Biden and Trump vs Iran Part 4

Den of Spies

A rather large clue about the arms for hostages dealings between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian mullahs was what happened on inauguration day 1981. During the campaign, Ronald Reagan and his proxies had accused the Carter White House of being weak in the face of the hostage crisis. The implication being that once Reagan was elected he would bring Tehran to its knees and force their release. As Craig Unger notes in his book, Den of Spies, Bill Casey worked this angle like a magician: attracting attention to one hand, Carter’s, so you would not see what the other was doing. Because the other hand was dealing arms to those people who took the hostages while chanting “Death to America!”

Casey worked this trick so well that even when something quite odd happened on January 20, 1981, the media and the public missed its importance. President Carter had slept in the West Wing overnight as telexes were passed back and forth arranging the imminent release of the hostages. That morning, at about 8:30 AM, Carter was given word that the planes were loaded and on the tarmac in Tehran. But they did not take off. The minutes ticked on and the Reagans came by and picked up the Carters: Reagan talking about looking forward to seeing Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra later.

On live TV the transfer of power took place, Carter was leaving office. It was only after Reagan was sworn in that the planes took off from Tehran. In other words, the departure was delayed by four hours. Thirty minutes after that departure, Reagan arrived at a congressional luncheon. He announced that the “planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian air space, and they’re now free of Iran.” (Unger, p. 290). Before entering the political arena, Reagan had been a film actor for years. This scenario seemed lifted right out of a Hollywood movie. At that time, no one seemed to ask the question: Why would the Iranians wait those four hours until Reagan took the oath as president? What was so important about that? At that time, no one could have guessed that the tableaux had been stage managed by Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey. To the public, Carter was not going to get any credit for their return. It was Reagan who announced it. But yet, any dealings Reagan’s representatives had with Tehran remained covert and hidden.

This illusion was not pricked until the spring of 1991. On April 15^th Gary Sick, formerly of the National Security Council, wrote an editorial for the New York Times. That piece ran one day before PBS broadcast a TV special on the same subject-- “The Election Held Hostage”-- which was produced by Robert Parry and Robert Ross. In his article, Sick said that, years after the crisis, he discovered that the Hashemi brothers were really double agents, secretly working for Bill Casey. Sick noted that there were now simply too many sources—up to fifteen-- to dismiss the story. The publication of this article shed backward light. Finally, the 4 hour delay on inauguration day could be chalked up as, in all probability, prearranged stagecraft.

Recall, this is now about 12 years into the whole Reagan/Bush “It’s morning in America” motif. To then say that the Reaganites had broken the law, betrayed the republic, and negotiated with the Moslem fundamentalist Khomeini—and this is how they came to power—that was a hard pill to swallow.

But there was even more evidence it was true. Bani Sadr’s foreign minister was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. Like Bani Sadr, he wanted to deal with Carter to unfreeze assets so as to buy spare parts to confront the invasion by Iraq. He told one French outlet that he had information the Reagan camp was blocking a solution to the hostage crisis. Five days after that he wrote a letter to an Iranian newspaper saying the same. Ghotbzadeh was later detained, and then shot by firing squad in 1982. (Unger, p. 257). As mentioned previously, President Bani Sadr also knew about the plot. He was the subject of three murder attempts. Bani Sadr had to leave the country in a disguise. And some of his followers were then killed. (Unger, p. 294). This is how explosive the facts were.

But in spite of all the above, the opposition to the story was rabid. In America it was led by Newsweek and The New Republic. The latter story was entitled “The Conspiracy that Wasn’t” and was written by Steven Emerson and Jesse Furman. The article called the Sick/Parry concept “a total fabrication” and anyone who spent time investigating it was a gullible dupe. What made this story double edged was that The New Republic had a reputation for being a liberal magazine. But this was not really true anymore. Since Martin Peretz had purchased the publication, it had employed moderate to conservative writers like Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and particularly Michael Ledeen. Ledeen was notable for later saying, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” (National Review, April 3, 2002, article by Jonah Goldberg). In fact, some would later claim that the journal had become a neocon bastion.

Newsweek ran three stories attempting to debunk the Sick/Parry thesis. This began in late October of 1991 and continued into November. One of them was entitled “The October Surprise: Making of a Myth”. Since Newsweek had hired him to work on these stories, Unger has some insights into how they were made.

As The New Republic stated, Casey had an alibi which presumably took any meeting with Iranians in Madrid off the shelf. He was at a historical conference in London. There was a big problem with this. Newsweek did not differentiate the two different ways that attendance was recorded at that conference. A light pencil mark was made if the person was expected to attend a presentation; a dark ink one was made if he did attend. On July 29^th the former marks were made. On July 28^th there was a notation next to Casey’s name which said, “came at 4 PM”. Further, historian Robert Dallek made a speech that day between 11:30 and 1:00 PM and Casey was supposed to attend, but Dallek said he did not. (Unger, p. 107). This meant that Casey likely did not get there until 4 PM that day. Since Madrid was a 90 minute flight from London he could easily have been there in the morning and returned by that time.

But Newsweek depended on those attendance charts, no matter how faulty they were. The other excuse the publication used was that there were no large arms shipments to Iran. (Unger, p. 104) As we have seen, not only was this false, there is evidence that some shipments were made before Reagan became president. Unger made objections to these two problematic conclusions. He was given the brush off by editor Maynard Parker. Then he went to the fact checker on the story. The man replied with, “I think you have a point. But my bosses have determined that they are not going to make it.” (Unger, p. 110)

What makes this all the worse is that there was written evidence that Casey was in Madrid in the month under question. The Bush 1 White House was asking for documents on the subject since, as Carter requested, congressional hearings were now in the making. The State Department had a memo saying that Casey was in Madrid in July of 1980 for unknown purposes. That info was passed to the White House. C. Boyden Gray supervised the White House strategy on how to contain congressional investigations into the October Surprise. Gray admitted that, “This is partisan.” (Unger, p. 162). This might be the reason that memo was not passed on to either the senate committee or the House committee. (Robert Parry, Consortium News, 12/1/2018)

There was also evidence that George H. W. Bush was in Paris for the final October meeting, after which—as we have seen-- the first arms transfers took place. The late Robert Parry did some interesting reporting on this issue. What makes it more interesting is that, like Casey, Bush could never come up with a viable excuse explaining: if he was not in Paris, where he was on that day? And he and his entourage did try. (Ibid, Parry) First he was at a friend’s house, then he was playing tennis at a country club, then he had brunch with Judge Potter Stewart and his wife, etc. As Parry showed in the referenced article, none of these withstood journalistic scrutiny.

So why did the House committee investigating the October Surprise accept it? Because the House Republicans threatened “to block continued funding for the inquiry unless the Democrats agreed that Bush had not gone to Paris.” (Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 6, 2016). As both Parry and Unger revealed, the Republicans also vetoed having Spencer Oliver on the committee even though he had a reputation as being a thorough and honest investigator.

In fact, the chairman of the House committee, Lee Hamilton, wrote a column for The New York Times on January 24, 1993. That article actually used Casey’s alibis as key reasons for putting the controversy to rest once and for all.

As both Parry and Unger have convincingly written, that committee had some serious failings. According to an interview Hamilton did with Bob Parry, he never saw the State Department memo placing Casey in Madrid in July. Just four months after Hamilton wrote his article, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Samir confirmed that the October Surprise happened. (Parry, American Dispatches, p. 177). The testimony of de Marenches through his co writer David Andelman was dismissed as having little probative value. (House Report, p. 167)

The committee also sidelined the testimony of Bani Sadr. They said none of his reported sources of information actually participated in the events. (ibid, p. 78) When Unger interviewed Bani Sadr the former president said this statement was simply false. He had meetings with Ayatollah Khomeini and his nephew Reza Pasandideh. He also had brought documents for the committee to read, but the committee did not examine them. According to Bani Sadr, Hamilton told him, “It would be very dangerous if we accepted such a thing.” (Unger, p. 163).

Which reminds the reader of John Connally’s statement about the Kennedy assassination. When journalist Doug Thompson met up with Connally in 1982 he asked him if he thought Lee Oswald fired the gun that killed JFK. Connally replied with this: “Absolutely not. I do not for one second believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission.” Thompson then asked, “So why not speak out?” Connally said, “Because I love this country and we needed closure at the time. I will never speak out publicly about what I believe.” (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)

Connally went from being a silent part of the JFK cover up in 1964, to being an active part of the October Surprise plotting in 1980. For those who try and dismiss this latter day plot as being based on the words of unreliable arms dealers and phony intelligence agents, how do the following fit into that rubric: Connally, Lt. Governor of Texas Ben Barnes, President of Iran Bani Sadr, Israeli prime minister Shamir, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, French SDECE chair Alexandre de Marenches, and finally a secret report by the KGB. That report stated: “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership….The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.” This was another important piece of information kept classified by the House committee. (Nat Parry, Scheerpost, 3/22/2023)

Finally, in May of 2023, The New Republic—not owned by Martin Peretz anymore-- went back on its original story. They admitted the Reagan campaign delayed the release of the hostages for political again. Is 43 years a long time to admit you were wrong?