Still, in late 1994, I gained access to documents from that October Surprise investigation, including papers marked "secret" and "top secret" which apparently had been left behind by accident in a remote Capitol Hill storage room. Those papers filled in a number of the era's missing pieces and established that there was more to the reports of Republican interference in 1980 than the task force publicly acknowledged. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
But besides undermining the task force's October Surprise debunking, the papers clarified President Reagan's early strategy for a clandestine foreign policy hidden from Congress and the American people.
One such document was a two-page "Talking Points"
prepared by Secretary of State Alexander Haig for a briefing of President
Reagan. Marked "top secret/sensitive," the paper recounted Haig's first trip to
the Middle East in April 1981.
In the report, Haig wrote that he was
impressed with "bits of useful intelligence" that he had learned. "Both [Egypt's
Anwar] Sadat and [Saudi Prince] Fahd [explained that] Iran is receiving military
spares for U.S. equipment from Israel," Haig reported.
This fact might have been less surprising to Reagan,
whose intermediaries allegedly collaborated with Israeli officials in 1980 to
smuggle weapons to Iran behind Carter's back.
But Haig followed that
comment with another stunning assertion: "It was also interesting to confirm
that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against
Iran through Fahd."
In other words, according to Haig's information, Saudi Prince Fahd (later King Fahd) claimed that Carter, apparently hoping to strengthen the U.S. hand in the Middle East and desperate to pressure Iran over the stalled hostage talks, gave clearance to Saddam's invasion of Iran.
If true, Jimmy Carter, the peacemaker, had encouraged
a war.
Haig's written report contained no other details about the "green
light," and Haig declined my request for an interview about the Talking Points.
But the paper represented the first documented corroboration of Iran's long-held
belief that the United States backed Iraq's 1980 invasion.
In 1980,
President Carter termed Iranian charges of U.S. complicity "patently false." He
mentioned Iraq's invasion only briefly in his memoir, in the context of an
unexpected mid-September hostage initiative from a Khomeini in-law, Sadeq
Tabatabai.
"Exploratory conversations [in Germany] were quite
encouraging," President Carter wrote about that approach, but he added: "As fate
would have it, the Iraqis chose the day of [Tabatabai's] scheduled arrival in
Iran, September 22, to invade Iran and to bomb the Tehran airport. Typically,
the Iranians accused me of planning and supporting the invasion."
The
Iraqi invasion did make Iran more desperate to get U.S. spare parts for its air
and ground forces. Yet the Carter administration continued to demand that the
American hostages be freed before military shipments could resume. But according
to House task force documents that I found in the storage room, the Republicans
were more accommodating to Iran.
Secret FBI wiretaps revealed that an
Iranian banker, the late Cyrus Hashemi, who supposedly was helping President
Carter on the hostage talks, actually was assisting Republicans with arms
shipments to Iran and with money transfers in fall 1980.
Hashemi's older brother, Jamshid, testified that the
Iran arms shipments, via Israel, resulted from secret meetings in Madrid between
Reagan's campaign director, William J. Casey, and one of Khomeini's emissaries,
a radical Islamic mullah named Mehdi Karrubi. [Today, Karrubi now considered a
"reformer" is at the center of Iranian political unrest.]
For whatever
reasons, on Election Day 1980, President Carter still had failed to free the
hostages and Ronald Reagan won in a landslide.
A 'Private Channel'
