(2 of 2)
But Shackley denies any wrongdoing in the Iran-contra affair. "I have had nothing to do with what Secord has chosen to call 'the enterprise,' " Shackley told TIME last week. "I have had nothing to do with North." Nonetheless, North's projects freely used private operators. Secord, for example, retained the services of American National Management Corp. to fly supplies to the contras in Nicaragua. That company was founded and run by Colonel Richard Gadd, a retired Air Force cargo-plane pilot who was a longtime associate of Secord's. Gadd had also worked for the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, which hired him in 1983 to transport helicopter pilots to Barbados prior to the invasion of Grenada.
The Grenada invasion was the occasion for North's involvement with a particularly amateurish group of private agents. Senate investigators have learned that North used a Macy's department store maintenance engineer named Kevin Kattke in covert operations in Grenada.
Kattke, 38, a self-described anti-Communist and American patriot, had befriended a band of Grenadian exiles plotting to overthrow the leftist regime of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Seeking help in planning a coup, Kattke called on retired Army Colonel George Morton, an employee of the Vinnell Corp. in Washington, which for years has supplied military special training to Saudi Arabia. According to Kattke, Morton turned him over to Gadd, who was then working for Vinnell. But Kattke's coup plans were aborted when the Prime Minister was killed by his rivals in the government. When North began planning his own operation to support a possible U.S. invasion to oust Bishop's successors, he turned to Kattke's group for help.
Before the Oct. 25, 1983, invasion, North ordered Kattke to organize a public protest in New York City demanding the removal of the hard-line Marxist government in Grenada. North also asked Kattke to have his Grenadian contacts instigate riots on the island as a diversion. Kattke tried, also at North's request, to obtain the names of the 650 American students at St. George's | University School of Medicine in Grenada, which had its home offices on Long Island. The safety of the students was one of the ostensible reasons for the U.S. intervention.
Kattke has told Senate investigators that he failed in all three tasks North had given him, but he did provide useful intelligence about conditions on the island. After the invasion, North sent Kattke to Grenada as his personal emissary. When plans to use a Coast Guard boat's secure radio to contact North fell through, Kattke persuaded State Department officials on the island to send his messages to North in cipher on protected lines.
Nor is Kattke through with the world of international diplomacy. His latest project: a plan to unify factions in Iran.