Our first guest today is Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, he's the author of Secrecy and Privilege and Neck Deep.
And well, I want a history lesson and Bob Perry is the man to give it.
It's about the Vietnam War and the tapes that came out this week of LBJ cursing the Nixon campaign, basically accusing them, well not basically, accusing them of quote treason, at least in private phone calls, for their interference in his attempt to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War in 1968.
How could this be?
What is going on here?
Welcome back to the show, Bob Perry.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and especially when we're talking about Republicans and the chain of criminality that really runs through from the Nixon administration, through the Vice President's office, through the Reagan campaign and the Vice President's office of the 1980s, through the Project for a New American Century and the Vice President's office in the last two Bush Jr. terms here, it's one hell of a story.
It really does go back to Richard Nixon, doesn't it?
Well, a lot of it does.
Nixon sort of set the tone of how Republicans would conduct politics.
And my family was Republican back then, but they were sort of the more, sort of the New England Republicans.
And that was quite different.
There was a sense of small government is best, be careful about how you spend the taxpayers' money.
And a respect for the Constitution.
And Nixon, partly out of his own personality, and partly out of just a sense of how you have to win at all costs, changed that.
He brought a desire to do whatever was needed, even if that meant trying to play tricks, essentially dirty tricks on his opponents.
And in this case, this extraordinary case in 1968, the evidence is now quite overwhelming that his campaign, with his knowledge and essential approval, interfered with Lyndon Johnson's efforts to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion.
Well, now, let me make sure I understand, because obviously, you know, I'm a young guy.
I wasn't born until 76.
Well, I like to think I'm young.
I actually have a few gray hairs in my beard now.
But I wasn't born until 76, so I'm not really sure about all these things.
But correct me if I'm wrong, Richard Nixon at this point was nothing but a failed gubernatorial candidate from California.
He had no official position of power to do any negotiating on behalf of America whatsoever.
No, he was out of office.
Of course, he'd been vice president under Dwight Eisenhower.
And then he lost to Kennedy in 1960.
And then he sort of, he failed in a run for the governorship of California in 62.
He was more or less out of politics for a while, although there was sort of plotting and scheming on how to get back in.
And then in 68, he won the Republican nomination for president.
But at the time of these events, in late October of 1968, he was just, he was just a private citizen, a nominee for the presidency, but not holding any office.
So he was doing this, and his people were doing this, in a way to block what they saw as the possibility that a, that a peace agreement, or at least a significant progress toward a peace agreement, would help Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's vice president and running as the Democratic nominee for president.
So the move became, how do you stop this, these peace talks from moving forward?
At the time, you also have to remember, there were half a million American soldiers in harm's way in Vietnam.
This was a war that had already gone on from, for most of the 1960s.
And it was, it escalated in the last few years.
But at that point in 68, Johnson thought he had a real window to end the war, to get the United States out, and get some kind of peace deal.
And he was trying to get the South Vietnamese government, which the U.S. was supporting, to the bargaining table in Paris.
And so the maneuver of the Nixon campaign was to, to tell President Thu in South Vietnam, via various intermediaries, including the ambassador, their ambassador in Washington, to delay, to not, not show up, to, because he would get a better deal if he waited for Nixon to come in, than if he did this and possibly helped the Democrats end up winning in 68.
So it was a, it was a political maneuver, but with promises that, that President Thu would do, would have a, would, would have more protection, more support from a Republican administration than Democratic one.
And Thu did agree not to go to these peace talks.
And the war went on for four plus years.
All right.
Well, now on a couple of legalities, I want to know all about the details of how this was arranged and all this.
But as far as treason, it's the only crime defined in the Constitution, because they didn't want it being thrown around as, you know, Bob Perry's a traitor, because he's talking bad about the Republicans while they're in power and that kind of thing.
And so it is defined in the Constitution as an overt act of aid and comfort to an enemy.
And so I guess, well, is it, is it simply a matter of, of interpretation that this in effect was helping the North Vietnamese carry on their war?
Well, there also were indications from these tapes that there also, there may have been some overtures to the North Vietnamese as well from the Nixon people.
But the, the, the clear effort was to get the South Vietnamese to boycott the peace talks.
And, and I, I might argue they were in a sense, not an enemy, but they were a foreign power and they were operating with their own sense of what was in their interest.
So I'm not sure, I'm not sure that, that, that Johnson was, was using the technical term of the Constitution when he was talking about this.
He was basically saying that if you're, if you're doing something against your government in a way, when there are, when there are American soldiers in harm's way and you're dealing with a foreign power that is continuing that danger or increasing that danger, that that's a, that that's an extraordinary act of, for a, for a person running for high office in the United States.
Well, and to the, to the extent that it kept America at war against North Vietnam, I guess we need the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer on here to, to talk about whether this might actually qualify as treason in front of a grand jury.
I'm not so certain it wouldn't.
Well, I think it certainly is.
I think that one probably shouldn't get hung up exactly on the, on whether or not there'd be any indictments because there aren't, there aren't going to be.
The, the more significant point is that Nixon took action.
Well, right.
It's, it's the extent to which they're, I mean, this, to what the extent to which they're betraying their country.
I mean, really in trying to undercut.
They're betraying the soldiers who were in harm's way.
Many of whom died, more than 20,000 American soldiers died from this point on after, after Nixon won power.
So as well as estimates of around a million or so Vietnamese.
So there was, there were enormous consequences to the country.
Plus the, beyond that, there was just the disruption that occurred in the United States during that period.
Children were turned against their parents, parents against their children.
The, the, the, the society was almost being ripped apart by the continuation of the war from 68 on through 72.
So it was at best, you could say this was something that had horrendous consequences for individuals and for the nation.
Yeah.
As Nixon was running as the peace candidate who was going to end this terrible democratic war for us.
You know, also I wanted to throw in here the, the Logan Act, which is, I believe from the days of Thomas Jefferson, when some guy named Logan was trying to get us into a war with France and Jefferson was trying not to.
And so they passed this law or saw, I forget if you know the exact origin of the name.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but anyway, I know it's, it's a crime for Bob Perry to go around making his own foreign policy, whether we would argue later it was for or against the national interest in the larger sense.
Well, I, you know, I've never really thought of doing that, so I don't really know all the details, but, but sure.
I mean, it basically is really one of the question of, of judgment and, and, and a reckless behavior on the part of Nixon with a sense of his fierce ambition to gain power and really sort of an anything goes mentality.
And, and that sort of has colored how the Republicans have approached power really ever since.
And to a degree that most people don't know, Nixon remained almost virtually to his death, a significant advisor to the Republican party.
Many of their people that, that were running for office later would go to his, go visit him when he was living.
I think most, most of the time he's outside New York, but sometimes also in California and they would consult with him about what to do.
And he was, we have some of this because one of his assistants went around tape recording him in his last few years, Monica Crowley, and her book is quite revealing of, of Nixon, even to the extent of going into the Clinton years where he's advising them, advising the Republicans to go after Clinton, to try and impeach Clinton as sort of payback for what the Democrats had done to Nixon over Watergate.
And so he was also consulting with, with people seeking office.
He was a, he was pushing Bob Dole to be the nominee in 1996.
And, and Dole of course did get the nomination that year.
So you have, you had Nixon really up to his final days, still plotting, still bitter, still conniving, still advising the Republicans to play that kind of politics.
Well, and when you say anything goes to, again, I wasn't in existence yet, but from the way I was told when I was a kid, 1968 was the year that America was basically being torn apart at the seams.
That for, for Nixon, I mean, him running as the peace candidate and promising, you know, peace with honor as soon as possible and those kinds of things, that was really the essence of, of what let him squeak by and win in the first place.
And he had to have perceived just how tenuous, you know, social relationships were here in the United States at the same time that the Vietnam war is one of the main driving factors behind all of this.
He's, he's in tune with it enough that he's got to run as the peace candidate and yet is cynical enough to completely betray that.
Right.
It's quite also, it's quite interesting to hear his conversations because he's on some of these tapes too.
While the key tapes that were released last week by the Johnson library were between Lyndon Johnson and Senator Everett Dirksen, who was the Republican leader in the Senate at the time.
And, and of course, Johnson having been a longtime Senator himself, knew Dirksen.
And they, and so when, when, when Johnson is getting this information, some of it through wiretaps, because they were wiretapping the, the, the South Vietnamese embassy, they were wiretapping Anna Chenault, who was known as the dragon lady.
She was part of the China lobby and one of the right-wing intermediaries between the, the, the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese.
So they had these, they had these, they were, they were getting this information from very reliable, but very sensitive sources, technical sources.
And as, and as Johnson sort of learns of this, he, he calls Dirksen and says, this is outrageous.
And that's, that's the quote where he talks about, this is treason, what they're doing.
And Dirksen said, says he agrees with, with the president's assessment and says, I'll have to talk to them.
So the Dirksen then goes and presumably talks to, to, to Nixon.
The next day, Nixon calls up and offers a rather lame, self-serving claim that he wasn't really doing any of these things, even though Johnson had pretty strong evidence that he was.
And then Nixon says, well, we're at a point where the war could almost, could be brought to an end.
I certainly don't want to disrupt that.
But then he goes ahead and disrupts it.
But the, so you have this sort of, this Nixon is sort of conniving character on the phone with Johnson.
Johnson has a, has a cold during this time.
And so the president's coughing and, and, but, but being fairly diplomatic, but blunt at the same time, he would try to sort of soft pedal little things like some of these points, because he didn't want to really raise the stakes too high, but he also was pretty stern as well.
And increasingly angry as this, as these conversations go forward.
Then in, just before the election, Johnson learns that a Christian Science Monitor reporter is on to the story and is trying to get confirmation.
And he, and so Johnson talks to Clark Clifford, who was then defense secretary and, and, and, and Rusk, who was the secretary of state, Dean Rusk.
And, and he's asking, what should I do?
Should we take this?
Should we confirm this?
Should we go public?
And, and, and Rusk and most, and most eloquently Clifford say, no, you shouldn't, because then Clifford says, this is really horrendous stuff that's happened here, but it'd be bad for the country if the American people learn of this.
And so he says, it will not be in our national interest for this to come out.
So basically you also get, not just how the, how the Republicans are becoming increasingly hard, hard ballish in playing tough even to this level, but you're also seeing how the Democrats and the establishment, Clifford being a pillar of the establishment in Washington at the time, how they were kind of deciding, well, we shouldn't let the American people in on this stuff because it's too ugly.
It would, it would raise doubts about the legitimacy of our government.
It would interfere with how we go about our foreign policy.
So let's just, you know, keep this under wraps.
Let's sweep it under the rug, basically, for the good of the country, as the phrase would go.
And so you see a lot of what happened has happened since this, this sort of decision that, that the American people are kind of like children and they really shouldn't be told some of these hard truths about how their government really functions and who's really running their country, because that would not, that would like shake their, their childlike beliefs and how this, how the government is working.
Ironically, what it's done is it's fed a lot of paranoia.
It's fed a lot of conspiracy theories, some of which are completely nonsensical.
But there also are cases where there were real scandals, real conspiracies that, that the public has been kept from as that pattern continued.
The Republicans continued to play hardball with, in how they approach things.
Obviously, Watergate was one case where that was kind of blew up in their face, but they continued with this.
And you saw in 1980, that trying to undercut Jimmy Carter on his hostage dealings with Iran, another, another scandal that, that the Democrats helped sweep under the rug when that was investigated as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Iran-Contra kind of came out as sort of a, another surprise for them, but it really, the Democrats have always approached this was, let's not, let's not have this go too far because my goodness, it will shock, it will, it will shake the belief of the American people in their, in their government.
So let's, let's play it nice.
The Republicans say, wow, that they, they see the weakness on the part of the Democrats.
And so they just play it harder.
And we've continued to see that pattern almost until the present day.
Yeah.
I'd rather lose an election than tell the truth.
It's the same thing that happened in 1960, when Kennedy came out and pretended that the Soviets were way ahead on intercontinental ballistic missiles and Nixon knew better and kept his mouth shut on that one.
Well, I think some of, some of what Nixon was doing was what he considered payback for the Democrats, at least, at least as his narrow, bitter defeat in 1960.
And now some of that can be debated.
Obviously, politics is not the sweetest business of all.
Everyone plays a little bit nasty.
But I think what, what, you know, Nixon with his personal chip on his shoulder attitude, saw anything that, that was done to him and this, and just sort of escalated up the ladder.
It's interesting.
Another thing I include in the piece I posted last night was that about the, about the Johnson tapes was that when you, if you dial forward to the beginning of the Watergate scandal, you know, 1972, Nixon is bugging the Democratic National Committee and, and learning essentially what their strategies are, what their vote tallies are for McGovern versus, you know, other, other possible candidates at the convention coming forward.
And so he's, so these, so these burglars go in a second time to sort of fix some of the bugs and add some more, and they get caught in June of 72.
Nixon then begins to coordinate.
We have, of course, the tapes from his office too.
So he starts coordinating how to respond to this.
And one of his strategies is to pressure Lyndon Johnson and to get Johnson to intervene with the Democrats, to get the Democrats to halt the Watergate investigation.
And one of Nixon's complaints is that Johnson had bugged his campaign in 68 in relation to this, the, these secret contacts that were being made with the South Vietnamese.
So Nixon then has used, you know, his, the fact that he was doing what he was doing and his people were dealing with the South Vietnamese buying Johnson's back, but Johnson learned about it through wiretaps effectively.
So that becomes an excuse for Nixon to do Watergate and then try to use that information, which Johnson had helped keep secret, supposedly for the good of the country, against Johnson, to blackmail Johnson into getting the Democrats to halt the Watergate investigation.
So it's kind of an interesting story that we can now piece together from a variety of very reliable sources, because we have, because for some reason, these two guys were taping a lot of their conversations with folks.
And we've had other information from the, the various records that have come out over the years to fill in much of the gaps.
So we, we know that we have the, it's been reported, oh, by some investigator reports have dug out things like the, the actual, the cables that went from the South Vietnamese embassy to Saigon relating to their dealings with, with, with, with the Nixon campaign.
We also have the memoir of Anna Chenault, the Dragon Lady, who was the, one of the chief intermediaries.
And she talks about who was giving her instructions and, and, and how she was being told to make sure that she doesn't tie it back to the Nixon folks.
So we have, so we, so we know an awful lot about this scandal.
But the other amazing thing to me, though, in the last week was this came out and it almost got, it got virtually no attention in the, in the major news media.
Right.
Even with the T word in there in the headline.
Right.
The AP, the AP did a fairly cursory job reporting that there, that Nick, that, that Johnson had accused the Nixon team of treason, but they really didn't have, they didn't go to any detail, provided no context.
They included Nixon saying it wasn't true, basically.
And, and they sort of soft peddled it.
Yeah, that ought to be good enough for you, Perry.
Nixon says it's not true.
No.
All right.
So wait, tell me all about the Dragon Lady, Anna Chenault, who's this lady and what she got to do with all, how this worked out?
Well, Anna Chenault was a very attractive Chinese woman.
And if you remember going back to the period, even earlier, the so-called McCarthy era, when the United States, when, when China fell to the, to the communist forces of Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Kai-shek, who was the right wing sort of nationalist leader, was driven out of China, fled to the island of Taiwan, where the nationals sort of remained in power ever since.
But, so Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters, some of whom were very influential in Washington, began to stir up this, these accusations that, that the Democrats, people in the, in the Truman administration had, had basically sold out the Chinese to the communists, that, that this was part of the plot to, to, to by traitors inside the, the US government to, to give countries to the communists.
Now, and that, that, that fed basically what we know is the McCarthy era.
So Anna Chenault, who then she, she married a, a general who was, who was known for the Flying Tigers, which had been a supply operation during World War II to supply the nationalist Chinese.
She ended up marrying this American officer, and she became a prominent socialite figure in Washington, in terms of building support for the nationalist Chinese movement, and continuing this hostility toward communist China, or ramping it up.
So, so that was sort of her background.
So she was, she was a part of the, what you might consider a right wing infrastructure in, in, in, in Washington, the, the, these were very well funded activities that were designed to put a lot of pressure on the US government to build up the military and be more aggressive when it came to things like communist insurgencies.
That's why she was a factor in relating to Vietnam, because the, the argument that, that was facing Johnson during this time was he was being accused of losing Indochina, much as Truman had been accused of losing China.
And Johnson was scared stiff that he would, that would be part of his legacy.
So he began to respond to that by building up American forces in Vietnam and led to what we know as the Vietnam War.
And now what about the role of Henry Kissinger in this?
Because if I remember right, Christopher Hitchens, in his movie, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, talks about, I guess, he was really the one organizing this whole thing, right?
Well, I mean, that's an interesting point, because obviously, the first, the first time this really sort of became this, this story was sort of known to the American people at any level, was in 1983, with the publication by Seymour Hersh of his biography of Henry Kissinger.
And in it, Hersh describes the role that Kissinger played in organizing, or because Kissinger was being insulted behind the scenes by the Johnson people, he was part of the effort of what, of getting the, getting the, the peace talks going in Paris.
But he was then back channeling that information to the Nixon people, describing to them the various strategies that Johnson was following, in order to bring peace to Vietnam, and to get the American troops out.
So that became the, that became the spark plug, that led the Republicans to then say, Well, how can we stop Johnson from doing these things that Kissinger had been told about, that is, bringing the parties together in Paris for peace settlement.
So yeah, Kissinger played a key role in this.
Now, it appears, and we still, there are still a lot of things we don't know, but it appears that Vice President nominee, Spiro Agnew, was another key figure, along with John Mitchell, who then was essentially campaign manager for Nixon, later, of course, became the Attorney General and was implicated in and convicted in the Watergate scandal years later.
But you had this crowd who were part of Nixon's entourage in various ways.
And Kissinger, but Kissinger was sort of in between the two camps, he was pretending to be helping the Johnson people.
But he was ingratiating himself with the Nixon crowd.
And ultimately, of course, he became Nixon's National Security Advisor, and later, Secretary of State.
So it helped his career along mightily.
Sounds like he ought to be rotting in a prison cell right now or something.
No.
Well, I mean, one could argue that.
And it's interesting that Kissinger also plays a role in the 1980 October surprise case, which I've looked at a lot because it was because I did the Iran contra scandal in the 1980s.
And as we would sort of look back and try to figure out how did this start, we found increasingly, there was a lot of evidence pointing to the Republicans making their first contacts with the Iranians in 1980 during their campaign.
And again, Henry Kissinger shows up.
And by the way, so does Richard Nixon, oddly.
Richard Nixon was involved with some of the CIA guys in 1980, coming up with schemes for how to, you know, how they would deal with Iran, they were kind of like, sort of, they weren't a part of the government at all, but they were, they were still acting like they were.
And and they were contemptuous of Jimmy Carter and his failure to get the hostages out.
And in that mix comes Henry Kissinger, who was, you remember, because he was great.
He'd been David Rockefeller's guy.
And Rockefeller was the chief banker, Chase Manhattan was the chief banker for the Shah of Iran.
So you had, you had a lot of these interesting connections going that way, too.
Some years, this is a dozen years later, when the Republicans are playing a similar kind of game.
How do you make the, because they thought that Jimmy Carter was trying to get the hostages out right before the election, to tip the election his way in 1980, and defeat Ronald Reagan.
So their goal was, how do you make that not happen?
And that became known as the October Surprise case.
Well, you know, it's interesting you bring up David Rockefeller there.
I remember in Barry Goldwater's memoirs, he has a chapter called Jimmy Who?
And it's about how, here you have Henry Kissinger, who's basically Nelson Rockefeller's guy, is the foreign policy guy for Nixon and Ford.
And then Carter comes in, and he's got Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Rockefeller's guy, running things in his administration.
They just switch back and forth again, between these two brothers and their political operatives.
Well, that is how the establishment sort of works.
I mean, not to be too obvious, but there are these people that are supposedly, quote, respected from all sides.
We're seeing it even now in the transition, on the Obama transition, where the establishment is just thrilled that Obama is putting in place all these people that they feel that, who are part of this grouping of who's respected in Washington.
The so-called realist school.
Well, my major is, you know, the neocons, who are not at all realists, are part of the establishment now in Washington.
They're very well respected, they have important positions, they're welcomed onto the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and they basically control the Washington Post.
So the neocons, or ideologues, are also part of this establishment.
And then you have people like Robert Gates, who essentially always acted like a neocon, although maybe he is more of an opportunist.
But he's embraced by the establishment, they love him.
And so all these, so the way it kind of works is that certain people are blessed in this group.
And there really isn't a lot of change from one, even one party to the next.
I mean, there's some emphasis, perhaps, and some might be harder line than the other, but a lot of it stays the same.
Yeah, Fred.
So, by the way, and forgive me for being such a kook on this issue.
But do you know what David Rockefeller is up to nowadays?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I haven't read, I read, I went through his memoir came out, I don't know, maybe several years ago.
And I went through that culling it for information, like a lot of memoirs, it really wasn't that revealing.
But it was interesting how, how he played a key role, of course, in, in 1980, in helping in dealing with the Shah's problem.
Because the Shah Buran, after being overthrown in 79, began wandering the world, sort of like a, you know, guy looking for a port to to to anchor his boat.
The Flying Dutchman, he was called, I think Kissinger came up with that line about him.
But but so David Rockefeller was approached by the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf, in a meeting they had in in New York, and, and Rockefeller is importuned by Ashraf to, to help her brother, who's also suffering from cancer, get medical treatment and a place to live.
And so, so essentially, Rockefeller agrees.
It turns out, of course, that Chase Manhattan has a lot of money for that, that the the old Iranian government had deposited, and the new Iranian government wanted to withdraw.
So it was in the interest of Chase Manhattan to, to make sure that money didn't go back to Tehran, because they were essentially bankrupt at the bank at that time.
So you have this sort of in this intrigue of, of getting Jimmy Carter to allow the Shah to enter the United States.
And it was Kissinger, and, and, and David Rockefeller played key roles in that.
And when they finally did get Carter to agree to allow the Shah to get treatment for his cancer, that's what provoked the uprising in Tehran, that led to the hostages being seized at the US Embassy.
So these guys were, these guys have always been playing mischief in their various ways.
And while they pretend to do these things for the best interest of the United States, it's often what's in their interest.
Well, yeah, and it often backfires even against their own interests.
But I guess that's why they have the Federal Reserve to bail them out.
Wow.
So where do I want to go?
Oh, I wanted to go to October Surprise then from there, because now, you know, they have the consequences of the revolution, which I wish I could memorize these Middle Eastern names better.
But there was a great article on antiwar.com, say about six months ago or so about how certain people in the State Department actually were in favor of because the Shah was on his way out anyway, he was sick, like you say, and he had to be replaced with somebody and some of them basically gave the okay, I don't know how widespread the agreement was in the government, but some of them seem to pretty much give the okay for the Ayatollah Khomeini to take over.
And then of course, you had the the uprising at the embassy and the taking of the hostages and all that, which ended up backfiring in their face.
So then the Republicans, as you have reported so thoroughly, and I forget which book is it?
Is it Secrecy and Privilege?
Secrecy and Privilege is probably the most detailed version of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so so and I know Gary Sick wrote a great book called October Surprise about this.
What wrote what exactly was was the deal?
How I mean, I think most people know the outline of at least the accusation that the Republicans actually convinced the Iranians to hold the hostages longer to wait until Ronald Reagan took office in order to hurt Jimmy Carter.
So I guess basically, I'd like the overall briefing on it if you can, and particularly with an eye to the role of George Bush, Sr., which seems to always get underplayed or downplayed.
Right.
Well, I think in some ways, if you look at what happened in 68, as a as a as a precursor to what happened in 1980, you'd see a lot of parallels.
Again, it was a case where the Democrats were in power.
They were facing a serious crisis.
There was an effort to achieve some kind of settlement, that the settlement, if it had occurred right before the election, could have tipped the election away from the Republicans to the Democrats.
And so the Republicans went about think their their position was essentially that Carter was doing the bad thing, that he was trying to have this well-timed hostage release that would would would would would help him politically.
So they the first they began investigating this and sort of figure out what Carter was up to.
And they had this they had they brought a lot of old CIA people who had worked for the former CIA Director George H.W. Bush.
And they've been part of his campaign before he joined with Reagan as his vice as the vice presidential nominee.
So they've kind of they kind of swung over to the to the Reagan-Bush campaign.
And they continued this effort to monitor and to essentially make contacts of their own.
And to in one in one level, try to figure out what Carter was up to how far along the negotiations were.
But that it seems to have evolved into something similar to what we saw in 68, passing on messages to the Iranian government that they would get a better deal, a better shake if if they dealt with the Republicans than with the Democrats.
And and there was also a lot of hatred in Tehran for Jimmy Carter.
He had praised the Shah, if you remember before the Shah fell.
And he was considered sort of a sanctimonious guy, they just didn't they didn't like him at all.
So there was this and plus, some of them did have relations going back with the CIA, that the Khomeini himself had received some levels of protection from the from the US intelligence services when he was in Paris.
So, so there was this, there was this history.
And and we now we don't we know a lot about this, even though it's remained on an official level murky.
But there was, for instance, a very detailed letter that the president of Iran, Bonnie Sauter, sent to the an investigation that was being done in the House of Representatives in 1992, that dealt with this issue.
And he described in detail the the efforts by the Khomeini people to set up a deal with the Republicans.
And he, Bonnie Sauter opposed it thought there should be the deal should be should have been done with the Democrats who were in office at that time.
And this, this crisis should have been ended effectively with by releasing the hostages.
So there was this internal battle inside Iran, which the Republicans fed into.
We also have a lot of evidence from from, for instance, even, even the PLO people were approached by the Republicans, with this idea that they could go to Iran, and Arafat actually did go to Iran, and convey the desire of the Republicans to work out their own deal with the Iranians.
There was, there have been witnesses from from Israeli intelligence, from French intelligence, that there were there were these meetings that went on both in Madrid, Spain, where these allegations of Bill Casey took part, he was the then the the chairman of the of the Reagan campaign.
He was in a later went on to be CIA director.
But the Casey the Casey had these had various meetings.
Casey also had a lot of interesting ties with the Kissinger Rockefeller crowd.
Well, I wanted to ask you one thing just came up.
I didn't want to interrupt you.
But you just gave me the perfect opportunity.
I seem to remember and I'm sorry, because I can't remember where I read this.
But I believe I read somewhere that Reagan made a deal with David Rockefeller that he would get their support if he would nominate Bush to be his vice president and make him bring Casey in on his campaign and then put him in the administration.
Well, Casey was already in the Reagan campaign.
He comes in and at the time of the New Hampshire primary, but Casey was a person who had dealings with with that crowd from New York.
Casey was, of course, basically a New York wheeler dealer lawyer type.
The as far as as Bush clearly, you know, clearly this Bush was a favorite of the of the David Rockefeller crowd.
I don't I don't know, personally, whether or not there was some face to face meeting, where such a deal was struck.
But But clearly, Reagan was, was bringing in that wing of the party, and also bringing in these these old CIA guys who had been basically cashiered under Jimmy Carter, and they were very angry about what Carter had done to them.
So they sort of joined the campaign too.
And that's, and that provides an important impetus to this kind of skullduggery that that is at the core of the October surprise story.
And but then you but but you have to but you have Casey, you have you have a lot of evidence now that George HW Bush, much like Agnew may have done as the vice presidential nominee in the 1968 matter.
Bush may have played a similar role for the 1980 matter, because, you know, essentially, if you're if you're a foreign power, and you're negotiating with someone who's not actually in power, in the United States, you would want someone who you know, is going to be there.
If this, if this group wins.
Now, a lot of the people are the operatives might not be there, they might get jobs, they might not, but a vice presidential nominee is going to be there, if if the if that party wins.
So it may be that there were needs to have assurances from somebody who was essentially in the line of command for the incoming government.
But it appears that Bush played a similar role with in the 1980 matter.
And another name that has been brought in by by and by several of these sources, including some documented sourcing was Robert Gates.
Robert Gates had been he had been a CIA guy under under poppy Bush, he had, he was sort of very ambitious, he was trying to move up through the ranks, he had, he'd gone over to he'd worked for Carter's White House for a while in the NSC staff, and then came back to work for as an executive assistant to the CIA director Turner.
And then these, the allegations are that he and some other people who were still in the CIA, collaborated with some of their old colleagues who were who were had left the CIA, in helping the republicans pull off this, this scheme of making their own separate deal with the Iranians.
And then whether or not that's true, I mean, a lot of evidence it is true.
But whether it is true or not, what we do know is that after Casey was put in at CIA, Bob Gates, his career skyrocketed, he was picked out of relative obscurity, and made the head of the analytical division, where he then began changing the whole way that the CIA approaches information, as you know, you know, they used to have a, an old, an old policy of providing what they call bark on intelligence, real tough, whatever the facts are, ma'am kind of stuff.
And it was Bob Gates who got them to essentially politicize everything and exaggerate certain threats.
So it would fit with what the policymakers in the Reagan administration wanted to do.
Right.
He's the guy who was saying that the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall, right when they were imploding around him.
Right.
And really, the interesting thing is that the agency knew that the Soviet Union was imploding.
The I've talked even to people on the operations side, who said there are the best US sources inside the Soviet government, and they in the US had had some very good sourcing were described, they would they were describing the collapsing Soviet Union.
This is as late as as early as 1970s.
And certainly by the 1980s, it was well known and there were many of the criminologists, the Mel Goodman's Ray McGovern type, who were warning of this, too.
So what Gates did is he essentially moved those guys out and moved in malleable analysts who were very career oriented, who would deliver the intelligence that the Reagan administration wanted to hear that if the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall, that it was on the agenda.
And he said, in March, the US better build up the US is the military budget, they're better us better go and intervene in all these little brush fire wars around the world.
And ironically, that's the that was the reason that the CIA missed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But it really didn't miss it as much as it had been politicized to such a degree, that that was an answer that the British people didn't want to get.
So the agency, under Bob Gates is control in this regard, gave them the information they wanted.
And that, and many of the people that Gates put in, remain with the agency in high positions, right up through the WMD mess in Iraq, where they played a similar role, where they gave the White House what they knew the White House wanted to hear that, oh, that there was a huge threat from Iraq, much like they exaggerated the threat from the Soviet Union.
So you have this, these, you have this, we will be going back to the 1980 matter, we do know that Gates, his career skyrocketed, for some reason, after, after the other Reagan people got in.
So there's a lot of, so there's just been a lot of evidence.
And I go through it in some detail and secrecy and privilege trying to lay out, because some of it does get a little complicated.
And there are counterclaims.
And I have to deal with those too, of why certain claims that there were efforts to debunk this story in the early 1990s, that were fairly effective, at least in debunking them, even though the, even though the stories themselves turned out to be false.
The Newsweek and the New Republic did cover stories, based on an alibi they had, they had bought into for Bill Case's whereabouts on a key day.
And it turned out they'd gotten it completely wrong.
And we later were able to show based on witnesses that were at the place that Casey was supposedly at, for this alibi, that, that the Newsweek and New Republic stories were wrong.
But they never corrected them.
And, and it was such a desire by that point, even among the Democrats, in late 92, after the election, which was putting Bill Clinton into office, that there was no real interest in pursuing the truth.
The interest was in, in trying to be bipartisan, and not in embittering the Republicans.
This is the Democratic side of this, of this dysfunctional relationship that we have between the Republicans and Democrats.
The Republicans play these really, it's like they're the abusive husband and the, and the Democrats play the role of the cowering wife.
Well, and they do it the other way around when the other side's in power.
And we're about to watch at least four, maybe eight years of that too.
Well, how much do they do?
Really?
I mean, they didn't under, under Clinton.
Basically, the Democrats took it on the, on the chin over and over again, with all these investigations that were over, over trivial matters compared to the kinds of things that the Republicans had been doing.
Yeah, but see, Bob, now here's where I'll differ with you.
They were investigating a bunch of trivial matters compared with the things that Clinton was doing, such as sending the Army's Delta Force to burn the Branch Davidians to death, such as covering up the FBI informant's involvement in the Oklahoma bombing and the disappearance of, there ever was a John Doe number two in, in the fake intelligence for bombing Sudan, in the fake, never existed mass graves in Kosovo.
Well, I mean, I, you know, I'm not sure I agree with all those points.
I think they're, they're more complicated than, than you're laying them out.
But I do, I would, I don't recall the Republicans presenting for any of those investigations.
No, that's what I'm saying.
They went after Whitewater and Paula Jones and a bunch of BS.
Right, exactly.
And so that, my point is that, that the Republicans made it, it made a determination really starting in 93, that they were going to impeach or destroy Bill Clinton and get back in power through his destruction.
And that led ultimately to his impeachment over his sexual misconduct with Paula Jones, or with Monica Lewinsky.
But then, and they did actually achieve much of what they wanted.
They, they set the stage for George W. Bush getting the presidency in 2001.
Right.
And then, of course, we've talked about this before, too.
And this is really the lesson, I think, of this entire thread of history going back to 1968.
And that was this, this meeting that Seymour Hersh reported, where it was like the Iran-Contra alumni got together, I guess, I don't know if it was actually in the vice president's office, they're all standing around having drinks or whatever, talking about the lessons and the, and of all these various covert operations.
And the lesson really is, use the vice president's office, keep the CIA and the military, you know, as, as much on the sidelines as possible, use the National Security Council.
These are the best ways to skirt the law and get away with bloody murder.
Well, that's certainly what they learned out of Iran-Contra.
And again, Iran-Contra was a scandal.
The Democrats did everything they could not to investigate.
You know, I was writing about that for the Associated Press with the Contra side of it, and Ollie Norris' secret operations to keep the Contras funded.
He was, of course, using the NSC.
He was working closely with the vice president, the vice president Bush's office.
And we were able to really break that down, and in a number of stories, including the Contras getting involved with drug traffickers, as another way to finance themselves.
So, well, we had all that, and it went to the, and when the Democrats were kind of pushed into looking at it in the summer of 86, Lee Hamilton, who was then chairman of the Intelligence Committee, went over to the White House with Dick Cheney, who was then a congressman from Wyoming and a member of the committee.
And Henry Hyde and some other people.
And they sat down with Ollie Norris and with our story and said, this is true.
And he said, no, it's not.
And they basically said, oh, okay, that's good enough for us.
And one of Hamilton's guys called me afterwards.
I was at the AP office in DC, and I was told, we've looked into this, and your story doesn't check out.
And we have a choice between believing these honorable men, people in the White House, or your sources, and it's not a close call.
And so that was the extent of their investigation, really, at that time, and only was because one of Norris' last planes that he was sending to drop weapons to the Contras got shot down.
The Hassenfuss plane, right?
Right, on October 5th of 1986, that the story began to unravel.
And there were too many facts.
So the Democrats did everything they could not to investigate this story.
And then once they started investigating it, when that happened, there was also the disclosure in the Middle East about the Iran operation, which now appears to have been a sequel to the 1980 October surprise stuff.
It was sort of that Reagan had continued secretly sending weapons to the Iranians, seemingly out of that relationship that was built up some years earlier.
And when that broke, again, the Democrats weren't involved, neither was the Washington press corps.
And then things got sort of out of control for a while for the Republicans, and they had a little scandal around Contra.
But very quickly, for the good of the country, and I was actually at some of these dinner parties where this sort of language is used.
We have to basically deceive the American people for the good of the country.
We can't take this to the fullest extent.
We can't find all the truth, because if you do that, then you're going to impeach Ronald Reagan, and who wants to do that?
This is too messy.
So the decision becomes, let's just do a kind of a political investigation.
We'll bring out a few things.
We'll slap some wrists.
We'll try to keep the president, and in this case also the vice president, Bush, out of the line of fire, because, oh my God, that would be too terrible if we implicated them in all this.
We'll sort of lay it at the feet of an Ollie North, maybe John Poindexter's boss, a few other people.
They call them the men of zeal.
And we were supposed to believe that they'd kind of done all this without their higher-ups knowing anything.
And it was kind of a preposterous story, but it's more or less what the Democrats agreed to sort of put out.
And the Republicans actually were even angry at that.
They did their minority report, which Dick Cheney was involved in writing, along with David Addington.
And they basically said the president should be allowed to do whatever he wants.
And Cheney has later, in 2005, referenced that back when he was explaining how his view of the imperial presidency had developed.
And he refers you back to that minority report that was issued in 1987.
Well, and I think frontline or something, one of those said that he was watching Nixon get on the helicopter and leave out one of the windows in the White House and just couldn't bear the idea that a president would ever have to bow down to the Congress and leave his position.
He would never let that kind of thing happen on his watch again.
Well, you know, much of what the Republicans did after that, in terms of building their right-wing media and all the rest of it, was to prevent another Watergate.
That was the phrase they would use, we will not allow another Watergate.
Right, not that they'll stop being criminals, but they'll stop letting themselves get in a position where they could ever be held the slightest bit accountable for it.
That's right.
I'm sorry, because I've got a hundred more questions.
I want to ask you all about Eric Edelman and a hundred other things.
I could keep you on the phone for three hours, but Bob, you've got to go and I've got to go, and the interview's over.
I'm sorry.
Okay, thanks a lot.
Well, thank you very much for your time today.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Perry from Consortium News.
And by the way, they're still doing their fun drive.
Economic times have hit hard, but ConsortiumNews.com is such an excellent website.
It's an indispensable resource.
Please share whatever you've got, $5, $10, $50, whatever you can do.
They're doing their fun drive still at ConsortiumNews.com.
Go and help them out.
The books, again, are Secrecy and Privilege and Neck Deep.
This is Anti-War Radio.
And, hon, you know what?
The next interview doesn't start until the bottom of the hour, and I could have kept him on.
I could have asked all about Eric Edelman.
And I forgot.
Oh, well, that's it.
All right, well, we're Anti-War Radio.
We'll be back here.
Dang.
