Word: nsc
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...report assails the NSC staff, headed until December 1985 by Robert McFarlane, and then by Poindexter, for an "obsession" with secrecy that "provided an excuse for abandoning sound process." It notes that the NSC staff, including North, tried to keep much of the Iran initiative secret from foreign policy experts in the U.S. Government even though it was known to a "variety of persons with diverse interests and ambitions -- Israelis, Iranians, various arms dealers and business intermediaries and LtCol North's network of private operatives." Beyond risking exposure abroad, this meant that the "unprofessional" operation was never guided at home...
...Tower commission finds the legality of these NSC staff actions murky, partly because in December 1985 Congress altered the Boland Amendment to permit some CIA intelligence exchanges with the contras. A classified appendix provided other loopholes. Scowcroft calls the Boland Amendment a "masterpiece of ambiguity...
...weakest section, the report notes that North, "either on his own or at the behest of others, actively sought to conceal important information" after the scandal became known. He produced a chronology of Iranscam events that "had many inaccuracies." McFarlane is faulted for helping Poindexter, North and other NSC staffers produce a dozen versions of this chronology, which the former National Security Adviser admitted "did not present a full and completely accurate account." The board reported that it could not confirm whether North had shredded documents relevant to the investigations under...
...committees but "did not fully relate the nature of events as they had occurred." This produced an "understandable perception," said the board all too softly, "that they were not forthcoming." More ominously, the board also expressed its concern that notes presumably made by Poindexter, the official notetaker at key NSC meetings, "appear to be missing...
...wonder that Lieut. Colonel North did not have the time or inclination to linger over literary style. For as the Tower report voluminously documents by reprinting those memos, North was operating as a reckless and overburdened free agent of the NSC. During 1985 and '86 he simultaneously conducted a tense and frustrating series of arms-hostages negotiations with Iran and coordinated a supply line for the contras in Nicaragua. Like the ringleader of a vast, secret circus, North masterminded an elaborate network of boats and planes, along with not-for-profit corporations and Swiss bank accounts to help...