Can North Be Believed?

By Ed Magnuson

Would he talk or wouldn't he? After a week of haggling over whether Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North would ever detail his multiple roles in the Iran- contra scandal, the zealous former National Security Council aide agreed to begin his long-awaited public testimony next week before the congressional committees probing the affair. But even as the committees worked with North's lawyer to clear the path for the Marine's testimony, other witnesses were planting land mines in his way. Their accounts raised a pointed question: Can North be believed?

The colonel's credibility was badly damaged when Security Consultant Glenn Robinette told how North had falsified backdated letters to make it appear that he intended to pay for a security system that Robinette had installed at his home in the spring of 1986. In fact, the $16,000 system had already been * paid for by retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, North's partner in selling arms to the Iranians and supplying them to the Nicaraguan contras. As a Government employee, North knew it was illegal to accept any gifts related to his job.

In early December of last year, shortly after he was fired from his NSC post, North called Robinette to ask why he had never received a bill for the security system. Robinette, a former technical specialist for the CIA, realized what the Marine colonel wanted. He sent North two invoices, one dated in July when the work on the system had been completed; the other was dated in September, as though it were a second notice.

Back to Robinette in a single envelope came two responses from North, dated as though they had been replies to the earlier invoices and outlining optional methods of payment. The first letter was formal, the second informal, as though the two men had become friends in the interval. North even apologized in the latter note for the poor printing of the letter E, explaining, "Please forgive the type -- I literally dropped the ((typewriter)) ball." Actually, a document expert told the committee, the E had been filed down to give it a different appearance from the letter dated earlier.

A series of more consequential deceptions by North was related by Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper. As the scandal was unfolding last fall, Cooper had been directed by Attorney General Edwin Meese to help pin down any official U.S. involvement in missile sales made to Iran by Israel in 1985. The stickiest sale was a November 1985 shipment of 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles in which an airplane chartered by the CIA carried the weapons from Israel. Not until the next January did Ronald Reagan sign a "finding" authorizing such covert action.

The CIA had initially supplied the White House with a fairly accurate account of the Hawk shipment. But when the late CIA director William Casey and then National Security Adviser John Poindexter were preparing to brief Congress last November on the Iran arms sales, North offered a drastically different version. At a meeting Cooper attended in Poindexter's White House office on Nov. 20, North forcefully claimed that no one in the U.S. Government had been aware that Israel had sold Hawk missiles to Iran; the few Americans who knew of this flight, he said, thought the plane carried oil-drilling equipment.

In fact, North's once secret computer messages to Poindexter had detailed the arrangement to sell Hawks in exchange for the expected release of U.S. hostages. Former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane had told Secretary of State George Shultz about the plan. A CIA official in Lisbon had sent cables to CIA headquarters about the missile shipment. But as North brazenly lied about the matter at that meeting, Poindexter and Casey remained silent. Meese and Cooper, who had been given copies of the contrary CIA chronology, also sat quietly, apparently accepting North's version. North, explained Cooper, seemed to have "superior knowledge of the facts."

The lies would apparently have been repeated to Congress if a copy of Casey's proposed testimony had not been turned over to the State Department. There Abraham Sofaer, the top legal adviser to Shultz, spotted the falsehoods -- and blew the whistle. Sofaer told Cooper he would resign if Casey did not change his testimony. The CIA director did so, but only slightly. He avoided mentioning the Hawks to the House Intelligence Committee, and cited the claim about oil drilling equipment.

Cooper was also present when Meese and Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds confronted North with the incriminating memo that revealed plans to divert some $12 million from the Iran arms sales to help the contras. Reynolds had found the memo in North's files on Nov. 22, the day after North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, had shredded documents. ("I must have missed one," North later told McFarlane.) Impassive when first handed the paper, North later slipped in a seemingly incidental question: "Did you find a cover letter?"

Asked Meese: "Should we have?"

Replied North: "No, I just wondered."

No cover letter turned up, of course, and investigators still do not know whether the memo, which had reached Poindexter, ever moved on to the Oval Office. Two members of the committees have said North subsequently shredded even more documents.

Cooper's account of North's duplicity prompted a question from Democratic Congressman Louis Stokes, who asked, "Based upon everything you know about Colonel North . . . would you believe him under oath?" Cooper's solemn reply: "Congressman, I would not." Millions of Americans should soon have a chance to make their own assessment of the credibility of the man whom Ronald Reagan called a "national hero."

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington