2 Bush Staffers List Contacts on Contra Aid

WASHINGTON â€”  Aides to Vice President George Bush reported Monday on three years of contacts with a shadowy figure in the contras support network, but they insisted that they did not know until August that the man may have been involved.

The two men said that they set up an Aug. 8 meeting to hear former CIA operative Felix Rodriguez voice concern about the flow of aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, and met with him at least five other times in the following three months.

In a chronology of their contacts with Rodriguez, Bush’s national security adviser, Donald P. Gregg, and his deputy, Col. Samuel Watson, said they did not learn until later that Rodriguez was involved in the contra resupply effort.

Their next reported contact was Oct. 5 and 6, when Rodriguez, in two telephone calls to Watson, told him that “one of the contra resupply aircraft was missing, possibly in Nicaragua.�

Loss of Plane Told

Watson informed the staff of the National Security Council, the report said, and U.S. officials subsequently learned that a C-123 aircraft carrying three Americans--including Eugene Hasenfus, who was captured, tried and imprisoned--had been shot down.

The chronology, prepared by Gregg at the direction of the Vice President, shows a pattern of frequent personal and professional contacts between Gregg and Rodriguez, who were CIA colleagues in Vietnam, and, more recently, with Watson.

In the report, however, Gregg maintains that Rodriguez did not begin to reveal his role until the Aug. 8 meeting with Gregg and Watson, at which he expressed concern “that the informal contra supply effort which then existed might not survive� until the CIA-directed delivery of $100 million pending in formal U.S. aid could begin.

Gregg and Watson reported meeting four days later with officials of the CIA, NSC and State Department, to pass along the concerns raised by Rodriguez, who had called on Gregg in late 1984 to lend the El Salvador Air Force some of his expertise in counterinsurgency.

Bush Role Denied

Their account of that Aug. 12 meeting emphasized, however, that “the Vice President’s office had no jurisdiction or responsibility with regard to contra supply operations.� It said Gregg and Watson arranged the session in the belief “that Mr. Rodriguez’s observations were sufficiently important to pass along.�

Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, who released the chronology of meetings and telephone calls, said that the record shows “that Donald Gregg and his staff maintained periodic communication with Felix Rodriguez, but were never involved in directing, coordinating or approving military aid to the contras in Nicaragua.�

Nor, Fitzwater said, “was there any awareness� on the part of Bush or members of his staff, that proceeds from arms sold to Iran were being diverted to the contras.