Vice (10 page)

Yet Wright kept pushing, working with Costa Rican president
Oscar Arias
(who would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts). Wright also told the hostile factions that his office door in Washington was open to all of them. In Cheney's view, the Speaker was encroaching on the power of the executive branch—a transgression Cheney found intolerable. Cheney had seen the powers of the presidency eroded after Watergate. Ronald Reagan was a vehicle to restore that power. Jim Wright was an obstruction. Wright's open-door policy provided Cheney the opportunity to begin a campaign that would end Wright's career.

In September 1988 a group of Nicaraguan Contra leaders showed up at Wright's office asking for help with prisoners the Sandinista government had detained during civil unrest. In an interview, Wright said he found it unusual that they showed up unannounced, but he cleared his schedule. He had already sent word to the CIA that agency operatives creating civil unrest and pushing the Sandinista government to overreach in Nicaragua were violating laws passed by Congress. So Wright informed the Contra delegation that they could no longer expect CIA agitators to work on their behalf.

"That got back to Cheney and Elliott Abrams, and they were furious," Wright says. The
State Department
moved the Contra delegation along to the offices of the right-wing
Washington Times.
There, they told the editorial staff what Wright had revealed to them—that the CIA was provoking civil unrest in Managua. A week later, Wright was blindsided by a
Washington Times
reporter who said that several sources told him Wright had leaked classified
CIA activity in Nicaragua
. Wright, in fact, had conveyed in a closed meeting with the Contra delegation nothing they didn't already know.

Dick Cheney demanded that Wright be investigated. The
Speaker of the House
had been set up by the State Department so that Cheney could take him down. Again Cheney focused his argument on leaking. Speaking as a member of the Intelligence Committee, he cited major "institutional questions that go to the integrity of the House, to the integrity of the oversight process in the area of intelligence, and to the operation of the Intelligence Committee."

Newsday
investigative reporter
Roy Gutman
followed the story to Foggy Bottom, where he verified that a political appointee at the State Department had sent the Contra delegation to the
Washington Times
office with specific instructions to leak the CIA content of their conversation with Wright. Cheney seized the moment and the attention of the press. He and minority leader Bob Michel filed a complaint with the Ethics Committee and demanded an investigation by the Intelligence Committee. They claimed Wright had compromised U.S. intelligence operations.

In his office at the Texas Christian University library in Fort Worth, Wright, who had been Michel's host at a golf tournament several days before the minority leader filed his ethics complaint, still seems unable to come to terms with what was done to him. "I got no warning from them. I expected him—if not Cheney, then certainly Bob Michel—to say 'Jim, can you tell us about this? What does it involve?' I heard nothing from them, except that they were requesting an
ethics investigation
. It was the sort of thing I couldn't imagine Bob Michel doing. We had a good working relationship, and I held him in high regard."

Michel later apologized to Wright. He said Cheney had put so much pressure on him that he acquiesced and co-filed the ethics complaint. Cheney was not yet minority whip, so Michel put the imprimatur of the House leadership on the complaint against Wright.

The filing of the complaint in September 1988 began the end of Jim Wright's career. Cheney, who assumed he would soon become minority leader, was eliminating a powerful adversary, as he had moved Nelson Rockefeller out of the Ford administration. Newt Gingrich would pick up where Cheney left off. Over the course of the following year, Wright would be accused of defending Texas S&L owners as the industry collapsed. Ultimately, he would be drummed out of Congress because friends and supporters placed bulk orders for a book he had written, which came to be construed as undisclosed campaign contributions, and because it was alleged by the
House Ethics Committee
that he received an undisclosed gift in the form of two apartments made available for his use by a Dallas businessman.

Under pressure from his critics, Wright did not fight the charges but he resigned his seat in Congress on May 31, 1989, six weeks after a team of FBI agents had walked into his office and told him they were doing a background check on Dick Cheney. "I told them, 'Dick Cheney is a patriotic person who is devoted to the interests of the United States and will be completely dedicated to the president, in my opinion,' " Wright says. "That he would make a good secretary of defense." That same night, Jim and Betty Wright ran into Dick and Lynne Cheney at the Ford Theater.

"We walked in and Dick was there," says Wright. "He stood up and whispered in my ear, 'Thanks for the very nice response to the investigating committee.' "

On October 5, 1986, a Sandinista soldier fired a surface-to-air missile and ended Ronald
Reagan's secret war in
Nicaragua. The president and his covert warriors in the White House would have been better off if the entire crew of the CIA. transport shot down in southern Nicaragua had died. But a "cargo kicker" dropping supplies to the Contras ignored instructions and wore a parachute. As the plane crashed into the jungle, he floated down into the arms of Sandinista soldiers waiting on the ground. The following day, newspapers around the world featured photos of
Eugene Hasenfus
, a down-on-his-luck construction worker from Wisconsin who had found temporary work with CIA contractors.

Two weeks later, at a secret meeting of the House Intelligence Committee, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams tried to cover the administration's tracks. Wry and strident, Abrams was a self-declared former socialist who had embraced
neoconservatism
with a zealous intensity, even marrying the daughter of one of the movement's leading lights,
Norman Podhoretz
. In the meeting, Abrams and CIA officials assured committee members that the U.S. government was not involved in any way in supplying the Contras, according to a summary classified "Top Secret Veil." They had nothing to do with the Hasenfus trip. All U.S. officials had done was offer public encouragement, Abrams said. It was a brazen lie. The Democrats on the committee didn't believe a word of it, but the story was good enough for one of its Republican members, Dick Cheney.

"Mr. Cheney said he found our ignorance credible," read the summary written by the administration staffer taking notes that day in the secure committee room on the fourth floor of the Capitol dome.

For years Cheney had attempted to convince his colleagues that they should support Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America, but had met with mixed results at best. The Democratic Congress had been inconsistent in its support. So zealots like Abrams and Lt. Col.
Oliver North
took matters into their own hands. When Hasenfus went down, North, who stage-directed the Contra operation out of the National Security Council in the White House, was on his way to Frankfurt, West Germany. North was negotiating with a delegation from Iran—a country designated a supporter of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department—as part of an ongoing effort to exchange arms for U.S. hostages held by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas. He was selling missiles to a regime that had all but declared war on America. Hasenfus's capture forced the colonel to cut short his trip and return to Washington, D.C., as the administration, from President Reagan on down, went into full public denial mode. Cheney, an ardent cold warrior, was no exception.

On November 3, the Lebanese weekly
Ash-Shiraa
published a story about a secret trip to
Tehran
the previous May by former U.S. national security advisor
Robert McFarlane
. The U.S. media picked up the story and added new details to an emerging portrait of Keystone Kops diplomacy in which North gave the Iranians a Bible inscribed by Reagan and, to sweeten the deal, a chocolate cake. The Iranians had, in response, stalled.
Hezbollah
released a few hostages and then picked up a few more.

Debate began within the administration over how much to reveal to Congress and the public. At the urging of CIA director
Bill Casey
and Vice Admiral
John Poindexter
, who had replaced McFarlane as national security advisor, the president agreed to downplay the extent of the administration's dealings with Iran. At the time, they believed that negotiations with Iran would continue. "Must say something because I'm being held out to dry," Reagan said, according to notes of an internal White House meeting on November 10.

The White House staff decided the president would speak to the nation and tell the American public that the talks with Iran had been about restoring normal relations rather than bartering for hostages. The day before Reagan's speech, he and other senior White House officials met with the four leaders of Congress in the White House
Situation Room
to give them a preview. House minority leader Bob Michel sent Cheney in his stead. At the meeting, Reagan fed the congressional leaders the same lies he would tell the American public the next night. In his address, he claimed that the weapons and spare parts shipped to Iran "could easily fit into a single cargo plane." In reality, there were more than a thousand missiles over several shipments.

Again, Cheney, the good soldier, tried to hold the line, telling
The New York Times
after the speech that he took "issue with describing the efforts as arms for hostages," and warning critics against "Monday-morning quarterbacking."

But disclosures quickly overtook denials. By the end of November, White House efforts to contain the story veered toward obstruction of justice. U.S. attorney general
Edwin Meese
conducted an "investigation" into the affair. The inquiry smacked of a cover-up, as Meese declined an FBI offer of assistance and failed to take notes of his interviews. During his probe, the attorney general discovered a memo drafted by North in early April 1986 that detailed how $12 million from the arms sales to Iran would be diverted to the Contras. The two strands of an illegal policy came together in that memo. Poindexter and North had missed the document during a frenzy of shredding and alterations of official records that had started in October. Among the documents they did destroy was a retroactive Presidential Finding from December 1985 that gave official authorization to the transfer of HAWK missile parts to Iran the previous November. The finding was never shared with Congress at the time, as required by law. On November 25, Poindexter resigned and the White House sent North back to the Marine Corps.

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."