THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1993
January
- January: In his last days as Defense Secretary,
Neoconservatives
Dick Cheney releases a document called "Defense Strategy for the 90s," which basically rehashes the plans for global domination called for in the Wolfowitz/Libby report of 1992. However, with Bush no longer the president, these plans will have to be put "on hold" until GeorgeW. Bush takes office in 2001. Instead, the plans are refined and expanded on as part of the Project for the New American Century, a GOP think tank. (CCR) - January: Iraq continues to interfere with UNSCOM inspections,
Gulf War
and repeatedly sends aircraft into both the "no-fly zones" and into the demilitarized zone between Iraq and Kuwait. France, Britain, and the US mount a number of punitive air raids; the Iraqis begin to show more cooperation with UNSCOM. (UN/Electric Venom) - January 3: Presidents Bush and Yeltsin sign the START II accords,
Global nuclear proliferation
which limit the US and Russia to a maximum of 3,000 to 3,500 nuclear missiles. It takes three years for the US Congress to ratify the treaty. (Arms Control Association)
Bush and Clinton administrations bury "October Surprise" evidence
- January 11: Russia's Supreme Soviet sends a secret cable to the US Congress.
GOP campaign strategies
The cable claims that Russian national security files held evidence of the 1980 "October Surprise," where Reagan and Bush officials secretly negotiated with Iran to continue holding American hostages until after the elections, thereby weakening Jimmy Carter's chances for reelection. The cable is buried in a storage compartment and never released to the public. The cable tells of attempts by the Carter administration to win the hostages' release by promises of arms and diplomatic relations with Iran; the Republicans make a better offer, and the hostages are not released. The Reagan administration will supply Iran with arms, spare parts, and munitions for the next several years, often facilitated by Israel. The deal leads to the infamous Iran-Contra shipments. (See the January 13, 1980 entry about the House Task Force's "investigation.") - In May 1993, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir answers a reporter's question, "Was there an October Surprise," with the flat reply, "Of course, it was." In another interview, retired Israeli General Yehoshua Saguy, who was head of Israeli military intelligence in 1980, will say that Prime Minister Menachem Begin claimed American approval for Israel's secret 1980 weapons shipments to Iran. The approval had not come from President Carter, who had angrily objected to the shipments when he learned of them. Former French intelligence director Alexandre deMarenches privately mocks the House task force findings and continues to stand behind the sworn testimony of his biographer that says he arranged meetings between Ronald Reagan's campaign chief William Casey and Iranians in Paris in October 1980 (the task force concluded that deMarenches's biographer, David Andelman, was "credible" but for some reason his testimony lacked "probitive value"). These witnesses corroborate longstanding claims about Republican interference from leading Iranians of the period, including Iran's President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Foreign Minister Sadeq Ghotzbadeh and Defense Minister Ahmed Madani. Other testimony had come from intelligence agents with confirmed ties to Israel, France and the United States.
- In 1994, senior representatives of Iran's current government will hold informal talks in Europe with Americans close to President Clinton. Like deMarenches, these Iranians are amused at how wrong the House task force had been. Casey indeed had made secret overtures to Iran during the hostage crisis of 1980, these Iranians will aver. Senior officials in the Clinton administration are informed of the new claims, but refuse to reconsider the House task force findings for unspecified reasons. In 1995, investigative journalist Robert Parry obtains permission from the House International Relations Committee to examine the task force's unclassified papers. He is the first to ever ask for access to the documents. The files and documents are stored in a small office, actually a converted ladies' room, in the sub-basement of the Rayburn House Office Building. Parry finds dusty boxes filled with not only unclassified documents, but "secret" and even "top secret" papers, which Parry speculates had been left behind in the haste to bring the investigation to a conclusion.
- One of the documents is a "secret" deposition from senior CIA officer Charles Cogan, who testified that in 1981 he attended a meeting in CIA headquarters in Langley, where a high-ranking Republican gloated to Casey about their success in disrupting Carter's attempt to rescue the American hostages held in Iran. Another box contains a "secret" summary of FBI wiretaps placed on phones belonging to Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian financier who had worked for the CIA in 1980. Hashemi also was a key Carter intermediary in the hostage talks. But in fall 1980, the wiretaps showed Hashemi receiving a $3 million deposit arranged by a Houston lawyer who claimed to be associated with then-vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. After the 1980 election, the Houston lawyer was back on the phone promising Hashemi help from "the Bush people" for one of Hashemi's failing investments. And shortly after President Reagan's inauguration in 1981, a second mysterious payment to Hashemi arrived from London by Concorde, via a courier for the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). There were notes, too, describing Bush's active involvement in secretly monitoring Carter's Iran hostage negotiations. According to one set of notes, dated Oct. 27, 1980, Bush instructed foreign policy adviser Richard Allen to funnel last-minute information about the negotiations back to him via Theodore Shackley, the CIA's former associate deputy director for operations. Still, another file contained a summary of all "secret" and "top secret" State Department records on arms sales to Iran in the 1980s. One "top secret/sensitive" document recounted private meetings that Secretary of State Alexander Haig had with Middle Eastern leaders during a trip in May 1981. The leaders told Haig about the continuing secret flow of weapons from Israel to Iran. Parry also finds a "confidential" report that had been sent by Russia's Supreme Soviet informing the task force that their secret files contained evidence that Casey, Bush and other Republicans had negotiated secretly with Iranians in Europe in 1980. None of this information is included in the task force's final report.
- Task force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella appears nervous about the weaknesses of the task force's debunking of the October Surprise allegations; on December 8, 1992, Barcella told his deputies "to put some language in, as a trap door" in case later disclosures disproved parts of the report or if complaints arose about selective omission of evidence. "This report does not and could not reflect every single lead that was investigated, every single phone call that was made, every single contact that was established," Barcella suggested as "trap door" wording. "similarly, the task force did not resolve every single one of the scores of 'curiosities,' 'coincidences,' sub-allegations or question marks that have been raised over the years and become part of the October Surprise story." Parry writes, "[A]s the documents made clear, many of those 'coincidences' left out were historically important. The October Surprise story connected some of the world's most powerful figures in secret interlocking business deals. The documents also revealed an investigation that not only overlooked a few 'curiosities' or failed to mention a 'lead' or two, but an inquiry that consistently slanted the evidence. The boxes of documents revealed that the task force used false alibis on Casey's whereabouts for key October Surprise dates; withheld relevant documents and testimony that clashed with its conclusions; dismissed credible witnesses who supplied unwelcome support for the allegations; and accepted dubious -- if not blatantly false -- testimony from Republicans." The files also prove some "curious" conflicts of interest among the staff members, particularly Barcella. In the 1980s, Barcella had served as lead attorney for the tremendously corrupt international bank BCCI, which paid his firm over $2 million to shield the bank from press and governmental investigations. At that time, Barcella was the law partner of Paul Laxalt, who chaired the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign.
- Cyrus Hashemi is a mysterious player. An Iranian banker working out of Manhattan, on September 23, 1980, he received a phone call from two men in Houston informing him that "a Greek ship captain" would be delivering a $3 million deposit from Beirut to Hashemi's offshore bank in the Antilles. The "Greek ship captain" would use the code name "Fibolous." One of the two Texans is former judge Harrel Tillman, a long-time friend of George Bush. Hashemi is currently acting as a principal intermediary for Carter's efforts to free the 52 American hostages in Iran. On November 20, after Carter failed to gain the hostages' release and subsequently lost the presidential election, Tillman called Hashemi again about the "purchase of [a] refinery," according to a secret FBI wiretap summary. Tillman had been in contact with Bush, now the vice-president elect, and had consulted with "the 'Bush' people" about the troubles that Hashemi and his business associate, John Shaheem, were having with a bankrupt oil refinery in Newfoundland. "Bush people would be cooperative with this matter and make it a showcase," Tillman said, according to the summary. "But the 'Bush' people would not act on it until after the Inauguration" in January 1981. Parry interviews Tillman in 1995 about the phone calls, and claims to remember nothing about any of the conversations except being questioned about them by congressional investigators in 1992. "I'm not trying to be evasive," he insists. But Tillman reveals some more interesting connections -- besides being a staunch supporter and donor towards the 1980 Reagan-Bush ticket, he also worked as a consultant to Iran's radical Islamic government -- at the same time he was "helping" Carter broker a deal for the release of the hostages. While the purpose of the mysterious $3 million transaction to Hashemi's bank remains unclear, it is known that Hashemi worked closely with former Nixon administration official Stanley Pottinger and was a business associate of John Shaheen, a Republican businessman who counted among his best friends William Casey, then in charge of the Reagan-Bush campaign and later the head of the CIA.
- Jamshid Hashemi, Cyrus's older brother, swore to the task force investigators that Hashemi began working with Casey and Shaheen on sabotaging Carter's hostage negotiations in the spring and summer of 1980. Cyrus arranged a clandestine meeting in Madrid between Casey and a radical Iranian mullah, Mehdi Karrubi, in late July 1980. At the meeting, Casey allegedly opened a back-channel to Iran that disrupted President Carter's hostage negotiations and ensured Ronald Reagan's victory that November. Two dozen other Iranian, European, and Middle Eastern officials have made similar assertions, but the task force ignores Jamshid Hashemi's testimony and the statements of the other officials to assert that "no credible evidence" exists to support allegations of Republican sabotage.
- One of the task force's principal arguments for the debunking was that a careful review of secret FBI wiretaps on Cyrus Hashemi's phones from September 1980 to February 1981 found nothing to support the so-called October Surprise charges. Parry's examination of the raw data uncovers another story entirely. The task force is aware of the $3 million deposit by "Fibolous" to Hashemi's bank, but fails to mention it in the final report. The task force report fails to examine any of the financial connections that tied Shaheen and Hashemi to wealthy figures from the Philippines, the Middle East, BCCI, and the ousted royal family of Iran. Parry writes, "All those links gave Hashemi powerful motives to betray President Carter -- and, in each one, William Casey was in the background." And the secret FBI wiretap summary provides damning clues to Hashemi's involvement. Besides his routine chats with high-priced prostitutes, Hashemi talked almost daily with Shaheen, a former OSI officer who once worked with Casey on the failed Newfoundland oil refinery discussed by Hashemi and Tillman. On September 22, the day before he received news of the $3 million deposit, Hashemi was working the phones, trying to line up a $40 million loan to help Shaheen regain control of the refinery. That same week, Hashemi and Shaheen hashed over schemes for opening a bank together, possibly in Asia with some Philippine investors. On September 25, Hashemi and Shaheen discussed a "Hong Kong deal," according to the wiretaps. On October 14, the two men were arranging a meeting with Philippine bankers and businessmen. Hashemi expressed concern because he had already deposited "a large sum of money in a bank in the Philippines." While Hashemi was ostensibly helping Carter negotiate the release of the American hostages in October 1980, he was also working with other Republicans lining up arms shipments to Iran, including parts for helicopter gunships and night-vision goggles for pilots, according to the wiretap summary. The summary also contains information about recorded phone conversations between Hashemi and his wife Houma, in which she scolded her husband for lying about his discussions of the hostages with Iranian prime minister Mohammed Rafsanjani. On October 23, Shaheen visited Hashemi's office on 57th Street, and briefed one of his European associates, Dick Gaedecke, about about the latest developments in the hostage negotiations. Hashemi was passing along secret information about the negotiations to Shaheen, Casey's confidant.
- Evidence of a direct link between Hashemi and Ronald Reagan is evident, though not incontrovertible. In 1992, Reuters reported that FBI sources were claiming that agents heard Reagan's voice on one of the tapes, in a conversation with Hashemi. The congressional investigators claim that Reagan's voice is not on any of the tapes, except as recorded background noise from television broadcasts. But they were unable to explain an eight-day gap on one tape. They were also unable to explain why eleven of the tapes were completely blank, though tape experts believe the tapes were probably intentionally erased. The House task force found nothing suspicious in this.
- The House report also leaves out testimony from Iran's former Defense Minister, Ahmed Madani, who stated that he, too, had chastised Hashemi for collaborating secretly with the Republicans behind President Carter's back. Madani testified that Hashemi offered to bring Casey to a hostage discussion during the campaign. "We are not here to play politics," Madani said he responded. The discussion convinced Madani that "Casey wanted to fish in troubled waters" and that Hashemi was "double-dealing" Carter.
- After Reagan's victory, the FBI recorded more conversations documenting Hashemi's ties to the Republicans. On November 20, the same day as Tillman's call about the "Bush people," Hashemi boasted to fellow Iranian Mahmood Moini about ties to Casey, who was then running President-elect Reagan's transition office. "I have been, well, close friends...with Casey for several years," Hashemi told Moini.
- Even after Carter officials stopped using Hashemi in the negotiations because of their discovery of his arms dealings, Hashemi stayed involved. On January 15, just days before Reagan's inauguration and the release of the hostages, Hashemi met with Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials in London and opened an account for them with around $3 million, according to the FBI wiretaps. The money apparently was to finance arms sales. On January 19, the last day of the Carter presidency, Hashemi called a colleague to describe "the banking arrangements being made to free the American hostages in Iran." Hashemi was also moving ahead with military shipments to Iran. "How should we proceed with our friend over there?" the associate asked Hashemi. "I'm just a little bit nervous that everyone is trying to move in on the action here." The hostages were released on January 20.
- Unusual deposits continued to flow into Hashemi's bank, First Gulf Bank and Trust. In early February 1981, the FBI recorded a call alerting Hashemi that "money from BCCI [is] to come in tomorrow from London on Concorde." Within days of the recording, Reagan's Justice Department ordered all the wiretaps dismantled. Though the FBI and field prosecutors wanted to use the wiretaps to pursue arms-trafficking charges against Hashemi, Justice Department officials stymie the indictment for over three years. Even when the indictment finally came down, in May of 1984, someone in the Justice Department tipped off Hashemi that a grand jury was hearing evidence, allowing him to cancel a flight from London to New York and avoid arrest. Less than a year later, in early spring 1985, Israeli arms dealers, Albert Schwimmer and Ya'acov Nimrodi, arrived at a luxury London hotel to meet with Cyrus Hashemi, Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi and an Iranian intelligence agent and arms dealer named Manucher Ghorbanifar. Hashemi was proposing more weapons sales for Iran. He was working again with John Shaheen and Bill Casey, who was now director of the CIA. In 1986, Hashemi suddenly fell critically ill with what was diagnosed with acute leukemia, and died on July 21. Parry writes, "But what Hashemi had started in that London hotel room would become known a few months after Hashemi's death as the Iran-Contra Affair."
- On December 21, 1992, senior CIA official Charles Cogan, one of the agency's Middle East specialists, testifies before the House task force. The task force had already written its report, but the members wanted to tie up some loose ends. Cogan begins with a startling revelation. He testifies that in 1981, he heard then-CIA director tell prominent Republican Joseph Reed about disrupting Carter's attempt to release the American hostages in time for the November 1980 elections. "Joseph Reed said, 'we' and then the verb [and then] something about Carter's October Surprise," Cogan testified. "The implication was we did something about Carter's October Surprise, but I don't have the exact wording." (Another congressional investigator, who discussed the recollection with Cogan in a less formal setting, concluded that the verb apparently was the past tense of an expletive related to sex.) The task force, supposedly charged with seeking evidence of Republican sabotage of Carter's hostage negotiations, was hostile to Cogan. Republican lawyer and former CIA official David Laufman asked if he had ever discussed the matter with Reed. Cogan replied that he had, after Reed had taken a position at the United Nations. "I called him up," Cogan said. "He was at his farm in Connecticut, as I recall, and I just told him that, look, this is what sticks in my mind and what I am going to say [to Congress], and he didn't have any comment on it and continued on to other matters." The task force lawyers failed to ask Cogan about Casey's reaction to Reed's remark about sabotaging Carter's negotiations; instead, Cogan's testimony was filed away in a box and never referred to again.
- Parry also discovers notes from an FBI agent, Harry Penich, who tried to interview Reed about his knowledge of the affair; Reed refused to take any of Penich's calls. It took a subpoena for Penich to gain access to Reed, at Reed's huge estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. "He was surprised and absolutely livid at being served at home," Penich wrote. "His responses could best be characterized as lashing out." Reed threatened Penich with retribution by going over his head to an unnamed supervisor at the FBI; Penich labels Reed's threats as "inappropriate and improper." When Reed finally agrees to be interviewed by the task force, he is treated gingerly by the lawyers on the commission. No one challenges Reed's assertion that he never had any contact with Casey in 1980, and no one asks about Reed's leadership of the David Rockefeller-backed admission of the deposed Shah of Iran to the US for cancer treatment, the event that triggered the seizure of the US Embassy in tehran and the taking of 52 Americans as hostages. Reed says that he only visited Casey in 1981 -- the meeting documented by Cogan -- to "pay respect" to him as part of Reed's new ambassadorship to Morocco. He told the task force that he didn't even know what the term "October Surprise" would have referred to.
- Task force lawyers fail to ask Reed about a documented visit that Reed made to the Reagan-Bush campaign headquarters on September 11, 1980, to visit Casey, a visit that contradicted Reed's denial of ever having met with Casey during that year. On that visit, Reed accompanied David Rockefeller; Owen Frisbie, Rockefeller's Washington lobbyist; and the late Archibald Roosevelt, a Chase adviser and a CIA veteran of Middle East operations, including the 1953 plot that restored the Shah to the Peacock Throne of Iran. In the 25 years after the Shah's restoration to the throne, David Rockefeller's bank profited handsomely from the shah's deposits. But when the shah was ousted in January 1979, Chase faced serious exposure as the new Islamic government ordered $6 billion pulled from Chase's vaults. Besides the money, Rockefeller and his aides were furious at President Carter's treatment of the shah. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lamented that the shah had been turned into a real-life "Flying Dutchman," fleeing from one temporary shelter to another, from Egypt to Morocco to Mexico to the United States to Panama, before returning to Egypt where he died on July 27, 1980.
- Task force lawyers failed to follow up on more testimony from Cogan that indicated close financial ties not only between the Shah's royal family, the Pahlavis, and Rockefeller and Chase Manhattan, but to William Casey's own close business circle. According to a 1984 CIA memo given to the task force, Casey recruited John Shaheen and Cyrus Hashemi in 1979 to sell off property in New York City belonging to the Shah's Pahlavi Foundation. At that time, the radical Islamic government in tehran was claiming that property as its own and the Shah's family was desperate for the cash. This is an early indication of the close ties between Casey, Shaheen, and Hashemi. According to Jamshid Hashemi, it was his brother Cyrus who arranged the July 1980 meetings in Madrid where Casey discussed the hostages with a radical Iranian mullah, Mehdi Karrubi. Though Jamshid's testimony was at the heart of the October Surprise charges that Casey derailed Carter's hostage talks, the task force ignores his testimony and decides that there is "no evidence" that Casey even met Hashemi before the 1980 elections. Parry observes, "In the public report, the task force briefly mentioned the CIA memo, but deleted the identity of the foundation. The word "Pahlavi" was excised, thus obscuring the significance of the information.
- Hashemi and Shaheen also planned to establish a bank together, possibly in Hong Kong, with Philippine investors. The bank deal took final shape two days after Reagan's inauguration and the near-simultaneous release of the 52 American hostages whom Carter had failed to free. On January 22, 1981, Shaheen opened the Hong Kong Deposit and Guaranty Bank with $20 million that had been funneled to him through a Rockefeller-connected lawyer in Geneva, Jean Patry. Included on the board of directors was Herminio Disini, known internationally as Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos's "bag man." According to one of Shaheen's lawyers, Shaheen met with Marcos in early 1981; Marcos considered the Hong Kong bank a way for him "to get his hands on some of the Arabs' Euro-petrodollars." In 1980, Marcos may have delivered secret payments to Casey as well. After Marcos's overthrow in 1986, Reagan asked for files on those payments before Marcos fled to Hawaii. The letter, purportedly written by Marcos's executive assistant, Victor Nituda, stated that Senator Paul Laxalt, the Republican crony of Reagan's, "expects all documents checklisted during his last visit or the deal is off." One of the files was marked "1980 SEC-014, Funds to Casey." Another file was slugged "1980 SEC-015, Reagan Funds Not Used." While in exile in Hawaii, Marcos reportedly boasted to visitors that he gave $4 million to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, contributions that would have violated federal election laws, and might explain why Marcos was allowed to profit off the Hong Kong bank. From 1981-84, Hong Kong Deposit and Guaranty did pull in hundreds of millions of petrodollars, just as Marcos had hoped. The bank also attracted high-flying Arabs to its board of directors. Two directors were Ghanim Al-Mazrouie, the Abu Dhabi official who controlled 10 percent of BCCI, and Hassan Yassin, a cousin of Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi and an adviser to BCCI principal Kamal Adham, the former chief of Saudi intelligence. Though Cyrus Hashemi's name was not directly connected to the Hong Kong bank, he did receive cash from BCCI. As stated above, an FBI wiretap of Hashemi's office in early February 1981 picked up an advisory that "money from BCCI [is] to come in tomorrow from London on Concorde."
- HKDG collapses in 1984 and around $100 million disappears. Since Shaheen himself dies in 1985, of liver cancer, the bank's loss was written off. The single investor who lost $20 million in the collapse never comes forward, preferring to remain unidentified rather than come forward to make a claim. The House task force discovers that the unidentified investor is in fact Princess Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister. Ashraf tells the task force that the $20 million was a routine business investment, and the task force does not follow up. Ashraf was, in 1980, one of Carter's most implacable enemies, blaming Carter for failing to save her brother's throne and for the murder of her son at the hands of Iranian radicals. Too, Ashraf suspected that Carter's team may have been willing to trade her brother for the hostages. It is quite possible that Ashraf's "missing" $20 million, supplied to Hashemi's business partner Shaheen, might, along with the mysterious "Concorde" money from BCCI, is some kind of payoff or funding for the Republicans' sabotage of the hostage negotiations. But since lead investigator Lawrence Barcella had worked for BCCI as a lead attorney in the 1980s, he was not interested in pursuing any leads that might lead anywhere near BCCI.
- Another fascinating connection that is uncovered by Parry's scrutiny of the House task force documents leads to Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein. In the summer of 1980, Hussein was not the reviled enemy of Western civilization and George Bush's bete noire, but an ally, albeit a fractious and unreliable one, in the Middle East. Iran's Islamic revolution had the Saudi royals and other Arab governments in fear for their positions and their lives; Hussein was seen as a bulwark against the Iranians exporting their Islamist revolution to neighboring countries. Hussein was also wooed by CIA-backed Iranian exiles who needed a base from which to challenge the Khomeini regime. And of course, Western powers fretted about the Middle East's oil fields. Hussein, with his formidable Soviet-supplied army, was quite useful. Hussein visited the Saudi royal palace on August 5, 1980, for the first of a series of meetings with the Sauds. The Sauds wanted Hussein to invade Iran; they also have claimed to have passed along a secret message from Jimmy Carter about the US aims in the region. Carter was desperate, both politically and morally, to secure the freedom of the 52 American hostages being held in tehran. He knew that the 1980 presidential elections would hinge on whether or not they were freed before Election Day. Carter also knew something about covert Republican back-channel contacts with the Iranians about the hostages, which he will confirm to a journalist nearly ten years later. Hussein invades Iran in September 1980. The war did nothing to stabilize the region, and led to the killing and maiming of over a million Iranians and Iraqis, but it did pour billions in profits into the coffers of the well-connected arms merchants supplying both sides. It also spawned a raft of national security scandals in the US. Americans learned something of the duplicitous dealings of the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1986-87 Iran-Contra hearings, but compliant investigators decided to pin the blame on Oliver North and a few low-level confreres. Later inquiries into "Iraqgate" allegations of secret, illegal US military support for Iraq, and into the missing billions from the lavishly corrupt BCCI ran into dead ends; so did evidence implicating the CIA and Nicaraguan contra rebels in cocaine trafficking. The same thing happens to the 1993 investigation into the 1980 "October Surprise."
- Among the many papers uncovered by Parry were documents detailing Reagan's early foreign policy strategies, a clandestine policy approach hidden from Congress and the American people. One such document is a two-page "Talking Points" memo prepared by then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig for a briefing of Reagan. Marked "top secret/sensitive," the paper recounted Haig's first trip to the Middle East in April 1981. Haig wrote that he was impressed with "bits of useful intelligence" that he had learned. "Both [Egypt's Anwar] Sadat and [Saudi Prince] Fahd [explained that] Iran is receiving military spares for US equipment from Israel." This fact might have been less surprising to Reagan, whose intermediaries allegedly collaborated with Israeli officials in 1980 to smuggle weapons to Iran behind President Carter's back. But Haig then wrote, "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd." In other words, according to Haig's information, Saudi Prince Fahd (now King Fahd) claimed that Jimmy Carter, apparently hoping to strengthen the US hand in the Middle East and desperate to pressure Iran over the stalled hostage talks, gave clearance to Iraq's invasion of Iran. If true, Jimmy Carter, the peacemaker, had encouraged a war. Haig's written report contained no other details about the "green light." Though Haig has never discussed the report, it represents the first documented corroboration of Iran's long-held belief that the United States backed Iraq's 1980 invasion. In 1980, Carter termed Iranian charges of US complicity "patently false." He mentioned Iraq's invasion only briefly in his memoirs, in the context of an unexpected mid-September hostage initiative from a relative of Khomeini, Sadeq Tabatabai. "Exploratory conversations [in Germany] were quite encouraging," Carter wrote about that approach, but added: "As fate would have it, the Iraqis chose the day of [Tabatabai's] scheduled arrival in Iran, September 22, to invade Iran and to bomb the Tehran airport. Typically, the Iranians accused me of planning and supporting the invasion."
- The Iranians were both angry and pragmatic. They demanded that the US provide them with spare parts for its air and ground military equipment to counter the invading Iraqis; Carter continued to insist that the hostages be freed before the US would continue shipping parts. So instead, the Iranians turned to Carter's political enemies, the Republicans, who were far more accomodating. Secret FBI wiretaps revealed that Cyrus Hashemi, who supposedly was helping Carter on the hostage talks, was assisting Republicans with arms shipments to Iran and peculiar money transfers in fall 1980, as documented above. Hashemi's older brother, Jamshid, testified that the Iran arms shipments, via Israel, resulted from secret meetings in Madrid between the GOP campaign director, William Casey, and radical Islamic mullah Mehdi Karrubi. Iran got its parts, the hostages remained captive, and Carter lost the election to Ronald Reagan.
- The hostages were freed within minutes of Reagan's inauguration, which Reagan officials spun as evidence that the Iranians were cowed by the new, blustery Republican commander-in-chief. In the upcoming weeks, Reagan officials began discreetly meeting with Iraq's chief allies in the Iran-Iraq war, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and with Israel, who was quietly supplying Iran with arms as a counterbalance to Iraq and the Arab states. Haig came back to Washington from Riyadh on April 8, 1981, announcing a new era of friendly relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. His top-secret memo reveals more, particularly the establishment of a three-way secret communications channel between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. This three-way dialogue became the cornerstone of Reagan's secret foreigh policy: as Parry writes, "the Saudis as the moneymen, the Israelis as the middlemen, and the Egyptians as a ready source for Soviet-made equipment" for the Iraqis and Iranians alike. Both Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat expressed their pleasure at a new, more forceful American regime. "It is clear that your policies of firmness toward the Soviets has restored Saudi and Egyptian confidence in the leadership of the US," Haig wrote for the presentation to Reagan. "Both [Fahd and Sadat] went much further than ever before in offering to be supportive." Haig wrote that "sadat offered to host a forward headquarters for the Rapid Deployment Force, including a full-time presence of U.S military personnel." Sadat also outlined his strategy for invading Libya to disrupt Moammar Qaddafi's intervention in Chad, a policy that Haig intended to attempt to moderate. According to Haig's document, Saudi's Prince Fahd was "also very enthusiastic" about Reagan's foreign policy. Fahd had agreed "in principle to fund arms sales to the Pakistanis and other states in the region." The Saudi leader was promising, too, to help the US economy by committing his oil-rich nation to a position of "no drop in production" of oil. "These channels promise to be extremely useful in forging compatible policies with the Saudis and Egyptians," Haig wrote. "Both men value the 'special status' you have conferred on them and both value confidentiality. I will follow up with [Defense Secretary] Cap Weinberger and [CIA Director] Bill Casey. ...The larger message emerging from these exchanges, however, is that your policies are correct and are already eliciting the enthusiastic support of important leaders abroad." In the following years, the Reagan administration would exploit the "special status" with all three countries to skirt Constitutional restrictions on executive war-making powers. Secretly, the administration would tilt back and forth in the Iran-Iraq war, between aiding the Iranians with missiles and spare parts, with Israeli help, and helping the Iraqis with intelligence and indirect military shipments, with Saudi and Egyptian help.
- In 1984, facing congressional rejection of continued CIA funding of the Nicaraguan contra rebels, Reagan exploited the "special status" again. He tapped into the Saudi slush funds for money to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels in their war in Central America. He also authorized secret weapons shipments to Iran in another arms-for-hostages scheme, with the profits going to "off-the-shelf" intelligence operations. Parry writes, "That gambit, like the others, was protected by walls of 'deniability' and outright lies. Some of those lies collapsed in the Iran-Contra scandal, but the administration quickly constructed new stonewalls that were never breached. Republicans fiercely defended the secrets and Democrats lacked the nerve to fight for the truth. The Washington media also lost interest because the scandals were complex and official sources steered the press in other directions."
- The gamesmanship had unintended and far-reaching consequences. In 1990, a decade after Iraq's messy invasion of Iran, an embittered Saddam Hussein was looking for pay-back from the sheikhdoms that he felt had egged him into war. He was especially furious with Kuwait for slant drilling into Iraq's oil fields and refusing to extend more credit. Again, Hussein was looking for a signal from the US president, this time George Bush. When he explained his confrontation with Kuwait to US Ambassador April Glaspie, he received an ambiguous reply, a reaction he apparently perceived as another "green light." Eight days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait, an invasion that required 500,000 US troops and thousands more dead to reverse. It also led, in its own convoluted fashion, to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Bush's son. George W.
- According to the official version of events, former Reagan-Bush campaign chairman William Casey, Reagan's CIA director and a key player in the Republican sabotage of Carter's attempts to free the hostages before the election, wasn't in Madrid over July 26-27, 1980, negotiating with Iranians over the secret sabotage scheme. Instead, Casey was at the annual Bohemian Grove retreat in Northern California. A House task force investigator crowed to Parry and other journalists that he had found a photograph placing Casey in the Grove during that weekend. Jamshid Hashemi had already testified that he was with Casey in Madrid, helping Casey negotiate with Iranian mullah Mehdi Karrubi. Casey was verifiably in Arlington, Virginia, early on July 26, and in London on July 28. The question has always been, was Casey in London over those missing two days? Both Newsweek and the New Republic published cover stories in November 1991, during the heat of the October Surprise investigation, that claimed Casey was at a World War II historical conference in London on July 27 and 28. Therefore, he could not have been in Madrid, and thusly the entire October Surprise thesis was merely a "myth." Parry writes, "The impact of those two magazine stories cannot be overstated. They convinced most of the Washington news media and many members of Congress that the longstanding suspicions of Casey's skulduggery were false. A kind of debunking hysteria followed, with other publications joining in a stampede that trampled any careful examination of the October Surprise facts." It turns out that both publications were wrong. More thorough interviews with Americans who had attended the London conference reveal that Casey was not there either Sunday evening or Monday morning. Casey arrived at 4 pm, according to the attendance sheet. Neither Newsweek nor the New Republic corrected their stories. "so millions of Americans were left believing that the two magazines had established a correct alibi for Bill Casey and that the October Surprise story had been disproved," Parry writes.
- The stories were wrong, so instead of trying to find the truth, the House task force set about finding another alibi for Casey. By the fall of 1992, they decided that Casey must have been at the Bohemian Grove encampment during those fateful two days. According to this new alibi, Casey flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Friday, July 25, with Republican operative Darrell Trent. He then drove with Trent to the Bohemian Grove, arriving sometime late Friday evening. Casey stayed at the Grove until Sunday morning, July 27. He then went to San Francisco, boarded a British Airways flight, flew all night, and landed about lunchtime the next day, Monday, July 28, in London. That itinerary left no time for a side trip to Spain, so Jamshid Hashemi's allegations of a secret two-day meeting in Madrid could be declared false a second time. The October Surprise charges were again dismissed. But Parry and other reporters for PBS's Frontline found clear, documentary evidence that Casey had indeed been at the Grove -- over the following weekend, August 1-3. Indeed, the House task force's own evidence countered the Bohemian Grove alibi. According to Grove records obtained by the House investigators, Casey's host, Darrell Trent, was already at the Grove on Friday, July 25, while Casey was still in Washington. So they could not have traveled together from Los Angeles. Further, the task force found a plane ticket for a flight that Casey did take that day -- a ticket for the Washington-to-New York shuttle. A Casey calendar entry then showed a meeting on Saturday morning, July 26, with a right-to-life activist who said she met Casey at his home in Roslyn Harbor, NY. Republican campaign records revealed that on August 1, Casey did travel to Los Angeles, where he met up with Darrell Trent. Also on August 1, Grove financial records documented Casey and Trent making purchases at the Grove. In addition, a diary entry from Matthew McGowan, one of the Grove members at the Parsonage cottage, shows that "we had Bill Casey, Gov. Reagan's campaign mgr., as our guest this last weekend." Nevertheless, the House task force sticks with the Bohemian Grove alibi.
- The task force also works to alibi Casey for the other crucial date, October 19, 1980. Witnesses testified that Casey was in Paris for another round of meetings with Karrubi, an assertion supported by former French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches. Instead, the task force takes the word of Casey's nephew, Larry Casey, who says that he clearly remembers his father placing a phone call to Casey, at the Arlington campaign headquarters, on October 19. Though Larry Casey has no corroboration for that memory, the task force accepts it as "credible." Again, Frontline reporters prove that alibi is bogus. In 1991, a year before Larry Casey testified to the task force, Parry interviewed him and was told he remembered his parents having dinner with Casey in Washington that evening. When Parry showed Larry Casey the sign-in sheets for the GOP headquarters, showing that Larry's parents picked up Casey on October 15, he concedes that he misremembered. An American Express receipt later confirmed October 15 as the date of the Jockey Club dinner. All that aside, the task force accepts Larry's story about the phone call alibi. When Parry presents the task force with his evidence to the contrary, they ignore it.
- Then comes the assertion of a task force investigator who says he found a photograph of Casey at the Grove on the last weekend of July 1980. But when Parry questions him, the investigator hedges: "Well, Bill Casey's not in the photograph. Everyone else is. Darrell Trent, his host, is there. But Bill Casey's not in the picture." But the task force asserts that the photograph is solid proof of Casey's presence at the Grove. Task force chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, cites the Casey alibis as solid reasons why the report "should put the controversy to rest once and for all." Hamilton's assertion is in a New York Times op-end from January. 24, 1993 titled "Case Closed." In 1994, Parry found the photo in question. It shows 16 men at the Grove during the last weekend of July. He writes, "They were posed in a formal setting, with some older gentlemen seated in front and the other members and guests standing in elevated rows behind them. I looked at one man after another, searching for the tall, stooped, large-headed figure of Bill Casey. He was nowhere to be seen."
- On October 27, just days before the elections, a nervous George Bush calls senior Reagan foreign policy advisor Richard Allen. Allen is keeping close tabs on Carter's attempts to free the Americans held hostage in Iran. Bush has heard from Texas Republican John Connelly that the Middle East is buzzing with rumors that Carter was about to win the release of the hostages in return for a delivery of spare military parts to Iran via Israel. Like everyone else, Bush knows that the release before the election would throw the presidency to Carter. Allen's notes, found by Parry in the boxes of documents abandoned by the House task force, prove that Bush, not Reagan, was running the October Surprise for the Reagan-Bush campaign. In 1992 Allen testified, in a still-secret deposition, that Connally had heard that Carter had ransomed the hostages' freedom with an Israeli shipment of military spare parts to Iran. Allen said Bush then instructed him to query Connally, who was in Houston, and to pass on any new details to two of Bush's closest personal aides. According to the notes, Allen was to relay the information to "Ted Shacklee [sic] via Jennifer." Jennifer was Bush's longtime assistant, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Allen testified. "shacklee" was Theodore Shackley, the legendary CIA covert ops specialist known as the "blond ghost." During the Cold War, Shackley had run many of the CIA's most controversial paramilitary operations, from Vietnam and Laos to the JMWAVE operations against Fidel Castro's Cuba. When Bush was CIA director in 1976, he appointed Shackley to a top clandestine job, associate deputy director for operations. Shackley's CIA career ended in 1979, after three years of battling Carter's CIA director, Stansfield Turner. Shackley believed that Turner, by cleaning out hundreds of covert "old boys," was destroying the agency as well as Shackley's own career. Shackley went into business with another ex-CIA man, Thomas Clines, a partner with Edwin Wilson, the rogue spy who later would go to prison over shipments of terrorist materials to Libya. Clines himself would be convicted of tax fraud in the Iran-Contra scandal, another controversy in which Shackley was involved.
- Shackley wanted Reagan and Bush in the White House, and thought he could possibly secure the directorship for himself as well. He volunteered to help his former boss's campaign in early 1980, an involvement that has remained a closely guarded secret. Task force members should have taken note of Shackley's involvement. They already knew that ex-CIA members were managing a round-the-clock "Operations Center" at the Arlington campaign headquarters to monitor Iranian developments. Allen dismissed the group as a "plane load of disgruntled CIA" officers "playing cops and robbers." A secret draft chapter of the House report stated, "Many of the [Operations Center's] staff members were former CIA employees who had previously worked on the Bush campaign or were otherwise loyal to George Bush." But that section was deleted from the publicly released version. Another task force discovery -- also dropped from the final report -- was that conservative "journalist" Michael Ledeen, another Shackley associate, was privately collaborating with the Reagan-Bush campaign on the Iran hostage issue. The draft chapter said Ledeen was an unofficial member of the campaign's "October Surprise" group. A separate page of Allen's notes revealed Ledeen joining campaign director, Casey, in a September 16 meeting for what was called the "Persian Gulf Project." Ledeen had been responsible for the late 1980 story that revealed Billy Carter's business ties to Libya, writing it for the New Republic without mentioning that he was a paid consultant for SISMI, the Italian intelligence bureau that had leaked the information, or that he was working for the Reagan-Bush campaign. And Shackley still maintained close ties with Donald Gregg, the CIA liason inside Carter's National Security Council; Gregg is believed to have kept the Reagan-Bush campaign informed of the secret negotiations over the hostages. Gregg would later become national security adviser to Vice-President Bush and a secondary figure in the Iran-contra scandal.
- Still, the question remained, did Casey and Bush meet with Iranian mullahs in 1980? The two were alleged to have done so on October 19. Four French intelligence officials, including France's spy chief Alexandre deMarenches in statements to his biographer, placed Casey at the Paris meeting. But two other witnesses, a pilot named Heinrich Rupp and Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe, also claimed to have seen Bush in Paris that day. Ben-Menashe testified that Casey and Bush were accompanied by active-duty CIA officers. Rupp, who says he flew Casey from National Airport to Paris, recalled that the flight left very late on a rainy night. The night of October 18 indeed was rainy and sign-in sheets at the Republican headquarters showed Casey stopping at the Operations Center for a 10-minute visit at about 11:30 pm. The headquarters in Arlington was only a five-minute drive from National Airport. Casey also had no credible alibi for his whereabouts on that day. Bush, however, was a different story. He was under Secret Service protection and those confidential records listed him as taking a day off from the campaign at his home in Washington. Yet, there were troubles with Bush's alibi. None of the Secret Service agents could recall the two personal trips that Bush supposedly took in the morning and afternoon of October 19. Then, the Bush administration blocked access to one family friend listed as receiving a visit from the Bushes in the afternoon. The name was blacked out in the records given to the task force, and the investigators only got the name by promising to keep it secret and to never question the family friend. The House task force acquiesced to these unusual terms, and the purported alibi witness was never interviewed. In its first public statement on July 1, 1992, the task force cleared Bush. That decision meant that the task force never had to explain another oddity. Frontline investigators, including Parry, had found that on October 18, a Chicago Tribune reporter, John Maclean, told US Foreign Service officer David Henderson that he had learned from a Republican source that that Bush was flying to Paris that day to discuss the hostages with Iranians. Such allegations from two separate sources, who were strangers to one another, should have prompted the task force to interview the alibi witness, but they refused. Parry writes, "To the task force, the possibility that former and current CIA officers conspired with Republicans and foreign intelligence services to unseat a President of the United States was unthinkable. If true, it would have meant that elements of the CIA mounted a silent coup d'etat that undermined American democracy to put in place a President who would unleash the spy agency."
- CIA hardliners were quite pleased with the new administration. Under Casey, covert operations proliferated; dozens of cashiered CIA officers were brought back on contract, and billions of tax dollars were funnelled into CIA projects. The Carter-era concerns about human rights were tabled, and CIA-trained units launched death-squad operations throughout Central American and Africa. Reagan officials winked at drug smuggling by CIA-connected groups, including the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghani mujahedeen. They took no action to stop CIA associates from plundering international banks, most notably through BCCI, which had paid off a key Iranian in the October Surprise operation.
- As it turned out, Connally had raised a false alarm on October 27. The shipment of Israeli spare parts to Iran had been in defiance of Carter, not as a payoff for the hostage release. Carter told the task force in 1992 that Israel's ruling Likud party had been solidly behind Reagan's election, mostly because they disapproved of his attempts to thaw relations between the US and various Arab nations. Led by chief investigator Lawrence Barcella, who was close to many of the figures implicated in the October Surprise, the task force failed to investigate the allegations. On February 3, 1993, GOP congressmen trumpeted the "debunking" of the October Surprise affair. Henry Hyde, on the floor of the House, called the entire story a "myth." Indeed, Republicans soon twisted the story into a Republican grievance, using it for the next three years as a battle cry to justify their demands for one investigation after another into Clinton. Parry writes, "House Democrats may have thought they were buying some political peace by clearing Casey and Bush on the 1980 matter. But the Democrats were wrong." The few who did were quickly muzzled. House member Melvin Dymally wanted to write a formal dissent to the official report, revealing the truth behind many of the bogus alibis and twisted conclusions, but Barcella, with the key assistance of chairman Lee Hamilton, pressured Dymally into withdrawing the dissent by threatening to denounce Dymally for missing task force meetings and not having his staff aide, Marwan Burgan, cleared for reviewing all classified material. After Hamilton fired all the staffers who had worked on Dymally's Africa subcommittee, Dymally withdrew the dissent. Two weeks before, Bush had pardoned six Iran-Contra conspirators, bringing the Iran-Contra investigation to a final standstill. Bush leaves office as his staff members are ripping out the hard drives of their computers and refusing to comply with Congressional requests for documents about the secret arming of Iraq.
- Bush has a key ally in the cover-up: Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Dole, who will garner the 1996 presidential nomination, "played the same protective role for Bush that House Minority Leader Gerald Ford had for President Nixon in the early days of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s," Parry writes. Dole was a critical player in the stonewalling of the Iran-Contra investigations, in the process winning powerful friends among the hard-right Reagan supporters. Dole mounted a filibuster against any independent Senate inquiry into the October Surprise, and on November 22 corralled enough Republicans to defeat a cloture vote and block special funding for the investigation. After a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee sponsored a small-scale investigation, Dole's closest Senate cronies, Mitch McConnell and Jesse Helms, summoned the chief counsel, Reid Weingarten, into a closed-door meeting. McConnell brow-beat Weingarten with personal insults. Helms barred Weingarten's investigators from interviewing witnesses outside Washington. Weingarten did make some significant discoveries. He obtained testimony corroborating claims that Casey had known Cyrus Hashemi before the 1980 election. His investigators found that some FBI wiretaps of Hashemi might have been intentionally erased. He revealed that key Casey records -- the 1980 passport and several calendar pages -- were missing and that the Casey family was withholding documents. But Weingarten could come to no specific conclusions except that Casey had been "fishing in troubled waters" on the hostage issue in 1980 and was engaged in "informal, clandestine, and potentially dangerous efforts on behalf of the Reagan campaign to gather intelligence on the volatile and unpredictable course of the hostage negotiations." The investigation was shunted into the friendlier hands of the House task force, which rubber-stamped the cover-up of the Reagan-Bush sabotage of the Iranian hostage negotiations. Parry writes, "In that way, the historical legitimacy of the Reagan and Bush presidencies was preserved. Henry Hyde and the other Republicans could celebrate." (Consortium News, (Consortium News, Consortium News, Consortium News, Consortium News, Consortium News, Consortium News, Consortium News)
- January 13: The House task force issues a report debunking the 1980 "October Surprise" theory,
GOP campaign strategies
saying that "no credible evidence" exists to confirm it. Instead of searching for evidence, the task force concocts specious alibis for the players involved, including William Casey and George H.W. Bush. As for the information supplied by the Russians, there is no follow-up, even though two CIA directors (Casey and Robert Gates) and two Presidents (Reagan and Bush) are directly involved in the scheme. See the above item for exhaustive information on the October Surprise, as documented by investigative journalist Robert Parry. (Consortium News) - January 13: As violent protests against abortion providers, abortion clinics,
Minority rights
and family counseling clinics escalates, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, refuses to use an 1871 law called the "Ku Klux Klan Act" to bar protesters from trying to block women's access to abortion clinics. (CBS) - January 18: As one of his final actions in office, outgoing President Bush pardons Aslam Adam.
Republican corruption
Adam, a Pakistani, is currently serving his 8th year of a 55-year sentence for smuggling $1.5 million worth of heroin into the US. The pardon garners little media attention; a journalistic investigation four years later shows that US Senator Jesse Helms, a stalwart friend of the Pakistani military regime, had interceded for Adam. Adam was allowed to return home to Karachi, Pakistan. The prosecutor of the Adam case, Ken Andresen, will say, "This move by President Bush as he was leaving office strikes me as exceedingly peculiar, given his strong rhetoric regarding his efforts to fight crime in general and drugs in particular." (Salon, US House of Representatives) - January 20: Clinton takes office as President. Clinton is forced to renege on his vague promise of a "middle-class tax cut" after finding out just how badly the US economy had been laid waste by the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Clinton Administration
He finds that the budget is over $3 trillion in deficit, figures that have been carefully camouflaged by the Bush administration; to offset the surprisingly large deficits, Clinton will raise taxes, mostly on the upper classes. The same conservatives who had presided over the historical deficits under Reagan and Bush will, in Joe Conason's words, throw a "monumental tantrum," screaming about the "largest tax increase in history." The accusation is a lie when first made, and will contunie to be a lie no matter how many times it is repeated. The Wall Street Journal confirms that the 1993 tax increase is nowhere near the "largest in history;" that honor is reserved for the tax increase of 1983, proposed by the Reagan administration and shepherded through the Congress by Senator Bob Dole. Conservatives will fight Clinton's tax increase because it targets the wealthiest Americans -- the top 1.2% of taxpayers -- though Clinton's budget cuts, again in response to the enormous deficits saddled on the US economy by 12 years of Reagan-Bush policies, affect most Americans. The ruckus caused by the right about Clinton's tax policies will, in large part, bring about the debacle suffered by Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections. (CNN, Joe Conason) - Many in the fundamentalist Christian hard right refuse to accept Bill Clinton as president.
Clinton Administration
The Christian Coalition calls his inauguration "a repudiation of our forefathers' covenant with God," and religious-conservative activist Paul Weyrich announces, "The nation deserves the hatred of God under Clinton." (Joe Klein/Paul Waldman) - January 20: Peace talks between Israel and the PLO begin in a villa outside Oslo, Norway.
Middle East peace process
The talks will continue sporadically for months. One of the key roadblocks to hammering out an agreement is the resistance of Israel towards recognizing the legitimacy of the existence of the PLO. (Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Dawoud el-Alami)
Clinton is asked by Bush to back off on Iraq/BCCI investigation and agrees
- Late January: Early in his term, Clinton is asked by Bush to back off on the Iraqgate/BCCI investigation, and agrees to do so.
BCCI scandal
The reason for Clinton's acquiescence is unclear; either he did so out of a concern for national security and national unity, or he believed that by doing so, he would win some cooperation with the GOP in Congress, a belief that, if true, turns out to be false and, in retrospect, exceedingly naive. (Consortium News) - Late January: Clinton's first action upon entering office is to sign Executive Order 12834,
BCCI scandal
entitled "Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees," which places severe restrictions upon the ability of his senior political appointees to lobby their colleagues after they leave office. Clinton will rescind the order shortly before he leaves office in favor of Executive Order 13184 of December 28, 2000, partially in acknowledgement of the powerful lobbying advantage enjoyed by Washington Republicans. (Wikipedia) - Late January: After leaving the Pentagon, former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney
joins the American Enterprise Institution. In 1995 he will join Halliburton Corporation as its CEO. He will also sit on the boards of Proctor & Gamble, Union Pacific, and EDS. (Nationmaster) - During the Clinton years, Enron pumps nearly $2 million into Democratic causes,
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
mostly to facilitate Enron's participation in junkets run by Clinton's Commerce Department, and CEO Kenneth Lay will forge a particularly close working relationship with Clinton's Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. However, Enron retains its GOP favoritism, pouring three times the amount of money into GOP congressional contributions than into Democrat campaign funds. In 1996, Lay will serve as the regional chairman for the presidential bid of Phil Gramm, who was also supported by Texas governor George W. Bush. (Kevin Phillips)
"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together." -- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 21, quoted by Brandi Mills
