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Den of Spies: Craig Unger on Reagan, treason and the first October surprise

Late last month, Hillary Clinton warned of an impending “October surprise”, the sort of political bombshell often seen towards the end of presidential campaigns and which in her case, in defeat by Donald Trump in 2016, saw both the leak of her Wall Street speeches, by Russian hackers, and an FBI investigation of her email use.

“I anticipate that something will happen in October, as it always does,” Clinton told PBS, adding that she expected Trump and Republicans to make “concerted efforts to distort and pervert Kamala Harris, who she is, what she stands for, what she’s done”.

Craig Unger agrees.

“Trump does all his stuff in plain view,” the veteran American reporter says. “I mean, he says, ‘Russia, are you listening? Send me her emails’ … So it’ll be interesting to see what happens this October.”

Unger is the author of House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, bestsellers on Trump and Russia. But his new book concerns a different October surprise: the original and perhaps most shocking of all.

In Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House, Unger goes back to 1980, when a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, faced a Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Republicans feared October would bring the release of American hostages held in Iran since the previous year, thereby boosting Carter, perhaps enough to recover from the humiliating failure of the Desert One rescue mission. Therefore, Unger believes, senior Republicans set out to make sure no release occurred until after their man won.

Unger describes shady dealings between Reagan aides and Iran, Israel the go-between, the Iranians receiving American arms. As the historical record shows, Carter could not secure a release. In November, he lost the election. In January 1981, minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages were set free.

In Unger’s telling, such machinations contain direct echoes of 1968, when secret contacts between Richard Nixon and Hanoi dynamited both hopes of peace in Vietnam and the presidential ambitions of Hubert Humphrey, just one Democrat who in Unger’s words “brought a knife to a gunfight”, fatally underestimating Republicans’ ruthless hunger for power.

But Unger also looks forward, arguing that the October surprise of 1980 “was really the origin story for Iran-Contra”, the huge Reagan-era scandal over arms sales to Tehran to fund rightwing rebels in Nicaragua that “didn’t start in 1984 as most Americans thought, it started in 1980 when the Republicans weren’t even in power, but they were secretly sending weapons to Iran through Israel.

“All this was done under cover of darkness. This has been part of our history that we are loth to acknowledge, and I think we really have to if America’s to be a real democracy. This is one of those things that was denied, denied, denied, again and again and again.”

Unger has pursued the story of the October surprise for more than 30 years, often to his own cost. He discovered it in 1991, in a New York Times column by Gary Sick, once of Carter’s national security council, headlined “The Election Story of the Decade”. Unger worked on the story for Esquire and Newsweek but as the brewing scandal threatened to ensnare George HW Bush, Reagan’s vice-president and White House successor, and amid congressional investigations Unger deems woefully inadequate, news outlets abruptly dropped the story, declaring it all a hoax. Unger was sued for $10m by one player in the affair, labelled a conspiracy theorist by others. Nevertheless, he persisted.

“We have to acknowledge the dark parts of American history,” he insists, “if we’re to be truly honest.”

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Most of the darkest parts of Den of Spies concern William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager who worked for the predecessor of the CIA during the second world war, then led the agency once Reagan took power. Asked about the congenitally unreliable characters who populate his book – embittered CIA veterans, Mossad operatives, Iranian arms dealers turned double agents among them – Unger says: “I think no one put together really [that] even before the Iran hostage crisis, Bill Casey … had a network of intelligence operatives.”

Describing Casey as “a mix of James Bond and Mr Magoo”, Unger continues: “He was the kind of guy who spit when he talked, he was going in a dozen directions at once, he was fairly tall but he looked always stooped over, and when he ate, he would spill food all over himself. But he was dazzlingly brilliant in his way. Casey was a master spy during world war two … [and] he didn’t get back in officially in the intelligence game until 1981 when he became head of the CIA, and yet, during that whole time, he had a sort of a secret network, and he was able to plug them in appropriately, to deal arms to Iran, without anyone getting caught. I mean, it was amazing. Think how difficult it is. It’s hard enough to run a presidential campaign.”

Den of Spies is peppered with amazing details. One is an attendance ledger for a conference at the Imperial War Museum in London in which marks in pen or pencil seem to indicate confirmed attendance or not, on which hinges the feasibility of Casey flitting to and from meetings in Madrid on which, Unger argues, the whole plot turns.

That Unger has finally been able to tell the story at book length owes much to Bob Parry, another investigative journalist who got on to the trail of the October surprise. After Parry died, in 2018, Unger inherited his files.

“He’d gotten a lot of information. He called them The X Files, and now I have them. They were only digitized after Bob’s death, and that enables you to search through 23 gigabytes of data, which is millions of pages. I knew the aliases that the [Iranian] arms dealers used. Jamshid Hashemi was one of them, and he had, I think, 10 aliases, so I was able to search using his aliases. And when I did that, I came upon some documents that had been given to me and to Congress and Bob Parry as well by former [Iranian] president Abolhassan Banisadr [who died in 2021, aged 88], and I don’t think even Banisadr realized the context, but the invoices he gave me for the arms they were receiving, some of them went right back to Bill Casey’s operative: Jamshid Hashemi.”

Den of Spies is full of such tales, dizzying in their turns and switchbacks. Unger is well aware some may see him as obsessed, so relentless is his pursuit. “I did not need to be reminded that things had ended badly for Captain Ahab,” he writes, of the anti-hero of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Unger’s chapter titles duly include “My White Whale”. But as he says, though Jimmy Carter still lives, having turned 100 on publication day, Den of Spies comes out in a world where dark machinations to win power no longer seem so unthinkable as in the days of Carter, Reagan and Bush.

The October surprise of 1980, Unger says, “is very much a prequel to what we’re going through with Donald Trump, who does commit some of the same crimes. This was, I believe, a treasonous covert operation to sabotage an American presidential election. And today we see Trump with very, very close allies, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin and MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, of Saudi Arabia], all of whom may somehow, one way or another, interfere with this election.”