On first thought, one would say that Scott Fitzgerald never made a more fatuous remark than when he observed, "There are no second acts in American lives." A glance at the press will show the unwisdom of the maxim. Riddled with silver bullets though they may have been, there are some Americans who just never stop coming back. Nixon, Milken, Presley ... count them for yourself. Our president even managed to get his start as "the Comeback Kid," a new variant, and a promising one, on an old gambit.

There are some characters, though, who will not be granted the second act of their choice. As I write, Oliver North is proposing himself as the standard-bearer of the party of Lincoln, in the home state of Mr. Jefferson. He wants to be the next Republican senator from Virginia. It will never happen.

I can be pretty sure about this, because I've learned from being dead wrong about him the first time out. On July 8, 1987, I sat helpless with laughter in a Senate hearing room as North also sat, festooned with every medal he could unearth—including his parachute-jump wings and his shooting badges—defending himself against charges that he had misused private funds to install a security system at his home. Claiming that master terrorist Abu Nidal was on his case, he told a group of petrified congressmen and Keystone Kop attorneys the following fable:

Now I want you to know... I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, okay? There's an even deal for him... I was about to leave for Tehran. I had already been told by Director Casey that I should be prepared to take my own life. . . I do not wish to over-dramatize this, but the Abu Nidal terrorist in Rome who blasted the eleven-year-old American Natasha Simpson to her knees deliberately zeroed in and fired an extra burst at her head, just in case. Gentlemen, I have an eleven-year-old daughter, not perhaps a whole lot different than Natasha Simpson, and so when Mr. Robinette told me on or about the tenth of May that he could immediately install a security system, I said: "Please try to keep it to the eight thousand to eighty-five hundred dollars. I am, after all, a Marine lieutenant-colonel, and I live on my salary."

It was impossible to witness this without surrendering to hilarity. Apart from my professional admiration at such a ham job, I had just become the only person in the world who could claim to have sat in the same room with both Abu Nidal (with whom I had a chilling encounter in Baghdad in 1976) and Oliver North. So there was something to dine out on. But more, I had been present at the birth of a tremendous comic performer—one who combined the moist sentimentality of Nixon's "Checkers" speech with the near-hysterical improvisation of a Joe McCarthy. Emerging from the hearing room with a smile on my lips, I ran straight into the brainless roars of "Olliemania," which had been provoked by exactly the words I have quoted above. Well, fair's fair and a joke's a joke and I'm the first to laugh, but really...

4445 View article pages

The laugh, however, will be on North in the end. Because the things that make him unelectable are—most of them, at any rate—contained in those few operatic sentences I just cited. Take, just for a taste test, the matter of Abu Nidal. Abu Nidal, hired gun, leader of a renegade faction of the Palestinian Al Fatah organization, and author of the Rome and Vienna bloodbaths, is one of those people about whom everything that is said is true. One truthful thing said about him is that he bought arms from Manzer al-Kassar, a Syrian operator who turned arms money into drug money and vice versa. Al-Kassar was once sentenced to two and a half years in prison by a British court for his part in the smuggling of dope. In 1987 he held a meeting with the Medellin cartel to arrange a carve-up of the cocaine trade.

In that same year, which was a good year for his business, Manzer al-Kassar also received $1.5 million from Oliver North. In return for this, he furnished Eastern-bloc weaponry to the contras. So I, too, would have been fascinated to see the face-to-face meeting North proposed between himself and Abu Nidal. "Whaddaya got?" would have probably been the opening line on both sides.

You think that I exaggerate? Listen to the tape on which North chats with Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar, you may recall, was the former secret-police informer turned arms dealer who acted as a designated pimp and middleman for the ayatollah's Iran. North continued to believe in him long after the C.I.A. had put out a warning to all stations that he was a crook. Their recorded exchange in London went like this (remember that the negotiable currencies here are Americans held in darkened cellars in Beirut, and weapons forbidden by Congress to their kidnappers):

GHORBANIFAR: I think this is now, Ollie, the best chance because we never would have found such a good time, we never get such good money out of this. [Laughs.] We do everything. We do hostages free of charge; we do all terrorists free of charge; Central America for you free of charge; American business free of charge.... Everything free.

And what is North's response? Instead of saying "Nothing is for free," or even "Don't call me Ollie," the tape has him replying, "I would like to see... some point this, uh, idea, and maybe, y'know, if there is some future opportunity for Central America."

Semper fi! North could sure be tough when it came to scaring some uninformed congressmen before the cameras. But leave him alone with a gunrunning middleman for hostage takers and he was more than a patsy and somewhat more than eager to please.

In his famous sketch about T. E. Lawrence, Alan Bennett gave this deadpan commentary: "Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, within his belt a short curved gold sword of the Ashraf descendents of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London." This comes back irresistibly when one hears North talk about his life being in danger in Teheran because Bill Casey had said it was. (Incidentally, by then North was conveniently quoting a dead man whose widow, Sophia, has since angrily repudiated her husband's protege.) In point of fact, far from conducting a mission behind the Iranian lines, North was met at the airport, whisked past customs by his grinning hosts, and installed with his party on the entire top floor of Teheran's main hotel. There he offered large consignments of heavy weaponry to the most hard-line elements of the government excoriated, by the Reagan administration and all subsequent administrations, as most conspicuously involved in the rape of international law.

Far from being the enemy of "terrorists," North was the man who introduced them into the closest counsels of the U.S. government.

Even if you didn't know this, you could have guessed it from the topic the Iranians kept raising. In return for their "help" in gaining the release of American civilian hostages, they wanted guns and money, but they also demanded the release of a group of proIranian prisoners jailed in Kuwait. This group, known as the Da'wa prisoners, had been convicted of bombing the United States Embassy in Kuwait City. North's response? No problem! He later pressed the Kuwaitis to comply, in return for some "guarantees" from Iran. It was this disclosure which, said Secretary of State George Shultz, "made me sick to my stomach." Will the sturdy Republican voters of Virginia be able to say less?

(North, incidentally, appears to have a special affinity for those who conspire to attack American embassies overseas. In April 1985, the Costa Rican authorities arrested several of North's mercenary subordinates on a fortified ranch. In subsequent statements, these men talked of a plan to blow up the American Embassy in Costa Rica, and to assassinate the American ambassador to that country, in order, to blame the crime on the Sandinistas and build support for the contra war.)

4647 View article pages

The memory of the hostage trauma has of course faded somewhat. But in a Senate campaign, North cannot expect to avoid questions about his consorting with hostage takers. It's often forgotten that three additional American hostages—Frank Reed, Joseph Ciccipio, and Edward Tracy—were taken captive in Beirut after North opened his arms-for-bodies bazaar. Why not, since their market value had so obviously increased? That might weigh on the conscience of a lesser man, though North has never blamed anyone but Congress for the entire affair.

And then there was a non-American hostage, taken as a direct result of North's Teheran and Beirut shenanigans. Terry Waite, the personal envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, did not know that North was running a "back channel" to the kidnappers. He negotiated in good faith, but with people who obviously did know and who therefore didn't trust him. He vanished into hell for five years. At one point he asked North directly if he had been "using" him. "Our government uses people every day" was North's blithe reply.

Speak for yourself, Ollie. In any case, there are numerous devout Christians in the state of Virginia. North, indeed, never opens his mouth without claiming to be one. He has sought allies among Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. It will be interesting to see how many believers—including Pat Robertson himself—will be able to embrace North with any sincerity once they read Terry Waite's memoirs.

All right, whom does that leave? Suppose you are a Virginia voter and you can't stand the Constitution and throw up at the thought of Congress and never could figure out the hostage fuss anyway and are inclined to believe "Ollie" over the press and the smart-asses. You still care about drugs, right? And "the war on" same?

It was in April 1985 and February 1986 that North's most trusted deputy, Rob Owen, warned him in two memos that the contra operation, with its off-the-book slush funds, and fly-by-night air transport and shipping, was being used as a conduit by narcotics smugglers. There is no record of North ever responding to these warnings: indeed, he intensified his support for the same operatives rather than otherwise. But he cannot claim not to have been told.

Then it was in June 1986 that The New York Times published the two massive front-page stories that exposed General Manuel Noriega's pattern and history of organized drug trafficking, a pattern later adduced by the U.S. government to justify an actual invasion of Panama in which members of North's beloved Marine Corps were killed by Noriega's goons. Yet, in August 1986, North's own handwritten notes (recently unearthed by the National Security Archive) show him arranging a secret meeting with Noriega to arrange "cleaning up [Noriega's] image."

The same set of notes shows a hectic session between North and Noriega, during which the pair planned the sabotage of the airport, the oil refinery, and the telephone system in Nicaragua. North has never been asked to explain his "image"-cleaning services for Noriega, nor his collusion with a drug lord in planning attacks on civilian targets, nor his suggested payment of at least $1 million to a Noriega treasury which was then well understood to be fed almost entirely by cocaine profits.

What about the case of Jose Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general convicted on American soil of planning the assassination of the president of Honduras and sentenced to five years in federal prison? According to the Justice Department, Rosa was bankrolling his enterprise with a $10 million cocaine deal, also on American soil. North nonetheless insisted on clemency for Rosa, because of his usefulness to the contras and because he had been "always ready to assist us." When was the last time a Senate candidate ran as the spokesman for clemency in such cases?

If you now go back to the North statement at the beginning of this article, you will plainly see that every word in it, including "and" and "the," amounts to a lie. Glenn Robinette, the private investigator and ex-C.I.A. man who was paid out of Iran-contra proceeds, later testified to falsifying, at North's request, the invoices for the installation of the famous security fence, to a total, incidentally, of $16,000. And North's words "I do not wish to overdramatize this" were used to introduce an irrelevant six-foot blowup of a Newsweek article on Abu Nidal. Far from being the enemy of "terrorists," North was the man who introduced them into the closest counsels of the United States government, and afforded them privileges and courtesies he never extended to the elected Congress he deliberately deceived.

5053 View article pages

There is a reason for the (so far) widespread public ignorance of North's hair-raising underworld connections. Actually, there are two reasons. The first is that the Senate and House inquiry into Iran-contra decided in advance to concern itself only with "the diversion"—the illegal transfer of funds from one bunch of thugs and torturers in Iran to another bunch in Central America. It's as if, in considering the implications of the whole term "Iran-contra," the lawyers had decided to play it safe and concentrate only on the hyphen. That was their mandate, and they discharged it poorly, as the Walsh report illustrates. However, no such restriction applies in the case of a candidate for the United States Senate. He can and will be asked about what he actually did, on both sides of the hyphen.

The medical records of his 1974 mental crack-up were later weeded from North's file; the cover-up will probably be raised during the race.

The second reason is the (so far) remarkable solidarity of Republican politicians and commentators. It's true that on minor questions of North's veracity, and on equally minor questions of his petty-cash depredations, figures as diverse as Elliott Abrams, Mrs. William Casey, Edwin Meese, and Ross Perot (and we're not talking famously scrupulous people here) have come forward to say that North is a liar and that he cannot be trusted around the cash register. But all of this stuff is also deliberately trivial. What about North's involvement in the spending of slush money in a congressional campaign in concert with supporters of the John Birch Society, while he was working for the National Security Council?

North, from his position on the N.S.C., approved the disbursement of money, questionably raised for the contras by the Bircher fanatic Carl "Spitz" Channell (who later pleaded guilty to defrauding the U.S. government), used by his subordinates to intervene in the reelection campaign of Congressman Michael Barnes of Maryland (who was onto North about the arms). North also and notoriously interfered with witnesses and with evidence, and attempted to pervert the course of an imminent congressional investigation by having a crucial witness, former mercenary foot soldier Jack Terrell, defamed as a potential presidential assassin. In the face of this fantastic subversion of the principle of elected government, where are the defenders of the dignity of the great deliberative body?

I called a sample group of Republican senators—Robert Dole, Richard Lugar, William Cohen, and Mark Hatfield—to ask for comment on the wisdom or decency of choosing North to be one of their number. All promised an early reply. None delivered. So far, then, the party establishment is paralyzed by partisanship and afraid of North's fundraising capacity. One hasn't heard yet, either, from William Safire or the other keepers of the G.O.R conscience.

Thanks to the limited scope of the prosecution, North was able to defend himself on a narrow front and finally, in spite of innumerable admissions, to get off on a technicality. (Talk about the courts being too soft on crime.) This is why one looks forward so keenly to the rest of the campaign, which has months yet to run. Although the candidate avoids interviews, and talks of press conspiracies even more hotly than does Ross Perot, he's finding it harder to laugh off the material that is surfacing even in the conservative press.

The report about his deceitfulness and his being slippery with cash appeared in Reader's Digest, which North, with his Bates Motel glare, promptly denounced as targeting "traditional values, strong families, and the defense of our nation." (That's Reader's Digest!) And it was the ultra-right Washington Times which most prominently reported North's mental crack-up in 1974, when his former battalion commander Richard Schulze found him "babbling incoherently and running around naked, waving a .45 pistol." The medical records of this episode were later weeded from North's file; it's probably the cover-up rather than the original meltdown that will be raised as part of the normal course of a Senate race.

First from behind his illicit fence, and now from the millionaire comfort of his Virginia ranch—which, for connoisseurs of fantasy, is called Narnia, after C. S. Lewis's mystical land—North has insisted, in ever more demanding fund-solicitation letters, that he was the target of an "inquisition" by Congress. It's as if he objects to the very inquiry into illegality which he, by his shredding parties and pre-arranged lying, did so much to prolong and confuse. While telling the voters of Virginia that "I have put Iran-contra behind me," North was all the while spending chunks of his sudden fortune on a series of secret legal motions to excise damning passages from the final report on the scandal, written by Republican judge Lawrence Walsh. The report itself demonstrates why North has tried to suppress it. In the bracing air of open democratic contestation, however, it will be fascinating to see how North accounts for his involvement in hostage taking, for his smuggling of foreign despots and desperadoes into secret American discussions, and for his guilty knowledge of the narcotics racket, to say nothing of his friendly intervention on behalf of those who bomb U.S. embassies. I don't think that Semper fidelis will quite cover it.

5455 View article pages

Nor does retired lieutenant colonel David Evans, who served with North at Marine Corps headquarters and who writes to me that "to many Marine officers, North violated the oath of office, which is not to persons, but to a concept: The Constitution. The oath that North took cannot co-exist with his actions. Hauling that Marine uniform out of the closet was for effect. In North's case, patriotism was not the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first."

Evans is registered to vote in Virginia, and isn't especially enamored of the North campaign, which, according to a leaked version of a sample mailing, is directed chiefly against "those pushing to give homosexual activists free access to our military and those who want to make laws allowing foreigners who have AIDS to become U.S. citizens." In the margin of this distraught leaflet, another reserve officer, who sent it to me, had written, "Makes me want to barf. Words of a scoundrel. Words of Elmer Gantry. Swore to defend the Constitution, and shredded it."