Critics question Gates' role in Iran-Contra scandal

Soon after the Sandinistas downed an arms-laden plane over Nicaragua, Robert M. Gates met privately with three other senior CIA officials to decide what they would tell Congress as it investigated whether the secret mission violated a U.S. ban on military aid to the right-wing insurgents seeking to topple the Marxist government.

That meeting was the subject of an inquiry by Iran-Contra prosecutors when they considered indicting Gates over allegations that he deceived Congress about the illegal program.

Questions about whether Gates told the truth about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal 20 years ago may surface again during a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday on his recent nomination by President Bush to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

Gates' responses may not threaten his nomination after all these years. But they could shed light on his credibility — a highly sensitive issue that has dogged the White House and Rumsfeld because of perceptions that they have misled the public about the rationale for going to war in Iraq and how they intend to prevail.

In its day, the Iran-Contra scandal, which engulfed the Reagan-era White House when President Bush's father was vice president, had all the intrigue of a spy novel. Some critics have always wondered whether Gates — one of the scandal's few political survivors — disclosed all he knew about the illicit mission to arm the rightist faction, called the Contras, that sought to overthrow the Marxist government controlled by the Sandinistas, who were inspired by the late Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto Sandino.

A final Iran-Contra report by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh focused on one private meeting involving Gates, then the CIA deputy director under William Casey.

That meeting — shortly after the Oct. 5, 1986 downing of the Contra plane — preceded a call days later by a Contra official to The Miami Herald and other newspapers to falsely claim responsibility for the plane, which belonged to a then-secret Contra re-supply network run by National Security Council aide Oliver North.

Gates maintained that he knew nothing about the illegal program and North's role in it until Nov. 25, 1986. That is when then-Attorney General Edwin Meese disclosed that profits earned from covert weapons sales to the Iranian government — in return for the release of American hostages — were being used to fund the Contra forces.

The diversion of the Iranian profits was among the ways that some Reagan administration officials used to circumvent the Boland Amendment, which barred U.S. military aid to the Contras — forces initially funded by the CIA.