Probers Blame White House on Delay of Papers

WASHINGTON — Despite President Reagan’s pledge to cooperate fully with congressional probes of the Iranian arms scandal, White House officials so far have failed to provide key National Security Council documents requested by the Senate and House intelligence committees, members of both panels said Wednesday.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, dissatisfied with an Administration offer to allow only two of its staff members to see critical documents, is “still negotiating” the terms under which it may have access to the records, a committee aide said.

‘Like Pulling Eyeteeth’

The delay has become a source of increasing friction between the White House and Capitol Hill, where U.S. arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to Nicaraguan contras has triggered a spate of hearings and investigations. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) complained that getting the White House to cooperate is “like pulling eyeteeth.”

“There obviously has not been a decision at the White House to give us the information we need,” he said. “We’ve been having to drag it out piece by piece. . . . We have no documentary evidence; no memoranda of conversations; no information on bank accounts.”

Even such basic information as the text of the Jan. 17 presidential order waiving the provisions of the U.S. arms embargo against the Tehran regime--officially allowing the sales to proceed--was given to the committee “just recently, 11 months after the issuance,” Hamilton said.

At the White House, however, spokesman Larry Speakes insisted: “We have provided them with all documents that we can identify, and we’ll continue to try to supply their requests. . . . Anything we can find that they want, we’d be glad to give them as long as the security of the documents is protected.”

The Senate and House intelligence committees are the only congressional panels with secure storage facilities for classified documents, Speakes said, and the papers they have sought “are highly classified”--in this case placed in the category of “compartmentalized classified information” available to only a few individuals.

“In the case of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, we have worked out an arrangement with them where the ranking Republican and ranking Democratic staff member came down” to the White House on Tuesday to review the documents and make notes “which they could report back to their committee members,” he said.

Fear a Bad Precedent

Some of the Administration’s caution apparently stems from a traditional White House concern, shared by all recent presidents, that too broad a release of material might set a precedent that would weaken the ability of future chief executives to invoke “executive privilege.” That presidential right is recognized by the courts and designed to protect certain confidential communications with key advisers.

Congress and the White House have wrangled repeatedly over the release of sensitive Administration documents in the past, most notably during the Watergate investigations.

But, unlike the domestic nature of the Watergate scandal, the current investigations delve into the specific workings of the President’s foreign policy and mark the first time Congress has tried to gain access to secret documents of the White House’s National Security Council.

“Every point and every step of the way they have said: ‘We have to be careful that we don’t set precedent but, by the same token, we want to make absolutely sure that we’re doing everything in our power to live up to the President’s commitment’ to make sure that our investigation is facilitated in every way possible,” said Bernard McMahon, staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Cite Limit to Access

White House officials have indicated a willingness to surrender any memoranda that Congress requests regarding Reagan’s ultimate decisions in the case, but they have asserted that all so-called “option papers” prepared for the President before final decisions and internal advisory memoranda are covered by executive privilege, Senate sources said.

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), a senior Intelligence Committee member, said the White House’s response to the current requests will be considered a key test of Reagan’s pledge of cooperation. But Cohen cautioned that the situation has not yet reached a standoff, and the committee has no reason yet to suspect that the White House will not cooperate.

The committee has also requested documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department and various private companies.

While many congressional investigators have complained about White House responses, McMahon said that the CIA has put together a special team that “worked all last weekend pulling together whatever we’ve asked them for and making sure we got whatever we want.”

Of particular interest to investigators are National Security Council memoranda “related to an NSC staffer” that could fill the gaps left by the refusal of key figures in the case to testify, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) said.

‘Heard Allusions’

However, McMahon said: “We don’t know there is such (specific) memoranda. . . . We just have heard allusions to memoranda, and so we don’t know whether there is or what status or whether it was written on a back of a piece of paper or whatever.”

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the difficulty in obtaining important documents has raised further suspicions as to what those records may contain.

“Politically, it’s a pretty crazy thing (for the Administration) to do, or those documents are pretty damaging,” he said.

Times staff writers Maura Dolan, Tom Redburn and James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.