AMY GOODMAN: And you’re listening to Democracy Now!

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Last Friday, after becoming concerned whether my national security apparatus had provided me with a security or a complete factual record with respect to the implementation of my policy toward Iran, I directed the attorney general to undertake a review of this matter over the weekend and report to me on Monday. And yesterday, Secretary Meese provided me and the White House chief of staff with a report on his preliminary findings. And this report led me to conclude that I was not fully informed on the nature …

ATTORNEY GENERAL EDWIN MEESE III: The funds were transferred, and that’s one of the things that has disturbed me and disturbed the president. That was not an inherent part of anything having to do with the policy itself. Instead, it was actually an aberration from the policy.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: Although not directly involved, Vice Admiral John Poindexter has asked to be relieved of his assignment as assistant to the president for national security affairs and to return to another assignment in the Navy. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North has been relieved of his duties on the National Security Council staff.

ATTORNEY GENERAL EDWIN MEESE III: We don’t know the exact amount yet. Our estimate is that it is somewhere between $10 [million] and $30 million. Admiral Poindexter did know that something of this nature was occurring, but he did not look into it further.

REPORTER: Is anyone else going to be let go, sir? Is anyone else going to be let go?

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: No one was let go. They chose to …

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, the words and sounds of 10 years ago. Theodore Draper, in a foreword to the book The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, wrote, “If ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrown, we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done. During the course of the Iran-Contra affairs from 1984 to 1986, something in the nature of a junta was at work inside the U.S. government. We usually think of a junta as plotting to overthrow a president. This junta came into being to overthrow an established constitutional rule of law with the help of a president. The main lesson from this experience is that the chief danger to our political system is from within, not from without.”

It’s been exactly 10 years since Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that he discovered a memo in Oliver North’s files mentioning the illegal sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras. The announcement opened the window on what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, a Reagan administration conspiracy to defy Congress and lie to the American people.

Back in the 1980s, the big question echoing through this country was: What did they know, and when did they know it? Today on Democracy Now!, we’ll ask: What do we know now, 10 years later, and what does it all mean for democracy?

Coming up, we’ll be joined by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and his assistant, Mary Belcher. We’re also going to be speaking to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive and co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History. Pacifica national affairs correspondent Larry Bensky, who anchored Pacifica Radio’s live daily coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings and won a George Polk Journalism Award for it, was supposed to be with us today, but he was too sick to make it. Larry, we do hope that you feel better. We’re also going to be joined by Andy Messing, who was an associate of Oliver North.

But why don’t we begin with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh? Welcome to Democracy Now!

LAWRENCE WALSH: Glad to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s been 10 years since that news conference with the attorney general at the time, Edwin Meese, and President Ronald Reagan. Can you talk, for people who don’t remember this or who weren’t conscious at the time, about what the significance of what happened then, what was announced on that day, was?

LAWRENCE WALSH: Well, the big significance was that this was a move by Attorney General Meese, Donald Regan and perhaps other advisers of President Reagan to deflect attention from President Reagan toward Colonel North and toward Poindexter and to make it look as though this were a runaway conspiracy conducted by the National Security Council staff, when in fact these activities were administration — had wide administration support.

There were two separate illegal activities. One, President Reagan was determined to continue the support of the Contras in Nicaragua, even though Congress had cut off support and had actually forbidden the use of any government funds in support of the Contras. And second, quite apart from that, President Reagan was determined to recover American hostages held in Lebanon by radical Islamic groups, in spite of our national policy not to trade with hostage takers.

So, his advisers devised a sort of scheme whereby we would ship arms to Iran, who was at war with Iraq, secretly, and the Iranians would exercise influence over the hostage takers to return the hostages. Now, this was contrary to national policy, and it was contrary to the American — to the Arms Export Control law, which requires that notice be given to Congress before American arms can be shipped to a foreign nation. Even though those arms have been shipped to one nation — say, Israel — Israel can’t ship them to another nation without the approval of both the president and Congress. And Congress was deceived as to both of these operations.

When they were exposed, the third effort developed, which was to cover up the president and to blame this on North and Poindexter as though it was something they did all by themselves. That’s, in a nutshell, what the problem was.

AMY GOODMAN: I think that’s a pretty good description of that nutshell. Bob Parry is also joining us, investigative journalist who broke the Iran-Contra story for AP. He now heads up the investigative unit of The Nation magazine and publishes his own newsletter called The Consortium. So, here we had the president and the attorney general making the announcement. This wasn’t journalists who were breaking the story at that moment. Talk about your work at that time and what you were following and what you felt were the real crimes.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, the first story that we did at the Associated Press was in June of 1985, and it was the first story to mention Oliver North’s operations. We then pursued it and followed it through that fall. I was joined with Brian Barger, who is now with CNN. He was at AP then, too. And we did stories about Contra drug trafficking and about efforts in Miami to investigate by federal prosecutors looking into this area and how they were stopped from their work. We followed it through 1986. We did a long story, citing 24 sources, in June of ’86, describing how North ran the operation through intermediaries.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you first get tipped off to the story in June of ’85?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, I’d been following Ollie North for a while. I had met him in '83, and he was clearly a person going off in some rather wild directions. And I'd been covering Central America and CIA activities there, so they all kind of merged. And you’d hear, talking to the Contras and talking to supporters of the Contra movement, descriptions of Oliver North. That’s how we got onto it initially. It was really from the Contras.

But then, by June of — by August of '86, the Congress finally agreed to look into this, and the House Intelligence Committee trooped over to the White House and sat down in the Situation Room with Oliver North and said, basically, “Are these allegations true?” And North basically said, “No, they're not.” And so, this Democratic-led committee, headed by Lee Hamilton, came out and said, “Well, thank you very much. We’re sorry we bothered you.” And they called me, and they said, “Well, your story didn’t check out.” And that was pretty much where it stood. We had been basically stopped, beaten, partly by the Democrats, as well as the Republicans. And Barger was sort of — left the company, left the AP.

And then, in October, of course, October 5th of '86, a Sandinista teenager, a draftee in the army, shot down a plane flying over Nicaragua, and it was one of North's planes. And one of the men survived, Eugene Hasenfus, and the story began to spill out finally. Then, a month later, in Beirut, there was a story written by a Beirut weekly, Al-Sharaa, which described how the United States was selling arms to Iran. Reagan, of course, denied that initially, and it went through a period of several weeks as the story began to fall apart from the White House point of view.

And then, when it got to November 25th of 1986 — I remember the day well — I was sitting in the AP office, and I was on the phone, and suddenly one of the copy boys came in and was quite distressed. And there was some caller on the phone who was being rather abusive, he felt, but who wanted to talk to me. And so, I said, “OK,” and I got off the call. And it was — the call was from Andy Messing, who was one of Oliver North’s friends and assistants.

AMY GOODMAN: Who we’ll be joined by in a few minutes.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, I hope so. And Andy was saying — Andy said, “Bob,” he said, “they’ve hosed Ollie.” And I said, “What do you know? What do you what are the details?” He said, “That’s all I know. They hosed Ollie. Call Fawn.” And so I called Fawn Hall on Ollie’s direct line, which we had.

AMY GOODMAN: Ah, the names come back.

ROBERT PARRY: And Fawn Hall comes on the line, and she’s totally nonplussed. And she confirms that, in fact, Oliver North had been fired, along with John Poindexter. And so, at AP, we began moving a bulletin series describing this major event happening in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: And then the news conference was held.

ROBERT PARRY: And then, later, the news conference was held, essentially confirming it. And I must — I remember the thought of watching — first of all, Reagan speaks, and he leaves the podium, and he looks stricken. And then Ed Meese shows up, sort of takes over, looking almost, almost, almost happy. It was a very funny sort of look. And then Meese describes that there had been this diversion of money from the Iran operation to Central America. He doesn’t really say the Contras at that point.

But then — but, so, we have this rather remarkable story that unfolds. And over the next weeks and months, we learn more. But almost from the beginning, and it was clear from the beginning, that a cover-up was being moved into place and that the effort was to contain this. As, I think, Bob Dutton put it in one of his depositions, a Chinese wall was built around the president.

And again, the Democrats intervened, strangely, to protect the president. By early '87, the Democratic leadership in Congress had decided that they did not want this to go to an impeachment, and so they basically decided to go along with the cover-up, that Judge Walsh described a few minutes ago, which was to blame it on Oliver North. And while Oliver North had lied in August of ’86 when he said he wasn't doing this, he basically begins to tell the truth. He says, “I’m the fall guy. Don’t you get it?” when he testifies in July of ’87. And in fact, he was the fall guy. But the Democrats, and obviously the Republicans, too, fell for it.

AMY GOODMAN: The part I don’t get of your story is when you said once the Democrats called you at AP and said, “No, this isn’t a story. It’s not panning out. We’ve spoken to Oliver North,” why did that stop you?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, it didn’t stop me particularly, but the AP was always very nervous about moving on these stories. There was a lot of pressure throughout this period to stop us. The White House was denying everything flatly. So was the State Department. So was the CIA. And so, when you’re faced with that, and plus, the mainstream — most of the mainstream press was not picking up on this. There were a few stories here and there. Miami Herald did some good work. But the Post and the Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times, which are the premier papers as far as the mainstream press is concerned, were largely looking the other way. They had decided not to pursue it. And that left the AP feeling very, very alone and out there on a limb. And I had taken them there. And so, when the Democrats joined in this effort to say nothing’s going on, it made it very tough.

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Bob Parry, investigative reporter who was with AP at the time. Now he is independent, I suppose where all good journalists can continue to do their work. We’re also joined by Lawrence Walsh. We’re going to come back to him in a minute and then talk with some other people who have been investigating this, as well as Andy Messing, a close associate of Oliver North. You’re listening to Democracy Now! We’ll be back in 60 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: These people are hired by the American public, elected by the American public and paid by the American public to conduct our business for us. And what we’re trying to find out is what actually happened, and who cares whether it takes them five years? I could care less. I mean, we want to know the answers. They haven’t given us any answers. I mean, what’s going to happen as a result of this inquiry is people are now going to speculate on whether these members of Congress are covering their own tracks. That is the inevitable conclusion that people are going to reach because of the shortness, the strangulated nature of the inquiry.

REP. LEE HAMILTON: My name is Lee Hamilton. I represent the 9th Congressional District of the state of Indiana. Well, I think you just can’t keep these investigations going on forever. And I personally didn’t object to the limitation on time. The committees go out of business the end of October in 1987. I think it did put pressure on us to move, which, in retrospect, I think was OK and made us move. Now, there are going to be some loose ends, and we’re not going to be able to pursue every lead to its conclusion, but one of the things we do will be to recommend that other investigating committees of the Congress complete the work.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right, Democratic Congressmember Lee Hamilton doing what Bob Parry was just describing him doing, and that was trying to put an end to the investigation. We are going to go back to Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, in just one minute. We are joined by Bob Parry, investigative journalist, and Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives and co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History. One of the points that you’ve made over the years, Peter, is that the diversion was a diversion. Talk about that.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, it was just like Lawrence Walsh said in his opening remarks. It was an effort to spin the scandal away from the president and on to a rogue operation in the National Security Council. Ten years ago today, Ed Meese came to the podium of the press conference only because he was forced to by the public revelations that were taking place. The scandal was spilling out all over the — all over the country, if not the world, at that point, and this was an effort to really channel it in one direction. And it was a largely successful effort, as Bob puts out.

Let me just say two things. One, it’s a great honor to be on Pacifica with Lawrence Walsh — Judge Walsh, a pleasure to be on the show with you — and with Mary and with Bob, who really, really, all together, the three of them, just stood at the height of really getting this issue into the public domain. And let me just say that I wrote an article about Lawrence Walsh and the work that he was doing in September of 1994, called him the Lone Ranger of the Iran-Contra scandal, he and his staff, because they were really the only people out there trying to get the truth into the public domain.

And I got a letter after my article appeared, from the former speaker of the House, Jim Wright, who conceded to me in this letter that, in fact, Congress had totally mishandled the situation, that Congress had been far too fast to try and protect the president. In his letter, he admitted to me that he and the other leaders of the House and the Senate basically got together at the very beginning and decided that the United States of America couldn’t weather another Watergate situation, so that unless there was evidence that Reagan knew about the diversion, all the other illegal activity that Reagan might have been involved in was going to be set aside so that we wouldn’t get into the issue of impeachment like we did with Richard Nixon.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Walsh, independent counsel on the Iran-Contra scandal, what were you doing on November 25th, 19 — what was it? — 1986? And then, how did you come to be the independent counsel?

LAWRENCE WALSH: On that day, I was in Oklahoma City practicing law. I live in Oklahoma City with my wife and family. And my wife and I heard it on the evening news. My first instinct was defensive, because I had sympathized with President Reagan’s determination — you know, support of the Contras. Out here, more so than on the East Coast, I think we were sympathetic with the need to prevent the spread of communism into Central America, which is closer to Oklahoma than Washington is. And so, you know, I regretted it. I had liked Reagan, and I still do, but I was uneasy about that.

Then, about 10 days later, the presiding judge of the panel that appoints independent counsel called me. And actually, one of his colleagues had tipped me off a few hours earlier. And I had told them that — told him that if this was what I — he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He just wanted to be sure I was available for the presiding judge when he called. I said, “If this is what I think it is, be sure to give the independent counsel broad powers,” because you can’t investigate a thing like this narrowly. You’ve got to be able to deal around the fringes and with witnesses who are going to be reluctant and who will need to be dealt with firmly, and perhaps prosecuted, as you try to get information. And so, when the presiding judge called me a few hours later, I accepted his request that I agree to be considered. We had to be checked for conflicts of interest. Then, about five days later, I was interviewed by the full panel. And then, on December 19th, I was sworn in as independent counsel, without an office, without a staff, without anything, not even a yellow pad, except the one I brought with me from Oklahoma.

At that point, we had to put together a staff quickly. And, of course, there were a large number of lawyers, particularly young lawyers, who were ready and anxious to do this sort of work. And we picked an excellent group. Then we had to get them cleared for top-secret information, because we were dealing in an area where foreign affairs, where information is subject to classification by the intelligence agencies, and we couldn’t even read it until we were cleared. I was cleared very quickly, but some of my staff weren’t cleared for two months. We didn’t have an office. We didn’t get the — we had to get one from the General Services Administration. We finally got an office on March 1st. I was appointed on December 19th.

In the meantime, the congressional committees were plunging ahead and threatening to grant immunity to North and Poindexter, who I knew would be key witnesses for me, even though I had to prosecute them first to get them to talk. But I could not — we sort of worked out a compromise. They agreed to give me about 90 days from — but they insisted they were going to grant them immunity. Then, that’s what, in fact, happened. The committees were under this unrealistic timetable of finishing their work up. They were going to finish their hearings by the first of the summer, by July.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the timetable?

LAWRENCE WALSH: Because the — 

AMY GOODMAN: Why was there a limit put on this invetigation?

LAWRENCE WALSH: — next was a presidential election year. They did not want this to spill over into 1988. They wanted to have it all cleaned up in 1987. And the committees were — the leadership of the houses, I think, may have made a basic mistake. They appointed committees with a relatively equal representation. And the Democrats, although theoretically having — although, I guess, they had a slight majority of the committee, could not work their policy alone without risking a very partisan split with two reports, one by the Democrats and one by the Republicans. They wanted to avoid that, which really gave the Republicans, led by Senator Redmond and by Dick Cheney, who was then a congressman, the whip hand in order to hold plausible unanimity of the committee. These Republicans really controlled its program, and they were pushing to get this over with. As far as they were concerned, Oliver North had destroyed records and should be prosecuted for that, and that was it.

Then, in June, they granted immunity to North and Poindexter. And not only did they give him, North, immunity, they didn’t even get a statement from him first. They didn’t know what they were getting in return for their grant of immunity. Ordinarily, you never put a witness on the stand, certainly never publicly, if you don’t know what he’s going to say. But that’s exactly what this committee did.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry, what were your thoughts at the time when Oliver North was granted immunity?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, it seemed pretty clear by then that the Congress was not going to pursue this as aggressively as they should. And I think one of the real terrible legacies of Iran-Contra was that this — unlike Watergate, where the press, in a sense, did its job, the Congress, in a sense, did its job, and a reasonable history, reasonably accurate history, was pulled out, painfully, no question, at great harm to the country in some ways, but it was also very important, because it gave the people of this country a real record, a history of what happened, and it provided a certain level of trust that the public could have in its institutions.

Iran-Contra was the exact opposite. The people that told the truth were punished. The people that helped cover up and who — both in the administration and, in some cases, in the media, benefited. You saw it later on when Judge Walsh led a very heroic effort to correct this record, and he made a breakthrough on the cover-up in 1991, if you remember. It was that far along. That’s when some records were discovered that were turned in late, and they led to the Weinberger papers, the Caspar Weinberger papers, which showed that there had been a cover-up all along. But still, there was this victory of those who covered up. And I think that has generated a tremendous amount of distrust and harm to our system, and I think our institutions are looked at very skeptically now by the public, and rightly so, because they failed to give us an honest history of this period. And that is not an insignificant failure.

AMY GOODMAN: In a few minutes, we’re going to go to Mary Belcher, who was instrumental in putting together the final report. But before you leave, Bob Parry, and also Peter Kornbluh, I wanted to look at the drug aspect of this. So, we’re talking about the diversion of the money that came from the arms sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras. But the legacy we’re seeing today, the story of drugs coming into this country, facilitated by the CIA, can you talk about the drug story then and how much was understood?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, Brian Barger at I at AP wrote the first story about Contra drugs on December 20th, 1985. It was that early. And we had come upon this, again, mostly through the Contras and through their supporters and through DEA officials in Central America. And so we wrote this story, which also had a good deal of backing from Washington. This was well known inside certain circles of Washington, high levels.

But the effort was, again, to contain it, because the Reagan administration saw the Contra drug problem as a PR problem, as it saw many of these questions. How do you contain the information? How do you prevent the information from reaching the American people so they might react which — to which they might react negatively? And so, the effort to contain it was the most important priority for the Reagan administration. And that, I think, has continued to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: And when you say “it,” explain what you mean by “containing it.”

ROBERT PARRY: Containing the negative information, whether it be in the case of drug trafficking by certain Contra elements or whether it be the kinds of disclosures that were spilling out at that time around the Oliver North matter. It was always a case of: Can you spin this? Can you do what they call perception management? That was a term they used, “perception management.” They wanted to manage the perceptions of the American people about these questions. And when a government commits itself to that, it’s a very serious problem, because then the public doesn’t know what to believe. And in many cases, it’s right not to believe much at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about the investigation that took place, a six-year, $40 million investigation. Lawrence Walsh, you were hit hard by many Republicans saying that this is the reason there shouldn’t be independent counsels at all. Talk about what you feel were the greatest accomplishments of your investigation, the most important information that you raised and uncovered.

LAWRENCE WALSH: I think the most important information was that this was an administration-wide activity, that it wasn’t a runaway conspiracy by Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter. I think that what you had was not only a willful president, not necessarily criminal, but a willful president, who insisted on pursuing two policies that could not be concluded legally. He may not have figured all that out, but that’s what actually happened. And then those policies go forward. Then there is this effort to blame somebody else, not the president: The president is an innocent victim of all this, just because he didn’t — he may not have known all the details. And then, good career officers are put in a position where they feel they must lie to protect a willful president. And they lie. And then we catch them. We expose their lies. Some of them confess to their lies. They are indicted by my office, as we must do in cleaning this up.

And as they begin to expose higher-ups, and Cabinet officers like the secretary of defense are drawn into it, President Bush and his administration and the Republicans in Congress, led by Robert Dole, begin to batter us publicly, because we’re getting too close to their friends. That’s what, to me, was even more ugly than the original Iran-Contra errors themselves. President Bush, who ends up by pardoning the Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who for years concealed his notes, which were almost like a moving picture of this entire operation as it developed. He lied. He said he didn’t have them. He lied to Congress. He lied to us. He lied to the Tower Commission. He even said, you know, one of the great mistakes is that there were no notes kept of these key meetings. He kept those notes, but he kept them secret. He hid them and lied about them.

Now, when a man like that was about to go to trial, who would, one, have to expose the high-level aspects of the Iran-Contra activity and, second, would expose the knowledge of those in the White House, including the Vice President George Bush himself, who was the vice president at the time, Bush pardoned him. And it was an unprecedented pardon. It was a pardon in advance of trial, a pardon granted on the eve of trial to block a trial, something which in our history no president had ever done. Other presidents who had been involved in scandals, like President Harding, President Grant, had refused to pardon their colleagues to prevent their exposure. President Bush was the first to do that.

So, to me, it gave a very ironical twist to the investigation. The Iran-Contra conspiracy was bad enough in itself. The original cover-up by Meese and Regan was cynical and evil. But when the president of the United States, four years later, when all of these facts are unfolded, then pardons and prevents the trial of one of those most knowledgeable of all these activities, it seemed to me that we had a double — it doubled the size of the scandal.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that Caspar Weinberger and Oliver North should be in jail today?

LAWRENCE WALSH: The question of jail is for the courts. The difference between people like those involved in Watergate, who had a venal objective, they were — they were trying to get something for either a political group, or
there was even talk there, as I remembered, of money passing. There wasn’t that kind of venality in this activity. This was an activity in which willful pursuit of policies contrary to those of Congress was at the bottom of it. And it’s really for a judge to decide whether people who do that, otherwise honest, decent people, who are drawn into a web of policy controversy, should go to prison. We did ask that North be given a brief prison term. We did — and Admiral Poindexter was sentenced to 18 months. But they both escaped because of the immunity that Congress had given them.

The others, those who pleaded guilty and then testified to help expose the high level of this conspiracy, I felt differently about. I did not think they should go to prison. They would include people like Alan Fiers, Clair George, who was the number three man in the CIA, who would not break his code of silence and was prosecuted and convicted, was sentenced to a prison term and would have served it. But Bush, when he decided he had to pardon Weinberger to try to broaden so it wouldn’t be — so the narrow purpose of his activity would not be so apparent, then pardoned all of those involved in Iran-Contra, including Clair George.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Walsh, we have to break for a minute.

LAWRENCE WALSH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then we’re going to come back, and I want to ask you about what you think the fate of President Reagan and President Bush should have been. We’re also going to be joined by Mary Belcher, who helped write the final report, Iran-Contra report, and Andy Messing, a close associate of Oliver North. Peter Kornbluh will also be with us. You’re listening to Democracy Now! We’ll be back with 60 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. And it is 10 years since Attorney General Edwin Meese and President Ronald Reagan announced the Iran-Contra scandal. To divert attention, they talked about the diversion of funds from the sale of weapons to Iran to the Contras in Nicaragua. And today we’re going to try to get at what people think are the real crimes. We’re joined by the independent counsel at the time, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh. He joins us from his home in Oklahoma. We are joined by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive and co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History. We’re also now joined on the phone by Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation, which studies special operations, low-intensity conflict — he’s a former associate of Oliver North — and Mary Belcher, who put together the final Iran-Contra report, a former Washington Times reporter who became an assistant to Lawrence Walsh. What do you think are the most critical findings, and what should be remembered today about what happened, and what perhaps may be continuing to happen, in some ways?

MARY BELCHER: Well, I think the most relevant lesson for today is that criminal investigations and politics don’t mix. They just don’t mix, and — at least in Iran-Contra. And they worked at odds. And I’m disappointed to hear that certain political forces are coming forth to try to defeat the Whitewater investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean.

MARY BELCHER: Well, I read in the paper this morning that James Carville is marshaling forces to come against — come publicly speak out against Kenneth Starr’s investigation. And I really think the two things should be separate.

AMY GOODMAN: Who he calls Pat Robertson’s cigarette lawyer.

MARY BELCHER: Yes, it’s déjà vu all over again, as far as I’m concerned. And politics will always defeat criminal process when the criminal investigators are outnumbered.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about the putting together of the final Iran-Contra report and the access you had to classified information? I mean, that seemed to be a key issue at the time. Lawrence Walsh was just talking about Caspar Weinberger holding on to his diaries for a very long time, Oliver North, too.

MARY BELCHER: Well, we finally did find those things. Walsh was given a haystack to investigate, and we had to investigate the whole haystack. It took seven years. We weren’t just looking for a needle. I think if you read the final report, you’ll see that it’s almost a very — a completely opposite finding from what the Congress found. They found that it was a rogue operation. We found that everyone knew. The question, “What did they know, and when did they know it?” is — it’s a pointless question. Everyone knew everything.

AMY GOODMAN: Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, let’s ask you that question of President Reagan and then President Bush, vice president at the time. Do you think they should have been charged with crimes?

LAWRENCE WALSH: I think you have to be very careful in dealing with the president of the United States. He is unique. There’s no one like him. And, you know, he’s exposed 24 hours a day, and he is perhaps entitled to the protection of his staff. We did not think they should be indicted, either Bush or President Reagan. You must realize that criminal prosecution is the somewhat clumsy weapon. It means you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt each of the elements of a crime. And then, when you have an officer who is on watch all every hour of the day, every day of the year, as the president is, it can’t be any accidental thing, any even subconscious thing, that can be the center of a prosecutor’s attention. There has to be an error — it has to be deliberateness about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t — 

LAWRENCE WALSH: And it has to be deliberateness proved by testimony under oath.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Bush —

LAWRENCE WALSH: Now, the problem always is to get through the group closest to the person involved. Excuse me.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Bush, who was vice president at the time, cover up his own diaries?

LAWRENCE WALSH: Yes. Well, I mean, he didn’t produce them. To us, that was a cover-up. He started keeping a diary, strangely enough, as the Watergate problems began to unfold, and he started to keep them in early November 1986. And he kept those diaries until after he was defeated for election, for reelection. And then, on December 11th of the year in which he was defeated, he finally began to give us parts of them. Now, the diaries did not prove as valuable as some of the diaries did, but there were pieces in there that that we should have had, and it would have speeded our investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, on the back of your book, The Iran-Contra Scandal, you’ve got a quote from George Bush, and it says, “The administration in disarray — foreign policy in disarray — cover-up — who knew what when?” George Bush noted this in his personal diary on November 25th, 1986, the day that Iran-Contra exploded in the United States.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yeah, I think the Bush diaries may not have been great evidence for prosecution and illegality, but they certainly answered a key question, which was what George Bush knew and when he knew it. He protested all along, all during his run for the presidency in 1988, that he was not in the loop, as he put it, on these operations, either the Iran operation or the Contra operations. And his diaries show that — in fact, he says in his diary the very first day that he’s one of the few people in the administration that actually was in the loop on the Iran operations. And then, because Lawrence Walsh and Mary Belcher and the staff of the independent counsel were able to bring Oliver North to trial, we learned that Bush was heavily involved in the Contra operations, the illegal Contra operations, the quid pro quos that were going to countries like Honduras in order to buy their support for the Contra war.

So, part of what I think — getting back to this history, it’s important to note that because of the work of the independent counsel’s office, we do have those diaries. We have the Weinberger diaries. We have the Bush diaries. And at the very least, we have the history which shows the truth. They show that George Bush was elected for the presidency of the United States on a false position vis-à-vis his knowledge of the Iran-Contra operations. They show an administration-wide operation, rather than just a cabal of zealots, as the Congress put it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Andy Messing into this conversation. Andy Messing, again, a close associate of Oliver North. In his memoirs, North argued the Reagan administration used the diversion as a diversion. He wrote, “This particular detail,” the diversion, “was so dramatic, so sexy, that it might actually — well, divert public attention from other, even more important aspects of the story, such as what else the President and his top advisors had known about and approved. And if it could be insinuated that this supposedly terrible deed was the exclusive responsibility of one mid-level staff assistant at the National Security council (and perhaps his immediate superior), and that this staffer had acted on his own (however unlikely that might be), and that, now that you mention it, his activities might even be criminal — if the pubic and the press focused on that, then maybe you didn’t have another Watergate on your hands after all.” Bob Parry just talked about that call he got as Oliver North was sacked on November 25th, 1986. What are your thoughts on this day, 10 years later, about your colleague, Oliver North?

ANDY MESSING: Well, he certainly compartmentalized a lot of things. He was like a giant vacuum that was trying to suck as much responsibility into his particular office for the juice. And I didn’t realize this Iran gambit and other activities he was involved in, because I was compartmentalized. I was just doing anti-death squad stuff out of El Salvador. And the only reason I was even vaguely associated with some of the Contra activities is because of the fact that I had heard a lot of spillover of how screwed up the operation was, from associates who were coming to me because they knew I had access to North.

I later wrote about this in an article for a policy review for the Heritage Foundation, and I was like the skunk at the garden party, because, you know, I listed all the problems that the Contras were having, to include — I intimated the drug problem, too.

So, the whole thing was just poorly run, because I think North would have done well had he stuck to just one or two things, but he was like a giant vacuum. You know, he’d sit in a meeting, and all these little wimpy people would sort of hide under the table when somebody would say, “We got to do this. What about this?” And they’d all duck under the table, and North would be standing on the table, waving his arms, say, “Call me. Call me. You know, let me do it.” And so —

AMY GOODMAN: You were saying —

ANDY MESSING: — he just spread himself too thin.

AMY GOODMAN: You were saying, at the time, you understood about the drug problem, as you called it, the Contra drug problem, that you understood that the Contras were bringing drugs into this country to fund their operation?

ANDY MESSING: I had been told several times about it. And I had gone to North, and I said, “Look where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” You know, when the liberals talked about all this death squad activity, everybody poo-pooed it. And then we found out it was true. You got to pay attention to these things. And then, of course, the actual low-intensity element to the thing, in terms of the operation of the guerrilla war, was just abysmal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, because the U.S. government was supporting the Contras, and the Contras were involved, and it was understood by the government what they were involved with in supporting their operation, bringing drugs in, it was clear that the U.S. government was working with the Contras and bringing drugs into this country. Is that a fair assessment?

ANDY MESSING: No, no, there were rogue elements that were involved in the drug operation, from what I understood, and there wasn’t any concerted effort. I mean, all this stuff that’s going on by The Mercury News is — is they’re off the mark. They’re off the mark. But the fact is that there was dark side capitalist activities associated with what otherwise would have been a noble effort.

And the second fact is that the guys who were running the guerrilla operations were so inept at it, besmirched at what would have been otherwise a noble effort, that the two in itself detracted from the effort so severely that it had a long-term effect of bringing the whole thing down like a house of cards. So, we were all sitting around looking at each other, saying, “God, this is terrible. You know, there’s all these knuckleheads running this program.” And then we’d go to North and Casey talking about it, and nothing would happen. And then Iran — and then it started to happen right in, like, September of ’86, October. And then, you know, Iran-Contra fell on them. And it was too little, too late, and too late, and —

AMY GOODMAN: Was Oliver North taking the fall for the president and the vice president?

ANDY MESSING: Well, you know, you got to keep in mind that this whole thing is about executive branch and legislative branch fighting over foreign policy. That’s the macro issue, which was never, never resolved. OK? And then the second thing, which Mary brought out, is this special prosecutorial thing, that, you know, we have one standard for Iran-Contra, and we have a different standard for Whitewater and the politics of the whole thing. So, you know, where all these Washington Post reporters for Whitewater? I mean, we don’t see it. So you got this double standard. So there’s a second issue that’s not resolved in a macro sense. So, you know, when I look back on this thing, all I do — you know, on Iran-Contra, all I do is shake my head, because from about 1984 onward, it started being one mistake after another, and it was just — it was terrible, because I was going into Nicaragua with congressmen, and I was meeting with guys like Daniel Ortega, and these people were nuts. They were nuts. The communists were nuts down there. They were venal and just out of control.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to wrap up, because the end of the hour has come all too soon. But I do want to ask, talking about the Contras, Peter Kornbluh, tomorrow, the Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to hold hearings where Adolfo Calero and Eden Pastora will be testifying. What’s happening here?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, it’s evident that history has not yet been resolved in the case of the Iran-Contra scandal. We still have this issue in front of us right now and in the guise of the whole investigation and scandal over the issue of Contras and drugs. And even as we wait to see what the evidence is for CIA involvement in drugs coming into the United States of America, it is clear that the bottom line of that scandal, as the bottom line of Iran-Contra, was the obsession of the Reagan administration of overthrowing the Sandinista government, all laws, all morality, all issues of real concern to the American public be damned.

I think when you think about Iran-Contra, you can think about it in three ways. Iran-Contra was illegal policy, it was illogical policy, and it was unconstitutional policy. And part of the result of that is what we are facing today, the issue of drugs coming into our cities, and hearings still with Contra leaders on Capitol Hill 10 years after this scandal broke.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet you have the newspapers today saying there’s no way the CIA was involved with drug running in this country; this is all a lot of conspiracy.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, I think the conspiracy theories are a little bit off the mark. But I think the truth is, is that the CIA and the other Reagan administration officials, including Oliver North, first and foremost, John Poindexter and others, clearly did collaborate with, tolerate, protect and in some cases even pay known drug smugglers who were deemed important players in the Contra war. We can document that with their own White House email messages and their own Oliver North notebooks.

AMY GOODMAN: Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, we give you the last word on this 10th anniversary of the breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal.

LAWRENCE WALSH: Well, I think maybe the last word is that the system of law worked clumsily. It took too long. But I think that the outline of the matters we’ve talked about this morning was exposed, not withstanding the disadvantage we were put in by an overhasty investigation by the Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lawrence Walsh, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Lawrence Walsh has a new book coming out on the Iran-Contra scandal. We’ve also been joined by Bob Parry, investigative journalist; Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives; and Mary Belcher, former Washington Times reporter and assistant to Lawrence Walsh; and Andy Messing, associate of Oliver North, who now works at the National Defense Council Foundation.

If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. You can always also get Larry Bensky’s documentary, Untangling the Web, which was produced in 1987, at the Pacifica Archives. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to another edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!