Gates Knew of Secret Contra Aid, North Says

WASHINGTON —  Former White House aide Oliver L. North said Tuesday that Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, knew about his secret operation to fund Nicaragua’s Contra rebels.

But North added that he does not know whether Gates was told that profits from secret missile sales to Iran were diverted to the Contras.

“For someone not to have known that I was involved deeply in providing all manner of things to the Nicaraguan resistance had to be an almost conscious act of ‘I don’t want to know,’ ” North said in an interview with several reporters.

“There was a rather profound effort to portray this thing as something that was going on in the basement of the White House by a renegade lieutenant colonel,” he added. “It went through the NSC (National Security Council), it went through the CIA, it went through other intelligence agencies.”

North’s comments on Gates’ role in the Iran-Contra scandal were his first on the CIA nominee, who was questioned closely about his knowledge of the secret operations during his confirmation hearings.

Gates told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew generally that North was aiding what he called “private benefactors” in support of the Contras but insisted that he did not know any of the details. The secret operation funnelled millions of dollars and planeloads of weaponry to the rebels. Congress had prohibited U.S. military aid to the Contras at the time.

Members of the Intelligence Committee expressed skepticism over Gates’ account but voted to recommend his confirmation last week, 11 to 4. The full Senate is expected to confirm him as early as next week.

North also said that he believes President Bush--who was then vice president--knew much of what he was doing. “I bet I prepared, gosh, let’s put it modestly, a couple of hundred thousand pages of memoranda that went up my chain of command and in many cases went laterally to the vice president’s office . . ,” he said.”But . . . George Bush was not in my chain of command,” he added.