OCTOBER SURPRISE

The Month When Evil Elves Get Very Busy

Welcome to October: a month that, in American presidential politics, has become fraught with peril, conspiracy, and general ratfucking. Squeaker races like the Harris-Trump election are decided in the last few weeks. Think back on 2016: Anthony Weiner’s laptop, Comey’s letter about Hillary’s emails, and the Billy Bush tape all dropped in the final weeks. The phrase has become a political cliche. 

Forty-four years ago, America lived through a dark event in the modern history of American politics. In the 1980 “October surprise,” Republican operatives paid off Iranian mullahs with weapons in exchange for slow-walking the release of 52 U.S. hostages — with the goal of making Carter look weak and getting the Gipper (Reagan) elected.

Before we get to that though: Happy birthday to President Jimmy Carter! He turns 100 today. What a milestone. Reports from his hospice bed in Georgia are that he hopes to be here long enough to vote for Kamala Harris. Carter is a good man, probably our finest ex-President. Even MAGAs who reject his traditional charity-centered Christianity and liberal politics must admit it. His greatest scandal in office was admitting that he sometimes felt “lust in his heart” for women other than Rosemary. 

Carter arguably lost his bid for a second term thanks to one of the dirtiest tricks in modern U.S. history. The original October surprise ended Carter’s chances for a second term. Islamist militants in Tehran kidnapped 52 American embassy employees and held them for 444 days. Carter’s campaign shared a year-long election news cycle with images of blindfolded and helpless Americans. The Carter administration worked tirelessly behind the scenes to secure their release. They even sent a military team in — a disastrous operation that ended with eight American servicemen dead. 

Negotiations were fruitless — until all were suddenly released an hour after Reagan’s inauguration. 

This curious piece of history is buried under decades of subsequent debacles and Middle Eastern wars, the rise of ISIS, 9/11, and now images of America’s own insurrection and discord, presided over by a dangerous buffoon unimaginable to the political generation in the 1980s. 

In a new book out today, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter and the Secret History of the Treason that Stole the White House, journalist Craig Unger argues that the activities of October 1980 are foundational to understanding the dark side of American politics and especially Republican chicanery to maintain control as its demographic base shrinks. 

Unger brings interviews, documents, receipts, and tapes to argue that embassy hostages would have been released much sooner, but for a treasonous conspiracy orchestrated by Bill Casey, former OSS spy, Reagan’s campaign manager, and future CIA director. Working through shady arms dealers in the Middle East and using Israel as the go-between, the Reagan team sent arms to the mullahs in exchange for them slow-walking the release of the hostages.

Throughout 1980, the Carter administration had been negotiating tirelessly to end the standoff. The administration thought it was close to a deal when suddenly, in October, the negotiating Iranians simply vaporized. The hostages were still hostages on election day, Carter lost, and the mullahs only released the Americans an hour after he handed off the White House to Reagan.

Everyone in American politics smelled a rat, but only a few journalists dug deeply to understand what had happened. As the Reaganites took over Washington, access journalism took precedence over looking backward, as it so often does. 

Craig Unger was one of the few scribes who persevered. I spoke with him yesterday about his book. Our conversation here is condensed for space. 

NB: How did you come to believe that the October surprise conspiracy was not just a wacky theory but real?

UNGER: The political realities at the time made me dubious initially. The Iranians were marching on the streets chanting "Death to America," calling us the great Satan. And the Republicans were more vociferous than anyone in condemning them. The big joke going around in those days that the Republicans were spreading was — what's red and flat and glows in the dark? And the answer was, Tehran five minutes after Reagan becomes president. They wanted to blow it up. The key to this was arms dealing. Iraq was invading Iran, they needed those weapons. There were a lot of scandals going on at the same time and a lot of mysterious deaths. [For more on this web, watch the Netflix documentary series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.]

NB: How exactly was the Reagan team conspiring? You found records suggesting Bill Casey was at a meeting with Iranian representatives in the summer of 1980. How was that treasonous?

UNGER: Well, he's arming a hostile foreign power in a covert operation. The Logan Act prohibits private citizens from interfering with American foreign policy. Casey was not part of the government at that time. There were arms embargoes against Iran. So the United States government couldn't make those sales legally, and a private citizen certainly couldn't. It was done with the express purpose of sabotaging an American presidential election. And it succeeded. They got away with it. 

NB: You argue that Israel played a central role in the conspiracy, moving arms to Iran with its network of spies, one of whom — Ari Ben Menashe — talked to you. It’s hard to believe Israel would help arm Iran.

UNGER: What almost no American realized is that Israel was much more scared of Iraq than Iran. And if Iraq beat Iran, they would control all the oil in the Middle East. They'd have Iranian oil, Iraqi oil, and they'd be just enormously powerful. And that was considered a much greater threat to Israel than Iran. Israel had a lot of reasons to hate Jimmy Carter, most notably the Camp David Accords. Though that was Carter's greatest triumph, it won the Nobel Peace Prize and it's a treaty that's lasted over 40 years, and it was enormously successful, Israel was very pissed off because they had to give back the Sinai. They really held that against Jimmy Carter and they wanted him out. Part of the subterfuge, one thing that was hard to overcome, is Israel did not want this revealed because Israel was participating in a covert operation that sabotaged an American presidential election. And obviously, America is Israel's greatest patron. So they were selling disinformation.

NB: How did that disinformation work? You worked for a mainstream media outlet, Newsweek, which at the time was still influential. You detail how editors quashed the story, and kind of ostracized you after investing a lot of money and time in reporting it. Did you ever figure out why? 

UNGER: No one wanted to see the documents. I expected them to say, hey, he's finished. We've got the goods on him. Recently, I went back to all those people for the book. I never got a good explanation from them as to why they were doing what they did. But they were killing the story. And I have to think that there were two major sources of the disinformation. One was likely Israeli intelligence because they wanted to discredit [self-identified former Israeli spy] Ben Menashe. And two was, you know, during the Reagan era, a lot of the Beltway journalists loved being part of the Reagan administration. They bought into the glamor and all that. And access. And Henry Kissinger was a contributor at Newsweek at the time. They talked to him every week.

NB: You paid a personal and professional price for sticking with the story. One of the conspirators, Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, sued you and you were shunned by your peers for a while. 

UNGER: It was pretty devastating, at least for a few years. I won the lawsuit, we won at every stage. But the legal process is so consuming. I won at the appellate level and appealed again to the United States Supreme Court, which denied cert. The whole process took four or five or six years. My name was under a cloud. And it's hard to quantify the damage — when people don't return your calls, what do you say? You know: what's going on? I mean, I had credentials. I had been at a New York magazine, Esquire, and later Vanity Fair and I couldn't get any work. 

NB: In your book, you write: “Six of the last eight Republican White House victories were won with the help of well-orchestrated campaigns featuring illegal arms deals with foreign powers, disinformation, cyber warfare, voter suppression, or other anti-democratic measures.” People now often say or think Trump's treasonous behavior is the worst ever in U.S. history. Can you put into context what you see when you look at him and his interactions with, say, the Russians or any other country? 

UNGER: Well, what Trump does, he does in plain sight. He says, Russia, if you got those emails, please release them. He says that openly on the campaign trail. And it doesn't take an investigative reporter to see him siding with Putin against Zelensky. It's just a matter of being nakedly obvious. Back in the earlier days, that was unacceptable. The Republicans in 1980 kept up a wonderful smokescreen where they were going after Carter for being weak and dealing with Iran, for allowing America to be humiliated. When in fact, they were secretly allied with the people who destroyed the secular democrats in Iran. You know, one thing that's never really said about the October surprise: without the Republicans intervening, it's quite possible a moderate like President [Abolhassan] Banisadr would have emerged victorious and that Iran would have become a secular democracy.

NB: It's the beginning of October. We're in the middle of a squeaky tight and contentious election cycle. There’s a lot on the line. What are the chances of an October surprise erupting in your view in the next 30 days? 

UNGER: It is hard to believe there will be an election with no malfeasance. I don't like to predict things or what might happen, but it's very clear Trump is aligned with Bibi Netanyahu. Trump is aligned with Vladimir Putin, with MBS of Saudi Arabia. And all three of them want Trump elected. So who knows what's going to happen? But it's very quite possible something will.

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Free Stuff and Promos:

October 1 is also the anniversary of the worst mass shooting in American history, an event that plays a seminal role in my first novel, a short, dystopian satire called Zero Visibility Possible. You can listen to my recent interview about it here, or watch a Youtube video of a recent reading I did here in a scuzzy-storied downtown NY boîte. I will give a free subscription to The Freakshow to anyone who buys the novel, which is available in paperback or Kindle. Just email me the receipt.