by Bob Spitz
“The CIA’s assessment of what it would take to support and grow an insurgency in Nicaragua varied between $60 million and $100 million a year,” says Bud McFarlane. That was a hard pill for Congress to swallow. Ronald Reagan sought to cast it as a separation-of-powers issue—that is, constitutionally the President of the United States is responsible for the conduct of foreign policy. The congressional response to that was, “Yes, but . . .”—the but being that the money comes from Congress. The United States wasn’t at war with either Nicaragua or El Salvador. Was covert assistance in the national interest? Congress didn’t think so, at least not to the extent of the president’s request. Initially, Congress granted $40 million to fund Contra operations in Nicaragua, effectively saying, “You can have that for the balance of this year, but there isn’t going to be any more after that.”
An amendment to the House Appropriations Bill—and attached as a rider to the Defense Appropriations Act of 1983—limited U.S. government assistance to the Contras in Nicaragua. Known as the Boland Amendment, after its sponsor, Massachusetts representative Edward Boland, it put a severe crimp in the administration’s Latin America policy. But it was madness, administration officials thought, to tell the Contras they had until the end of the year to receive financial support and then, after that, they were on their own. A loophole had to be found.
Washington was a vast net with no shortage of loopholes; it took nothing more than a little creativity to circumvent a statute. Every bill was subject to interpretation, and the Boland Amendment presented no great challenge. It said that no federal funds could be appropriated for the Contras, but said nothing about private funds or money from other sources. At least, that’s the way aides close to the president read it. Proponents of the covert efforts might conceivably approach other countries, like Saudi Arabia, for contributions to the cause. The NSC had its own financial reserves that could be tapped into. On July 12, 1983, President Reagan signed a secret “Covert Funding on Nicaragua” initiative, which more or less freed up questionable sources of cash earmarked to “support and conduct covert activities including paramilitary activities designed to . . . facilitate the efforts by democratic Nicaraguan leaders to restore the original principles of political pluralism, non-alignment, a mixed economy and free elections to the Nicaraguan revolution.” It was imparted to Contra leaders that they could expect enough funding and equipment to support a force of twelve thousand guerrillas.
This meant the CIA was no longer aiding what was supposedly the original objective with regard to the Contras—stemming the flow of arms trafficking to Marxist guerrillas. The United States was actively supporting plans to overthrow the Sandinista government.
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As the summer of 1983 heated up, American efforts to resolve the foreign occupation in Lebanon by Israel and Syria grew increasingly desperate. The Marine unit stationed on the flatlands of the Beirut airport was taking sporadic fire from Muslim artillery located in the surrounding mountains. But there was no great hope in the White House, and certainly no great plan. The president sought to avoid any involvement that would put at risk his domestic agenda. In the vacuum, Bill Clark, his national security adviser, seemed to be making key foreign policy decisions on his own.
Without consulting the president or even the secretary of state, Clark sent his deputy, Bud McFarlane, on an independent mission to the Middle East in July 1983. “My assignment was to try to get the withdrawal of all foreign troops in Lebanon,” McFarlane recalls. In Damascus, he attempted to negotiate a cease-fire, a cooling-off period before even the word “peace” could be mentioned. His meetings with Hafez al-Assad were as eye-opening as they were fruitless. “Can’t we find some element of common ground?” McFarlane asked the Syrian despot. “No,” Assad responded. “Israel has no right to be a state, and Lebanon is really part of Syria. We are maintaining order there and will continue to do that.”
McFarlane, who was a deeply religious man, attempted to appeal to Assad on humanitarian principles. “People are dying—yours, Lebanon’s, Israel’s, the Palestinians’. Can you at least agree on the sanctity of human life to stop the shooting long enough to make a feasible negotiation?”
It was at that point McFarlane first encountered a hand motion that he would learn was common among Muslims. Assad knitted his fingers together and then fanned them outward in a cupping motion and looked up, to indicate that the situation was in Allah’s hands—it was God’s will. “There is no sanctity of a human life of an Israeli,” Assad told him. “Even Lebanese are subordinates, and I will determine what is best for them.”
Six weeks later, McFarlane had another meeting with Assad but could see he was getting nowhere. It was clear to McFarlane that he wasn’t dealing with a rational, analytical person. Assad was intractable when it came to establishing any kind of peaceful resolution in Lebanon. “I needed some leverage vis-à-vis the Syrian forces deployed in the Beqaa Valley,” McFarlane says, “so I asked the president to send the battleship New Jersey to the eastern Mediterranean, and he agreed.” Perhaps, McFarlane thought, Assad’s belief in Allah’s will could be blunted by a show of strength. “If he saw the New Jersey was positioned to blow away the army that props him up and keeps him in office, he might adopt a more humanistic approach.”
The encounter in Syria left McFarlane depleted. Two days earlier, on September 1, 1983, he learned that a Korean passenger plane, KAL 007, with 269 people aboard, had been shot down—perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not—by a Soviet fighter. The loss of life haunted McFarlane. On September 3, after informing Assad of the New Jersey’s arrival, he flew to Cyprus, and went straight to his hotel to try to decompress. “But I couldn’t sleep,” he recalls. He got up at three in the morning and called his pastor, Jim Macdonell, at Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in Rockville, Maryland. It was Sunday morning in the States, he’d be preparing for services. “Jim, I’m out of gas here,” McFarlane confessed. “I’m not getting anywhere in my efforts with Assad. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just weigh in and ask the congregation to pray.”
“Sure,” Macdonnell assured him.
Three hours later McFarlane got word that Assad had agreed to a cease-fire.
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McFarlane’s mission brought a measure of peace to the Middle East at the expense of a measure of war with George Shultz. While Shultz considered “the cease-fire in Lebanon a major achievement of our diplomacy,” the secrecy of the negotiations—kept even from him, the secretary of state—coupled with other secret orders that had established maneuvers for a naval blockade off the coast of Nicaragua—stirred anger that he “was totally out of the decision loop.” Foreign policy, as far as Shultz could tell, was being made and implemented by Bill Clark. If he needed more evidence of this, he only had to consult the latest issue of Time, with the cover story “Clark Takes Charge” and the accompanying article depicting him as the administration’s lead dog on foreign policy. It was the last straw.
Shultz stormed into the Oval Office on July 25, 1983. “The process of managing foreign policy has gone completely off the track,” he fumed. “You can conduct foreign policy out of the White House if you want to, but you don’t need me under those circumstances.” Shultz told the president that “if he wanted an errand boy, he should get somebody else.” In fact, he said, “Bill Clark seems to want the job, because he is trying to run everything.” And with that, Shultz offered his resignation.
Ronald Reagan hadn’t seen that coming. He was taken aback by Shultz’s offer to quit and rejected it emphatically. He’d already lost one secretary of state. Another casualty so soon after Haig’s departure was unthinkable. It would send the message that his administration was unstable, and in any case, he considered Shultz an exceptional statesman. “I told him he had my confidence,” Reagan noted in his diary, “and that it would be a disaster for all of us if he left.” The president’s reassurance was gratifying to
Shultz, but by no means the end of the problem.
Nancy Reagan had her own view. She nursed a grudge against Bill Clark that went back some years. “He struck me as a user,” she wrote in her memoir, My Turn. She felt that he misrepresented her husband’s positions when it came to foreign affairs. She found him too conservative and too confrontational, and she feared his influence would help to paint her husband as a warmonger. “Bill brought tough national security and foreign policy issues to the president,” says John Poindexter. “Nancy thought those areas were too controversial and would lower his popularity, so she developed a real dislike for Bill and blamed him for hijacking Reagan’s interest.”
George Shultz was her idea of a mensch, not only “a tough negotiator with enormous energy” but also warm and cuddly, “a big teddy bear.” When she learned that Shultz threatened to resign, she hit the roof. She called Shultz and argued that Clark should be fired, then took her case to the president. She knew in advance it would be rejected out of hand. Judge Clark was Reagan’s adviser as well as perhaps the only person in the White House he considered a real friend, and there was no way he’d agree to dismiss him.
Clark didn’t have to worry. He soon decided he’d had enough, and his disenchantment touched off a major shake-up. James Watt, the confrontational secretary of the interior, had also run afoul of Nancy Reagan, who engineered Watt’s swift sacking. That opened an escape hatch for Clark, a Westerner and an outdoorsman. He requested a reassignment to Interior, a move the president was only too happy to make. But who would replace Clark as the national security adviser? A scramble developed in the White House. Jim Baker and Mike Deaver hatched a scheme, a switcheroo: Baker would take over as the NSC adviser, with Baker’s deputy, Richard Darman, joining him there, and Deaver would fill the vacancy as White House chief of staff. The president thought it was a fine idea, and his wife was on board. He’d announce it on October 14, just before leaving for Camp David, at the end of a busy week. Baker and Deaver had even prepared a press release to report their promotions.
That same afternoon, at a National Security Council meeting, Bill Clark passed a note to Ed Meese about the Baker-Deaver move. Meese was stunned. “It would be a complete disaster,” he decided. Baker, he felt, was too much of a pragmatist; he would attempt to move Ronald Reagan too far to the center. It would send a signal to the Soviets that the United States was in compromise mode. Deaver—the White House gatekeeper and go-between with Nancy Reagan, to whom he gave prejudiced information—was an even bigger liability. Meese came to the conclusion that “Mike was intoxicated with power.” He’d lost his way, lost touch with his sense of responsibility to the president and the party. Meese felt Deaver wasn’t capable of handling substantive issues. Clark felt the same way, and he persuaded the president to delay his announcement, at least until after the weekend, when he came back from Camp David.
Reluctantly, Reagan agreed. When he returned to the Oval Office, he summoned Baker and Deaver. “I’ve had a lot of opposition to this from some of the boys,” he told them. “I want to think about it over the weekend.”
Deaver was crushed. “You don’t have enough confidence in me to make me Chief of Staff!” he screamed, fighting back tears.
Meanwhile, Clark rallied the troops, herding Meese, Weinberger, Bill Casey, and Jeane Kirkpatrick into his office to mount a strategy. They were in unanimous agreement. “We decided these appointments couldn’t go through,” Ed Meese recalls. Bill Casey was the most vociferous. “How can you make the biggest leaker in Washington the head of national security?” Casey huffed.
Leaking had been a scourge in the Reagan administration. Too many diplomatic issues and internal debates conducted behind closed doors wound up as stories in the national press. Risky initiatives, some unacceptable to Congress, often demanded secrecy and the strict confidence of parties, but participants found it difficult to keep the details to themselves. Leaking stories to the press, insider information, was ammunition and capital—a way to stir up public opinion or to expose a rival, altering the balance of power. According to Al Haig, a victim of persistent leaks, “In the Reagan administration, they were not merely a problem, they were a way of life. Leaks constituted policy; they were the authentic voice of the government.”
The whole mess infuriated Ronald Reagan. Classified information was leeching out of the White House—his White House—and it embarrassed him. What’s more, it said something deplorable about the men he trusted. It was contemptible, to say nothing of the fact that it was jeopardizing policy. On Monday evening, September 12, 1983, Reagan bristled when NBC’s Chris Wallace reported that Bud McFarlane and other key NSC officials advocated offshore air strikes against Syrian forces in Lebanon. On September 14, Reagan opened the Washington Post to find an article detailing the administration’s Lebanon strategy, which cited “White House officials” as its source. Someone close to him had planted that story. It infuriated him. Adding fuel to the fire, Bill Clark complained that the story, by mentioning Bud McFarlane by name, put his deputy’s life in danger in the Middle East. “I want you to consider ordering the Attorney General of the United States to investigate this forthwith,” he demanded.
Ed Meese agreed and drafted a paper authorizing the investigation. “The problem was, there was no smoking gun,” he says. Clark pointed the finger at Jim Baker, but Meese says it was hard for the president to believe anything negative about Baker. Meese knew better. Meese was convinced that Baker had given the Post the drop on the Sandra Day O’Connor appointment in advance of the announcement as well as countless other “anonymous” scoops. On other occasions, Baker sent his deputies, Richard Darman and Margaret Tutwiler, to do the dirty work. “They were the two principal leakers,” Meese says. He had firsthand evidence. “One Friday night, I was working late,” he recalls. “No one knew I was in the White House. But around eight o’clock, I startled Darman as I encountered him leading [syndicated columnist] Bob Novak up the back stairs.”
Attorney General William French Smith decided to administer polygraph tests to the president’s inner circle. Lie-detector tests! An uproar ensued. Jim Baker, in particular, was furious. He barged in on the president’s lunch with George Bush and George Shultz to insist that the investigation be dropped. Shultz leaped to Baker’s defense. “I’ll take the test—once,” Shultz said, “and afterward you’ll have my resignation.”
Ronald Reagan hadn’t calculated on such a fierce backlash. He immediately telephoned the attorney general and retracted the polygraph order, opting to “roundtable it” that afternoon at a legislative strategy meeting. But if he was expecting an orderly dialogue, he’d miscalculated. The staff who gathered was as factionalized as the Middle East. The Baker people and the Clark people squared off against each other, pointing fingers and hurtling accusations. A red-faced Clark stormed out in a fit of protest. It was as ugly a display as had occurred in the Reagan White House, and it managed to destabilize the president’s trust. It marked the end of both Baker’s and Clark’s influence on matters of national security, and damaged their reputations with George Bush and George Shultz.
As a result, neither Baker nor Deaver got the new job he sought. Clark was relocated, some say “banished,” to Interior, far from the White House power struggle.
Ronald Reagan deplored this type of disturbance, but the real fireworks were only beginning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
URGENT FURY
“October of ’83 was an incredible time.”
—JOHN POINDEXTER
In the fall of 1983, the administration’s Middle East policy went up in flames.
In September, the president’s top command continued to wage fierce policy battles over strategy in Lebanon. There was serious discord between State and Defense officials, and the Marines stationed there were caught in the middle. They’d been taking fire on a daily basis, despite the administration’s insistence that they were neither in combat nor targets, an
d they had been warned not to be drawn into a combat role. That position was part of a dodgy legal shield. Had American troops been in an official combat situation, the president would have to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973, forcing him to withdraw the troops in sixty to ninety days unless both houses of Congress authorized their presence. Ronald Reagan wanted to avoid that at all costs, insisting repeatedly that it would send “extremely dangerous signals” to Syria and the Soviet Union. When the Marines began exchanging mortar fire with Druze combatants in the Shouf Mountains on September 19, the president’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, told the White House press corps: “The shelling out of the mountains is not directed at U.S. troops or diplomats and for that reason, U.S. personnel are not in a situation of imminent hostilities.”
Tell it to the Marines!
In fact, Bud McFarlane says, “they were sitting ducks.” He was in a position to know, barricaded as he was in the American ambassador’s residence in the foothills of the Shoufs, where a mortar had blasted a gaping hole in the courtyard. He cabled Washington straightaway, warning that “ammunition and morale are very low. . . . In short, tonight we could be in enemy lines.” He felt the Syrians and their compatriots in the mountains were committing acts of savagery that could eventually threaten the Marines, and he hoped the president “would just fish or cut bait.” It was time, McFarlane said, “to put the screws to Syria.” No good would come of things “until the U.S. and the Arabs applied some sticks to Assad.” But his advice fell on deaf ears. Cap Weinberger told the president that the Marines didn’t sanction McFarlane’s “sky-is-falling cable.” To strengthen the Defense Department’s case, Weinberger instructed the commandant of the Marine Corps, General P. X. Kelley, to brief a congressional committee. “There is not a significant danger at this time to our Marines,” Kelley insisted, “no evidence that any of the rocket or artillery fire has been specifically directed against Marines.”