Item: The pending Iran-Contra trial of Clair George, the former third-ranking official at the Li Central Intelligence Agency, will soon revisit a curious scene, through the words of a key prosecution witness:

George’s subordinate Alan Fiers (the witness) is summoned to an October 1984 meeting in the office of the late CIA Director William Casey. George and Oliver North are there. "Ollie," says Casey, "Alan tells me you’re operating in Central America. Is that true?" "No, sir," responds North. "Good," says Casey. "I want you to understand that you’re not to operate in Central America." Later, George tells an incredulous Fiers, "What you saw going on in there was a charade." The implication: North would continue operating in Central America, with Casey’s blessing.

Item: A Nov. 24, 1986, White House meeting is described as follows in Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s indictment of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger:

President Reagan and his top seven aides are discussing how to respond to the rapidly breaking Iran-Contra scandal. Attorney General Edwin Meese III tells the group that his investigation has concluded that the president had not been told of a possibly illegal 1985 arms shipment. Some or all of those present know this to be false. But nobody corrects Meese, who tells the nation a similar story the next day, at a nationally televised news conference.

Item: Toward the end of an April 15, 1973, meeting with President Nixon, White House Counsel John Dean was surprised when Nixon "got up out of his chair, went behind his chair to the corner of the Executive Office Building office, and in a barely audible tone said to me he was probably foolish to have discussed [E. Howard] Hunt’s clemency with [Charles] Colson." This led Dean to suspect that the office was bugged. (It was.)

These are all variants on one of the more colorful aspects of modern American political theater: the Washington charade.

This column’s modest purpose is to make a small beginning at the large task (to be completed in somebody’s doctoral thesis) of deconstructing the Washington charade, by assembling a few examples (readers are invited to send more, including historical and literary parallels), suggesting subcategories, tracing historical roots, and placing it in the larger universe of organized deception.

The Washington charade may be defined to include all staged encounters in the political-legal world in which one or more participants (usually acting in concert) say things for the purpose not solely of communicating with one another, but of deceiving third parties.

The 1984 Casey episode is the charade in almost its purest form: officials having a conversation known by each of them to be permeated with falsehood, in an atmosphere dripping with conspiracy, for the purpose of generating evidence that can- be used later to deceive others.

Casey expected to be asked by congressional oversight committees whether he knew of any oversight restrictions on covert operations against Nicaragua Now he could respond by relating his staged conversation with and all those present could corroborate him without committing. provable perjury. Maybe Casey taped it, too-just to be safe.

The Nixon episode is a different species-a sort of auto-charade, in which the main actor speaks in part for the benefit of a hidden tape recorder known only to him. Or only to her: Think of Gennifer Flowers surreptitiously taping phone calls in which she tried to draw Bill Clinton into . sex talk. Or the video of Rasheeda Moore urging the amorously inclined Marion Barry Jr. to smoke some, crack; the auto-charade is a staple of undercover agents.

While the classic Washington charade unfolds in .- the inner sanctums of the executive branch- presumably never coming to light in most cases-Congress engages quite publicly in similar conduct. Members are often given a chance to vote on both sides of an issue or to cast harmless votes they don’t really mean.

The Washington charade has deep historical roots. Indirection and circumlocution have been used by people hatching criminal schemes from time immemorial. The purpose seems to be to still one’s own conscience, to avoid an unambiguous manifestation of criminal intent to any witness who might later make trouble, or both.

A precursor was Henry II’s "Who will free me from this turbulent priest?" Some knights, taking this as a veiled order to murder Thomas à Becket, promptly did so.

The effort to insure "plausible deniability" by discussing sensitive operations in circumlocutions terms became institutionalized by the U.S. intelligence network during the Cold War. Initially the purpose was to conceal the U.S. role in covert operations overseas from foreigners. It evolved into deceiving Congress and the public, to insulate the president and aides from legal and political accountability. And so we may never know whether President Eisenhower ordered a CIA hit on Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba or whether President Kennedy ordered the attempts on Fidel Castro.

It was to restore accountability that Congress, beginning in 1974, required that all covert intelligence operations be authorized by "findings,” signed by the president and conveyed to Congress in a "timely fashion.”

The Reagan White House rampantly evaded these safeguards. Reagan authorized arms shipments to Iran in 1985 before signing a finding; National Security Adviser John Poindexter tore up a subsequent finding to avoid political and legal jeopardy; the arms sales were not reported to Congress; and Poindexter gave Reagan ” absolute deniability" by claiming that he kept the president in the dark about the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to rebels in Nicaragua-even Though poindexter later testified, "I’m sure the president would have enjoyed knowing about it."

The full flowering of the Washington charade from less elaborate games of deniability may have been spurred in part by the Reaganites’ eagerness to evade the "finding" requirement; one can imagine the charades Poindexter may have acted out with Reagan to satisfy himself that the president would "enjoy" the diversion.

Two phenomena unknown in Henry H’s time may also be at work here, as in the case of the Wall Street charade practiced by insider traders.

The first is the modern litigation bar’s development of plausible deniability into a virtual legal specialty, called "witness preparation," which occupies a morally ambiguous world where zealous representation shades into criminal conspiracy. Many a lawyer will advise his client (or friendly witness) about the probable legal consequences and the plausibility of various possible scenarios before pinning the client down to an account of the facts. The client will then tell a story serendipitously fitting the best scenario the lawyer has offered him. Often he will be lying. But the witness-preparation charade has enabled the lawyer to facilitate the lie while avoiding guilty knowledge.

To avoid "suborning perjury," the late Edward Bennett Williams would "help the client come up with a plausible story to explain away incriminating facts…subtly, through leading questions and a certain amount of winking and nodding," according to Evan Thomas’ 1991 Biography, The Man to See. The government is full of lawyers practiced in this art.

The second new phenomenon is the growing pervasiveness of the concealed tape recorder, the wiretap and other forms of bugging. Officials nowadays often find it prudent to assume that someone might secretly be taping them. Just as Dean suspected Nixon, Nixon (wrongly) suspected Dean. The president’s own taping system recorded him in April 1973 fretting about a March 21 meeting with Dean: ‘I just wonder if the son of a bitch had a recorder on him."

Fear of taping encourages artifices more elaborate than those that might suffice to protect against possible whistleblowers, whose integrity or recollection can be attacked. It was not Dean but the tapes that brought Nixon down.

There are cruder defenses against the hidden recorder, of course. Frank Rizzo, then mayor of Philadelphia, took city Democratic leader Peter Camiel into a hotel bathroom in 1973 and turned on the water full blast before trying to bribe him for a political favor, according to Camiel.

While running water won’t fool a first-rate tape recorder, the Washington charade has its own pitfalls, even for those who revel in deception and criminality: The very indirection that provides Protective may misunderstand their elliptical marching orders or later pretend they did.

As the Senate’s Church Committee reported in 1975: "A system which relies on secrecy, compartmentation, circumlocution, and the avoidance of clear responsibility…creates the risk of confusion and rashness in the very areas where clarity and sober judgment are most necessary."

Thus was Iran-Contra hauntingly foreshadowed.