Desperado Democrats and the Sick Offense

...Sick has been cagy about who is on his list of sources, although we know that Jamshid Hashemi is on it...

...Clearly the quality of the witnesses is a bit of a problem for Gary Sick...

...Now, nowhere in Sick's 1985 book on the hostage negotiations, All Fall Down, is there any indication of prevarication from 'Tehran...

...Embassy in Tehran the previous November were not released until after the elections...

...As Mark Shields said in a recent column, "If the Reagan campaign did in fact deal illegally and unconscionably with the Iraniansto keep American citizens in brutal captivity just to win some electoral votes, then Heaven and History demand vengeance...

...If someone had seen you earlier in the day, you could have flown later on the Concorde...

...George Szamuely DESPERADO DEMOCRATS AND THE SICK OFFENSE Gary Sick's hallucinatory theory—brought to you by the New York Times—links Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980 to Republican conspiring with Khomeini's Iran...

...He asserts that he was employed by Israeli Defense Forces Military Intelligence...

...as Mark Shields recently argued, "It's precisely because Sick is so widely respected that his charges have gained such a serious hearing in the press and among elected Democrats on Capitol Hill...

...If Sick cannot make up his mind about the veracity of five of his witnesses, why should he feel so confident about the other ten...

...There is also Ari Ben-Menashi, who claims to have been in Paris on October 20 with Casey and Mehdi Karrubi...

...when it failed to materialize, he paid a heavy political price...

...After all, no one is claiming that Sick has presented a compelling case...

...If you look at all the other things he believes, it is really no surprise he believes this one as well...

...According to Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, "Bani-Sndr is a prime believer in conspiracy theories...

...Second, that with the release of the hostages, President Carter, as he himself recently put it, "would've been reelected THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 15 without any problems...

...One genuine question is why, given the gravity of his charges, Sick does not immediately submit his evidence to the Justice Department, rather than titillate us with the promise of more information in his forthcoming book...

...The upshot of these wild charges was that the Justice Department charged Brenneke with making false statements...

...He enjoyed convivial relations with Churchill—the only man who could have known his true identity and to whom he referred as "my old comrade-in-arms...

...Democrats have bought into it out of political desperation and paranoia...

...Testifying during the sentencing of his friend Heinrich Rupp on a bank fraud conviction, he asserted that both of them had been at the Paris meeting on October 20...

...The Reagan Administration even initiated Operation Staunch to prevent third countries from selling arms to Iran...

...The "percentages agreement" over the division of Europe that Churchill offered Stalin in 1944—the immorality of which has always appeared so at odds with Churchill's conduct—now becomes understandable The circumstantial evidence that Stalin was Kitchener is strong, even if the "smoking gun" has not yet surfaced...

...No trace of HMS Hampshire, which allegedly "sank" while bound for Russia in 1916 with Kitchener on board, was ever found...

...What exactly is "indirect knowledge...

...In fact, even a week before the election, Reagan and I were neck-and-neck...

...Jack Blum, who had worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee narcotics investigation, claims he interrogated Brenneke in depth for four months, and that Brenneke never mentioned this trip to Paris until he heard the "October surprise" story from Barbara Honegger...

...And even if he went undetected, how could he be certain his Iranian and Israeli interlocutors would go undetected as well...

...Hitchens dismisses Barbara Honegger as "insane" and Heinrich Rupp as "a fascist," but likens the search for a "smoking gun" to the historian David Irving's challenge to all corners to find one document to prove Hitler authorized the Final Solution...

...But this has not stopped him from adding his voice to those calling for an investigation...

...What is "some aspect...

...If the House sets up an investigative committee, I for one will call on the United Nations to appoint an international panel to investigate whether the Russian Revolution was not from the beginning manipulated by British imperialist forces...

...Russian accent was atrocious...

...As Daniel Pipes pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, as long ago as 1988 Sick had written, "I'm covinced on the basis of what I heard that there were some meetings in Paris...

...Why would Casey take off for Paris a fortnight before the elections...

...And, from whatever source, did the Iranians ever get all that much military equipment...

...I know the Iranians changed their policy at that time...

...A nd then, of course, there is Abolhassan Bani-Sadr...

...In the absence of further information, I have not made up my mind about this allegation...

...Who benefited from Stalin's installation of Communism in Eastern Europe after the war...

...Three of the sources say that they saw him there...

...He has claimed that he had documentary proof of an agreement between Reagan's people and the ayatollahs...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 17...

...Jimmy Carter today claims that back in 1980 he heard "rumors and allegations" of meetings between Reagan's people and the Iranians but refused to believe them...

...If it was so essential for him to be present, why could the meeting not have taken place in Mexico or Panama...

...On October 11, Carter offered the Iranians $150 million worth of military equipment in return for the release of the hostages...

...It took Sick's former White House colleague Lloyd Cutler to add that the Hashemi brothers were indicted in 1984 for illegally exporting weapons to Iran during the Carter Administration...

...Not the Polish, Czech, and Hungarian Communists, whose downfall could have been foretold from the humiliating circumstances of their accession...

...Yet in his autobiography, My 71irn to Speak, he quotes only from the transcript of the sentencing hearing where Brenneke first made the charges...

...He cheerily admits to eschewing empirical criteria: "I start from the hypothesis whether it is conceivable, given everything we know about Casey, that if the offer was made to him that in return for the sale of arms the Iranians would not release the hostages until after the election, would he turn around and leave...

...With Carter trailing badly in the polls and with Iran a major preoccupation of the CIA throughout 1980, would it not have been sensible for Carter to ask his friend CIA director Stansfield Turner to look into these "rumors and allegations...

...Quite so: the Iranians rushed to complete the negotiations with Carter's people, so much so that Sick professed himself amazed, in All Fall Down, that the final package "was, in several key respects, less advantageous to Iran than the offer the United States had on the table in October...

...Not the Soviet Union, whose invasion two years later was greatly facilitated by the attendant partition of Poland...

...How could Casey be sure that his Parisvisit would not be noticed by the French security services or by the local CIA station...

...He was later acquitted: though he could provide no proof for his assertions, neither could the government disprove them...

...Only Great Britain—whose own invasion was postponed indefinitely—benefited in the short term...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 ter's fall is not surprising: with so little intelligence available on Iran, Casey, as new director of central intelligence, believed the Israeli contacts could prove useful, provided the quantity of arms shipped was small...

...It becomes obvious when one looks at Stalin's face: Who else could he have been but Lord Kitchener...

...20 . . . [there was] a series of meetings in several hotels in Paris, involving members of the Reagan-Bush campaign and high-level Iranian and Israeli representatives...

...For if the difference between a Carter victory and a Reagan landslide was the nonrelease of the hostages, then Reagan's people were right: Carter, who had been well behind in the polls earlier in the year, was seriously misleading the public about an "October surprise" release of the hostages...

...Let the investigation begin...

...Democratic fiascoes can always be blamed on some piece of Republican skulduggery...

...And there is Richard Brenneke, who claims to be an arms dealer and a money-launderer...

...Again, it must be asked how much respect is due Sick, who claimed in his Times article that he had never believed the stories about the supposed deal between the Reagan people and the Iranians until he began researching the subject "two years ago...

...But how much respect is due Sick...

...In his New York Times article, he claims that "from Oct...

...If the Iranians had a second offer on the table, they certainly didn't behave like the "shrewd bargainers" Sick claims they were...

...Gregg said he was on the Delaware coast that weekend, and provided a photograph of himself and his family on a sunny beach...

...Obviously it was Great Britain that benefited, securing the permanent presence in Europe of its English-speaking cousins from across the Atlantic...

...Israel did not stop these shipments until Carter pressured Begin after the siege of the embassy...

...Certainly not the Soviet Union, saddled with half a dozen impoverished countries that would prove a steady drain on its exchequer...

...But a meteorologist claims it was cold and cloudy that weekend in Delaware...

...The Democrats are now calling for an inquiry in the vain hope of making people forget their shoddy performance during the Gulf crisis...

...If there is no record of your trip, you could have traveled under an assumed name...

...Of the Hashemis' background, Sick mentioned only Cyrus's "cooperation with the U.S...

...Given that Iran lost the war largely because Iraq was able to obtain vastly greater quantities of arms, it is absurd to raise the question...

...For Christopher Hitchens, however, who almost singlehandedly kept the story alive through the lonely 1980s, it is not...

...If there are "more than fifteen," how many are there...

...Customs Service in a dramatic sting operation that resulted in the arrest of several Americans, Israelis and Europeans on charges of plotting illegal arms sales...

...Both propositions are dubious...

...T oday, former President Carter and assorted congressmen, pundits, and newspaper editorialists are calling on the House of Representatives to investigate former Carter aide Gary Sick's latest allegations that in 1980 the Reagan campaign team conspired with the Khomeini regime to ensure that the fifty-two hostages seized from the U.S...

...M y father used to argue that Joseph Stalin was an Englishman...

...Jimmy Carter says that Sick's "evidence is so large, the number of people that make the reports and so forth—I think it has aroused a genuine question...

...There is nothing wrong with a full congressional investigation...

...In fact, the conspiracy itself makes about as much sense as a Final Solution without Hitler...

...Why would Iran—having just been invaded by Iraq—reject a deal with a President who could provide arms in twenty-four hours, in order to deal with a campaign manager, who at the very best would have nothing to offer for three months...

...If we assume he would not and we know such an offer was made to him, then we can only draw one conclusion...

...Who benefited from Stalin's nonaggiession pact with Nazi Germany...

...Upon arrest, they claimed they had had the administration's blessing—a lie, according to Cutler, who argues that the Reagan Justice Department would hardly have pressed charges if the Hashemis had been in a position to blackmail the U.S.: "In fact, the Hashemis' bargaining position was so weak that the prosecutors pressed Cyrus into cooperation with [the] 'sting.' " We do not know who else is on the list, but it is quite likely to include Barbara Honegger, who worked as a researcher in the Reagan campaign and enjoyed brief fame in 1983 when she resigned from the administration, accusing it of doing nothing to advance women's rights...

...Moreover, Blum says, just about every statement Brenneke made to the committee—including assertions that he had worked for the CIA and that he had been a player in the arms trade—was a lie...

...Also in attendance, according to Brenneke, was Donald Gregg, a CIA official attached to Carter's National Security Council who went on to become Vice President Bush's national security adviser...

...While the Reagan Administration didn't approve of the sale, nor did it wholly disapprove...

...However far-fetched it may seem, the inconvenient facts fall into place...

...Stalin's George Szamuely is a writer living in New York City...

...Paris is a long way, and a two-day disappearance would likely be noticed...

...As John Fund reported in these pages in December 1983, her unpublished autobiography Omens of Power accounted for George Washington's presidency by pointing to the symmetry of the three stars in the constellation Orion's Belt, explained the link between the Dog Star Sirius and the Masonic goal to "establish a new world secular order," and spoke of the "coincidences that link Ronald Reagan . . . to the ancient and secret Masonic tradition...

...Well, all I can say is that my father was no less "widely respected" than Sick is...

...15 to Oct...

...Nor, as Lou Cannon pointed out in the Washington Past, had Carter been above pulling an "April surprise" at Teddy Kennedy's expense—dropping groundless hints at the time of the Wisconsin primary that a hostage release was pending...

...Sick goes on: At least five of the sources who say they were in Paris in connection with these meetings insist that George Bush was present for at least one meeting...

...But if it had been sunny in Delaware that weekend, would that have disproved anything...

...This is the big weakness of the conspiracy theory: there was no payoff and there were no diplomatic relations (the half-baked 1986 sale of arms notwithstanding...

...Stalin even arranged to transfer German Communists living in exile in the Soviet Union into the safekeeping of Adolf Hitler...

...Shortly afterwards, she began claiming that on October 24 or 25, 1980, someone in the Reagan campaign had told her there would be no "October surprise" because "Dick cut a deal"—Dick being Richard Allen, Reagan's first national security adviser...

...According to Hashemi, he and his brother Cyrus had arranged meetings in Madrid between William Casey and Mehdi Karrubi, the current speaker of the Iranian parliament...

...As Sick himself explained at the time, the Iranians "were shrewd bargainers...

...For there was something fishy about the Russian Revolution, too many inconvenient facts crying out for explanation: Why were more Communists murdered in its name than at the hands of the most ferocious anti-Communists...

...Note two basic assumptions: First, that the Iranians were seriously interested in delivering the hostages into the hands of Jimmy Carter, a man they hated with an inexplicable passion...

...Earlier in her career, Honegger had been a vocal champion of parapsychology...

...As a result, the Iranians, who had seemed ready to release the hostages, began to adopt delaying tactics...

...Nineteen eighty-eight was the year of Willie Horton, 1972 of Watergate, 1968 of Nixon urging the South Vietnamese to reject a peace agreement they had no intention of accepting anyway...

...and they would probably calculate that any president, assured of four years in office, would be less likely to compromise than a president fighting for his political life...

...The murder of the Old Bolsheviks, who must have had their suspicions, suddenly makes sense...

...By the same token, should the allegations prove groundless, Heaven and History will demand vengeance against the frivolous accusers, Jimmy Carter and Gary Sick...

...The former president of Iran lost out to the mullahs and has been living in exile in France since 1981...

...The story makes no sense on two T important historical grounds...

...Stalin's role in the revolution was murky, to say the least, and all documents pertaining to it were forged...

...Only one hypothesis makes any sense...

...ick offers no campaign receipts, ho-k) tel bills, airline tickets, telephone logs, or any other documents as evidence...

...Obviously, Turner did not have then, nor does he have now, any information to support them...

...For how do you prove that you were not in Paris...

...Lack of evidence is only proof of the effectiveness of the coverup...

...That the flow of arms from Israel resumed after CarChristopher Hitchens, who almost single-handedly kept the story alive through the lonely 1980s, cheerily admits to eschewing empirical criteria...

...the Israelis claim he was merely "a translator at a junior level...

...The "Stolen Election of 1980" is part The a familiar mythology...

...His charges, of course, depend on the testimony of shady and unreliable characters...

...On the contrary: after October 10, "although there was evidence that the regime in Tehran was making an effort to work its way out of the crisis, I commented to Brzezinski that it was becoming doubtful that they could hold totheir original timetable of release before November 4." Sick claims he has "more than fifteen sources who claim direct or indirect knowledge of some aspect of" the alleged secret meetings...

...Throughout his career in Russia, Stalin worked as a British agent...

...Indeed, Heinrich Rupp said that he had personally flown Casey there...

...Sick regards this as confirmation that the Paris meetings took place (although he purports not to be using the unreliable Brenneke, Gregg's major accuser, as a source...

...Rue, Israel continued to ship fairly small quantities of arms to Iran after the fall of the Shah, in keeping with its fear of Iraq...