George Lied to Senate Panel, Witness Says : Trial: Former lawmaker testifies that ex-spymaster concealed meeting with Iran-Contra arms middleman. Judge delays Weinberger case.

WASHINGTON —  Former CIA spymaster Clair E. George “purposely, willfully” concealed the fact that he had met arms middleman Richard V. Secord from senators investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, a former senator charged Friday.

“When the question came up . . . he knew it all along. He never met Secord, he says, but we know he did,” former Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton testified during George’s criminal trial.

George, the former chief of all CIA overseas spy operations, is charged with lying when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee under oath on Dec. 3, 1986, that he had never met Secord.

George also told the lawmakers that he did not know Secord’s role in the Ronald Reagan Administration’s secret arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

Secord testified this week that he met George during a Jan. 20, 1986, meeting in the White House Situation Room.

Defense lawyer Richard A. Hibey, during a heated cross-examination of Eagleton, attempted to suggest that George’s recollections at the Senate hearing might merely have been an error in memory.

Hibey pointed out that former CIA general counsel Stanley Sporkin told the committee earlier on the same day that Secord attended the Jan. 20 White House meeting.

When Eagleton, a committee member, said he did not remember Sporkin’s testimony, Hibey said: “What right have you to brand his (George’s) testimony as a lie rather than a mistake when you knew differently only hours before.”

“There’s not anything that’s a mistake about Clair George walking into the Situation Room of the White House . . . and seeing a man he knew to be a scum,” Eagleton shot back.

Meanwhile, a federal judge on Friday put off the Iran-Contra trial of Caspar W. Weinberger for two months until Jan. 5 and said he will give the former defense secretary quick access to the previous statements of government witnesses.

The huge volume of paperwork requires abandoning the tentative Nov. 2 trial date, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan said.

Prosecutors have turned over tens of thousands of documents since Weinberger’s June 16 indictment and will not finish the job until the end of August at the earliest, lawyers for both sides said at a court session.

Weinberger lawyer Carl Rauh said prosecutors are deluging him with an avalanche of Iran-Contra documents that have no bearing on his client’s criminal case. Prosecutor John Barrett said Rauh’s requests for documents are so broad that prosecutors have no choice but to provide so much material.

Weinberger is charged with five counts of obstruction and lying in the Iran-Contra scandal.