Still, the evidence of the Newsweek-New Republic error was so obvious that the House Task Force investigators had no choice but to jettison the magazines' London alibi for Casey. But they then replaced it with another equally ridiculous one, putting Casey at California's Bohemian Grove of all places and having him take an overnight flight from San Francisco to London, arriving on the afternoon of July 28.
That alibi was bogus, too. Casey actually attended the Bohemian Grove on the first weekend of August, not the last weekend of July, as documentary evidence and witnesses made clear.
But these continued absurdities spoke to the determination of Official Washington to put the October Surprise story to bed, a Zeitgeist that Newsweek and The New Republic had helped create with their false reporting in mid-November 1991. [For more details on this journalistic fiasco, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
White House Silence
Yet, what Beach's "memorandum of record" suggests is that Bush's White House knew in real time -- as Newsweek and The New Republic were trumpeting their misplaced certainty about Casey never going to Madrid -- that U.S. embassy officials on the ground were indicating that he had been there.
At this point, it's still impossible to say what was in the Madrid cable that Williamson mentioned to Beach. The archivists at the Bush library in College Station, Texas, continue to withhold nearly one-quarter of the 4,800 "October Surprise" pages citing national security and other reasons. So, it is not clear whether the State Department ever turned over the cable or how conclusive it was.
Yet there are other signs that Republicans went to some length to conceal Casey's clandestine travels that year.
In 1991-92, as October Surprise investigators tried to nail down Casey's whereabouts on key dates, their efforts were frustrated by Casey's family. After serving as Reagan's first CIA director and becoming enmeshed in the Iran-Contra scandal in late 1986, Casey had collapsed from a cancerous brain tumor and died on May 6, 1987, with many of his personal records turned over to his family.
However, when the family grudgingly supplied those records to investigators, Casey's 1980 passport was missing along with several pages from his personal calendar for that year.
From the Bush library files, there's also no indication that the White House told investigators about Williamson's information regarding a Casey trip to Madrid either. Nor did anyone in power do anything to stop the Washington press corps' rush to judgment, which condemned Jamshid Hashemi as a liar and a perjurer.
Instead, the media stampede was allowed to surge forward, trampling anyone still foolish or brave enough not to get out of the way -- and making a mess of U.S. history in the process.
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