An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  On December 12, our nation got another reminder of the high price we were having to pay for the continuing strife in the Middle East and our efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict: Nearly 250 American soldiers returning home after six months of duty as members of the international police force posted in the Sinai under the Camp David accords were killed when their plane crashed after a refueling stop in Newfoundland.

  Less than three weeks later—two days after Christmas—we got still another reminder: Palestinian terrorists callously sprayed automatic weapons into crowds of passengers at the Rome and Vienna airports, killing twenty people, including an eleven-year-old American girl and four other Americans. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi promptly called the suicide attack a “noble act.”

  On the body of one of the terrorists was a Tunisian passport. The passport had been taken by Libyan officials from a Tunisian worker at the time he was expelled from Libya. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the terrorist had gotten the passport.

  I felt we couldn’t ignore the mad clown of Tripoli any longer. By now, we had a shelf full of contingency plans designed to express in a concrete way our displeasure with his terrorism—but whatever we did, we had to take into account the presence of nearly one thousand American oil workers in Libya. Qaddafi wouldn’t think twice about taking his vengeance on them.

  Two of my cabinet members whom I admired most, Cap Weinberger and George Shultz, never got along especially well together. There was always a little chill—a tension—between them. I suspect that it went back to when they were both executives of the Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco. Whatever it was, they didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Sometimes, for example, Cap thought that George was too eager to enter into certain arms control agreements with the Soviets and tried to advise me to go more slowly than George favored (I’ll get into this later). There were numerous conflicts between them. I don’t think this was necessarily bad for the country or for the administration: Every member of the cabinet had to view the problems of the nation and interpret world events from the special vantage point of his or her own job and responsibilities, based in part on the advice of specialists in their respective departments.

  Conflicts between the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom were inevitable no matter who ran them, and they didn’t start with my administration. I think it is important for presidents to have advisors who offer them different points of view and express disagreement instead of always expressing unanimity. I always encouraged the members of my cabinet to disagree not only with me but with each other.

  But while George and Cap disagreed on many topics, they were united on one thing: Almost from the day Bud McFarlane brought us the proposal for arms sales to Iran, they were against it. They warned me against participating in any arrangement that might be interpreted as linking the shipment of arms with efforts to free the hostages. At that meeting on Pearl Harbor Day, 1985, when we considered continuing and possibly even expanding the covert operation begun the previous summer, they made their opposition clear to me forcefully. They didn’t argue that the plan involved a swap of arms for hostages, but they contended that if information about it ever leaked out (and George insisted that it would), it would be made to look as if we were.

  My response to them was that we were not trading arms for hostages, nor were we negotiating with terrorists.

  “Look,” I said, “we all agree we can’t pay ransom to the Hizballah to get the hostages. But we are not dealing with the Hizballah, we are not doing a thing for them. We are trying to help some people who are looking forward to becoming the next government of Iran, and they are getting the weapons in return for saying that they are going to try to use their influence to free our hostages. It’s the same thing as if one of my children was kidnapped and there was a demand for ransom; sure, I don’t believe in ransom because it leads to more kidnapping. But if I find out that there’s somebody who has access to the kidnapper and can get my child back without doing anything for the kidnapper, I’d sure do that. And it would be perfectly fitting for me to reward that individual if he got my child back. That’s not paying ransom to the kidnappers.”

  Because of the opposition of Cap and George, I decided to wait. The Pearl Harbor Day meeting ended without me making a decision, although I said I wanted to keep the channels open and asked Bud McFarlane to take the next step and meet again with the principals involved in the negotiations. I told him to say we wanted a dialogue directly with responsible Iranians, and that the Iranians could prove they were responsible by freeing the hostages, but that we would not trade arms for hostages.

  When he returned later that month from a meeting with the group in London, Bud told me that they had demanded shipments of additional weapons and had said that if word leaked out about the negotiations and our refusal to send arms, the lives of Iranian moderates involved in the contacts, as well as those of the hostages, would be in jeopardy. Bud said he thought that Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian arms merchant who was the principal middle man in the negotiations, was untrustworthy, and he was blunt in expressing his misgivings about continuing the initiative.

  But I felt that there were not many other options—possibly there were no others—open to us for getting the hostages home. I believed we had to explore every road, to do everything we could to get them out of Beirut as well as to develop a relationship with the future leaders of Iran. Despite difficulties, I believed that this group offered the best hope for accomplishing both objectives.

  Although I didn’t make a decision at that meeting on Pearl Harbor Day, inside I felt that we should proceed with the initiative on a step-by-step basis—cautiously and in compliance with the law—to see where it would lead. As I’ve said, I felt a heavy weight on my shoulders to get the hostages home. We were coming up to another Christmas season with American citizens held captive far from home, separated from parents, wives, and children, deprived of basic freedoms, and subjected to almost unspeakable living conditions. What American trapped in such circumstances wouldn’t have wanted me to do everything I possibly could to set them free? What Americans not held captive under such circumstances would not want me to do my utmost to get the hostages home?

  It was the president’s duty to get them home. I didn’t want to rest or stop exploring any possible avenue until they were home safe with their families.

  As the year came to an end, we spent a few days, as we usually did over New Year’s, at the home of former Ambassador Walter Annenberg near Palm Springs, where I played my annual round of golf and closed out the year with this entry in my diary: “Ended 1985 with 18 holes of golf; as usual, I had some enjoyable shots but many more of the other kind . . . then the New Year’s party and as always it was great. Of course, hanging over all of this was a cloud we tried to ignore temporarily—the matter of Qaddafi and his connection with the massacres at Rome and Vienna airports. We all feel we must do something, yet there are problems, including 1,000 Americans living and working in the mad clown’s country.”

  67

  THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of 1986 were a blur of tragedy and international crisis. There was the Challenger disaster, the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, a new clash with Japan over its restrictions on American imports, new efforts by Congress to starve the Contras, and continuing problems in the Middle East. On January 7, I wrote in the diary: “After quite a session, I finally came down on the side of an executive order bringing Americans and American business home from Libya and canceling relations—trade, etc., with them. At the same time we beef up the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. If Mr. Qaddafi decides not to push another terrorist act, okay, we’ve been successful with our implied threat. If on the other hand he takes this for weakness and does loose another one, we will have targets in mind and instantly respond with a h—1 of a punch. At tonight’s press conference, I announce the executive order.”

  As I’ve mentioned before, with all the prominence that the Iran-Contra affair has since received, it might see
m that all we were thinking about at the White House during that period was the Iran initiative. But it was only one of many, many things that were occupying us at the time. Not only were there major items of foreign policy such as arms control and problems in Nicaragua and the Philippines and visits with various heads of state, but there was a full plate of domestic issues as well, notably the battle to reform taxes and cut the budget deficit, and, of course, the Challenger tragedy. On any given day, I was sent dozens of documents to read, and saw an average of eighty people. I set the policy, but I turned over the day-to-day details to the specialists. Amid all the things that went on, I frankly have had trouble remembering many specifics of the day-to-day events and meetings of that period, at least in the degree of detail that subsequent interest in the events has demanded. In this book, I have set out to describe everything I remember about the Iran-Contra affair.

  At the same January 7 meeting of the National Security Council at which I approved the executive order involving Libya, John Poindexter and the NSC staff proposed pressing ahead with the Iranian initiative. This meant approving an additional shipment of TOW missiles, but with a new emphasis on negotiating directly with moderate members of the Iranian government rather than with the go-betweens.

  In retrospect, I think there were probably always a few questions in my mind about the reliability of the people we were dealing with during the negotiations that began after Bud McFarlane’s visit to me at the hospital in the summer of 1985. Several times, they promised that hostages would be released momentarily, and nothing happened. Still, Bill Casey said that the world of covert operations was full of people who were less than angels. The people we were dealing with had managed to get out one hostage, and, since we had made our connection with them, there had been no major terrorist acts committed against Americans by the Hizballah.

  In early January, I was assured again that Ghorbanifar and company had good connections in Iran. Warts and all, they were our best hope for getting the hostages out, so I decided to proceed with the initiative despite a deep division within the cabinet and staff: Ed Meese, Bill Casey, and especially John Poindexter—who became the principal manager of the initiative after McFarlane retired—argued for going ahead; Cap Weinberger and George Shultz remained very much opposed, with Shultz especially strong in his opposition. They argued forcefully that I was wrong, but I just put my foot down.

  I did not think of the operation (and never have) as an “arms-for-hostage” deal, because it wasn’t. Cap and George had both had experience in prior administrations. I couldn’t ignore their warning that if word about the initiative leaked out, it would be misinterpreted—but I just felt that the opportunities involved justified taking the chance. I didn’t expect the plan to fail, but if it did, I was prepared to take the heat.

  Through February, we expected the hostages to be released almost on a daily basis, but they didn’t come. We pressed harder for direct talks with moderate Iranian officials, always maintaining tight secrecy over the operation because any leaks could threaten the hostages as well as the people we were dealing with in Iran. Meanwhile, we had other matters to deal with in the Middle East.

  In March, the Sixth Fleet launched a new round of naval maneuvers in “Qaddafi’s lake”—the Gulf of Sidra—and we waited to see what his response would be. Commanders of our flotilla were instructed to cross what Qaddafi called his “line of death”—an imaginary boundary in the high seas more than one hundred miles off the coast of his country (and far beyond the twelve-mile limit set by international law), which Qaddafi claimed delineated Libyan territory. I ordered that, if Libya attacked our aircraft or ships, our forces were to reply in kind, but with a measured and limited response.

  Two days after the maneuvers began, Qaddafi’s forces fired SAM missiles at several of our carrier-based planes (and missed) and sent several missile-firing boats within the vicinity of our fleet—an act of aggression in international waters. We responded by sinking the Libyan vessels and knocking out the radar installation that had guided the Libyan missiles. After that, our intelligence agencies went on special alert, waiting to learn what Qaddafi’s next move would be.

  In late March, Nancy and I flew to California to spend a few days at the ranch. While we were there, I was awakened late at night by John Poindexter, who said a terrorist’s bomb had just exploded at a disco in West Berlin that was a favorite of U.S. servicemen. An American soldier and a Turkish woman had been killed and more than two hundred other people, including at least fifty American servicemen, had been injured in the blast.

  Our investigation of the bombing quickly focused on Libya. Although Qaddafi went on television and condemned it as a senseless act of terrorism against innocent people (which it truly was), in less than a day our intelligence experts established conclusively that there had been conversations regarding the bombing before and after it occurred between Libyan diplomats in East Berlin and Qaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. The evidence was irrefutable. Intelligence data provided positive proof that Libya was responsible for the bombing. Our intelligence agencies also obtained information outlining secret plans for additional acts of terrorism by Libya against Americans and people of other countries. Forewarned, they were able to prevent the attacks.

  Now that the American oil workers were out of Libya, I knew we had to do something about the crackpot in Tripoli. “He’s not only a barbarian, he’s flaky,” I said at the time. I felt we had no alternative but a military response: As a matter of self-defense, any nation victimized by terrorism has an inherent right to respond with force to deter new acts of terror. I felt we must show Qaddafi that there was a price he would have to pay for that kind of behavior, that we wouldn’t let him get away with it. So I asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a plan: What can we do that would send the right signal to Qaddafi without harming innocent people?

  At an NSC meeting on April 7, 1986, we reviewed maps and photographs of Libya and weighed various options, including strikes at locations in Tripoli that might have resulted in civilian deaths. “I’m holding out for military targets to avoid civilian casualties because we believe a large part of Libya would like to get rid of the colonel,” I wrote in my diary that night. Two days later, there was this entry in the diary: “A full—in fact, two full NSC meetings planning targets for retaliation against Qaddafi. Our evidence is complete that he was behind the disco bombing in West Berlin that killed an American sergeant and wounded 50 G.I.’s. We have five specific military targets in mind.” On April 10, I wrote, “Another session with Admiral [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman William J.] Crowe on potential Libyan targets. I think it will be Monday night. I’ve sent a long passage to Prime Minister Thatcher explaining in generalities what we’re up to. She has replied with a long message pledging support but expressing concern about possible civilian casualties. That’s our concern also.”

  This was one of the times, incidentally—while we were trying to come up with targets that would let us make our point but not hurt innocent people—when I really lost my patience with the press. Through the inevitable leak, several reporters picked up a scent that we might be planning an operation against Qaddafi in response to the disco bombing. In some cases, they got fairly accurate information, and some of their reports virtually announced to Qaddafi that the United States was planning to attack him. We tried to talk them out of revealing these state secrets—as far as I was concerned, maintaining secrecy in a war against terrorism is as crucial as it was during World War II, when the press accepted restrictions on its reporting to safeguard important operations and American lives—but they would have none of it. Every time they got a leak, they ran with it, even though it meant risking human lives.

  On April 13, we settled on the principal target: Qaddafi’s military headquarters and barracks in Tripoli, which was located well away from civilian targets. Housed in this compound was the intelligence center from which Libya’s worldwide program of state-sponsored terrorism was directed.

  T
he attack was not intended to kill Qaddafi; that would have violated our prohibition against assassination. The objective was to let him know that we weren’t going to accept his terrorism anymore, and that if he did it again he could expect to hear from us again. It was impossible, however, to know exactly where he would be at the time of the attack. We realized that it was possible, perhaps probable, that he might be at or near the intelligence center when our planes struck.

  France and Italy refused to permit our F-111 bombers to cross their air space on the way from a base in England to Tripoli to join carrier-based planes from the Sixth Fleet in the attack. As a result, the F-1ll’s had to detour more than a thousand miles over the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; this would shorten their effective range and, by leaving them with less reserve fuel, would possibly make them more vulnerable during the attack. The refusal upset me, because I believed all civilized nations were in the same boat when it came to resisting terrorism. At least in the case of France, however, economic considerations prevailed: While it publicly condemned terrorism, France conducted a lot of business with Libya and was typically trying to play both sides.

  On April 14, the night the attack was scheduled, I briefed congressional leaders on what was about to happen and told them about the intercepted messages that proved Libyan intelligence agents were responsible for the disco bombing. Late that night, sitting at my desk upstairs in the family quarters of the White House, I wrote in my diary: “Well, the attack took place right on the nose 7 P.M. our time. About 11 minutes over the target areas. Preliminary report. All planes withdrew but two of our F-Ill’s are unreported. Maybe it’s only radio failure. Maybe they are down. We don’t know as of this time. One thing seems sure. It was a success.”