Unraveling Fiasco

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For once, Ronald Reagan did not want to give a speech. For nearly two weeks, the Administration had tried to bottle up stories about U.S. dealings with -- and arms shipments to -- Iran. When two top aides got into a sharp dispute in his presence, Reagan sided with National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who counseled continued secrecy. But the story refused to die, and so the President belatedly followed White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan's advice that he at least brief congressional leaders. The blistering criticism continued, and a press conference on Wednesday by Said Rajaie-Khorassani, Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, finally convinced Reagan that he should take his case public. Even then he was reluctant. Hours before his TV report to the nation on Thursday, an angry President told reporters that he would deliver it only because "I've never heard such dissemination of misinformation since I've been here."

The real problem facing the President, however, was that the shocking stories that so upset him were not, in fact, misinformation. They were basically true. The Administration, acting on his orders, had secretly shipped military equipment to Iran even as it was waging an international crusade for a strict arms embargo against that country for promoting terrorism. Worse yet, the shipments, which broke the spirit and perhaps the letter of U.S. law, had become entangled with murky efforts to barter for the release of American hostages, even as the U.S. was proclaiming that it would never deal with terrorist kidnapers.

The unraveling Iranian fiasco is the latest in a string of controversies that have called into question the Administration's credibility and competence in foreign affairs. They threaten to dissipate six years of aggressive effort by Reagan to strengthen America's standing in the world. Among the other setbacks to credibility: the disingenuous explanations of the shady connections between the White House and the private network run by former CIA personnel supplying aid to the contras fighting in Nicaragua, the campaign of "disinformation" against Libya proposed by the National Security Council, and Reagan's befuddled and dubious accounts of what he proposed during his dangerously fanciful discussions of total nuclear disarmament with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik.

Of all these challenges to the Administration's vaunted spin-control talents, the latest furor threatens to do the most damage. It flies in the face of deep public aversion to Iran, to dealing with supporters of terrorism and to using arms shipments as a bargaining tool for the release of hostages. Not surprisingly, the twelve-minute talk Reagan finally gave was perhaps the most defensive of his presidency, with only occasional touches of his usual confident eloquence.

Said the President, in an opening comment he penned himself: "Now you're going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name." His key points:

-- Yes, "for 18 months now, we have had under way a secret diplomatic initiative to Iran." Purpose: "to open a dialogue" with a strategically vital nation, some of whose leaders seemed willing to moderate its bitter anti-Americanism.

-- Yes again, "during the course of our secret negotiations, I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran."