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Mon, 04 Jan 1993 03:46:00 est
Date: Mon Jan 4 03:45:53 est 1993
From: "John Covici" <
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Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 23
Status: O
X-Status:
{XVII: Campaign 1980}
Epiphany of a Scoundrel
John Sears of the Reagan campaign
signaled to the {Nashua Telegraph}, a
paper published in southern New
Hampshire, that Reagan would accept a
one-on-one debate with Bush. James
Baker was gulled: He welcomed the idea
because the debate format would
establish Bush as the main alternative
to Reagan. ``We thought it was the best
thing since sliced bread,'' said Baker.
Bob Dole complained to the Federal
Elections Commission about being
excluded, and the Reagan camp suggested
that the debate be paid for out of
campaign funds, half by Reagan and half
by Bush. Bush refused to pay, but
Reagan pronounced himself willing to
defray the entire cost. Thus it came to
pass that a bilateral Bush-Reagan
debate was scheduled for February 23 at
a gymnasium in Nashua.
For many, this evening would
provide the epiphany of George Bush, a
moment when his personal essence was
made manifest.
Bush propaganda has always tried
to portray the {Nashua Telegraph}
debate as some kind of ambush planned
by Reagan's diabolical campaign
manager, John Sears. Established facts
include that the {Nashua Telegraph}
owner, blueblood J. Herman Pouliot,
and {Telegraph} editor John Breen, were
both close personal friends of former
Governor Hugh Gregg, who was Bush's
campaign director in the state. Bush
had met with Breen before the debate.
Perhaps it was Bush who was trying to
set some kind of a trap for Reagan.
On the night of February 23, the
gymnasium was packed with more than
2,400 people. Bush's crony, Rep. Barber
Conable (or ``Barbarian Cannibal,''
later Bush's man at the World Bank), was
there with a group of congressmen for
Bush. Then the excluded GOP candidates,
John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole,
and Phil Crane, all arrived and asked
to meet with Reagan and Bush to discuss
opening the debate up to them as well.
(Connally, also a candidate, was in
South Carolina.) Reagan agreed to meet
with them and went backstage into a
small office with the other candidates.
He expressed a general willingness to
let them join in. But Bush refused to
talk to the other candidates, and sat
on the stage waiting impatiently for
the debate to begin. John Sears told
Bush's press secretary, Peter Teeley,
that Sears wanted to talk to Bush about
the debate format. ``It doesn't work
that way,'' hissed the liberal Teeley,
who sent James Baker to talk with
Sears. Sears said it was time to have
an open debate. Baker passed the buck
to the {Nashua Telegraph}.
From the room behind the stage
where the candidates were meeting, the
Reagan people sent U.S. Senator Gordon
Humphrey out to urge Bush to come and
confer with the rest of them. ``If you
don't come now,'' said Humphrey to
Bush, ``you're doing a disservice to
party unity.'' Bush whined in reply:
``Don't tell me about unifying the
Republican Party! I've done more for
this party than you'll ever do! I've
worked too hard for this and they're
not going to take it away from me!'' In
the back room, there was a proposal
that Reagan, Baker, Dole, Anderson, and
Crane should go on stage together and
announce that Reagan would refuse to
debate unless the others were included.
``Everyone seemed quite irritated
with Bush, whom they viewed as acting
like a spoiled child,'' wrote an aide
to Anderson later.@s1@s3 Bush refused
to even acknowledge the presence of
Dole, who had helped him get started as
GOP chairman; of Anderson and Crane,
former House colleagues; and of Howard
Baker, who had helped him get confirmed
at the CIA. George kept telling anybody
who came close that he was sticking
with the original rules.
The audience was cheering for the
four excluded candidates, demanding
that they be allowed to speak.
Publisher Pouliot addressed the crowd:
``This is getting to sound more like a
boxing match. In the rear are four
other candidates who have not been
invited by the {Nashua Telegraph},''
said Pouliot. He was roundly booed.
``Get them chairs,'' cried a woman, and
she was applauded. Bush kept staring
straight ahead into space, and the
hostility of the crowd was focusing
more and more on him.
Reagan started to speak,
motivating why the debate should be
opened up. Editor Breen, a
rubbery-looking hack with a bald pate
and glasses, piped up: ``Turn Mr.
Reagan's microphone off.'' There was
pandemonium. ``You Hitler!'' screamed a
man in the front row right at Breen.
Reagan replied: ``I'm paying for
this microphone, Mr. Breen.'' The crowd
broke out in wild cheers. Bush still
stared straight ahead in his temper
tantrum. Reagan spoke on to ask that
the others be included, saying that
exclusion was unfair. But he was unsure
of himself, looking to Nancy Reagan for
a sign as to what he should do. At the
end, Reagan said he would prefer an open
debate, but that he would accept the
bilateral format if that were the only
way.
With that, the other candidates
left the podium in a towering rage.
``There'll be another day, George,''
growled Bob Dole.
Reagan and Bush then debated, and
those who were still paying attention
agreed that Bush was the loser. A staff
member later told Bush, ``The good news
is that nobody paid any attention to
the debate. The bad news is you lost
that, too.''
Film footage of Reagan grabbing
the microphone while Bush stewed in his
temper tantrum was all over local and
network television for the next 48
hours. It was the epiphany of a
scoundrel.
Now the Bush damage control
apparatus went into that mode it finds
so congenial: lying. A radio commercial
was prepared under orders from James
Baker for New Hampshire stations: Here
an announcer, not Bush, intoned that
``at no time did George Bush object to
a full candidate forum. This accusation
by the other candidates is without
foundation whatsoever.''
Walter Cronkite heard a whining
voice from Houston, Texas as he
interviewed Bush on his new program:
``I wanted to do what I agreed to do,''
said the whine. ``I wanted to debate
with Ronald Reagan.''
The New Hampshire primary was a
debacle for Bush. Reagan won 50 percent
of the votes to George's 23 percent,
with 13 percent for Baker and 10
percent for Anderson.@s1@s4
Bush played out the string through
the primaries, but he won only four
states (Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Pennsylvania and Michigan) plus Puerto
Rico. Reagan took 29. Even in
Pennsylvania, where the Bushmen
outspent Reagan by a colossal margin,
Reagan managed to garner more delegates
even though Bush got more votes.
Bush was able to keep going after
New Hampshire because Mosbacher's
machinations had given him a post-New
Hampshire war chest of $3 million. The
Reagan camp had spent two-thirds of
their legal total expenditure of $18
million before the primaries had begun.
This had proven effective, but it meant
that in more than a dozen primaries,
Reagan could afford no television
purchases at all. This allowed Bush to
move in and smother Reagan under a
cascade of greenbacks in a few states,
even though Reagan was on his way to
the nomination. That was the story in
Pennsylvania and Michigan. The
important thing for Bush now was to
outlast the other candidates and to
build his credentials for the
vice-presidency, since that was what he
was now running for.
Seeking his `Birthright'
All the money and organization had
not sufficed. After some expensive
primary failures, Bush now turned his
entire attention to the quest for his
``birthright,'' the vice-presidency.
This would be his fifth attempt to
attain that office, and once again,
despite the power of Bush's network,
success was uncertain.
Inside the Reagan camp, one of
Bush's greatest assets would be William
Casey, who had been closely associated
with the late Prescott Bush. Casey was
to be Reagan's campaign manager for the
final phase of the 1980 elections. In
1962, Prescott and Casey had co-founded
a think tank called the National
Strategy Information Center in New York
City, a forum where Wall Street lawyers
like Casey could join hands with
politicians from Prescott's wing of the
Republican Party, financiers, and the
intelligence community. The National
Strategy Information Center provided
material for a news agency called Forum
World Features, a CIA proprietary that
operated in London, and which was in
liaison with the British Information
Research Department, a Cold War
propaganda unit set up by Christopher
Mayhew of British intelligence with the
approval of Prime Minister Clement
Attlee.
This Prescott Bush-William Casey
think tank promoted the creation of
endowed chairs in strategic analysis,
national intelligence and the like on a
number of campuses. The Georgetown
Center for Strategic and International
Studies, later the home of Kissinger,
Michael Ledeen and a whole stable of
ideologues of the Anglo-American
empire, was in part a result of the
work of Casey and Prescott.
Casey was also a close associate
of George Bush. During 1976, Ford
appointed Casey to PFIAB, where Casey
was an enthusiastic supporter of the
Team B operation along with Bush and
Leo Cherne. George Bush and Casey would
play decisive roles in the secret
government operations of the Reagan
years.
As the Republican convention
gathered in Detroit in July 1980, the
problem was to convince Reagan of the
inevitability of tapping Bush as his
running mate. But Reagan did not want
Bush. He had conceived an antipathy,
even a hostility, for George. What
Reagan had experienced personally from
Bush during the {Nashua Telegraph}
debate had left a lasting and highly
derogatory impression.
According to one account of this
phase, ``ever since the episode in
Nashua in February, Reagan had come to
hold the preppy Yankee transplant in,
as the late Senator Robert Kerr of
Oklahoma used to say, minimum high
regard. `Reagan is a very gracious
contestant,' one of his inner circle
said, `and he generally views his
opponents with a good deal of respect.
The thing he couldn't understand was
Bush's conduct at the {Nashua
Telegraph} debate. It imprinted with
Reagan that Bush was a wimp. He
remembered that night clearly when we
had our vice-presidential discussions.
He couldn't understand how a man could
have sat there so passively. He felt it
showed a lack of courage.'' And now
that it was time to think about a
running mate, the prospective
presidential nominee gave a sympathetic
ear to those who objected to Bush for
reasons that ran, one of the group said
later, from his behavior at Nashua to
`anti-Trilateralism.'|'' According to
this account, conservatives seeking to
stop Bush at the convention were citing
their suspicions about a
``|`conspiracy' backed by Rockefeller
to gain control of the American
government.''@s1@s5
Drew Lewis was a leading Bushman
submarine in the Reagan camp, telling
the candidate that Bush could help him
in electoral college mega-states like
Pennsylvania and Michigan where Ted
Kennedy had demonstrated that Carter
was vulnerable during the primaries.
Lewis badgered Reagan with the prospect
that if he waited too long, he would
have to accept a politically neutral
running mate in the way that Ford took
Dole in 1976, which might end up
costing him the election. According to
Lewis, Reagan needed to broaden his
base, and Bush was the most palatable
and practical vehicle for doing so.
Much to his credit, Reagan
resisted; ``[H]e told several staff
members and advisers that he still
harbored `doubts' about Bush, based on
Nashua. `If he can't stand up to that
kind of pressure,' Reagan told one
intimate, `how could he stand up to the
pressure of being President?' To
another, he said: `I want to be very
frank with you. I have strong
reservations about George Bush. I'm
concerned about turning the country
over to him.'|''
As the convention came closer,
Reagan continued to be hounded by
Bushmen from inside and outside his own
campaign. A few days before the
convention, it began to dawn on Reagan
that one alternative to the unpalatable
Bush might be former President Gerald
Ford, assuming the latter could be
convinced to make the run. Two days
before Reagan left for Detroit,
according to one of his strategists,
Reagan ``came to the conclusion that it
would be Bush, but he wasn't all that
happy about it.''@s1@s6 But this was
not yet the last word.
Casey, Meese and Michael Deaver
sounded out Ford, who was reluctant but
did not issue a categorical rejection.
Stuart Spencer, Ford's 1976 campaign
manager, reported to Reagan on his
contacts with Ford. ``Ron,'' Spencer
said, ``Ford ain't gonna do it, and
you're gonna pick Bush.'' But judging
from Reagan's reaction, Spencer
recalled later, ``There was no way he
was going to pick Bush,'' and the
reason was simple: Reagan just didn't
like the guy. ``It was chemistry,''
Spencer said.@s1@s7
Reagan now had to be ground down
by an assortment of Eastern Liberal
Establishment perception-mongers and
political heavies. Much of the
well-known process of negotiation
between Reagan and Ford for the ``Dream
Ticket'' of 1980 was simply a charade
to disorient and demoralize Reagan
while eating up the clock, until the
point was reached when Reagan would
have no choice but to make the classic
phone call to Bush. It is obvious that
Reagan offered the vice-presidency to
Ford, and that the latter refused to
accept it outright, but engaged in a
process of negotiations ostensibly in
order to establish the conditions under
which he might, eventually,
accept.@s1@s8 Casey called in Henry
Kissinger and asked him to intercede
with Ford. What then developed was a
marathon of haggling in which Ford was
represented by Kissinger, Alan
Greenspan, Jack Marsh and Bob Barrett.
Reagan was represented by Casey, Meese
and perception-monger Richard Wirthlin.
Dick Cheney, Ford's former chief of
staff, who is now Bush's pro-genocide
secretary of defense, also got into the
act.
This complex strategy of intrigue
culminated in Ford's notorious
interview with Walter Cronkite, in
which the CBS anchorman asked Ford if
``It's got to be something like a
co-presidency?'' ``That's something
Governor Reagan really ought to
consider,'' replied Ford, which was not
what a serious vice-presidential
candidate might say, but did correspond
rather well to what ``Gerry the Jerk''
would say if he wanted to embarrass
Reagan and help Bush.
The best indication that Ford had
been working all along as an agent of
Bush was provided by Ford himself to
Germond and Witcover: ``Ford,
incidentally, told us after the
election that one of his prime
objectives at the convention had been
`to subtly help George Bush get the
[vice-presidential]
nomination.'|''@s1@s9
Drew Lewis helped Reagan make the
call that he found so distasteful.
Reagan came on the line: ``Hello,
George, this is Ron Reagan. I'd like to
go over to the convention and announce
that you're my choice for vice
president ... if that's all right with
you.''
``I'd be honored, Governor.''
Reagan now proceeded to the
convention floor, where he would
announce his choice of Bush. Knowing
that this decision would alienate many
of Reagan's ideological backers, the
Reagan campaign leaked the news that
Bush had been chosen to the media, so
that it would quickly spread to the
convention floor. They were seeking to
cushion the blow, to avoid mass
expressions of disgust when Bush's name
was announced. Even as it was, there
was much groaning and booing among the
Reagan faithful.
As the Detroit convention came to
a close, the Reagan and Bush campaign
staffs were merged, with James Baker
assuming a prominent position in the
Casey-run Reagan campaign. The Ray
Cline, Halper, and Gambino operations
were all continued. From this point on,
Reagan's entourage would be heavily
infiltrated by Bushmen.
The October Surprise
The Reagan-Bush campaign, now
chock full of Bush's Brown Brothers
Harriman/Skull and Bones assets,
announced a campaign of espionage. This
campaign told reporters that it was
going to spy on the Carter regime.
Back in April, Carter had taken to
live television at 7:00 a.m. one
morning to announce some ephemeral
progress in his efforts to secure the
release of State Department officials
and others from the U.S. embassy in
Teheran, who were being held as
hostages by the Khomeini forces in
Iran. This announcement was timed to
coincide with Democratic primaries in
Kansas and Wisconsin, in which Carter
was able to overwhelm challenges from
Teddy Kennedy and Jerry Brown. A memo
from Richard Wirthlin to Casey and
Reagan initiated a discussion of how
the Carter gang might exploit the
advantages of incumbency in order to
influence the outcome of the election,
perhaps by attempting to stampede the
public by some dramatic event at the
last minute, such as the freeing of the
hostages in Teheran. On April 24, a
military task force failed to free the
hostages. Casey began to institute
countermeasures even before the Detroit
GOP convention.
During the convention, at a July
14 press conference, Casey told
reporters of his concern that Carter
might spring an ``October Surprise'' in
foreign or domestic policy on the eve
of the November elections. He announced
that he had set up what he called an
``incumbency watch'' to monitor
Carter's activities and decisions.
Casey explained that an ``intelligence
operation'' directed against the Carter
White House was functioning ``already
in germinal form.'' Ed Meese, who was
with Casey at this press conference,
added that the October Surprise ``could
be anything from a summit conference on
energy'' or development in Latin
America, or perhaps the imposition of
``wage and price controls'' on the
domestic economy.
``We've talked about the October
surprise and what the October surprise
will be,'' said Casey. ``I think it's
immoral and improper.''@s2@s0
The previous evening, in a
television appearance, Reagan had
suggested that ``the Soviet Union is
going to throw a few bones to Mr.
Carter during this coming campaign to
help him continue as President.''
Although Casey and Meese had
defined a broad range of possibilities
for the October Surprise, the most
prominent of these was certainly the
liberation of the American hostages in
Iran. A poll showed that if the
hostages were to be released during the
period between October 18 and October
25, Carter could receive a 10 percent
increase in popular vote on election
day.
The ``incumbency watch'' set up by
Casey would go beyond surveillance and
become a dirty tricks operation against
Carter.
What followed was in essence a
pitched battle between two fascist
gangs, the Carter White House and the
Bush-Casey forces. Out of this 1980
gang warfare, the post-1981 United
States regime would emerge.
Carter and Brzezinski had
deliberately toppled the Shah of Iran,
and deliberately installed Khomeini in
power. This was an integral part of
Brzezinski's ``arc of crisis''
geopolitical lunacy, another
made-in-London artifact which called
for the United States to support the rise of
Khomeini, and his personal brand of
fanaticism, a militant heresy within
Islam. U.S. arms deliveries were made
to Iran during the time of the Shah;
during the short-lived Shahpour
Bakhtiar government at the end of the
Shah's reign; and continuously after
the advent of Khomeini.
Subsequently, President Carter and
senior members of his administration
have suggested that the Reagan/Bush
campaign cut a deal with the Khomeini
regime to block the liberation of the
hostages before the November 1980
election. By early 1992, the charges
and countercharges reached such a fever
pitch that a preliminary congressional
investigation of the affair had been
initiated.
In March 1992, {Executive
Intelligence Review} issued a Special
Report titled, ``Treason in Washington:
New Evidence on the `October
Surprise,'|''@s2@s1 which presented
extensive new evidence from internal
FBI and CIA documents, released under
the Freedom of Information Act, that
suggests that the then-Republican
vice-presidential candidate played a
personal role in keeping the hostages
in Khomeini's hands until after
Election Day 1980; and that Casey, a
personal friend of Bush's father and
Reagan's CIA director, coordinated the
operation.
The central link suggesting Bush's
role in the scandal was Cyrus Hashemi,
an Iranian arms dealer and agent of the
Iranian SAVAK secret police, whom Casey
seems to have recruited as a liaison to
the mullahs.
On December 7, 1979, less than two
months after the hostages were seized,
Carter's assistant secretary of state,
Harold Saunders, was contacted by an
intermediary for Cyrus Hashemi. The
Iranian arms merchant proposed a deal
to free the hostages, and submitted a
memorandum calling for the following:
removal of the ailing expatriate Shah
from U.S. territory; an apology by the
United States to the people of Iran for
past U.S. interference; the creation of
a United Nations Commission; the
unfreezing of the Iranian financial
assets seized by Carter; and arms and
spare parts deliveries by the United
States to Iran. All of this was summed
up in a memorandum submitted to
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance
following meetings with Hashemi and his
attorney.@s2@s2
The notable aspect of this
encounter is the identity of the
American lawyer who was both the
business partner and the intermediary
for the Iranian gun-runner: John
Stanley Pottinger. The account of the
1976 Letelier case provided above (see
Chapter 16) has established that
Pottinger was a close friend of George
Bush. Pottinger, it will be recalled,
had served as assistant attorney
general for civil rights in the Nixon
and Ford administrations between 1973
and 1977, after having directed the
U.S. Office of Civil Rights in the
Justice Department between 1970 and
1973. Pottinger had also stayed on into
the early Carter administration,
serving as special assistant to the
attorney general from February to April
1977. Pottinger had then joined the law
firm of Tracy, Malin and Pottinger of
Washington, London, and Paris. After the
1980 election, Pottinger was being
considered for a high-level post in the
Reagan/Bush administration.
This same Pottinger was now the
representative for gun-runner Cyrus
Hashemi. Given Pottinger's proven
relation to Bush, we may wonder to what
extent was Bush informed of Hashemi's
proposal, and of the responses of the
Carter administration.
Relevant evidence that might help
us to determine what Bush knew and when
he knew it is still being withheld by
the Bush regime. The FBI bugged Cyrus
Hashemi's phones and office from August
1980 to February 1981, and many of the
conversations that were recorded were
between Hashemi and Bush's friend
Pottinger. Ten years later, in November
1991, the FBI released heavily redacted
summaries of some of the conversations,
but most of the summaries and
transcripts are still classified.
{EIR}'s Special Report thoroughly
documented how Pottinger was protected
from indictment by the Reagan-Bush
Justice Department. For years,
prosecution of Hashemi and Pottinger,
for illegally conspiring to ship
weapons to the Khomeini regime, was
blocked by the administration on
``national security'' grounds.
Declassified FBI documents show that an
indictment of Pottinger had been drawn
up, but that the indictment was killed
at the last minute in 1984 when the FBI
``lost'' crucial taped evidence. The
FBI conducted an extensive internal
investigation of the missing
``Pottinger tapes'' but the results
have never been disclosed.
Other information on the
intentions of the Khomeini regime and
secret dealings may have reached Bush
from his old friend and associate
Mitchell Rogovin, the former CIA
general counsel. During 1976, Rogovin
had accompanied Bush on many trips to
the capital to testify before
congressional committees; the two were
known to be close. Rogovin was credited
with having saved the CIA after it came
under major congressional and media
attack in the mid-1970s. In the spring
of 1980, Rogovin told the Carter
administration that he had been
approached by Iranian-American arms
dealer Houshang Lavi with an offer to
start negotiations for the release of
the hostages. Lavi claimed to be an
emissary of Iranian President Abol
Hassan Bani-Sadr; Rogovin at this time
was working as the lawyer for the John
Anderson GOP presidential campaign.
Bush's family friend Casey had
also been in direct contact with
Iranian representatives. Jamshid
Hashemi, the brother of Cyrus Hashemi
(who died under suspicious
circumstances during 1986), had told
Gary Sick, a former official of
Carter's National Security Council,
that he met with William Casey at the
Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. in
March of 1980 to discuss the hostages.
According to Jamshid Hashemi, ``Casey
quickly made clear that he wanted to
prevent Jimmy Carter from gaining any
political advantage from the hostage
crisis. The Hashemis agreed to
cooperate with Casey without the
knowledge of the Carter
administration.''@s2@s3
Casey's ``intelligence operation''
included the spying on the opposing
candidate that has been routine in U.S.
political campaigns for decades, but
went far beyond it. As journalists like
Witcover and Germond knew during the
course of the campaign, and as the 1984
Albosta committee ``Debategate''
investigation showed, Casey set up at
least two ``October Surprise''
espionage groups.
The first of these watched the
Carter White House, the Washington
bureaucracy, and diplomatic and
intelligence posts overseas. This group
was headed by Reagan's principal
foreign policy adviser and later NSC
chairman, Richard Allen. Allen was in
touch with some 120 foreign policy and
national security experts sympathetic
to the Reagan campaign. Casey helped
Allen to interface with the Bush
campaign network of retired and active
duty assets in the intelligence
community. This network reached into
the Carter NSC, where Bush crony Don
Gregg worked as the CIA liaison man,
and into Carter's top-secret White
House situation room.
Another October Surprise
monitoring group was headed by Adm.
Robert Garrick. The task of this group
was the physical surveillance of U.S.
military bases by on-the-ground
observers, often retired and sometimes
active duty military officers. Lookouts
were posted to watch Tinker Air Force
Base in Oklahoma, Andrews Air Force
Base near Washington, McGuire Air Force
Base in New Jersey (where weapons
already bought and paid for by the Shah
were stockpiled), and Norton and March
Air Force bases in California.
Garrick, Casey, Meese, Wirthlin,
and other campaign officials met each
morning in Falls Church, Virginia, just
outside of Washington, to review
intelligence gathered.
This group soon became
operational. It was clear that Khomeini
was keeping the hostages to sell them
to the highest bidder. Bush and Casey
were not reticent about putting their
own offer on the table.
Shortly after the GOP convention,
Casey appears to have traveled to
Europe for a meeting in Madrid in late
July with Mehdi Karrubi, a leading
Khomeini supporter, now the speaker of
the Iranian Parliament. Jamshid Hashemi
said that he and his late brother Cyrus
were present at this meeting and at
another one in Madrid during August,
which they say Casey also attended. The
present government of Iran has declined
to confirm or deny this contact, saying
that ``the Islamic Government of Iran
sees no benefit to involve itself in
the matter.''
Casey's whereabouts in the last
days of July 1980 are officially
unknown. Part of the coverup on the
story has been to create uncertainty
and confusion on Casey's travels at the
time. What is known is that as soon as
Casey surfaced again in Washington on
July 30, he reported back to
vice-presidential candidate George Bush
in a dinner meeting held at the Alibi
Club. It is certain from the evidence
that there were negotiations with the
mullahs by the Reagan-Bush camp, and
that Bush was heavily involved at every
stage.
In early September, Bush's
brother, Prescott Bush, Jr., became
involved, with a letter to James Baker
in which he described his contacts with
a certain Herbert Cohen, a consultant
to the Carter administration on Middle
East matters. Cohen had promised to
abort any possible Carter moves to
``politicize'' the hostage issue by
openly denouncing any machinations that
Carter might attempt. Prescott offered
Baker a meeting with Cohen.
Sometime in fall 1980, there was a
meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in
Washington among Richard Allen, Bud
McFarlane, Laurence Silberman of the
Reagan-Bush campaign, and a mysterious
Iranian representative, thought to be
an emissary of Hashemi Rafsanjani,
currently Iranian President and an
asset of U.S. intelligence who was
then becoming one of the most powerful
mullahs in Khomeini's entourage. The
Iranian representative offered a deal
whereby ``he could get the hostages
released directly to our campaign
before the election,'' Silberman
recalls. (Silberman went on to become a
judge in the District of Columbia
Appeals Court and led the vote in
overturning Oliver North's conviction.)
Allen has claimed that he cut this
meeting short after 20 minutes. Allen,
McFarlane, and Silberman all failed to
report this approach to the White
House, the State Department or other
authorities.
On September 22, Iraq invaded
Iran, starting a war that would last
until the middle of 1988 and which
would claim more than a million lives.
The U.S. intelligence estimate had been
that Khomeini and the mullahs were in
danger of losing power by the end of
1980 because of their incompetence,
corruption and benighted stupidity.
U.S. and other Western intelligence
agencies, especially the French,
thereupon encouraged Iraq to attack
Iran, offering the prospect of an easy
victory. The ``easy victory'' analysis
was incorporated into a ``secret'' CIA
report which was delivered to the Saudi
Arabian government with the suggestion
that it be leaked to Iraq. The real
U.S. estimate was that a war with Iraq
would strengthen Khomeini against
reformers who looked to President
Bani-Sadr, and that the war emergency
would assist in the imposition of a
``new dark ages'' regime in Iran. An
added benefit was that Iran and Iraq as
warring states would be forced vastly
to increase their oil production,
forcing down the oil price on the world
market and thus providing the bankrupt
U.S. dollar with an important subsidy
in terms of the dollar's ability to
command basic commodities in the real
world. Bani-Sadr spoke in this
connection of ``an oil crisis in
reverse'' as a result of the Iran-Iraq
war.
President Bani-Sadr, who was later
deposed in a coup d'etat by
Khomeini, Rafsanjani and Beheshti, has
recalled that during this period,
Khomeini decided to bet on Reagan-Bush.
``So what if Reagan wins,'' said
Khomeini. ``Nothing will really change
since he and Carter are both enemies of
Islam.''@s2@s4
This was the time of the
Reagan-Carter presidential debates, and
Casey's operation had also yielded
booty in this regard. Bush ally and
then-Congressman David Stockman boasted
in Indiana in late October that he had
used a ``pilfered copy'' of Carter's
personal briefing book to coach Reagan
prior to the debates.
Many sources agree that a
conclusive series of meetings between
the Reagan-Bush and Khomeini forces
took place in the weeks and months
prior to Election Day 1980. In late
1991, as the campaign season heated up,
close to a score of articles appeared
in the U.S. press responding to Gary
Sick's {October Surprise} book, which
gave credibility to the charge that the
Reagan-Bush campaign had indeed made a
dirty deal with the mullahs to prevent
the release of the hostages. Even
Carter, who said that he had heard such
rumors back in 1980, now agreed that a
congressional investigation would be
helpful in settling the matter.
President Bush and an entire gaggle of
political operatives and
neoconservative journalists denounced
Sick's book and the accusation as the
fantasies of ``conspiracy theorists.''
Sick and other journalists who
published articles about the affair
were severely criticized for retailing
the stories of an assortment of
intelligence informants, gun-runners,
money launderers, pilots, and other
flotsam and jetsam from the seamy side
of international espionage and intrigue
by pro-Bush journalists and
congressional leaders opposed to
probing the accusations. Immediately
after the Iran-Contra scandal made
headlines in early 1987, numerous
sources surfaced and began to contact
journalists with purported eyewitness
accounts of meetings between
Reagan/Bush campaign representatives
and Khomeini intermediaries. Several of
the sources said they had seen Bush and
Casey at meetings in Europe with
Khomeini's emissaries. Others offered
bits and pieces of information
complementing the eyewitness reports.
One source, Richard Brenneke, a
self-admitted money launderer and pilot
for the CIA, was indicted for perjury
by a U.S. attorney in Colorado for
saying he had been told by another
alleged CIA pilot, Heinrich Rupp, that
he had seen Bush in Paris in October
1980. Brenneke said that he had
personally seen Casey and Donald Gregg
in Paris at the same time. But a jury
acquitted Brenneke. Later, Frank Snepp,
a former CIA officer turned
investigative reporter, did an
expose published in the {Village
Voice}, allegedly proving that Brenneke
could not have been in Paris in October
1980 because he had obtained credit
card receipts showing that Brenneke was
in Oregon at the time he had told
others he had been in Paris. The
original source on Bush's secret trip
to Paris was Oscar LeWinter, a
German-based professional snitch, who
seems to have done some work for both
the Israeli Mossad and the CIA.
LeWinter later admitted that he had
been paid, allegedly by the CIA, to
spread false information about Bush and
Casey's secret trips to Europe for
meetings with messengers from the
mullahs.
Does that mean there is no smoking
gun linking Bush to the ``coincidence''
that the hostages were only released on
Inauguration Day 1981, within minutes
of Reagan taking his presidential oath?
No. What is clear, is that some
intelligence apparatus deployed an
elaborate disinformation campaign which
created a false trail which could be
discredited. The intelligence community
operation of ``damage-control'' is
premised on revealing some of the
truth, mixed with half-truths and
blatantly false facts, which allows the
bigger story to be undermined. It is
possible that Bush was not in Paris in
October 1980 to meet with an Iranian
delegation to seal the deal. Bush has
heatedly denied that he was in Paris at
this time, and has said that he
personally did not negotiate with
Khomeini envoys. But he has generally
avoided a blanket denial that the
campaign, of which he was a principal,
engaged in surreptitious dealings with
the Khomeini mullahs.
There is another intriguing
possibility: During the same time frame
that LeWinter and Brenneke (Oct. 18-19,
1980) say Bush was in Paris, an
adversary of then-President Bani-Sadr
and puppet of Khomeini, Prime Minister
Ali Rajai, was in New York preparing to
depart for Algiers after consultations
at the United Nations. Rajai had
refused all contact with Carter,
Muskie, and other U.S. officials, but
he may have been more interested in
meeting Bush or one of his
representatives. What is now well
documented is, that throughout 1980,
many Reagan/Bush campaign officials
were tripping over themselves to meet
with anyone purporting to be an
Iranian. If a deal were to be
authenticated, there is no question
that Khomeini and crew would have
sought a handshake from someone who
could not later deny the agreement.
Between October 21 and October 23,
Israel dispatched a planeload of
much-needed F-4 Phantom jet spare parts
to Iran in violation of the U.S. arms
boycott. Who in Washington had
sanctioned these shipments? In Teheran,
the U.S. hostages were reportedly
dispersed into a multitude of locations
on October 22. Also on October 22,
Prime Minister Rajai, back from New
York and Algiers, announced that Iran
wanted neither American spare parts nor
American arms.
The Iranian approach to the
ongoing contacts with the Carter
administration now began to favor
evasive delaying tactics. There were
multiple indications that Khomeini had
decided that Reagan-Bush was a better
bet than Carter, and that Reagan-Bush
had made the more generous offer.
Barbara Honegger, then an official
of the Reagan-Bush campaign, recalls
that ``on October 24th or 25th, an
assistant to Stephan Halper's `October
Surprise' intelligence operation echoed
William Casey's newfound confidence,
boasting to the author in the
operations center where [Reagan-Bush
Iran-watcher Michel] Smith worked that
the campaign no longer needed to worry
about an `October Surprise' because
Dick [Allen] cut a deal.''@s2@s5
On October 27, Bush campaigned in
Pittsburgh, where he addressed a
gathering of labor leaders. His theme
that day was the Iranian attempt to
``manipulate'' the outcome of the U.S.
election through the exertion of
``last-minute leverage'' involving the
hostages. ``It's no secret that the
Iranians do not want to see Ronald
Reagan elected President,'' Bush lied.
``They want to play a hand in the
election--with our 52 hostages as the
52 cards in their negotiating deck.''
It was a ``cool, cynical,
unconscionable ploy'' by the Khomeini
regime. Bush asserted that it was
``fair to ask how come right now
there's talk of releasing them [the
hostages] after nearly a year.'' His
implication was that Carter was the one
with the dirty deal. Bush concluded
that he wanted the hostages ``out as
soon as possible.... We want them home
and we'll worry about who to blame
later.''@s2@s6
During the first week of December,
{Executive Intelligence Review}
reported that Henry Kissinger ``held a
series of meetings during the week of
November 12 in Paris with
representatives of Ayatollah Beheshti,
leader of the fundamentalist clergy in
Iran.... Top-level intelligence sources
in Reagan's inner circle confirmed
Kissinger's unreported talks with the
Iranian mullahs, but stressed that the
Kissinger initiative was totally
unauthorized by the president-elect.''
According to {EIR}, ``it appears that
the pattern of cooperation between the
Khomeini people and circles nominally
in Reagan's camp began approximately
six to eight weeks ago, at the height
of President Carter's efforts to secure
an arms-for-hostages deal with Teheran.
Carter's failure to secure the deal,
which a number of observers believe
cost him the November 4 election,
apparently resulted from an
intervention in Teheran by pro-Reagan
British circles and the Kissinger
faction.''@s2@s7 These revelations from
{EIR} are the first mention in the
public record of the scandal which has
come over the years to be known as the
October Surprise.
The hostages were not released
before the November election, which
Reagan won convincingly. Khomeini kept
the hostages imprisoned until January
20, the day of the Reagan-Bush
inauguration, and let the hostage plane
take off just as Reagan and Bush were
taking their oaths of office.
Whether George Bush was personally
present in Paris, or at other meetings
with Iranian representatives where the
hostage and arms questions were on the
agenda, has yet to be conclusively
proven. Here a thorough and intrusive
congressional investigation of the
Carter and Reagan machinations in this
regard is long overdue. Such a probe
might also shed light on the origins of
the Iran-Iraq war, which set the stage
for the more recent Gulf crisis. But,
quite apart from questions regarding
George Bush's presence at this or that
meeting, there can be no doubt that
both the Carter regime and the
Reagan-Bush campaign were actively
involved in dealings with the Khomeini
regime concerning the hostages and
concerning the timing of their possible
release. In the case of the Reagan-Bush
Iran connection, there is reason to
believe that federal crimes in
violation of the Logan Act and other
applicable laws may have taken place.
George Bush had now grasped the
interim prize that had eluded him since
1968: After more than a dozen years of
effort, he had now become the Vice
President of the United States.
Notes for Chapter XVII
13.
Mark Bisnow, {Diary of a Dark
Horse: The 1980 Anderson Presidential
Campaign} (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1983), p.
136.
14.
For the {Nashua Telegraph}
debate, see: Jeff Greenfield, {op.
cit.,} pp. 44 ff.; Mark Bisnow, {op.
cit.,} pp. 134 ff.; Jules Witcover and
Jack Germond, {Blue Smoke and Mirrors}
(New York: Viking, 1981), pp. 116 ff.
15.
Germond and Witcover, {op.
cit.,} p. 169.
16.
{Ibid.,} p. 170.
17.
{Ibid.,} p. 171.
18.
The best testimony on this is
Reagan's own response to a question
from Witcover and Germond. Asked if
``it was true that he was trying to get
President Ford to run with him,''
Reagan promptly responded, ``Oh, sure.
That would be the best.'' See Germond
and Witcover, {op. cit.,} p. 178.
19.
{Ibid.,} p. 188.
20.
{Washington Star,} July 15,
1980.
21.
{EIR Special Report:}
``Treason in Washington: New Evidence
on the October Surprise,'' March 1992.
22.
See {EIR Special Report:}
``Project Democracy: The `Parallel
Government' Behind the Iran-Contra
Affair'' (Washington, 1987), pp.
88-101.
23.
Gary Sick, ``The Election
Story of the Decade,'' {New York
Times,} April 15, 1991.
24.
Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, {My
Turn to Speak} (New York: Brassey's,
U.S., 1991), p. 33.
25.
Barbara Honegger, {October
Surprise} (New York: Tudor Publishing
Co., 1989) p. 58.
26.
{Washington Post,} Oct. 28,
1980.
27.
{Executive Intelligence
Review,} Dec. 2, 1980.
---- John Covici
[email protected]
