October 29, 2006 at 08:57:08

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Original October Surprise (Part 3)

By Robert Parry (about the author)     Page 9 of 13 page(s)

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While the Republicans were busy in Washington, Carter's emissaries in West Germany were hammering out the framework for a hostage-release settlement with Tabatabai.

"I was very optimistic at the time," Tabatabai said in an interview with me a decade later. "Mr. Carter had accepted the conditions set by the Iranians. I sent an encrypted message to the Imam [Khomeini], saying I would be back the next day."

A settlement of the hostage crisis seemed to be in the offing. But Tabatabai's return was delayed by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War on Sept. 22. Tabatabai had to wait two weeks before he could return to Iran.

October Surprise

With little more than a month to go before the U.S. election, Republicans and Iranian representatives continued to meet in Washington. Indeed, one of the first public references to secret Republican-Iranian contacts was to a meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel supposedly in late September or early October.

Three Republicans – Allen, Silberman and Robert McFarlane, an aide to Sen. John Tower – have acknowledged a session with an Iranian emissary at the hotel. But none of them claimed to remember the person's name, his nationality or his position – not even McFarlane who purportedly arranged the meeting.

In early October, Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe said he learned from superiors in Israel that Carter's hostage negotiations had fallen through because of Republican opposition, according to his memoirs, Profits of War.

The Republicans wanted the Iranians to release the hostages only after the Nov. 4 election, Ben-Menashe wrote, with the final details to be arranged in Paris between a delegation of Republicans, led by George H.W. Bush, and a delegation of Iranians, led by cleric Mehdi Karrubi.

Also present, Ben-Menashe wrote, would be about a half dozen Israeli representatives, including David Kimche, and several CIA officials, including Donald Gregg and Robert Gates, an ambitious young man who was considered close to Bush. At the time, Gates was serving as an executive assistant to CIA Director Stansfield Turner.

In retrospect, some of Carter's negotiators felt they should have been much more attentive to the possibility of Republican sabotage. "Looking back, the Carter administration appears to have been far too trusting and particularly blind to the intrigue swirling around it," said former NSC official Gary Sick.

By October 1980, however, Carter was clawing his way back into the presidential race, with the possibility that an Iranian hostage settlement still could change the dynamic of the campaign.

Sensing the political danger, the Republicans opened the final full month of the campaign by trying to make Carter's hostage negotiations look like a cynical ploy to influence the election's outcome.

On Oct. 2, Republican vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush brought up the issue with a group of reporters: "One thing that's at the back of everybody's mind is, 'What can Carter do that is so sensational and so flamboyant, if you will, on his side to pull off an October Surprise?' And everybody kind of speculates about it, but there's not a darn thing we can do about it, nor is there any strategy we can do except possibly have it discounted."

With Bush's comments, Carter's supposed "October Surprise" was publicly injected into the campaign. But there was "a darn thing" or two that the Republicans could do – and were doing – to prepare themselves for the possibility of a last-minute hostage release, including gathering their own intelligence about the Iranian developments.

Little scraps of news and rumors about the hostages were rushed to the campaign hierarchy. Richard Allen recalled one urgent memo he wrote when he was told by a journalist that Secretary of State Edmund Muskie had floated the possibility of a swap of military spare parts for the hostages.

Like a scene in a spy novel, Allen coded the journalist as "ABC" and Muskie as "XYZ" and compiled a quick memo on the hot news. "I breathlessly sent this out to the campaign, to [campaign director William] Casey, to [pollster Richard] Wirthlin, to [senior adviser Edwin] Meese, I think [to] the President and maybe [to] George Bush."

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