Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall ... - Offnews.info

“As he frequently said with pride, Oliver North made things happen.” 32In his autobiography, Under Fire, An American Story, North says that the criminal proceedingsagainst him boiled down to “two fundamental issues. The first was that everything I had done wasknown about and approved by those I had worked for. … The other … was that I hadn’t actedwith criminal intent. In other words, I had no intention of breaking any laws. In fact, those of usinvolved in helping the [Nicaraguan] resistance went to great lengths to avoid violating the BolandAmendment or any other statute.” 33North’s legal defense operated on theory that his superiors knew almost everything that he haddone, and that Reagan—who “did not always know what he knew” but was aware of everythingconcerning the scandal—had sought to shield himself through plausible deniability. 34 Most observersagree that North’s “goals of freeing the hostages and helping the contras were also the president’sobjectives.” 35Although Reagan was apparently never briefed about the diversion of the Iran monies to theContras before the operation was about to implode, North’s advocacy of the idea met with approvalfrom his NSC boss, Poindexter, and CIA director William Casey, who “at times seemed to treatNorth … as a son.” 36 North reported that Casey greeted the proposal with enthusiasm, calling it“the ultimate irony, the ultimate covert operation.” 37 And contemporaries clearly remember Northregaling in what he thought was the president’s direction. For example, a CIA official who servedas a liaison between the Contra supply operation and the government of El Salvador recalled sittingin North’s office in 1986, as the television showed Congress debating renewing official aid to theNicaraguan insurgents. “Those people want me, but they can’t touch me,” North said, pointing to thetelevision, because he was in favor with “the old man.” 38In the North trial, Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh noted, the Marine’s defense “centeredon his claims that all of his actions were known to and approved by his superiors, that although heknew certain of his actions were wrong, they were justifiable in light of the need for covert action ina dangerous world, and that he never believed that any of his actions were unlawful.” For example,North admitted to helping the Contras while the Boland Amendment was in effect, saying that in1984 he was instructed by CIA Director Casey and National Security Advisor McFarlane “veryclearly … that I would be the one to replace the CIA for each of these activities. … I was told notto tell other people, not to talk about it, keep my operational role very, very secret, that it shouldnot be something that others came to know about.” 39 In response to a question from the prosecutorduring the Congressional Iran-Contra hearings about whether the government kept secrets from theAmerican people, North responded: “By their very nature, covert operations, or special activitiesare a lie. There is great deceit-deception practiced in the conduct of covert operations. They are atessence, a lie.” 4032Hartle, op. cit.; North’s self-propagated image of derring-do, together with his cloak of clandestinity, lent itself, ready made, in the vernacular pressto variants of accusations of a “Dr. Strangelove” kind, that North himself was a member in good standing of a pathological and lunatic fringe. Or asconservative essayist R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., wrote, a member of one of “two distinct species of true believers at large in Washington,” the first, “aboutwhom all learned sociologists warn, to wit: the anticommunist military goon, the straight-arrow right-winger, the propounder of old-fashioned virtues.”Tyrrell, “Borne Aloft on Hot Air,” The Washington Post, July 21, 1987, p. A21. In fact, North did risk being stereotyped in the redoubtable fashion ofU.S. academia and the American Left, which cast anti-communism in its more extreme and disreputable form, stereotyping all as McCarthyites andmilitarists. In Not Without Honor, Powers noted that during the July 1987 congressional hearings, “Those alarmed by Reagan’s anti-communist rhetorichad been appalled by the spectacle of the bemedaled … North facing down congressmen with attacks on their patriotism ...” (p. ix)33North, op. cit., p. 390.34Oliver North, op. cit., p. 14.35Cannon, op. cit., p. 656.36Anderson, op. cit., p.398;37Taking the Stand: The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L.North, New York: Pocket Books, 1987, p. 195.38Fox Butterfield, “Colonel Recounts How North Ran Contra Operation,” The New York Times, May 28, 1987; see also North, Under Fire, p. 353.39Walsh Iran/Contra Report, Chapter 2: United States v. Oliver North, pp. 10, 12.40Quoted in Michael Lynch and David Bogen, The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings, Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1996, p. 115.136Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall-Winter Issue / Edicíón Otoño-Invierno 2010 / Edicão Outono-Inverno 2010 / Volume 11