Ollie's Turn

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The silence is over. The cameras are in place, the microphones tuned, the TV networks willing, even eager, to drop their soap operas and go live to Capitol Hill. Investigators are armed with several cartons of papers turned over last week by the witness to guide their questioning. This week, after seven months of claiming his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, Oliver North at last appears before the congressional committees probing the Iran- contra affair and begins to talk in public.

But how much of the rumor, mystery and myth swirling around his name will North's testimony dispel? Not all, almost certainly. By arrangement with the lawyers who so long counseled North to say nothing, the committees intend to limit their questioning of the Marine lieutenant colonel, at least initially, to four days. Yet ten times four days would scarcely suffice to explore every secret scheme in which North is said to have put his finger during his five years on the National Security Council staff, to unravel all the private networks he hammered together to carry out secret policies, to track down the sources of the authority that enabled him to order around Ambassadors, CIA agents and Government officials who outranked him.

Then there is the question of how much of what North says under oath ought to be believed. He has already been caught in a lie he told to Justice Department investigators before he was fired from the NSC staff last fall, and doubts about his testimony to Congress may eventually have to be resolved by a trial jury. Though North will testify under a grant of limited immunity, which ensures that nothing truthful he says this week can be used against him, he can still be prosecuted on the basis of other evidence collected by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. In the view of legal experts, the testimony of witnesses to the Iran-contra committees has provided more than enough evidence to support indictments on such counts as conspiracy to defraud the Government and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Indeed, it is unlikely that any investigator this week will even pose in so many words some of the numerous questions raised by North's career on the NSC. The committees, to be sure, are prepared to give their star witness a tough, at times caustic, grilling. But their investigation is limited to the Iran- contra affair, and their attention is focused on such matters as whether and how much President Reagan knew about the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to the Nicaraguan rebels. That complex scandal, however, points to broader problems that also deserve investigation: What do North's many escapades say about the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration? How much did that policy depend on covert operations, hidden not only from Congress and the public but from much of the official Government? And how did such improbable figures as North and his bizarre retinue of private operators come to play such major roles?

Whatever details about Iran-contra emerge from this week's testimony, the outline of the larger problem has become increasingly clear. Ronald Reagan and some of his top aides, notably the late CIA Director William Casey, came to ! power committed to step up the murky struggle with the Soviet Union in the back alleys of the world. They were determined not just to contain but to roll back what they saw as a pattern of alarming Communist advances. They quickly grew impatient with congressional restrictions and the inbred caution of the State Department, the Pentagon and even the CIA. They turned increasingly to covert operations, including some not subject to the checks and balances of normal Government. That, combined with sloppy management from the President on down, opened the way to, if it did not make inevitable, the ascendancy of a can-do zealot like Ollie North.

Covert operations have been a hallmark of the Reagan Administration from its inception. Members of Congress widely estimate that 50 to 60 presidential "findings" authorizing such operations are in force at any given time. (Descriptions of covert operations are supposed to be communicated to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. But at least some, like the sale of U.S. arms to Iran authorized by a January 1986 finding, were kept secret.) Several legislators believe the number of known findings is more than in any previous Administration. More important, the operations have grown steadily in size, importance and cost. Covert operations, says Anthony Beilenson, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, are a "much bigger portion of the foreign policy pie than ever before."

Even so, the President and some of his top aides felt frustrated. The requirement to notify Congress of covert operations was constraining; Casey in particular believed in telling the legislators no more than the law required -- and sometimes less. Worse, when covert actions made necessary the participation of a skeptical, often skittish, federal bureaucracy, it seemed to place roadblocks in Reagan's way. Some congressional sources are pursuing the theory that in early 1983 the President and a few top members of his Cabinet decided to move some covert operations to the National Security Council staff, which, because it was not officially an intelligence agency, was exempt from congressional oversight -- or so the Administration thought.

According to this view, junior NSC officers, prominently including a specialist in counterterrorism named Oliver North, were given wide authority to call on all branches of the military and intelligence communities for assistance, with no questions asked. The officers were told to use their ! imagination and to try unorthodox methods.

Whether the change in the NSC's role was conscious or evolutionary, it is clear that in anticipation of a congressional ban on CIA contact with the contras, Casey and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane turned to North to run the secret war in Nicaragua. Says Neil Livingstone, a consultant on counterterrorism who worked with North: "Bill Casey was not prepared to fight the bureaucratic battles. He knew there were a lot of people who could raise great problems if they went public with their concerns. He turned the NSC into the Washington station of the CIA."

As a result, says Livingstone, North "came into the NSC as an easel carrier and ended up as the world's most powerful lieutenant colonel." Witnesses before the Iran-contra committee have testified that they got a strong impression North was working more for Casey than for his nominal bosses, McFarlane and his successor as National Security Adviser, John Poindexter. "Covert actions were pretty much left to Casey and ((CIA Deputy Director)) John McMahon, with little if any top-level discussion or review," says one former Administration policymaker. According to this official, even Reagan was cut out of the loop: "The President became less and less involved. Decision making was less systematically fashioned. There was no process to involve him. There was too much informality."

Whatever formal authority he was given, North was adept at expanding on it. One of his techniques: when a presidential finding was issued authorizing a covert operation, North would exploit a bureaucratic mechanism known as a "memorandum of notification" to spell out the meaning of the vaguely worded finding. By drafting these memos, North was able to tailor the ways and means of the operation according to his own designs. If he got a memo approved, as he often did, he would then put together an interagency working group to plan how to carry out the mission.

In January 1986, for example, at North's urging, Reagan was persuaded to sign a finding authorizing the kidnaping of suspected terrorists. It also allowed the Government agents to monitor and harass not only individual terrorists and groups but also institutions that cooperated with them, such as foreign banks that financed their travel. North then began to map plans to put the finding into operation; so far, nothing much seems to have come of those plans, but the way North used the memorandum of notification, says one source ^ who worked with him, "really explains Ollie's rise to prominence." Watching the gung-ho Marine employ such methods made at least some of his colleagues uneasy. "Oliver North is going to get the President in real trouble," an NSC aide told a friend two years ago. Last year, before the Iran-contra scandal became public, the aide repeated the warning: "Just remember -- it's going to happen."

To this day it is difficult to pin down just which operations North became involved in. One reason is North's irrepressible flair for self-dramatization. In the days before he began taking the Fifth Amendment, he told innumerable stories about daring exploits that either were embellished or seem never to have happened. Another reason is that he operated far out of sight of much of the official Government. He claimed to have done much of the planning for the invasion of Grenada. But Jeane Kirkpatrick, then Ambassador to the United Nations, who attended the meeting at which that invasion was finally approved, says North was not present and his name never came up. Indeed, for all her deep involvement with Central American policy generally and the contras specifically, Kirkpatrick says she heard little about North and saw even less of him before leaving the Government in 1985.

A few examples of North's activities, however, indicate his range and some of his absorbing interests. "Ollie was always talking about hit teams" to strike at terrorists, says one colleague. In 1985 he did more than talk: he prompted an operation calling for CIA training of Lebanese hit teams. In their eagerness to please Washington, the Lebanese hired a private gang that in March 1985 mistakenly blew up an apartment building next to the home of two suspected terrorists, killing 80 people. Shocked, the CIA aborted the training operation.

The same year, North was a key player in a venture that sent Poindexter and Donald Fortier, the NSC's deputy planning director who died last year of cancer, winging to Cairo to try to talk Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak into a joint U.S.-Egyptian invasion of Libya. "North had a fixation about ((Libyan Leader Muammar)) Gaddafi," says an associate. Mubarak coldly rebuffed the suggestion, and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were horrified when they heard the plan; they estimated that it would have required 90,000 American combat troops. Nonetheless, North reportedly kept urging the scheme for an additional six months. Though he got no takers, he did take part in the planning of the ! U.S. air strike against Libya in April 1986 in retaliation for the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin disco.

By then North was deeply into the linked covert operations in which he was indisputably the linchpin: the supply of arms to the Nicaraguan contras and the trading of weapons to Iran for U.S. hostages. The full dimensions of those projects are still coming to light. Lately, for example, Administration officials have disclosed that he met secretly at least five or six times in 1985 and 1986 with Anglican Church Envoy Terry Waite to trade information about the hostages in Lebanon. Waite would provide North with his impressions of the Shi'ite captors he had seen in his efforts to free the hostages. North, in turn, would describe the negotiations the U.S. was conducting with Iran about those same hostages -- though Waite was never told about the arms sales. North reportedly even supplied a helicopter to take Waite from Cyprus to Beirut last October.

Waite was in no sense working for North, but the contacts endangered Waite nonetheless, as North should have known they would. Waite may have been trying to prove to the kidnapers, and the world, that he was not a U.S. pawn when he journeyed to Beirut one more time last January after the U.S. overture to Iran had collapsed. Instead, he too became a hostage, seized and probably held by the terrorists he had negotiated with. After his abduction, the Lebanese radio broadcast claims, Waite was kidnaped on suspicion of being an American spy.

At his zenith, North had at his disposal what amounted to his own treasury, consisting of funds contributed by foreign countries and private donors. He also bossed his own mini-CIA of private operators, headed by Richard Secord, some of whom seem to have been motivated as much by profit as by patriotism. At times North came close to running his own foreign policy: at a meeting in Germany last October, he promised Iranian negotiators that the U.S. would support Iran's efforts to depose Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In his own mind, much of what North did was to further the so-called Reagan Doctrine. The name was a journalistic coinage that factions in the Administration eventually embraced but to this day have never fully defined. Says one former Reagan aide: "Nowhere on any day at any time has any Government official given a speech on the Reagan Doctrine, least of all the President."

Generally, however, the Reagan Doctrine is taken to mean that the U.S. will no longer seek just to contain but will try to roll back the spread of Soviet- aided Communism. This it will do by actively assisting, and perhaps even trying to create, resistance movements struggling against Soviet-allied Marxist governments in the Third World. Said Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post, writing in Foreign Affairs: "The Reagan Doctrine goes over to the offensive. It upholds . . . the goal of trying to recover Communist- controlled territory," especially in countries "where the Marxist grip is relatively recent and therefore presumed light."

While the doctrine may be laudable, to be successful it requires complete cooperation from Congress, the Government bureaucracy and the public in committing the U.S. to a series of long-term, shadowy struggles whose outcome is in serious doubt. As Kirkpatrick, a staunch promoter of the Reagan Doctrine, noted in a monograph written for the Heritage Foundation, "Even people who share the President's basic political and moral orientation have questions about whether support for resistance movements is practical, whether it risks war, whether it makes sense to support small groups of people who 'can't win.' "

The difficulty of rallying support apparently led the Administration to rely more and more on carrying out the Reagan Doctrine by secret means. Dave McCurdy, an Oklahoma Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who at times sympathizes with the President's foreign policy, states flatly that the "Reagan Doctrine was a covert doctrine -- at least it was covert in implementation." Covert operations are unavoidable in a world where the enemy resorts to them freely. Some of the actions the Reagan Administration undertook or expanded, notably American aid to the guerrillas battling the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, are eminently defensible morally and practically. But other anti-Soviet moves have entangled the U.S. with allies who cannot stand scrutiny. A prize example is the financing of food supplies for guerrilla groups fighting the Soviet-backed Vietnamese occupiers of Kampuchea. Congress at one point forbade any U.S. aid to the Khmer Rouge, an out-of-power Communist faction that, when it ruled Kampuchea, launched a program of maniacal genocide. But relief officials in the area say some food paid for by the U.S. got to the Khmer Rouge anyway.

At times too the Administration turned to secrecy for operations it could have conducted openly. Congressman McCurdy recalls asking Jonas Savimbi, the leader of anti-Marxist guerrillas in Angola, whether he desired open or covert aid. Savimbi replied that he wanted the clearest possible expression of American support, so in 1986 McCurdy and a bipartisan group of legislators voted to provide aid overtly -- only to be opposed by the Administration, which insisted on arming the guerrillas on the quiet, for diplomatic reasons.

In Nicaragua, which the Administration regards as an all-important test of the Reagan Doctrine, the U.S. got itself trapped in a self-damaging cycle. In 1984 it was discovered that the CIA had secretly supervised the mining of Nicaraguan harbors -- another operation that North had a hand in planning. Vessels of friendly countries were damaged, and Congress was furious at not being adequately informed of the operation. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater angrily wrote Casey, "The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don't know what the hell he is doing?"

As a result of the incident, the legislators in 1984 toughened the so-called Boland amendment to forbid any U.S. military aid to the contras. But by then some officials felt so committed to bringing down the Marxist Sandinista government that they were driven to circumvent, if not outright break, the law. Some Reagan officials have since taken refuge in legalistic quibbles about exactly what the Boland amendment prohibited. In truth, the amendment, like Congress's whole policy toward Nicaragua, was no model of clarity. But North, according to one participant in his schemes, knew full well what he was doing. According to this source, North kept copies of the Boland amendment in his desk drawer, and once pulled one out and remarked cavalierly, "This is the law I'm violating, and I could go to jail."

The sale of arms to Iran might be regarded as a foreign policy aberration. The operation had only the most tangential connection with the Reagan Doctrine, even if one accepts the geopolitical justification of cultivating moderates in Iran to help swing a post-Khomeini government away from hostility to the U.S., and thus frustrate Soviet designs on a vital region. That justification was not much more than a rationalization for North, who initially horned in on the affair as the NSC's antiterrorist expert. His electronic messages to Poindexter spoke in the crudest terms of so many weapons to be traded for each American hostage freed. But the operation sadly - illustrates how the obsession with covert operations became self-perpetuating. Because the arms sales aroused bitter opposition even within the Government, and would never have been approved by Congress, they had to be carried out in the deepest secrecy. And there was Ollie North with a ready network of gunrunners available to smuggle the weapons and with a maze of Swiss bank accounts to receive the funds.

Now, of course, North's network has come apart with a crash so resounding that it threatens to discredit the entire Reagan Doctrine. Despite the severe excesses committed in its name, the strategy of combatting Soviet expansionism is at least a debatable option for U.S. foreign policy. But any policy that is concealed from Congress and much of the Government always runs the risk of conferring enormous power on individuals who may abuse it or confuse it with their own reckless or over-zealous imperatives. That is just what happened in the case of Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. He wound up disastrously damaging the very causes he worked so fervently to promote.

With reporting by Michael Duffy, Jay Peterzell and Barrett Seaman/Washington