The Family Jewels (41 page)

Clair George apparently adopted marching orders consonant with how he thought Director Casey would respond under such circumstances. George's misleading briefing to congressional staff was of a piece with his approach from the moment of the crash of the Hasenfus plane. Due to his CIA position, George had constant access to intelligence on the private benefactors'
contra
resupply operations, as well as agency contacts with the network. At one point he affirmatively instructed a subordinate not to become involved in activities that were being handled by North at the White House. Some of the CIA personnel most directly involved, like the chief of station in Costa Rica, worked for George. Yet in two October 1986 appearances before congressional committees, Clair George denied knowledge of the network, representing that he knew only what was in the newspapers. In testimony during November and December, George's denials included any knowledge of the role of Oliver North,
contra
funds, or the private benefactors. At several of these appearances, the deputy director for operations was accompanied by the chief of CIA's Central America Task Force, Alan D. Fiers, who joined Clair George in misleading Congress. George would later tell the joint congressional committee
investigating Iran-Contra that William J. Casey would never have countenanced a private off-the-shelf covert operation.

The deceptions of Bill Casey, Clair George, and other CIA officers aimed at protecting the Reagan administration and the CIA. But they left Langley vulnerable to being left to flap in the wind while others ran for cover. The wholesale destruction of documents at the White House, including all copies of at least one—possibly two—presidential findings, made it impossible for the CIA to demonstrate that its covert activities had been authorized. The Israeli deliveries to Iran posed a significant accountability problem, while complicity in
contra
operations threatened to derail the reconstitution of the long-standing effort against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. White House and other Reagan administration officials made no attempt to deflect allegations against the CIA. The agency's effort to protect this Family Jewel only did it harm, while the Iran-Contra faults overall were so large that no effort to scapegoat the CIA actually could protect the White House.

In December 1986 Director Casey appeared again, at a pair of House hearings, one before its appropriations committee, the other before armed services. There he denied knowing of the diversion—and later adverted it might conceivably have been cooked up by North and Poindexter—withheld information about the private benefactors, and disclaimed any knowledge of Saudi Arabia's contributions to the
contras
other than what
he
had read in the papers. Despite Ronald Reagan's complaints, it seemed the newspapers were everybody's source now. Casey was scheduled before the Senate Intelligence Committee again on December 16. The previous day, returning to Langley to prepare his testimony, Bill Casey collapsed in his office. Lawyer John Rizzo was standing outside the door. Taken to a hospital, Casey was found to have a brain tumor. Operated on, Casey was then treated for prostate cancer. He never returned to CIA. William J. Casey
passed away on May 6, 1987, taking the Iran-Contra secret to the grave.

Congressional investigators, a presidential commission (the Tower Board), and, after December 1986, an independent counsel all struggled to get to the bottom of this affair. The latter two proceeded with a degree of comity, but the congressional investigation did not. As it happened, the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives contingent on the joint committee was Representative Richard Cheney. Since leaving the White House with his Ford administration colleagues, Cheney had returned to his home state. He stood for office in the next election, announcing his candidacy in December 1977, and had been elected from Wyoming in 1978. Mr. Cheney rose rapidly in the House. By the mid-'80s he had become the minority whip and was a member of, among others, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Iran-Contra erupted just after the 1986 elections, which had returned Dick Cheney to office. He had actually been expecting some post-electoral relaxation. Cheney had planned an elk hunt, obtained the necessary hunting license, and was packing his bags for the flight home. Then the call came to attend a White House briefing. It was the November 12 event where President Reagan insisted everything had been above board and Admiral Poindexter then misled the congressional leaders. Elk hunting forgotten, Representative Cheney became enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair as he had been—from the White House side—in the Year of Intelligence.

President Reagan, falling precipitately in the polls, began to understand that his own veracity on Iran-Contra had become an issue. At the beginning of December he created the Tower Board to review the affair from the NSC
perspective. Reagan also instructed Attorney General Meese to arrange for the appointment of an independent counsel. On December 2 he hosted another White House function, a Republican leadership meeting in the Cabinet Room. Dick Cheney was present. There President Reagan declared he would welcome congressional inquiries as well as the independent counsel. Mr. Reagan announced that Frank Carlucci would become his national security advisor, succeeding the disgraced John Poindexter. The next day Cheney returned to the Oval Office, again with the Republican leadership, while Ronald Reagan once more explained what he thought he had been doing and asked what had been wrong with that. As they sat, Admiral Poindexter appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering. By December 4 the die had been cast. Congress would move forward with a joint investigating committee; Cheney would lead the Republican side of its House membership.

A month later, on January 5, 1987, joint committee members held an inaugural get-together with newly consecrated independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh and his deputy. There Mr. Cheney sat, “coldly radiating dissatisfaction,” and openly worried that cooperation between the two entities would be a one-way street, with the congressional committee providing data while the prosecutors, with their legal obligations, furnished nothing.
³⁰
That summer, when the committee was going full bore on its public hearings, Representative Cheney interrupted when Oliver North was stepping onto shaky ground under questioning, taking the group into closed session because the subject matter was supposedly sensitive. He reserved some of his own time and used it later to give North leave—in the nationally televised hearings—to present his standard Soviet/Cuban/Nicaraguan scare briefing. And when questioning North himself, Dick Cheney condemned Congress for its numerous changes in “policy” about
Nicaragua, excused NSC covert operations on grounds of presidential frustration with hidebound bureaucracy, and explained Reagan's decisions on Iran as intelligible “when we understand the depth of concern on the part of the President over the fate of a handful of American citizens in the brutal torture and subsequent death of [CIA Beirut station chief] Mr. Buckley.”
³¹
In August, with the American public glued to the television watching the Iran-Contra hearings every day, Cheney telephoned the White House and spoke to President Reagan, who recorded, “He feels the public is fed up with the whole subject of Iran-Contra.”
³²
Mr. Reagan naturally agreed.

Such cooperation as was forthcoming between the joint committee and the independent prosecutor proved sterile, as Walsh, for fear of tainting his court filings with data obtained by Congress under grants of immunity, felt required to establish autonomously all the same facts discovered by the congressional investigators. The conviction of John Poindexter was thrown out precisely because of such congressional taint.

Independent counsel Walsh nevertheless persevered and eventually obtained indictments, with plea bargains and some convictions, against a number of Iran-Contra players. When Walsh moved to indict former secretary of defense Caspar W. Weinberger for concealing evidence, Cheney, by then himself the defense secretary in the first Bush administration, went on television to denounce the move. He permitted Weinberger special access to Pentagon files. Secretary Cheney advised Bush to pardon Weinberger and the others. On December 24, 1992, President George H. W. Bush did so, Weinberger in advance of his trial; along with Clair George, Alan Fiers, and Duane Clarridge of the CIA; Elliott Abrams of the State Department; and former national security advisor Robert McFarlane.

Within the halls of Congress at the time, Representative Cheney pressed for a quick investigation, assertedly to get the story out, but incidentally ensuring that members would
have the least time possible to explore the facts or wear down the individuals who were subjects of inquiry—indeed ensuring that grants of immunity became a major vehicle for obtaining testimony. When public Iran-Contra hearings opened in May 1986, Cheney led off with an attack on
Congress
, not the executive, remarking that a major question to be aired, which had led to the events of Iran-Contra, was the lack of a distinct policy on the part of Congress. This was the same man who, when Congress had debated the legislation that proscribed CIA activity in Nicaragua in the first place, had characterized it as a “killer amendment” designed to force the
contras
to lay down their arms.
³³
That seemed pretty lucid, especially since the legislative history of the provision explicitly admitted of no exceptions. What Cheney left unsaid was that in the American system of government, in its classic formulation, the president proposes and Congress disposes—in other words, the executive makes policy, which the legislature accepts or rejects.

Speaking of rejection, once the Iran-Contra investigation had run its course, Cheney led a minority of members who repudiated the committee's report and appended their own tome of 150 pages essentially refuting its findings. Mr. Cheney engages in a modicum of creative storytelling in his recent recounting of Iran-Contra. In his memoir Cheney positions himself with the administration's critics:

The freeing of hostages was undeniably a good thing, but it was clear to me that the initiative was ill-conceived. It violated the arms embargo that we had imposed on Iran and that we were insisting other nations observe, and it undermined our strict policy against negotiating with terrorists. Congress had not been told about the operation, as we should have been.
³⁴

These were reasonable points, but they have a sharper edge
than Dick Cheney exhibited at the time, when he essentially functioned as a defender of the Reagan administration.

For example, the Iran-Contra minority report recognized congressional concern at being kept in the dark by the Reagan administration, but excused this on the grounds that Congress had a record of leaking. The Cheney report viewed the legal problems thrown up by the diversion and by violations of the Arms Export and Control Act as minor and technical, the NSC staff's deceits as not intended to hide illegalities, and the excesses of the affair as simple, well-intentioned mistakes, substantially the result of “an ongoing state of political guerrilla warfare between the legislative and executive branches.”
³⁵
Violations of the U.S. arms embargo against Iran, and of the policy of not negotiating with terrorists, were hardly mentioned in this Cheney report. Its analysis overwhelmingly credited the idea that the arms deals were an attempt at a strategic opening to Iran, one that more or less haphazardly degenerated into arms-for-hostages trades. There was no effort to explain why, if that were so, any cover-up was necessary. The minority report recommendations aimed almost entirely at Congress, and its body contained several chapters emphasizing the scope and depth of presidential power on national security.

Now to today's Family Jewels. In the second Bush administration, that of President George W. Bush, Richard Cheney had become vice president of the United States. As seen in our chapters on surveillance and on detention and interrogation, Cheney rematerialized as a major player who helped fuel Bush administration excesses. We have not even engaged the
other
set of events of that era, the push to justify an invasion of Iraq. There, too, Cheney played a key role. With aides David S. Addington, his pocket-size Constitution in his jacket, and I. Lewis Libby, who would take the fall for
the smear of an honorable CIA officer, the tale was always about presidential power, the very stuff of the Iran-Contra minority report.

So far, the record from George W. Bush's watch is complex but fundamentally similar to earlier periods. After the 9/11 attacks, there were demands for investigation of its antecedents followed by a joint inquiry by the House and Senate. The administration, spearheaded by Vice President Cheney's office, kept critical subjects off the agenda and circumscribed the flow of information to the panelists. The resulting inquiry satisfied few and led to demands for a broader investigation. Cheney opposed this too. When the September 11 Families Association, a group formed of family members of the victims and survivors of the attacks, pressed anyway, its political weight proved formidable. Congress and the Executive agreed to an investigation by a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The Bush administration, after promising full cooperation, again sought to restrict the information provided to the commission and impede access to White House aides. Vice President Cheney successfully fended off any questioning of himself or President Bush under oath, limiting their participation to a single, private meeting with the commissioners, and narrowly defining the records that could be made of their encounter.

In the case of the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, in the justification of which Bush, Cheney, and all their aides had been active participants, the White House moved heaven and earth to portray itself as the victim of faulty CIA intelligence on Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to Al Qaeda. Administration demands for that intelligence—driven by Cheney's personal pressure—and its harping on the false data to create a political basis for war, were hotly denied. Congressional investigations of the underlying facts were obstructed, and the administration changed the subject with its own
presidential commission, one that would broaden the focus to include other WMD cases and treat Iraq as simply a matter of analytical and collection methodology.