True North

This country had a love affair last summer. Televised testimony held us riveted for several days in July, while a series of posters and magazines and video tapes and paperback books presented a new hero to the American people. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, United States Marine Corps, fascinated us with his handsome features and his sincere words and gestures.

The fact that North temporarily won our acceptance is proof to some experts that we Americans are a people who can be manipulated into hasty choices. Historian Barbara Tuchman, writing about our infatuation with North when it was at its height, concluded, "The 'Olliemania' phenomenon--which now reaches from Oliver North T-shirts to clubs promoting North for President--demonstrates a distressing popular development that I consider the main point of the Iran affair, deeper than the issues of incompetence in government. It is the public's acceptance of the pictured image without regard to the reality underneath.... This is the result of a visual--which is to say nonthinking--culture."

Tuchman's assertion raises serious questions: Are we Americans passive participants in a "nonthinking" culture? During crises, do we foolishly accept "the pictured image without regard to the reality underneath"? Did we buy The Oliver North Story--about a bemedaled and uniformed war hero who was ready to face down Abu Nidal, arm the Contras, mine Nicaraguan harbors, sell missiles to Iran and give his President total loyalty--no questions asked? (continued on page 154)True North(continued from page 105)

We're not as dumb as Tuchman thinks.

Most of us suspected that the Oliver North story was more complicated than that, but we didn't have much information to go on. So we shut up and walked through the bookstores and newsstands and airports that were clogged with the trappings of Olliemania. To calm my own suspicions, I went to Washington, D.C. I was working on the theory that no man is a hero to his colleagues, that if you want the scoop on an individual, you interview his peers; so I talked with people who had served with North in the Marine Corps and on the National Security Council staff.

Every source I quote is a combat veteran. Each one knew North personally. Most of my sources are still active-duty Marines or intelligence personnel. They have some interesting stories to tell about their experiences with Oliver North, stories that run contrary to the publicized images of him. North is, to these men, more complex than the TV picture we absorbed last summer. Much more.

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"Let's have lunch with Ollie," one former Marine officer wrote to another last July. "He can lie to Congress, but he can't lie to us." That comment may sound flippant, but if so, the flippancy has been well earned. Those two former Marines are Vietnam veterans who spent several months at Khe Sanh in 1968, participating in one of the most difficult battles in Marine Corps history.

Talk with Marines who know North and have served with him, and if you are an outsider, an automatic code of silence will go into effect. You will be frozen out. It's nothing personal, really. The Marine Corps is one of the last truly tight-knit organizations in this culture, and it protects its own people with fierce loyalty. But if you are a former Marine (as I am), an insider by virtue of your training and service, you will find Marines willing to talk with you frankly, if anonymously, about Oliver North.

Marines display a consistent reaction when you ask about the veracity of North's public image: They laugh at the gulf between the illusion and the reality. They are amused at how simplistically North has been portrayed. They think that the American people got only one side of the Oliver North story during the Iran/Contra hearings--not "the good, the bad and the ugly," as North claimed he was giving us, but something more like "the good, the better and the best." There is, the Marines with whom I talked suggest, a large variation between true North and magnetic North, between the complex human being they know and the simple public picture painted of him.

The bare bones of North's career are these: Born in 1943 in Texas (the son of an Army officer who earned a Silver Star in World War Two), raised in the state of New York, North graduated from high school in Philmont, New York, in 1961. He took classes at State University College of New York at Brockport in 1963 (school officials deny North's claim that he earned a degree there). He attended the United States Naval Academy, lost a year of school after he was badly injured in an automobile accident, graduated from Annapolis in 1968 (his class yearbook says he "expertly concealed his scholarly attributes from all but the Bull Department"), accepted a commission at graduation as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and, upon completion of Basic School (a rigorous course of instruction for all newly commissioned Marine officers) at Quantico, Virginia, in November 1968, found himself with orders to go to Vietnam.

North served in South Vietnam as an Infantry platoon commander from December 3, 1968, to August 21, 1969. In that time, he performed aggressively in combat, winning both a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. He left Vietnam in late November 1969 for an assignment as an instructor at Basic School. From 1969 to 1973, North remained at Quantico. He was promoted to captain in 1971. In 1973 and 1974, he served on Okinawa as officer in charge of the Northern Training Area (essentially a jungle-warfare school).

In December 1974, something unplanned happened to Oliver North. The details are murky, the records unavailable, but it is generally accepted among his colleagues that he cracked up. He was found in a state of high anxiety one day, holding his .45-caliber pistol and threatening suicide. He spent 22 days in Bethesda Naval Hospital, near Washington, D.C. The official diagnosis, according to reliable reports, was "delayed battle stress."

The Marines who knew North at that time were not willing to go into too many details for the record, but there were common elements in their memories. According to them, North had exhausted himself physically and emotionally while running the Northern Training Area, and it was at that juncture that he also had to face some very real problems with his marriage and his family back in the U.S.A.

"I was in Washington in 1974 when Ollie got back from Okinawa," one Marine reports. "He was interviewing for a position at Eighth and I, the Marine Corps barracks in D.C. It's the show place of the Marine Corps, really, a spit-and-polish billet with lots of parades and reviews. The next thing I knew, Ollie had disappeared. He didn't get the Eighth and I post. I was told he'd had some kind of nervous breakdown. I won't go into the particulars, but I think Ollie was affected by a lot more than combat stress."

After his release from Bethesda, North spent the next four years as a manpower analyst at Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In June 1978, he was sent to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he was promoted to major and served as a battalion staff officer for two years. He then attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. On August 4, 1981, he was assigned to duty with the National Security Council. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel on October 1, 1983.

That's the basic structure of North's career, and it is fine as far as it goes. But North apparently took it further. According to Marines who should know, he presented inflated credentials in the grand Eighties tradition of the fictional résumé and the exaggerated autobiography. Men in the public eye, such as Gary Hart, Joe Biden and Pat Robertson, have all been charged with creating their own myths, editing their lives, inventing themselves, fictionalizing their exploits. North, to some, is also a man who has played loosely with biographical truth, who has orchestrated some significant elaborations about his own history.

"Ollie came over to the NSC staff in 1981," says a man I'll call Max, a professional intelligence officer who is still active in some of the most difficult assignments available. It is part of his job to keep a close watch on the world's dangerous characters. He is as tough as they come, and he has been down some alleys that North has only dreamed about. A Vietnam veteran himself, Max speaks in controlled, bemused tones about a man he knows well. Ironically, we are sitting in Lafayette Square, across from the old Executive Office Building, the home of the National Security Council.

"In 1983, North wrote a single-page biography," Max says. "It's been withdrawn since then, but you should see it. It's pure Ollie North, and it's also pure bullshit. He writes that he 'participated in both conventional and unconventional warfare operations in Southeast Asia.' He's putting that down in print. It's supposed to hint that he was playing Green Beret on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or that he was doing cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia. He used to tell people those war stories, you know. But here he's submitting them as truth in an autobiographical document for the NSC. And that 'unconventional warfare operations' stuff is bullshit. Ollie North was an 03, an Infantry officer in a line company--nothing more, nothing less.

"Look at the rest of this biography. When we got this piece of paper at the NSC, we laughed and laughed. 'Major North is responsible for national-level contingency planning, crisis management and counterterrorism.' Do you suppose any of the rest of us on the NSC had any responsibilities? Was he really in charge of all that, as he claims? No way, José. You still reading? 'He has organized and directed combined operations with more than a dozen of our allies.' This is dated September 1983; he's been on the staff two years at this time and he's directing combined operations with our allies? Sounds like grade-A bullshit to me. Ollie's writing a novel here. He's claiming primary responsibility in areas where he was nothing special, just another gofer.

"This whole damned bio sheet is suspect. He says he 'has published works in various military journals.' Where are they? We can't find them."

Max hands the sheet of paper to me with a chuckle. It is autumn in Washington, still hot and muggy, and as I read North's description of himself, I think of the years he worked in the building I can see from where I am sitting.

"You want to know what we think of Ollie at the NSC?" Max asks. "We think he's the ultimate self-promoter. He's out there blowing his own bugle, baby. Full blast. All the time. And here he is, in print, for the record, jiving us as usual."

We sit for a time without talking. Max fidgets, stands up to leave, sits down again.

"One more thing. It may seem small, but it really has a lot to do with how America looks at this guy. Oliver North never wore his uniform to work while he was with the NSC. Not for six years. Not until the day he was fired. He wore civilian clothes at all times. I've often wondered how his testimony would have gone down if he'd been sitting there in front of the Iran/Contra committee in a three-piece suit. You know how many Marines hated to see him up there in that uniform? He dragged the corps into the scandal and he successfully exploited the image. But he wasn't working for the Marine Corps when he did all that slick NSC stuff. So he should have left the corps out of it."

This is the one theme I heard more than any other from the Marines who had worked with Oliver North. They were frustrated with their powerlessness to correct the image he had projected of a Marine officer, in uniform, admitting that he lied to his superiors, shredded vital evidence and deceived the nation.

"I worked with Ollie practically every day for five years," Max says. "I've seen him kiss ass like a choirboy and I've seen him buddy up to admirals and generals on a first-name basis. I've heard Fawn Hall call him an asshole when he got too stuck on himself. I've been on secret trips where I was embarrassed to be with him, he was so standoffish and undiplomatic."

I ask a question that has bothered me for a long time: How did a man with some fairly erratic behavior in his past gain entrance to an agency as important as the National Security Council?

Max smiles. "If you understood Ollie's history at the NSC, it might help put him in perspective. Ollie was at the Naval War College in 1980. That's a one-year stint, but he made the most of it. He wrote a paper about the recommissioning of World War Two battleships. Why did he choose that subject? Well, it may be more than a coincidence that the recommissioning of World War Two battleships just happened to be the pet project of the new Secretary of the Navy at the time, John Lehman. And it may be more than a coincidence that Ollie's paper ended up on Lehman's desk. Ollie and Lehman got to be buddies, and Lehman had a lot to do with North's NSC appointment.

"When Ollie got to the NSC, he was basically an easel carrier. He helped set up exhibits and carry briefcases when senior officers went up to Capitol Hill to testify. Luckily for Ollie, the Reagan Administration was in the process of making the NSC its secret operational arm in all sorts of crises. Ollie was in the right place at the right time, made himself noticed by working nights and weekends, became indispensable in small ways that started to grow as the NSC grew. The Reagan Administration was saying, 'We're looking for a few good cowboys,' and Ollie was saying, 'I just happen to have my horse with me.' And when Ollie and Bill Casey met, it was two character flaws falling in love with each other. But let me make it clear: No matter what Ollie says on his own bio sheet, he was never the number-one honcho; he was not top dog in every department at the NSC. He had bosses. He had people to report to."

Max talks about his exasperation as he watched North testify at the Iran/Contra hearings. "I started yelling at the TV set. I couldn't believe how much they were letting him get away with. Finally, I went up to one of the Senators I know. 'Why don't you blow him away?' I asked. 'Why are you letting him build himself into a national hero? You know his real biography. He's not that special. He's got some glitches.' The Senator didn't even blink. 'Nobody wants to take him on,' he said. 'We know he's gilding his lily. But nobody wants to be the bad guy.' "

Max and I shake hands and part company. It is dusk. There are lights on in the windows of the NSC offices as I jog by the old Executive Office Building later that evening. I laugh to myself, wondering how many nights Oliver North worked under those lights, wondering whether the brief biography of North that Max showed me had been prepared and typed in that very building.

This business of North's exaggerated claims and false credentials crops up often as Marines reflect on his image. Retired Marine lieutenant general Victor Krulak wrote a column about that for the San Diego Tribune: "There has been a lot of press discussion about what a two-fisted fighting man North is. His combat exploits in Vietnam are romanticized, like the Sunday-supplement tale of his valiant singlehanded midnight foray across the Demilitarized Zone to capture and bring back a North Vietnamese prisoner. It is an exciting story, but, like many others, it never happened."

A former Marine Corps officer who knew him well told me that North had had an early reputation for self-promotion. "I'm a charter member of the Olliewatchers Club," he says. "A bunch of us formed it back in Basic School when we were commissioned. We've been watching Ollie promote himself since 1968. He was in our Basic School class and he stood out. For one thing, he was politically well connected. He always had a godfather, some senior officer looking out for him. For another, he hyped himself all the time. I remember working with Ollie on Okinawa in 1973 and 1974. He did a good job running the Northern Training Area. But he also called newspapers and reporters and got himself written up in the Navy Times and places like that. He was such a publicity hound. The Olliewatchers laugh about it. Marine officers don't go around arranging their own PR. But Ollie did. That's just his nature."

To a man, the Marines with whom I talked resented North's continual search for the spotlight. "Showboat" and "hot dog" were terms often used to describe him by men who had won as many medals as he had, run as many risks.

"North's not like any other Marine officer I've ever known," one active-duty Marine says. "I was at the 20th reunion of Khé Sanh veterans recently. I looked around the room that night and I thought about what great guys these Marines are, what shit they'd been through in Vietnam, how modest they were about it. Most of them were quality people then and are quality people now--really normal guys who went through hell and then came back to America and tried to adjust. Some of them stayed in the corps and did their jobs and got promoted or passed over, but I'm here to tell you, they never drew a lot of attention to themselves. Some of them left the Marine Corps and became lawyers, stockbrokers, real-estate salesmen. One of my buddies is a janitor in Alaska. Another writes children's books. Another runs a truck stop in Florida. Normal guys who adjusted as best they could. They would never think of showboating the way Ollie does. They really don't approve of that. They see him as a very strange anomaly, a two-percenter. He's out on the fringe; that's all I can tell you."

The perception that North was somehow outside the normal boundaries of a Marine officer's conduct, that he was too willing to hype himself to his bureaucratic bosses at the NSC, too eager to succeed and achieve in the civilian world while holding a military commission, ran through most of the comments I heard about him. Even men who had admired him in his earlier years saw him as a person who had lost the sharp focus of the combat Marine and had turned himself into an office politician.

"Oliver North is a tremendously complex man," says a Marine officer who served with him at various times over a period of ten years. "Before his problems in 1974, he was one of the best officers I'd ever served with. He was good in combat, outstanding as an instructor at Quantico, terrific on Okinawa when he was running the Northern Training Area. I remember once I literally put my life in his hands when he taught me how to rappel out of a CH-53 helicopter. We were hovering 100 feet over the Okinawan jungle, and he hooked a snap link to my line, checked the knot and out of that chopper I went. He was cool and competent, and if he'd screwed up that day in 1974, I'd be dead. It's as simple as that.

"But Ollie went through tremendous changes at the end of 1974. Face it: Hospitalization for emotional problems could have a strong negative impact on an officer's advancement within the corps.

"I saw North at a Marine Corps Birthday Ball after he joined the NSC, and I was surprised at his appearance. He had the demeanor of a politician. There he was in his dress blues, medals and all, but he needed a haircut and he was talking like an Assistant Secretary of State. He was trying to be a bureaucrat, not a gung-ho Infantry officer. I watched him at the Iran/Contra hearings and I felt the same way. 'Take off the uniform, Ollie,' I kept mumbling at the TV. 'Don't bring the Marine uniform into that charged political atmosphere. A Marine officer doesn't lie to Congress. He doesn't fudge the truth. He doesn't shred documents. He stays politically neutral, because that's what his officer's commission requires him to be.'

"The real truth about Oliver North? He's an unusual alloy, a strange combination of things. He has displayed real courage in combat, and to this day, I would follow him into battle any time, anywhere. But he's also got an enormous ego when it comes to self-promotion. Both halves of that equation are true, but I suspect that sometimes those two conflicting parts collide. The bureaucratic self-promoter and the combat Marine meet at his center and cancel each other out. What happens to him then? I don't know, but maybe he loses sight of himself and has no idea at that time who he really is."

There is a feeling among North's fellow officers that Marines belong somewhere other than the heady environs of the State Department and the NSC. They see North as a man who, essentially, got fancy. They think he didn't really know what he was doing as he tried to participate in affairs of state. He was holding the commission of a Marine Corps officer, but, in the opinion of some of his colleagues, he seems to have forgotten that. They think his actions display truly bad judgment. Bad as in deadly.

"I almost dropped at the knees when I heard about Ollie's helping with arms sales to Iran," says one former battalion commander who served in Beirut in the early Eighties. "He should have known better. Those Iranians sponsored the terrorists who blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 of our men. What was Ollie doing selling weapons and missiles to those bastards?

"I think I know something about what Ollie experienced at the NSC. He felt like a big shot. I've been there. When I walked around Beirut, the press wanted to talk to me. I liked that. I liked being lionized, being interviewed. There's a saying 'If money doesn't get you, power will.' I understood that. And I guarded against it. But I think Ollie held himself in awe. And he made some lousy judgments, like backing arms sales to our enemies."

The man pauses, searching for words. I remember how, when the news of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut reached me, I almost vomited. I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, how quickly I left the room to be by myself and hold down the nausea. That may seem melodramatic to some people, but once a Marine, always a Marine; you identify with the corps, no matter what your political convictions, and the men who are lost long after you leave the Service are still, somehow, your brothers-in-arms.

"A lot of senior officers called Ollie Lieutenant Colonel Rambo long before the public got to know about him. The only way I can put it is this: Some guys have a hidden agenda; you know what I mean? Some guys want to be in Marine recon a little too much. They want to carry lots of ammo and four kinds of knives and wear camouflage paint, even in the mess hall. They hot dog it in front of the troops and the troops love it, but you have to ask yourself what the agenda is for those guys. I always thought Ollie had a hidden agenda. I think he loved power and glory a little too much. I never would have agreed to sell missiles to the people who blew up my men, not for all the praise in Washington, D.C. But Ollie had another agenda. I'm not saying he favored the bombing of the barracks. I'm saying he didn't think clearly about the consequences of his actions. He wanted glory. And he got it. Sort of."

Ollie North leaves behind a trail of stories wherever he goes. A lot of them are about his overzealous behavior, and they frequently evoke laughter. Take the one about the lockers at Camp Lejeune.

"Ollie had a strange reputation at Lejeune because he liked to stay up for two or three days at a time--no sleep, no rest, just work," a Marine colleague relates. "It was dumb to do that. Nobody can stay up that long and not make mistakes. But Ollie thought it made him look good, I guess. Sometimes some of the senior officers would just shut Ollie down. They'd tell him to take a break, go home, be with his family. It was weird. Ollie was taken out by stress in 1974, but he piled more and more stress on himself in the next years. Why? To prove he could take it? To prove he was a man? I don't know.

"Anyway, the battalion was coming back from a Mediterranean cruise. The commanding officer wanted the lockers in the barracks checked to make sure everything was OK. So Ollie took over and walked in with the advance party and cut off all the locks on the lockers, without trying to find keys or combinations or getting any of the troops to help him. He just fired from the hip and tore the place up. The C.O. was pissed. He almost canned him then and there. The rest of us were laughing. It was pure Ollie North: Leave him unsupervised and he'll break your back."

And what of the Marine Corps itself? Is it responsible for the actions of Oliver North? Did it manufacture him out of whole cloth, encourage him to exaggerate his autobiography, ask him to become more bureaucrat than grunt? Is Marine Corps training deficient? Does it reward workaholism and hot dogging, punish indepth thinking and careful planning?

It's not as if the Marine Corps leadership hasn't considered the problem. Listen to the statements of one of the men in charge of officer training.

"Long before it was public, we were aware of Ollie's activities, and we were very uncomfortable with some of them. We asked ourselves a basic question: Did our training support this kind of personality? I hate to say it, but the answer is, in some ways, yes, we are responsible for the mind-set of Oliver North. He brought a lot of problems to us, but he's also a product of our system.

"When you train Marines for combat, you aren't sitting around a table somewhere discussing computer programming. You're training Marines to go to war and get the job done. So it's always a delicate balance. You want a man who will take the hill when it has to be taken--but you also want a man who will coordinate his efforts and be part of the combat team while he's doing it.

"After the Iran/ Contra scandal broke, I was really surprised by the reactions of the young lieutenants who were in Basic School at the time. It's true that North was a hero to some of them, but it's also true that they had a pretty good perspective on the guy. The term hot dog came up a lot when they discussed him. They could sense that Ollie was a grand-stander.

"The training has changed since North went through Basic School. We're trying to teach Marines how to fight smarter, better. We don't train them to go hi diddle diddle right up the middle, the way we used to. 'Don't confuse bravery with intelligence,' we tell them. 'If you've got the time to fall on a grenade for your buddies, you've also got the time to yell, "Grenade!" and hit the dirt.' "

The man pauses and thinks about his own example. So do I. We both know men who have sacrificed themselves in just that fashion. There is a terrible beauty in such gestures. But you are sometimes left wondering if, just before that moment of self-sacrifice, there wasn't a better choice.

"Today we emphasize that we don't want people with a hidden agenda. We don't want people with a death wish. I tell every class I teach about a company commander I knew at Khé Sanh who stood up and walked around and played macho man every time we had incoming artillery fire. At Khé Sanh, we were taking several thousand rounds of incoming every day. I tell them what a jerk I thought that company commander was, how it was his job to be on the horn planning counterbattery fire, how he should have been helping his troops by thinking and coordinating and strategizing, not swaggering around like some cowboy. We're looking for that delicate balance between aggression and common sense."

The Marines have spoken, and it is clear that they see Oliver North as a man, not a myth. He is more than a picture on a poster, more than a talking head on TV. "North's behavior," writes General Krulak, "has gained for him a variety of descriptives: zealot, extremist, mystic, radical, missionary, hero, prophet. While none of the descriptive terms is totally correct, all of them portray a man who has an apostolic devotion to his cause--a devotion, however, that created a blurring between means and ends."

It is precisely that blurring between means and ends that we, the American people, sensed last summer. We knew something was missing as we watched the tube and put up the posters and bought the books and read the magazines. "What's wrong with this picture?" we kept asking ourselves. We didn't articulate our doubts, really, but they were there. And rightfully so, it turns out. We were practicing a quiet, patient, careful form of patriotism in the midst of all that noise and hoopla, and we were not as dumb as some people thought.

"I always assumed Ollie would have been happy in northern Bavaria in the late Thirties," a Marine officer told me with a smile. "He stood up and clicked his heels whenever he talked to the President on the phone. It seemed like something out of a bad movie to me, but he meant it. And that scared me."

It is possible that if Oliver North were to graduate from the United States Naval Academy this summer and were to head for Marine Corps Basic School, he would receive the kind of training that would help him become a more secure, less frantic officer, and he would grow into a man less eager to please his superiors and more genuinely modest and humane. He might also find role models who could teach him that warriors need wisdom as much as they need ambition and that there are many forms of self-destruction, including that sneakiest of contemporary vices, workaholism.

But harsh reality has a way of declaring itself in the military. The fact seems to be that no educational system and no series of role models can subdue those few officers who romanticize their purpose, overdramatize their importance and fictionalize their history. Those few officers will do anything their superiors tell them to do, and they will do it with flair, gusto, bravery, efficiency, shrewdness, energy--and one more thing: a certain kind of blindness.