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Robert Budfer McFarlane, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan who was the only Reagan White House official to voluntarily accept legal blame for the Iran scandal, died on May 12 in Lansing, Michigan. He was 84 years old.
The reason is an exacerbation of a previous lung condition, said his son Scott McFarlane. Mr. McFarlane lived in Washington, D.C., and was hospitalized while visiting Michigan with his family.
A silent retired Marine lieutenant colonel, Mr McFarlane worked at the heart of military and political society in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the son of a congressman who graduated from the US Navy and was awarded a veteran of the Vietnam War.
In the early 1970s, he was a military aide to Henry Kissinger, who was both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to President Richard M. Nixon. Mr McFarlane’s later efforts in Iran were often seen as a misguided effort to emulate Kissinger’s groundbreaking raids to restore relations with communist China.
After his military resignation in 1979, Mr. McFarlane served on the Senate Armed Services Committee and then became an adviser to Secretary of State Alexander Hague during the first years of the Reagan administration.
Mr McFarlane was responsible for Hague’s difficult tasks in the Middle East and with Congress, and won praise for convincing Congress to reimburse the MX missile program and make progress in nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet Union.
He became deputy national security adviser and in 1982 insisted on the deployment of US Marines in Lebanon for a peacekeeping mission. It was a risky move that ended in disaster when terrorists bombed a Marine barracks, killing more than 240 U.S. servicemen in October 1983, just two weeks after Mr McFarlane’s new job as Reagan’s chief security adviser.
As a national security adviser, he is credited with helping shape Reagan’s proposed anti-missile strategic defense initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. But almost everything he did was overshadowed by the Iran-counter scandal, the illegal sale of weapons to Iran in exchange for the country’s help in releasing US hostages held in Lebanon. The effort also aimed to help restore US diplomatic relations with Iran, which were severed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The conspirators, with Mr McFarlane at the center, diverted tens of millions of dollars in arms sales to help the Nicaraguan “contras,” rebels fighting the pro-communist Sandinista government backed by Fidel Castro. By law in the early 1980s, Congress restricted, and then banned, US direct military aid to the rebels.
Mr McFarlane’s main deputy in the Iran-counter scheme was Oliver North, a Marine lieutenant colonel serving on National Security Council personnel. North is working directly with CIA Director William Casey to circumvent the law.
As the Special Trust wrote in his 1994 memoir, Mr McFarlane was “disappointed with Iran’s initiative after Israel’s first delivery” of missiles to Tehran. I thought it was time to end this project. It quickly became an Israeli hostage arms trade, rather than a serious attempt to identify Khomeini’s eventual successor. But I felt that this was a policy that the president would pursue.
On December 4, 1985, Mr. McFarlane resigned from Reagan over what he called his increasingly bitter personal and professional disagreements with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and White House Chief of Staff Donald Reagan, who they tried to belittle him and restrict his independent access to the president.
Mr McFarlane also never fully won the trust of Secretary of State George Schultz, who was troubled by the White House’s secret support for the Nicaraguan counter-attacks.
After officially leaving the Reagan administration, Mr McFarlane remained an unofficial White House emissary in an effort to release US hostages held by Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based plenipotentiary of Iran, and to hold a secret meeting with what he hoped are “moderate” Iranian officials ready to discuss steps towards normalization.
In May 1986, the new National Security Adviser, John Poindexter, asked Mr. McFarlane to lead a secret mission in Tehran. He arrived there the same month in an unmarked Boeing 707, carrying an Irish passport as a pseudonym. He was accompanied by North, CIA agent George Cave and two other CIA agents.
They were taken to the former Hilton Hotel and taken to an isolated apartment, waiting to meet with Iranian officials. No one has called for substantial diplomatic talks, nor has there been a realistic possibility of a promised hostage release. Meanwhile, Iranian guards shook 707 and seized parts of the Hawk missiles that the Iranians had requested as Mr McFarlane’s entrance ticket to Tehran.
Mr McFarlane left after a third day of deadlock talks. He left behind a beehive chocolate cake, iced with a key, which was to symbolize a new opening between Iran and the United States.
His dream of renewing relations with Iran for Reagan and thus comparing Kissinger’s triumph in China to Nixon failed. In his own memoirs, Weinberger mocked Mr. McFarlane as “strange, withdrawn, gloomy, and pretentious” with “a great desire to be perceived as better than Henry,” which was “a difficult task at best.”
Although there were rumors of a secret counter-supply channel, the first public evidence came on October 5, 1986, when a CIA-controlled cargo plane carrying weapons of Nicaraguan rebels was shot down by Sandinista forces. Congress soon launched an investigation into Operation Iran-counter.
In November 1986, Poindexter resigned and North was fired. There was talk of impeachment for Reagan. Reagan’s White House officials initiated a damage control plan to fence off the president and blame Mr McFarlane, who was no longer in the White House and lacked the influence and status of friends like Schultz and Weinberger.
On December 1, Reagan appointed a special commission chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas) to investigate the Iran-counter scandal. Mr McFarlane later said he was depressed and overwhelmed with guilt for failing to prevent a scandal surrounding Reagan, who publicly insisted he would not trade weapons for hostages.
On the evening of February 9, 1987, before appearing before the Tower Commission, Mr. McFarlane swallowed 30 Valium pills and fell asleep next to his wife. In the morning she found him unconscious and called a friend, a doctor, who saved him. He was subsequently hospitalized for psychiatric treatment.
In the first interview since his suicide attempt, Mr McFarlane told the New York Times: “What really drove me to despair was the feeling that I had failed the country. If I had stayed in the White House, I’m sure I could have stopped things from getting worse.
When he recovered, Mr. McFarlane testified before congressional committees, which often contradicts the memory of others in the White House and the National Security Council. It was not until March 1988, following negotiations between his lawyer, Leonard Garmont, and Iran’s Special Prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, that Mr McFarlane pleaded guilty to four counts of wrongdoing and a grand jury found North and Poindexter guilty.
Mr McFarlane admitted to hiding information from Congress four times, hiding the White House’s secret support for the contrasts. On March 3, 1989, he received a two-year suspended sentence and was fined $ 5,000 for each of the four crimes. He was ordered to do 200 hours of community service, but could receive a maximum of four years in prison and fines of $ 400,000.
Prior to his sentencing, Mr McFarlane told the court: “It is clear that this episode in the history of the country has created huge upheavals in the processes in our country, and as far as I have contributed, I regret it. I am proud to have served my country. “
In 1992, he was pardoned by President George W. Bush, along with Weinberger, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and three former CIA employees. North’s 1989 conviction on criminal charges stemming from the affair was overturned for technical reasons and he was never tried again.
Robert Carl McFarlane was born in Washington on July 12, 1937. At the time, his father, William, represented Texas as a Democrat in the US House of Representatives.
He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1959 and twice served on combat tours in Vietnam. In 1967 he received a master’s degree in strategic research from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In 1959, Mr. McFarlane married Jonda Riley. In addition to his wife, the survivors are three children, two sisters and eight grandchildren.
Following the Iran-Counter affair, Mr. McFarlane began an international consulting business. He reappeared in the news in 2009 when the Sudanese government sought his help with the Obama administration to lift sanctions. Omar Hassan Bashir, who was president at the time and was later ousted by a military coup in 2019, has been charged by the International Criminal Court with genocide and war crimes related to the Darfur conflict.
Sudanese officials have helped sign a $ 1.3 million contract between Mr McFarlane and the Qatari government, The Washington Post reported. Mr McFarlane met with Sudanese intelligence officials in Middle Eastern capitals, where he insisted that he would not work directly for Sudan, but only through a third country such as Qatar. Federal investigators conducted an investigation but declined to file criminal charges.
In Washington, Mr. McFarlane has long been seen as a man of controversy: remorseful and defensive against Iran-counter, soft and seemingly impenetrable, but in fact sarcastic about what he considered fraud and disloyalty to those to whom he thought he had served a submissive Marine.
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