Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 26, 1994                   TAG: 9411180018
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DRUG LINKS

North has at least one valid defense: Despite probes that, had they found the goods, presumably would have nailed him, he has never been charged with anything to do with drug-running. There's also a common-sense defense: It's hard to imagine a White House aide condoning cocaine smuggling, even to help finance a rebel war against Nicaragua's government.

Still, to bring in former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams for the defense - well, that is too rich.

Pardoned by President Bush for his crimes, Abrams shares with North a record that includes: conviction of a federal offense, participation in illegal Iran-Contra operations, and admission of deliberately misleading Congress (and, by extension, the American people).

Are we supposed to accept, on his word alone, Abrams' insistence that "those of us who ran that [Contra supply] program, including Oliver North, were completely committed to keeping it absolutely clean"?

North's denial is also strong. In his autobiography he wrote: "Very little in my life has angered me as much as the allegations that I or anyone else involved with the resistance had a drug connection."

Yet the candidate during his Senate campaign has yet to square this blanket denial, in any detail, with facts that linger and trouble. Among them:

Notes North jotted down during the 1980s, such as: Contra leader Federico Vaughan "wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos." And: "DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S." And: "$14 million to finance Supermarket came from drugs." (The "Supermarket" was a Honduran warehouse in which arms for the Contras were stored.)

The story, recounted last week in The Wall Street Journal, that a drug smuggler was killed by Colombian hitmen in 1986 - and eight months later the cargo plane he had used to carry cocaine into the United States was shot down over Nicaragua, with Eugene Hasenfus and a load of Contra supplies aboard.

The allegation - by two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents based in Central America - that North and the CIA operated hangars in El Salvador from which airplanes delivered drugs to the United States and carried cash back to finance the Contra war.

North's relationship with John Hull, a shadowy character indicted by Costa Rica for cocaine trafficking. Hull, who worked closely with North in the '80s, owned airstrips along the Nicaraguan border that served the Contra supply effort.

The presumption of innocence covers North as much as anyone, of course. The fact that he has never been charged with drug-related activities should not be discounted.

But this is not a court of law; it's a U.S. Senate race. And the troubling questions remain. North should answer them, publicly, in more detail than he has so far. He might also find better defenders than Elliott Abrams.

At least to some Virginia voters, specific explanations would be more reassuring than accusations of dirty politics, blanket dismissals of any truth to the allegations, and Iran-Contra figures as character witnesses.