Reagan gave his approval, but the White House wanted to keep the operation a closely held secret. The shipments were to be handled with "maximum compartmentalization," the notes said. On Aug. 20, 1985, the Israelis delivered the first 96 missiles to Iran.
It was a pivotal moment. With that missile shipment, the Reagan administration stepped over a legal line. The transfer violated the Arms Export Control Act's requirement for congressional notification when U.S. weapons are trans-shipped and a prohibition on shipping arms to nations, like Iran, that had been designated a terrorist state.
On Sept. 14, 1985, Israel delivered a second shipment, 408 more missiles to Iran. The next day, one hostage, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, was released in Beirut. But other Americans were snatched in Lebanon, undermining a key rationale for the arms deals.
Word of the Iranian arms shipments also was spreading through the U.S. intelligence community. Top-secret intelligence intercepts in September and October 1985 revealed Iranians discussing the U.S. arms delivery.
The risk of U.S. exposure grew worse in November 1985 when a shipment of 80 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles ran into trouble while trying to transit through Portugal en route from Tel Aviv to Tehran. In a panic, White House aide Oliver North pulled in senior CIA officials and a CIA-owned airline to fly the missiles to Tehran on Nov. 24, 1985.
But one consequence of drawing the CIA directly into the operation was a demand from the CIA's legal advisers that a presidential "finding" be signed and congressional oversight committees be notified. Gates has denied any involvement in those 1985 shipments.
Yet, with the White House desperately looking for ways out of its worsening dilemma, the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence -- with Robert Gates at the helm -- suddenly reported a substantial decline in Iran's support for terrorism, according to McGovern's affidavit.
By citing this alleged Iranian moderation, the CIA created some policy space for Reagan finally to formalize the arms shipments with an intelligence "finding," signed on Jan. 17, 1986. But the authorization -- and the Iran arms deals -- were still kept hidden from Congress, the one Iran-Contra decision that Gates said he regretted.
When the Iran-Contra scandal finally broke into the open in November 1986, most participants in the operation tried to duck the consequences, especially for the 1985 shipments that violated the Arms Export Control Act, what Secretary Weinberger once warned President Reagan might constitute an impeachable offense.
For second-tier officials, such as Gates, admitting knowledge of or involvement in the 1985 shipments would amount to career suicide. So, Gates and most other administration operatives insisted they knew or recalled little or nothing.
Undercutting Gates' claims of ignorance and innocence, however, was the fact that his underlings in the DI had been pushing unsupported notions about why shipping arms to Iran made sense, according to Glaudemans and McGovern.
Mysterious Climb
There were other complaints from CIA veterans who had observed Gates' rapid climb up the agency's career ladder.
Before Gates' ascent in the 1980s, the CIA's analytical division has a proud tradition of objectivity and scholarship regarding the agency's intelligence product. However, during the Reagan administration with Gates playing a key role, that ethos collapsed.
At Gates' confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Melvin Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.
These former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA's analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow's behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.
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