Robert Parry & Norman Solomon in Consortium News, December 19, 2000

http://www.consortiumnews.com/121900a.html

Saving Ronald Reagan

"We need you, Colin," pleaded the familiar voice over the phone.

"This is serious," said Colin Powell's old mentor, Frank Carlucci, who in in December
1986 was President Reagan's new national security adviser.
"Believe me, the presidency is at stake."

With those words, Colin Powell re-entered the Iran-contra affair, a set of events he had
dangerously advanced almost a year earlier by secretly arranging missile shipments to Iran.

But just as Powell played an important behind-the-scenes role in those early missile
shipments, he would be equally instrumental in the next phase, the scandal's containment.

His skillful handling of the media and Congress would earn him the gratitude of
Reagan-Bush insiders and lift Powell into the top levels of the Republican Party.

In late 1986, Carlucci called Powell in West Germany, where he had gone to serve as
commander of the V Corps. Powell thus had missed the November exposure of the secret
shipments of U.S. military hardware to the radical Islamic government in Iran. Though
Powell had helped arrange those shipments, he had not yet been tainted by the spreading
scandal.

President Reagan, however, was reeling from disclosures about the reckless arms-for-hostage
scheme with Iran and diversion of money to the Nicaraguan contra rebels. As the scandal
deepened into a potential threat to the Reagan presidency, the White House searched for some
cool heads and some steady hands. Carlucci reached out to Powell.

Powell was reluctant to heed Carlucci's request. "You know I had a role in this business,"
Powell told the national security adviser.

But Carlucci soon was moving adroitly to wall Powell off from the expanding scandal. On
Dec. 9, 1986, the White House obtained from the FBI a statement that Powell was not a
criminal suspect in the secret arms deals.

Carlucci also sought assurances from key players that Powell would stay outside the
scope of the investigation. The next day, Carlucci asked Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger, Powell's old boss, "to call Peter Wallison, WH Counsel -- to tell them Colin
had no connection with Iran arms sales -- except to carry out President's order."

Weinberger wrote down Carlucci's message. According to Weinberger's notes, he then
"called Peter Wallison -- Told him Colin Powell had only minimum involvement on Iran."

The statement wasn't exactly true. Powell had played a crucial role in skirting the
Pentagon's stringent internal controls over missile shipments to get the weapons out of
Defense warehouses and into the CIA pipeline. But with the endorsement of Weinberger,
Carlucci was satisfied that his old friend, Powell, could sidestep the oozing Iran-contra
contamination.

On Dec. 12, 1986, Reagan formally asked Powell to quit his post as commander of V
Corps in West Germany and to become deputy national security adviser. Powell
described Reagan as sounding as jovial and folksy as ever.

"Yes, sir," Powell answered. "I'll do it." But Powell was not enthusiastic. According to his
memoirs, My American Journey, Powell felt he "had no choice."

Taking Charge

Powell flew back to Washington and assumed his new duties on Jan. 2, 1987. As usual,
Powell took to his task with skill and energy. His personal credibility would be instrumental
in convincing official Washington that matters were now back under control.

By that time, too, the White House already was pressing ahead with a plan for containing
the Iran-contra scandal. The strategy evolved from a "plan of action" cobbled together by
chief of staff Don Regan immediately before the Iran-contra diversion was announced on
Nov. 25, 1986. Oliver North and his colleagues at the National Security Council were to
bear the brunt of the scandal.

"Tough as it seems, blame must be put at NSC's door -- rogue operation, going on
without President's knowledge or sanction" Regan had written. "When suspicions arose
he [Reagan] took charge, ordered investigation, had meeting with top advisers to get at
facts, and find out who knew what. ... Anticipate charges of 'out of control,' 'President
doesn't know what's going on,' 'Who's in charge?'"

Suggesting that President Reagan was deficient as a leader was not a pretty option, but it
was the best the White House could do. The other option was to admit that Reagan had
authorized much of the illegal operation, including the 1985 arms shipments to Iran
through Israel, transfers that Weinberger had warned Reagan were illegal and could be an
impeachable offense.

By February 1987, however, the containment strategy was making progress. A
presidential commission headed by former Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, was finishing a
report that found no serious wrongdoing but criticized Reagan's management style.

In its Feb. 26 report, the Tower Board said the scandal had been a "failure of
responsibility" and chastised Reagan for putting "the principal responsibility for policy
review and implementation on the shoulders of his advisers."

On matters of fact, however, the board accepted Reagan's assurances that he knew
nothing about Oliver North's secret efforts to funnel military supplies to the Nicaraguan
contras and that the president had no hand in the White House cover-up of the Iran-contra
secrets.

"The Board found evidence that immediately following the public disclosure, the President
wanted to avoid providing too much specificity or detail out of concern for the hostages
still held in Lebanon and those Iranians who had supported the initiative," the Tower report
stated. "In doing so, he did not, we believe, intend to mislead the American people or
cover-up unlawful conduct."

To dampen the scandal further, Powell helped draft a limited mea culpa speech for
Reagan to give on March 4, 1987. Powell felt that the Tower Board had been too tough on
Secretary of State George Shultz and Powell's old boss, Caspar Weinberger. So Powell
tried to insert some exculpatory language.

"I tried to get the President to say something exonerating these two reluctant players,"
Powell wrote in his memoirs. Powell's suggested language noted that Shultz and
Weinberger had "vigorously opposed" the Iranian arms sales and that they were excluded
from some key meetings "by the same people and process used to deny me [Reagan]
vital information about this whole matter."

In the speech, Reagan finally acknowledged that the operation had involved "trading arms
for hostages" and "was a mistake." But the president did not read the phrasing meant to
exonerate Shultz, Weinberger and, by inference, Weinberger's assistant in 1985-86, Colin
Powell.

After Reagan's limited admission, the White House resumed its strategy of shifting the
bulk of the blame onto Oliver North and other "cowboy" NSC staffers.

Reagan, however, was not always cooperative with the plan. In one press exchange about
North's secret contra-supply operation, Reagan blurted out that it was "my idea to begin with."

North, too, would tell the congressional investigation that the official version was a "fall-guy
plan" with him as the fall guy. Logic about what a junior officer could accomplish without
higher authority weighed in favor of North's truthfulness, at least on that point.

Clearly, a large number of people, including senior officers in the CIA and elsewhere the
White House, knew a great deal about the contra operations and had sanctioned them.

Nevertheless, Powell's personal credibility helped persuade key journalists to accept the
White House explanations. Soon, Washington's conventional wisdom had bought into the
notion of Reagan's inattention to detail and North's rogue operation.

Recovery

As the Iran-contra scandal faded in the summer and fall 1987, Powell turned his attention
to another touchy assignment: winning renewed CIA aid for the Nicaraguan contras, a
difficult task in the wake of the Iran-contra debacle.

According to Powell's NSC calendars, which we obtained from the National Archives, the
politically astute general devoted large amounts of time to this assignment.

In My American Journey, Powell recounted a meeting with contra leaders in Miami. While
admitting they were "a mixed bag," Powell wrote that the contra military commander, Col.
Enrique Bermudez "impressed me as a true fighter ready to die for his cause. Others
were just unregenerate veterans of the corrupt regime of Anastasio Somoza. ... But in the
old days of East-West polarization, we worked with what we had."

Powell's records at the Pentagon and at the NSC revealed no information about -- or
apparent interest in -- long-standing allegations that the contras engaged in cocaine
trafficking and committed atrocities against Nicaraguan civilians.

[Recent CIA and Justice Department reports have linked Bermudez to Nicaraguan drug
traffickers who smuggled cocaine into the United States during the contra war, although
Bermudez's precise role remained unclear. See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Despite his belief in a Cold War rationale, Powell confronted a Congress that favored
pressing for a regional peace settlement, rather than continuing contra military aid. Powell
was determined to reverse that judgment.

Although still an active-duty military officer, Powell twisted the arms of leading
congressmen. On Nov. 16, 1987, in the Oval Office, Powell joined in dressing down
House Speaker Jim Wright, who was pushing for peace negotiations with Nicaraguan
President Daniel Ortega.

In his book Worth It All, Wright said Reagan, Carlucci and Powell portrayed Wright
essentially as gullible for giving Ortega any credit. Wright paraphrased Powell and
Carlucci as saying “ou couldn't count on anything [Ortega] said or did unless you had him
at the end of a bayonet.”

Powell replaced Carlucci as national security adviser in November 1987 and assumed an
even more prominent role in the contra battle. In January 1988, Powell carried that fight to
the reluctant countries of Central America.

There, Powell joined assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams in threatening leaders of
four Central American nations who questioned Reagan's pro-contra policies. Powell and
Abrams warned the leaders that their countries could face a cut-off of U.S. economic aid if
they did not back the contras.

"These people [Powell and Abrams] are trying every weapon in their arsenal to break up
the peace process," complained Rep. Bill Alexander, D-Ark.

But the Central American leaders and the Democratic-controlled Congress resisted the
pressure. The contras received no more CIA military funding and negotiations did achieve
a peace settlement in Nicaragua, as well as in nearby El Salvador and eventually in Guatemala.

But Powell had proved himself a good soldier again.

War & Politics

From Vietnam and Iran-contra, Colin Powell came to understand that combat was only a
part of the mix in modern warfare. Large doses of politics and P.R. were equally
important, if not more so.

"Once you've got all the forces moving and everything's being taken care of by the
commanders," Powell advised other senior officers at the National Defense University in
1989, "turn your attention to television because you can win the battle [and] lose the war if
you don't handle the story right."

Powell explained that the fickle political mood of Washington could alter the outcome of
conflicts and damage careers. So he saw it as a military imperative to cultivate the
opinions of the media elite.

"A great deal of my time is spent sensing that political environment," Powell said.

In the last years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Powell earned his spurs as an expert
spinner. He could wow reporters in White House background briefings or schmoose their
bureau chiefs over an elegant lunch at the nearby Maison Blanche restaurant.

Yet, at the start of George Bush's presidency in 1989, Powell wanted a respite from
Washington and got it by assuming command of Forces Command at Fort McPherson in
Georgia. That posting also earned the general his fourth star.

But his sojourn into the regular Army would be brief, again. Behind the scenes, the Bush
presidency was hurtling toward another confrontation with a Third World country, this time
Panama.

Next: War and Reputation

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