CT Blue

We are all familiar with the term “October Surprise”. It refers to an action taken shortly before an election, usually by the party in power, designed to affect the election’s outcome. The term was first used, I think history would show, in 1980, when Republicans loudly proclaimed their certainty that Jimmy Carter would somehow, likely in some sort of unholy deal with Iran, get the hostages out of Iran at a time designed to guarantee himself re-election. All the while, many of us have always believed, the Republicans were conspiring with the Iranians to make sure that such a thing would definitely not happen until Reagan was safely elected. There was evidence in support of the theory, though never a smoking enough gun to make a dent on public opinion. Most people never bothered to wonder why Carter was able to finally succeed in freeing the hostages on the date most favorable for Reagan: Inauguration Day, which guaranteed that Reagan would not have the issue to dog him, and would not have ownership of whatever agreement was made to free them. Who knows, Jimmy might have known he was being played, but what could he do?

Later, when Ronnie was caught sending money to Iran, inquiring minds wanted to know: were those persistent rumours about a campaign season deal true? Congress duly investigated, but as was their wont, Democrats preferred a believe-no-evil approach was called for. A critical question was whether Bill Casey, the by then deceased former head of the CIA, had or had not gone to Madrid to make the deal to guarantee the hostages would remain hostages for the duration. The Congressional committee decided he did not, and absolved the Reaganauts of any wrongdoing.

But…, as Robert Parry of Consortium News reports:

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who oversaw two congressional investigations into Ronald Reagan’s secret dealings with Iran, says a key piece of evidence was withheld that could have altered his conclusion clearing Reagan’s 1980 campaign of allegations that it sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran.

In a phone interview on Thursday, the Indiana Democrat responded to a document that I had e-mailed him revealing that in 1991 a deputy White House counsel working for then-President George H.W. Bush was notified by the State Department that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey had taken a trip to Madrid in relation to the so-called October Surprise issue.

Casey’s alleged trip to Madrid in 1980 was at the center of Hamilton’s investigation in 1991-92 into whether Reagan’s campaign went behind Carter’s back to frustrate his attempts to free 52 American hostages before the 1980 election, popularly known as the “October Surprise.” Hamilton’s task force dismissed the allegations after concluding that Casey had not traveled to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “We couldn’t show that. … The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation. “If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

The document revealing White House knowledge of Casey’s Madrid trip was among records released to me by the archivists at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the October Surprise inquiry was taking shape.

(via Consortiumnews)

I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but this one fit together all too neatly, and it was precisely the sort of thing one would expect from a party that has always, since the days of Nixon, believed in winning at any cost. I’ve always believed that it happened, and I think it paved the way for the later secret deal in which the U.S. secretly sold arms to a state that was, officially, an implacable enemy of ours.