Word: contra
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...District Court Judge Harold Greene ruled last week that Ronald Reagan must turn over portions of his private diaries to his onetime National Security Adviser John Poindexter. In Greene's view, 29 of the handwritten entries could "contain information of significance" to Poindexter's defense in the Iran-contra trial. Greene, who has viewed transcripts of the journals, says they hold no bombshells that will refute the former Commander in Chief's claims that he neither "knew of nor authorized" a diversion of Iranian arms-sale profits to help Nicaraguan contra rebels. However, the judge allowed that at least...
...resignation of Jimmy Carter's budget director. Charles Wick, the Reagan-era head of the U.S.I.A. and a frequent Safire target, gushes, "There's no way you can dislike the guy. I admire him so much." Perhaps no journalistic jousting caused the anguish of the Iran-contra rift with the late CIA director William Casey, whose 1966 congressional campaign Safire managed. Critical columns led to angry phone calls and a shouting match at a party -- all of which Safire recounted in the Times. But Sophia Casey, the CIA director's widow, recalls that her husband to the end "still...
Nevertheless, Iran-contra defendants Oliver North, John Poindexter and former CIA agent Joseph Fernandez forced prosecutors to reduce or dismiss many of the charges against them by insisting that reams of classified information were necessary for their cases. Noriega's lawyers are almost certain to make the same argument. "The only way to get to the truth is to get those documents," said Noriega defense attorney Steven Kollin last week. Even if that tactic fails, a question that has haunted more than one previous President -- what did he know and when did he know it? -- may yet rise...
...guilty plea on Noriega's behalf. Defense attorneys are also insisting that Noriega cannot get a fair trial in a nation where the President has publicly called him a thug. Yet the fact that twelve jurors could be found who were unfamiliar with the congressional testimony of Iran-contra star Oliver North makes it less likely that those objections will stand in the way of a trial...
Noriega won Washington's gratitude by allowing the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan contra rebels to train on Coiba Island, off Panama. In 1985 he made an offer to Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, then on the National Security Council staff, to assassinate Nicaraguan Sandinista leaders and carry out sabotage inside the country. All the time, though, Noriega was allegedly running arms to the Sandinistas and to leftist rebels in Colombia and El Salvador, supplying CIA information to Cuba and helping Cubans smuggle U.S. high- technology equipment through Panama to the Soviet bloc. Said Jose Blandon, a former intimate of Noriega...