Oliver North's Blank Check

By Richard Stengel

The messages were often written in a kind of furious shorthand, using abbreviations, initials and acronyms at every opportunity, as though the writer were too rushed to tap out the entire word or name. AMCITS stood for "American citizens," NLT for "no later than." Vowels disappeared from staccato sentences: "We will not be trying to adjust yr sched for next June for this mtg." Oliver North's memos, often typed on his computer late at night and sent directly to his National Security Council superiors, read like the dispatches of a man with no time to waste, a man obsessed, a man slightly out of control.

It was no wonder that Lieut. Colonel North did not have the time or inclination to linger over literary style. For as the Tower report voluminously documents by reprinting those memos, North was operating as a reckless and overburdened free agent of the NSC. During 1985 and '86 he simultaneously conducted a tense and frustrating series of arms-hostages negotiations with Iran and coordinated a supply line for the contras in Nicaragua. Like the ringleader of a vast, secret circus, North masterminded an elaborate network of boats and planes, along with not-for-profit corporations and Swiss bank accounts to help the U.S. sell weapons to Iran, as well as supply the contras with money and guns.

North was an obsessive master of detail, organizing everything from building a 6,520-ft. runway in Costa Rica to controlling the movements of a Danish- registered ship for the purpose of carrying weapons to the contras, and writing up talking points for negotiations with shady arms merchants. Whenever the Administration's enthusiasm seemed to be flagging on either the Iran or contra front, North whirled into action, proposing new policies for extricating the hostages and novel ways to raise more millions for the Nicaraguan rebels, sometimes employing the most outrageous of lies and schemes to keep the action going.

The memos in the Tower report reveal both Ollie the dutiful Marine and Ollie the renegade cowboy. The commission found that North kept National Security Adviser John Poindexter "exhaustively informed" of his actions through a computer network they code-named "Private Blank Check." The name aptly describes the license Poindexter gave his aide to carry out foreign policy through questionable initiatives in the name of the U.S. In negotiations with Iranian officials, he announced that the U.S. was tilting away from its official policy of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war, and he fabricated fantastic stories of meetings with the President at Camp David. He wheedled support for the contras out of some half a dozen foreign governments and an assortment of private citizens. Despite the CIA's objections, he gave intelligence information to the Iranians. He claimed that he had threatened the President of Costa Rica with the cutoff of U.S. aid if the President disclosed the existence of a covert airstrip. At one point, he even proposed sinking or hijacking a freighter en route to Nicaragua and stealing the weapons on board for the contras.

At each turn, North's flamboyance was offset by a passion for secrecy. From the National Security Agency he obtained top-secret encryption devices to create a secure communications link to the private operators in his contra- supply operation. The report suggests that Poindexter sought to keep Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- and sometimes even the President -- in the dark about North's activities. This secrecy was compounded by the lack of any governmental supervision or internal review of the NSC operation. The result, says the commission, was an "unprofessional" program that failed to achieve even its own objectives: "Repeatedly, Lieut. Colonel North permitted arms to be delivered without the release of a single captive."

Although North has yet to tell his story to any Iranscam investigators, his memorandums are eloquent testimony to the fantastic nature of his activities. Those efforts were both macro and micro: he supervised the raising of millions of dollars in funds from South Korea and Taiwan while organizing numerous drops of munitions in Nicaragua. A hand-drawn chart that was found in North's office safe shows the complex path of money from private fund-raising organizations to various shadowy corporations. The chart suggests a link between two fund-raising organizations run by North's ally, Conservative Carl ("Spitz") Channell, and such corporations as Lake Resources, Udall and Trans World Arms, all of which have been connected to the contra-supply effort. Between the fall of 1984 and the end of 1986, North helped raise tens of millions for the contras.

A colleague describes North as a "crisis junkie," and his twin programs toward Iran and Nicaragua provided plenty of outlets for his considerable energies. Indeed, his contra-supply operation provided the means for his involvement in the arms-for-hostages dealings. In November 1985 a plane that North had scheduled to carry arms to the contras was pressed into service to make a delivery to Iran. From that time on, North basically used the existing contra logistical network to help ship arms to Iran. It was the linking of the two -- a violation of the cardinal intelligence rule against mixing operations -- that brands North as an amateur in the minds of experienced intelligence officials.

Like the President he so admired, North was obsessed with getting the hostages home. From the beginning of his involvement with the hostages, North crafted elaborate proposals on how to free the "LebNap victims," as he once called them. These sometimes included equations computing the means and number of weapons that would be required for the release of one American citizen. He noted in one memo to Poindexter, "1 707 w/300 TOWs = 1 AMCIT."

In December 1985 he dramatically resisted McFarlane's efforts to shut down the arms pipeline to Iran. North wrote a memo to Poindexter in which he argued, "Like you and Bud, I find the idea of bartering over the lives of these poor men repugnant. Nonetheless, I believe that we are, at this point . . . too far along with the Iranians to risk turning back now. If we do not at least make one more try at this point, we stand a good chance of condemning some or all to death and a renewed wave of Islamic Jihad terrorism. While the risks of proceeding are significant, the risks of not trying one last time are even greater." North often displayed a kind of psychological brinkmanship in his memos, hinting that the hostages might be killed if the U.S. did nothing.

In January of 1986, North was back in business after the President signed an intelligence finding authorizing the sale of weapons to Iran. North concocted an elaborate "notional timeline" (which included his belief that the Ayatullah would step down in 1986) for what he called "Operation Recovery." The plan reveals the Marine officer's talent for military logistics and his naivete about geopolitics. For a month North had planes, missiles and money hopscotching all over the globe to deliver weapons to supposedly moderate elements in Iran in order to bring about the release of the American hostages. Although Iran received 1,000 TOW antitank missiles as a result of his efforts, no Americans were freed.

$ In the fall of 1986 North dreamed up a rather surrealistic Bible-for-Koran swap to demonstrate U.S. good intentions. It eventually backfired when the Iranians displayed the Bible to humiliate the President. In October, North journeyed to Frankfurt, West Germany, to meet with a group of Iranians and presented them with a Bible inscribed by the President with words from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians: "And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.' " As he did so, he told them, according to the report, "We inside our Government had an enormous debate, a very angry debate, over whether or not my President should authorize me to say, 'We accept the Islamic Revolution of Iran as a fact.' He ((the President)) went off one whole weekend and prayed about what the answer should be and he came back almost a year ago with that passage I gave you. And he said to me, 'This is a promise that God gave to Abraham. Who am I to say that we should not do this?' " North went on to tell the Iranians he had had two private discussions with the President at Camp David; in one, North asserted, Reagan had said that he wanted to see the Iran-Iraq war end on terms acceptable to Iran.

Yet the President had inscribed the Bible only a few days earlier, at North's suggestion, on the understanding that the inscription was a favorite passage of one of the Iranians. North, according to White House sources, has never been to Camp David. When the President was apprised of North's story by the Tower commission, he described the NSC aide's statements as an "absolute fiction."

At one point North's activities on behalf of the contras began to worry Poindexter. Some of these covert operations were getting publicity, and North seemed unable to keep his activities under restraint. In May 1986, in a message titled "Be Cautious," Poindexter warned him that he was overreaching: "I am afraid you are letting your operational role become too public." McFarlane even suggested to Poindexter that North get out of the spotlight by going to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a disability review.

Shortly thereafter, Poindexter appeared to have decided to relieve North of the contra "account." North was wounded, but responded with an artful memo in which he played the chastened schoolboy, managing to sound contrite and defiant at the same time: "Since I returned a few minutes ago I have been told that even my luncheon with my sister yesterday is in question . . . I can understand why you may well have reservations about both my involvement in Nicaragua policy and even my continued tenure here . . . I want you to know that it is for me, deeply disappointing to have lost your confidence, for I respect you, what you have tried to do and have enjoyed working with you on a number of issues important to our nation."

Poindexter replied with a fatherly "Now you are getting emotional again," then added, "I just wanted to lower your visibility so you wouldn't be such a good target for the Libs." North continued his contra operations. "Ollie knew how to stroke John," recalls one fellow NSC staffer. "He was a master, let me tell you." North frequently played up to his superiors. In a note to McFarlane, he talked about the "tremendous pressure" on Poindexter, saying, "My part in this was easy compared to his. I only had to deal with our enemies. He has to deal with the cabinet."

Poindexter's indulgence of North was a principal reason the Iran-contra affair went so badly astray, according to the Tower commission. Although North made himself into the point man for Iranscam's excesses, the Tower commission blames Poindexter for failing to restrain his aide in carrying out what were, after all, presidential policies. "Poindexter's own bent for operations aided and abetted rather than compensated for North," Commission Member Brent Scowcroft told TIME. "There's nothing wrong with having a 'cowboy' working for you, but you have to keep the reins tight."

North still seems convinced that he was more of a selfless patriot than an out-of-control cowboy. On the day the Tower report was released, he was asked what he would like people to know about him as they go through the report. A born-again Christian, North replied, "I guess they ought to read the Eighth Beatitude of Matthew 5." That New Testament passage reads: "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." As Iranscam's investigations continue, however, North is more likely to be prosecuted for recklessness' sake.

With reporting by Alessandra Stanley/Washington