THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 18, 1994 TAG: 9410180350
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN AND WARREN FISKE, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb charged on Monday that Republican Oliver L. North perjured himself with claims in 1987 that he had no personal financial interest in the Reagan administration's covert sale of arms to Iran.
Meanwhile, North attacked the Democratic incumbent's attendance record as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Robb said North lied when, under oath, he told Congress and a national television audience he had no stake - ``not one penny'' - in Swiss bank accounts created from proceeds of the arms sales.
``It turns out not to have been true, and given the knowledge that we (now) have, it could not have been true,'' Robb said.
He also charged that at least some of North's actions during what became the Iran-Contra scandal were ``pure profiteering. It had nothing to do with patriotism.''
Robb's re-election campaign has been built around attacks on North's truthfulness, but Monday's attack was perhaps the toughest Robb has delivered personally. It marked the first time he has accused North of lying under oath. North was convicted of three felonies, including obstructing Congress, in the Iran-Contra affair, but he has taken pains to note that he was acquitted of perjury.
All of North's convictions were set aside when an appeals court concluded that testimony he gave Congress under a grant of immunity may have been used against him in court.
North has admitted to mistakes in connection with the arms sales and the diversion of profits to anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua. But he casts his errors as a product of his patriotic determination to free Americans held hostage in the Middle East.
Campaigning in Richmond on Monday, North dismissed Robb's charges as an attempt to resurrect allegations put to rest in the late 1980s during investigations of the arms sales.
``It's not mine. It never was mine,'' North said of the money in the Swiss accounts. ``I don't know anything about it.''
Government documents unearthed and reported on last week by Hearst Newspapers indicate that North and his family could receive $2.3 million or more from two arms sale accounts. The Swiss froze the accounts in late 1986 at the request of the U.S. government; the Justice Department is suing two of North's former associates, who opened the accounts, to recover the funds.
North contends he was unaware of either account. But Hearst reported that congressional investigators found his phone number on documents creating one of the accounts, a $200,000 fund for the education of his four children. The fund was created after North's wife, Betsy, went to Philadelphia in March 1986 to meet with Willard Zucker, financial manager for an arms-dealing business set up by two North associates to funnel weapons to Iran.
The second account, a $2 million fund also established in 1986, named North as sole beneficiary in the event anything incapacitated the two associates, Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim. Secord told Hearst that North had no knowledge he was being named a beneficiary of either account.
Robb said Monday that at a minimum, North should renounce any claim on the Swiss accounts. But North argues that he has never asserted a claim and so has nothing to renounce.
As Robb met with reporters at his campaign headquarters, North was in Richmond attacking what he said was the incumbent's dismal attendance record as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
During 1993 and '94, Robb attended only 17 of 64 meetings of the full Armed Services Committee and subcommittees to which he's assigned, North said. ``Chuck Robb didn't even bother to show up 75 percent of the time. . . . I know what would have happened to anyone else who showed up to work one day out of four. They'd be fired.''
North said that Virginia's other senator, Republican John W. Warner, attended about 80 percent of Armed Services committee and subcommittee meetings during the same period. Warner is supporting independent candidate J. Marshall Coleman in the Senate race.
Bert Rohrer, a spokesman for Robb, did not dispute the North camp's figures, calling the attack ``a silly numbers game.'' He suggested that Robb gets much of the information he misses at Armed Services meetings by attending Senate Foreign Relations Committee sessions on the same topics.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES
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