Colonel Oliver North's trial - 20 September 1991

This letter is really two or three PSs, postscripts, to earlier letters done, one a week ago, the other earlier in the summer. Because, in some cases, the facts have gone surprisingly beyond my guesses or a new element has crept in, or a facetious or a satirical remark has come true in life. Proving once again that there are some sides of life impossible to satirise. The facts will satirise themselves.

Well, last week, some of you may recall, I marvelled at the five-year prosecution of that former Marine Colonel, Oliver North for his part, his principal part in the Iran-Contra scandal. Which not to bring up any more than the two main facts was about the secret sale of arms to Iran and the use of the proceeds to arm the Nicaraguan rebels after Congress had passed a law banning all military aid to them. Colonel North was the man who set up the secret pipeline to the rebels. He was at the centre of the whole operation, which the Reagan administration, at first, strenuously denied.

Then there was a big television circus, a congressional investigation, at which was revealed the lurid details, the foreign helpers, the people involved in what amounted to the conduct of a secret foreign policy being run mainly by Mr Casey, the head of the CIA, by Colonel North and by his boss, a Mr McFarlane, the president's national security advisor. The most amazing feature of this whole elaborate and costly plot was that while President Reagan was hot for giving aid of every sort to the Contras, probably the hottest exponent of aid in the United States. Yet, he didn't know or couldn't remember a thing about any of it, about the arms' sale to Iran or the use of monies to arm the rebels. To this day, Mr Reagan maintains his ignorance of these thundering facts.

Now, I said last time that so much sinister and possibly criminal behaviour was revealed by that congressional investigation that a special independent prosecutor was appointed to look into bringing several people to trial. This would normally be the job of the department of justice, but that department, including its head, the attorney general, was very active in the business of denying any involvement by any members of the administration, high or low. The prosecutor's name was Mr Lawrence Walsh. Mr Walsh did bring criminal actions against a range of conspirators and eight of them were convicted. But how about the central figure, the leading conspirator, Colonel North? Well, he'd been so much in charge. He'd been here, there and everywhere. So much so, that the Congressional committee felt they must get from him everything they could. Now the Constitution says that no man may be required to testify against himself in any criminal case. And there was the strong chance that Colonel North might respectfully refuse to answer all questions on grounds of self-incrimination.

So the Congressional Committee offered Colonel North immunity from prosecution on anything he might testify to in its hearings. That meant that at the end of the hearings, if the special prosecutor still wanted to bring the Colonel to trial on criminal charges he would have to find evidence outside everything the Colonel had testified to before Congress. It seemed at the time to innocent onlookers a whacking concession to make to the Colonel and a very large obstacle to put in front of the special prosecutor. I took this point up at the time with various politicians and learned lawyers. They were all very kind, tolerant of my naïveté. But explained that there was such a wealth of incriminating evidence that there'd be lots to spare from the congressional hearing which could be effectively hurled at Colonel North in court of law. I see.

Well, as you know, Colonel North did come to trial, on 12 criminal counts. Partly because the jury had heard some of them spouted on the television, also because they suspected Colonel North was covering up for a boss, higher even than Mr McFarlane, they threw out all but three of the charges and convicted him on them. He appealed. The appeals court judge said one was irrelevant and he set aside the other two as being legally insufficient. So the Colonel was now a free man. Not quite. That's where we were, he was, when I talked last week.

But then, as I mentioned, his boss, Mr McFarlane, was called by the appeals court judge to a special, a very odd hearing, but of a sort that, I predict, will become more and more common. Mr McFarlane, North's boss and President Reagan's national security advisor, was, as much as anyone, Colonel North's most serious accuser. But the judge asked him now, "if the appearances of Colonel North before that Congressional Committee had coloured or in any way affected his own testimony at North's trial?" At the end of the hearing, Mr McFarlane said, "Yes, it had". In other words, the special prosecutor, through Mr McFarlane, had violated the Colonel's immunity. That was all it took. The judge threw out the whole case and Colonel North is free.

Of course he was jubilant. He said before a cluster of microphones and a wall of cameras that he had been "completely exonerated". Well, yes. Legally acquitted but, as he put it, vindicated? He was set free, as the New York Times put it, because the prosecution couldn't prove he'd had a perfect trial. Four years ago, Colonel North freely confessed to many things. He had deliberately lied to Congress, he had destroyed, shredded lots of incriminating documents. He had used some of the profits from the Iranian arms' sales to build an actual security fence around his house. The special prosecutor's comment was that the congressional grant of immunity had indeed placed in his way a huge obstacle.

What come out of it I think is a lesson which Congress should be the first to learn. In investigations that might lead to criminal charges, think twice about granting immunity from prosecution to any key witness. Make up your mind. Decide to hold a congressional committee hearing or leave it to the department of justice to mount a criminal case. This lesson gets up and screams to be learned. But I fear, as I hinted last time, that the temptation to hold an open congressional hearing has become irresistible ever since the hearings offered politicians the opportunity to go on television and if they talk before the cameras long enough to earn, at no cost to themselves, the national recognition that movie stars and rock performers have to earn from years of work and exposure.

Does anyone remember the closing line of a talk I did during Wimbledon week? About a player named Prpic. A Yugoslav. After the upheavals in that country and the war between the Serbs and the Croats, I suggested that maybe on the programme Mr. Prpic might not want to be listed as a Yugoslav but a Serb. Well, as the young man said to the judge, "it seemed amusing at the time". Well, during the Flushing Meadows' week, the playing of the American Tennis Championships, another Yugoslav, a more highly rated young player with a thunderbolt of a serve, Goran Ivanisevic, announced that if he is picked to represent his country in international competition, he will not play for Yugoslavia but he will play for his country, Croatia.

There are, as I mentioned last time, four, now five, congressional hearings going on. All trying to monopolise one or other of the 24-hour television channels. The one which, however, has for the time being faded from the screen is the hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee to pass on, to approve or reject the president's nomination to the supreme court of a black man, Mr Clarence Thomas. The five days in which he has appeared and been questioned exhaustively about his views have contained many ironies.

The senators who might have been expected to back almost any black nominee, the passionate liberals, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Metzenbaum of Ohio are dead against him and are certain, I should say, to vote against him. Mr Thomas's most fervent supporter, idolater almost, is a Southerner, Senator Strom Thurmond, now 86, and the Democrat who in 1948 walked out of the Democratic convention because President Truman was preaching integration. Senator Thurmond was a lifelong segregationist. But Mr Thomas is his man because he is that comparative rarity, a black conservative. There seems little doubt that Mr Thomas will be approved by the Committee and then by the whole Senate and will move next month to fortify the already firm conservative majority on the court.

At the end of his five-day ordeal, Mr Thomas thanked everybody and recalled his poor childhood and the discrimination he overcame. And he concluded with a sure-fire cliché, "This could happen", he said, "only in America."

This is always the safest possible declaration of patriotism. Even when it's pronounced with blazing sincerity, nobody ever stops to say "Is that true?" How about a poverty-stricken Welsh boy who got to be Prime Minister of Great Britain? Or an illegitimate Scottish crofter? A Somerset orphan brought up in poverty, left school at 11, became British foreign secretary? I think the deadliest riposte ever given to this sentimental refrain must surely have come from Nikita Khrushchev, when on his 1960s tour of this country he wound up as principal guest at a luncheon in Hollywood. His host was the head of a studio, once a Greek immigrant. And he it was who told to the sound of dripping tears how his poor family had come to America, how he grew up humbly, how in the end he'd become the grand mogul of a Hollywood studio. He turned poignantly to Mr Khrushchev and intoned, "Only in America".

Mr Khrushchev got up and told briskly and with no embroidery about a shepherd boy, son of a coal miner, went onwards and upwards and became head man of the Union of all the Soviet Socialist Republics. The shepherd boy turned to his host, "Only, Mr Skouras, in the Soviet Union".

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