The Phantom of Iranscam

By Laurence Zuckerman

According to George Bush, the true nature of the Iran-contra scandal was only revealed to him on Dec. 20, 1986. That Saturday morning, nearly a month after Edwin Meese had rocked the nation by disclosing the diversion of Iranian arms- sale profits to the contras, Minnesota Senator David Durenberger, then chairman of the Intelligence Committee, drove to the Vice President's home. "Not until that briefing," Bush says, "did I fully appreciate how the initiative was actually implemented."

Yet as last week showed, the issue will not die. Nor should it. Despite his insistence that he was "out of the loop," there is hard evidence that Bush, a former CIA director who ran the Administration's antiterrorism task force, had access to enough information about the tawdry arms-for-hostages deal that his professed failure to understand what was happening is as damaging as the notion that he knew more than he admits.

In the year before his talk with Durenberger, Bush attended more than 30 high-level meetings where the Iran policy was raised. He was present at the Jan. 6, 1986, session where the President signed a finding authorizing the sale of TOW missiles to win the release of American hostages. The next morning the President's top advisers, including Bush, gathered in the Oval Office. George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger testified that they vigorously opposed the arms sales, arguing that they would undermine the Administration's policy against terrorism. "I was intense," Shultz told the Tower commission. "Everybody was well aware of my views." By the end of the meeting, Shultz testified, it was clear that the President and the Vice President disagreed with him.

Bush says he may have been out of the room at the time, and doesn't recall the two Secretaries' strenuous opposition. Had he heard them, Bush has said, "I would have moved to reconsider the whole project." A computer message, which was sent by John Poindexter only a few weeks later, noted the high-level opposition to the arms sales and concluded that the "President and V.P. are solid in taking the position that we have to try."

The following July, Bush and his chief of staff, Craig Fuller, met in Jerusalem with Amiram Nir, an adviser to then Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Nir was helping to arrange the arms sales to Iran. According to Fuller's detailed account of the meeting, Nir told Bush the deal was an arms-for-hostages swap, and that he was negotiating with the most "radical elements" in Iran, not with moderates. Bush told Rather he believed Nir was talking about an Israeli operation. But Fuller's summary says Nir specifically told Bush how the Israelis had taken pains to mask U.S. involvement and even described what had happened when he accompanied Robert McFarlane on a secret trip to Tehran the previous May. On the campaign trail last week Bush said Nir presented him with only a "tiny piece of a very complicated puzzle," and he simply did not grasp its meaning. "I didn't know what he was referring to when he was talking about radicals, nor did I ask."

Bush claims to have answered all questions about the Iran deals, except for those regarding the private advice he gave the President. But it is what Bush says, not what he refuses to say, that is most troubling. His claim that he never figured out that the Iran deals were an arms-for-hostages swap is undercut by his admission that he was motivated by an understandable concern for Hostage William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was being tortured by his captors. By portraying himself as incidental to one of Reagan's most sensitive foreign initiatives, he reveals either a worrisome detachment from critical issues or an unwillingness to assert his convictions.

The Vice President says he knew even less about the secret contra supply operation run by Oliver North. Yet on two occasions Bush and Donald Gregg, his national security adviser, met with Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA agent who coordinated air drops to the contras from El Salvador. All three men insist the contras were never discussed. But a memo outlining the agenda for a May 1986 meeting included the topic "Resupply of the contras." During the summer of 1986, Rodriguez complained to Gregg that North's men were skimming profits from the supply effort. When one of the supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua in October, leading to the capture of American Eugene Hasenfus, Rodriguez immediately alerted Gregg's office. Gregg says he never told Bush these details because he didn't consider the information to be "vicepresidential." As with the Iranian arms deals, such claims that Bush was in the dark are as damning as the suspicion that he knew what was going on.

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington