October 29, 2006 at 08:57:08

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Original October Surprise (Part 3)

By Robert Parry (about the author)     Page 5 of 13 page(s)

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On Jan. 21, 1980, George H.W. Bush stunned the Republican presidential field by beating Ronald Reagan in the Iowa caucuses. In the glow of victory, Bush saw his face on the cover of Newsweek and claimed to possess the "Big Mo," a preppyish phrase for momentum. Bush next took aim at New Hampshire, next door to Maine where his family vacationed in the summer.

But Bush's Big Mo would last only long enough to force one historic change in the Reagan campaign. Reagan decided to fire John Sears as head of the campaign. Foreign policy adviser Richard Allen was among the Reagan loyalists who recommended Bill Casey, a crafty old spymaster who had worked for Richard Nixon and had bounced around the tough world of Long Island politics.

On Feb. 26, the day of the New Hampshire primary, which Reagan would win, the former California governor replaced Sears with Casey.

"I feel very strongly that this country is in trouble, that it needs to be turned around and I have felt for over a year that Governor Reagan is the only man in America who's ever turned a government around," Casey said in accepting the job.

Years later, Casey's widow, Sophia, gave me an unpublished paper containing Casey's personal reflections on the campaign. Though the report focused on campaign mechanics, it also revealed Casey's dread at the prospect of four more years of Jimmy Carter in the White House.

"Everyone [in Reagan's camp] agreed that Jimmy Carter had to be removed from office in order to save the nation from economic ruin and international humiliation," Casey wrote. He also recognized the pivotal role played by the Iranian hostage crisis in highlighting Carter's shortcomings. "The Iranian hostage crisis was the focal point of the failure of Carter's foreign policy," Casey wrote.

After his appointment, Casey went to work building a staunchly conservative organization that soon was rolling up victories for Ronald Reagan. But Casey also didn't forget what he viewed as the single-most important variable of the campaign: the 52 hostages whose continuing plight was growing into a national obsession.

Casey, the old OSS veteran, wanted to know all he could about Carter's progress toward resolving the crisis. "Over the ensuing months, Casey and the Republican campaign systematically constructed an elaborate and sophisticated intelligence organization targeted on their own government," wrote former NSC official Gary Sick in his book, October Surprise.

By early spring 1980, Reagan was rolling toward victory in the Republican race, though Bush hung on as the representative of the party's more moderate wing.

In the background, the Iran-hostage stand-off continued to loom as a political wild card. The crisis threatened Carter's reelection chances if it lingered but offered hope for a rebound if the hostages returned home at a timely moment.

In the tradition of the best spy tradecraft, Casey wanted to have sources right in the middle of the action – and as it turned out, one of Casey's longtime friends, John Shaheen, was already in tight with Cyrus Hashemi, one of President Carter's intermediaries to the Iranian government.

A Shaheen associate told me that Casey and Shaheen, the two old OSS guys, often discussed the hostage crisis in the context of their experience in the intelligence world. Sometimes their conversations turned to batting around their own ideas for how to resolve the standoff and how to show up Carter, the Shaheen associate said.

Shaheen also was in touch with Arab leaders in Europe and sounded them out, too, about ways for resolving the Iranian impasse, the associate said.

"Shaheen," the associate said, "loved this clandestine stuff. He ate it up. These guys [Casey and Shaheen] were real patriots. They would have been involved in it under the table, over the table and on the side of the table. But they would have done it."

Jamshid Hashemi said Casey's obsession with the hostage issue led the Reagan campaign chief to approach the Hashemi brothers directly. Jamshid Hashemi said that in March 1980, he was in his room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington when Casey and another Shaheen associate, Roy Furmark, arrived.

"The door was opened and Mr. Casey came in," Jamshid said. "He wanted to talk to me. I didn't know who he was or what he was. So I called my brother on the phone. I said, 'there's a gentleman here by the name of Mr. Casey who wants to talk to me.' I remember that my brother asked me to pass him the phone and he talked with Mr. Casey."

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