The Bottom Line/Christopher Byron WHO KNEW WHAT WHEN? FROM THE MOMENT THE BCC SCANDAE ‘broke open this summer, one question has | hovered over everything: Why has it taken | ten long years—and incessant. goading | from the press—for authorities in Wash | ingion and London to begin moving against one of the biggest global bank frauds of alltime? ‘Answers range from bureaucratic in- | competence to dark theories about poi eal coverups, Now comes evidence— | | though in. many respects. incorplete— that unavoidably focuses fresh attention on George Bush himself Specially, documents have been pro- duced that at least inferentally implicate Bush's office, when he was vice-president | in 1984, in BCCI-financed activities in- volving the Iran-contra scandal, ‘There is no “smoking gun” in these | documents, which come from sources in both London and the U.S. What's more, the man who wrote the documents—a British CIA agent named Leslie Alam AS- pin—has been dead since 1989, and there are certain ambiguities in the materials that would be easier to clear up if he were ‘Nonetheless, now that I've checked | his sister, Kathleen Leach, in Patier- son, Missouri, as well as with bis lawyers in Britain, it'seems fairly chear that the | documents are authentic ‘One of these documents is at statement, dated May 1, 1987, four days | before the start ofthe congressional Iran- | ‘contra hearings. In preparing the sta ‘ment, Aspin seems to have been hoping 10 protect his brother Michael from prosecu- tion on s pending British arms charge. His | idea was apparently 10 establish that he ‘and his brother had been working on be: half of the United States government in the transaction—and to offer as proof & document full of information that had not yet become public ‘The statement describes Aspin’s act tiesofien in excruciating det went about organi 1984 row-missle shipment from Portugal to Iran on behalf of Oliver North, Official= ly, North was on the staf of the National Security Council in Washington at the time. But according to his recently declas- sified diaries, he appears to have been spending much of his time working for Bush instead, ‘Another document is a notarized state- ment that lists three numbered secounts atthe Paris branch office of BCCI that As- pin opened on November 15, 1984, in 28 NEW YORK/NOVEMMER 1991 ile deal. Ac arms broker, Manucher Ghorbani when the accounts were opened. that was first reported by London's Ob- server newspaper iast summer, tough ap- parently without attracting the attention the news warranted. Kathleen Leach says she has yet other documents from her brother's effets, ‘These include two personal telephone books, which she says contains phone ‘numbers for a long list of people, inelud- ing North, General Richard Secord, and many others who have by now become tainted by Iran-contra Collectively, these documents speak like a voice from the grave. And the mes- sage they bear is that George Bush might ‘well have known more about both BCCI and lan-contra than he has been letting on, ‘The documents, discovered in May 1989 among Aspin's personal papers by his family, were given by his sister to Peg gy Adler Robohm, a Connecticut writer involved in research on the Iran-contra scandal. Robohm in turn asked that John Loftus, a former Justice Department pros- IM DEEP: News about North from the grave. cutor, examine them; Loftus had worked on espionage and ‘war-crimes cases in Washing- ton, D.C, during the Carter years. Loftus, whose book on ‘Cold War spies and the Vati- ean, Unholy Trinity, is due this winter from St, Martin's Press, compared. the docu ments with the recently de- classified multivolume set of Oliver North's office diaries. Ths dries became public in 1990 as a result of a freedom: of-information request by the National Security Archives in Washington. Loftus says he found that what Aspin claimed in his statement meshed perfectly with var ous notes and entries in North's diaries—entries that | ‘Aspin could not have con- ceivably known about since the diaries were still classi- fied even a” year after his death ‘Overall, what Asp’ pus pers establish is that “arms for hostages’ deals were tak- ing place lng before the June | 1985 date that conventional wisdom sets 8s the start of the Iran-contra scandal. Moreover, the papers make clear that not only were both U:S. and British intel gence involved in the arms deals but so | Was the office of Vice-President Bush. Fhe story of Leslie Aspin and arms for hostages begins with the Boland Amend- | ment and the end of congressional aid to the contras, which ran out in May 1986 Dating. the Tran-coniea hearings, there were snippets of testimony suggesting that withthe cutoff of funding, the Rea gan administration began cooperating with the Thatcher government to help supply arms covertly to the Nicaraguan coniras. The Aspin papers suggest that Such an arrangement with Britain di in fact exist—and that it was this arrange- ment that marked the start of the Iran- contra pipeline ‘The pipeline itself soems to have taken pe notin June 1985, as North claims in | his new “tell all” book’ Under Fire, but in | the immediate aftcrmath of the terrorist | bombing of the US. Marine Corps bar- | racks in Beirut in October 1985. ’At that time, aesording to published re- ports, a toplevel anti-terrorist working | group was convened. Its purpose: t0 ki (eter by Ad Sout late PeeA diary entry in January 1984 reads, “Call Casey: thanks for SIG pref,” an ap- ‘parent reminder to thank CIA boss Wil- iam Casey for nominating him to a hush- ence (0 @ bricfing on Salvadoran ‘terrorists. Unfortunately for the terrorist fighters, the plan to kidnap the kidnappers seems tohae leaked. On March 16, the caper’ rector, ley. Goal posted io Berut by Casey tun the show locally, was himself In desperation, the boys came up with » ‘One of the first people recruited for the plot was Aspin himself. According to his May 1987 statement, Aspin was ap- proached by Cascy in June 1984 and asked to participate, Almost immediately, ‘he was in contact with North and General ‘Secord, and before long was not only ‘working on that project but was also in tes. Nor, for that matter, does the Tower ‘Commission Report or any of the other “official” documents regarding the scan- dal. Last week, I asked Arthur Liman, ‘chief counsel for the Senate in the lean. ‘contra hearings, why the hearings went ‘back no further than June 1985, and he answered with a “We were re- stricted to the terms of the mandate given to the committee by the Senate,” he said. ‘Too bad. for a better undersianding of Iran-contra’s murky beginnings: might ‘well go far toward clearing up, one way or ‘the other, whether the government has something to hide about BCC = =m