October 29, 2006 at 08:57:08

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Original October Surprise (Part 3)

By Robert Parry (about the author)     Page 3 of 13 page(s)

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The Allen notation, which I discovered among the House Task Force's files in late 1994, was the first piece of documentary evidence to confirm the suspicions that Bush and Shackley were working together on the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980.

Babe in the Woods

From the beginning of the hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter never appreciated how much he was surrounded by his enemies. He was the proverbial babe in the woods.

Out of necessity or naivety, Carter also turned to people he believed might help resolve the hostage crisis while not knowing their ties to his enemies.

Frantically looking for emissaries to Iran's revolutionary government in late 1979, the Carter administration accepted the assistance of an Iranian banker named Cyrus Hashemi, who presented himself as a conduit to the Iranian mullahs.

A worldly businessman in his 40s with one foot in the West and the other back in Iran, Hashemi seemed a reasonable candidate. He was well-tailored, well-schooled and well-connected. When he visited Europe, he stayed at the best hotels; when he crossed the Atlantic, he took the supersonic Concorde.

Gary Sick, a Middle East expert on Carter's National Security Council staff, said Hashemi established himself in December 1979 as a well-informed Iranian who could help the administration sort out Iran's new ruling elite.

"Cyrus Hashemi quickly demonstrated that he had access to a number of high-level officials in the Iranian revolutionary government, most notably the governor-general of Khuzistan [Ahmad Madani] but also individuals within Khomeini's own family," Sick wrote in his book, October Surprise.

Besides helping the Carter administration, however, Cyrus Hashemi was maintaining personal and business ties to key Republicans, most notably former U.S. intelligence officer John Shaheen, a Lebanese-born, New York-based businessman who was a close friend of William Casey, himself a former spy.

Shaheen and Casey had served together in the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. After the war, Shaheen and Casey remained friends and became business associates.

In the 1970s, Casey, then a lawyer at the politically well-connected firm of Rogers and Wells, advised Shaheen on a troubled oil refinery that Shaheen built at the wind-swept coastal town of Come-by-Chance, Newfoundland, Canada.

Casey traveled with Shaheen to Kuwait to negotiate a source of oil for the refinery, though the poorly engineered facility would ultimately fail, never having produced a drop of gasoline. Shaheen and Casey also kept their hands in the intelligence business and maintained close ties to the CIA.

According to Cyrus Hashemi's older brother, Jamshid, the dealings between Cyrus and Shaheen dated back to the late 1970s.

"For many years, he [Cyrus] had been cooperating with Mr. Shaheen," Jamshid told me in an interview. "I asked him [Cyrus] in 1979, at the end of 1979. He was very open about it. He knew that Mr. Shaheen had contacts with the government of the United States. At that time, I did not know which section or which organization."

The Shaheen connection led Cyrus Hashemi to William Casey even before Casey took over Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, according to Jamshid Hashemi and a 1984 CIA memo that surfaced later.

According to the CIA memo, former Attorney General Elliot Richardson said in 1984 that Casey had recruited Shaheen and Cyrus Hashemi in 1979 to sell off property in New York City belonging to the deposed Shah's Pahlavi Foundation.

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