American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [67]
Anyway, they’ll violate all the laws of human decency to make sure Ronald Reagan gets elected. I’ve always believed you’ll govern like you campaign. If you lie and cheat during the campaign, it’s not going to end there. And, of course, it didn’t. Before long we had the Iran-Contra scandal, which we’ll look at in the next chapter. I angrily look at the American people and wonder how they can possibly accept this. We just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Oh, well, that’s government, that’s what they do.” No, we need to understand, government is us!
The whole seamy saga surrounding the hostages started to unravel in 1987, when the Miami Herald published an article quoting some statements from a CIA agent, Alfonso Chardy, about the secret October meetings. Also that year, Bani-Sadr wrote a book that was published in Europe and got into some of what he knew. Playboy and Esquire followed up with articles. In 1989, Barbara Honegger came out with her book October Surprise; she’d been a loyal Reagan staffer until she left out of disillusionment with some of the practices she’d observed. Honegger said she was present on inauguration day when she heard Reagan say to “tell the Iranians that the deal is off if that [last] hostage is not freed.”21 Reagan had left office by the time of Honegger’s book, and Poppa Bush was just beginning his first term.
In early November 1989, Ari Ben-Menashe was arrested in L.A. The Mossad agent was charged with having violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, by attempting to sell Iran three C-130 transport planes with a false-end-user certificate. Apparently our left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Israeli master spy Rafi Eitan was worried that Ben-Menashe “was in a position to blow wide open the U.S./Israeli arms-to-Iran network whose tentacles had extended everywhere: down to Central and South America, through London, into Australia, across to Africa, deep into Europe.”22
Sure enough, Ben-Menashe was soon squawking to reporters. He implicated Bush and Gates in the October Surprise. He talked of a secret American policy to send weapons through Chile to the Iraqis. (We’re playing both ends against the middle again). The government of Israel tried to discredit Ben-Menashe as a fabricator, but Associated Press journalist Robert Parry uncovered internal Israeli documents proving he’d worked for an arm of their military intelligence for a decade (1977- 1987). So the Israelis had some egg on their face, but meantime both they and the White House were seeking out more friendly reporters. One of these was Steven Emerson, who wrote that he’d seen derogatory records on the “delusional” Ben-Menashe. But corroboration for what Ben-Menashe had to say did surface over time, including the Iraq weapons deal.23 A federal jury acquitted him of the charges at the end of 1990.
Also in 1990, PBS’s Frontline aired a program on the October Surprise that included a sound bite of Reagan playing golf with Bush in Palm Springs and saying he’d “tried some things the other way” to free the hostages but that the details were “classified.” Oops, open mouth and insert foot, Mr. Former President. By now, there was enough outside pressure for the House of Representatives to form an October Surprise Task Force in February 1992. The fellow who chaired the committee was Lee Hamilton, a “bipartisan” Democrat who from then on always seemed to end up in charge of these types of investigations. Next time would be the Iran-Contra hearings that made Oliver North a household name. Then Hamilton would be vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, whose shoddy work we’ll look at later. Now he’s retired after serving 34 years in the House, but he’s still on Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. I guess they need expertise in cover-ups—Freudian slip, I mean clandestine-ops.
The chief counsel for the House’s October Surprise Task Force was a fella named Barcella, fresh from Larry’s having been lead attorney for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI for short. BCCI had paid his firm more than $2