by Bob Spitz
As McFarlane suspected, Ghorbanifar reneged on the deal. “The missiles arrived, and they were the wrong missile!” he protested. They were obsolete, technically unable to shoot down high-altitude targets.* What’s more, they bore Israeli markings, including the Star of David, which was repugnant to the Iranians.
Yes, the operation was a fiasco—and that wasn’t the worst of it. To pull off the weapons transfer, Oliver North had enlisted the assistance of master-of-stealth Richard Secord. Secord’s job in the HAWK missile transfer was to procure the weapons. Secord had worked in the foreign sales of weaponry in the Pentagon, and he knew where to go to get the job done. Ollie North had persuaded an Israeli arms merchant to deposit $1 million into North’s Lake Resources slush-fund account to cover expenses, but Secord had managed to bring the deal in for only $150,000. That left a cool $850,000 profit—which North diverted to the Contra operation.
This rechanneling of funds would later prove disastrous and give name to the Iran-Contra scandal. In the meantime, however, there was hell to pay elsewhere. By enlisting help from the CIA, through his dealings with Dewey Clarridge, North had in all probability breached the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, a 1974 federal law requiring the president to inform a congressional committee before the agency initiates a covert operation. “This is criminal!” North was told by John McMahon, deputy director of the CIA, who was livid when he learned of the agency’s involvement. He insisted his aides produce a proper presidential finding, which would authorize the action and send it to the proper congressional committee. “And I want it retroactive to cover that flight.”
The turmoil and disappointment only seemed to increase Ronald Reagan’s determination to get the hostages back, whatever the cost. The president was particularly anguished over a letter he’d received from four Americans held captive in Iran. “We know of your distaste for bargaining with terrorists,” it said, “but do you know the consequences your continued refusal will have for us? It is in your power to have us home for Christmas. Will you have mercy on us and our families and do so?” Christmas . . . mercy . . . families—the letter hit all the right notes that played on the president’s heartstrings. “This thing is really eating away at Reagan, and he’s driving me nuts about it,” North complained to an associate. “He wants them out by Christmas.”
It was unlikely that Reagan was driving Oliver North nuts. As far as official records reveal, Ronald Reagan and Oliver North had virtually no direct interaction. Still, the order to bring the hostages home had come down the chain of command, and no doubt North felt the pressure to get something done. He was on a mission, his own mission, inspired by his sense of patriotism and a gung-ho desire to succeed at all costs.
That desire was slowly draining from his boss, Bud McFarlane. McFarlane had been under siege since replacing Bill Clark as national security adviser in October 1983. The pace of crises was unmercifully demanding, but it was the politics, the unrelenting politics, that was wearing him down. In the tug-of-war for control of territory between State and Defense, McFarlane was a one-man demilitarized zone. He’d been caught so often in the Shultz-Weinberger cross fire that he’d actually beseeched the president to choose between the two.
Shortly before the inauguration in January 1985, McFarlane found himself sitting alone with the president in the forward cabin of Air Force One. They were returning to Washington from an appearance in California and McFarlane sensed an opening. Treading cautiously, he said, “I think the tension between George and Cap undermines the pace at which you can achieve your goals. At any rate, you’d be better off if you changed one or the other.” He knew that Shultz had recently made the same argument, offering to resign and ceding State to Weinberger, claiming it would give the president the policy he was comfortable with. “Unless you choose to do that,” McFarlane agreed, “you’re going to have to endure meeting after meeting with them and be the arbiter.”
A reflective mood came over the president. He sat silently for a while, mulling the situation, before saying, “If I fired George and Cap became dominant, I’d get bad policy recommendations.* And if I kept George, I’d have to fire Cap, and I don’t want to do that. He’s my friend. So you’ll have to act as the arbiter for me. Bring me their opposing views, and I’ll make a decision. But I’m not going to fire either one of them.” Case closed.
It had worked for a while. McFarlane cha-cha’d gingerly between the two Cabinet officers, neither of whom was a graceful dance partner—Shultz, who treated him contemptuously, and Weinberger, who McFarlane felt was unqualified. There was a lot of stepping on toes in the process, and McFarlane, although fleet of foot on the dance floor, didn’t always have the steps. The same went for McFarlane’s interactions with Don Regan. From the outset, the domineering chief of staff conspired to blunt the National Security head’s authority. It had been a constant struggle for McFarlane to get past Regan’s blockades at the president’s door. Judge Clark, McFarlane’s predecessor, established that the national security adviser would have direct access to the president. Jim Baker had honored the arrangement both with Clark and when McFarlane took over. But Don Regan made it clear that McFarlane reported to him. It was infuriating that a man with no real foreign policy experience and few ideas about national security could interpose himself between the president and his trusted adviser. Regan began offering comments in the morning security briefings, often interrupting McFarlane to press his opinion. And when McFarlane prepared to address a congressional committee to advocate for funds for the MX missile, Regan dismissed him, saying, “I’ll go—they don’t want to hear from you.”
The issue, of course, was control. Regan had made it abundantly clear. “You get it into your thick head that you work for me,” Regan had instructed McFarlane, stabbing a finger at him. “I don’t want to hear anything more from you.”
That tack might have worked on Merrill Lynch underlings, but McFarlane wasn’t cowed. “I don’t work for you; I work for the president,” he said.
“The hell you do! And everything you do comes through me or you’ll be out of here. Got that?”
“All right,” McFarlane responded calmly. “I’ll be out of the office by the end of the day.”
Don Regan eventually backed down, but soon after returning from the Geneva summit, he rolled out a new offensive. If he couldn’t dispose of McFarlane by intimidation, he’d do it with innuendos and allegations. Meg Greenfield, the editorial page director of the Washington Post, warned McFarlane that the chief of staff was “putting out stories” about him. According to a “source,” which she later named as Regan, McFarlane was reputed to be having affairs with two women—his press assistant, Karna Small, and NBC News White House reporter Andrea Mitchell. The rumors had even been planted anonymously in Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplement. Naturally, Regan denied any involvement. “Well, let’s leave it at that you’re not involved,” McFarlane told him during an edgy lunch in Santa Barbara, “but please stop it.”
No such luck. Reports of McFarlane’s alleged exploits continued to leach out of Don Regan’s office. The chief’s Mice nicknamed McFarlane “Loverboy,” their focus sharpened by Regan to undermine McFarlane’s authority. Tensions built steadily between the two ex-Marines and permeated the White House. After a year of this, it was clear to McFarlane that Regan was determined to get rid of him, and if not, then to eviscerate his authority in the Oval Office. McFarlane conceded that he was no longer up to the fight. He was an unusual combination of case-hardened Marine and tender soul, a man who took every setback to heart, who brooded, who was consumed with self-doubt, who seethed with frustration, though outwardly he seemed unflappable, stoic. “He’s the most complex man you will ever meet,” a former Reagan official recalled. Another official recalled that “he broke down and sobbed more than once in his final weeks at the White House.” Several times while recalling those days for this book, he stopped to choke back tears. For a Vietnam vet who had never been wounded in battl
e, who had faced down Hafez al-Assad and bloodthirsty Iranian clerics, the pitched fight with Don Regan was taking its toll.
* * *
—
A final showdown came in the fall of 1985, during deliberations over a five-year plan to balance the budget through deficit reduction. Cutting the size of government was one of Ronald Reagan’s key objectives, the tent pole of his presidential campaigns, and he put his weight behind a scheme hatched by two Republican senators, Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman, and a Democrat, Fritz Hollings. The bill, known as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, legislated automatic across-the-board budget cuts in each of the five years, regardless of the impact they would have on government programs. Senate Republicans had stuck their necks out to support the cuts, risking the anger of their elderly constituents by voting to slash Social Security cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) and other popular entitlement programs.
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, while appealing to conservatives, was loaded with political obstacles. Cuts across the board meant cuts across the board—an astonishing $50 billion hacked dispassionately from the budget—which did not spare even defense spending. The measure earmarked an automatic cut of $10 billion for the Pentagon. If the president sought to continue the military buildup and SDI, it practically required him to come up with new taxes to finance them. “Never!” Ronald Reagan bellowed in response. “When Mondale said what our country needs is a tax bill, I said, ‘There’ll never be a tax bill as long as I’m President of the United States.’” He’d meant it then, and he was doubling-down now. At the last minute, though, the president took Social Security cuts off the table as being too painful for public consumption and vulnerable to Democratic retaliation. Military spending was also untouchable. He’d basically stripped the bill of its belt-tightening guts and left the Republican coalition that had backed it hanging out to dry heading into midterm elections.
Initially, Don Regan had used his bully pulpit to sell the president on Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (before he understood that it jeopardized the administration’s defense program). At a morning White House staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Regan announced to those attending that there would be unilateral support for the bill. Bud McFarlane sensed reckless haste and sought to put the brakes on. “I think we need to discuss this,” he said, interrupting Regan. McFarlane “knew the president didn’t understand the risks, probably didn’t grasp the specifics of the bill.” He told Regan that the president needed to know the choices involved.
The chief of staff threw an all-out tantrum, pounding on the table and firing off expletives. “No!” he screamed, flying into a rage. “No such choices!” It was a startling spectacle, and those watching it cut open-mouthed glances at one another. Bud McFarlane decided he’d had enough.
On November 26, McFarlane flew out to California, knowing the president would be at the ranch for Thanksgiving. He’d already written a letter of resignation and dropped it off with a military adjutant. Once before, Ronald Reagan had refused to accept McFarlane’s resignation, but this time would be different. McFarlane had an ace he intended to play. When the two men met in a Los Angeles hotel suite on December 2, McFarlane said, “I need some more time with my family”—the magic phrase he knew the president wouldn’t dispute. “It was a cop-out,” McFarlane admits in retrospect, “but unassailable. Family was the one thing Ronald Reagan placed above service to country.”
Still, the president seemed troubled by the situation. “Bud,” he said, “I have never had at any time in my life someone who is indispensable to me. I’d like you to reconsider, but . . .”
McFarlane took him off the hook. “Mr. President,” he said, “the time has come.”
Most accounts of the meeting contend that McFarlane recommended his deputy, John Poindexter, as his successor, but he maintains the president never asked. Had he done so, McFarlane says he might have named Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger or Navy secretary John Lehman. Poindexter, whom he admired as a solid naval officer, had no real experience serving with civilians. The job required that the national security adviser engage with those who have an influence on policy, specifically the U.S. Congress and the press. Poindexter, he knew, was dismissive of both bodies, an attitude not uncommon among military officers. The political process offended him.
In McFarlane’s estimation, John Poindexter was not the right man for the job. He was a classic number-two man, much like Mike Deaver, who must have recognized a fellow traveler when he saw one. When Deaver got wind of Poindexter’s imminent appointment, he rushed to a pay phone and called Nancy Reagan. “It’s a big mistake,” he warned the First Lady. “He’s too weak to mediate between Defense and State.”
Mrs. Reagan understood the stakes. The second term was off to a rocky start. Aside from the Geneva summit, the White House appeared to be in disarray, its policies neither well defined nor well served. She’d admired Bud McFarlane, felt he’d given the president honest, often difficult advice. John Poindexter, as far as she knew, was a blank slate. Would he have the president’s back? She had no clue. “I think it’s too late,” she told Deaver. “It’s already settled.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“SO FAR DOWN THE ROAD”
“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.”
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
On the morning of December 5, 1985, the day after his appointment, Admiral John Poindexter, the fourth national security adviser in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, visited the Oval Office for the first time in his new official capacity to deliver the finding required by the CIA that gave retroactive approval to the transfer of TOW missiles to Iran.
It was an extraordinary document. It clearly laid out the arms-for-hostages arrangement and instructed CIA Director Bill Casey not to brief Congress on it. In a separate memorandum, Casey advised Reagan to sign it, and sign it the president did, giving it nothing more than a cursory glance and saying nothing. “He understood what it laid out,” Poindexter insists. “He thought it was no big deal to sign the finding; if necessary, we could clarify it later.” If the new national security adviser had misgivings about it, he kept them to himself, but his subsequent actions spoke volumes. Rather than circulating copies of the finding to the usual selection of key Cabinet officers and depositing it in the NSC archives, as one normally would, he put the original in the safe of his counsel, Paul Thompson, and left it at that. Later, Poindexter admitted that he realized the document could cause “significant political embarrassment” to the president. At the time, he decided, “anyone who wanted to see it could come to my office and I’d show it to them.”
With the finding authorizing the operation properly signed, events began to unfold at a breakneck pace. Oliver North, sensing an ally in the new national security adviser, sent Poindexter a long, rambling message making the case for keeping the Iran operation alive. It laid out a new, bigger, and more fantastic arms sale to trigger the release of more hostages. The United States would send Iran a mind-boggling 3,300 TOWs and 50 HAWK missiles, but in staggered increments, each shipment eliciting the release of one hostage. When all was said and done, they’d have one French and five American hostages to show for the swap. “We all agree that there is a high degree of risk in pursuing the course we have started,” North wrote, “but we are now so far down the road that stopping what has been started could have even more serious repercussions.” To jack up the stakes, he mentioned the likelihood of additional hostage seizures, hostage executions, and “a renewed wave of Islamic terrorism.”
Poindexter was sold. He sent North flying off to New York to gauge the Israelis’ interest in continuing as intermediaries, and from there on to London to make arrangement for the missile sale with his trusty supporting cast: Secord, Kimche, Ghorbanifar, and the financiers. All that was holding things up was the president’s approval.
A powwow to discuss the si
tuation was convened in the Reagans’ White House residence on Saturday, December 7, 1985, with nearly all the president’s principal advisers in attendance. Only George Bush was absent, in Philadelphia to attend the Army–Navy football game, though some observed that this provided him with cover in case any blowback threatened his presidential ambitions. The rest—Shultz, Weinberger, Regan, McFarlane, and John McMahon (sitting in for Bill Casey, who was in New York for treatment for prostate cancer)—lounged on sofas and chairs grouped in the front of the grand Palladian window at the west end of the main hallway. The president, dressed for the weekend in a western pearl-button shirt and jodhpurs, was perched atop a camel saddle and rocked back and forth, distracted, as Rex, a frisky King Charles spaniel that Nancy had adopted only a day earlier, darted about.
McFarlane, returning informally only days after his resignation, laid out North’s scheme in great detail. Shultz and Weinberger, in another rare show of unity, expressed vehement opposition, arguing that it betrayed U.S. policies against negotiating with terrorists and would only encourage more hostage-taking. Weinberger pulled no punches. “I think this is a terrible idea,” he said, before spending a half hour explaining to the president that such an arms deal violated the U.S. embargo against selling weapons to Iran. And the operation raised any number of other legal issues. Don Regan and John McMahon agreed. Reagan was undaunted. “Look,” he said, “if I’ve got a child kidnapped for ransom, I don’t believe in paying ransom. But if I suddenly discover there’s somebody else who might be able to get that child back from the kidnapper and knows a way to get it back, yes, I’d reward that individual.” A missile exchange was one way of doing that. He was adamant that “no stone be left unturned,” reducing the arms transfer to “Israel selling some weapons to Iran.” He certainly didn’t intend to disengage. “The American people will never forgive me if I fail to get the hostages out over this legal question.”
