Ollie's Cash Stash

It was a classic courtroom confrontation: defendant and prosecutor, both decorated Marine veterans of Viet Nam, locked in a bitter cross-examination. The Oliver North who endured four days of acerbic questioning by prosecutor John Keker last week did not come across as a selfless patriot used by superiors to carry out a covert plan for assisting the Nicaraguan rebels in defiance of a congressional ban. Instead, North emerged as an evasive witness with a selective memory and unusual personal finances.

The most curious tale in North's testimony concerned the "family fund": a stash of up to $15,000 in cash that North claimed he kept in a steel box bolted to the floor of a closet in his suburban Washington home. North's initial explanation of how he happened to have that much cash lying around elicited muffled laughter from the courtroom audience. "When I would come home on Friday . . . I would take my change out of my pocket and put it in that steel box I'd been issued as a midshipman." When Keker expressed his disbelief, North added another explanation: proceeds from a 1964 insurance settlement after an automobile accident in which he suffered a serious knee injury.

North is accused of embezzling $4,300 in traveler's checks that was intended to aid the contras. He claimed that he financed some of his activities from the family fund, then reimbursed himself by dipping into the contra donations. North's credibility was further damaged by former NSC administrator Mary Dix, who testified that several times in 1984 and 1985 North was so hard up for money to buy lunch and gasoline that he railed at secretaries who claimed that the agency's petty-cash fund was too low to reimburse his out-of-pocket expenses. He stopped badgering, Dix said, in mid-1985 -- about the time his safe held thousands of dollars for the Iran-contra "enterprise."

North's hope is that the jury will believe that most of his secret actions ; were approved by President Reagan, former National Security Advisers John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane and the late CIA Director William Casey. After North's testimony, the defense rested, setting the stage this week for closing arguments and jury deliberations. They are likely to turn on a difficult question: Is Ollie North, who admitted lying to protect the contras, now telling the truth?