Karl Rove is promising an October Surprise. What is an October Surprise? Back in the early fall of 1980, during the election campaign between Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, the Republicans were looking good. Only one thing could deny them the Presidency. If Jimmy Carter was able to secure the release of the hostages being held in Iran he might ride the crest of a wave of good feeling to victory. The Republicans were terrified that Carter would pull a magic rabbit out of his hat and deal them a nasty surprise. The question is, what did they do about it? Did they actively work in back channels to prevent the release of the hostages until after the election? Remember, the hostages were released as Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated.
Democrats were suspicious. Rumors abounded that former CIA chief and VP candidate George Bush and future CIA chief William Casey had travelled to Europe and met with Iranian representatives.
During the 1992 Presidential election season, George Bush was running for re-election. The House Intelligence Committee was conducting an investigation to determine whether members of the Reagan-Bush campaign had worked to prevent an October Surprise. The chairman was Lee Hamilton of Indiana. He had already gone easy on Bush in 1988, during another election season, when he was investigating his role in Iran-Contra. He would later be tapped again to co-chair the 9/11 Commission. Hamilton was under heavy pressure to exonerate Bush of any wrongdoing.
Members of the Committee were concerned that some of the most damning evidence against Bush and Casey may have originated as Soviet disinformation. So Hamilton contacted the former chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Defense and Security Issues, Sergei V. Stepashin, to see if he could clear things up. Stepashin wanted to be cooperative as Russia was in desperate need of U.S. foreign aid. He sent back a report that arrived only two days before Hamilton was scheduled to issue his report declaring the October Surprise Plot a myth. What did Stepashin’s report say? Go below the fold.
From Robert Parry’s May 15, 1999 article.
Then, on Jan. 11, 1993, Stepashin reported back with the results of his internal Russian investigation. Translated by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and forwarded to Congress, Stepashin’s six-page report stated that Moscow possessed detailed information about secret initiatives undertaken by the Reagan-Bush campaign to negotiate a delay in the hostages’ freedom.
“William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” Stepashin’s report read. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA director George Bush also took part. … In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”
Stepashin’s report also described President Carter’s secret offers to Iran. One key meeting occurred in Athens in July 1980 with Pentagon representatives agreeing “in principle” to deliver “a significant quantity of spare parts for F-4 and F-5 aircraft and also M-60 tanks … via Turkey,” according to Stepashin’s report.
In return, Iranians “discussed a possible step-by-step normalization of Iranian-American relations [and] the provision of support for President Carter in the election campaign via the release of American hostages.”
Stepashin wrote matter of factly about this geopolitical bartering. He observed that both the Reagan campaign and the Carter administration “started with the proposition that [Iran’s leader] Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini, having announced a policy of ‘neither the West nor the East,’ and cursing the ‘American devil,’ imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means.”
The Republicans simply won the bidding war. But President Carter had the constitutional authority to conduct negotiations with foreign powers. The Republican campaign did not.
Hamilton decided to issue his report anyway. He accepted the speculation that the Russian report was just based on open source material made available in the Western Press. And what happened to the Russian report?
In late 1994, nearly two years later, I received permission to review the unclassified records from the task force investigation. I was led to dozens of boxes stored in a former Ladies Room of an obscure office off the Rayburn House Office Building parking garage.
In the boxes, I found not only the unclassified records, but a number of secret documents that apparently had been left behind by accident, including Cogan’s testimony. Another was the “confidential” embassy cable containing the translation of Stepashin’s report.
They dumped the report in a box in a former ladies room.
Finally, what relevance does this all have for today? Well, this is about Iran, remember? Did you think we took Saddam’s side in that nasty Iran-Iraq war? Well, yeah, sort of.
Stepashin also described how the Reagan administration fulfilled its debt to Iran. “After the victory of R. Reagan in the election, in early 1981, a secret agreement was reached in London in accord with which Iran released the American hostages, and the U.S. continued to supply arms, spares and military supplies for the Iranian army,” Stepashin wrote.
The deliveries were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers, his report said. Spares for F-14 fighters and other military equipment went to Iran from Israel in March-April 1981 and the arms pipeline stayed open into the mid-1980s.
“Through the Israeli conduit, Iran in 1983 brought surface-to-surface missiles of the ‘Lance’ class plus artillery of a total value of $135 million,” Stepashin’s report stated. “In July 1983, a group of specialists from the firm, Lockheed, went to Iran on English passports to repair the navigation systems and other electronic components on American-produced planes.”
The tap for Iranian-bound arms opened wider in 1985, with the Iran-contra shipments.
Remember. Hizbollah started kidnapping and killing Americans in Beirut in 1983. They were backed by Iran. That led to tensions. Eventually, William Casey ordered this. At least, he ordered that if you can believe Bob Woodward.
What do you think Karl Rove has in mind for this October? Would the Dems be bad people if we went and helped bin-Laden hide until after the midterms? Would we be traitors?
