Vice

by Lou Dubose

  Democrat Jim Wright, elected Speaker of the House in the beginning of 1987, realized administration officials had violated a number of laws, starting with the Boland Amendments that prohibited military aid to the Contras. North, Casey, and Poindexter had constructed a parallel foreign policy operation with third-country funding and paid mercenaries—all beyond the reach of the congressional authority enshrined in the Constitution. In the process they had violated at least four federal statutes.

  Democratic congressional majorities in both the Senate and the House guaranteed that there would be hearings in what was shaping up to be the worst constitutional crisis since Watergate. It was time for Dick Cheney to advance from foot soldier to general—a commission that he instinctively felt belonged to him. He would be at the center of the successful attempt to defend Reagan, using the opportunity not only to turn defeat into victory, but ultimately to expand the constitutional role of the president to conduct foreign policy.

  Months later, when Cheney finally questioned Poindexter, he addressed that first November meeting in the Situation Room. Cheney felt at home in the Sit Room, dating back to his time as deputy chief of staff for Ford more than a decade earlier. He chided White House officials for lying to him, because it was counterproductive to the cause: "The point is, if the relationship is going to work long-term, there have to be a handful of members of Congress who have enough knowledge about policy to be able to do whatever needs to be done on the Hill to support and sustain the President's efforts downtown."

  When it came to blunting the investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, from 1987 to 1992, Cheney would fill that role.

  Going into the 100th Congress in January 1987, Wright believed he faced a difficult situation. Both the Senate and the House had appointed committees to look into the scandal. Laws had been broken. Attorney General Edwin Meese had requested an independent counsel to investigate, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals had tapped retired federal judge Lawrence Walsh. "I could see the potential for a carnival atmosphere," remembers Wright.

  Some Democrats in the House were talking about impeachment, and Wright wanted to stifle that idea as quickly as possible. Both Wright and Senate majority leader Robert Byrd had gone through the trauma of Watergate, and neither had the stomach for a repeat. "That is the last thing I wanted to do," Wright says. "Ronald Reagan had only two years left in his term. I was not going to allow a procedure that would lead to his impeachment in his final year in office."

  The two men decided on a first-ever joint House-Senate investigative committee. They hoped that a single committee would make the process go more quickly and thus limit the damage to the institution of the presidency. In their vision, the joint committee would be composed of senior members who would be sober enough to prevent the investigation from becoming a witch hunt. Wright remembers telling the Republican leadership, "You appoint and we appoint and we can maintain some control."

  Byrd picked as his chairman Hawaii's senator Daniel Inouye, a decorated World War II veteran who had served on the Senate Watergate Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. Inouye, in a shrewd gesture of bipartisanship, named New Hampshire Republican senator Warren Rudman to be his vice chair, promising to share all the powers of the chairmanship with him. Rudman was one of only a few former prosecutors to sit on the committee. A supporter of the Contras, Rudman nonetheless thought the White House had improperly bypassed Congress. He would overshadow Inouye.

  Wright asked Indiana conservative Democrat Lee Hamilton to chair the House side. Hamilton had an expertise in foreign policy, with service on the Foreign Affairs Committee and as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He, like Inouye, had an abiding faith that bipartisanship was essential to the proper function of government. Wright also named several of the more powerful Democratic committee chairmen in the House. While these men provided the gravitas the Speaker sought, the time-consuming responsibility of running their own committees hindered their effectiveness in investigating the scandal.

  Republican minority leader Bob Michel chose six committee members. His choices reflected a different agenda than the Speaker's. Michel selected Cheney to be the ranking Republican House member. Few were more knowledgeable when it came to intelligence issues, better positioned to understand what was at stake, and as ruthlessly partisan. According to one well-placed committee staffer, Cheney was the White House's guy on the committee, and the conduit through which the White House communicated with the Republican minority.

  To accompany Cheney, Michel added several of the more ideological House Republicans, including Henry Hyde of Illinois and Bill McCollum of Florida. Both men would go on to be key lieutenants in Newt Gingrich's revolution and House managers in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. As early as 1987, they were ready to burn the village to the ground in order to save it from the Democrats. This time, their contempt for an institution and its established order was not focused on the executive, but on a Democratic Congress.

  The Democrats began with a disadvantage that resulted from their deference to the executive. Wright had lost leverage by making it clear that impeachment was not an option. The committee ignored important evidence, including recordings of Reagan's phone conversations with foreign leaders involved in third-party funding. While his expertise was unquestioned, Hamilton's desire to be fair, and his middle-of-the-road orientation, made him an easy mark for the Republican House members, who wanted the committee to fail. Hamilton worried about the potential damage to the government from an activist investigation that would lead to impeachment. "The real question was whether Reagan would be able to govern," he recalls today.

  But it wasn't enough for the Republicans that the Democrats had declared they would not pursue impeachment. Their goal was to prevent any damage to the Reagan administration. "It was obvious that Dick Cheney and others were more interested in protecting the president than in finding out what had happened," says Rudman today from his Washington, D.C., law firm. And Cheney had a broader agenda: to ensure that the committee would in no way diminish the powers of the executive branch.

  As he had done throughout his career, Cheney lulled his enemies into underestimating him. He wasn't a table-pounder. "I never felt on his part any incivility or anger," says Hamilton, who can't recall his colleague's ever losing his temper during their meetings.

  Cheney preferred to operate behind the scenes. Sometimes he would even send a proxy to the committee leadership meetings. "You saw the results of his work, but you rarely saw what he did," remembers a Democratic committee staffer. "We totally misread the guy. We thought he was more philosophical than political."

  The Republicans got a big break on February 2, 1987, when CIA director Bill Casey resigned because of a lymphoma that had spread to the lining of his brain. He was a key witness. Casey had directed North to set up "the Enterprise," a secret organization run by General Richard Secord that trained, supplied, and even fought for the Contras—and in the process evaded Congress's intent to limit support for the rebel group. North would testify that Casey had suggested that the Enterprise could become a model for other covert operations around the world. Casey had been the first to propose hitting up third parties, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, for money to aid the Contras, despite the objections of Secretary of State George Shultz, who worried that "every quid had a quo." As one Democratic congressman would put it, Casey was the "godfather" of the scandal.

  In April, Cheney told a UPI reporter that Casey was "one of the best CIA directors the agency had ever had." He continued: "I don't think it's fair for people to criticize the man based on speculation and innuendo, and to do it at a time when he is incapable of defending himself strikes me as in extremely poor taste."

  The day after the hearings began on May 6, 1987, Casey died of pneumonia. In death he would become a helpful scapegoat for Oliver North and a resting place for missing information that would have filled out the contours of the scandal. But even i
n his absence, four CIA officials were eventually charged with criminal offenses. (The first Bush administration would pardon three of them and stymie the investigation of the fourth by refusing to declassify information needed for his defense—the same "graymail" tactic Cheney's vice presidential chief of staff, Scooter Libby, would use years later in an attempt to block his own prosecution.)

  By early April 1987, Cheney was meeting with the Democratic leaders to discuss the logistics of the hearings. "Lee Hamilton and I bent over backwards to be fair to the Republicans," recalls Wright. Rudman represented a bloc of moderate Senate Republicans who parted company with their more partisan House colleagues. "The meetings were very, very intensive," Rudman says.

  The first fight was over how long the hearings would last. The Republicans wanted it over quickly—"like tomorrow," one former staffer jokes. "Did I know Dick wanted to shorten it? Yes, I knew that," says Hamilton. The Democrats, fearful of being labeled as overly partisan for extending the proceedings into the 1988 election year, agreed to an artificial ten-month deadline to complete the investigation and issue a report. It was an invitation to the administration to stall while simultaneously burying the committee under mountains of useless information. Toward the conclusion, in the fall of 1987, committee investigators kept discovering new evidence, such as White House backup computer files. "We wanted to keep it going," recalls one staffer. "Cheney didn't want to do that." His view that the committee should stick to its schedule won out.

  One of the biggest issues facing the committee was what to do about the special prosecutor. It would be impossible to obtain candid testimony from North or Poindexter if the threat of criminal prosecution hung over them. To avoid being prosecuted for their testimony, the two men would likely take the Fifth and refuse to respond. Rudman and Senate counsel Arthur Liman urged Walsh to obtain a quick conviction by prosecuting North right away for obstructing justice with his shredding party. The Republican senator thought he could get his Republican committee members to defer their investigation until after such a prosecution, thus satisfying the interests of justice and getting the whole truth into the open. The special prosecutor with the political tin ear declined. He envisioned a much longer case that would take at least a year to prepare and prosecute. "Walsh might have been more successful if he had followed our suggestion when Liman and I met with him," recalls Rudman. "But he had this grand scheme of conspiracy."

  Walsh's intransigence forced the committee into a Hobbesian choice: Either abort the investigation, or grant immunity so North could testify.

  Cheney argued that North should be spared having to appear before the committee in deference to the criminal case, according to Rudman. Even some Democrats felt that way. "People were all over the lot on that one," Rudman recalls.

  Inside the Democratic caucus, the strongest proponent for offering immunity in exchange for quick testimony was Hamilton. "He believed that North had information no one else had," recalls one staffer. Hamilton, like the moderate Republicans, wanted a thorough airing of the details of the scandal, but he was not as keen on a criminal prosecution. As a compromise, the majority agreed to defer the testimony of North and Poindexter until the end of the investigation. With me eventual support of committee member Tom Foley of Washington, Hamilton's view carried the day.

  "Hamilton was so fair-minded and balanced that in order to get agreements, he gave ground in areas where he shouldn't have," remembers another committee staffer.

  The deal the committee struck with North's canny lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, doomed Walsh's investigation and the hearings. The committee offered North "use immunity," which guaranteed that nothing he said could be used against him in future criminal proceedings. They also agreed to a series of other demands, including that they would not depose North prior to his testimony; that the duration of his testimony would be limited; that they would not have the option of recalling him later; and that he would be allowed to produce documents the committee requested less than a week before he was due to testify.

  "I think [Iran-Contra] is radically different from Watergate," Cheney told a reporter on April 6, 1987, almost exactly a month before the hearings began. "I think there's a very real possibility that it's going to be at best a footnote in the history books."

  The preconditions Cheney championed all but guaranteed that the substance of Iran-Contra would be forgotten.

  To accommodate more than two dozen congressmen plus their staff, the joint committees built expensive two-tiered stages for the televised hearings. Director Steven Spielberg would later comment to Senate counsel Arthur Liman that the setup worked in favor of the witnesses, who would be shown on television "at the hero's angle, looking up as though from a pit at the committees, who resembled two rows of judges at the Spanish Inquisition." (When it came time to hold hearings for the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Robert Bork later that year, Senate Democrats made sure they sat on level ground.)

  Central Casting couldn't have chosen better characters to occupy the "villains' angle." In addition to the often bloviating congressmen, the two chief interrogators for the Senate and House were Liman and John Nields, the first a nasal-voiced New York ethnic with "spaghetti hair," and the second a balding lawyer with long locks down to his collar who couldn't keep his distaste for the witnesses from creeping into his voice. The two men would meet their match in Oliver North. And as Dick Cheney would do throughout his career, he would be right behind his leading man, helping him along and reaping the benefits.

  Cheney's opening statement explained his intentions for the hearings. At the time, Republicans were still playing defense. "Some will argue that these events justify the imposition of additional restrictions on presidents to prohibit the possibility of similar occurrences in the future," Cheney intoned. "In my opinion, that would be a mistake. In completing our task, we should seek above all to find ways to strengthen the capacity of future presidents and future Congresses to meet the often dangerous and difficult challenges that are bound to rise in the years ahead."

  Through the first several witnesses, Cheney began to develop his themes, a counter-narrative to Iran-Contra that would have been absurd if not delivered in such a measured and matter-of-fact way by the congressman from Wyoming. Cheney's first point came as early as his opening statement, when he said, "One important question to be asked is to what extent did the lack of a clear-cut policy by the Congress contribute to the events we will be exploring in the weeks ahead?"

  Cheney and the administration witnesses tried to make the case that because Congress had supported the Contras in the past, its refusal to do so later constituted a form of actionable negligence, which justified the administration's establishing a parallel support network as a "bridging" mechanism until Congress could be brought around to a sensible policy. Cheney's line of argument reached its most ridiculous extreme during his questioning of the notorious CIA agent Felix Rodriguez.

  The agency had first recruited Rodriguez, a Cuban exile, in 1967, to train a team to hunt down Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia. Rodriguez caught the fatally naive guerrilla leader in the Bolivian highlands in October of that year. After a brief interrogation, Rodriguez had Che executed. In Vietnam, Rodriguez flew helicopter missions and worked with the CIA. One of his superiors and a close friend from Vietnam was Donald Gregg, who would later become national security advisor for Vice President Bush. Gregg had helped place Rodriguez at the Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador, where, under the pseudonym Max Gomez, he managed the Contra resupply operation. It was this name that Eugene Hasenfus would tell his Sandinista interrogators was his point of contact. When Hasenfus was shot down, Rodriguez tried to phone Gregg at the White House to report the news, but he couldn't get through to his former commander.

  The extent of Bush's and Gregg's knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair was never fully clarified. But when Cheney questioned Rodriguez before the committee, his intent was not clarification. Instead he changed the subject, asking how folks in the Third Wo
rld thought the United States measured up in the struggle against global communism. "Can you comment upon the difference in terms of the perception on the part of the people at the local level as to the long-term commitment of the United States versus, say, the long-term commitment of the Soviet Union?" Cheney asked. In courthouse terms, a fact witness was being turned into an expert witness.

  Rodriguez was happy to oblige. When it came to consistency in foreign policy, the Soviet Union with its authoritarian government was the standard to beat. "The Soviet Union had a continuous policy no matter who changes in their hierarchy," answered Rodriguez.

  Later in the hearings, when North once again blamed Congress and the American people for forcing the administration to lie to them, Senator Rudman had had enough. "The American people have the constitutional right to be wrong," he said. "And what Ronald Reagan thinks or what Oliver North thinks or what I think or what anybody else thinks makes not a whit if the American people say, 'Enough.' "

  Rudman jokes today that the remark will probably be on his tombstone. "Yes, Congress voted for the Contras and then they voted against them, but it doesn't matter what the hell they did," he says. "The law changed, but it's still the law. That's just the way the country works."