As Lieut. Colonel Oliver North spun out his story with a dazzling display of charm, guile and unbridled self-righteousness during his long-awaited appearance in the Iran-contra hearings, he portrayed himself as a dutiful junior officer, ever willing to "salute smartly and charge up the hill" at any order from his superiors. Yet the bemedaled Marine refused to fall on his sword and take full blame for the scandal that has wounded his Commander in Chief. Although he confessed candidly -- and defiantly -- to blatant lies and deceptions, North also threw what even he called "Ollie North's dragnet" over high officials of the Administration he had served. North's net fell only a carefully calculated distance short of the Oval Office.
Alternately subdued, passionate, angry and sarcastic, the onetime National Security Council aide testified that he had expected to "be dropped like a hot rock when it all came down." He had, indeed, been fired by President Reagan last Nov. 25, after Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed that the profits from U.S. weapons sold secretly to Iran had been used to send military supplies to the contras fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. But North declared, "I never in my wildest dreams or nightmares envisioned that we would end up with criminal charges." Now faced with that dire possibility through the investigation of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, North made it clear that he had rebelled against his self-described role as the Administration's appointed "fall guy." He would go, all right, but not alone.
Knocking down his previous story that he had been on such chummy terms with the President as to joke with him about the delicious irony of sending the Ayatullah's money to the contras, the Marine placed a proper bureaucratic distance between himself and the top boss. (This wisecrack, North conceded, had been uttered out of the President's hearing as he and his superior, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, left a White House meeting.) North said he had never even discussed his far-flung secret operations one-on-one with the President. But, he insisted, "I assumed that the President was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved."
North had some basis for his assumption. He claimed he had sent not one but five memos "up the line" to Poindexter seeking presidential approval to divert the Iran arms proceeds to the contras. North went ahead and directed the diversion after each of three U.S. sales to the Iranians because Poindexter never told him that his proposals had been disapproved. He said he had "no recollection" of ever seeing Reagan's initials or check of approval on any returned document. He had shredded all but one of his copies and, incredibly, could not remember even looking to see if they bore approvals. It was the discovery on Nov. 22 of the one copy North had missed that hastened Meese's bombshell disclosure of the diversion three days later.