Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I really should read my own blog.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Not all heroes wear capes.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Come on, man.

Petty moves from a petty man.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

All hail the time of the bunny!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Repub Venality, Retro Edition: The Iranian ‘October Surprise’

Repub Venality, Retro Edition: The Iranian ‘October Surprise’

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The GOP wants one last chance to show Jimmy Carter how ‘cunning’ they were back in 1980, and Peter Baker is more than happy to launder their gleeful dance (unpaywalled link):

It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.

His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.

Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.

“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday…

Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”

None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office…

Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November…

Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”

But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”

Excellent point from Tom Scocca, at Indignity:

… The hostages also got a bad deal out of it. Former Newsweek correspondent Elaine Shannon tweeted that after the release, Carter’s aides learned the hostages “had been falsely told he hadn’t tried to free them.”

Judging by Barnes’ account, at least 17 percent of their captivity—the 77 days between Reagan’s election and inauguration, to say nothing of the months between Connally’s tour and the election—served only to burnish Reagan’s standing at Carter’s expense. They were directly held hostage for the sake of Ronald Reagan’s public relations.

Reader Interactions

51Comments

  2. 2.

    MisterDancer

    First, a personal note: Both my Brother and, now, my Fiancee, have had/current have COVID in last few weeks. Been dealing with taking care of people/dodging the infection as best as I can. That’s on top of a radically increased workload and calling and managing quotes for a home extension (when it’s safe for them to visit!).

    These are reasons I’ve been a bit quiet, of late. :)

    That said: I’m glad for this reporting. This has been…more than rumor? For decades, but rarely talked about in our media.

    There’s so much oft-venal and corrupt backstory behind how we got to this moment in America. How so many frankly abused the work of the post-WWII era to destroy groups, institutions, and people, all for money and power.

    We “may have known” this to be true. But every time it gets notice like this, a bit more of the halo around the Reagan era get chipped away, like the rusting statue to Mammon all his works were.

    Let it all rust away.

  4. 4.

    cain

    Just shows how much the GOP are ruthless in their pursuit of power and American exceptionalism. It’s one of the things that I’m always unhappy about when GOP takes the presidency – that our foreign policy is going to be an utter disaster.

  5. 5.

    Another Scott

    I guess Baker has a book coming out soon??

    “New from FTFNYT political reporter, Peter Baker – The Secret Story of how General Benedict Arnold worked behind Washington’s back to surrender West Point and change the course of the Revolution!…”

    :-/

    As a tweeter above said, Iran wasn’t going to release them early – they wanted to punish Carter as long as possible.  Framing this as “Evil Genius and Presumptive Leadery™ Republicans stole the White House from the hapless Democrats yet again” removes agency from the folks actually keeping our people captive.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  6. 6.

    Wapiti

    So really, TFG pressuring Zelenskyy to get some help on his campaign wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was just another venal Republican pulling venal Republican dirty tricks. So it’s understandable that all of the venal Republicans in the House and Senate gave him a pass.

  9. 9.

    Scout211

    @Wapiti:

    I’d like to think things have improved these days but, sadly no. Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelenskyy was only caught immediately because he was an idiot and his advisors were idiots.  Any other Republican in office would have done a much better job of concealing that extortion.

    That’s one of the many things that is worrisome about Pompeo running for president and his experience in his two roles in the Trump administration.

    Luckily, he doesn’t seem to be getting any traction so far.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    @patrick II: No of course not.  In fact, there are federal laws against such things.

    That doesn’t mean that the result would have been different if Reagan’s people weren’t messing around in the background.  I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that Iran would have done anything to help Carter win the election – for any inducement  – and they certainly weren’t going to release the captives before Carter left.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  14. 14.

    Mike in NC

    So who was it who “bullied” Jimmy Carter into letting the Shah into the US and thereby sabotaging his own reelection effort?

  15. 15.

    John S.

    Whether it’s Ronald Reagan backchanneling Iran to keep American hostages locked up for political gain, or Barack Obama secretly negotiating with Tehran to prevent nuclear war that could end life on planet Earth, both sides have been guilty of sneaking around with the Ayatollahs.

    DougJ is a national treasure.

  16. 16.

    Shalimar

    @Another Scott: I don’t think the efforts had much to do with the results either, but I’m fine with not giving Iranians agency.  There is nothing wrong with remembering Nixon and Reagan negotiating with our enemies before they were president.  It’s treason.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    @Mike in NC:

    When Republicans are revealed to have worked as private citizens with foreign adversaries for political gain, it’s not an opportunity to relitigate political decisions by Democrats. IMHO.

  18. 18.

    patrick II

    @Another Scott:

    My point is that Baker’s visit is being trivialized and discounted because it probably was ineffective.  But it shouldn’t be.  First, because he didn’t know that at the time and was doing his best to interfere in U.S. policy, and secondly it continued a pattern started by Nixon that countries learned not only could they deal with nominees but by doing so could influence an election.  And all without consequence. Although to be fair, after Nixon, they should also have learned you can’t trust Republicans to live up to the deal you thought you made.

  20. 20.

    gene108

    I don’t think this will change anyone’s thinking on how deep the rot goes in the Republican Party. From the article, a bit of hedging:

    Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.

    Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

    All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.

  22. 22.

    Another Scott

    @Mike in NC: I’m sure Wikipedia covers this in detail, but my (possibly fuzzy) recollection of the time is that there were lots of people for and against letting the Shah into the US for medical treatment.

    1. “Medical care is non-political.  If we say ‘no’ then we make it political and set a bad precedent.”  “He’s out of power now – he’s just a private dude trying to save his life.  Saying ‘no’ makes it political.”  “The gang running Iran now are just a bunch of yahoos – we can’t let them make demands on our standard procedures for doing things in our own country.”  “He was an important ally for a couple of decades – we can’t just ignore him in his hour of need.  It will make other countries less willing to work with us going forward.”
    2. “He was a monster (even if he was ‘our’ monster), he’s out of power, and now is the time to change the page.”  “The current government doesn’t want us to help him, so we need to think about what that means for the future”  “He’s not going to survive anyway, letting him in would be needlessly antagonistic, and he could go to Switzerland or some place similar for similar care.”

    UNC.edu:

    When the shah left Iran on 16 January 1979, it was expected that he would quickly seek asylum in America, the nation that had been his strongest supporter and stalwart friend. Even Khomeini had “expressed no objections” to the shah’s exile in the United States at this time. To this end Sunnylands, the sprawling Palms Springs estate of Walter Annenberg, was offered and readied as a place of haven for his royal friend. But the shah “proved to be as indecisive in exile as he had been in power, and this presented a disagreeable problem for the United States government.” Without consulting with the Americans, the shah first made a quick one-week stopover in Cairo at the invitation of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and then flew on to the household of another monarch, King Hassan II of Morocco, for an indefinite stay. To Brzezinski, this “pause” in his peregrinations “proved to be disastrous,” and “generated an issue where none should have existed.” As February rolled along the shah’s invitation remained valid, but the shah preferred to remain as Hassan’s guest.

    But just two weeks after his arrival in Rabat, circumstances reversed for the shah. If he had been loitering in the Near East region hoping that there would be a reversal of fortunes in Iran which would result in an opportunity (or call) to return to the Peacock Throne, he was destined for disappointment. Chances were dimming that the Provisional Government of Iran (PGOI) would collapse; nor had Khomeini’s support among the masses of Iranians waned. And, in a case of rather unfortunate timing, revolutionary militants stormed the United States embassy in Tehran on 14 February, holding the mission personnel hostage for several hours and generating fear for the safety of the remaining Americans in Iran. The final blow for the former monarch landed when King Hassan decided he had had sufficient time with the depressed and dispirited shah; he asked his guest to leave. The shah now sent word to Washington that he was ready to accept the U.S. government’s invitation.

    At a meeting of the Special Coordinating Committee (SCC — the highest level policy and crisis management group in the Carter White House) on 23 February the decision was made to inform the shah that, while the invitation was still officially open, there were now serious complications. Specifically, the short-lived takeover of the American embassy the previous St. Valentine’s Day had some senior officials in Washington reconsidering the wisdom of hosting the shah. The shah’s entry into the United States was potentially an inflammatory act, and, with a deteriorating security situation in Tehran, there was still a very real threat to American interests and the remaining American officials and citizens. The risk to American lives at that time was serious, apparent, and exigent: U.S. intelligence personnel at one of the CIA’s TACKSMAN intelligence collection sites had been taken captive days before, and American Ambassador William Sullivan was at that moment in negotiations over their release (the TACKSMAN sites were a cooperative effort with the shah’s regime for monitoring the Soviet missile test ranges).

    As always in international relations, and dealing with people who are used to having near-ultimate power, there were lots of things to consider…

    Distilling this down to a black/white choice by Carter ignores 90% of the issues, and the way the world actually works, IMO.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  23. 23.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @James E Powell: Bearing in mind that I hate undefined abbreviations like The Former Guy hates criticism:

    WTF does ESAD mean? I searched and the top link was a Portuguese art-and-design school and the links got more confusing from there.

  25. 25.

    Tony G

    Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and the other perpetrators of this outrage are, of course, safely dead now.  I wonder whether their families can be sued by the surviving hostages whose suffering was extended by this treason?  And, to state the obvious, I wonder what is the excuse of the New York Times and the other mainstream media for their taking 43 years to investigate and report on this?

  26. 26.

    gene108

    @MisterDancer:

    That said: I’m glad for this reporting. This has been…more than rumor? For decades, but rarely talked about in our media…..We “may have known” this to be true. But every time it gets notice like this, a bit more of the halo around the Reagan era get chipped away, like the rusting statue to Mammon all his works were.

    I think Reagan will eventually lose a lot of luster, like Jackson and Wilson. Jackson was a very influential president, like Reagan, but his actual policies, from the Trail of Tears to destroying the Second Bank of the U.S., were god awful to dumb.

    Wilson, when I was in high school, was taught positively because of his progressive reforms and other reforms that came to fruition during his presidency, like the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th to 19th Amendments. Now his luster is fading because of his overt racism.

    Reagan’s policies hollowed out the middle class, and have led to problems from college affordability to run away income inequality. Plus, more corruption on top of Iran-Contra, and once the GenX generation passes on, the ones who were kids in the 1980’s and many still remember Reagan years fondly, his shine will be gone.

  27. 27.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    Many years ago, I read 3 interesting books about the October Surprise

    Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery by Robert Parry

    October Surprise by Gary Sick

    October Surprise by Barbara Honegger

    There’s also a Wikipedia article

    October Surprise conspiracy theory

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory

    Speaking of Republican dirty tricks, let’s not forget this one:

    Vietnam and the “Chennault Affair”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chennault#Vietnam_and_the_%22Chennault_Affair%22

  29. 29.

    gene108

    @Tony G:

    And, to state the obvious, I wonder what is the excuse of the New York Times and the other mainstream media for their taking 43 years to investigate and report on this?

    1. They didn’t try very hard, and
    2. No one involved leaked about what happened until this year.

    Edit: I think damn near everyone in this country had more faith in the integrity of elected officials, than they do today. Watergate seemed so jarring to the adults, when I was growing up. It’s nothing compared to Bush, Jr. and Trump.

    No one thought a former governor of California would try to undermine U.S. international interests in the pursuit of office. The coincidence was hanging in the air, but it probably seemed so unbelievable it was largely dismissed.

  30. 30.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Tony G: I wonder whether their families can be sued by the surviving hostages whose suffering was extended by this treason?

    No, they cannot.

  33. 33.

    Mai Naem mobile

    Fuck Ben Barnes. He waits until it doesn’t matter. Jimmy Carter is literally on his deathbed and this scumball POS comes forward now. Really? GFY. The POS is probably good friends with Ken Paxton, Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz.

  34. 34.

    prostratedragon

    @Gin & Tonic:  I assume you  don’t mean ATL/SA, which is 83-63 approaching halftime. Well admittedly, that must be quite a spectacle.

  36. 36.

    dm

    @gene108: Dismissed until Iran-Contra.  I remember stories about Reagan’s attorney general (Ed Meese?) panicking when he heard about Iran-Contra, and speculation among the conspiracy-minded (myself included) was because it risked the cover over the earlier deal being blown.

    So, the late 80s it was “that’s just a Conspiracy Theory, and can’t be taken seriously”.  It seems to me that the Nixon negotiations with North Vietnam were “just Conspiracy Theory” at the time, as well.

  37. 37.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @gene108:

    I remember how we learned after the fact that George Will (who praised Reagan’s debate performance) had coached Reagan extensively to prepare him for the debate.

  38. 38.

    WaterGirl

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR: I think if people are going to use acronyms they should define them rather than tell people to go look it up on google.  A hundred of us probably have the same question, I know wI did – what the hell is ESAD – and it’s ridiculous for a hundred people to have to google it to find out what it is.

    My pet peeve

    I looked it up.  It’s eat shit and die.

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    @gene108: But, but, but, Ronny lowered taxes, fixed the budget, ended crime, closed the government, kicked down The Wall himself, gave us huge cars with 200 mpg carburetors, made food taste good again.

    It is written.

  42. 42.

    Gvg

    @gene108: This. My father tried to explain to me how upsetting it was to him and others of his generation when they found out that Eisenhower had lied when he denied that we had spy planes over flying Russia (Gary Powers incident) and I just could not get it because the President and officers have a duty to keep spying secret, and this was spying about nuclear missles pointed at the US….I told dad I would have considered him a bad President if he wasn’t sending spy planes. Dad did not get the assumption that sometimes even good guys in government lie, let alone assume some of them are really bad clear through, though he did get that later on. They did not expect lies from authority, ever.

  43. 43.

    artem1s

    @gene108: 

    No one thought a former governor of California would try to undermine U.S. international interests in the pursuit of office.

    Let’s not forget that Raygun was largely a puppet of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Crime Family. The GQP was split about who should get the nomination. Texas Oil wanted Bush. But even Poppy eventually conceded he couldn’t get to the WH by himself and made the deal with Raygun to be his VP. The oil industry hated Carter for a number of reasons. They loved the Shah and wanted to hand pick his successor. After the Ayatollah took over, it was clear Texaco was never going to get their assets’ back, there or in Libya. Carter was a nuclear power wonk and believed the country needed a path to energy independence rather than sucking up and kissing the Saud’s asses the way the HGW and W both did. It wouldn’t surprise me if the OPEC Embargo also had some GOP and Dem TX oil interests egging them on. They certainly had a hand in slowing down refineries and gas production. Oil = money for a lot of the people involved in the keeping the hostage situation going. Their reasons had very little to do with the cowboy hairdoo whose one skill was that he could hit his mark and read his lines. They wanted Darth and Poppy pulling those strings.

  44. 44.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Ladyraxterinok: wasn’t George Will the one who stole the debate prep docs left by Carters people at a TV studio or something. Let’s not forget the Senate Judiciary Committee GOP hacking the Dem side’s computers for prep for some USSC nomination. I would bet some money the guy who took the fall for that is making some big $$$ at some GOP grifting operation.

  45. 45.

    CliosFanBoy

    @Mai Naem mobile:   No, that was someone else in the Carter campaign. Will helped Reagan prepare for the debates, then praised Reagan’s performance without noting he had done the coaching.

  46. 46.

    CliosFanBoy

    We can’t assume Iran would have held onto the hostages.  Yeah, they hated Carter, but the hostages were most important for the ayatollahs’ domestic political struggles with the “moderates.”  The hostages were a hindrance once they had consolidated power, and Carter stood in the way of getting much-needed replacement parts for Iranian weapons systems from Israel. Release the hostages to Carter and maybe the arms shipments get a green light again. But Carter reopening the arms flow was not a sure thing even if the hostages were released, and Reagan’s promise WAS a sure thing.

    One part left out of this story was that Reagan also promised not to retaliate against Iran for the hostage-taking if they held onto the hostages just a bit longer.  That was no small thing, especially as Iraq was really pressing Iran very hard at the time.

  48. 48.

    J R in WV

    And of course holding the hostages until after Carter left office was a minor part of the whole conspiracy…

    Selling arms to one faction in the Middle East to fund the provision of other arms to right wing terrorists in Central America was by far the worst part of the conspiracies. Murderous treasonous monsters, all of them!!

  49. 49.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Kristine: ​
     

    @James E Powell: I had to look it up too. Yet another new to me acronym.

    I didn’t recognize it either. I’ve never seen ‘eat shit and die’ acronymed before. It’s so short, why would one bother?

  51. 51.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV: Plus, the Reagan administration double-crossed the Iranians, and helped Iraq a lot than they did Iran. And Iraq was the aggressor in that war.

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