In a Washington Post magazine article, writer Marjorie Williams summed up the Establishment's indictment of Walsh. She wrote: "In the utilitarian political universe of Washington, consistency like Walsh's is distinctly suspect. It began to seem ... rigid of him to care so much. So un-Washington. Hence the gathering critique of his efforts as vindictive, extreme. Ideological. ... The truth is that when Walsh finally goes home, he will leave a perceived loser."
Truncated Inquiry
This hostile environment prevented Walsh from pursuing important lines of inquiry. For instance, the Walsh team had strong suspicions that Vice President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser Donald Gregg had lied when he testified that he was unaware of North's Contra resupply operation.
Ex-CIA officer Gregg insisted on his lack of knowledge although Gregg's close friend (and former CIA colleague) Felix Rodriguez was working with North in Central America and called Gregg after each Contra arms delivery.
There already had been problems with Gregg's story, including the discovery of a vice presidential office memo describing a planned meeting with Rodriguez about "resupply of the contras." Gregg bizarrely explained the memo away as a typo that should have read, "resupply of the copters."
In Firewall, Walsh disclosed that Gregg's stonewall suffered another crack when Col. James Steele, U.S. military adviser to El Salvador, flunked a polygraph test when he denied his own role in shipping weapons to the Contras. Confronted with those results and incriminating notes from North's diaries, "Steele admitted not only his participation in the arms deliveries but also his early discussion of these activities with Donald Gregg," Walsh wrote.
Gregg also failed his own polygraph when he denied knowledge of the Contra supply operation. (Gregg flunked, too, when he denied participating in the October Surprise operation in 1980, the alleged secret CIA-GOP operation to undermine President Carter's Iran hostage negotiations and secure Reagan's election.)
But facing both political pressures and personal attacks from the Washington press corps, Walsh and his staff set aside the Gregg mystery in order to complete work on several perjury cases against active-duty CIA personnel.
In 1991, Walsh also discovered evidence that former Defense Secretary Weinberger had concealed notes from the investigators, leading to Weinberger's indictment. In December 1992, after Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton, the White House belatedly disclosed to Walsh that Bush, too, had been withholding his diary entries from investigators.
Bush further sabotaged Walsh's inquiry by issuing six Iran-Contra pardons on Christmas Eve 1992, including one for Weinberger that killed the planned trial in early 1993 and prevented Walsh from exposing the extent of the Reagan administration's cover-up.
Walsh hoped to question Bush about his Iran-Contra role -- and had agreed to postpone any deposition of the then-president until after the election -- but Bush stiffed the special prosecutor, refusing to sit down for any additional questioning about the scandal.
Walsh's investigators did question White House associate counsel Lee Liberman who justified the delay in producing Bush's diaries, in part, for political reasons. "It would have been impossible to deal with in the election campaign because of all the political ramifications, especially since the President's polling numbers were low, " Liberman said. [See Peter Kornbluh's "The Iran-Contra Scandal -- 25 Years Later" at Salon.com.]
Facing Bush's resistance to a deposition, Walsh considered convening a new grand jury in 1993 to compel Bush's testimony. However, the cumulative impact of the media/political attacks not just on Walsh but on younger members of his staff led those prosecutors who feared for their career prospects to push back against Walsh. He was in his 80s and wasn't as worried about his future.
Walsh finally relented and agreed to shut down his investigation, meaning that one of the key lessons derived from Iran-Contra was that a determined cover-up of a national security scandal, backed by a powerful media apparatus and aggressive political allies, can work.
In the early 1990s when I interviewed the House Foreign Affairs Committee's longtime Democratic chief counsel Spencer Oliver, he put Iran-Contra in exactly that historical place, as the polar opposite of Watergate when Richard Nixon's abuses of power had real consequences, including Nixon's forced resignation and prison terms for many of his subordinates.
"What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate," Oliver said, "was not 'don't do it,' but 'cover it up more effectively.' They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
