07/10/12 – Robert Parry – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, websites are scotthortonshow.com and thestressblog.com.
Stop by, got all the interview archives for you there.
Our next guest today is the great Robert Perry from consortiumnews.com, he used to write for the AP and Newsweek way back in history and he's the author of Neck Deep and he's got this very interesting article, a little bit of war party history for us here, Shamir's October Surprise Admission.
Welcome to the show, Bob, how are you doing?
Good Scott, how are you?
I'm doing real good, appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you.
What was the October Surprise of 1980?
Well basically it's been a controversy over whether the Republicans, the campaign of Ronald Reagan undermined President Carter's efforts to gain the freedom of 52 American hostages who were then being held in Iran.
Carter had been trying for some time, even with a failed rescue effort, but during the fall of 1980 as the election was coming up, and as the race was fairly close, at that point Carter and Reagan were pretty much neck and neck.
The Republicans felt that if Carter was able to engineer the release of the hostages from Iran that would give him the boost he would need to actually win the election and prevent Ronald Reagan from becoming president.
However there is now a substantial amount of evidence from basically a couple dozen sources, many of whom in key positions, who have described the Republican efforts to make sure that didn't happen.
Allegedly the Republicans contacted the Iranians behind Carter's back and indicated that the Iranians would get a better deal if the hostages did not get released before the election, which is what happened, and in the last few days before the election, ironically the election was on the first anniversary of the hostages being seized, so there was a great deal of attention on this topic and suddenly the numbers in the polls widened and Ronald Reagan romped off to a landslide victory, defeating Carter, and the Republicans also knocked off a number of the key Democratic Senators and gained control of the Senate as well.
So it was a very important turning point in American history, arguably it was the beginning of the era that we're now living in, where major tax cuts were instituted for the wealthy, the separation between the rich and the rest of us became much more accelerated, and we ended up with the system we sort of now have, but a lot of that turned on those events right before the election in 1980.
And now, well let's see, there's lots of different things to talk about there.
First of all, what were the Iranians doing holding American hostages in the first place?
Well the Iranians had just gone through their revolution, and if you go back even to 1953, the United States through the CIA, collaborating with British intelligence, had overthrown the elected government of Iran under Mosaddegh, who had been their Prime Minister and he was forced into exile, and the U.S. essentially reinstalled the Shah of Iran on the peacock throne, and he governed the country with an iron hand from 1953 to 1979.
At that point, a revolution occurred in Iran, and he was driven from power, and Ayatollah Khamenei, who was a religious leader, came back to lead the revolution.
And when you get to the fall of 1979, about the time that the hostages were taken, the power struggle in Iran was very tense, and in a way, some radical students broke in and seized the U.S. Embassy and took a number of Americans hostage.
Ultimately, 52 were held.
Hey Bob, do I have it right that the reason that they really got so riled up and raided the embassy was a reaction to David Rockefeller convincing Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter to let the Shah into the United States for medical treatment?
That was the ultimate insult?
That yeah, he was our puppet, just like we've been denying all this time, kind of thing?
Well, I think it's pretty obvious he's been our puppet, but the...
Well, but that was the way I read it somewhere, anyway, I don't even remember anymore.
No, that's right, correct.
Basically, after being overthrown, the Shah traveled from country to country.
He also had cancer and needed medical treatment.
And David Rockefeller was importuned by the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf, to make sure to manipulate the U.S. government into allowing her brother into the United States.
And so David Rockefeller turned to his team of people, some obviously very influential, he being a very powerful banker and who dabbled in public affairs at the time.
And Henry Kissinger was one of his employees, and the pressure was put on Jimmy Carter to do so.
There was a lot of face-to-face between Rockefeller and Carter, where Carter essentially threw Rockefeller out of the Oval Office for being so overbearing.
Anyway, ultimately, Carter was persuaded on humanitarian grounds to let the Shah in.
When he did so, to receive medical treatment, that sort of touched off this ultimate spasm of student outrage, and they seized the U.S. Embassy, what they called the Den of Spies.
And so they went in there to obtain documents that they thought would prove their case.
They did get a number of documents, but they also got these hostages.
And then there was a power struggle inside Iran about whether or not to keep the hostages or not, and the hostage crisis was the way for the Khomeini side, the more extremist religious side, to consolidate its power in Iran, which is what happened.
And so that obviously became a focus also of American politics, because it seemed to show the humiliation of the United States under Jimmy Carter, and played into the theme of Ronald Reagan, of being the tough guy who would set everything straight.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the narrative now that pretty much everybody learns is, as soon as he took power, they knew better than to cross all wrong.
But basically it's a false narrative.
We now know, and obviously some of this is in dispute still, but we know conclusively that immediately after taking office in 1981, President Reagan authorized or allowed the Israelis to begin shipping American weapons to Iran.
And that was uncovered, actually, briefly in 1981, when one of the planes crashed, and there was even an interview with Nicholas Valiotis, who was then the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, who had looked into this after the crash and concluded that this approval had been granted by senior levels of the Reagan administration, and that the contacts had gone back to the campaign.
In other words, that the Israelis had worked with the Republicans before they won the election to get this general approval to provide assistance to the Iranians.
At that point, remember, the Israelis, who had a very close relationship with Iran under the Shah, were trying to re-establish their ties, and they were helping the Iranians who were then at war with the Iraqis.
Iraq was at that point a bigger threat to Israel than Iran was.
So you had this effort by the Israelis to both rebuild their ties to Iran and also help the Iranians fight the Iraqis by shipping them U.S. weapons.
At the same time, America is helping Saddam fight the Iranians by shipping him weapons.
Well, that happens later.
I mean, there's a point, that occurs more in the 82-83 time frame, when Reagan tilts secretly.
All this is in secret, and much of this history is still hidden from us.
But we have pieces of it.
But what is clear is that in that period, Reagan realizes that the Iranians have gained the upper hand, which he also doesn't want to see, and so he tilts to the Iraqis.
And then we see Don Rumsfeld as the emissary going over and shaking Saddam Hussein's hand and so forth.
So that's how it all sort of played out.
So yeah, what became Iran-Contra on our TV in 1986 and 1987 and all that, it all started back before Reagan was even sworn in, with this plot to make Carter look weak, so that Reagan could win.
Very interesting stuff.
We'll be right back with more with Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, author of Neck Deep.
Right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm not sure if I'm on or not.
There's some kind of technical difficulty, but I know I'm recording.
So a lot of people are going to be able to hear it later anyway.
So we're going to keep rolling right on with Robert Perry at ConsortiumNews.com.
Shamir's October Surprise admission.
We're talking a little bit about the history of Republican corruption and the Iran-Contra scandal and the Iran-Iraq war, but the October Surprise, where the Republicans...
Can you tell us a little bit more detail about how the Republicans negotiated with the Iranians to hold the hostages longer, to not let Jimmy Carter be able to take credit for them being released on his watch?
Well, the Republicans sent a variety of emissaries to contact the Iranians.
They'd used a surprising number of potential and real conduits.
They even approached Yasser Arafat, then head of the PLO, and asked him if he would use his good graces with the Iranians to help make the contacts for the Republicans.
He ultimately, Arafat, went to Iran, but found out that the Republicans had had other channels already opened.
There were meetings that involved...
There were a number of Iranians, some who supposedly were helping out the Carter administration, like there was a banker named Cyrus Hashemi, who was an Iranian who had come over and essentially was recruited by the CIA to be a contact.
He was...
The Carter administration did not know that he was also working very closely with William Casey, who was then Reagan's campaign director and later became, of course, CIA director.
Casey was a business associate of Hashemi.
So Hashemi was, while going to meet Iranians supposedly to help the Carter administration win the hostage release, he was also sending messages to the Iranians to tell them that they really should hold the hostages, and that he was working with people to help do that.
Hey, it ain't treason if we win!
Well, that basically was the way it went.
There are also allegations, some of which have now been multiply corroborated, although still in dispute, that key figures in the campaign went to meetings in Europe, that Casey himself went to meetings in Madrid and in Paris to meet with senior Iranians, and that...
And there's an allegation, which remains hazy, that in one of the final meetings, George H. W. Bush took part, and he was, of course, the vice presidential nominee at the time, and had been a former CIA director himself, and that he essentially snuck off for a secret trip to Europe to sort of seal the deal in October of 1980.
Now, of course, that's denied by Republicans, but there's been an increasing body of evidence, including some documentary evidence, that that is true.
So we end up in this sort of hazy place where, while the evidence is overwhelming that the Republicans were making contacts with the Iranians behind Carter's back, the precise details of how they pulled off the deal remain somewhat in dispute.
How much of this story came out then, or how long did it take before the story started breaking?
Well, there were bits and pieces that probably had been coming out since almost the time it occurred.
So that's what I thought.
However, it wasn't until the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
And if you remember, the Iran-Contra scandal breaks in the fall of 1986.
And at that time, first of all, that was denied, too.
The Reagan people said it didn't happen, there were no contacts with Iran, and then there was so much evidence, they were forced then to develop a new cover story.
And the new cover story was, yes, there were these contacts in 1985 and 1986, but that's how it began.
And they tried very hard to constrain all the investigations, to focus only on those two years, maybe go back to 1984, but that was it.
What we kept learning as we were investigating this, I was with the AP and Newsweek during this period, was that you couldn't explain these deals if you just looked at that time frame.
So we were going back further and finding evidence that, indeed, the Reagan people had cleared these arms shipments via Israel to Iran as early as 1981.
So the time frame really spread back to right to this period, then these allegations began to be filled in, in terms of finding witnesses who'd taken part, there was even an investigation done by the Russian government after the Cold War ended, in which the Russian government went into its intelligence files and sent them to a congressional task force, saying that indeed these meetings had happened, and that the Russians had been monitoring them.
So you have an awful lot of evidence.
Now the problem has always been that the Republicans have been very tough in denying it, and it's been hard to get these investigations seen through to the end.
They tend to peter out, the Democrats have tended to be kind of weak-kneed, and I must say, in journalism, there's been an awful lot of professional cowardice as well, where the journalists don't want to go into these areas that are considered a little more difficult to prove and can lead to them getting attacked.
So we've ended up with this kind of murky history, but I think, and I've sort of put this together in my previous book, Secrecy and Privilege, I go into a great deal of detail, and at the ConsortiumNews.com website, there's a special section that deals with this topic, the October Surprise investigation.
So you can look at this history, a lot of it is now documented and very well supported, just that it remains in that murky land of the Republicans keep saying it's not true, and despite what the evidence may show.
Yeah, unless you had one new big story, big smoking gun to bring it back up.
It probably wouldn't even matter then, Scott, to be totally honest.
I think the way America works these days, that it's very hard, even when you have layers and layers of evidence.
I've recently been looking more at the 68 October Surprise, not to get into that, but ...
Oh, no, that one's so important, go ahead, man, that thing ought to blow everyone away.
And that was a case where, this is sort of, there's a precursor to the 1980 event, that was in 68, and many of the same people were involved.
Then, of course, it was Richard Nixon who was facing possible defeat because President Johnson was very close, much closer than I'd understood, and most of us understood, to ending the war in Vietnam in 68.
He'd had the peace talks set up, he was ready to sort of strike the deal with the North Vietnamese, but then Nixon intervenes behind the scenes, or his campaign does, and they get the South Vietnamese to sort of back out of the peace talks and sort of kill the peace talks right before the election in 68.
And so instead of Humphrey coming from behind and beating Nixon, Nixon hangs on and wins by about 500,000 votes.
So you have this ... and then, of course, what Nixon did was he actually lived up to his commitment to the South Vietnamese, he promised them a better deal, he said, if you help me, I will give you a better deal.
And so the war went on for another four plus years, at extraordinary cost to the United States, and obviously to the people of Indochina, and what we have now, I was able to access at the ...
Well, really, wait, wait, millions of people died, right?
Laotians, Cambodians, millions of people died in the meantime, for the very same deal.
Right, it touched off, not only did it inflict tremendous suffering and death in North Vietnam, it also spread the war into Cambodia, Laos, etc.
And of course, we then had the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, and so forth, much of it driven by Nixon's desire to achieve this better settlement for South Vietnam.
Ultimately, four years later, he struck basically the same deal that Johnson had before him in 68.
And ultimately, the South Vietnamese government collapses.
So it was a total failure for the United States.
But it got Nixon elected.
Ironically, interesting, we also now have a lot of new evidence that what Nixon knew was that Johnson had a file on this.
Johnson had a file that he'd maintained, after he'd learned this was happening, he had the FBI do wiretaps, and he was able to piece it together, but he never goes public with it because he's afraid it's going to cause too much harm to the American body politic if he exposes what Nixon was doing.
But Nixon knows, and so Johnson has his national security advisor, Walt Rostow, take the file with him.
Rostow literally dubs this file the X Envelope, and takes it with him out of the White House in 69.
Nixon's trying to find it.
And we now have these tapes of, and the beginnings of the Plumbers Unit, which leads us into Watergate.
Nixon is telling his people, we've got to find this file.
And then Nixon thinks it's at the Brookings Institution.
And that's where he says, we've got to have Howard Hunt and these guys go into Brookings and break, oh, go into their file and get this file and bring it back to me.
And so in other words, these things have this interesting way of seeping from one scandal into the next.
Yeah.
These Republicans, I'll tell you what, an audience, didn't I tell y'all that Robert Perry knows what the hell he's talking about when it comes to this stuff?
Now tell us, who is Yitzhak Shamir, for those of us youngsters who don't know?
Well he was the, he followed Menachem Begin as Prime Minister of Israel in the early 1980s.
What does he have to do with this October surprise story?
Prime Minister Shamir, he actually had gone back to the days of the founding of Israel and was involved in the terrorism that the Israelis used to sort of drive the British out and get control and get rid of the Palestinians.
He and Menachem Begin were both sort of labeled terrorists at the time.
They then went into the Likud and when that became a party to try to settle the West Bank and Begin becomes the first Likud Prime Minister.
He's the one who would strike the deal with the Republicans behind Carter's back.
He hated Carter for the Camp David peace deal and so that's his motive in part for siding with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
But then Shamir comes in as his Foreign Minister and ultimately he succeeds Begin as Prime Minister.
Now after Shamir's retirement and after much of my investigation of this, I did it for PBS Frontline, but after that ended, I was asked by a documentary crew that was doing a different documentary, an independent group, to take help them on an interview with Shamir.
So I flew to Israel in 1993 when Shamir was in retirement and went into his office.
And during this interview, which I only handled part of it, but he was asked, he started talking about the October Surprise of 1980 and he said that he had read Gary Sick's book.
Gary Sick was a former NSC official under Carter who'd written a book saying he thought this October Surprise thing had happened, that the evidence was very strong in his view.
And Shamir had read the book.
And Shamir said, I've read Gary Sick's book and he was asked, well, what do you think?
Was there an October Surprise?
And he says, yes, of course there was.
And so that was asked and I later came back to it and said, you know, tried again to pin him down and he, I guess he'd realized he'd sort of gone a little too far and was, and sort of backed away or tried to finesse the question.
But he was quite clearly on the record having said that indeed this October Surprise scenario of the Republicans going behind Carter's back to sabotage his hostage negotiations was true.
Now it turned out that ultimately that documentary ran out of money, never was produced, but I was able to use some of the transcripts from a couple of the interviews for my later work.
But when Shamir died this past week or so, I went back to that material and did a piece for ConsortiumNews.com just describing this rather interesting afternoon with Yitzhak Shamir in 1993.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad I messed up and asked you about it again, because got a lot better detail that second time around there.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
We got to go.
We're over time.
But thank you so much for your time on the show as always, Bob.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Bob Perry.
ConsortiumNews.com is the website.
This article is Shamir's October Surprise admission.