(Author’s note: This essay was written before the current Mideast crisis and my remarks about the Israelis in the Iran-Contra/October Surprise context should in no way be read as a comment on the merits of their on-going campaign against Hamas.)
Several months ago, Peter Baker of The New York Times broke the code to a long-standing mystery, the so-called October Surprise conspiracy.
But surprise! It was not precisely the conspiracy envisaged by those who obsessed over it thirty years ago when it was all the rage in liberal media.
It was a truth even more shocking.
By Baker’s account a Texas political operative, Ben Barnes, now 85, has finally confessed to having been part of secret GOP maneuvering in 1980 to destroy Jimmy Carter’s reelection chances by sabotaging his effort to free the American hostages in Iran. Barnes’ arch-collaborator in this alleged screw-job was legendary former Texas governor John Connally, an ex-Democrat who had lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan — then helped him to defeat Carter.
According to Baker’s story, Connally accompanied Barnes, his political protege, “to one Middle Eastern capital after another” in the summer of 1980, “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.” They wanted Teheran to know that Reagan “will win and give you a better deal.”
An itinerary recently uncovered in Connally’s files and described by the Times “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 August 11.” Barnes was listed as his traveling companion.
As events played out, Reagan did win the presidency in November 1980 in part because Carter had embarrassed himself by failing to liberate the 52 Americans still being held by the Iranians a year into the revolution. Then, seemingly through pure serendipity, the holy men in Teheran had a sudden change of heart and, on Reagan’s inauguration day, surrendered the hostages to him.
Suspicions flared among Reagan haters. Conspiracy theories bred books and bloviating in all the predictable quarters. But journalists and investigators could not quite nail down the “there” there.
But now, all these many years later, we have new fuel for the near-dormant fire, the Times’ piece, with its astonishing quotes from the belatedly contrite Ben Barnes.
I stumbled on the article only recently and did some research to see what kind of reverberations it had triggered. A think piece by David Cay Johnston was the only significant ripple.
My surprise at this is perhaps a symptom of how ancient I am. There was a time when any such revelation would have sent political junkies scrambling for op-ed space. I guess we have become numbed by Trump mania and the latest outbreak of election interference.
The aspect of Baker’s story that truly grabbed me was his mention of Israel as one of the Barnes-Connally stopovers. It set off tremors that have kept me awake at night.
Let me put you in my picture so you’ll see that I am not exaggerating.
Back in the late 1980s and early 90s I covered the Iran Contra scandal and the seemingly related October Surprise up close and intensely for ABC News and The Village Voice.
In case you’ve forgotten, each imbroglio was a grab bag of mind-bending non-sequiturs.
The alleged October Surprise plot, vintage 1980, pitted candidate Reagan against Jimmy Carter in the Iran hostage negotiations.
Iran Contra, vintage 1981-1986, involved, first off, the alleged sale of America-made arms to Iran by Israeli brokers — with a greenlight from the Reagan administration. Purpose: to liberate American hostages, these held in Lebanon, and to strengthen Iran’s hand against everybody’s favorite bad boy, Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
It was never determined by any journalist I know whether the earliest of these improbable arms sales, the ones in 1981, received an explicit okay from newly elected President Reagan. Nor did any of us figure out whether they were linked to the October Surprise chimera – i.e., whether they represented Reagan’s belated payoff to the Iranians for delaying release of the American hostages they had taken until he had beaten Carter for the presidency.
There was a lot of speculation about this, but the evidence never materialized.
Proceeds from later Israel-to-Iran arms sales, circa 1985, which were rubberstamped by President Reagan were used by his operatives, including Oliver North, to buy weapons for anticommunist forces in central America after Congress had shut down direct aid to them.
Deliveries were handled by an assortment of shady actors including some with drug connections, like Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, who despite being a favorite of Israel (who knew?) was later deposed by Reagan’s successor, President George Bush, senior,
If you’re confused about all this, imagine what it was like trying to disentangle these particulars in real time with the GOP and various other stakeholders running constant interference.
In early 1992, after spending some time investigating Iran Contra, I wrote a series for the Voice about the October Surprise. I exposed as a fraud one of the main self-described plotters, an elusive Oregonian named Richard Brenneke.
Hitching a ride on initial coverage of the scandal, Brenneke had told conspiracy theorists Barbara Honegger, Gary Sick and anyone else who would listen that during the run-up to the 1980 election he had piloted Reagan acolytes (he singled out Donald Gregg, a former CIA colleague from my own Vietnam days) to secret meetings in Paris with Iranian reps. The mission of these envoys, according to Brenneke, was to sabotage Carter’s hostage release initiatives.
It was a riveting story, but it did not pan out. I obtained credit card receipts showing that Brenneke had been elsewhere on the dates of the alleged Paris flights.
My articles were picked up by Congressional Republicans and used to cast doubt on the entire October Surprise story.
But in the course of my reporting, I had uncovered a new angle, titillating evidence that the Israelis, who were no friends of Jimmy Carter, had played spoiler in the hostage release game, ultimately to candidate Reagan’s benefit.
For many months prior to the election, I was told, Israeli operatives had been secretly bargaining with Teheran to ensure the safe exit of Iranian Jews. At candidate Reagan’s behest – again this was all very speculative reporting – these same operatives had encouraged the Iranians to believe they could profit by holding onto the American hostages until after the U.S. election, because a Republican administration would give them better terms.
I never took any of this to print because I could not substantiate what seemed to be an outrageous smear against Israel, a soul obsession for me, though I am not Jewish. But because of my prior extensive coverage of Iran Contra, I kept getting a tingling sensation at the back of my neck. The well-established fact that the Israelis had been knee-deep in the Iran Contra skullduggery, as secret spear-carriers (and arms peddlers) for Reagan, lent credence – certainly a scintilla of logic — to the prospect that they had played a similarly supportive role in the October surprise business.
I had every reason to let such suspicions roam. Only a few months before, through a series of weird circumstances, I had wound up serving as a consultant on CIA-related issues to the lawyers representing newly toppled Manual Noriega during his trial in Miami on drug and racketeering charges. I learned from Noriega himself that the Israelis, in particular his Mossad case officer, Mica Harari, had helped coordinate Noriega’s own efforts to supply the Contras, which were designed to complement Oliver North’s “off the books” operations to the same purpose.
Indeed, it appears that arms captured by the Israelis in Lebanon were often part of Noriega-orchestrated weapons shipments to the Contras and other regional clients and that many of the dedicated “private” transports were piloted by covert CIA contractors or secret Israeli hirelings working in tandem with U.S. operatives.
It was this jerry-built hybrid operation that often figured in contemporaneous allegations of drugs-for-arms deals and stories about commingled deliveries of the same. With Noriega handling quality control, just about anything is imaginable.
When I read the Times’ story about Barnes and Connally’s outreach to Israel (and others) to kneecap Carter’s hostage negotiations, I cursed myself for not having dug deeply enough into Reagan’s evident penchant for outsourcing unsavory tasks to our consummate mid-east ally.
In my real time reporting I had never been able to put the Israelis credibly at the center of the alleged October Surprise mischief or credibly implicate the Reagan campaign in it. And alas, the Times’ article provides no specifics about the Barnes-Connally pitch to Israel or whether it registered at all. But even given these lingering question marks, for the first time the specter of a secret cabal by Reagan campaigners and Israeli agents to game the 1980 election takes on a terrible clarity.