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

By Lawrence E. Walsh W.W. Norton and Co. 544 pages. $29.95.

On his last day as independent counsel in the Iran-contra investigation, I had the occasion to meet the Honorable Lawrence Walsh. The setting was a small going-away party, held in the spartan Watergate hotel room that had become his Washington home for seven years. Only a few veteran reporters of the scandal and a handful of friends attended. It was an inauspicious sendoff for a man who, quite alone, had overcome the viciousness of establishment Washington to expose, document, and prosecute one of the most important constitutional scandals of modern times.

Walsh came to Washington, D.C., in January 1987 to be the Perry Mason of the Iran-contra scandal. In January 1994--after four major prosecutions, four major convictions, seven plea bargains and publication of his massive three-volume final report--he left as the scandal's Lone Ranger, excoriated by his enemies, abandoned by would-be allies, and maligned by the media.

In a journalistic effort to shoot the messenger, a disparaging front-page story in the January 19, 1994, issue of The New York Times suggested that of all the people associated with the scandal, the independent counsel "himself may turn out to be the most widely scorned figure in the whole affair."

The Times was wrong. Lawrence Walsh's legacy of breaking through the Reagan administration's "firewall" of conspiracy and cover-up now stands against the stark backdrop of a criminal government, a complacent Congress, and a petulant press. Robert Parry, the first reporter to expose Oliver North's illicit contra operations, predicts "Walsh will be remembered as one man who told the people the truth."

Lawrence E. Walsh, Esquire, would have seemed an unlikely candidate for this role. A life-long establishment Republican, he had served as a deputy attorney general during the Eisenhower administration. At seventy-five years of age when the Iran-contra scandal broke, he was a well-respected attorney at the cushy Oklahoma firm of Crowe and Dunlevy, living the good life in semi-retirement with his wife, Mary.

Moreover, he was an unabashed sympathizer with Ronald Reagan's contra war. "I saw the cause the administration supported in Nicaragua as necessary," he writes in his memoir. In early December 1986, after the scandal hit the press and Oliver North was fired, Walsh shared with his wife an admiration for Ollie's "patriotism and initiative" and even "thought briefly of the arguments I could make in his defense."

Instead, Walsh was appointed independent counsel. To the surprise of those who picked him, he supervised the historic prosecutions of North, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and Deputy CIA Director Clair George, among others. As those trials took place between 1989 and 1992, Walsh himself evolved from a conservative idealist to a critic of a system he came to believe was weighted against the rule of law and accountability. That evolution is what sets Firewall apart from other, more mundane accounts of Iran-Contra, and makes it the most important book on the scandal.

Walsh's first target for prosecution was Oliver L. North, whom Walsh describes as "a Gulliver among bureaucrats . . . who had won the dual role of superstar and scapegoat." Walsh won convictions on three charges, including destruction and falsification of evidence and accepting an illegal gratuity, but the jury acquitted North on nine others. Although the prosecutors were "disappointed," as Walsh recounts in his chapter on "The Trial of Oliver North," the "critical fact was that the verdict had nailed North as the felon he was." Poindexter was similarly nailed--convicted on all five charges of perjury on which Walsh's team had indicted him. After one trial ended in a hung jury, Clair George was convicted on two felony counts of lying to Congress.

These convictions were unprecedented. They marked the first time that criminality committed in the name of national security was legally proven, the government criminals brought to trial, and actually found guilty. Moreover, Walsh's initial success came against great odds and overwhelming opposition.

The "independent counsel," he soon discovered, was independent in name only. Walsh was, in fact, quite dependent on the Executive Branch to declassify documents needed for trial, on Congress to halt grants of immunity to key actors in the scandal, and on the courts to negotiate political pressure on the legal system. Early on in his tenure, Walsh writes, he "recognized the nature of the awesome, three-sided conflict in which I found myself. My team and I could be crushed when the political forces of government, the national-security community, and the courts collided."

In the end, of course, these forces did combine to undermine the lonely pursuit of justice that, for seven years, the Office of the Independent Counsel undertook.

Over Walsh's intense opposition, Congress gave North and Poindexter immunity to testify in the summer of 1987; their hard-won convictions were later overturned on the ruling that some of their Congressional testimony might have been indirectly used against them.

The CIA prevented the trial of operative Joe Fernandez by simply refusing to admit publicly what Walsh calls "a fictional secret"--that the Agency maintains CIA stations in Central America.

Through a 1992 Christmas Eve pretrial pardon, President Bush aborted the obstruction-of-justice trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger--"an unabashed deadpan liar," Walsh calls him--who withheld extensive personal notes on the Iran-contra operations, and flagrantly deceived prosecutors about their existence. (Bush also took the opportunity to pardon four other Iran-contra conspirators, including Clair George and the infamous Elliott Abrams.) Bush, Walsh writes, played "the last card in the cover-up."

In the final phase of his investigation, Walsh seriously considered subpoenaing Bush and deposing him for a possible indictment for having withheld his own extensive daily notes on Iran-contra meetings from prosecutors. But his staff argued that this would appear "retaliatory."

"I gave up," Walsh concedes. "It had been a good fight but a losing one."

The legacy of the independent counsel is not, then, his record of convictions. (In the end, only one mid-level operative, Thomas Clines, served time in jail--sixteen months for failure to report his Iran-contra profits to the IRS.) Walsh's legacy was the historical record itself His final report--filed in August 1993 and, after a protracted legal effort by Reagan, North, and Edwin Meese to block its publication, released in January 1994--went far beyond Congress's weak-kneed effort to document the scandal. Walsh's tenacious commitment to obtaining the truth unraveled the cover-up.

Along the way, Walsh's office obtained thousands of invaluable documents. Among them were Weinberger's 1,700 pages of handwritten notes which, according to Walsh, could have led to "a timely impeachment of President Reagan," had they been revealed in 1987. Walsh's final report also laid to waste the mendacious mythology that George Bush had been "out of the loop" on both the Iran and contra operations; that the scandal was the work of a "rogue NSC staff", that the "diversion" is what the scandal was all about.

As Vice President, Bush was heavily involved in both the contra and Iran operations; as President, Walsh asserts, he "made the cover-up complete." Far from being perpetrated by a mid-level NSC "cabal of zealots," as the Congressional final report incorrectly concluded, the conspiracy and cover-up were the work of the President and his top advisers, including Attorney General Meese, Chief of Staff Donald Regan, Secretary of State Shultz, Weinberger, and the rest, Walsh's final report made dear. Announcing the discovery of a "diversion" was itself an effort to divert attention away from the President's crimes in the Iran operation. "When the diversion was disclosed publicly," Walsh points out in Firewall, "it riveted the,nation's attention, shifting the focus from the President's deceit of Congress to his staff's performance. The revelation of the diversion abetted the cover-up."

While his final report now sits, unread, on the shelves of government repositories, Firewall has made the truths of the Iran-contra scandal fully accessible to any member of the public who can reach a bookstore. To the earlier legal history documenting the crimes of state, Walsh the author has added his own professional account and reflections on his seven-year investigation.

This book might well have been titled Judge Smith Comes to Washington--such was Walsh's experience with the weakness and deceit of the system he saw himself as trying to uphold. His protracted pursuit of truth and accountability within the heart of the national-security state, he admits in the final chapter, recalled Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. By the time the exhausted old fisherman returns to shore with his prized marlin, it has been shredded by sharks, Walsh reminds his readers. "As the independent counsel, I sometimes felt like the old man; more often, I felt like the marlin."

For Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-contra operation was a "criminal activity of constitutional dimensions." But the malfeasance in Washington, he notes, went far beyond the perpetrators of these crimes; it included what Walsh terms a "contempt for the rule of law" by such Congressional leaders as Bob Dole, who attacked Walsh at every step. He also faults "spurious Congressional oversight" from a legislative branch that allowed Iran-contra to happen, botched its own investigation, and undermined that of the independent counsel.

The scandal illustrates "both the forces that propel high-level officials to engage in illegal activities and the barriers to full disclosure once the illegal activities have been exposed," he writes. A commitment to breaking through the firewall of conspiracy and cover-up that so often shields illegitimate covert operations from public scrutiny has to be shared by the Executive Branch, Congress, and the press, rather than simply relegated to a disempowered special prosecutor, Walsh concludes. There is no other way to clear the shark-infested waters of Washington.

Peter Kornbluh is senior analyst at the National Security Archive, and co-author of "The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History" (The New Press, 1993).