TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT2410> <title> Oct. 28, 1991: The Unsinkable Ollie North </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Oct. 28, 1991 Ollie North:"Reagan Knew Everything" </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> EXCERPT, Page 67 COVER STORIES The Unsinkable Ollie North </hdr><body> Finally unshackled by the special prosecutor, unburdened of bitterness, the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal returns as By Barrett Seaman The tradecraft was vintage North. Once a week, usually a Monday, from June 1990 to last August, writer William Novak would fly from Boston to Washington's Dulles International, where he would take a ground-floor room at the airport Marriott Hotel. North, traveling as "Mr. Smith," would arrive separately by car, park out back and slip into Novak's room through the back door. Using a Toshiba laptop computer, the pair would then work through the day and into the evening on a document that would remain secret until barely a week before it was published. When room service delivered their evening meals, North, ever clandestine, would hide in the bathroom. The idea of keeping the Smith Project top secret was shared by the New York publisher HarperCollins, largely for the promotional value; by North's lawyers, who were concerned that research for the book might be subpoenaed by prosecutors; and by North himself, who remains incorrigibly, unabashedly enamored of cloak-and-dagger operations. The notorious Colonel North, known by a variety of code names and aliases since his days in Vietnam (Blue, Steelhammer and Mr. Goode, among them), would later laugh that his publisher "did a helluva lot better at keeping secrets than the U.S. government." The time for keeping secrets will never completely pass for Oliver North. He was careful to have his book vetted by the appropriate federal agencies and did not object to the few exclusions sought by the Pentagon, CIA and NSC, most of them potential clues to the identity of intelligence sources and methods. But the time for blind loyalty is past. In Under Fire, North certainly fires back at those who turned on him during the Iran-contra battle. His disdain for Congress, the press and the special prosecutor's office is almost palpable. He ends his thank-yous to those who helped him produce the book with this curt reference to the special prosecutor: "Larry Walsh was no help at all." George Shultz is blistered for what North sees as a calculated distancing of himself from policies only after their failure was assured. His disillusionment with many he had thought to be comrades in the global war against terrorism and communism is detailed. He pieces together the disparate shards of evidence that accumulated over the five years since the scandal broke into a compelling mosaic that declares, in effect, "Yes, you dummy, of course Ronald Reagan knew what was going on! How could he not?" There are those who will say North has been cunningly selective in his reconstruction. Bill Casey, dead and gone, will never be able to refute North's detailed account of his management of Iran-contra's complexities, while sitting officials like George Bush and Robert Gates get what amounts to a free pass. North would challenge that. While phone records revealed hundreds of contacts between his office and the CIA director's, he would argue, Bush and Gates got off clean because he, North, had no direct knowledge of any incriminating involvement they might have had. Devoid of any other evidence, that judgment will probably prevail. Some selectivity is inevitable. But Under Fire is not a mere self-serving, finger-pointing exercise, as other personal accounts of the scandal have been. Iran-contra trivia buffs may have a tough time finding serious flaws in this text. North is even more open about his own role than he was in the famous hearings or in his trial, but without the chin-jutting defiance he displayed before the Joint Committee in 1987. He admits to misleading members of Congress back in 1986, when Lee Hamilton of Indiana and others came to the White House to find out whether North was violating the Boland amendments by directly supporting the Nicaraguan resistance. He admits he should have realized, as he now reluctantly does, that the arms-for-hostages enterprise was a foolhardy and counterproductive policy. He describes in poignant detail the dark depression he endured in 1974-75 when his wife left him, leading him to check into the psychiatric unit of the Bethesda Naval hospital. Co-conspirator Novak, who previously wrote autobiographies with Lee Iacocca, Tip O'Neill, Nancy Reagan and Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, admits that he initially resisted working with North. "When this book was first proposed to me, I turned it down," says the writer. "I expected he was not only rigid but perhaps even an extremist to boot." But Novak was won over almost immediately. "Instead of the automaton I had anticipated," he says, North turned out to be "warm, extremely bright, well read, spontaneous and often very funny." North has been largely out of sight, out of mind since the heyday of the Iran-contra hearings. And there will be legions who will decry his return to the national stage. Those who blame him for the foreign policy disaster that nearly brought down the Reagan presidency, and those who couldn't abide either Reagan or the contras, will probably not change their mind. But the Ollie North who returns is an intriguing blend of the old and the new. Unchanged is the corny, small-town, voice-cracking patriotism; the deep and apparently genuine religiosity that regularly peeks out from under the sleeve; the inescapable, occasionally overbearing, self-confidence. But the new Ollie is also softer at the edges, older, a bit wiser and less naive, and as of a month ago, for the first time in five years, free. When he learned in mid-September that Lawrence Walsh had reluctantly but finally dropped his case, North told Jim Dobson, an old friend and counselor, "It was as if I'd been swimming across a fast-moving stream with a big millstone tied to me--and suddenly someone came along and cut the rope. I can breathe again." Earlier this month, just after he turned 48 on Oct. 7, North went to regain his citizenship by registering to vote in Virginia. The form demanded to know if he had ever been convicted of a felony. North had to call his lawyer and now close friend, Brendan Sullivan, to ask how he should reply. Sullivan advised his client to mark no. The Marine Corps, from which North felt compelled to retire when he was indicted, has now restored his full pension. After months of staring painfully at court documents that read The United States v. Oliver L. North, a contradiction of everything he had ever thought about himself, the ordeal was over, just as if it had never happened. But it did happen, and it both tempered and scarred North. During the ordeal, he built around himself a defense mechanism--literally and figuratively. Sullivan and his team of lawyers at Williams & Connolly protected North from the outside world and instilled in him an intellectual discipline that comfortably matched his Marine Corps habits. His old Naval Academy classmates started a defense fund, a trust that has managed through contributions from around the country to pay for most of the millions in legal and security bills that have piled up since 1986. His circle tightened to his family, his lawyers and those who supported him and his causes--among them the many denizens of the grass-roots right who gave money to the contras in the swashbuckling days of Richard Secord and Spitz Channell. Now there was a new element to their affinity for North. "Ollie is popular among people who see him as a guy who got slammed by Big Government," says Mark Merritt, an official at the Freedom Alliance, North's not-for-profit foundation that espouses "traditional American values" and performs such good deeds as shipping $2.7 million worth of gift packages to Desert Storm troops last year. The Freedom Alliance also spreads the political gospel through a monthly newsletter and daily radio broadcasts by Ollie that are syndicated to some 300 stations around the country. In addition, North's North American Partnership does business on his and wife Betsy's behalf, taking in the proceeds of his book, contributions of friends and sympathizers, speaking fees (up to $25,000), and earnings from a weekly column that reaches more than a dozen newspapers ranging from the Dallas Times-Herald to the Crockett Times of Alamo, Tenn. Ollie's latest commercial enterprise, unlike the famous one run by Secord and Hakim, is straightforward and aboveboard. Guardian Technologies International, of which North is chairman, manufactures bulletproof vests made from Spectra, a lightweight fiber that North touts as a generation beyond Kevlar. Guardian did about $1 million in sales last year, largely to law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. and overseas. North is aiming to double that this year, using innovative marketing tools like Armor Overnight, which guarantees delivery by noon the next day for those who fax their vest size and Visa account number. The company even offers protective vests for police dogs. The new North, much like the old, is a natural salesman. He buttonholes police chiefs along the after-dinner speaking circuit, hawking his product as energetically as he does his political views. If Ollie had gone into the insurance business, he surely would have been named to the Million Dollar Club or the President's Circle his first month out. But instead of going into insurance, North became a Marine--and by his own appraisal as well as others', "a damned good one." From there he went to the National Security Council, where he performed audacious deeds of derring can-do. Had Ollie North not existed, Tom Clancy would surely have invented him. With one big difference: a Clancy character would probably not have got into the messes North did in the Reagan White House. Nor would he have faced the dismal choices between "bad and worse" that North confronted, instead of the straightforward "right and wrong" choices he expected out of life. In retrospect, he tells friends, he realizes that the simple life of a career Marine left him ill-prepared to "wake up and find myself in Machiavelli's palace." What North is less inclined to admit is that his personal ambitions may have blinded him to the pitfalls. His own account supports the somewhat mushy notion that he attached himself to a series of father figures--Reagan, McFarlane, Casey, Poindexter--and sought to please them with little regard for their flaws or hidden motives. Only through the shock of what amounts to betrayal and the forced re-examination of events has North come to see his mistakes. "It was cathartic in many respects," he told one confidant. The judicial process, the hearings, the hounding by the press, his trial and conviction--a siege relieved only five weeks ago by his "exoneration"--placed heavy burdens on North and his family. Still, he found himself better prepared than many of his fellow defendants. "I had enormous resources that these other people did not have," North has said. "Spiritual resources, financial resources, legal resources, physical resources--I was in damned good shape when I started this process." Despite the signals, North believed well into that process that truth was the sole object of the Iran-contra probe. "I had it all wrong," he confided to a friend recently. "I thought the purpose was to get to the bottom of all this." Neither the hearings nor the subsequent trials have got to the bottom of Iran-contra. And North's "smoking gun in the closet" tape, while intriguing, does not resolve the question of Reagan's guilt or innocence. Even Walsh's office, to which North and his team are naturally loath to give any credit, tried to follow up on the evidence, comparing voice tapes of a handful of logical candidates with those of the two men overheard on the Citibank phone system. But so far, no match has been made. And even if it were, the evidence would probably not stand up in a court of law. North avoids saying so directly in the book, but his remarks to others suggest that he probably would never have pursued this trail leading to Reagan were it not for the things Reagan has said--and not said--about him since he was fired. North dismisses as bogus Reagan's claim that his "national hero" label was meant to refer only to the retired Marine's Vietnam record. And the former President's failure to stand up for John Poindexter at the trial of North's former boss last year was in North's eyes a travesty. He thinks Reagan, by then out of office, should have taken the rap for Poindexter and stood up for what he believed in. "Instead," North complained recently, "he leaves as a legacy this videotape of a doddering old man. It's unbelievable!" Reagan, traveling abroad last week, was "unavailable for comment" on North's allegations, according to a spokesperson for the former President. Now the rehabilitated North is back taking his own stand. In southwestern Virginia last week, where he stumped for G.O.P. candidates for state offices, he charmed crowds with a mixture of self-deprecating humor, mother-and-flag sentimentality and a keen ear for local issues. He is as natural a politician as he is a salesman, instinctively playing to his audiences and parrying the protests of the liberal activists who often show up. While the stock portion of his speeches touts predictable right-wing values, some of the specifics do not fit the cookie-cutter conservative label. North would set limits on use of the death penalty, promote public schools and enact a 24-hour delay on gun purchases. But when asked whether he will run for office--Republicans in both Virginia and North Carolina are wooing him--the Colonel has a standard answer: "I'm running for husband and father first," he'll say. "There are five votes in the family, and I haven't got them wrapped up yet." Yet when pressed by friends or party solicitors, North will more seriously say that first he wants to get his various enterprises up and running and his life back in order. When pressed further, as he sometimes is, he will point out that running for national office would just put him right back into "that sad swamp along the Potomac." "It'll take me a while to recover from that," he confessed to someone recently. But probably not that long. </body></article> </text>