Where Are They Now? Iran-Contra Saga Of 1987 Continues To Have Repercussions For Cast Of Players

Cameras rolled, spotlights brightened, and once again, Oliver North was center stage as he stepped to the microphone.

“I don’t think I’ve seen this many members of Congress since I was last subpoenaed,” North quipped, flashing one of his signature gap-toothed grins at the crowd of well-wishers at a tribute dinner earlier this month. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., led the applause at the salute to North and “ultimate victory in the Cold War.” The festivities raised $150,000 for Freedom Alliance, a conservative think tank North founded in 1990.

It was 10 years ago this summer that North, then a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, testified before a joint congressional committee investigating his role in trading arms for hostages with Iran and in diverting the $3.8 million proceeds of those arms sales to the antiCommunist Nicaraguan Contra rebels. North was only one act in a televised Iran-Contra drama featuring a guerrilla war, record-shredding, midnight flights to the Middle East and secret messages scribbled in a Bible. Former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., vice chairman of the Iran-Contra committee, remembers a nation “paralyzed,” waiting to learn details of then-President Reagan’s potential involvement.

“Everyone was paying attention,” Rudman recalls. “The White House was at a standstill. The Congress was at a standstill.”

Iran-Contra has long since become a matter for the history books. But for many of the players in the drama that unfolded in the summer of 1987, the battles continue long after the lights went down and the cameras stopped rolling.

Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose $31 million, six-year investigation produced 11 convictions (only one person, Thomas G. Clines, went to jail), just published a book charging that the scheme, and subsequent cover-up, were orchestrated by the Reagan White House, only the most recent addition to the vast library of self-exculpating memoirs. Former national security adviser Robert McFarlane, now building power plants around the world, thinks he has taken the rap for decisions made by his superiors. And Elliott Abrams, the State Department official who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress for his involvement in the scheme, has just published a book.

North, whose 1989 conviction on several felony counts was overturned on appeal, has ridden his notoriety to a best-selling book on the affair, a daily talk radio show, a lucrative career on the lecture circuit and, in 1994, the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Virginia in an unsuccessful campaign.

Today, the colonel’s a little grayer and not quite as trim, but as combative as ever, labeling nemesis Walsh “a bitter old loser” in a recent interview.

For most of those who endured Iran-Contra scrutiny, however, presidential pardons and overturned convictions have not healed battered professional reputations. Abrams, whose petition to revoke a U.S. Court of Appeals censure after being convicted of lying to Congress, was rejected by the Supreme Court. Today, he admits to “mistakes” in his conduct. But he thinks his actions hold up well when compared with alleged fundraising improprieties of the 1996 Clinton campaign, which are being investigated in Senate hearings.

“It may have been right or wrong to sell missiles to Iran,” Abrams said, “(but) the people who did it did it exclusively for national security reasons, not personal reasons.” Not so with the campaign allegations a decade later, he said. “There’s no national interest here,” he said bitterly. “It’s about winning an election or making a buck.”

McFarlane wants to be remembered for “reducing nuclear weapons and accelerating the collapse of Marxism in Russia.” But McFarlane, who attempted suicide twice during the Iran-Contra investigation, realizes history has cast him as a conspirator. “Life isn’t fair and that’s OK,” he said in a recent interview. McFarlane does think he has shouldered an inordinate amount of the blame, whereas, he says, others including former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger emerged relatively unscathed.

“It’s so curious to me that as someone who did indeed propose (arms for hostages) originally and who recommended it be stopped five months later … who cooperated with investigators and did not take the Fifth, I was tagged as responsible.”

Life outside the spotlight has been similarly rocky for Fawn Hall, the secretary who testified she helped North alter and shred incriminating documents. Her testimony won rave reviews and an exclusive contract with a Beverly Hills talent agency, but an acting career never panned out, and a proposed book about her role was never finished.

Hall now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Danny Sugerman, a manager and chronicler of the late rocker Jim Morrison and his band, the Doors. Once the fiercely loyal secretary, Hall told Redbook magazine in 1995 that North “used” her. Hall, who told Redbook that she and Sugerman were, for a time, addicted to crack cocaine, was recently reported to be shopping around a book manuscript titled “My Heroin Honeymoon,” which recounts the couple’s descent into drug abuse on a postnuptial trip to Thailand.

Sugerman, reached by phone in Los Angeles, said the book is on hold, and the couple is pursuing “other priorities.” Hall is now studying art history and photography and hopes to pursue a career in art, Sugerman said, adding that Hall “doesn’t do interviews on Iran-Contra.”

The man who first brought notoriety to the scheme has also paid a high personal price.

The world first became aware of American involvement in Nicaragua in October 1986 when government troops shot down a plane carrying arms shipments to the Contras and captured the only survivor, Eugene Hasenfus.

The ex-Marine and ex-CIA operative works at the same construction job in Marinette, Wis., he had before going to Nicaragua. Life, however, is not back to normal. “Gene Hasenfus died over there,” said his wife, Sally. “There’s a man here, but it’s not the same.”