Veteran journalist Craig Unger, who had worked on the Newsweek cover story, said the magazine knew the Casey alibi was bogus but still used it. "It was the most dishonest thing that I've been through in my life in journalism," Unger later told me.
However, even though the Newsweek and New Republic stories had themselves been debunked, that didn't stop other neoconservative-dominated publications, like the Wall Street Journal, from ladling out ridicule on anyone who dared take the October Surprise case seriously.
Peculiar Journalism
Emerson also was a close friend of Michael Zeldin, the deputy chief counsel for the House task force that investigated the October Surprise issue in 1992. Though the task force had to jettison Emerson's bogus Casey alibi, House investigators told me Emerson frequently visited the task force's offices and advised Zeldin and others how to read the October Surprise evidence.
Subsequent examinations of Emerson's peculiar brand of journalism (which invariably toed the Likud line and often demonized Muslims) revealed that Emerson had financial ties to right-wing funders such as Richard Mellon Scaife and had hosted right-wing Israeli intelligence commander Yigal Carmon when Carmon came to Washington to lobby against Middle East peace talks.
In 1999, a study of Emerson's history by John F. Sugg for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting magazine's "Extra!" quoted an Associated Press reporter who had worked with Emerson on a project as saying of Emerson and Carmon: "I have no doubt these guys are working together."
The Jerusalem Post reported that Emerson has "close ties to Israeli intelligence." And "Victor Ostrovsky, who defected from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and has written books disclosing its secrets, calls Emerson "the horn' -- because he trumpets Mossad claims," Sugg reported.
Yet, the way Washington was working by the end of the 12-year Reagan-Bush-41 era, there was little interest in getting to the bottom of a difficult national security scandal. The House task force simply applied some fantastical logic, such as claiming that because someone wrote down Casey's home phone number on another key date that proved he was at home, to conclude nothing had happened.
Between the House task force's finding of "no credible evidence" and the subsequent ridicule heaped on the allegations by major U.S. news outlets, the October Surprise case was cast aside as a "conspiracy theory," which is how it is still categorized by Washington's insiders and by Wikipedia.
However, subsequent disclosures have revealed that a flood of new evidence incriminating the Republicans arrived at the House task force in its final weeks, in December 1992, so much so that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella says he recommended that task force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, extend the investigation for several months. However, Barcella said Hamilton refused, citing procedural difficulties.
Instead, the incriminating evidence was simply kept from other task force members, and the investigation was shut down with a finding of Republican innocence. It even appears that a late-arriving report from the Russian government about its own intelligence on the case corroborating allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal was not even shown to Hamilton, the chairman.
When questioned this year, Hamilton told me he had no recollection of ever seeing the Russian report (though it was addressed to him) and Barcella added that he didn't "recall whether I showed [Hamilton] the Russian report or not." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden."]
According to other recent interviews, dissent within the task force over some of the irrational arguments being used to clear the Republicans was suppressed by Hamilton and Barcella. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Tricky October Surprise Report."]
In other words, Official Washington preferred to sweep this unpleasant scandal under the rug rather than confront the facts and their troubling implications.
Yet, with Reagan remaining a conservative icon and his anti-government policies still in vogue among millions of Americans slashing taxes for the rich, weakening corporate regulations, rejecting alternative energy, and expanding the military budget the lost history of this broader Iran-Contra scandal has turned out to be a case that what the country didn't know did turn out to hurt it.
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