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In this follow-up to Season 9's "The Election Held Hostage", Robert Parry investigates whether Ronald Reagan's campaign manager could have met with Iranian officials in the summer of 1980 regarding a possible end to the hostage crisis.

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00:00Frontline is a presentation of the Documentary Consortium.
00:07Tonight on Frontline, did the 1980 Reagan campaign conspire to delay the release of the American hostages?
00:14Several of the Americans that were held in Iran have requested that we investigate.
00:20This is such a sick story that it defies my comprehension.
00:26This is only an effort to smear George Bush and Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, and that's why they're doing what they're doing.
00:34In February, after a heated debate, Congress launched an official investigation.
00:39That probe goes on behind closed doors today.
00:43Tonight, Frontline examines the questions and the evidence.
00:47Investigating the October Surprise.
00:56With funding provided by the financial support of viewers like you.
01:02And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
01:08This is Frontline.
01:14Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States and the 53 freed Americans.
01:24Last April, Frontline examined allegations that the 1980 election turned on a dirty trick.
01:41A conspiracy to delay the release of American hostages in Iran.
01:46The program caused a stir, in part because the charges were endorsed by a widely respected ex-government official, Gary Sick.
01:58I resisted believing these stories for more than eight years.
02:05Sick was a former National Security Council expert who had worked for Presidents Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter.
02:11The day before the broadcast, Sick had written a lengthy op-ed article in the New York Times.
02:17In that article, Sick reported new allegations of secret meetings in 1980 in Madrid,
02:23between Iranian officials and Reagan-Bush campaign manager William Casey.
02:32In its report, Frontline independently explored the allegations.
02:36While we found the evidence less than conclusive, newspapers across the country began calling for a full investigation.
02:46White House reporters even asked George Bush if he had met with Iranians.
02:51Were you ever in Paris in 1980?
02:53Was I ever in Paris in 1980?
02:56Definitively, definitely, no.
03:00On Capitol Hill, congressmen pondered whether an investigation was needed.
03:06Seventy-eight Democrats signed a petition.
03:11Eight former hostages also urged a closer look.
03:15My reaction is that we need an investigation.
03:19And I say that as a citizen.
03:23Even Ronald Reagan helped fuel suspicions by implying his campaign had established contact with Iran.
03:29I did some things actually the other way to try and be of help in getting those hostages.
03:36I felt very sorry for them and getting them out of there.
03:40A few days after that golf course press conference, ABC Nightline reported in more detail the claims of Jamshed Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer.
03:50Hashemi claimed to have participated in Madrid meetings between William Casey and a close associate of Ayatollah Khomeini.
03:57Some deals should never be made, Mr. President, whether arms for hostages or hostages for elections.
04:08Calls for an official probe intensified in Washington.
04:11The weight of circumstantial information and persistent rumors over the years that such contact did take place have led us to conclude that these matters should be brought to a conclusive end once and for all.
04:25The so-called October surprise conspiracy had moved into the political mainstream.
04:33As new allegations arose, former President Reagan ordered a search of his campaign files.
04:39But how much scrutiny could the allegations bear?
04:43On September 10th, the Village Voice established that at least one of the supposed witnesses to alleged Paris meetings had lied.
04:53And in November, two national news magazines published cover stories denouncing the alleged deal as myth, dismissing the story's chief sources as frauds.
05:03A week later, Gary Sik published his book.
05:07He cited 14 sources alleging knowledge of a hostage deal.
05:12And he pointed to US-approved post-inauguration weapon shipments to Iran as the payoff.
05:18But Sik's research came under immediate attack.
05:21As an investigative reporter, I went into this trying to find out whether certain things happened.
05:27New Republic reporter Stephen Emerson made the rounds of the talk shows denouncing Sik.
05:32I would say Gary Sik was used by other people, that he has fallen victim to their naivete and their willing intention to manipulate him.
05:45Steve Emerson has not talked to any of the sources that I cite or the corroborative sources.
05:49This is as if Casey was on the moon during those periods of time.
05:53Gary?
05:54He was the director of a campaign. Where was he during those periods of time?
05:57A student of abnormal psychology, I think, would have a field day with this excursion into political paranoia.
06:04Three months later, after more bitter debate, the House of Representatives voted on February 5th to launch an official investigation.
06:12You know, and I know, that journalistic inquiries are no substitute for a congressional investigation.
06:21Over the last year, as the debate has blown hot and cold in Washington, Frontline has continued its investigation.
06:28In tonight's broadcast, we will concentrate on a few of the key questions Congress is now confronting.
06:37Where was campaign manager William Casey on days of alleged secret meetings?
06:42What more can be learned about the supposed Iranian emissary?
06:47What can newly released FBI files tell us about the man who allegedly brokered the deal?
06:54Why are some of the supposed witnesses lying?
06:58And finally, can the available evidence be explained some other way?
07:03I feel very strongly that this country is in trouble, that it needs to be turned around.
07:17And I have felt for over a year that Governor Reagan is the only man in America who's ever turned a government around.
07:25The controversy naturally centers on Casey.
07:28He was an experienced spy, skilled in deception.
07:33He would be Reagan's first choice to head the CIA, and was the architect of the Iran-Contra operation.
07:42But plausibility aside, what proof is there that Casey actually cut a deal?
07:50Frontline sought documentation of Casey's whereabouts for the months of July, August, September, and October of 1980.
07:59We went to Ralph Bledsoe, director of the Ronald Reagan Library in California.
08:04The overall theme of the museum is the presidency.
08:09Bledsoe was the man Ronald Reagan asked to search the Reagan-Bush campaign files.
08:14Frontline reporter Robert Perry talked to him about what his 18-day investigation turned up.
08:19The collection consists of about a million and a half records or so.
08:25We probably looked at 100,000 to 150,000 of those records or perhaps more.
08:31Did you find any records pertaining to Mr. Casey's whereabouts, his travel, airplane tickets, hotel receipts, anything of that sort?
08:43No.
08:45It's hard to tell exactly where he was on certain days.
08:50We did not find, as I recall, any kind of materials that were dated during the period of time we were searching for that would place him any one particular place.
09:03That's why I'm saying the search didn't really show much about his travels.
09:09So of the one and a half million documents related to the 1980 Reagan campaign, Bledsoe found no records detailing the whereabouts of campaign director Casey.
09:19But just a summary, there were no expense records for Mr. Casey?
09:26We found none.
09:27There were no travel records for Mr. Casey?
09:29We found no travel records for him.
09:31There was no calendar for Mr. Casey?
09:33We found no calendar for him.
09:36And except for a handful of dates, you could not establish his whereabouts anywhere over that several month period from the convention to the general election?
09:44That's correct.
09:46Though Bledsoe came up empty-handed, Frontline's investigators had better results.
09:52From interviews with dozens of campaign staffers, campaign reporters, and Casey's personal friends, as well as from reviewing contemporaneous news reports, Frontline has been able to document Casey's whereabouts for about two-thirds of the days between the Republican convention in July and the election in early November.
10:11We concentrated on three sets of dates, given as the times of the alleged secret meetings.
10:18The first was in late July in Madrid.
10:21Iranian arms dealer Jamshed Hashemi claims that he and his brother Cyrus helped arrange the first Arms for Hostages negotiation.
10:40Allegedly, the two principals were William Casey and Iranian cleric Mehdi Karubi.
10:47The meetings, says Jamshed, span two days.
10:51In fact, hotel records do exist, suggesting the Hashemis were in Madrid in late July.
10:57But what about Casey?
11:00Is there a two-day gap in his schedule in late July?
11:04Newsweek and the New Republic say no.
11:08Here is what Frontline's investigation found.
11:10On Thursday, July 24th, Casey was in Washington.
11:19He was photographed on that day, accepting a campaign check at the Federal Election Commission.
11:25Reagan wasn't there to get it, but his campaign chief, William Casey, represented him when the Federal Election Commission approved a check for the $29 million to finance Reagan's drive for the White House.
11:35The next day, Friday, July 25th, Casey can't be located.
11:41But according to a note on his secretary's calendar, Casey was in Washington the following day, the 26th.
11:48If the note is correct, it rules out a two-day meeting in Madrid for those dates.
11:53But what about Sunday, the 27th, and Monday, the 28th?
11:57Here, Newsweek and the New Republic cited what they consider conclusive proof that campaign manager Casey could not have been in Madrid because he was busy attending an academic conference in London.
12:13According to a British government source, Casey paid for a room at the conference for both Sunday and Monday nights.
12:19But did Casey attend the conference daytime sessions?
12:25Here, reporters have relied on the planning records of Jonathan Chadwick, administrator of the Imperial War Museum.
12:31In doing my planning in advance of the conference, I also had to make sure that we did not invite more people to attend than could fit into this room that we're sitting in now.
12:48To achieve these objects, I had to create these two charts.
12:57This is my accommodation plan.
13:00This is the attendances and meals plan.
13:04Now, on my chart, I see I have marked that on 16th July 1980, Arthur Funk, Professor Funk,
13:15who was the chairman of the American delegation, telephoned me to say that Mr. Casey would not be coming on 27th or 28th July after all,
13:31but that we could expect him to arrive on the 29th.
13:36And I marked my chart to show that information.
13:41Chadwick would make an X to mark an anticipated absence and a check, or as the British say, a tick, to show that a participant was expected to attend.
13:52For July 28th, the first day of the conference, Chadwick penciled X's in the boxes for Casey.
13:59But at some point, Chadwick then inked in checks over those X's.
14:05When Frontline first interviewed him, Chadwick said the checks might have gone in when someone told him that Casey had changed plans and would arrive for the opening session.
14:14Later, he became certain that Casey had in fact shown up unexpectedly.
14:21When Mr. Casey appeared on the morning of 28th July, I was naturally taken by surprise because my last information was that he wasn't going to be here until the next morning.
14:33Anyway, I was glad enough to see him and just put ink ticks for him right through the day.
14:43Recollections are inherently unreliable 11 years later, but my recollection is that on that morning of 28th July, Casey arrived with the other Americans in a sort of bunch.
15:00Out of 25 participants interviewed by Frontline, three others remember Casey arriving on that Monday morning.
15:09But four Americans plus the British host of the conference, Sir William Deacon, recall Casey arriving about six hours later on Monday afternoon.
15:19One of these Americans, UCLA professor Robert Dalek, was keeping a special lookout for Casey.
15:25And I have a very strong memory of not seeing Mr. Casey at the conference that morning because I was giving my talk at 1130 in the morning and I looked for him in the room.
15:40I remember looking for him in the room. I knew he was a prominent figure and I was interested to know whether he was going to be there or not.
15:49And the room wasn't that crowded. There may have been, what, 40 or 50 people at most.
15:55I remember meeting him late that afternoon because we walked around the Imperial War Museum together and Arthur Funk was there.
16:06And that's when that famous photograph was taken of Arthur Funk and myself and Casey.
16:14In fact, Chadwick's own chart adds credence to Dalek's recollection.
16:20In Casey's box for the afternoon session, Chadwick has written,
16:25Came at 4 p.m.
16:27If indeed, Casey first appears late Monday afternoon,
16:31theoretically he would have had more than enough time to attend meetings in Madrid on Sunday and Monday morning.
16:37But what about Chadwick's checkmarks on Monday morning?
16:42Dalek remembers a Monday morning announcement.
16:45Casey was on his way but had been delayed by business.
16:49Chadwick says he doesn't recall such an announcement.
16:52But if true, it's possible, he says, that he would have checked Casey in for the whole day.
16:58In addition, there is possibly a wider gap in Casey's schedule in the days before the conference.
17:03The calendar note made by Casey's secretary, Barbara Hayward, places him in Washington on Saturday.
17:10But her calendar may be unreliable.
17:13Earlier that same week, it put Casey in a place he didn't go.
17:18And Frontline could not confirm the key Saturday note.
17:22Hayward declined to be interviewed.
17:24Without confirmation of Hayward's calendar note and given confusion over the meaning of Chadwick's charts,
17:35Casey's whereabouts are therefore in question for a three-and-a-half-day gap
17:40from Friday until four o'clock Monday afternoon.
17:42A second set of meetings in Madrid has also been alleged by Jamshid Hashemi.
17:52ABC Nightline reported that hotel records do show that a known alias of Jamshid Hashemi, Ali Balneen,
17:59was registered at the plaza from August 8th through the 12th.
18:02But Casey's schedule is even harder to pin down in August.
18:09Busy organizing the campaign staff, Casey was out of public view for days on end,
18:15and his co-workers have only vague recollections of when they were with him.
18:19Bill Casey to me was sort of a mystery man.
18:24You know, he was here, he was there, he was around.
18:27Retired Admiral Robert Garrick was an aide at Reagan campaign headquarters where Casey had his office.
18:34He had his own driver, and the car would whip away, and the driver brought him to these meetings when he showed up.
18:42The way he deported himself, you never knew exactly what he knew, but you sometimes felt he knew something,
18:50and he'd tell you at the appropriate time.
18:55One of the few precise memories of Casey for this period comes from a campaign employee
19:01who recalls Casey in Washington on August 12th, watching Senator Edward Kennedy's convention speech.
19:06A nominee whose name is Ronald Reagan has no right to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
19:15Then on August 14th, Casey shows up on an ABC News program.
19:20What did Governor Reagan think of Senator Kennedy's speech?
19:24I haven't talked to Governor Reagan about Senator Kennedy's speech.
19:28After months of investigation, and interviews on and off the record with 56 campaign co-workers,
19:33as well as with Casey's friends and relatives, Frontline found there was little hard information for other dates during this period.
19:41While many remember Casey working long hours at the Arlington headquarters,
19:46few could reconstruct any specific memory for any one day.
19:51So for early to mid-August, the time frame set by Jamshid Hashemi for the second Madrid meeting,
19:58Frontline could not nail down Casey's whereabouts.
20:01The same is true for the rest of August and early September, with a few exceptions.
20:10But on September 10th, the campaign headquarters began requiring that visitors be signed in.
20:17Frontline obtained a copy of those logs, and they show Casey with visitors on many of the remaining days of the campaign.
20:24Presumably, the logs might help refute long-standing accounts of a third set of meetings in Paris.
20:33Here, speculation centers on Sunday, October 19th.
20:37On Saturday, October 18th, sign-in sheets at campaign headquarters show Casey's brother and sister-in-law stopping by at lunchtime.
20:47Then, at 11.30 that night, Casey seems to have signed in for a 10-minute visit to the operations center,
20:53where campaign news and developments in Iran were monitored around the clock.
21:00Frontline next locates Casey 32 hours later, on Monday morning, October 20th, in Cincinnati with Ronald Reagan.
21:08He had flown there that morning from Washington, D.C.
21:13We were unable to locate Casey on Sunday, but neither did we find any evidence that he traveled to Paris over the weekend.
21:20The absence of better travel records for Casey remains a mystery.
21:32But one last note.
21:35In 1983, a House committee investigated Casey's role in Debategate, the 1980 theft of Carter campaign materials.
21:44Casey told the investigators he kept records.
21:47They included, he said, a personal log in addition to a desk calendar and a secretarial log.
21:55When investigators asked Casey where his personal log could be found, he told them he thought it was in his files.
22:03When he was told that the subcommittee investigators had not found it, he said he would search for it.
22:08Today, those records are still missing.
22:11They appear not to be in the campaign archives, and Casey's widow says she hasn't seen them.
22:17In today's Tehran, angry slogans say she hasn't seen them.
22:19and many are still Hariti.
22:21Yes, the principles ofvatspe否.
22:22That sounds good.
22:24Comeوا, To some folks died at the table...
22:26I cannot not find any evidence that he had printed,zier
22:37orاث went to jail in the tabちょっと from the top of our wing.
22:40In today's Tehran, angry slogans remain on the walls of the former U.S. Embassy.
22:52The embassy is now home to a training center for Iran's revolutionary guards
22:57and a bookstore selling captured secret American documents.
23:04Though Ayatollah Khomeini died two years ago
23:08and the new government has toned down its anti-American rhetoric,
23:12Iran remains a country deeply distrustful of the United States.
23:18Mehdi Karubi, now Speaker of the Iranian Parliament,
23:22is one of the most outspoken critics of the great Satan.
23:27Allegedly, Karubi was the principal Iranian emissary
23:30who negotiated with William Casey in Madrid and in Paris.
23:33This front-line interview was Karubi's first on-camera response to the West
23:42about Jamshid Hashemi's allegations.
23:44Front-line could not establish the truth of Karubi's assertion
23:52that he had never been to France or Spain.
23:53I think Mr. Karubi did have trips to outside Iran in those days,
23:58in many occasions.
24:00Saeed Rajai Khorasani is another senior member of the Iranian parliament.
24:05He was the Islamic Republic's ambassador to the United Nations
24:07during the hostage crisis.
24:08In 1980 he represented Iran before the Iran
24:11and the Syrian parliament of the Iranian parliament.
24:12He was the Islamic Republic's ambassador
24:14to the United Nations during the hostage crisis.
24:16In 1980 he represented Iran before many international audiences.
24:30A middleman, particularly an Iranian middleman who is a respectable clergy
24:40in the Iranian society, who goes and talks to American,
24:46let's say, representatives in Spain, is not respected very highly.
24:54And if someone like Mr. Karubi has had any contact of this nature,
25:02it is most reasonable to assume that he prefers to keep the news of that contact
25:07secret and undisclosed.
25:24It's exactly like expecting Mr. Kaysi in those days to come to the American people
25:50and attend them what to live in Madrid.
25:52But definitely Mr. Kaysi would not say anything
25:55and our Mr. Kaysi is not going to say anything now.
26:13If Kaysi cannot be pinned down and Karubi denies everything,
26:17what about the man who allegedly brokered the deal, Cyrus Hashemi,
26:21a New York-based banker and arms dealer?
26:24There's evidence he was in Madrid in late July.
26:28What else do we know?
26:33In September 1980, the FBI installed bugs and wiretaps in Hashemi's New York offices.
26:40The FBI suspected that Cyrus was an important financier for the Khomeini regime.
26:46And they suspected he was acting as a paymaster for Iranian agents in the United States.
26:53The wiretaps did confirm that Cyrus was extremely influential with senior levels of the Iranian government.
26:59Indeed, the Carter White House thought enough of Cyrus' influence to use him as an intermediary with Iran throughout the hostage crisis.
27:09But was Cyrus a double agent, as his brother Jamshed asserts?
27:15Do the FBI wiretaps turn up any evidence that Cyrus was back-channeling information to the Republicans,
27:21most importantly, to Kaysi?
27:24It was impossible for us to determine.
27:27The FBI summaries of the wiretaps are heavily censored.
27:31Only an investigator with access to uncensored wiretap summaries can determine if the surveillance picked up any evidence of links between Kaysi and Hashemi.
27:44But there is evidence of indirect links.
27:47Kaysi and Hashemi had important business associates in common.
27:52According to the wiretaps, Cyrus was profiting from multi-million dollar business deals with a close Kaysi friend, John Shaheen.
28:01Shaheen had known Kaysi for 35 years.
28:04They met as spies in the OSS, the CIA's forerunner.
28:10John and Bill Kaysi were very good friends.
28:13Bill met him in the Second World War.
28:17And we'd have dinners together and talk about the war and so on.
28:23That's how Bill knew John Shaheen.
28:26Another mutual business associate was Roy Furmark.
28:30Furmark, I would see Furmark every day, every year, the Shaheens had a Christmas party.
28:37And I went to about five of them and I always saw Furmark.
28:43He was a very good friend and a very good employee of John Shaheen.
28:49The wiretaps show that in September 1980, a Shaheen company, Mid-Ocean, deposited two and a half million dollars into a bank Cyrus Hashemi owned.
29:00And in October 1980, Cyrus Hashemi offered 45 million dollars to bail Shaheen out of a failing oil refinery that Shaheen had built in Newfoundland.
29:11At the same time, Kaysi was in close contact with Shaheen.
29:15According to a Shaheen assistant, the two men talked by phone at least once a week during the 1980 campaign.
29:22Kaysi had even done legal work for Shaheen on the oil refinery before he became campaign manager.
29:28There is no evidence in the censored wiretaps, however, that Kaysi was in direct contact with Cyrus Hashemi.
29:37But Cyrus's older brother, Jamshed, told Frontline that Shaheen's assistant, Furmark, introduced the Hashemis to Kaysi in March 1980.
29:47Furmark denies it.
29:49Furmark would acknowledge only that he met Cyrus Hashemi in 1979 and had business dealings with him during 1980.
29:58Shaheen died in 1985.
30:02The censored FBI summaries shed no further light.
30:07But the summaries do show that Cyrus Hashemi was double dealing the Carter administration in another way.
30:17Beginning in October of 1980, Hashemi, while supposedly helping the White House on the hostage issue,
30:23began plotting illegal military shipments to Iran.
30:29By December, the FBI reported that the thrust of Hashemi's activities had shifted from the hostages and any hostage negotiations
30:38to what amounts to the improper and illegal shipment of military support equipment to Iran.
30:47Other documents show that Hashemi arranged aircraft spare parts, rafts, and electrical wiring shipments.
30:55According to the last FBI wiretaps, he was even scouting the American market for air-to-air missiles.
31:04Armed with the wiretap evidence, the FBI would push for, and finally get, an indictment of Cyrus and Jamshed Hashemi nearly four years later.
31:15Some reporters have cited the indictment as reason to question Jamshed's October surprise account.
31:21Why, they ask, wouldn't the Hashemi's have used their secret knowledge of a hostage deal to ward off any prosecution?
31:29But the FBI documents do show a pattern of favoritism towards the Hashemi's.
31:35In February 1981, two weeks after the inauguration, the wiretap was pulled from Cyrus' New York office,
31:43even though he was still considered an agent of a foreign power.
31:47A year later, when the FBI pushed for an indictment, the Reagan Justice Department put it off, arguing that the charges were too petty.
31:59Faced with Washington's objections, the arms trafficking allegations lingered for another two years before the FBI finally got its wish for a grand jury.
32:09Even then, the Reagan Justice Department gave the Hashemi's special treatment.
32:15Just before the indictments could be handed up in mid-1984, an assistant attorney general insisted on tipping off the Hashemi's.
32:23The FBI watched as Cyrus canceled a return flight from London to New York, where he would have been arrested.
32:31Cyrus would ultimately escape arrest entirely, agreeing to cooperate in a sting operation against Israeli and American arms dealers, rather than face trial.
32:41In 1986, in 1986, in the midst of that case, he died, the cause of death listed as acute leukemia.
32:51In early 1989, the Justice Department finally dismissed the remaining charges against Cyrus' brother, Jamshid.
32:59Jamshid had alluded to reporters of an October surprise plot as early as 1983,
33:05but it was only after he was cleared of charges that he went public, saying he had actually participated in meetings.
33:17To the best of my recollection, it was either the 19th or the 20th, which would mean either a Sunday or a Monday.
33:25I can't give you an exact date. I mean, that's the best I can do, is say it was the 19th or the 20th.
33:31While questions remain about Casey's schedule and Karubi's and the Hashemi's involvement,
33:37some self-proclaimed witnesses to an arms for hostages deal have turned out not to be credible at all.
33:44It was a case of, okay, you're going to get your weapons, we're going to get our hostages.
33:49Last April, when Frontline first examined the 1980 hostage mystery,
33:54we recounted the outcome of a federal trial in Portland, Oregon.
33:58In that 1990 trial, Richard Brennecke, an Oregon businessman with a specialty in money laundering,
34:05was accused of perjury for asserting to a federal judge that Bill Casey, George Bush, and CIA officer Donald Gregg
34:13went to Paris around mid-October 1980 to put the finishing touches on a hostage deal.
34:20I'd never met Mr. Casey. The only knowledge I had of him was pictures in newspapers and identification that...
34:28And he was not bashful. It was, hi, I'm Bill Casey.
34:32So he introduced himself to you? Yeah.
34:34And I said, good morning, I'm Dick Brennecke.
34:37Brennecke was found innocent of perjury when federal prosecutors failed to prove a negative,
34:43that Casey, Bush, and Gregg were not in Paris.
34:47We told the truth, we told the truth all along, and by God, it was believed.
34:56Following his acquittal, Brennecke enlisted the help of a researcher, Peggy Robome, in order to help him write his memoirs.
35:03So I flew out to Oregon and packed up Dick's files with him.
35:12But after Robome began to search through Brennecke's 1980 financial records,
35:17she found evidence that Brennecke was in fact lying about his own presence in Paris.
35:22I found credit card receipts that matched the dates when he had said that he had been in Paris.
35:32in 1980, specifically, receipts for the weekend of October 17th through 19th,
35:43and receipts that went through the 21st, that at the time when he said he had been in Paris,
35:49at a meeting regarding what's known as the October Surprise,
35:54he had gone up to Seattle, Washington for a kendo tournament.
35:59On October 19th, for instance, when Brennecke claimed to be on his way to Paris to meet Casey and Gregg,
36:05his personal papers show him checking out of a motel in Seattle, Washington,
36:10getting his car washed, and then having dinner at Mazzi's, an Italian restaurant back in Portland.
36:16It remains unclear why he lied.
36:21It does seem sort of monumentally stupid to be preparing a book to talk about your life that you did not lead,
36:32but to bring documentation that would show you to be not telling the truth.
36:38Does it not?
36:41I would say careless.
36:44Brennecke refused to be re-interviewed for this broadcast.
36:49Whether he lied for personal gain or for some other motive,
36:53it's a mystery why he presented his Paris story under oath to a federal judge in an unrelated case four years ago.
37:00There were meetings that took place in France.
37:08But besides Brennecke, a half dozen other individuals have claimed knowledge of Paris meetings between Republicans and Iranians.
37:15Most admit that their information is second-hand.
37:19And since some of them travel in the same circles,
37:22they could have been feeding off each other's scraps of information.
37:26It is also possible that some were picking up rumors that had begun floating around Republican circles as far back as mid-October 1980.
37:36At that time, John McClain, a Washington-based correspondent for the Chicago Tribune,
37:42had gotten a tip George Bush was on his way to Paris.
37:46I was told by someone who was in a position, a secondary position in Republican circles,
37:53I suppose that's a decent way to describe it, where he would have access to information of this kind
37:58that Bush was planning to or was on his way to Paris to discuss the hostage situation.
38:07In checking out the rumor, McClain approached a State Department official, David Henderson.
38:13Henderson's calendar shows he met with McClain on October 18th.
38:17He blurted out excitedly that George Bush was going to Paris or was on his way or was essentially there already.
38:29It was clear to me that it was an imminent thing that was about to happen right that weekend
38:35to meet with the Iranians to talk about the release of the American hostages.
38:41What I know for sure is that it came up, that I checked it out and I got nowhere with it,
38:47that I didn't feel particularly astounded by it at the time
38:51and wouldn't have been particularly astounded if it had been true.
38:55To the best of my memory, it wasn't true.
38:57To the best of my memory of how I checked things out, it was not true, but it was being discussed.
39:02After the Republican campaign denied the rumor, McClain dropped the story.
39:12But rumors that George Bush attended a final meeting with Iranians persisted.
39:18One individual who has fueled them is a former Israeli intelligence official, Ari Ben-Manashi.
39:24As you know, President Bush has vociferously denied that he was in Paris that weekend.
39:32Obviously, he has bad memory.
39:36Ben-Manashi is perhaps the most perplexing of those alleging an October surprise deal.
39:42Frontline has established Ben-Manashi did work for a unit of Israeli military intelligence from 1977 to 1987.
39:50Though Israeli government spokesmen insist he was only a translator,
39:55senior Israeli and Iranian sources have told Frontline that Ben-Manashi served as an intelligence officer
40:01handling sensitive assignments concerning Iran in 1980.
40:09When Ben-Manashi ran afoul of U.S. law in 1989 and was charged with conspiracy to sell three C-130 transport planes to Iran,
40:18the Israeli government disowned him.
40:22Ben-Manashi won an acquittal, but his credibility with reporters collapsed
40:27because some of his assertions proved implausible, particularly his claim about George Bush.
40:33Are you saying that he is lying about this?
40:36He was in Paris that weekend.
40:40Is there any possibility that you saw someone who might have looked a bit like the president but was not the president?
40:52At the time, it's clear. It was clear that it was him.
40:59Although Ben-Manashi insists Bush was in Paris, the vice presidential candidate was in the public eye almost constantly in the weeks before the election.
41:08His whereabouts should be no mystery.
41:12In the Frontline broadcast last April, we showed heavily censored records from Bush's Secret Service detail,
41:21reflecting a Bush trip to a suburban Washington country club that would have ruled out any trip to Paris.
41:27Since then, after an appeal from Frontline for more information, the Secret Service revealed more of that record,
41:35including a passage showing that Bush was at his Washington home.
41:42The Secret Service has declined to make available any agent from the detail for an interview.
41:47Independently, Frontline located three of the agents.
41:52They all cited secrecy rules and declined comment.
41:56But if the Secret Service record is correct, then a Bush trip to Paris is impossible.
42:03That for political gain, I would assign an American to captivity one minute longer than necessary,
42:13I think is a vicious personal assault on my integrity and my character as president.
42:19If the Reagan campaign did not conspire to delay a hostage release,
42:37is there another explanation that fits the body of circumstantial evidence that exists?
42:42Frontline's investigation has looked at just such a possibility,
42:49that Republican contacts with the Iranians did exist,
42:52but were intended not to delay a hostage release, but to win their release as early as possible.
42:58Remember what President Ronald Reagan said on the Palm Springs golf course last year.
43:04I did some things actually the other way to try and be of help in getting those hostages.
43:13I felt very sorry for them and getting them out of there.
43:16And this whole thing that I was worried about that as a campaign thing is absolute fiction.
43:24I did some things to try the other way.
43:27When pressed to explain what he had done, Reagan suggested there might have been some contacts.
43:33Every effort on my part was directed toward bringing them home.
43:37Does that mean contacts with the Iranian government?
43:40Not by me, no.
43:42By your campaign perhaps?
43:43Well, I can't get into details. Some of those things are still classified.
43:47Thank you very much.
43:48Reagan didn't explain what he meant by classified.
43:53If his campaign conducted any foreign policy initiative, it would not have been classified.
43:58He was still only a candidate.
44:03But Frontline did find that some Republican activists were exploring ways to help end the hostage crisis
44:08as early as six months before the election.
44:11Besides humanitarian concern for the hostages, there was worry that the crisis was eroding America's image in the world.
44:24But there was also fear that if President Carter won the hostages' freedom right before Election Day,
44:30the so-called October Surprise, it could threaten Ronald Reagan's expected victory.
44:36All I know is there's a concern, not just with us, but I think generally amongst the electorate,
44:43well, this Carter's a politically tough fellow.
44:47He'll do anything to get re-elected and let's be prepared for some October surprise.
44:52And I hope it doesn't happen if it's a contrived event that has short-run political benefit
44:59but long-run detrimental benefit, detriment, be of long-run detriment.
45:05A South African arms dealer, Dirk Stoffberg, claims to have been approached by Casey,
45:11who asked him to help arrange a swap of South African weapons for the American hostages.
45:17It was during the summer of 1980, and some colleagues of mine were instrumental in assisting the release of three British hostages.
45:26We used the kind officers also of the Swedish Embassy and had to deliver various arms to the Iranians.
45:35As a result of this, I was contacted by the Brits. I went to London in the summer of 1980.
45:42I was taken by the British official to the Capitol Hotel in Knightsbridge,
45:48and I was then contacted by a man, a tall man, well-built with blonde hair.
45:53He introduces Reiner Jacoby.
45:56Reiner Jacoby was an international intelligence freelancer who made a living in the shadowy world of covert operations.
46:03Stoffberg said Jacoby took him to meet an important American.
46:08Reiner came to pick me up one evening, took me to the Churchill's Hotel.
46:15It was about 8.30, and introduced me there to a man which he called Mr. Casey.
46:21He was a tall man, balding and slightly stooped.
46:24He was sitting at the table alone. I joined him. We had dinner.
46:30It lasted for about three hours.
46:35I was asked if during the contacts I had if we could assist on the same way we got the British hostages released
46:42to get the hostages released that were taken during the Embassy siege.
46:46I said certainly we'll talk to the people concerned and give whatever cooperation we could.
46:51And Mr. Casey was looking for a way to get the hostages out, not keep them in?
46:56Most definitely. He wanted them released, and we had to use whatever methods we could with the Uranians,
47:01and the Uranians wanted weapons.
47:03Stoffberg has sworn to this account in an affidavit to congressional investigators
47:08and presented documents showing that he was in London in mid-August 1980.
47:13Tracked down in Hong Kong, the other supposed witness, Reiner Jacoby, has corroborated the essential points of Stoffberg's story.
47:24But there are reasons to doubt both men's stories.
47:28Stoffberg claims that it was his work on the British hostages release that got him referred to Casey in mid-summer 1980.
47:36But the three British hostages were not released until February of 1981.
47:41At best, Stoffberg's help to the British was in a very early stage when he supposedly met with Casey.
47:48Jacoby is another witness of dubious credibility.
47:52Indeed, Jacoby and Stoffberg were both facing criminal charges when they first offered their claims about a Casey meeting.
47:59Stoffberg's recent testimony to congressional investigators looking into the October surprise allegations did help him shave a few months off a sentence.
48:11However the evidence is viewed, there seems to be no explanation for the mass of circumstantial evidence that exists.
48:28No one hypothesis seems to fit all the witnesses' accounts.
48:33Can the U.S. Congress or any investigator ever discover the truth?
48:40Consider one more piece of the October surprise puzzle.
48:44Remember Richard Brennecke.
48:46He was the man who said he was in Paris with Casey in October of 1980, but who was later found to be lying.
48:53His story doesn't end there.
48:56The allegation that Brennecke participated in Paris meetings was not at first put forward by Brennecke himself.
49:02That allegation came from a mysterious source who surfaced in September 1988, two months before that year's presidential election.
49:12One night, the source called a radio talk show in Los Angeles.
49:17The name I'm going to use this evening is Mr. Razine.
49:20Mr. Razine.
49:22Mr. Razine, tell us about the George Bush connection to this alleged deal.
49:27Was he there?
49:29Sure as God made a little green apples.
49:34Though Brennecke backed up Razine's account, reporters quickly discovered errors in Razine's story.
49:40Mr. Razine first called me in, I think it was early September.
49:48Martin Killian is a Washington correspondent for the German magazine Der Spiegel.
49:53And he was talking about three meetings in Paris, two on Sunday the 19th of October, one Monday the 20th.
50:01And he rattled down a list of names, among them Richard Allen and Mr. Gregg.
50:11Now, very quickly, it turned out that there were problems with Mr. Razine's story.
50:21I found out that Mr. Allen, whom Mr. Razine had accused of having been part of this that weekend, October 19th, Sunday, that Mr. Allen was not in Paris.
50:34He had been on some talk show, Sunday talk show live.
50:40The discrediting of Razine's story had a lasting impact.
50:44October surprise theories lost credibility.
50:48But who was Razine? Why was he lying?
50:53Killian later learned that Razine's real name was Oswald Le Winter, a former literature professor and author.
51:00In the 50s and early 60s, he had won a number of prestigious poetry awards.
51:06But in the 70s, he apparently turned to politics.
51:10In 1976, Frontline discovered, Le Winter went to Washington, where he offered his services as a consultant specializing in negative campaign research.
51:20Frontline located Le Winter in Germany, where he now lives.
51:25Is Le Winter your real name?
51:27I prefer not to answer that, okay?
51:32What's the name on my passport?
51:36Le Winter admitted he was indeed Razine and that he had lied in 1988.
51:42But his news story was even more bizarre.
51:46He claimed that he had been hired by four American intelligence operatives to salt October surprise allegations with enough false information to discredit the whole story.
51:56Well, I met with four people, basically, and was given to understand that there were a number of others who were interested in seeing this succeed.
52:17In other words, making sure that the media lost interest, that the story was discredited.
52:29Le Winter refused to say who the four people were who supposedly hired him, nor would he provide any other supporting evidence.
52:38So his news story, too, is suspect.
52:41Is this, then, a deception within a deception?
52:44If nothing else, the story of Oswald Le Winter seems to epitomize the strange nature of the riddle called the October surprise.
53:05In this report, we touched on only a few of the questions surrounding the alleged conspiracy.
53:12Despite months of investigation and interviews with hundreds of people in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States,
53:20we do not have a satisfactory answer for what did or did not happen in 1980.
53:27The complexity and ugliness of the October surprise charges make it understandable why many politicians, journalists, and citizens simply want to dismiss the possibility of a hostage deal altogether.
53:41But a more exhaustive review of alleged pre-election contacts with Iranians could shed light on two later historical developments.
53:50After Ronald Reagan's inauguration, the U.S. government did secretly authorize Israel to ship U.S. weapons to Iran.
53:59As Frontline reported a year ago, and as the New York Times also has found, that secret approval was never adequately explained.
54:08Who gave the okay, and why?
54:13And when a new hostage crisis struck in 1984, many of the same band of arms dealers, financiers, and intelligence operatives were together again.
54:24John Shaheen, Roy Firmark, William Casey, and Cyrus Hashemi all joined forces in a scheme to win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon.
54:35Cyrus Hashemi brought to the first negotiating session an Iranian named Hassan Karubi, Mehdi Karubi's brother.
54:42That secret arms for hostages scheme would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.
54:50The Congressional Committee investigating the October Surprise is due to release a preliminary report this summer.
55:03But even with the power to compel testimony and to subpoena documents, that investigation, born in bitter partisan debate, faces a daunting task.
55:14The overriding truth about 1980 may be that the American people may never know what happened.
55:23The aboveriding truth about
55:34¶¶
56:04¶¶
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57:11Next time on Frontline, the deepening divide between the politicians and the people.
57:18I think politicians are like lovers.
57:20They chase you, and when they get what they want, then they forget about you.
57:24Correspondent William Greider examines the roots of today's political discontent.
57:28I'm tired of being victimized by the very people that we've elected to represent us.
57:35The Betrayal of Democracy, a Frontline election special.
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