Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (14 page)

By the middle of his second term, this radical ethic had become fully operational in the White House. Forget open debate. Forget making your case to Congress or the public. Even a congressional request for information on a matter like Nicaragua was an offense to the presidency. Reagan didn’t need a permission slip from anyone. He wouldn’t even take one if offered. Forget the Boland Amendment. He was the president! He had personally approved all the covert activities in Nicaragua. His administration had not always met the legal requirements of keeping Congress up to speed on this secret war, but that was his call. He didn’t trust the legislature. And frankly, Congress needed a brushback.

Reagan was convinced that a president needed unconstrained authority on national security. He was also convinced that he knew best (after all, he was the only person getting that daily secret intelligence briefing). These twin certainties led him into two unpopular and illegal foreign policy adventures that became a single hyphenated mega-scandal that nearly scuttled his second term and his legacy, and created a crisis from which we still have not recovered. In his scramble to save himself from that scandal, Reagan’s after-the-fact justification for his illegal and secret operations left a nasty residue of official radicalism
on the subjects of executive power and how America cooks up its wars.

The day after President Reagan complained in his diary about that old Vietnam syndrome, in March 1985, the militant Islamic group Hezbollah abducted an American journalist in Lebanon, bringing the total number of US hostages there to four. “Was shown the photo recently taken by the bastards who are holding our kidnap victims in Lebanon,” Reagan wrote five days later. “Heartbreaking, there is no question but that they are being badly treated.” Hezbollah grabbed two more Americans living in Beirut over the next few months, so that by the summer of 1985, the group was holding a journalist, a Catholic priest, a Presbyterian minister, and two administrators from the American University in Beirut. Reagan’s national security team was especially concerned about the other known hostage: the CIA station chief in Beirut.

This was Reagan’s worst nightmare—American hostages, and in the Middle East again. Nothing was more politically resonant to him than how the long, drawn-out, 444-day water torture of a hostage situation in Iran had worn away what remained of the Carter presidency, demoralized the American people, and made the country look weak. Those fifty-two hostages had been freed in the hours after Reagan’s inauguration, and the new president welcomed them to his White House a week later. “It’s the most emotional experience of our lives,” said Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, of the ceremony in the Blue Room. “You could feel it build until the point it hurt inside.” And President Reagan’s wife, Nancy, a woman with a reputation for keeping a cool distance from the hoi polloi, could not maintain her composure: “Oh I can’t stand this,” she exclaimed, and began hugging
and kissing the returning victims of Ayatollah Khomeini and his Iranian henchmen.

“Those thenceforth in the representation of this nation will be accorded every means of protection that America can offer,” Mr. Reagan said from the Blue Room that day, for the world to hear. “Let terrorists be aware that when the rules of international behavior are violated, our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution.… Let it also be understood, there are limits to our patience.”

Three years later, the president, in the triumph of bringing home those might-have-been hostages from Grenada, was still speaking it aloud: “The nightmare of our hostages in Iran must never be repeated.” But here was Reagan in 1985, in the hostage soup, and with no real channel of communication to Hezbollah. So when the president’s national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, came to him in July 1985 with a hush-hush plan that might just free the captive Americans, the president grabbed it and held on for dear life.

“Bud, I’ve been thinking about this,” he said in one call, according to McFarlane. “Couldn’t you use some imagination and try to find a way to make it work?”

“Mr. President,” McFarlane had answered, “your secretary of state and secretary of defense were against this.”

“I know, but I look at it differently. I want to find a way to do this.”

The main agent in the hostage-release scheme was a Paris-based exiled Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who claimed to have ties to a buzzing nest of moderates inside Iran’s military. These army officers, according to the tale Ghorbanifar told, wanted to overthrow the madman Khomeini and make a fresh start with the United States. As a show of good faith among new future friends, the United States would open up
the spigot for weapons sales to Iran, and the Iranian moderates would convince Hezbollah to release all of the American hostages in Beirut.

By the time Ghorbanifar presented his tantalizing arms-for-hostages plot, he was already well known in US intelligence circles. A lengthy CIA report described him as “personable, convincing … speaks excellent American-style English.” (Not even intelligence guys are immune to the charms of excellent American-style English.) However, the report concluded, Ghorbanifar “had a history of predicting events after they happened and was seen as a rumor-monger.… The information collected by him consistently lacked sourcing and detail notwithstanding his exclusive interest in acquiring money.… Subject should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance. Any further approaches by subject or his brother Ali should be reported but not taken seriously.” In fact, on the occasions the CIA had subjected Ghorbanifar to a polygraph test, he generally proved himself to be a liar on any question more complicated than his name and his place of residence. But still, under cover of secrecy, Reagan decided it would be good policy to get in bed with Ghorbanifar and his French silk jammies.

As the deal unfolded—badly—assessments of Ghorbanifar within Reagan’s White House national security team included “corrupt,” “devious,” “duplicitous,” “not to be trusted,” and “one of the world’s leading sleazebags.” National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane even called him a “borderline moron.” There was pretty good evidence that Ghorbanifar’s main goal was money. And still, Reagan decided it would be good policy to continue to pursue the Ghorbanifar plan.

The way the first arms-for-hostages deal was designed, Israel would sell US-made weapons to Iran, and the US government would replace Israel’s weapons from its own stocks. As a favor
to us, Israel was allowing itself to be used as a pass-through for America sending missiles to Iran. It was a shame that the first arms shipment of ninety-six TOW antitank missiles to Iran ended up (and this was truly unfortunate, everybody agreed) in the hands of Khomeini’s loyal Revolutionary Guard. Worse, no hostage was released. It turned out to be arms-for-no-hostages.

Reagan was undeterred, and, as ever, optimistic. “It seems a man high up in the Iranian govt believes he can deliver all or part of the 7 Am kidnap victims in Lebanon sometime in early Sept,” Reagan recorded in his diary a few days after the first failure. “They will be delivered to a point on the beach north of Tripoli & we’ll take them off to our 6th fleet. I had some decisions to make about a few points—but they were easy to make. Now we wait.”

In spite of Reagan’s high hopes, the second weapons delivery of more TOW missiles, also via Israel, shook loose only one hostage, and not the one McFarlane requested. In planning the third shipment, eighteen Hawk antiaircraft missiles, Reagan’s operatives managed to piss off Portugal, endanger Turkey, get the CIA illegally involved, raise protests from the Defense Department, and move Secretary of State George Shultz to think about resigning … and all for nothing. This time, according to Ghorbanifar, there would be no hostages released at all, because the Iranians were upset at having received substandard weapons. In fact, they’d like to return the Hawks.

Nearly six months and millions of dollars of weapons into the arms-for-hostages deal, Reagan had yet to inform Congress about the status or existence of the operation. The president had his reasons. The way Reagan told it to himself, the success of it hinged on secrecy. The president had kept his secretaries of state and defense largely out of the loop; hell, he withheld information from his own personal record of the events of his presidency.
“I won’t even write in the diary what we’re up to.” No one could know, most especially Tip O’Neill and the Democrats in the House; Reagan didn’t want them to run crying to the press.

This insistence on secrecy was fueled in part by Reagan’s fear that the hostages or the men inside Iran doing the talking would be killed if details of the negotiations became public. Nobody in the Reagan administration had good enough contacts to know if this fear had any basis in reality. Hard data had never been—and would never be—a controlling factor in the Reagan administration’s decision-making process. But there was also just the embarrassment factor. Given a choice between secrecy and the public finding out about the operation’s Laurel-and-Hardy-worthy failures (up to and including the Iranians sending our weapons back, dissatisfied!), who wouldn’t choose secrecy? Finally, there was the fact that much of what Team Reagan was doing was not simply flying in the face of their own stated policy against dealing with terrorists (“We make no concessions,” Reagan had said. “We make no deals”) or state sponsors of international terrorism (Iran was a gold-plated designee on that list); it was not just shredding the president’s own executive orders and national security directives; it was not simply executing a spectacular and hypocritical affront to good sense and good diplomacy; but, in fact, much of this arms-for-hostages operation was quite flagrantly against the law. Flat-out illegal.

Reagan’s deal violated the Arms Export Control Act by permitting Israel to secretly transfer US-supplied arms to a third country and failing to report the transfer to the proper officials in the US legislature. And the CIA, in providing access to the jet that flew the Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Iran in November, had violated a post-Vietnam amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that forbade the agency from undertaking covert
operations in a foreign country unless a president issued a finding that the operation is “important to the national security of the United States.”

At a White House meeting three weeks after the disastrous and illegal-on-two-counts shipment of the TOW missiles, most of the president’s top advisers tried to pull him out of the arms-for-hostages racket. A CIA deputy director explained that the notion of an independent moderate faction in the Iranian Army was a fiction, which meant that, even if Casey’s deputy didn’t say it aloud, selling weapons to Iran meant selling weapons directly to Khomeini. George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, who rarely agreed on anything, were agreed on the benighted nature of the Ghorbanifar operation. Secretary of State Shultz had never bought Reagan’s argument that because we put Israel between ourselves and Iran, and then put some unknown and unidentified “Iranian moderates” between ourselves and Hezbollah, this was not an arms-for-hostages deal. Those were a couple of strands of hair too fine to split. And Secretary of Defense Weinberger pointedly reminded Reagan of the violations of both the embargo on selling arms to Iran and the Arms Export Control Act. The president was visibly annoyed with both Shultz and Weinberger, Shultz later said, and “very concerned about the hostages, as well as very much interested in the Iran initiative.… Fully engaged.” Despite the vocal in-house opposition to the operation, the Iranian arms deal remained on the table for the next month, largely because Reagan himself would not let it be extinguished.

In the meantime, by the reckoning of the White House’s NSC staff, one good thing had come from this mess of an arms deal: a smallish but quite useful windfall had dropped into
the Swiss bank account of a private American company set up almost exclusively to further President Reagan’s foreign policy agenda. That first arms-for-hostages profit didn’t happen by design. The logistics of the third weapons shipment—the Hawks shipment—became so knotty that Israel had to pay a retired US Air Force general to deliver to Iran their four separate planeloads of twenty antiaircraft missiles. They advanced Gen. Richard V. Secord and his partners at Lake Resources, a key subsidiary of what came to be called “the Enterprise,” a million dollars for the job. Only one of the four shipments was actually made. The Enterprise spent $150,000 of the $1 million making that one flight to Tehran, but what would become of the remaining $850,000?

As it turned out, the Enterprise, this web of shady little offshore companies, had another client in real need. That extra money became what Secord—and perhaps his contact inside the Reagan White House, Col. Oliver North—called a “Contra-bution.” And this is where Iran-Contra, the scandal that almost destroyed the Reagan presidency, earned its hyphen.

By the time General Secord got his unexpected windfall, the White House had been for a year secretly running a public-private partnership to keep the Contras in what the many Marines on Reagan’s team liked to call “beans, boots, Band-Aids, and bullets.” The privatization of the Contra aid operation was an idea first promoted in the highest circle of the Reagan administration in the summer of 1984, when it started to become clear that Congress was going to stop the US government from aiding the Contra military effort directly. According to now-declassified minutes, much of the June 25, 1984, National Security Planning Group meeting in the White House Situation Room was about funding the Contras. And everybody in the room understood they were edging up against legally questionable measures.

“If we can’t get the money for the [Contras],” said UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the meeting that afternoon, “then we should make the maximum effort to find the money elsewhere.”

“I would like to get the money for the Contras also,” Secretary of State George Shultz countered, “but another lawyer, Jim Baker, said that if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense.”

“I am entitled to complete the record,” CIA Director Casey chimed in, to remind everybody of the presidential finding on Nicaragua that Reagan had signed. “Jim Baker said that if we tried to get money from third countries without notifying the oversight committees, it could be a problem and he was informed that the [presidential] finding does provide for the participation and cooperation of third countries. Once he learned that the finding does encourage cooperation from third countries, Jim Baker immediately dropped his view that this could be an impeachable offense.”