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The facts are that while such charges have been made regarding the October Surprise, none of them have ever been substantiated by any actual facts. You might as well talk about how 9/11 was a false flag operation too while you are at it.

“There were also secret negotiations,” Bani Sadr maintains, and it is these negotiations between officials of the Khomeini regime and members of the Reagan presidential campaign staff that would explain the subsequent unpredictable Reagan administration Mideast policies. As a result, a contract was signed with Israel for shipment of arms in March 1981, Bani Sadr says, and by the time he fled Iran in late July, 1981, there had been at least three Israeli arms shipments, including the one that crashed.

How did Israel get involved in direct contacts between Iranians and Reagan campaign officials? Bani Sadr says it was through the Iranian negotiators, who had close ties with Savak, the Iranian secret police organization which had had Israeli advisers in the time of the Shah.

The former Iranian president’s information dovetails at this point with facets of the story previously revealed by American journalists. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus have reported in the Washington Post and Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald that three Reagan campaign aides met in a Washington DC hotel in early October, 1980, with a self-described “Iranian exile” who offered, on behalf of the Iranian government, to release the hostages to Reagan, not Carter, in order to ensure Carter’s defeat in the November 4, 1980 election.

The American participants were Richard Allen, subsequently Reagan’s first national security adviser, Allen aide Laurence Silberman, and Robert McFarlane, another future national security adviser who in 1980 was on the staff of Senator John Tower (R-TX). The three American participants claim no deal was struck and that none of them can remember the Iranian’s name.

Bani Sadr, however, says the secret deal was made, even as the Iranians publicly reached an agreement with the Carter administration to release the hostages in return for the unfreezing of $4 billion. The Iranian who secretly met with the Reaganauts in Washington, Bani Sadr says, was either Parvis Sabati, Manucher Ghorbanifar, or both. Ghorbanifar, like McFarlane, figures prominently in the subsequent US-Iran arms-for-hostages negotiations in 1985 and 1986. Ghorbanifar has also been described by the CIA and by Colonel Oliver North as an agent of Mossad, Israel’s CIA.

Backstopping the 1980 Reagan-Iran negotiations, according to Bani Sadr, were four powerful figures in the Iranian Government: Speaker of the Parliament Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani (the “moderate” through whom the Reagan administration also worked in 1985 and 1986); Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who died in a July 1981 bomb explosion at his political party’s headquarters; Prime Minister (and Bani Sadr’s successor as President) Mohammad Ali Rajai; and chief government spokesman Behzad Nabavi.

The arms supply contract Iran signed with Israel in March, 1981, less than two months after Reagan’s inauguration, was the payoff for delaying the release of the American hostages, Bani Sadr maintains. This is largely corroborated by a Washington Post report of November 29, 1986, that Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave Israel permission in 1981 to ship $10 to $15 million in US arms to Iran, and a 1983 statement by former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon that the extensive Israeli arms dealings that began in 1981 with Iran were approved by the United States. There is no question, also, that the trickle of US and other arms that began flowing to Iran through Israel in 1981 led to a flood in subsequent years.

If the evidence from overseas points the finger squarely at the Reagan administration, evidence from the United States itself is even more damning. A July 7, 1987, article written for the political weekly In These Times by Jim Naureckas and Barbara Honegger, a worker in Reagan national campaign headquarters in 1980, described the “paranoid” fear of an “October Surprise” by the Carter campaign just before the election. “In late fall,” the two authors wrote, “the surveys still found the election too close to call. Reagan’s pre-election top pollster, Richard Wirthlin, predicted that a pre-election hostage release would boost Carter at least 5 or 6 percent in the polls, and as much as 10 percent—giving him a sure victory—if the release came before the campaign’s final week…But in the campaign’s closing weeks, the mood of high anxiety suddenly changed…’We don’t have to worry about an October surprise’ a jubilant staffer at the campaign’s operations center (told Honegger). ‘Dick’s cut a deal.’”

“Dick” was Richard Allen, and the deal apparently was a promise of arms in return for a delay by Tehran in releasing the hostages. A few days after the conversation Honegger describes, another Reagan campaign official, future CIA director William Casey, was sufficiently confident to tell journalist Roland Perry on October 30 that if something happened to give Carter the election, “it won’t be the hostages.”

It is no secret that the Reagan campaign had set up an elaborate apparatus to head off such an “October surprise.” It included a network of active and retired military personnel serving on or living near US Air Force bases who were prepared to alert the Reagan campaign to any unusual activity that might indicate a pre-election rescue effort. The network plan, concocted by retired Admiral Robert Garrick, was to abort the mission by leaking it to the press.

A congressional subcommittee chaired by Representative Donald Albosta (D-MI) investigated this Reagan campaign “intelligence operation,” and allegations that prior to their televised debate Reagan had prepared himself by examining a stolen copy of Carter’s briefing materials. In May 1984, the sub-committee issued a 2,413-page report entitled “Unauthorized Transfers of Non-Public Information During the 1980 Presidential Election” which describes the campaign intelligence network and its actions.

Much of this information is laid out in the In These Times article cited above, and also in three articles by Christopher Hitchens in the June 20, July 11, and August 8, 1987, issues of The Nation. Several Washington Post articles, and Alfonso Chardy, writing in the Miami Herald, also supply evidence of a deal between Iranian emissaries and future Reagan administration officials. Many of the names cited in these accounts of the 1980 events reappear in the 1987 congressional Iran-contra investigations. They include William Casey, Attorney General Edwin Meese, Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, former CIA Deputy Director Max Hugel, Richard Secord, Oliver North, and Michael Ledeen.

Both operations involved some of the same characters, the same shadowy connections to Israel, the same secret wheeling and dealing with Iran, and the same extensive investigation by congressmen who then shied away from closing the circle. They pulled back when they realized that, standing with the president in the docket, was not only some of Israel’s shadow government in Washington, but the Israeli government itself.

Hitchens sums it all up as follows: “Well, the hostages were released at just the right time, and the first shipments of weapons began the very next month. You may wonder if the Reaganites were capable of making such a vile deal. But you don’t really wonder that, do you?”

Most members of congress have at one time or another strongly criticized every serving US president. Hardly any member of congress has ever reproached a sitting Israeli prime minister or high official. Clearly the Albosta group wasn’t going to break the precedent in 1984, nor were the Iran-contra investigators, led by Daniel Inouye, in 1987. The moral is clear: If you plan to put something over on the American people, no matter how venal, self-serving, or destructive, you can get away with it if Israel is also involved. If history shows there is no American official above US law, it also shows there is no Israeli official who is not.