Richard V. Secord, Middleman in Iran-Contra Scandal, Dies at 92

A war hero and a former Air Force general, he denied wrongdoing for his role in the Reagan-era shipment of arms to Iran to support Nicaraguan rebels.

Richard V. Secord, a former Air Force general and C.I.A. operative who was the logistical middleman in the Iran-contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration with illegal arms sales to Iran to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua, died on Monday. He was 92.

A family member, who asked not to be identified, confirmed the death but provided no other details. Mr. Secord had been living in an assisted-living facility in the Daytona Beach area of Florida as recently as August.

A highly decorated fighter pilot who flew 285 missions in Vietnam and directed the C.I.A.’s secret air war in Laos to disrupt Hanoi’s Ho Chi Minh Trail supply route, Mr. Secord was a master of covert operations who was believed to have staged the only successful rescue of prisoners during the war in Indochina and who once directed the defense of a mountaintop radar site against great numbers of North Vietnamese regulars.

Mr. Secord emerged from Iran-contra with a reputation — an incorrect one, he maintained until his death — as a shady character who reportedly made millions in commissions. He pleaded guilty to a felony, lying to Congress, and was put on probation. Prosecutors also called him a silent partner of Edwin P. Wilson, a renegade C.I.A. operative who sold tons of plastic explosives to the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and went to prison for over two decades.

Under a cloud of suspicion in the Wilson imbroglio, Mr. Secord retired as an Air Force major general and resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense in 1983. As a civilian, he then went into another covert venture, privately organized by Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, who was the deputy director of military affairs for President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and a friend of Mr. Secord’s.

Over several years, investigators said, the clandestine project raked in some $47 million from the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and, contravening a congressional directive, used some of the profits to supply arms, medicine and other provisions to the guerrilla forces, called contras, who were fighting to overthrow the elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

After news reports and federal investigators uncovered threads of the operation, Congress held public hearings in 1987 that exposed foreign policy run amok in the hands of private citizens and Reagan administration officials, including Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, the president’s national security adviser; his deputy, Colonel North; and William J. Casey, the director of central intelligence.

Mr. Secord, the first witness before the joint investigating committee, testified that, acting on Colonel North’s orders, he had become the operational middleman, arranging arms sales to Iran and buying and delivering supplies to the Nicaraguan rebels. The Enterprise, as it was called, had secret Swiss bank accounts and its own airplanes, pilots, airfields, communications setup and a ship.

He also offered a detailed accounting. He said $12 million went to the United States Treasury to pay for the arms sent to Iran. Another $8 million, he said, was still in a Swiss bank account, held for Albert Hakim, his business partner in a company, Stanford Technology Trading Group, for use in what he called a secret government project unrelated to Iran or Nicaragua.

Only $3.5 million of the $12 million reckoned to be profits went to the contras, he said. Another $3 million went for the expenses of delivering the arms to Iran, while $1 million was used to buy the ship. Millions more were earmarked for “commissions” for the participants, including himself, although he insisted that he had received no money. He acknowledged that millions were unaccounted for.

Mr. Secord said he had been recruited by Colonel North, first to supply the contras and later to arrange the arms deal with Iran. He said he had obtained supplies for the contras with the help of the C.I.A. and the State Department; that he had met Mr. Casey several times; and that he understood that Mr. Reagan and Vice President George Bush had both been told that proceeds from the Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan rebels.

In four days of testimony, Mr. Secord never budged from his position that he had been doing the bidding of the Reagan administration, had acted as a patriot for what he believed to be a righteous cause and had not personally profited from his involvement. Indeed, he declared that he and his colleagues had done nothing wrong.

“We believed our conduct was in the furtherance of the president’s policies,” he said. “I also understood that this administration knew of my conduct and approved it.”

Later, Colonel North, who had been dismissed from the N.S.C., testified fervently in much the same vein. He said that he did not know if Mr. Reagan knew of the Iran-contra transactions, but that Mr. Casey, who had recently died, had approved the operations. Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush denied any knowledge of the affair.

As the hearings progressed, questions about the witnesses’ conduct and motives, as well as about the money, were raised by members of Congress, journalists and a special prosecutor, Lawrence F. Walsh, who had been appointed under a federal ethics law directed at wrongdoing by government officials.

In 1988, Admiral Poindexter, Colonel North, Mr. Secord and Mr. Hakim were indicted on various charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. Some charges were later reduced or dismissed over concerns that prosecutions might expose classified information.

In 1989, Mr. Secord pleaded guilty to one count of lying to Congress and was placed on probation for two years. (His guilty plea was overturned years later.) Mr. Hakim pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and also received probation. In 1990, Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North were convicted of multiple felonies, but the rulings were reversed on appeal and their cases dismissed.

Mr. Secord’s memoir, “Honored and Betrayed” (1992, with Jay Wurts), heaped scorn on the prosecutions and on his former colleagues. “Mr. Secord says he tried to save all these people from themselves,” Joel Brinkley wrote in a review for The New York Times. “But as he looks back, the lesson he has taken from the entire experience seems to be: ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’”

Richard Vernon Secord was born in LaRue, Ohio, on July 6, 1932, the oldest of three children of Lowell and Wahneta (Hodson) Secord. Richard and his siblings, Sandra and Jim, attended local schools. Their father, a truck driver, taught Richard how to hunt for food and encouraged him to go to college.

The parents divorced in 1946, and Ms. Secord moved her children to Columbus, about 60 miles south of LaRue. Richard earned A’s and B’s and graduated in 1950 with a perfect attendance record at Columbus South High School. Good grades helped him get a congressional appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York. He graduated in 1955, joined the Air Force and finished pilot training in 1956. He earned a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University in 1972.

In 1961, he married Jo Ann Gibson. They had three children: Julia and the twins Laura and John.

From 1962 to 1965, as a young aviator, Mr. Secord achieved one of the best records of the Vietnam War. In 1963, he was assigned to Iran and trained pilots for the Shah of Iran’s air force.

Detailed to the C.I.A. in 1966, he ran a secret air war in Laos, fighting communist Pathet Lao forces and interdicting enemy supplies and reinforcements on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In one exploit, he directed by radio a force of nine helicopters in a 1967 raid on a prisoners-of-war camp in Laos that chased away 40 guards and escaped with 53 Asian prisoners in what is believed to be the only successful such rescue of the war.

“We did it without a shot being fired,” Mr. Secord said in an interview for this obituary in 2019.

He also told of directing, by radio, the final defense of a remote mountaintop advanced-technology radar station in Laos, called Lima Site 85, that for months had been guiding American warplanes to their targets in North Vietnam with great precision. Hanoi eventually found the radar site, and in 1968 sent in a force of 3,000 troops to destroy it, Mr. Secord said.

His small force of Hmong and Thai defenders was no match for the enemy, and in a climactic battle it was overrun, he said. His pleas for air cover, he said, drew no response from the air operations command in Vietnam. A dozen defenders were killed, and six survivors were rescued by helicopter. When it was over, an American warplane was ordered in and engulfed the site with napalm to keep its technology from the enemy, Mr. Secord said.

In the aftermath of the Iran-contra scandal, in 1996 he joined Computerized Thermal Imaging, a company that produced diagnostic medical equipment, becoming its president, chief operating officer and chairman. He resigned in 2005.

Mr. Secord had lived in Fort Walton Beach, a Florida Panhandle city along the Gulf of Mexico, since 1995. His wife of 62 years, Jo Ann Secord, died in January at 84. He later moved to the assisted-living facility in the Daytona Beach area, near the home of his son, John, USA Today reported in August.

In addition to his son, his survivors include two daughters, Laura and Julia, and a number of grandchildren.

Mr. Secord told in his memoir of receiving a fateful phone call in 1984.

“Hello, Dick,” said the voice. “This is Ollie.”

In a face-to-face meeting later, Colonel North invited him to join the covert Iran-contra enterprise. Mr. Secord said that he knew Iran but that he had no expertise on Nicaragua.

“That doesn’t matter,” he quoted Colonel North as saying. “You’re an expert in special ops. You’ve been all over the world, know how to size people up. And, according to Bill Casey, you know how to keep your mouth shut.”

Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.