The judge in the Iran-Contra case complained Thursday about more delays in bringing Oliver L. North to trial and called on the Reagan administration to speed up the declassification of necessary documents if it wants the case to go forward. ``The highest levels of the government have to make a decision as to whether this case is going to go or if it's not going to go,'' Gesell said during a hearing on the problems posed by reams of secret government documents collected by independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. The judge expressed frustration over Walsh's request for a one-month delay in getting 150,000 pages of secret documents cleared by an interagency task force. ``If you can't get a trial going soon there isn't going to be a trial,'' Gesell warned both sides during the hearing in U.S. District Court. Gesell said he was not ready to schedule a trial of the former White House aide, even though he had been preparing to set a date. ``I anticipated when I came on the bench of issuing a trial date notice tomorrow. I'm not going to do that. The case isn't ready,'' the judge said. Gesell suggested that Attorney General Edwin Meese III designate a Justice Department official to review the situation to help the administration decide whether it is ready to release secret documents or whether the case has to be dismissed. The judge questioned whether ``we won't need to have a clear decision from the administration itself that they want to try this case or they don't want to.'' Walsh said he already has consulted with Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Martin about the secrecy problems and would meet with other senior Justice Department officials. Some 82,000 pages of classified documents, many from the National Security Council where North worked until he was fired in November 1986, already have been turned over to the defense for pretrial review. Of that group, Walsh said a ``much smaller number but still a large number'' of documents will be relevant to the case. The prosecutor repeated previous assertions that the batch of unprocessed 150,000 pages from the CIA or the Justice Department contained little that would be relevant to the defense case. Walsh said the task force, composed of representatives of agencies that originate the documents, needs more time to mark the portions of the documents that must be redacted before they can be introduced at trial. Gesell said he had deferred to the interagency task force out of concern for national security concerns about disclosing the documents in open court. But ``the obstacles keep arising,'' the judge said. Although he expressed confidence ``they are not trying to torpedo the case or help the case,'' the task force members ``are not in the position to judge the larger implications of the case,'' Gesell said. The judge said a high-level political decision is needed on what material the administration will allow to be disclosed in court. On Wednesday, Gesell had ordered North to specify by July 11 what secret government documents he intended to disclose in court to defend the charges against him. North, along with former national security adviser John M. Poindexter and arms dealers Albert Hakim and Richard V. Secord, are accused of conspiring to illegally divert U.S.-Iran arms-sale profits to the Nicaraguan rebels during a ban on such aid. The judge has ordered four separate trials. North was designated as the leadoff defendant by Walsh. The issue involves classified documents that North and, ultimately, his three co-defendants would be allowed to introduce into evidence to rebut the charges. Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, a defendant must notify the government of secret documents he wants to disclose in court. The judge then decides whether the documents are indeed relevant to the case. Under the law, Gesell can order the substitution of secret documents that government doesn't want released with statements of facts the material would prove if presented to the jury. He can also dismiss the charges if there are too many secret documents that the government wants withheld from the case. An alternative to dismissing all the charges would be to force North to stand trial on some of the counts contained in the indictment that wouldn't require extensive use of classified documents. These might include charges that North lied to Congress about his role in the covert effort to help the Nicaraguan rebels and allegations he obstructed a presidential inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair by destroying documents. Walsh's request to delay production of the remaining documents and a defense complaint about the slow pace of pre-trial discovery prompted Gesell to convene the hearing. Among other things, the defense complained that it has yet to receive any of the government documents that Walsh's investigators were allowed to look at but could not copy. These include relevant pages of President Reagan's diary and schedule.
