As The Shadows Lengthened

In due course, recently was corrected to May 1986, and the two planeloads shrank to a single pallet of spare parts for Hawk missile batteries, apparently purchased by Iran from Israel to use against Iraq. But the other facts about McFarlane’s journey to the heart of darkness were too specific to ignore, especially when two of his traveling companions were identified as employees of the Reagan National Security Council: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Howard J. Teicher. They were accompanied by two CIA operatives, one of whom spoke Farsi. The complete roster suggested that Admiral Poindexter and William J. Casey, the CIA director, must have authorized the trip, if not Ronald Reagan himself. Such august names, and the staring fact that Reagan’s former national security adviser was doing some kind of military business with a terrorist state, aroused an instant moral uproar.

The President lost no time in taking a defiantly righteous stance, declaring on November 6 that the stories about McFarlane’s trip had “no foundation.” The United States had no mercenary interest in Iran, whose responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of American hostages in Lebanon was a matter of international notoriety. “We will never pay off terrorists, because that only encourages more of it.”

But what was it? More terrorism, or more trade? And what price moral resolution, when the price of David Jacobsen turned out to be 500 TOW antitank missiles, delivered just five days before his release? Even if the TOWs were (like the Hawks) obsolescent equipment that Israel no longer needed, the U.S. Treasury seemed to have been defrauded. Congress, after all, had supplied the missiles to Israel in the first place as aid, not merchandise. While Reagan denied that there was any secret arms-for-hostages deal, 500 brand-new TOWs were en route to Israel via a CIA proprietary airline, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

The “Iran Initiative,” so called by McFarlane (perhaps in the hope that it would attain the prestige of the Strategic Defense Initiative), has been pretty universally accepted as a violation of American and moral law. Ronald Reagan authorized it almost sixteen months before its consequences broke upon him. He did so in a moment of weakness, as he lay recovering from cancer surgery in Bethesda Naval Hospital:

What a morning–the Dr. took the metal clips out of my incision–what an improvement that made… he told me he’d take the feeding tubes out before lunch and he did. Such a feeling of freedom….

Nancy and I had lunch, I find that I can only eat a few mouthfuls. A lot of cards and messages to look at. Then around 4:30 p.m. a wave out of the window to the press and down to X-Ray.

Bud came by–it seems 2 members of the Iranian govt. want to establish talks with us. I’m sending Bud to meet them in a neutral country.

Gorbachev has passed the word he’d like to establish a private channel of communications….

I watched a TV press round table on their handling of my “illness.” I detected an effort on the part of some… to use the term–“The President has cancer.” My Dr’s said use of the present tense is a mis-statement. The President had cancer–it has been removed.

Let us in fairness consider this diary entry of a half-deaf man who has, only five days before, been hacked open from pubis to breastbone, and, seventy-two hours before, received about the most terrifying news that doctors can deliver: a positive biopsy. He has been awake since 5:15 a.m., and is trying without much success to get his shocked and shortened intestinal system back into action. At 10:22 a.m. (the diary’s paragraph arrangement is misleading), an expressionless little man comes in and drones something about wanting to meet with some reform-minded Iranians. Even Donald Regan, who monitors the briefing, hears nothing but a “general” mention of hostages still in captivity. If there is any implication that McFarlane’s foreign contacts might be “helpful,” one day, in springing them, it is vague enough not to alarm the famously reactive Chief of Staff. Reagan, like Regan, hears nothing about hostages worth recording. He hears only the encouraging words want and talks and neutral applied to two Iranian “government” officials, together with what sounds like a request for travel. He says yes, and the little man is gone by 10:45.

The rest of the day is occupied with medical matters. Dr. Steven Rosenberg, who gave the President his cancer confirmation on Monday, may say privately that Ronald Reagan is in the “top one percentile” of patients exhibiting self-control at le moment critique. But major surgery is an insult to both body and mind, no matter how strong the former or how determined the latter. The primary instinct of every cell and circuit is to recuperate. Hence the characteristic abstraction of convalescents. They are otherwise engaged; they take in only a minimum of what the healthy try to tell them.

Reagan’s July 18 diary entry is terse, but historically important. It was written at the time, whereas his and McFarlane’s and Regan’s later versions of the conversation (ten, by one count) vary. Did McFarlane indeed tell him that representatives of the Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, had relayed a message from representatives of Iran’s Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, to the effect that certain “authoritative” Iranians wanted to “develop a dialogue with the West”? And did McFarlane add that his Iranian contacts were confident that they could “achieve the release of the seven Americans now held hostage in Lebanon”? Again, did McFarlane drop the name of Manucher Ghorbanifar as a classic Middle Eastern volunteer middleman, who naturally felt that the Iranians should “show some gain” in any hostage transaction?

One can almost hear, in a quiet corner of the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel in Hamburg, the soft rubbing of Manucher Ghorbanifar’s finger and thumb as he talked of a few hundred TOWs “from Israel” to spring the first hostage. Ghorbanifar was a Persian carpet dealer, a former secret policeman to the Shah, a rumored Israeli spy… but he flourishes in other books. The question this one asks is, did Ronald Reagan hear any such soft rubbing, in his hospital room on July 18, 1985? McFarlane insists that he did.

The obfuscation began at a “pre-brief” (dress rehearsal) before Reagan’s disastrous press conference of November 19, 1986. He was capable of white lies when he thought his mother’s ghost would approve–primarily to avoid hurting people or breaching confidences–and whoppers if he had read them in conservative magazines, but, as both pre-brief and press conference showed, he was terrible at concealing what he knew to be true.

I attended the former meeting, to the extreme consternation of Peter Wallison, the White House counsel, and found Dutch querulously dependent on Admiral Poindexter for basic facts. (Regan, his normal prompter, was out of town.) He fumbled the first “question” about Iran’s terrorist record–“What answer have we got on that?”–and could not manage the details of the next, about the specifics of the arms transfer.

“Not quite accurate, Mr. President,” Poindexter said calmly. “I recommend you say all shipments out of the United States or by third parties could be placed in one aircraft.”

It would have to have been a prodigious aircraft, given the fact that Iran had received, in aggregate, 2,004 TOWs, eighteen Hawks, and more than two hundred Hawk spare parts. But few of us knew that on November 19, 1986, and if Dutch did–having authorized all the shipments–he was very willing to forget. Poindexter also made sure that the word Israel slipped his memory. If asked whether the United States had authorized the Peres government to ship arms to Iran–“arms we ourselves provided, bought, and paid for”–the President should talk only vaguely of “a third country.”

Dutch did not like this. He kept trying to say third country, but his mental phonograph replayed it as Israel. “Perhaps,” he said unhappily, “I will just say I won’t answer questions on how the arms were delivered.”

He did better when asked about the possible illegality of his authorizations under the Arms Export Control Act, which required him to report foreign military sales to Congress. “I am granted certain rights and waivers as President… I felt it was in the interests of the national security to go forward with this initiative…. I was within my rights to notify Congress at a time that I should choose.” Now Wallison looked unhappy, feeling that he had given “the right answer to the wrong question.” Dutch agreed to say only that he had relied throughout on the counsel of Attorney General Edwin Meese.

The atmosphere in the White House theater, already apprehensive, became near-desperate when he guessed that the total value of the shipments might be “one billion dollars” (“Much less, Mr. President!” Poindexter groaned. “Don’t get into specifics!”), and stated that CIA representatives were “not engaged” in the Initiative (“Yes, sir, they were!”).

Predictably, he floundered at the press conference that night, avoiding the I word with such obvious clumsiness that viewers actually sympathized with him. The White House was forced to issue a presidential clarification twenty minutes after he stepped down from the podium.

“They were out for blood,” he wrote in his diary, but took comfort in the flattery of a few sympathetic aides. “Our gang seems to feel ‘I done good’.”

Attorney General Meese came to see the Chief on the morning of Monday, November 24, to say that, after reviewing documents to do with the Iran Initiative not yet shredded by Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North, he had found evidence of what looked like “a diversion of funds” to the Nicaraguan contras.

I knew something had gone seriously wrong when I was barred from the President’s regular “issues lunch” with senior staff. At three that afternoon, I waylaid Pat Buchanan and asked what had been discussed.

“Oh, a new set of economic figures the President is taken with.”

“But what about Iran?”

“Nothing. Hardly touched on it.”

I found this hard to believe, and stared at him. He looked back as he had done once before, long and searchingly.

“The music’s stopped playing,” he said.