THE OCTOBER SURPRISE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000201250007-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: November 1, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000201250007-6
ARTICLE APPEARED PENTHOUSE
ON PP-GE___ZQ-_- November 198.t
the hostages,"
This stunning exclusive, purporting to
scoop all the world's other news-gather-
ing organizations, amounted to fulfillment
of a dire warning that had been made over
the past several months by officials of the
Committee to Elect Reagan: Be on guard
for an attempt by President Jimmy Carter i
to formulate a secret ransom deal to free
the American hostages in Iran. Such a
move, Reagan's men felt, coming so soon
before the November 4 election, might
guarantee Carter's reelection.
The men around Ronald Reagan called
it the "October surprise," and Moore's ex-
clusive report seemed to confirm their
worst fears-that the euphoria resulting
from the release of the 52 American hos-
tages might sway millions of American
voters into forgetting why they were think-
ing of voting against Jimmy Carter,
Or so it would appear. But, in fact, the
words delivered by a reporter on a local
television station owned by ABC in Chica-
go represented the climax of a sour chap- I
ter in the history of American politics. And
it is a chapter that has remained unknown
up until now. In basic form, it amounts to:
? A political-espionage operation, di- Reagan campaign. Besides George Bush,
rected and controlled by some members the vice-presidential candidate and for-
of the Reagan committee, that dwarfed in mer CIA director with extensive contacts
scale anything conceived in the days of
the Nixon political-spying operation-or
any other similar operation, for that matter,
? An operation that ultimately resulted
in the destruction of what was apparently
an imminent deal between Iran and Carter
to release the American hostages months
before they were set free coincident with
Reagan's inauguration. That deal was,
aborted by a news leak that took place im-
mediately after the Reagan committee
learned of it.
? A complicated series of events that
saw TV reporter Larry Moore used as an
innocent dupe to destroy the very deal he
was reporting.
What follows is not a nice story. There are
no heroes and no winners. It is a story of
political chicanery. Until the present time
only a tiny part of it has surfaced: charges
that Reagan's people stole confidential
briefing papers prepared for Carter prior
to his nationally televised debate with Rea-
gan, an incident known as "debategate."
But there is more-much more.
Whether any criminal prosecutions will
result remains an open question. Last
spring a congressional investigation con-
cluded that there had been a "cover-up"
of the Reagan spying operation. Mean-
while, an attempt to appoint a special
prosecutor to probe the 1980 campaign is
still ensnared in legal arguments.
Still, few seem to grasp the full extent
and depth of the spying operation-its
tracks have been well covered, and even
revelations connected with the theft of the
briefing papers have not unlocked the rest
of the spying operation's secrets.
Like all modern presidential-election cam-
paigns, the Reagan campaign had a politi-
cal-espionage apparatus. As a.challenger,
Reagan could come to rely 'on the'custom-
ary resources of such operations: dis-
gruntled career diplomats, government
employees, and not-so-loyal'members of I
the opposition party.
But there were two factors that elevated
this time-honored custom of political espi-
ohage,.into something much.different_in
1980. One was the growing conviction
within the Reagan campaign that Carter
almost certainly would pull an October
surprise, i.e., arrange the release of the
hostages at the most critical point of the
campaign. Therefore, there was an urgent.
requirement for detailed intelligence from
inside the Carter White House.
The second factor, and in some ways
more important than the first, was the na-
ture of some of the people running the
all across the U.S. intelligence communi-
ty, there was William J. Casey, director for
the entire campaign. -
Casey, the present'CIA director, was a
mil 1o sire Wall Street lawyer who had
served in the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) during World War II and later
served in a variety of official and nonoffi-
cial government appointments, including
membership on the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board. A man with
wide contacts throughout the governmen-
tal and intelligence structure, Casey was
known as an obsessive collector of infor-
mation, a man with an unquenchable, de-
vouring passion for all data.
And the data Casey was most interest-
ed in during the 1980 campaign was infor-
mation on the Carter White House and the
Carter reelection campaign. For example,
the minutes of a September 12, 1980:
meeting of Casey's lieutenants record that
the campaign director "wants more infor-
mation from the Carter camp...." Per-
haps not so coincidentally, the exhortation
came just three days after a secret com-
munique from the German government to
Carter that Khomeini was ready to, make a.'
deal on the hostages-and on the very
same day that Khomeini signaled the Car-
ter White House that the Germans were
bona fide messengers.
This interesting coincidence of events .
suggests a fairly sophisticated informa-
tion-gathering operation that. extended
into the Oval Office, an operation that was
able to alert the Reagan committee to
even the most sensitive top-secret devel-
opments. While it is difficult to estimate its
size, there is no question that the spying
operation was quite extensive, covering
the entire government apparatus.
Casey himself had revealed the exis-
tence of the operation in July 1980, during
the Republican National Convention- in
Detroit. With typical audacity, Casey told
reporters that he was establishing an
"intelligence operation" in the campaign,
and he said flatly that it was aimed at dis-
covering whether Carter planned any Oc-
tober surprise.
Reportedly, however, other Reagan
campaign officials were upset at Casey's
direct admission of an intelligence opera-
tion, and it was not, as such, ever referred
to again in public. But it flourished in se- i
cret. Oddly enough, the operation's most
valuable assets were not campaign work-
ers but a fairly large number of ostensibly
loyal government employees. To the Rea-
gan committee's surprise, there were
many military and intelligence-agency em-
ployees who had become convinced that
Carter was a dangerously muddleheaded
feather merchant. While not enamored of
Reagan, they felt strongly that under no
circumstances should Jimmy Carter be
reelected president.
STAT
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000201250007-6