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Bush claims to have answered all questions about the Iran deals, except for those regarding the private advice he gave the President. But it is what Bush says, not what he refuses to say, that is most troubling. His claim that he never figured out that the Iran deals were an arms-for-hostages swap is undercut by his admission that he was motivated by an understandable concern for Hostage William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who was being tortured by his captors. By portraying himself as incidental to one of Reagan's most sensitive foreign initiatives, he reveals either a worrisome detachment from critical issues or an unwillingness to assert his convictions.
The Vice President says he knew even less about the secret contra supply operation run by Oliver North. Yet on two occasions Bush and Donald Gregg, his national security adviser, met with Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA agent who coordinated air drops to the contras from El Salvador. All three men insist the contras were never discussed. But a memo outlining the agenda for a May 1986 meeting included the topic "Resupply of the contras." During the summer of 1986, Rodriguez complained to Gregg that North's men were skimming profits from the supply effort. When one of the supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua in October, leading to the capture of American Eugene Hasenfus, Rodriguez immediately alerted Gregg's office. Gregg says he never told Bush these details because he didn't consider the information to be "vicepresidential." As with the Iranian arms deals, such claims that Bush was in the dark are as damning as the suspicion that he knew what was going on.