The CIA`s No. 3 official told a federal jury Thursday that his predecessor, Clair George, may have lied to Congress when asked about a secret Iranian arms deal in 1986.
George, the one-time director of overseas spy operations, is on trial for lying to congressional panels about the agency`s covert operations to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to help the Nicaraguan rebels, or contras, in the mid-1980s.
Thomas Twetten, a 35-year veteran who has had George`s old job since 1991, told the jury about the CIA policy of ”operational secrecy,” in which one office does not know what another one is doing.
The need for secrecy, he explained, requires that information about covert activities be ”compartmentalized” within the agency. Only those who need to know about a particular action are told, resulting in some top agency officials being left in the dark on some operations.
The effort that President Reagan began in late 1985 to win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon was no exception, witnesses said. Charles Allen, another 35-year veteran of the agency, told the court Thursday that George
”did not see each and every document” pertaining to the Iran deal.
Prosecutors focused Thursday on the hostage overture, which involved national security aide Oliver North and Twetten, then the deputy chief of the CIA`s Near East division. On George`s orders in January 1986, Twetten began to work with North in arranging the logistics for new arms shipments, even though he said there was a consensus among top CIA officials that it was ”pretty silly.”
Within a few days North delivered a document, entitled ”Notional Timeline for Operation Recovery” with details of how retired Air Force Maj. Richard Secord-using an alias-would transport the weapons purchased from the Pentagon through a secret CIA account.
A copy of the document, Twetten said, was supposed to have been in George`s safe.
Although Twetten could not at first recall discussions about Secord with George, he conceded that he probably did after a prosecutor reminded him of his prior testimony. George is accused of lying about Secord`s role and his contacts with Secord.
An FBI expert testified Thursday that he found George`s fingerprints on a draft of his allegedly false Senate testimony from 1986 as the Iran-contra operation was starting to unravel.
FBI fingerprint specialist Edgar Corley said the prints were discovered two months ago on the third draft of the testimony George gave Oct. 10, 1986, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Corley acknowledged that he could not determine when George had handled the paper.
George has denied ordering a revision in that draft.
The drafts are important because the final version removed any mention of how an air base in El Salvador had evolved to supply both arms and humanitarian aid to the Nicaraguan contras in 1985-86 when Congress banned U.S. military assistance.
A CIA official who helped prepare the Senate testimony said he wrote on the draft ”deleted by DDO”-a reference to George`s title as deputy director for operations-and that the sentence was crossed out.
In his testimony before the grand jury last year, George was asked whether he had directed that the sentence be deleted.
”I cannot believe I did,” George responded. ”I do not recall getting to this kind of detail in preparing this statement.”
