Authors: Hedrick Smith
North cut through the bureaucracy with his own special swagger. “I just saw the boss,” he would brag. In fact, by one official tally, he saw Reagan only about once a month, in briefings or National Security Council meetings. But even officials who discounted North’s chesty exaggeration accepted North’s authority as someone who spoke for the president. They sensed North was pursuing policies close to Reagan’s heart and for all they knew, with Reagan’s explicit approval.
North told congressional investigators that he wrote five proposals for President Reagan’s approval, outlining arms deals with Iran and diversion of funds to the
contras
.
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Three times, he said, he was given the go-ahead—he assumed by the president—in February, May, and October 1986. “I assumed that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved it,” North asserted. “Throughout I believed that the president had indeed authorized such activity.”
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Poindexter claimed never to have seen any of North’s proposals, even the one found in North’s files.
Nonetheless, Poindexter backed North’s contention that he had operated under orders, but Shultz and McFarlane disputed North. McFarlane said that North had gone too far and had misled him about how deeply North was engaged in aiding the
contras
. McFarlane denied agreeing to North’s “creation of a separate, clandestine, and far-reaching network of private operations that involved private profits and which was to be concealed even from other members of the executive branch.”
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Shultz said that Reagan had erupted in fury at learning that one of North’s agents had—with Poindexter’s and North’s assent—discussed with an Iranian contact the possible release of the Dawa terrorist prisoners in Kuwait, contrary to Reagan’s policy. The president, said Shultz, reacted to that news as if he had been “kicked in the belly.”
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The Power of the Secrecy Loop
Finally, the policy leverage of North and his NSC bosses is a lesson in the power of the secrecy loop—the power of classified information. To be involved in a “close-hold” covert operation is to take on an extra mystique of authority with bureaucratic peers. People in the know are assumed by other officials to have authority for what they are doing. The NSC staff, especially North, worked that angle to the hilt.
Clandestine operations are compartmented and officials regularly accept being shut out of sensitive information if they are not central players. If others know more, that alone is a badge of authority. The mentality of the covert operators is that protecting the operation is the highest need—above the law and other obligations. In the Reagan administration, moreover, paranoia about Congress caused some officials to avoid asking about things they might later be compelled to tell Congress.
“Agency people, and I would say here from the director on down, actively shunned information,” CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1987. “We didn’t want to know how the
contras
were being funded, in part, because we were concerned it would get us involved in crossing the line imposed by the law. And so we actively discouraged people from telling us things.” That instinct went for the State Department and the Pentagon, too; it gave North carte blanche.
Secrecy becomes an important pretext for shutting out policy dissenters. By their nature, covert operations cause sharp disagreements (to wit, Shultz and Weinberger on the Iranian operation). So, advocates of covert operations use the fear of leaks as a justification for
freezing out internal critics and maintaining their own exclusive channel to the president. That was Poindexter’s mind-set and his favorite litany.
It is a familiar rationale in the foreign policy game, used in some notable disasters. In 1961, under President Kennedy, the CIA and top military did not want the State Department informed about plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, for fear that State would object and block the operation. Kennedy learned the price of such self-serving secrecy. By the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, wary of the CIA and the generals, Kennedy drew on a wide range of civilian advisers. Clearly, the same secretive motives were at work in Reagan’s Iranian operation. Advocates kept critics in the dark—not only for security reasons but to avoid giving them ammunition to scotch the operation.
Given Shultz’s and Weinberger’s vehement opposition, many found it hard to understand why those two—as the senior cabinet officials for defense and foreign policy—could not dissuade the president. Most important, Reagan did not want to be deflected; his impulses were reinforced by Casey, Poindexter, McFarlane, Meese, and sometimes Bush and Regan.
Moreover, Shultz claimed he was crippled by secrecy. In the congressional hearings, Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde asked Shultz why he had never tried to stop the Iranian deals by threatening to resign. Shultz replied that he had never had the right information at the right time. Indeed, during the eighteen months of the Iranian operation, Reagan met only four times with his full national security circle on that issue. Each time, Shultz said, he had left with the impression that he and Weinberger had succeeded in halting the operation, only to discover long afterward that it was still going. After one session, on January 7, 1986, Shultz and Weinberger thought the operation was dead; ten days later, Reagan signed the go-ahead order. But Shultz did not learn of that order for ten months, because Poindexter kept Reagan’s order in his safe and never informed Shultz.
Repeatedly, cabinet officials learned more from outsiders than from colleagues or simply stumbled onto information. Weinberger discovered that—on NSC staff orders—the Pentagon’s electronic intelligence arm, the National Security Agency, cut him off the list for some Iranian intelligence. Infuriated, he ordered an aide to “remind the agency for whom they were working.”
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In May, 1986, Shultz was tipped off by the U.S. ambassador in London that a major British arms dealer had been asked for a $50 million line of credit to underwrite American arms sales to Iran. When Shultz inquired, Regan told him this “couldn’t be true or shouldn’t be true,” though plans were then
under way for another big arms deal. When North urged Poindexter in mid-May to have a top-level review of McFarlane’s Tehran trip, Poindexter replied: “I don’t want a meeting with RR, Shultz, and Weinberger.” Ignorance kept the two cabinet secretaries from objecting.
But in June and July 1986, Shultz was tipped off by senior State Department officials that the Iranian deals were going ahead, and he made no protest. Never did he and Weinberger approach Reagan jointly—and privately—to tell him they could no longer serve in good conscience so long as the Iranian operation continued. Perhaps their disagreements on other issues hampered such collaboration. More likely, both sensed what Reagan wanted to do, and they retreated into self-protective ignorance.
By pushing his NSC staff into running covert operations, President Reagan got part of what he wanted: The
contras
were kept afloat militarily until he could press Congress in 1986 to vote for overt military aid. But the Iranian operation blew up in Reagan’s face. It was both a policy and political catastrophe.
The presidency—not only Reagan’s presidency but future presidencies—paid a steep price for the deliberate duplicity of Reagan’s NSC staff and its contempt for the rule of law.
“The reason for not misleading Congress is a very practical one—it’s stupid!” Representative Dick Cheney scolded Poindexter. Cheney was no dove; he was former chief of staff under President Ford and an ardent Republican partisan of Reagan. “It’s self-defeating,” Cheney insisted, “because while it may in fact allow you to prevail in the problem of the moment, eventually you destroy the president’s credibility.”
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Another high cost was the legacy of institutional mistrust left by the Iran-
contra
operation and ventilated in the long Iran-
contra
hearings, which became not only a vehicle for Congress to redress the power balance vis-à-vis the presidency but a forum for generating reforms. Secretary Shultz urged that the NSC staff be barred from covert operations, that its size be reduced, and that the CIA’s intelligence-gathering function be separated from its policy advice and operations, because it was tempted to slant intelligence to fit its policy bias. The congressional investigating committee recommended new laws requiring presidents to approve all covert operations and inform Congress within forty-eight hours of such approval, and new controls to plug the escapes used by Reagan’s NSC staff—any covert operations funded by foreign countries and private individuals.
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Congress was outraged, as Congressman Ed Jenkins, a pro-
contra
Georgia Democrat, protested, that not a single elected official—president, vice president, or any member of Congress—knew about the
contra
fund diversion from Iran. House Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton lectured North on how he had undermined the basic philosophy of the Constitution. “If I understand our government correctly, no small group of people, no matter how important, no matter how well intentioned they may be, should be trusted to determine policy,” Hamilton admonished North. “Short cuts in the democratic process, and excessive secrecy in the conduct of government, are a sure road to policy failure,” he later said. “Policies formed by short cuts and excessive secrecy undermine a president’s ability to make informed decisions, lead to confusion in his administration, and deny him the opportunity to gain and sustain congressional and public support.”
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William Cohen, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, put the responsibility on President Reagan. “He in essence took policy underground by cutting out the State Department, for all practical purposes the Defense Department, and the CIA, and most specifically, Congress, and he placed the responsibility for this covert policy and its execution in the hands of a few individuals,” Cohen protested. “Unfortunately, the President turned to amateurs instead of listening to professionals and, in my judgment, he must accept the consequences.… The President cannot be held accountable for those acts of agents and employes who act well beyond the scope of their authority. But he surely is responsible when he sets up a mechanism that is specifically designed to eliminate the institutional checks and balances against rash or impetuous conduct in the affairs of the Executive Branch of government.”
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The congressional investigating committee placed ultimate responsibility with Reagan despite his claim of ignorance about the diversion of Iranian funds to the
contras
. The committee’s majority judgment said, “The President created or at least tolerated an environment where those who did not know of the diversion believed with certainty that they were carrying out the President’s policies.”
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Congressional criticism of Reagan framed a basic maxim of the power game: The gravest risk a president takes in clandestinely using his NSC staff to make and carry out policy is that this policy cannot survive wider scrutiny and win sustained political support, either from Congress or the public. That risk is magnified when the policies override acts of Congress or run counter to the administration’s declared policy. Reagan took that risk on the Iran-
contra
operation, bypassing Congress and internal dissenters, because he did not want to be deterred
from his policy goals. Reagan played the backdoor game because, like Poindexter, he “didn’t want any outside interference.” And the crashing collapse of his policy and his credibility was inevitable when his deceit was exposed.
Another Reagan Pattern: Short-Circuit
However serious the political fallout from the Iran-
contra
affair, top strategists and politicians felt that Reagan raised an even graver danger with his radical, pell-mell decisions at the Iceland summit meeting in October 1986. In his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan once again showed a penchant for short-circuit decision making, working with a small group and leaving key advisers in the dark. As on SDI and the Iranian operation, Reagan’s Iceland tactics betrayed his go-for-broke impulse: his tendency to improvise crucial policy on the spot, bypassing normal channels of advice that protect presidents on major decisions.
Reagan’s moves in Iceland alarmed West European leaders as well as thoughtful American politicians. Intelligent censure of Reagan came from Republicans such as Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, and former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, and from Democrats such as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin, among many others. These critics all favored workable arms control and reductions, but felt Reagan had thrown caution and realism to the winds because he was reaching too hard for an unprecedented breakthrough. They criticized him not only for what he proposed but for his impulsive style of decision-making.
Schlesinger called Reagan’s “carefree utopianism” at Reykjavík a “near disaster” for Western security because it could have led to the “end of the shield that has protected the West since 1945.”
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Kissinger and West European leaders echoed that fear. “In the long run, the events surrounding the Reykjavík summit may prove to have been more damaging than Iran,” he observed. “At Reykjavík—as on Iran—the President lacked a reasoned statement of options and consequences.”
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The alarm was touched off by Reagan’s unexpected and unprepared proposal to abolish all offensive ballistics missiles in ten years, a shocking shift from Reagan’s own offensive weapons buildup. It was a sudden, on-the-spot modification of a much looser notion that Reagan had raised in a letter to Gorbachev in July 1986. The new version promised in a decade to sweep away the deterrent force that had protected the
Western Alliance since World War II, without studying the cost of replacement weapons and of building up conventional armies to protect the West.