Richard V. Secord, general involved in the Iran-contra affair, dies at 92

General Secord joined the plan in the summer of 1984. Then retired from the Army and working as a private arms dealer, he received an opening from Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, then an aide to the Council of National Security.

The Reagan administration pursued two policy goals. In the Middle East, the White House wanted to use back-channel arms sales to the Islamic regime in Iran to help secure the release of American prisoners in Lebanon.

At the same time, an effort was underway in Nicaragua to prop up counter-rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinista government, ultimately using funds generated by the Iran deals. The operation was carried out in secret because in October 1984 Congress had cut off all military aid to the contras.

In General Secord, a West Point graduate with unlimited security, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, National and Northern Security Advisor, had found perhaps the ideal candidate to handle the Byzantine logistics of his plan, which went known simply as the “Company.”

General Secord, whose 28-year Air Force career had been as colorful as it was distinguished, had experience in covert operations. As a young officer in Indochina in the early 1960s, he flew more than 200 secret combat missions against the Viet Cong, then helped the CIA supply Lao tribesmen fighting local communist forces.

He had later been stationed for several years as the US military liaison to the Shah of Iran, specializing in arms procurement. During his tour, he arranged arms deals worth $17 billion for the Shah, who was soon ousted from power, however.

Once considered a possible Air Force chief of staff, he had become deputy assistant secretary of defense, but left the military under a cloud in 1983. He said he had “become haunted.” for his relationship with Edwin P. Wilson, a renegade. former CIA agent whom he met socially from the spy world, and who was convicted of selling explosives to Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi. General Secord was never charged with any crime.

In his memoir Honored and Betrayed (1992), written with Jay Wurts, General Secord maintained that he agreed to participate in the Iran-contra operation out of what he considered his patriotic duty, although later revelations would suggest that financial reasons did not play a role. small paper

“I wanted to look like a white knight,” said Malcolm Byrne, author of “Iran-Contra: The Reagan Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power.” “But the reality was that he had a mixture of motives.”

General Secord and his business partner, Albert Hakim, an Iranian-born American arms dealer, set about creating a maze of fictitious accounts in Swiss banks. The goal, as North established, was to build an autonomous unit for clandestine activities that could not be traced back to the United States government, in spy parlance a “cut” operation.

An admiring North later wrote, “Why Dick can do something in 5 minutes. that the CIA can’t do in two days is beyond me, but he does it.”

In early 1985, with funds mostly coming from Saudi Arabia, Enterprise partners began buying weaponry on the global gray market and reselling the equipment to the contras.

In early 1985, North recruited General Secord and his partner to begin distributing weaponry, consisting of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, to the Iranian government, with the profits diverted to the contras.

Money from Iran and the counter-initiatives circulated with scant accounting in what amounted to a huge slush fund. According to later government investigators, more than $47 million went through the Enterprise.

“It was all back of the envelope and off the books,” said Byrne, deputy director of the Washington-based National Security Archive’s anti-secrecy group. “The priority was to get the job done.”

In early 1986, under North’s direction, General Secord used his network of clandestine contacts to begin establishing a more elaborate system of resupplying the contras.

The various operations had been carried out under a cloak of secrecy that was unexpectedly lifted in early October 1986, when the Sandinistas shot down a supply plane bound for the contras. The remains yielded a phone log listing calls from a safe house against General Secord’s home and office in Virginia.

The following month, the entire operation unraveled when a Lebanese weekly published details of the arms-for-hostage deal with Iran. Before long, President Reagan fired North, appointed an independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, and Congress launched a series of investigations.

When a joint panel of Congress began hearings on the Iran-contra affair in May 1987, General Secord was called as the first witness.

In contrast to several other key witnesses, including North, Poindexter and Hakim, he testified without immunity. In his four days in court, he insisted indignantly that he was not being taken advantage of. In a later interview with The New York Times, he dismissed concerns about the Enterprise’s financial dealings as “pipsqueak stuff.”

But in the weeks that followed, other evidence and testimony portrayed General Secord as a man not unduly burdened by matters of expediency. Hakim, for example, testified that General Secord had used Enterprise funds to buy a $32,000 Porsche and a private jet.

However, General Secord left the proceedings with fans. Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican, praised him and North as “the kind of guys the country turns to when it has real problems and dirty work to do.”

In April 1989, General Secord was indicted by a federal grand jury on nine counts of lying to Congress about his knowledge of the secret network’s financial dealings.

The heart of the prosecution’s case was that Enterprise’s revenue rightfully belonged to the US government.

Investigators discovered that General Secord realized more than $2 million from his Iran-contra business in 1985 and 1986 and that he took precautions to conceal the payments to avoid paying taxes. It also turned out that only about $4 million of the proceeds from the Iran arms deals made it to the contras.

In November 1989, five days before his trial, General Secord agreed to plead guilty to one count of lying to Congress. He admitted that, when asked whether North had benefited financially from Enterprise, he did not disclose that he had paid for an expensive security system for North’s home, an alleged bribe to ensure business continued by General Secord.

General Secord was later sentenced to a $50 fine and probation, and the judge decided he had suffered enough.

The son of a truck driver, Richard Vernon Secord was born on July 6, 1932 in the farming town of LaRue, Ohio. In 1955, he graduated from West Point Military Academy and received a commission in the Air Force. He quickly rose through the ranks, receiving his first general star at age 43.

After Iran-contra, General Secord returned to private business, serving for a time as a top executive at Computerized Thermal Imaging, a computer imaging company, and as president of the Air Commando Association.

In 1961, he married Jo Ann Gibson. He died in January. He leaves three children, Julia, Laura and John; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

To the end, General Secord fell victim to the perfidy in Washington and defended the Iran and Counter Initiatives as necessary measures to advance the nation’s interest. As he noted at one point in his memoirs, “It didn’t feel like we were acting like impulsive cowboys in this, but like people who finally woke up and smelled the coffee.”