Oliver North had "a bit of a problem," the White House aide told Iranian negotiators in May 1986 as the Reagan White House engaged in arms-for-hostages deals with Iran. His airplane was out of gas at the Tehran airport. Could he have some fuel?
"We'd like to" get the plane filled up "before we go much further in this" bargaining, North said as he and former national security adviser Robert McFarlane tried desperately to win freedom for U.S. hostages held in Lebanon.North's fuel shortage was one of the tidbits that ABC's "Nightline" broadcast Wednesday night from secretly tape-recorded negotiating sessions of the Reagan administration's arms sales to Iran.
The tapes have never been played publicly before. Transcribed excerpts appeared in the congressional report on the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987. Although the recordings broadcast by ABC did not disclose substantive new details, they included some new material and captured the flavor and tone of the negotiations.
The Tehran talks collapsed when the Iranians kept making additional demands, said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council aide who went on the McFarlane mission to Tehran and appeared on "Nightline."
The Iranians asked that the U.S. government intervene with Kuwait to obtain the release of imprisoned Iranians accused of terrorist attacks, according to the secret tape recordings, made by a member of the U.S. delegation.
"We want a commitment from the U.S. government" to talk to Kuwait, one of the Iranian negotiators said through interpreter George Cave, a former CIA official.
"Well, I'm not gonna give that to him," replied North. "I have no power nor authority to give that commitment. And we have tried privately and on occasions very, very secretly and we have been rebuffed, OK?"
On the tapes, a frustrated North invokes President Reagan's name in an effort to move the hostage negotiations forward.