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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
8, 2006
Lies, Cover Ups and Slanted Intelligence
Robert
Gates and Iran/Contra
By LAWRENCE E. WALSH
The day after Clair George's arraignment,
we turned to Robert Gates. The Senate intelligence committee's
hearings on his appointment to head the CIA were scheduled to
begin within a few days. Craig Gillen and I met the committee's
chairman, David Boren, and ranking minority member, Frank Murkowski,
and staff counsel in Boren's office. Reiterating what I had already
told Boren, we said that two questions had not been answered
satisfactorily: Had Gates falsely denied knowledge of Oliver
North's Contra-support activities? Had Gates falsely postdated
his first knowledge of North's diversion of arms sale proceeds
to the Contras?
We then described what our
investigation had turned up about Gates. Alan Fiers had told
us that he had kept Gates generally informed of his Contra-support
activities, through written reports and regular face-to-face
presentations, although his oral reports had been guarded because
Gates had not always had a note-taker present. The CIA now claimed
it could not find the notes of these meetings.
We said that Richard Kerr,
the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, had informed Gates
in August 1986 of Charles Allen's belief that North had diverted
funds from the Iranian arms sales for the benefit of the Contras;
Allen himself had told Gates the same thing in early October.
Allen had told us that Gates, who had appeared irritated, had
told Allen to write a memorandum for CIA director William Casey
and had said that he did not want to hear about North. To us
and to the congressional committees, Gates had denied having
any recollection of either conversation. Whenever questioned,
Gates had always claimed that he had first learned of Allen's
concern about the diversion on the day after Eugene Hasenfus
was shot down. Gates said that he and Allen had then reported
this to Casey, who told them that he had just received much the
same information from another source.
That day, according to North
and Gates, Casey had invited North to lunch in his office, which
was next to Gates's office. Gates had joined them, and according
to North, had heard Casey tell North to clean up the Ilopango
operation. North claimed that he had then begun to destroy records.
Gates claimed not to remember the discussion of North's Nicaraguan
activities. Although he had heard North mention Swiss accounts,
Gates said, he had not understood the reference. He claimed to
have been in and out of the room. All he remembered, he said,
was that North had told him that the CIA was completely clean
regarding the Contra-support operation.
We suggested to the senators
that they specifically request the notes of Fiers's reports to
Gates. We told them that we did not think we had enough corroborating
information to indict Robert Gates, but that his answers to these
questions had been unconvincing. We did not believe that he could
have forgotten a warning of North's diversion of the arms sale
proceeds to the Contras. The mingling of two covert activities
that were of intense personal interest to the president was not
something the second-highest officer in the CIA would forget.
Moreover, Gates had received the same reliable contemporaneous
intelligence reports about North's activities that Charles Allen
had. The information suggesting that North had overcharged the
Iranians would surely have caught the attention of anyone as
astute as Gates.
When, after Eugene Hasenfus's
aircraft was shot down, Gates and Allen had told Casey about
Allen's concern that North had diverted funds to the Contras,
how could Gates have forgotten that Allen and Kerr had warned
him about the diversion a few weeks earlier?
The Senate intelligence committee's
hearings on George H.W. Bush's nomination of Robert Gates to
head the CIA began on Monday September 16, 1991. The hearings
were televised. Gates, who had already answered extensive interrogatories
from the committees, was the first witness. In substance, he
denied recalling the details of Iran/Contra. He said that he
wished he had been more skeptical and that he had asked more
questions. Thirty-three times he denied recollection of the facts.
As I watched some of the broadcasts,
I was impressed by the strength of the committee's members and
by their identification with and sympathy for the national security
community. The powerful committee had several respected members,
including former secretary of the Navy John Warner and Sam Nunn,
both of whom were also on the armed services committee, and Warren
Rudman, who had been the ranking Republican on the Senate select
committee on Iran/Contra.
Only Democrats Howard M. Metzenbaum
of Ohio and Bill Bradley of New Jersey pursued the Iran/Contra
connection. I got the impression that most of the senators did
not want to hold Iran/Contra against Gates. As associates of
the national security fraternity, they might object to venal
conduct, but they did not want to rake up the issue of an old
non-disclosure. They obviously respected Gates's ability and
his stature as Bush's deputy national security advisor; the president
was clearly nominating someone he personally knew and trusted.
Senator Rudman openly disparaged
the discussion of Iran/Contra: "I might say parenthetically
that I hope someday I will never have to talk about this subject
again. But I guess it just keeps coming up. It's almost like
a typhus epidemic in that anybody within five miles of the germ
either died, is infected, or is barely able to survive, so I
guess we're back in that mode again."
The committee singled out William
Casey as the culprit in Iran/Contra and suggested that Gates
had been largely bypassed in matters related to it. As Senator
Murkowski (R-AK) put it: "What's coming out is a better
understanding of the management style of Casey, and the compartmentalization.
There are numerous instances where senior CIA officials were
bypassed on projects that were worked by the director and his
designees solely."
Senator John Chaffee (R-RI)
said that Casey had not run a typical bureaucracy: "Bill
Casey ran the outfit in a manner that jump-charged the command
Chains of command in diagrams didn't fit with Bill Casey."
This view was contradicted
by Thomas Polgar, a decorated former CIA officer and later a
Senate committee staff member. Polgar testified that Gates had
been Casey's creation and had not been "compartmentalized"
out of sensitive information.
Fiers testified that Gates
was an exceptionally gifted operator and that his meteoric rise
had aroused jealousy among some older colleagues. Fiers said
that Gates was very smart, very capable, although "sort
of on the make." According to Fiers, Gates had understood
"the universe" of the Contra-supply operation-that
it had been run out of the White House, with North as the quarterback-but
had not been given extensive detail.
Charles Allen told the committee
of his efforts to warn Gates about the diversion of the arms
sale proceeds to the Contras. After testifying that Gates had
appeared irritated, Allen said, "My personal fears were
that somehow this initiative had gotten off the track, and that
it might have gone even higher to the Oval Office."
Richard Kerr, who was now the
deputy director of the CIA under William Webster, confirmed Allen's
story. In addition to relaying the information to Gates, he had
told another CIA officer of Allen's concern. As I watched the
hearings, I felt certain that Gates would not have brushed off
these alarming reports if he had not already known about the
diversion. He simply had not wanted to be told by a new witness.
I also disbelieved Gates's
testimony about President Reagan's December 5, 1985, retroactive
finding purporting to authorize the CIA's facilitation of the
November 1985 Hawk missile shipment to recover the Iranian hostages.
In the high-level meetings at the CIA a few days after the Hawk
shipment, Casey's deputy John McMahon had announced that Reagan
had signed the finding. But Gates told the committee that he
had forgotten about the finding by November 1986, when he supervised
the preparation of Casey's testimony for his appearances before
the House and Senate intelligence committees. The CIA's then
former general counsel, David Doherty, however, told the senators
that he had handed Gates a draft of the finding only a day or
so before Casey gave his misleading testimony.
The testimony of Charles Allen
minimized the likelihood that Gates's failure to remember the
president's finding had been accidental. During the preparation
of Casey's testimony, said Allen, an agency lawyer had shown
him a draft finding. Allen had promptly telephoned North. "In
an abrupt manner," said Allen, North had "told me emphatically
that the finding did not exist and that I was mistaken."
Allen had then spoken to George. "I recall with great clarity
Mr. Clair George informing me in a blunt and verbally abusive
manner that the finding did not exist and that I should 'shut
up talking about it.'"
Much of the later testimony
in the month-long hearings shifted away from Iran-Contra to the
question of whether Gates had slanted intelligence reports to
accommodate the political views of Casey or others. At the end
of the hearings, Gates was given an opportunity to respond. He
directed most of his response to the issue of slanted intelligence
reports. By the time the committee voted, eleven to four, to
approve Gates's appointment, the testimony regarding Iran/Contra
was no longer fresh. The next day, Herblock's cartoon in the
Washington Post showed the CIA headquarters with a big banner
proclaiming, "Now Under Old Management."
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