The Watchers (57 page)

In his memoir Reagan said that he called off the attack at the last minute, after changing his mind. As Naftali observes, “If he did, then he told only Weinberger and left McFarlane and Poindexter in the dark.” Naftali also interviewed Poindexter, who said that the president looked surprised when McFarlane informed him that the defense secretary “had canceled the air strike.” Poindexter told me the same thing in an interview. If Weinberger and Reagan came to some new agreement about the raid in private, which is possible, then both men took the details to their graves.

30
North replied that his CIA contact on terrorism, Charlie Allen, had just brought them to his attention:
Interview with Poindexter, confirmed by Charlie Allen.

31
Poindexter called up his friend CIA director Bill Casey. The two had developed an honest rapport:
The fateful relationship of Poindexter and Casey nearly merits a book of its own. Both men can rightly be called architects of the Iran-Contra affair, and they exerted tremendous influence on the foreign policy of the Reagan administration. Their legacies are intertwined. Casey, who died in 1987, is one of the oddest and most mysterious directors of central intelligence I've ever encountered. His portrait is perhaps best captured in Bob Woodward's riveting account of the CIA in the 1980s,
Veil
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). In an interview, Poindexter told me the story of how he and Casey first came to be on close terms, and it's worth retelling here because it illuminates the characters of both men.

The early part of their relationship was cool and distant. After Poindexter became the deputy national security adviser, he let it be known within the White House that he thought Casey should resign. He said that the CIA was doing a terrible job managing a covert program to aid Contra rebels fighting the socialist government of Nicaragua. A CIA document, known as the “Freedom Fighter's Manual,” had leaked to the press; it used cartoon illustrations and simple language to teach average Nicaraguans how to disrupt their government through sabotage and organized violence or by passively combating nationalized industries. (One panel showed a smiling man with dark hair and a mustache, his bare feet propped up on an ottoman, holding a glass of champagne while calling in sick to work.)

Casey found out that Poindexter had spoken poorly of his leadership, and one afternoon he called the admiral in his White House office and requested a private audience. Under direct questioning from Casey, Poindexter repeated what he'd said. He told Casey that the manual was an embarrassment to the administration. He also said that Casey appeared ill, and he noted that the director had been missing a lot of meetings lately.

Casey wasn't Poindexter's boss, but he had every right to chew him up one side and down the other for what he'd said. Instead Casey confided to Poindexter that he had cancer and that when he was away it was because he'd gone to New York to receive treatment. Poindexter never again called for Casey to step aside. “In the future,” Casey told him, “if you think I'm not doing something right, just give me a call.”

“Yes, sir, I'll do that,” Poindexter replied.

32
Bush led a top-to-bottom review of the government's haphazard counterterrorism and intelligence efforts:
The review, titled “Public Report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism,” was published in February 1986. The document contains a helpful chronology of “significant 1985 terrorist events involving U.S. citizens,” which gives a good sense of how the Reagan administration viewed the burgeoning antiterrorism campaign.

34
North had felt overwhelmed when he arrived at the White House:
See Timberg's
The Nightingale's Song,
as well as North's memoir,
Under Fire: An American Story,
cowritten with William Novak (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

34
Poindexter knew that North exaggerated his own influence on the NSC staff:
Poindexter's recollections of North come from interviews conducted in 2004 and 2008.

Without question, the best and most compelling account of the
Achille Lauro
affair that I encountered was written by Michael Bohn, a former director of the Situation Room and a retired naval intelligence officer.
The
Achille Lauro
Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and the Prejudice of Terrorism
(Dulles, Va.: Brassey's, 2004) seamlessly weaves Bohn's personal experience working at the White House during the crisis with historical documents, contemporaneous journalism, and more than a dozen interviews with participants, including John Poindexter, Jim Stark, and Nicholas Veliotes. His sources are almost all public, and they provided an invaluable source of research material as I reconstructed the narrative from a new point of view.

In addition to Bohn's work I relied significantly on the following: “The Voyage of the
Achille Lauro
” by William Smith in
Time
magazine, October 21, 1985; the detailed spot reporting of the
New York Times,
which covered the story from multiple cities and continents (see especially a lengthy article penned by E. J. Dionne and Joseph Berger from October 13, 1985, “Italy Said to Free 2 P.L.O. Aides; U.S. Issues Warrant for One; Hostages Tell of ‘Death List'; Account of Ordeal”; contemporaneous broadcast news transcripts; and David Martin and John Walcott's
Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America's War Against Terrorism
(New York: HarperCollins, 1988). I also conducted detailed interviews about the
Achille Lauro
episode on two occasions in 2008 with Poindexter. Unless otherwise noted, all statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to him come from those discussions.

40
Abu Abbas, the founder of the PLF:
Abbas was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2003. He later died in U.S. custody the following year. According to a Pentagon spokesman at the time, Abbas died of natural causes.

42
“He's lying,” Poindexter told his colleagues flatly:
Interview with John Poindexter. See also Bob Woodward's
Veil
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), in which the author writes about Mubarak's communications having been intercepted by U.S. intelligence. Poindexter did not acknowledge how the government came to know that Mubarak was lying.

43
At Poindexter's instruction, North had cultivated a relationship with the military attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, General Uri Simhoni:
Interview with Poindexter. Also see Michael Ledeen's
Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988).

44
“Just confirm to me that you are not acting on your own”:
Interview with Uri Simhoni in
The Reagan Presidency: An Oral History of the Era
, by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, published by Brassey's of Dulles, Va., in 2003, which is an updated edition of the authors'
Reagan: The Man and His Presidency
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

45
“Let me ask him,” McFarlane replied:
McFarlane's interaction with the president is also recounted by Robert Timberg, in
The Nightingale's Song
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

46
Eventually, Weinberger reached Reagan aboard Air Force One using a public radio frequency:
See “Reagan Knew Phone Hookup Wasn't Private,” Associated Press, and “Hostages and Hijackers; U.S. Plans Were Made on Open Line,” by Bill Keller for the
New York Times,
both from October 15, 1985.

46
As the pilots approached they could make out the shape of a 737 against the starry sky:
The accounts of the midair interception were chronicled by Bohn, Martin, and Walcott, based in large part on contemporaneous news reports. Martin and Walcott also interviewed participants in the crisis, and they obtained transcripts of the air-to-air dialogue between the U.S. and Egyptian pilots through the Freedom of Information Act.

48
North called a friend who knew the prime minister's mistress and tracked them down at his residence in Rome:
The friend was Michael Ledeen, author of
Perilous Statecraft.
Poindexter confirmed Ledeen's role, and Simhoni spoke of it as well, in the oral history compiled by Strober and Strober.

49
“Thank you, Mr. President. But you should really salute the Navy”:
Interview with Poindexter. Also see Timberg's re-creation of the scene in
Nightingale's Song
.

Unless otherwise noted, all statements, thoughts, and actions attributed to Poindexter in this chapter come from interviews conducted in 2004 and 2008, as well as in numerous electronic messages we exchanged in the intervening years. To my knowledge Poindexter has not given detailed interviews about his role in the Iran-Contra affair to any journalist.

Much of the narrative of Iran-Contra comes from official investigations and histories. For a thorough and concise account of the enormous volume of information on the operations, and of the days and months preceding their exposure, see “Iran-Contra: The Final Report,” by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. Bob Woodward's
Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), provides a narrative account based substantially on the point of view of former secretary of state George Shultz. And the “Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,” with its “minority report,” provides much historical information and, equally as important, political context. The National Security Archive's
The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History
(New York: The New Press, 1993) is an unmatched collection of original documents from the era, including the second finding on the Iran arms initiative written by Poindexter.

50
Reagan had admonished his NSC staff to “keep the Contras alive, body and soul”:
See Walsh.

52
In the corridors of the State Department and the Pentagon, there were agitated complaints and whispers about a rogue NSC staff that had “gone operational”:
This is conveyed in the aforementioned histories, and it was reiterated during interviews I conducted with former NSC staff officials who served in the Clinton and then the Bush administrations, all of whom were working in the long wake of Iran-Contra.

52
Poindexter wrote a lengthy national security directive, which Reagan signed in September 1984, that established a high-level committee to set security policies for sensitive government computer networks:
The directive is number 145, titled “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security,”
www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd145.htm
.

54
“I think we ought to keep trying,” Reagan said, after the others had stopped talking. “I just couldn't live with myself if we didn't take all possible action to get them back”:
Some accounts of this meeting have Reagan saying, “The American people will never forgive me.” Woodward recounts it this way in
Shadow,
based on notes taken by Shultz's executive assistant, Charles Hill. Poindexter, however, recalls that the president said, “I just couldn't live with myself.” I cannot explain the discrepancy, and although the distinction might appear trivial, since both accounts make it clear that Reagan was personally committed to action regardless of the political or legal consequences, I have concluded that the second version is more accurate. Poindexter vividly recalled the scene, imparting such details as what Reagan was wearing and how he sat on the ottoman. This meeting clearly made an impression on him. I also think that Poindexter knew Reagan's mind as well as any of his aides at this time. It is also clear to me from other sources—most notably the president's own diary entries and his public statements—that he held himself responsible for the fate of the hostages.

55
Poindexter had no intention of notifying Congress; indeed, he took an expansive reading of the law's requirement that Congress be apprised of all findings in a “timely manner”:
The National Security Act requires that the president notify the intelligence committees of any covert operations in a timely manner, and the lack of specificity in that deadline has been a source of contention for decades. I mention this here because on many occasions Poindexter emphasized to me that he used a literal reading of this requirement to his advantage. The law does not say what “timely” means, so, in the absence of any firm definition, Poindexter felt that it was generally the president's prerogative to decide when a covert intelligence operation could, and should, be revealed to Congress.

The law gives the president broad discretion to delay notification until after the operation has commenced, so Poindexter's reading might have been legally defensible. But politically, it was dangerous. He knew as well as anyone that the committees despised learning of covert operations after the fact. In particular, operations conducted in Latin America had been the subject of intense debate on Capitol Hill, and when the administration failed to keep Congress fully and currently informed, it threatened to erode the tenuous trust that intelligence committee members had built with CIA director Bill Casey. In April 1984 the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that the CIA had been planting mines in the harbors of Nicaragua. Democrats and Republicans considered this an act of war, and they were furious that Casey hadn't brought the operation to their attention; it turned out that he buried the news in a piece of lengthy testimony that he delivered to the committee more than a month earlier. The “notification,” such that it was, had gone unnoticed.

By the time Poindexter took over as national security adviser he was well aware that Congress had inserted itself into the administration's national security policy in large measure because members felt that they hadn't been told all the facts. By not notifying them of the Iran initiative he was playing with fire.