(4 of 7)
North's unwelcome embrace also took in Meese, who had sat silent at a White House meeting on Nov. 20 while Casey, Poindexter and North proposed a false story that no U.S. Government officials had been aware the previous year that Israel had shipped Hawk missiles to Iran with the help of the CIA and the NSC staff. Meese claims that he did not learn of the Hawk sale until last November, but North asserted that the Attorney General knew of it the year before. In November 1985, North testified, he saw a signed copy of a now missing presidential finding that retroactively authorized U.S. participation in the sale. The Attorney General usually reviews such findings. A Justice Department spokesman denied again last week that Meese had ever been involved in the Hawk sale.
Deflecting the tough questions of the committee lawyers with lengthy answers and some deft jabs ("Don't get angry, counsel. I'm going to answer your question"), the combative North brazenly defended many of his actions. He even assailed members of Congress for putting him through what he called "this ordeal." Said North: "I don't mind telling you that I'm angry at what you have attempted to do to me and my family."
Rather than apologize for lying to congressional committees about his role in the contra military effort, North boasted, "I didn't want to show Congress a single word on this whole thing." Said he: "Lying does not come easy to me. But we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies." Yet North seemed caught in a contradiction between this assertion and his insistence that his support for the Nicaraguan rebels was always in full compliance with the law.
North's shredding of documents was so brazen that one new revelation of this activity prompted even the committees' toughest interrogator, Senate Chief Counsel Arthur Liman, to sit back amid laughter and say, "I want to hear more about it. Go ahead." North claimed that even as three aides from the Attorney General's office pored over his Iran files on the day they found the lone diversion memo, he had walked right past them with other papers and fed them into his office shredder, which they could hear grinding away. Didn't anyone, asked Liman, say, "Stop . . . What are you doing?" Replied North with a grin: "They were working on their projects. I was working on mine." (The Justice Department later denied North's account.)
Some of North's deceptions were neither humorous nor motivated by lofty concerns about saving anything but his own skin. He admitted taking "hundreds of pages" of papers and many of his spiral-bound notebooks out of secure NSC offices to his home in suburban Great Falls, Va. Noting that North had complained about the lack of security at his house, Liman asked why he would do this. Back came the up-front answer: "To protect myself."