It made little sense, the investigators thought, that the Reagan administration would keep selling arms to Iran to free American hostages in Lebanon only to have others taken. So, they considered a different narrative, that Reagan's men had no choice but to make these deals with Iran because they had begun doing so in 1980 before taking office.
Walsh's investigators even polygraphed Bush's national security adviser Donald Gregg regarding his alleged role in the 1980 contacts with Iran. The denials from Gregg, a former CIA officer, were judged deceptive. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501.]
The October Surprise motivation also fit better with Reagan's initial reaction to the Iran-Contra disclosures in 1986. Reagan flatly denied that the sales were arms for hostages -- and only grudgingly reversed his position under immense political pressure as the substitute narrative of a botched but well-meaning hostage initiative was being put in play by his White House aides.
Momentum for the Truth
In spring 1991, the combination of the PBS documentary and Sick's op-ed in the New York Times created momentum among some Democrats in Congress to examine what was beginning to look like the October Surprise prequel to the Iran-Contra story.
But the stakes were also rising on the other side. Not only was President George H.W. Bush beginning his campaign for reelection, but the Republicans faced the prospect of seeing their treasured Reagan legacy shattered -- if the public came to accept that the GOP icon had obtained national office, in part, through an act of treachery with a foreign enemy.
Other powerful Americans also faced potential damage if the full October Surprise story were told. At Frontline, our investigation had turned up evidence that David Rockefeller, who had been the banker to the ousted Shah of Iran, and his longtime aide Henry Kissinger were hovering in the background.
Rockefeller and Kissinger could be detected pulling strings and holding secret meetings with Reagan's campaign chief William Casey, a key October Surprise suspect. [For details on the Rockefeller-Kissinger tie-in, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com's "How Two Elections Changed America."]
And, the Israelis were determined to head off any investigation into the possibility they had helped remove a sitting U.S. president who had pressured them into accepting a land-for-peace swap with Egypt in 1978 and was expected to push for a similar deal with the Palestinians if he won reelection.
In other words, some very powerful forces would do whatever they could to prevent an aggressive investigation of the October Surprise controversy, an inquiry that might establish a dangerous new narrative, drastically reshaping how Americans understood their recent history.
So, it was not surprising that U.S. news organizations with close ties to these powerful forces would step to the fore in 1991 to do whatever was necessary to diffuse this investigative momentum.
The major pushback against the October Surprise story came from my old colleagues at Newsweek and from The New Republic, a once-leftist magazine that had been purchased by neoconservative Martin Peretz, a staunch and proud defender of Israeli government interests.
After the PBS documentary aired in April 1991, I received a call from a Newsweek correspondent who told me that executive editor Parker had considered the program an act of "revenge" on my part and was ordering up his own investigation. I responded that revenge was the last thing on my mind.
However, it soon became clear that Newsweek's top brass was determined to knock down the story, although I came to the conclusion that this assault was motivated less by animus toward me than by a desire to protect the image of the Establishment, i.e. the likes of Rockefeller, Kissinger and Bush.
At The New Republic, Peretz gave the knockdown assignment to Steven Emerson, who then was still regarded as a mainstream journalist though one known to have extremely close ties to Likud and Israeli intelligence.
On the same weekend in November 1991, the two magazines splashed on their covers similar October Surprise debunking stories containing matching alibis which supposedly proved that another witness, Iranian financier Jamshid Hashemi, was lying about a July 1980 meeting between William Casey and senior Iranians in Madrid.
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