TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capcon.1

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                                                                                May 25, 1987

IRAN-CONTRA

The Good Soldier


Unwittingly, McFarlane paints a picture of a hands-on President


As the Iran-contra scandal spreads in ever wider circles, a
disturbing image of Ronald Reagan is taking shape. Most
accounts of Iranscam, notably the damning Tower commission
report, depict the President as a wooly-minded, out-of-touch
leader who permitted a band of overzealous aides to conduct
secret and possibly illegal operations right under his nose.
The White House has done little to dispute that
characterization, and for good reason:  an inattentive Reagan
who knew little of the weapons sales to Iran and nothing about
the illicit funneling of arms to the Nicaraguan rebels seemed
better than a President who played an active role in the affair.

But last week a different picture of Reagan began to emerge.
The new portrait depicts the President as a hands-on boss who
thoroughly involved himself in the contra crusade. In this
version, Reagan ordered his staff to keep the rebels' cause
alive after Congress banned U.S. support in 1984 and 1985. He
carefully monitored the contras' fortunes, asking questions
about troop strength, supplies, battlefield activities. He
welcomed contributions from one foreign leader and lobbied
another head of state to expedite an arms shipment.

The revised picture of the President was drawn by Robert
McFarlane last week during four days of sometimes anguished
public testimony before the House and Senate Select Committees
investigating Iranscam. McFarlane, who served as Reagan's
National Security Adviser from October 1983 to December 1985,
is perhaps the most poignant figure in the scandal. Last
February, depressed about his role in the political melodrama,
he attempted suicide by swallowing an overdose of Valium.

Under the glare of television lights in the Rayburn Office
Building, the dour former Marine described himself as a loyal
public servant who became an architect of policies he did not
always believe in. Yet time and again he defended the President
while blaming himself for the questionable efforts to support
the contras. "President Reagan's motives and direction to his
subordinates throughout this enterprise has always been in
keeping with the law and national values,"  McFarlane asserted.
"I don't think he is at fault here, and if anybody is, I am."

While McFarlane came across as a good soldier, his earnest
admissions did not wash with Indiana Democrat Lee Hamilton,
chairman of the House panel. "I appreciate your willingness to
shoulder great responsibility," Hamilton told the witness. "But
I cannot accept that answer...You cannot, it seems to me, accept
responsibility for mistakes, ad admirable as that may be, and
thereby absolve the President of responsibility."  Outside the
hearings, Democratic Senator George Mitchell of Maine was more
colorful. "McFarlane's testimony of the President's personal
involvement," he said, "does tend to indicate that the water is
lapping at the walls of the sand castle."

Indeed, McFarlane's account indicated that he molded contra
policy to comply with the President's orders. The former
National Security Adviser said that in 1983 Reagan approved a
secret CIA plan for mining Nicaraguan harbors to prevent arms
and supplies from reaching the Sandinista regime. When Congress
learned of the operation in 1984, it passed the Boland
amendment, cutting off U.S. assistance to the anti-Sandinista
rebels. Yet the President, McFarlane testified, directed his
aides to continue helping the contras "hold body and soul
together." Said McFarlane: "We were to demonstrate, by our
simple conviction and persuasion, that he intended to reverse
the course of the Congress and get the funding renewed."

Reagan was briefed "dozens" of times on the contras'
on-the-ground progress and on the Administration's efforts to
sustain the movement. McFarlane said. Occasionally, the
President became directly involved in providing assistance:
when Honduras blocked a shipment of arms to the contras in
October 1985, McFarlane said, Reagan contacted Honduran
President Robert Suazo Cordova and persuaded him to release the
weapons.

Reagan's activism in favor of the contras raised questions about
his role in soliciting funds from third countries, an indirect
form of support that Congress explicitly prohibited in October
1985. In a curious charade designed to avoid embarrassing
nations that are friendly to the U.S., it was agreed that they
would be cited only by a number. But it was clear the "Country
2" was Saudi Arabia, which had, at McFarlane's prompting,
contributed $1 million a month to the contras since May 1984.
In February 1985, the President held a meeting in the Oval
Office with King Fahd. Just a few days after the visit, the
Saudis told McFarlane they would double their monthly donation.
When Reagan was informed, McFarlane testified, his reaction was
one of "gratitude and satisfaction--not of surprise." In all,
said McFarlane, the Saudis contributed $32 million to the
contras in 1984 and 1985.

Reagan last week admitted discussing contra funding with Fahd
but stressed that he was not the one who raised the subject.
"My diary shows that I never brought it up," he declared. "It
shows that the King, before he left, told me that he was going
to increase the aid."

At week's end the President revised his argument, contending
that even if he had solicited funds from Saudi Arabia, the law
did not prohibit him from doing so. "There is nothing in the
Boland amendment that could keep me from asking other people to
help [the contras]," Reagan told a group of newsmagazine
reports. "The only restriction on me was that I could not
approve the sending of help myself out of our budget money."

Reagan was forced to rebut another startling disclosure by
McFarlane, in this case an apparent contradiction of Reagan's
oft-stated policy of refusing to pay ransom to terrorists.
McFarlane claimed that in 1985 the President authorized a plan
to pay $2 million provided by Texas Billionaire H. Ross Perot
for the release of two American hostages in Beirut. "I don't
recall anything ever being suggested in the line of ransom,"
Reagan said last week. But, he added, he may have discussed
paying foreign agents who could help win the release of American
captives. Said Reagan:  "I've never thought of that as ransom."

While the testimony by McFarlane tainted the President, it was
most incriminating to himself. Though he often tried to obscure
his statements with circumlocutions, it became evident that
McFarlane, who testified without immunity, was making himself
more vulnerable to prosecution. Under questioning by House
Counsel John Nields, McFarlane admitted misleading two
congressional committees last summer when he testified that he
did not know the full extent of Saudi Arabia's contributions to
the contras. "I was trying to use some tortured
language--inappropriately, I think," he said. "It wasn't a full
account."

He confessed that in the summer of 1985 he allowed his deputy,
Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, to alter NSC documents to conceal
from congressional investigators evidence of possible violations
of the Boland amendment. Implicating himself in a possible
cover-up, McFarlane told the panel that he had contributed to
a false chronology of events prepared for use by the President
and CIA Director William Casey. Moreover, McFarlane
acknowledged that North told him last November that he was
planning to throw a "shredding party" to get rid of documents
outlining the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to the
contras.

Last week's hearings concluded with further evidence of
Administration support for the contras when Robert Owen, 32, a
former Senate aide who worked as a courier for North, described
meeting with contras in several secret rendezvous and handing
them envelopes full of cash, as well as maps and photographs
prepared by the CIA or the Pentagon. Owen told of one incident
in which North gave him $6,000 or $7,000 worth of traveler's
checks and instructed him to cash them and pass the money on to
a rebel leader. Owen claimed that a White House administrative
aide, Johnathan Miller, helped him cash the checks. A few hours
after the testimony, Miller resigned.

McFarlane and Owen stressed that the Administration's actions
had a noble purpose:  to rescue Nicaragua from a repressive
Marxist cabal and thus prevent the spread of Communism to the
U.S. mainland. To investigators on Capitol Hill, however, the
issue was not the Administration's policy toward Nicaragua but
its seeming contempt for Congress. "If the National Security
Adviser of the President of the U.S. and other high officials
do not provide complete and accurate answers to the Congress,
what can we do?"  Chairman Hamilton asked McFarlane last week.
"How can our system of government work?" Just as central as
the fate of Central America, Hamilton was saying, was the
attitude of an Administration that thought it could conduct
foreign policy in defiance of Congress.

--By Jacob V. Lamar Jr. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington.