Giuliani Tries to Use the 1980 “October Surprise” as Ammunition for His Campaign

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Sun Jul-08-07 09:53 PM
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Giuliani Tries to Use the 1980 “October Surprise” as Ammunition for His Campaign

I find this infuriating.

In a recent speech Rudy Giuliani brought up the theme, as he does whenever he opens his mouth, about how tough Republicans are compared to Democrats. This particular speech dwelt on a comparison of the handling of the Iranian hostage crisis by Presidents Carter and Reagan. The point of Giuliani’s speech – which I’m sure he’ll repeat a hundred times between now and the end of his campaign – was that Jimmy Carter the Democrat was “weak” and Ronald Reagan the Republican was “strong”, and that’s why President Carter was unable to secure the release of our hostages for over a year, while Reagan was able to secure their release within an hour of his inauguration.

I can’t find a link to the exact speech, but no matter because Giuliani apparently is spouting this garbage wherever he goes these days. Here’s a typical example of how Giuliani dramatizes how Reagan secured the release of our hostages within two minutes of being sworn in as President:

“Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan's eyes, and in two minutes they released the hostages.”

Uhhhhh – ok, I didn’t know that the Iranians attended Reagan’s inauguration, but I’m sure Rudy would know. Or maybe he’s just speaking metaphorically or something. Anyhow, let’s consider a few things:

The Iranian hostage crisis

You might recall that that the Iranian hostage crisis began on November 4, 1979, when an angry Iranian crowd seized the American embassy in Tehran and kidnapped approximately 90 Americans, 52 which they held as hostages until the Iranians released them on January 20, 1981, about two minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President. But actually, the roots of the crisis go back much further than that, so let’s go back to 1953:

In 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles convinced President Eisenhower to accede to a CIA plot to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohmmad Mosaddeq. Reasons included Mosaddeq’s recent nationalization of Iran’s oil industry and fear that his leftist leanings would make him susceptible to Communist influence. The CIA-led coup was successful, and Mosaddeq was replaced by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran with an iron fist for the next 26 years, to the great detriment of the Iranian people. That coup has been a major factor in anti-American feeling in Iran and in the Middle East in general, ever since.

In January 1979 the Iranian people finally deposed the Shah, and he fled the country. In October of that year Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the United States to be treated for cancer. That was perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back, which angered the Iranians and led them to seize the American embassy and take hostage the Americans within it.

President Carter attempted to deal with the crisis in many ways: He applied economic pressure by stopping the import of oil from Iran and freezing Iranian assets in the U.S.; he tried several diplomatic initiatives, dealing with emissaries from several other countries; and when all that failed he ordered a daring rescue mission, which failed when a helicopter crashed in an Iranian desert.

Back to Rudy’s stupid claim

I think there’s one point on which we can all agree with Rudy: After 444 days of captivity during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, the release of the American hostages within two minutes of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan was no coincidence. If any further proof is needed, the fact that the hostages had been sitting for several hour in a plane, which took off for the U.S. a couple minutes after Reagan was sworn in, should end all speculation on that score. Anyhow, Alex Higgins has a response to Giuliani’s comments that would make good material for a Saturday Night Live skit:

Trying to enter this fantasy takes some mental effort. Picture the Ayatollah Khomeini toying with President Jimmy Carter and laughing at him. Suddenly, newly-elected Reagan comes on the TV screen as the new president. The mocking mullahs wet themselves as they stare into his hard-man eyes and immediately agree to release all hostages, saying they are very sorry and won’t do it again and please be nice to us, Mr. Reagan, sir. That is the image Giuliani was presumably trying to get across. He is apparently quite serious, and no one else at the debate called him on it.

In any event, after Carter lost his election bid for a second term, he continued to vigorously work towards the release of the hostages – an effort that apparently ended in success. Higgins explains:

Carter hoped desperately to salvage his reputation by bringing the hostages home before he left the White House. As inauguration day came closer, he became practically an insomniac – the hostages dominated his waking thoughts, and he stayed awake to have them. In the end he was reduced to hoping they might be released in the final minutes of his presidency. On Inauguration Day itself, at 6:35 in the morning, Carter’s chief negotiator, Warren Christopher, rang him from Algiers to say that a deal with the Iranians had been concluded, with Iran being granted none of its major demands. The 52 remaining hostages were coming home.

Hmmm – So why did Iran wait until Reagan was inaugurated before releasing the hostages?

This is a very important question. Moreover, since Rudy repeatedly brings it up to fuel his campaign by using it to prove how strong Republicans are and how weak Democrats are, it is a question that deserves a lot of thought.

In trying to answer this question, I think that there are four points on which all reasonable persons can agree:

1) The release of the hostages by the Iranians didn’t occur in a vacuum – rather, it must have been based on an agreement that the Iranians reached with representatives of the United States, more specifically with a U.S. presidential administration (or potential administration), and more specifically yet, with either the Carter-Mondale or the Reagan-Bush administration.

2) The timing of the hostage release, just a couple of minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, was no coincidence. It was specifically designed to give Ronald Reagan credit for the hostage release that Jimmy Carter had worked so long and hard for, and therefore it was designed to make Reagan look good or Carter look bad or both.

3) Therefore, common sense would tell us, in trying to determine whether the Iranian agreement was made with the Carter-Mondale or the Reagan-Bush administration, that it was obviously the Reagan-Bush administration.

4) Lastly, it should be obvious that the deal was not reached in the two minute window following Reagan’s swearing in as President.

So Rudy is correct on all points except for the last one. Ronald Reagan does indeed deserve the credit for arranging the hostage release. And come to think of it, Rudy is not wrong about the fourth point either. He never said that the deal was made within two minutes of Reagan’s swearing in. And surely he’s not stupid enough to think it either. So Rudy was right! Why am I calling him stupid?

But wait! The Reagan-Bush team had no authority to make a deal with the Iranians while Jimmy Carter was President – especially since they never spoke to Carter about it, and since the deal was obviously made while Carter himself was attempting to secure the release of hostages using his authority as President. So it would have been illegal for the Reagan/Bush team to do that. Furthermore, by prevailing upon the Iranians to wait until Reagan took office before releasing the hostages, the Reagan Bush team would have extended the misery of the hostages. And if their deal was made specifically to stop the release of the hostages prior to the 1980 election (so as to improve their chances of winning the election), that would have extended the captivity of the hostages by several months. In that case, their deal would have been especially reprehensible. In fact, it might be considered treasonous.

Evidence that the Reagan/Bush team made a deal with the Iranians to withhold release of the hostages until after the 1980 election

Investigative journalist Robert Parry conducted extensive investigations into this issue and produced documentary that suggested that the Reagan Bush team did in fact negotiate with the Iranians to postpone the release of the hostages. The evidence included more than two dozen witnesses to the negotiations and documentary evidence of shipments of U.S. arms to Iran. The subject of Parry’s allegations is often referred to as the “October Surprise Conspiracy” because the Reagan-Bush team had long warned that Carter would pull an “October Surprise” by announcing the release of the hostages right before the 1980 election.

Not surprisingly, Parry’s investigation and allegations led to the gearing up of the Republican attack machine and two articles, one by The New Republic and one by Newsweek , which debunked the story by finding an alibi for William Casey (the Reagan-Bush campaign chairman) for the period in late July of 1980 during which some witnesses had placed him at a meeting in Madrid. Those stories essentially killed the story in “official” Washington circles, sending it into the realm of “conspiracy theories” – perhaps forever.

But the so-called “debunking” of the “October Surprise” allegations appears to have been based on a fraud. Parry spoke with participants at the conference that had been established for Casey’s alibi, and they all agreed that Casey was not there, thus debunking the alibi. So we have several conference participants versus a single alibi. No matter. Neither the New Republic nor Newsweek ever issued a retraction, so their original stories continued to provide plenty of fuel for Republicans.

Nevertheless a special House Task Force was finally created in 1992. To chair the committee the Democrats picked Lee Hamilton (Yes, the same one who co-chaired the 9-11 Commission), who was well known for his bi-partisanship, mild manners, and willingness to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt when faced with wrong-doing.

While acknowledging that the original alibi, which placed Casey in London on July 28, 1980, was bogus, the Committee proceeded to find another alibi, this one placing Casey in Bohemian Grove, California, during the weekend of July 26th.

When documentary evidence was later found showing that Casey was not in Bohemian Grove the weekend of July 26th, but instead was there the following weekend (of August 2nd), the House Task Force refused to let go. To counter that, they claimed proof that Casey couldn’t have been in Bohemian Grove during the weekend of August 2nd, by finding his phone number on a list of phone calls made to New York that weekend. They had no evidence that he answered a phone call in New York, just a phone number on a list (sigh). Thus the Task Force concluded, despite the documentary evidence to the contrary, that Casey was in Bohemian Grove on July 26th, therefore he couldn’t have attended the meeting in Madrid, and therefore the October Surprise witnesses who placed him there were liars – again. And this was the version of the story that was sent to the printers as the House Task Force report of January 13, 1993, which purportedly debunked the October Surprise Conspiracy theory for all time.

More evidence surfaces prior to the official release of the House Task Force report

But shortly after the House Task Force shipped their report off to the printers, a cable report based on KGB sources arrived from Moscow that supported the October Surprise Conspiracy. As described in Robert Parry’s book, “Secrecy and Privilege – Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq”, the report said that:

CIA officials and other Republicans had met secretly with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 Presidential campaign… The Russians asserted that the Reagan-Bush team had disrupted Carter’s hostage negotiations, the exact opposite of the Task Force conclusion…

“William Casey, in 1980, met three times with the Iranian leadership”, the report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.” At the Paris meeting in 1980, “Robert Gates… and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the Russian report said. “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 Tehran.”

The Russian report wasn’t the only barrier confronting the House Task Force as they prepared to release their report. One Democratic Task Force member, Congressman Mervyn Dymally, submitted a dissent complaining of a host of factors that combined to lead the Task Force to exonerate the Reagan-Bush team on extremely shaky grounds. Hamilton threatened Dymally (See “Dissent denied” section) that if he didn’t withdraw his dissent “I will have to come down hard on you.” After Dymally refused to withdraw his dissent, Hamilton, as chairman of one of Dymally’s committees, fired some of his staff. Dymally then withdrew his dissent in order to prevent further firings of his staff.

Parry tries once again to resurrect the investigation

In a final attempt to investigate the issue, Parry obtained access to some of the House Task Force documents, which he examined in an abandoned ladies room in the Rayburn House Office Building. To Parry’s great surprise, he found among those documents material that had been classified “top secret”, including the Russian report, which supported the October Surprise allegations.

Parry wrote up a report on his findings and tried to get it published in a newspaper or magazine. But it was too late. The story had already been “debunked”, and anyhow, Washington journalism was much too busy with trying to nail Bill Clinton on a minor real estate deal to bother with anything so trivial as a plot to steal a Presidential election by extending the period of captivity of American hostages.

The “October Surprise Conspiracy” in perspective

Some things are just too hot and controversial to talk about.

It’s bad enough that Jimmy Carter’s bid for reelection was thwarted by a cynical, illegal, and probably treasonous meddling with his attempts to secure the release of American hostages; it’s bad enough that our hostages’ misery was consequently prolonged by several months; it’s bad enough that even getting elected wasn’t good enough for the Reagan-Bush team – that they had to prolong the hostage release until after they took office in order to ensure that they would get credit for it; and it’s bad enough that a Congressional committee (under the chairmanship of Lee Hamilton) whitewashed the whole affair for God knows what reasons.

Now, in addition to all that, a Republican candidate for President of the United States is still trying to benefit from the whole sordid affair, by using it to make an ex-Democratic President look weak and an ex-Republican President look strong.

For God’s sake isn’t it time that our corporate news media starts talking about this? Rudy Giuliani brought it up, and apparently he intends to keep on bringing it up. Why doesn’t someone ask him, if he’s so willing to give credit to Ronald Reagan for securing the release of our hostages, to explain to the American people how he thinks Reagan did that?