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public than Kelly, taking issue with not only what North said, or did not say, and did or did not do,regarding Iran-Contra, but even challenging the personal story that he had spun for himself andfor the public. In his study of the Marine Corps, Making the Corps, military journalist Thomas E.Ricks observed that the service’s orientation on the front line combatant and its small size “seems tohave encouraged both a sense of brotherhood and a culture of candor within the Corps that the otherservices lack.” To which he added: “To be sure, there are liars, knaves, and cheats within the Corps, asthere are anywhere—and the Corps’ liars can be whoppers, as Lt. Col. Oliver North demonstrated.” 72Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, the legendary “paramarine” during World War II, challenged the veracityof North’s tales about his derring-do in Vietnam, saying: “His combat exploits in Vietnam areromanticized, like the Sunday-supplement tale of his valiant single-handed midnight forays into the(Demilitarized Zone) to capture and bring back a North Vietnamese prisoner. It is an exciting story,but like many others, it never happened.” 73Ultra-conservative retired Army Major General John Singlaub, highly-decorated officer, afounding member of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a vocal Contra supporter also found achasm between the North people thought they knew and the Marine lieutenant colonel he knew: “Topeople all over the world Ollie North was a hero. But I knew better. There was a wide gap betweenthe media image of Ollie North--the honest, loyal Marine--and the sordid reality of his true characterand performance.” 74 Even retired Air Force Gen. Richard Secord, a key North ally, said that he hadbalked at an attempt by McFarlane and North to create “plausible deniability” for Reagan on theissue of the arms transfers. Plausible deniability, he said, “is and always will be an important toolfor covert operations, but it has to be built into the plan. You can jury-rig something after the fact… I was doubly upset about this now, with Congressional hearings looming, and really ticked atMcFarlane and disappointed in Ollie for going along with him because we were no longer fussingwith talking papers, but giving testimony under oath to Congress. There is a big difference betweenpeddling disinformation as a cover story and committing perjury.” (italics added) 75Other aspects of North’s conduct came into question from various quarters within the military.For example, although North tried to portray his landing at London’s Heathrow airport, and hissubsequent encounters with immigration officials using a false identity, in a humorous vein, Col.Anthony E. Hartle, the director of the philosophy program at West Point wrote: “However standardsuch an exchange may be for an espionage agent, it may be questionable for a Marine officer,whose professional ethic places great emphasis on honesty and truth-telling to lie purposefully andsubstantively to officials of a friendly nation.” North’s efforts to backdate checks and to hide the factthat a third party paid for an expensive security system installed at his Virginia home were viewedby Hartle as suggesting that North “might have set aside the moral discrimination between truthand falsehood that served him well as a midshipman at the Naval Academy and as a young Marineofficer.” While it is not unethical for an officer to mislead the enemy, he wrote, North’s treatmentof Congress, FBI and NSC security staff agents, and those directed by Reagan to investigate thescandal, all suggested that they could “be deceived in the name of a greater good known only toNorth and other members of the covert operations group. … When the inefficiency and lack ofresponsiveness of democratic procedures become to great a luxury or danger, and persons otherthan the people’s elected representatives conclude that, because they understand the real priorities,democratic procedures must be set aside, then the republic is perhaps most endangered.” 7672Ricks, op. cit,, p. 192.73U.S. News and World Report, “The Story of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North”, (1987) p. 12., quoted in Cannon, op. cit., p. 627; Michael Ledeen, anNSC consultant who worked closely with North tallied the stories North told him and wondered if North “had a great deal of difficulty distinguishingbetween truth and fantasy. … He had an enormous capacity to believe in his own stories. My question is whether it was a temporary phenomenon,because he was so burdened, or is it in his nature?” Quoted in Weiss, The New York Times, op. cit.74David Hackworth, “Drugstore Marine,” Playboy, June 1994 Vol. 41, No. 6.75Richard Secord, Honored and Betrayed, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1992, p. 341.76Hartle, op. cit.142Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall-Winter Issue / Edicíón Otoño-Invierno 2010 / Edicão Outono-Inverno 2010 / Volume 11