And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.
In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan's assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials. "It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment," Veliotes said.
In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp's dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. "It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration," Veliotes said. "And I understand some contacts were made at that time."
When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn't recall who the "people on high" were who had described the informal clearance of the Israeli shipments but he indicated that "the new players" were the young neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as senior political appointees.
Neocon Schemes
Newly discovered documents at the Reagan presidential library reveal that Reagan's neocons at the State Department -- particularly Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz -- initiated a policy review in 1981 to allow Israel to undertake secret military shipments to Iran. McFarlane and Wolfowitz also maneuvered to put McFarlane in charge of U.S. relations toward Iran and to establish a clandestine U.S. back-channel to the Israeli government outside the knowledge of even senior U.S. government officials.
Not only did the documents tend to support the statements by Veliotes but they also fit with comments that former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made in a 1993 interview in Tel Aviv. Shamir said he had read the 1991 book, October Surprise, by Carter's former National Security Council aide Gary Sick, which made the case for believing that the Republicans had intervened in the 1980 hostage negotiations to disrupt Carter's reelection.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, "What do you think? Was there an October Surprise?"
"Of course, it was," Shamir responded without hesitation. "It was."
And, there were plenty of other corroborating statements as well. In 1996, for instance, while former President Carter was meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Arafat in Gaza City, Arafat tried to confess his role in the Republican maneuvering to block Carter's Iran-hostage negotiations.
"There is something I want to tell you," Arafat said, addressing Carter in the presence of historian Douglas Brinkley. "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 said, according to Brinkley's article in the fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic Quarterly.
As recently as this past week, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr reiterated his account of Republican overtures to Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis and how that secret initiative prevented release of the hostages.
In a Christian Science Monitor commentary about the movie "Argo," Bani-Sadr wrote that "Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation ... which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan."
Though Bani-Sadr had discussed the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, he added in his commentary that "two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini's regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad ... and the Reagan administration."
In December 1992, when a House Task Force was examining this so-called "October Surprise" controversy -- and encountering fierce Republican resistance -- Bani-Sadr submitted a letter detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Khomeini and his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign.
Bani-Sadr's letter -- dated Dec. 17, 1992 -- was part of a flood of last-minute evidence implicating the Reagan campaign in the hostage scheme. However, by the time the letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent. [See Consortiumnews.com's "'October Surprise' and 'Argo.'"]
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