The Watchers (9 page)

UNODIR. Management by exception. Asking forgiveness instead of permission. The captain transmitted his intentions to his superiors, marked them UNODIR, and before anyone could protest he was already under way.

UNODIR (pronounced “yoo-no-dear”) was the understanding of authority that led Poindexter to fuse the Iran and Contra operations without asking for the president's permission—and without telling him what he'd done. unless otherwise directed, keep the Contras alive, body and soul. Unless otherwise directed, bring the hostages home.

Not only had Reagan not directed otherwise, he had left no doubt about his intentions. Only three days after he'd promoted Poindexter, Reagan called a meeting in the White House residence with his top aides: the newly minted national security adviser, the secretaries of defense and state, and the deputy director of the CIA, who was standing in for Bill Casey. It was a Saturday, the day of the Army-Navy game. They debated the merits of the Iran initiative and whether to move ahead or dial it down. Was it worth the risk of international scandal? Was there some other way to rescue the hostages?

Reagan's secretaries quarreled. But the president sat silently, his arms folded, perched on an ottoman made out of a camel saddle, rocking back and forth on the heels of his cowboy boots. Poindexter watched him closely and read his body language and the quiet resolve in his face.

“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.”

Reagan was haunted by things left undone. The hostages' families had scolded his administration publicly for not doing more to obtain their release. They said he'd devoted more energy to higher-profile incidents—the hijackings of TWA 847 and
Achille Lauro
. The sister of a Roman Catholic priest, kidnapped almost a year earlier, said Reagan wanted to keep her brother and the others “out of sight, out of mind.” Perhaps he was guilty of the former, but in the pages of his diary Reagan kept a tortured, deeply personal vigil. He felt that he'd come to know these people. And Poindexter knew that as well as anyone in the residence that day.

Reagan was not ignorant of the risks of moving ahead with the weapons sales. “If it ever becomes public,” he said, “it'll be very difficult to explain. It will be like trying to define the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.” He paused. “But I think I can do it.”

And that was the end of it. The ship had sailed, and on a banner day—Navy beat Army 17-7.

Poindexter set about reengineering the Iran operation. The first order of business was to get the president's rationale on paper. Remarkably, McFarlane had never asked the CIA to draw up an intelligence finding on the arms sales. 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.” Who could say what timely really meant? he reasoned. Adjectives were subjective.

Poindexter wanted the finding to keep discipline in the system. Structure. Process. So if the unthinkable happened, if the operation did become public, the president could turn to the American people and proclaim, Here are my reasons. Here are my principles. And they are good principles. Poindexter never believed that arms for hostages alone would win the public's approval, even though that crude exchange was precisely how Reagan saw the deal.

Poindexter refused to be rushed on the finding. Bill Casey's number two at the CIA insisted that Reagan sign something to cover the agency's own hide; he sent over a terse document describing the covert action as essentially a quid pro quo. Annoyed, Poindexter took it to the president and obtained his signature. But then he locked the only copy of the finding in his safe and called Casey's deputy back. “I'm keeping one copy. If you or anyone else wants to verify it, you can come over here and look at it.”

He wrote a longer, more nuanced finding. It articulated strategic policy goals and principles, ideas that he felt reflected the grander, loftier order he'd constructed at the White House. Poindexter knew the president saw things much more simply, as a straight exchange of missiles for influence. But, UNODIR. The president would approve of the broader objectives, he told himself. And eventually, he did.

In January, weeks before Poindexter lit the fuse of Iran-Contra, he presented Reagan with the new finding. It enumerated three purposes: establish a more moderate government in Iran; obtain intelligence that could help prevent acts of terrorism; and—lastly—“furthering the release of the American hostages held in Beirut and preventing additional terrorist acts by these groups.” What had started as Reagan's primary concern now was one of several.

At the end of the document, under the options “OK” and “NO,” Reagan initialed the former.

The president now had a script. But whether he could learn the lines, Poindexter wasn't sure.

 

For some time now, Poindexter had watched Reagan slip beneath the cover of a fog. He forgot things. He got confused in meetings and in public appearances. At times, the head and shoulders of the man who seemed born to play the president rose above the mist, clear and distinguishable. But then the cloud wrapped up around him again, and he was lost.

Poindexter never had felt more responsible for the president's protection, because of both the precarious covert actions he'd undertaken and Reagan's frail mental state. It was his job, by law, to be the president's honest broker. He had warned Reagan of all the risks and taken steps to shield him. Poindexter advised the president in writing, “Because of the extreme sensitivity of this project, it is recommended that you exercise your statutory prerogative to withhold notification of the Finding to the Congressional oversight committees until such time that you deem it to be appropriate.”

Poindexter worried that the potential exposure of the Iran initiative threatened the broader war against terrorism. But the mission itself seemed to have no effect on that conflict. The missiles were flowing, yet the hoped-for reciprocal release of the hostages was limited to two, not seven. The NSC staff quibbled with their Iranian sources over missile parts and prices as if they were haggling over rugs in a bazaar. Since the dialogue had begun the previous September there had been no attacks against the United States or Israel by Iranian fundamentalists. But in late December Palestinian terrorists stormed the Rome and Vienna airports with machine guns and hand grenades, killing 18 civilians. The administration fingered Libya as the state sponsor, touching off military skirmishes that led, in April, to the bombing of a disco in West Berlin that killed two American servicemen. Nine days later Reagan ordered an air strike on Tripoli. The war had spread, and in ways no one could appreciate immediately. (Reagan's successor reaped the whirlwind two years later, when Libyan-sponsored bombers blew a Pan Am jet and 259 people out of the sky over a Scottish village; 11 residents died under falling debris.)

Yet Poindexter and his team never relented. The families of the American hostages had visited personally with him at the White House, presenting a nine-hundred-foot-long yellow ribbon covered with signatures and messages of support. The gesture moved him deeply, and he felt himself becoming committed to the cause in ways that transcended policy pronouncements.

“You can meet with anyone in our government at any time,” Poindexter promised the relatives. In confidence, he hinted at initiatives under way, specifics that his predecessor McFarlane had never given them. Poindexter built up their hopes. The families left the White House convinced that he was working on the problem harder than ever. “He's a classy guy,” the daughter of one hostage told a reporter.

But the system was coming apart. Not because of the terrorists but because of the complexity of the schemes to defeat them. The man who wanted to control and understand events found himself increasingly befuddled by them. That's when he started to make mistakes.

 

In July, six months after Reagan signed the broader finding on Iran, rumors surfaced about the NSC staff 's other operations in Nicaragua. Lawmakers once again were debating aid to the Contras, but Poindexter was still operating within the confines of the funding prohibition. America's campaign against socialism in Latin America had become an on-again, off-again war.

Democrats were particularly outraged by newspaper and television reports that said North was personally involved in efforts to resupply the rebels, in defiance of Congress. Just what the hell was going on? several lawmakers wanted to know.

The powerful chairmen of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees asked Reagan for answers. Was the NSC involved in military aid, with foreign governments helping the Contras or any collection of private citizens on the outside? This wasn't the first time they'd asked—McFarlane had received Congress's questions, and answered them, when he was still at the White House.

Now the same questions fell to Poindexter, in the form of a paper folder containing a congressional correspondence and an accompanying document for his response. The folder was tucked into a pile of briefs, memos, and communiqués that resided on Poindexter's desk. He opened the folder, read the precise questions that the committees wanted answered, and then realized that McFarlane had provided them already. Poindexter reaffirmed that declaration, essentially telling the committee to see McFarlane's prior statement on the matter. But Poindexter didn't read what McFarlane had actually written.

They were lies. Or, in the most charitable light, deliberately misleading partial truths. In a written response to Lee Hamilton, the Democratic chair of the intelligence committee, McFarlane had averred, “I can state with deep personal conviction that at no time did I or any member of the National Security Council staff violate the letter or spirit” of the ban on aid to the Contras.

How could Poindexter have failed to examine carefully what he was signing on to? Looking back years later, he would find himself at a loss. He was just so busy. There was just so much information. He trusted that under his watch the Contra operation was being run more tightly. The NSC staff was not part of the intelligence community and therefore could be a legal conduit for funds. It was a narrow loophole, but he threaded it, never touching the line, apparently coming out clean on the other side.

But McFarlane had done something altogether different. He'd been reckless by broadly asserting, with unequivocal and practically indignant tones, that there had never been a covert Contra policy of any kind. He insisted that the letter
and
the spirit of the law were intact. He gave Poindexter no wiggle room. Had
he
written the responses to Hamilton this time, Poindexter would have been evasive, answering only what was asked. He would have phrased his responses jesuitically: technically true, though not entirely truthful.

As it happened, the House chairmen weren't buying Poindexter's assurances, at least not on paper. They asked for a meeting with North, the administration's alleged man in Nicaragua. In August, nearly a dozen members came down and met with North in the Situation Room. Poindexter didn't attend, but when he received a debrief from another staff member after the event, he concluded that North had handled it just right. He hadn't lied, but he hadn't told the members everything.

The committee seemed satisfied; they dropped their inquiries about the Contras. Poindexter expressed his satisfaction to North in an electronic mail message: “Bravo Zulu,” the naval signal for “well done.”

They walked a thin line. But thick enough to hang them.

 

When the climax of this comedy of errors played out, on a frantic stage crowded now with the king, his princes, and their enemies, there was cause for celebration. It was November 3, 1986. An American hostage in Lebanon had just been released. Congressional and gubernatorial elections were to be held the next day. And Reagan was preparing to sign a landmark immigration law, something he'd worked hard for since taking office. Then, on November 3, an independent Lebanese publication,
Al Shiraa
, published an exposé on McFarlane having made a secret visit to the Iranian capital. The details were sketchy but sharp enough for Iranian officials to confirm that the ex-national security adviser had come to Tehran at the behest of the U.S. government.

Two days after the article ran, a reporter covering the signing ceremony for the immigration bill asked Reagan pointedly, “Do we have a deal going with Iran of some sort?”

The president, who seconds earlier had jokingly congratulated himself for remembering the names of all the attending luminaries, replied simply, “No comment.” But then a request. “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, 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.”

Reagan had just let the cat out of the bag. The rest of his secrets unraveled quickly. Soon the press picked up on a seemingly unconnected item: the downing of a U.S. cargo plane a month earlier in Nicaragua. The sole survivor, an American named Eugene Hasenfus, told his Sandinista captors that he worked for the CIA. They scoured the wreckage, recovering documents that named a slew of Americans and a State Department humanitarian assistance office that North had subverted for the Contra aid program.

Administration officials told Congress that Hasenfus did not work for the CIA, which was true. He worked for North. Only twelve days after the shoot-down, Congress, once again placated by White House assurances, approved the administration's $100 million Contra aid package. The era of prohibition had ended. Poindexter and North had bridged the gap in tough times.