Oliver North's Blank Check

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In December 1985 he dramatically resisted McFarlane's efforts to shut down the arms pipeline to Iran. North wrote a memo to Poindexter in which he argued, "Like you and Bud, I find the idea of bartering over the lives of these poor men repugnant. Nonetheless, I believe that we are, at this point . . . too far along with the Iranians to risk turning back now. If we do not at least make one more try at this point, we stand a good chance of condemning some or all to death and a renewed wave of Islamic Jihad terrorism. While the risks of proceeding are significant, the risks of not trying one last time are even greater." North often displayed a kind of psychological brinkmanship in his memos, hinting that the hostages might be killed if the U.S. did nothing.

In January of 1986, North was back in business after the President signed an intelligence finding authorizing the sale of weapons to Iran. North concocted an elaborate "notional timeline" (which included his belief that the Ayatullah would step down in 1986) for what he called "Operation Recovery." The plan reveals the Marine officer's talent for military logistics and his naivete about geopolitics. For a month North had planes, missiles and money hopscotching all over the globe to deliver weapons to supposedly moderate elements in Iran in order to bring about the release of the American hostages. Although Iran received 1,000 TOW antitank missiles as a result of his efforts, no Americans were freed.

$ In the fall of 1986 North dreamed up a rather surrealistic Bible-for-Koran swap to demonstrate U.S. good intentions. It eventually backfired when the Iranians displayed the Bible to humiliate the President. In October, North journeyed to Frankfurt, West Germany, to meet with a group of Iranians and presented them with a Bible inscribed by the President with words from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians: "And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.' " As he did so, he told them, according to the report, "We inside our Government had an enormous debate, a very angry debate, over whether or not my President should authorize me to say, 'We accept the Islamic Revolution of Iran as a fact.' He ((the President)) went off one whole weekend and prayed about what the answer should be and he came back almost a year ago with that passage I gave you. And he said to me, 'This is a promise that God gave to Abraham. Who am I to say that we should not do this?' " North went on to tell the Iranians he had had two private discussions with the President at Camp David; in one, North asserted, Reagan had said that he wanted to see the Iran-Iraq war end on terms acceptable to Iran.

Yet the President had inscribed the Bible only a few days earlier, at North's suggestion, on the understanding that the inscription was a favorite passage of one of the Iranians. North, according to White House sources, has never been to Camp David. When the President was apprised of North's story by the Tower commission, he described the NSC aide's statements as an "absolute fiction."