Vice (11 page)

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 in 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 World 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."

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.