Next, the Most Important Witness?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Who will prove to be the most important witness the Iran-contra committees hear? No, not Oliver North -- at least not according to Warren Rudman, vice chairman of the Senate panel. After listening to North for four days last week, the New Hampshire Republican repeated a longstanding prediction: the crucial witness will be Ollie's old boss, former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who follows North to the stand this week.

To be sure, TV viewers cannot expect any rerun of North's theatrics. The balding, pipe-puffing Poindexter is the exact reverse of a dramatic figure. He speaks, when he must, in a soft monotone, and the sentences are brief and colorless. But it was Poindexter who received North's voluminous memos, and Poindexter who talked to Ronald Reagan every day. So it is Poindexter who can answer some central questions: How much did the President know about North's secret activities to aid the contras? Did Poindexter ever tell Reagan about the diversion of Iranian arms-sale profits to the Nicaraguan guerrillas? And if not, on whose authority did Poindexter allow North to proceed?

Replying to those questions before a national audience may be close to the ultimate agony for Poindexter. When Reagan appointed the vice admiral to the job of National Security Adviser in 1985, he already had such a reputation for reclusiveness that one of the first questions journalists asked him was whether they would ever see him again. "Maybe," replied a smiling Poindexter. In a job that brought world renown to such predecessors as McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Poindexter proceeded to stay nearly invisible for just under a year. He was seen outside the White House so seldom that Washington reporters labeled his rare public appearances "Poindexter sightings."

Within the Government, he was far more comfortable talking to colleagues by computer messages than face-to-face. Indeed, it was his fondness for electronic conversation that created many of the memos he will be grilled about this week. At home, his wife Linda has jokingly told a friend that she is looking forward to her husband's testimony "because I'll probably hear him say more words in a week than I've heard in 29 years of marriage."

Even after the Iran-contra affair thrust him into the headlines last November, Poindexter maintained his silence. He quietly resigned from the National Security Council and pleaded the protection of the Fifth Amendment when initially called before congressional investigators. He accepted a lowering in rank to rear admiral and the loss of one of his three stars. To remain a vice admiral, Poindexter, 50, would have had either to take early retirement or transfer to a job requiring Senate confirmation. Said a colleague: "Can you imagine him taking the Fifth at his own confirmation hearing?"

Commuting every day to a desk in the Pentagon, where he has been assigned to the Navy's long-range planning, or occupying himself with various fix-up projects at home in Rockville, Md., Poindexter at first tried to ignore all developments in the growing Iran-contra scandal. But for the past three months he has spent his time in the Washington office of his attorney, Richard Beckler, preparing for his appearance on Capitol Hill. Last week he sat glued to a TV set, watching North's testimony and expressing admiration for his former aide's assertiveness. Though Poindexter has no hope of matching it, he has been taking lessons from his lawyers in how to avoid potential traps set by cross-examiners.

The drilling has not come easily to Poindexter: he has grumbled to friends that he considers the hearings a politically motivated show to be stoically endured. He is more worried about the investigation conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Though Poindexter will testify this week under a grant of limited immunity, Walsh could still indict him on the basis of evidence gathered separately. Friends say Poindexter believes he is indeed in danger of indictment.

If so, it would be a sad denouement to a once sparkling career. Before his appointment to the NSC, Poindexter was considered the model of the fast-track Navy officer. His superiors seem to have marked him early as a potential Chief of Naval Operations -- a position that was long thought to be Poindexter's own goal -- and to have carefully groomed him for the job through a judiciously chosen mixture of Washington assignments and sea-duty posts.

Certainly no one ever doubted Poindexter's intellect. "Even when we were kids, John was someone special," recalls his cousin Richard Poindexter, 54, who was close to him in childhood. "We knew he was extremely intelligent and seemed even then destined for greater things." The son of a banker, John Marlan Poindexter grew up in Odon, Ind. (pop. 1,400), described by Richard Poindexter as a "very conservative, Bible-belt community." A thin, shy and bookish child, Poindexter was an exemplary student who won appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy from the late Republican Senator Homer Capehart. Poindexter's mother Ellen recalls that the Senator once sat in the family's living room on a Sunday afternoon and told John that "he hadn't had very good luck with boys from Daviess County." That statement, she believes, was "part of the reason why John wanted to do so well" at Annapolis.

Poindexter graduated in 1958 first in his class academically and was chosen brigade commander, signifying that he rated first in leadership ability as well, an extremely rare double honor. After a year at sea, he was selected for a scholarship program of advanced study in science. He chose nuclear physics at Caltech, even though he had taken only a single physics course at Annapolis. "The Navy's chief science adviser told me to scale back, saying, 'You'll never make it,' " Poindexter said in an interview with TIME last year. "But I thought I was very good, and nothing was beyond my capability." Poindexter plugged away and won a Ph.D. five years later. His thesis topic: "Electronic Shielding by Closed Shells in Thulium Compounds."

Two days after his graduation from Annapolis, Poindexter married Linda Goodwin, a college student he had met while traveling with the Naval Academy debating team. In John's first year at Caltech, Linda bore the first of five sons, who now range in age from 27 to 16. Linda is as outgoing as John is reserved. "On personality tests we are on the opposite ends of the spectrum," says she. After their children started leaving home in 1980, Linda began studying for the ministry. She was ordained an Episcopal priest last December, and is associate pastor of a church in Gaithersburg, Md.

After Caltech, Poindexter served alternating tours at sea and in Pentagon offices. In 1981 he got to the White House as military aide to National Security Adviser Richard Allen. His first jobs were not demanding: "He put up maps on the wall before briefings," joked Allen later. Within months, however, he was reorganizing the White House Situation Room and updating the NSC's computer system. Writing computer programs has been one of Poindexter's abiding interests; he recently devised a new program to modernize the publications of Linda's church.

Poindexter rose steadily at the NSC, finally taking over day-to-day | operations as deputy to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. The Admiral won some brief glory, at least within the White House, for coordinating the U.S. capture of the terrorists who had seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Though North claimed credit for devising and executing the operation, colleagues say Poindexter deserves the greater honor. They vividly remember him sitting coolly at his desk munching a sandwich from the White House mess and sipping a glass of red wine while directing the interception by Navy jets of the Egyptian airliner carrying the seajackers.

When McFarlane resigned toward the end of 1985, worn out by a turf war with Chief of Staff Donald Regan, the President named Poindexter to succeed him. It was widely believed Regan, who is thought to have been present at nearly every one of Poindexter's daily briefings of the President, considered Poindexter a man he could control. The new National Security Adviser did manage to resolve two long-standing policy disputes within the Administration: he mediated the decisions to abandon U.S. observance of the unratified SALT II treaty and to retaliate against terrorism by launching the 1986 air strike against Libya. But he showed no interest in explaining policy. The press lambasted him for writing a memo last August urging a campaign of "disinformation" against Libya. Congressmen complained he was excessively secretive in dealing with them too. Said Poindexter: "It's true we need to get out our story better. But considering the things I do best, it doesn't make sense for me to change."

Friends and former colleagues think Poindexter was badly miscast at the NSC. "He is a nuclear physicist, an exemplary military man and a brilliant technician," says one NSC veteran. "In other words, an ideal No. 2 or 3." A close observer asserts the admiral "could write a tough computer note to North, but he had trouble resisting Ollie's pleading in person. The combination of personal softness and political inexperience is what did him in." The irony, a Navy colleague remarks, is that "he didn't want to go to the NSC in the first place. He wanted to command ships."

Both Poindexter and Reagan may now wish he had. Voicing what might be a bureaucratic credo, Poindexter once advised associates that the way to get ahead was never to make a mistake. This week he will be called to account for some of the most politically damaging mistakes ever made in American foreign policy.

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington