Word: secord
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...character flaw as old as Icarus was in evidence last week. Behind all the revelations lurked arrogance, a modern hubris. Hart dared the press to stalk him, as though no disclosure could wound him. Secord disdainfully asserted that he could run foreign policy better than those designated to do so. And all along, the President assumed that no one would find out he was sending arms to Iran and evading, rather than enforcing, the ban on aid to the contras. They all wrapped themselves in their own misguided certainty, believing they were immune not only from harm but from public...
...operated in a world of manipulated fact and disinformation, a place where candor is rarely considered a virtue and anyone asking questions should be treated with suspicion. No, he insisted from the first, he knew nothing about money from Iranian arms sales being funneled to the contras. Even Richard Secord, who helped oversee the diversion of funds and testified on Capitol Hill last week about his meetings with Casey, could not say with certainty whether the CIA director knew...
That was perhaps the major impact of Richard Secord's testimony, which occupied the entire first week of public hearings by the joint congressional committee investigating the most explosive political scandal in a decade. Testifying primarily in the unemotional tones of a math professor but occasionally displaying flashes of deadpan wit and, under cross-examination, an acerbic temper, the retired Air Force major general described for four days how he organized and ran a private network that at the Government's behest secretly supplied arms to the contras in Nicaragua and later to Iran. Much of the story had been...
...detailing the elaborate private network that was set up by Oliver North to funnel arms to the contras and initiate the failed weapons-for-hostages deals with Iran, Secord painted a picture that was far more horrifying than he seemed to realize. It showed the scope of the Administration's deceit in circumventing the congressional ban on military aid to the contras and the depths of its hypocrisy in violating the Government's proclaimed policy against dealing with terrorists. Secord also showed, again with little awareness of its significance, how dangerous it can be when the Government seeks to avoid...
...Secord heard from North that Ronald Reagan knew about the diversion of profits from the Iranian arms sales to the contras. North told Secord that "in some conversations" he had mused to the President about the irony of having the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini unwittingly finance the Nicaraguan guerrillas. But given North's reputation for embellishing or even inventing conversations between the President and himself, should what he told Secord be believed? "I did not take it as a joke," said Secord. Nonetheless, he said he was "skeptical" about North's report of the conversations, because "it did not sound like...