many conversations with Mr. Nir about this problem," North testified to Liman. "I would also point out that through this entire endeavor, Mr. Nir insisted that we keep the prices up. Whether, as we assumed, that was because the Israelis did not want us underbidding what they were normally doing, or whether that was simply to generate more revenues, I do not know."

Even when Liman sought to draw a portrait of American profiteers defrauding helpless contras, North was able—not being rehearsed like other witnesses—to guide him back to the Iranian business partner of the Israelis, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who, NOrth pointed out, was said by William Casey and the CIA to be an agent of their Israeli equivalent, the Mossad.

Speaking of the exorbitant prices Iranians were paying for American weapons, North told Liman: "Some of us advocated letting Ghorbanifar deal with it himself. I would point out that although we had certainly run the charges up, Mr. Ghorbanifar had almost doubled it on top of that...It wasn't simply a matter of keeping it from the Congress. This was an operation that was to be kept secret across the board."

The media had the idea from the beginning that the Israeli presence was an embarrassing no-no. Very little of North's praise for Israel and virtually nothing of what Senator McClure asked about the Israeli role appeared in the mainstream press—especially America's two newspapers of record, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Again, Robert Novak put it accurately when, speaking of the press coverage of the hearings, he observed, "When you mention 'Israel' in this room, they all head for the hills."

The masterpiece of bold media omission, however, came from the New York Times when it broke the Tower Commission report on Feb. 27. Although the report was headline news, the editors managed to delete the word "Israel" from their coverage even more totally than they do from stories about where US foreign aid really goes. R.W. Apple, the Times bureau chief in Washington, summarized the references to Israel with a vague statement that behind all the famous American figures enmeshed in the arms sales to Iran there lurked "a shadowy network of Americans, Israelis and Iranians, some of whom were considered most unreliable by other senior US officials."

Later, when he realized how thoroughly his references to Israel had been purged from media coverage of the Tower Commission's report, former Senator Tower held a daring breakfast where he mourned the suppression of his references to the sweeping nature of the Israeli involvement. But the damage had been done and the pattern set for the Iran-contra hearings whitewash to follow.

George Weller was for many years a war and foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Chicago Daily News. The author of several books and plays, he received a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1943, the George Polk Memorial award in 1955, and a Neiman Fellowship in 1947-48.