by Lou Dubose
But for Cheney and administration officials, the law was a secondary issue. Exhibit A was Elliott Abrams, who had denied the existence of third-country funding after himself flying to London to solicit a $10 million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei. He apparently had no qualms about misleading legislators and the American people if it furthered his ideological aims. Abrams would eventually plead guilty to two minor offenses, including withholding information from Congress. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush pardoned Abrams, who never felt it necessary to demonstrate any contrition. When Cheney got his chance to question Abrams—whose public deceptions included a cover-up of the 1981 massacre of almost a thousand civilians by the Salvadoran army at El Mozote—the congressman was effusive in his praise. "I, for one, want to thank you for your efforts over the years," Cheney said in closing. "I do personally believe you have an extremely bright future in the public arena in the United Stares."
Almost a decade later, Dick Cheney saw to it that Elliott Abrams was appointed deputy national security advisor in the Bush-Cheney White House.
While Cheney and the House Republicans had started the Iran-Contra hearings in a defensive posture, the appearance of Oliver North altered the terms of engagement. "Post-Ollie, their entire mood and goals changed," recalls a Democratic staffer. "It was 'Happy days are here again.' We are going to play this string. This is going nowhere."
On July 7, North first assumed the "hero's angle" in the marbled elegance of Room 325 in the Senate Office Building. He was costumed for the part, in his Marine dress uniform with rows of ribbons pinned to his chest. Over the next six days, he would put on a bravura performance, earnestly wrapping himself in the flag: just an obedient soldier following orders. As one writer would note, North exhibited a righteous glow that made him look "as if he were posing for an inspirational wall hanging." To question poor Ollie was one more injustice in a long history of political perfidy against the armed forces, dating back to Vietnam. "We didn't lose the war in Vietnam, we lost the war right here in this city," North said.
For two days, majority counsel Nields grilled North. During the interrogation, the colonel stated that Casey had directed him to create the clandestine Enterprise organization supporting the Contras, that Poindexter had authorized the transfer of money from the arms sales to the Contras, and that North believed the president was aware of the diversion. Once the operation came into public view, North confessed, he started destroying the evidence. On several occasions he had lied to Congress. North's admissions, delivered with exaggerated self-justification, came out in testy exchanges with a clearly frustrated Nields.
"I'd have offered the Iranians a free trip to Disneyland if we could have gotten Americans home for it," came one typical reply to a line of questioning on giving missiles to that Middle Eastern nation.
"He made all his illegal acts—the lying to the Congress, the diversion, the formation of the Enterprise, the cover-up—seem logical and patriotic," Liman would note with begrudging admiration in his autobiography, Lawyer.
It didn't help that Nields chose to target covert operations. The issue divided the Democratic caucus between those who wanted to use the hearings to pursue policy objectives like limiting covert action and those who wanted simply to get to the bottom of what had happened. A focus on covert operations united the House Republicans, as hampering the president's maneuvering room in this area was one of their greatest fears. "The issue for Cheney and Hyde as well as Colby was that [the hearings] would shut down the ability to conduct covert actions," recalls one GOP staffer.
At one point, Nields prodded North: "In certain communist countries, the government's activities are kept secret from the people, but that is not the way we do things in America, is it?"
The question was a slow, hanging ball right over home plate, and North hit it out of the park. His response mirrored Cheney's worldview perfectly: "I think it is very important for the American people to understand that this is a dangerous world, that we live at risk." Translation: Covert operations are essential to keep the nation, and yes, even dimwitted congressmen, safe.
At the end of the first day, Cheney enthused on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that the colonel "probably was as effective as anybody we've had before the committee in coining forward very aggressively and stating what he did, saying why he did it, arguing that he was in fact authorized to take the activities that he did."
As if reading from the same playbook, North developed a theme oft repeated by Cheney and the House Republicans throughout the hearings: Because members of Congress leaked like an old faucet, the legislative branch could not be trusted with classified information that pertained to national security. For North, the argument extended to the hearings themselves: "I believe that these hearings, perhaps unintentionally so, have revealed matters of great secrecy in the operation of our government, and sources and methods of intelligence activities have clearly been revealed, to the detriment of our security."
Inouye forced North to admit that he had no evidence to support such a claim. "The greatest leaks came out of the White House," recalls Rud-man. "North and company were the biggest leakers of all during that period." And today it's no different, he says. "Just look at the case now with that CIA agent [Valerie] Plame. God forbid anyone did that on the Hill, there would be hell to pay. The administration would be lining up howitzers on the White House lawn to fire at the Capitol."
On Friday, July 10, the fourth day of North's testimony, Cheney took his turn at questioning the witness. It was more like a duet than an interrogation. "Let me say at the outset that I have been tremendously impressed with the way you have handled yourself in front of the committee," Cheney told North. "And I know I speak for a great many people who have been watching the proceedings, because the Congress has been absolutely buried in the favorable public reaction to your testimony and phone calls and telegrams."
North had taken to putting stacks of supportive telegrams on his witness table, as if the increasingly cowed committee needed a reminder of the tens of thousands of messages of encouragement he had received. Although the telegenic colonel's public support was undeniable, not widely reported at the time was that Western Union offered a half-price special on pro-North telegrams sent to the committee.
Throughout the hearings, and in particular during the North testimony, it was as if the witnesses and the House Republicans were following a hidden script, complete with programmed queries and answers not available to everybody else. "It was apparent to me that there was coordination going on," says Rudman. Bruce Fein, who served as research director on the minority staff, confirms it. "Sure we talked with those folks," he says, and claims it wasn't unusual. "It's not that you lie but this is the way you can coordinate strategy."
As the ranking House Republican on the committee, Dick Cheney was the coordinator of the opposition. Through leading questions, Cheney helped North portray himself as just a guy guilty of wanting "to cut through red tape." Cheney, a man blessed with wonderful comedic timing, played an impeccable straight man. He fretted that North's eagerness to cut corners to help "the Resistance" could generate political opposition that would make it harder for Congress to renew aid.
North made the most out of this invitation to emote:
Hang whatever you want around the neck of Ollie North . . . but for the love of God and the love of this nation, don't hang around Ollie North's neck the cutoff of funds to the Nicaraguan Resistance again. This country cannot stand that, not just because of Nicaragua, but because of all the other nations in the world who look at us and measure by what we do now in Nicaragua, the measure of our whole commitment to their cause. To things like NATO, to things like our commitment to peace and democracy elsewhere in the world.
The two men were now in the zone, a parallel radical-right fantasy-land, blithely ignoring the damage to America's reputation caused by the administration's support for the Contras and its willingness to barter weapons for hostages with Iran and Hezbollah. Forgotten w
as the U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors that had killed innocent civilians and brought a swift condemnation by the World Court. Or the brutal Contra attacks on civilian infrastructure, including medical clinics, which provoked outrage in European capitals. Or even the ridicule to which now emboldened Iranian hard-liners had subjected U.S. overtures.
"And by way of closing, Mr. Chairman, let me again simply thank the witness," concluded Cheney. "Colonel North has been, I think, the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard, and I know I speak for a great many Americans when I thank him for his years of devoted service to the nation, both in the United States Marine Corps and as a member of the NSC staff. Thank you very much, Colonel North."
Cheney and Hyde had assembled a crackerjack staff that quickly responded to take advantage of the new dynamic of popular sentiment against the hearings that North had set in motion. From the beginning of the hearings, the two Republican congressmen had wanted to stake out a position on how they believed government should work, according to Fein.
Intense and energetic, Fein had worked at the Office of Legal Policy, President Reagan's legal strategy shop in the Justice Department. From there he had gone on to be general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission before answering the call to serve the committee. He wasn't the only Reagan loyalist on the team. Joining him on Cheney's staff was David Addington, a former assistant general counsel for the CIA. After 1984, Addington moved on to the Flouse Committees on Intelligence and International Relations, where he continued to serve the interests of the agency while forging a lasting professional bond with Cheney. "It's on the [Iran-Contra] committee that he and Cheney seemed to really come together," remembers one Democratic staffer.
Working with their best witness, the minority team defined limits to the role of the Congress in conducting foreign policy. In command of the floor, and with the American public watching, North put forth complex constitutional arguments to justify his conduct. In particular, North mentioned a 1936 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. The case involved an executive order President Roosevelt issued at the behest of Congress, imposing an arms embargo on Bolivia and Paraguay, then at war with each other. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., charged with violating the ban, argued that the embargo was illegal. The Court upheld the president's order. In his opinion, Justice George Sutherland declared the "exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations." (In his opinion, Sutherland misquoted a speech by John Marshall from 1800. Marshall, a Virginia congressman at the time, was arguing not for expansive executive power but for the role of the president as the enforcer of treaties ratified by the Senate.)
"[Cheney and the House Republicans] were forced into the more theoretical arguments about the presidency because of the limitation of the evidence to support their positions [that nothing illegal had occurred]," Hamilton believes.
North's first attempt at referencing Curtiss-Wright occurred during questioning by Senator George Mitchell of Maine. "The Supreme Court held again that it was within the purview of the President of the United States to conduct secret activities and to conduct secret negotiations to further the foreign policy goals of the United States," North declared.
Senator Mitchell happened to be a very good lawyer.
"If I may just say, Colonel, the Curtiss-Wright case said no such thing," Mitchell responded. "I just think the record should reflect that Curtiss-Wright was on a completely different factual situation and there is no such statement in the Curtiss-Wright case."
But North wasn't finished trying to get it into the record. The next day, after careful prompting from another House supporter, New Jersey Republican Jim Courter, North read a quote from Sutherland's opinion.
Here was a career Marine Corps officer with no background in law explicating a Supreme Court case. When Louis Fisher heard North's use of Curtiss-Wright, he thought, "Someone is feeding him this." Fisher was the research director for the majority on the Iran-Contra Committee and a specialist on separation of powers. "This was one of the key arguments used by the Republicans and witnesses, and it was just a misuse of history," he recalls from his office at the Library of Congress, where he started working in March 2006. For thirty-five years the Congressional Research Service employed Fisher, until he wrote a report on whistle-blowers and commented in an online article that Congress and the courts were too deferential to the executive branch. This set off a series of rebukes from his superiors that led to his reassignment to the law office at the Library.
Fisher's job on the Iran-Contra Committee was to protect the legislative branch. In this he sometimes found himself at odds even with some of the committee Democrats who he believes misread Articles I and II of the Constitution, which respectively detail the powers of the Congress and the executive. "Some wanted to declare that the president was preeminent in foreign affairs," he says. "This was the institutional thing that I was supposed to watch."
Cheney had deferred twenty minutes of his allotted time for questioning North in case he had anything to say later. By the end of North's week of testimony, the House Republicans had been so successful that Cheney offered North his remaining time to deliver a slideshow on why funding the Contras was so important. The turnaround from defense to offense was complete.
After twelve weeks and more than two hundred fifty hours of testimony from thirty-two witnesses, all that was left to fight over were the conclusions. The Democratic leadership wanted a unanimous report. In order to placate Republicans, they agreed to leave out controversial aspects of the investigation such as accusations of an administration cover-up and evidence implicating Reagan. The committee produced dozens of drafts and revisions in an attempt to accommodate the minority. Once again, they underestimated Cheney and the House Republicans.
"From the get-go they wanted a minority report," says Fein of Cheney and Hyde.
Over the months of hearings, the minority developed its arguments to counter the mainstream impression of Iran-Contra. "Basically it was the brainchild of Cheney and Hyde, that was 99 percent of it," says Fein, who helped write the report. Fein says that Cheney and Hyde had made their positions so clear during the hearings that it was hardly necessary to consult them to write a report that would advance their arguments.
The official majority report was due to come out on Tuesday, November 17, 1987, but a printing problem delayed it by a day. On November 16, the House Republicans leaked a copy of the minority report to The New York Times in a successful attempt to upstage the majority. At a press conference the following day, all the Republicans on the committee save three—Senators Warren Rudman, Paul Trible, and William Cohen—attacked the majority for engaging in a "witch hunt" against Ronald Reagan and his administration. "There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for 'the rule of law,' no grand conspiracy, and no administration-wide dishonesty or cover-up," the report read. "In our view the administration did proceed legally in pursuing both its contra policy and the Iran arms initiative."
Rudman called the minority report "pathetic." In a paraphrase of Adlai Stevenson, he said his Republican colleagues had "separated the wheat from the chaff and sowed the chaff."
The detailed minority report included three chapters of legal arguments dating back to the Constitutional Convention justifying why the executive branch had supremacy in foreign affairs. When the report was released, those arguments were largely ignored by the press, which focused instead on the conflict. The Democrats also dismissed the minority's position. "This was '87," remembers one Democratic staff member. "We had a substantial majority and the Republicans were trained to be what we thought was a permanent minority party. When they would yap and yell, we would let them yap. It just didn't matter."
The Democratic-led majority saw Iran-Contra differently, finding that the "clandestine financing operation undermined the powers of Congress as a coequal branch and subverted the Constitution." Th
e administration had violated a key belief of the Framers that "the purse and the sword must never be in the same hands."
Within a week, Cheney's attention had already shifted to thwarting any attempt to use the hearings to enact reforms. On November 23, he held a press breakfast at which he threatened a "big fight" if Democrats tried to impose limits on covert action or the president's ability to conduct foreign policy. What worried Cheney was bipartisan legislation gaining support in the Senate that would require the president to notify Congress of covert actions within forty-eight hours, among other restrictions. In the end, no significant reforms came out of Iran-Contra, in no small part thanks to Cheney.
While Congress was finished, the special prosecutor was just getting started. Oliver North went on trial in February 1989. A jury convicted him on three counts and acquitted him on nine others. A judge gave North a three-year suspended sentence, two years' probation, $150,000 in fines, and twelve hundred hours of community service. A year later, a three-judge appeals court overturned the convictions because the congressional immunity grant had tainted the trial. The same appeals court also overturned a conviction of Admiral Poindexter on five felony charges.
Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh had one final big fish on the hook. In the course of his investigation, he discovered that then secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger had lied to investigators and Congress about whether he had kept notes of key meetings. Thus began an arduous attempt to bring Weinberger to trial. By this time, Cheney had already moved on to fill Weinberger's old job at the Pentagon. Yet Cheney's attempt to stymie the investigation of Iran-Contra continued.
At an arraignment of Weinberger on November 24, 1992, an attorney for the special prosecutor complained that Cheney's team had given Weinberger special access to government files to aid in his defense, as well as information about what investigators were looking at. This was contrary to Defense Department regulations, according to the lawyer. "One of our attorneys found that Weinberger's attorneys had documents that came from the Department of Defense," says a member of Walsh's team. "Cheney was passing them information that pertained to our prosecution. He was working on behalf of Weinberger's defense." At about the same time, Cheney went on Meet the Press and called Weinberger's indictment "a travesty."