In the mid-1990s, while working on a book about Carter's post-presidency, Brinkley was present for a face-to-face meeting between Carter and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, when Arafat tried to confess a role in the October Surprise maneuvering.
"There is something I want to tell you," Arafat said, addressing Carter at a meeting in Arafat's bunker in Gaza City. "You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election."
Arafat insisted that he rebuffed the offer, but Carter discouraged any further comments, apparently not wanting to reopen the October Surprise controversy and open himself to accusations that he was engaging in sour grapes.
Naively perhaps, Brinkley recounted this extraordinary exchange in an article for the fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic History, a scholarly quarterly. Later, through a spokesman, Carter confirmed to me that the conversation with Arafat had occurred as described by Brinkley.
However, when Brinkley got around to writing his much more widely circulated book on Carter, The Unfinished Presidency, the startling Arafat admission was missing. After getting a better feel for the October Surprise taboo, Brinkley presumably concluded that his professional standing would be hurt by an association with the ugly controversy.
Still, Arafat's account did not stand alone. In 1990, I had interviewed Arafat's longtime confidant Bassam Abu Sharif who also described how a senior figure in the Reagan campaign had contacted Arafat and the PLO in Beirut about engineering a delay in the hostage release.
"It was important for Reagan not to have any of the hostages released during the remaining days of President Carter," Abu Sharif said. "The offer was, "if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO.' In spite of that, we turned that down. "I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages."
Other PLO sources said Arafat discovered during a September 1980 trip to Iran that his hostage intervention was superfluous since the Republicans already had established other back channels to the radical Islamic mullahs.
However, Brinkley's hesitation to add his first-hand knowledge to the October Surprise history suggests that the idea of simply "leaving this one to the historians" won't result in a satisfactory outcome if people want to know what really happened during this important early chapter of the history from the past three decades.
Now, with the death of Kimche, the voice of one more witness who might have filled in important details has fallen silent.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
