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"Well, gee, I'm sorry that you don't understand," Allen lashed back. "I really feel badly for you. It's really too bad you don't understand. But that's your problem, not mine."
"But wouldn't you normally ask that kind of background question?"
"Not necessarily," Allen said. "McFarlane wanted me to meet a guy and this guy was going to talk about the hostages. I met plenty of people during that period of time who wanted to talk to me about the hostages. " This was no different from anybody else I would meet on this subject."
"It obviously turned out to be different from most people you've met on the subject," I interjected.
""Oh, it turned out to be because this guy is the centerpiece of some sort of great conspiracy web that has been spun," Allen snapped.
"Well, were there many people who offered to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan?" I asked.
"No, this one was particularly different, but I didn't know that before I went to the meeting, you understand."
"Did you ask McFarlane what on earth this guy was going to propose?"
"I don't think I did in advance, no."
What also was unusual about this meeting was what Allen and Silberman did not do afterwards. Though Allen said that he and Silberman recognized the sensitivity of the approach, neither of Reagan's foreign policy advisers contacted the Carter administration or reported the offer to law enforcement.
Defying Logic
It also defied logic that seasoned operatives like Allen and Silberman would have agreed to a meeting with an emissary from a hostile power without having done some due-diligence about who the person was and what his bona fides were.
Iranian arms dealer Lavi later claimed to be the mysterious emissary. And government documents revealed that Lavi made a similar approach to the independent presidential campaign of John Anderson, although Anderson's campaign -- unlike Allen and Silberman -- promptly informed the CIA and State Department.
For his part, Silberman denied any substantive discussion with the mysterious emissary but refused to discuss the meeting in any detail. He did insist that he was out of town on Oct. 2, the date cited by Lavi, but Silberman wouldn't provide a list of dates when he was in Washington during the fall of 1980.
Though purportedly having arranged the meeting, McFarlare also insisted that he couldn't recall the identity of the emissary.
Later, when a Senate panel conducted a brief inquiry into whether the Republicans interfered with Carter's hostage negotiations, a truculent Allen testified -- and brought along a memo that he claimed represented his contemporaneous recollections of the L'Enfant Plaza meeting.
