BOOK: The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era
Page 8-9
The Reagan strategy had its roots in the classic intelligence practice of using proprietaries and “cut-outs” to effect policy while preserving deniability. Always useful against unwanted public scrutiny, these techniques were perfectly suited to the 1980s’ political environment of presidential activism on behalf of the “Reagan Doctrine,” the commitment to roll back pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World. Congressional doubts and public hostility made overt pursuit of that doctrine difficult or impossible. Even the CIA was a problematic tool of policy owing to legal requirements that it report covert operations to Congress.²
“Since the Vietnam War,” one Reagan NSC member told a reporter, reflecting the widespread distrust of Congress by administration policymakers, “we have had this growing involvement by the legislative branch in the details of foreign policy that—you can make a constitutional argument—are properly left to the president. When you do that, you drive him in the direction of using other techniques to achieve objectives.”³
Ironically, however, deep-cover contracting also appealed to administration activists frustrated by bureaucratic gridlock between warring departments and the tendency of rival policymakers to leak details of unpopular, unwise or illegal policies.
Such rivalries “made it impossible to function at all” except in secret, argued former Pentagon special operations planner Noel Koch. The lesson that individuals like Oliver North drew, according to Koch, was “If you’re going to do anything bold or innovative, you’re going to have to do things through irregular channels.”⁴
Or as another “covert missions planner” said of North’s decision to rely on former Pentagon special operations veterans for his secret missions, “the CIA and NSC have no capability to do things in a secure fashion. You want to do something quietly, then you can’t tell the bureaucracies. Here’s a guy who can go to key people in foreign countries and get things done. As a private citizen, he has no obligation to tell anyone.”⁵
And quite apart from the matter of capabilities, many insiders doubted even the resolve of the CIA to implement tough policies abroad. Angelo Codevilla, a hawkish former staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed the view of many “roll-back” conservatives in Washington:
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey…personally seems to favor the victory of liberation movements. His Agency has the charter for dispensing the aid. But from among the CIA’s senior personnel have come strong echoes of the State Department’s view of the role of liberation movements in U.S.-Soviet relations. In their dealings with Congress and the NSC, CIA officials have often outdone even their colleagues in the State Department in reticence to provide aid to such movements quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient for victory, declaring that the Agency would rather be rid of the burden of supplying such aid at all.⁶
The White House decisionmaking center for covert operations and contracting-out strategy lay within a tiny team of select State, Defense, CIA and NSC officials known as the “208 Committee” or “Policy Development Group.” Oliver North, the workaholic organizer of secret contra supply missions and Iran arms deals, was one of its most active members.⁷ Meeting in the Crisis Management Center in Room 208 of the Old Executive Office Building, surrounded by secure computer data links to the National Security Agency, this group could plan secret operations free from the obligation to report to the intelligence committees of Congress. Its mission was to implement the Reagan doctrine of fighting Soviet influence throughout the Third World, wherever possible by supporting indigenous forces.⁸ Its thorough overview of missions and logistics included such details as “which weapons will be shipped, which secret warehouse goods used, which middlemen will deliver them to clandestine airstrips.”⁹ For the most sensitive policies, as with the Iran arms shipments, only a few members of even this group took part in policy discussions.
For North and others in this select circle, the guiding principle was power and the task was to expand it without answering to other authorities. As one White House memo from 1982 outlined the mission of “Project Democracy”—the rubric under which the NSC began to undertake foreign policy initiatives of its own—“we need to examine how law and executive order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale.”¹⁰ Contracting-out provided means to subvert the law and stretch the scope of executive orders.
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