A secret interagency group with representatives from state, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI.
It's go to hit terrorists before they hit us.
It's meeting place, the White House.
It's chairman, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.
Tonight, two of its members go public for the first time.
Good evening, I'm Ted Koppel, and this is Nightline.
There's increasing evidence that Oliver North ran a whole array of covert operations from the White House.
Tonight, we'll take you inside one of them.
Our guests, Noel Cook, former top anti-terrorism strategist at the Pentagon,
and Oliver Buck-Rebel, the senior counter-terrorism official at the FBI.
This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
Whatever his merits or defects, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, one-time National Security Council aide,
must have been, when he served in that capacity, a very busy man indeed.
Revelations during the last 24 hours alone allege that North was behind a proposal for a joint U.S.-Egyptian invasion of Libya.
Another report has North violating the classification of secret material,
sending intelligence reports not intended for foreign distribution to the government of Iran.
And yet another report in today's Wall Street Journal elaborates on a story we first reported some two months ago,
having to do with the creation of a special interagency task force designed to help combat terrorism.
It happened, as John McQuethy reminds us, at a time when Americans were feeling particularly vulnerable.
They are beating the passengers. They are beating the passengers. They are threatening to kill them now.
They are threatening to kill them now. We want the fuel now, immediately.
The summer of 1985, the frustration of being able to do almost nothing during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 grows.
One American is killed, the others held for two weeks in Beirut.
Elsewhere in Lebanon, U.S. officials continue to frantically search for William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut,
one of the most valuable intelligence analysts in the region.
He has been a hostage for more than a year, and there are fears he is now dead.
Back in Washington, in desperation, a new counterterrorism group is formed in the White House,
drawing on expertise from key agencies in the government.
Its mandate? Cut through the red tape and creatively find a way to fight the terrorists.
Its chairman, Lt. Col. Oliver North. From the Pentagon, Noel Cook.
State Department, Robert Oakley. The CIA, Dewey Claridge, and the FBI, Oliver Buck Ravel.
The outlines of this group were first brought to public attention two months ago in a special edition of 2020.
By late 1985, the group is convinced that U.S. policy needs to move from reactive to proactive,
from responding after the fact to acting before the event, getting them before they get us.
Colonel North has already drafted an NSDD, a National Security Decision Directive,
which calls for vigorous action to neutralize terrorists.
The terms kidnapping and assassination are deliberately avoided in meetings, but as one source told us,
everybody knew what neutralize means. It's a term of art. This was not a debating society. Action was taken.
The operational arm of this group is at the CIA.
Later, on a special edition of Nightline that evening,
Senator Duremberger, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed doubt that this special group was really wielding wide power.
The implication that there's a handful of folks operating without some sense of direction or even some oversight is an exaggeration.
Bobby Inman, former number two man at the CIA, saw it differently.
My worry, frankly, is that you've got some people who aren't being monitored,
that operations, programs that would normally have been staffed, carefully reviewed, finally approved by the president,
may be being developed without all of those checks and balances that are very critical.
It turns out that the special group did a great deal that the president knew about and of which he approved,
but also that at least some members of the group were involved in activities that the president did not know about.
For example, Oliver North, in bargaining with Iranians to free the hostages,
was authorized to provide Iran some detailed intelligence on Iraq, the country with which Iran has been fighting a war for some seven years.
North provided what was authorized and, according to intelligence sources, some things that were not authorized,
top secret data that he apparently threw in as a bonus on his own.
We now know that one of the things this group put together was a presidential finding signed a year ago
authorizing U.S. officials to kidnap terrorists and bring them to the U.S. to face trial.
This directive was meant to apply to places like Beirut where there is no central authority,
where terrorists operate without fear that they will be brought to justice.
The idea for such a presidential finding had been openly talked about for months.
Senator Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee even held hearings on it.
I prefer to call the procedure an international arrest,
but I would not shy away from the term abduction and I would emphasize to this subcommittee
that it is entirely legal and appropriate in accordance with international rules of law and with United States law.
Specter said this evening he did not know about the secret directive until today.
Oliver North's group was also involved in planning rescue attempts.
From information provided by hostages who have already been released,
the group knew the remaining hostages were frequently moved around Beirut,
that they were wrapped up like mummies each time they were moved.
Analysts believe the hostages were transported inside cement trucks
and a plan was drafted to try to intercept a convoy of such trucks.
The plan was never executed.
Imprecise information and fear that more might die than were rescued apparently stymied the idea.
There were also attempts at psychological warfare, those aimed particularly at Libya's Muammar Qaddafi.
The U.S. ran naval exercises off Libya's coast.
There were leaps galore in Washington about impending military action, which for months never happened.
And when it finally did, it caught Qaddafi by surprise, nearly costing him his life, one of the goals of the operation.
Intelligence sources say he now sleeps in a different place every night.
The hijacking of the Achille-Laro cruise ship provided Oliver North's group with one of its greatest successes.
The airplane that was to carry the terrorists out of Egypt to safety was intercepted over the Mediterranean
by American fighter planes and forced down in Italy.
The idea for the intercept, White House sources say, came from Oliver North's small group,
a group which ended up having extraordinary power by virtue of where it met,
most often in the White House and by who sanctioned most of its operations, the president.
John McQuethy for Nightline in Washington.
We'll be talking tonight with two people who were members of that group John McQuethy was talking about
a little later with the senior FBI man on board, Oliver Buck Ravel.
But first, when we come back with Noel Cook, former Defense Department official in charge of counterterrorism.
This is ABC News Nightline, brought to you by Ford Motor Company.
Joining us live in our Washington bureau is Noel Cook, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
in charge of International Security Affairs, the department's primary counterterrorism official.
Mr. Cook, prior to the summer of 1985, counterterrorism was run, I believe, out of the State Department.
How did the group come to be moved to the White House? Can you give us a little bit of background?
Well, the group wasn't moved out of the State Department.
State continues to be the lead agency for development of policy dealing with terrorism.
But there was a great deal of frustration going back as far as the Dozier incident in late 1981
with the ability of the State Department to actually manage the terrorist incident,
to understand what the forces were that would be involved and how they would be deployed and how they would be employed.
And we had a great concern, and I think other agencies similarly had a concern,
that this thing could not be done from that particular venue in an effective way.
There was, as you might imagine, a great deal of turf and protection involved in this.
The State Department did not want that responsibility moved.
Every time we had an incident that went bad, every time we had a difficulty, we came back, we scrubbed it,
we looked at this thing again, we came to the conclusion that we had to have a group located within the NSC
that had the authority and the ability and the manpower to manage one of these events.
Now, there was at length in 1984 a National Security Decision Directive that said,
by a date certain, you have to come back to us and tell us what we need to do,
and by the 1st of January 1985, that has to be done.
The State Department and CIA particularly both objected to that,
and even though this was a signed Presidential Decision Directive, nothing was done.
Now you come up to 1985 with TWA 47.
In the aftermath of that, there was a Vice Presidential Task Force formed.
It talked to something in excess of 70 experts.
Everyone that trooped through there said,