American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  But what if those hostages could actually have gained their freedom months earlier? And if Jimmy Carter had been successful in his negotiations, what if he’d been reelected to a second term? What if the Reagan-Bush team cut a secret deal with Iran to hold on to their American prisoners until after the November election? Would anybody call that treason?

  Even at the time, as busy on the wrestling circuit as I was, I thought—whaaaat?! This stinks. It reeked of a behind-the-scenes deal. Here’s the thing everybody forgets: Even though Reagan ended up swamping Carter in the election, as late as the middle of October Reagan’s own poll-taker had Carter ahead by two percentage points. If Carter had managed to free the hostages before the election, good chance he’d have won. Instead, we had what Gary Sick, both Ford and Carter’s Middle East expert on the National Security Council, called “a political coup” in his book October Surprise.

  Most of us remember Operation Desert One, a hostage-rescue attempt by our military early in 1980 that ended up dead-in-the-desert, got eight Americans killed, and resulted as a major embarrassment for Carter. During negotiations after that, Iran was demanding of the Carter people that we exchange $150 million in American military equipment that they’d already ordered and paid for, before the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini took power. Carter said he wouldn’t deal with arms merchants, but otherwise thought this seemed fair enough. Meantime, the Reagan campaign was busy monitoring Carter’s every move on this.

  As early as March 1980, William Casey—who was then managing Reagan’s election campaign and later was named his CIA director—approached two Iranian wheeler-dealers in Washington. The Hashemi brothers, Jamshid and Cyrus, were asked if they’d set up a meeting with some representatives of the government.1 The thing was, Cyrus Hashemi, who’d done some work for the CIA, was also an important intermediary for the Carter White House in the talks.2 Anyway, what was basically a bidding war proceeded from there.

  Casey went to Spain in July and worked out arrangements to get arms to the Iranians from several locations in Europe, by way of Israel, once the hostages were freed.3 The equipment was worth billions and involved arms dealers, not to mention $40 million in bribes going to various individuals.4 Abol Bani-Sadr, president of Iran at the time, later wrote about the “secret deal” in two books.5 One of Khomeini’s nephews was supposed to present Iran with a proposal from Carter, but he instead returned home with one “from the Reagan camp.” Bani-Sadr was told that if he didn’t accept it, the Republicans would make the same offer to his radical rivals. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.” Bani-Sadr said he first resisted and tried to get the hostages released right away—there had already been an official agreement with Carter done in Algeria—but, not surprisingly, Ayatollah Khomeini was working both sides of the street.6

  A secret plan by the Carter administration for a second hostage rescue mission went operational in September. But it was leaked to Richard V. Allen, soon to be Reagan’s national security adviser. “Shortly thereafter, the Reagan-Bush campaign launched a major publicity effort warning that President Carter might be planning an ‘October surprise’ to obtain the release of the hostages prior to the election .”7

  That fall, Cyrus Hashemi received a $3 million deposit arranged by a Houston lawyer who was associated with vice-presidential candidate Bush.8 Around that time came a meeting in Paris that involved Bush himself—although the U.S. government, and most of the media, would do their best to pretend it never happened. (Bush called it “that ugly little word-of-mouth rumor.”)

  Playing their cards close to the vest, Iran’s leadership was saying it wanted either Reagan or Bush to personally put their John Hancock on a final agreement. On September 22, Iraq invaded Iran, which made Iran’s need for war equipment all the more urgent. A series of meetings ensued over five days at different hotels in Paris. Bush and Casey are said to have arrived at the Paris Hilton for a 90-minute discussion to cut the final deal on October 19. Secret Service spokesmen later claimed that Bush was in Washington that weekend, but their logs showed a missing 21 hours in his itinerary. There’s nothing from the time of a speech he gave on a Saturday night, until another speech that he arrived late for the next night, and other Secret Service documents show that he flew into National Airport at 7:35 PM on that Sunday.9 He left for Paris on a BAC-111 owned by one of the Saudi royal family, and returned on a fast SR-71 aircraft that the CIA loaned him.10

  “At least five of the sources who say they were in Paris in connection with these meetings insist that George Bush was present for at least one meeting. Three of the sources say that they saw him there.”11 Ari Ben-Menashe, an ex-member of Mossad Israeli intelligence, said he’d been part of an advance team working with the French in arranging the meetings.12 CIA contract agent Richard Brenneke testified under oath that he’d seen Bush, along with NSC official Donald Gregg, in the French capitol that weekend.13

  There was also an investigation overseen by Sergey V. Stepashin, who later became Russia’s prime minister. On January 11, 1993, he had a sixpage report translated by the American Embassy in Moscow and forwarded to Congress. At the Paris meeting, the Russians independently learned, “R[obert] Gates, at the time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA director George Bush also took part.”14

  Robert Gates, eh? Well, that brings us right up to the present. Gates came in to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary under Bush-II, late in 2006, and Obama decided to keep him there. If truth be known, Gates has a shady history as a career intel guy. In 1991, there were accusations he brushed aside that he’d had a secret role in arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq War. Witnesses in the Middle East said this had included Saddam Hussein getting hold of cluster bombs and material for chemical weapons. Later, a sworn affidavit by one of Reagan’s National Security Council guys said that when Iran was gaining the upper hand in the spring of 1982: “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq.”15 It was also 1982 when the U.S. kindly removed Iraq from its list of terrorist states.

  Kinda makes you wonder about who our “enemies” really are, doesn’t it? There the Republicans were, sending weapons first to Iran to make sure Reagan got elected, then turning around and arming Saddam Hussein—right down to getting him stuff for chemical weapons that would justify W’s invasion of Iraq twenty years later! And now today, it’s all about demonizing another recipient of our generosity—Iran! Who’s the real demon here? We are, behind the scenes, because we’re the ones giving these countries weapons that they can turn around and use on us. It’s utter craziness, and so frustrating to watch our leaders operate with so little regard for human life.

  I’m a believer that if Congress and the media had been doing their jobs right when the October Surprise story began coming out in the late eighties and early nineties, we’d never have gone to war in Iraq. In fact, there would—or at least should—have been impeachment proceedings against George Bush Sr., and that would have been it for the family in politics. No two-term presidency for Junior.

  Of course, it was Poppa Bush who set the family precedent for stealing elections. Keep in mind that he’d been director of the CIA in 1976. “Bush had also protected wayward or hot-triggered Agency operatives—veterans of everything from Chilean assassinations to Vietnam’s Phoenix program and improper domestic surveillance—from indictment by President Ford’s Justice Department.”16 Then Carter came along and replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner. The CIA’s good-old-boy network hated Carter, because Turner proceeded to clean house and dismiss many of the longtime covert operatives.

  But I digress. Let’s pick up the 1980 story with the fact that, right after the Paris meeting with Bush and Gates in attendance, Iran suddenly told the Carter administration it had no further interest in receiving military equipment.17 Then, ove
r the next several days, Israel quietly shipped F-4 fighter-aircraft tires to the Iranians, in violation of the U.S. arms embargo,18 while Iran started dispersing the hostages to several different locations.

  So, Carter lost the election and then came the timed release (like a good sleeping pill) on Reagan’s inauguration day. Banker Ernest Backes from Clearstream in Luxembourg later said he’d been in charge of a transfer of $7 million from Chase Manhattan and Citibank on January 16, 1980, to help pay for the hostages’ liberation.19 According to Bani-Sadr of Iran: “We have published documents which show that US arms were shipped, via Israel, in March, about 2 months after Reagan became president.”20

  Call me naïve, but I just find it amazing how powerful people can do illegal things and so easily cover their tracks. If George Bush went over and used the hostages for pawns in a political game, shouldn’t he and his cronies go to jail for that? I mean, let’s make a comparison. Say some people were being held hostage in a bank, and you found out that a lieutenant on the police force delayed getting them freed simply to advance his own personal agenda, wouldn’t you be appalled enough to think that officer should be fired or even stand trial for doing this? The hostages in Iran had been there for months! But ultimately, the Bush-Casey types figure, it’s fine because we’ll win the presidency and all will be better off. You sacrifice the few for the many, not really knowing whether the many are going to profit or not. It’s like saying, if somebody had killed Charles Manson a year before the Sharon Tate murders, none of those people would have died.

  Anyway, they’ll violate all the laws of human decency to make sure Ronald Reagan gets elected. I’ve always believed you’ll govern like you campaign. If you lie and cheat during the campaign, it’s not going to end there. And, of course, it didn’t. Before long we had the Iran-Contra scandal, which we’ll look at in the next chapter. I angrily look at the American people and wonder how they can possibly accept this. We just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Oh, well, that’s government, that’s what they do.” No, we need to understand, government is us!

  The whole seamy saga surrounding the hostages started to unravel in 1987, when the Miami Herald published an article quoting some statements from a CIA agent, Alfonso Chardy, about the secret October meetings. Also that year, Bani-Sadr wrote a book that was published in Europe and got into some of what he knew. Playboy and Esquire followed up with articles. In 1989, Barbara Honegger came out with her book October Surprise; she’d been a loyal Reagan staffer until she left out of disillusionment with some of the practices she’d observed. Honegger said she was present on inauguration day when she heard Reagan say to “tell the Iranians that the deal is off if that [last] hostage is not freed.”21 Reagan had left office by the time of Honegger’s book, and Poppa Bush was just beginning his first term.

  In early November 1989, Ari Ben-Menashe was arrested in L.A. The Mossad agent was charged with having violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, by attempting to sell Iran three C-130 transport planes with a false-end-user certificate. Apparently our left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Israeli master spy Rafi Eitan was worried that Ben-Menashe “was in a position to blow wide open the U.S./Israeli arms-to-Iran network whose tentacles had extended everywhere: down to Central and South America, through London, into Australia, across to Africa, deep into Europe.”22

  Sure enough, Ben-Menashe was soon squawking to reporters. He implicated Bush and Gates in the October Surprise. He talked of a secret American policy to send weapons through Chile to the Iraqis. (We’re playing both ends against the middle again). The government of Israel tried to discredit Ben-Menashe as a fabricator, but Associated Press journalist Robert Parry uncovered internal Israeli documents proving he’d worked for an arm of their military intelligence for a decade (1977- 1987). So the Israelis had some egg on their face, but meantime both they and the White House were seeking out more friendly reporters. One of these was Steven Emerson, who wrote that he’d seen derogatory records on the “delusional” Ben-Menashe. But corroboration for what Ben-Menashe had to say did surface over time, including the Iraq weapons deal.23 A federal jury acquitted him of the charges at the end of 1990.

  Also in 1990, PBS’s Frontline aired a program on the October Surprise that included a sound bite of Reagan playing golf with Bush in Palm Springs and saying he’d “tried some things the other way” to free the hostages but that the details were “classified.” Oops, open mouth and insert foot, Mr. Former President. By now, there was enough outside pressure for the House of Representatives to form an October Surprise Task Force in February 1992. The fellow who chaired the committee was Lee Hamilton, a “bipartisan” Democrat who from then on always seemed to end up in charge of these types of investigations. Next time would be the Iran-Contra hearings that made Oliver North a household name. Then Hamilton would be vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, whose shoddy work we’ll look at later. Now he’s retired after serving 34 years in the House, but he’s still on Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. I guess they need expertise in cover-ups—Freudian slip, I mean clandestine-ops.

  The chief counsel for the House’s October Surprise Task Force was a fella named Barcella, fresh from Larry’s having been lead attorney for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI for short. BCCI had paid his firm more than $2 million to keep it shielded from investigations by the press or government agencies.24 When a reporter asked Barcella if he saw any conflict of interest, since BCCI had helped finance arms deals to Iran in 1983, Barcella accused the man of McCarthy-like behavior. Well, you won’t find BCCI mentioned once in the Task Force’s report. Even though, within days after William Casey became head of Reagan’s CIA, BCCI officials along with Iranian banker Cyrus Hashemi set up two Hong Kong-based banks that were underwritten by $20 million in Iranian assets from the Shah’s royal family.25 As for Barcella, he was “apparently quite sensitive to the interests of the U.S. intelligence community during his days as a federal prosecutor.”26

  Given who was in charge, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the task force’s conclusions. In 1993, the House report found “no credible evidence supporting any attempt by the Reagan presidential campaign—or persons associated with the campaign—to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran.” Lee Hamilton noted that the vast majority of sources for the allegation were “wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”27Washington Post columnist David Broder lauded Hamilton as the “conscience of Congress” for repudiating the accusations.

  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also conducted a small-scale investigation. They’d imposed travel restrictions on checking out leads in Europe, denied subpoena power, and claimed a shortage of funds. The Secret Service wouldn’t allow any questioning of agents who might have gone with Bush to Paris. The Senate’s report, issued on November 19, 1992, said the “vast weight of all available evidence” was that Bush never made that trip to cut a deal with Iran.

  William Casey was dead by now, and his family decided not to supply any of his records. Donald Gregg, a member of Bush’s NSC staff after working more than 30 years for the CIA, failed a lie-detector test on the matter, but the Senate committee would only say “that Gregg’s response was lacking in candor.”28 The House found “credible” French intelligence sources about the Paris meetings, but still concluded somehow that it was all “baseless.”29

  As for that report by the Russians, which ended up in Hamilton’s hands two days before he was to announce the Task Force’s conclusions, he instead took at face value a cable from an American Embassy official in Moscow that the report might be “based largely on material that has previously appeared in the Western media.” (Not the Times or the Post, I’ll bet!) The Russians continued to insist that the intel was their own and reliable; they considered the report “a bomb” and “couldn’t believe it was ignored .”30

  There’s one journalistic hero in all this, and it’s Robert Parry. He just kept plugging away and, in 198
4 after he uncovered Oliver North’s role in the Iran-Contra story for Newsweek, he was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting. Pretty soon, though, he was persona non grata with the establishment media, so he started Consortium News as an online magazine dedicated to investigative reporting. He’s also written several books, and he’s still out there pitching for truth.

  Most other journalists stayed the course with Lee Hamilton. Newsweek did a piece headlined: “The October Surprise Charge: Treason; Myth.” The New Republic called it “The Conspiracy That Wasn’t.” The author of that piece was Steven Emerson, who is today considered one of our top authorities on Islamic extremists, their financing and operations. Since 9/11, he’s given many briefings to Congress on Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other networks. To say the least, he’s a well-connected journalist.31

  I can’t let this chapter go without talking a little about Bill Clinton’s reaction to it all, after he defeated Bush to become president in 1992. Twice emissaries from Iran told members of his cabinet about those Republican contacts with Islamic radicals close to Khomeini. But Clinton turned away, or at least his team did, not wanting to open themselves to charges of playing politics. The Germans, as well, are said to have offered the Clinton Administration information from their Stasi intel files. But whatever they turned over, Clinton kept secret.32

  I sometimes get a strange sense of déjà vu, when I think of how the Obama Administration now wants to put all of Bush-II’s torture policies behind us.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  We need to realize that the precedent-setter for one political party to steal a presidential election from another happened with Ronald Reagan, a man some would like to see join our greatest presidents on Mount Rushmore. Like the political assassinations earlier, this was a continuation of an ends-justify-the-means mentality that will ultimately destroy our democracy altogether if we allow this attitude to continue. Also, let’s consider how our “friends” so quickly become our “enemies.” Is it all about what suits certain people in power? Who’s really benefiting from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the demonization of Iran?