Audition (81 page)

It was all very tidy at the beginning. We scheduled the interview for a Wednesday afternoon in Khashoggi’s apartment, which would give me and my producer, Martin Clancy, ample time to edit the piece for Thursday night’s
20/20
broadcast. But the night before the interview Khashoggi phoned from Las Vegas to announce a change in plan.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to do the interview in New York,” he said. “I’m going to Monte Carlo and I’ll take you with me on my plane. We’ll do the interview there.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I’ll be bringing my producer and a crew of six.”

“Good,” Khashoggi replied firmly.

Merv then weighed in. “I don’t like the sound of the whole thing,” he said. “I’m going with you.” And the crew became seven.

Very early Thursday morning, 3:00 a.m., in fact, we took off from Newark Airport aboard Khashoggi’s private DC-8. The plane turned out to be an airborne version of his yacht. The seats were covered in cream-colored chamois and silk, the seat belts had gold-plated buckles, and Khashoggi’s private chef served us breakfast on china monogrammed with the initials
AK
in gold.

The first part of our interview with Khashoggi took place on the plane on December 11. (We planned to do the second part at his apartment in Monte Carlo.) We had no time to spare because Martin and I intended to feed the complete interview by satellite back to New York for the 10:00 p.m. broadcast that night. And so the explosive interview began at thirty thousand feet, the jet engines whistling in the background, with Khashoggi dressed in a caftan.

For the first time a face was put on the arms-for-hostages scandal rocking the Reagan administration. An Arab face with an Arab accent describing the clandestine deal between Robert McFarlane and “moderates” in the Iranian regime trying to get the U.S. hostages in Lebanon released in exchange for U.S. weapons (Iran was six years into a bloody war with Iraq). He also confirmed the establishment of a Swiss bank account to shelter some thirty million dollars received from the Iranians for the weapons. The account was controlled by top national security officials in the Reagan administration, who were siphoning the money off to illegally fund the Contra rebels fighting the Communist regime in Nicaragua.

I was totally amazed by what I was hearing. But there was still a missing piece. The actual arms dealer was an Iranian businessman named Manucher Ghorbanifar, a shadowy figure who operated so far below the radar no one even had a photograph of him.

“I’m taking you to see Ghorbanifar,” Khashoggi said when we landed in Nice, France.

Now I was really flabbergasted. The interview with Khashoggi was a coup in itself, but Ghorbanifar, too? The man whose telephone conversation I’d listened in on in the bathroom at La Costa? The man with the “toes”? Merv looked quite nervous about the whole thing but without skipping a beat we immediately boarded Khashoggi’s waiting helicopters (we needed two to transport us all) and flew to Monte Carlo.

Ghorbanifar was startled, to say the least, when he arrived at Khashoggi’s apartment. He was expecting to see Khashoggi privately, not an American television crew. Heaven knows what power Khashoggi held over Ghorbanifar, but basically he told the arms dealer to do the interview, and Ghorbanifar immediately sat down with me, sweating profusely.

His motive behind everything was no more complicated than making a sound business deal, he told me. New weapons for Iran would help secure a victory over Iraq and a potentially profitable peace from which both he and his business partner, Khashoggi, would benefit. “Two billion a day,” he projected. According to Ghorbanifar, the weapons-for-hostages deal had worked. He claimed he had negotiated the release of three hostages, including Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian minister. (What he did not mention were the new hostages being captured as replacements.) With this news the interview came to a close.

Martin and I raced back to our hotel to edit the interviews. He edited Ghorbanifar and I edited the Khashoggi interview we had done on the plane. We’d been up for more than twenty-four hours by then and were punch-drunk with exhaustion. We finally finished at 3:00 a.m. Monte Carlo time, which made it 9:00 p.m. in New York. We had to wake up a grumpy French technician to transmit the interview, the final portion of which arrived fifteen minutes before
20/20
went on the air. There was obviously no time for ABC to promote it or even preview it. They just ran it cold. And it made a huge splash.

Ted Koppel picked up the interviews on
Nightline
, and the story made all the newspapers the next day. I was sleeping it off in Monte Carlo. Merv was wonderful. When I finally came to, he proposed spending a romantic weekend in Paris. A lovely idea that never happened.

Khashoggi called and said in a rushed voice that Ghorbanifar was coming to his apartment at 2:00 p.m. with an urgent message that he wanted me to deliver to President Reagan. We must meet with him, he said. Our flight to Paris wasn’t until the late afternoon, so I agreed. I assumed the message would be in a sealed envelope I could easily get to the White House.

It wasn’t.

And this is where I got into deep trouble.

Ghorbanifar, very composed without a television camera on him and not sweating at all, opened the conversation with a startling projection: “I am going to tell you everything because I might be killed and someone must know the true story,” he said. “I know your president is being pressured not to have anything to do with Iran, but I want you to tell him that he must keep the door open. If he does I believe I can have another hostage released on Christmas Eve, maybe even two. As this is a matter of life and death, no one except the president must know about it. If the story gets out, the hostages will not be released, I will be killed, and my family in Iran will be killed also.”

I swallowed hard and all but choked. I couldn’t believe it. Ghorbanifar was going to tell me the entire story of his role in Iran-Contra, or Irangate as some were calling it. This big scoop was falling into my lap.

I got out the little notebook I always carry to take notes, and Ghorbanifar launched into an endless story of high-level deceit and betrayal. Part of it concerned his ally, Ayatollah Montazeri, a moderate, who was among those in line to succeed the ailing Ayatollah Khomeini (who had led the Islamic revolution against the shah). Unlike the West-hating Khomeini, Montazeri wanted to restore relations with America and the West. The arms deal, which had been struck with McFarlane and Lt. Col. Oliver North, then an aide to the National Security Council, would have given the pro-Western Montazeri enough prestige to cement the succession. Three or four arms shipments had taken place, but some included faulty parts. The deal had temporarily fallen apart, Montazeri had been discredited, and Ghorbanifar’s own life was in danger. Adding insult to injury, when the shipments resumed, the Americans tried to cut Ghorbanifar out of the deal. It was then, he said, and only to protect himself, that he had personally given the sensational story of the arms-for-hostages scheme to the Lebanese newspaper.

These tidy paragraphs do not represent in the slightest the time it took Ghorbanifar to tell me the saga. (At one point I thought, “What the hell am I doing here?”) I filled my little notebook, then moved on to Khashoggi’s stationery. When my pen went dry, I began using pencils. When Khashoggi’s stationery ran out, I started writing on whatever scrap of paper I could find. And still Ghorbanifar went on.

Merv sat there silently next to me as afternoon became evening and evening became night, getting up only occasionally to cancel plane reservations to Paris and make new ones. Finally, finally, Ghorbanifar finished telling his story. It was 4:00 a.m. By that time Merv and I were so exhausted we’d given up any thought about spending a romantic weekend together. We checked back into the hotel and slept for an entire day.

I pieced together my notes as best I could when we got back to New York. What a fantastic story, but how much of it could I use? Ghorbanifar had made it clear that if I publicly revealed certain portions of it or identified him as my source, the hostages would not be released and he and his family might be killed. I understood now why Khashoggi had sent me Fred Friendly’s lecture. How much of what Ghorbanifar had told me did I have to tell ABC? And what about the message Ghorbanifar wanted me to deliver to the president: Resist pressure. Keep talking to Iran. Send more arms. The hostages will not be released if you don’t. There are other lives at stake.

I knew the rules: a reporter is not supposed to become personally involved in a story and certainly not be allowed to act as a messenger. But, like it or not, I
was
involved. I didn’t want anybody’s blood on my hands, so I decided to honor Ghorbanifar’s demand for secrecy. But how to get to Reagan? Though I’d interviewed the president several times, I really had no personal relationship with him. I couldn’t just call the White House and say, “I’d like to talk to the president, please. I have an important message for him.” Well, I suppose I could have, but I was afraid that I’d have to speak to six aides along the way who would want to know what this was all about.

And then it came to me. Nancy Reagan could be the conduit to her husband. I couldn’t call Mrs. Reagan cold at the White House, but we had a mutual friend, Jerry Zipkin, who was very close to her. They talked, I heard, almost daily. I telephoned Jerry. “I know this sounds odd, Jerry, but I need to talk to Mrs. Reagan. I’m involved in a very serious matter, and I need to talk to her as soon as possible. Can you telephone her at the White House and ask her to call me?”

An hour later Mrs. Reagan called. “I’m in a very strange position,” I said to her. “I have some important information for the president.” I told her the entire story, concluding: “I have no idea how accurate this material is, but I was asked to make sure the president got it himself.” While we were speaking I heard a click on the line. “Ronnie? Is that you?” Mrs. Reagan asked. It was, so I repeated the story to the president. He then gave me specific instructions about how to send my written material to him at the White House. I followed those instructions, and that was the last I heard from anyone in the administration.

A week or so later Merv and I took my daughter to Hawaii for Christmas. On Christmas Eve I sat in front of the television set waiting for a news bulletin announcing that a hostage had been released. There was no bulletin. Someone, somewhere along the clandestine line, had failed. Was it our side? Was it Ghorbanifar? I never knew and could not find out.

I thought I was through with my part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Two investigations had been launched. One a congressional committee headed by former Senator John Tower, and another by a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. But a month or so after I’d spoken to Reagan, a story appeared in the
New York Times
about the release of unspecified documents pertaining to the arms-for-hostages deal. Concerned that my name might eventually surface, I sat down with Roone Arledge and Dick Wald, the senior vice president of ABC News, and went through the entire saga from beginning to end. I gave them a copy of the memo I’d relayed to the White House about Ghorbanifar, that he’d said his life was in danger, that a hostage might be released if Reagan acted on his message. Roone and Dick decided I would report key elements of the story on the evening newscast, without naming Ghorbanifar as the source. So I did, enabling ABC to scoop the other networks on the story.

That would have been that had the
Wall Street Journal
not picked up the story again in March 1987, this time naming me. Titled “Iran Arms Dealer Used Barbara Walters to Secretly Pass on a Message to Reagan,” the story reported that my memo about Ghorbanifar had been circulated among the editors at ABC News and that I had sent the memo to the White House “without prior approval from the network.”

The phone rang.

“Please come to my office,” came the cold voice of David Burke, an ABC News executive who was more or less the official watchdog for policy and procedure. “We’d like to talk to you.”

It was not a pleasant meeting.

Burke was stern and angry. In front of a very uncomfortable Dick Wald, Burke told me the network was going to publicly reprimand me for violating ABC News regulations that prohibit any employee of the news division from giving material to any government agency without the prior knowledge and approval of ABC News. The only exceptions were life-and-death situations, in which correspondents were allowed to use their own judgment.

I was stunned. “As far as I’m concerned, David, this was a matter of life and death and I did use my best judgment,” I said. “Why don’t I just explain to the press that Ghorbanifar told me his life was in danger and that, if Reagan acted, a hostage was supposed to be released.”

But he would have none of it. I was publicly reprimanded.

“Barbara Walters’ transmission of her information to the president was in violation of a literal interpretation of news policy,” read, in part, ABC’s statement to the press. “ABC News policy expressly limits journalistic cooperation with government agencies unless threats to human life are involved. Miss Walters believed that to be the case.”

Just about every newspaper and magazine in the country carried the story. “Barbara Walters Gave Reagan Papers on Iran,” headlined the
New York Times
, as if I’d been a major participant in the Iran-Contra affair. “Walters as Courier Criticized,” chimed in the
Los Angeles Times
, while a slightly kinder
USA Today
headlined its story: “Walters Takes Heat for Iran Memo to Reagan.” A cartoon in the
New York Post
even had Ayatollah Khomeini sitting behind a desk over the words: “Good evening and welcome to
20/20.
Barbara Walters and I have swapped jobs.”

In retrospect I should have showed Roone and Dick and also David Burke the Ghorbanifar material sooner. At the time I was worried that somehow it would leak out, possibly leading to Ghorbanifar’s death. But I still would have sent that report to the White House in the hope that a hostage would be released.