"A Man of Many Talents"

By Richard Stengel

When Oliver North wanted to get something done quickly, secretly and with a minimum of fuss, he called his friend Richard Secord. In November 1985 Secord came to the rescue of frazzled White House officials by deftly diverting a plane that was scheduled for a weapons shipment to the contras to help transport arms to Iran. As North later wrote admiringly to Admiral John Poindexter, "Why Dick can do something in five minutes that the CIA cannot do in two days is beyond me -- but he does." Another time North wrote, "a man of many talents ol' Secord is."

Wherever the complicated trail of the Iran-contra affair leads, it seems at some point to intersect with retired Air Force Major General Richard V. Secord. The blunt, no-nonsense West Point graduate has remained aloof and silent since the scandal broke last November. But beginning Tuesday, when he appears as the joint congressional committee's opening witness, the mysterious Secord may become a household name and perhaps the first man to piece together the complex puzzle of Iranscam.

Secord had a bird's-eye view of the entire affair. As president of a company selling arms around the world, the retired two-star general provided aircraft and crews to ship weapons to Iran, accompanied former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane on his secret mission to Tehran, purchased short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft for the contras and was in charge of coordinating munitions drops for the rebels.

All of this was nothing new for Secord. In his three decades of military service, he was involved in clandestine operations wherever things were hottest around the world. After seeing action as a fighter pilot in Viet Nam, he was attached to a CIA force in Thailand to supervise flights for the agency's secret Laotian war. In 1975 he was stationed as a military attache in Iran and helped guide the Shah in spending billions of dollars on a 500-plane air force. In Tehran, he met his future partner Albert Hakim, who was then engineering the sale of sophisticated electronic equipment to the Shah's secret police.

Secord returned to Washington in 1978 to head the Air Force's military- assistance and sales program. There he formed a relationship with Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative turned arms merchant now serving 52 years in federal prison for illegally selling arms to Libya. Secord's career stalled in 1982, when he came under investigation by a federal grand jury for allegedly conspiring with Wilson and others to defraud the U.S. Government of $8 million on an Egyptian arms-shipping contract. He was suspended from duty for a short time, although he was never indicted; he was reinstated with the approval of then Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, now the National Security Adviser. He left the Air Force the following year to become president of Hakim's Stanford Technology Corp.

Friends say Secord has been itching to tell his story, but did not decide to do so until he was allowed by the congressional committee to inspect secret bank records, controlled by Hakim, which convinced him that he had no legal culpability. House Chairman Lee Hamilton is certain that Secord's testimony will go right to the heart of Iranscam. "Secord is a comprehensive witness," says Hamilton. "There aren't many of them in this drama. Most of the witnesses who will follow him will fill in the gaps."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Los Angeles and Michael Duffy/Washington