Where The Buck Finally Stops

By Hays Gorey/Washington

The President's responsibility is firmly fixed in the Constitution: "He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." In a stinging 450-page report certain to trigger heated controversy, a majority of the congressional Iran-contra committees this week will charge that Ronald Reagan failed to fulfill that solemn obligation. Says Warren Rudman, the feisty New Hampshire Senator who was one of three Republicans to join the 18-member majority: "The report deals with the responsibilities of the presidency, and I think it's fair."

During the hearings on the sordid Iranian and contra deals this summer, members of the committees were able to work together in unusual bipartisan harmony. But reaching a consensus on their final report was more difficult: all six Republican House members and two of the five Republican Senators refused to sign the majority report because they thought it too tough on Reagan and his men. They will instead issue a 150-page dissent.

The majority report deals with Reagan far more harshly than the Tower commission did last February; it blamed Reagan's lax "management style" for the scandals. The congressional report concludes that Reagan probably knew more than he has admitted about the arms sales and contra-funding efforts; if not, he is to be equally faulted. Without flatly rejecting Reagan's repeated assertions that he knew nothing of the diversion of Iranian profits to the contras, the majority report says that issue is unresolved. Thus it indirectly questions the credibility of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who swore that he approved the diversion and intentionally did not inform the President.

The report does not cite specific ways in which Reagan failed to uphold the law. But it raps him for allowing the National Security Council rather than the CIA to conduct covert operations and then failing to monitor the activity closely to see that it was kept within the boundaries of the law. NSC staff members were "out of control," the report says, with Oliver North and Poindexter "privatizing" foreign policy and allowing retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord and his business partner, Albert Hakim, to handle American negotiations with Iran and control huge sums of money from the transactions.

The original purpose of the Iran deals, the report says, was to trade arms for hostages. But the arms flow continued even though Iran did not release the American hostages. Why? The committee concludes that North and others came to believe the hefty arms-sale profits could serve as an ongoing source of funding for the contras.

Although earlier drafts of the majority report accused the Administration of a cover-up, that term is not included in the final version. However, the report details the bumbled investigation by Attorney General Edwin Meese, which allowed North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, time to destroy documents. It criticizes efforts by North, Robert McFarlane and others to falsify testimony that former CIA Director William Casey was to deliver to Congress. Says a staffer: "Even if it doesn't say 'cover-up,' the majority report makes clear that people were trying to keep other people from knowing what had been going on." The report does note that the White House cooperated with the congressional investigation, but seven House Democrats plan to issue a separate addendum saying they disagree with this assertion.

The three Senate Republicans who signed the majority report are Rudman, Maine's coolly independent William Cohen and Virginia's Paul Trible, whose unrelenting pursuit of the arms-money trail surprised Administration loyalists. But other Republicans felt the final product was, in Utah Senator Orrin Hatch's words, "too political." Claims Henry Hyde, the fiercely partisan Illinois Congressman: "The majority report is polemical in the extreme. It is impossible to sign." He argues that the report ignores what he believes was the true intent of the arms deals: to seek better relations with Iran. The majority report, in fact, cites various pieces of evidence to refute this theory, most notably Reagan's original 1985 "finding" (it was destroyed by Poindexter, but a copy was retained in CIA files) that describes a clear arms-for-hostages rationale for dealing with Iran.

Cohen concedes that in the weeks of hauling and tugging by the two committees' 26 members, much that was political got into the report. "Some House Democrats tried to put everything in the worst possible light." He told them, "You can make a point without pulverizing it." After dozens of drafts and revisions, a compromise was reached that was able to attract the three Republican Senators.

Cohen credits the committee with having traced the arms-sales money, something neither the Tower commission nor the Senate intelligence committee was able to do. He notes that the committee discovered the "off-the-shelf" covert operations directed by North and revealed the extent of Administration efforts to fund the contras after Congress had refused further aid.

The committees could not answer all questions about the Iran-contra affair. Testimony of different witnesses is contradictory. Documents were destroyed. Former CIA Director Casey died before he could be interrogated. Poindexter used variations of "I cannot recall" 184 times during his five days of testimony. Israeli witnesses were prohibited by their government from testifying. Nevertheless, the committees' majority report is clear on the most central point: the President's protestations of ignorance do not absolve him from responsibility for what went on at his behest and in his name.