The Iran-Contra Scandal: The United States sent military spare parts to Iran as part of a secret operation intended to gain the release of American hostages in Lebanon, American intelligence sources said today. It also persuaded Israel to do the same, the sources said. The operation, which has been going on for more than a year and a half, was also intended to provide the Administration with a way of addressing, and perhaps influencing, relations between Teheran and Washington once the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ends, another intelligence source said. He described the effort as “prudent,” an apparent reference to Washington’s desire to help moderate elements gain control of the Iranian Government. The information on the operation followed statements by Iranian officials on Monday that Robert C. McFarlane, the former national security adviser to Mr. Reagan, had made a secret trip to Teheran in an effort to gain the hostages’ release.
The United States and the Soviet Union said today that they had failed to make gains on arms control in two days of talks. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, looking somber, reported at a news conference: “I cannot say that the meetings have moved arms control matters along in any significant way, and I regret this.” In a statement at the airport before leaving for Moscow, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said the discussions had left “a bitter taste” and he voiced the hope that “leaders in Washington” would ultimately understand the need for ridding the world of all nuclear weapons. The foreign ministers had met here in the first talks since the Iceland summit meeting last month. In Iceland, the two sides came close to agreement on some issues and there had been expectation that the Vienna talks would revive the momentum.
The inconclusive Soviet-American discussions here suggest that the arms control breakthroughs nearly achieved in the Iceland summit meeting have, at least temporarily, complicated and even strained relations between the two superpowers. The Vienna talks, according to officials from both sides, showed that it was likely to take months to sort out the advances made by President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The officials say it may take even longer to translate the Iceland understandings into concrete agreements. Soviet-American relations, which appeared to be on track at least for an agreement to eliminate medium-range missiles in Europe and for a visit by Mr. Gorbachev to the United States, have now been thrown into a period of heightened mistrust.
Bonn tried to smooth relations with Moscow ruffled by a reported remark comparing Mikhail Gorbachev to Josef Goebbels. Chancellor Helmut Kohl said it had been reported incorrectly.
Spain and Britain are on a collision course after Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez said that Spanish vessels will ignore Britain’s new restrictions on fishing around the Falkland Islands, diplomats said in Madrid. Spain supported Argentina in the 1982 war over the islands in the South Atlantic. And Spain leads other Western European nations in fishing in the conservation zone Britain has declared within a 150-mile radius of the Falklands, beginning next February 1. Its refusal to abide by a British regulation requiring fishing boats to obtain permits to enter the zone could lead to a similar reaction from the Soviet Union.
Spain’s Basque country erupted in protests against France’s expulsion of six suspected separatist guerrillas as French Premier Jacques Chirac paid his first official visit to Madrid. Demonstrators blocked expressways and roads around several Basque towns, set fire to a French-registered truck and stoned the headquarters of the ruling Socialist Party in Hernani. During his seven-hour visit to Madrid, Chirac met with King Juan Carlos I and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. The most important issue “is the anti-terrorism struggle,” a Spanish Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
The first Soviet cancer victim allowed to seek medical treatment in the United States arrived in New York with her husband, a Jewish refusenik who waited 20 years to emigrate. Tatyana Bogomolny, 47, said she received chemotherapy in Moscow but has not had any treatment since June. Her husband, Benjamin, 40, had the longest wait of any Jewish refusenik, a term for people denied permission by the Soviets to emigrate, before being allowed to leave.
The U.S. Government has awarded a $10 million contract to a Los Angeles-based company to furnish support staff for the United States Embassy in Moscow and the American Consulate General in Leningrad, the State Department announced today. The Government awarded the contract to Pacific Architects and Engineers, a company with 4,500 employees that provides maintenance, operations and support staff to businesses and governments.
Forty-five people were feared killed today when a civilian helicopter carrying 47 people from an oil rig in the icy waters of the North Sea crashed off the Shetland Islands. Only two passengers were rescued, according to the reports from the crash scene near the remote Brent oilfields more than 100 miles north of the Scottish coast. “You can see bodies floating everywhere,” said Doug Dale, keeper of the Sumburgh lighthouse, the southernmost point of the Shetlands, a few miles from where the twin-rotor Boeing Vertol Chinook helicopter suddenly disappeared from radar surveillance and plunged into the sea.
Prosecutors today accused the Abu Nidal group of the Sept. 6 massacre of 21 worshippers at an Istanbul synagogue. The indictment was the first official statement linking the Palestinian group with the attack. It also accused six Palestinians of the 1985 murder of a Jordanian diplomat and said the two incidents were among five Abu Nidal actions in Turkey. The three others were the 1982 slaying of a Palestinian student in Ankara; the attempted car bombing of a United States officers club in Izmir in 1983; and an attempt to place a bomb on an Alitalia plane at Istanbul airport, also in 1983.
A major buyer of St. Laurent, the premier fashion designer, is Carlo de Benedetti, the Italian industrialist who runs Olivetti operations. He said he had bought a 25 percent stake in Yves St. Laurent.
The head of a major American Jewish organization asked Pope John Paul II today to visit Jerusalem and lead a day of prayer against terrorism. Nathan Perlmutter, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, made the appeal during a papal audience for participants in a Catholic-Jewish theological seminar held here this week. Despite the religious focus of the meeting, a prominent topic of discussion was the Vatican’s refusal to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Another point of controversy was an accusation by some Jewish scholars that liberation theology, an important school of Catholic thinking in Latin America, was tainted with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Israeli leftists, defying their Government, met with Palestine Liberation Organization representatives today but the meeting was cut short because Arab terrorists threatened to kill the Palestinians, Israeli participants said. On Wednesday, two rocket-propelled grenades exploded in the courtyard of the Rumanian Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in an apparent warning about the country’s unofficial sponsorship of the meeting. No one was hurt. The Israeli Government had tried to discourage the meeting. A law passed in August forbids contact between Israelis and members of terrorist groups, a definition Israel applies to the P.L.O. In Beirut, the Abu Nidal Palestinian group said Rumania would “pay dearly” for its role in the conference and threatened Palestinians taking part.
A rift among those who rule Iran is apparently widening, with the heir apparent to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly attacking his opponents and saying relations between Tehran and Washington cannot be normalized unless Washington changes its policies. An account of a speech delivered on Tuesday by the heir apparent, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, was published here today by the leftist daily newspaper As Safir. There was no explanation why the state-controlled news organizations in Iran did not publish the speech, which marked the seventh anniversary of the seizure of the United States Embassy in Tehran by Islamic militants.
The Afghan war spilled into the corridors of the United Nations as Afghan diplomats assaulted two visiting rebels opposed to the Soviet-backed regime in an effort to keep them from holding a press conference. The scuffle came a day after the General Assembly approved, 122 to 20, a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Witnesses said three members of the Afghan U.N. delegation pushed, punched and shoved two representatives of the Islamic Union of Afghanistan Moujahedeen on the third floor of the U.N. headquarters building. No one was hurt.
South Korea warned North Korea that it might take “self-defense measures” unless the north stops building a big dam that Seoul says could hurt the south. The dam is being built on a tributary of the Han River in the Kumgang mountain region near the eastern end of the demilitarized zone between north and south. The Han River runs through Seoul into the Yellow Sea. Seoul officials say the dam project will deprive the south of needed water, and Defense Minister Lee Ki Baek said that if the dam ever collapsed or was destroyed, the resulting flood could cause havoc in the south.
The head of the Philippines’ military warned today of a possible plot by disaffected officers and ordered his commanders to neutralize any such action. A statement issued by the office of General Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces Chief of Staff, said he had “warned any military adventurers against embarking on such a rash course of action because it could be bloody and destabilizing.” The warning from General Ramos came in a period in which President Corazon C. Aquino has been consolidating her support in various sectors in response to a challenge from Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile.
Jamaican Prime Minister Edward P. G. Seaga has announced that he is reversing his decision to resign, saying economic recovery and a new International Monetary Fund agreement depend on his remaining in office. In a statement issued Wednesday night to the governing Jamaica Labor Party, Mr. Seaga said supporters had persuaded him to reconsider, in the national interest, the decision he made last month.
Jose Ignacio Ponce remembers when this town was controlled by occupying United States marines, and he doesn’t want to see the marines here again. “People in Ocotal developed a real hatred for the Yankees during the occupation and we still don’t much care for them,” said Mr. Ponce, who is 75 years old. He pointed to street corners where he said he had watched marines fight nationalist guerrillas loyal to the rebel chieftain Augusto Cesar Sandino half a century ago. Ocotal, a provincial capital with about 25,000 inhabitants, is a living textbook for those who believe history delights in patterns and symmetries. Older residents like Mr. Ponce fear they may be about to see a repetition of what they witnessed as youngsters.
Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla group said it will respect a truce on the first anniversary of its violent takeover of Bogota’s Palace of Justice in which 11 Supreme Court judges and 84 other people died. Relatives of the dead, left-wing groups, human rights organizations and artists held memorial observances, and dozens of wreaths were laid in front of the building, whose facade is still pock-marked with bullet holes. Army reinforcements were visible in the streets of the capital as authorities guarded against another spectacular move by the guerrilla organization.
The Bolivian government offered a public apology to the Roman Catholic Church for a police raid on a convent in search of an alleged patch of marijuana. Instead of marijuana, anti-narcotics police found herbs growing in a garden when they raided the historic Convent of the Recollect in Sucre on October 29. Interior Minister Fernando Barthelemy sent a message saying he “deeply regrets the raid” to Cardinal Jose Clemente Maurer, Bolivia’s highest prelate. He also told Maurer that an inquiry has been ordered and promised that those responsible would be punished.
South Africa said tonight that it had evidence that two of its black-ruled neighbors had plotted to overthrow an ally of Pretoria, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi. Malawi is the only black-ruled African nation to maintain full diplomatic ties with Pretoria. Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha said at a news conference in Pretoria that his accusations were drawn from a document found in the wreckage of a plane that crashed on South African territory last month, killing President Samora M. Machel of Mozambique. The document, he said, showed that delegations from Mozambique and Zimbabwe met October 16, three days before the plane crash, to plot the overthrow of Dr. Banda and the destruction of road links with some of Malawi’s black-ruled neighbors.
A white South African woman was sentenced to 25 years in prison today for bombing police stations and political party offices on behalf of the outlawed African National Congress. The woman, Marion Monica Sparg, a 28-year-old former journalist, arrived in court dressed in a black suit and green shirt and wearing a yellow ribbon. The colors are those of the A.N.C., the most prominent of exiled movements seeking to end white rule in South Africa.
President Reagan participates in a signing ceremony for S. 1200, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. President Reagan today signed a landmark immigration bill that prohibits employers from hiring illegal aliens and offers legal status to many illegal aliens already in the United States. In a brief ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, surrounded by Administration officials and members of Congress who were instrumental in passing the legislation, Mr. Reagan hailed the bill as “the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952.” “Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship,” the President added. Mr. Reagan issued an unusually detailed four-page statement listing his reservations about parts of the bill and his interpretation of key provisions, including one that outlaws job discrimination against legal aliens. He said he understood this provision to require proof that the employer had a “discriminatory intent.”
President Reagan today vetoed legislation to strengthen the Clean Water Act, saying it was too expensive. It had been passed without dissent by both houses of Congress. His pocket veto sets the stage for an early test of strength with the 100th Congress. Several members said today that the legislation would be reintroduced as soon as Congress convened. A bill dies by pocket veto if the President declines to sign it within 10 days of receiving it and Congress is no longer in session. In a memorandum stating why he would not sign the water legislation, Mr. Reagan said the $18 billion called for in the legislation for sewage treatment facilities was triple the amount he had requested.
As the dust from the election Tuesday started to settle today, Congressional leaders and White House officials began work on their legislative strategies, and both sides immediately focused on the Federal deficit as a key point of conflict. Strong differences remain over how to attack the budget issue, and Republican lawmakers said Democrats would have to pay for their victory by taking the lead on an issue that has no politically popular solution. Top Administration aides reinforced that point when they said the White House would continue to stress spending cuts as the best way to deal with the deficit. “We’re not going to back off in suggesting them,” said Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff.
Facing a new Congress controlled by Democrats, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said today that he would continue to submit military budgets that were big enough to meet the needs of national security. Asked if that would be politically “realistic,” given the strong opposition to big increases in military spending that has already gripped Congress, Mr. Weinberger said: “I’m not going to approach it ‘realistically.’ If I did, we’d be in worse shape than we are.”
President Reagan participates in a briefing for the American delegation of the International Conference on Private Sector Initiatives.
A Democrat was declared the winner of one of the most closely contested races for the House of Representatives today, but Republicans apparently won three others. That makes the probable House lineup for the 100th Congress, which convenes in January, 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans, representing a gain of 5 seats for the Democrats. It was one of the smallest shifts in history, but in the 1962 election the net change was one seat. Both parties claimed victory this time, the Republicans because they held Democratic gains well below the average for the sixth year of a Presidency, the Democrats because they padded an already big margin.
A record number of women ran for office, but did not score a record number of victories. However, women in politics said Tuesday’s elections showed gains over the past and a growing sophistication of women in politics. Women are accustomed to measuring their political progress in inches, not miles. So those who track this evolution were not surprised that the election that had a record number of women running did not yield a record number of women winning. “If we use a yardstick of where we ought to be, the results look awful,” said Irene Natividad, chairman of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. “But if we use a yardstick of where we have been in the past, we made quite a big jump.”
To Bill Sorenson, campaign manager for Mark Andrews up in North Dakota, the picture seemed painfully clear. The farm issue had cost his Republican candidate a second term in the Senate. “It hurt,” he said on day after the Senator’s narrow, cliff-hanging loss on Tuesday. “It was by far the biggest factor.” But while experts saw a clear link between the troubles of Middle Western farmers and Republican defeats in both Dakotas, they found it hard to draw a clear picture of the effect on other races. Varel Bailey, an Iowa farmer who is Republican farm policy specialist, perhaps best expressed a prevailing sense of mystery.
Marion S. Barry Jr. was elected Tuesday to a third term as Mayor of Washington, D.C., defeating five challengers who sought to portray him as an inept leader of a wasteful government. Final unofficial returns, without absentee ballots, showed that Mr. Barry had received 79,142 votes, or 61 percent of the votes cast.
Justice Department officials said they are considering whether a court-appointed, independent counsel should take over a New York-based investigation of Lyn Nofziger, the Washington public relations executive and former political aide to President Reagan. U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani in Manhattan is investigating allegations that Nofziger, four months after leaving the President’s staff in January, 1982, contacted White House officials on behalf of a New York defense contractor.
Taxpayers must submit new W-4 wage withholding statements under the new tax law. They also face harsher penalties for being careless, late, too aggressive or dishonest in computing their taxes.
The AIDS virus attacks different types of cells in the brain and central nervous system than in the rest of the body, a finding that may complicate treatment of the deadly infection, Government scientists reported today. The virus, designated HTLV-3/LAV, also appears capable of causing some diseases directly rather than by destroying the body’s natural immunity to infections, as is the case in acquired immune deficiency syndrome, researchers from the National Cancer Institute said in reports published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “The elegant and painstaking research reported here stands as a milestone,” Dr. Robert Joynt, dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Dr. Howard Streicher of the institute wrote in an editorial accompanying the reports.
In a sweeping move to cut costs and regain its competitive edge, the General Motors Corporation announced yesterday that it would close 11 plants in the United States that employ about 29,000 people, or more than 5 percent of its work force in this country. Calling the shutdowns “the first phase” of a reorganization and modernization program, G.M. officials said at a news conference in Detroit that they were also studying the possible closing of other assembly, stamping, engine and component facilities. “I wouldn’t say this is the end of the plant closings,” said F. James McDonald, the company’s president. Roger B. Smith, G.M.’s chairman, said the shutdowns were part of G.M.’s $10 billion program to replace obsolete facilities with modern, efficient plants. By making the company more competitive, he added, these moves would improve its ability to maintain market leadership and enhance the job security of its remaining work force.
An Eastern Airlines captain trying to land his own small twin-engine plane in thick fog flew into a Boeing 727 airliner on a taxiway at Tampa International Airport in Florida yesterday morning and was killed as his craft burst into flames. The Boeing 727, a Pan American World Airways plane carrying 17 passengers and 6 crew members to Miami, suffered damage to the left forward fuselage and burns atop the wing as the small craft careened over the wing. The only injuries to the airliner’s occupants were sprains suffered by four people while running over rough ground after evacuating the craft by an escape chute. The Pan Am pilot, Capt. Edwin Lunsford, averted what might have been a head-on collision by veering to his right when he saw the small plane, a Piper Aztec, descending out of the fog toward him.
John A. Walker Jr., who confessed he ran one of the most damaging spy rings in American history, was sentenced today to life in prison, with a Federal judge recommending that he never be paroled. The judge, Alexander Harvey 2d, said in Federal District Court that he felt “contempt and disgust” for Mr. Walker, who recruited his brother, son and best friend into a spy ring that allowed the Soviet Union to decode more than one million secret Navy messages. Under a plea agreement worked out last year, Judge Harvey sentenced Mr. Walker’s son, Michael L. Walker, to 25 years in prison. Judge Harvey said he would recommend that Michael Walker also serve his sentence without parole.
A fireball that startled people from New Mexico to California as its glowing tail burned across the sky was a Soviet rocket, the authorities said yesterday. The North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs had predicted the Wednesday night re-entry of a rocket launched from the Soviet Union on September 5, said Del Kindschi, a spokesman for United States Space Command. The rocket placed a communications satellite into orbit. The rocket first appeared above northern California, then passed over Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, and finally above the southwest coast of Mexico, Mr. Kindschi said.
Tobacco plants have been genetically altered so that they emit light on orders from a gene transplanted from fireflies, a research team reported yesterday. In total darkness the glow from the plants’ leaves, stems and roots can be seen by eye, said members of the research group at the University of California in San Diego. The light emission becomes dramatically visible on photographic film exposed to the plants. “This is the first time anyone has taken a gene that codes for light production and transferred it into the genetic material of a complex multicellular organism,” said Dr. Donald R. Helinski, one of the leaders of the research team. Except for their ability to emit light, the plants appear to be completely normal.
A new strain of influenza, the Taiwan flu, has been found in four of seven patients in the first official influenza cases of the 1986-87 flu season, the national Centers for Disease Control reported. The presence of the new flu strain, named for the area in which it was first detected, signals a severe flu season because it is unlikely that anyone under 35 has been exposed to a similar virus, the Atlanta-based agency said. Health officials also said that the flu vaccine currently available is not designed to protect against the new strain, and it may be at least two weeks before a new vaccine is available.
The helicopter used by an escaped convict to lift a woman from a prison courtyard was found abandoned in the hills, the authorities said today. The helicopter was sighted by a motorist off a canyon road Wednesday night, nine hours after the 30-second escape at the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton, 10 miles away.
Former Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis was acquitted by a Circuit Court jury in Miami of charges of dealing in stolen property with undercover agents. Sturgis, 62, had been accused of scheming to defraud drug dealers who came seeking shortened prison terms for colleagues and accepting stolen Rolex watches as down payments. Defense attorney Ellis Rubin said that Sturgis often worked as an informant, and U.S. Customs Service supervisor John McCutcheon testified that Sturgis had given tips to Customs in the past.
The mob’s ruling council has controlled crime since the 1930s and ran the entire concrete construction industry in New York City, a prosecutor said in closing arguments in the trial of eight Mafia bosses and associates. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Savarese summed up the government’s case, which has included some 85 witnesses. The defense begins its final arguments Monday. The indictment charges that the commission operated as a racketeering enterprise involved in loan shark operations, bribery and extortion.
Federal regulators closed four more banks, bringing this year’s failures to a post-Depression high. of 123, officials said. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. officials said the number of failures is likely to reach 150 before the end of the year and is unlikely to subside much next year because little improvement is expected in the nation’s farm and energy-producing regions. Regulators also fear mounting problems in real estate lending will aggravate the situation.
Thirteen police officers from a Brooklyn precinct were arrested on charges ranging from misconduct and petty larceny to burglary, selling loaded guns and dealing in crack, or solidified cocaine. All the officers pleaded innocent to the charges, which stemmed from an investigation of allegations that police in the largely minority neighborhood shook down drug peddlers for money and narcotics, then resold the drugs. The entire command of the 77th Precinct was replaced, and new sector and borough commanders were appointed last week.
Rev. Donald Wildmon begins a campaign against Howard Stern.
“Just Like the First Time” second studio album by Freddie Jackson is released (Billboard Album of the Year 1987)
Major League Baseball:
Houston’s Mike Scott (18-10) wins the National League Cy Young award.
Stock prices dropped yesterday in concert with a weaker bond market, and a wave of profit taking. The market was also hurt by the psychological impact of another decline in the International Business Machines Corporation’s price, which fell 1 3/4 points, to 121 3/8. The Dow Jones industrial average was down nearly 21 points at one time early in the day, but ended the day off only 7.45 points, to 1,891.59. Volume dropped to 165.3 million shares, from 183.2 million shares on Wednesday.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1891.59 (-7.45)
Born:
Katie Leclerc, American actress (“Switched at Birth”), in San Antonio, Texas.
Ben Rector, American folk-Americana singer-songwriter (“Brand New”), in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Died:
Lili Kraus, 81, Czech-Hungarian-British concert pianist and educator.
