Demonic (15 page)

There were two types of October Surprise conspiracy theorists: international con men and domestic dingbats. The international crooks would suddenly remember being part of the October Surprise conspiracy upon being arrested for some other crime, such as smuggling or fraud.

A classic example was Gunther Russbacher, an Austrian who had pulled off a string of con jobs, including impersonating: an Air Force officer, an Army captain, an Air France pilot, a federal prosecutor, a secret agent, and a stockbroker. During his sentencing for theft while posing as a stockbroker, the
Chicago Tribune
reported that his wife Raye said Russbacher was “actually a deep-cover CIA operative whom the government is trying to suppress because he piloted a flight that carried George Bush to meet with Iranians in 1980 to delay release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran—the so-called October Surprise.”
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You cannot tell me anyone in the media, even on the
New York Times
editorial page, seriously believed these people. (Frank Rich was still the theater guy for the
Times
back then.)

Then there were the standard nut-bar conspiracy theorists who claimed to have personal knowledge of meetings between representatives of presidential candidate Reagan and the Ayatollah. The two key American “witnesses” to the October Surprise were paranormal expert Barbara Honegger and fake CIA agent Richard Brenneke.

Honegger was a former low-level Reagan staffer, who told reporters she heard voices from the future.
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She believed in supernatural events and claimed that an intelligence officer told her that satellites were directed to part the clouds during Reagan’s inauguration so that the sun would shine only on him.
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She was briefly famous in 1983 for accusing the Reagan administration of not caring about women, announcing to one of her many fawning media admirers, “I am honored to have been
used by the Force, if you will, with a capital F, like in ‘Star Wars.’ That’s how I feel. You know, the Zeitgeist of history.”
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Honegger was Christopher Hitchens’s main source for his stories promoting the October Surprise conspiracy in
The Nation
magazine.

In search of an ally, Honegger approached fake CIA agent Brenneke and told him about the October Surprise story. She handed him a list of Reagan associates asking him to put a check by those who were at the Paris meetings. Brenneke’s own notes of the meeting show that this was the first he had heard of the October Surprise “thesis,” as he called it. He wrote, “Honegger meeting notes: Thesis: Reagan-Bush campaign conspired to delay the hostage release until after the November 1979 election [sic]
 … Howard Hughes was somehow involved.
…”

Brenneke was about to be fired from his lucrative job with a left-wing think tank for failing to produce evidence of a different conspiracy theory, so he needed a new gig. Suddenly, it rang a bell. And so, a few weeks later, not only had Brenneke heard of the October Surprise meeting—he had been there! A LaRouchite confirmed that he had seen Brenneke at the meeting, something Brenneke himself had not remembered until that very moment.

According to these three reliable sources—Brenneke, Honegger, and the LaRouchite—in October 1980, George H. W. Bush (later Reagan’s vice president), William Casey (later Reagan’s CIA director), and presumably Howard Hughes met with the Ayatollah’s representatives in Paris to make their nefarious deal. We’re still trying to determine if the Freemasons were involved.

Needless to say, Secret Service records established the precise location of vice presidential candidate Bush throughout the 1980 campaign. And he wasn’t in Paris. Once that was confirmed, the conspiracy theorists simply dropped Bush from their imaginary meeting but were otherwise undaunted. The dates of the alleged meetings kept changing, depending on what could be proved about William Casey’s whereabouts in the fall of 1980. By process of elimination, the wackadoodles finally settled on three days in October for which there appeared to be no evidence of Casey’s whereabouts.

With the conspirators having finally decided that October 17—20
were the absolutely, positively definite dates for the alleged October Surprise meetings, it turned out Casey’s whereabouts could be proved after all. He was at a conference in London, “The Anglo-American History of World War II.” Unfortunately for the conspirators, the conference director kept detailed notes on who attended each session. Not only was Casey present at nearly every talk, including his own, but there were credit card receipts establishing Casey’s presence in London even during brief periods when he left the conference. In all, Casey’s precise location could be proved for nearly every minute of the three-day period. And he wasn’t in Paris, either.

Then it turned out that even fake CIA agent Brenneke was not in Paris during the alleged October Surprise meeting. Having placed himself at the center of the secret meetings in Paris, Brenneke planned to capitalize on it by “writing” a book. So he turned over all his notes and diaries—8,000 pages in all—to his ghostwriter, Peggy Adler Robohm. One can imagine Robohm’s surprise when she came across credit card receipts, signed by Brenneke, proving that he had attended—believe it or not—a Star Trek Convention in that week. Okay, it wasn’t actually a Star Trek Convention. Brenneke was attending a martial-arts tournament in Seattle on the crucial dates from October 17 to 19.

Robohm promptly contacted Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who was chairman of the congressional committee spending millions of taxpayer dollars to investigate the October Surprise. But Hamilton wasn’t interested. So she sent Brenneke’s files to Snepp at the
Village Voice
.

At least Brenneke had a good explanation for the credit card receipts placing him at the Seattle martial arts tournament during the crucial meeting in Paris. When Snepp asked him about the receipts, Brenneke said, “No comment.” This was the conspiracy that Jimmy Carter demanded a blue-ribbon commission to investigate and on which millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted.
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Interestingly, many of the same screwballs pushing the October Surprise nonsense have popped up in more recent conspiracy theories. Brenneke became a star witness in the Mena, Arkansas, cocaine conspiracy by claiming to have flown drugs for the CIA from Mena when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
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Honegger is the originator of
the peculiar 9/11 conspiracy theory holding that all the clocks stopped at the Pentagon at 9:32 on 9/11, thus proving that the plane could not have hit at 9:37. Oswald LeWinter—another of Gary Sick’s critical sources for his book
October Surprise
—attempted to sell forged documents to Mohamed al-Fayed in 1998, allegedly proving that the British intelligence service was involved in the death of Diana, princess of Wales. I’m pretty sure he also started the urban legend about how you can cook an egg with an activated cell phone.

But despite the fact that the October Surprise conspirators made Dan Rather’s source on the Bush National Guard story look like Eliot Ness, major mainstream media such as ABC’s
Nightline
, PBS’s
Frontline
, and the
New York Times
ferociously promoted the October Surprise using these nuts as their sources.

Now here’s the most dazzling part of the conspiracy theory: The investigation of the October Surprise was itself an October Surprise.

The Democrats’ Show Trials into Sick’s cuckoo allegations didn’t take place until 1992—a dozen years after the alleged conspiracy but the very year one of the main alleged conspirators, then-president George H. W. Bush, was running for reelection.

Why didn’t the
New York Times
start pushing the October Surprise conspiracy theory in 1984, when Reagan was running for reelection? Why not in 1988, the first time alleged conspirator Bush was running for president? The answer is: Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Those elections weren’t close. Why waste a mammoth, preposterous lie trying to save the likes of Michael Dukakis?

Rumors about Reagan and the Ayatollah had been buzzing about the dental fillings of nutcakes for more than a decade, but suddenly, just before a presidential election twelve years later, Congress and the media were ravenous to investigate whether the Republican president facing reelection was a traitor. Ironically, Democrats carrying on about how Republicans had engaged in dirty tricks to steal the 1980 election was a dirty trick to steal the 1992 election.

The
New York Times
did not begin hawking the October Surprise theory until the third year of Bush’s presidency—and didn’t stop until Bill Clinton was elected. Right through the 1992 presidential election,
newspapers were crackling with accusations that Bush had been involved in Reagan’s fiendish plan to keep American hostages in the hands of Islamic lunatics until Carter lost the election.

ABC’s Ted Koppel set the tone on
Nightline
, saying that if the allegations were true, “it would be an act of political treachery bordering on treason.”
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The Associated Press reported—in February of an election year—“Democrats contend that they are not out to get Reagan or Bush but simply want to clear the air of a rumor that, if true, would amount to treason.”
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Yes, and if it were true that Obama was a secret agent of al Qaeda—think of what that would mean!

Apart from not being true, how was the October Surprise conspiracy different from the late Senator Ted Kennedy engaging in secret negotiations with the Soviet Union in order to undermine Reagan’s foreign policy? If the October Surprise was so dastardly that we had to spend millions of dollars investigating it, how about investigating a U.S. senator warning the Russkies that the U.S. president was a belligerent lunatic who was terrifying all “rational people.”
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Unlike the October Surprise, that actually happened. Other people who may still be working in Democratic politics were involved. How about an investigation into that bit of treason?

Even after liberal publications such as the
Village Voice
, the
New Republic,
²³
and
Newsweek
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had thoroughly debunked the October Surprise, a Democratic House and Senate were convening lengthy investigations into whether Reagan had struck a secret deal with Iranian monsters holding Americans hostage. Sick, darling of the
New York Times
, denounced the debunkers, claiming Snepp was still connected to the CIA, that
New Republic
reporter Steve Emerson was part of a Zionist conspiracy, and that the Senate report was “another cover-up.”
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The House investigation of Bush’s role in the nonexistent October Surprise began in February 1992 and the Senate inquiry began in the spring of that year—coincidentally, a presidential election year. In the House, not one single Republican voted for the investigation and thirty-four honest Democrats voted against it. Neither congressional inquiry managed to wrap up before the election. So George H. W. Bush ran for reelection while two show trials—er, congressional investigations—were
in the process of determining whether or not he had committed treason. That sounds fair.

The Senate completed its inquiry into the October Surprise a few weeks after the 1992 presidential election. The House completed its investigation one week before Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

Having served its function, the Senate investigation concluded that “by any standard, the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages.”
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Amazingly, the
New York Times
refused to accept the Senate committee’s findings and expressed hope for “a fuller, fairer understanding” from the House investigating committee. Jimmy Carter was unable to comment because he was in Pyongyang with Habitat for Humanity building Kim Il Sung a new missile silo.

Five million dollars and yet another congressional investigation later, the House report concluded: “There was no October Surprise agreement ever reached” and further that there was “no credible evidence” that the Reagan campaign had attempted to delay the hostages’ release.
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Five million bucks for that. Liberals were hysterical about the famed “30 million dollars” for Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigation during the Clinton years—and Starr got fifteen criminal convictions and a president’s impeachment. The House spent $5 million in an intensive, ten-month investigation to disprove the fantasies of a LaRouchite, a paranormal expert, a fake CIA agent, and the guy who was in charge of Iranian affairs for President Carter.

After foisting this useless investigation on the nation by flacking the crazed conspiracy theories of Gary Sick, instead of apologizing, the
Times
gave Sick equal time on that day’s op-ed page to respond. His conclusion: Representative Lee Hamilton, the Democrat who had chaired the House’s October Surprise Task Force, was in on the cover-up.

Among other lunacies, Sick wrote:
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1. “As a White House official involved in the hostage negotiations, I refused for many years to accept those allegations [about the October Surprise].”

This was preposterous: Sick had been hawking the October Surprise theory to the media as early as 1988, each time claiming to have resisted believing, but finally being overwhelmed by, the apocryphal evidence.
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