...the weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980 ... a former and future head of the CIA met in Paris with representatives from a terrorist regime to plot the cynical manipulation of an American presidential election.
It is an act of treason for private American citizens to negotiate political deals with foreign governments without official authorization. But that didn't stop George Herbert Walker Bush and William Casey from sitting down with the Ayatollah Khomeini's mullahs to discuss a matter of mutual interest: making sure the 52 American hostages being held by Iran stayed locked up until after the November election contest between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan.
The Republicans were terrified of an "October Surprise"--a move by the Carter government to free the hostages before the vote. So ex-CIA chief Bush--now Reagan's vice-presidential candidate--and Casey were dispatched to Paris to offer the Iranians a covert deal to keep the Americans in chains until Reagan was safely in office. The proposed payoff? A newly-elected Reagan-Bush administration would supply Khomeini's military with a secret supply of American weapons. ...
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd0909.htmlThe allegations are not vague. They allege that representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at a meeting in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections, so that Reagan's opponent, then President Jimmy Carter, whose team had been negotiating, wouldn't gain a popularity boost (an 'October Surprise') before election day. The allegations included a date-specific allegation that William Casey met with an Iranian cleric in Madrid, Spain, and much of the tardy investigations centered on whether, at the weekend in question he was actually at Bohemian Grove retreat in California. ...
A Public Broadcasting System's 'Frontline' documentary in 1990 brought the story unavoidably to the surface in considerable detail. ...
http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/O/October-Surprise.htm1991: ...Gary Sick, a retired career Navy officer and a National Security Council Middle East adviser in President Jimmy Carter's White House, now is writing a book on the subject. His article in the April 15 New York Times, and a one-hour sympathetic examination of the evidence on PBS's "Front Line, " shown nationwide on April 16, left little doubt among open-minded readers and viewers that Ronald Reagan campaign officials promised arms and money to Iran to delay release of 52 American hostages until after the Nov. 4, 1980 presidential election.
What both Sick and the program skirted, however, was the extent of Israel's role, not just as sole source of the arms shipments, but perhaps in instigating the deal as well. And, more important, both touched only lightly on the fact that, as "middleman" in the 1980 deal, Israel had the subsequent power to blackmail the Reagan administration, and did. The question this raises is whether that vulnerability to blackmail also extends to President George Bush, who was running as vice presidential candidate on the Reagan ticket at the time the deal was made.
Various parts of the story were reported throughout the summer of 1987 by, among others, Barbara Honegger in In These Times, Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, and Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald. This writer, after a September 1987 interview in Paris with Abolhassan Bani Sadr, president of Iran while the hostages were being held and Reagan campaign aides were meeting with Iranian Islamic Republic officials, wrote an extensive report in the October 1987 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and, most recently, in the October 1990 issue. ...
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0591/9105011.htmThe day (Gary) Sick's piece appeared in the times, listing dates and participants in suspected meetings between campaign staffers and Iranian clerics, none of the network evening newscasts even mentioned the story (although ABC's Nightline explored the issue that night and has since aired two investigative reports, produced with the Financial Times of London). The New York times ran a page 10 story the day of Sick's op-ed issue until two weeks later, with another page 10 piece. The first report in The Washington Post, a five-paragraph Reuters story, ran eleven days after Sick's op-ed piece. Over the next three months, Time and Newsweek dealt with the October Surprise one time each: Newsweek in a page 28 story in the April 29 issue, Time on page 24 and 25 of the July 1 issue.
In the time between mid-April, when Sick's piece and a PBS Frontline documentary explored the October Surprise, and early August, when Speaker of the House Thomas Foley announced his decision to move ahead with a full-scale inquiry, there were a number of newsworthy developments. Jimmy Carter accused Donald Gregg, now the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, of leaking classified information from the Carter administration to the Reagan campaign, and Carter staffers raised the alarming allegation that Reagan's campaign may have tipped off the Iranians about a planned second attempt to rescue the hostages; the State Department considered blocking a visa for former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who came to the U.S. to promote his book My Turn To Speak, in which he asserts that the Reagan campaign cut a deal with the Iranians at the height of the hostage crisis; President Bush made his first public denials of the allegations; and eight of the former hostages voiced suspicions about the circumstances surrounding their release.
But many of these developments, which were reported by the wire services and picked up by alternative papers and even by the Phil Donahue show, were missed altogether by the major media. And a story that could make Deep Throat look shallow has yet to make the cover of Time or Newsweek. ...
http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/91/5/october_surprise.aspRussian Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin wrote a six-page report in January 1993 confirming that agents of Ronald Reagan's presidential election campaign met with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of the 52 U.S. hostages to insure President Jimmy Carter's defeat.
The explosive new proof of the Reagan campaign's plot to sabotage Carter's reelection is contained in the July-August edition of I.F. magazine, published by the respected investigative journalist, Robert Parry, who has written extensively about the "October Surprise." ...
http://www.pww.org/past-weeks-1999/Oct%20surprise%20plot.htmMuch, much more out there -- just start Googling!