The Iran-contra affairs were covert operations managed by a member of the National Security Council staff. Each of these terms--Iran-contra affairs, covert operations, the National Security Council and its so-called staff--needs some explanation, because they are not what they may seem.

Owing to common usage, we have been saddled with at least two misnomers. There was not one Iran-contra affair, as if the Iran and contra operations were two parts of one whole. They were not. They were, in fact, quite different operations and dealt with very different problems and countries. That both were managed by the same few officials and sometimes intersected at particular points did not make them one and the same affair. Moreover, putting the Iran affair first reverses the order of precedence in the chain of events. The affair of the contras--otherwise known as "Freedom Fighters," actually the armed opposition to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua--came first and had its own independent origin. The term "contras" originated with the Sandinistas, who denounced their enemies as "contrarrevolucionarios," and the shorter form was generally adopted.

The other misnomer, the " National Security Council staff," takes us into the institutional context of both affairs. Before we get to the Irancontra stories themselves, it is well to see how this NSC staff, as it is called, fitted into the structure of the American government and thereby enabled the two affairs to take the course they did.

Institutionally, the beginning goes back to the National Security Act of July 26, 1947, during the Truman administration. This legislation gave birth to both the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The NSC was set up with four statutory members--the president, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense--and two advisory members, the director of the CIA and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Presidents could also add temporary members at their pleasure. The NSC's main task was to "advise the President on all matters relating to national security."

In theory, the NSC is more than a creature of the president. It was created by an act of Congress and can be changed or abolished by an act of Congress. Its members have a responsibility to advise the president, though he is not obliged to take their advice. Yet the NSC would have no reason to exist if the president never chose to listen to its advice, or if it were prevented from advising him, or if it were cut off from information needed in order to give him its best advice.

This setup was originally thought of as a way of providing the chief cabinet members with a regular forum in which they could influence or at least advise the president before he made important decisions. It has not always worked out that way. Truman himself did not encourage the NSC to fulfill this function; he rarely attended its meetings until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Reagan later virtually excluded the secretaries of state and defense from knowing, let alone advising him, about the Iran affair.

A major change came during the Eisenhower administration. The NSC had originally been given a small staff, headed by an executive secretary. In 1953, President Eisenhower reorganized the setup and made the staff, now headed by a special assistant to the president for national security affairs, into something different. The staff was largely divorced from the NSC as a whole and turned into a virtual adjunct of the presidency. This shift was accomplished by incorporating it into the Executive Office of the President (EOP), first created in 1939 on the eve of World War II. The EOP was originally intended to do no more than provide the presidency with a more efficient administrative office, a largely housekeeping service. But like so much in the postwar period, it gradually took on so many new political, economic, public relations, and other functions, foreign and domestic, each with its own staff and organization, that the presidency was transformed into another swollen bureaucracy. By President Reagan's time, the staff numbered over 1,600 and, as one study put it, "constitutes a bureaucracy probably as compartmentalized in structure and Byzantine in its workings as any in the federal government." . . .