Meese Says North Told Him, Panels Different Stories

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III testified Wednesday that former White House aide Oliver L. North last November gave him answers to at least six key questions that directly contradict North’s recent testimony under oath before the Iran- contra committees.

In his second and final day of congressional testimony, Meese said he has no way of knowing whether North had lied to him or to the panel. But he sharply disputed North’s contention that it is sometimes necessary for government officials to lie to protect important policy initiatives.

“I don’t condone . . . anyone lying under any circumstances whatsoever, including whether it’s a fact-finding investigation, testimony before a congressional committee, statements to the President or statements to me as attorney general, and I think there’s no reason or justification or excuse for it whatsoever,” Meese told the investigating committees.

Testimony Recalled

In North’s congressional testimony earlier this month, he said he had lied on several occasions to maintain the secrecy of the Iran arms sales and the contra supply project and defended his actions as necessary to protect the lives of the anti-Sandinista rebels and U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

“Lying does not come easily to me . . . but I think we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies,” North said.

Nevertheless, North was never asked by the House and Senate committees to explain the discrepancies between his congressional testimony and the statements he made to Meese during a two-hour interview in the attorney general’s office last Nov. 23 as the Iran-contra affair was unraveling.

Meese sympathized with the committee members who, as they prepare to write their report on the Iran-contra affair, are having trouble deciding whether North and other key witnesses were telling the truth. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate panel, pleaded: “Do you have any advice to us as to how we may determine who’s lying and who’s not lying?”

But the attorney general offered no advice, noting that ultimately it will be up to independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh--not the committees--to determine who will be prosecuted for wrongdoing in connection with the Iran-contra scandal.

Although Meese was the second Cabinet officer--following Secretary of State George P. Shultz--who has condemned North’s misstatements, his criticism was expected to be more controversial than Shultz’s because he has long been a close associate of the conservatives who strongly support North. Meese already is under fire from some staunch North supporters for his role in disclosing the diversion on Nov. 25.

Tells ‘Great Sorrow’

Meese said that, before the Iran-contra affair was disclosed, he had “high regard” for North and his boss, former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter. As a result, their involvement in these matters has been what he described as “a matter of great sorrow.”

Generally, Meese said, he assumes that what North told Congress was more truthful than the information he gave the attorney general during their meeting last November because North’s congressional testimony was given under oath and with limited immunity from prosecution.

Nevertheless, Meese added that he does not believe North’s committee testimony that the late CIA Director William J. Casey approved the diversion of profits from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels. According to Meese’s own testimony, North and Casey told him last November that the then CIA director did not know of the diversion.

North was more likely to have told the truth about Casey last November, Meese said, because “at that time Mr. Casey was still available to refute any statement that might have been true or untrue.” Casey died in May, two months before North appeared before Congress.

Besides North’s conflicting statements about Casey’s knowledge of the diversion, Meese acknowledged under questioning by Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) that there were these additional discrepancies:

--North told Meese he was initially unaware that a November, 1985, shipment from Israel to Iran contained U.S.-made Hawk missiles, adding that he first believed the Israeli plane to Tehran was carrying oil-drilling parts; he told the committees he knew from the outset that the shipment contained Hawks. The CIA provided logistical support for that shipment without first obtaining written presidential approval.

What Poindexter Knew

--North told Meese that Poindexter, then deputy national security adviser, was unaware of the November, 1985, Israeli shipment until after the fact; he told the committees that Poindexter was aware of it from the beginning.

--North told Meese that Israel decided how much money would be diverted from the Iran arms sales to the contras; he told the committees that the funds were controlled by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, who ran the contra supply network.

--North told Meese that the diversion of funds was first proposed by Amiram Nir, the Israeli prime minister’s assistant for counterterrorism; he told the committees it was an idea put forth by Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman who arranged the first U.S. sales.

--North told Meese that contra leader Adolfo Calero opened three Swiss bank accounts into which the Israelis deposited profits from the Iran arms sales; he told the committees that Secord controlled the accounts in which the profits were deposited.

Meese also condemned destruction of White House documents by North and Poindexter:

“I have no trouble condemning anything that is used to deceive or to otherwise withhold from proper authorities the information that they receive and that includes lying, it includes the withholding of information that should properly be reported to the President or to Congress, and it also includes the destruction of any official documents in an effort to deceive some of those who are in authority who should have access to that information.”

There is evidence that North shredded many pertinent documents in the three days after Meese uncovered the diversion--even working from 11 p.m. until 4:15 a.m. to finish the job shortly after his Nov. 23 interview with the attorney general. As a result, some committee members have criticized Meese for failing to immediately secure the documents in North’s office.

Many members of the committees appeared stunned when Meese, in his own defense, asserted that some of the documents destroyed by North probably were not pertinent to the Iran-contra investigation.

“Do you think Col. North spent from from 11 p.m. in the evening until 4:15 a.m. the next morning destroying irrelevant documents?” Mitchell asked.

“I think he probably did,” Meese replied.

Although committee members praised Meese for disclosing the diversion shortly after he found evidence of it, he also was frequently criticized for not conducting a more professional inquiry. In response, he acknowledged that he did not approach the investigation with the thought that it would produce evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

“This was not a Hercule Poirot investigation,” he said, referring to the super sleuth in the novels of Agatha Christie.

After his testimony ended, Meese told reporters he thought he had “laid to rest any questions or concerns about the quality of the investigation we conducted in November of 1986.”

Mitchell noted that Meese used the accepted techniques of investigation when he interviewed lower-level officials such as North, who was an employee of the National Security Council, but abandoned those techniques when he talked to Cabinet-level figures such as Casey, Poindexter and Vice President George Bush. The attorney general had failed to take any notes in his conversations with those individuals.

When Meese defended his failure to take notes on grounds that the investigation was quickly coming to a close, Mitchell commented that his explanation was “very hard to accept.”

Meese then shot back: “It may be strange to you, it may strike you that truth being stranger than fiction, but I take offense at the idea that it’s hard to accept because what I have told you is the absolute truth of what happened.”

It was the only moment during his two days of questioning that Meese departed from his normally congenial manner.

Despite the criticism, many committee members appeared to share Meese’s view that he had quieted much of the congressional discontent over the quality of his inquiry.

No Cover-up Seen

Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), who had previously accused the attorney general of “incompetence” in investigating the scandal, strongly denounced any speculation of a cover-up effort by Meese at the outset of the day’s proceedings.

“I think it is grossly unfair for anyone to infer or suggest that the attorney general of the United States and the Justice Department was involved in some effort to cover up or obstruct the discovery of the true facts of the matter,” he said. “I have expressed it in strong terms to the contrary.”

Rudman’s view was shared by a leading Democrat, Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, who congratulated Meese and his staff for recognizing the significance of the memo outlining the diversion when they discovered it in North’s files last Nov. 22.

As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Meese spent much of his second day of testimony explaining his view of the legal issues involved in the Iran-contra affair.

Committee members generally seemed to approve of Meese’s conclusion that most of the $8 million remaining in Swiss bank accounts from the Iran-contra affair is the legal property of the U.S. Treasury. He said the Justice Department is prepared to cooperate with the independent counsel in seeking to recover those funds.

He nonetheless acknowledged that there are legal theories that would support the view expressed by Secord that the money still belongs to him.

At the same time, several panel members appeared to be upset when Meese expressed the opinion that the staff of the National Security Council was exempt from the terms of the 1986 congressional ban on military assistance for the contras by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Meese based his controversial opinion on the assumption that the NSC staff is not and should not be an intelligence agency--even though in the case of the Iran-contra affair it was conducting covert operations such as those normally carried out by CIA.

Inouye said he was “quite distressed” by Meese’s opinion, which appeared to uphold the views held by North and Poindexter. “From what you’re telling me, employees of the Department of Agriculture could have carried out these actions without violating the law,” he said.

Meese, faced with vehement objections from Inouye and others, then softened his stance somewhat. He noted that he had never rendered an official legal opinion on the subject and added: “It is an issue, though, on which reasonable minds could differ.”

The committees also released the deposition of William F. Weld, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, which had been the subject of a dispute between Democrats and Republicans on the panels.

The transcript from Weld’s July 16 private testimony before committee staff members appeared to support the Democrats’ view that Weld had unsuccessfully sought to have the criminal division involved in an initial investigation of the Iran arms sales as the scandal broke last November.

Republicans on the committee had argued that Weld wanted a role not in the Iran-contra probe, but in a separate arms smuggling investigation being conducted in New York.

It was not until Nov. 25, three days after he uncovered the diversion memo, that Meese invited the criminal division to take part in his investigation.