IRAN AFFAIR WAS STANDARD FARE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2013
• Sequence Number: 57
• Publication Date: April 1, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/05/22 : CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9
UN rAut _.LJU"J1- i April 1987 - --
Iran Affair Was Standard Fare
Scandal Wasn't an Aberration, but the Military-CIA Way
By ROGER MORRIS
The Tower Commission and its rebuke
to the President may have been a saving
watershed for Ronald Reagan. but it is
much less clear what it did for the rest
of us, and particularly for the making of
American foreign policy-an issue, after
all, that lay at the heart of the Iranian arms
disaster.
The picture that has emerged from the
commission's inquiry is of a government
that misfunctioned and misfired in often
bizarre ways. They were, as the commis-
sion was fond of saying, "aberrations" in
the system. Presumably the slippage can
be fixed.
If only it were that simple.
Take George P. Shultz and Caspar W.
Weinberger, the secretaries of state and
defense so conspicuously absent from the
Oliver L. North-John M. Poindexter rump
government when it was wheeling and
dealing in arms and money. Both positioned
themselves discreetly clear of the disaster.
Both lobbied for and won a formal, public
presidential acknowledgement of their
innocence. Yet both Shultz and Wein-
berger preside over bureaucracies hardly
more exemplary than the National Secur-
ity Council staff now thought to have run
amok (and been duly reined in).
Weinberger's Pentagon has been a key
player in the secret wars in Central Amer-
ica as well as the cynical dealings with Iran
and Iraq on both sides of the bloody Persian
Gulf war. And we must never forget that
North and Poindexter did not wander in off
the street to get their jobs and the atten-
dant fearsome White House authority.
They were, in their arrogant and belliger-
ent view of the world, vintage products-of
a post-World War II, post-Vietnam pro-
fessional officer caste that has dominated
so much of U.S. foreign policy from the
Defense Department for the past quarter
of a century.
Shultz's State Department not only
knowingly abdicated authority and respon-
sibility to a Marine lieutenant colonel of
uncertain emotional provenance and diplo-
matic expertise, but our Foreign Service
then could do no more than point the finger
at its fey, befuddled President, whom
Shultz has known for years to be present
yet absent in the making of foreign policy.
By any measure it was perhaps the least
finest hour for a Foggy Bottom already
legendary for its bureaucratic and political
cowardice.
Of all the bureaucratic survivors, even
beneficiaries, of the Iran-contra scandal,
however, the most ironic by far has been
the Central Intelligence Agency.
True, the nomination of CIA career
, deputy Robert Gatettoosucceed the ailing
William J Caas
. ey had toe withdrawn after
it was revealed that Gates, in a 1985 memo
to the White House, formally and enthusi-
astically favored the arms deal with Iran.
But the Gates sacrifice has been the only
CIA casualty thus far, and the Tower
inquiry itself all but exonerated the agency.
"Insufficient attention," the panel conclud-
ed, "was given to the implications of the
NSC staff having operational control of the
initiative rather than the CIA." If only the
professionals had been in charge.
The salient and sometimes sordid point of
this scandal is that this was, from begin-
ning to end, classically a CIA operation.
It was not only that North's shadowy go-
betweens in Europe were old CIA con-
tacts, or that the contras were always the
agency's proxy guerrillas in Central Amer-
ica. They emulated the CIA in spirit and
method in their willful evasion of congres-
sional restraints, their incurable covert-
ness, their recruitment of slightly seedy
characters to execute the "scenario," as
North's memos called it.
If North was a zealous Marine colonel in
the White House West Wing by day, he
was by night-at the meetings with rebel
groups and sympathetic rightist contribu-
tors-almost a caricature of the CIA soldier
of fortune that we've glimpsed from the
Bay of Pigs to Chile to Watergate.
The unpalatable fact, as the Tower
Commission should have explained far
more candidly, is that the NSC staff with its
executive-branch immunity has long been
a surrogate for the CIA and a focal point for
an often lawless, extra-constitutional for-
eign policy when legal restraints or con-
gressional oversight on the agency proved
STAT
cumbersome. The NSC's ambitious, can-do
young officers have been there to run the
errands, manage the payoffs, shred the
awkward documents.
And if the staff men assigned to the NSC
have not been willing and ideologically
agreeable military officers from the Pen-
tagon, they have often been CIA career-
ists whom the agency has always readily
offered to national-security advisers-
crisp, talented young men who ostensibly
serve the President of the moment but
whose real politics and real loyalties lie at
CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
These are the reassuring players in re-
serve-the Pentagon, State and CIA-to
whom the Tower Commission would now
have us turn to heal the wounds left by
a renegade NSC. It is a sad and perilous
naivete about the complex politics of for-
eign policy.
Those bureaucracies will be there, large-
ly untouched and unreformed. long after
Ronald Reagan has gone back to his Santa
Barbara ranch for good.
And we will have lost in shallowness, in
the political sleight-of-hand of the past
months, a rare chance to lift the veil on the
usually hidden world of foreign policy-to
seize in the Iran-contra scandal the truly
cleansing moment that it just might have
been.
Roger Morris worked on the senior staff
of the National Security Council under
Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard
M. Nixon. He is completing the first of a
two-volume biography of Nixon.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/05/22 : CIA-RDP99-01448R000301310057-9