From: Penthouse January 1991 Vo. 22, No. 9 �1991 Penthouse International Ltd. All rights reserved ISSN 0090-2020 ----- GEORGE BUSH, SPYMASTER GENERAL New evidence reveals how C.I.A. spy-craft created and disguised the Reagan administration's sleaziest scheme. BY FRANK SNEPP AND JONATHAN KING With the country awash in the savings-and-loan scandal and bedeviled by a major confrontation in the Middle East, it seems almost churlish to taunt President Bush with the still unresolved mysteries of the now ancient Iran-contra affair. But if presidential credibility counts for anything in the current crises, what is now emerging about Bush's role in Contragate�the sleazier half of the scandal�should sober us all. Ever-mounting evidence, most of which has surfaced since he entered the White House, shows that Vice-President Bush bent and battered the truth almost beyond recognition. o Although Bush still maintains he was out of the loop when it came to the contras, it now turns out that he was a major player in what was tantamount to an international extortion scheme aimed at winning them allies through the use of foreign aid to bribe and coerce support for their cause, o Despite his oft-repeated claim that he knew nothing of the actual supply effort, new evidence proves that he signed off on early deliveries, helped organize a supply bridge to contra bases in Honduras, and sent members of his staff into the field to write progress reports. o Most important of all, recent documentation produced by the government itself confirms the central role played by the Israelis in arming the contras�and bolsters allegations that the Vice-President's staff helped stage-manage this operation. On the eve of the 1988 presidential election, a wispy arms dealer from Oregon named Richard Brenneke appeared for one brief moment to hold the keys to the kingdom�or the trip-wire to Armageddon, depending on your political viewpoint. Several months before, the congressional committees investigating the Iran-contra mess had barely reserved a footnote for presidential hopeful George Bush. But in nearly 20 hours of interviews with us in our capacity as ABC News investigators, Brenneke turned their verdict around, implicating Bush directly and elaborately in the contra side of Irangate. >From 1983 onward, by Brenneke's account to the authors and a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, the Vice-President's office had been a "control point" for contra-supply operations run by Israeli agents out of Panama, Honduras, and El Salvador. He fingered Bush's then national security adviser, Don Gregg, as ringmaster for the operation, and Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban-American who'd once worked with Gregg in the C.I.A., as a principal field operative. He even implicated himself, saying that as a contract pilot he'd flown drugs to the United States as part of the increasingly corrupt U.S.-Israeli supply shuttle. Brenneke's claims were outrageous, conspiratorial, and very likely politically inspired. Some sources told us he was an Israeli intelligence plant out to discredit former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres and other Laborites in Tel Aviv who'd embroiled Israel in the Irancontra scandal. And when ABC's "World News Tonight" broadcast three circumspect accounts of his allegations in the spring of 1988, the White House savaged his credibility, tagging him falsely as an indicted coconspirator in a New York gunrunning case. A year later, after Bush was safely ensconced in the White House, the Justice Department brought perjury charges against Brenneke, alleging that he'd lied about his affiliation with the C.I.A. (he'd said he had one) and an early episode in the Iran-contra affair. By the time he was finally cleared of all charges in a federal courtroom last May, his reputation had been so sullied by official mudslinging that neither the press nor Congress could be persuaded to reexamine what he'd had to say. Killing the messenger had been raised to a fine art. The real significance of Brenneke's ordeal, however, lies not so much in its injustice as in its irony-the fact that his case against Bush keeps getting stronger. During the 1989 trial of Oliver North, the government reluctantly admitted to a 42-page condensation of classified documents�a "stipulation"�that thrust Bush to the very center of Contragate. More recently, two Washington-based organizations, the National Security Archive and Public Citizen, have used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose previously suppressed portions of North's diaries that obliterate what's left of Bush's fig leaf of deniability. To appreciate the importance of the new revelations�and the extraordinary effectiveness of Bush's cover-up�you have to recall what he and his former aides have said about their role in Contragate. Don Gregg, the man who headed the Vice-President's national security staff, once declared flatly: "We never discussed the contras. We had no responsibility for it (the contra war]. We had no expertise in it." Bush himself insisted that he knew nothing of the "privatized" supply initiative until it became front-page news in late 1986, after the congressional ban on contra aid had eased. Given the newly embellished histor-ical record, it's now stunningly clear that we were Bush-whacked: The "privatized" aid network Bush allegedly knew nothing about never really existed anyway. What's more, Brenneke has been proven dead right about the issue that so dominated the Iran-contra hearings. The "diversion" of Iran arms profits to the contras, he warned us, was never more than a decoy to draw attention away from a far darker scandal in which Bush was deeply involved. When C.I.A. Director George Bush first met Don Gregg in 1976, the idea of using third-party "cutouts" to fund unpopular causes behind Congress's back was very much the rage in Langley, Virginia. A year before, during the twilight of the Vietnam War, both Israel and Saudi Arabia had been encouraged to provide secret handouts to Saigon to offset U.S. aid cutbacks. Not long after Bush settled into his C.I.A. job, two of his deputies drew up a proposal urging that the C.I.A. look increasingly to private companies to help front and even implement sensitive operations. Gregg, a scrupulously honest intelligence professional who'd once served as a regional C.I.A. base chief in Vietnam, had no hand in fashioning this scheme. But as a sometimes C.I.A. liaison to Congress, he quickly came to understand how crippling excessive oversight by Congress could be. The answer to that, apparently, was increased deniability of the sort these cutout operations allowed. During Reagan's first year and a half in office, cutouts and indirect funding became operational staples at William Casey's newly ''revitalized" C.I.A., and basic tools in its burgeoning secret war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In July 1982 Gregg, then an intelligence specialist on the National Security Council, drew up a "finding,'' to be signed by the President, designed to give a patina of legality to such deep-cover operations. His draft, though later overlooked by Iran-contra investigators, reads in retrospect like a blueprint for everything that would finally define Reagan's "secret -war'"�"funding, arms supply, and some training" by "third-co untry nationals," combined with supplementary aid from "selected Latin-American and European governments, organizations, and individuals." The "finding" was never formally adopted; nobody wanted to add to the lengthening paper trail. But soon afterward, two of Gregg's old Vietnam colleagues-Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez-rallied him behind an impressive substitute. Both Enders and Rodriguez had first met Gregg in Vietnam in the early 1970s and had worked closely with him in developing a highly effective helicopter assault strategy for jungle warfare. Rodriguez was already renowned for his role in tracking down and killing Che Guevara in 1967, and Enders built quickly on the expertise he learned at Gregg's elbow to become one of the C.I.A.'s top paramilitary specialists. In 1981 he and Rodriguez, who'd retired from the agency several years earlier, traveled to Central America to explore ways of combating leftist insurgents more effectively. The blueprint they drew up, informally dubbed "Pink Team Plan," borrowed heavily from the assault strategy they'd conceived in Vietnam, though with one critical difference: Whereas C.I.A. contract pilots had flown the prescribed counterinsurgent missions there, this time cutouts-Cuban exiles�were to do the dirty work, under the ostensible sponsorship of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In March 1983 Gregg-now elevated to the post of the Vice-President's national security adviser�forwarded the Pink Team Plan to his White House colleague Robert McFarlane, who in turn sent it on to his boss, the President's own N.S.C. chief. William Clark. ''This is representative of the kinds of things we can do with Israel if we work quietly behind the scenes," McFarlane wrote in a covering note that escaped notice during the Iran-contra investigations. "I set this in motion with my Israeli counterpart, David Kimche, over a year ago." The Kimche he was referring to was a top Israeli intelligence expert, and what he'd set in motion, according to Richard Brenneke, was an arrangement for joint Israeli-U.S. paramilitary operations against the Sandinistas. On this point, Brenneke's claims were anchored in precedent, for the Israelis had long been a familiar if mischievous presence in Central America. In the late 1970s, when the U.S. cut aid to the region's various pariah regimes, 'including Anastasio Somoza's Nicaraguan dictatorship, weapons merchants from Tel Aviv and Haifa were right there to pick up the slack. And as the Somocistas gradually metamorphosed into the contras in the early 1980s, Israeli entrepreneurs simply followed the market. By late 1982 the C. I. A., working with the Mossad, had set up a covert pipeline to the newborn contras running from arms marts in Eastern Europe through warehouses in Texas and North Carolina to bases in Costa Rica and Honduras. Early in the Iran-contra investigations, the Senate Intelligence Committee produced a secret report (later made public) that homed in on the Israeli connection. But as the hearings progressed and political sensitivities came into play, the search for culprits veered away from our most important Middle Eastern ally to focus on less-valued scapegoats. It was only when Brenneke stepped forward in early 1988 to point a finger that suspicion swung back on Jerusalem. In light of the story he told, the Pink Team Plan looked like part of a much larger skein linking Bush's office to the deepest secret of Reagan's secret war. If you are to believe Brenneke, Don Gregg became Bush's national security adviser specifically to coordinate Israel's contra account. In fact, Brenneke claims to have phoned Gregg's office repeatedly�beginning in 1983�to seek instructions for Israeli supply masters. Gregg has told us that he is "morally certain'' that he never talked to Brenneke, whom he considers an inveterate liar, and Brenneke has not been able to document in any satisfactory way the missions he claims to have flown for the U.S.-Israeli network. Still, evidence of massive Israeli complicity in Contragate�the core of his allegations�is now irrefutable and overwhelming. In 1989, at Oliver North's trial, the Bush administration cracked the window. According to its agreed stipulation, William Casey proposed�and retired Air Force general Richard Secord negotiated�a joint supply venture with the Israelis in the spring of 1983 known as Operation Tipped Kettle. Under the terms of this arrangement, the Pentagon was to receive a substantial consignment of captured P.L.O. weapons, and then pass them on to the C.I.A. for distribution. In return, the administration promised "flexibility'' in meeting Israel's own aid needs-exactly the kind of trade-off that would characterize the Reagan-Bush approach to all "third-country" support for the contras. How much Bush's staff knew of Operation Tipped Kettle cannot be determined. But shortly after the Israeli aid spigot began to flow, the National Security Council abruptly expanded the Vice-President's role in the planning and approval of all covert operations. By the following November, according to two N.S.C. memos available to (but never exploited by) Iran-contra investigators, the Vice-President was being asked routinely to "concur'' in major supply shipments to the contras. Even more provocatively, he was also beginning to show up in all the places where the contras needed special friends. In December, for instance, with Gregg and North in tow, he headed off to Panama to confer with the dark angel himself, General Manuel Noriega. Israeli intelligence sources, including a Mossad operative named William Northrop, have told us that Panama was by now the switching station for Israeli supply lines reaching into Costa Rica and Honduras, and former Noriega aide Jose Blandon claims that his ex-boss had become a virtual protege of the Israelis' man on the scene, former Mossad superagent Michael Harari. To judge from official accounts, Bush and Noriega engaged in little more than diplomatic small talk. But Blandon says the get-together was actually a turning point for the Panamanian strongman, persuading him to get behind the contras in a big way. Blandon's credibility has been challenged by Bush supporters, but one thing is certain: Over the next year and a half, Noriega became one of the contras' staunchest supporters. As it happened, the contras now needed all the support they could get, for U.S. aid transfusions were fast drying up. By the spring of 1984, the C.I.A.'s audacious mining of Nicaraguan harbors had so infuriated Congress that a total aid shutdown was in the works, and pressure was mounting on the administration to find alternate supply sources. In March, according to the North trial stipulation, Casey proposed another aid pitch to the Israelis (the result was Operation Tipped Kettle II), and shortly thereafter, newly appointed national security adviser Robert McFarlane scored a breakthrough with the Saudis, persuading them to contribute $1 million a month to the contras' war chest. With that, the stage was set for what now appears to have been Bush's initiation into the darkest rites of Contragate. The baptism came at a full-dress White House meeting convened on June 25, 1984, to figure out how to keep the contras from going under. Initially, Iran-contra investigators dismissed the session as a moderately important policy review. But in light of evidence released at North's trial, it now appears to have been a pirates' ball. As Bush and the President looked on approvingly, William Casey took the floor to argue for a radical new approach to contra re-supply, including the use of aid promises to bribe countries like Honduras and Costa Rica into lending support. According to recently declassified notes of the meeting, Bush cheered Casey on enthusiastically, asking at one point how anyone could object "to the U.S. encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas." He did worry that the administration might be seen to be trading favors for such assistance. But evidently, over the next several months, this concern faded. >From a mere advocate of Casey's con game, Bush allowed himself to be converted into an active player. The following February, with U.S. military aid now totally cut off, a group of senior administration officials, including North and Deputy National Security Adviser John Poindexter, met to plot out a battle plan for Honduras. According to the North stipulation, they drafted a crafty letter to Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova, promising him "enticements," including increased aid, if he would hop on the contras' bandwagon. Already U.S. economic assistance to his regime had been frozen to soften him up, and in early March the squeeze paid off; Suazo said yes. On the 16, George Bush hurried off to Tegucigalpa to hand him our quid pro quo, a basketful of benefits to compensate for what we'd held back. Thus did the Vice-President become the bagman in what amounted to an officially sanctioned extortion scheme. Nor was Honduras the administration's only "touch.'' The previous August, according to recently revealed evidence, Secretary of State George Shultz had proposed a similar trade-off with El Salvador, linking U.S. aid commitments there to continued local support for the contras, and in January McFarlane met with President Duarte to shore up the deal. Though Bush wasn't directly in the loop, he wasn't out of it, either. By early spring, Felix Rodriguez, longtime friend of his national security adviser, had become Bush's eyes and ears inside the Salvadoran military. >From the moment Contragate hit the front pages, Rodriguez was Bush's Oliver North, an inconvenient gunbearer whose excesses threatened to backfire on the patron himself. No one could deny that the two knew each other. The public record showed that Rodriguez had met three times with the Vice-President�first in January 1985 and again in May 1986�and had made over a dozen phone calls to Bush's staff. But a "chronology" released by Bush's office on the eve of the Iran-contra investigations effectively "sanitized" these contacts, implying that the only thing Rodriguez had ever discussed with Bush was his work as a "counterinsurgency expert" in El Salvador. Like most good cover stories, this one contained a seed of truth. From March to September 1985, Rodriguez did fly about 100 combat missions against Salvadoran rebels from his base at Ilopango airfield in El Salvador. But where Bush and his apologists played false was in casting the Salvadoran venture as something unconnected with the secret contra war. The North stipulation makes clear that from June 1984 onward, the administration saw El Salvador as a crucial launchpad for contra supply deliveries. It's also apparent from this document that by the time Rodriguez planted himself at Ilopango, the Salvadoran regime had succumbed to U.S. arm-twisting and had agreed to let the air base be used by gunrunners servicing the Resistance. During the Iran-contra investigation, the Vice-President's staff maintained th at Rodriguez hadn't become involved until September 1985. But some sources allege that he was recruited into the Israeli network as early as 1983. In his recent autobiography, Shadow Warrior, he acknowledges that "like many of my friends in Miami, I'd been actively helping the contras since the early eighties." Did Bush know nothing of this? In fact, it can now be shown that he even helped set up one of Rodriguez's early supply runs. As the government admitted at North's trial, Bush came up with a clever pump-primer just before his own trip to Honduras in March 1985. Hoping, apparently, to convince the locals that the Resistance had friends everywhere, he proposed that a private group "supportive of the Resistance" be encouraged to fly a load of medical supplies to Tegucigalpa to coincide with his own arrival there. The North stipulation does not identify the private group, but in his autobiography Rodriguez inadvertently reveals that he made a supply drop himself just as Bush was arriving. Nor were supply deliveries Bush's only immediate concern. During the Iran-contra hearings, investigators came across an entry from Oliver North's schedule that recorded a meeting between him and the VicePresident on January 23 that dealt with "CentAm C/A"�Central American covert action. Initially, no one could guess what this signified. But a recently released passage from North's notebook shows that one "CentAm CIA' high on the lieutenant colonel's priority list in early 1985 was a planned sabotage mission inside Nicaragua involving General Noriega of Panama. Given Bush's expanding role in covert planning, North may well have briefed him on this operation. How much he may have told the Vice-President cannot be determined, but on March 6, Panamanian sappers backed by British mercenaries did carry out the mission, blowing up a major munitions dump in Managua. Years later, after Noriega became a public embarrassment, Bush's defenders tried to justify our continued reliance on him by insisting that there was no "firm" intelligence in 1985 linking him to drug trafficking or anything else that might have disqualified him as an ally. But again North's notebooks raise serious questions. A recently released entry reveals that at the very moment of the Managua operation, Bush himself was complaining to other U.S. officials about narco-trafficking in Panama. "VP distressed," wrote North in March 1985, "about drug business." By the following summer, the taint of drugs was seeping through the entire contra supply system as contract pilots often doubled as mules for the cartel. On top of this, the press and Congress were beginning to scent a scandal. On August 8, The New York Times trumpeted that the contras were getting direct military advice from White House officials, and within days the House Intelligence Committee launched an inquiry that could hardly have gone unnoticed in the Vice- President's office. As publicity and the grit of corruption began' to crimp the machinery, North and his collaborators shifted to a new tack, urging General Richard Secord to set up a supply shuttle of his own. By September this allegedly private enterprise was taking shape so rapidly that its principals were already scouting for air bases. It was at this point that the Vice-President's staff stepped smack into the center of the contra supply muddle. The tip-off comes in a North diary entry dated September 10, 1985. On that day, says North, he met with Don Gregg and Colonel James Steele, the U.S. military adviser in El Salvador, to discuss contra-related logistic problems. During the Iran-contra hearings, investigators released only a fragment of this note, a fragment so artfully censored by the White House and North's own lawyers that little could be made of it. Its very brevity gave Gregg an excuse to deny that the meeting had ever taken place. That smoke screen has since evaporated. In 1988 testimony to congressional investigators, Steele confirmed that the meeting had occurred. Though he denied having discussed the contras at that meeting, newly released portions of North's notebooks contradict him. They also contain such a detailed account of the get-together that they cinch the case for Gregg's own complicity. What emerges from these notes is a picture of three knowledgeable officials huddled around a conference table, weighing the merits of Ilopango over Aguacate in Honduras as a principal contra supply base. One participant (North does not say who) complained of "radar coverage" at Aguacate, and noted that contra leader Enrique Bermudez "was prepared to devote a special ops unit [to sit] astride" rebel supply lines threatening an unidentified site in El Salvador. There was also discussion of a trip by Bermudez to Ilopango "to estab[lish] log[istics] support/maint[enance]." The September 10 meeting, with Gregg front and center, apparently hastened the contra resupply overhaul, for soon afterward the pieces fell into place. On Steele's advice, North decided to enlist Rodriguez's services, and on September 30, as Rodriguez admitted at the Iran-contra hearings, he called North to tell him "it was a go." In his testimony, Rodriguez neglected to say that he also placed a call to Gregg that day, but Gregg's own phone logs, obtained in a 1988 lawsuit, confirm that he did. They also reflect a call from North, suggesting that everybody with a stake in Secord's new setup was now gabbing openly about it. Over the next few weeks, Secord and company geared up for their first major supply run. And in late November, North, now heavily preoccupied with Iran arms shipments as well, sidetracked them by accepting their help in completing a botched Israeli weapons delivery to Iran. Bush later denied any knowledge of this, but only a couple of days after Secord helped make good on the delivery, the Vice-President sent a Thanksgiving note to North commending him for his "tireless work with the hostage thing and Central America." Some see this note, which was glossed over at the Iran-contra hearings, as definitive proof of Bush's full complicity in the scandal. But an even stronger clue might be found in the seemingly strange U.S. reaction to the crash of an American aircraft near Gander, Newfoundland, two weeks later. According to the Canadian Air Safety Board, it was ice on the wings that caused the downing of the chartered DC-8 on December 12. Officially, the ill-fated 248 American soldiers on board were simply heading home for the Christmas holidays. Nobody in the Pentagon even hinted that some might have been secret operatives or that the charter company, Arrow Air, might have been doing anything more than routine transport work. Exhaustive research strongly suggests, however, that at least 20 of the crash victims were U.S. commandos returning from a counter-terror mission in the Middle East and that Arrow Air was no run-of-the-mill charter, but an important part of the contra supply network and the arms shuttle to Iran. In little-noticed Iran-contra testimony, one of Secord's associates admitted the company's involvement in both operations. Given the airline's covert accounts, a prompt and thorough inquiry into the Gander crash might have thrust Iran-contra into the headlines a year before it surfaced. Even now the tragedy could come back to haunt Bush. As Vice-President, he headed up Reagan's counter-terror task force and was responsible for monitoring operations of the sort allegedly undertaken by the commandos on the flight. To imagine that he wasn't fully briefed on the circumstances surrounding their death, or the reported sensitivity of the carrier's mission, is to give him no credit at all. Indeed, chances are that the tragedy was whitewashed and hushed-up precisely because so much was at stake. Even before the Gander crash slipped from the headlines, another piece of the contra supply network suddenly came unhinged, and Bush again found himself on the diplomatic hustings, handling repair work. The crisis arose in late 1985 when Jose Azcona Hoyo was elected to replace Suazo as president of Honduras. Lest the new regime renege on the deal the United States had levered out of its predecessor the previous spring, Bush was hustled off to Tegucigalpa the following January for another round of "Let's Make a Deal." In a recently released notebook entry, North keys the trip to a new "third-country solicitation" plan, and according to the stipulation presented at his trial, the State Department wrote Bush's script for him, framing it as a good cop-bad cop scenario in which he was to play the smooth pitchman while his traveling companion, Admiral Poindexter, muscled Azcona privately. The script apparently played out as written. Within weeks Azcona approved a trial supply delivery to the contras, and the administration promptly repaid him with a security-assistance package worth $20 million�another of its quid pro quos. With Bush again becoming personally embroiled in contra support, his staff got more involved as well. In January 1986 Gregg's newly appointed deputy, Colonel Sam Watson, packed himself off to Honduras and El Salvador to survey supply bases and air fields firsthand. Inexplicably, Iran-contra investigators missed the significance of this field trip, and only after a previously undisclosed Watson memo surfaced in a 1988 lawsuit did anyone realize that here was further proof of the Vice-President's own prevarication. Written in February, shortly after Watson's return, the memo summarizes the very logistic headaches supposedly unknown to Bush's staff at the time, and bears some scrawled marginalia from Gregg�"Rodriguez agrees with this"�which belie his claim that he and his old friend never discussed the contras' supply problems before August of that year. Equally damning are two other documents generated by Gregg's staff a few weeks later. Both are "scheduling memos" written in anticipation of a May 1 meeting between Bush and Rodriguez, and both list "resupply of the contras" among the topics to be discussed. When questioned about these now famous documents at the Iran-contra hearings, Rodriguez insisted that El Salvador, not the contras, was the only topic he'd broached with the Vice-President, and in later testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gregg attempted to cast the "resupply" notation as a garbled reference to some sort of operation involving "resupply of the copters" which Rodriguez had been flying against Salvadoran rebels. Giving everyone a very generous benefit of the doubt, he and Rodriguez may have been telling the truth. But there is now plenty else on record to indicate that by early summer 1986, Rodriguez's contra connection�and indeed his increasingly troubled relationship with Secord�were the talk of Bush's office. Watson's own diaries, obtained during the Iran-contra hearings, reflect an overriding preoccupation with such problems. One entry, dated July 29, recounts a White House staff meeting at which Rodriguez was accused of having "shut down pilots resupply." Three days later Watson noted a complaint from North that "F[elix] screwed up s[outhern] front," a reference to the contra operation in Costa Rica. In his recent autobiography, Rodriguez provides a gloss on all this, admitting that in his pique over Secord's inefficiency and alleged money-grubbing, he increasingly asserted control over the "private" supply shuttle. His main worry, apparently, was that Secord would commandeer the air fleet and attempt to sell it to the C.I.A. for personal profit once congressional restrictions on contra aid eased. Always the crusader, Rodriguez wanted to ensure that the contras got their fair share. Had the Iran-contra committees questioned Rodriguez about Watson's notebooks, they might have discovered that Bush's staff knew far more far earlier than anyone was ready to admit. But again they pulled their punches, allowing both Rodriguez and Gregg to go on pretending that it was not until early August�after the congressional aid ban was loosened�that any of Bush's men lea rned of the Rodriguez-Secord partnership. If you are to believe Bush's official chronology, the moment of revelation came on August 8, when Rodriguez sailed into Gregg's office to blow the whistle on Secord. Until then, supposedly, Gregg hadn't realized that Secord and North were running a private supply shuttle for the contras. The notes Gregg took during this session do not read, however, like the jottings of a man caught by surprise. They plod indifferently through Rodriguez's revelations, as if they were no news at all, and contain a stunningly provocative phrase�"a swap of weapons for $ was arranged to get aid for the contras"�that suggests insight into subtleties ranging well beyond Rodriguez's problems with Secord. Rodriguez told Iran-contra investigators that he couldn't remember mentioning a "swap" to Gregg, and when Gregg was asked by a reporter if he might have been referring to the fabled "diversion'' of Iran arms profits to the contras, he countered that he'd known nothing about it. Nobody on the investigating committees bothered to ask him whether the swap reference might relate to something else�like the aid-for-arms deals the administration had struck with Israel, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Nor was he pressed to explain why, after hearing Rodriguez out, he hadn't alerted Bush himself. His flippant explanation�" It was a very murky business''�left his congressional inquisitors nodding dumbly in agreement. Two months later, on October 5, a Sandinista gunner shot one of Secord's planes out of the sky over Nicaragua, thus ending the contra supply operation once and for all. Appropriately, Rodriguez placed the first distress call to Watson, and soon Eugene Hasenfus, the lone surviving crew member, announced from a jail cell in Managua that Rodriguez had honchoed the supply effort with Bush's knowledge. Based on North's notebooks, the administration's first reaction was to look for a scapegoat. On November 25, according to a recently released entry, Poindexter apparently proposed that Bush contact the Israelis and try to persuade them to accept blame for the profits-diversion scheme. There is no evidence that Bush followed through on this idea. But the very fact that Bush was seen as the logical go-between lends weight to Brenneke's claim of longstanding collaboration between the Vice-President's office and Jerusalem. With Bush so personally vulnerable to fallout from Contragate, he and his staff immediately launched a damage-control gambit of their own. In mid-December, Gregg helped prepare the chronology that distanced Bush from every facet of the secret war, and as time passed, this gifted intelligence officer increasingly mortgaged his own credibility to spare his boss. During the 1989 congressional hearings on his ambassadorial appointment to South Korea, Gregg was still dodging so many questions about Iran-contra that even a staunch Republican supporter confessed that some of his testimony strain[s] belief." As for Bush himself, he simply brazened it out, initially rebuffing inconvenient questions, and finally seeking shelter behind the Iran-contra committees' concluding report, which didn't so much clear him of wrongdoing as ignore him. During the North trial last year, as the trade-off deals he'd negotiated with Honduras came to light for the first time, he continued to stonewall, declaring unblushingly, "There was no quid pro quo." In the end Bush emerged from this final tremor with nary a scratch, Gregg got his ambassadorial posting, and Richard Brenneke just barely escaped a jail sentence. For all of Bush's diligence in constructing a cover-up, however, he couldn't have done it without Congress's help. During the Iran-contra hearings, probers acquiesced in unnecessary time constraints and deliberately ignored certain leads out of concern for protecting Israel and other allies. There is also evidence�to be found in North's notebook�that some of them may have been guilty of outright collusion with the White House. The clue appears in a newly declassified entry written on March 4, 1985, just before Bush's first trip to Honduras. On that date, according to North's shorthand, Robert McFarlane briefed four congressmen, including Henry Hyde and Bill McCollum, on the emerging plan to seek "third-country support" for the contras�a plan which, as North described it, called explicitly for "center[ing] the activity in the White House.'' Later, as members of the Iran-contra panels, Hyde and McCollum would become the administration's most vocal cheerleaders, happily joining fellow Republicans in writing a minority report that got Bush off the hook. Not only did the report find the Vice-President ignorant of the supply effort, it flatly dismissed the possibility "that any quid pro quo was sought or received in return for any third-country contribution to the Resistance." In view of Hyde and McCollum's newly revealed inside knowledge, it's extraordinary that Bush still blithely cites these conclusions as proof of his innocence. Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh once speculated that Irangate was really about the skewing of our constitutional checks and balances through imperial sleight of hand. It is one thing, he suggested, for a White House official to claim "executive privilege" when he doesn't want to tell Congress about a secret policy. That puts lawmakers on notice and triggers healthy debate. But if the White House tries to keep Congress out of the decision-making process by deliberately hiding the truth, he added, the scales are thrown dangerously out of kilter. For all of its faults, the Iran-contra investigation left most Americans feeling that the scales had been upset and that Reagan himself deserved much of the blame. But no one seemed to be able to fix Bush's responsibility because the heart of the scandal�the secret horse-trading on the contras' behalf�remained hidden. Now, with this last secret blown, a new George Bush stands exposed. And what's most striking about him is that he's much more than we ever suspected. He emerges not merely as Reagan's equal in subterfuge, but as his master in action, someone who actually helped execute a dirty-tricks scheme to hijack Congress's prerogatives. For make no mistake: When Bush traveled to Central America in 1985 and 1986 to barter secretly for contra support, he was pursuing a tried-and-true covert-action formula borrowed from his C.I.A. days-the mobilizing of cutouts to provide the government deniability. Only this time the object wasn't to keep some hostile foreign power in the dark, but all of us. pps. 46-48; 52; 86; 122; 172. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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