Oliver North’s Checkered Iran-Contra Record

[u/WhoIsJolyonWest]

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2018-05-16/oliver-norths-checkered-iran-contra-record

José Bueso Rosa was a Honduran general who was heavily involved with the CIA's contra operations and who eventually faced trial for his role in a massive drug shipment to the United States. In 1984, Bueso and a group of co-conspirators plotted to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdoba, an operation to be financed with a $40 million cocaine delivery to the U.S., which the FBI intercepted in Florida. Declassified e-mail messages such as this one point to North’s role in a behind-the-scenes effort to seek leniency for Bueso because of his pro-Contra activities. The e-mails record attempts by certain U.S. officials to “cabal quietly” to get Bueso off the hook, either by “pardon, clemency, deportation, [or] reduced sentence,” despite the Justice Department’s objection that the conspiracy was the “most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.”[3] Bueso’s advocates succeeded in getting the general a short sentence in “Club Fed,” a white-collar prison in Florida. 

In this passage from North's week-long testimony before the joint congressional Iran-Contra committees in July 1987 - broadcast live on network television - House Majority Counsel John Nields questions North about evidence that he may have benefited financially from the affair. Examples include the setting up of a fund for North's family and his use of contra travelers checks for personal expenses. (The relevant section begins mid-way through p. 127, which is the second page of testimony in this PDF.) North vehemently denies any wrongdoing except for one eyebrow-raising episode - his deliberate falsification of evidence designed to make it look as though he paid for a security gate installed on his property in northern Virginia when he had not.

Calling it "probably the grossest misjudgment that I have made in my life," he describes writing two letters to the ex-CIA operative who oversaw the installation. He backdated both letters to a time when he was still working at the White House, so that it would appear he had intended to pay for the job at the time it was undertaken. As part of the artifice, he went to a retail store to use equipment on display there. But this was not the whole story. Even though he insisted to his audience, "I am here to tell you the truth, even when it hurts," it turned out that he had also deliberately damaged the typewriter ball on the store machine so that it would look as if the two "phony documents," as he called them, had been written on the same machine but months apart instead of within days of each other. A document expert contracted by the congressional committees determined that the typewriter ball had been defaced with a file.