Gregg was now famous in Washington as Bush's day-to-day controller of the criminal
gun-running into Central America. Before the Gregg hearings began, both Republican
and Democratic Senators on the committee tried to get President Bush to withdraw the
Gregg nomination. This was to save them the embarrassment of confirming Gregg,
knowing they were too intimidated to stop him.
What follows are excerpts from the typed transcript of the Gregg hearings. The transcript
has never been reproduced, it has not been printed, and it will not be published by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is evidently embarrassed by its
contents.@s8@s8
Gregg: [As] his national security adviser [for] six and a half years ... I worked closely with the
Vice President keeping him informed as best I could on matters of foreign policy, defense, and
intelligence.... Travelling with the Vice President as I did ... [in] a great variety of missions to
more than 65 countries.... [After Vietnam] I did not see [Felix Rodriguez] until the early eighties
where he would drop into Washington sporadically ... we remained friends.... So, some of those
contacts would have been [1979-1982] when I was at the White House at the NSC.Sen. Sarbanes: And Felix would come to see you there?Gregg: No, at my home.... [Then] he brought me in '83 the plan which I have already discussed
with Senator Cranston.... [At that point] I was working for the Vice President ... [which I began in]
August 1982.Sen. Sarbanes: In December of 1984 he came to see you with the idea of going to El Salvador.
You ... cleared it with the Vice President?Gregg: ... I just said, `` My friend Felix, who was a remarkable former agency employee ... wants
to go down and help with El Salvador. And I am going to introduce him to [State Department
personnel] and see if he can sell himself to those men, '' and the Vice President said fine.Gregg: Felix went down there about the first of March [1985]. Before he went ... I introduced him
to the Vice President ... and the Vice President was struck by his character and wished him well in
El Salvador.Sen. Sarbanes: So before he went down, you undertook to introduce him to the Vice President....
Why did you do that?Gregg: Well, the Vice President had always spoken very highly and enthusiastically of his career
[!], or his one-year as DCI [Director of Central Intelligence]. I had gone out with him to the
agency just after I joined him in '82 and I saw the tremendous response he got there and he got
quite choked up about it and as we drove back in the car he said, you know, that is the best job I
have ever had before I became Vice President. So here it was, as I said probably the most
extraordinary CIA comrade I had known, who was going down to help in a country that I knew
that the Vice President was interested in.... The Vice President was interested in the progress of the
Contras. There were two occasions on which he asked me, how are they doing and I, on one
occasion went to a CIA officer who was knowledgeable and got a run-down on how they were
doing from that and sent it to the Vice President and he sent it back with no comment. On another
occasion, he asked me again, how are they doing, and I went--I drew a memo up, I think on the
basis of a conversation with North. Again, he returned that with no comment. So he was interested
in the Contras as an instrument of putting pressure on the Sandinistas. But what I said we had
never discussed was the intricacies, or who was supplying what to whom....