Ex-Officer, Businessman : Little-Known Pair Major Figures in Weapons Saga

WASHINGTON — They met in Tehran in the mid-1970s during the height of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign.

One was a rapidly rising American military officer serving as the chief adviser to the Iranian air force commander. The other was a fast-moving international businessman peddling a sophisticated telephone eavesdropping system to enable the shah to check on the loyalty of his air force officers.

Today, more than a decade later, Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim have emerged as a principal focus of the broadening investigation into the roots of the two-edged scandal rocking the presidency of Ronald Reagan--the covert transfer of U.S. arms to Iran and the channeling of profits to the Nicaraguan contras.

After retiring from the U.S. Air Force as a major general, Secord forged his wealth of military and intelligence contacts into a business association with Hakim, who emigrated to America before the fall of the shah and has since built on his reputation as a “deal maker” and a master at the intricate use of covert bank accounts.

Both have become recognized members of an informal, worldwide fraternity of former intelligence agents, retired military officers, international businessmen and others who operate outside normal government channels--but sometimes at the behest of government officials--to supply arms and other services for counterinsurgency movements.

While the precise roles of Secord and Hakim in the Iran-and-contras operation remain unclear, a source familiar with the investigation said Secord “handled operational details” such as arranging for airplanes and planning covert deliveries while Hakim “handled the financial details” such as moving funds through secret banking channels.

Both dealt with Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the dismissed National Security Council aide who has been identified as the chief operative in the controversial Iran-contras connection. While North has become a magnet for massive news media attention, Secord and Hakim have remained virtually invisible--mystery figures in a mysterious operation.

The contrasts were vivid last week:

--At dawn on one frosty morning in suburban Great Falls, Va., Kentwood Lane was clogged with cars filled with photographers and reporters waiting for North to emerge from his two-story, Colonial-style brick house. At 8:40 a.m., when he helped two of his young daughters into a small brown car, he encountered the glare of flood lights and a barrage of shouted questions. Maneuvering the car through the throng, North smiled and pleaded with the journalists to step aside. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” he said.

No Subpoena Served

--Several days later in another Virginia suburb a few miles from North’s home, an aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee, accompanied by a U.S. Capitol policeman, rapped on the door of Stanford Technology Trading Corp., where Secord serves as an officer and director. The Senate aide was seeking to deliver a subpoena, but a voice from behind the door said the person they sought was not there. The door was not opened and the subpoena was not served.

--The night before in Northern California, a reporter who drove up a winding road along a ridge with a spectacular view of the town of Los Gatos got no response when he rang the buzzer at the locked gates of a residential compound owned by Hakim. A Mercedes-Benz and a Cadillac registered to Hakim were parked in the driveway, but a neighbor said he had not seen the owner for some time.

But despite their aversion to publicity, Secord and Hakim do cast at least faint shadows. Interviews with their friends and government investigators and scattered public records and documents offer glimpses of the two men and information on how they became so deeply involved in the controversy that has shaken the Reagan presidency.

Those who know Secord almost invariably mention his eyes--coldly penetrating yet guarded and impassive. He is “quiet, reserved, soft-spoken,” said one Capitol Hill friend of 15 years, but “when you say something to him, his eyes penetrate out at you. . . . His eyes look at you very intently.”

One representative of the contras who said he has met many times with Secord added: “When you talk to him, you can’t read any response in his eyes. You never know what he is thinking.”

This source described the retired general as the principal organizer of the airlift intended to keep the Nicaraguan rebels supplied during a congressional ban on U.S. military aid--an effort that Reagan Administration officials now acknowledge was partially financed with proceeds from the Iranian arms sales.

Other sources have said Secord also played a key role in arranging for shipment of missiles and military spare parts to Iran as part of a secret program intended to help win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon.

Secord has not publicly responded to the assertions, and attempts to reach him last week were unsuccessful. But interviews with his associates and a review of his background indicate abilities and inclinations that would make him suited for such roles.

The 54-year-old Ohio native graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1955 and began an Air Force career that led to a role as a decorated command pilot with more than 4,500 hours flying time. At the heart of clandestine operations in Vietnam and Iran, he moved into the upper echelons of the Pentagon, where he shaped arms packages for Middle East nations.

Beginning with a tour as a fighter pilot in Vietnam in 1962 and a reported stint with the CIA in Laos in 1966, Secord developed a specialty in covert operations and, in the process, built up what one congressional source called “incredible intelligence contacts.”

One of his contacts was said to be Thomas Clines, a now-retired CIA official who, sources said, in recent years helped Secord recruit personnel for the covert operations to resupply the contras.

In 1975, Secord was sent to Iran to head the U.S. Air Force mission. There, according to his official Pentagon biography, he “acted as chief adviser to the commander in chief of the Iranian air force and managed all U.S. Air Force programs to Iran as well as some Army and Navy security assistance programs.”

It was during this period that the shah was receiving vast quantities of sophisticated U.S. weapons--more than $17 billion worth in the 1970s.

And it was during this period that Secord met Hakim, who represented U.S. companies in Tehran and who had set up his own company, Stanford Technology, in Switzerland in 1974. That small company soon landed a big contract to supply the shah’s air force with a computerized telephone monitoring system said to be capable of listening in on thousands of calls at the same time.

Hakim had extensive--and, it subsequently was disclosed, expensive--contacts with Iranian military officers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hakim testified in a 1983 Connecticut civil suit that he routinely funneled most of the more than $6 million in commissions he received from a major U.S. company to Iranian military leaders who helped arrange contracts.

Rescue Mission Canceled

A year before the shah’s fall, Secord returned to a Pentagon assignment and, after supporters of Khomeini seized the U.S. Embassy and took dozens of diplomatic personnel as hostages, he was deputy to the head of a planned rescue mission that was never carried out after the first such effort ended in disaster with a helicopter crash at the base called Desert One.

It was in this role that Secord is believed to have had his first dealings with North, then a young Marine officer also assigned to help plan the rescue mission.

In 1981, after Reagan took office, Secord became the first military officer to be named deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. It was in that role that he lobbied for the controversial sale of AWACS reconnaissance planes to the Saudis--a successful campaign that also involved North, by then an aide to the White House National Security Council.

At about this time, Hakim was establishing himself in the Silicon Valley. He bought a $500,000 home on the ridge overlooking Los Gatos in 1979 and, two years later, invested $360,000 in commercial property in San Jose and $300,000 in a pair of condominiums.

Two former CIA agents, Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil, became associated with Hakim’s company in the 1970s and, according to federal prosecutors, used its name in such ventures as attempting to sell arms to Libya. Wilson was convicted on federal charges and is now serving a lengthy prison sentence. Terpil is still a fugitive.

According to an interview published last summer by the San Jose Mercury-News, Hakim said he dismissed Terpil when he discovered what was going on, and later helped in the federal prosecution of Wilson.

Secord also knew Wilson, and that acquaintanceship caught him up in a controversy that, according to some friends, led to his retirement from the military.

At Wilson’s trial, Secord testified he had known him for about 10 years. According to law enforcement authorities, Secord’s name cropped up several times in the Wilson investigation. He was never charged, but his promotion to three-star general did not come through and he announced his retirement from the military in 1983.

Since his retirement, Secord has served as a Pentagon consultant on special operations warfare. And he has become active in Hakim’s company, showing up in a 1986 California corporate filing, for instance, as a director of Stanford Technology.

Publicly Linked to Effort

Secord became publicly linked with the contra resupply effort this fall. One contra official said the retired general was “instrumental” in setting up the covert airborne supply line while U.S. military aid was cut off by Congress for a two-year period ending in October.

Telephone records from El Salvador show several calls were made to Secord’s home and office from “safe houses” there that were used by the crew of the cargo plane shot down in Nicaragua on Oct. 5. Secord has denied any connection to the doomed flight but acknowledged he had talked with several contra leaders.

“I’ve told them what I think they ought to do and how they ought to design their efforts,” he was quoted last month by the Long Island newspaper Newsday. “So you can say I advised them.”

When the controversy erupted over Iranian arms sales, Secord denied as “absolutely false” any suggestion he helped ship the weapons. But he also told Newsweek magazine: “If you asked me, was I an adviser on arms imports to Iran, that’s another matter. I can’t talk about that.”

Much less can be gleaned about Hakim from public sources.

Known as ‘Deal Maker’

At age 51, he is described by acquaintances as a short, stocky, “distinguished looking man” who moves easily in international financial circles. “He is a deal maker,” said a former business associate. “He knows how to do business internationally--how to open letters of credit, get bank credits, move money from one place to another.”

Calls to his company’s office in a new, red-brick building in Vienna, Va., a suburb of Washington, bring either no answer or a curt “no comment.” A visit to another company office in a run-down neighborhood of warehouses in the Mission district of San Francisco turned up no trace of Hakim.

At that office, Stanford Technology’s general manager, Robert Divincenzi, said he could offer no clues on Hakim’s whereabouts. “Typically, I see him once a month or so,” he said, “but I can go months without seeing him. I haven’t spoken to him in two months.”

Divincenzi described the company’s business as physical security systems for industrial plants and military installations. He said Hakim is the principal or sole owner.

Hakim, he said, “does have an interest in the Middle East, but I would not consider that a political interest. He is a businessman, a good businessman.”

Times staff writers Robert A. Jones in San Francisco, Victor Zonana in Los Gatos and Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this article.