05/12/10 – Robert Parry – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and I'm happy to welcome Robert Perry back to the show, he's one of the best reporters around, no doubt about that, the website is ConsortiumNews.com, and well, pretty much any crime the Republicans ever committed, dating back to William Howard Taft or something, and Bob Perry is on it.
Welcome back to the show, Bob, how are you?
Pretty good, thanks for having me.
Well I really appreciate you joining us here, so let's talk about a giant scandal brewing right about the time I was turning two or so.
The Republicans made a corrupt, evil, criminal conspiracy deal with the evil Ayatollah Khomeini to hold on to America's hostages in Beirut longer, so that it would benefit Ronald Reagan.
That just could not possibly be true, Bob Perry.
Well not Beirut, it was in Tehran, but uh...
Oh, well, it was a little of both, wasn't it?
Well later on it became Tehran, there were also arms for hostage deals that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, which were a bit later, 85-86, that related to hostages held in Beirut.
Right, this is about the guys taken at the embassy during the revolution.
The ones taken at the embassy in 1979 were held in Tehran, and that was when Jimmy Carter was president, and he struggled unsuccessfully to get them released prior to the election in 1980.
They weren't released until actually after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on January 20th of 81, and then became an important part of Reagan's early mystique as a leader who could frighten America's enemies, who was not going to be trifled with, because the myth was that the Iranians were so scared of Reagan that they released the hostages rather than face him down as the new president.
The evidence now is pretty clear that there were a number of back-channel contacts with the Iranians prior to all this that led to that coincidence of timing.
It wasn't just that Iran was afraid, and in fact, we now know, based on work that came out of the Iran-Contra scandal, as we traced back the origins of those contacts, it was clear that in 81, the United States gave a green light to the Israelis to ship substantial amounts of weapons, U.S.
-made weapons, to the Iranians.
Wow, as early as 1981, they were shipping them weapons, huh?
Right.
And that was known inside the Reagan administration, and one of the flights was shot down over the Soviet Union.
It was an Argentine plane that was being controlled by the Israelis, delivering weapons to Iran, and that was in the summer of 81.
And when some of the senior State Department officials began checking back into the story, they encountered the fact that the senior people in the Reagan administration knew about all this and insisted that it be kept secret, because this would have opened the door to a lot of concerns among Americans that, especially at that point, Americans were very angry with the Iranians for the hostage crisis and for their other humiliations.
So the idea that the United States was going along with a program to arm the Iranians would have been a scandal of its own right.
So that was kept under wraps.
Yeah.
Now, I'm sorry to interrupt here.
I don't want to get too far off of the October surprise, but it's interesting to me that I guess I've always sort of understood that America really backs Saddam Hussein.
And of course, your reporting, again, I can refer people to ConsortiumNews.com, where you reprinted the, I guess it's a PDF file or a picture of a memo from Alexander Haig to Ronald Reagan saying he just got back from Saudi Arabia, where King Fahd confirmed that Jimmy Carter had, through King Fahd, given the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran.
But the point I'm getting to here, Bob, is that I guess the way I've always understood it is that Carter and Reagan really backed Saddam Hussein.
And yeah, they sold weapons to the Iranians, too.
And so you can kind of, in a joking sort of way, say, yeah, arm both sides.
But they really armed the Iraqis far more than the Iranians.
But now you're telling me that they were shipping weapons to Iran as far back as 81.
It makes me wonder, you know, how out of balance that arming of both sides really was.
Well, I think they were arming both sides to some degree.
I think you're correct to say that the tilt went more heavily to the Iraq side.
There was a very important affidavit that we also have up at the website, written by one of Reagan's national security advisors named Howard Teicher, in which he described in 82 the decision by Reagan to throw the U.S. secretly behind the Iraqis to prevent an Iranian breakthrough and victory.
At that time, remember, Iran and Iraq were at war.
And there was concern, especially among some of the Gulf states, that the Iranians, which were a Shiite-dominated government, would defeat Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government.
And push on through to the Persian Gulf.
So there was a decision by Reagan to substantially back the Iraqis at that point.
And that is now documented.
And you're right that that history, while it's still somewhat denied by Republicans and by some government entities, the evidence is very strong that indeed that happened.
But parallel to that was this operation that really went back to 1980, when the Republicans began making contacts behind Carter's back with the Iranians.
The Iranians, even before the war broke out in 79, between Iran and Iraq, were desperate to get American-made weapons, because that's what had supplied the Shah's army.
So they were basically negotiating, according to the evidence, with both sides.
Carter was offering them various deals to try to get the hostages out, especially before the election.
And there was a parallel set of negotiations that the Republicans were conducting with Iran to see about getting the hostages released later.
That is, after Reagan won the election, and indeed after he became president.
So that's really been the mystery.
And what the new information, the story you're talking about, which I posted a week or so ago, was that there was a key document that had arrived for a congressional investigation.
Congress looked into this in 1992.
After the Iran-Contra scandal has played out a bit, people are sort of looking back at how did this start.
And these allegations arose from various people, Iranians, some Israelis, some Europeans, some Americans who were involved with this alleged scheme by the Republicans.
So an investigation took place, but it was always half-hearted.
And it turns out, it appears anyway, that based on interviews I've done recently, that there was a key document that was delivered from the Russian government, it was requested by the head of the task force, Lee Hamilton, a congressman from Indiana at the time.
And Hamilton had asked the Russians, who recently had come out of the Soviet Union, they went out to the Russians, and he asked them for what their intelligence files showed on this stuff.
And the Russians had a lot on this, because...
Hang on one sec there.
For folks in the audience who are scratching their head, why does the name Lee Hamilton sound so familiar, Bob?
Well, Lee Hamilton is considered one of the Washington wise men now.
After leaving Congress in 1999, he has been appointed to a number of key commissions to do investigations, including the 9-11 Commission, and then also the Iraq Study Group.
So he's one of these go-to guys, whenever there's some kind of scandal or question, he's named to the investigating body.
The problem is that Hamilton's not a very good investigator.
He tends to look for political solutions to complex problems that might raise doubts among the American people about what's going on with their government.
He doesn't really go for the truth, he goes for kind of a politically acceptable answer.
And in the case of this October Surprise, the 1980 issue, he did pretty much that.
He didn't want to go into certain areas that might really have caused tremendous conflicts between the Republicans and the Democrats.
He viewed this as kind of history, especially after the election in 92, there was sort of a sense of, well, why bother?
Since George H. W. Bush was one of the characters involved in this scandal, it seemed like piling on since he'd already lost the election and was leaving office to really go after him.
And as they sort of concluded, despite this accumulating evidence that was arriving late in their investigation of Republican guilt, they decided to just press ahead and say nothing happened.
But then the Russians, who Hamilton had contacted, deliver a report, their own report on what happened in this whole area.
And they take it beyond the 1980 area, but they say, here's what we have on what happened.
And they also, from their intelligence files, had that the Republicans were conducting these meetings with the Iranians and that Carter was doing a parallel thing on his own on behalf of the U.S. government at the time.
And that followed with a number of weapons shipments to the Iranians that the U.S. government sanctioned.
So the Russians basically confirmed the story or corroborated it.
But it now appears that that report, which I was able to get hold of, was never shown to Lee Hamilton, even though it was addressed to him, that it was sort of intercepted by the chief counsel on the task force, a guy named Larry Barcella, and just filed away.
And so when I reached Hamilton about this a couple of weeks ago, he was dumbfounded that this document existed.
So I mean, again, it goes to this point of how incomplete and shoddy this investigation was that purported to say that, gee, nothing happened here, even though the evidence kept building up that indeed something did happen here.
All right, everybody, I'm talking with Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
And well, let me highlight this paragraph.
Key October surprise evidence hidden is the title of the article in question here.
And now I just wanted to read a short little bit from here.
The Iranians, quote, 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, according to the U.S. Embassy's classified translation of the Russian report.
Meanwhile, the Republicans were making their own overtures.
The Russian report said, quote, William Casey in 1980 met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership, the report said.
The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.
And it continues here, obviously, with more direct quotes from this Russian report.
But so now what I want to get to here, Bob, is those of you who were covering this story all the way through, I remember Gary Sick.
I think I still have Gary Sick's book, October Surprise.
I haven't read it since high school.
So I don't remember all the specifics of who supposedly went where, when, whatever.
But I remember that part of the accusation was that William Casey was going to Spain and was going to France and that that's where some of these meetings were taking place.
Also there's the question of the involvement of, at that time, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush.
So what I want to know is, when you finally got your hands on this Russian report, did they just, it just lined up perfect?
All your names and dates and everything you already thought you knew is just verified here or what?
Well, not entirely.
There were things in the Russian report that I had never heard of.
There were certain meetings that I was not knowledgeable about.
Did it contradict your reporting in any major way?
No, it didn't.
It was generally corroborating what a number of other witnesses had already said.
What was shocking about it, though, was that it was kept from the American people.
It was listed as confidential, coming from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, but it really wasn't that sensitive in any real terms.
And the fact that it was never released, that I had to find it, I found it in one of the boxes they'd left behind with their documents from this task force investigation.
And I found it a number of years ago and I'd written about it and talked about it, but I never was able to get through to Hamilton on it.
And when I...
So what I was surprised, I actually went back to Hamilton on a different topic.
There was a question raised by one of the task force members that they had never voted unanimously to approve this report, which is what Hamilton had claimed.
So I went back to Hamilton to ask him, how did this happen?
How was there...
Was there really a vote?
When one of the task force members who recently was going back to his papers and found out that there was this claim of a unanimous vote when he was opposed to this report, he was rather shocked.
This is a congressman named Mervyn Dymally.
And so I went to Hamilton to ask him about that.
In the context of that conversation, I said, well, why didn't you ever release this Russian report?
And Hamilton said, basically, what Russian report?
So then I went back to the head of the chief counsel, Larry Barcella, and he said, well, I may just never have shown it to Hamilton.
He just sort of filed it away in a box.
Did he have an explanation as to why?
Well, his explanation, I include his email to me in the article, but he basically says that, well, it wasn't clear what the Russians knew, if it was good information or bad information.
But instead of checking on it, they just stuffed it in a box.
And the other point that there's a disagreement now between Hamilton and Barcella is Barcella has told me, actually over several years, that he had urged Hamilton to extend the investigation because there was a lot of material coming in late in their investigation, which implicated the Republicans that confirmed these allegations.
And Barcella had said that Hamilton didn't want to do it because it would be very hard to get the new Congress, because there was a change in Congress at that point, to reauthorize it.
The Republicans would be very angry and that he just didn't want to go there.
When I asked Hamilton about that, Hamilton got really bristled and said that he had no recollection at all of Barcella proposing an extended investigation, that if there had been any outstanding evidence, he would have gone in that direction.
But as far as he knew, there wasn't.
So what is now clear is that this very important election in 1980, which really was a hinge upon which the history of the United States turned, we became a very different country because of that election, because of Reagan's landslide victory and how he changed the country, the direction he put us on.
But that that election may well have been influenced by this very serious, dirty trick.
And that for the good of the country, in a sense, a lot of the people who looked into this and found that actually it may well have happened, chose to shield the American people from that fact, that because apparently the thinking may have been that, well, that would make Americans very disturbed and it would cause a lot of partisan anger on both sides, that it was best just to sort of sweep it under the rug or in this case, shove it into a box.
And and that's how and that is a disturbing element of how American history can be miswritten.
Well, I'm hearing kind of a lot of mayhaves and apparently is there is this still a possibility rather than a fact that you're reporting to us here?
Well, you know, I'm a journalist.
I work for AP and Newsweek and PBS and other places for a long time.
So I tend to talk about things in terms of what evidence shows rather than declarative facts.
So I think there are questions.
There are still things that should have been nailed down that were never nailed down.
There were interviews that were not undertaken that should have been undertaken.
George H.W. Bush, for instance, has a very curious alibi for the days in question for his involvement.
Yet he and he has and he denied being involved in two press conferences back in 92 when he was president.
But he's never been questioned under oath.
There's never been a real effort to explain some of these inconsistencies in his alibi.
What is his alibi?
I'm interested in that.
Well, his alibi really, which should be a very strong one, one that when I was at PBS looking at this, we considered very strong, which was that he was under Secret Service protection and there were Secret Service reports filed about where he was on a key day.
He'd gone out of public view for this weekend, October 18th and 19th of 1980.
He went out of public view, even though it was at a key point in the campaign.
But he supposedly stayed around his house in Washington and he went on a couple of little side trips, according to what the Secret Service had in their records.
However, the Secret Service guys couldn't recall either of these trips.
And one of them, the one guy who said he did recall it, one of the trips had people at this meeting who were never there.
So that kind of collapsed.
And then there was a second trip to a family friend, apparently.
And the task force was denied...
The Bush people, Bush controlled the government at the time, the executive branch.
And the executive branch refused to release the name of this person that Bush supposedly visited, which would have been a very good alibi, presumably.
But what the task force finally agreed to was to get the name of the alibi witness, but promised never to talk to the alibi witness and never released the name of the alibi witness.
So it was just one of these really odd elements of this investigation, because nobody, no police officer in America, if you were suspected of committing some kind of offense and you said, look, I've got a great alibi, I've got a great alibi witness, and I'll tell you who it is, but you can't talk to that person.
They wouldn't fall for that.
You know, if you were a rookie cop on the beat, you wouldn't fall for that.
You'd say, well, it's an alibi witness that clears you up, so let's go talk to the person.
In this case, Bush said, you can't talk to the person.
And they agreed.
Right.
And the difference between us regular people and him is that he is a former congressman and the son of a senator and the former director of Central Intelligence.
That's why he gets to not have his alibi witness cross-examined.
But I just want to make sure to nail down a date here that we're talking about a period of time where Bush had already lost the primary election to Reagan and had already been chosen in the convention to be the vice presidential candidate.
In 1980, he had run against Reagan, if you remember, and had lost in the primaries, but was picked by Reagan at the Republican convention in Detroit in 1980 to be his vice presidential running mate.
It's a very interesting story because at that point, a lot of old CIA people were supporting Bush, who'd been their old boss.
And of course, Carter had purged a number of these CIA guys from the agency because he was concerned about the various abuses that had been occurring over the years.
So a lot of these angry CIA guys were part of Bush's entourage, including people like Ted Shackley, who was the former head of clandestine services.
And so they moved over with Bush to the Reagan campaign, and they created a kind of their own little intelligence service within the Reagan-Bush campaign.
Well, and Casey even became the campaign director, right?
Casey was campaign director.
He was an old-time spy himself.
He'd been with the OSS and considered himself quite a spook.
And then, of course, after Reagan becomes president, Reagan appoints Casey to be the CIA director.
So you have this whole group of people who consider themselves, first of all, they feel they know what's best for the country in their own way.
And they are very skilled and adept at clandestine operations.
So it appears what they did is they just put in motion their own little covert operation done somewhat behind the president's back, President Carter's back.
And there are a number of well-placed people who have described elements of this.
But pretty much all that evidence was thrown away or just ignored as the task force in 1992 just decided, well, let's just say nothing happened and we'll all be happy and go home.
Well, what evidence is there about what George Bush actually did as opposed to being at his phony alibi places?
Well, there have been allegations from a couple of the arms intelligence types, dealers, arms dealers who say that Bush was present for a meeting in Paris with arranged by the head of French intelligence, Alexandre Desmarraches.
Now Desmarraches is one of these pieces of information that came in late in the 92 task force investigation.
Desmarraches had told his biographer, a guy named David Andelman, that these meetings that happened and that but that he didn't want them included in his memoir because it would reflect badly on his friends, George H.W. Bush and Bill Casey.
But this biographer then goes and actually testifies before the task force in late December, mid late December of 92.
So you have that piece of evidence.
You also had something that we came across at Frontline, which I always thought was the most extraordinary thing.
Well, I should add here, you also have some you also had an Israeli intelligence officer who described was part of these meetings who described Bush being there.
And you had one of the guys who was a pilot bringing in some of these people to Paris saying that that he saw Bush arrive with this group.
So you had these, you know, somewhat shady sources, you might say, but people who were actually actually sort of who they say they were making these claims.
But the thing that always struck me that was most dramatic was when we were looking at this at PBS and we'd done we'd done one documentary on it.
And Gary Sick had come out with his with Gary Sick had been one of Carter's national security guys.
He'd come out with a an article in a book saying he thought it happened that these deals had had actually been done.
Now, when that happened, there was a letter arrived on Capitol Hill sent to Congressman or Senator Cranston, written by a former State Department officer who said he recalled that in mid-October of 1980, that he had had a conversation with a journalist, a well-placed journalist.
He wasn't sure, couldn't recall the guy's name, but that the reporter told him that he'd just been informed by a Republican source that Bush was on his way to Paris to meet with the Iranians about the hostages.
When we got this letter, it was forwarded to us.
I thought this has to be silly, has to be crazy, but I gave it to one of our producers to go check it out.
And so the producer was able to track down because of an article the reporter had written who the guy was, who the reporter was.
His name was was John McClain.
And he was the son of Norman McClain, the author of the book A River Runs Through It.
And he'd been a Chicago Tribune reporter with very close ties to the Republicans.
So we tracked down McClain, and I interviewed him, and he didn't want to be talked to.
He did not want to talk about this at all.
He hadn't talked about it since his conversation with the State Department guy, apparently.
But he agreed.
He said, well, okay, yes, I was given this tip by one of my Republican sources, but, you know, I couldn't really corroborate it, so I never did anything with it.
But the fact that you had this real-time piece of evidence from a reliable person, this journalist, McClain, who had talked about this with the State Department guy, would certainly demand, in my view, that at least you question Bush, or at least you check with that alibi witness whose name they were given with the proviso they don't talk to the person.
It's enough here to at least sit down with the president, or even maybe after he left as the ex-president, and say, you know, what exactly did you do?
Who did you meet with?
What happened?
Now, Bush might still have lied, and under oath, he might not have cared.
But at least, you know, he should have been questioned.
But so you had this body of evidence, which is fairly compelling.
And against it, you have these sort of flat denials from some of these Republicans.
But we also know those same Republicans had lied when the Iran-Contra scandal was beginning to break.
If you remember, I was then at AP and reporting on this, and, like, for instance, when one of the Oliver Norris planes was shot down in Nicaragua in 1986, George H. W. Bush was one of those people that came out and said, there's no U.S. government connection to that flight.
The White House also flatly denied reports when they first came out in Lebanon that there had been other arms deals with the Iranians, the so-called October surprise arms deals.
So you had this history of these guys lying and being caught in their lies on parallel operations.
So it was always seemed sort of it was just irresponsible, in my view, for this task force to sort of opt for some politically expedient solution rather than do the hard work and the tough work, and maybe in some cases the painful work of asking the tough questions, getting serious answers, evaluating evidence clearly, and then telling the American people what was discovered.
Well, you know what I wonder about, though?
It's funny.
On its face, it just sounds like a cover story, right?
Oh, George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush, Bush Senior, Vice President Bush.
He was out of the loop.
But then again, I kind of wonder whether there's actually, you know, I'm not trying to quit the guy on these particular scandals or any particular evidence about that, but I am kind of under the impression that there was a bit of a split between Ronald Reagan and his guys that he brought with him from California versus George H. W. Bush, the skull and bones man from Yale, the son of Prescott and the Eastern Establishment kind of group that Reagan had to basically compromise with in the primary and make Bush his VP guy.
And there are at least, I'm trying to remember something specific I could cite to you here, Bob, but just kind of something about how the Reaganites didn't really like the Bushies and kind of did keep the Vice President sort of separate.
But I guess it kind of makes me wonder whether, yeah, that's just because they were running all the covert operations out of the vice president's office, like during the Bush junior years.
Well, that was, you know, what we discovered, that many of these operations were being run out of the vice president's office, including much of the Iran-Contra scandal.
And that goes back even to the Hassebus plane going down, that was the all over North plane that was shot down by the Sandinistas.
And they discovered a lot of records on it.
And Hassebus opened up because he had survived the crash.
Do you think that East West split is just kind of myth?
Yeah, I think to some degree, it's a myth.
I think it's not entirely a myth, but I think when it came to the foreign policy stuff, they were very much in sync.
Reagan was much more active and knowledgeable about things like the Contra War than is generally understood.
The idea of Reagan being the guy asleep at the switch all the time, was it may have been true on the budget or something like that, but it wasn't really true on his pet foreign policy project.
He saw those as kind of like a movie, and he was really into that.
But he turned over a lot of the day-to-day running of that to the guy you'd expect, George H.W. Bush, who had experience, he'd been at the CIA, he knew the area quite well, he knew all these different areas quite well.
And so Reagan relied on him and they met regularly and privately, those conversations have never been released, to discuss how to handle many of these foreign policy issues.
So the idea of Bush playing this role, especially in accordance with Casey, who was not really an inner circle guy for Reagan, but an early supporter of Reagan.
Remember, Reagan replaced his campaign director after the New Hampshire primary with Casey.
So Casey came on a little bit later, but was considered this tough operative who could make things happen.
And so you had this mix of people, and Casey and Bush worked very closely together.
Some people have told me that, who were involved in this mix, that especially that Casey was to some degree a bit out of it himself, he was very old and developed some health problems, and that Bush really became the key foreign policy intelligence operative for the Reagan administration.
See, I like that.
That fits more what I would like to believe.
I'm sorry, I'm all out of time here, Bob, I could interview you for another two or three hours if you had the time, and I did, but I just hope we can do this again soon sometime.
Okay, well thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is the great Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
And in fact, here, let me go ahead and recommend you the article, Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden, and the book is called Neck Deep, The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
And Tracy Harmon will be joining Angela Keaton here on Anti-War Radio right after this.