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(Continued)
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
What we have before us today is the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories--the so-called October surprise.
This theory has a life of its own. It was born amid the followers of Lyndon LaRouche, and nurtured by the enterprising investigative journalists at ABC's `Nightline' and PBS `Frontline.' Now that the key sources of the theory have been thoroughly debunked, one would think we could allow the theory to die a long-overdue death. But for some reason, we undertake a Senate investigation, at a cost approaching $600,000 in order to keep it alive awhile longer, which would amount to a full employment act for a number of lawyers as well.
I have watched some of this story unfold from my vantage point as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. When some of these allegations arose during the confirmation hearings of Robert Gates, we explored the credibility of some key sources such as Ari Ben Menashe and Richard Babiyan. In doing so, we found that we could quickly dismiss them.
I was bothered, Mr. President, when we heard no retractions when ABC News finally got around to polygraphing Mr. Menashe and discovered that he was not telling the truth. Instead, they simply turned to other sources such as Jamshid Hashemi. If it is possible to find a witness less credible than Ari Ben Menashe, I think ABC News may have found one in Mr. Hashemi.
Until I saw the recent pieces in Newsweek and the New Republic, I was quite concerned that American investigative journalism was headed straight for the supermarket tabloid rack. Thankfully, some investigative journalists working for the New Republic and Newsweek directed their considerable talents toward seeking the truth, and in the process, may
have helped to save the medium itself.
Here is what the New Republic said in its November 18 article entitled `The Conspiracy that Wasn't.'
* * the truth is, the conspiracy as currently postulated is a total fabrication. None of the evidence cited to support the October Surprise stands up to any scrutiny. The key sources on whose word the story rests are documented frauds and imposters. Representing themselves as intelligence operatives, they have concocted allegations that are demonstrably false.* * *
Newsweek, in its November 11 edition, said:
Newsweek has found, after a long investigation including interviews with government officials and other knowledgeable sources around the world, that the key claims of the purported eyewitnesses and accusers simply do not hold up. What the evidence does show is the murky history of a conspiracy theory run wild.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent those two articles be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
It is a story that will not die--a dark tale of conspiracy and political intrigue that, if true, would constitute something like an accusation of treason against George Bush, the late William Casey and other members of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Briefly put, the `October Suprise' theory holds that Bush or Casey--or possible Bush and Casey--cut a secret deal with Iran in the summer or fall of 1980 to delay the release of 52 U.S. hostages until after the November elections. Their objective, or so the theory holds, was to deny Jimmy Carter whatever political advantage the hostages' last-minute release might create--or, in short, to swing the 1980 election toward Reagan and Bush.
The October Surprise theory has been kicking around for the past 11 years, and it has become a mother lode for conspiracy junkies of all political persuasions. It got its biggest boost early this year when Gary Sick, a former member of Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff, wrote an article on the op-ed page of The New York Times asserting his belief that it could have happened. Sick, who has already written a much praised book (`All Fall Down') about the Iran hostage crisis, is about to publish a second book laying out his case for the October Surprise. The new book, to be published this week by Random House, is entitled `October Surprise.' The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, meanwhile, voted last week to launch an investigation of the October Surprise theory, and the House Rules Committee is scheduled to vote this week whether or not to launch a separate investigation headed by Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana. So, true or not, the October Surprise is about to become yet another exhibit in the Beltway's chamber of Alleged Political Horrors--to escalate, along with the BCCI scandal, the Iran-contra affair and the savings and loan crisis, from cocktail-party gossip to subpoenas, sworn testimony and endless disputes among lawyers, investigators and witnesses.
Like all good conspiracy theories, this one forces all who would deny it to prove a negative--to prove that something did not happen. As any logician can testify, proving a negative is ultimately impossible. Equally disturbing, the October Surprise theory has now become complicated and so hideously detailed that no reasonable person can say with absolute certainty that there was no conspiracy and no deal. But Newsweek has found, after a long investigation including interviews with government officials and other knowledgeable sources around the world, that the key claims of the purported eyewitnesses and accusers simply do not hold up. What the evidence does show is the murky history of a conspiracy theory run wild.
Washington in the fall of 1980 was, like the rest of the United States, obsessed with the U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran. It was a national crisis: public officials, the voters and the news media were grasping at every rumor. Jimmy Carter, then running for a second term, was almost completely preoccupied by obscure events half the world away; so was the Reagan campaign. In April, the Carter administration launched a desperate military gamble to extract the hostages from captivity, and failed, miserably, in the smoking wreckage at Desert One. The campaign proceeded: Carter turned back Edward Kennedy's challenge in the Democratic primaries, and Reagan dispatched George Bush. The hostage crisis, seemingly at an impasse, continued to simmer amid the hullabaloo of an election campaign. The election came and went with Carter's landslide defeat--and in December, with the hostages still held in Iran, rumors of some sort of backstage contract between the Republican campaign and the Iranian government first appeared in print.
The outlet was hardly prestigious: the Executive Intelligence Review, a periodical published by followers of right-wing political
extremist Lyndon LaRouche. On Dec. 2, 1980. EIR ran a story alleging that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a target for LaRouche followers, `held a series of secret meetings during the week of Nov. 12 in Paris with representatives of Ayatollah Beheshti, leader of the fundamentalist clergy in Iran.' This was attributed to `Iranian sources' in Paris. The article continued: `Top level intelligence sources in Reagan's inner circle confirmed Kissinger's unreported talks with the Iranian mullahs, but stressed that the Kissinger initiative was totally unauthorized by the president-elect. `If you know any way of controlling that man,' said one Reagan insider, `please let me know'.' (Kissinger said the EIR report was `totally untrue.')
The story said that this meeting was the climax of a prior liaison: `. . . it appears that the pattern of cooperation between the Khomeini people and circles nominally in Reagan's camp began approximately six to eight weeks ago, at the height of President Carter's efforts to secure an arms-for-hostage deal with Teheran. Carter's failure to secure the deal, which a number of observers believe cost him the Nov. 4 election, apparently resulted from an intervention in Teheran by pro-Reagan British intelligence circles and the Kissinger faction.'
EIR said that its source `stressed' that those involved in this effort `did not have the approval of Ronald Reagan himself.' Fast-forward to 1983, when the LaRoucheans returned to the story. An article in the Sept. 2 issue of their journal New Solidarity gave more detail. `During the pre-election period, Carter and his crowd were frantically trying to negotiate a deal based on arms and spare-parts shipments, which Iran desperately needed after the outbreak of war with Iraq on Sept. 22 . . . The deal . . . fell through when the hard-line mullahs boycotted the Majlis in late October. Ayatollah Beheshti--known as the most pro-Soviet of the mullahs--was the key mover behind this.'
When the story got its next boost--in an April 1987 article in The Miami Herald--it was from former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani Sadr, by now in exile in Paris. Bani Sadr `said he learned after the hostage release that two of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomein's advisers had been involved in negotiations with the Reagan camp. The negotiations were to delay release of the hostages until after Reagan became president . . . The former president identified the two as Hashemi Rafsanjani [now himself Iran's president] and Mohammed Beheshti.' Bani Sadr said he had asked both men about this. `They laughed.' he said. `They didn't say no'.'
The Herald's story didn't get much play. But when Bani Sadr next spoke, to Flora Lewis of The New York Times in August 1987, the story grew. With The New York Times, Bani Sadr was more specific than he had been with The Miami Herald. He said negotiations with the Carter administration had been going well. `But then in October, everything suddenly stopped. My aides found out it was because the group in charge of the hostage policy, Rafsanjani, Mohammed Beheshti and Khomeini's son, did not want Carter to win the election. There was a meeting in Paris between a representative of Beheshti and a representative of the Reagan campaign.' These and subsequent events, Lewis wrote, `confirm for him persistent rumors that the Reagan campaign offered arms if the hostages were not released until after the 1980 election. . . .' The story had finally made it into the mainstream.
The timing was propitious--high summer, so to speak, for conspiracy buffs. The reason was the Iran-contra scandal, which proved that the Reagan administration had indeed engaged in secret dealings with Iran. Although the exact starting point of those secret negotiations remains obscure to this day, it seems clear that the roots of Iran-contra run deeper than anyone has been able to document publicly. The Reagan White House, it seems clear, was obsessed by Iran during the early 1980s. Iran-contra also showed that the administration was eager to engage in covert action, and that it was ready to lie, destroy documents and cover up a range of covert activities that violated the law.
Contragate, in short, created fertile ground for the October Surprise theory. Reporting in November 1987, the joint investigating committee created by the House and Senate relegated the October Surprise rumors to a footnote. `There have been allegations that officials of the 1980 Reagan campaign--in order to prevent a pre-election announcement.
by President Carter (an `October Surprise')--met with Iranian emissaries and agreed to ship arms to Iran in exchange for a post-election release of hostages,' the report stated. `Reagan campaign aides were, in fact, approached by individuals who claimed to be Iranian emissaries about potential release of hostages, as were other campaign staffs. The committee was told that the approaches were rejected and found no credible evidence to suggest that any discussions were held or arrangement reached on delaying release of hostages or arranging an early arms-for-hostages deal.'
It is likely that the October Surprise would have died somewhere in late 1987, except for the appearance of a group of apparently knowledgeable, conspiracy-minded `super-sources.' Journalists are vulnerable to the lure of a super-source--another Deep Throat, someone who knows all and pieces everything together in a nice, neat package. In the October Surprise case, there are four would-be Deep Throats: Barbara Honegger, Richard Brenneke, Jamshid Hashemi and Ari Ben-Menashe. At some point each has claimed first-person knowledge of the conspiracy. The stories they told overlapped in broad outline--and in some cases, they compared stories, swapped details and helped each other become more convincing. Journalists committed to the notion of the October Surprise often acted as a conduit between them.
Barbara Honegger: Honegger was a researcher in Reagan's 1980 campaign and worked at the White House and the Justice Department until 1983. In summer of 1987, Honegger claimed that in late October 1980, in the Reagan campaign headquarters in the Washington suburb of Arlington, she had heard a jubilant staffer say, `We don't have to worry about an October Surprise. Dick cut a deal.' Dick, presumably, was Richard Allen, the Reagan campaign's top foreign-policy adviser and subsequently Reagan's first national-security adviser. It was the first confirmation from inside--a bull's-eye for the conspiracy theorists and the journalists who were following their trail.
But there were several problems. The most basic was that Honegger was never able to identify this alleged staffer or say whether she had any reason to believe the staffer knew what he was talking about. The second was that Honegger, who published a book, `October Surprise,' in 1989, herself seemed to have some difficulty in separating fact from fiction. Even Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for The Nation magazine and a sometime proponent of the October Surprise theory, said her expose was `diffuse and naive.'
Richard Brenneke: A businessman from Portland, Ore., Brenneke claims to have worked for the CIA for 18 years as a contract operative. He met Honegger in August 1988 in Washington, where she told him about her theories on the October surprise. Brenneke, astonishingly enough, claimed he had been present when the deal was done. He said the meeting had taken place in Paris, at the Hotel Raphael, on Oct. 19, 1980. And Brenneke confirmed what Honegger already thought: William Casey, then Reagan's campaign manager and later CIA director during Iran-contra, had represented the Reagan-Bush campaign. Donald Gregg, then a member of Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff and later a national-security adviser for Vice President Bush, had been there, too. The Iranians were two arms dealers, Manucher Ghorbanifar and Cyrus Hashemi.
Then, two weeks later, Bani Sadr expanded his previous story. In Playboy magazine, Bani Sadr made the most surprising charge so far--George Bush was also present in Paris. (In a scathing story on the October Surprise, The New Republic reported last week that Bani Sadr has now retracted his claim that Bush was present.) Brenneke said he, too, could confirm that Bush was in Paris--and he said so, under oath, in Denver on Sept. 23, 1988.
Brenneke was testifying on behalf of Heinrich Rupp, 58, a pilot and gold dealer who had been convicted of bank fraud. Rupp was an old friend, Brenneke said, the two had been involved in covert ops for the CIA. Brenneke gave senstational testimony. He said he had worked for the CIA for 18 years, until 1985. He said that on Oct. 19, 1980, Rupp had flown `Mr. Bush, Mr. Casey, and a number of other people to Paris, France, from the United States for a meeting with Iranian representatives.' Brenneke said he had been directly involved in one of what he said were three meetings with the Iranians. He listed the Americans present as Bush, Casey, Donald Gregg and Richard Allen. He said the Iranians included Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was then speaker of the Iranian Parliament and now president of Iran, and Cyrus Hashemi.
Brenneke's testimony made news--and among those who read it, with mounting fury, was the investigator from Sen. John Kerry's subcommittee, Jack Blum. Blum had spent thousands of hours checking what Brenneke had told him and had begun to believe that Brenneke was a fraud. The final proof, for Blum, came when he read Brenneke's assurance to the judge in Denver. `I will say, your honor, I have made these statements to Senator Kerry's committee and the United States Senate--again, under oath. . . .' Blum knew that was not true Brenneke had never mentioned any involvement in the October Surprise. Blum pressed the U.S. attorney's office in Denver to file perjury charges, and Brenneke was indicted in May 1989.
The trial, in April 1990, pitted Brenneke against the U.S. government--and the government lost. Donald Gregg, now U.S. ambassador to South Korea, testified he had not been in Paris on Oct. 19 or 20, 1980. Two of Casey's former secretaries said he had not been out of the country at that time. Two Secret Service agents said they were guarding Bush on the campaign trail when the meetings allegedly took place. A CIA records specialist said there was no trace that Brenneke had ever worked for the agency. But the government's case was sloppy, and Brenneke's lawyers played on the jury's doubts so skillfully that Brenneke was acquitted. In the process, he said he never meant to testify that he had actually seen Bush in Paris--only that he had been told Bush was there.
Ari Ben-Menashe: Ben-Menashe first surfaced as an October Surprise source in 1990, while he was being held in a federal prison in New York City on charges of attempting to sell U.S.-made military transport planes to Iran. Tried in October, he was acquitted after maintaining he had the secret approval of both the Bush administration and the Israeli government. Although Israeli officials deny it, Ben-Menashe claims he was an Israeli intelligence agent and an adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Like Richard Brenneke, Ben-Menashe has been interviewed many times by journalists looking into the October Surprise (Newsweek, Nov. 4). Ben-Menashe says he, too, was in Paris on Oct. 19-20, 1980, as a member of a six-person Israeli team that helped set up the meeting. He says he saw Bush and Casey there, and that they were accompanied by Robert Gates, who is now George Bush's nominee as CIA director. He says the Iranian delegation was led by the Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, not Cyrus Hashemi and Manucher Ghorbanifar. He told Newsweek that the meeting took place at the Hotel Ritz, not the Raphael or Crillon as Richard Brenneke claims; he also told another investigator, Israeli author Shmuel Segev, that the meeting was held at the Hotel George V. ABC News gave Ben-Menashe a lie-detector test in November 1990; according to Christopher Isham, an ABC producer, Ben-Menashe failed it.
Jamshid Hashemi: Jamshid Hashemi is a younger brother of Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer who died in London in 1986. Jamshid has been a source for ABC News and for `Frontline,' the PBS documentary program. He claims that he, his brother Cyrus and Karrubi met William Casey in a hotel in Madrid in July 1980, to begin negotiating a secret deal with the Reagan-Bush campaign. There is at least some corroborating evidence for this claim. For one thing, knowledgeable officials agree that Cyrus Hashemi played a minor role during the hostage crisis--offering to help establish communications between the Carter White House and Iranian leaders. For another, as ABC-News reported, the register at the Madrid Plaza Hotel actually shows that `A. Hashemi' and `Jamshid Halaj' were registered as guests at the time in question, late July 1980.
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There are, of course, myriad further details to these shifting and mutually contradictory allegations. But the essentials are clear. There were two sets of meetings, the first between Karrubi, the Hashemi brothers and William Casey in Madrid, and the other in Paris in October. The second meeting involved either Casey and Gregg--or Casey, Bush and Gates--on the American side. On the Iranian side, depending on which `witness' is believed, it involved either Cyrus Hashemi and Manucher Ghorbanifar or the Ayatollah Karrubi. Bush, Gates and Gregg have all denied that they were in Paris on those dates, and that they ever tried to arrange a deal with any Iranian leaders. Casey is of course dead. So is Cyrus Hashemi. Ayatollah Karrubi has denied ever visiting Madrid.
A team of Newsweek correspondents has spent much of the past eight weeks exploring the evidence for these allegations. The Newsweek team believes that:
Casey did not go to Madrid: Jamshid Hashemi told his story at length to PBS's `Frontline' series in April and to ABC's `Nightline' in June. He would not appear on camera for either program, and he did not reply to Newsweek's requests for an interview. He alleges that in March or April 1980, Casey made contact with Cyrus and himself while the pair were on a visit to Washington. Casey, he says, wanted to establish contact with an Iranian who was close to Ayatollah Khomeini. The brothers agreed to act as go-betweens. The meeting took time to set up, but in July, Cyrus asked Jamshid to bring the Ayatollah Karrubi from Teheran to Madrid to meet with Casey. According to Jamshid, Mehdi Karrubi arrived with his brother Hassan.
They talked with Casey over two consecutive days, Jamshid says--two morning sessions of some three hours apiece. Then in August, Jamshid says, there was a second meeting between Casey and Karrubi, also in Madrid. After an exhaustive search of press reports, of Casey's diaries and of the diaries of his colleagues, ABC's `Nightline' reported that there was a three-day window--July 27, 28 and 29--during which Casey's whereabouts were unknown. On the 30th, ABC reported, Casey was being interviewed by an ABC correspondent at Reagan campaign headquarters and dined that night with Bush in Washington.
But Casey's whereabouts during the July `window' are convincingly established by contemporary records at the Imperial War Museum in London. Casey, it turns out, took a three-day breather from the campaign to participate in the Anglo-American Conference on the History of the Second World War. As a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services--the forerunner of the CIA--Casey delivered a paper on OSS operations in Europe during the war. He went to a reception for conference participants on the evening of July 28, and he was photographed there. He delivered his papers on the morning of July 29.
ABC News acknowledged these facts in an update later in June--but still maintained that Casey had enough time on July 27 and 28 to fly to Madrid to meet with the Iranians. A close examination of the conference records by Newsweek, however, demonstrates that Casey in fact was present at the conference sessions in London on July 28. Historian Jonathan Chadwick, who organized the conference, kept a precise, day-by-day and session-by-session record of who was present and who was not. According to Chadwick's records, Casey was present at 9:30 a.m. on the 28th, stayed for the second morning session, leaving after lunch and returning at 4 p.m. He was also present, of course, on the 29th, when he delivered his paper. `I was very excited that such a big man was coming, but it turned out to be a disappointment,' Chadwick said. `He just talked it through in a very gravelly voice. He came over as a very tough sort.'
There are records showing where Casey slept and ate as well--at the Royal Army Medical College, close to the Imperial War Museum. Officials there say they have a bill in the name of `W. Casey' charging him for a room on the nights of July 27 and 28, and for `messing' (eating a meal) on the 28th and 29th. There is, in short, no possibility that Casey could have held meetings with anyone on two successive days in Madrid.
Finally, there are large questions about Jamshid's story. He told ABC's Ted Koppel, for instance, that he and Cyrus made big profits in the arms trade as a direct result of the meeting in Madrid. But there is little evidence that the Hashemis had much money to spare. Elliot Richardson, who was Cyrus Hashemi's attorney in a 1984 arms-smuggling case, said that Cyrus seemed to be dealing in a `remarkably petty' quantity of arms.
The Paris meeting did not occur: The vast discrepancies between Ben-Menashe's account and Brenneks's account show, at the very least, that one of the two men is lying. But the weight of evidence suggests that both versions are false.
Ben-Menashe has changed his story repeatedly: did it happen at the Ritz, as he told Newsweek, or at the Hotel George V, as he told Shmuel Segev? He is also confused about dates. In an interview with Newsweek, Ben-Menashe said he was sure it was Oct. 19 or Oct. 20 because it was close to the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Sukkot, a movable feast, occurred on Sept. 25 in 1980.
There is reason to believe, meanwhile, that Brenneke was nowhere near Paris on Oct. 19-20, 1980. The evidence consists of Brenneke's own credit-card receipts and desk diary for that period of time. According to a recent story in New York's Village Voice newspaper by Frank Snepp, a former CIA agent who is now a freelance journalist and investigator, Brenneke's credit-card receipts show that he stayed at a motel in Seattle, Wash., from Oct. 17 to Oct. 19. His desk calendar, Snepp also reported, showed that he was home in Portland on Oct. 20. These records, Snepp said, were shown to him by Peggy Adler Robohm, a writer who at first admired and wholly believed Brenneke's stories. Robohm got the records from Brenneke himself, during a short-lived collaboration on his autobiography. Fearful of being caught in a literary fraud, Robohm ended their collaboration last summer.
(Brenneke did not return repeated calls from Newsweek. But one of his lawyers, Mike Scott, said Snepp's story was false.)
There is, finally, solid evidence that George Bush did not go to Paris on Oct. 19-20, 1980--the U.S. Secret Service logs recorded where candidate Bush was on those days. Those logs show that Bush campaigned in New Jersey and Pennsylvania on Oct. 17, and that he went to the Chevy Chase Country Club, outside Washington, during the day on Oct. 19. They also show that he delivered a campaign speech before the Zionist Organization of America at a Washington hotel that night. The logs show that he returned to his home at about 9:30 on the night of the 19th. The next day, Oct. 20, the Secret Service logs and press reports both record that Bush was back on the campaign trail in New Haven, Conn. Given the travel time involved, there is no reasonable possibility that he could have flown to Paris, met the Iranians and returned to the United States in that time period.
These details may or may not convince conspiracy theorists who cling to the October Surprise--just as the Warren Commission report failed to convince a whole generation of would-be investigators that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy.
But the evidence on, Bush and Casey's whereabouts--and on the bona fides of their accusers--must also be considered against the broad history of U.S.-Iran relations in the 1980s. Indeed, the October Surprise theory, rests on two broad-brush assumptions that are highly suspect.
One is the notion that Iran must have gotten U.S. weapons from the Reagan administration in return for delaying the hostages' release. Despite the record of the Iran-contra scandal, however, there is oddly little evidence of any substantial weapons `payoff' to Iran. An authoritative analysis by the Stockholm international Peace Research Institute shows that Iran spent approximately $5 billion on arms between 1980 and 1983--and $3 billion of that total went for military equipment from communist-bloc countries. It is true, apparently, that Israel supplied Iran with $50 million worth of spare parts for U.S.-built F-4 Phantom jets in the spring of 1980. But $50 million is chicken feed for swinging a U.S. presidential election. And Iran never got spare parts for its more potent F-14s, which rarely flew during the Iran-Iraq War but which could well have deterred Iraqi air attacks on Teheran and other cities. Only the United States could have provided the parts. Arms dealer Ian Smalley, who made a fortune selling weapons to Iran, says he does not believe that the Reagan administration cut a deal. `If the U.S. had been in the market, we would have been out of business,' Smalley said.
A second pivotal notion is that secret negotiations on the hostage issue between the Carter administration and the Iranian government inexplicably broke down during October 1980. (Gary Sick, among others. places great emphasis on this fact.) But Iranian leaders were arguably distracted by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, which began on Sept. 22. In a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, former Carter administration official Harold Saunders argues that the war `diverted and absorbed the attention of Iran's leaders'--and Saunders said that only `skillful management' by Rafsanjani got the Iranian Parliament to resolve its disagreements on the hostage issue. If, as some October Surprise proponents have claimed, Rafsanjani participated in the alleged secret deal with the Reagan campaign, why did he try to resolve the hostage impasse while Carter was still in power? Then, too, many Iranians hated Jimmy Carter. Eric Rouleau, who is now France's ambassador to Turkey, was a journalist, in Teheran at the time. Rouleau, who knew many Iranian leaders personally, says he heard no gossip about any pending deal with the Reagan campaign. But the Iranians were well aware that releasing the hostages could help Carter win the election--and Rouleau says there was `a lot of discussion, lots of declarations, to the effect that the Iranians would never give any kind of `gift' to President Carter.'
There is, finally, one tantalizing coincidence in the secret record of the hostage crisis. On July 1, or July 2, 1980, Cyrus Hashemi met with a member of the Iranian leadership at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. He was, apparently, acting as a go-between for the Carter administration, which by then was desperately seeking some new avenue to reopen the hostage negotiations. (That meeting, Newsweek sources say, led to a last-ditch diplomatic initiative by Secretary of State Edmund Muskie in September.) Within a week, according to Bani Sadr's diaries, Bani Sadr was told by the Ayatollah Khomeini's nephew that Iran had been approached by Reagan's men with a proposition on the hostages. The meeting site--Spain--was mentioned. Could it be that the Ayatollah's nephew confused Reagan with Carter--and that the whole notion of the October Surprise stems from that simple mistake?
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Few op-ed pieces prove to be as popular or long-lived as the one Gary Sick wrote for The New York Times last April. He claimed that in October 1980 officials in Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign made a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election. In return, the United States purportedly arranged for Israel to ship weapons to Iran. The charges of an `October Surprise' weren't new. They had been circulating in the press since 1987. But Sick, who had served on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff and is the author of the acclaimed All Fall Down (1985), an account of the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, gave new impetus to the story. So did a show the following day by pbs's `Frontline,' in which Sick was featured.
When Sick first wrote about the release of the hostages in his book, he explained that there were several reasons they were freed in January 1981: Iranian enmity for Carter, the complications of unfreezing Iranian assets, the disorganization of the Iranian regime, and the protracted nature of U.S.-Iranian negotiations. But in his op-ed piece, Sick wrote that in preparation for a new book on Iran, October Surprise (to be published this month), he interviewed `hundreds of people' who told him about a secret Reagan-Bush hostage deal in 1980. What finally persuaded him was `the absence of contradictions on the key elements of the story' provided by his sources. Sick became convinced that William Casey, then Reagan's campaign manager, had met secretly in Madrid in the summer of 1980 with Iranian intermediaries to negotiate a secret deal, and that Casey and other officials met in Paris in October 1980, after which Iran broke off negotiations with the Carter administration. Sick also wrote that three of his sources saw then Vice President George Bush in Paris as well, but that `in the absence of further information, I have not made up my mind about this allegation.'
The Sick piece and the `Frontline' story prompted a spate of alarmed editorials, an indignant request from former President Carter for a `blue-ribbon panel' to investigate the charges, and congressional inquiries into the October Surprise.
But the truth is, the conspiracy as currently postulated is a total fabrication. None of the evidence cited to support the October Surprise stands up to scrutiny. The key sources on whose word the story rests are documented frauds and imposters. Representing themselves as intelligence operatives, they have concocted allegations that are demonstrably false, and their stories, full of internal inconsistencies, are also contradictory. Almost every primary source cited by Sick or `Frontline' has been indicted or was the subject of a federal investigation prior to claiming to be a `participant' in the October Surprise. Finally, evidence we have uncovered shows that William Casey and George Bush could not have been present at the meetings alleged by the sources.
The term `October Surprise' was actually coined by Reagan campaign aides who worried in the fall of 1980 that Carter would launch an operation to free the hostages in order to win the election. Thus in the fall of 1980 members of the Reagan campaign team often met to discuss developments regarding the hostages. there was concern that Carter would do something to exploit the hostage situation, and some of the things the Republicans did--such as stealing Carter's debate book--were sleazy. But they certainly did not amount to treason, as proponents of the October Surprise have charged.
The conspiracy theory began to catch on in April 1987. On the front page of the Miami Herald, Alfonso Chardy reported on a secret meeting in early October 1980 with Richard Allen and Laurence Silberman, then foreign policy advisers to Reagan, and Robert McFarlane, then an aide to Senator John Tower on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The article said they `met secretly' (it was actually in the hotel lobby) for `20-30 minutes' at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., with a `man who said he represented the Iranian government and offered to release to candidate Reagan 52 American hostages being held in Tehran.' Allen told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last May that he went at the `insistence' of McFarlane, who only indicated that the meeting was about the Middle East. Although the article quoted Allen as saying that he rejected the man's offer as `absurd' and told him to deal directly with the Carter administration, the article strongly implied that this meeting was part of a new scandal linked to the Iran-contra affair. Allen's decision not to inform Carter officials of the meeting fueled suspicion about the story.
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the president of Iran from January 1980 through June 1981, was quoted as claiming that he `learned in 1981' that Iranian leaders Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Beheshti had collaborated with Reagan campaign aides to release the hostages. (Beheshti and Rafsanjani, bitter political opponents of Bani-Sadr, had forced him from power. Beheshti was later killed by a bomb in 1981, and Rafsanjani is now president of Iran.) Bani-Sadr also charged that the Reagan officials had promised Iran that it would receive weapons for its war with Iraq. But Bani-Sadr stipulated that the promises of weapons were not linked to the release of the hostages--and furthermore, he didn't know if any weapons were eventually shipped.
In early July 1987 the October Surprise got a big push from the Nation with Christopher Hitchens's charge that the Reagan campaign assured the Iranians that `if they kept the American hostages until after the election,' the Iranians would be rewarded with arms. Hitchens quoted Barbara Honegger, a Reagan campaign researcher and low-level worker in the Reagan White House, as saying that in late October 1980 she had overheard an unidentified `staffer' say, `We don't have to worry about an `October Surprise.' Dick cut a deal,' presumably a reference to Richard Allen.
As these charges began circulating, Bani-Sadr's memory improved dramatically. On August 3 Flora Lewis reported in a New York Times column, based on an interview, that Bani-Sadr now held without doubt that the `Reagan campaign offered arms if the hostages were not released until after the 1980 election.' He also asserted that in October 1980 his `aides found out' that Rafsanjani and Beheshti had delayed the release of the hostages, that there was a meeting between Beheshti and a `Reagan campaign official' in Paris, and that he `learned later' that Allen, Silberman, and McFarlane met with an Iranian envoy in Washington.
Bani-Sadr's memory continued to improve. On August 9, 1987, Miami Herald reporter Chardy quoted him as now saying that `secret contacts between Reagan and Khomeini representatives' had fixed a deal in October 1980 to free the hostages. (Note that according to Sick in a 1988 Los Angeles Times story, `Bani-Sadr had nothing to do with the negotiations. He was completely out of it.') The article also reported that the Reagan administration approved of, or at least condoned, Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981. All the ingredients for the cabal were now in place.
Then, in an August 1987 interview with Leslie Cockburn for her book Out of Control, Bani-Sadr said that he knew ahead of time that Rafsanjani and Beheshti sent an Iranian envoy to meet with Allen and Silberman and that he even protested to Rafsanjani and Khomeini that it was `dangerous' to renege on the negotiations with Carter. Remember that initially he claimed to have no prior knowledge of any such meeting. Later he said he `learned' about the meeting in 1981. Now he was saying that he knew of the meeting ahead of time.
It got better. The following year, in a September 1988 article in Playboy by Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, which painted the most comprehensive October Surprise conspiracy to date, Bani-Sadr said definitively that George Bush was the Reagan campaign official who met in Paris with Beheshti in October 1980. (A year later Bani-Sadr said he had a `document' showing that Bush was present at the meeting--but he could not disclose the document because `the life of the writer . . . and the lives of many people would fall into danger.') Bani-Sadr's accusations about Bush prompted an editorial in The Washington Post--not especially disposed to defending Bush in general--in October 1988 that noted Bani-Sadr's motivation in `smearing Bush.' The Post wrote, `Bani-Sadr has to hope that U.S.-Iranian relations will continue to be antagonistic if the Iranian opposition is ever to have a chance of gaining important American support. His effort to smear Bush betrays concern about tension lessening if the Republicans stay in power.'
Emboldened by the eager response to his allegation by international journalists, Bani-Sadr wrote his memoirs, which went beyond even the October Surprise conspiracy. In My Turn To Speak: Iran, the Revolution & Secret Deals with the U.S. (published in France in 1989, and in the United States in 1991), Bani-Sadr portrayed himself as a man victimized by the double dealings of the Khomeini regime and the Reagan campaign.
At the same time a new `source' emerged--who was fortuitously able to confirm Bani-Sadr's allegations. His name was Richard Brenneke, an Oregon businessman, and he surpassed even Bani-Sadr in his ability to recall events that he had admitted earlier he knew nothing about.
Brenneke claimed to have worked for the CIA and FBI in addition to the Mossad and the French, Italian, and other intelligence services. He first surfaced in late November 1986, immediately after the official disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair, when he claimed that he personally had informed then Vice President Bush's office in February 1986 of secret details of the Iran-Contra affair. Reporters flocked to Brenneke as he began propounding incredible tales of U.S. and other covert operations. For example, he was a primary source for a front-page New York Times story on February 2, 1987, about the `Demavand project,' a purportedly classified CIA-Pentagon operation to ship billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons, including tanks, bombers, and helicopters to Iran. Brenneke, the article reported, had provided the Times with `documents and tel-exes' including a letter of reference, dated June 20, 1979, which stated that he had been employed by the CIA for thirteen years and that the CIA `found him to be thorough, competent, and very trustworthy.'
The CIA and the Defense Department issued categorical denials of the story. Other reporters at the Times began looking into Brenneke's allegations and his background. Both began to collapse. According to a veteran New York Times reporter, `We soon found out that Brenneke was . . . an absolute liar. Even the documents he gave us were forged, including the CIA letter of reference.'
At The Portland Oregonian, reporters were amused at Brenneke's celebrity status: the paper had reported weeks earlier that Brenneke had greatly `exaggerated' his role in arms sales, that he had said he couldn't remember if he worked at the CIA, that none of his international arms dealing ever came to fruition, and that he had been the subject of an FBI investigation for his suspected role in a check-kiting scheme and a forged airplane title report years earlier.
For the most part, however, the press was willing to suspend disbelief. ABC News quickly ran a series of `investigative' stories based on new Brenneke allegations. In April 1988 the network aired a report based on a `confidential source'--who the network later admitted to be Brenneke--alleging that in 1983 the United States, working with Israeli intelligence, secretly flew weapons to the contras and used the planes on their way back to transport drugs into the United States.
Newsweek followed up with a story by Robert Parry that provided even more details about Brenneke's allegations, including the charge that Donald Gregg, Vice President Bush's national security adviser (now ambassador to South Korea), was part of the drugs-for-weapons operation. Parry suggested that he had independent confirmation of the ABC allegations, but Brenneke was the only named source for both news organizations. Over the next five months Brenneke's claims were the focus of more than 200 national news stories and columns. (One of the few reporters to raise questions about Brenneke was Mark Hosenball, who wrote an article for TNR in June 1988 saying that Parry and ABC had uncritically bought the story of an unreliable witness.)
It seemed there wasn't anything Brenneke did not know. He told The Los Angeles Times that he supplied explosives to a PLO training camp located in western Oregon, a camp about which Oregon law enforcement knew nothing. He told the Seattle Times of his knowledge of Israelis training Colombia drug cartel hit squads. He told the Detroit Free Press that he supplied U.S. intelligence with information from an Iranian military officer that included maps of Qaddafi's headquarters two months before the United States bombed Libya in April 1986. He quickly discovered that it was possible to get away with any allegation in the national security arena: if an intelligence agency already suspect in the public's mind, denied something, that merely reinforced the authenticity of the charges.
By late September 1988 Brenneke, having never mentioned anything about the October Surprise, suddenly emerged as the primary source of the conspiracy in the United States. His disclosures came right after he met Honegger, the former Reagan campaign aide, in August 1988. Honegger had become one of the leading champions of the October Surprise. She claimed to have her own intelligence and confidential sources who `confirmed' the conspiracy and began working on a book called October Surprise, published in 1989.
Honegger herself was no stranger to controversy. A believer in paranormal events (she has an unusual master's degree in `parapsychology'), she claimed a `source' with her voice contacted her in early 1980 to tell her she would get a job with the Reagan administration. She said that an intelligence officer told her that U.S. satellites parted the clouds during Reagan's inauguration to let the sun shine only on Reagan. When she resigned from the Reagan White House, she told a reporter that she had been guided by insights that she described as `channeled information . . . as if it were from the future.'
Honegger says in her book that she met Brenneke on August 22, 1988, in Washington. At the meeting, Brenneke told her that he had learned from his `Iranian contacts' that a secret meeting was held at the Raphael Hotel in Paris on October 19, 1980, between William Casey, Donald Gregg, Iranian arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi, and Iranian merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar. Brenneke told Honegger that he was not present at the Paris meeting, but that he had been in the city that weekend and that his presence there was purely `coincidental.'
Honegger, who had been in touch with Bani-Sadr and was eager to substantiate his story about Bush attending the secret Paris meeting, recounted the allegations. What could Brenneke tell her about `Bush's possible participation'? she asked. Brenneke said he would `make a few phone calls to see the `lay of the land,' and would get back to her.
A week later the Playboy article hit the stands.
On September 23, 1988, Brenneke suddenly recalled that he had attended at least one of the meetings in Paris in October 1980, that there were a total of three meetings held on October 19 and 20, 1980, and that he had played a pivotal role in the October Surprise deal. Brenneke was appearing that day as a character witness at a Denver court for the sentencing of his friend Heinrich Rupp. Trained as a Nazi pilot, Rupp was a Colorado gold dealer who had been convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to forty-one years in jail. Brenneke told the court that Rupp had been prosecuted to shut him up about his involvement in flying Reagan campaign aides to Paris in October 1980.
Brenneke testified that on October 18, 1980, Rupp participated, at the request of the CIA, in a flight taking Bush, Casey, Allen, and Gregg to a meeting in Paris with Iranian representatives to work out a deal to delay the release of American hostages until after the election. He said that Rupp had been a long-time CIA pilot, and that Rupp personally flew Casey to France. Brenneke also said that he attended the third meeting, at which Casey and Cyrus Hashemi (both men were dead by the time of Brenneke's testimony) and Gregg also participated.
Brenneke went on to say that a CIA officer named Robert Kerritt had given him instructions to go to Paris. And as a result of the meetings with Casey and Bush, he claimed that he witnessed an agreement over the `logistics of transferring $40 million [in U.S. funds] for the purchase of weapons [for Iran].' Asked whether he ever played a `role in conveying or transferring that money,' Brenneke said, `I don't believe so.'
After the February 1987 New York Times article had appeared, Brenneke had been contacted by Jack Blum, special investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, headed by Senator John Kerry. He met with Brenneke for hundreds of hours, and a year and a half later Brenneke began telling newspapers that Blum and the other staffers corroborated his allegations about the October Surprise. Moreover, Brenneke testified under oath in the Rupp hearing that he had provided the October Surprise information to the Senate subcommittee and that it was later confirmed by the staffers.
Yet according to Blum and other Senate staffers, not only did Brenneke never mention the October Surprise; the subcommittee found him to be an outright liar. The committee obtained thousands of pages of documents from law enforcement and intelligence agencies and discovered, says Blum, `that nothing he said was true--he had made it up based on what he read in the newspaper or what he was told.'
The Senate subcommittee released a 1,166-page report in December 1988, in which two pages are devoted to Brenneke. Among the conclusions: `The records show that Brenneke was never officially connected to U.S. intelligence.' The report noted that Brenneke `began telling his stories about his `secret' life as a spy' after being stopped by the U.S. Customs Service on his way back from Europe and asked about documents relating to arms deals. `His response was to offer to become a Customs informant,' stated the report. Customs declined the offer. The report also noted that `Brenneke applied for a job with the CIA when he finished school but his application was rejected.'
By May 1989 Brenneke's stories began to catch up with him. A Denver grand jury indicted him for perjury for making false declarations under oath to a federal judge in the Rupp hearing. Brenneke's trial took place in Portland, Oregon, in April 1990. A cia official testified that not only had Brenneke and Rupp never worked for the cia; the agency had never heard of anyone named Robert Kerritt--Brenneke's supposed contact. Secret Service agents testified that Bush had not left the country in the two weeks before the election; two of Casey's secretaries said the same thing about their boss. Then Gregg testified that on the weekend of October 18 and 19, 1980, rather than being at the Paris meetings as Brenneke claimed, he was on vacation at a beach in Delaware; on Monday, October 20, he said he was back at work at the Old Executive Office Building. He recalled that the weather was cloudy and produced a photograph of himself and his daughter on the beach. The back of the photo is stamped `October 1980' from the processing lab. The photo showed a hazy but party sunny sky.
In response, Brenneke's lawyers produced Robert Lynott, a retired Portland tv weatherman who testified that his review of the weather reports showed there were overcast and rainy conditions most of that weekend in Deleware--and that therefore the photo must have been taken at a different time. This turned out to be the key piece of evidence on which the jury concentrated.
Following a three-week trial, Brenneke was acquitted, thanks to the prosecution's incompetence and overconfidence and the defense's success in shrouding Brenneke in the smoke and mirrors of the intelligence world. The prosecution was roundly criticized for not asking for or admitting any documentary evidence. The Secret Service agents didn't bring records to the trial, which made them vulnerable on cross examination. Casey's two secretaries admitted that Casey kept secrets from them, which rendered their testimony questionable in the minds of jurors.
Prosecutors did not introduce into evidence Gregg's datebook, which has the word `beach' penned on the October 18 weekend, or the four computerized White House memoranda that he sent from and received in his office on October 20. Thus the jury became preoccupied with the questions raised by the defense about the alleged date of the photograph. Three jurors later admitted that their `doubt' about the photograph was the main reason they had acquitted Brenneke.
Despite the litany of Brenneke's inconsistencies, October Surprise supporters touted his acquittal as proof of his veracity. Sick says: `Brenneke had the courage of his conviction in taking on the U.S. government on three key allegations [about the presence of Bush, Casey, and Gregg at the Paris meetings], and he was acquitted. . . . The evidence on George bush not being in Paris is less persuasive than that of Donald Gregg. The way Bush has dealt with this is very suspicious. There is not a single shred of evidence that Bush was where he said he was.' `Frontline' embraced Brenneke's trial defense that the weather conditions on the Delaware shore on October 20, 1980, were incompatible with the Gregg photo, claiming that `U.S. government documents show the weather was cold and cloudy that weekend on the Delaware shore.' In fact, detailed hourly weather maps of that weekend from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that on Sunday afternoon weather conditions were compatible with the picture Gregg produced.
`Frontline,' Sick, and October Surprise conspiracy supporters also rely on the `eyewitness testimony' of Brenneke's good friend Rupp. Weeks after Sick published his op-ed piece, in which he indirectly cited Brenneke and Rupp (though not by name), when questioned by reporters skeptical about Brenneke's credibility, he disclaimed any reliance on him. Rupp, however, was still a primary source. He has maintained that his involvement in a loan fraud, which led to the collapse of the Aurora Bank in Colorado in 1985, was actually due to the CIA, for whom he said he was working, as part of a `national security operation' related to Iran-contra.
Like Bani-Sadr and Brenneke, Rupp's sudden recall of the October Surprise came about belatedly. Only after his conviction for bank fraud, Rupp began telling newspapers and TV stations that he flew Casey to Paris on October 18, 1980, and insisted that Bush was present on the tarmac at the French airport. There are numerous inconsistencies in Rupp's account. He was unable to produce any proof that the worked for the CIA, and the plane he said he piloted to Paris that weekend, according to leasing company records, was actually parked in California. Furthermore, Rupp's passport (and Brenneke's too, for that matter) shows no exit from the United States or entry into France in October 1980. Rupp has told reporters he didn't know who his passengers were at the time of the flight to Paris. He claims only to have recognized the `Old Professor' six years later when Casey was shown `testifying on television' about the Iran-contra scandal (a dubious detail, seeing that Casey had a stroke a day before the televised hearings). Rupp also said it was only years later that he recognized the `tall man with the crooked eyes'--the person at the Paris airport--as George Bush. Is it conceivable that Rupp would not have recognized Bush or Casey when he saw them? After all, he claims to be a long-time CIA employee and pilot--and Bush was head of the CIA four years before. Moreover, Brenneke says that Rupp was one of `Casey's favorite pilots.'
As for the allegations about Bush's presence in Paris on October 19 and 20, Secret Service records and contemporaneous news accounts of Bush's speeches show indisputably that he is publicly accounted for almost hourly--in numerous campaign stops--from October 15 through the late evening of October 18. On Sunday morning, October 19, according to information obtained by Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal, Bush had a private lunch with Judge Potter Stewart at the Chevy Chase Country Club. And Secret Service records show that agents went to the club to provide protection for Bush that Sunday morning. On the evening of October 19 Bush spoke at a campaign event at the Washington Hilton, which is substantiated by newspaper accounts. On Monday, October 20, according to a schedule released by the White House and confirmed by newspaper and wire service reports, Bush campaigned the entire day in several cities in Connecticut.
When confronted with this information, October Surprise buffs either claim that the Secret Service records were fabricated or maintain that Bush could have flown to Paris on the Concorde and technically returned eight hours later. But if he did fly via Concorde (or any other high-speed plane), it conflicts with all of the statements made by Rupp and Brenneke, who said that Bush and Casey has flown to Paris on October 18 on a BAC-111. Nor is it compatible with any of the statements made by the other key sources used by `Frontline' and Sick.
By any measure of honest reporting, the October Surprise conspiracy should have died long ago. But like a version of the child's game `telephone,' the story had taken on a life of its own, changing and expanding as it went from source to source. More and more `eyewitnesses' began emerging who often appropriated elements of the conspiracy, swapped lies among themselves or were prodded by journalists, and then wove new tales inserting themselves as minor or major characters. Though Bani-Sadr has consistently claimed to have his own proof of the conspiracy, for his book his only evidence was excerpts from Brenneke's court statements in the Rupp hearing. An October Surprise cult emerged, fueled by entrepreneurial journalists who had made the allegations into a lucrative cottage industry. PBS's `Frontline' documentary, for example, cost about $200,000 to $250,000 to produce, paid partially by taxpayer funds.
`Frontline' touted Brenneke's acquittal on perjury charges, declaring that `the government tried and failed to prove that William Casey was not in Paris.' `Frontline' and Sick did not tell the public about Brenneke's numerous misstatements, discrepancies, and prevarications, which cast doubt on the credibility of the entire October Surprise scenario. On `Frontline' Brenneke said again that Gregg and Casey traveled secretly to Paris in October 1980. (Allen had produced a videotape of his October 19 appearance on `Meet the Press,' so his name did not come up this time.) But Brenneke changed his story once again. In September 1988 he testified that he did not play a role in the transfer of $40 million in weapons to Iran; on `Frontline' he said that he was instructed by Casey at the meeting to launder the $40 million through a Mexican bank and that he did so.
Rather than rely exclusively on Brenneke, Sick and `Frontline' featured new sources who they said `confirmed' each other's accounts. These included Houshang Lavi, Ari Ben-Menashe, and Jamshid Hashemi. Lavi, an Iranian-born arms dealer, claimed he was the unidentified Iranian emissary who met with Allen, McFarlane, and Silberman in Washington in early October 1980 at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel. `Frontline' quoted Lavi as saying that he witnessed Khomeini's representatives being allowed to enter NATO bases in Europe and `pick whatever they want' for shipment back to Iran.
What `Frontline' and Sick did not reveal was the following: (1) Lavi's claim to have met the three Reagan supporters has been denied by McFarlane, Allen, and Silberman. (2) The only independent record of Lavi's meeting with anyone in 1980 are memoranda from the John Anderson campaign showing that he approached Anderson campaign officials on October 2 offering to secure the release of the hostages if the United States would unfreeze Iranian assets and provide F-14 spare parts. The campaign referred him to the State Department. (3) Lavi implied that he was acting on behalf of Bani-Sadr, but the State Department, according to 1980 department documents, found that he `had no authority to speak on behalf of Bani-Sadr,' that he was a `self-appointed middleman' who was trying to broker a deal by going back to each party showing he had lined them up, and that `Lavi was a thoroughly disreputable character.' (4) American and European defense and intelligence officials say it is ludicrous to believe that Iranians were escorted to NATO bases to play a military version of `supermarket sweep.' (5) Since 1988, when Lavi was `discovered' by Honegger, he has made a series of unsubstantiated allegations, including that Customs Service agents assassinated an informant (Cyrus Hashemi) by pumping poison gas into his hospital room.
Even more than Lavi, `Frontline' and Sick relied heavily on the statements of Ari Ben-Menashe, an October Surprise source who only surfaced in 1990. `Frontline' described Ben-Menashe as a `former Israeli intelligence officer' and aired his claim to be `one of half a dozen Israelis sent to Paris at Casey's request to help coordinate arms deliveries' to Iran. `Frontline' reported that Ben-Menashe `saw a man [he] believed to be Bush' in Paris. Sick used Ben-Menashe as one of his major sources in proving that the October Surprise happened, that Casey was a key participant, and that Israel shipped weapons as part of the `deal.'
Apparently emboldened by the acceptance of his allegations on `Frontline' and by Sick, last spring Ben-Menashe told several Australian newspapers and In These Times that he saw Bush arrive at a meeting on October 17 or 18, 1980, at a `top-floor conference room' in Paris, shake hands with Mehdi Karrubi, a leading Iranian cleric, and `close the door.' But none of the other `eye-witnesses' and `sources' had ever mentioned Ben-Menashe's presence in Paris or that of any other Israelis, or of Mehdi Karrubi. Moreover, all of the reported sightings of Bush took place on October 19 or 20--not on October 17 or 18. Ben-Menashe has also claimed that Israel shipped more than $82 billion in arms to Iran since 1980--more than thirty-five times Israel's defense imports and domestic weapons production!
In an interview with In These times last April, Ben-Menashe claimed that it was he--not Lavi--who met to discuss the hostages in early October at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel with Allen, McFarlane, and Silberman.
Without providing any evidence--despite repeated promises to reporters and to congressional officials to hand over `documents'--Ben-Menashe has belatedly become a key insider on other topical issues. He has claimed to have detailed inside knowledge of the Inslaw case. He said that he met many times with Robert Gates in Chile and the United States, and even that he transferred a suitcase containing $16 million to Gates at one point. (The CIA and the National Security Council provided documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee showing that Gates was meeting elsewhere at the time of every meeting cited by Ben-Menashe.) Ben-Menashe has said that McFarlane was a paid Israeli agent since 1978, had received `millions of dollars from Israel, and was the secret `Mr. X' in the Jonathan Pollard spy case. He even says that the United States, through Israel, shipped `billions of dollars of arms' to Iraq. He has become an `expert' on Israel's nuclear program--despite the fact that he never had any connection to it. He has claimed that in 1981 he planted the homing device at the Osirak reactor before it was bombed by Israeli planes, but records show he wasn't out of the country then. He has told Israelis and journalists that he was even offered to be head of the Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service, but that he declined.
Sympathetic reporters uncritically portray Ben-Menashe as a `senior Israeli intelligence officer' and a `national security adviser' and `special emissary' to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. In a recent interview, Sick said: `I am satisfied that Ben-Menashe knows a great deal. He has told me three or four things that I was able to corroborate. He told me he was an officer in a sigint [signal intelligence] unit. I have made no attempt to corroborate any of his other information [beyond allegations of 1980].' Seymour Hersh's new book, The Samson Option, which describes Israel's nuclear program and intelligence activities, uses Ben-Menashe as the primary source. Hersh said in an interview that Ben-Menashe was in sigint, that he was a `key player,' and that `the Israelis want to hurt him bad' for his leaks of high-level classified information. But Hersh didn't interview Ben-Menashe until April, and he told The New York Times that he did not go to Israel to investigate Ben-Menashe's allegations or credibility. Hersh claims, incorrectly, that he would have been subject to Israeli censorship. What's more, according to U.S. and Israeli government documents and officials, Ben-Menashe was never in sigint, and the Israelis have never even attempted to initiate legal proceedings against Ben-Menashe, an act they would have obviously pursued if he were the source of important leaks. The closest access Ben-Menashe ever had to intelligence was his work as a low-level translator for the Israel Defense Forces External Relations Department from 1977 through 1987. Contrary to Hersh's assertion that the department is one of the most sensitive branches of military intelligence, it is in fact, compared with other branches, one of the most insignificant.
Ben-Menashe's responsibilities included translating
letters and reports between the Israeli military and foreign military attaches. They did not include any translations of cables, though Israeli officials acknowledge that he did have access to minimally classified information, including a report in 1986 prepared for the United States discussing Israel's request to replenish weapons that it supplied to Iran as part of the Iran-contra operation. This alerted him to Israeli involvement in the affair, and to Iran's desperate search for weapons.
Like others before him, Ben-Menashe's recall of the October Surprise came about belatedly--after he was arrested in 1989, imprisoned for a year, tried, and ultimately acquitted in 1990 on charges of illegally trying to export planes to Iran. According to his own letter of resignation, he left in 1987 because he had not received a promotion in many years. (Ben-Menashe has told reporters that he was fired for leaking a covert operation.) His personnel file notes that he was denied a special security clearance at one point because he was considered `delusional.' It also says that he had begun trying to peddle weapons in scams in Chile (where he impersonated an Israeli embassy official), Singapore, and Sri Lanka (where he impersonated a Hebrew University professor). Since 1987 he has periodically charged foreigners with being Mossad agents, without any evidence. The most recent and notorious of these claims, which appears in Hersh's new book, is against media giant Robert Maxwell, who has sued.
In 1989 Ben-Menashe was arrested in California along with two Americans. A U.S. Customs agent, posing as a buyer for Iran, tape-recorded some of the conversations in which the men offered to ship the military transport planes to Iran, using a false end-user certificate, for $12 million apiece. Ben-Menashe was going to obtain the transport planes from Israel. The trial of Ben-Menashe and one of the Americans was held in 1990 in New York (the other was tried in California); Ben-Menashe was eventually acquitted. Most of the evidence that the prosecution introduced was directed against his co-defendant, and the evidence submitted against Ben-Menashe was insufficient to convict him.
Yet the court records and information provided by prosecutors show how wildly inconsistent Ben-Menashe's story has been. In 1988 he told a Time reporter that he was involved in a `secret operation' to free American hostages in Lebanon by arranging the sale of planes to Iran through Israel. But a short while later Ben-Menashe told a U.S. Customs undercover agent that since 1987 he had been `self-employed as a journalist and a translator and a political writer doing a lot of traveling . . . [and] that he had no ties with the Ministry of Defense.' The undercover agent also testified that Ben-Menashe revealed to him that he was trying to obtain planes from Israel to be sold to an arms buyer. At pretrial, however, Ben-Menashe told attorneys that he became involved in plane sales to Iran because he wanted to expose Israel's covert operations. Ben-Menashe said he was acting as an `undercover journalist
gathering information for a book' to `expose the ugly role of Israel and the United States in weapons sales.'
During and after the trial, Ben-Menashe contended that he was one of the leading intelligence agents in Israel: Ben-Menashe's lawyer told the court that only three people in Israel were `privy to what was going on with Iran-contra'--Shamir, Israeli counterterrorism official Amiram Nir, and Ben-Menashe. Ben-Menashe claimed that Shamir dispatched him personally to carry out an operation to investigate who was trying to sell planes to Iran. Accordingly to sworn affidavits, Israeli officials in the office of the prime minister, including Shamir himself, never heard of Ben-Menashe.
Despite his brazen claims of being a `senior intelligence officer,' Ben-Menashe went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the prosecution from obtaining his personnel records. He refused to sign a waiver authorizing the Israeli government to release his records to the U.S. court, telling his lawyers and the prosecutor that to do so would constitute a violation of the `Official Secrets Act in Israel,' punishable `by death.' In fact, there is no such thing as an `Official Secrets Act' in Israel, and there is no death penalty for releasing classified information--nor for that matter has Israel ever invoked its death penalty, with the notable exception of the execution of Adolf Eichmann. The judge compelled Ben-Menashe to sign the waiver. The records were then produced, which showed he was just a translator.
As a final defense, Ben-Menashe supports claim that he must be credible because he knew of the Israel arms sales to Iran before they became public. But Israel officials note that this knowledge can be explained both by his work translating letters to the United States in 1986 and by the fact that rumors of Israeli arms sales to Iran had circulated routinely throughout the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Ben-Menashe supporters also cite the numerous trips abroad he made from 1980 through 1987, evidence, they claim, that he was a secret agent. Yet his trips were on non-paid leave, and were recorded in his civilian passport. He never possessed a diplomatic passport as he claimed.
The last `new' primary source used by `Frontline' and Sick was Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian middleman. His account added a new dimension to the October Surprise: he claimed that, in addition to the meetings in Paris in October 1980, there were earlier meetings in July and August of 1980, which Casey attended and at which the `deal' was actually made to delay release of the hostages.
In interviews on `Frontline' and with Sick, Jamshid said that in July 1980 he and his brother Cyrus (who died in 1986) met secretly in Madrid with Casey, a `senior cia officer,' and Iranian cleric Mehdi Karrubi. Jamshid said that Casey urged that `the Iranians hold the hostages until after the election,' and that he, Cyrus, and Karrubi attended a second meeting with Casey in August in Madrid, where `Karrubi expressed acceptance . . . the hostages would be released after Carter's defeat.' In his op-ed piece, Sick accepted uncritically
Jamshid's claims that he and his brother helped put the final touches on an agreement between Casey and Iran that weapons would be supplied if Iran delayed the release of the hostages.
Missing from Sick's and `Frontline's recounting are revelations of Cyrus's and Jamshid's backgrounds that show their credibility problems to be even worse than those of Brenneke and Ben-Menashe.
Cyrus Hashemi was a typical Iranian middleman, trying to marry up business deals between Iran and other countries by inflating his importance to each side. According to declassified CIA documents and American intelligence officials, in early 1980 he offered his services to the Carter administration in getting the hostages released in return for spare parts for Iran. His lawyer, former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, put him in touch with the State Department. During the abortive attempt to free the hostages in April 1980, Cyrus offered to organize assistance from supporters in Tehran. The State Department even supplied him with funds, through the CIA, to assist him. But Cyrus failed to demonstrate that he had any connections in Tehran, and the CIA concluded that `his offers were part of a scam.' All contact was dropped with Cyrus.
Cyrus was only one of several self-anointed Iranian intermediaries who purported to speak for Iran in dangling the freedom of the hostages in exchange for military weapons. Sick himself observed as much several years ago, in a chapter for the 1985 Council of Foreign Relations anthology American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis: `Throughout the late summer and fall of 1980, the Carter administration had been approached by private individuals claiming to speak for Iranian authorities . . . the evidence strongly suggested that these were private entrepreneurs who saw the possibility of some lucrative business for themselves.'
In mid-1984 Cyrus, Jamshid, and a third brother, Reza, were indicted for their illegal efforts from October 21, 1980, through November 1981 to ship tens of millions of dollars of military equipment to Iran. After learning about the Hashemis' secret contacts with Iranian arms procurement officials in September 1980, FBI agents wiretapped Cyrus's office and temporary apartment in Manhattan. According to a transcript of one conversation on October 21, 1980, Cyrus and several Americans discussed plans to fulfill a request from Iranian officials for Cyrus (who had told them that he could obtain badly needed weapons) to arrange the
exporting of arms. In the conversations Cyrus admitted that the project was illegal and suggested various ways of avoiding detection. That was the day after Brenneke had said Cyrus was in Paris meeting with Casey. In a subsequent interview with ABC's `Nightline,' Jamshid made another startling claim: that starting in August 1980, after the `deal' was concluded with Casey, tens of millions of dollars of American-made weapons were shipped by boat to Iran from Israel. No evidence exists to support the claim, but if it is true, why would the Hashemis have worked so feverishly to obtain weapons in October through what they knew were illegal means?
Reza pleaded guilty, but Cyrus and Jamshid fled to Europe to avoid arrest. Cyrus retained several lawyers, including Richardson, who asked Casey, unsuccessfully, for special dispensation for his client in light of his earlier `assistance' to the United States in 1980, referring to his secret work with the State Department. When that failed, Cyrus attempted, again unsuccessfully, to negotiate for charges against him to be dropped in return for his cooperation in interceding with Iranian officials to secure the release of the hostages in Lebanon. Throughout this period neither Cyrus nor Reza nor Jamshid ever revealed to their attorneys or to U.S. government officials their alleged secret meetings with Casey in 1980. Is it conceivable that these men, who were desperate to get the charges against them dropped and were threatening, according to memorandums of conversations between Justice and CIA officials at the time, to reveal anything they knew, would not have threatened to disclose the most damaging information they possessed--a secret deal between Casey and Iran in 1980?
According to court records, in 1985 Cyrus, still a fugitive from Justice, became involved with a group of international arms dealers, including Americans and Israelis, trying to sell arms to Iran. Cyrus then asked his attorneys to relay to the Justice Department his offer to serve as an informant in the arms transaction in return for dropping the charges. The U.S. government agreed only to be `lenient' with Cyrus. He accepted. Soon thereafter the Customs agents, as part of a giant sting operation, began working with Cyrus overseas and in the United States to record secretly his conversations with the arms dealers.
Cyrus died on July 21, 1986, in London. A coroner's
report attributed his death to a virulent strain of leukemia, which had been diagnosed only days before. A U.S. Customs Service agent attended the autopsy and concurred in its conclusions. Nevertheless, Hashemi's supporters, including attorney William Kunstler (who represents one of the arms dealers) and `Frontline's Parry have stated that his death was `mysterious,' that Cyrus was murdered to shut him up about what he knew about the October Surprise, and that the U.S. government has covered up his murder. Kunstler, who says that `there are suspicious needle pricks on both elbows' about the case, points out that The Village Voice is seriously considering paying for an exhumation. If anyone had an incentive to kill, Cyrus, however, it was the arms dealer. After all, it was Cyrus's death that forced the government to drop its case against these men.
On July 20, after Sick and `Frontline' had aired Jamshid's charges, abc's `Nightline' picked up on them. In an off-camera interview Jamshid described the meetings in Madrid at which the deal was allegedly arranged. At the first of them, which he said covered two consecutive days in `late July,' Casey and two unidentified Americans first proposed the deal to Mehdi Karrubi, a `close associate' of Khomeini. The Hashemis allegedly served as interpreters. According to Jamshid, the parties met in Madrid again two weeks later, when Karrubi conveyed Khomeini's approval of Casey's offer. `Nightline' and The Financial Times of London investigated Jamshid's charges and claimed to have found evidence that corroborated the story.
Among the `evidence' was the fact that hotel records indicate a Jamshid Halaj and an A. Hashemi checked into the Madrid Plaza in late July, and an Ali Balnean in August. These names allegedly confirmed Jamshid's recollection that he and his brother often used aliases. Jamshid even furnished `Nightline' with a business card using the name Ali Balnean. (`Nightline' also said that the name Robert Gray was in the hotel records. Robert Gray is a Washington public relations executive who served as Casey's top deputy in the 1980 campaign. He supplied `Nightline' with his passport, which indicated that he had not left the country in July or August 1980.) Even if one were to believe that the records were not altered, with the Hashemis running around the globe attempting to broker arms deals it would hardly be surprising that they had been in Madrid during the time Jamshid is talking about. Casey, however, was not.
`Nightline' said that Hashemi's accounts of the meetings were supported by the fact that William Casey was unaccounted for in the public record between August 8 and August 13, as well as July 27 to July 29. It is true that Casey was absent from the public record for a week in August, but it is surely more likely that he was busy with the Reagan campaign than flying off to Madrid. `Nightline' offered more `evidence' in support of the July absence: an unrelated article from The New York Times on July 30, 1980, about the complaints of a right-to-life group over Bush's selection as vice president, quoting a
Reagan spokesman as saying Casey would deal with the group, `when he returns [today] from his trip abroad.' (In a side note, `Nightline' did report that Jamshid Hashemi said Bush did not attend the alleged October Paris meetings as claimed by a number of others.)
However, `Nightline' had failed to find out that Casey was not in Madrid, but in London, at the Anglo-American Conference on the Second World War. So at the end of an unrelated show a week later, having been contacted by some of those who had attended the conference with Casey, `Nightline' provided a brief update on their previous report. They said that it had been confirmed that Casey had presented a paper on special operations in France during World War II on the morning of July 29, and showed a picture of Casey with some others taken at a reception on the evening of July 28. Ted Koppel said this would leave July 27 and early on July 28 for Casey to have met in Madrid (it is a ninety-minute flight from Madrid to London).
But `Nightline' was wrong again. Jonathan Chadwick, the secretary of the British planning committee for the conference, showed us documents from the conference, which chart the attendance of each participant at each session as well as their accommodations. Casey is not only accounted for on the evening of July 28 and the morning of July 29, but also for the night of July 27 and all day, except for a brief absence, on July 28. This makes Jamshid's story of two consecutive days of meetings impossible.
Not surprising, after the `Frontline' and Sick airing of the October Surprise, new `sources' emerged to tell of their dealings with Bush and Casey. Gunther `Russ' Russbacher claimed that he was the `smoking gun' in the October Surprise conspiracy. He told Marc Cooper of the Village Voice, in a story published this past August, that as instructed by his `big boss' at the CIA, he--along with `co-pilot' Richard Brenneke--flew Bush and Gregg back and forth to Paris in October 1980. What's more, Russbacher claimed that he flew back to the United States in a SR-71 supersonic high altitude spy plane in a flight that lasted ninety minutes. `Sitting next to me was George Bush,' throughout the flight.
Russbacher gave his interview to The Village Voice from prison, where he is serving a twenty-one-month sentence for impersonating a federal officer. Yes, he too claims that he was framed by the CIA to shut him up. But he would not be silenced. And as noted by the Voice, Russbacher `has already become a sought-after guest on the radio talk show circuit (from a phone inside the prison) and his story has elicited queries from ABC `Nightline,' NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Newsday, USA Today, San Diego Union, San Jose Mercury News, Dallas Morning News and other publications.'
The Voice revealed that Russbacher had a lengthy relationship with federal authorities, going back to 1965 when he was arrested for impersonating a U.S. marshal, to his army desertion in 1967, his false claim that he was an Army major, and his escape from prison in 1975. In
1987 he pleaded guilty to securities fraud.
For believers in the October Surprise, no doubt there are other `sources' out there, waiting to provide their own testimony. Yet the story has finally begun to unravel--and at least one star witness seems to have caught himself in his own web of lies. The Voice, which has been a proponent of the conspiracy, published a piece in September declaring that Brenneke `was nowhere near the alleged conspirators' meetings in Madrid and Paris in 1980, where he claims he helped Republican big-wigs negotiate a secret hostage deal behind Jimmy Carter's back.' The author, Frank Snepp, had obtained Brenneke's diaries and credit card receipts, which showed that between 1980 and 1982 Brenneke `was never away from his favorite Portland restaurants and shopping malls for more than a few days at a time'--despite his sworn testimony that he personally flew planeloads of arms to Iran for `four to five weeks at a time' and his claim to have met with Bush, Gregg, and Iranian intermediaries during the same period.
Brenneke had originally given his financial documents to a writer named Peggy Adler Robohm after she signed a contract with Brenneke and his agent last year to write his story. Initially an ardent believer in Brenneke, after scrutinizing his personal records Robohm found credit card bills, and personal calendar notations that showed indisputably that he had lied, and she volunteered her information to Snepp. Snepp, who had reported Brenneke's allegations as truthful for abc News for several years, now admits that his `apparent October Surprise fabrications undercut the credibility of everything he touched.' He also concedes that Brenneke's own letters `trace the evolution of his public allegations, showing how tips from journalists and other sources prompted him to change this or that date, or modify a particular story line.'
Still, conspiratorialists are not easily dissuaded. Although Snepp no longer believes that Bush or Gregg went to Paris in October 1980, he believes that Casey met with Iranian officials in Madrid in July 1980 to negotiate a secret deal with the Iranians. As for Brenneke, Snepp questions whether he was deliberately planted to `sidetrack and sabotage the investigation.' Nevertheless, it is important to note that despite the irrefutable evidence that Brenneke never participated in any meetings, none of the other key sources has ever disassociated himself from Brenneke.
Meanwhile, with Brenneke largely discredited, Ben-Menashe has emerged as the main source. The October issue of Esquire features an article by Craig Unger that rehashes many of the earlier allegations and Ben-Menashe's most fantastic stories about the conspiracy. Not to be outdone, Newsweek has hired Unger to be a special consultant to help promote its own October Surprise investigation, although it recently published a piece raising serious questions about Ben-Menashe's credibility.
Beni-Sadr himself seems to be tripping over misstatements he has made over the past several years. In an
interview with The New Republic in September 1991 at his home in Versailles, he recanted key allegations. Asked whether he still affirmed his charge in Playboy that Bush led the American side in secret Paris meetings with the Iranians and at least three arms dealers whom he also named, Bani-Sadr said, `No, that information had been given to me. So I gave the information so that it could be checked to see if they were there. For me, their presence does not matter. I have never guaranteed that those people were really those who had negotiated.'
Pressed on his allegation in his book and in Playboy about Bush's presence in Paris, which he had said came from `intelligence,' Bani-Sadr now backed away: `I have always repeated that I wasn't sure.' He went on to say: `As a matter of fact, I am a sociologist. I do not deal with names; I deal with relations. And morally also I cannot really say if these people or other people were there because I am not sure.... I received names from Iran and I transmitted them; some proved to be true through research and others did not.' Still, Bani-Sadr had a novel explanation for why he had raised the Bush charge: `It is said that Bush himself and his entourage initiated this information so they could later refute it and brand it all lies.'
In the end, October Surprise believers point to their final fall-back argument: Casey was capable of doing anything. Indeed, Casey was capable of doing a lot of nasty things--as demonstrated by the Iran-contra disclosures. But no evidence has ever emerged that shows Casey at a secret meeting in Madrid or involved in any scheme to delay the release of the hostages.
On October 20, the very day that Brenneke and Ben-Menashe claim that Casey was in Paris, campaign records show that Casey had an 8 a.m. appointment at the Metropolitan Club in Washington and that he had two other appointments that day. Moreover, Richard Allen's personal telephone log shows that Casey made a telephone call to him on October 20 at 7:30 a.m., which Allen recalls as being local.
Proponents of the October Surprise theory, including Sick, cite as circumstantial evidence of a Reagan-Khomeini deal the facts that promising negotiations with the Carter administration in the fall of 1980 were broken off and that the Iranians dropped arms from their list of demands. Even here, however, the events do not support the conclusion. According to all accounts of the crisis, far from breaking off, the negotiations continued intensely through January. In September 1980 Khomeini sent his associate Sadegh Tabatabai to meet with the American negotiator, Warren Christopher, in Germany. `The first meetings were very promising.' Christopher told The Los Angeles Times in October 1988. Tabatabai presented a set of moderate demands, including a U.S. non-intervention commitment, the unfreezing of Iranian assets in the United States, and the return of the Shah's wealth to Iran. In addition, Tabatabai asked for the delivery of some $350 million in arms and other military equipment that the Shah had purchased. Although Sick and other conspiratorialists remain surprised
at the dropping of this demand, Christopher, who should know, notes: `I discouraged it, and it never came back. . . .' As he explained to the Los Angeles Times, `The issue of arms stayed on the table only briefly. I think they were just testing us.'
In September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The Iraqi invasion preoccupied the Iranians, interrupting the negotiations. It was not until November 2, after they had stabilized the front, that the Iranians were able to return to the negotiating table. It was too late to reach a deal before the November 4 election. Both Christopher and Lloyd Cutler, counsel to President Carter, accept this explanation. As Christopher said: `It is an interesting question why the promising meetings we had in September ended so abruptly. . . . But I've always felt that the outbreak of the war seemed a sufficient explanation.' In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Cutler wrote that it was not until later in the fall that Hashemi Rafsanjani consolidated power, and any earlier deal would have made him vulnerable to attack from the more radical, anti-U.S. mullahs, including Bani-Sadr, who opposed the January deal with Carter as being too favorable to the United States. It was for this reason also that the Iranians rejected an October 11 offer from President Carter to provide, in exchange for the release of hostages, $150 million in arms that had been purchased by the Shah but held in the United States after the revolution. The release was in fact delayed, but it was done so unilaterally by the Iranians for their own motives--not least their enmity for Carter.
One of Sick's and `Frontline's major claims is that Israel served as a conduit for weapons immediately after release of the hostages. Yet none of their sources even remotely agrees on what arms were allegedly traded as a result of a deal, or how they were traded. Ben-Menashe's assertion that Israel sold $82 billion in arms to Iran over six years, mostly transported by plane, is contradicted by Jamshid Hasemi's statement that his brother arranged for the shipment of $150 million in arms by boat in four round trips from Israel to Iran between August 1980 and January 1981. Houshang Lavi declared that he witnessed Iranian officials select arms on nato bases in 1981, and Richard Brenneke claimed that he laundered $40 million to Iran for arms purchases. And Bani-Sadr can't even get his own story straight. In In These Times he said that Iran received between $50 million and $100 million in arms during his administration. In his book and in our interview, however, Bani-Sadr denied
that any large arms shipments were received when he was president, and that those promised as a result of the 1980 `deal' are continuing today.
Israel did in fact deliver arms, most probably with Reagan administration approval, in February 1981. However, State Department documents and interviews with Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials show that the amount was no more than $70 million. Moreover, the shipments were anything but an aberration. They were the resumption of what had been Israeli policy toward Iran prior to the crisis and the arms embargo, a policy that had often diverged from American interests. Israel had even continued some shipments during the embargo, but when Prime Minister Begin retroactively asked President Carter for his approval, Carter angrily refused, and no more equipment was traded. Shipments were resumed only after Carter himself, as part of a final agreement before he left office, lifted most sanctions on Iran on January 19, 1981.
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Meanwhile, Sick has plunged even further into the depths of conspiracy. Several journalists say that earlier this year he told them that Gates was part of the October Surprise in 1980, and that the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, David Boren, would not investigate because he was being `blackmailed' by the White House, which threatened to leak derogatory allegations about his personal life. According to Sick: `I never said I had personal knowledge of that. It was being told to me by other journalists.' As for the bigger story, Sick says: `The whole October Surprise was a professionally managed covert action, and I'm frankly surprised that I have as much evidence as I do.'
Sick's stubborn perpetuation of the story is all the more surprising given the scorn with which he greeted the Republicans' allegations in 1980 that Carter was planning an `October Surprise' to win the election. Six years ago, writing in the Council of Foreign Relations anthology, he declared: `In the last few months before the presidential elections, there were spurious reports that the Carter administration was planning a spectacular military operation against Iran. This so-called `October Surprise' allegedly would be intended to win votes for the president. The story was a total fabrication. It was promptly denied by the White House, and a number of responsible newspapers refused to print it. Nevertheless, the story received widespread attention and soon developed a life of its own.'
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Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, investigative journalism is an American institution--one that we frankly depend on in a democracy. In the New Republic and Newsweek stories, I believe we witnessed a midcourse correction in investigative journalism. The journalists at those magazines, along with their editors, looked at the activities of their colleagues at `Nightline' and `Frontline' and said, `That's enough * * * this may be interesting and entertaining to some, but it isn't journalism of the sort that we want to practice.' So I commend them for working to set the record straight.
As for us, Mr. President, I do not believe this is destined to be our finest hour. I heard it reported that the New Republic spent about $3,000 to disprove the October surprise theory. In true Government fashion, I predict that we will spend $600,000 to do the same thing.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. (Mr. Daschle). Who yields time?
Mr. SANFORD. Mr. President, I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Georgia.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. FOWLER. I thank my friend, the Senator from North Carolina.
I think the search for truth ought to begin on this floor tonight. I find it ironic to hear my friend from Alaska saying that polygraph tests should now be used as a litmus test when some of the same Republicans were arguing about 3 weeks ago that in the case of Anita Hill, who took a polygraph test, that that should never even be brought up, much less considered in any way, shape, or form to judge the truth.
Mr. MURKOWSKI. The Senator from Alaska did not say that. ABC's news director said that.
Mr. FOWLER. I noted that the Senator from Alaska quoted that approvingly and with authority for his point on the polygraph, thus endorsing the concept.
The colonel that my friend from Maryland referred to is Colonel Charles Scott of my State of Georgia. He served our country for 31 years--in war and peace--bravely, courageously, and with distinction. He was held hostage by the Iranians for 444 days.
When the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] earlier quoted Colonel Scott's testimony this morning, he stopped short of the truth. The Senator from Kentucky said `quoting Colonel Scott, `I have no firsthand knowledge, I do not know whether it happened or not.' Colonel Scott said that, but he said I want the truth. `We ought to have an investigation. I am no partisan,' said Colonel Scott. `* * * 31 years I served my country. I voted for Ronald Reagan. I voted for George Bush. And at least we could find out the truth. Please, Senators, conduct an investigation and help us find out the truth'.
That is what this is about this evening.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
Mr. SANFORD. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Massachusetts.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 4 minutes 40 seconds remaining.
Mr. SANFORD. I yield 4 minutes.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I have listened to the proponents of this measure for the last 10 or 20 minutes and, in fact, everything that they have said is the reason they have made the argument for why we ought to go forward with an investigation because each and every one of them have spent time from their perspective trying to discredit each of the witnesses.
The point is there is a different point of view about these witnesses. And the question is whether we are going to have a legitimate investigation that seeks to decide in an appropriate manner who might or might not be telling the truth. The issue that is being asserted by those of us on this side is that they are not telling the truth. But this is an issue
which raises fundamental questions about understanding about us, about this institution, about what happened, and we ought to answer them.
The very people who are making light of these witnesses, I might say, are the very people who made light of all the witnesses who said that the Contras were involved with drugs and arms, and those are the very witnesses today that are in the Noriega trial testifying under oath for the Government.
The people who make light of this are the very people who made light of the effort to say that General Noriega was involved in drugs and ought to be taken down, and then he was. Now he is on trial. The people who make light of this are the very people who made light of all of witnesses in the BCCI case, and now that is a matter of record.
The people that we say come up here and tell the truth so consistently have now been found guilty in our courts and are pleading guilty for having lied to the Congress.
So the question is, are we going to make an effort to find the truth or are we not? They assert that there is not somehow a record here that makes a case that we ought to investigate.
Well, Mr. President, this is an issue about that. Gary Sick, as Senator Sarbanes said, as others have said, is no flake. This book is documented, and the existence of a book means that this issue will not go away. This Senate has seen fit to have an investigation of an issue not 10 years old but 20 years old, of an issue that has not had 1 or 2 investigations, but maybe 50. We have discovered 50 on the POW-MIA issue. In the hearings we held last week, we discovered already that those 50 previous investigations never even established the baseline of the numbers of people who were lost or may not have been lost. That is not even known for certainty.
There are secret lists. Right here I have a document about the arms sales, that shows that the arms sales went through BCCI, the very arms sales that were linked to this, and we know that Adnan Khashoggi had a $10 million check as part of the arms sales that went through BCCI. We are just learning about these things.
Gary Sick spent three administrations at the NSC, two of them Republicans--Reagan and Ford. He wrote a book that was highly critical of President Carter. He began his investigation for his book with a view that all of these allegations were poppycock. He did not believe them until he kept coming across them, until he discovered himself in his research that the Iranian Foreign Minister had told the Parliament on August 16 that: `The American Republican Party, in order to win the upcoming election, is trying very hard to delay the resolution of the hostage question until after the American election.' He learned about the activities of Cyrus Hashemi, an international wheeler dealer who specialized in bringing Americans and Iranians together.
He kept learning about meetings that took place. So, Mr. President, the issue is whether or not we are going to perform for the American people what the hostages themselves have asked us to do. And the fact that the hostages alone have asked us, given what they went through in that desert, given the years they gave up of their lives, the danger they face, that alone ought to require the U.S. Senate to do its duty.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
The Senator from North Carolina is out of time.
The Senator from Kentucky has 5 minutes and 30 seconds remaining.
Mr. McCONNELL. I yield to the Senator from North Carolina [Mr. Helms].
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I believe pontificating has reached a new high in the Senate tonight. I had a call earlier this week from a North Carolinian--Democrat, by the way. I do not speak harshly about Democrats, but I would not be here had it not been for their votes along with Republicans. He said, `Jesse, you have all sorts of scams in Washington. I remember the Abscam.' Then he said there was the `Iran scam.' And he said now we have the `sham scam.' That is what it is all about.
I wish the American people would take a look at the salaries proposed for this little fantasy that is about to unroll. They are planning to hire a chief counsel at an annual salary of $115,000. They are going to hire two associate counsels at an annual salary of $90,000 apiece. I guess that means a plain ordinary lawyer. And $80,000 each on an annual basis for four investigators. Well, it is coming down a little. That is $40,000 apiece. One executive secretary, $39,250. One security clerk at $33,500. Two paralegals, each for an annual salary of $29,625. One receptionist at $19,000. One secretary at $25,000.
I think that lays out the picture very well. It is just what the Senate has always needed: More high priced lawyers.
Mr. President, there are a whole lot more of things that could be said that have not been said.
Mr. President, on October 29, the Committee on Foreign Relations voted to report Senate Resolution 198, as amended, to the Rules Committee for further action. The vote was 9 ayes, 8 noes, and 1 present.
No member of the minority on the committee voted in favor of the resolution. Seven out of eight members of the minority strongly oppose Senate Resolution 198, even as amended. This is the resolution which has now been discharged from the Rules Committee by unanimous consent.
The original purpose of Senate Resolution 198 was to provide additional spending authority of $596,000 to the Committee on Foreign Relations for the purpose of investing `its duly authorized inquiry into allegations that private United States citizens acted to delay the release of United States hostages in Iran until after the 1980 Presidential elections.'
The reference is to the so-called `October surprise'--that is, to a group of totally unsupported statements by journalists, former aides of President Carter, and dubious international adventurers that a conspiracy existed in the 1980 Presidential campaign to delay the release of the United States hostages taken in Iran on November 4, 1979.
In addition to the new spending authority the resolution provides unprecedented subpoena power to the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs to require witnesses to appear `any time or place' before staff for depositions--without the concomitant presence of committee members--and to produce subpoenaed documents, accounts, evidence, and so forth. The Senate legal counsel during the business meeting advised Members that the full committee itself does not have the sweeping power to compel witnesses to appear before staff under pain of contempt and other penalties.
Most members of the minority felt strongly that the resolution as presented exhibited a partisanship unworthy of the traditions of the committee. No specific evidence was presented by the supporters to the resolution to support the need for such an investigation. The undersigned believe that the expenditure of $596,000 represents an appalling waste of the taxpayers funds that would contribute to the lack of confidence that the public has expressed toward the Senate.
The committee adopted, 17 to 1, an amendment to broaden the investigation to include allegations against both United States citizens and Government officials who may have acted to manipulate the release of the hostages in Iran in relation to the 1980 Presidential election.The amendment gives only a semblance of balance to the partisanship of the original text.
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During the committee debate on the resolution, minority members pointed to the total lack of evidence justifying the expense of the taxpayer's money on yet another investigation. I asked whether there was `even enough evidence to look for a shred of evidence?' In answer to my question, I quoted from the majority report of the Iran/Contra Committees--repeat, the majority report--on page 162:
Reagan campaign aides were, in fact, approached by individuals who claimed to be Iranian intermediaries about potential release of hostages, as were other campaign staffs. The committees were told that the approaches were rejected and have found no credible evidence to suggest that any discussions were held or agreements reached on delaying release of hostages or arranging an early arms-for-hostages deal.
At that time, I pointed out that even the majority had found no credible evidence.
The distinguished Senator from Indiana [Mr. Lugar] took the point further. He stated:
The allegations are that our President, George Bush, and our former President, Ronald Reagan, were involved in a conspiracy with the Iranian Government to delay the
freedom of American hostages. It is an outrageous charge.
It goes to the heart of our entire political system. Anyone who does not see the gravity of this seems to me is simply moving in a very superficial realm to what is a fundamental charge as to the legitimacy of our government.
The President of the United States, that is George Bush, is alive and he has testified that there was no October Surprise, there was no consipiracy, there were no visits by him or persons in his campaign in any such manner. He is our President now and he has given that testimony and he has said it a number of times, publicly and privately.
The distinguished Senator from Alaska [Mr. Murkowski], pointed out that the chief witness cited as the basis of the allegations was completely unreliable. He said:
As Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I have been exposed to the allegations and to one of the people who makes these allegations, one Ari Ben Menashe. He gave two extensive interviews to our Committee staff in the context of the Gates investigation. PBS `Frontline' did some stories based on the Ben Menashe tale. Newspapers ran other stories. The Intelligence Committee asked the FBI to investigate specific issues during the background investigation of Bob Gates. We asked the CIA's Inspector General to investigate. We also asked Bob Gates under oath--under oath--to answer allegations involving the October Surprise. We made inquiries and we simply found nothing.
There is nothing credible, in my opinion, as Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, to suggest that there is evidence which suggests there is more to investigate.
The distinguished Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] was equally emphatic. He stated:
The Tower Commission, the House and Senate Select Committees on Iran/Contra, and the Independent Counsel considered every dimension, every angle, every issue at some point or another, including, as Senator Murkowski indicated, as recently as the Gates hearings.
My figures indicate that $6 million and 50 staffers were involved in the Iran/Contra investigation; the Independent Counsel, $27.6 million; and on and on. Now we want to go out and try to do it one more time.
The distinguished Senator from Indiana, [Mr. Lugar], continued the case by making the following points:
Clearly, if there were charges that were credible, if there were at least the normal due process of law, an indictment in which a fair number of people, a Grand Jury or someone, had looked at material, that would be one thing. But the contention that I am making is there is not a credible case. There is not any.
It's not a question of covering up something. This is a question of manufacturing something to investigate.
Now if the Majority is prepared to make a case that is credible to investigate, of persons who have some eye witness knowledge, documentation, and what have you, that would be worthwhile.
But I'm saying in this case there isn't any evidence, at least that I've seen or that any of us have seen. This is why it appears to come as a matter of whole cloth out of someone's imagination.
Minority members of the committee were willing to discuss any factual evidence, if such evidence were available. In the course of the discussions, I proposed that the committee go into secret session, excluding members of the press, the public, and staff from the room, to receive any credible evidence that the proponents of the resolution could offer as justification. The proponents did not accept the offer, and did not submit and evidence in open or closed session supporting the credibility of the October surprise allegations.
Senate Resolution 198 also authorizes sweeping new subpoena powers to the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, powers even greater than the full committee possesses, and lacking the checks and balances in the full committee rules. I pointed out that the effect of these new powers is to create a committee within the committee like the bank within the bank of BCCI, where actions hidden from the bank's officers and directors took place.
The committee within the committee concept turns the committee system on end because it endows a subcommittee, supposedly a constituent part of the full committee, with greater powers and secrecy than the full committee itself. Moreover, it creates a capsule of secrecy which excludes all other members of the committee, except the members of the subcommittee. Indeed, in the guidelines proposed by the chairman of the subcommittee, he arrogates to himself, with the concurrence of the ranking members of the subcommittee, the authority to make all decisions without even reference to other members of the subcommittee.
Minority members feel strongly that the exclusion of other Senators who are members of the full committee from the work and files of the subcommittee sets a dangerous and sinister precedent, and is a violation of rules 26 and 27 of the Senate.
The opportunity for abuse of the subpoena power is particularly serious. Under the rules of the Committee on Foreign Relations, the chairman--of the full committee--may issue a subpoena after consultation with the ranking minority member, or after a vote of the full committee.
When subpoenaed, witnesses must present themselves before the committee--that is, before a meeting of the members themselves--to give testimony or produce records. A witness who refuses faces charges of contempt or other sanctions of law. However, a witness who refuses to give a deposition to a member of the committee staff faces no penalty. He or she may voluntarily give a deposition before staff, but cannot be compelled to do so.
The fact that the committee must vote and at least one Senator must be present during testimony of a subpoenaed
witness are built-in procedural safeguards which protect the rights of the witnesses as well as the integrity of the process.
However, the authority demanded by the subcommittee is indeed disquieting. Under the proposed authority, the subcommittee chairman, with the concurrence of the subcommittee ranking member, would be able to issue the subpoena. There is no provision for a vote by the members of the subcommittee, much less the committee as a whole.
Once the subpoena is issued, the witness would be compelled to give depositions before sfaff at any time or place, or face the penalties of contempt, as well as being compelled to produce subpoenaed documents or evidence. This contrasts sharply with the full committee practice of compelling witnesses to testify only before Members of the Senate.
The practice of allowing staff to travel anywhere to force witnesses to give depositions discards the inherent safeguard of requiring the presence of a Senator--an elected official responsible to the people--to be present. Not only does it multiply the physical possibilities of receiving coerced testimony, but it would require the most intense supervision of the staff employee by the subcommittee chairman to ensure that the civil rights of U.S. citizens are not violated.
But during the committee debate, the subcommittee chairman, Mr. Sanford, indicated that he did not intend to provide such supervision. According to the transcript of October 22, he stated:
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We will attempt to leave as much as possible to the discretion of the professional investigators that we retain for the purpose, that we will not be personally involved in the investigation until, indeed, there is something for the Committee to hold some public hearins on.
Moreover, my colleague from North Carolina [Mr. Sanford] reinforced this unsettling theme that the staff would be given free reign to conduct the investigation as they chose, by stating:
We will not have a procedure that forces the professionals to tell us exactly where they are going and when, but that in advance we will indicate approval of going to location A, B, C, and D, but the time or the timing of that would be life to the professional counsel that we bring in for the purpose of directing the investigation.
Considering that the broad scope of the investigation stretches half way around the world, this admission suggests that the subcommittee chairman is relinquishing responsibility of staff investigators to do what they want with only vague guidelines to restrain them. Moreover, these special authorities would be given to a yet-to-be-hired staff of investigators whose skills and biases are not known.
Indeed, the subcommittee chairman is also seeking unprecedented authority in Senate Resolution 198 for the subcommittee to issue its own rules and guidelines, without putting them to a vote or discussion by the whole committee. If Senate Resolution 198 is approved, the subcommittee could make up its own rules as it proceeds and with no restraints whatsoever over its manner of proceeding or the targets of its investigation.
Ironically, the majority counsel of the committee and the legal counsel of the Senate had prepared a detailed set of consensus procedures to guide the subcommittee in its work. The minority did no participate in the drafting of these procedures, but I found them fair and reasonable with two or three minor corrections. Unfortunately, the subcommittee chairman rejected the draft procedures out of hand, and concocted a vague, but highly partisan procedure that virtually contradicted the consensus document on all key points.
The allegations involved in the so-called October surprise are inflammatory and after 11 years unsubstantiated. Indeed, the Senator from Indiana [Mr. Lugar] called them ludicrous. Yet Senate Resolution 198 would allow a rogue `committee within a committee' to send staff all over the world with a mandate and extraordinary powers to investigate in secrecy whatever and whomever it chooses in connection with the so-called October surprise. The authoritarian powers sought by the proponents of this resolution stir the deepest apprehensions of the minority that this investigation is an act of the most blatant and tasteless partisanship.
Senate Resolution 198 calls for increasing the over-all spending authority of Senate Resolution 62, the current omnibus committee funding resolution, by $596,000 for the period beginning March 1, 1991, and ending February 29, 1993, and expanding the spending authority of the Committee on Foreign Relations for that period. Presumably, the investigation would be completed during that period.
The proposed cost breakdown is as follows:
Salaries
$395,500
Consultants
72,000
Administrative
128,500
Total
596,000
The subcommittee seeks authority for the following staff:
-----------------------------------------------------
Title Annual salary Total for period
-----------------------------------------------------
1 chief counsel $115,000 $57,500
2 associate counsels 90,000 90,000
2 counsels 80,000 80,000
4 investigators 40,000 80,000
1 executive secretary 39,250 19,625
1 security clerk 33,500 16,750
2 paralegals 29,625 29,625
1 receptionist 19,000 9,500
1 secretary 25,000 12,500
Total 395,500
-----------------------------------------------------
This hiring profile essentially establishes a select committee within the committee. The outline of the personnel positions resembles the staff of a high-priced law firm or a prosecutor's office, rather than that of a bipartisan investigating committee. Not surprisingly, the subcommittee chairman has announced that he proposes to hire a distinguished former U.S. assistant attorney, well-known for successful prosecutions against judges, Members of Congress, and the executive branch as the chief counsel.
The minority is disturbed that a staff based upon the concept of what is, in effect, a special prosecutor, will inevitably taint the outcome of the investigation. Although the proposed chief counsel has an outstanding and well-deserved reputation as a prosecutor, the minority feels that introduction of a prosecutor's outlook at this stage of the investigation is entirely premature.
As noted above, the majority has cited no evidence of any crime. Nor has the majority suggested that any statutes might have been violated. Moreover, if any such statutes were violated 11 years ago, the question is moot, since by now the statute of limitations has run. The sole reason put forward for the investigation is the totally unsubstantiated charge of political manipulation of the electoral process.
Thus the notion of a prosecutorial approach to a long-past political question is akin to exhuming a corpse from the past century for forensic analysis to titillate historians. Finally, it undermines the objectivity and integrity of the investigating process.
The minority firmly believes, therefore, that the request to spend $596,000 on unsubstantiated political allegiations is a total waste of the taxpayers' money for partisan political purposes.
Mr. President, clearly, this proposal needs additional discussion. I urge that the motion for cloture on Senate Resolution 198 be rejected.
Mr. McCONNELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky is recognized.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, much has been said about the hostages. The hostages' credibility is not the issue. They, by their own admission, do not really know what happened; they have no earthly idea. They were in seclusion and probably are much less likely to know what happened even than people here in the Senate. So the hostages' credibility is not the issue here. The hostages do not know anything about this.
As a matter of fact, it could be argued that Gary Sick does not really know anything about this. He admitted today that the section in his book related to the key meeting that was alleged to have occurred in Madrid, he relied on six sources to prove that the meeting had happened in Madrid; of those six, only one claimed to have been there, and that was a convicted felon.
So, Mr. President, I repeat, the only October surprise envisioned by this investigation is a October 1992 surprise. There is no more basis to go back and investigate these allegations than there would be to investigate whether or not the Democrats stole the Illinois election in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race. That was only 31 years ago. Surely we can go back and look at that and see what really happened. There are all kinds of allegations out there, Mr. President. At what expense do we chase every rabbit that somebody in America wants to chase?
Mr. President, how much time do I have left?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. One minute and 50 seconds.
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Mr. McCONNELL. I yield the remainder of my time to the Republican leader.
Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Kentucky for his statement and for his knowledge of this particular subject. I am not going to say anything derogatory about Gary Sick. He happens to live in Russell, KS, or he did live in my hometown. His parents live in my hometown. I have not had any contact with him for a long time.
Notwithstanding that, I think the Senator from Kentucky has made some salient points, and we are just wasting $600,000. That money might be better spent checking into Centrust and David Paul and some of these people who ripped off the American taxpayers for billions of dollars. Will that be investigated as part of this, I ask the Senator from Kentucky?
Mr. McCONNELL. I say that, unfortunately, an investigation of CenTrust is not envisioned by this.
Mr. DOLE. I do not think it is envisioned by anybody, as far as I can tell. It should be invested by somebody. I hope that all Republicans will vote against cloture.
I yield back my time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time has expired.
Mr. MITCHELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. MITCHELL. Parliamentary inquiry. Do I have leader time left?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Leader time has been reserved.
Mr. MITCHELL. I will be very brief and use a moment of my leader time.
Mr. President, in recent months serious allegations have been made in the media and elsewhere that individuals associated with the political campaign organization of then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan entered into a secret ageement with representatives of the Government of Iran. Allegedly, the agreement was to delay the release of United States hostages until after the Reagan administration took office in 1981, in exchange for the subsequent sale of arms to the Government of Iran.
The alleged actions are reported to have included a third government, or governments and other third parties, in the sale of, or the promise of the sale of weapons.
While I am not aware of any conclusive evidence of any such agreement, the seriousness of the allegations and the weight of the circumstantial information compel an effort to establish the facts. This is particularly so in light of the accusation that the President and former high U.S. Government officials were involved.
Although I personally accept President Bush's statement that he neither participated in, nor had any knowledge of such contacts, former Presidents Reagan and Carter and President Bush have all expressed the view that these allegations should be laid to rest once and for all.
Mr. President, we know two things: We know that the release of the hostages was delayed until moments after President Reagan took office. And we know that after taking office President Reagan authorized a secret effort to transfer arms to Iran. So the two events did occur. That is a matter of history. That is undisputed.
What we do not know is whether the two events occurred completely independently and totally by coincidence, or whether they were the result of a secret agreement linking them and causing them to occur in that fashion.
That is what this inquiry is intended to establish. I think it raises a question, a fundamental question in everyone's minds. If someone is so opposed to trying to find out the facts, the question arises: What are they trying to hide? Why are they so afraid of an inquiry? What is it that they are trying to conceal?
Common sense, and our own human experience in our daily affairs tells us that when some individuals and groups go to great lengths to prevent the facts from being made public, they are concerned about what those facts are and what those facts will reveal. So I think the fundamental question before the Senate now is a simple one: We know the release of the hostages was in fact delayed until moments after President Reagan took office, and we know that, shortly thereafter, President Reagan did in fact authorize the secret transfer of arms to Iran. Was that just a coincidence? Did it just happen completely independent of any agreement, or was there some agreement? We do not know. We ought to find out for the sake of all concerned and lay this issue to rest once and for all. If there was no agreement, then we ought to try to find out and get that on the record and establish it.
I should think all concerned would want to have the facts made public. So I urge my colleagues to vote for cloture, to permit this inquiry to go forward, so we can find out the facts once and for all, so that at least on this one occasion the American people can feel secure that nothing is being hidden, nothing is being concealed, and there is no coverup. We just want the facts.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, will the majority leader yield 30 seconds at this time?
Mr. MITCHELL. Yes.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want the record to be clear, and I say to the minority leader, David Paul's records and CenTrust's records had been subpoenaed by our committee over a year and half ago. We would welcome him as a witness; he is on our witness list. And if the minority leader would like to join in making $600,000 available to our staff and the two people who have done the entire investigation of BCCI, I promise him an investigation of CenTrust such as the Justice Department has never seen.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the clerk will report the motion to invoke cloture.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to proceed to Senate Resolution 198, to amend Senate Resolutuon 62 (102d Congress) to authorize the Committee on Foreign Relations to exercise certain investigatory powers in connection with its inquiry into the release of the U.S. hostages in Iran.
Paul Sarbanes, Don Riegle, Claiborne Pell, Dennis DeConcini, Jim Sasser, Paul Wellstone, Bob Graham, Wendell Ford, Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, John Glenn, Paul Simon, Howard Metzenbaum, J.J. Exon, George Mitchell, Harris Wofford.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the quorum call will be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, is it the sense of the Senate that the debate on the motion to proceed to the consideration of Senate Resolution 198, the resolution to amend Senate Resolution 62 of the 102d Congress, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. FORD. I announce that the Senator from New Mexico [Mr. Bingaman], the Senator from Louisiana [Mr. Breaux], the Senator from Arkansas [Mr. Bumpers], the Senator from Iowa [Mr. Harkin], the Senator from Nevada [Mr. Kerrey], are necessarily absent.
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Mr. SIMPSON. I announce that the Senator from Idaho [Mr. Symms], is necessarily absent.
I further announce that, if present and voting, the Senator from Idaho [Mr. Symms] would vote `nay.'
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Levin). Are there any other Senators in the Chamber desiring to vote?
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 51, nays 43, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn, not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
Mr. MITCHELL addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
END