This is a new series of articles where I explain various terms, catchphrases, and other confusing topics, as well as many secret government projects and agencies. If there are any subjects you’re interested in learning about, please include them in the comment section.
1980 October Surprise Theory
The 1980 October Surprise theory refers to an allegation that representatives of Ronald Reagan‘s presidential campaign made a secret deal with Iranian leaders to delay the release of American hostages until after the election between Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, the incumbent. The detention of 66 Americans in Iran, held hostage since November 4, 1979, was one of the leading national issues during 1980, and the alleged goal of the deal was to thwart Carter from pulling off an “October surprise“. Reagan won the election, and on the day of his inauguration—minutes after he concluded his 20-minute inaugural address—the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages.
According to the allegation, on top of the Carter administration’s agreement to unfreeze Iranian assets in U.S. banks in exchange for the release of the embassy hostages, the Reagan administration’s practice of covertly supplying Iran with weapons via Israel likely originated as a further quid pro quo for having delayed the release until after Reagan’s inauguration, setting a precedent for covert U.S.-Iran arms deals that would feature heavily in the subsequent Iran–Contra affair.
After 12 years of varying media attention, both houses of the United States Congress held separate inquiries and concluded that credible evidence supporting the allegation was absent or insufficient. Nevertheless, several individuals—most notably, former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr, former Lieutenant Governor of Texas Ben Barnes, former naval intelligence officer and U.S. National Security Council member Gary Sick, and Barbara Honegger, a former campaign staffer and White House analyst for Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush—have stood by the allegation.
Background
In November 1979, a number of U.S. hostages were captured in Iran during the Iranian Revolution. The Iran hostage crisis continued into 1980; as the November 1980 presidential election approached, there were concerns in the Republican Party that a resolution of the crisis could constitute an “October surprise” which might give incumbent Jimmy Carter enough of an electoral boost to be re-elected. After the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, mere minutes after Republican challenger Ronald Reagan‘s inauguration, some charged that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranian government whereby the Iranians would hold the hostages until after Reagan was elected and inaugurated.
The issue of an “October Surprise” was brought up during an investigation by a House of Representatives Subcommittee into how the 1980 Reagan Campaign obtained debate briefing materials of then-President Carter. During that investigation, sometimes referred to as Debategate, the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee obtained access to Reagan Campaign documents. The documents included numerous references to a monitoring effort for any such October Surprise. The Subcommittee, chaired by former U.S. Representative Donald Albosta (D–MI), issued a comprehensive report on May 17, 1984, describing each type of information that was detected and its possible source. A section of the report was dedicated to the October Surprise issue.
Origins
The first printed instance of the October Surprise theory has been attributed to a story in the December 2, 1980, issue of Executive Intelligence Review, a periodical published by followers of Lyndon LaRouche, prior to the release of the hostages. Written by Robert Dreyfuss, the article cited “Iranian sources” in Paris as well as “Top level intelligence sources in Reagan’s inner circle” as saying that Henry Kissinger met with representatives of Mohammad Beheshti during the week of November 12, 1980. The story claimed that “pro-Reagan British intelligence circles and the Kissinger faction” meeting with the Iranians six to eight weeks prior had interfered with “President Carter’s efforts to secure an arms-for-hostage deal with Teheran”. The LaRouche movement returned to the story in the September 2, 1983, issue of New Solidarity, stating “The deal … fell through when the hard-line mullahs boycotted the Majlis in late October.”
The theory garnered little attention until news of the Iran–Contra affair broke in November 1986. John M. Barry of Newsweek has said that Iran–Contra “created fertile ground for the October Surprise theory”. Scott D’Amico in Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories in American History wrote that “[t]he arms-deal arrangement provided credence to those who believed Reagan was fulfilling his end of the October surprise pact with Khomeni.” In the November 24, 1986, issue of The New York Times, William Safire charged: “The geopolitical excuse offered now – that the ransom was a plan to influence post-Khomeini Iran – is a feeble cover-up. Robert McFarlane first approached the Reagan campaign in the summer of 1980 with an Iranian in tow who proposed to deliver our hostages to Mr. Reagan rather than President Carter, thereby swinging the U.S. election. The Reagan representatives properly recoiled, but Mr. McFarlane has had Iranian held hostages on the brain ever since.” Safire’s piece was based upon information he solicited from Laurence Silberman in 1984 regarding a brief meeting four years earlier between Silberman, McFarlane, and Richard V. Allen with a Malaysian man who proposed a plan to contact someone who could influence Iran to delay the release of the hostages in order to embarrass the Carter administration. Silberman later wrote: “Ironically, it was I who unwittingly initiated the so-called ‘October Surprise’ story, which grew into an utterly fantastic tale”. An article by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus a few days later in the November 29, 1986 The Washington Post said that United States officials tied to Reagan, well before the Iran Contra affair, considered an initiative to sell US-made military parts to Iran in exchange for the hostage held there. The House October Surprise Task Force credited the Woodward/Pincus article as raising “claims that would become keystones in the October Surprise theory”.
The Miami Herald published an article by Alfonso Chardy on April 12, 1987, that McFarlane, Silberman, and Allen had met with a man claiming to represent the Iranian government and offering the release of the hostages. Chardy’s article also quoted exiled former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr who said he had learned that Beheshti and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani were involved in negotiations with the Reagan campaign to delay the release of the hostages until Reagan became president.
Chronology
The House October Surprise Task Force outlined as “principal allegations” three supposed meetings between representatives of Reagan’s campaign and Iranian government officials in the summer and fall of 1980 to delay the release of the hostages: 1) a meeting in Madrid during the summer, 2) a meeting at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., that autumn, and 3) a meeting in Paris in October. The Task Force characterized three other alleged meetings or contacts as “ancillary allegations”: 1) a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in early spring 1980, 2) a meeting at the Churchill Hotel in London in the summer of 1980, and 3) a meeting at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel in New York in January 1981.
- March 1980: Jamshid Hashemi told Gary Sick he was visited by campaign manager William Casey and Roy Furmark while staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in March 1980. Hashemi claimed Casey was aware of his contacts in Iran and wanted to discuss the American hostages held there. He told Sick that he then reported the meeting to his “intelligence contact” Charles Cogan, then a senior official within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Hashemi later testified that he was alone with Casey and denied telling Sick that Furmark was present, and that the meeting with Casey occurred in July 1980. The House October Surprise Task Force concluded that there was no credible evidence to support the allegations. The Task Force said that Hashemi was the only source of the story, that he provided no evidence to substantiate the allegations, that there were major inconsistencies in his story to different parties, and that there was credible documentary and testimonial evidence inconsistent with his allegations.
- Spring 1980: In an October 1990 interview, Jamshid Hashemi told Gary Sick he was introduced to Donald Gregg, a U.S. National Security Council aide with connections to George Bush, at Cyrus Hashemi‘s office in New York City in the Spring of 1980. Jamshid told Sick that he and Cyrus had lunch with Gregg at a restaurant near Cyrus’ office where they discussed the contacts that were underway between the brothers and the U.S. Government. The House October Surprise Task Force said that they found no credible evidence that Gregg met with the Hashemi’s, and noted that Jamshid recanted the allegation in testimony stating he had never met with Gregg. After Jamshid’s testimony denying that he told Sick that he met with Gregg, he told Sick that the person he met with was actually Robert Gray. The Task Force concluded that Jamshid Hashemi’s “recent statements about this matter as totally devoid of credibility and probative of a tendency to modify his allegations to conform to subsequent revelations which are inconsistent with those allegations.”
- July 1980: Jamshid Hashemi was also the principal source for allegations that an American delegation consisting of William Casey, Donald Gregg, and another unidentified American met with Iranian officials Mahdi Karrubi and his brother Hassan Karrubi at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid. first in July 1980 then again the following month. Jamshid Hashemi claimed he and his brother Cyrus Hashemi attended the meetings to provide translation services betweenthe two parties. According to Jamshid Hashemi, Casey promised that in exchange for the hostages the new Reagan Administration would return all of Iranian’s frozen assets and military equipment that had been withheld by Carter. Jamshid Hashemi said Casey instructed the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. According to Jamshid, the meetings ended when Karrubi said he did not have the authority to make that commitment but would return to Tehran and seeking instructions from Ayatollah Khomeini. The Task Force said they “determined that Jamshid Hashemi’s allegations regarding meetings in Madrid in the summer of 1980 are fabrications” and that there was no credible evidence to support them.
- About August 12, 1980: Jamshid Hashemi alleged that Karrubi met again with Casey in Madrid, saying Khomeini had agreed to the proposal, and that Casey agreed the next day, naming Cyrus Hashimi as middleman to handle the arms transactions. Hashemi also alleged that more meetings were set for October. The House October Surprise Task Force concluded that these allegations were not credible. Cyrus Hashimi purchases a Greek ship and commences arms deliveries valued at $150 million from the Israeli port of Eilat to Bandar Abbas. According to CIA sources, Hashimi receives a $7 million commission.
- September 22, 1980: Iraq invades Iran.
- Late September 1980: An expatriate Iranian arms dealer named Hushang Lavi claims he met with Richard V. Allen, the Reagan campaign’s national security expert, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, and Lawrence Silberman, co-chairman of Ronald Reagan‘s foreign policy advisors during the campaign, and discussed the possible exchange of F-4 parts for American hostages, but Lavi says they asserted they “were already in touch with the Iranians themselves”.
- October 15–20: Meetings are held in Paris between emissaries of the Reagan-Bush campaign, with Casey as “key participant”, and “high-level Iranian and Israeli representatives”.
- October 21: Iran, for reasons not explained, abruptly shifts its position in secret negotiations with the Carter administration and disclaims “further interest in receiving military equipment”.
- October 21–23: Israel secretly ships F-4 fighter-aircraft tires to Iran, in violation of the U.S. arms embargo, and Iran disperses the hostages to different locations.
- January 20, 1981: Hostages are formally released into United States custody after spending 444 days in captivity. The release takes place just minutes after Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president.
Investigations
Gary Sick
The October Surprise allegations gained traction in the mainstream media after an editorial column by Gary Sick was published in The New York Times on April 15, 1991. Sick, who had served as President Carter’s Iranian expert on the National Security Council, wrote: “I have been told repeatedly that individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages until after the presidential election. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel.” Sick wrote that members of the Reagan-Bush campaign had met with high-level representatives of Iran and Israel in a series of meeting in Paris between October 15–20, 1980, and that there were 15 sources who had direct or indirect knowledge of the event.
Sick later published a book (October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan), published in November 1991, on the subject. Sick’s credibility was boosted by the fact that he was a retired naval captain, served on Ford’s, Carter’s, and Reagan’s National Security Council, and held high positions with many prominent organizations; moreover, he had authored a book recently on US-Iran relations (All Fall Down). Sick wrote that in October 1980, officials in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including future CIA Director William Casey, made a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election; in return for this, the United States purportedly arranged for Israel to ship weapons to Iran.
Sick admitted that “The story is tangled and murky, and it may never be fully unraveled.” He was unable to prove his claims, including that, in the days before the presidential election with daily press pools surrounding him and a public travel schedule, vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush secretly left the country and met with Iranian officials in France to discuss the fate of the hostages.
Frontline / Robert Parry
Sick’s editorial in The New York Times directed readers to watch the investigative documentary program Frontline the following evening to view interviews of his sources. In the Frontline episode released on April 16, 1991, Robert Parry “investigated startling new evidence about how both the Carter and Reagan camps may have tried to forge secret deals for [the Iranian] hostages during the 1980 presidential campaign.” The program presented allegations 1) that Cyrus Hashemi and William Casey met in Madrid to delay the release of the hostages, 2) that there was a meeting in Paris to finalize the deal, and 3) that there were shipments of American-made arms from Israel to Iran.
In a second episode released on April 7, 1992, Parry “investigated whether or not William Casey, Reagan’s campaign director, could have met with Iranians in Paris and Madrid in the summer of 1980.” This program discussed the alleged whereabouts of Casey and Mehdi Karroubi, the credibility of witnesses to the meetings, and other theories about the alleged evidence.
Danny Casolaro
In August 1991, freelance writer Danny Casolaro (among others) claimed to be almost ready to expose the alleged October surprise conspiracy, when he suddenly died a violent death in a hotel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia, raising suspicions. He appeared to be traveling on leads for his investigation into the Inslaw Affair. His death was ruled a suicide. The case was the subject of a 2024 Netflix docuseries titled American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.
Newsweek
Newsweek magazine also ran an investigation, reporting in November 1991 that most, if not all, of the charges made were groundless. Specifically, Newsweek found little evidence that the United States had transferred arms to Iran prior to Iran Contra, and was able to account for William Casey‘s whereabouts when he was allegedly at the Madrid meeting, saying that he was at a conference in London. Newsweek also alleged that the story was being heavily pushed within the LaRouche Movement.
The New Republic
Steven Emerson and Jesse Furman of The New Republic also looked into the allegations and reported, in November 1991, that “the conspiracy as currently postulated is a total fabrication”. They were unable to verify any of the evidence presented by Sick and supporters, finding them to be inconsistent and contradictory in nature. They also pointed out that nearly every witness of Sick’s had either been indicted or was under investigation by the Department of Justice. Like the Newsweek investigation, they had also debunked the claims of Reagan election campaign officials being in Paris during the timeframe that Sick specified, contradicting Sick’s sources.
The Village Voice
Retired CIA analyst and counter-intelligence officer Frank Snepp of The Village Voice reviewed Sick’s allegations, publishing an article in February 1992. Snepp alleged that Sick had only interviewed half of the sources used in his book, and supposedly relied on hearsay from unreliable sources for large amounts of critical material. Snepp also discovered that Sick had sold the rights to his book to Oliver Stone in 1989. After going through evidence presented by Richard Brenneke, Snepp asserted that Brenneke’s credit card receipts showed him to be in Portland, Oregon, during the time he claimed to be in Paris observing the secret meeting.
Senate investigation
The US Senate‘s November 1992 report concluded that “by any standard, the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages.”
House of Representatives investigation
The House of Representatives’ January 1993 report concluded “there is 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”. The task force Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Indiana) also added that the vast majority of the sources and material reviewed by the committee were “wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence”. The report also expressed the belief that several witnesses had committed perjury during their sworn statements to the committee, among them Richard Brenneke, who claimed to be a CIA agent.
Allegations
Former Iranian President Banisadr
It is now very clear that there were two separate agreements, one the official agreement with Carter in Algeria, the other, a secret agreement with another party, which, it is now apparent, was Reagan. They made a deal with Reagan that the hostages should not be released until after Reagan became president. So, then in return, Reagan would give them arms. We have published documents which show that US arms were shipped, via Israel, in March, about 2 months after Reagan became president.
— Former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr
This accusation was made in Banisadr’s 1989 memoir, which also claimed that Henry Kissinger plotted to set up a Palestinian state in the Iranian province of Khuzestan and that Zbigniew Brzezinski conspired with Saddam Hussein to plot Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran. Foreign Affairs described the book as “a rambling, self-serving series of reminiscences” and “long on sensational allegations and devoid of documentation that might lend credence to Bani-Sadr’s claims”.
Writing again in 2013 in The Christian Science Monitor, Banisadr reiterated and elaborated on his earlier statements:
I was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me. After arriving in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism. Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise”, which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.
Two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, the Islamic Republican Party, and the Reagan administration.
Barbara Honegger
Barbara Honegger was a campaign staffer and policy analyst for Reagan who resigned her post as a special assistant in the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in 1983 after publicly criticizing what she claimed was the administration’s lack of commitment to gender equality. She claims that while working for Reagan she discovered information that made her believe that George H. W. Bush and William Casey had conspired to assure that Iran would not free the U.S. hostages until Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the 1980 presidential election, and she alleges that arms sales to Iran were a part of that bargain. In 1987, in the context of the Iran–Contra investigations, Honegger was reported as saying that shortly after October 22, 1980, when Iran abruptly changed the terms of its deal with Carter, a member of the Reagan campaign told her “We don’t have to worry about an ‘October surprise.’ Dick cut a deal,” with “Dick” referring to Richard V. Allen.[53][56]
Michael Riconosciuto
[edit]
In context of his involvement in the Inslaw affair, Michael Riconosciuto claimed that Reagan associate Earl Brian worked on an agreement with the Iranian government to delay the release of the hostages, and that the software was stolen in order to raise funds for Brian’s payment.
Kevin Phillips
Political historian Kevin Phillips has been a proponent of the idea. In his 2004 book American Dynasty, although Phillips concedes that many of the specific allegations were proven false, he also argues that in his opinion, Reagan campaign officials “probably” were involved in a scheme “akin to” the specific scheme alleged by Sick.
Chase Bank revelations
In a memoir by Joseph V. Reed Jr. it is revealed that the “team” around David Rockefeller “collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show. The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.”
Duane “Dewey” Clarridge
Shortly after the death of Duane Clarridge in April 2016, Newsweek published an article by Nicholas Schou claiming that the former CIA operations officer and Iran–Contra figure had previously told him that the October Surprise conspiracy as depicted in George Cave’s novel, October 1980, was “really true”. Schou noted that Cave denied actually believing that officials working on behalf of Reagan plotted to delay the release of the hostages.
Declassified 1980 CIA memo
In 2017, a declassified CIA 1980 memo was released in which the agency concluded “Iranian hardliners – especially Ayatollah Khomeini” were “determined to exploit the hostage issue to bring about President Carter’s defeat in the November elections.” MuckRock, a press organization specialized in Freedom of Information Act requests, argued that “While the document doesn’t prove the Reagan campaign intended to collude with Iran, it does document Iran’s motives and matches the October Surprise narrative outlined by former CIA officers George Cave and Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge.”
Ben Barnes
In March 2023, Peter Baker reported in The New York Times that former Texas governor John Connally, who had sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, travelled to several Arab countries and Israel between July 1980 and August 1980. According to Connally’s close associate Ben Barnes, who accompanied him on the trip, Connally told the Arab officials whom he spoke with to relay a message to Iran to the effect that “Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter.” Barnes also recounted accompanying Connally to a September 1980 meeting in Houston in which Connally briefed William J. Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and a central figure in many versions of the “October Surprise” theory, on the outcome of the trip, with Casey specifically asking if “[the Iranians] were going to hold the hostages.”
While there is documentation that this trip to the Middle East occurred and that Connally communicated with close Reagan associates during the trip, Baker states that there are “no diaries or memos to corroborate” Barnes’s recollection of what, specifically, Connally told the Arab officials. Additionally, Barnes’s account does not confirm “debunked previous theories of what happened,” such as the Reagan campaign reaching an arms-for-hostages agreement with Iran prior to the outcome of the 1980 election. Barnes avoided scrutiny during the congressional “October Surprise” investigations, but his anecdote about Connally had been previously published in H. W. Brands‘s 2015 biography of Reagan, albeit “generat[ing] little public notice at the time” according to Baker. Barnes acknowledged not being in a position to assess personal involvement by Reagan himself or the effect (if any) that Connally’s overture may have had on Iranian actions.
In May 2023, Sick, former Carter administration Chief Domestic Policy Advisor Stuart E. Eizenstat, author Kai Bird, and journalist Jonathan Alter published an article in The New Republic outlining the various allegations and circumstantial evidence (including Barnes’ allegations) that have emerged in the decades following the earlier investigations, declaring the credibility of the theory to be “all but settled.”
Be Skeptical of Reagan’s “October Surprise”
Conspiracy theories, by their very nature, are not easily debunked. It is hard to prove definitively that something did not happen. Conspiracies involving politics can be especially murky. Rough-and-tumble presidential campaigns often do feature dirty tricks for electoral advantage, but false accusations of such skullduggery are arguably even more routine.
Which, then, is the case with the hoary “October Surprise”? This conspiracy theory alleges that in the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan’s camp surreptitiously urged revolutionary Iran to delay releasing American diplomats, intelligence officers, and marines taken hostage the year before until after the November election. This would deprive President Jimmy Carter of the political boost that the freed captives would provide. Their detention for 444 days transfixed the world, empowered Iran, and humiliated the United States.
The term “October Surprise” first originated with the Reagan campaign’s worry that Carter would wait until October, mere weeks before the election, to announce the release of the hostages and thus secure his re-election. The later emergence of the conspiracy theory flipped this term, where in former Carter staff member Gary Sick’s book of the same name it became the alleged effort by the Reagan camp to persuade Iran to delay the hostage release until after the election, purportedly in exchange for a U.S. promise to sell arms to Iran once Reagan became president.
Despite extensive multi-year investigations by Congress, an independent counsel, and countless journalists and scholars, there has yet to emerge a single piece of concrete evidence supporting the allegation. It has nonetheless persisted in the precincts of political gossips, Middle East conspiracism, social media, and even the occasional serious book, such as Kai Bird’s recent biography of Carter.
And last month the conspiracy theory resurfaced on the front page of the New York Times in an article by veteran journalist Peter Baker.
Now, the aged but still energetic Texas political icon and Democratic lobbyist Ben Barnes claims to the nation’s most prestigious newspaper that his fellow Texas political icon John Connally intrigued to boost the Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 by trying to entice Iran to hold the American hostages until after the November election. In Barnes’ telling, he accompanied Connally on a surreptitious trip that summer to six Middle Eastern countries, making the same appeal in each capital, excluding Israel: that their leaders send a message to Tehran appealing that the release of the hostages be delayed until after the election.
If true, this is not just another campaign dirty trick. Rather, it is a treasonous betrayal of 52 imperiled Americans. It is the gravest of charges to level. And it is also almost certainly false.
Barnes claims that, in each of five Arab nations (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia), Connally delivered the same message to the top leadership. In Barnes’ words it was:
Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter… It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.
The New York Times has now published at least two additional stories further airing Barnes’ claims, and many other media outlets have similarly parroted the story.
Barnes’ story has a seductive appeal. In Barnes and Connally, the Texas-sized tale features two charismatic Texan politicians, both with colorful pasts and outsized personalities. Their narrative also offers a political balm to Carter as he faces his twilight days. It traffics in the intrigue and messiness of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. It feeds human nature’s appetite for conspiracies and supplies easy-to-digest explanations for complex historical events.
Yet here are many good reasons to doubt Barnes’ account. It remains a theory in search of facts.
In Lewis Carroll’s classic book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the queen tells Alice that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Accepting Barnes’ account requires a similar set of almost impossible steps into the surreal. Specifically, in trusting Barnes’ story, one would have to believe the following six impossible things:
- At least five Arab governments knew about Connally’s scheme for over four decades but none of their officials has ever breathed a word of it.
- Although those five Middle Eastern governments knew about Connally’s entreaty, the entire U.S. diplomatic and intelligence apparatus in the Middle East did not know about it, even though Connally interacted with embassy staff in multiple countries and the Carter administration followed his whereabouts.
- Connally, a Republican, knowingly made these entreaties in the presence of Barnes, a lifelong Democrat with close friends serving on the Carter campaign and within the senior ranks of the Carter administration, and yet trusted that Barnes would not breathe a word of it to his Democratic colleagues.
- While Connally’s trip was supposedly of the utmost importance to the Reagan campaign and of intense personal interest to campaign manager Bill Casey, somehow Connally and Barnes waited an entire month after their return from the region to brief Casey on their trip.
- The Islamic Republic of Iran, a sworn enemy of the United States, refused to leak, reveal, or otherwise disclose these entreaties from Connally, despite both the power of such revelations to humiliate and possibly destroy the Reagan presidency, and the willingness of Iranian leaders to divulge Reagan’s arms-for-hostages gambit in the Iran-Contra scandal six years later.
- In addition to investigating Iran-Contra, the House and Senate spent thousands of hours reviewing millions of pages of documents, subpoenaing and interviewing hundreds of witnesses with even the remotest possible connection to the allegations, and somehow had never encountered information about a two-week trip by the former Texas governor, secretary of the Treasury, and presidential candidate, as the supposed real architect of the plot.
As with all conspiracy theories, this one starts with bits of truth. It is true that the Reagan campaign obsessed that Carter might pull an “October Surprise” by engineering the release of the hostages just weeks before the election. Paranoid though Reagan and his team (especially Casey) were, their fears were not entirely groundless. A few months earlier, Carter had faced a spirited challenge for the Democratic nomination from Sen. Ted Kennedy. On the morning of the pivotal state of Wisconsin’s primary election day of April 1, just before the polls opened, Carter appeared on national television to announce a “positive development” in negotiations with Iran and hinted that the hostages might soon be released. In the coming days it became clear that no such breakthrough had taken place, but Carter won the Wisconsin primary, and his campaign leadership believed that the Iran announcement boosted their votes.
It is also true that the release of the hostages before the election would have provided Carter with a substantial political benefit — just as the captivity of the hostages had damaged Carter politically, and just as any positive policy developments benefit incumbent presidents. For anyone in the Reagan or Carter campaign teams to state these facts out loud may have been impolitic, but not untrue.
It would have been another matter altogether of treachery and betrayal for the Reagan campaign to try to delay the release of the hostages, as Barnes and other conspiracists allege. Beginning with the participants themselves, Barnes’ account does not hold up under closer scrutiny. Connally was ambitious and ruthless. He was, however, neither treasonous nor stupid — and he would have had to be both to engage in the absurd plot that Barnes now claims.
As for Casey, the former CIA director was capable of chicanery and guilty of many other political transgressions. For example, he almost certainly stole Carter’s campaign debate briefing book, not to mention that he was investigated for financial misdealing in his private-sector business, and played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal. However, there is no hard evidence of his guilt on the 1980 Iran hostage case.
Any clandestine endeavors to pass along a deal to Iran in 1980 would have been difficult to keep secret. If a prominent American like Connally were to visit the region and make such demands, the American diplomats, military attaches, and intelligence officers stationed in each country would have immediately heard about it from their local counterparts. They would have, in turn, promptly disclosed the information to their respective headquarters in Washington, not to mention later to congressional investigators. If Connally presented “a better deal with Reagan” to Tehran through Middle Eastern leaders, it strains credulity to believe that U.S. intelligence collection assets would not pick up indications of his scheme, nor would Middle Eastern officials eventually disclose his offer — especially Syrian and Jordanian leaders who detested the Reagan administration.
Take Beirut, for example. A declassified State Department cable located in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library documents Connally’s trip. On July 30, 1980, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie received an update from John Gunther Dean, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, in which Dean described contacts between Connally and the U.S. embassy. In the cable, Dean reports to Muskie on the exchange between embassy staff and Connally, whose aide invited U.S. officials to the airport for a meeting. There, Deputy Chief of Mission Robert South Barrett obtained a personal briefing from Connally about his interactions with the leadership of Lebanon before the former Texas governor departed for Saudi Arabia. Connally informed Barrett that he held a meeting with Foreign Minister Fouad Boutros, outgoing Prime Minister Selim Hoss, and President Elias Sarkis, during which they discussed the dire political situation in Lebanon and the pressing need for further U.S. engagement in the fragile country.
If Connally made overtures to Iran, his visit to Lebanon offered ample opportunity. Iran’s relationship with Lebanon during this period made the country’s leaders the most likely conduits if Connally were seeking to pass a message along to Tehran. Dean’s closeness to the Lebanese leadership indicates that, had Connally presented a secret deal from the Reagan camp, Dean would have heard about it.
As an experienced diplomat, Dean had forged a close relationship with Sarkis, visiting Baabda Palace several times a week to play bridge with the Lebanese president. Dean also spoke privately with Hoss at length on a routine basis, including in the days after Connally’s visit. And, in the course of his duties, the U.S. ambassador maintained close relations with Johnny Abdo, Lebanon’s intelligence chief. Years later, Dean revealed that he even held the countersignature required for releasing the reserves of the National Bank of Lebanon. In short, as a Beirut insider, Dean would assuredly have detected any secret overtures from Connally and Barnes.
The Carter administration was not only following Connally’s movements, but also focused substantial intelligence resources on anything related to the hostage crisis. The National Security Agency and CIA devoted an array of collection assets to the Middle East during the hostage crisis. And, because of Operation Rubicon, as the Washington Post has reported, Iran unwittingly used Crypto AG, a CIA-owned company, to encrypt its communications. As a result, the Carter administration closely followed the deliberations of Iranian leadership and its web of contacts in the Middle East and Europe throughout the hostage crisis. Iran harbored few secrets from its American enemy.
Accepting Barnes’ account requires believing that Connally presented a deal to Iran through Middle Eastern leaders and yet somehow the U.S. intelligence community picked up no signs of their interactions, even though the Carter administration managed to capture nearly every other secret communication in the region.
Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, then director of the National Security Agency, served as one of Carter’s leads on monitoring the hostage crisis, including Iranian communications as well as signals and message traffic throughout the Middle East. Inman aided Carter in his negotiations with Iran using the intelligence collected through Crypto AG and from other sources and methods. Indeed, Inman was so central to the crisis that it fell to him to inform Carter on Reagan’s inauguration day that, while Tehran had agreed to release the hostages, they would not be allowed to depart Iran until moments after Reagan took the presidential oath. As historian H. W. Brands and some former hostages themselves have pointed out, such was the animus of the Iranian revolutionaries toward Carter that Tehran did not intend to release the hostages until Carter had left office. Which is precisely what happened in a final act of humiliation delivered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
As Inman previously testified to Congress, and this month reconfirmed to us personally, he “judges with the highest level of confidence” that no one associated with the Reagan campaign ever attempted to persuade the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages.
Nor does Inman have any motive to exonerate Casey. While Inman later served under Casey as CIA deputy director, the two had a famously difficult relationship, such that Casey’s other ethical lapses influenced Inman’s decision to resign from CIA in 1982.
But one does not have to take Inman’s word alone. After the Senate Special Counsel for the October Surprise finished its investigation and found no evidence, the House of Representatives October Surprise Task Force conducted an even more thorough examination of the most sensitive records of the U.S. government. The task force reviewed more than 100,000 files from the State Department, over 5,000 pages of documents from the CIA, and several thousand pages of unredacted signals intelligence from the National Security Agency. Connally’s treasonous deal of the century is nowhere to be found in this highly classified material.
Barnes’ other claims similarly wilt under closer scrutiny. He told the New York Times that Connally “wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Yet, by Barnes’ own account and travel records, he and Connally returned to the United States on Aug. 11, and did not meet with Casey in Dallas to debrief on their trip until Sept. 10, a full month later. In the crucible of a presidential campaign, when every day counts and every decision matters, on a matter of such intense interest as the hostage crisis, it again tortures credulity to believe that Casey waited an entire month to obtain a report on a vitally important mission that he had allegedly commissioned. (And while there is solid evidence that Barnes and Connally visited Dallas on Sept. 10, there is no independent confirmation that Casey was also in Dallas that day).
Nor has any evidence for the Texan’s alleged gambit emerged in the historical record since the congressional investigation. In more recent years, multiple U.S. government official historians have looked extensively through State Department and intelligence community records, including many still classified, for any evidence of the October Surprise allegations. No such documents have been found. (This includes the long-rumored cable from the U.S. embassy in Madrid in July 1980 noting that Casey had visited the city. The cable most likely does not exist.) Moreover, as we can attest firsthand, one will not find any hard evidence to buttress Barnes’ story in the 1980 Reagan campaign papers housed in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.
Instead, some facts in the tale can be easily explained as more benign than sinister. What of Baker’s mention of Nancy Reagan’s phone message from the Reagan ranch to Connally on July 21 saying that her husband “wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings”? It was almost certainly just that. The presidential convention in Detroit had ended four days earlier. Connally, who had also run for the Republican nomination, was disappointed that Reagan had picked George H. W. Bush as his running mate. As the new nominee, Reagan wanted to unite the party and ensure that all of his former primary rivals, including Connally, backed his campaign. Reagan had just hired some of Connally’s campaign staff, including press secretary James Brady. Reagan also genuinely valued Connally’s advice and hoped that the Texan, who wielded a formidable fundraising network, would share his support base and political insights with the campaign — especially because Reagan’s campaign strategy against Carter focused on winning Connally’s home state of Texas, a then-key swing state which had narrowly voted for Carter in 1976. It made eminent sense for Reagan to call Connally and invite him to participate in campaign strategy meetings.
For that matter, why did Connally take the trip to the Middle East in the first place? It was almost certainly for this reason: Having endorsed Reagan’s candidacy, he was trying to burnish his foreign policy credibility in hopes of landing a senior cabinet position, such as secretary of state or secretary of defense, in a Reagan administration. And Connally chose the Middle East for his travel (instead of another region like Europe or Asia) in part to remedy the self-inflicted damage from a major speech that he had given several months earlier on Middle East policy in which he seemed to downplay Israel’s security while also upsetting some Arab states by calling for a bigger American military presence in the region. The speech had resulted in weeks of criticism and national ridicule. Visiting the Middle East gave Connally the opportunity to repair his image and audition for a national security job.
Indeed, Connally’s desire to demonstrate his Middle East policy expertise also casts further doubt on Barnes’ claims that Connally asked leaders in Sunni countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to serve as intermediaries with Iran. Iran’s revolutionary leaders detested Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, especially for his decision to host the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, who coincidentally died of cancer in Cairo on July 27, amid Connally’s trip. The shah received a state funeral three days later in Egypt, much to Khomeini’s ire. Tehran also viewed the Saudis as distrusted enemies. Connally knew this. It would have been far-fetched for him to make himself look like a foreign policy amateur with such ham-handed requests to Iran’s Sunni foes.
Just as there is no evidence from 1980 records for Barnes’ allegations, subsequent events make the charges appear even more outlandish. Take, for example, the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan presidency’s biggest scandal that captured the world’s attention six years later in 1986. In Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for Tehran’s agreement to release American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups (the “Contra” part of the scandal entailed diverting funds from the arms sale sales to support the Contras fighting against Nicaragua’s Soviet-sponsored Sandinista government — in violation of the Boland Amendment). Iran-Contra, on the surface, could make the October Surprise scenario appear plausible, only because Iran-Contra included the same basic formula of the Reagan team offering to trade arms to Iran as part of a deal for releasing American hostages. The October Surprise conspiracy tale has the same principal figures and countries operating under a similar agreement and framework.
Yet instead, the historical record of Iran-Contra only further undermines any case for the October Surprise.
To begin, no participant in Iran-Contra — either in the United States, Iran, or Israel — ever muttered a word about Connally’s alleged 1980 deal transpiring. From Casey to Iranian senior official Hashemi Rafsanjani, those involved in the scandal had many reasons and auspicious occasions to reference the alleged precursor to the arms-for-hostages deals undertaken in the Reagan administration. Casey and Reagan, for their part, agonized over Hizballah’s kidnapping of CIA Station Chief William Buckley in 1984, whom Casey had personally dispatched to Lebanon. Both the president and the CIA director were traumatized by firsthand accounts of Buckley’s torture. Reagan himself worried about the other hostages daily, fixated on their plight. Yet, instead of drawing on any aspect of the alleged arrangement of 1980 to free Buckley and other U.S. hostages, the ill-conceived Iran-Contra scheme used shady middlemen motivated by profit, such as Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi businessman, and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer. The arms-for-hostages deals proceeded comically and disastrously, and soon became public. If the Reagan campaign had cut a secret deal with Iran in 1980, the vast historical record of Iran-Contra doesn’t contain any evidence of past cooperation between adversaries. Rather, it demonstrates operational difficulties and deep distrust between bitter enemies — in part because neither side had ever before attempted such a clumsy gambit.
Even if Iranian leaders did not reference the October Surprise in the wake of Iran-Contra, they would have had every incentive to do so in its aftermath. In the last two years of the Reagan administration, the relationship between the United States and Iran devolved into open conflict during the “tanker wars.” In 1988, Reagan launched Operation Praying Mantis against Iran, destroying most of the tiny Iranian navy. Hostilities reached the point of tragedy, leading to the USS Vincennes mistakenly shooting down the civilian Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988. During this conflict Iranian leaders had strong incentives to disclose evidence of any secret overtures from the 1980 campaign. Yet, despite a prime opportunity to humiliate Reagan, they never did so.
The Iran hostage crisis was a terrible episode in American history. It was a punishing trial for Carter, and a severe trauma for the hostages themselves. But it was not a treasonous betrayal by Connally or the Reagan campaign.
A Short History of Everyone Who Confirmed Reagan’s October Surprise Before the New York Times
the New York Times published a blockbuster story that said two prominent Texas Republicans flew across the Mideast in the summer of 1980 for secret meetings with regional leaders to urge them to tell Iran to keep the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the election that pitted GOP candidate Ronald Reagan against then-President Jimmy Carter.
The Times reported that Ben Barnes, a key figure in Texas politics, said he made the trip with former Texas Gov. John Connally, a major supporter of Reagan’s campaign, and that when they returned home, Connally met in an airport lounge with William Casey, who’d been a top U.S. spy during World War II and was then Reagan’s campaign manager. Connally and Casey discussed the trip, according to Barnes, who The Times quoted as saying, “History needs to know that this happened.” After Reagan beat Carter in a landslide, Reagan appointed Casey head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All this is powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did — as has been alleged for decades — strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released. While that has never been proven, what’s known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Reagan campaign was deeply worried that Carter might get the hostages out before November and thereby give a big boost to his prospects.
You might understandably ask: If this actually happened, how could it have been kept secret? Why hasn’t anyone with knowledge of it spoken up before? The answer is that it hasn’t been kept secret, and many, many people have said it occurred. But most of the people doing so have been foreigners. Barnes is merely the most important American to finally come out and support the story.
The 1980 October Surprise theory has always been plausible on its face. Casey had worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign (and was later named head of the Securities and Exchange Commission by Nixon). It’s since been proven that the Nixon’s presidential campaign secretly collaborated with the government of South Vietnam to prevent President Lyndon Johnson from striking a peace deal ending the Vietnam War. The Nixon campaign was concerned that peace would help his opponent in the race, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Nixon’s cynicism can be measured by the fact that thanks to his gambit, 20,000 additional American soldiers, plus unknown hundreds of thousands of other people, died as the war continued for many years.
The concept of the October Surprise seems almost benign in comparison. A mere 52 American hostages had been seized by Iranian revolutionaries at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and all the scheme required was keeping them there for another few months.
Most of the important digging on this subject was done by the late Robert Parry, a one-time Associated Press reporter and founder of Consortium News. Parry and others found that an astonishing array of people at the top of world politics had said things similar to Barnes, long before Barnes spoke out. Here are the most important:
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr
Bani-Sadr was the president of post-revolutionary Iran from January 1980 until June 1981, when he was impeached and fled the country.
In Bani-Sadr’s 1991 memoir, “My Turn to Speak,” he wrote that:
Yitzhak Shamir
Shamir served two terms as Israel’s prime minister in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the time of the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, he was Israel’s minister of foreign affairs.
The subject of the October Surprise came up when Shamir was interviewed by several reporters in 1993, after Shamir had left office. When one asked Shamir whether it had happened, Shamir immediately responded, “Of course. … I know in America, they know it.”
Shamir then declined to elaborate.
Yasser Arafat
Arafat was head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian National Authority. In 1996, he met with Carter in the Gaza Strip. According to historian Douglas Brinkley, Arafat told Carter, “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election. I want you to know that I turned them down.”
“The Good Spy” by Kai Bird includes a fascinating tale of a Lebanese businessman named Mustafa Zein who claimed to have acted as a go-between Arafat and Jack Shaw, who worked with Casey on the Reagan campaign. Shaw told Bird that this was all a big misunderstanding on Zein’s part. Arafat, according to Zein, eventually told him that Casey had struck a deal directly with the Iranians at a meeting in Spain.
Alexandre de Marenches
In 1980, de Marenches was the head of France’s external intelligence agency, the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage. The 1993 House investigation spoke with David Andelman, a journalist who had co-written de Marenches’s memoirs.
Andelman said de Marenches had told him off the record that he was involved in “setting up a meeting in Paris between Casey and some Iranians in late October of 1980.”
The House investigation also spoke to de Marenches, who denied any involvement in 1980 skullduggery. De Marenches traveled to California in December 1980, just after the election, to meet with Reagan. After Reagan took office, de Marenches became a close Reagan adviser.
The Russian Government
The House task force sent a request to the Russian government for any information it had in its intelligence files on the subject of the Reagan campaign in 1980. At the time, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and the Russian government was eager for good relations with America, so it was incentivized to help the U.S. Congress.
Russia response was yes, the October Surprise happened. Part of it read: “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership. … The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”
These claims from Russia, however, did not appear in the investigation’s final declassified report. They were in the classified version, however. We know this because Parry stumbled across it when he went to the U.S. Capitol to pick up a regular copy of the report, but he was accidentally sent to a storage room full of copies of the classified version.
Parry wrote that he subsequently spoke to “one well-placed official in Europe who checked with the Russian government.” This official told him the Russian considered the report “a bomb” and “couldn’t believe it was ignored.”
The George H.W. Bush White House
As the House investigation put it, the main October Surprise allegation was that “during the summer of 1980, William Casey and other Americans met on several occasions in Madrid with … two Iranian officials sent at the direction of the Khomeini regime.” They asked the George H.W. Bush administration to produce any records the U.S. government might have on this subject. The House task force looked at everything and concluded “the evidence allegedly supporting each of these meetings was neither from credible sources nor corroborated.”
Here’s the funny thing, though. In 2011, Parry was looking through the records of the Bush Presidential Library. And there he found a memo from associate White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr., recording a conversation he’d had with State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson about getting the relevant documents to the House investigators. Williamson, Beach wrote, had told him that they’d found “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”
This memo from Beach and the mysterious cable from the Madrid embassy were somehow never turned over to the House investigation. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who’d led the inquiry, wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016 asking for the cable. He did not receive it. For Kai Bird’s book “The Outlier,” which includes a chapter of additional evidence about an October Surprise, Bird submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the cable. The State Department likewise has not produced it for Bird — even after he filed a lawsuit in 2019 — informing him that they can’t find it.
At this point, even James Baker, first Reagan’s chief of staff and later his treasury secretary (and then Bush’s secretary of state), won’t say Casey wasn’t in Madrid. Asked about it by one-time Carter staffer Stuart Eizenstat, he responded: “Would I be surprised if Casey did it? There is nothing about Casey that would surprise me. He is a piece of work.”
Those are the highlights — but there is, believe it or not, more where this came from. The October Surprise story has long been derided as a conspiracy theory, and still has not been conclusively proven. But at this point, a belief that nothing out of the ordinary happened in 1980 requires faith in an enormous number of coincidences — so many that you might call it a coincidence theory.
A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election
It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
The hostage crisis in Iran hampered Mr. Carter’s effort to win a second term.
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.
Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.
“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.
Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.
Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.
All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.
Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.
Brief news accounts at the time reported on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describing the trip as “strictly private.” An intriguing note in Mr. Connally’s file confirms Mr. Barnes’s memory that there was contact with the Reagan camp early in the trip. Under the heading “Governor Reagan,” a note from an assistant reported to Mr. Connally on July 21: “Nancy Reagan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” There was no record of his response.
Mr. Barnes recalled joining Mr. Connally in early September to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip during a three-hour meeting in the American Airlines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport. An entry in Mr. Connally’s calendar found this past week showed that he traveled to Dallas on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University turned up no documents indicating whether he was in Dallas then or not.
Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”
None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.
Iran released the American hostages minutes after Mr. Carter left office at noon on Jan. 20, 1981.
John B. Connally III, the former governor’s eldest son, said in an interview on Friday that he remembered his father taking the Middle East trip but never heard about any message to Iran. While he did not join the trip, the younger Mr. Connally said he accompanied his father to a meeting with Mr. Reagan to discuss it without Mr. Barnes and the conversation centered on the Arab-Israeli conflict and other issues the next president would confront.
“No mention was made in any meeting I was in about any message being sent to the Iranians,” said Mr. Connally. “It doesn’t sound like my dad.” He added: “I can’t challenge Ben’s memory about it, but it’s not consistent with my memory of the trip.”
Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.
The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.
To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.
Mr. Reagan welcomed Bruce Laingen, a former hostage in Iran, to the White House in January 1981. Mr. Laingen and 51 other Americans had been held for 444 days in Tehran.
The House and Senate separately authorized investigations and both ultimately rejected the claims. The bipartisan House task force, led by a Democrat, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and controlled by Democrats 8 to 5, concluded in a consensus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that stories of covert dealings were not backed by credible testimony, documents or intelligence reports.
Still, a White House memo produced in November 1991 by a lawyer for President George H.W. Bush reported the existence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was discovered two decades later by Robert Parry, a journalist who helped produce a “Frontline” documentary on the October surprise.
Reached by telephone this past week, Mr. Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Mr. Connally but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.”
Michael F. Zeldin, a Democratic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Laufman, a Republican lawyer for the task force, both said in recent interviews that Mr. Connally never crossed their radar screen during the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.
While Mr. Casey was never proved to have been engaged in any October surprise deal-making, he was later accused of surreptitiously obtaining a Carter campaign briefing book before the lone debate between the two candidates, although he denied involvement.
Mr. Carter meeting with Gary Sick, a national security aide, in the Oval Office. Mr. Sick advanced a theory after Mr. Carter’s loss that a Reagan ally had brokered a deal with Iran for the hostages’ post-election release in exchange for arms.Credit…
News of Mr. Barnes’s account came as validation to some of Mr. Carter’s remaining advisers. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history. “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”
Mr. Connally was a political giant of his era. Raised on a South Texas cotton farm, he served in the Navy in World War II and became a confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, helping run five of his campaigns, including his disputed 1948 election to the Senate that was marred by credible allegations of fraud. Mr. Connally managed Mr. Johnson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, then worked for the ticket of John F. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson. Mr. Connally was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the Navy. He then won a race for governor of Texas in 1962.
He was in the presidential limousine sitting just in front of Mr. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire. Mr. Connally suffered injuries to his back, chest, wrist and thigh, but unlike Mr. Kennedy survived the ordeal. He won two more terms as governor, then became President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury and ultimately switched parties. He was a favorite of Mr. Nixon, who wanted to make him his vice president or successor as president.
Mr. Connally was indicted on charges of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice in 1974, accused by prosecutors of taking $10,000 to support a milk price increase, but acquitted by a jury.
Along the way, Mr. Connally found a political protégé in Mr. Barnes, who became “more a godson than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biography of Mr. Connally. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for college selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Mr. Barnes was elected to the Texas Legislature at age 21 and stood at Mr. Connally’s side for his first speech as a candidate for governor in 1962.
With Mr. Connally’s help, Mr. Barnes became House speaker at 26 and was later elected lieutenant governor, a powerful position in Texas, only to fall short in his own bid for governor in 1972. He urged Mr. Connally to run for president in 1980 even though by then they were in different parties.
After Mr. Connally’s campaign collapsed, he and Mr. Barnes went into business together, forming Barnes/Connally Investments. The two built apartment complexes, shopping centers and office buildings, and bought a commuter airline and an oil company, and later a barbecue house, a Western art magazine, a title company and an advertising company. But they overextended themselves, took on too much debt and, after falling oil prices shattered the Texas real estate market, filed for bankruptcy in 1987.
The two stayed on good terms. “In spite of the disillusionment of our business arrangements, Ben Barnes and I remain friends, although I doubt that either of us would go back into business with the other,” Mr. Connally wrote in his memoir, “In History’s Shadow,” shortly before dying in 1993 at age 76. Mr. Barnes, for his part, said this past week that “I remain a great fan of him.”
Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.
Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”
Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Connally was running for secretary of state or secretary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Connally was later offered energy secretary but declined.)
From left, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Connally and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. Mr. Barnes said Mr. Connally promoted Mr. Reagan to every leader they met on their trip.
Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”
But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”
Task Force Says No Secret Hostage Deal
In a final twist to the long-running saga of the “October surprise” allegations, a House task force recommended early in 1993 that the Justice Department consider bringing perjury charges against several people who claimed to have information buttressing the story.
The special task force said Jan. 13 that it had debunked 12-year-old allegations that operatives for the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign had conspired to delay release of American hostages held by Iran.
For years, proponents of the October surprise theory alleged that in the waning days of the 1980 presidential campaign, aides to Ronald Reagan tried to prevent President Jimmy Carter’s administration from securing a dramatic hostage release. The prospect of such a political coup became known as the October surprise.
According to the thesis, Reagan campaign manager William J. Casey and other officials negotiated a secret arms deal with Iranian officials to induce Tehran to delay the release of the 52 American hostages until after Election Day.
The report of the 13-member task force unconditionally rejected the allegations, concluding: “There is 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.”
The report stated that there was “wholly insufficient evidence” that anyone associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign communicated with representatives of the Iranian government.
Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind., who chaired the task force, praised the 10-month, $1.3 million investigation as a model of bipartisanship. But Republicans bitterly criticized the entire exercise as a Democrat-inspired boondoggle, even as they claimed vindication in the report’s exoneration of Reagan and Bush.
A separate Senate subcommittee investigation had released its report on Nov. 23, 1992, stating that it could find no conclusive evidence that officials from the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign negotiated a secret agreement.
Background
Allegations of a secret deal to stall the hostages’ release had circulated for years. But the scenario gained new attention in April 1991, when a former Carter administration National Security Council aide, Gary Sick, wrote an article discussing possible contacts between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government.
The hostage crisis, which dragged on from Nov. 4, 1979, to Jan. 20, 1981, consumed Carter’s presidency and played a significant role in his defeat for a second term. After negotiations with Iran to secure the hostages’ release stalled, Carter ordered a rescue attempt in April 1980, but it failed, and eight soldiers were killed in an accident. (1980 Almanac, p. 352)
As talks carried on into the fall of 1980, Reagan campaign officials warned that Carter might try to engineer an “October surprise” to boost his re-election chances. Sick alleged that the Reagan campaign may have short-circuited such a deal. Former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr told The New York Times that a meeting between Republicans and Iranians was held in Paris in October 1980.
Richard V. Allen and two other top Reagan-Bush campaign officials acknowledged that they met in Washington with an Iranian emissary in September or October, but said they rejected an offer to deliver the hostages in a way advantageous to Reagan.
The charges were explosive because of the suggestion that vice presidential candidate George Bush may have traveled to Europe in the fall of 1980 to negotiate the deal. Bush denied that he was part of any such negotiations and said his travel at the time was well documented.
The secretive Casey, a World War II spymaster who was Reagan’s CIA director from 1981 until his death in 1987, was at the center of speculation about a secret agreement. News reports suggested that Casey was in Europe at the time the negotiations supposedly took place. The Senate subcommittee probe concluded that Casey conducted “potentially dangerous” efforts to collect intelligence on the Carter administration’s efforts to gain the release of the hostages.
House Probe
With the 1992 election just nine months away and President Bush a subject of scrutiny, the House conducted a politically charged debate Feb. 5 on whether to authorize a special October surprise task force.
Approved by a 217-192 vote, H Res 258 established a task force of eight Democrats and five Republicans to look into the allegations. (Vote 13, p. 4-H)
Its chairman, Hamilton, said that while the seriousness of the charges compelled Congress to undertake the investigation, “I genuinely hope that these allegations can be disproved conclusively.”
Republicans lashed out at the investigation, charging that Democrats were listening to “wackos and weirdos.”
“Who’s going to be your chief investigator, Geraldo Rivera?” asked Toby Roth, R-Wis. Republicans sought to expand the probe to look into matters potentially damaging to Democrats. Minority Leader Robert H. Michel, R-Ill., offered an amendment to require the task force to look into any attempts by the Carter administration to negotiate the release of the hostages prior to the election. Michel’s amendment was defeated on a straight-line party vote, 158-249. (Vote 12, p. 4-H)
In an effort to quell criticism that the investigation was designed to damage Bush before the election, Hamilton announced on July 1 that preliminary information indicated that Bush probably did not travel to Europe during the time period alleged by Sick and others.
“All credible evidence leads to the conclusion that President Bush was in the United States continuously during the Oct. 18-22. 1980, time frame and that he was not attending secret meetings in Paris,” said Hamilton.
“We are glad that Congress, in a bipartisan report, concluded today what we knew all along, that President Bush had no involvement with any alleged meetings in Paris in October 1980 and, in fact, he never left the country at that time,” said a White House statement.
Task Force Conclusions
The House task force released its findings Jan. 13, 1993 rejecting the 12-year-old allegations.
The 968-page report was likely to be Congress’ final word on the longstanding charges, which had been a thorn in the side of two Republican presidents. It went even further than an earlier Senate report, released in November, in spiking the allegations.
Hamilton said the task force found that nearly all of the sources for the October surprise turned out to be “wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.” Attorneys for the panel said it had informed the Justice Department of people who might have lied to Congress.
Despite its extensive investigation, the task force was unable to obtain Casey’s passport.
The report became fodder for the Republicans. Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Ill., the ranking Republican on the task force, tried to turn the tables on Democrats who had supported the investigation. He accused the Carter administration of trying to negotiate its own arms-for-hostages swap. He charged that in 1980, Carter administration officials offered to provide Iran with $230 million worth of weapons — part of $12 billion in Iranian assets frozen by Carter after the Americans were seized — if Tehran freed the hostages.
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., raised the issue during the confirmation hearings for Warren M. Christopher, President-elect Bill Clinton’s nominee for secretary of State.
Hamilton insisted that the offer by Carter’s administration was not comparable to the Reagan administration’s arms-for-hostages dealings with Iran during the mid-1980s. Carter offered only to unfreeze the assets after the hostages were released, Hamilton said.
Senate Probe
The investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs found no “sufficient credible evidence” to support allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign tried to delay the hostages’ release.
Unlike the House inquiry, the subcommittee never received the approval of the full chamber for its probe. After Democrats were unable in 1991 to get the 60 votes needed to cut off debate on a resolution authorizing the probe, Democrats tapped Reid Weingarten to act as special counsel.
In his report, released Nov. 23, Weingarten said that although the Reagan administration “privately acquiesced in some limited Israeli shipments of American-made weapons to Iran and slightly relaxed” a policy of limiting shipment of weapons to Iran, there was no credible evidence that actions were taken as “a reward to the Khomeini regime in exchange for an agreement relating to hostages.”
Weingarten said the failure to obtain Casey’s passport and other important documents impeded the investigation. He concluded that Casey conducted “informal, clandestine and potentially dangerous” efforts to collect intelligence on Carter administration negotiations with Iran.
More than 40 years later, a Texan reveals a secret that may have swayed an election
On April 25, 1980, President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to update the nation on the 52 American hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran. The day before Carter’s speech, U.S. army special forces attempted to rescue them. But the mission failed, and eight U.S. servicemen died in a helicopter crash. President Carter took responsibility and vowed not to give up on the captive Americans.
“Throughout this extraordinarily difficult period, we have pursued and will continue to pursue every possible avenue for the release of the hostages,” Carter said.
The Carter administration faced more opposition than the president knew, though.
The hostage crisis was a key issue in the 1980 presidential election, in which Carter faced a re-election challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan. If the hostages were released before the election, Carter would get a big boost in the polls.
Which is why in July of 1980, Reagan ally and Texas political giant John Connally took a trip to the Middle East with a message for heads of state: Iran will get a better deal for the hostages with Reagan than with Carter, so it would be wise to wait until after the election to release them.
And that’s what happened. Minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, the hostages were released.
Connally’s involvement in the affair was a secret until just a few days ago, when the New York Times published an account of the story as told by Connally’s protégé: Ben Barnes, the youngest state lawmaker to ever serve as Texas speaker of the house. Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the Times, spoke to the Texas Standard about the story.
Listen to the story above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: How did you come to unearth this story after four decades? Did Barnes just call you up or what?
Peter Baker: Well, I’ve known Ben Barnes a little bit over the years. But he told a few friends over the years this story, and I think it had been weighing on him. It’d been something that he had been thinking about, and while he was watching some of the television accounts lately of President Carter going into hospice care, and seeing some of the images back from that hostage crisis back in 1980, he really began thinking this is the time to talk.
And so a mutual friend of ours – a mutual intermediary – mentioned that to me and I contacted him and he was ready to talk in a way I think he hadn’t really done before. He told a few friends. He told the author H.W. ‘Bill’ Brands from the University of Texas who mentioned this in a book of his – I want to be clear about that, a biography of Ronald Reagan in 2015. But it never got the notice at the time. But I think Ben Barnes thought it should and now he wanted to finally have the story told.
So what was Barnes’s role in this trip to the Middle East?
Well Barnes, as you rightly say, was Connally’s protégé – the two of them very close. Connally had just finished running for president himself. He tried to win the Republican primary nomination but lost to Reagan. And basically, he comes back to Texas and he says, ‘look, I’m gonna take a trip to the Middle East. Why don’t you come with me?’ Barnes says he didn’t really know what the purpose was. But they sit down in capital after capital in the Arab world, and what he discovered was that at each of these stops, Connolly was delivering that same message you just talked about to each of these leaders – ‘tell the Iranians not to release the hostage before the election. They’ll get a better deal from Reagan’ – and Barnes was shocked. He was a Democrat still, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to come out with that and tell everybody because he was afraid that Democrats would think he was a “Benedict Arnold,” in his phrase, for going on this trip in the first place. And so he basically has kept the secret for the most part for the last 43 years.
So what emotions did Barnes express when he was telling you all this?
Well, I think he felt regret. I think he felt, you know, some sense of relief in finally having the story come out. I think he wanted President Carter to know about this before he passed and my understanding is he was told about the article and has been informed about it now. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think that that has been an important moment for him, to bring some closure for it.
Is there any way to estimate what sort of impact Connally’s mission had on the hostage crisis? And for that matter, the 1980 election? You could even go further and say the trajectory of American politics.
Obviously, it was a big moment in our history that changed from Carter to Reagan. And we don’t really know. What is important to know is that Ben Barnes can talk about what he saw, right? And what he heard. What he was in the room for. What he can’t tell us is whether Reagan knew about this, for instance. Now, he does say that they met with Bill Casey, who was Reagan’s chief campaign chairman after the trip and filled him in about it. And that’s important because Casey has been at the center of a lot of suspicions over the years about any interactions between the Reagan camp and the Iranians. And he later became the Central Intelligence Agency director.
But you know, Barnes doesn’t know for sure if Reagan knew about it, and he doesn’t know if the message was ever passed on to the Iranians. He doesn’t know if the Iranians acted on it. We just know, as you pointed out, the results of what happened. They didn’t release them before the election. And we don’t know if there’s any kind of deal-making, you know, the original October surprise conspiracy theory, which has been investigated and to some extent debunked. But that theory had it that Reagan camp promised arms for Iran through Israel if they were to release the hostages. That’s not something that Barnes can tell us about.
But let’s just play it out for a second. You’re right about this: if, in fact, Connally’s message makes it to the Iranians and this influences their decision, it does change history because it is possible that, had there been a release of the hostages, it might have changed the dynamics for President Carter. He was actually keeping up with Reagan, and even ahead of Reagan until just a few weeks before the election. So it could have been a much different outcome.
But Peter, you said there has been this conspiracy theory, and has largely been debunked. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about a concerted organized effort to try to convince or get the message to the Iranians. We don’t know if that message was actually received and what the quid pro quo might have been completely. But does this not confirm the suspicions of the basic thrust of that theory that has been lingering out there for four decades?
Well, I think for President Carter, who has long thought something like this happened, it certainly seems to verify that something underhanded took place. No question about it. Connally’s message was that 52 American citizens should be held captive for longer than they needed to be for political reasons. That’s pretty remarkable. But again, as you say, we don’t know for sure what part that played in it. It’s important also to remember we talked about whether it would have changed the election. I mean, it’s important to remember that the economy was doing badly. Carter was, you know, troubled by inflation, unemployment – things that were holding down his popularity. So we don’t know for sure. But I think that a lot of people around Carter certainly believe that, had the hostages been released in October or anytime in September or whatever, that would have made a difference.
I was thinking about the last time a senior-level official, Robert McNamara, came clean years after Vietnam. And there was a lot of concern and a lot of criticism that he held those secrets for so long, and that the war could have been brought to a quicker end. Are there parallels here and, I wonder, does this rewrite history in a sense?
That’s an interesting parallel. You’re right. McNamara’s story is a fascinating one, the defense secretary who came to regret the war that he led. Really powerful story. And you’re right, there are a lot of people asking today, “well, how come the story wasn’t told 43 years ago, or at least sometime before then?” But it’s a reminder that history has a secret and there are things still to be unearthed. And eventually, people late in life decide to tell stories that they weren’t willing to tell when they were younger. Ben Barnes isn’t a young guy. I think he didn’t want, as he said, his obituary to have this in it. But he didn’t want President Carter to pass away without having had a chance to sort of make clean, if you will.
Resources
en.wikipedia.org, “1980 October Surprise Theory.” By Wikipedia Editors; warontherocks.com, “Be Skeptical of Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’.” By William Inboden and Joseph Ledford; theintercept.com, “A Short History of Everyone Who Confirmed Reagan’s October Surprise Before the New York Times.” By Jon Schwarz; nytimes.com, “A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election.” By Peter Baker; library.congress.com, “Task Force Says No Secret Hostage Deal.”; texasstandard.com, “More than 40 years later, a Texan reveals a secret that may have swayed an election.” By Michael Marks;
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