The Tower Panel: Laying Out the Brutal Facts

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The NSC staff secrecy was even more obsessive on North's pivotal role in supplying the contras with arms at a time when military aid was banned by Congress. On May 15, Poindexter warned North by computer, "From now on, I don't want you to talk to anybody else, including Casey, except me about any of your operational roles. In fact, you need to quietly generate a cover story that I have insisted that you stop." The next day, Poindexter sent a message that the now departed chief of staff must appreciate: "Don Regan knows very little of your operation and that is just as well." In June, Poindexter indicated that Shultz too should be kept out of contra details, telling North, "To my knowledge Secretary Shultz knows nothing about the prior financing. I think it should stay that way."

Astonishingly, the Tower board found that not even the President was aware that his NSC staff, rather than the CIA, was both directing and carrying out the Iran deals. The report faults Casey for not warning Reagan of the risks involved in letting the inexperienced North run such operations and for not insisting the CIA take over the covert project. Declares the report, with deliberate understatement: "The President did not seem to be aware of the way in which the operation was implemented and the full consequences of U.S. participation." He did not, it appears, even bother to ask.

As to how the entire Iran initiative started, the report says it is "unclear" whether it was prompted by Israel, by "the avarice of arms dealers," or was a result of an "American request for assistance." But the board is certain that Israel "had an incentive to keep the initiative alive" and kept intervening with the NSC staff, Poindexter and even the President to do so. While Israel had great success in repeatedly reviving U.S. interest when it seemed to be waning, the report declares flatly, "U.S. decision makers made their own decisions and must bear responsibility for the consequences."

In the most detailed narrative yet compiled on the scandal, the report sheds new light on some of the sorry affair's major questions:

Was the U.S. trading arms for hostages? The Tower board concedes that the U.S. officials aware of the Iran initiative may have had different motives. But despite such differences, the report concludes, "Almost from the beginning the initiative became in fact a series of arms-for-hostages deals."

The blame for turning the Iranian initiative into an outright arms-for- hostages scheme is placed squarely on one man: Ronald Reagan. The report reveals that notes from the President's diary, as well as his repeated questions about the fate of the hostages to such aides as Regan and Poindexter, show that Reagan's "intense compassion for the hostages . . . appeared to motivate his steadfast support of the Iran initiative, even in the face of opposition from his Secretaries of State and Defense." Regan, for example, told the board that in December 1985 the President had said "that we were going to spend another Christmas with hostages still there and that he was looking powerless and inept because he was unable to do anything to get the hostages out."