[News] Robert Gates and Iran/Contra

[Anti-Imperialist News]

[and with the new vice president of Nicaragua a former Contra leader, 
wonder if the lines of communication between the US and Nicaragua 
won't be easy...cm]


http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh11082006.html

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."

Lawrence E. Walsh was the independent counsel in the Iran/Contra 
investigation from 1986 to 1993. This article is excerpted from his 
book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393318605/counterpunchmaga>Firewall: 
the Iran/Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.


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