Disinformation

excerpted from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

p126

Editors don't make any bones about "the presidential factor." "We've got to cover what the President says and does," is the common refrain. But what happens when the President and his aides routinely lie as they try to sell their policies to the American public? Then the presidential factor is a recipe for distortion.

"Lying to the press goes back to the beginning of the republic," says David Wise, a former New York Herald Tribune editor who has authored a number of books on the American espionage establishment. But institutional Iying took on a new dimension at the outset of the Cold War, as clandestine operations began to multiply like rabbits. The proliferation of covert actions required a plenitude of cover stories-and cover stories, lest we forget, are lies. "It used to be that policies were framed to fit events," Wise remarked in a 1987 interview about Reagan-era disinformation. "Now events are shaped and manipulated to fit policies."

Over the years, reporters have had to contend with a steady barrage of deceptions, half-truths and blatant falsehoods emanating from the White House. This deliberate perversion of the truth calls into question the fundamental character of a democratic society, which is supposed to be based on the consent of the governed. An ill-informed public can't hold officials accountable for their policies.

"Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed," said I.F. Stone. But the Reagan era was unprecedented in that it marked the first time government officials came right out and said that a president's numerous misstatements of fact and his inability to grasp detail didn't really matter. "We've been dealing with...an administration that freely states-and stated early-that literal truth was not a concern," said Bill Kovach when he was Washington news editor of the New York Times.

U.S. officials openly flaunted their disregard for the facts during the 1980s. "You can say anything you want in a debate and 80 million people hear it," George Bush's press secretary stated shortly after the vice presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro in October 1984. "If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what? Maybe 200 people read it."

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Austrian scholar Karl Kraus' dictum: "How is the world ruled and led into war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those lies when they see them in print."

p128
Following the lead of U.S. officials, mass media depicted the Soviet Union as the prime mover of a worldwide terrorist network that included Libyan leader Moammar Qadaffi as a key operative. The demonizing of Qadaffi began in earnest shortly after Reagan took office. First came the lurid tales (based on "unnamed intelligence sources") of Libyan hit squads stalking President Reagan. Later came the Berlin disco bombing, which killed two people, including an American serviceman, and injured 200 in April 1986. Citing "irrefutable evidence" that Qadaffi was behind the bombing, Reagan ordered an air attack against Libya a week later. It was, as Noam Chomsky observed, the first air raid in history geared to preempt coverage on 7:00 p.m. prime-time news in the U.S.

As it turned out, the so-called "irrefutable evidence" was hardly airtight. Manfred Ganshow, chief of the Berlin Staatsschutz and head of the 100-person team which investigated the disco bombing, told Stars and Stripes, a publication servicing the U.S. armed forces, three weeks after the incident: "[I have] no more evidence that Libya was connected to the bombing than I had two days after the act. Which is none." This, however, did not dissuade the American media, whose rush to judgment was as dramatic as Reagan's rise in the popularity polls following the Libya raid. A New York Times editorial claimed that proof was "laid out clearly to the public... Even the most scrupulous citizens can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya."

Months later, West German authorities concluded that if any country was behind the Berlin disco bombing, it was Syria, not Libya. But that hardly seemed to matter as U.S. news media continued to blame the incident on Qadaffi. Soon another round of stories appeared, warning of new plots by Libya. Replete with 42 references to unnamed U.S. officials, a Wall Street Journal article by John Walcott and Gerald F. Seib disclosed that Qadaffi was planning more terrorism. This time the unnamed source turned out to be National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who was promoting what Newsweek later called a "disinformation program" aimed at destabilizing the Libyan government. The propaganda operation was outlined in a three-page memo, dated August 14, 1986, from Poindexter to President Reagan.

When details of the disinformation plot were leaked to the U.S. press, Secretary of State George Schultz justified the deception by quoting Winston Churchill: "In time of war, the truth is so precious it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies." The Reagan administration, Shultz said, was "pretty darn close" to being at war with Libya. Reporters and editors cried foul, expressing righteous indignation about being misled by the U.S. government-as if they had suddenly discovered something new!

Indeed, journalists should have known that the Reagan administration was Iying about Libya. Five years prior to the Poindexter revelations, Newsweek reported on a CIA-run "disinformation program designed to embarrass Qadaffi," along with covert operations to overthrow and perhaps assassinate him.

U.S. actions-rhetorical and military-against Libya, and "counter-terrorist" rhetoric in general, were geared largely toward converting public anxiety over anti-Western political violence into support for an aggressive American foreign policy and increased intervention in the Third World. Exaggerating the threat of external demons in order to whip up nationalist hysteria at home was nothing new in American history. By focusing on Libya, the Reagan administration picked a fight it knew it could win. Seen in this context, the bombing of Libya was as much salutary medicine for Vietnam syndrome jitters as it was a plot to kill Qadaffi.

Cloaked in fiction

Even when lies by the government are exposed, U.S. reporters dutifully return to the same poisoned well, seeking information from official sources that have been publicly discredited. Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams appeared frequently as a guest on Nightline and other TV news shows, despite his admission that he intentionally misled Congress regarding U.S. policy in Central America. Abrams' confession aroused little skepticism among journalists as to whether he could be trusted as a news source. Never once did Ted Koppel, who fancies himself a tough interviewer, ask Abrams: "Why, given your record of deceit, should we believe anything you say about Nicaragua?"

A cub reporter would surely grow skeptical about a courtroom defendant who continually changed alibis. Yet as soon as Reagan took office, veteran journalists pandered to his Nicaragua obsession, hardly blinking at the everchanging explanations for why it was necessary to support the contras. First it was merely to "interdict" weapons allegedly flowing from Nicaragua to Salvadoran leftists. Next it was to force the Sandinistas to enact "democratic reforms," when all along the real motive should have been obvious-to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and destroy the popular revolution that swept the Sandinistas into power in 1979.

If journalists weren't so busy fixating on a White House chimera, they might have noticed that the weapons were actually moving in the opposite direction-from CIA-run air bases in El Salvador to the Nicaraguan contras. The Iran-contra scandal exposed Reagan's inner circle as a coterie of chronic dissemblers and schemers, revealing "a wholesale policy of secrecy shrouded in lies, of passion cloaked in fiction and deception," as Bill Moyers put it in an exceptional PBS report, "The Secret Government-The Constitution in Crisis."

Lt. Col. Oliver North, Elliott Abrams and other U.S. officials lied repeatedly as they sought to give credence to the absurd notion that Nicaragua, an impoverished country of three million, with no navy or air force to speak of, posed a serious threat to the security of the United States. The anti-Sandinista propaganda offensive included oft-repeated allegations of Nicaraguan complicity with Khomeini's Iran-an ironic charge given that North and the CIA were secretly supplying weapons to Iran at the time. Such deliberate falsifications were part of a protracted disinformation campaign designed to manufacture a "Nicaraguan threat."

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The much-ballyhooed conclusion that journalists are of a predominantly leftish bent failed to square with data compiled by researchers without a strongly conservative agenda. A Brookings Institution study, for instance, found that 58 percent of Washington journalists identified themselves as either "conservative" or "middle of the road."

A 1985 Los Angeles Times survey, comparing 3,000 journalists to 3,000 members of the general public, found that journalists were more conservative when asked if the government should act to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Fifty-five percent of the general public supported such measures, compared to only 50 percent of the "news staff" and 37 percent of the editors.

But all the heated number-crunching may be much ado about little. The private opinions of media workers are much less important than the end products. Mark Hertsgaard has astutely pinpointed "the deeper flaw in the liberal-press thesis"-"it completely ignored those whom journalists worked for. Reporters could be as liberal as they wished and it would not change what news they were allowed to report or how they could report it. America's major news organizations were owned and controlled by some of the largest and richest corporations in the United States. These firms were in turn owned and managed by individuals whose politics were, in general, anything but liberal. Why would they employ journalists who consistently covered the news in ways they did not like?"

If there's a political tilt to news coverage, it derives principally from mass media owners and managers, not beat reporters. "Admittedly," said sociologist Herbert Gans, "some journalists have strong personal beliefs and also the position or power to express them in news stories, but they are most often editors; and editors, like producers in television, have been shown to be more conservative than their news staffs." To the extent that personal opinions influence news content, Gans added, "they are most often the beliefs of the President of the United States and other high federal, state and local officials, since they dominate the news."

However baseless, accusations by conservatives that the media lean left have made many journalists compensate by tilting in the other direction. In this sense, the liberal media canard has been effective as a pre-emptive club, brandished to encourage self-censorship on the part of reporters who "bend over backwards not to seem at all critical of Republicans," commented Mark Crispin Miller. "Eager to evince his 'objectivity,' the edgy liberal reporter ends up just as useful to the right as any ultra-rightist hack."

And there are plenty of those, dominating America's highest-profile forums for political commentary on television and newspaper editorial pages. "In terms of the syndicated columnists, if there is an ideological bias, it's more and more to the right," President Reagan's media point man David Gergen declared in a 1981 interview. As the decade wore on, the imbalance grew more extreme.

The syndicated likes of George Will, Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley and John McLaughlin achieved monotonous visibility on national TV, thanks to producers casting nets wide for right-wing pundits. As a tedious ritual they were paired with bland centrists, so that supposed "debates" often amounted to center-right discussions-on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Gergen with the Washington Post's charmingly mild Mark Shields; on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley, Will with the network's stylized but politically tepid Sam Donaldson; on CNN's Crossfire, Buchanan or Novak with somnolent ex-CIA-exec Tom Braden. (In late 1989, Braden yielded his seat "on the left" to Michael Kinsley of the New Republic magazine, but this didn't make the show any less unbalanced. "Buchanan is much further to the right than I am to the left," Kinsley acknowledged. As Howard Rosenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Crossfire should at least get the labeling right: Pat Buchanan from the far right and Michael Kinsley from slightly left of center.")

In early 1989, columnist Jack Newfield counted eight popular political opinion talk shows on national television. "These shows all have certifiably right-wing hosts and moderators," wrote Newfield. "This is not balance. This is ideological imbalance that approaches a conservative monopoly... Buchanan, who calls AIDS a punishment from God for sin, and campaigns against the prosecution of Nazi war criminals hiding in America, is about as far right as you can get."

A fixture on CNN, and often made welcome on the biggest TV networks, Buchanan has flaunted his admiration for prominent fascists past and present, like the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (who came to power allied with Hitler) and Chile's bloody ruler Augusto Pinochet. "A soldier-patriot like Franco, General Pinochet saved his country from an elected Marxist who was steering Chile into Castroism," Buchanan effused in a September 1989 column, going on to defend the apartheid regime in South Africa: "The Boer Republic is the only viable economy in Africa. Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy with sanctions?"

Sharing much of the remaining op-ed space are others from the hard right, including former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; William Safire (like Buchanan, an ex-speechwriter for the Nixon-Agnew team); erstwhile segregationist James J. Kilpatrick; Charles Krauthammer; former NBC News correspondent and Moral Majority vice president Cal Thomas; neo-conservative prophet Norman Podhoretz, and Ray Price (yet another Nixon speechwriter). Aside from a handful of left-leaning liberals, most of the other op-ed mainstays are establishment-tied middle-roaders such as Flora Lewis, David Broder, Jeff Greenfield, Georgie Anne Geyer, and Meg Greenfield.

p145
By 1987, religious broadcasting had become a $2 billion a year industry, with more than 200 full-time Christian TV stations and 1,000 full-time Christian radio stations. This means that evangelical Christians control about 14 percent of the television stations operating in the U.S. and 10 percent of the radio stations, which bombard the American public with a conservative theo-political message. TV ministries continue to thrive, despite the widely publicized preacher sex and money scandals of the late 1980s.

Some journalists may reject the mythology about liberal prejudice, but when addressing what is going on they're prone to denial. Instead of identifying the thumbs on news-media scales, the preference is to call the whole contraption neutral. "Everybody talks about media biases to the right or the left," syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman pooh-poohed in 1989. "The real media bias is against complexity, which is usually terminated with the words: 'I'm sorry, we're out of time." Of course, electronic news media are surface-skimming operations. Views that seriously challenge the status quo, however, have few occasions to be interrupted, since they're so rarely heard at all.

p147
Shadowboxing in Washington

When Reagan became President in 1981, there was a high degree of consensus within America's corporate and political elites about domestic and foreign policy. Abdicating the role of a real opposition party, Democratic leaders in Congress were more eager to put on a show than put up a fight.

Sometimes the media used the passivity of the Democrats to justify their own. Either way, as Walter Karp put it, "the private story behind every major non-story during the Reagan administration was the Democrats' tacit alliance with Reagan."

It was a convenient arrangement for each of the three principals. The Reagan administration got credit for superb political smarts, and-after its nadir, the unraveling of the Iran-contra scandal-admirable resiliency. ("Howard Baker restored order to the White House," etc.) The Democrats scored points for slugging it out with the Reaganites. And the media reported the shadowboxing as a brawl instead of a contest that kept being thrown before it ever got bloody.

"For eight years the Democratic opposition had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless President with an appalling appetite for private power," Karp wrote. "That was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics of the Democratic party into news. Slavishly in thrall to the powerful, incapable of enlightening the ruled without the consent of the rulers, the working press, the 'star' reporters, the pundits, the sages, the columnists passed on to us, instead, the Democrats' mendacious drivel about the President's 'Teflon shield.' For eight years, we saw the effects of a bipartisan political class in action, but the press did not show us that political class acting, exercising its collective power, making things happen, contriving the appearances that were reported as news."

One of the chronically contrived appearances was President Reagan's great popularity-phenomenal only in that it was a distortion. In April 1989, the New York Times reminded readers that Reagan was "one of the most popular Presidents in American history." Authoritative, but false-as University of Massachusetts political science professor Thomas Ferguson promptly documented for the umpteenth time. "It is tiresome," he wrote in the Nation magazine, "always to be pointing out that this ever-popular and seemingly indestructible refrain monumentally distorts the truth. But it does." The past half-century of polling data from Gallup Report showed Reagan's average public approval rating while in office (52 percent) to be lower than Presidents Johnson (54 percent), Kennedy (70 percent), Eisenhower (66 percent), and Roosevelt (68 percent). What's more, Reagan barely bested his three immediate predecessors-Carter (47 percent), Ford (46 percent) and Nixon (48 percent). Of the last nine Presidents, Reagan's approval ranking was a mediocre fifth.

But the Reagan popularity myth was extremely useful for all concerned. It enhanced the administration's power. It alibied the congressional Democrats' ineffectual pseudo-opposition. And it left the media-unencumbered by much authentic political conflict-free to talk about the success of the mirage on stage instead of the motives and methods of those orchestrating from the wings. "It was a win-win situation," recalled Jeff Cohen of FAIR.

"First, Reagan wins by manipulating the media and the public, then he wins by getting laudatory stories out of the media about how brilliantly he manipulates the media and the public."

In fact there was plenty of vigorous opposition to the Reagan administration, but little of it came via Capitol Hill. It was strongest at the grassroots, in a diversity of American communities, wild and woolly areas that national political reporters had little patience-or coverage-for, especially when propounded views didn't fit within the "two sides" put forward by news operations based in Washington and New York. Reagan wasn't very popular among the millions of hungry and homeless, the unemployed, racial minorities, the bankrupt farmers, the struggling single mothers or the union members forced to accept cuts in wages and benefits.

But he was popular among journalists. Sam Donaldson, nurturing his hold-on-there image as one tough inquisitor around the White House, found the commander-in-chief simply charming. "I'm gonna admit something," Donaldson said during Reagan's first term. "He's a hard President to cover for most reporters, because he is such an amiable, warm, human being." The business and financial community-especially media owners and military contractors-were even more enthused about Mr. Nice Guy in the White House, whose policies catered to the interests of corporate America.

Of course, Reaganomics had a distinct downside, as Mark Hertsgaard noted in his book On Bended Knee-"it deprived the many while subsidizing the few." But most of the press didn't guffaw when Reagan insisted that social spending could be slashed without hurting the poor, or that taxes could be cut and the military budget jacked up without incurring a huge deficit. When Congress approved Reagan's tax package in 1981, major news media skirted an obvious point: it constituted one of the most phenomenal giveaways to big corporations and wealthy individuals in American history.

Teflon journalism

Much of the Reagan program was directly at odds with popular sentiment. But the President's aides figured they could overcome this problem if the press adopted the Reagan agenda as its own. The goal was not simply to neutralize the press but to turn it into a government asset. Toward this end, a team of public relations experts utilized a deft combination of news management techniques. They played emotionally on patriotic themes ("America is Back"), repeating the same message in a variety of forms as often as possible. The way issues were presented took precedence over substance, as the White House served up pre-masticated news bites and photo opportunities. Mass media bit the bait, while the President himself remained largely off limits to reporters. Thus on television, we caught glimpses of Reagan visiting a senior citizen center or doing a cameo at the International Games for the Disabled, but journalists never got close enough to ask him why he cut programs for the elderly and the handicapped.

Jeff Gralnick, executive producer of ABC World News Tonight, commented on the media's willingness to play by Reagan's rules. "It's my job to take the news as they choose to give it to us," he told Hertsgaard. "The evening news telecast is not supposed to be the watchdog on the government. It never was, never will be. We are a national front page, five days a week."

When journalists tried to do some serious reporting about Reagan, they often got flak from management. CBS News executives pressured White House correspondent Lesley Stahl to tone down what they viewed as overly negative stories, especially about the economy. As Stahl recounted, "No one said to me, 'We're being more positive, we're out to be less shrill,' if you will. When occasionally a piece would have a sharply critical close, I found it coming back changed, with editorial suggestions that took the hard edge off the piece." For the most part, critical stories that saw the light of day were scattered, one-shot affairs and, therefore, basically innocuous, as far as the White House was concerned.

On the whole, Reagan's people were quite pleased by the media coverage the President received. "I think a lot of the Teflon came because the press was holding back," said David Gergen, White House communications director during Reagan's first term. "I don't think they wanted to go after him that toughly." Reagan aide Michael Deaver felt the same way. In his memoirs, Deaver wrote that prior to the Iran-contra scandal, "Ronald Reagan enjoyed the most generous treatment by the press of any President in the postwar era. He knew it, and liked the distinction."

Soft treatment of the President was most evident at his rare news conferences, when Reagan stumbled along without the help of a teleprompter. After a while, reporters stopped trying to correct his legendary gaffes and inane statements. Journalists avoided asking difficult questions, lest they appear partisan. Following a press conference in June 1986, a White House aide remarked that the media treated Reagan "almost reverentially." Indeed, those reporters who marveled at the Teflon President were often the same ones who coated and protected him.

Mass media fawning over Reagan reached a height during Fourth of July festivities in 1986. A Time magazine cover story titled "Yankee Doodle Magic"-featuring a beaming Reagan haloed by fireworks-called him "one of the strongest leaders of the 20th century...who has restored the authority of the presidency." "People tend to trust him," Time asserted, "even if they utterly disagree with his principles." Two months later, in a cover story praising his hands-off managerial style, Fortune magazine hailed Reagan as a model executive-"One extraordinarily important if little-noted element of the Reagan legacy is already established: He has proved once again that the presidency is manageable." Shortly thereafter came the Iran-contra scandal, and the media bubble burst.

p153
As Mark Hertsgaard has written, "The essentials of the contra story and to some extent the Iran arms sales were known to individual members of the press nearly 18 months before they became headline news in November 1986. Parts of the stories were even reported in major media outlets... But the stories were not deemed worthy of vigorous pursuit, were not picked up throughout the rest of the news media, were not accorded a sufficiently high profile to attract the attention of the American public. And so they floated past largely unnoticed, fortifying Reagan administration officials in the conviction that they could conduct whatever illegal or unpopular operations they wished without fear of detection."

p153
Ten signs of an official scandal

The Iran-contra revelations shared ten common characteristics of an official scandal:

1) The scandal comes to light much later than it could have to prevent serious harm.

2) The focus is on scapegoats and fall guys, as though remedial action amounts to handing the public a few heads on a platter.

3) Damage control keeps the media barking but at bay. The press is so busy chewing on scraps near the outer perimeter that it stays away from the chicken house.

4) Sources on the inside supply tidbits of information to steer reporters in certain directions-and away from others. With the media dashing through the woods, these sources keep pointing: "The scandal went that-a-way!"

5) After denials by government officials come well-publicized admissions of "mismanagement," "mistakes," even "improprieties." The media take, and report, these half-hearted confessions at face value.

6) The spotlight is on outraged officials-senators, congressmen, special prosecutors, federal judges-asking tough questions. (But not too tough.) As time passes, politicians and/or the judicial system take the lead in guiding media coverage.

7) Despite all the hand-wringing, the press avoids basic questions that challenge institutional power and not just a few powerful individuals.

8) Even when the proverbial "highest levels" are implicated, a journalistic fog sets in, obscuring trails that could lead to more substantial revelations, or far-reaching solutions.

9) Protracted news coverage makes a big show out of airing certain facts, over and over, but in the end the most powerful and culpable oxen remain ungored.

10) Inevitably, media pundits emphasize that despite all the past problems, the system is cleansing itself. "The system works."

p154
Olliemania, Olliemedia

Unable to muster the resolve for a full-fledged investigative assault, the press began to do the White House damage-control shuffle. The plan for containing the scandal was set in motion at the very moment Meese disclosed the diversion of Iranian "assets" to the contras and fingered North and Poindexter as the higher-ups responsible. Mass media picked up the cue and focused on the diversion while ignoring other crucial issues, such as U.S. government complicity in contra drug smuggling. The overriding question became, "What did the President know, and when?" It all seemed to boil down to this: If Reagan knew about the diversion, he was guilty; otherwise he was innocent. And since North and his colleagues had already shred key documents, the damage-controllers knew the paper trail would stop short of Nice Guy in the White House.

During the congressional Iran-contra hearings in the summer of 1987, PBS analyst Elizabeth Drew commented on how ironic it was that people were "searching for a smoking gun in a room filled with smoke." The televised hearings coincided with the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution-yet neither Congress nor the press showed much fiber when it came to confronting those who had made a mockery of constitutional government by setting up an "off the shelf" apparatus to conduct secret missions.

A Miami Herald article by Alfonso Chardy disclosed that Oliver North had "helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as...widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." Published on the eve of North's congressional testimony, Chardy's article should have put a snag in the can-do colonel's attempt to pass himself off as a beleaguered patriot. But the papers of record and the TV networks shamelessly ignored the story. (The media silence was deafening when Congressman Jack Brooks tried to raise the issue during the hearings, only to be reprimanded by the chairman, Senator Daniel Inouye.)

Coverage of North's testimony was marked by the same superficiality that characterized White House reporting throughout the Reagan presidency. TV commentators described his chin line, his haircut, the way his voice choked up at just the right moments. Ted Koppel said North held "an entire nation enthralled." John Chancellor called it "a terrific performance" that "played in Peoria." Dan Rather praised it as "Washington theater at its best." Typically the emphasis was not on what North said but on how he said it.

TV analysts neglected to point out the most glaring contradictions. While North claimed to be an anti-terrorist, he sold missiles to the Iranian government, which backed the Islamic fanatics who pulled off the 1983 terrorist attack that killed 241 Marines in Beirut. North bragged of his role in apprehending the Achille Lauro hijackers, but his contra supply network utilized the services of Manzar Al-Kassar, a Syrian drug and gun runner who also supplied weapons to the group that hijacked the Achille Lauro. Many other such contradictions went unreported, in part because so many of the guest "experts" who provided commentary during the hearings were drawn from the ranks of hardline conservatives and intelligence operatives-people like Patrick Buchanan, John McLaughlin, former CIA agent Ray Cline and retired general John Singlaub, who was himself deeply implicated in the scandal.

In devising covert operations, spymasters create cover stories in advance to contain the damage should their schemes be exposed. North's congressional interlocutors chuckled when he revealed that his mentor, CIA director William Casey, had told him that he might not be a big enough fall guy; North's immediate superior, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, would probably also have to take the rap if it came down to that. Poindexter was a well-known dissembler on Capitol Hill, having planted disinformation in the U.S. media about Libya. Yet when it came his turn to testify about Iran-contra, he was pegged by reporters as the one person who could prove or disprove that Reagan was privy to the diversion scam. Poindexter said no. He also maintained it was his job to provide the President with "plausible deniability."

In effect, Poindexter told Congress and the media that they had been taken for a ride on a national security roller-coaster, and now the ride was over. Since there was no way to refute Poindexter's testimony, he would end up being the principal fall guy, just as CIA director Casey had planned. The Democrats in Congress, still refusing to act like an authentic opposition party, had little inclination to pursue the matter further. And the Washington press corps, peering through a cover story that had been rendered transparent, caught a vivid glimpse of its own weakness, and moved on. A new political season was about to begin.


Unreliable Sources

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