Is Oliver North a chess player?
He testified at his trial:
"I felt like a pawn in a chess game being played by giants. It was a situation where I had been sent to do a lot of things, almost everything that was in that Resolution of Inquiry, by the direction of the President of the United States, I had been told by Admiral Poindexter and by Mr. McFarlane countless times; that I had given the commitment of the United States in the name of the President to the resistance [contra] leadership, to the people in those other countries, the people in foreign governments all over 18 or 19 countries, and that those were things I was told could not, should not and will not be revealed, and yet there was a very strong likelihood that they would be asked, and they were; that the things I had done with the resistance itself in delivering everything from medicine for jungle leprosy to ammunition, to the bases we built for deliveries for the resistance, the arrangements I had made with foreign governments to deliver surface-to-air missiles and ammunition, all of those things I had been told to give the commitment of the United States that it wouldn't be revealed.
I had been told specifically that the Saudi aid that the President had gotten and that Mr. McFarlane had gotten will never be revealed. And by this time we were also using monies from the sale of arms to the Nicaraguan resistance -- to the Iranians to help the Nicaraguan resistance, and that would never be revealed.
And I was put in this situation where having been raised to know what the Ten Commandments are, that it would be wrong to do that, but I never perceived that it would be unlawful. ..."