TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028481.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14.5 KB | 291 lines

                                                                                EXCERPT, Page 67

COVER STORIES

The Unsinkable Ollie North


Finally unshackled by the special prosecutor, unburdened of
bitterness, the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal
returns as

By BARRETT SEAMAN


    The tradecraft was vintage North. Once a week, usually a
Monday, from June 1990 to last August, writer William Novak
would fly from Boston to Washington's Dulles International,
where he would take a ground-floor room at the airport Marriott
Hotel. North, traveling as "Mr. Smith," would arrive separately
by car, park out back and slip into Novak's room through the
back door. Using a Toshiba laptop computer, the pair would then
work through the day and into the evening on a document that
would remain secret until barely a week before it was published.
When room service delivered their evening meals, North, ever
clandestine, would hide in the bathroom.

    The idea of keeping the Smith Project top secret was
shared by the New York publisher HarperCollins, largely for the
promotional value; by North's lawyers, who were concerned that
research for the book might be subpoenaed by prosecutors; and
by North himself, who remains incorrigibly, unabashedly enamored
of cloak-and-dagger operations. The notorious Colonel North,
known by a variety of code names and aliases since his days in
Vietnam (Blue, Steelhammer and Mr. Goode, among them), would
later laugh that his publisher "did a helluva lot better at
keeping secrets than the U.S. government."

    The time for keeping secrets will never completely pass
for Oliver North. He was careful to have his book vetted by the
appropriate federal agencies and did not object to the few
exclusions sought by the Pentagon, CIA and NSC, most of them
potential clues to the identity of intelligence sources and
methods. But the time for blind loyalty is past.

    In Under Fire, North certainly fires back at those who
turned on him during the Iran-contra battle. His disdain for
Congress, the press and the special prosecutor's office is
almost palpable. He ends his thank-yous to those who helped him
produce the book with this curt reference to the special
prosecutor: "Larry Walsh was no help at all." George Shultz is
blistered for what North sees as a calculated distancing of
himself from policies only after their failure was assured. His
disillusionment with many he had thought to be comrades in the
global war against terrorism and communism is detailed. He
pieces together the disparate shards of evidence that
accumulated over the five years since the scandal broke into a
compelling mosaic that declares, in effect, "Yes, you dummy, of
course Ronald Reagan knew what was going on! How could he not?"

    There are those who will say North has been cunningly
selective in his reconstruction. Bill Casey, dead and gone, will
never be able to refute North's detailed account of his
management of Iran-contra's complexities, while sitting
officials like George Bush and Robert Gates get what amounts to
a free pass. North would challenge that. While phone records
revealed hundreds of contacts between his office and the CIA
director's, he would argue, Bush and Gates got off clean because
he, North, had no direct knowledge of any incriminating
involvement they might have had. Devoid of any other evidence,
that judgment will probably prevail.

    Some selectivity is inevitable. But Under Fire is not a
mere self-serving, finger-pointing exercise, as other personal
accounts of the scandal have been. Iran-contra trivia buffs may
have a tough time finding serious flaws in this text. North is
even more open about his own role than he was in the famous
hearings or in his trial, but without the chin-jutting defiance
he displayed before the Joint Committee in 1987. He admits to
misleading members of Congress back in 1986, when Lee Hamilton
of Indiana and others came to the White House to find out
whether North was violating the Boland amendments by directly
supporting the Nicaraguan resistance. He admits he should have
realized, as he now reluctantly does, that the arms-for-hostages
enterprise was a foolhardy and counterproductive policy. He
describes in poignant detail the dark depression he endured in
1974-75 when his wife left him, leading him to check into the
psychiatric unit of the Bethesda Naval hospital.

    Co-conspirator Novak, who previously wrote autobiographies
with Lee Iacocca, Tip O'Neill, Nancy Reagan and Sydney Biddle
Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, admits that he initially resisted
working with North. "When this book was first proposed to me,
I turned it down," says the writer. "I expected he was not only
rigid but perhaps even an extremist to boot." But Novak was won
over almost immediately. "Instead of the automaton I had
anticipated," he says, North turned out to be "warm, extremely
bright, well read, spontaneous and often very funny."

    North has been largely out of sight, out of mind since the
heyday of the Iran-contra hearings. And there will be legions
who will decry his return to the national stage. Those who blame
him for the foreign policy disaster that nearly brought down
the Reagan presidency, and those who couldn't abide either
Reagan or the contras, will probably not change their mind. But
the Ollie North who returns is an intriguing blend of the old
and the new. Unchanged is the corny, small-town, voice-cracking
patriotism; the deep and apparently genuine religiosity that
regularly peeks out from under the sleeve; the inescapable,
occasionally overbearing, self-confidence. But the new Ollie is
also softer at the edges, older, a bit wiser and less naive, and
as of a month ago, for the first time in five years, free.

    When he learned in mid-September that Lawrence Walsh had
reluctantly but finally dropped his case, North told Jim Dobson,
an old friend and counselor, "It was as if I'd been swimming
across a fast-moving stream with a big millstone tied to me --
and suddenly someone came along and cut the rope. I can breathe
again."

    Earlier this month, just after he turned 48 on Oct. 7,
North went to regain his citizenship by registering to vote in
Virginia. The form demanded to know if he had ever been
convicted of a felony. North had to call his lawyer and now
close friend, Brendan Sullivan, to ask how he should reply.
Sullivan advised his client to mark no. The Marine Corps, from
which North felt compelled to retire when he was indicted, has
now restored his full pension. After months of staring painfully
at court documents that read The United States v. Oliver L.
North, a contradiction of everything he had ever thought about
himself, the ordeal was over, just as if it had never happened.

    But it did happen, and it both tempered and scarred North.
During the ordeal, he built around himself a defense mechanism
-- literally and figuratively. Sullivan and his team of lawyers
at Williams & Connolly protected North from the outside world
and instilled in him an intellectual discipline that comfortably
matched his Marine Corps habits. His old Naval Academy
classmates started a defense fund, a trust that has managed
through contributions from around the country to pay for most
of the millions in legal and security bills that have piled up
since 1986.

    His circle tightened to his family, his lawyers and those
who supported him and his causes -- among them the many
denizens of the grass-roots right who gave money to the contras
in the swashbuckling days of Richard Secord and Spitz Channell.

    Now there was a new element to their affinity for North.
"Ollie is popular among people who see him as a guy who got
slammed by Big Government," says Mark Merritt, an official at
the Freedom Alliance, North's not-for-profit foundation that
espouses "traditional American values" and performs such good
deeds as shipping $2.7 million worth of gift packages to Desert
Storm troops last year. The Freedom Alliance also spreads the
political gospel through a monthly newsletter and daily radio
broadcasts by Ollie that are syndicated to some 300 stations
around the country. In addition, North's North American
Partnership does business on his and wife Betsy's behalf, taking
in the proceeds of his book, contributions of friends and
sympathizers, speaking fees (up to $25,000), and earnings from
a weekly column that reaches more than a dozen newspapers
ranging from the Dallas Times-Herald to the Crockett Times of
Alamo, Tenn.

    Ollie's latest commercial enterprise, unlike the famous
one run by Secord and Hakim, is straightforward and aboveboard.
Guardian Technologies International, of which North is
chairman, manufactures bulletproof vests made from Spectra, a
lightweight fiber that North touts as a generation beyond
Kevlar. Guardian did about $1 million in sales last year,
largely to law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. and overseas.
North is aiming to double that this year, using innovative
marketing tools like Armor Overnight, which guarantees delivery
by noon the next day for those who fax their vest size and Visa
account number. The company even offers protective vests for
police dogs.

    The new North, much like the old, is a natural salesman.
He buttonholes police chiefs along the after-dinner speaking
circuit, hawking his product as energetically as he does his
political views. If Ollie had gone into the insurance business,
he surely would have been named to the Million Dollar Club or
the President's Circle his first month out.

    But instead of going into insurance, North became a Marine
-- and by his own appraisal as well as others', "a damned good
one." From there he went to the National Security Council,
where he performed audacious deeds of derring can-do. Had Ollie
North not existed, Tom Clancy would surely have invented him.

    With one big difference: a Clancy character would probably
not have got into the messes North did in the Reagan White
House. Nor would he have faced the dismal choices between "bad
and worse" that North confronted, instead of the
straightforward "right and wrong" choices he expected out of
life. In retrospect, he tells friends, he realizes that the
simple life of a career Marine left him ill-prepared to "wake
up and find myself in Machiavelli's palace."

    What North is less inclined to admit is that his personal
ambitions may have blinded him to the pitfalls. His own account
supports the somewhat mushy notion that he attached himself to
a series of father figures -- Reagan, McFarlane, Casey,
Poindexter -- and sought to please them with little regard for
their flaws or hidden motives. Only through the shock of what
amounts to betrayal and the forced re-examination of events has
North come to see his mistakes. "It was cathartic in many
respects," he told one confidant.

    The judicial process, the hearings, the hounding by the
press, his trial and conviction -- a siege relieved only five
weeks ago by his "exoneration" -- placed heavy burdens on North
and his family. Still, he found himself better prepared than
many of his fellow defendants. "I had enormous resources that
these other people did not have," North has said. "Spiritual
resources, financial resources, legal resources, physical
resources -- I was in damned good shape when I started this
process."

    Despite the signals, North believed well into that process
that truth was the sole object of the Iran-contra probe. "I had
it all wrong," he confided to a friend recently. "I thought the
purpose was to get to the bottom of all this."

    Neither the hearings nor the subsequent trials have got to
the bottom of Iran-contra. And North's "smoking gun in the
closet" tape, while intriguing, does not resolve the question
of Reagan's guilt or innocence. Even Walsh's office, to which
North and his team are naturally loath to give any credit, tried
to follow up on the evidence, comparing voice tapes of a handful
of logical candidates with those of the two men overheard on the
Citibank phone system. But so far, no match has been made. And
even if it were, the evidence would probably not stand up in a
court of law.

    North avoids saying so directly in the book, but his
remarks to others suggest that he probably would never have
pursued this trail leading to Reagan were it not for the things
Reagan has said -- and not said -- about him since he was fired.
North dismisses as bogus Reagan's claim that his "national hero"
label was meant to refer only to the retired Marine's Vietnam
record. And the former President's failure to stand up for John
Poindexter at the trial of North's former boss last year was in
North's eyes a travesty. He thinks Reagan, by then out of
office, should have taken the rap for Poindexter and stood up
for what he believed in. "Instead," North complained recently,
"he leaves as a legacy this videotape of a doddering old man.
It's unbelievable!" Reagan, traveling abroad last week, was
"unavailable for comment" on North's allegations, according to
a spokesperson for the former President.

    Now the rehabilitated North is back taking his own stand.
In southwestern Virginia last week, where he stumped for G.O.P.
candidates for state offices, he charmed crowds with a mixture
of self-deprecating humor, mother-and-flag sentimentality and a
keen ear for local issues. He is as natural a politician as he
is a salesman, instinctively playing to his audiences and
parrying the protests of the liberal activists who often show
up.

    While the stock portion of his speeches touts predictable
right-wing values, some of the specifics do not fit the
cookie-cutter conservative label. North would set limits on use
of the death penalty, promote public schools and enact a 24-hour
delay on gun purchases. But when asked whether he will run for
office -- Republicans in both Virginia and North Carolina are
wooing him -- the Colonel has a standard answer: "I'm running
for husband and father first," he'll say. "There are five votes
in the family, and I haven't got them wrapped up yet." Yet when
pressed by friends or party solicitors, North will more
seriously say that first he wants to get his various enterprises
up and running and his life back in order. When pressed further,
as he sometimes is, he will point out that running for national
office would just put him right back into "that sad swamp along
the Potomac."

    "It'll take me a while to recover from that," he confessed
to someone recently.

    But probably not that long.