On Jan. 11, 1993, just two days before the task force's debunking report was scheduled for release, the Russian government sent an extraordinary report to Hamilton describing Moscow's internal intelligence on the controversy.
The Russian report described Republican meetings with Iranians in Europe, including Casey's trip to Madrid and the Paris meeting that the Russians said also involved George H.W. Bush and then-CIA officer Robert Gates (and later U.S. Defense Secretary).
Instead of making the Russian report public, Barcella stuck it -- and its startling information -- in a cardboard box that was filed away with other classified and unclassified material from the investigation. (I found the Russian report later when I got access to the task force's raw documents. For the text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.)
While concealing the Russian report and other evidence corroborating the October Surprise allegations, the House task force released its negative findings on Jan. 13, 1993, and went on the attack against the witnesses who had rejected Leon's demands that they recant their testimony.
In January 1993, task force leaks indicated that Jamshid Hashemi and Ari Ben-Menashe would be referred to the Justice Department for prosecution on perjury charges. However, no such indictments were ever returned. Over the years, both Hashemi and Ben-Menashe have stuck to their stories.
When I re-interviewed Hashemi in 1997 about the October Surprise case, he said, "I thought it was my duty that the people in the United States should know. They should know, they should be the judge of it."
Though Hashemi sat through my interview with the same gentlemanly style that I encountered when I first met him in 1990, he did flash with anger when I asked him about the task force's report. "Rubbish, that's what I think," said Hashemi. "Just a whitewash of the whole situation. It's a cover-up."
Hashemi argued that it made no sense for him to have invented his October Surprise account, which he repeated under oath to Congress in 1992. He had nothing to gain -- and a great deal to lose, he said. "Who has ever paid me a single dime?" Hashemi asked. "I had to pay all my lawyer's fees. What did I gain here?"
Hashemi blamed the cover-up primarily on the attack strategy of Republican lawyers on the task force, particularly Richard Leon.
Casey in Madrid
In the later release of documents from the Bush library, one was particularly relevant to Hashemi's claim that Casey had traveled secretly to Madrid, a claim that The New Republic/Newsweek articles and the House task force had rejected (albeit with contradictory and false alibis).
As the congressional investigation was just getting underway in fall 1991, State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson informed associate White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. that among the State Department "material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown," Beach noted in a "memorandum for record" dated Nov. 4, 1991
In other words, even as The New Republic and Newsweek -- and then the House task force -- were impugning Hashemi's truthfulness about a Madrid trip, Bush's White House was aware of evidence that placed Casey in Madrid during the October Surprise time frame. [For more details on the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege or America's Stolen Narrative.]
Earlier this year when I interviewed Hamilton about the Beach memo citing Casey's Madrid trip, the former congressman said the information had been withheld from his investigation and would have surely altered the task force's conclusions.
"We found no evidence to confirm Casey's trip to Madrid," Hamilton told me. "We couldn't show that. ... The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that."
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force's dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force's investigation.
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