Word: secretes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lieut. Colonel Oliver North spent nearly three years coordinating arms purchases and helping to raise money for the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua. But none of North's secret activities may prove as vital to the rebels as his testimony before the Iran-contra committees. As millions of Americans watched on television, North pleaded passionately for support of efforts to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista junta. He was even permitted to deliver his patented fund-raising pitch, minus the projection of 57 slides that usually accompany the spiel. Holding a photograph of a makeshift contra grave, North, his voice choking...
Even so, leaking is indeed a classic tool in the hardscrabble world of Washington politics. Congressmen, who are generally given only the outlines of a covert operation, occasionally hint their opposition to a secret activity without actually exposing it. Intelligence officials, on the other hand, leak for a wider variety of motives: to support or reshape an operation (such as assistance to the Afghan guerrillas), sometimes to score points or advance their political position...
...Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was caught spying for Israel. In a 1983 incident, members of the Intelligence Committees commented publicly on U.S. and CIA support for the Nicaraguan contras. Administration officials had talked about the subject so often that the Intelligence Committees decided that it was no longer a secret matter...
When readers of the New York Times glanced at the paper one morning last week, coffee cups rattled and bleary eyes widened. There, across two columns at the top of Page One, was an extraordinary mea culpa: A CORRECTION: TIMES WAS IN ERROR ON NORTH'S SECRET-FUND TESTIMONY. Two days earlier the Times had reported that Lieut. Colonel Oliver North testified that the late CIA Director William Casey wanted to use the profits from arms sales to Iran to set up a covert-operations fund that would be kept secret from Ronald Reagan. In fact, North testified only that...
Poindexter contended that during daily briefings he reported to Reagan "in general terms" on the status of the contras. He said he told the President of North's "instrumental" role in helping sustain the rebels, filling Reagan in on the secret airstrip built in Costa Rica by North's contra resupply network. The admiral said that while the President knew the rebels were being supported by private donations and contributions from third countries, he never asked where precisely the money was coming from. "The President . . . is not a man for great detail," said Poindexter, inadvertently provoking chuckles from the audience...