He repeatedly used phrases such as “I cannot specifically recall.” At one point, Powell said, “To my recollection, I don’t have a recollection.”
Making It Happen
In the next phase of the evolving Iran operation – the direct delivery of U.S. missiles to the Islamic fundamentalist government – Powell would play an even bigger role.
Indeed, without the prodigious work of Colin Powell, the unfolding disaster might never have happened, or might have stopped much sooner.
In early 1986, Powell exploited his bureaucratic skills to begin short-circuiting the Pentagon’s covert procurement system that had been put in place after the Yellow Fruit scandal.
Defense procurement officials said that without Powell’s manipulation of the process, the Pentagon’s internal auditing systems would have alerted the military brass that thousands of TOW anti-tank missiles and other sophisticated weaponry were headed to Iran, designated a terrorist state.
But Powell managed to slip the missiles and the other hardware out of U.S. Army inventories without key Pentagon officials knowing where the equipment was going.
The story of Powell’s maneuvers can be found in a close reading of thousands of pages from Iran-Contra depositions of Pentagon officials, who pointed to Weinberger’s assistant as the key Iran-Contra action officer within the Defense Department.
For his part, Powell insisted that he and Weinberger minimized the Pentagon’s role. Powell said they delivered the missiles to the CIA under the Economy Act, which regulates transfers between government agencies.
“We treated the TOW transfer like garbage to be gotten out of the house quickly,” Powell wrote in My American Journey.
But the Economy Act argument was disingenuous, because the Pentagon always uses the Economy Act when it moves weapons to the CIA.
Powell’s account also obscured his unusual actions in arranging the shipments without giving senior officers the information that Pentagon procedures required, even for sensitive covert activities.
Reagan’s Sign-off
Weinberger officially handed Powell the job of shipping the missiles to Iran on January 17, 1986. That was the day Reagan signed an intelligence finding, a formal authorization that is required by law for the conduct of covert operations, in this case, the transfer of arms from U.S. stockpiles and their shipment to Iran.
In testimony, Powell dated his first knowledge of the missile transfers to this moment.
A day after Reagan’s finding, Powell instructed Gen. Max Thurman, then acting Army chief of staff, to prepare for a transfer of 4,000 TOW anti-tank missiles, but Powell made no mention that they were headed to Iran.
“I gave him absolutely no indication of the destination of the missiles,” Powell testified.
