Editor's Note: Part 3 of our series about the "Original October Surprise" of 1980 addresses the troubling question of whether disgruntled CIA officers collaborated with their former boss, George H.W. Bush, to sabotage President Jimmy Carter's Iran-hostage negotiations -- and thus changed the course of U.S. political history.
To read the first two parts of the series -- dealing with the inept investigation by Indiana Democrat Lee Hamilton and the role of banker David Rockefeller in the 1980 affair -- click here for Part 1 or here for Part 2. The series is adapted from Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq:
There are few threats to a democracy more serious than the possibility that the nation's intelligence services would abuse their extraordinary powers and secretly influence the election of the nation's leadership, in effect turning their clandestine skills for manipulating overseas events on their own country.
That is why Congress and Presidents have barred the Central Intelligence Agency since its founding in 1947 from operating domestically. It also explains why the core questions of the 1980 October Surprise case remain a sensitive mystery even today:
Did disgruntled CIA officers conspire with their former boss, George H.W. Bush, to exploit the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 to defeat President Jimmy Carter whose policies had infuriated many CIA veterans? Did that secret CIA operation change the course of American politics, paving the way for a quarter century of Republican dominance?
On Nov. 4, 1980, after a full year of frustrating efforts to free the 52 American hostages held in Iran, Carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George H.W. Bush. The hostages were finally freed after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
While the full story is still unclear a quarter century later, the evidence leaves little doubt that former CIA Director Bush – first as a Republican presidential candidate and then as the party's vice presidential nominee – supervised a team of bitter ex-CIA officers whose careers had suffered under Carter.
These ex-intelligence officers were so angry with Carter that they cast off their traditional cloak of non-partisanship and anonymity in 1979 and enlisted in the Republican drive to unseat the sitting President.
During Bush's bid for the Republican nomination, these veterans of CIA covert operations worked as his political foot soldiers. One joke about Bush's announcement of his candidacy on May 1, 1979, was that "half the audience was wearing raincoats."
Bill Colby, Bush's predecessor as CIA director, said Bush "had a flood of people from the CIA who joined his supporters. They were retirees devoted to him for what he had done" in defending the spy agency in 1976 when the CIA came under heavy criticism for spying on Americans and other abuses.
Reagan's foreign policy adviser Richard Allen described the group working on the Bush campaign as a "plane load of disgruntled former CIA" officers who were "playing cops and robbers."
All told, at least two dozen former CIA officials went to work for their former boss. Among them was the CIA's director of security, Robert Gambino, who joined the Bush campaign immediately after leaving the CIA where he oversaw security investigations of senior Carter officials and thus knew about potentially damaging personal information.
Besides the ex-CIA personnel who joined the Bush campaign, other pro-Bush intelligence officers remained at the CIA while making clear their political preference. "The seventh floor of Langley was plastered with 'Bush for President' signs," said senior CIA analyst George Carver, referring to the floor that housed senior CIA officials.
Carter administration officials also grew concerned about the deep personal ties between the former CIA officers in Bush's campaign and active-duty CIA personnel who continued to hold sensitive jobs under Carter.
For instance, Gambino, the 25-year CIA veteran who oversaw personnel security checks, and CIA officer Donald Gregg, who served as a CIA representative on Carter's National Security Council, "are good friends who knew each other from the CIA," according to an unpublished part of a report by a House Task Force, which investigated the October Surprise issue in 1992. [I found this deleted section – still marked "secret" – in unpublished task force files in 1994.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
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