THE PARDONS; Birth of a Scandal and Mysteries of Its

Parentage
nytimes.com/1992/12/25/us/the-pardons-birth-of-a-scandal-and-mysteries-of-its-parentage.html

December 25, 1992

Some say the scandal began sometime in the mid-1980's, as President Ronald Reagan
grew so emotionally involved with the plight of the American hostages held in Lebanon
that he began letting his aides know he would pay almost any price to see them freed.

Others date the beginning of the Iran-contra affair more precisely, saying it started in a
London row house near Hyde Park on Dec. 8, 1985. There, several American officials and
operatives running the covert sales of arms to Iran went over the books and discovered
they had about $750,000 left over from the last transaction.

As Richard Secord, a retired Air Force major general who was the chief operative, told it
later, he asked Oliver L. North, a Marine lieutenant colonel who worked in the White
House, what should be done with that money, and the National Security Council aide
tossed off an answer.

"Use it to support the contras," he is reported to have said with a flip of the hand.
Disclosure of Covert Deals

However the beginning is dated, the beginning of the end came in October 1986, when an
angry, jealous Iranian Government official arranged to have more than five million
leaflets printed giving a lurid, tendentious account of his political competitors' agreement
to buy arms from "the Great Satan."

The leaflets were plastered on every available wall space at Teheran University, and within
days an obscure Lebanese weekly magazine called Al-Shiraa had printed an article about
the covert program. With that, one of the nation's longest-running public scandals was
born, a confused political mystery that seemed to have no end.

Just over five years ago, the special Senate and House committees ended their joint
investigation of the covert program to sell arms to Iran and divert proceeds to Nicaraguan
rebels. Their final report concluded that "pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy"
had led the Reagan White House into widespread "deception and disdain for the law."

Illegality, as it turned out, was in the eye of the beholder. In the end, nearly everyone
agreed that the sale of arms to Iran was bad policy, but hardly anyone argued that it was
against the law. Crimes and Loopholes

Prosecutors and partisans did say it was a crime to provide aid to the Nicaraguan rebels.
Congress had passed bills -- named after their sponsor, Representative Edward P. Boland,
a Massachusetts Democrat -- intended to make such aid illegal. The first Boland
Amendent was passed exactly 10 years ago.

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But Reagan Administration officials convinced themselves that each amendment had
loopholes, and almost immediately they began slipping their covert aid programs right
through them. The loophole argument was tenuous at best, but in fact no one was ever
prosecuted specifically for violating those laws.

Most of the prosecutions attempted and carried out, including those involving the men
President Bush pardoned today, were on peripheral charges like perjury, obstruction of
justice and withholding information from Congress.

When Congress ended its investigation in November 1987, the committees concluded that
"all the facts may never be known." Unanswered Questions

Among the large remaining questions were: Did President Reagan know what his aides
were doing? And was Vice President George Bush involved or unaware?

From the beginning, Mr. Bush said he was "out-of-the loop," largely unaware of the arms-
for-hostage deal. But an accumulation of evidence over the last four years, including new
information released on the eve of the election last month, suggested that Mr. Bush
probably knew far more than he has been willing to admit.

When Lawrence E. Walsh, the special prosecutor, got word of the pardons today, he
seemed to underscore this point when he said there had been "a disturbing pattern of
deception and obstruction that permeated the highest levels of the Reagan and Bush
Administrations.

"The Iran-contra cover-up, which has been continued for more than six years, has now
been completed with the pardon of Caspar Weinberger." What Is Known

Whatever the truth of Mr. Walsh's comment, 61 months after the Congressional
committees concluded that the answers to many questions might never be known, their
conclusion still holds. But here in broad outline is what is known:

President Reagan came to office in large part because President Jimmy Carter had
seemed impotent, unable to free American hostages in Iran. With that as background, Mr.
Reagan grew obsessed, some aides said, with finding a way to free American hostages in
Lebanon. He did not want to be accused of abandoning them.

He held similar feelings for the Nicaraguan contras, a rebel force his Administration had
created to harass and undermine the Marxist Sandinista Government that had seized
power in Managua in 1979. After Congress passed the Boland Amendments cutting off
military aid to the contras, Mr. Reagan refused to let them go. He did not want to be
accused of abandoning them. And in both Nicaragua and Lebanon, Mr. Reagan charged
his aides with seeing what could be done to help.

It was Israel that drew the Reagan Administration into selling arms to Iran, in theory to
improve relations with Teheran. Long worried that Iraq was their greatest threat, the
Israelis tried for several years to curry favor with the Iraq's rivals, the Iranians.

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With Mr. Reagan's blessing, the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, and his aide,
Colonel North, worked with Mr. Secord and the Central Intelligence Agency to begin
shipping Hawk and Tow missiles to Teheran. In return, several American hostages were
released. But at the same time, more hostages were taken,

Later investigations showed that from the first shipment in February 1985, through the
last in October 1986, the American effort was fraught with naivete and incompetence,
while the Iranians consistently responded with duplicity and deceit. When Mr. McFarlane
and others secretly flew to Iran in May 1986 as a representative of President Reagan -- a
daring and dangerous trip -- senior Iranian officials refused to meet with them.

In the end neither side was happy, which helped explain how the covert program spilled
into public view. Colonel North's Mission

After Congress cut off aid to the contras, Mr. McFarlane and his successor, John M.
Poindexter, charged Colonel North with finding a way to help them. Colonel North turned
to Mr. Secord, and with help from William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence,
they raised money and put together a small, rag-tag private air force. In 1985, it began air
dropping military equipment and supplies to contra forces in the field.

That operation began falling apart at almost the same time the arms sales to Iran became
public. On Oct. 5, 1986, the Sandinistas shot down a supply plane carrying 70 automatic
rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, seven rocket-propelled grenade launchers and a
crew of four. Three crewmen were killed, but a fourth, American Eugene Hosenfus, was
captured and put on trial in Managua. With that, that story of that covert program began
to unravel.

The swirling accounts in the press left the Justice Department little choice but to have a
look. And even a quick glimpse showed that all roads led to Colonel North's office. Alerted
that Justice officials were coming to examine his files, he began furiously shredding his
documents. But he was unable to destroy them all. Among those remaining, Justice
lawyers found one showing that proceeds from the arms sales were channeled to the
contra-aid program.

It was that unusual, secret connection between two covert and highly controversial
programs that captured the public imagination, set off the outrage and turned the affair
into a major national scandal.

President Reagan appointed a special commission headed by former Senator John Tower.
The commission concluded that Mr. Reagan's aides had been responsible for all that
happened, while the President was largely unaware.

The Senate and the House began investigations of their own, and in the spring of 1987 the
two were merged; televised hearings were scheduled for summer. For weeks these
hearings captured much of the nation's attention, particularly Colonel North's stiff-jawed

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testimony. He won so many admirers that his lawyer began stacking the congratulatory
telegrams on the table in front of him. By the final day, Colonel North was almost hidden
behind them.

After more than 280 hours of testimony from more than 28 public witnesses the
committees were still unable to answer many of the basic questions, including: What did
President Reagan know? Was Vice President Bush involved? Public Interest Fades

By 1988, the public seemed to lose interest in the scandal; the investigations were left in
the hands of Mr. Walsh, the special counsel. In the following years, he won convictions or
guilty pleas on secondary charges from most of the major players, including Colonel
North, Mr. McFarlane and Mr. Poindexter. But many of the victories seemed ephemeral.
Polls showed most of the public no longer cared. And several of the convictions were
reversed or set aside on appeal.

Mr. Weinberger was the most senior former official charged; he was to stand trial in
January on four felony counts, including perjury and making false statements.

Now, with Mr. Bush's pardon, that trial and the others still pending are canceled, and now
the answers to many of the larger lingering questions may forever go unanswered.

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