Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up.

On December 24, 1992, seven weeks after losing a hard-fought re-election campaign, President George Bush pardoned six men indicted in the Iran-Contra affair. The investigation was in its sixth year, had cost over $30 million, and had been the source of many restless nights for the special prosecutor in charge, Lawrence Walsh. The Judge, as many colleagues called Walsh, could have responded to the pardons with a simple statement declaring that his investigation was over. He could have just declared victory and gone home.

But Walsh, a prosecutor by training and temperament, decided to go down fighting. Appearing before a gaggle of reporters and cameras in Oklahoma City, Walsh blasted Bush's pardons as a "signal that if you work for the government, you are above the law. ...It demonstrates," Walsh lamented, "that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office -- deliberately abusing the public trust -- without consequence." He made similar charges on CNN, Nightline, and PBS, telling Robert MacNeil that the presidential pardon was "the last card in the cover-up. [Bush has] played the final card."

Unable to try his case in a court of law, Walsh turned to the more mercurial court of public opinion. Almost five years later, he is still at it. Judging by his new book Firewall. The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, the octogenarian Republican prosecutor is not terribly well-suited to the change of venue, a fact he seems to acknowledge in the book's early pages. "This narrative attempts to limit the repetition of facts to that which is necessary to an evaluation of my developing views and the actions of others as well as myself, but even so, extensive repetition is at times inevitable." The warning helps, but for only so long. When men by the name of Ledeen start "meet[ing] with Gorbanifar, Kimche, Schwimmer, and Nimrodi during September, October, and November," don't be surprised if your eyes glaze over and you start wondering why anyone but the most gungho Iran-Contra buff would want to tackle this 531-page tome.

Behind the plodding prose, however, is a sincere effort by Walsh to recount, memo by memo, why he decided to prosecute Col. Oliver North, John Poindexter, and other administration officials, and how President Reagan's top aides hid diaries and feigned ignorance to protect their boss. Drawing on what must be gigantic stacks of government memos, trial transcripts, and depositions, Walsh accuses Reagan of authorizing arms shipments to Iran in exchange for hostages (thus violating the Arms Export Control Act) and allowing the proceeds from the arms sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, or "freedom fighters," in violation of the Boland Amendment. The President, Walsh contends, was in the thick of Iran-Contra from the get-go, and when word of the scandal leaked, the President's men held high-level cabinet meetings in which they decided to blame North and other subordinates, effectively erecting a "firewall" around Reagan.

Many of the statutes at issue, including Boland, are loosely worded and, Walsh decides, not the best grounds for criminal prosecution. So instead of charging North & Co. with a broad conspiracy to defraud the government, Walsh pursues more mundane, though still felonious, crimes -- like lying to Congress. Even this is no easy task. Like the protagonist in the movie After Dark, Walsh is thwarted at every turn, his goals -- in this case truth, justice, and trial dates -- obstructed by oftentimes sinister forces beyond his control.

Take, for example, the criminal trial of Col. Oliver North. The problems begin with Congress, which grants North immunity in exchange for his testimony. Under the law Walsh's prosecutors are still allowed to try the colonel; but to do so they must avoid all mention of North's congressional testimony, a constraint that forces these high-profile lawyers to flee the room any time Ollie appears on TV.

As the case is about to begin, Nortlis defense team requests thousands of classified government documents, delaying the trial for months. (The documents are eventually produced, but-no surprise-the information had already been made public) Walsh's team finally gets its day in court, convicting the colonel of lying to Congress, shredding documents, and accepting a home security system from a crony. Yet 14 months later, in the summer of 1990, an appellate court ruled by a 2-to-1 vote that the judge in the first trial had not looked hard enough into whether Nortws congressional testimony had been used against him. The decision made another trial all but impossible, and Walsh had little choice but to dismiss the case.

Intransigent bureaucracies, arrogant senators, bumptious defense attorneys, md right-wing judges could drive insane even the most hardened prosecutors, yet Walsh perseveres. We glimpse the Judge doggedly pursuing the higher-ups, discovering juicy notes of meetings between the President and his cabinet while negotiating plea agreements with a few CIA and State Department officials, most notably Alan Fiers and Elliot Abrams.

Walsh devotes several chapters to the president's men-chief of staff Donald Regan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- detailing what each man knew about the arms shipments and when he knew it. After a painstaking investigation, Walsh concludes that only Weinberger, who according to Walsh withheld notes and lied to Congress, is worth indicting. After haggling unsuccessfully with Weinberger's defense attorneys, Walsh starts preparing for trial, only to have Bush issue his Christmas Eve pardons.

Walsh has now spent a decade pouring over documents, deposing witnesses, and thinking and writing about the Iran-Contra affair. In that time he has accumulated some powerful evidence supporting his claim that at the heart of Iran-Contra lay not a few rogue superpatriots shipping arms to Iran, but rather a massive cover-up by powerful G-men. Yet all prosecutors need to construct clear, compelling cases; and Firewall, Walsh's attempted coup de grace, at times reads so much like a rambling legal brief that the charges are difficult to decipher, and the conclusions murky.

Walsh is on firmer ground when he reminds us that independent counsels are faced with enormous, sometimes insuperable and unnecessary problems. Walsh suggests several remedies: Congress should think long and hard before granting immunity to those facing indictment; the national security bureaucracy should loosen its often exaggerated stranglehold on "secret documents"; and politicians should be very careful about attacking independent counsels and turning legal investigations into political crusades. Sound advice for the nation from someone who knows.