Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Gorbachev’s final verdict: “Ronald Reagan wanted to finish his time in the presidency as a peacemaker, as a man who wanted to change the world for the better.”

  Many of the American and Russian analysts I’ve talked to over the years believe that while the political transformation in the Soviet Union was encouraged by the ideas of Ronald Reagan, the driving force was the dynamic of what was happening internally within the Soviet state. Former national security advisor and defense secretary Frank Carlucci disagrees, crediting Reagan’s unwavering strength and consistency for propelling change in the Soviet system. After Reagan’s death, Carlucci told me, “He saw it as a corrupt system, and he believed that if you just opened it up, it would fall of its own weight, and it did.”

  If Reagan had stuck to his big ideas—ending the Cold War and expanding the economy—he could have avoided the controversy that almost brought his presidency to its knees.

  CHAPTER 4

  Of Arms and Men

  For me, the scandal that almost brought down the Reagan White House began as an innocuous inquiry from my desk editor on November 3, 1986. We were in California covering the president’s final campaign push in the midterm elections before returning to Washington when an obscure Lebanese newspaper reported that the former national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, had secretly visited Iran, with whom the U.S. still had no diplomatic relations. His mission was to persuade Iran to help win the release of hostages being held in Lebanon, over which Iran had significant control. What was going on?

  The decidedly unsavory cast of characters included a Middle Eastern arms merchant, Adnan Khashoggi, who claimed he hadn’t been fully paid for an arms deal he’d helped broker as payment for the release of the hostages. I had been covering the White House for five years and knew nothing about any of this. In fact, none of the White House correspondents had any idea that in the basement offices of the National Security Council, Oliver North and CIA director Bill Casey were running their own completely secret and illegal shadow government.

  How could something like this go undetected? It is difficult to describe just how isolated the White House press corps can be, traveling inside the “bubble” created by the Secret Service, the White House staff, and all the comforts and conveniences of network producers, official transcripts, and charter aircraft. A small pool flies on the president’s airplane, but rarely sees the president. In fact, although we had a camera crew on Air Force One in case Reagan should appear, Larry Speakes wrote that he decided to close off the press cabin in the rear of Air Force One because of me. It seems, according to Larry, that I once tried to film the president in sweatpants, instead of a shirt and tie. Speakes wrote that he then assigned the president’s military aide to close the door that separated the staff cabin from the press area. In his book, Speaking Out, the former press secretary writes, “I doubt if the aide considered that job quite as important as his usual task, which was to carry the codes that would be used to signal our nuclear forces to retaliate if the Russians attacked us.” I can’t imagine what the military aide must have been thinking about being on door patrol, instead of nuclear watch.

  There are perks to traveling with the president. For security reasons, you deliver your bags to White House transportation office employees before departure from Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, and you next see them in your hotel room, wherever you are traveling in the world. Whether at the Great Wall of China or a campground in the Grand Tetons, the White House communications office installs telephones for the press, with the expense paid by the networks and newspapers in the traveling press corps.

  The availability of advance texts and transcripts shortly after each event enables reporters who prefer dinner or souvenir shopping, especially in exotic locations, to skip a president’s speech entirely. If that practice encourages laziness among reporters, it also carries risks for the chief executive. Living in the bubble can leave him isolated, too, and unchallenged. On one trip early in Reagan’s presidency, flying back from South America, we had a rare session with the president on Air Force One. We asked Reagan for his reflections on his first visit to Latin America. He said, “You’d be surprised, yes, because, you know, they’re all individual countries. I think one of the greatest mistakes in the world that we’ve made has been in thinking, lumping—thinking ‘Latin America.’” He seemed to be just discovering that fact.

  Comments like that contributed toward a tendency by reporters, and others, to underestimate Reagan at first. People didn’t realize that he had an instinctive ability to assess allies and adversaries alike, and to see the big foreign policy landscape. But, at the same time, he relied far too heavily on his advisors, delegating decision making more than most presidents. That is partly how Iran-Contra evolved from a presidential wish to get some hostages home into an elaborate plot that threatened the very core of Reagan’s presidency.

  Still, it is remarkable that no one uncovered the plot before it began to unravel in the Middle East. Perhaps it is because even the most diligent correspondents covering Reagan, those who developed congressional and independent sources to maintain perspective and context, were often at the mercy of immediate deadlines or were separated by several time zones from those who really knew what was going on. In addition, it wasn’t often that we got the opportunity to talk to the president, especially on foreign trips. Journalism’s dirty little secret is that if an administration wants to keep something under wraps, it often can. White House correspondents can be kept completely out of the loop, even on routine stories. When it came to the illegal Iran-Contra scheme, clearly the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency were not going to volunteer that they were conducting a top secret arms-for-hostages operation in defiance of Congress.

  So when our editors first called us in Santa Barbara that November day in 1986, we were dismissive. The charge was that Ronald Reagan was selling missiles to Iran—a country with which we had no relations—in violation of his own arms embargo. It was tantalizingly easy to accept the president’s denial. When we asked about it on November 6 at a bill signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, the president tried to deflect the question, replying: “Could I suggest an appeal to all of you with regard to this, that the speculation, the commenting and all, on a story that came out of the Middle East, and that to us has no foundation,…that all of that is making it more difficult for us in our effort to get the other hostages free.”

  Still hoping to salvage a deal for the hostages, the National Security Council approved a carefully crafted White House denial: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” That should have set off alarm bells for those of us covering the story. The word “negotiate” left a lot of room for maneuvering. So did the definition of “terrorist.”

  Behind the scenes, the White House was in turmoil. Those in the small circle who knew about the secret operation had to figure out what to say to their colleagues. Then they had to assess the political damage, and the impact on U.S. foreign policy. All this while attorney general Ed Meese was investigating whether any laws had been broken. As a result, it was four days before the White House even confirmed that McFarlane had been to Iran. With the media now in a full uproar, a week later the president addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He acknowledged selling “small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts” to improve relations with Iran—not as ransom for hostages. In Watergate terms, that kind of limited admission was known as a “limited hangout.” The cover-up was on.

  How did an administration rooted in Reagan’s strong principles get involved in this mess? You had to know Reagan to realize how important releasing the hostages was to him, and how easily he could deceive himself and be deceived by his staff. Although he had pledged, immediately after taking office, that he would never make concessions to terrorists, his response was completely human, if not presidential. He reacted to the plight of the American hostages viscerally, riding to the rescue as though he were playing the hero in one of his
Westerns. This was a man who had so fully absorbed his Hollywood roles that he once claimed to have filmed newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, though he had only “experienced” those events from the safe remove of a military film unit in Hollywood.

  Selling arms to Iran raised a complex set of political and foreign policy issues for Ronald Reagan, who thought of himself as the chief defender of Western values and certainly of the lives of Americans at risk abroad. To him, Iran held a special place in the pantheon of suspect states. Given that Reagan had been the unintended political beneficiary of Carter’s hostage crisis, he knew the ayatollahs were open to deals. As a result of the Carter experience, Reagan was predisposed to be wary of the potential political damage of a protracted hostage crisis on his watch. In addition, he was angry about the murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley, who had been captured, tortured, and executed in 1985 by the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Islamic Jihad, or “Holy War,” an organization backed by Iran. Reagan took personally what had happened to Buckley, repeatedly asking his national security team for details about his capture and death.

  Buckley’s death followed a tumultuous period in the early 1980s. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the anti-American terrorism we’ve had to endure for the last quarter century. In the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the resulting violence against Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militias supported by Israel, the Reagan administration got trapped into guaranteeing the safe exit of Yasser Arafat and his followers from that country. Suddenly, the United States was the unlikely protector of the Palestine Liberation Front and its leaders, injecting us into the middle of a war for which we were not equipped. It wasn’t long before we ourselves became the target of the terror movement, first with a bombing outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983, and then the massive attack on the marine barracks in the Lebanese capital six months later. Two hundred forty-one U.S. troops were killed, the worst military losses in a single incident since the Vietnam War. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

  In that climate, it isn’t difficult to understand the origins of the Iran-Contra scheme. Reagan had described the contras fighting the communist regime in Nicaragua as the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers. The CIA, under the direction of Bill Casey in Langley and Oliver North and National Security Advisor John Poindexter in the White House, was circumventing congressional prohibitions to direct the covert operations. Already involved in “cowboy” operations, it was not a big leap for the administration to combine that initiative with another presidential imperative, freeing the hostages being held in Lebanon. And given that the president was wired emotionally to identify strongly with the captives, it did not take a presidential order for his aides to know that gaining their release was his top priority.

  When a major story begins unfolding, there is almost a tangible smell in the air as well, a physical manifestation of crisis. The briefing room becomes a chaotic jumble of camera crews and correspondents doing round-the-clock updates. Newspaper and magazine reporters more accustomed to cozy “background” sessions over lunch with “senior officials” suddenly show up and wait, joining broadcast correspondents who can never leave the White House for fear of missing a new development. And the press area becomes a sea of half-eaten takeout containers delivered by the networks to their captive employees. It’s a mess.

  The White House staff was scrambling, and so were we. The attorney general was conducting his—somewhat limited—inquiry to uncover the scope of the National Security Council operation. I rightly suspected that there was a parallel effort by some of the participants to cover their tracks. But nothing prepared me for the shock of learning the full dimension of the scam being run out of the White House basement.

  With Jim Baker no longer in the White House, the president was left without anyone close by with political antennae to sound the alarm when policies veered off course. Baker’s move to Treasury, across East Executive Avenue, was only yards from the White House. But it was far enough that Don Regan, a man with little judgment and even less political skill, could take firm charge of the most critical operations of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

  Regan and I had clashed at the Geneva summit. Now, a little over a year later, we would go up against each other again, during a night of high drama in the East Room of the White House where the president was finally holding a prime-time news conference to explain the exploding Iran-Contra scandal. The room was bathed in light from the elaborate crystal chandeliers and the television klieg lights mounted on tall poles. As NBC’s second correspondent, I was seated midway toward the rear of the room: there was no guarantee I’d even manage to catch Reagan’s eye and be called upon. As the president faced the press, my colleague Chris Wallace asked about something Regan had told us, that the U.S. condoned Israel’s shipment of arms to Iran. Wasn’t that in effect sending the message to terrorists or states like Iran who sponsor them that they could gain from holding hostages?

  Still in full denial, the president replied no, because he didn’t see where the hostage takers had gained anything. He was still unable to accept the linkage between Iran’s ability to purchase the weapons and the Iranian-supported terrorists holding Americans in Lebanon. A few minutes later, Reagan called on me and I followed up on Chris’s question, pointing out that his chief of staff had confirmed that the U.S. condoned an Israeli shipment of missiles to Iran shortly before an American hostage was released in September of 1985. The timing was critical because it was four months before the president had issued a legal directive giving authority to make such arms shipments without notifying Congress.

  Standing in the glare of the floodlights, I asked the president, “Can you clear that up, why this government was not in violation of its arms embargo and of the notification to Congress for having condoned American-made weapons shipped to Iran in September of 1985?”

  Ronald Reagan said, “No, I never heard Mr. Regan say that, and I’ll ask him about that, because we believe in the embargo.” Caught up in the moment, I asked if he would now assure the American people that he would not “again, without notification, and in complete secrecy, and perhaps with the objection of some of your cabinet members, continue to ship weapons,” if he decided it was necessary. It was the kind of direct, challenging question you might not ask if you had time to rehearse it. Reagan’s answer indicated he had still not accepted the reality of what his rogue national security team had done.

  He replied, “No, I have no intention of doing that, but at the same time, we are hopeful that we are going to be able to continue our meetings with these people, these individuals.” Despite everything, he still held on to the fiction that his envoys were negotiating with independent Iranian “moderates” and not the leadership of Iran. I could see panic on the faces of the president’s aides standing in the front of the room. The president had been working off a chronology initially prepared by the CIA, but as it worked its way through the NSC, it had been altered to protect top White House officials, like John Poindexter.

  This left Ronald Reagan exposed and vulnerable at the most important press conference of his presidency, briefed with a misleading chronology. It was a particularly explosive combination given Reagan’s penchant for misstating facts even when his staff wasn’t misleading him. As a result, at a moment when he needed to correct the record and show that he was cleaning up the scandal, the president instead repeatedly denied a central element in the case—that Israel had secretly shipped the weapons to Iran for the U.S. The press conference ended at 8:35 p.m. Chris Wallace rushed out to the North Lawn camera position to go live, as I returned to our small cubicle in the White House to start writing a story for the Today show the next morning.

  Fifteen minutes later, an announcement over the press room loudspeaker stated that the president was going to issue a written statement clarifying something he had just said. It was unprecedented for this or any White House—a correction, within minutes of a presidential
news conference. The mea culpa stated, “There may be some misunderstanding of one of my answers tonight.

  There was a third country involved in our secret project with Iran.” Reagan was acknowledging Israel’s involvement, mere minutes after his vigorous denials.

  Looking at the clock, I realized I had only minutes to get the correction to Chris on the North Lawn before our expanded post–news conference coverage concluded and the network resumed entertainment programming. I’m a good runner, but I broke all personal records getting to the camera position before we went off the air. On my knees so that viewers couldn’t see me, I handed Reagan’s statement to Chris. Without missing a beat, he read it live, adding it was “something that I have never seen before in my years at the White House.”

  Tom Brokaw responded, “That doesn’t say much about the president’s hands on the reins of foreign policy, does it?”

  The next morning, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, who felt the president had at least won the viewers’ sympathy after the grilling he’d endured, reflected on the high stakes intensity of the moment: “At times, the president behaved like a student trying to remember details on which he had been drilled, as undoubtedly he had.”

  But the drama of the night didn’t end with my sprint to the North Lawn. Out of breath from running, I returned to the NBC White House booth to grab a ringing phone. It was Don Regan, yelling and cursing, threatening to ruin my career and have me fired. How dare I embarrass him with the president in front of the entire world? I have never been so frightened, before or since: I could feel my stomach cramp, and stammered that I was only asking obvious questions about points that were in the public record.

  The call did not end well. I’ve “talked back” to a lot of powerful men over the years, from Frank Rizzo to the men around Reagan, Clinton, and both Presidents Bush. Until recently, men running for president did not even include any women among their top advisors. It was rare to find women of any real power in the West Wing. Unused to dealing with women as professionals, men in the White House often bullied the women correspondents. But even in that kind of men’s club atmosphere, Don Regan was in a class by himself. He wielded power roughly, and ruthlessly.