NORTH: ...I must confess to you, Mr. Nields, and I think you have seen it in my messages to my superiors, I was not entirely comfortable with the arrangements that had been worked in the summer of 1985 and in the autumn-winter of 1985.

I made it very clear. I was after all the person who in the U.S. Government who had the responsibility for coordinating our counterterrorist policy. I had written for the President's words, "We will not make concessions to terrorists." For the very first time in January, the whole idea of using U.S. weapons or U.S.-origin weapons or Israeli weapons that had been manufactured in the United States was made more palatable.

I must confess to you that I thought using the Ayatollah's money to support the Nicaraguan Resistance was a right idea. And I must confess to you that I advocated that. To this day, you have referred to it as a diversion. My understanding of the word "diversion" is that what we did is we took something off the course that was originally intended and what we did is we diverted money out of the pocket of Mr. Ghorbanifar and in the enormous files of intelligence that I had received from our intelligence agencies, it was very clear that Mr. Ghorbanifar and perhaps others had made enormous profits on the September and November transactions.

They didn't make them on the November transaction because it was never completed, but they certainly had in the August-September transaction. And I saw that idea of using the Ayatollah Khomeini's money to support the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters as a good one.

I still do. I don't think it was wrong. I think it was a neat idea and I came back and I advocated that and we did it; we did it on three occasions.

These three occasions were February, May, and October, and in each one of those occasions, as a consequence of that whole process, we got three Americans back and there was no terrorism while we were engaged in it against Americans.