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In meetings with Peres, Le-
deen hinted of possible U.S.
interest in gathering infor-
mation about Iran. Peres in-
sisted that Ledeen come back
to Washington with a
message: Iran had requested
artillery shells from Israel,
and Peres wanted to know if
the Reagan administration
would object to such a deal.
"It was just a research trip,"
Ledeen says now. "It was just
a search for information.
Peres and I had always gotten
along well; it was natural for
me to be asking him. What
Peres said was that Israeli in-
telligence on Iran was not as
good as they would have lik-
ed. But unbeknownst to me,
they had just met Ghor-
banifar, and were trying to
evaluate him."
Not too long after that, Le-
deen himself met with Ghor-
banifar, the flamboyant Ira-
nian businessman who fled
the Islamic revolution but
maintained active ties to
elements in Iranian society.
The 1985 meeting in
Jerusalem, he told the Tower
commission, was the first
time that the subject of
weapons and hostages was
raised. In his testimony, Le-
deen emphasized one of his
major themes — that his own
interest in dealing with Iran
had more to do with broad
foreign policy considerations
than the idea of trading arms
for hostages.
At this point, the Iran-
Contra affair becomes a
hopeless tangle of conflicting
theories and inconclusive in-
formation. Volumes have
been written about the initial
delivery of TOW missiles to
Iran, and the later delivery of
Hawk missiles, despite Iran's
failure to live up fully to its
initial promises in the
shadowy trade.
Ledeen refers to his own
withdrawal from the affair in
1985, and his surprise a year
later to hear that the project
had been resumed, with a
greatly reinforced emphasis
on the arms-for-hostages
angle.
He makes it clear that his
withdrawal had nothing to do
with the propriety of dealing
with elements of the Iranian
government or the paradox of
selling them arms even as the
State Department was at-
tempting to convince other
Western nations to cut off the
flow of weapons to Iran.
"There were two tracks to
the policy," he says. "Ghor-
banifar was saying that there
were relatively pro-Western
forces in Iran, who believed
for better or worse that Iran
had to come to terms with the
West, who were willing to
come out and meet secretly
with us. I was still very in-
terested in establishing con-
tact and seeing what they had
to say.
"On the other hand, there
was a clear message coming
from the regime, saying, Y
give us so many arms, we
release so many hostages.' I
didn't like it; at this point, I
said to [then National Securi-
ty Advisor Robert McFarlane,
get me out of the hostage
business." Ledeen attributes
the growing emphasis on
arms-for-hostages negotia-
tions to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, he says, was "very
passionate" about the
hostages; as the affair evolv-
ed, he suggests, the president
and his top foreign policy
team made the hostage issue
the primary consideration in
dealings with Iran.
Despite his role in making
some of the first contacts with
the Israelis, Ledeen continues
to insist that his own efforts
were relatively minor and
that the goals of the real in-
stigators of the arms-for-
hostages process were well-
meant, if ineffective.
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Who's To Blame?
Ledeen blames much of the
public furor over the con-
troversy on a turf battle bet-
ween Congress and the ad-
ministration. "One basic
lesson about all this involves
the conflict between the
legislative and the executive
branches," he says. "The
reason hearings were held is
that Congress was trying to
expand its power. One of the
greatest blunders of the
Reagan administration dur-
ing Iran-Contra is that they
didn't defend the interests of
the executive branch."
As always, Michael Ledeen
is a tough man to read.
But Ledeen keeps coming
back to some basic points that
have the sound of genuine
conviction. The Iran-Contra
affair, he argues over and over
again, was a well-meant
foreign policy initiative that
went sour. Covert activities
are a necessary tool of foreign
policy in a perilous world.
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