• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Absolutely no one who could credibly claim to have been involved in a secret deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranians came forward to attest to the alleged “October Surprise.”

According to Village Voice reporter Frank Snepp, who was the first to thoroughly discredit the October Surprise hokum,13 reporters acted as conduits for information, allowing alleged witnesses to conform their stories with one another. “Only by swapping rumors and tacking with the latest ones,” Snepp said, “were they able to create an impression that they knew of this event firsthand.” Curiously, the Deep Throat conspirators kept changing their stories to fit the available evidence and would wait to hear what other loony tunes were prepared to “confirm” before “confirming” anything themselves.

There were two types of October Surprise conspiracy theorists: international con men and domestic dingbats. The international crooks would suddenly remember being part of the October Surprise conspiracy upon being arrested for some other crime, such as smuggling or fraud.

A classic example was Gunther Russbacher, an Austrian who had pulled off a string of con jobs, including impersonating: an Air Force officer, an Army captain, an Air France pilot, a federal prosecutor, a secret agent, and a stockbroker. During his sentencing for theft while posing as a stockbroker, the Chicago Tribune reported that his wife Raye said Russbacher was “actually a deep-cover CIA operative whom the government is trying to suppress because he piloted a flight that carried George Bush to meet with Iranians in 1980 to delay release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran—the so-called October Surprise.”14

You cannot tell me anyone in the media, even on the New York Times editorial page, seriously believed these people. (Frank Rich was still the theater guy for the Times back then.)

Then there were the standard nut-bar conspiracy theorists who claimed to have personal knowledge of meetings between representatives of presidential candidate Reagan and the Ayatollah. The two key American “witnesses” to the October Surprise were paranormal expert Barbara Honegger and fake CIA agent Richard Brenneke.

Honegger was a former low-level Reagan staffer, who told reporters she heard voices from the future.15 She believed in supernatural events and claimed that an intelligence officer told her that satellites were directed to part the clouds during Reagan’s inauguration so that the sun would shine only on him.16 She was briefly famous in 1983 for accusing the Reagan administration of not caring about women, announcing to one of her many fawning media admirers, “I am honored to have been used by the Force, if you will, with a capital F, like in ‘Star Wars.’ That’s how I feel. You know, the Zeitgeist of history.”17 Honegger was Christopher Hitchens’s main source for his stories promoting the October Surprise conspiracy in The Nation magazine.

In search of an ally, Honegger approached fake CIA agent Brenneke and told him about the October Surprise story. She handed him a list of Reagan associates asking him to put a check by those who were at the Paris meetings. Brenneke’s own notes of the meeting show that this was the first he had heard of the October Surprise “thesis,” as he called it. He wrote, “Honegger meeting notes: Thesis: Reagan-Bush campaign conspired to delay the hostage release until after the November 1979 election [sic] … Howard Hughes was somehow involved.…”

Brenneke was about to be fired from his lucrative job with a left-wing think tank for failing to produce evidence of a different conspiracy theory, so he needed a new gig. Suddenly, it rang a bell. And so, a few weeks later, not only had Brenneke heard of the October Surprise meeting—he had been there! A LaRouchite confirmed that he had seen Brenneke at the meeting, something Brenneke himself had not remembered until that very moment.

According to these three reliable sources—Brenneke, Honegger, and the