Five minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981, the 52 American hostages held in Iran at the time were released -- ending a crisis that had gripped the country for months and was a major factor in the outcome of the presidential election (the hostage taking was the Republicans' Willie Horton of 1980).
The timing was seen as more than coincidence for some political observers among the opposition, who have long suspected that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign staff negotiated a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the presidential election. The deal was allegedly cut to prevent an "October Surprise" hostage release in the weeks before the election; in return the arms embargo against Iran would be lifted.
Despite the coverage provided by a few persistent journalists in the alternative media -- including The Nation's Christopher Hitchens and In These Times' Joel Bleifuss -- the story has largely been dismissed by official Washington and the mainstream media. But that may be changing.
In April of this year, Gary Sick -- a former National Security Council staffer during the Carter administration and a frequent media analyst during the Gulf crisis -- wrote an editorial in The New York Times ("The Election Story of the Decade," April 15) describing "hundreds of interviews" he conducted while working on a recent book about the Reagan administration's policy toward Iran. Sick had earlier dismissed the charges as a "fanciful" conspiracy theory, but explained in the editorial that the "weight of testimony has overcome my initial doubts."
The Sick editorial -- and a "Frontline" investigative documentary that appeared on Public Broadcasting System the following day -- gave new life and credibility to the charges, which most politicians and journalists have appeared slow to investigate. Both are still feeling the after-effects of the last scandal involving the Reagan-Bush administration and arms and hostages, and seem to be waiting for the other to take the lead. But ignoring these allegations will not make them go away.
Eight of the former American hostages recently joined the chorus calling on Congress to investigate. Meanwhile, 75 members of Congress signed a May 8 letter to House Speaker Tom Foley urging him to appoint a non-partisan commission of private citizens to do the job, and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore called for the same as Sojourners went to press.
Whatever committee or panel is assigned the task, it will need subpoena power to get to the bottom of the allegations -- including whether President Bush was present at one of the secret negotiating meetings reported to have taken place in Paris in October 1980.
Bush has called the allegations "insidious." Reagan recently described them as "absolute fiction," but would not say whether his campaign officials made contact with Iranian government officials before the 1980 election. "Some of those things are still classified," he told reporters.
Is this starting to sound familiar? Perhaps the most disturbing implication of the charges that have surfaced, as Gary Sick and others have pointed out, is that instead of being an aberration, the Iran-Contra scandal was perhaps the re-emergence of a policy that began even before the Reagan-Bush administration assumed office.
Judy Coode assisted with research.
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