In authorizing the first investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese set the chronological parameters as 1985 and 1986.
Congressional inquiries also focused on those two years, despite indications that the scandal began earlier, such as the mystery of an Israeli-chartered arms flight that was shot down in July 1981 after straying into Soviet air space.
Only late in the Iran-Contra criminal investigation did Walsh and his investigative team begin suspecting that Reagan's supposed motive for selling arms to Iran in 1985-86 -- to gain release of U.S. hostages then held in Lebanon -- made no sense because whenever a hostage was freed another was taken captive.
So, Walsh began examining the possibility that the tripartite relationship of Iran-Israel-and-Reagan predated the Lebanese crisis, going back to 1980 and Carter's futile efforts to win freedom for those 52 U.S. hostages in Iran.
Those hostages weren't freed until Reagan took office, raising suspicions even then that Republicans had gone behind Carter's back to strike their own deal with Iran.
That suspicion was one reason why Walsh's investigators asked former Vice President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser (and ex- CIA officer) Donald Gregg about his possible role in delaying the release of the hostages in 1980. His denial was judged deceptive by an FBI polygrapher.
People on High
Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan's assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, described his discovery of the earlier Iran-Israel-Republican connections after the Israeli plane went down in the Soviet Union in 1981.
"It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment," Veliotes said in an interview with PBS Frontline.
In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp's dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election.
"It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration," Veliotes said. "And I understand some contacts were made at that time."
Though some two dozen witnesses -- including senior Iranian officials and a wide range of other international players -- have expanded on Veliotes's discovery, the pressure became overpowering in the final years of George H.W. Bush's presidency not to accept the obvious conclusions. [For details of the evidence, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
It was easier for all involved -- surely the Republicans but also the Democrats and much of the Washington press corps -- to discredit the corroborated 1980 allegations. Taking the lead was the neoconservative New Republic.
In fall 1991, as Congress was deliberating whether to conduct a full investigation of the October Surprise issue, Steven Emerson, a journalist with close ties to Likud, produced a cover story for The New Republic claiming to prove the allegations were a "myth."
Newsweek published a matching cover story also attacking the October Surprise allegations. The article, I was told, had been ordered up by executive editor Maynard Parker who was known inside Newsweek as a close ally of the CIA and an admirer of prominent neocon Elliott Abrams.
The two articles were influential in shaping Washington's conventional wisdom, but they were both based on a misreading of attendance documents at a London historical conference which Reagan's campaign director William Casey had gone to in July 1980.
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