Word: iran-contra
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When he testified on Capitol Hill as the first witness in the Iran-contra hearings, retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord portrayed himself as a patriotic private citizen recruited by the White House to help support the Nicaraguan contras after Congress had cut off U.S. Government assistance. Although Secord told his story without insisting on immunity from prosecution, last week he assailed the hearings in a Wall Street Journal column, calling the proceedings an "obscene spewing of information and misinformation" and an example of the nation's "periodic, spasmodic flirtation with self- destruction...
...sales of U.S. weapons to Iran. Fund Raiser Carl Channell reportedly kept 35% of the private donations he solicited for the contras to bankroll his plush Washington offices, stretch limos and hefty payments to friends and associates. Even Oliver North, the superpatriotic National Security Council aide who ran the Iran-contra initiatives, cashed $2,000 worth of traveler's checks received from Contra Leader Adolfo Calero while purchasing groceries, hosiery and snow tires. Ironically, the often maligned contras apparently did not have the sticky fingers of some of their benefactors. Sources on the congressional committees say Calero was "meticulous...
Much of the testimony at the congressional hearings has revolved around the question of profiteering. Secord admitted that he and his business partner, Albert Hakim, hold in Swiss bank accounts some $8 million generated by the Iran-contra "enterprise." He said he had no interest in keeping this money and would gladly give it to the contras as a memorial to the late CIA director William Casey. But meanwhile he has taken court action to keep U.S. investigators from acquiring the bank records of these accounts...
After 25 years, Pfeiffer thinks it is time for his own studies of the fiasco to be made public. "Kirkpatrick's order to destroy the documents was outrageous," he commented last week. "What's to say the CIA's records on the Iran-contra matter won't disappear the same...
Former President Jerry Ford phoned from California to say how distressed he was that 26 members of Congress were locked into the Iran-contra diatribe, rancorously elbowing one another for television time, while the ailing American economy went unnoticed and untended...