The article, 10 Conspiracies Of Ronald Reagan, Iran, And The Octopus, posted at LRC presents a brief overview of the historical background of the 1980 October Surprise when key individuals of the Reagan/Bush campaign covertly met with top members of the Iranian government to prevent the release of the 55 Americans held hostage in Tehran before the November election, ensuring the defeat of Democrat incumbent Jimmy Carter. The hostages were released on the day Ronald Reagan took office. Critical arm shipments, materiel and military supplies soon began flowing to the Khomeini regime, years before the more widely known Iran-Contra Scandal, which almost brought down the Reagan administration.

Barbara Honegger worked as a researcher at the Hoover Institution before joining the Ronald Reagan administration as a researcher and policy analyst in 1980. She was the Director of the Attorney General’s Anti-Discrimination Law Review at the Department of Justice. After leaving Washington, she became the Senior Military Affairs Journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School.

While working for Reagan she discovered information that convinced her that George H. W. Bush and William Casey had conspired to make sure that Iran did not release the U.S. hostages until Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the 1980 presidential election.

In 1987 Honegger began leaking information to journalists about the Reagan administration. However, it was not until Reagan left office that Honegger published October Surprise (1989). In her book, Honegger claimed that in 1980 William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated.

In the years since October Surprise was published other sources such as Ari Ben-Menashe, an Iranian-born Israeli businessman, security consultant and author, who was previously an employee of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate from 1977 to 1987 and an arms dealer; premier investigative journalist Robert Parry, who has authored numerous books and articles on the October Surprise; and Gary Sick, who served on the staff of the National Security Council under President Carter, have come forward to confirm Honegger’s story. Sick is the author of a book also entitled October Surprise. He was the principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs from 1976 to 1981, a period which included the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. After leaving government service, Sick served as Deputy Director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, and is the executive director of the Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University (1993–present), which has published five books and numbers many of the leading scholars on the Persian Gulf among its global membership. He is an adjunct professor of International Affairs and a senior research scholar at Columbia’s School of International & Public Affairs, where he has been voted one of the top professors. He is emeritus member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch, and serves as founding chair of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East.

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