The making of a candidate: how Oliver North went from vilifying Congress to running for the Senate - Cover Story

It looks like something right out of the democracy-in-action section of a civics textbook. On a Friday night in October at a suburban Washington hotel, some 250 eager college students have gathered to see one of their heroes, paying $10 each for the honor. Red, white and blue streamers hang from the ceiling, a huge American flag hugs a wall, and the handmade "College Republicans Ollie" poster attached to the podium adds a personal touch to the large, custom-crafted "Oliver North American Hero" banner.

"I've always wanted to see Ollie," enthuses a 21-year-old student from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "I can't wait to see the fireworks when he wins," pipes up his 19-year-old classmate, referring to North's campaign for the U.S. Senate - at the time legally organized but publicly undeclared.

"He's literally an American hero. He stood up for what he believed in," says a George Washington University sophomore who watched the Iran-Contra hearings as an enthralled 13-year-old. "He took responsibility for what he did, and that's the important thing - even if it was against the law. And that's not clear," the student adds. "He was acquitted on all charges. [Election to the Senate] will be his vindication."

When North finally enters the room and steps up to the podium, pandemonium breaks out. Chants of "Ollie Ollie Ollie" rock the room. The pep rally-like chanting and clapping and foot-stomping are repeated at regular intervals throughout North's speech, becoming particularly raucous whenever Ollie blasts the Democrats, questions Bill Clinton's manhood or makes even a passing comment about welfare. The students' response to North's exhortation to prayer, however, is noticeably subdued.

But it really doesn't matter what North says, or that his hair is all gray now, that the ramrod Marine of their memories has put on a few pounds, filling out his navy pinstriped suit. The students - virtually all white and nearly all male - don't even care that he has less to say about his political aspirations than he does about a bunch of Virginia Republicans they've never heard of and can't vote for. That he's here is enough; just one flash of that famous gap-toothed grin sends them into a tizzy.

Once the speech is over they line up for autographs and photographs. North obliges them willingly - striking a handshake pose for the men, putting his arm around the women, smiling on cue and even suggesting how to operate a stubbom camera - making him at once both a celebrity being fawned over by adoring fans and a shrewd political operator. The scene is campaign commercial picture-perfect.

Just out of camera range a couple of bodyguards stand watchfully, providing North with unobtrusive security. Not much farther away is North's chief of staff, Mark Merritt, who explains politely that his boss does not give interviews and says with a straight face that North was forced to file as a Senate candidate, transforming his exploratory committee into an official campaign committee, because "the problem is that he has such fundraising capacity." Just how much the aspiring senator has raised Merritt isn't saying; he allows only that "the money is still coming in. It's going better than we expected."

After every last person in the room wanting a signature or photo with North has gotten it, North's entourage escorts him down the hall, into an elevator and out again, where they disappear in the shadows of the hotel's basement-level garage.

This is the same Ollie North who, during his glory days at the White House, reveled in the shadows of covert operations and thrived on the power of secret deal-making. But now North, the arms-for-hostages dealmaker who disdained the U.S. Congress and, according to biographers and historians, circumvented its constitutional authority, has become North the Senate candidate. And behind this remarkable, only-in-America transformation is a story of personal and political empire-building - fueled by masterful fundraising and message-spreading operations.

OLLIE'S EMPIRE

For all the questions the Iran-Contra hearings didn't answer, the one thing they made perfectly clear was Oliver North's powerful capacity to stir emotions, to elicit strong feelings of patriotism and loyalty. For six days in July 1987 Americans sat riveted to their television sets, entranced - or horrified - by the moist-eyed, jut-jawed, bemedaled image of little-guy Oliver North standing his ground in the face of powerful U.S. congressmembers, government lawyers and the unblinking eyes of countless cameras and klieg lights. The White House and congressmembers' offices, as well as North, were flooded with calls and telegrams of support for Ollie.

Within days of North's testimony conservative fundraisers had started banking on his name; seven weeks later Republican Party committees and conservative groups had sent out more than six million fundraising letters "on the Ollie North thing." Said conservative fundraising guru Richard Viguerie: "We've gotten the strongest response to those [North] mailings of any mailings I've been associated with."

While North and his supporters didn't benefit financially from those Ollie North mailings, they did get some inspiration. With Ollie as the money magnet, they could raise cash for other causes as well, including North himself. Since 1988 three organizations affiliated with North - one a legal defense fund, one a political arm with tax-exempt status and the other a political action committee - have raised more than $23 million. North and his supporters also have used the organizations and the money they've raised to develop a mailing list of as many as half a million names, collect political debts and otherwise lay the groundwork for what promises to be a very well-positioned and -financed Senate race.

The seeds of North's empire were sown in 1988, when some of his friends and former classmates established the North Legal Defense Trust to help North pay mounting legal bills. North had been indicted on 12 charges related to his role in supplying privately funded military aid to the contras and his attempts to cover up the arms-for-hostages operation, and in 1989 he was convicted on three counts of obstructing Congress, destroying documents and accepting an illegal gratuity. North appealed the verdicts, and in 1990 a U.S. Appeals Court overturned his convictions. In 1991 a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case against him because Congress had granted him limited immunity.

According to documents filed with the New York Department of State, the defense fund paid North's attorneys roughly $5.3 million from 1988 through 1991, while another $44,598 in legal services was "forgiven." The fund collected more than $13.2 million in tax-deductible donations before disbanding last year, yet legal fees represented only 40 percent of its expenditures. Of the remainder, almost $1.3 million, or about 10 percent, was spent to provide "personal protection for the safety of Oliver North and his family," while 50 percent, or $6.7 million, of the group's spending went to cover management and fundraising costs. Last year the group incurred no legal fees but spent $116,406 on security for North and overhead.

Meanwhile another key component of the growing North empire was raising additional millions of dollars and getting North's name, picture, voice and right-wing political message out to hundreds of thousands of citizens across the country. According to its own literature, in 1990 North founded an organization called the Freedom Alliance and became its president. In a March 1990 fundraising letter that solicited tax-deductible checks of $25, North asked supporters whether he should "fade away or build the Freedom Alliance out of the fires of [his] adversity." The organization's brochure, which mainly promotes North - quite literally, in one instance, by stating that North was a member of the National Security Council (NSC) rather than on the NSC's staff - explains that "Oliver North founded Freedom Alliance to ensure that Americans know when our national defense, our system of justice, and our traditional moral values are being put at risk for the sake of `politics.'"

In fact, what became the Freedom Alliance in 1989 was forged by a group of conservatives in March 1987, barely three months after Lt. Col. North had been "reassigned" by his commander-in-chief and a few months before his Iran-Contra testimony. According to papers filed with the Maryland secretary of state's office, the Interamerican Partnership was incorporated for the purpose of "assist[ing] poor people in under-developed Latin American and Caribbean nations."

The organization's president was Ron Godwin, a newspaper executive whose publication is owned by a corporation founded by the Unification Church's Rev. Sun Myung Moon and who previously had been executive director of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Godwin, senior vice president of the Washington Times, also had been involved with several right-wing groups, including one called the Central American Freedom Alliance, that encouraged the Reagan administration to openly overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Alan P. Dye, an incorporator and another former president of the Interamerican Partnership turned Freedom Alliance, sat on the group's board of directors until last year and continues to serve as its legal counsel. In 1989 the board changed the group's name to the Freedom Alliance and revised its charter to reflect a change in emphasis from helping poor people to engaging in charitable and educational activities. And not until 1990 did North come on board.

Freedom Alliance officials won't discuss North's claim that he was the founder of the group; Dye cited attorney-client obligations of confidentiality and referred inquiries into the organization's background to Alliance chair and retired Matine Lt. Gen. E. J. Bronars, who insisted that questions be submitted in writing and provided perfunctory written responses, among them the statement that "North has been associated with Freedom Alliance since its inception in the Fall of 1989, and is regarded as the founder of Freedom Alliance." Godwin failed to return phone calls, and another incorporator, Hugh Webster, declined comment.

Whatever the precise nature of the group's origins, since 1990 the organization has functioned in effect as Oliver North's political arm, promoting him and his political views. It is unclear at what point North seriously began considering running for the Senate, but the activities sponsored by the Freedom Alliance clearly have benefited that cause. And since the Freedom Alliance is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity, it has done it with tax-deductible contributions - more than $9 million since 1989.

According to Bronars, whose salary from the Alliance was $65,108 last year, the group's primary activities are "humanitarian/charitable, and public policy information/education programs." Although its tax-exempt status restricts the amount of lobbying and political activity the Alliance can engage in, information in its tax returns and publications indicates a strong focus on political activities - which, in strict accordance with the law, the group classifies as "educational" - with relatively little money or time going toward humanitatian or charitable programs.

Last year 40 percent of the group's expenses were for printing, postage and shipping and 30 percent covered salaries, payroll taxes and benefits for its employees and contracted workers. A mere 1 percent of its spending was in the form of a charitable grant, while another 1.3 percent was spent on unexplained "specific assistance to individuals." The remainder of the group's expenditures covered rent, legal and accounting fees, travel and conferences and other overhead expenses.

Presumably the organization's newsletter, "The Free American," which goes to as many as 100,000 people every month, accounts for some of its printing and postage bills. Until North resigned as Freedom Alliance president in September - citing potential conflicts with a possible Senate race - issues of the newsletter featured a front-page drawing of North, accompanied by a quote, an inside column called "The President's Pen," and a back-page "personal word from Oliver L. North."

Edited by Cliff Kincaid, a former talk show host for a Washington-area radio station owned by televangelist Pat Robertson, the Alliance newsletter regularly attacks the "homosexual lobby," the United Nations and Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as President Clinton's handling of everything from the military, the drug war, health care reform and NAFTA to logging in the Pacific Northwest.

North's Alliance-financed radio commentary, "The Freedom Report," was aired daily on nearly 300 radio stations, and the Alliance mailed frequent fundraising letters signed by North. The fundraising letters explain that the Alliance needs more money to counter the "militant radicals" who threaten the nation's public schools, Clinton's "fanatical friends" and the "radical homosexual lobbyists" who would destroy the military and corrupt the Boy Scouts, and the "liberal special interests" who threaten to "wreck the world's finest health care system."

In 1990 and '91 the Alliance solicited donated materials from corporations and individuals - "ranging from magazines to sunglasses" - for distribution to military personnel, and provided some assistance to persons visiting family members wounded in the Gulf War. In four years it has spent $203,748 in cash grants to individuals or organizations; 74 percent of that amount has gone to an inner-city youth anti-drug program in Washington called the Alliance to Save America's Future, known as SAFe. The entire substance of the Freedom Alliance's "community outreach" program, the SAFe grant represented only 1 percent of the Alliance's expenditures last year.

If SAFe sounds familiar, it is: It's where North served out his criminal sentence of 1,200 hours of community service (even though his conviction was on appeal and was later overturned). It's unclear which came first - the Freedom Alliance's grants to SAFe, North's association with the group or SAFe president Thad Heath's position as treasurer of the Freedom Alliance's board of directors in 1990 and 1991. Asked how the associations began and how SAFe has used its Freedom Alliance grants, Heath refused to comment.

OLLIE-PAC

In late 1991, E.J. Bronars, executive director of North's legal defense fund and chair of the Freedom Alliance, signed Federal Election Commission (FEC) registration papers for the For Liberty in American Government (FLAG) political action committee, which-later changed its name to V-PAC. With that, the final tool in North's political career-building arsenal was put into place. For if the Freedom Alliance gets out North's political message, V-PAC pays many of the bills that come with his political ambition.

(Bronars also serves as chair of V-PAC. Freedom Alliance, V-PAC and, until its dissolution, the legal defense fund also share the same street address, subleasing office space from Guardian Technologies Inc., North's bulletproof vest company. Beyond that, Bronars says, "no relationship exists" between the groups.)

From January 1992 through June 30 of this year, V-PAC took in contributions of $843,383 - and accumulated debts of $128,875. Like other so-called "leadership" PACs that exist primarily to pay expenses and dole out political favors, thus creating political debts, V-PAC's raison d'etre appears to be to further the political career of its honorary chair, Ollie North. "The PAC finances his travel," says North's - and V-PAC'S - chief of staff Mark Merritt. North travels to Republican candidate fundraisers, campaign events and GOP conventions to benefit other candidates, meanwhile building networks for his Senate campaign.

"He's been to every pig roast and fish fry in Virginia," says Robert Holsworth, chair of the political science department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Mark Rozell, a political scientist at Mary Washington College, says North "has very actively worked the system from the ground up for the past two years."

When the state GOP held its convention last June, for example, North was there. A visible presence at the Richmond Coliseum, where the official party business was being conducted, North was the star attraction at a standing-room-only, after-hours reception at the local Marriott. To most observers, the event had an unmistakable "Ollie for Senate" aura about it. Yet because North was not a declared candidate, V-PAC picked up die tab: $5,646 for "catering and facilities," according to reports filed with the FEC.

The lion's share of the PAC's expenditures go for mailing list rental, direct mail printing and postage, salaries, travel, consulting services and public opinion surveys. Only 5.6 percent of contributions to V-PAC have been passed on to congressional candidates; additional funds and "in-kind" contributions have gone to Republican candidates for Virginia's state legislature. By making contributions and appearing at campaign events and ftindraisers, North "has collected so many political IOUs across the state it would be very difficult for anyone else to oppose him" for the Republican nomination, Rozell believes.

The Freedom Alliance and North's legal defense fund are not legally required to disclose the identities of their donors. But because federal PACs are required to identify contributors of more than $200, V-PAC's reports offer limited insights into the financing of Ollie's empire.

Among V-PAC's contributors are at least two leading contra funders: Washington, D.C.'s C. Thomas Clagett Jr. wrote a $20,000 check for contra guns and ammo in 1986 and gave $5,000 to V-PAC earlier this year. Barbara Christian of Prospect, Ky., who contributed at least $7,700 to the private contra fundraising network run by Carl Russell "Spitz" Channell (and coordinated from the White House by North), has given $10,000 to V-PAC. She's also made contributions to North's legal defense fund and the Freedom Alliance, although she won't say how much.

Christian's connection to North goes beyond direct mail. According to North's daily White House appointment calendars, declassified during the Iran-Contra investigation, North met with Christian at least twice in 1985. After Christian contributed to the contra cause, she received a thank-you note from North, commending her for her "crucial contribution," saying the president soon would be making a renewed effort to assist the contras, and pointing out that "once again [her] support [would] be essential."

Apparently North made a good impression. In a telephone interview Christian confirms meeting with North and says, "I think he is a thoroughly honest American. He would be a breath of fresh air in Washington politics. I'm 100 percent for Col. North."

Other top V-PAC contributors include Larry Addington, owner of Ashland, Ky.- based Addington Resources, a coal mining and waste management company; Bruce Gottwald, a longtime leading GOP donor in Virginia whose Ethyl Corp. has made him one of the country's 400 richest individuals; Worthington Industries President Donal Malenick of Dublin, Ohio; and $100,000 Republican Party donors John McConnell, who owns the Columbus, Ohio-based Worthington Industries, a supplier of steel to auto companies, and California developer A.G. Spanos.

Another name on the V-PAC list is Clifford Heinz, who also is connected to the Freedom Alliance. In 1989 the Alliance received a $50,000 start-up loan, interest-free. The following year the benefactor forgave the loan and the Freedom Alliance counted it as a gift. The group's directors refuse to reveal the source of the money, but ketchup heir Heinz, speaking through an assistant from his home in Newport Beach, Calif., confirms that he signed the check.

(Heinz's politics are nothing if not interesting. The same year he was helping the right-wing, military-boosting Freedom Alliance get off the ground, he and his wife Elaine were hosting the Dalai Lama at their home; while visiting the Heinzes, the Dalai Lama leamed he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Heinz also provided a $300,000 endowment for the Heinz Chair in the Economics and Public Policy of Peace at the University of California, Irvine.)

While private contributors to North's organizations have helped to launch his political career, he has earned close to $2 mllion in speaking fees and book royalties since January 1992, accepted more than $200,000 in salary from the Freedom Alliance since 1990 and collected a military pension, according to disclosure forms filed as part of his candidate registration. His assets, including more than $1 million in reported stock holdin,s in his bulletproof vest company, plus his home and Narnia Farm in Virginia's Shenardoah River valley, are valued at more than $2.1 million.

HIDDEN TRUTHS

When Reader's Digest ran an article earlier this year titled "Does Oliver North Tell the Truth?" North sought help from some friends - the more than 100,000 people on the Freedo'm Alliance's mailing list.

Writing in the group's newsletter, he decried his constant persecution by the "media elites" and "their vengeful effort to destroy" him; suggested that tbe Digest's "savage rehash" was somehow related to his organization's opposition to the president's "plan to allow open homosexuals in our Armed Forces"; and renewed his resolve to "struggle for traditional values, strong families and the defense of our nation" in the face of yet another "futile effort to crush" him. Before signing off with his customary "Semper Fidelis," he asked his supporters to "continue to support" him and his organization in the "struggle."

Hundreds of North's supporters heeded the call, writing angry letters to Reader's Digest and, in some cases, following Ollie's lead by canceling their subscriptions. But among the former high-ranking officials or public figures who told the magazine North had been less than truthful were retired U.S. Army Gen. John Singlaub, who worked with North on the arms-for-hostages scheme; former National Security Adviser William Clark; Ross Perot; and the widow and son of former CIA Director William Casey. Reader's Digest concluded that "too many past discrepancies have shown us that Oliver North's word is not always enough."

Testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings, North made no apologies for lies he had told Congress and others about the arms-for-hostage operations. "I think it is very important f6r the American people to understand that this is a dangerous world; that we live at risk and that this nation is at risk in a dangerous world," he said. "And they ought not to be led to believe, as a consequence of these hearings, that this nation cannot or should not conduct covert operations. By their very nature, covert operations ... are a lie. There is a great deceit, deception practiced in the conduct of covert operations. They are, at essence, a lie."

In his best-selling autobiography, Under Fire, North writes that although he knew it was wrong to lie to Congress, he never "imagined that anything I was doing was a crime." And he still feels his lying to Congress was justified, he writes.

But long before the Iran-Contra scandal broke, North's colleagues on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, as well as others who worked with him, had begun doubting his word. Testifying at North's trial in 1989, CIA and NSC operative Vincent Cannistraro said: "With Col. North you could never be certain that what he was telling you was true or was fantasy or was being told you deliberately to mislead you, so my normal modus operandi when receiving information from Col. North, as I'm sure it was for most other people who knew him for some time, was to take everything with about four grains of salt and try to sort it out from there."

Constantine Menges, a former CIA official who worked closely with North at the NSC in the early to mid-1980s, has written that "Ollie seemed to begin by exaggerating his exploits and his closeness to the powerful. Then he began to deceive in a far more serious way, misleading his colleagues and superiors about important facts, about views of other officials, and about his own actions." Menges's book Inside the National Security Council paints a portrait of North as a manipulative operator who was more committed to his own personal ambition and policy goals than the president or national security.

Several authors, researchers and the team of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh have attempted to catalog North's deceptions. Ben Bradlee Jr., author of Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North, writes: "Aside from North's admitted lying to Congress about the contras, his admitted lying to the Iranians, his admitted falsifying of the Iran initiative chronology, his admitted shredding of documents and his admitted lying to various administration officials..., there are stories, statement or claims that he has made to various people while at the NSC that are either untrue, strongly denied, or unconfirmable and thought to be untrue."

Among them, Bradlee says, are North's claims that he: met frequently alone with President Reagan; piloted an aerial rescue mission plane over El Salvador; had strategic conversations with foreign heads of state and high-ranking U.S. officials; performed military service in Angola; and participated in a secret mission to Israel.

"He's a convicted liar," says longtime Virginia Republican activist Don Moseley. "He lied to Congress and the president and he makes a big joke about it." Explaining that he hopes to generate some Republican, military-based opposition to the former Marine, Moseley, a former naval officer, adds, "He's unfit to serve. It would be a national disgrace."

A former official in the Reagan White House who worked closely with North and asked not to be named says he is "very worried about the possibility of North becoming a senator."

Even some who publicly support North's candidacy admit in private that North makes them nervous. Given his background, some of the circumstances and personalities behind his public persona and his reputation as a loose cannon, they're left facing the same question State Department employees had in the mid-1980s when they issued North a fake passport. They assigned him the name "Willie B. Goode."

FISHING FOR VOTES?

Oliver North, the anti-communist crusader who was disowned and hung out to dry in the Congress and the courts by his White House superiors, now seeks a peculiar redemption: a voters' seal of approval, a popular mandate to straighten out the swne congressional system that he believes let him - and the country - down.

A highly controversial figure, North inspires both worshipful loyalty and hateful scorn. But as a candidate seeking votes, he has a lot going for him: a powerful speaking style coupled with a homespun manner, and a made-by-tv reputation as someone who will take on the powers that be to stand up for what he believes in. His testimony before the congressional Iran-Contra committee gave him a level of name recognition most politicians would kill for, and North has been capitalizing on it and profiting from it ever since. The Iran-Contra hearings created the market for his best-selling autobiography, enabled him to command as much as $25,000 for a speech and made him one of the best money-raising draws in modem American history.

Some observers cite North's political operations, the bulletproof vest company he founded in 1990 and his fundraising efforts not only for himself but also for other Republican candidates in Virginia as evidence of a publicly humiliated man who is working hard to reinvent himself as an upstanding citizen who plays by the rules. Others, however, point to North's millionaire status, his profiteering from the Iran-Contra scandal through speeches and his book, and his undaunted personal ambition and see a familiar and troubling modus operandi.

But North is nothing if not a phenomenon. "He has a persona that fills up a room in a way that very few other people do," says Robert Holsworth. Beyond his personal charisma, North also has political appeal, observers believe. "There's this sense that he's a stand-up kind of guy at a time when politicians are roundly denounced for not having beliefs," Holsworth says. Political analyst and author Larry Sabato cites the current "anti-Congress age" as a factor in North's popularity.

Technically, North still has to win the Virginia Republican Party's nomination for the Senate race, but his supporters have already attempted to lock it up. The conservative wing of the state party, led by the Religious Right, succeeded in persuading the party to detennine that its nominee will be chosen by party convention next June rather than a primary election. A convention "increases the opportunity for people who want to be the most involved," says party spokesperson Rich Jefferson. "It makes for a more participatory government than a primary.

Citing the manner in which the "more ideologically committed" members of the state Republican party have used the caucus process to take over, Mark Rozell says North's nomination is "a done deal." Sabato agrees that "no other potential candidate has the money or the issues" needed to beat North, but adds that the Republicans could be making a big mistake.

"If they nominated almost anyone but North they could beat [Democratic Sen.] Chuck Robb hands down," says Sabato, whose analysis of Virginia politics is widely cited. Instead, he adds, "they've taken a sure thing and turned it into a toss-up" because both Robb and North have been embroiled in scandal and accused of lying. Further muddying the political waters is the probability that Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder will challenge Robb in a Democratic primary and the possibility, if Wilder fails there, that he would run as an independent in the general election against Robb and North. Holsworth is looking forward to a "donnybrook of a Senate race," a campaign that some observers believe could be one of the most hotly contested and closely watched in the country next year.

From the looks of things, Ollie North is raring to go. Appearing in October at the College Republican fundraiser at a Washington-area hotel, he ended his speech with a story. If the unclear moral of the story left listeners confused, the "whatever-it-takes" drive of the storyteller came through loud and clear:

His next door neighbor Sam, North told the students, loves to fish - with dynamite. One day when Sam was out fishing along the banks of Virginia's Shenandoah River - blasting here and blasting there - he was approached by a game warden who told him that fishing with dynamite was illegal.

Sam is a quiet kind of fellow, North explained, so at first he didn't say anything to the game warden. He just picked up a stick of dynamite, placed it in the game warden's hand and lit the fuse. Then Sam said, "Son, are you gonna fish or are you gonna talk?"

With that said, Ollie North, flashing his famous gap-toothed, mischievous grin, left the stage to thunderous applause.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Common Cause Magazine
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