The October surprise really happened.
The surprise occurred in 1980, when members of the Reagan/Bush campaign asked Iran to hold the American hostages captive longer. William Casey, who was Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, met with Iranians in Madrid and asked them not to release the hostages as long as Jimmy Carter was president. Casey promised Iran armaments, which Israel would deliver to them. Casey and others promised the Iranians that things would be much better for them once Reagan was elected. Goodbye, Jimmy Carter.
Craig Unger’s new book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House, has me thinking about the surprise all over again.
The Surprising Long Story
In the past, I believed in the October surprise. President Jimmy Carter made it illegal to give weapons to Iran after the hostages were captured. But Reagan’s people gave Iran arms through Israel, even before Reagan became president. The hostages were released right after Ronald Reagan was sworn into the presidency, minutes after he took the oath of office. If the hostages had come home while Carter was still president, he might have been reelected.
I believed the story of the surprise when I read Gary Sick’s April 1991 op-ed in the New York Times, The Election Story of the Decade. I asked my family for a copy of Sick’s November 1991 book, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, for Christmas. Honestly, my family didn’t want to hear me complain about it, so I kept my mouth shut as I read the book in the back room. Sick, who was Carter’s natural security advisor and an expert on Iran, told us back then that the Reagan/Bush campaign maneuvered to keep the U.S. hostages in Iran until after Reagan was elected. The hostages should have been released as Jimmy Carter did everything he could to set them free. But Carter did not defeat Reagan’s “brilliant” campaign manager, William Casey. Casey had Office of Strategic Services [OSS] spy experience from World War II. He kept his international contacts in place after that. He knew how to get the deal done that he wanted. He wanted Reagan elected and Carter dismissed.
That’s what happened.
Many years later, I posted the March 2023 New York Times story, sadly entitled A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election, on my websites. In that essay, former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes explained how his mentor, Texas Governor John B. Connally, Jr., helped Reagan beat Carter. How? Connally visited the Iranians and asked them to keep the hostages imprisoned until Reagan was president. Reagan would give them a better deal, he promised. The Reagan administration gave the Iranians plenty of arms, which Carter had denied them. After his trip, Connolly told Reagan aide Casey what he had done.
Ben Barnes came forward because President Carter was still alive, and he wanted the history made clear. Recently, on Carter’s 100th birthday, Craig Unger published this new book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House. Carter died on December 29, 2024. He was the longest-lived president in American history.
The new book made me think about the surprise all over again. Was it treason?
Why Did I Follow the Story?
Why do I care? In 1991, as today, I followed the stories because I thought President Jimmy Carter was a very moral man. He was a committed Christian. As a student of religion, ethics, and law, I wondered if Carter was too moral to be a good president. Long ago I wrote an essay about Christian morality and dirty hands, asking the theoretical question if politicians could be moral. Other people have asked similar questions about Carter and morality; those issues repeat in stories about the surprise. I spent some time in the Carter Library trying to understand what Carter’s moral and political record is, and how those two skills relate to one another. Sometimes Carter’s morality appears to have hurt his political record.
Unger’s book suggests it might have undermined his dealings with the hostages. It was interesting to consider if other politicians would try to block Carter, as it’s unlikely that Carter would have secretly fought with enemies to deny another politician election.
Unger notes Carter wouldn’t have traded arms for hostages because “it went against his foreign policy principles.” In contrast, Casey knew “[s]ometimes you have to get your hands dirty.” He did, and he won.
Unger is sure the surprise occurred because the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, confirms it happened. Unger interviewed Bani-Sadr. As Unger puts it, “Bani-Sadr had the receipts” showing that Casey had met with the Iranians in Madrid. The former Iranian president made a “repeated insistence that the October surprise was real.” For the record, Bani-Sadr was quickly eliminated as Iranian president. He moved to Versailles. Instead, Iran kept the religious Islamic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and eliminated the secular Bani-Sadr.
Unger compares Carter and Bani-Sadr, explaining they were both religious, one a Christian and the other a Shi’ite Muslim. Neither of them had the “reactionary political baggage” that some in their faith had. Instead, they “were thoughtful, humane, idealistic, and intelligent—qualities that had propelled them to such lofty positions. But once they got there, they were both relatively weak and ineffective when it came to wielding power—and their foes went in for the kill.”
Both were secular leaders. And both lost within their own countries.
Unger’s Account
Unger has been looking at the surprise story a long time, more than thirty years. His career has suffered because of it. He explains that he, too, thought the 1991 Sick story was dynamic and maybe true. After he wrote one essay about the surprise, he was hired by Newsweek and thought he would have great success with this big story.
But soon the counter-surprise narrative developed.
The counter-narrative was that Casey was never in Madrid. Instead, some records showed he was at a London conference and couldn’t have been with the Iranians in Madrid.
The counter-narrative held for a long time. Both the U.S. House and the Senate had committees review the events. Their conclusion was that the surprise was a fake conspiracy story, invented by crazy and gullible journalists. They downplayed the surprise and found no evidence of it. “The verdict was in stone: there was no October surprise.”
Their approach matched what happened in the news media. Instead of going with Unger’s story, the media rejected that news. Reagan’s security advisor, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, sued Unger for libel.
Unger had a hard time remaining focused on this story. The journalist who stayed with it was Robert Parry, who died in 2018. Parry discovered congressional documents about Iran were stored in an old, abandoned woman’s bathroom in the House office’s parking garage that was changed into a storage room. The archive had records that the committees hadn’t mentioned.
Parry wrote Trick or Treason about the surprise. Unger credits Parry with his detailed work on the surprise. In 2022, Unger asked Diane Duston, Parry’s widow, about his work. Duston gave Unger 23 gigabytes of Parry’s extensive files about the surprise. That is a lot of pages.
It is amazing to read the book and see how much work goes into such a story. It is incredible to think of the travel, interviews, document searches and persistence that first led Parry and then Unger to describe how this complex story, with meetings all over the world, developed. And to make sure everyone understands that the surprise really happened.
Confirmation
Other sources keep telling us the surprise really happened.
In May 2003, Jonathan Alter, Gary Sick, Kai Bird, and Stuart Eizenstat—all experts about Jimmy Carter—wrote It’s All But Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the American Hostages, in The New Republic. Their conclusion? “We think there’s now enough evidence to say definitively that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, the late William Casey, ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election—and that these acts of betrayal might have affected the outcome.”
Their conclusion is strong: “Casey’s unpatriotic conduct should now be viewed by historians as an established fact.” They mention that one of the hostages, Barry Rosen, said these events were “the definition of treason.” Unger also called it treason in his book’s title.
Kai Bird, in The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, added that Casey’s negotiations “could be deemed a blatant violation of the 1799 Logan Act prohibiting private citizens from negotiating disputes with foreign powers.” Bird also says: “By any definition, this was an act of treason. But Republican operatives and Casey himself probably regarded it as mere hardball politics.” Bird says Carter is “studiously agnostic” about Casey’s diplomacy.
Bani-Sadr told Unger that he had mentioned the connections between the Iranians and Casey to Congressman Lee Hamilton, who directed the House study of the surprise. Hamilton found the story “so chilling that he didn’t know what to do.” Bani-Sadr agreed with Hamilton that the news was horrible, but told him “the price is much heavier if you don’t tell the truth to Americans. Then, you really endanger democracy.”
The Price
There was an early result of the October surprise. Do you remember the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran, and then gave the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua? Unger says that series of illegal sales of arms started with the surprise. The October Surprise and Iran Contra “are identical.” The first encouraged the next.
Unger says the surprise “cast in stone the perception of Jimmy Carter as a feckless Boy Scout who was so hobbled by his Sunday school morality that he allowed America to be weakened and humiliated by Iran.” He would have been seen differently if he had brought the hostages home. His failure, the book notes, was really his opponents’ treachery.
Surely our views of failed and successful politicians would be different if there had been no treason in the campaign. Jimmy Carter would have a different reputation.
After their discussion, Bani-Sadr told Unger: “You have to write it,…If not, it will happen again.”
It looks like it happened again, in Iran Contra. Is there anything to learn from this experience?
According to Unger, “In the end, Democrats can either learn from this dark, dark history and figure out how to deploy effective countermeasures. Or they will be destroyed by Republican treachery when it is too late.”
