October 29, 2006 at 08:57:08

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Original October Surprise (Part 3)

By Robert Parry (about the author)     Page 11 of 13 page(s)

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Many critics of the October Surprise story have insisted that it is impossible to conceive of George H.W. Bush, the former CIA director, arranging for a secret flight to Paris while under Secret Service protection in mid-October 1980.

These critics have argued that this story must have been concocted for political reasons after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in late 1986 when a "conspiracy fever" gripped Washington.

But whatever the larger truth, the suspicion that the October Surprise allegations were invented after the Iran-Contra scandal has turned out to be wrong. The story of George H.W. Bush's alleged trip to Paris was circulating among Republicans in mid-October 1980.

David Henderson, then a State Department Foreign Service officer, recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980, when Chicago Tribune correspondent John Maclean arrived at Henderson's house in Washington for in interview about Henderson's criticism of the Carter administration's handling of Cuban refugees from the Mariel boat lift.

But Maclean, the son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It, had something else on his mind, Henderson recalled. Maclean had just been told by a well-placed Republican source that vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush was flying to Paris for a clandestine meeting with a delegation of Iranians about the 52 American hostages.

Henderson wasn't sure whether Maclean was looking for some confirmation or whether he was simply sharing an interesting tidbit of news. Henderson had not previously heard of the Bush trip and wondered out loud if it might be part of a bipartisan effort to finally resolve the long-running hostage crisis.

Maclean never wrote about the leak he had received from his well-placed Republican source because, he said, a campaign spokesman subsequently denied it.

As the years passed, the memory of that Bush-to-Paris leak faded for both Henderson and Maclean, until the October Surprise allegations surfaced again in the early 1990s.

Several intelligence operatives were claiming that Bush had undertaken a secret mission to Paris in mid-October 1980 to give the Iranian government an assurance from one of the two Republicans on the presidential ticket that the promises of future military and other assistance would be kept.

Henderson mentioned the meeting in a 1991 letter to a U.S. senator, a copy of which was forwarded to me while I working at the Public Broadcasting Service's Frontline program. In the letter, Henderson recalled the conversation about Bush's trip to Paris but not the name of the Chicago Tribune reporter.

A producer at Frontline then searched some newspaper archives to find the story about Henderson and the Mariel boat lift as a way to identify Maclean as the journalist who had interviewed Henderson.

Though not eager to become part of the October Surprise story in 1991, Maclean confirmed that he had received the Republican leak. He also agreed with Henderson's recollection that their conversation occurred on or about Oct. 18, 1980. But Maclean still declined to identify his source.

The allegations of a Paris meeting also received support from several other sources, including pilot Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey from Washington's National Airport to Paris on a flight that left very late on a rainy night in mid-October.

Rupp said that after arriving at LeBourget airport outside Paris, he saw a man resembling Bush on the tarmac. The night of Oct. 18 indeed was rainy in the Washington area. Also, sign-in sheets at the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, placed Casey within a five-minute drive of National Airport late that evening.

The sign-in sheets showed Casey stopping in at the campaign headquarters at about 11:30 p.m. for a ten-minute visit to the Operations Center, which was staffed by CIA veterans monitoring developments in Iran.

There were other bits and pieces of corroboration about the Paris meetings. As early as 1987, Iran's ex-President Bani-Sadr had made similar claims about a Paris meeting.

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