The Russian Report was addressed to the task force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, and arrived on Jan. 11, 1993, just two days before the task force issued its debunking report. The task force's chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella, apparently acting on his own, decided to simply hide the contradictory Russian Report.
Barcella later told me that he envisioned the Russian Report and the other documents disappearing into a government warehouse like the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Subsequently, I was told by Hamilton that he had no recollection of ever seeing the Russian Report, and Barcella said in an e-mail to me that he didn't "recall whether I showed [Hamilton] the Russian report or not." [See Consortiumnews.com's "October Surprise Evidence Hidden."]
(Ironically, one of the Republicans implicated in the Russian Report was Robert Gates, who in 1980 was an ambitious young CIA officer possibly looking to ride a Reagan election victory like an express elevator to the top of the CIA.)
"Green Light'
Another document from those files was a "top secret/sensitive" talking point memo that Secretary of State Alexander Haig had written for a briefing of President Reagan in spring 1981, about confidential conversations that Haig had had with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Saudi Prince Fahd.
"Both Sadat and Fahd [explained that] Iran
is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel," Haig
reported, a fact that might have been less surprising to Reagan, whose
intermediaries allegedly had collaborated with Israeli officials in
1980 to smuggle weapons to Iran behind Carter's back.
But Haig followed that comment with another stunning assertion: "It
was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a
green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd." If true
and Carter has denied doing so that would mean that Carter,
frustrated by Iran's refusal to release the U.S. hostages, might have
encouraged a bloody war that changed history.
When I contacted Haig about his memo, he refused to discuss the talking points by saying they remained classified. The "top secret" justification apparently derived from the fact that two foreign leaders (Sadat and Fahd) had been providing their candid insights into Middle East events.
Unlike the current WikiLeaks case, I did not rely on a government "leaker" to turn over classified material. I discovered a number of secret documents among the unpublished files of the Hamilton-Barcella task force because the files had not been fully purged of classified material.
In late 1994, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had granted me access to boxes of the task force's supposedly unclassified material with the restriction that I could copy only a dozen pages per visit. After finding the classified material, I volunteered to do the copying myself and then took the secret material with me. I made several visits, extracting more papers each time.
Though I wrote about the documents and posted them on the Internet, I was never contacted by any government agency to complain. Perhaps, key people didn't notice or the thinking was that it made more sense to ignore the material. [To see the actual October Surprise documents, click here.]
The North Secrets
Earlier in my career while working at the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s government officials got angrier when I reported on information they would have preferred be kept secret.
For instance, there was gnashing of teeth inside the White House in June 1985 after I wrote the first story mentioning how national security aide Oliver North was involved in fundraising and other support activities for the Nicaraguan contra rebels.
Later, the New York Times published its own story on this contra support but bowed to White House pressure to leave out North's name, simply referring to him as an unnamed official. North and the White House were insisting that North's role was so sensitive that mentioning his name put his life at risk.
Then, when the Washington Post weighed in, I got a call from Leonard Downie Jr., who was then the Post's managing editor. He also was under pressure to protect North's identity, but had noticed that the AP had already published North's name. I explained that we had seen no reason not to, since North was a publicly known official on the National Security Council. The Post followed our lead and named North.
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