THE NORTH NOTEBOOKS From Washington by Tim Wheeler May was not a good month for those assi

THE NORTH NOTEBOOKS

From Washington by Tim Wheeler

               
        May was not a good month for those assigned to the coverup of 
the Iran-contra conspiracy.  New disclosures erupted in legal 
proceedings across the country.  And all of the new information 
reinforced evidence pointing in one direction -- toward President 
George Bush.

        The information was so revealing that it would have 
precipitated a full-fledged political crisis were it not for 
collaboration in the coverup by the bi-partisan congressional 
leadership, the courts, and the Big Business news media.  Indeed, the 
refusal of Congress and the media to root out the source of the Iran-
contra conspiracy and bring the criminals to justice is now becoming, 
in itself, an overriding issue.  Investigative writers such as Seymour 
Hersh of the New York Times and Scott Armstrong of the National 
Security Archive are beginning to sharply assail Congress and the 
media for cowardice and collaboration in the conspiracy.  More and 
more, Iran-contra is exposed as a crisis of the two-party system with 
the Democrats unable or unwilling to challenge the secret junta in the 
White House basement.

        Congress's refusal to take principled action means that the 
conspirators are making a clean getaway.  They may be emboldened to 
resort once again to the same criminal enterprise if Congress, for 
example, terminated all aid to the death squad regime in El Salvador.  
After all, the main reaction of Congress to the Iran-contra affair was 
to repeal the Boland Amendment, which had outlawed aid to the contras, 
and to restore that aid.  And not one of the White House conspirators 
-- including National Security Advisers Robert McFarlane and Adm. John 
M. Poindexter, Oliver North, Fawn Hall -- has yet served an hour in 
jail.  What a contrast to the Watergate scandal, which forced the 
resignation of President Nixon and sent John Ehrlichman, H.R. 
Haldeman, Attorney General John Mitchell and a bunch of others to 
jail.

        The problem is that no matter how hard Congress and the media 
try to sweep the Iran-contra crisis under the rug, new revelations 
keep bubbling up in both expected and unexpected places:  In Portland, 
Oregon, a jury unanimously acquitted Richard Brenneke, the former CIA 
agent of lying when he accused George Bush of attending a secret 
meeting with Iranians in Paris in 1980 in which a deal was made to 
keep the 52 American hostages in captivity in Teheran until after the 
1980 elections.  Bush's former national security adviser, Donald 
Gregg, flew back from South Korea, where he is Bush's ambassador, to 
testify that Brenneke was lying.  The jury believed Brenneke, not 
Gregg.

        In Miami, the Justice Department is maneuvering to convict 
Panamanian General Manuel Noriega of drug trafficking while denying 
Noriega's attorneys access to evidence they need to defend him.  A 
federal judge threw out one deal in which the federal government would 
pay the legal fees of Noriega's lawyers in exchange for their 
agreement not to subpoena the CIA's files.  Those files would be 
highly embarrassing because they contain the record of Noriega's 
employment on the CIA payroll for 20 years at $200,000 per year and 
show that he had many accomplices in high places, including Bush, with 
whom he met repeatedly.

        In Washington, at the request of Irangate special prosecutor 
Lawrence Walsh, a new grand jury has been empanelled to consider 
evidence that Bush and President Reagan were very much "in the loop" 
on the criminal enterprise.  Also in Washington, Sen. John Kerry (D-
Mass.), chair of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism and 
Narcotics, announced May 18 that he is examining thousands of newly 
released photocopied pages from Lt. Col. Oliver North's notebooks, 
which expose White House lying on the Noriega case.  The National 
Security Archive and Ralph Nader's Public Citizen released thousands 
of the same pages at two press conferences on May 8 and May 18.

        Senator Kerry declared, "The North notebooks confirm that 
high-level U.S. officials, including officials at the CIA and the NSC 
[National Security Council], knew about General Noriega's drug 
trafficking and corruption in 1986, kept him on the U.S. payroll and 
discussed helping him clean up his image in return for his help for 
the contras."

        "The information was important because throughout 1988, while 
my hearings were taking place, the White House was denying that it had 
known about Noriega's drug trafficking."  Kerry added, "There is 
something fundamental that is violated in a democracy when the White 
House can classify documents as 'Codeword Top Secret' in order to 
suppress politically damaging information in an election year."  Kerry 
suggested that Walsh examine sworn testimony of former Assistant 
Secretary of State Elliot Abrams and Donald Gregg to determine if they 
committed perjury.  Kerry said the documents also raise questions of 
whether NSC and intelligence officers engaged in domestic surveillance 
in violation of the law.

        The North notebooks provide a wealth of new evidence.  One 
page, released for the first time May 8, lists a "mtg w V.P." at 12 
noon, August 6, 1986.  North began that day by meeting with Israeli 
terrorist expert, Amiram Nir.  According to North's notes, he then 
went to an extraordinary meeting at the White House with members of 
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  According to 
his later testimony, North "lied, lied, lied" to the lawmakers about 
the Iran-contra conspiracy.  North then met with several other covert 
agents, including Gregg.  Finally he met with Vice President Bush.  
Did the Vice President discuss with North his lies to an official 
oversight committee of the U.S. Congress?

        Asked about this notation in North's notebook, White House 
Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater declared, "The vice president's role 
in the Iran-contra affair was completely examined in the congressional 
inquiry and we have nothing to add."

        Among the North notebooks released May 18 were those 
reflecting the coverup began November, 25, 1986, when then-Attorney 
General Edwin Meese announced at a White House news briefing the sale 
of U.S. arms to Iran and diversion of the profits to the contras.  
Much has been written about the notations North jotted on one page of 
his steno pad that day.  "Call from JMP," North wrote, referring to 
his boss, National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter.  The page 
continues: "VP call Peres ... Discovered contra connection ... wd be 
best if Israel wd accept that they were aware that some funds were 
diverted ... Put it off on Gorbanifar [sic]."  Thus, North suggests 
that Vice President Bush telephoned Israeli Defense Minister Shimon 
Peres to enlist his help in the cover story pinning the diversion on 
Iranian businessman and arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.

        In the photocopy of that page from North's notebook released 
by the congressional Iran-contra committee two years ago, Exhibit JMP-
85, all references to Israel are blacked out.  On the second line, 
only the letters "VP" are legible.

        That same frenzied day, with shredders working overtime, North 
scrawled notes on other conversations.  "Meese story wrong," is the 
headline on one page, evidently recording the protests of an Israeli 
official, almost certainly Amiram Nir.  "Israelis: Elements of what 
Meese said are wrong, some are correct," North wrote.  "Finding 
drafted before we had any sense that finding wd be used for this 
purpose."

        A few lines down North jotted, "Nir/North ... we first 
discussed ... Does Meese know truth?"  Then, beneath this, North 
wrote, "Finance: purposely constructed finding so that there were 
several layers of denialability ... No CIA resources."  This referred 
to a finding signed by President Reagan authorizing the Iran-contra 
adventure.

        Later, North's notes seem to reflect growing anger by Nir.  
North wrote, "Nir -- statement being issued ... What basis did Meese 
use?  Worse possible end to an ... Easily proven wrong."  Then North 
placed in quotation marks the following, "I cannot back this story."  
The final sentence on that page declares, "Message has been read to 
Shultz and Perez [sic] prior to release."  A few pages later, North 
wrote, "1845 -- Call from President Reagan."

        Part of the problem in deciphering North's notebooks is 
filling in the blank spots in his shorthand.  Analysts at the National 
Security Archive have become expert at reading North's hieroglyphics.  
Malcolm Byrne, a National Security Archive analyst, told reporters at 
a May 18 news conference, "George Bush has said he was 'out of the 
loop' and did not realize the Iran initiative was an arms-for-hostage 
deal until December 1986.  The new North notebooks place Bush much 
closer to the loop than ever before."  Byrne described Bush as a 
"godfather" of Iran-contra who was "key to getting the Israelis on 
board with the cover story once the scandal broke in November 1986."

        Byrne said comparing the heavily redacted or blacked-out 
photocopies of North's notebooks released earlier with the relatively 
legible versions released through the Archive's Freedom of Information 
lawsuit is, in itself, revealing.  Most of the redactions of the 
earlier versions were North references to Bush and to Israel.  A high 
priority, he said, was "protecting Israel ... Bush."

        Amiram Nir is the link between Bush and the Israelis in the 
operation.  Deleted at White House request from the very first Senate 
report on the Iran-contra affair in January 1987 was a reference to a 
meeting Bush held with Nir some time in September 1985.  The likely 
significance of a Bush-Nir meeting at an unknown time and place in 
September 1985 becomes clear in a review of what Nir did in the months 
that followed that meeting.  "I recall that we met New Years Day 
[1986] or the day after," North testified to Congress, "and it was 
Nir's proposal at that point to use the profits ... selling Israeli 
TOWs at a profit, replenishing them with part of that money, using 
part of that money for other operations."  Did Nir discuss this scheme 
in his September 1985 meeting with Bush?  Why was the White House so 
anxious to have that Bush-Nir meeting expunged from the Senate's 
report?  Perhaps it was Bush who authored the diversion scheme.  The 
Senate complied with the White House request but then voted not to 
release the report, which remains classified to this day.

        Bush met again with Nir on July 29, 1986 at the King David 
Hotel in Jerusalem.  That meeting gave Bush a chance to work out with 
Nir a more plausible alibi and to put a tighter lid on their meeting 
the previous September.

        Nir knew too much.  On November 30, 1988, three weeks after 
Bush's election, Nir died in a plane crash in Mexico.

        Scott Armstrong, founder of the National Security Archive, 
wrote a scathing article in the May-June edition of the Columbia 
Journalism Review about the refusal of the media to expose the truth 
about the Iran-contra conspiracy.  Armstrong pointed out that Nir was 
"the most likely vehicle for reporting on Bush's involvement in the 
Iran arms deal" since he was an intelligent agent "who served as the 
point of contact with Israeli intelligence for both George Bush and 
Oliver North."  After Nir's death, Armstrong declared, "even 
investigative reporters seemed to lose interest in the already well-
documented set of facts about Bush's involvement."

        Armstrong blasts Congress, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh 
and the media "for not pursuing the most obvious trails of evidence: 
the violations of law ... When Congress fails to act as an anvil, the 
hammer of the press flails harmlessly in the air.  'If neither house 
of Congress cares, why should we?' went the typical Washington 
jounalist's refrain.  The fervor with which serious journalists 
pursued Watergate was missing.  The press seemed to share, rather than 
challenge, Congress' willingness to pass the buck."  Armstrong cites 
the trial of John Poindexter on charges that skirt the main issue -- 
Iran-contra's menacing affront to constutional government.  Wrote 
Armstrong, "I sometimes wonder if, should new revelations emerge -- 
illegal support for the contras, for example -- the press would even 
to bother to cover the story."