For his part, Maclean never wrote about the Bush-to-Paris leak because, he told me later, a Reagan-Bush campaign spokesman denied it. As the years passed, the memory of the leak faded for both Henderson and Maclean, until the October Surprise story bubbled to the surface in the early 1990s.
Henderson mentioned the meeting in a 1991 letter to a U.S. senator that was forwarded to me. In the letter, Henderson recalled the conversation about Bush's trip to Paris but not the name of the reporter.
A Frontline producer searched some newspaper archives and found a story about Henderson that Maclean had written. Though not eager to become part of the October Surprise story in 1991, Maclean confirmed that he had received the Republican leak. He also agreed with Henderson's recollection that their conversation occurred on or about Oct. 18, 1980. But Maclean still declined to identify his source.
The significance of the Maclean-Henderson conversation was that it was a piece of information locked in a kind of historical amber, untainted by later claims and counter-claims.
One could not accuse Maclean of concocting the Bush-to-Paris allegation for some ulterior motive, since he hadn't used it in 1980, nor had he volunteered it a decade later. He only confirmed it when approached by Frontline and even then wasn't particularly eager to talk about it.
Still, in December 1992, Hamilton had issued the order to end the investigation with a finding of Republican innocence à ‚¬" and contrary facts were not going to get in the way of that mission. [For a full accounting of the October Surprise evidence, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Avoiding Dissent
For the task force, all that was left to do was to run the report past some bored congressmen and hope that no one looked too closely at the evidentiary gaps and the irrational alibis. That plan mostly worked but a staff aide to Rep. Mervyn Dymally of California spotted some of the absurd alibis.
One of those alibis was the bizarre claim that Richard Allen writing down Casey's home phone number proved that Casey was at home. Another alibi was that because a plane flew from San Francisco directly to London on another key date, Casey must have been onboard, even though actual documentary evidence refuted that.
According to sources who saw Dymally's dissent, it argued that "just because phones ring and planes fly doesn't mean that someone is there to answer the phone or is on the plane." But Dymally's reasonable observations were fiercely opposed by Hamilton.
Hamilton warned Dymally, who was retiring from Congress, that he would "come down hard" on Dymally if the dissent were not withdrawn. The next day, Hamilton fired all the staffers who had worked on Dymally's Africa subcommittee.
Seeing the firings as retribution (though Hamilton denied a connection), Dymally relented and withdrew the dissent, which was never made public. With that obstacle cleared, the task force report was shipped off to the printers.
The report was scheduled for release on Jan. 13, 1993, just one week before George H.W. Bush's Presidency officially would come to an end. But there was still one more surprise for the October Surprise task force.
On Jan. 11, 1993, Hamilton received a response to a query he had sent to the Russian government on Oct. 21, 1992, requesting any information that Moscow might have about the October Surprise case.
The Russian response came 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.
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