The Vice President's Men
By Seymour M. Hersh, London Review of Books
18 January 19
When George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January
1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time
leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the
world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about
Reagans two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his
knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with
which he appeared to handle the presidency. Bush was invariably written off
as a cautious politician who followed the lead of his glamorous boss
perhaps because he assumed that his reward would be a clear shot at the
presidency in 1988. He would be the first former CIA director to make it to
the top.
There was another view of Bush: the one held by the military men and
civilian professionals who worked for him on national security issues.
Unlike the president, he knew what was going on and how to get things done.
For them, Reagan was a dimwit who didnt get it, or even try to get it. A
former senior official of the Office of Management and Budget described the
president to me as lazy, just lazy. Reagan, the official explained,
insisted on being presented with a three-line summary of significant budget
decisions, and the OMB concluded that the easiest way to cope was to present
him with three figures one very high, one very low and one in the middle,
which Reagan invariably signed off on. I was later told that the process was
known inside the White House as the Goldilocks option. He was also bored
by complicated intelligence estimates. Forever courteous and gracious, he
would doodle during national security briefings or simply not listen. It
would have been natural to turn instead to the director of the CIA, but this
was William Casey, a former businessman and Nixon aide who had been
controversially appointed by Reagan as the reward for managing his 1980
election campaign. As the intelligence professionals working with the
executive saw it, Casey was reckless, uninformed, and said far too much to
the press.
Bush was different: he got it. At his direction, a team of military
operatives was set up that bypassed the national security establishment
including the CIA and wasnt answerable to congressional oversight. It was
led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau, a brilliant navy officer who would be
known to those on the inside as M. He had most recently been involved, as
deputy chief of naval operations, in developing the USs new maritime
strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he
was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret
team operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bushs chief of
staff which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug
trafficking, terrorism and, most important, perceived Soviet expansionism in
more than twenty countries, including Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil,
Argentina, Libya, Senegal, Chad, Algeria, Tunisia, the Congo, Kenya, Egypt,
Yemen, Syria, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania,
Georgia and Vietnam.
Moreaus small, off-the-record team, primarily made up of navy officers, was
tasked with foreign operations deemed necessary by the vice president. The
groups link to Bush was indirect. There were two go-betweens, known for
their closeness to the vice president and their ability to keep secrets:
Murphy, a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the
CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bushs national security adviser
and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreaus team mostly worked
out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor
of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or two, when
necessary, in a corner of Murphys office, which was near Bushs, in the Old
Executive Office Building next to the White House.
The Reagan administration had been rattled by a wave of Soviet expansionism
and international aggression that had begun before the president took
office. In 1979, even before their incursion into Afghanistan, the Soviets
had taken over the old airbase at Cam Ranh Bay in the former South Vietnam,
which had been extensively rebuilt and updated by the US during its losing
war. It was a base heavy with symbolism for the American and British navies
in December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese dive bombers
operating from Cam Ranh sank two of Britains premier battleships and the
Soviet decision to expand there was seen by some senior admirals as an
alarming affront. And a revolutionary increase in Americas capacity to
intercept and decode Soviet signal traffic in the year before Reagan came to
power led to the discovery by analysts at the National Security Agency of a
ring of Soviet sleeper agents inside the United States, many of them working
in federal jobs with the Carter White House feared access to national
security data.
A former military officer who worked closely with Moreau recalled the early
tensions that prompted Bush to increase the targeting of Soviet operations.
Moreaus actions were aimed at limiting Soviet influence without provoking a
confrontation. We saw the Russians sorting out their internal politics and
expanding economically, the officer recalled. Its military had become much
more competent, with advances in technology, nuclear engineering and in
space. They were feeling good about their planned economy and believed that
their state control of education from cradle to grave was working, and it
seemed as if the Russians were expanding everywhere. We were in descent; our
post-Vietnam army was in shambles; morale was at rock bottom, and the
American people had an anti-militarist attitude. There was a sense of
general weakness, and the Russians were taking advantage of it. They had
developed the MIRV the multiple independently targetable re-entry
vehicle, a missile carrying several nuclear warheads and were putting
ICBMs on wheels and hardening nuclear silos. This was at the time when it
became clear that the president was drifting, and was not an effective
leader.
By 1983, it was plain to those who worked on national security for the White
House that Reagan wouldn't or couldn't engage with intelligence or
counterintelligence matters. Bush had emerged, by default and very much in
private, as the most important decision-maker in America's intelligence
world. He controlled the strings, the officer said. We ran small, limited
operations that were discreet, with a military chain of command. These were
not long-term programmes. We thought we could redouble our efforts against
the Soviets and nobody would interfere. And do it in such a way that no one
could see what we were doing or realise that there was a masterplan. For
example, the published stories about our Star Wars programme were replete
with misinformation and forced the Russians to expose their sleeper agents
inside the American government by ordering them to make a desperate attempt
to find out what the US was doing. But we could not risk exposure of the
administrations role and take the chance of another McCarthy period. So
there were no prosecutions. We dried up and eliminated their access and left
the spies withering on the vine. Once identified, the Soviet sleepers who
worked inside the federal bureaucracy were gradually dismissed or moved to
less important jobs, in the hope that the low-key counterintelligence
operation would mask the improvements in the USs capacity to read sensitive
Soviet communications. Nobody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff ever believed we
were going to build Star Wars, the officer said, but if we could convince
the Russians that we could survive a first strike, we win the game. The aim
of the game was to find a way to change the nuclear status quo of Mutual
Assured Destruction, or seem to do so. We wanted the Russians to believe
that we had removed the M from MAD.
In the beginning, the officer told me, there was a great fear that the
Russians were ten feet tall. What we found was total incompetence. Moreaus
team were amazed to find how easy it was to reverse Soviet influence often
with little more than generous offers of American dollars and American arms.
Across the Third World in countries such as Chad, Senegal and Côte
dIvoire the offer of advanced American electronics and communications
equipment was also invaluable. The Russians simply were not liked abroad,
the officer said. They were boors with shoddy clothing and shoes made out
of paper. Their weapons were inoperative. It was a Potemkin village. But
every time we found total incompetence on the part of a Soviet mission, the
American intelligence community would assume that it was Soviet deception.
The only problem was that it was not deception. We came to realise that the
American intelligence community needed the threat from Russia to get their
money. Those of us who were running the operations were also amazed that the
American press was so incompetent. You could do this kind of stuff all over
the world and nobody would ask any questions.
Congress, and the constitution, were at first no more of an obstacle to Bush
and Moreaus covert operations than the press. The one member of Congress
who knew what was going on was Dick Cheney, a close friend and confidant of
Bushs from their days together in the Ford administration. In 1976, in the
aftermath of the Church Committees inquiry into CIA abuses, standing
intelligence committees had been set up in both the Senate and the House,
charged with holding the CIA and other intelligence agencies to account. But
it was understood by all those involved in the vice presidents secret team
that these committees could be bypassed, even though the laws governing
covert intelligence activities had been stiffened: there was now a legal
requirement that all covert CIA and military intelligence operations had to
be made known to the committees through a formal, written document known as
a finding. But there was a big loophole in the legislation, in the view of
the vice presidents men. There was no requirement for a finding for merely
asking questions, the officer said, and so wed make routine requests for
intelligence assessments from the CIA through the Joint Chiefs and the
National Security Council. Our basic philosophy was that we were running
military not intelligence operations and therefore did not have to
brief Congress. So we could legally operate without a finding. He was
describing an ingenious procedure for getting around the law: one that would
be put into use again after 9/11, when Cheney, by then vice president,
triggered the unending war on terror. The issue for Moreau was how do we
take advantage of what the CIA has to offer its people, with their
language skills and its networks and assets overseas, the officer said.
The disadvantage was if we used the CIA in an intelligence context, we had
to get a finding. We decided to get around the law by using agency people in
what we claimed was a liaison capacity. The next step was to attach the
CIA operators to military units as liaison who were working for Moreau.
Casey knew his CIA was being cut out and so he became more active where he
could in Latin America. As a precaution, the team prepared written
findings when CIA men or information were being made use of but they were
put in a safe, to be produced only if anyone in Congress found out what
was going on.
Moreau was contemptuous of Casey and thought the CIA was a crazy
organisation that had no concern about the consequences of its covert
actions, according to the officer. He remembered Moreau telling his
subordinates on the secret staff: Im accountable to the vice president and
you motherfuckers are accountable to me. The agency is not accountable to
anybody not the president, not Congress, not the American people. They
will do whatever they want to support their mission, which is defined by
them. Cutting out the CIA leadership though using their resources where
needed, partly through the good offices of Dan Murphy, who had many
connections inside the agency was key to Moreaus operations. From the
beginning our philosophy was no publicity, the officer said. Enlisting the
agency formally would involve findings, and relying on the CIAs
knuckle-draggers paramilitary units who were seen as too dumb and too
incompetent. But by using only the military we inadvertently laid the
groundwork for what we have now a Joint Special Operations Command
essentially out of civilian control.
One of Moreaus confidants was Alfred Gray Jr, a marine who rose from
enlisted private to general. He was someone who could be trusted to do the
dirty jobs that were seen as inevitable in combating the spread of communism
in the Third World. By the early 1980s, Gray was a two-star major general
commanding a division of the marines; he would be made commandant of the
Marine Corps in 1987. If there were people to hurt, he would get it done and
leave no footprints. Gray was profane and tough as nails, the officer
said. He tells us: I can do that. Weve got guys who can do stuff. And
the marines are organised, unlike the navy. Whenever there are two marines
together, one is senior to the other. As the teams activity stepped up,
the officer told me, they began compiling hit lists. The CIA would
provide us with lists of bad guys from the files of the Drug Enforcement
Agency, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, much of it
focused on the drug war and anti-communist operations. A lot of it was in
Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and of course Nicaragua. We were doing the
same thing then that the administration is doing now only now its
institutionalised with JSOC. Back then we used the marines and Delta Force,
and there was no reason, as today, to say anything to the Joint Chiefs.
Moreaus strategy was to act in advance to pre-empt terrorism. Why wait for
it to take place?
Moreaus activities have remained secret, and, as I learned while reporting
on this aspect of history, those who knew of his activities at the time
remain sceptical that they can be written about today. Im aware of what
youre referring to, one senior defence official told me. And Art Moreau
was just like M. But you are working in an area that remains highly
classified, and even today it may be too sensitive to reveal the rudiments
of our intelligence networks. I doubt if any records still exist.
Over the course of 1983, Moreaus team was given a target that would prove
much tougher than the Soviets terrorism in the Middle East. Sixty-three
American diplomats, intelligence experts and military personnel, along with
civilian employees, were killed when the US embassy in Beirut was bombed in
April 1983, and six months later 241 military personnel, most of them
marines, were killed in an attack on a barracks at Beirut airport. The US
embassy in Kuwait was bombed in December that year, and there was a wave of
kidnappings of Westerners among them William Buckley, the CIA station
chief in Beirut, who would die in captivity.
A particular target was Muammar Gaddafi. By 1981 Gaddafi was beginning to
get more and more bizarre, the officer said. He was making a lot of moves
into our hemisphere: selling air-to-surface missiles to Argentina, selling
Hind attack helicopters to Nicaragua, supplying aid to Peru, supporting the
government in Venezuela, and even dealing with the Popular Front in
Palestine. He also closed the Gulf of Sidra to our 6th Fleet. We had to take
care of Libya. Gaddafi was a primary military and oil threat, and he became
a strategic target.
An assassination was planned, using Caseys CIA assets in Libya, the officer
said, and because of the CIAs involvement the administration was required
to inform the congressional leadership about aspects of the plan via a
highly classified finding. This was promptly leaked by someone in Congress,
so Moreaus team thought, and the operation called off allegedly. Moreaus
people continued to support the Libyan opposition. In May 1984, the National
Front for the Salvation of Libya, an opposition group that would later be
clandestinely supported by the CIA, failed in an attempt on Gaddafis life.
Eight rebels were killed along with eighty government soldiers, according to
published reports. Gaddafi responded by executing three members of the
Muslim Brotherhood and arresting and torturing thousands of others. One of
the Americans involved in the plot was Major-General Richard Secord, who had
resigned from the air force in 1983 after being accused of improper dealings
with a former CIA officer. Secord, who had a long career in special
operations, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony count for lying to Congress
about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, but never came close to spending a
day in jail. His sentence of two years on probation was reversed the
following year.
Moreaus operations were described, indirectly, in The Reagan Imprint (2006)
by John Arquilla, who teaches in the special operations programme at the
United States Naval Postgraduate School. Arquilla wrote about a secret 1984
White House memorandum NSDD 138 that authorised sabotage, killing
pre-emptive and retaliatory raids, deception and a significantly expanded
[intelligence] collection programme, aimed at suspected radicals and people
regarded as their sympathisers. Arquilla reported that the memorandum
(which wasnt declassified until 2009) triggered intense controversy inside
the government, and the directive was never implemented in full. He added
that Bush was initially cool to the idea as well, though he eventually
warmed to it.
It seems likely, from the suggestive reference to Bush, that Arquilla knew
more than he could write, or wanted to write. The officer remembered the
bitter internal dispute over the memorandum, which was promulgated well
after Moreaus team began its activities. The irony was, of course, the
officer said, that as we racked up some amazing successes, the
administration took credit and defence and the agency each thought the other
was responsible.
There were a few hints of Moreaus real authority in the early Reagan years.
A 2010 US army history of the 1983 decision to invade the Caribbean island
of Grenada includes a paper by Edgar Raines of the US Army Centre of
Military History. It recounts a series of secret planning meetings in which
Moreau, while junior to others present, was in many ways the most
influential person in the room
Moreaus ideas thus had a way of reaching
the very highest echelon of government. It made him a force with which to
reckon. Raines notes that Moreau had managed to direct the most sensitive
operational decision-making to the Special Situation Group, a committee of
the most senior policymakers chaired by Bush. None of this was made public
at the time.
A memorandum declassified in 2008, written in April 1984 by Richard Kerr,
then deputy director of the CIA, noted that the agencys products its
intelligence reports and estimates were being cut off by Moreau and his
team, and not reaching the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I have
the feeling, Kerr wrote plaintively, that if we are going to get something
past Admiral Moreau we will need to send it via the briefer with a note . .
. asking that it be called to the attention of the chairman. Moreau himself
received the full range of CIA products. Admiral Moreaus interests, Kerr
added, are all subjects, worldwide.
Another hint came in Colin Powells 1995 autobiography he was military
aide to the secretary of defence, Caspar Weinberger, at the time of the
Grenada invasion. Powell wrote that Moreau
came to me one morning with an odd revelation. The secretarys office was
not getting some of the most curious traffic that the NSA plucked out of the
air. On his own hook, Art had decided to share this withheld material with
me. What I read enraged me
The content of the messages was startling
enough, but what troubled me just as much was why the secretarys office
should be cut out of the loop.
Powell, who shared his bosss scepticism about the value of a war on terror,
showed the intercepts to Weinberger. Weinberger equally furious asked
where they had come from. I explained, Powell wrote, that they were
bootlegged to us by Admiral Moreau, who got them from the NSA. And dont I
control the National Security Agency? Weinberger asked. There was no
suggestion in Powells book that either he or Weinberger challenged Moreaus
access to intercepts deemed too sensitive for the secretary of defence.
Bush was petrified that the president would say the wrong thing to
outsiders about what was going on, and he was hanging around the Oval
Office, the officer said. You never knew whether the president might start
talking about an operation in China or into Vietnam. Reagan was kept out of
trouble at important national security meetings by being given a script. My
colleagues and I would write a talking paper for the president before
meetings that resembled movie scripts, because the Old Man knew scripts as a
reference. We were constantly updating the script, because if we made a dumb
mistake, he would read it. Wed talk among ourselves about where to put the
emphasis for certain words and phrases. In Deadly Gambits, his 1984 study
of arms control, Strobe Talbott showed what happened when Reagan didnt have
a script. During a conversation about arms control with a group of
congressmen, the president suddenly proclaimed: Land-based missiles have
nuclear warheads, while bombers and submarines dont. Even as he said
these words, Talbott wrote, his voice dropped and wavered, as though he
had forgotten his lines and knew there was something not quite right about
his attempt to improvise.
Casey was another source of tension, the officer said. He was going around
giving the impression that he was a super spook, but nobody on the inside
cared because he had no juice. We knew he was over the hill and living on
his past glory with the OSS the Office of Strategic Services, the CIAs
wartime predecessor. He may have run Reagans election campaign, he may have
been controlling the US operation in Afghanistan, but the military men
working with Moreau saw him as bizarre, unpredictable, out of control and
dishonest. Murphy made sure to be kept up to date on what Casey was up to.
The CIAs director got his chance of glory in Nicaragua, whose Sandinista
government was inordinately feared by Reagan and Casey as a dire threat to
the United States. Casey was able to get his way because of a rare error of
judgment by Moreau, who had brought Marine Lieutenant Oliver North onto the
secret team. The Iran-Contra story, as seen from inside the Moreau
operation, has little in common with the public record. Bush, known to his
friends and aides as Poppy, was also worried about Nicaragua and Daniel
Ortega, the Sandinista leader, and was instrumental in the decision to give
clandestine American support to the Nicaraguan opposition force known as the
Contras. Moreaus team inevitably became involved: a high-risk proposition
for the group because Congress had passed an amendment barring the use of
American funds for support of the Nicaraguan opposition. There was no
question about Bushs part in what would become the Iran-Contra scandal.
Dan Murphy and Poppy would sit down and work it out about the Contras, the
officer said. They saw Ortega as turning Nicaragua into a Russian puppet
state. We cant have that. This is our turf. We have to protect Guatemala
and Honduras and Panama. So I and my colleagues on Moreaus team wrote
findings about covert actions going after Daniel Ortega.
But it was important to keep Casey out of the way, the officer said, in
order to protect our real operations. Unfortunately, the person charged
with protecting the vice presidents inside team was Ollie North, then on
the staff of the National Security Council. We were in different parts of
the White House where conspiracy was a constant and Norths job was to
keep Moreau up to date on all NSC operations. North was a plant. It became
clear to the Moreau team that the CIAs Casey-led operations in support of
the Contras were veering out of control. Casey had been busy illegally
raising millions of dollars for the Contras from concerned American
citizens and foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia and Brunei, whose
leaders were seeking favour with the White House. Moreau thought that
Caseys actions in support of the Contras were stupid and a time bomb, the
officer said. What had begun as a quiet op designed by Moreau to influence
public opinion inside Nicaragua was becoming a political football. So Moreau
calls on his boy Ollie and tells him to get involved with the Contra issue
and keep it from getting out of control. He picked the wrong guy. North was
loyal and enthusiastic, but he was fucking dumb. North saw a career path
through keeping in with Casey but then the operation took a ludicrous turn
after Buckleys kidnapping in Beirut in March 1984 by members of the group
that would soon call itself Hizbullah.
A plan developed to sell anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles to Iran, via
the Israelis, in return for Iranian help in releasing Buckley and the other
prisoners (the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had overthrown the
shah in 1979, was viewed with great hostility by the Reagan administration).
Profits from the arms sales would then be used to finance support for the
Nicaraguan opposition in direct violation of the congressional ban. Ollie
brings in Dick Secord and Iranian dissidents and money people in Texas to
the scheme, and its gotten totally out of control, the officer said.
Were going nuts. If we dont manage this carefully, our whole structure
will unravel. And so we former members of Moreaus team who were still
working for Bush leaked the story to the magazine in Lebanon. He was
referring to an article, published on 3 November 1986 by Ash-Shiraa magazine
in Beirut, that described the arms for hostages agreement. He would not say
how word was passed to the magazine, nor did he acknowledge that with this
leak Moreaus group was acting with as much self-interest, and as little
regard for the consequences, as Moreau had accused the CIA of doing. The
officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would
unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. Our goals
were to protect the Moreau operation, to limit the vice presidents possible
exposure, and to convince the Reagan administration to limit Bill Caseys
management of covert operations. It only took a match to light the fire. It
was: Oh my god. We were paying ransom for the hostages to Iran.
Moreau was gone by the end of 1985: at the recommendation of Bush, he had
received his fourth star and was rewarded for his high-pressure double duty
in the White House by being appointed commander of US naval forces in Europe
and Nato forces in southern Europe. There was another factor: on 1 October
1985, Admiral William Crowe replaced John Vessey as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. The formidable Crowe had been filled in, up to a point, on
the clandestine operations inside the vice presidents office. He got a
whiff of what was going on, the officer said. Crowe quickly disbanded
Moreaus secret team and returned its officers to navy duty. There would be
no undeclared operations on his watch. The roof could have fallen in the
following November, when the Iran-Contra scandal became public. The
congressional inquiry that followed focused on Reagan, and what he did and
didnt know. Bush was mostly out of the line of fire, and so was Moreau.
Casey, meanwhile, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in December 1986, and
left office within days. He died five months later.
If Casey had not taken ill, the officer assured me, he would have been the
fall guy, and taken one for the Boss the president. Bush, with his
seemingly secure run for the presidency in 1988 under threat, flew into a
panic about the burgeoning scandal. He had played a major role in the
sure-to-fail scheme; a comprehensive inquiry might well discover the 35 or
so earlier covert operations many of them successful that he and the
Moreau group had conducted. The teams carefully prepared findings, none of
which had been given to Congress, were destroyed, as were any other records
of the extraordinary operations unit. Moreau suffered a major heart attack
in December 1986, while on duty, and died soon afterwards at a military
hospital in Naples.
Secrecy, internal rivalries and illegality had doomed Moreaus project but,
for all its flaws, there were some in the defence establishment who felt, as
Moreau did, that extraordinary efforts were needed to combat international
terrorism. How ironic it is, a senior defence official told me, given all
the interest now in waging covert warfare, that the very real opportunity to
pre-empt al-Qaida, and launch a war decades before 9/11, was squandered by a
mix of overzealous, sometimes misguided operators and bickering
administration officials.
In 1986, as the Iran-Contra scandal turned toxic, the immediate problem for
Vice President Bush was political survival. Too many outsiders men like
Oliver North knew too much. The vice president began keeping a diary
with notable fake elements late in 1986, as the scandal was being
investigated by the special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. The diary wasnt
turned over to Walshs inquiry until after Bushs defeat in the 1992
presidential election, despite relevant subpoenas dating back to 1987. It
begins with the sentence: This is November 1986, the beginning of what I
hope will be an accurate diary, with at least five and maybe 15 minutes a
day on observations about my run for the presidency in 1988. But Bush was
unable to restrain himself, repeatedly wondering whether North and his close
associate on the National Security Council, Admiral John Poindexter, would
do the right thing when testifying before Congress. The right thing, of
course, was for North and Poindexter to lie and not say what they knew about
Bushs involvement. At one point, Bush refers to allegations in the media
that he has not come clean on his part in the scandal, and adds: The
implication being that I was some way linked in to the diversion of funds to
the Contras or that I was running a secret war which, of course, was
precisely what he had been doing. Later, writing about the arms for hostage
agreement, he says: Im one of the few people that know fully the details,
and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there. It is not a
subject we can talk about.
Bushs unconscious seemed to spin out of control again when he was summoned
in December 1986 by the Tower Commission, a three-member investigating group
put together by the White House in a failed attempt to head off the Walsh
inquiry. The testimony before the Tower Commission, I think went well,
Bush wrote. I made several suggestions to them
[and] they include no more
operations by the NSC; CIA to conduct covert operations; formalise process
of the NSC staff; clearly [no more] oral findings, and failure to follow up
on these covert operations was wrong. Nobody had any dream that these kinds
of things were going on. He was once again describing what Moreaus group
had been doing. The diary, had it been turned over earlier, as Bushs team
of lawyers certainly understood, would have led to a great deal of further
questioning, and possibly to an indictment.
Walsh reluctantly ended his far from satisfactory inquiry in 1993.
Convictions his staff won at trial were later overturned or suspended, as in
Norths case; others were pardoned by Bush before he left office. One of
Walshs last acts was to determine whether there was a case against Bush for
his initial refusal to turn over the diary. He decided against it after
concluding that there was little likelihood of a successful prosecution. The
same general conclusion had been reached two years earlier, before the
existence of the diary became known, by Christian Mixter, a senior attorney
on Walshs staff. While there was much evidence that Bush had attended most
of the important meetings on Iran-Contra, Mixter wrote, his role as a
secondary officer to the president made him less likely to be criminally
liable for the actions he took. Mixters analysis was not made public until
2011.
There is no evidence that Walsh or any of the lawyers on his staff found out
about the existence of Moreaus special operations group, though it was
clear to some that there was more to know. John Barrett, who now teaches at
St Johns University School of Law in New York, spent five years working for
Walsh and came away, as he told me, with a very strong sense that the water
was way deeper than we could see. And who knew what was below. I concluded
that we were at the mercy of the executive branch. He added that Archibald
Cox, the Harvard law professor who was in charge of the Watergate
investigation in 1973, had been able to turn for help to John Dean the
White House counsel who testified in public about the presidential cover-up.
Unlike Cox, we didnt have an intelligence insider.
The Washington press corps was equally in the dark. Scott Armstrong, a
Washington journalist who spent years researching US policy on Iran,
recalled a pleasant lunch he had long after the Iran-Contra inquiry with Don
Gregg, Bushs national security adviser. The conversation inevitably turned
to the Iran-Contra days and Armstrong told Gregg that he and other
journalists had always been interested in his role. Greggs answer, as
Armstrong recalled it, was crude and mysterious: You guys [in the press]
were always sniffing around my ass, and Dan Murphy passed right by you.
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