Oliver North's Blank Check

The messages were often written in a kind of furious shorthand, using abbreviations, initials and acronyms at every opportunity, as though the writer were too rushed to tap out the entire word or name. AMCITS stood for "American citizens," NLT for "no later than." Vowels disappeared from staccato sentences: "We will not be trying to adjust yr sched for next June for this mtg." Oliver North's memos, often typed on his computer late at night and sent directly to his National Security Council superiors, read like the dispatches of a man with no time to waste, a man obsessed, a man slightly out of control.

It was no wonder that Lieut. Colonel North did not have the time or inclination to linger over literary style. For as the Tower report voluminously documents by reprinting those memos, North was operating as a reckless and overburdened free agent of the NSC. During 1985 and '86 he simultaneously conducted a tense and frustrating series of arms-hostages negotiations with Iran and coordinated a supply line for the contras in Nicaragua. Like the ringleader of a vast, secret circus, North masterminded an elaborate network of boats and planes, along with not-for-profit corporations and Swiss bank accounts to help the U.S. sell weapons to Iran, as well as supply the contras with money and guns.

North was an obsessive master of detail, organizing everything from building a 6,520-ft. runway in Costa Rica to controlling the movements of a Danish- registered ship for the purpose of carrying weapons to the contras, and writing up talking points for negotiations with shady arms merchants. Whenever the Administration's enthusiasm seemed to be flagging on either the Iran or contra front, North whirled into action, proposing new policies for extricating the hostages and novel ways to raise more millions for the Nicaraguan rebels, sometimes employing the most outrageous of lies and schemes to keep the action going.

The memos in the Tower report reveal both Ollie the dutiful Marine and Ollie the renegade cowboy. The commission found that North kept National Security Adviser John Poindexter "exhaustively informed" of his actions through a computer network they code-named "Private Blank Check." The name aptly describes the license Poindexter gave his aide to carry out foreign policy through questionable initiatives in the name of the U.S. In negotiations with Iranian officials, he announced that the U.S. was tilting away from its official policy of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war, and he fabricated fantastic stories of meetings with the President at Camp David. He wheedled support for the contras out of some half a dozen foreign governments and an assortment of private citizens. Despite the CIA's objections, he gave intelligence information to the Iranians. He claimed that he had threatened the President of Costa Rica with the cutoff of U.S. aid if the President disclosed the existence of a covert airstrip. At one point, he even proposed sinking or hijacking a freighter en route to Nicaragua and stealing the weapons on board for the contras.