Everybody's Doing It

By George Russell

The Reagan Administration is not the only government struggling to cope with the problem of clandestine and illegal weapons sales to Iran. From Portugal, France and Sweden have come revelations that several Western countries are heavily embroiled in a variety of such illicit dealings. In almost every case, the motivations behind the traffic have been commercial rather than political, and its discovery abroad has led to considerably less domestic tumult than in Washington. Quipped one U.S. official: "The real question is, Who isn't selling arms to Iran?"

The most comic episode of European arms smuggling to surface involves a 4,300-ton West German freighter that has been sailing back and forth off the coast of Portugal for nearly a month. Gretl, owned by a Hamburg shipper, was carrying $6.8 million worth of Portuguese-made munitions, including some 67,000 120-mm mortar shells that were originally bound from the port of Setubal to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The shipment in a West German flag carrier was illegal under a Bonn law that forbids the transport of armaments to "areas of tension." The delivery was contracted for by the Danish shipping firm of Finn J. Poulsen, which has an indirect connection with Iranscam. Last April the company sold a 163-ft. ship to shadowy private partners of Oliver North, who paid with funds from North's Geneva bank account. That ship was used to deliver arms to the Nicaraguan contras.

West Germany was alerted on Feb. 9 to Gretl's illicit actions by members of the national seamen's union. The Bonn government immediately demanded that the ship put in at the nearest port of the twelve-member European Community. Not eager to have its cargo confiscated, Gretl headed back to off-load in Setubal.

The Portuguese government had other ideas. Anxious to prop up its shaky , domestic arms industry, Portugal has lifted all strictures against arms sales to Iran or its enemy Iraq. Insisting that Gretl's shipment was legal and should be delivered to Iran, the Lisbon government refused to let Gretl's crew dump its high-explosive cargo back on Portuguese docks. Ever since, the ship and its hapless crew have been condemned to their Iberian shuttle, at a cost of roughly $10,000 a day, while the West German shipper, the Danish charterer and the governments involved try to untangle the mess.

The Portuguese arms shipment might never have come to light had the weapons been transported as originally planned aboard Adonis, a freighter of Panamanian registry. Panama, like Portugal, has no strictures on arms sales or shipments to Iran. But Adonis was already on its way to Iran, reportedly laden with a 1,200-ton shipment of war materiel from Spain that was originally, and fraudulently, listed for a final destination in Portugal. Tipped off about the subterfuge, Lisbon did not permit Adonis to dock, and on Jan. 14 the ship canceled its request. Thus, when it came time to ship the country's own armaments to Iran, a vessel had to be chartered. Enter the ill-fated Gretl.

Portuguese newspapers have since claimed that Spain's Socialist government has countenanced the delivery of 175,000 tons of war materiel to Iran. The cargo was sent by Spain through Portugal after Madrid made direct shipments to Iran illegal in September 1986. Lisbon claims the Spaniards must have known what was going on, as many of the munitions shipped falsely to Portugal could not have been used in Portuguese weapons. Portugal has made a protest to Madrid. In addition, the respected Madrid daily El Pais has charged the Spanish government with selling $280 million of ammunition and military equipment to Iran since 1983, often using phony papers that listed Libya and Syria as buyers. The government denies the charges.

Another embarrassing case involves neutral Sweden, which forbids the sale of its arms to countries at war. The Swedish arms firm Bofors was reported last year by local newspapers to have sold several hundred Robot 70 portable ground-to-air missiles to Iran between 1983 and 1985. Last month the Belgian daily Le Soir reported that Swedish customs officials had sent a bulky dossier to their counterparts in Brussels. The file contained details of the shipment of Swedish war materiel destined for Iran through the Belgian port of Zeebrugge. Last week Martin Ardbo, the managing director of Bofors weapons division, abruptly resigned. This week the Swedes are expected to publish the results of a customs investigation that, it is believed, will show that an intricate network of European smugglers has used almost all the North European countries as transit points for weapons trade with Iran.

Charges of clandestine arms sales to Iran have also touched a sore nerve in France, but for a different reason: the French are among the principal arms suppliers for Iraq, and as a by-product of that political tilt, the government has embargoed shipments to Iraq's neighboring enemy. France's largest munitions producer, Luchaire, allegedly secretly sold 450,000 artillery shells to Iran between 1983 and 1985. The deliveries were concealed behind manifests that named Brazil, Thailand and Portugal as destinations. The French government filed fraud charges against Luchaire more than a year ago, but since then little action has been taken.

What do all the cases prove? Perhaps that cynicism and greed frequently count for more than policy and principle in the murky world of arms trading. Only in the U.S., though, was a national government directly involved in sensitive weapons sales in the face of its own repeated declarations against trading with terrorists.

With reporting by Martha de la Cal/Lisbon and William Dowell/Paris