PERILOUS STATECRAFT
An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair
Michael Ledeen
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988
307 pp., $19.95
Michael Ledeen was not allowed his day in court as a witness in the congressional Iran-Contra hearings. After his appearance was announced, he was "forgotten," and later refused a hearing. Thus he was unable to refute charges by more than one witness that he had allegedly "taken money" for his involvement in the arms-for-hostages deal, unable to explain that he had been called upon simply to set up political and intelligence channels to Iran. What is more, Ledeen was also unable to explain that while he had attempted on several occasions to brief George Shultz on his initial contacts with Iranian officials who seemed eager for genuine openings to the United States, Shultz--astonishingly enough for a secretary of state--never responded.
Ledeen then wrote a book "telling it all." As a historian and expert on East-West relations, intelligence, and terrorism, and, most importantly, as an observer of human nature with a sense of humor, he ended up writing what amounts to a comedy of errors, sometimes actually amusing, were the implications not so tragic.
It is rather preciously entitled Perilous Statecraft and is, indeed, about statecraft--specifically about the making of foreign policy during the Reagan years. As for its perils, Ledeen convinces us that they reached monumental proportions, not the least of which was the crippling of the already ailing and handicapped American intelligence service through information released during the Iran-Contra hearings.
According to Ledeen, the president should have approached the hearings more cautiously on the basis that much of Congress was contemptuous of national security and, for that matter, truth. Certainly, had Congress simply been interested in learning exactly what had happened, rather than principally in influencing the 1988 elections, it would have proceeded quite differently than it did, and learned many facts that--as facts often do--cut both ways. Republicans as well as Democrats would have been uncomfortable with some of the findings; but by criminalizing the activities of admittedly fallible administration officials, the chances of achieving any genuine understanding of the affair, says Ledeen, were all but doomed.
Ollie North, for example, should have been acknowledged by Congress as a brilliant, idealistic, dedicated public servant who had no intention of breaking any laws. North's dedication to the cause of the Contras was unquestionable and followed a pattern. Writes Ledeen: "His methods were the same in every aspect of his life; get as close to the edge as possible and run the greatest risk, so that the thrill of survival would be as intense as can be. I sometimes felt that North wanted to die in the course of Project Democracy, for even before he got involved in the Iran project, his work for the Contras was all-consuming." At the same time, Ledeen refuses to canonize the charismatic officer, exposing as well some of his shortcomings: North lacked the intellectual background that usually underlies sound foreign policy judgment, knew little about Iran, and was initially unskilled in
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