Ron Edmonds/AP Photo
President Ronald Reagan walks with CIA Director William Casey, May 24, 1984, in McLean, Virginia, as he arrives at the agency to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for a new building.
Tom Barrack is the most recent member of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign team to have been indicted for, essentially, being willing to sell out the interests of his country in exchange for payments from a foreign nation (in this case, the United Arab Emirates). He is free on $250 million bail. That makes nine campaign muck-a-mucks who’ve been indicted. (The total doesn’t include Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, whose transgressions occurred while on the payroll of Trump’s company, rather than his campaign.)
Trump took everything to extremes, but the willingness to toy with treason has long defined the Republican Party’s upper echelons. During the 1968 election, the Nixon campaign, armed with Henry Kissinger’s leaks from the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam, used a surrogate to advise the South Vietnamese government not to cooperate with any peace agreement and promised a better deal after he won. Nixon feared that if a deal was reached before the election, it would redound to the favor of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon’s “deal” worked out in that the South Vietnamese went along with it and he won the election, but not in the sense that it paid off for South Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger took essentially the same deal that the North Vietnamese offered, millions of deaths later, in 1973, over the objections of their since disappeared South Vietnamese co-conspirators in that now disappeared nation. Just as Barack Obama decided to keep quiet about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia in the fall of 2016, so Lyndon Johnson preferred to let Nixon beat Humphrey rather than alert the country to the Republicans’ perfidy. (In Johnson’s case, he did not want his likely illegal domestic spying on Nixon to be revealed, but he also may have actually preferred Nixon to Humphrey.)
Another episode of possibly treasonous GOP skullduggery remains a little murky to this day—and may have been far more significant than anyone realized at the time. This was the so-called “October Surprise” that either did or didn’t occur during the election of 1980. At issue here was the Iranian government’s holding 56 American diplomats hostage, as Jimmy Carter—whom Reagan was endeavoring to unseat—worked to set them free. As Kai Bird recounts in his much-praised new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier, William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chief and later his CIA director, “was a busy man in the summer of 1980.” Just after Reagan fought off a last-minute challenge from Gerald Ford to win his party’s presidential nomination, Casey took time from the campaign to travel to London, allegedly to give a paper at a conference on the history of the Second World War. (Casey had served in the OSS, the CIA’s WWII predecessor.) Casey flew on the Eastern Air Lines shuttle from Washington, D.C., to New York City on July 25, and his speech was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on July 29. Casey was absent when the London conference opened on July 28. His whereabouts between these dates, as Bird shows us, are “unaccounted for by any travel records.”
Where was Casey on the 26th and 27th? According to a deposition given by Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi to the House Task Force on the October Surprise in 1992, Casey flew to Madrid to meet with a representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, a meeting orchestrated by Hashemi and his brother Cyrus. The two men had longtime connections to both the Khomeini regime and the CIA. Bird writes: “[T]wo meetings were held between Casey and the Ayatollah Karrubi in a lavish suite at Madrid’s Hotel Ritz. Jamshid later told Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline, ‘Casey said the Iranians should hold the hostages until after the election … and the new Reagan administration would feel favorably towards Iran, releasing military equipment and the frozen Iranian assets.’” This is, needless to say, exactly what happened.
Extremely conveniently for all the Reagan administration Iran-Contra criminals looking for a fall guy, CIA chief Casey died of a brain tumor in 1987, not long after that crazy scheme was first (partially) discovered. In 1992, as President George H.W. Bush faced a tough battle for re-election, Rep. Lee Hamilton and his House Task Force on the October Surprise sought to uncover what actually had happened in the fall of 1980. They didn’t get very far: After Casey died, his 1980 passport somehow disappeared. His calendar turned up, but guess what? The pages for July 26–27, 1980, had gone missing. Investigative reporter Robert Parry (who died of pancreatic cancer in early 2018) later found a State Department memo in the archives of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library mentioning “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Bird calls this “damning evidence that Bill Casey did indeed make that side trip from London to Madrid in late July 1980.” What’s more, Bird adds, “the Bush White House deputy counsel knew of this evidence—but it was never turned over” to Hamilton’s committee. Why not? It turns out that Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray had “convened a meeting to discuss how they should handle the new evidence. Gray said the October Surprise investigation was ‘of special interest to the President.’ It was essential, he told his staff, that there be ‘no Surprises to the White House.’” Why was that? The investigation, he insisted, was—wait for it—“partisan.”
Bush had gone on a pardoning spree upon becoming president in 1988 in order to continue the cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration (in which Bush had been vice president) had secretly sold arms to Iran, using the proceeds to fund the Contras’ war against the Nicaraguan government. Among the pardoned were genocide-enabler Elliott Abrams and other officials still under investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. When revelations in former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger’s diaries appeared to implicate Bush himself, Weinberger received a pardon before a jury could decide on his guilt or innocence. This marked, as a furious Walsh later noted, “the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness.”
Trump took everything to extremes, but the willingness to toy with treason has long defined the Republican Party’s upper echelons.
So it sure looks like Casey made the pledge. Bird offers another clue as well. During the same 1980 campaign, Bassam Abu Sharif, an adviser to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, received a message from an “old” but still unknown “friend” of Ronald Reagan who asked “the PLO to use its influence to delay the release of the American hostages … until after the election” with the clear implication that in return, Reagan would be considerably friendlier to the Palestinians than Carter had been. Arafat was apparently not interested, and when Jimmy Carter visited Gaza in January 1996, he told Carter, “Mr. President, there is something I want to tell you. You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election. I want you to know that I turned them down.”
Imagine if the Jewish organizations that were so nasty to Carter during the 1980 election knew that!
I saw two shows at City Winery last week: the Dimmer Twins (Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley of the Drive-By Truckers) and a sort of supergroup put together by Peter Asher, who, thanks to his history with the Beatles and Apple Records, and his longtime producing of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, and Neil Diamond, was able to call on some of the greatest studio musicians in the world to form his nine-piece band to play to just 150 people in the intimate upstairs “loft.” The 77-year-old Asher is really more a raconteur than a singer. (You can listen to him with Alec Baldwin here.) A highlight was the mini-set performed by Kate Taylor. She and Peter had worked together on her Sister Kate album 50 years ago, before she went off to live in—I kid you not—a teepee. They recently pulled together Leland Sklar, Albert Lee, Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and the luminous Scarlet Rivera on fiddle for Kate’s new album Why Wait!. She sang a wonderfully bluesy “Good Day Sunshine” from the album. It was Peter who originally signed young James Taylor to Apple for his first album as the label’s first artist. Following his audition, George Harrison stole the opening line of Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” for the opening line of “Something.” James says nothing made him happier than being ripped off by the Beatles. Anyway, you can hear (and see) a little of her famous brother in Sister Kate’s funky presence.
And speaking of the Drive-By Truckers, if you are unfamiliar with their heavily literary, southern-fried genius, then I heartily recommend their just-released New West live (from 2006) double CD Plan 9 Records (back when Jason Isbell was still in the band). The DBTs are still making smart, challenging music. Hood noted that he and Cooley had been playing together now for 36 years and added, “Do you remember the albums the Stones made after 36 years?” I am actually willing to make the argument for the Stones’ later work, and am still angry at David Remnick for a quip he made about them in this otherwise great piece. But space constraints being what they are, even in the Interwebs, you will have to buy me a bottle of pinot noir at the Winery if you want to get into that.
