Ronald Reagan is heralded by conservatives today as a heroic figure who rejuvenated American society after the malaise of the 1970s.

Reagan’s worshippers, however, fail to acknowledge the rise of massive inequality in the 1980s, Reagan’s support for death squad operations in Central America, and the fact that Reagan only won the 1980 election after his campaign manager, William Casey, who was subsequently appointed CIA Director, committed a treasonous act known as “The October Surprise.”

“The October Surprise” involved Casey’s secret meeting with Iranian revolutionary leaders who agreed to withhold the release of 52 American hostages taken after the Iranian Revolution unseated the U.S. client regime of the Shah until after the election.

As part of the quid pro quo, Casey agreed to procure tens of millions of dollars of weapons to Iran via Israeli brokers to help Iran’s new Ayatollah regime repress a Kurdish uprising and defend itself in the Iran-Iraq War.

“The October Surprise” violated the 1799 Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from obstructing U.S. government diplomatic negotiations—something the Carter administration had been undertaking with Iran to try to secure the release of the hostages.^[1]

The political stakes were high because the Reagan campaign had portrayed the Carter administration as being weak for allowing the fall of a key U.S. Middle Eastern ally who had been installed in a 1953 CIA coup, and for failing to negotiate the release of the hostages who had been taken by armed college students supporting the Iranian Revolution.

The release of the hostages would have given Carter a huge boost on the eve of the 1980 election, especially in light of the failed Marine rescue operation (Eagle Claw) he had ordered.

At the beginning of October, Carter had been leading Reagan by one percentage point, though was unaware of the powerful covert forces that were plotting against him behind the scenes.

Den of Spies

Journalist Craig Unger has recently published an insightful book on “The October Surprise” titled Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House.

Unger worked as an investigative reporter for Esquire among other publications and has published previous books exposing the Bush dynasty’s ties to Saudi Arabia and Republican Party boss Karl Rove’s sinister ways.

For years Unger researched “The October Surprise” in collaboration with Robert Parry, founder of Consortium News.

Unger recounts in Den of Spies the barriers he faced trying to publish his findings on “The October Surprise” in liberal publications, which considered it to be a “conspiracy theory.”

On November 10, 1991, Newsweek, for which Unger had worked, published a characteristic article, “Making of a Myth” and The New Republic followed up with “The Conspiracy That Wasn’t” by Steven Emerson^[2] and Jesse Furman, which called the October Surprise a “total fabrication.”^[3]

Both magazines sought to discredit one of Unger’s key sources, Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli Mossad agent whom Newsweek erroneously claimed was merely an Israeli translator with no links to Mossad.

Friendly with Ahmad Kashani, the son of a powerful Shiite cleric, Ben-Menashe had told Unger about how he administered a secret arms channel to Iran as part of “The October Surprise” deal while serving with the External Relations Department of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Ben-Menashe said that, “to defend Iran against Saddam Hussein, Iran will actually deal with Satan [Ayatollah Khomeini called the U.S. the “Great Satan”]. Politically, it’s acceptable for Iran to buy arms from Israel, Iran never saw Israel as such a great evil. Remember, the Iranians are so anti-Arab that they were always willing to deal with Israel because of its anti-Arab stance.”^[4]

Ben-Menashe told Unger that he did not personally attend meetings in Madrid in July 1980 with Bill Casey and Iranian envoys Mehdi and Hassan Karroubi, but that he had received information about them from Ahmad Kashani and that, as a result of Kashani’s trips to Israel, Israel sent approximately 300 F-4 Phantom jet tires to Iran in March/April 1980 in violation of the Carter administration’s arms embargo.^[5]

Ben-Menashe said that Israel’s cooperation in the October Surprise stemmed from the fact that the Menachem Begin hard-line Israeli government felt humiliated by having been forced to give back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in the 1978 Camp David Accords brokered by Carter and was “only too happy to do what it could to make sure Carter was not reelected.”

Ben-Menashe said that Begin “would have done anything to get rid of Carter. That’s why there were orders in Israeli intelligence for us to cooperate with the Republicans.”^[6]

Casey’s Alibi for Key Meeting Breaks Down

Newsweek and The New Republic claimed that William Casey had an alibi for the pivotal meeting in Madrid where the October Surprise deal was consummated.

A 1992 bipartisan investigation led by Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who later co-chaired the much-maligned 9/11 Commission, claimed the same thing while reaffirming official skepticism about “The October Surprise.”^[7]

However, Unger found out that Casey’s alibi left time for a trip to Madrid as his schedule at an Office of Strategic Services (OSS-CIA precursor) reunion in London he was attending had some gaps in it.^[8]

Furthermore, documents left behind by Hamilton’s committee included a Soviet intelligence report indicating that Casey, George H.W. Bush and other Republicans had secretly met with Iranian officials in Madrid and Paris during the 1980 presidential campaign to discuss “the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.”^[9]

According to the Soviet report, the Iranians had reluctantly concluded they had needed to acquire weapons “by any and all possible means” and that arms shipments were carried out through Israel and private arms dealers.^[10]

Through an FOIA request for documents from the George H.W. Bush Library, Parry uncovered a July 1980 cable from the U.S. embassy in Madrid, which read: “Bill Casey was in town [Madrid] for purposes unknown.”^[11] Unger writes, “Casey had been in Madrid when the October Surprise meeting took place. Even the Bush White House said so. It was beyond dispute.”^[12]

A Costly Secret

In 2016, Unger traveled to Paris to meet with Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution who had been purged by Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters because of his support for secularism and social democracy.

Bani-Sadr explained to Unger how he had learned about “The October Surprise” while he was Iran’s president, how he tried to stop the conspiracy, which he thought was a “very dirty thing,” and how he subsequently survived three assassination attempts by militant clerics.^[13]

Bani-Sadr also told Unger that he had told Lee Hamilton what he knew and that Hamilton told him that “it would be very dangerous” for the American government to accept what he was saying because “if we say such a thing happened that means the last three presidential elections were not legitimate. The cost of accepting that is too heavy.”

To which Bani-Sadr replied: “Yes, but the price is much heavier if you don’t tell the truth to Americans. Then you really endanger democracy.”^[14]

Death of Iran’s Foreign Minister

Bani-Sadr was not the only Iranian government official to face assassination threats over “The October Surprise.”

Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh published a letter in an Iranian newspaper saying that “we know that the United States Republican Party, in order to win the coming election campaign, is trying hard to delay the solution of the hostage issue until after the United States election.”

Unger writes that, in 1982, Ghotbzadeh was executed by firing squad for his brave statement.^[15]

Casey’s Arms-Smuggling Network and the Safari Club

Part of the mystery surrounding “The October Surprise” centered on the fact that Casey had not been in the CIA before Reagan appointed him as his campaign manager.

But Casey had served in the OSS, and over the next 35 years cultivated powerful friends. As a tax lawyer, he was known for helping to rewrite laws that established tax shelters where the wealthy could offshore their money.

Some of Casey’s friends were Iranians close to the Shah and while heading the Export-Import Bank under the Nixon administration, he had okayed loans enabling the Shah to spend billions of dollars buying American arms.^[16]

Casey’s network included Alexandre de Marenches, director of the Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the French counterpart of the CIA. He was founder of the Safari Club, a network of intelligence agents and shadowy arms dealers repelled by the more liberal policies of the Carter administration and thawing of the Cold War in the 1980s.

As part of “The October Surprise” deal, de Merenches approved arms shipments from Nimes, France, to Tehran flown by Jacques Montanes who was associated with famed French mercenary Roger Faulques.^[17]

The Safari Club’s members included General Nematollah Nassiri, the head of SAVAK, Iran’s brutal intelligence service under the Shah; Henry Kissinger; and CIA operatives loyal to George H.W. Bush, such as Miles Copeland, Jr., and Theodore Shackley, head of the murderous Phoenix Program in Vietnam and the CIA’s drug-financed Hmong mercenary army in Laos.

After Jimmy Carter fired top CIA operatives because of the Church Committee and Pike Committee disclosures of the 1970s, Shackley, Copeland and others formed a private intelligence network, or shadow CIA, committed to rolling back leftist movements worldwide.^[18]

The “shadow CIA” would do anything in its power to get Reagan elected over Carter and, as such, played a crucial role in “The October Surprise.”^[19]

A key figure in this latter covert operation was Robert Sensi, who met Casey in the 1970s while working for Bahrain’s Gulf Air and Kuwait Airways and worked for Casey in the CIA. Sensi was valuable as a fixer who knew the “right people in Iran” to help arrange “The October Surprise.”^[20]

Another key figure in the covert operation was John Shaheen, an old friend of Casey from OSS days and childhood friend of Ronald Reagan. Shaheen had a close relationship with Adnan Khashoggi, a middleman in the Iran-Contra affair, and Jamshid and Cyrus Hashemi, two brothers close to Ayatollah Khomeini who led the Iranian delegation at the July 1980 Madrid meeting.

FBI wiretaps disclosed dozens of calls where Hashemi was discussing with Shaheen night-vision goggles, spare parts for helicopter gunships and fighter jets and other military equipment that were being shipped to Iran clandestinely through an import-export company in Stamford, Connecticut the Hashemi brothers owned that originally sold Persian rugs.^[21]

Three million dollars was deposited in Hashemi’s bank by a Houston lawyer, Harold Tillman, who was a close friend of George H.W. Bush.^[22]

Shaheen and Cyrus Hashemi had been business partners in an oil refinery in Newfoundland, Canada, which in the early 1970s became one of the largest bankruptcies in Canadian history.^[23]

In July 1980, when Jamshid was staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, he said that Casey knocked at his door and told him that he wanted to prevent Jimmy Carter from gaining any political advantage from the hostage crisis. Jamshid in turn agreed to the meeting in Madrid where the agreement was made to delay the hostages’ release.^[24]

Cyrus Hashemi had been part of the Carter administration’s back-channel diplomacy with Iran, though he double-crossed Carter through his secret plotting with the Republicans.

Gary Sick, Carter’s Iran specialist who authored the first exposé of “The October Surprise,” wrote that the Carter administration was negotiating for release of the hostages “primarily with ourselves,” which makes sense in light of what we now know about the Hashemis.^[25]

According to Unger, the Hashemi brothers were backing a moderate pro-Western faction of Iran’s revolutionary movement led by Ahmad Madani.

Internal CIA documents touted him as “one of the most prominent, and, potentially effective of the Iranians opposing the dominant clerical leadership.”

The CIA gave $500,000 ($2 million in 2024 dollars) to the Hashemis in support of Madani’s campaign, though discovered that most of the money was diverted elsewhere and that Jamshid was “dishonest and untrustworthy beyond belief.”^[26]

Cyrus Hashemi died of leukemia in July 1986, though insiders were convinced he was murdered to “protect the then-secret Iran initiative,” according to a source quoted in the Los Angeles Times.^[27]

In March 1980, Copeland hosted a meeting at his Georgetown home with Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., and his cousin Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., both of whom had played key roles in the CIA’s 1953 Iranian coup, and were part of the Rockefeller Group’s Project Alpha that brought the Shah to the U.S. after his fall.^[28]

“The October Surprise” was part of the Rockefeller Group’s effort to revive the CIA’s glory Days.

Joel McLeary, Deputy Assistant to Jimmy Carter, told Unger that he was told by Timothy Landon, a British intelligence operative with CIA ties who developed an arms depot off the coast of Oman as a staging area for Operation Eagle Claw [Carter rescue operation], that he had “blocked” Eagle Claw, resulting in the death of eight American servicemen.^[29]

Landon’s comments were given added weight by Mustafa Zein, a Lebanese businessman and CIA “access agent” who said that Robert Ames, former CIA Station Chief in Lebanon, had told him that two of the helicopters used in Eagle Claw were sabotaged so the operation would be a failure.^[30]

Zein wrote that “Bob [Ames] wanted this operation to succeed but Casey wanted [it] by all means possible to fail and he succeeded.”^[31]

Zein also said that he was shown a tape by Imam Mughniyeh, who was supposedly involved in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which William Buckley, the CIA Station Chief in Lebanon who replaced Ames and was kidnapped in March 1984, confessed to his captors that he had disabled two helicopters in Eagle Claw.^[32]

Buckley was described by journalist Joseph Trento as one of the oldest and dearest friends of Ted Shackley, a key figure in the George H.W. Bush-William Casey network who helped coordinate “The October Surprise.”^[33]

The First October Surprise

Something like “The October Surprise” had happened 12 years earlier when Richard Nixon violated the 1799 Logan Act by interfering to block peace negotiations by the Johnson administration and South Vietnamese government in order to bolster his election chances in 1968.

Nixon at the time was in a heated race with Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, who was poised to benefit from the signing of a peace agreement that would have ended the Vietnam War.

Using Anna Chennault, the wife of legendary Flying Tigers pilot Claire Chennault, as an intermediary, Nixon promised South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Van Thieu that he would stay in power throughout the duration of his presidency if he pulled out of the Paris peace talks.

During the 1968 election, William Casey was serving as a Nixon aide.

Unger writes that he voiced his suspicion to New York Times columnist William Safire that LBJ was going to “pull an October surprise”—a Vietnam peace initiative to help Humphrey defeat Nixon in the 1968 election—which Nixon needed to thwart.^[34]

Amazingly, Casey’s personal files at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution indicate that Casey held a meeting with Anna Chennault in June 1980.

This raises the possibility that Casey sought Chennault’s advice regarding “The October Surprise” and that the two were comparing notes about their treasonous acts.^[35]

Bermuda Triangle of Government Corruption

Den of Spies reveals a seamy side of U.S. politics to which the CIA is central and the CIA’s win-at-all-cost mentality that has destroyed functioning democracy.

Unger suggests that George H.W. Bush was present at the July 1980 Madrid meeting where “The October Surprise” plot was consummated although he concedes this is not firmly established.^[36] Future CIA Director Robert Gates and Donald Gregg, a CIA operative and later U.S. ambassador to South Korea under Bush were also thought to have been present at the Madrid meeting.^[37]

One thing that Unger leaves out is the importance of Dr. Earl Brian to “The October Surprise,” and its connection to the Iran-Contra scandal.

A former Cabinet official in Reagan’s administration when he was Governor of California, and who was involved with the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, Dr. Brian was allegedly rewarded for his role in helping to coordinate “The October Surprise” by being given ownership of a lucrative computer software company, INSLAW Inc., that illegally obtained Prosecution Management Information System (PROMIS) software for the CIA.^[38]

Originally developed by NSA staffer Bill Hamilton, the PROMIS software allowed for monitoring of financial transactions around the world and was used by the CIA to better facilitate money-laundering and drug smuggling operations.^[39]

Dr. Brian and other key figures in “The October Surprise,” including Bush, Shackley and Casey, used the PROMIS software to coordinate the illicit arms deals with Iran as part of clandestine funding of the Nicaraguan Contras (or counter-revolutionaries).^[40]

The criminal machinations behind the Iran-Contra affair and their links to the PROMIS software theft and “October Surprise” were investigated by journalist Danny Casolaro who was murdered in a West Virginia hotel room in August 1991 before he could publish a blockbuster book.

According to Wired magazine, Casolaro had ventured into the “Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime.”^[41]

This Bermuda triangle remains largely impenetrable, as CIA operatives continue to enjoy impunity for crimes they have committed with the sanction of those residing at the top of the American political chain.

---

1. 
   

   Craig Unger, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House (Boston: Mariner Books, 2024), 230. ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 171. Emerson was found to have close ties to Israeli intelligence, according to a Jerusalem Post report cited by Unger. ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 115. ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 94. ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   Idem. ↑

   
   
6. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 95. ↑

   
   
7. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 83. ↑

   
   
8. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 108. In an interview at the 1980 Republican Party Convention in Detroit, Casey used the word “intelligence operation” to describe what the campaign was doing. Edwin Meese was allegedly alarmed by the use of this phrase and Casey never used it again. ↑

   
   
9. 
   

   Unger, Den of Spies, 157, 158. ↑

   
   
10. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 238. An FBI memo to which Unger had access disclosed a $150 million shipment of tank ammunition, and anti-tank guns and ammunition on a Greek ship from the Israeli port of Eilat to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf. The Greek ship was later sunk. Other arms were flown by French intelligence operatives to Tehran through France, Italy, the UK, and Spain. ↑

    
    
11. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 162. ↑

    
    
12. 
    

    Idem. After Unger gained access to the documents showing that Casey was in Madrid in July 1980, he telephoned Bill Hamilton who said that these documents “might have changed” his committee’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion. ↑

    
    
13. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 219. ↑

    
    
14. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 164. ↑

    
    
15. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 237. ↑

    
    
16. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 177. ↑

    
    
17. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 258, 259, 260. ↑

    
    
18. 
    

    See Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005). ↑

    
    
19. 
    

    The CIA network associated with the Safari Club hated Carter not only because of his dismissal of many CIA officers but also because they believed he had not done enough to save the Shah who had invested a lot of his money in the Rockefeller-owned Chase Manhattan Bank. ↑

    
    
20. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 178. ↑

    
    
21. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 229, 282, 283. Hashemi was shown to have been in contact with a key Saudi investor (Ghaith Pharaon) in the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), which was the CIA’s money-laundering bank. ↑

    
    
22. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 248, 249. ↑

    
    
23. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 183. Hashemi was accused of being a CIA and Mossad agent. ↑

    
    
24. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 32. ↑

    
    
25. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 187. ↑

    
    
26. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 186, 187. ↑

    
    
27. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 65. the Los Angeles Times reported that Hashemi might have been “bumped off by government agents to protect the then-secret Iran initiative.” William Wachtel, Cyrus’s lawyer, said that he was 98% certain that Cyrus had been murdered. Nixon’s Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, told Robert Parry that “no one I know believed that he died of natural causes.” Richardson had become invested in “The October Surprise” case because he was representing Bill Hamilton, the owner of a computer software company, INSLAW, that was stolen by the CIA to carry out money-laundering and other covert operations like “The October Surprise.” ↑

    
    
28. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 194. ↑

    
    
29. 
    

    Oman was a staging area for Operation Eagle Claw. ↑

    
    
30. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 203. One of the helicopters encountered hydraulic problems, another was caught in a sand storm, and a third showed signs of a cracked rotor blade so aborted its mission. ↑

    
    
31. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 203. Ames was killed in the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut in April 1983. Ames’s biographer Kai Bird said that he was able to check out and confirm much of what Mustafa Zein had told him. ↑

    
    
32. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 204. Buckley was executed by his Shiite captors in 1985. ↑

    
    
33. 
    

    Trento, Prelude to Terror. ↑

    
    
34. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 226.Unger suggests that Nixon’s obsession with covering up his traitorous deal with Nguyen Van Thieu was the purpose behind the Watergate break-in and, thus, led directly to the Watergate scandal. ↑

    
    
35. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 232. ↑

    
    
36. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 255. ↑

    
    
37. 
    

    Idem. ↑

    
    
38. 
    

    Dr. Brian owned Hadron Inc., which gained control over the PROMIS software. CIA whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto was the one who said that PROMIS software was Brian’s payment for participation in “The October Surprise” and other covert operations. ↑

    
    
39. 
    

    Key software modifications were undertaken by Michael Riconosciuto who was working for Wackenhut, a CIA-front corporation at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Riverside County, California, from where arms were smuggled to the Nicaraguan Contras, the right-wing group mobilized by the CIA to fight the left-wing Sandinistas, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Dr. Earl Brian oversaw the PROMIS software modifications. Riconosciuto testified in U.S. federal court that the PROMIS software was modified for covert SWIFT Banking and it was installed at Transaction Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Citibank. ↑

    
    
40. 
    

    See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Son of Slain Journalist Who Exposed Web of CIA Corruption Calling For New Murder Investigation,” CovertAction Magazine, September 4, 2023. ↑

    
    
41. 
    

    Unger, Den of Spies, 79. ↑

    
    

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