American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [64]
After studying Jonestown, I think sometimes of the large, hand-lettered sign that was found in front of all those bodies. It said: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”39 Whether that was a reference to MK-ULTRA is impossible to know, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
The government should release all its files on Jim Jones and how he may have been tied into the spy network or even the mind-control program of the CIA. The Jonestown story should also give us pause, when it comes to the standard thinking that any group with a strong leader is necessarily a “brainwashed cult.” Would we say the same thing about the founder of Christianity?
CHAPTER NINE
″OCTOBER SURPRISE″: THE FIRST STOLEN ELECTION
THE INCIDENT: On the same day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, January 20, 1981, Iran released the American hostages it had been holding in our embassy there for 444 days.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: The timing was coincidental.
MY TAKE: Reagan’s people had cut a deal with Iran to keep the hostages beyond the presidential election, to ensure that President Carter’s negotiations with Iran failed and that he lost to Reagan.
“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
—Ronald Reagan
“How can a president not be an actor?”
—Ronald Reagan
If you’re like me, maybe you wondered a little about the timing. Within an hour after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president on January 20, 1981, the government of Iran released all but one of the 52 American hostages they’d been holding for 444 days. The American people rejoiced. The long ordeal that began when militant Muslims took over the American Embassy in Tehran was over.
But what if those hostages could actually have gained their freedom months earlier? And if Jimmy Carter had been successful in his negotiations, what if he’d been reelected to a second term? What if the Reagan-Bush team cut a secret deal with Iran to hold on to their American prisoners until after the November election? Would anybody call that treason?
Even at the time, as busy on the wrestling circuit as I was, I thought—whaaaat?! This stinks. It reeked of a behind-the-scenes deal. Here’s the thing everybody forgets: Even though Reagan ended up swamping Carter in the election, as late as the middle of October Reagan’s own poll-taker had Carter ahead by two percentage points. If Carter had managed to free the hostages before the election, good chance he’d have won. Instead, we had what Gary Sick, both Ford and Carter’s Middle East expert on the National Security Council, called “a political coup” in his book October Surprise.
Most of us remember Operation Desert One, a hostage-rescue attempt by our military early in 1980 that ended up dead-in-the-desert, got eight Americans killed, and resulted as a major embarrassment for Carter. During negotiations after that, Iran was demanding of the Carter people that we exchange $150 million in American military equipment that they’d already ordered and paid for, before the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini took power. Carter said he wouldn’t deal with arms merchants, but otherwise thought this seemed fair enough. Meantime, the Reagan campaign was busy monitoring Carter’s every move on this.
As early as March 1980, William Casey—who was then managing Reagan’s election campaign and later was named his CIA director—approached two Iranian wheeler-dealers in Washington. The Hashemi brothers, Jamshid and Cyrus, were asked if they’d set up a meeting with some representatives of the government.1 The thing was, Cyrus Hashemi, who’d done some work for the CIA, was also an important intermediary for the Carter White House in the talks.2 Anyway, what was basically