Oliver North’s role in Iran-Contra - 10 July 1987

I came here to tell you the truth, the good, the bad and the ugly. That has a manly, no-nonsense rhythm to it and it might be a famous line from a movie starring Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart.

It came, in fact, from the upright, bemedalled figure of the redoubtable Marine Colonel North, who shortly after that Beirut magazine broke the story of the secret sale of arms to Iran, at a time when President Reagan was urging the allies to back his policy of a boycott on all such sales – the name of Colonel North, who he was, what he was about tantalised the press, the media of more countries than the United States.

And when it, shortly, came out that the funds, some funds, profits – Colonel North calls them residuals – from the arms sale had been diverted to support the counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua at a time when Congress had prohibited military and paramilitary help to those countries... ever since then, we’ve all been itching to hear from the man who was at the control centre of the job.

Finally after seven months of hearing from practically everybody else the man himself appeared smartly before the Congressional select committees. I’m not going into the body or the details of Colonel North’s testimony just yet. There’s much more to come and especially from his old boss Admiral Poindexter, but there is a point the colonel made early on the first day which goes, I think, to the root of all covert, hidden, secret operations whether done by agents of Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Israel or whoever.

It’s a point very embarrassing to governments everywhere and in fact they don’t like to bring it up in their parliaments or other legislative bodies. The point was made with blue-eyed intensity by Colonel North when he reminded, kept reminding, the joint congressional committees that both the shipment of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the Contras were covert operations and that covert operations are essential to national security.

I’d like to throw in at once that there wasn’t a senator or a congressman sitting there who would deny the point and the same is surely true of every member of a House of Commons or the French assembly. The lawyer for the committee walked right into this point with a very early question. He put it to the colonel this way, “In certain Communist countries the government’s activities are kept secret from the people, but that’s not the way we do things in America, is it?”

The colonel would have been correct in answering, “Nonsense, the great bulk of our government’s activities are reported but every administration has covert operations going on all over the world which its agents are sworn not to report, in fact to deny.”

What the colonel said was this, “I think it is very important for the American people to understand that this is a dangerous world, that we live at risk. Covert operations are essential to protecting the country and” – here’s the nasty, undeniable point – “covert operations, by their very nature, are a lie. They are based”, he said correctly, “in deceit”.

He was really echoing down the decades the famous line of Winston Churchill, not spoken aloud I believe to the British public or any other public body, “In wartime truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies”.

The crucial word there is "wartime" but Colonel North was proceeding on the understanding – which is surely shared by many governments including democratic governments all around the world – that in the continuing Cold War governments, however regretfully, have to mount secret, hidden, covert operations through their intelligence agents and that the very secret of their success is deception both in word and deed.

So Colonel North, having once asserted this definition – he didn’t concede or sadly admit it, he asserted it – he could say from then on whenever the committee’s lawyer asked something like “Did you shred this documents so they wouldn’t get known about?” or “Did you help in revamping the true chronology of events in producing a fake chronology to send up to the president and so change the date when he appeared to know about these things going on?”

Colonel North didn’t hesitate for a split second. He’d say something like “Of course” or “Correct” and then to the lawyer repeat, like an earnest schoolmaster patiently getting a point across to a rather thick pupil, “As I’ve said before, this was a covert operation” and it, all these operations had been approved by his bosses in the National Security Council, Mr Robert McFarlane and Admiral Poindexter. We shall hear from him next week.

And it’s very clear by now the late Mr Casey, Director of the CIA, and the colonel assumed that their authority had come from the president. He had never heard directly, man to man, from the president or seen a note or memo with the president’s approving initials. So the central question is unanswered so far – how much did the president know?

By the way, the president himself believes that Colonel North’s early testimony completely exonerated him. However as I say on that key question, there will be more to come. Well after Colonel North gave his chilling but true definition of covert operations he also said that the president has a right, and he does, secretly to sanction covert operations in writing through what is known as a finding.

This is written permission to go ahead with the covert operation – the CIA regularly requests such findings. – after the attorney general has gone through the laws, precedents and so on and said yes you can do this. The whole question of the legal guilt of Colonel North and his many colleagues, assistants, contacts foreign and domestic, turns on whether a presidential finding and the permission of the colonel’s bosses in the National Security Council can legally bypass an act of Congress forbidding anyone in intelligence to supply or help supply military or paramilitary aid to the Contras.

But in blunt terms that apply to all governments, if a covert operation approved by a president or a prime minister, by high officers, members of their administrations, if it leaks out, or as they keep saying here “comes unravelled”, then are the intelligence agents, the men involved in the CIA, the KGB, MI5 or 6 or whatever initials your own country’s intelligence agency goes under, are these people punishable?

It’s always been assumed – and not only by readers of spy fiction – that, once caught, a spy shot himself or took arsenic or was bumped off if he knew too much. If I seem to have descended from strict reality and law into pulp fiction may I say that through the revelations of covert plots that went wrong or came out into the open in the past what... 20, 30 years, reality has constantly imitated fiction or perhaps all along the fiction has been the fact.

We – you and I – can’t be certain of that because as I said at the beginning most people including members of Congress or an assembly or a parliament choose not to know about or acknowledge such nasty goings-on. In fact, it has been the regular practice of governments to deny any knowledge of a spy once he was found out.

When the now-famous Sidney Reilly disappeared in the early 1920s his wife appealed to his great admirer Winston Churchill to help in his rescue. Mr Churchill blandly replied that Mr Reilly went to Russia on his own private affairs. And there’s the now-celebrated case of Paul Dukes, a highly valued member of SIS, the British secret intelligence service during and just after the First World War, a fanatical anti-Communist who ran incredible risks inside Bolshevik Russia.

Once when he was back in London Mr Churchill urged the Prime Minister Lloyd George to see him. “He will” said Churchill “interest you greatly”, but Lloyd George, not the most austere of statesmen, wouldn’t do it. He thought it improper to be associated in any way with his own intelligence agents.

Incidentally, Dukes did manage an audience with the King, George V, who remarked that “The spy is the greatest of soldiers”. Now that’s the sort of thing, the work, the methods of intelligence services, that most people today between the ages of, say, 50 and 80 never knew about for most of their lives – only the Germans and the Russians had spies.

But two generations have come since to the knowledge of good and evil or the overt and covert in the conduct of national policy. I suppose the James Bond films were the most startling bit of popular enlightenment but we knew that they were fun and nonsense. But then there were the novels of Graham Greene and John Le Carré and in Britain the excellent television series, The Sandbaggers.

In the 1950s the Americans got the first rather shocking hint that a president could know about and deny secret operations when the Russians brought down an American spy plane. President Eisenhower said indignantly, “It was no such thing” but then admitted it was, with the rather limp afterthought, “Well you do it too”.

How far we’ve come from the days when the great Justice Holmes’s only comment on wire-tapping was that it was “a dirty business” and even in the second war, when the American secretary of war wouldn’t think of looking at a secret memo from another department, “It would be like opening another man’s letters,” he said.

Now we have a real-life plot in which, quite gravely, according to Colonel North’s code book, Israel was known as “bananas”, the United States as “oranges” and the president was “Joshua”. Colonel North, I believe, would enthusiastically agree with the lawyer for the CIA who wrote in 1984, “Espionage is the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first”.

By the way, that, er, compelling line of Colonel’s North’s “I came here to tell the truth, the good, the bad, and the ugly,” was taken from the title of a western starring Clint Eastwood, another lone crusader.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.