The Can-Do Agency

By William R. Doerner

If Ronald Reagan is fond of any federal agency, it is most likely the National Security Council. In 1983 the NSC drafted the plans for the U.S. invasion of Grenada, an operation that Reagan still regards as the foreign policy high point of his presidency. The NSC concocted the idea of the midair capture of the Achille Lauro hijackers as they were being flown out of Egypt, and organized the U.S. Navy's first strike against Libya's radar installations last March. The agency's record of accomplishment allowed more than one of its members to consider himself a breed apart. Said one in early November: "We're the only ones who can make things happen."

Things have happened at the NSC all right, but not always the kind that the President can savor. Last week, in the wake of revelations that the agency had been involved in the transfer of Iranian arms sales profits to the contras, Reagan appointed a three-member "special review board" to study the role of the NSC in the conduct of foreign policy. Named chairman was John Tower, the former Republican Senator from Texas and more recently a U.S. arms negotiator. The other review-board members are former Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, and Brent Scowcroft, who served as Gerald Ford's National Security Adviser.

The main question facing the board is how a small department, with headquarters in the White House and operating with a budget of only $4 million, could run so dangerously amuck. The answer seems to be that it offered everything Reagan wanted as an instrument of policy. The NSC is protected by Executive privilege, immune to congressional oversight, secretive and small enough to be virtually leakproof. Though the NSC has enjoyed high influence in previous Administrations, the agency has rarely attained the degree of autonomy that it has under Ronald Reagan. But critics charge that the NSC has been playing outside its territory. "The National Security Council is not set up to handle operations and implement policy," says Sam Nunn, incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It's there to help the President make policy."

Created in 1947, the NSC was mandated to "advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies." It is supposed to function as a clearinghouse for security matters, evaluating data from the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies with an eye to making policy recommendations to the President. The council itself consists of the President, Vice President and Secretaries of State and Defense, with the director of the CIA and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff serving as advisers. As recently as John F. Kennedy's Administration, the NSC was a relatively small operation, with about a dozen employees. The duties of the agency, which now has a full-time staff of about 60, mushroomed under Henry Kissinger, who served Richard Nixon. Kissinger's best-remembered coup was his secret 1971 mission to Peking, which led to the establishment of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations.

The departing National Security Adviser, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, was the fourth man to hold that job in the Reagan presidency, an extraordinary turnover for such a sensitive post. A reclusive figure who cut himself off from Congress and the press, Poindexter was further undermined by placing too much trust in a small group of action-oriented staffers who often skirted normal channels. Finally, there was the death from cancer last summer of his deputy, Donald Fortier, who had exhibited considerable intellect as well as political savvy.

"Every President must have his National Security Council or the equivalent," says David Aaron, an NSC deputy under Jimmy Carter. "A President always has the need for independent advice." But that same independence can be abused by officials who invoke the President's name too freely in winning concessions from other agencies, as North supposedly did. "I used to have a rule," says McGeorge Bundy, who served as John Kennedy's National Security Adviser. "You never say, 'the President wants' unless you are very clear about what he really wants." The wisdom of that rule has begun to sink in at the White House: last week Ronald Reagan ordered responsibility for U.S. policy toward Iran moved from the NSC to the State Department.

With reporting by David Aikman and David Beckwith/