OpEdNews - Page 4 of Article: Who to Trust on a Truth Commission?

Ghotbzadeh made his comments about the Republican interference contemporaneously to the events, telling Agence France Press on Sept. 6, 1980, that he had information that Reagan was "trying to block a solution" to the hostage impasse. (Ghotbzadeh was later executed by Iranian hardliners.)

Despite Bani-Sadr's claims of first-hand knowledge and these corroborating statements by two other senior Iranian officials, the House task force dismissed Bani-Sadr's account as "hearsay" that lacked probative value.

Soon, however, there was more evidence to explain away. On Dec. 18, 1992, a day after Bani-Sadr's letter, David Andelman, the biographer of French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches, gave sworn testimony to the task force about the Republican-Iranian contacts.

Andelman, an ex-New York Times and CBS News correspondent, said that while he was writing deMarenches's memoir, the arch-conservative spymaster admitted arranging meetings between Republicans and Iranians about the hostage issue in the summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting held in Paris in October.

Andelman said deMarenches ordered that the secret meetings be kept out of his memoir because the story could damage the reputation of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush. At the time of Andelman's work on the book, Bush was running for re-election as President of the United States.

Andelman's testimony corroborated longstanding claims from a variety of international intelligence operatives about a Paris meeting involving Casey and Bush. But the task force brushed this testimony aside, too, paradoxically terming it "credible" but then claiming it was "insufficiently probative."

The task force's reasoning went that Andelman could not "rule out the possibility that deMarenches had told him he was aware of and involved in the Casey meetings because he, deMarenches, could not risk telling his biographer he had no knowledge of these allegations."

Bush-to-Paris

Besides corroborative testimony from intelligence operatives, including Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, the task force also was aware of contemporaneous knowledge of the alleged Bush-to-Paris trip by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean.

Maclean, the son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It, said a well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush's secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage issue. Maclean passed on that information to David Henderson, a State Department Foreign Service officer. Henderson recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980.

For his part, Maclean never wrote about the Bush-to-Paris leak because, he told me later, a Reagan-Bush campaign spokesman subsequently denied it. As the years passed, the memory of the leak faded for both Henderson and Maclean, until the October Surprise allegations bubbled to the surface again in the early 1990s.

Henderson mentioned the meeting in a 1991 letter to a U.S. senator that was forwarded to me while I was working for PBS Frontline. Though not eager to become part of the October Surprise story, Maclean confirmed that he had received the Republican leak. He also agreed with Henderson's recollection that their conversation occurred on or about Oct. 18, 1980. But Maclean declined to identify his source.

The significance of the Maclean-Henderson conversation was that it was a piece of information locked in a kind of historical amber, untainted by subsequent claims by intelligence operatives whose credibility had been challenged.

One could not accuse Maclean of concocting the Bush-to-Paris allegation for some ulterior motive, since he hadn't used it in 1980, nor had he volunteered it a decade later. He only confirmed it when approached by Frontline and even then wasn't eager to talk about it.

State of Denial

In December 1992, despite the mounting evidence that the Republicans indeed had made secret contacts with Iranian radicals in 1980, the task force continued under Hamilton's orders not to rethink its conclusions or to extend the investigation.

Meanwhile, the incriminating evidence kept on coming.

On Dec. 21, 1992, ex-CIA officer Charles Cogan recounted a remark in early 1981 from banker David Rockefeller's aide Joseph Reed to then-CIA Director William Casey about their success in blocking Carter's "October Surprise."

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