September 9,
2002
The October Surprise and
the World It Made
Speak,
Memory
by Chris Floyd
As the
world prepares to mark the anniversary of one of history's great turning points,
we would be remiss if we failed to make our contribution to the sad memorials.
And so, with heavy heart, we return to that fateful moment when the forces of
violent extremism struck a cowardly and deceitful blow against the cause of
freedom.
We refer, of course, to the weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980,
when 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.
The deal provoked furious debate in Teheran. The secular
revolutionaries who helped topple the U.S.-backed tyranny of the Shah wanted to
wash their hands of the hostages, who had been seized by Khomeini's fanatical
talibs. But the religious extremists who held ultimate power liked the cut of
that Reagan-Bush jib.
And why not? The mullahs had much in common with the
American archconservatives. Both groups hated Western modernity in almost all
its forms (except technology-- especially military technology, which they
embraced with fervor). They despised modernity's personal freedoms, its social
upheavals, its sexual openness, its questioning of traditional authority, and
its many blasphemies against the primitive sky-god that both groups blindly
worshiped.
The ayatollah cast his lot with Reagan and Bush. He held
the American captives until the very minute that Reagan-- victorious over the
hapless Carter, who'd been pilloried for "failing to free the hostages"--was
inaugurated as President. The CIA--hamstrung by Carter's reforms and his
intermittent commitment to human rights--was back in business. They had their
boy Bush in Reagan's White House; their old pal Casey was the new CIA
boss.
Iran got its payoff, too: sophisticated U.S. weaponry
flowed to the extremist regime, often using Israeli intelligence as a middleman.
The conduit proved valuable a few years later, when the Reagan-Bush White House
skimmed profits from secret Iranian arms sales to pay for their drug-running
operations and terrorist camps in Latin America: the infamous Iran-Contra
scam.
But like the American people, the Iranian mullahs were
also suckered. While shipping arms to Teheran, Reagan and Bush quietly embraced
the mullah's mortal enemy, Saddam Hussein. They gave him weapons, supported his
invasion of Iran, and supplied military intelligence to guide him while he
sprayed Iranian soldiers and innocent civilians with poison gas. When Bush
ascended to the Oval Office, he moved tons of dual-use technology to Iraq,
allowing Hussein to expand his biochemical and nuclear weapons capabilities.
If--and it's a big if--Iraq poses any nuclear or biochemical threat today, it's
in part because George Bush and his cronies fiddled the 1980 election and
foisted a "shadow government" dedicated to covert war and death-dealing
treachery on the American people, and the world.
A few tendrils of these dark truths emerged during the
last days of half-hearted Congressional investigations into Iran-Contra. The
treasonous Republican intervention with the mullahs was confirmed by several
credible sources, foreign and domestic, including two national leaders:
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who as president of Iran in 1980 had full knowledge of the
negotiations; and future Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. At the time of
the probe, Stepashin was head of the Supreme Soviet's Defense and Security
Issues Committee. At the request of the investigators, he carried out an
extensive review of Soviet intelligence files and sent Congress a remarkably
detailed report on the Reagan-Khomeini connection.
Several witnesses (and Stepashin's report) put Bush on the
scene for at least one day of the Paris sessions. Although Bush had
unaccountably disappeared from the campaign trail on the date in question, he
told Congress that he'd "taken a day off"--in the final push of a heated
presidential campaign--to visit two family friends. However, one friend --the
widow of a Supreme Court justice--said the purported visit never happened. Bush
adamantly refused to identify the second friend--unless Congress promised "not
to interview them at all."
Meekly, Congress agreed. There were no subpoenas, no grand
juries, no Starr warriors set loose to dissect Bush's claims: just a quiet
agreement among the elite to look out for their own. Stepashin's report was
disregarded; even Bani-Sadr's direct knowledge was derided as a "secondary
account." The testimonies were buried in obscure archives until investigative
reporter Robert Parry hunted them down and published them in his invaluable
journal, http://www.consortiumnews.com.
So yes, on Sept. 11, let's remember the victims of violent
extremism, and the heroes who died fighting to save them. But let's also
remember October 1980, and the cynical operators who helped create a world where
such insanity can thrive.
Chris Floyd is a
columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor to CounterPunch. He can
be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]