Veliotes: "Between Israelis and these new players."
Veliotes added that the embarrassing facts about the downed plane were obscured by Reagan's State Department, which issued misleading guidance to the U.S. press.
Israeli Pipeline
In my work on the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, I also had obtained a classified summary of testimony from a mid-level State Department official, David Satterfield, who saw these early arms shipments as a continuation of Israeli policy toward Iran.
"Satterfield believed that Israel maintained a persistent military relationship with Iran, based on the Israeli assumption that Iran was a non-Arab state which always constituted a potential ally in the Middle East," the summary read. "There was evidence that Israel resumed providing arms to Iran in 1980."
Over the years, senior Israeli officials have claimed that those early shipments, which Carter had tried to block, received the blessing of Reagan's team.
In May 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post that U.S. officials had approved Iranian arms transfers. "We said that notwithstanding the tyranny of [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, which we all hate, we have to leave a small window open to this country, a tiny small bridge to this country," Sharon said.
A decade later, in 1993, I took part in an interview with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Tel Aviv during which he said he had read Gary Sick's 1991 book, October Surprise, which made the case for believing that the Republicans had intervened in the 1980 hostage negotiations to disrupt Jimmy Carter's reelection.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, "What do you think? Was there an October Surprise?"
"Of course, it was," Shamir responded without hesitation. "It was."
Walsh's Suspicions
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh also came to suspect that those later arms-for-hostage deals traced back to 1980, since it was the only way to make sense of why the Reagan team kept selling arms to Iran in 1985-86 when there was so little progress in reducing the number of American hostages then held by Iranian allies in Lebanon. When one hostage was released, another was taken.
In conducting a polygraph of Vice President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser (and former CIA officer) Donald Gregg, Walsh's investigators added a question about Gregg's alleged participation in the secret 1980 negotiations between Reagan's team and the Iranians.
"Were you ever involved in a plan to delay the release of the hostages in Iran until after the 1980 Presidential election?" the examiner asked. Gregg's denial was judged to be deceptive. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]
So, the historical evidence suggests that the dramatic timing of Iran's hostage release -- as Reagan was giving his Inaugural Address -- was not the result of the Iranians fearing Reagan's retaliation, but rather was a choreographed P.R. event between Reagan's team and the Iranians.
In the days before Reagan's Inauguration, his acolytes had been busy circulating a joke around Washington which went: "What's three feet deep and glows in the dark? Tehran ten minutes after Ronald Reagan becomes President."
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