The House task force was concluding a year-long investigation into claims that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign had interfered with President Carter’s negotiations to free 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. A mixed bag of Iranian officials, foreign intelligence agents and international arms dealers had alleged a Republican deal behind Carter’s back. But the task force had decided there was “no credible evidence” to support allegations that the Reagan campaign had blocked Carter’s possible “October Surprise” of an election-eve hostage return.
Carter’s failure to free those hostages over 444 days had sealed his political doom and boosted Reagan from a neck-and-neck race to a resounding electoral victory. The hostages’ release, as Reagan was completing his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, opened a floodgate of patriotic fervor that reshaped the political landscape and made Reagan a hero.
The possibility that this pivotal moment in modern American history had resulted from a nearly treasonous dirty trick had drawn understandably angry denials from Reagan-Bush loyalists — and even from Democrats who feared that the public would lose faith in politics if the charges proved true.
So, with a collective sigh of relief, the House task force debunked the charges by adopting an elaborate set of alibis for the key players, particularly the late CIA director William J. Casey, who had run Reagan’s campaign. One of the Casey alibi dates was nailed down, according to the task force, because a Republican operative had written Casey’s home phone number on a piece of paper that day, although the operative admitted that he had no recollection of reaching Casey at home.
To the shock of the task force, the six-page Russian report stated, as fact, that Casey, George Bush and other Republicans had met secretly with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 presidential campaign. The Russians depicted the hostage negotiations that year as a two-way competition between the Carter White House and the Reagan campaign to outbid one another for Iran’s cooperation on the hostages. The Russians asserted that the Reagan team had disrupted Carter’s hostage negotiations after all, the exact opposite of the task force conclusion.
As described by the Russians, the Carter administration offered the Iranians supplies of arms and unfreezing of assets for a pre-election release of the hostages. The Iranians “discussed a possible step-by-step normalization of Iranian-American relations [and] the provision of support for President Carter in the election campaign via the release of American hostages.”
But the Republicans were making separate overtures to the Iranians, also in Europe, the Russians claimed. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russians wrote.
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter and former CIA director George Bush also took part,” the Russians said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”
Both the Reagan Republicans and Carter Democrats “started from the proposition that Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means,” the Russians wrote. According to the report, the Republicans won the bidding war.
“After the victory of R. Reagan in the election, in early 1981, a secret agreement was reached in London in accord with which Iran released the American hostages, and the U.S. continued to supply arms, spares and military supplies for the Iranian army,” the report continued. The deliveries were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers, the Russians said. Spares for F-14 fighters and other military equipment went to Iran from Israel in March-April 1981 and the arms pipeline kept flowing into the mid-1980s.
“Through the Israeli conduit, Iran in 1983 bought surface-to-surface missiles of the ‘Lance’ class plus artillery of a total value of $135 million,” the report said. “In July 1983, a group of specialists from the firm, Lockheed, went to Iran on English passports to repair the navigation systems and other electronic components on American-produced planes.” Then, in 1985, the weapons tap opened wider, into the Iran-contra shipments.
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