North did not work in isolation. McFarlane, responsible to President Reagan, gave the orders. Reagan has said that he had nothing to do with arms shipments, but that he did support the contras, and that, as president, he remained unaffected by the Boland Amendment. Reagan certainly sustained the contras in numerous speeches, in an address to Congress, in receiving contra leaders at the White House, in diplomatic talks with Saudi Arabian leaders, and in speaking at fund-raising events. Robert McFarlane’s testimony is that he acted with the president’s full authority. Reagan’s order, as McFarlane put it to North and Donald Fortier, was to do anything necessary to win the next aid vote. Part of that amounted to keeping the contra force in being. That task went to Oliver North.

  McFarlane himself performed a critical role. In meeting with counterparts from other countries, McFarlane mentioned contra funding as a dilemma facing the U.S. government. Help came from Saudi Arabia, which had never previously shown an interest in Central America, had no diplomatic relations with any country in the region, but had repeatedly invested in American covert action programs.

  In the summer of 1984 Colonel North had Adolfo Calero in his office. Ollie asked for a bank account where money for the contras could be deposited. Calero provided an account number in a Cayman Islands bank, hoping for the best. In July came a deposit of $1 million in UNO’s favor, followed by equal sums at monthly intervals through the year. After the third deposit, Calero began to believe, and UNO/FDN made plans. Seeing the president of Honduras on August 7, Ambassador John Negroponte told him that the FDN had funds from private sources.

  At the interagency level the policy fights of 1983 had neutralized Reagan’s Crisis Pre-Planning Group as a Nicaragua secret war command. Central American policy fell to the Restricted Interagency Group of senior officials. Ollie North represented the NSC staff at these meetings, chaired by the State Department representative, first Langhorne Motley, then Elliott Abrams. North also belonged to a three-person core group, a restricted RIG. The existence of this core group is disputed by Abrams, the purported chairman, though he admits its meetings took place, but the RIG figured widely in sworn testimony before Congress, a special prosecutor, and the courts. The third member of the core group was Alan Fiers, chief of the CIA’s Central America Task Force. Abrams’s logs show that these officials met seven times during the years 1985–1986, a period in which there were eighteen sessions of the full RIG.

  Where Ollie North pushed so hard that some saw him as a loose cannon, Alan D. Fiers, Jr., remained a man of contradictions. Zealous and brash to a fault, presumably a good match for North, the CATF chief behaved with caution on Project Democracy. Fiers knew no Spanish, though he had a reputation as a fine linguist. A member of the agency’s Middle East clan, Fiers was not entirely devoid of Latin experience, having been a Marine officer during the 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. Colleagues credited him with sharp political instincts, yet on Project Democracy he would be oddly ham-handed.

  The CIA chief knew his way out of a tight situation. Admiral Turner had selected Fiers as station chief in Saudi Arabia just before Bill Casey came on board. Reagan’s CIA director summoned Fiers and demanded to know why he should get the post and why he was any good at all. Fiers talked his way out of that one. Over four years in Riyadh he gained Casey’s confidence, accompanying the DCI when he visited, preparing points for the spy chieftain’s talks with Prince Turki as they coordinated the secret war for Afghanistan. By that time Fiers was slated to take over the Afghan task force. Instead Casey told Fiers he couldn’t have the post; the DCI would not say what was in store. Fiers answered he would serve wherever Casey wanted him. A couple of days later the DDO, Clair George, phoned Fiers with his promotion to chief of the Central America Task Force.

  Part of Fiers’s caution can be attributed to the high politics of the Nicaraguan secret war. Just days after he took over CATF, controversy over the psychological warfare manual exploded over Washington. Casey had Fiers up to the Seventh Floor to demand the damage be limited—Ronald Reagan had dropped six points in the opinion polls and, with the election weeks away, something had to be done. Director Casey would issue reprimands. Fiers defended task force officers as best he could, but he could not do much. The episode led to his first appearance before the Senate intelligence committee. Fiers felt like “a cat being thrown into a clothes dryer.”

  Of course by then the CIA operation had been defunded as a result of the harbor mining. It fell to Fiers to figure out how to move forward. The Boland Amendment seemed clear enough, but Fiers soon discovered Ollie North’s private operation. When North asked for CIA help, the CATF chief refused. Dewey Clarridge called Fiers to say things were afoot he knew nothing about, then advised him to collaborate with North. As far as Fiers could tell, the law restricted the NSC staff as much as the agency, and he took the issue to Latin baron Al Wedemeyer. Both went to see DDO George. Within a day or so the full group assembled in Casey’s office, where the CIA director staged an elaborate ruse. By then, with Reagan reelected, the problem of aiding the contras had acquired a long-term aspect. The episode demonstrates that Casey remained highly sensitive. Colonel North sat to the side. Director Casey turned to him.

  “Ollie, Alan tells me you are operating in Central America. Is that true?” Casey asked.

  He looked at Fiers. “Alan, tell Ollie what you told Clair.”

  Fiers did so, softening a few of the sharpest edges. Then Casey turned back to North: “Ollie, are you operating?”

  Colonel North replied, “No sir, I am not operating.”

  Director Casey then intervened. “Good,” he said. “I want you to understand that you are not to operate in Central America.”

  Alan Fiers emerged incredulous. He looked to Clair George for enlightenment. The DDO warned Fiers. George interpreted: “Sometime in the dark of night, Bill Casey has said, I will take care of Central America, just leave it to me. And what you saw go on in there was a charade.”

  “Jesus Christ, Clair,” Fiers shot back, “if that is true then this will be worse than Watergate!”

  Fiers determined to he a buffer between CATF officers and the controversies he expected from this project. Casey’s fair-haired case officer had no idea how true his fears would be.

  Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams noticed rivalry between North and Fiers. That may have been for Bill Casey’s ear. North clearly had a personal relationship with Casey, the first CIA director to have a hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building, just down the hall from Ollie in Suite 302. On at least two occasions Casey visited North, another time he sent over a friend who wanted to make a contra donation, beer brewer Joseph Coors, and North talked the man into giving $60,000 for a light plane. How often North popped down to the DCI’s office may never be known. In sworn testimony Bob McFarlane could not say whether Ollie followed his orders or Casey’s. North’s precise function for Casey remains a cipher, punctuated by reports that over 1984 and 1985 Bill Casey and Ollie North met UNO officials at a CIA safe house in Washington.

  Always the back-alley brawler, Casey maintained a wide range of personal contacts for different purposes, some operational. Milt Bearden and Dewey Clarridge, the Afghan and Central America secret-war bosses, both had lines to the DCI. Similarly Casey brought back CIA’s station chief in Managua from 1982 to 1984, Benjamin B. Wickham, Jr., as a special assistant, even working outside the agency on aspects of contra activity. North formed another such link, outside the purview of Fiers’s CATF. Because the Boland Amendment expressly prohibited the CIA assisting the contras, a channel such as North’s was essential if Casey wished to pursue the Nicaraguan war.

  Casey built his bridge to Alan Fiers in November 1984. The task force chief was at home at dinner when the director called and inquired how things were going. Fiers asked Casey if he wanted the story plain or gilded. When Casey said he wanted it straight, Fiers told him prospects were terrible. They agreed to meet the next morning. At Langley, Fiers reiterated his conclusions: negotiations with Managua had gone nowhere (Fiers apparently was unaware that the administration intended these talks to fail), and the CIA had no strategy. Casey asked for a policy paper. When Fiers came back, Casey read the memo, then said he would take care of policy and Fiers should focus on operations. After that, Fiers too had a direct line to Casey. Fiers saw their relationship as akin to that between a father and son, reminiscent of McFarlane with North.

  Fiers, far from being the only CIA official concerned about strategy, actually joined a long line of comrades. John McMahon told the Senate intelligence committee in 1991 that he had recommended that CIA hand off the contra project to the Pentagon even before the harbor mining. McMahon felt the secret war exceeded CIA capabilities. Similarly, about a month after Fiers’s exchange with Casey, intelligence deputy Bob Gates took a hand with a memo to Casey in which he began, “it is time to talk absolutely straight about Nicaragua.” Gates accepted the rationale for the war but noted that “the Contras, even with American support, cannot overthrow the Sandinista regime.” Gates advocated creation of a contra provisional government which the United States would assist openly, including a blockade (a la the Cuban Missile Crisis, he termed it a “quarantine”), economic sanctions, and air strikes to destroy Sandinista capabilities. But Gates conceded that the “hard measures” he favored in this December 14, 1984, paper “probably are politically unacceptable.” Bill Casey agreed with Gates’s judgment. That left the field to the contras themselves.

  Adolfo Calero wanted Colonel North’s help, whether or not that included Casey. Calero would take help anywhere he could get it. The Cayman Islands account number he gave North also went to retired generals John K. Singlaub and Richard V. Secord. Singlaub had been to Honduras in March, impressed with the FDN camps and their need for modern anti-aircraft weapons. Singlaub would help raise cash for the rebel umbrella group UNO and later became Calero’s best arms source. General Secord got the number when his company also made a donation.

  In addition to the secret means there existed an open funding mechanism through conservative fund-raiser Carl R. Channell, whose National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty collected more than $6 million. “Spitz” Channell courted donors quite successfully. With the White House, he arranged a series of NSC briefings for donors. President Reagan appeared twice in these sessions. On one occasion in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Reagan’s appearance came neatly sandwiched between talks by Elliott Abrams on general U.S. policy and a military briefing from Oliver North. Channell developed a one-two punch for likely prospects. He followed the gloom-and-doom with an appeal for a specific item the donor could contribute. The White House’s Office of Public Liaison complemented Channell’s effort with its own, with North as preferred speaker. The colonel asserted that those who opposed contra funding were mounting “the most sophisticated disinformation and active-measures campaign that we have seen in this country since Adolf Hitler.” Elliott Abrams critiqued the story boards for Channell television ads. Channell consumed 35 percent or more of the donations on overhead or propaganda.

  Ronald Reagan set the accent for the entire network with constant exhortations. In February 1985 and again later Reagan called the contras “brothers”; in March he termed Calero’s crew “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers” and declared to America, “we owe them our help.” Later he spoke of a Soviet “beachhead” in Nicaragua and called Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, that July, “a little dictator who went to Moscow in his designer glasses.” In case Managua missed the signal, on May 1 Reagan slapped a total trade embargo on Nicaragua.

  The overriding question was money to sustain the contras through the next appropriation—so-called bridging funds. Here too Reagan played a role. Bud McFarlane took the cash problem to the Saudis during preparations for a visit by King Fahd. The Saudi king, accorded a private tête-à-tête with President Reagan, saw him in February 1985. No record exists of what they discussed, but shortly afterward the NSC staff learned that the Saudis would renew and even double their aid to UNO. Within a month the contras received about $24 million in three large deposits, bringing aggregate Saudi aid to roughly $32 million, comparable to what the CIA had been paying before the mining. Truly the Saudis at this moment permitted the contras to maintain their strength.

  Beyond these connections, private sources helped Calero. A key operator was John K. Singlaub, who now headed the World Anti-Communist League and the United States Council for World Freedom. Singlaub had been deputy commander of U.S. forces in Korea during the Carter administration and had publicly criticized the president for considering withdrawals of American troops from that country. The confrontation with Carter led to Singlaub’s transfer, and he retired to pursue his political beliefs in private life. General Singlaub, veteran of a long career much given to special warfare, had been detached to the CIA in its early days, serving in China as base chief in Mukden. There he forged relationships with the Nationalist Chinese that he now used to solicit funds or material aid, particularly air defense, for the contras. In the Korean War, Singlaub had been CIA’s deputy chief of station. For the army in Vietnam, Singlaub had commanded MACSOG during the critical years 1966–1968. He still served as a Pentagon adviser. At least once he presented Casey with a proposal for a round-robin arms deal involving North Korea to provide the CIA with Soviet-style weapons.

  Singlaub made direct approaches to South Korea and Taiwan, followed up by North and McFarlane sending another NSC staff member, Gaston J. Sigur. That brought UNO two donations of $1 million each. Singlaub would have gone for more save for the intervention of Elliott Abrams. The general’s highly publicized private funding efforts in the United States proved much less lucrative, yielding $400,000 over two years. Singlaub gave Oliver North a contra weapons wish list which the Channell group used in fund-raising. Not least, John Singlaub had the contacts to bring Adolfo Calero the cheapest weapons and ammunition the FDN could buy anywhere.

  Langley was aware of these developments. In February 1985 North discussed South Korean contributions with DDO Clair George. George also spoke to Alan Fiers about weapons being bought in China by Richard V. Secord. A year later, in April 1986, CIA reporting from Europe picked up indications of purchases in behalf of the contras by Secord agent Thomas Clines.

  Finally, a constellation of minor benefactors were conjured by Reagan’s appeals. The president likened them to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. These included Refugee Relief International, which donated medical supplies, and Civilian Military Assistance, whose members went to Honduras to train FDN troops. These were “private patriotic Americans,” as North called them. As General Singlaub told Ollie, all the press attention that went to him and groups like Civilian Military Assistance drew eyes away from Suite 302 of the Old Executive Office Building. Yet though Singlaub and the others prided themselves on patriotism, their services were not fundamentally different from, say, Ed Wilson in Libya. The secret wars spawned a generation of freelance cowboys. Project Democracy then brought the ultimate distortion, the Office of the President working directly with private citizens on a covert action.

  It became apparent almost immediately in mid-1984 that the Nicaragua war had a new character. Colonel Bermudez’s FDN columns disappeared from the field; Pastora took ARDE out of the fight. Not only did the single front line fail to materialize, there was nothing at all. The contras shifted to subsistence mode while reliance on the benefactors injected private agendas. Benefactor aims were not necessarily identical to those of FDN, President Reagan, or the NSC staff. The Hondurans, more skittish than ever, worried not only about the presence of contra base camps but the openness with which FDN paraded around Tegu. Fortunately Honduran commander General Alvarez left the scene, deposed by internal maneuvers, and his successors renewed their commitment to the contra enterprise. Ambassador Negroponte again midwifed this evolution, promising the FDN would be more discreet.

  The Boland Amendment took effect on October 1, 1984, the first day of the new fiscal year. A final contingent of seventy-three CIA trainers left Honduras. Langley’s orders to its stations were explicit:

  FIELD STATIONS ARE TO CEASE AND DESIST WITH ACTIONS THAT CAN BE CONSTRUED TO BE PROVIDING ANY TYPE OF SUPPORT, EITHER DIRECT OR INDIRECT, TO THE VARIOUS ENTITIES WITH WHOM WE DEALT UNDER THE PROGRAM. ALL FUTURE CONTACTS WITH THOSE ENTITIES ARE, UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, TO BE SOLELY, REPEAT SOLELY, FOR THE PURPOSE OF COLLECTING POSITIVE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INFORMATION OF INTEREST TO THE UNITED STATES.

  Now there were narrow limits on what the CIA could do. Langley’s top analyst for Latin America, Robert Vickers, and Alan Fiers could no longer even know certain things. Soon after Boland took effect, Fiers rejected North’s invitation to a meeting with Calero for this reason.

  Bill Casey, however, continued to march to the beat of his own drummer. Casey would not discuss the contra aid with friend Joe Coors but had no hesitation sending him down the hall to donate money. Casey joked to North about contributing a million of his own. He saw Bud McFarlane in March 1985 specifically about third-country funding. Several months earlier the DCI had certified to Congress that the CIA had had no involvement in contra lobbying whatever. When the time came for Project Democracy to mount an airlift, Casey met with Gen. Richard Secord at North’s suggestion, and Ollie later took Secord to see the DCI as well.

  The CIA director ought to have been on warning. Not only had Bob Gates sent Casey personal advice to give the Nicaragua project away, Vickers produced an NIE in February 1985 on the prospects for Sandinista consolidation that warned of deficiencies in contra potential and even forecast declining effectiveness. Articles in the National Intelligence Daily, which Gates published, continued to highlight problems. Years later analysts accused Gates of slanting the books in favor of the rebels, but a 1990 inspector general study found that these products had been objective. Instead the IG faulted the small analytical unit within Fiers’s task force, tarring it with warping and hyping the data, basing claims on deduction rather than evidence, and interfering with circulation of DI reports (where Gates was found to have fallen down was in failing to prevent these CATF interventions). In any event, Casey and Fiers had to be engaged in wishful thinking to believe the contras were doing well.