Israeli Interests
In my work on the Iran-Contra scandal, I had obtained a classified summary of testimony from a mid-level State Department official, David Satterfield, who saw these early arms shipments as a continuation of Israeli policy toward Iran.
"Satterfield believed that Israel maintained a persistent military relationship with Iran, based on the Israeli assumption that Iran was a non-Arab state which always constituted a potential ally in the Middle East," the summary read. "There was evidence that Israel resumed providing arms to Iran in 1980."
Over the years, senior Israeli officials claimed that those early shipments had the quiet blessing of top Reagan-Bush officials.
In May 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post that U.S. officials had approved Iranian arms transfers. "We said that notwithstanding the tyranny of Khomeini, which we all hate, we have to leave a small window open to this country, a tiny small bridge to this country," Sharon said.
A decade later, in 1993, I took part in an interview with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Tel Aviv during which he said he had read Gary Sick's 1991 book, October Surprise, which made the case for believing that the Republicans had intervened in the 1980 hostage negotiations to disrupt Jimmy Carter's reelection.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, "What do you think? Was there an October Surprise?"
"Of course, it was," Shamir responded without hesitation. "It was." Later in the interview, Shamir seemed to regret his frankness and tried to backpedal on his answer.
Lie Detector
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh also came to suspect that that later arms-for-hostage case traced back to 1980, since it was the only way to make sense of why the Reagan-Bush team continued selling arms to Iran in 1985-86 when there was so little progress in reducing the number of American hostages then held by Iranian allies in Lebanon.
When Walsh's investigators conducted a polygraph of George H.W. Bush's national security adviser (and former CIA officer) Donald Gregg, they added a question about Gregg's possible participation in the secret 1980 negotiations.
"Were you ever involved in a plan to delay the release of the hostages in Iran until after the 1980 Presidential election?" the examiner asked. Gregg's denial was judged to be deceptive. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]
Despite all the evidence, the well-connected Republicans really had little to fear. In 1992, the House task force, which was assigned to look into the October Surprise mystery, was headed by centrist Democrat Lee Hamilton and hard-line Republican Henry Hyde. They and their staffs seemed more interested in dismissing the suspicions than digging for the truth.
When the task force report was issued on Jan. 13, 1993, it cleared the Republicans of all charges, but that conclusion was based on tendentious interpretations of the published evidence, the withholding of many incriminating documents, and the construction of illogical alibis for top Republicans.
For instance, one alibi for Casey on a key day was that Reagan's national security aide Richard Allen had written down Casey's home phone number on a notepad that day. Although Allen had no recollection or record of reaching Casey at home, the task force concluded that the act of writing down a person's home phone number proved the person was at home.
In the cause of maintaining political comity in Washington, the always-seeking-bipartisanship Democrats gave the Republicans another pass on what appeared to be a major national security crime.
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