Word: perots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...urgent call from the White House. National Security Council Aide Oliver North asked Texas Billionaire H. Ross Perot for $200,000 fast to rescue two American hostages in Lebanon. The billionaire immediately dispatched an associate who handed over the money to North in cash...
...Nothing ever materialized," says Perot. But eight months later, in January 1986, North phoned again and asked Perot for $100,000 to fund a new rescue attempt. Perot sent the money by courier to intermediaries of North's in Canada...
Once again, nothing happened. North, it seems, lost Perot's money chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. He had authority, however; North's boss Robert McFarlane says President Reagan approved the first hostage-rescue plan, and Reagan has a dim recollection of some such conversation -- though he insists that he "never thought of that as ransom." Only garbled portions of the story have become public, but Republican Senator Paul Trible of Virginia, who has been looking into the affair, and Government officials involved helped TIME piece together this account...
...would not put up the money unless it got proof that the informant really was in touch with Buckley's captors. So in May, North raised the $200,000 from Perot. He then described the plan in a June 7, 1985, memo to McFarlane. The $200,000, he indicated, would only be a kind of down payment; eventually $2 million would be needed from "the donor" to rent a yacht to bring the hostages to Cyprus, to set up a safe house for them on the island and, apparently, to pay additional bribes...
Reagan was forced to rebut another startling disclosure by McFarlane, in this case an apparent contradiction of Reagan's oft-stated policy of refusing to pay ransom to terrorists. McFarlane claimed that in 1985 the President authorized a plan to pay $2 million provided by Texas Billionaire H. Ross Perot for the release of two American hostages in Beirut. "I don't recall anything ever being suggested in the line of ransom," Reagan said last week. But, he added, he may have discussed paying foreign agents who could help win the release of American captives. Said Reagan: "I've never...