BARBARA HONEGGER'S BOOK, OCTOBER SURPRISE, IS A CLASSIC DEMONSTRATION OF HOW NOT TO WRITE ABOUT THAT NAGGING PROBLEM OF OUR TIME, CRIMINAL COVERT ACTIVITY AMONG THE GOVERNING ELITE.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050023-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: July 17, 1989
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S1 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/11: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050023-2
MINORITY REPORT.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
B arbam Honegger's book, October Surpri, is a
classic demonstration of how not to write about
that nagging problem of our time, criminal cov-
ert activity among the governing elite, Those who
have had it chance to review the evidence will know by now
that there is an excellent prima facie case for believing that
the Reagan-Bush 1980 election team attempted to derail
President Carter's negotiations for the return of the Amen.
can hostages' from Iran. They will see the logic of the derail-
ment in a contest that has since become evident: the secret
supply of arms to the Khomeini regime, They will appreciate
that the tempo of later events makes sense if a promise to
this effect had been made early on. They will also grasp the
reason for the exceptional feebleness of executive and Con-
gressional "eons" of Iran/contm skullduggery--
feebleness now exposed by a flow of "mislaid" documents
whose release would have made a difference only at the time.
The very haste of the cover-up was an index of desperation.
If the original sin of the Reagan-Bush regime had ever be-
come public, something more than a constitutional spasm
would have resulted. There would have been a Shakespearean
crisis of legitimacy in the state. Apparently, or so my betters
tell me, were not ready for that.
How does Honegger approach this grave matter? She
begins:
During my nearly four years as a political appointee in the
Reagan-Bush national campaign, transition team, White
House, and Department of Justice, I grew not only to like,
but to love Ronald Reagan as an individual.... I believed
then, as I do now, that he was the right personality at the
right time, needed to heal the nation. [Emphasis added.)
If I was embarking on something as weighty as Honeg-
ger's attempt to convince us all of the existence of high trea-
son, I might not have begun with the admission that I was
an airhead who was ready to believe any damn thing. Nor
would I have gone on, a few pages later, to say this:
When a theory explains so many acknowledged and other-
wise inexplicable facts, it deserves to be classed as a fact itself.
This is just what is not meant by the usefulness of a theory.
As I myself modestly put it, in a column on the October Sur.
Prise [see "Minority Report," July 4/11, 19871, a theory that
fits all the known facts usually has some merit, but it does
need to be tested. How can it be tested by someone who has
no discriminating faculty in reviewing the evidence? In an
epilogue to this undigested heap of a book, Honegger lists
people connected with the scandal who have since died. The
list includes William Casey, whose death was perhaps op-
portune but not mysterious, and the arms dealer Cyrus
Hashemi, about whose death I would like to know more. It
also includes a number of people whose connection to the
story is barely tangential. And it contains the following entry:
? DEAD: ABBIE HOFFMAN, social activist, who was
found dead in his home on April 12, 1989. Press reports of
Hoffman's death noted that he had been depressed about
an automobile accident, which had occurred some months
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
befow- This accident happened just
Wall t before Mr. Hoffman
H deliver his manuscript entitled "An Election Held
ostage" to Playboy
summer of 19S8. magazines offices in Chicago in the
.
How cunning of the invisible government to leave only
Barbara Honegger alive to promote her book. By her own
standard, she must be an agent of influence for the grand
coney. Come to think of it ... but mwh.
To the paranoid mind all things are connected. I have of.
ten mocked those whose world view is so cautious that they
no longer believe in anything but coincidence. But this is
ridiculous:
According to senior White House correspondent Sarah Mc-
Clendon, the Secret Service agents who accompanied Presi-
dent Reagan as he approached his waiting limousine outside
the Washington Hilton Hotel on the morning of March 30,
1981, were not in their usual tight formation around the c om.
mander-in-chief.
Perhaps with her eyes still dimmed by an old love, Honegger
infers that this unremarkable observation helps prove an
Iranian connection to John Hinckley's attempted assassina-
tion of Ronald Reagan.
Or there is this, offered with suggestive menace as an ex-
planation for Robert McFarlane's overdose of Valium the
night before he was to testify to the Tower commission:
Given that press reports at the time noted that taking Valium
is a notorious! unsuccessfu way of committing suicide it is
interesting that CIA Director William Casey later boasted
that a He detector could be fooled "with Valium and a few
tQcks "
Except that McFarlane wasn't going to take a lie-detector
test. He was about to testify before his old employer and
crony, whose commission screened out only those people
who were prepared to tell the truth. The end result of para-
noia here is that it makes the official self-invigilation look
better than it actually was.
Page
36.
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A key weasel word in published efforts of this kind is "re-
Portedly." An innocuous word on the face of it, but one that
always makes me put my'hand on my wallet. This book em.
Ploys "reportedly" as a kind of mantra. Cyrus Hashemi
was "r'eportedly" the New York chief for Khomeini Is secret
police. Savama; the SATI Company of Switzerland "re-
portedly" dealt with top members of the notorious Italian
secret society P-Z; Richard Secord and Oliver North "re-
ported1Y" met with the Iranian Ambassador to Bonn in
1984. V1te11, did they or didn't they? I believe that those who
wield power are implicitly capable of anything, which makes
me even keener than the next person to be absolutely specific
and certain about what they did this time or that time,
Intended perhaps to be definitive and hard-nosed, this
book is diffuse and naive. It even advances the theory that
the mysteriously dead Bill Casey, just before his turn came
to testify and just before his brain seizure, "told his long
time friend and personal counsel that he had decided to tell
everything he knew." If you believe that....
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/11: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050023-2