donny@elaine25.Stanford.EDU (06/17/91)
In article <donny.676964158@elaine25.Stanford.EDU> writes:
The following is an unofficial transcript of the opening statement made
by Gary Sick on thursday, June 13 at a conference on the 1980 hostage
issue sponsored by the Fund for New Priorities in America. Also
speaking at the conference were Christopher Hitchins, Martin Killian,
Joel Bleifuss and others. The conference was broadcast on C-Span.
Gary Sick:
"Well let me just give a very brief background about how I got to
where I am at this point, and where I think we are factually.
"I was perhaps one of the most reluctant people in this whole story. I
was in the White House when the hostages were released; at that time
there immediately began to be rumors that something had happened, that
there was some kind of a deal that was struck. I didn't believe that
that had happened, I didn't think that you needed to explain the facts
that way, that they could adequately be explained by Iranian internal
politics and other events, and later I wrote a book on the subject and
never even mentioned these rumors or charges. I was approached in the
1988 elections, when this subject began to emerge very strongly, by a
number of people asking me to comment on the thing, did I think these
charges were true? I recongnized at the time that there were certainly
some new allegations that were coming up, some new evidence that had to
be taken account of, but basically I was not prepared to say that I
thought the charges were true, and curiously enough even after the 1988
election and all this information had come out, I submitted a proposal to
the 20'th Century Fund to write a book about the Reagan administration
and Iran, and didn't even mention this as a possibility to be covered in
the book. However, as I started working on that book, I felt that I
had to start at the beginning, and I felt that I had to resolve these
issues in my mind once and for all because everything else that happened
between the Reagan administration and Iran was colored; if this did
happen, it made a tremendous difference in the way you analyzed what
came later. So I began working on that as I was working on a number of
other issues at the time.
"As time went on, and certainly not just because of my own work but
certainly Martin Killian was crucial in this - he had done far more work
than I had and kept filling me in on new information as it went along,
and in fact is probably more than anyone else responsible for why I'm
here; he may not like that, but that is a fact nevertheless - but
gradually as I worked on the issue I became more and more convinced that
something had happened; I was building up a detailed chronological base
and things kept falling into a pattern that I couldn't ignore, and
then I began doing interviews myself, and gradually moved from the side
of those who dismissed the idea entirely to what in my view now - and I
say this in all seriousness - there really is no doubt at all in my mind
that there were meetings between the Republican campaign and the
Iranians in the course of the 1980 elections to discuss the question of
the hostages. That to me is no longer seriously in doubt. The question
is exactly how did it happen and can this in fact ever be proved, and
I'm not sure we'll ever have full answers to either of those questions.
"Let me outline for you from my own perspective, based on my own
research, what I think happened, and the logic of what happened, and we
can go on from there.
"I do believe that the people in the Reagan campaign - or the Republican
campaign really because at the beginning of this thing, early 1980,
there were several Republican campaigns going on; you'll recall Mr Bush
was running against Mr Reagan at that time, and they each had their own
seperate campaign staffs, so I think both of them were in fact
interested in this issue at that time - but there was a very deep
abiding concern on the part of the Republican campaigns that the hostage
issue would be exploited by President Carter at a key moment in the
election and upset their campaign plans. Everything else was going
their way: the numbers were on their side in terms of the economy,
President Carter was viewed as badly wounded by not only the hostage
issue but a number of other things that were going on, and I think that
the Republicans felt, with some justification, that it was their
election, that this was going to be their time, and if you're the
campaign manager you have to think "What do I have to worry about? What
do I have to protect myself from?" And I think they looked around and
one of the things that struck them that they did need to protect
themselves about was the hostage issue - the fact that perhaps the
hostages could be released at the last second or at a key moment, and
there would be such a wave of emotional response from the American
people that it would overcome the view of Carter as someone who was not
qualified or as someone they weren't going to vote for, and change their
mind - that, it seems to me, was the essential underlying concern that
went on. From the information that I've been given by sources who in
fact said they were there when these things happened, Mr. Casey, who
became the campaign manager for Mr. Reagan in Februrary of 1980, within
a month or two after that, probably withing a month, approached some
individuals who were plugged into the Iranian circuit and who also, as
it turns out, were providing information to the U.S. government - these
were men who had been identified by the U.S. government as sources with
good access into Iran, and they were providing information to us, us
being the U.S. government at that time, about what was going on. Mr.
Casey got in touch with them, and, not to put too fine a point on it,
they became double agents. They were working on one hand for the U.S.
government, and on the other hand they were providing information to the
people in the Republican campaign. I have this from the fellow who did
it, and, his brother is dead, but those are his words, he said that we
became double agents working for both sides.
"That led to a major breakthrough in July of 1980 - after the
Republican convention and after Reagan was nominated, Mr Casey I believe
went to Madrid where he met, through the good offices of these
gentlemen who he'd met earlier, he met with Mr. Karubi who was at that
time a memeber of the intimate inner circle of Khomeni, and at that
meeting they talked about the possibility of some kind of aggreement
about the hostages. Mr. Karubi went back to Tehran, checked with,
presumably, Khomeni, and about 10 days later came back, they had a
second meeting, and aggreed that in their view the Iranians would hold
the hostages and make a "gift" of them, as Mr. Casey put it, according
to this source, make a gift of the hostages to the incoming Reagan
administration, in return for promises of political support, military
equipment, unfreezing Iranian assets, and arms. And the arms supply was
to begin fairly soon and go on after they came into office.
"That was the nature of the deal as I understand it, that was done at
that time, and a number of things happened in the period immediately
after that. One, the Iranians, being good bargainers, instead of just
taking the deal, came to the Carter administration, and opened
negotiations with us, I think now, in retrospect, to see if we had
something better to offer than what they'd been offered by the
Republican side. We of course did not know that another offer was
already on the table, so we were negotiating on the basis that, we
thought, we were only negotiating with the Iranians, in fact their may
have been a third party associated with the negotiations. We bargained
rather hard, actually, and in retrospect, I must say, it makes us look a
little bit naive. We honestly did not want to get into a position of
providing arms for hostages, as foolish as that may sound these days, we
did not think that was the way it should be done, and so we bargained
very hard - they asked us for arms, we held back, we delayed, we tried
to give them only partial information, we tried to get out of a
getting into a position of trading U.S. arms for Iranian hostages. In
the end, just before the election, President Carter agreed that we would
return all the military equipment that Iran had bought and paid for,
that was in the United States, that we would return that, but that
pledge was not made until late in October, and in the mean time we had
been bargaining. If indeed they had had a somewhat different offer from
the other side, our offer probably didn't look very good.
"In any event, the negotiations went on with the Carter administration.
There was at the same time a second rescue mission that was coming to
fruition, that had been planned by the Carter administration. At that
point there was no intention of using it, we were involved in
negotiations with Iran, but the hostage rescue mission was there in case
it was needed. I think the Republicans got very worried about that, and
that the second rescue mission was going to be used in late October to
reverse the situation if nothing else happened. There were a number of
reasons why the Republicans had reason to get nervous again, though the
deal had been done, and my understanding is that in mid-October they had
another meeting in Paris which
was attended by Republicans, again Mr. Casey, an Iranian group , and a
group of Israelis who were present, to review the deal as it stood at
that time, and to make sure that things were as they were supposed to be
as they came up to the final days of the election - this was about two
weeks before the election. Immediately after those meetings, which in
my view took place about the 15'th to the 20'th of October 1980,
immediatley after that, a whole series of things began to happen very
suddenly. Some of the hostages were moved to different locations, as if
they suddenly were afraid that a rescue mission was going to happen;
there was a secret shipment of military equipment from Israel to Iran,
which the Carter administration in fact learned about, and complained to
Israel that they were shipping arms to Iran and they promised not to do
it again, but it came within 48 hours after those meetings were
concluded in Paris. There were a whole series of other things that
happened; the Iranian parlaiment that was charged with responsibility
for dealing with the hostage issue went into a complete stall at that
point and everything came to a complete halt, suddenly nothing could get
done with regard to that, and there were a number of other things.
Anyway, it was a very active period in those 72 hours after what I think
were the completion of the meetings in Paris.
"The rest of the story you know quite well. The hostages were not
released before the election, Ronald Reagan won the election, the
hostages were held, detailed negotiations went on with the Carter
administration that were getting noplace until the 15'th of January 1981.
At that point the Iranians completely reversed themselves. In effect,
suddenly after having bargained very hard with us for months, from
November to January, the Iranians suddenly reversed themselved totally,
and for all practical purposes paid us to take the hostages back. That
isn't putting too strong a point on it; Iran suddenly agreed to bring
current all of its loans which was a terribly costly thing for Iran to
do to resolve the whole banking issue, and there were some technical
aspects, but suffice it to say that Iran completely reversed itself at
that point. And as you all know, on the 20th of January we had
completed all the negotiations for the release of the hostages at 8
o'clock in the morning, and all of the information was in Iran's hands,
and they sat and waited until five minutes after Mr. Reagan had taken the
oath of office, and at which point they announced that they agreed to
the terms that had been worked out as of 8 o'clock that morning, and the
hostages were released within a half an hour thereafter. As I say, this
did arouse some suspicions at the time, but, it was, you know, you could
understand it was the Iranians sort of taking one last twist of the
knife to Jimmy Carter, and they were quite capable of doing something
like that on their own.
"What we didn't know at the time, and I haven't learned till much
later, is that there was a substantial flow of military equipment which
began almost immediately, and it's probably not too much of an
exaggeration to say that as the plane with the hostages took off from
Tehran and headed for freedom, other planes were taking off from Israel
going the other way with military equipment. The military equipment
continued to flow for some years after that time from Israel and with
the knowledge of the U.S. government. This is not a supposition, this
is something that high officials in the Israeli governement have
themselves said publicly, and the people in the U.S. government at the
time who have been interviewed on this subject never say that this
didn't happen, they just say that "it wasn't me" who was responsible for
getting the reports about these arms that were being sent from Israel to
Iran. And that's basically the structure of the story.
"What don't we know about this? We don't know alot of things, and my
suspicion is that alot of things are not going to be known. I regard
this as a professional intelligence operation, a covert action, that was
done certainly with the assistance and participation of professionals.
They didn't, I'm sure, go around leaving stray memos in their wake, I
suspect that there were no photographs taken of Mr. Casey sitting with
Mr. Karubi in a hotel room in the Ritz hotel in Madrid, and so forth.
So if you're looking for a smoking gun, if that is what it takes, a
transcript or a tape of the meeting of Mr. Casey talking to Mr Karubi, I
suspect that we're not going to find that smoking gun. There are many
thnings, however, that we could learn that simply have not been
available to individuals working on this story, on their own and with
really very limited resources. Some of those things that we could
learn: certainly I would like very much to simply look at the campaign
records. Up until now, all of our efforts to look at the Republican
campaign records have met a stone wall from Mr. Meese who is responsible
for the campaign records, and he has refused to let anybody have a peek
at anything in those campaign records which are out in California now,
so that would be an interesting place to start. I would like very much
to look at Mr Casey's diaries, travel records and the like, I think we
might learn a great deal, and obviously if this isn't true, that's where
we're going to find out that it isn't true. We need to have hard
documentary evidence that says either Mr Casey was missing on those days
or that he did travel on those days or that he didn't, and if he didn't
let's find out about it. But we have to look at the records; a simple
denial that "I think he was around all that week" is not really enough
to take care of the issue, it's more serious than that. There are
flight records - we know the tail numbers of some of the aircraft that
were involved in these operations. I would like very much to have
access to FAA records that would identify those. I would like to have
passports subpoenad of certain individuals to see what the stamps are on
certain dates of travel. There are tapes that were made of Mr. Hashami,
who was working as, in effect a double agent; his office was bugged
during a good part of that period, that is now known for sure. He was
indicted later on on the basis of those tapes. Where are the tapes? I
would love to know what Mr. Hashemi was saying in his office and on his
telephone during that period of October 1980. We have not been able to
get our hands on those tapes. There are a number of places one could
look. Is that going to solve all of our problems or answer all of our
questions? Probably not. But we're never going to be able to answer
even the basic questions until we look at the material that is
presumably available and can only be gotten with a subpoena, so I will
end my lengthy opening statement.