23.03.2023

Counting stolen elections

At last we have definitive confirmation that the Republicans were urging Iran not to release US hostages until Ronald Reagan was elected. Daniel Lazare comments

America has seen two stolen elections in recent decades - plus a third would-be theft, in which a rightwing mob invaded Congress in order to force the 2020 presidential contest into the House of Representatives, so that Donald Trump could steal a wholly undeserved second term.

But now it looks like we can add another coup to the list - one that was all too successful. The reason is a remarkable front-page exposé in The New York Times about a secret Republican plot to persuade Iran to hold onto 52 US embassy hostages, so that Ronald Reagan could win the 1980 presidential election.¹

“Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr Reagan will win and give you a better deal.” Such was the Republican message to the supposedly revolutionary regime in Tehran, according to the Times. Since the Reagan team lived in terror of an ‘October Surprise’, in which Jimmy Carter would free the prisoners and then sweep back into office on a wave of public acclaim, the goal was to deprive the Democrats of a last-minute triumph by keeping the hostages on ice for a few months more. To be sure, the deal essentially made Republicans into parties to the crime. But they did not care because they were confident they could keep it under wraps.

Which they did for more than 40 years. But now a participant named Ben Barnes - a formerly high-flying Texas politician, who is now in his mid-80s - has decided to go public with what he knows.

“History needs to know that this happened”, now that the 98-year-old Carter has entered hospice care, he told the Times. “I think it’s so significant, and I guess knowing that the end is near for president Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

So the cat is apparently out of the bag regarding one of the most momentous secret operations in recent political history. Not that journalists did not suspect it all along. After all, the timing was so remarkable - Iran freed the hostages just minutes after Reagan took the oath of office on January 20 1981 - and the results were so beneficial to the Republican side that something more than mere coincidence had to be at work.

But evidence was lacking. In 1993, for example, a House panel headed by Democrat Lee Hamilton of Indiana concluded that the case was unproven, because William Casey - Reagan’s campaign chairman and subsequently CIA director from 1981-87 - insisted that he was in a conference in London when he was supposedly at a Madrid hotel negotiating with a top Iranian cleric. In the absence of clear and credible testimony, documentary evidence or intelligence reports, it was impossible to say otherwise.

What Hamilton did not know, however, is that the ‘Bush I’ administration had already come across something that one staffer described as “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown” at the designated time. Determined to safeguard Bush’s chances in the upcoming 1992 elections (which he would lose regardless), the White House arranged to keep the memo hidden for another two decades - until an investigative journalist named Robert Parry discovered it in 2011.²

The memo blows Casey’s alibi out of the water. A dozen years later, the Times is now providing further confirmation of Casey’s role by reporting that he flew to Texas in September 1980, so he could meet with Barnes and former Texas governor John Connally and debrief them about their mission.

Other evidence

The Times article provides other evidence as well. Four associates whom Barnes confided in over the years have confirmed that he provided them with the same account. One vouched for his honesty - “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” he said - and another, a University of Texas historian named HW Brands, included a brief synopsis of Barnes’s tale in a biography of Reagan that he published in 2015 (the bio, unfortunately, drew little notice).

Records confirm that Connally and Barnes left Houston in July 1980 for a four-week visit to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. And a note found in Connally’s file at the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas, shows that he was indeed in touch with the Reagan campaign. Dated July 21 1980, it reads: “Nancy Reagan called - they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” Finally, a calendar entry indicates that Connally travelled to Dallas on September 10 1980, which is when Barnes said the three-hour debriefing with Casey took place at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Together, it amounts to strong evidence that a multi-pronged Republican effort to establish back-channel communications with Iran was indeed underway.

In addition to George W Bush’s grand electoral theft in December 2000 and Trump’s romp to victory in 2016 despite trailing by nearly three million popular votes, another US election turns out to have been subverted as well. Indeed, if you toss in Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s secret efforts to sabotage peace talks in Vietnam and thereby prevent a Democratic victory in 1968, the number of stolen elections rises to four. That is nearly 30% over a half-century period, in which the popular will has been stymied either by an archaic constitutional provision known as the Electoral College or by secret operatives taking advantage of an increasingly opaque and undemocratic political structure. If conspiracy theories are running wild, it is because mysterious forces are pulling strings behind the scenes after all.

Casey, who died in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987, was a spook’s spook. A veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA precursor during World War II), he was a devout Catholic, a member of the far-right Knights of Malta and a fervid anti-communist who believed that there was no insurgency that a well-run CIA campaign of gun-running and assassinations could not destroy.

Once ensconced at the CIA, he embarked on Operation Cyclone, the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, in the belief that Saudi Wahhabism and Roman Catholicism were a perfect fit. He channelled hundreds of millions of dollars to a military junta in El Salvador, so that it could snuff out a leftwing insurgency - killing more than 75,000 people in the process, according to UN figures.³ He did the same in Guatemala, killing tens of thousands more. He sent up to $75 million to the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, so they could continue mounting “resistance” operations inside Cambodia after the newly-installed Vietnamese workers’ state toppled them from power in 1979.⁴

He directed destabilisation efforts in nearly a dozen other countries as well, including Lebanon, Poland, Libya, Syria, Cuba and Mozambique. “Clearly, the cloaks and daggers have come out of cold storage at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,” Newsweek magazine exulted in 1986. “For better or worse, the company is back in the business of covert action - with a global scope and an intensity of resources unmatched since its heyday 20 years ago.”⁵

The Times exposé sheds new light on how it all came together. Barnes has been out of politics for years, but he was once a rising star - the youngest person ever to serve as speaker of the state house of representatives and later a lieutenant governor. He was so influential, in fact, that he helped a young George W Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid fighting in Vietnam. His mentor - the equally stellar John Connally - was the man who will go down in history as the front-seat passenger in the open-roof touring car that John F Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.

A little longer

Formerly a Democrat, Connally had switched sides and was now hoping that Reagan would name him as secretary of state or defence if he got in. The grand Mideast tour he embarked on in July 1980 was therefore designed to prove his worth. According to Barnes, whom Connally invited to tag along, they flew in an oil-company jet from one capital to another. To each national leader along the way, Connally delivered a simple message: ‘Please inform the Iranians that Reagan will make it worth their while, if they keep the 52 Americans in captivity a little longer.’

“I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” Barnes told the Times. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” All the soon-to-be CIA chief wanted to know, he said, was whether “they were going to hold the hostages”.

Indeed, Israel would soon deliver a planeload of F-4 fighter aircraft tyres to Iran as a down payment. Such transportation increased once Reagan took office, with a senior ex-official in the Israeli military reporting that hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of equipment were soon flowing in by sea and air.⁶ Of course, it all came undone a few years later, when the world learned that yet another secret operative - a Marine colonel named Oliver North - was marking up prices and then using the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.

This is why George Bush I - vice-president under Reagan and then president himself from 1989 to 1993 - was determined to keep the original coup under wraps. He did not want the public to know that Iran-Contra was the tip of an iceberg, extending across much of the decade.

Cover-ups may not work forever, but they work long enough for the perpetrators to move on to other misadventures. By the time the public learns about one, others are already in the works, which is why secret government continues to expand.

The most obvious cover-up now, of course, concerns Nord Stream, the $20-billion Russian-built gas pipeline that somehow wound up destroyed six months ago. The sabotage occurred after Joe Biden vowed to “bring an end to it” if Russian troops entered the Ukraine; after undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland promised that “one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”; but before secretary of state Antony Blinken said that the pipelines’ destruction was a “tremendous opportunity” to reduce Russian energy exports and before Nuland expressed glee that Nord Stream was now “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”.

Yet the Biden administration claims to know nothing about what happened in between. Somehow, the pipeline got blown up the same way as the hostages got free. To this end, German and American intelligence sources are floating a story that neither the US nor Ukraine had anything to do with the pipeline’s destruction and that it was instead the work of unnamed “pro-Ukrainian” forces, who used a rented 50-foot sailboat to mine a pair of double-steel pipelines under 240 feet of water.

The story will not wash because the boat is too small to transport a ton of explosives, while an operation at such depths is difficult to imagine without military-scale equipment and expertise. Still, an obsequious press has so far refrained from asking inconvenient questions about whether the saboteurs got outside help or whether the whole story is a fabrication designed to distract attention from the responsible parties.

If so, will we have to wait another 40 years to find out? Or will political pressure force Biden to come clean about the US role?