The deliveries were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers, the Russian report said. [For text of the Russian report, click here. To view the U.S. embassy cable that contains the Russian report, click here.]
The Russian report came in response to an Oct. 21, 1992, query from Hamilton, who asked the Russian government what its files might show about the October Surprise case. The report came back from Sergey V. Stepashin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet's Committee on Defense and Security Issues, a job roughly equivalent to chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In what might have been an unprecedented act of cooperation between the two longtime enemies, Stepashin provided a summary of what Russian intelligence files showed about the October Surprise charges and other secret U.S. dealings with Iran.
In the 1980s, after all, the Soviet KGB was not without its own sources on a topic as important to Moscow as developments in neighboring Iran. The KGB had penetrated or maintained close relations with many of the intelligence services linked to the October Surprise allegations, including those of France, Spain, Germany, Iran and Israel.
History had shown, too, that the KGB had spies inside the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. So, Soviet intelligence certainly was in a position to know a great deal about what had or had not happened in 1980.
The Supreme Soviet's response was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by Nikolay Kuznetsov, secretary of the subcommittee on state security. Kuznetsov apologized for the "lengthy preparation of the response." It was quickly translated by the U.S. embassy and forwarded to Hamilton.
Lost Report
However, if the recollections of Hamilton and Barcella are correct, the report may never have reached Hamilton, instead being intercepted by Barcella who had previously acknowledged to me that he decided to simply file the report away in boxes containing the task force documents.
After I discovered the Russian report in one of those boxes in late 1994, I failed to get a response to questions I placed with Hamilton's congressional staff. Back then, Hamilton was a powerful figure in Congress, transitioning from being chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to being the panel's ranking Democrat.
Years later, in 2004, while working on the book Secrecy & Privilege, I managed to get Barcella on the phone to ask him why the task force hadn't at least released the Russian report along with the final task force report which had reached a contradictory conclusion.
Barcella explained that the Russian report had arrived late and its classification, as "confidential," meant that it couldn't simply be made public. Instead he said he filed it away, assuming it would disappear into some vast government warehouse, "like in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark.'"
In that interview, Barcella also acknowledged that new evidence implicating the Republicans in the October Surprise intrigue arrived in December near the end of the investigation, leading him to ask Hamilton to extend the investigation for a few more months so the new material could be evaluated, but that Hamilton refused.
However, the task force report released on Jan. 13, 1993 reflected none of that uncertainty, as it attacked various witnesses who claimed knowledge of the secret Republican-Iranian contacts. The task force claimed to have established solid alibis for the whereabouts of Bill Casey and other key Republicans on dates of alleged meetings with Iranians.
In my view, many of the task force's alibis and other key findings were misleading or downright false. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]
However, in 1993, Washington's conventional wisdom was that the October Surprise story was a bogus conspiracy theory, despite the fact that many of the same Reagan figures had been caught lying about the secret Iran-Contra guns-for-hostages negotiations in 1985-86.
Back on the Radar
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