Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL WINES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
On the morning of Nov. 6, 1986, as news of his secret role in the arms-for-hostages deals with Iran first cascaded onto the world's front pages, Oliver North sat at a computer terminal in his third-floor office at the National Security Council and tapped out an electronic message.
``Oh, Lord,'' he wrote to a co-worker, sounding pained. ``I lost the slip and broke one of the high heels. Forgive please. Will return the wig on Monday.''
Whatever the meaning of North's missive - it is unclear to this day whether he had just returned from an undercover mission or a rowdy Halloween party - it surely was never meant for public consumption.
Now it is public, along with 499 other internal White House computer messages, in a new book that purports to expose what Oval Office advisers really thought and did during President Reagan's tumultuous second term.
What they did, besides conduct government business and hatch various foreign-policy plots that have been largely reported, is play practical jokes, flirt and practice interoffice politics.
The resulting White House often looks less like the locus of earthly power than the water cooler in a lot of corporate accounting departments, law firms and even some newsrooms.
The paperback book and an accompanying computer diskette, titled ``White House e-mail,'' are published by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit Washington organization that seeks to preserve and declassify federal foreign-policy documents.
The book is based on a mountain of interoffice messages exchanged by White House employees over an in-house computer system during much of the 1980s. Many authors believed the e-mail exchanges were being automatically erased from White House computer files and would never resurface, while in fact, technicians were regularly transferring those messages and hordes of other files to more permanent storage devices.
In the years since Iran-Contra investigators discovered the backup files in 1987, the National Security Archives has fought a continuing legal battle to prevent the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations from destroying both those files and others recorded in the 1990s and late 1980s.
At stake are nearly 6,000 computer tapes and 135 hard drives, crammed with data drained from White House computers from 1982 to 1989.
The tapes and drives hold literally millions of pages of messages, more than could be readily declassified. The book and diskette, culled from 4,000 sanitized messages that the White House and Iran-Contra investigators have released, are a cross between history and voyeurism - a stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait.
Stunning revelations are few and far between, perhaps because the book's main characters, North and his boss during Iran-Contra, Adm. John Poindexter, already have been investigated to exhaustion by reporters and lawyers.
To no one's surprise, North appears in the book as a public servant concerned more with expediency than bureaucratic or diplomatic protocol. In a series of 1986 exchanges, for instance, he discusses a ``fairly good relationship'' with Panama's head of state at the time, Gen. Manuel Noriega, in which the two men sidestepped normal State Department channels to discuss ways of advancing what they considered their nations' interests in Central America.
Through an intermediary, the notes show, Noriega offered to ``take care of'' the socialist leaders of Nicaragua, where the United States was engaged in a proxy war.
``I told the messenger that such actions were forbidden by our law,'' North wrote, but he added that he was intrigued by the dictator's counteroffer to assist in sabotage operations against the Nicaraguan army and government.
Poindexter liked the notion. ``If he really has assets inside, it could be very helpful, but we cannot [repeat not] get involved in any conspiracy on assassination,'' he wrote of Noriega. ``More sabotage would be another story. I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities.''
Noriega is now in federal prison on drug-related charges.
Later that year, an agitated-sounding North wrote that he personally had threatened Costa Rica's president, Oscar Arias, with a cutoff of American aid if his government held a planned news conference to expose an American-backed operation that was ferrying arms to Nicaraguan rebels from a Costa Rica airstrip.
The airstrip was, in fact, part of a rogue operation that North and friends were financing with profits from the secret sale of weapons to Iran.
After a conference call with CIA and State Department associates, North wrote, he called Arias to ``tell him that if the press conference were held, Arias'' - a line of the note is censored here - ``wd never see a nickel of the $80M that McPhearson had promised him on Friday.''
``I recognize that I was well beyond my charter in dealing w/a head of state this way,'' North wrote his boss, but ``it seemed like the only thing I could do.''
Arias, who later won the Nobel Prize for his peace efforts in Central America, did squelch the news conference, but only for a few days; pro-communist aides in his government staged the event later without his consent, North wrote elsewhere.
The White House interoffice computer system fairly hummed with those sorts of anecdotes, but it also was employed for less global concerns. Messages detail behind-the-back efforts by presidential aides to sidestep reporters, win invitations to important meetings and, in one case, ensure that the ever-ambitious North was excluded from a session outside his area of responsibility.
With barely stifled electronic laughter, two aides recount the government's interest in purchasing an inventor's hand-held bazooka for use by American-backed rebels battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
The plan fell apart, it seems, when the inventor accidentally fired the bazooka in a suburban Washington gas station, leaving the station intact but blowing his undercover status to bits.
``Have we bought any? Looks like a good buy - no danger of jamming or other excessive difficulties in firing,'' wrote one senior national security aide, Peter Rodman.
``No,'' replied the CIA's liaison to the White House, Vincent Cannistraro, none of the $10 million funding to develop unconventional weapons was likely to be spent on that bazooka. The inventor, he wrote, ``is a good guy but surprisingly unsophisticated. Carrying around a loaded 30-millimeter cannon in downtown Arlington is not very smart.''
And there were practical jokes. One series of messages outlined an elaborate plot by the National Security Council's top lawyer and others to convince a State Department worker detailed to the White House that he was under federal investigation.
``Will you be here in the morning? I assumed you would be on admin leave status till this thing gets cleared up,'' the lawyer, Paul Thompson, wrote the state worker, Steven Steiner.
The next day, another aide messaged the worried Steiner: ``You got yourself into this one. Get yourself out! Do you think that I care about you as a person?''
At another point, North, a marine officer and Naval Academy graduate, sent a message to two Army officers on the White House staff on the eve of the annual football game between West Point and Navy.
``Certain aquatic items were recently misplaced by you or others currently or formerly affiliated with an institution of ill repute localed on the banks of the Hudson River,'' North wrote. ``We are certain, however, that your olfactory sensor systems, primitive though they may be, will be able to locate the subject items in the relatively near future.''
Translation: North, ever the covert operative, hid a package of dead fish in the men's office.
by CNB