This article is from the 1/91 issue of Penthouse.

It details Bush's true involvement in the Iran/Contra affair, as
the leader of the operation, and how he lied in order to protect
himself, the operation, and the secret government.  It was
written by two former ABC News investigators.  As of January 7,
1991, people in Washington are beginning to compare this article
to Woodward and Bernstein's uncovering of the Watergate/Nixon
scandal.  Please distribute wherever you can, on any BBS's,
faxes, flyers, mail it to your government representatives and
officials.  I am not a revolutionary or a psycho (except when it
is right, against something corrupt, deceptive, and incompetent),
I am just a college student who is tired of all the crap that has
plagued our government for so long.

                 George Bush:  Spymaster General
                 by Frank Snepp and Joanthan King
               (c) Penthouse, all rights reserved.

New evidence reveals how C.I.A. spycraft created and disguised
the Reagan administration's sleaziest scheme.  With the country
awash in the savings-and-loan scandal and bedeviled by a major
confrontation in the Middle East, it seems almost churlish to
taunt President Bush with the still unresolved mysteries of the
now ancient Iran-Contra affair.  But if presidential credibility
counts for anything in the current crises, what is now emerging
about Bush's role in Contragate - the sleazier half of the
scandal, should sober us all.  Ever-mounting evidence, most of
which has surfaced since he entered the White House, shows that
Vice-President Bush bent and battered the truth almost beyond
recognition.

*Although Bush still maintains he was out of the loop when it
came to the contras, it now turns out that he was a major player
in what was to amount to an international extortion scheme aimed
at winning them allies through the use of foreign aid to bribe
and coerce support for their cause.

*Despite his oft-repeated claim that he knew nothing of the
actual supply effort, new evidence proves that he signed off on
early deliveries, helped organize a supply bridge to contra bases
in Honduras, and sent members of his staff into the field to
write progress reports.

*Most important of all, recent documentation produced by the
government itself confirms the central role played by the
Israelis in arming the contras, and bolsters allegations that the
Vice-President's staff helped stage-manage the operation.  On the
eve of the 1988 presidential election, a wispy arms dealer from
Oregon named Richard Brenneke appeared for one brief moment to
hold the keys to the kingdom- or the trip-wire to Armageddon,
depending on your political viewpoint.

Several months before, the congressional committees investigating
the Iran-Contra mess has barely reserved a footnote for
presidential hopeful George Bush.  But in nearly 20 hours of
interviews with us in our capacity as ABC News investigators,
Brenneke turned their verdict around, implicating Bush directly
and elaborately in the contra side of Irangate.

From 1983 onward, by Brenneke's account to the authors and a
Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, the Vice-President's
office had been a "Control Point" for contra-supply operations
run by Israeli agents out of Panama, Honduras, and El Salvador.
He fingered Bush's then national security advisor, Dong Gregg, as
ringmaster for the operation, and Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban-
American who'd once worked with Gregg in the CIA, as a principal
field operative.  He even implicated himself, saying that as a
contract pilot he'd flown drugs to the U.S. as part of the
increasingly-corrupt U.S.-Israeli supply shuttle.

Brenneke's claims were outrageous, conspiratorial, and very
likely politically inspired.  Some sources told us he was an
Israeli intelligence plant out to discredit former Israeli prime
minister Shimon Peres and other Laborites in Tel Aviv who'd
embroiled Israel in the Iran-Contra scandal.  And when ABC's
"World News Tonight" broadcast three circumspect accounts of his
allegations in the spring of 1988, the White House savaged his
credibility, tagging him falsely as an indicted co-conspirator in
a New York gunrunning case.

A year later, after Bush was safely ensconced in the White House,
the Justice Department brought perjury charges against Brenneke,
alleging that he'd lied about his affiliation with the CIA (he'd
said he had one) and an early episode in the Iran-Contra affair.

By the time he was finally cleared of all charges in a federal
courtroom last May, his reputation had been so sullied by
official mudslinging that neither the press nor Congress could be
persuaded to re-examine what he'd had to say.  Killing the
messenger had been raised to a fine art.

The real significance of Brenneke's ordeal, however, lies not so
much in its injustice as its irony- the fact that his case
against Bush keeps getting stronger.  During the 1989 trial of
Oliver North, the government reluctantly admitted to a 42 page
condensation of classified documents- a "stipulation", that
thrust Bush to the very center of Contragate.  More recently, two
Washington-based organizations, the National Security Archive and
Public Citizen, have used the Freedom of Information Act to pry
loose previously suppressed portions of North's diaries that
obliterate what's left of Bush's fig leaf of deniability.

To appreciate the importance of the new revelations- and the
extraordinary effectiveness of Bush's cover-up, you have to
recall what he and his fomer aides have said about their role in
Contragate.  Don Gregg, the man who headed the Vice-President's
national security staff, once declared flatly:  "We never
discussed the contras.  We had no responsibility for it [the
contra war].  We had no expertise in it." Bush himself insisted
that he knew nothing of the "privatized" supply initiative until
it became front-page news in late 1986, after the congressional
ban on contra aid had eased.

Given the newly embellished historical record, it's now
stunningly clear that we were Bush-whacked:  The "privatized" aid
network Bush allegedly knew nothing about never really existed
anyways.  What's more, Brenneke has been proven dead right about
the issue that so dominated the Iran-Contra hearings.  The
"diversion" of Iran arms profits to the contras, he warned us,
was never more than a decoy to draw attention away from a far
darker scandal in which Bush was deeply involved.

When CIA director George Bush first met Don Gregg in 1976, the
idea of using third-party "cut-outs" to fund unpopular causes
behind Congress's back was very much the rage in Langley,
Virginia. A year before, during the twilight of the Vietnam War,
both Israel and Saudi Arabia had been encouraged to provide
secret handouts to Saigon to offset US aid cutbacks.  Not long
after Bush settled into his CIA job, tow of his deputies drew up
a proposal urging that the CIA look increasingly to private
companies to help front and even implement sensitive operations.

Gregg, a scrupulously honest intelligence professional who'd once
served as a regional CIA base chief in Vietnam, had no hand in
fashioning this scheme.  But as a sometimes CIA liaison to
Congress, he quickly came to understand how crippling excessive
oversight by Congress could be.  The answer to that, apparently,
was increased deniability of the sort these cutout operations
allowed.

During Reagan's first year and a half in office, cutouts and
indirect funding became operational staples at William Casey's
newly "revitalized" CIA, and basic tools in its burgeoning secret
war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.  In July 1982
Gregg, then an intelligence specialist on the National Security
Council, drew up a "finding" to be signed by the President,
designed to give a patina of legality to such deep-cover
operations.  His draft, though later overlooked by Iran-contra
investigators, reads in retrospect like a blueprint for
everything that would finally define Reagan's "secret war"-
"funding, arms supply, and some training" by "third-world
nationals", combined with supplementary aid from "selected Latin-
American and European governments, organizations, and
individuals."

The "finding" was never formally adopted: nobody wanted to add to
the lengthening paper trail.  But soon afterward, two of Gregg's
old Vietnam colleagues, Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez, rallied
him behind an impressive substitute.

Both Enders and Rodriguez had first met Gregg in the early
1970's, and had worked closely with him in developing a highly
effective helicopter assault strategy for jungle warfare.
Rodriguez was already renowned for his role in tracking down and
killing Che Guevara in 1967, and Enders built quickly on the
expertise he learned at Gregg's elbow, to become one of the CIA's
top paramilitary specialists.

In 1981, he and Rodriguez, who'd retired from the agency several
years earlier, traveled to Central America to explore ways of
comabting leftist insurgents more effectively.  The blueprint
they drew up, informally dubebd "Pink Team Plan", borrowed
heavily from the assault strategy they had learned in Vietnam,
though with one critical difference:  Whereas CIA contract pilots
had flown the prescribed counterinsurgent missions there, this
time cutouts, Cuban exiles, were to do the dirty work, under the
ostensible sponsorship of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

In March 1982 Gregg, now elevated to the post of the Vice-
Presidents national security advisor, forwarded the Pink Team
Plan to his White House colleague William McFarlane, who in turn
sent it on to his boss, the president's own NSC chief, William
Clark.  "This is representative of the kinds of things we can do
with Israel if we work quietly behind the scenes", McFarlane
wrote in a covering note that escaped notice during the Iran-
Contra investigations.  "I set this in motion with my Israeli
counterpart, David Kimche, over a year ago."

The Kimche he was referring to was a top Israeli intelligence
expert, and what he'd set in motion, according to Richard
Brenneke, was an arrangement for joint US-Israeli paramilitary
operations against the Sandinistas.

On this point, Brenneke's claims were anchored in precedent, for
the Israelis had long been a familiar, if mischievous, presence
in Central America.  In the late 1970's, when the US cut aid to
the region's various pariah regimes, including Anastasio Somoza's
Nicaraguan dictatorship, weapons merchants from Tel Aviv and
Haifa were right there to pick up the slack.  And as the
Somocistas gradually metamorphosed into the contras in the early
1980's, Israeli entrepeneurs simply followed the market.  By late
1982 the CIA, working with the Mossad, had set up a covert
pipeline to the newborn contras, running from arms marts in
Eastern Europe, through warehouses in Texas and North Carolina,
to bases in Costa Rica and Honduras.

Early in the Iran-contra investigations, the Senate Intelligence
Commitee produced a secret report (later made public) that homed
in on the Israeli connection.  But as the hearings progressed and
political sensitivities came into play, the search for culprits
veered away from out most important Middle Eastern ally to focus
on less-valued scapegoats.  It was only when Brenneke stepped
forward in early 1988 to point a finger that suspicion swung back
to Jerusalem. In light of the story he told, the Pink Team Plan
looked like part of a much larger skein linking Bush's office to
the deepest secret of Reagan's secret war.

If you are to believe Brenneke, Don Gregg became Bush's national
security advisor specifically to coordinate Israel's contra
account.  In fact, Brenneke claims to have phoned Gregg's office
repeatedly, beginning in 1983, to seek instructions for Israeli
supply masters.  Gregg has told us that he is "morally certain"
that he never talked to Brenneke, whom he considers an inveterate
liar, and Brenneke has not been able to document in any
satisfactory way the missions he claims to have flown for the US-
Israeli network.  Still, evidence of massive Israeli complicity
in Contragate, the core of his allegations, is now irrefutable
and overwhelming.

In 1989, at Oliver North's trial, the Bush Administration cracked
the window.  According to its agreed stipulation, William Casey
proposed, and retired Air Force general Richard Secord
neogotiated, a joint supply venture with the Israelis in the
spring of 1983 known as Operation Tipped Kettle.  Under the terms
of this arrangement, the Pentagon was to receive a substantial
consignment of captured PLO weapons, and then pass them on to the
CIA for distribution.  In return, the administration promised
"flexibility" in meeting Israel's own needs, exactly the kind of
tradeoff that would characterize the Reagan-Bush approach to all
"third country" support for the contras.

How much Bush's staff knew of Operation Tipped Kettle cannot be
determined.  But shortly after the Israeli aid spigot began to
flow, the National Security Council abruptly expanded the Vice-
President's role in the planning and approval of ALL covert
operations.  By the following November, according to two NSC
memos available to (but never exploited by) Iran-Contra
investigators, the Vice-President was being asked routinely to
"concur" in major supply shipments to the Contras.

Even more provocatively, he was also beginning to show up in all
the places where the contras needed special friends.  In
December, for instance, with Gregg and North in tow, he headed
off to Panama to confer with the dark angel himself, General
Manuel Noriega.  Israeli intelligence sources, including a Mossad
operative named William Northrop, have told us that Panama was by
now the switching station for Israeli supply lines reaching into
Costa Rica and Honduras, and former Noriega aide Jose Blandon
claims that his ex-boss had become a virtual protege of the
Israeli's man on the scene, former Mossad superagent Michael
Haran.

To judge from official accounts, Bush and Noriega engaged in
little more than diplomatic small talk.  But Blandon says the get
together was actually a turning point for the Panamanian
strongman, persuading him to get behind the Contras in a big way.
Blandon's credibility has been challenged by Bush supporters, but
one thing is certain:  Over the next year and a half, Noriega
became one of the contras staunchest supporters.

As it happened, the contras now needed all the support they could
get, for US aid transfusions were fast drying up.  By the spring
of 1984, the CIA's audacious mining of Nicaraguan harbors had so
infuriated Congress that a total aid shutdown was in the works,
and pressure was mounting on the administration to find alternate
supply sources.

In March, according to the North trial stipulation, Casey
proposed another aid pitch to the Israelis (the result was
Operation Tipped Kettle 2), and shortly thereafter, newly
appointed national security advisor Robert McFarlane scored a
breakthrough with the Saudis, persuading them to contribute
$1,000,000 a month to the contra's war chest.  With that, the
stage has been set for what now appears to have been Bush's
initiation into the darkest rites of Contragate.

The baptism came at a full-dress White House meeting convened on
June 25, 1984, to figure out how to keep the contras from going
under.  Initially, Iran-contra investigators dismissed the
session as a moderately important policy review.  But in light of
evidence released at North's trial, it now appears to have been a
"pirates' ball".  As Bush and the President looked on
approvingly, William Casey took the floor to argue for a radical
new approach to contra resupply, including the use of aid
promises to bribe countries like Honduras and Costa Rica into
lending support.

According to recently declassified notes of the meeting, Bush
cheered on enthusiastically, asking at one point how anyone could
object "to the US encouraging third parties to provide help to
the anti-Sandinistas".  He did worry that the administration
might be seen to be trading favors for such assistance.  But
evidently, over the next several months, this concern faded.
From a mere advocate of Casey's con game, Bush allowed himself to
be converted into an active player.

The following February, with US military aid now totally cut off,
a group of senior administration officials, including North and
Deputy National Security Advisor John Poindexter, met to plot out
a battle plan for Honduras.  According to the North stipulation,
they drafted a crafty letter to Honduran President Roberto
Cordova, promising him "enticements", including increased aid, if
he would hop on the contras bandwagon. Already US economic
assistance to his regime had been frozen to soften him up, and in
early March the squeeze paid off; Cordova said yes.  On the 16th,
George Bush hurried off to Tegucigalpa to hand him our quid pro
quo, a basketful of benefits to compensate for what we had held
back.  Thus did the Vice-President become the bagman in what
amounted to an officially sanctioned extortion scheme.

Nor was Honduras the administration's only "touch".  The previous
August, according to recently revealed evidence, Secretary of
State George Shultz had proposed a similar trade-off with El
Salvador, linking US aid commitments there to local support for
the contras, and in January McFarlane met with President Duarte
to shore up the deal.  Though Bush wasn't directly in the loop,
he wasn't out of it either.  By early spring, Felix Rodriguez,
longtime friend of his national security advisor, had become
Bush's eyes and ears inside the Salvadoran military.

From the moment Contragate hit the front pages, Rodriguez was
Bush's Oliver North, an inconvenient gunbearer whose excesses
threatened to backfire on the patron himself.  No one could deny
that the two knew each other.  The public record showed that
Rodriguez had met three times with the Vice-President, first in
January 1985 and again in May 1986, and had made over a dozen
phone calls to Bush's staff.  But a "chronology" released by
Bush's office on the eve of the Iran-Contra investigations
effectively "sanitized" these contacts, implying that the only
thing Rodriguez had ever discussed with Bush was his work as a
"counter insurgency expert" in El Salvador.

Like most good cover stories, this one contained a seed of truth.
From March to September 1985, Rodriguez did fly about 100 combat
missions against Salvadoran rebels from his base at Ilopango
airfield in El Salvador.  But where Bush and his apologists
played false was in casting the Salvadoran venture as something
unconnected with the secret contra war.  The North stipulation
makes clear that from June 1984 onward, the administration saw El
Salvador as a crucial launchpad for contra supply deliveries.
It's also apparent from his document that by the time Rodriguez
planted himself at Ilopango, the Salvadoran regime had succumbed
to US arm-twisting and had agreed to let the air base be used by
gunrunners servicing the Resistance.

During the Iran-contra investigation, the Vice-President's staff
maintained that Rodriguez hadn't become involved until September
1985.  But some sources allege that he was recruited into the
Israeli network as early as 1983.  In his recent autobiography,
Shadow Warrior, he acknowledges that "like many of my friends in
Miami, I'd been actively helping the contras since the early
eighties".

Did Bush know nothing of this?  In fact, it can now be shown that
he even helped set up one of Rodriguez's early supply runs.  As
the government admitted at North's trial, Bush came up with a
clever pump-primer just before his own trip to Honduras in March
1985.  Hoping, apparently, to convince the locals that the
Resistance had friends everywhere, he proposed that a private
group "supportive of the Resistance" be encouraged to fly a load
of medical supplies to Tegucigalpa to coincide with his own
arrival there.  The North stipulation does not identify the
private group, but in his autobiography Rodriguez inadvertently
reveals that he made a supply drop himself just as Bush was
arriving.

Nor were supply deliveries Bush's only immediate concern.  During
the Iran-contra hearings, investigators came across an entry from
Oliver North's schedule that recorded a meeting between him and
Bush on January 23 that dealt with "CentAm C/A", Central American
covert action.  Initially, no one could guess what this
signified.  But a recently released passage from North's notebook
shows that one "CentAm C/A" high on the lieutenant colonel's
priority list in early 1985 was a planned sabotage mission inside
Nicaragua involving General Noriega of Panama.

Given Bush's expanding role in covert planning, North may well
have briefed him on this operation.  How much he may have told
the Vice-President cannot be determined, but on March 6,
Panamanian sappers backed by British mercenaries did carry out
the mission, blowing up a major munitions dump in Managua.

Years later, after Noriega became a public embarrassment, Bush's
defenders tried to justify our continued reliance on him by
insisting that there was no "firm" intelligence in 1985 linking
him to drug trafficking or anything else that might have
disqualified him as an ally.  But again North's notebooks raise
serious questions.  A recently released entry reveals that at the
very moment of the Managua operation, Bush himself was
complaining to other US officials about narco-trafficking in
Panama.  "VP distressed about drug business", wrote North in
1985.

By the following summer, the taint of drugs was seeping through
the entire contra supply system as contract pilots often doubled
as mules for the cartel.  On top of this, the press and Congress
were beginning to scent a scandal.  On August 8, the New York
Times trumpeted that the contras were getting direct military
advice from White House officials, and within days the House
Intelligence Committee launched an inquiry that could hardly have
gone unnoticed in the Vice-President's office.

As publicity and the grit of corruption began to crimp the
machinery, North and his collaborators shifted to a new tack,
urging General Richard Secord to set up a supply shuttle of his
own.  By September this allegedly private enterprise was taking
shape so rapidly that its principals were already scouting for
air bases.  It was at this point that the Vice-President's staff
stepped smack into the middle of the contra supply muddle.

The tip-off comes in a North diary entry dated September 10,
1985.  On that day, says North, he met with Don Gregg and Colonel
James Steele, the US military advisor to El Salvador, to discuss
contra-related logistics problems.  During the Iran-Contra
hearings, investigators released only a fragment of this note, a
fragment so artfully censored by the White House and North's own
lawyers that little could be made of it.  Its very brevity gave
Gregg an excuse to deny that the meeting had ever taken place.

That smoke screen has since evaporated.  In 1988 testimony to
congressional investigators, Steele confirmed that the meeting
had occurred.  Though he denied having discussed the contras at
that meeting, newly released portions of North's notebooks
contradict him.  They also contain such a detailed account of the
get-together that they cinch the case for Gregg's own complicity.

What emerges from these notes is a picture of three knowledgable
officials huddled around a conference table, weighing the merits
of Ilopango over Aguacate in Honduras as a principal contras
supply base.  One participant (North does not say who) complained
of "radar coverage" at Aguacate, and noted that contra leader
Enrique Bermudez "was prepared to devote a special ops unit [to
sit] astride" rebel supply lines threatening an unidentified site
in El Salvador.  There was also discussion of a trip by Bermudez
to Ilopango "to estab[lish] log[istics] support/maint[enance]".

The September 10 meeting, with Gregg front and center, apparently
hastened the contra supply overhaul, for soon afterward the
pieces fell into place.  On Steele's advice, North decided to
enlist Rodriguez's services, and on September 30, as Rodriguez
admitted in the Iran-contra hearings, he called North to tell him
"it was a go."  In his testimony, Rodriguez neglected to say that
he also placed a call to Gregg that day, but Gregg's own phone
logs, obtained in a 1988 lawsuit, confirm that he did.  They also
reflect a call from North, suggesting that everybody with a stake
in Secord's new setup was now gabbing openly about it.

Over the next few weeks, Secord and company geared up for their
first major supply run.  And in late November, North, now heavily
precoccupied with Iran arms shipments as well, sidetracked them
by accepting their help in completing a botched Israeli weapons
delivery to Iran.

Bush later denied any knowledge of this, but only a couple of
days after Secord helped make good on the delivery, the Vice-
President sent a Thanksgiving note to North commending him for
his "tireless work with the hostage thing and Central America".

Some see this note, which was glossed over at the Iran-contra
hearings, as definitive proof of Bush's full complicity in the
scandal.  But an even stronger clue might be found in the
seemingly strange US reaction to the crash of an American
aircraft near Gander, Newfoundland, two weeks later.  According to
the Canadian Air Safety Board, it was ice on the wings that
caused the downing of the chartered DC-8 on December 12.
Officially, the ill-fated 248 Americans soldiers on board were
simply heading home for the holidays.  Nobody in the Pentagon
even hinted that some might have been secret operatives or that
the charter company, Arrow Air, might have been doing anything
more than routine transport work.

Exhaustive research strongly suggests, however, that at least 20
of the crash victims were US commandos returning from a
counterterror mission in the Middle East and that Arrow Air was
no run-of-the-mill charter, but an important part of the contra
supply network and the arms shuttle to Iran.  In little-noticed
Iran-contra testimony, one of Secord's associates admitted the
company's involvement in both operations.

Given the airline's covert accounts, a prompt and thorough
inquiry into the Gander crash might have thrust Iran-contra into
the headlines a year before it surfaced.  Even now the tragedy
could come back to haunt Bush.  As Vice-President, he headed up
Reagan's counterterror task force and was responsible for
monitoring operations of the sort allegedly undertaken by the
commandos on the flight.  To imagine that he wasn't fully briefed
on the circumstances surrounding their death, or the reported
sensitivity of the carrier's mission, is to give him no credit at
all.  Indeed, chances are that the tragedy was whitewashed and
hushed-up precisely because so much was at stake.

Even before the Gander crash slipped from the headlines, another
piece of the contra supply network suddenly came unhinged, and
Bush again found himself on the diplomatic hustings, handling
repair work.  The crisis arose in late 1985 when Jose Azcona Hoyo
was elected to replace Cordova as president of Honduras.  Lest
the new regime renege on the deal the US had levered out of its
predecessor the previous spring, Bush was hustled off to
Tegucigalpa the following January for another round of "Let's
Make a Deal".

In a recently released notebook entry, North keys the trip to a
new "third country solicitation" plan, and according to the
stipulation presented at his trial, the State Department wrote
Bush's script for him, framing it as a good cop/bad cop scenario
in which he was to play the smooth pitchman while his traveling
companion, Admiral Poindexter, muscled Azcona privately.

The script apparently played out as written.  Within weeks Azcona
approved a trial supply delivery to the contras, and the
administration promptly repaid him with a security-assistance
package worth $20 million, another of its quid pro quos.

With Bush again becoming personally embroiled in contrs support,
his staff got more involved as well.  In January 1986 Gregg's
newly appointed deputy, Colonel Sam Watson, packed himself off to
Honduras and El Salvador to survey supply bases and air fields
firsthand. Inexplicably, Iran-contra investigators missed the
significance of this field trip, and only after a previously
undisclosed Watson memo surfaced in a 1988 lawsuit did anyone
realized that here was further proof of the Vice-President's own
prevarication.

Written in February, shortly after Watson's return, the memo
summarizes the very logistic headaches supposedly unknown to Bush
at the time, and bears some scrawled marginalia from Gregg-
"Rodriguez agrees with this", which belie his claim that he and
his old friend never discussed the contras supply problems before
August of that year.

Equally damning are two other documents generated by Gregg's
staff a few weeks later.  Both are "scheduling memos" written in
anticipation of a May 1 meeting between Bush and Rodriguez, and
both list "resupply of the contras" among the topics to be
discussed.  When questioned about these now famous at the Iran-
Contra hearings, Rodriguez insisted that El Salvador, not the
contras, was the only thing he'd broached with the Vice-
President, and in later testimony before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Gregg attempted to cast the "resupply"
notation as a garbled reference to some sort of operation
involving "resupply of the copters" which Rodriguez had been
flying against Salvadoran rebels.

Giving everyone a very generous benefit of the doubt, he and
Rodriguez may have been telling the truth.  But there is now
plenty else on record to indicate that by early summer 1986,
Rodriguez's contra connection, and indeed his increasingly
troubled relationship with Secord, were the talk of Bush's
office.  Watson's own diaries, obtained during the Iran-contra
hearings, reflect an overriding preoccupation with such problems.
One entry dated July 29 recounts a White House staff meeting at
which Rodriguez was accused of having "shut down pilots
resupply".  Three days later Watson noted a complaint from North
that "F[elix] screwed up s[outhern] front", a reference to he
contra operation in Costa Rica.

In his recent autobiography, Rodriguez provides a gloss on all
this, admitting that in his pique over Secord's inefficiency and
alleged money-grubbing, he increasingly asserted control over the
"private" supply shuttle.  His main worry, apparently, was that
Secord would commandeer the air fleet and attempt to sell it to
the CIA for personal profit once congressional restrictions on
contra aid eased.  Always the crusader, Rodriguez wanted to
ensure that the contras got their fair share.

Had the Iran-contra committees questioned Rodriguez about
Watson's notebooks, they might have discovered that Bush's staff
knew far more far earlier than anyone was ready to admit.  But
again they pulled their punches, allowing both Rodriguez and
Gregg to go on pretending that it was not until early August,
after the congressional ban was loosened, that any of Bush's men
learned of the Rodriguez-Secord partnership.

If you are to believe Bush's official chronology, the moment of
revelation came on August 8, when Rodriguez sailed into Gregg's
office to blow the whistle on Secord.  Until then, supposedly,
Gregg hadn't realized that Secord and North were running a
private supply shuttle for the contras.

The notes Gregg took during this session do not read, however,
like the jottings of a man caught by surprise.  They plod
indifferently through Rodriguez's revelations, as if they were no
news at all, and contain a stunningly provocative phrase- "a swap
of weapons for $ was arranged to get aid for the contras", that
suggests insight into subtleties ranging well beyond Rodriguez's
problems with Secord.

Rodriguez told Iran-contra investigators that he couldn't
remember mentioning a "swap" to Gregg, and when Gregg was asked
by a reporter if he might have been referring to the fabled
"diversion" of Iran arms profits to the contras, he countered
that he'd known nothing about it.  Nobody on the investigating
committees bothered to ask him whether the swap reference might
refer to something else, like the aid-for-arms deals the
administration had struck with Israel, Honduras, Guatemala, and
El Salvador.  Nor was he pressed to explain why, after hearing
Rodriguez out, he hadn't alerted Bush himself.  His flippant
explanation, "It was a very murky business", left his
congressional inquisitors nodding dumbly in agreement.

Two months later, on October 5, a Sandinista gunner shot one of
Secord's planes out of the sky over Nicaragua, thus ending the
contra supply operation once and for all.  Appropriately,
Rodriguez placed the first distress call to Watson, and soon
Eugene Hasenfus, the lone surviving crew member, announced from a
jail cell in Managua that Rodriguez had honchoed the supply
effort with Bush's knowledge.

Based on North's notebooks, the administration's first reaction
was to look for a scapegoat.  On November 25, according to a
recently released entry, Poindexter apparently proposed that Bush
contact the Israelis and try to persuade them to accept blame for
the profits-diversion scheme.  There is no evidence that Bush
followed through on this idea.  But the very fact that Bush was
seen as the logical go-between lends weight to Brenneke's claim
of long-standing collaboration between the Vice-President's
office and Jerusalem.

With Bush so personally vulnerable to fallout from Contragate, he
and his staff immediately launched a damage-control gambit of
their own.  In mid-December, Gregg helped prepare the chronology
that distanced Bush from every facet of the secret war, and as
time passed, this gifted intelligence officer increasingly
mortgaged his own credibility to save his boss.  During the 1989
congressional hearings on his ambassadorial appointment to South
Korea, Gregg was still dodging so many questions about Iran-
contra that even a staunch Republican supporter confessed that
some of his testimony "strains belief".

As for Bush himself, he simply brazened it out, initially
rebuffing inconvenient questions, and finally seeking shelter
behind the Iran-contras committees concluding report, which
didn't so much clear him of wrongdoing as ignore him.  During the
North trial last year, as the trade-off deals he'd negotiated
with Honduras came to light for the first time, he continued to
stonewall, declaring unblushingly, "There was no quid pro quo".
In the end Bush emerged from this final tremor with nary a
scratch, Gregg got his ambassadorial posting, and Richard
Brenneke just barely escaped a jail sentence.

For all of Bush's dilligence in constructing a cover-up, however,
he couldn't have done it without Congress's help.  During the
Iran-contra hearings, probers acquiesced in unnecessary time
constraints and deliberately ignored certain leads out of concern
for protecting Israel and other allies.  There is also evidence,
to be found in North's notebook, that some of them may have been
guilty of outright collusion with the White House.  The clue
appears in a newly declassified entry written on March 4, 1985,
just before Bush's first trip to Honduras.

On that date, according to North's shorthand, Robert McFarlane
briefed four congressmen, including Henry Hyde and Bill McCollum,
on the emerging plan to seek "third-country support" for the
contras, a plan which, as North described it, called explicitly
for "centering the activity in the White House".  Later, as
members of the Iran-contra panels, Hyde and McCollum would become
the administration's most vocal cheerleaders, happily joining
fellow Republicans in writing a minority report that got Bush off
the hook.  Not only did the report find the Vice-President
ignorant of the supply effort, it flatly dismissed the
possibility "that any quid pro quo was sought or received in
return for any third-country contribution to the Resistance".  In
view of Hyde's and McCollum's newly revealed inside knowledge,
it's extraordinary that Bush still blithely cites these
conclusions as proof of his innocence.

Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh once speculated
that Irangate was really about the skewing of our constitutional
checks and balances through imperial sleight of hand.  It is one
thing, he suggested, for a White House official to claim
"executive privilege" when he doesn't want to tell Congress about
a secret policy.  That puts lawmakers on notice and triggers
healthy debate.  But if the White House tries to keep Congress
out of the decision-making process by deliberately hiding the
truth, he added, the scales are thrown dangerously out of kilter.

For all its faults, the Iran-contra investigation left most
Americans feeling that the scales had been upset and that Reagan
himself deserved much of the blame.  But no one seemed to be able
to fix Bush's responsibility because the heart of the scandal,
the secret horse-trading on the contras' behalf, remained hidden.

Now, with this last secret blown, a new George Bush stands
exposed.  And what's most striking about him is that he's much
more than we ever suspected.  He emerges not merely as Reagan's
equal in subterfuge, but as his master in action, someone who
actually helped execute a dirty-tricks scheme to hijack
Congress's prerogatives.  For make no mistake:  When Bush
traveled to Central America in 1985 and 1986 to barter secretly
for contra support, he was pursuing a tried-and-true, covert-
action formula borrowed from his CIA days- the mobilization of
cutouts to provide the government deniability.  Only this time,
the object wasn't to keep some hostile foreign power in the dark,
but all of us.