   |
  
Follow the Middle
East Forum
|
|||||
|
Please take a moment to
visit and log in at the subscriber
area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this
information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your
area.
Gary Sick, Discredited but Honored
  Be the first of your
friends to like this.
The so-called "October Surprise"
plot that briefly enthralled the American public twenty years ago is one of
the most influential political conspiracy theories in U.S. history. As the
story goes, fearful that the release of fifty-two American hostages in Iran
before the November 1980 presidential election would secure President Carter
a second term in office, the campaign of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan
agreed to funnel weapons to the Islamic Republic in exchange for a delay in
the hostage release until after the vote.
First floated by Lyndon Larouche and his
followers shortly after Reagan's landslide victory,[1] the conspiracy theory remained
obscure until the Iran-Contra scandal suddenly gave the idea of such
collusion an aura of plausibility. Since the Iranians clearly had it in their
power to have an impact on the 1980 election, it was not unreasonable to
surmise that they would have sought to leverage this influence. Those who
loathe the political right in the United States found it difficult to accept
that the Iranians held off on releasing the hostages until after Reagan's
inauguration without some form of quid pro quo.
The first to lend gravitas and mainstream
credibility to allegations of a delay-for-arms deal was Gary Sick, a member
of the National Security Council under Carter and his chief advisor on Iran.
Now at Columbia University, Sick had written a well-received book on the 1979
Iranian revolution and ensuing hostage crisis, All Fall Down: America's
Tragic Encounter with Iran.[2]
In an April 1991 New York Times op-ed, Sick wrote that "hundreds
of interviews in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East" with mostly
anonymous sources had led him to conclude that "individuals associated
with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to
delay the release of the American hostages."[3] Later that year, he published his
findings in October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election
of Ronald Reagan,[4]
an account that combined a heavily footnoted script with sensationalist
revelations about political corruption and treason.
One man's accusations have not had such a
sweeping impact on public perceptions since the McCarthy era. With all of the
major television networks covering the story incessantly, a January 1992 poll
showed that 55 percent of Americans believed the allegations.[5]
With the United States still reeling from the
Iran-Contra affair, Sick's accusations triggered a string of devastating
journalistic critiques[6]
and two congressional inquiries that definitively discredited the October
Surprise conspiracy theory.[7]
However, while Sen. Joseph McCarthy was destroyed by his irresponsible allegations,
The October Surprise made Sick a star. Today he is a much sought-after
commentator on Iran and Middle Eastern affairs with frequent appearances on
CNN and C-Span, columns in The Daily Beast[8] and Foreign Policy,[9] and a solid scholarly standing at
Columbia—despite having published no subsequent books.
This success is indicative of how lucrative
stridently politicized pseudo-research on the Middle East can be. While many
of his liberal compatriots have come to acknowledge that the specific
allegations he put forth in October Surprise are unfounded, most are
unwilling to discard either their lingering suspicions that some form of
delay-for-arms deal was made or find significant fault in Sick himself. If he
got it wrong, the consensus appears to be, it was an honest mistake.
In Search of Mehdi
However, a close examination of one glaring
misstep by Sick—largely unnoticed until now only because his book was
discredited on other grounds—raises new questions about this verdict. Much of
his argument rests on testimony he obtained from Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli
who claimed to have been a top Mossad agent deeply involved in Iranian
affairs. Central to his story is Mehdi Kashani, whom Ben-Menashe placed both
in Israel in early 1980 as an emissary of the Islamic Republic looking for an
arms deal, and in Madrid and Paris during the spring, summer, and fall of
that year as a member of the Iranian teams involved in the alleged meetings
with the Reagan campaign.
As it turns out, the Mehdi Kashani described
by Ben-Menashe in his conversations with Sick and in his 1992 memoir Profits
of War,[10] does
not exist. He is a phantom with a life story that casually blends public
domain biographical information of two very different, real-life individuals
with similar names—Mehdi Kashani, a government official involved in arms
procurement, and Seyed Ahmed Kashani, scion to a prominent religious family
and himself an Islamist politician—into a single, unlikely narrative.
Ben-Menashe's descriptions of the fictional Kashani—his activities, his
Iranian regime connections, and his whereabouts—suggest that he was not
sufficiently familiar with either of the real life inspirations for his
character, or with Iran in general, to detect his mistake. That Sick—by all
accounts an intelligent, seasoned observer of the country—carried forth this
ruse was not an honest mistake but a willful dereliction of professional
ethics.
Ben-Menashe was a latecomer among self-declared
participants in the October Surprise conspiracy, claiming involvement only
after he was arrested in 1989 for attempting to sell U.S.-built military
transport aircraft to an undercover U.S. customs agent posing as an Iranian
emissary[11] (an
early telltale sign that he was not very well connected). He was acquitted of
the charges after testifying that he had the secret approval of both the U.S.
and Israeli governments and then began approaching anyone who would listen
with an elaborate, self-glorifying account of international intrigue and
realpolitik that grew "more richly detailed with each telling."[12]
Ben-Menashe claims to have been a Mossad
agent posing as a student in Tehran during the late 1970s. There, according
to Sick, he "became acquainted with a number of student leaders on the
campus, most notably Ahmed Kashani, a young student who was a teaching
assistant in a university seminar" whom he identifies as a son of the
late Iranian cleric Ayatollah Abolqasem Kashani. Ahmed was "a man with a
famous name, whose family retained some political power and had its own
network of influence."[13]
Ben-Menashe told Sick that Ahmed Kashani
always used the first name "Mehdi" in their dealings,[14] and he casually substitutes this
nickname when writing in Profits of War of "Sayeed Mehdi Kashani,
the son of Ayatollah Abol Qassem Kashani, who at the time was an opposition
Shiite leader living in the holy city of Qom."[15] He also claimed that Kashani came
to Israel in early 1980 to negotiate an arms deal, which led to the delivery
of tires for Iranian F-4 fighter aircraft. According to Ben-Menashe,
Kashani's father "was now a member of the ruling Supreme Council,"[16] ostensibly explaining why a former
teaching assistant was suddenly a jet-setting arms broker for Iran's ruling
mullahs.
According to Ben-Menashe, Kashani was present
at all four rounds of talks allegedly held between the Reagan campaign
(including campaign chief William J. Casey, who would later become the head
of the CIA, and possibly George H. W. Bush) and the Iranians—two in Madrid in
May and July 1980 and one in Paris (which Ben-Menashe claims to have
attended) the following October.[17]
Ben-Menashe's testimony should have raised
red flags for someone with Sick's knowledge of Iran. To begin, Ben-Menashe
highlights Kashani's lineage as proof of his standing with the new Iranian
regime, a detail that Sick took to be true: "Kashani's father, Ayatollah
Abol Qassem Kashani, was now a member of the ruling Supreme Council."
However, the ayatollah died in 1962[18]—long
before the revolution or the late monarchical era when Ben-Menashe placed him
as "an opposition Shiite leader."
Nor for that matter does Ben-Menashe's
description of the circumstances of his friendship with Kashani hold water.
For one thing, it is unlikely that the real Mehdi Kashani, born in 1943,
would have been a student contemporary of Ben-Menashe in 1978 when, at
thirty-five, Kashani might already have been in the midst of his professional
career. For another, it is inconceivable that Seyed Ahmed Kashani, son of the
late prominent ayatollah with a powerful network of influence to rely upon,
would be employed as a lowly teaching assistant at the age of thirty-one. If
anything, had he been at a university, he would have been a professor or an
otherwise accomplished professional had he been pursuing a different career.
Indeed, two years after his supposed campus meeting with Ben-Menashe, Kashani
was already a member of parliament.[19]
Moreover, given his lineage and radical
political leanings, it is very unlikely that Seyed Ahmed Kashani would have
been willing to broker arms deals with the United States and Israel and
virtually inconceivable that he would have been allowed to play such a role.
As a member of parliament from 1980 to 1986, he was an outspoken left-wing,
Islamist radical and critic of the government.[20] His brother Mahmoud was even more
of a problem as a presidential candidate.[21]
The Kashani brothers were very much in step
with the politics of their father, a firebrand radical who combined Iranian
nationalism with radical Islam and hatred of Israel.[22] Both were close to Mehdi Hashemi,
a prominent figure in the more revolutionary wing of the clerical
establishment actively involved in promoting the export of the revolution.
Hashemi's radicalism made him vehemently opposed to any deal with Washington
and put him on a collision course with those in the regime who recognized the
need for U.S. weaponry to ensure that Iran did not lose the war against Iraq.
Indeed, it was Hashemi who was behind the November 1986 leak to the Lebanese
newspaper al-Shira that revealed the Iran-Contra affair to the world,
for which he was imprisoned, tortured, humiliated in a televised confession,
and finally executed.[23]
As part of the same crackdown, Seyed Ahmed Kashani was arrested in late 1986
on charges of conspiring against the state and spent more than two years in
prison.[24] This
is not the profile of a secret emissary to the "Great Satan."
No Due Diligence
Sick acknowledged that there are "dozens
of lapses" and "scores of dangling loose ends" in his
elaboration of the October Surprise conspiracy.[25] He specifically cautions the
reader about Ben-Menashe, "a colorful individual, full of extraordinary
tales … [who] cannot be used as a sole source. Everything he says must be
independently corroborated."[26]
However, Sick failed to perform such due
diligence. The corroboration that apparently led him to put faith in
Ben-Menashe's testimony was retroactive. Media reports in the wake of the
Iran-Contra scandal indicated that an Iranian by the name of Mehdi Kashani
was running many of the Islamic Republic's arms procurement efforts in
Europe.[27]
Kashani's conduit for arms purchases was Asco Malta, a Maltese subsidiary of
a Belgian company run by retired Israeli military officer Avraham Shavit.
Houshang Lavi, another self-declared participant in the October Surprise
conspiracy, supposedly acted as mediator for some of these transactions.[28]
In 1992, Mehdi Kashani was arrested in Madrid
on charges of running an illegal weapons procurement ring for Iran. He was
described in the local media as "a civil engineer and colonel in the
Khomeinist army," who had been living in Spain since 1984 and in London
before that. He headed a Madrid-based company, Aerofalcon, which he used to
procure military technology for Iran.[29]
Local reports of his arrest linked Kashani to the Iran-Contra affair.[30] Somehow, he got free and, a few
months later, resurfaced in Germany.[31]
Since then, Mehdi Kashani has continued to periodically capture the attention
of the media. In 1995, a New York Times exposé placed him in Germany
where he had partnered with another former Iranian government official to run
a small airport, which was apparently used for smuggling weapons. Once
exposed, the pair sold the airport and disappeared—but resurfaced three years
later in Ireland when an Irish construction company they were both involved
in went bankrupt.[32]
Soon after, Kashani became the chief operating officer of an Iranian company
with Irish connections, which was producing an all-in-one computer, printer,
and telephone system.[33]
He appears to be living now in Tehran.
There is ample evidence to establish that the
real Mehdi Kashani procured weapons for the Iranian regime during the 1980s
and dealt with retired Israeli officials involved in the arms trade, making
him a plausible participant in the October Surprise conspiracy. However, he
bears little resemblance to the man Ben-Menashe purports to know intimately.
He was not the scion of a prominent clerical family. Having lived in Spain
continuously after 1984, he clearly was not the radical firebrand jailed by
the Iranian government in 1986-89. Having worked as an oil ministry official
in London prior to that, he could not also have been a sitting member of
parliament from 1980-86.
Ben-Menashe's claim that he and Kashani were
close friends and partners in the arms trade is not only wholly
unsubstantiated but so poorly contrived as to undermine fatally Ben-Menashe's
relevance and credibility as a source. In his book, Ben-Menashe spends some
time discussing (inaccurately) the revelation of Iran-Contra in the Lebanese
press in November 1986 but not one word on the role, let alone the
imprisonment, of Ahmed Kashani. Had Ahmed and Mehdi Kashani been the same
person, as Ben-Menashe told Sick, and had Kashani been such an important
player in the secret arms dealings Ben-Menashe supposedly conducted
throughout the 1980s, then why should he suddenly disappear without mention
as he does in Ben-Menashe's book? Had Kashani been such a close friend, why
would Ben-Menashe offer not one word of sympathy for his lamentable fate?
Could it be that Ben-Menashe had, in fact, no idea about the entire Hashemi
affair and also never actually knew much about Seyed Ahmed Kashani?
A Mossad agent with a special expertise on
Iran would not be so appallingly unfamiliar with the late Ayatollah Kashani,
one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Iranian political
history, whose militant political activism greatly inspired the young
Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic's founding father.[34] Ben-Menashe's account of the
October Surprise conspiracy is not merely a "tangled yarn," as Time
magazine put it,[35]
but a remarkably inept one at that.
The truth is that Ben-Menashe was not a
participant in some grand conspiracy who later played fast and loose with the
facts to suit his own agenda but rather a thoroughly unreliable witness.
Although Profits of War is probably more embellished than the version
of events he recounted to Sick (he was now trying to capitalize on his
newfound fame and sell books), it is an amusing tribute to ignorance of Iran.
In describing how Kashani was able to easily pass through customs at Tel
Aviv's Ben-Gurion International Airport with a Philippine passport, he
explains that Ayatollah Abol Qassem Kashani "had been a close friend of
Ferdinand Marcos."[36]
Ben-Menashe's ignorance of the fact that the ayatollah was dead by the time
Marcos came to power pales in comparison to his naive imagining that a
radical Shiite cleric could have had either the desire or opportunity to
strike up a friendship with a right-wing, pro-U.S. dictator on the other side
of the world.
Could Sick have simply failed to pick up on
this, leading him to put undue faith in the latter's testimony so long as it
was consistent with what he thought he knew?[37] Perhaps, but the inconsistencies
between Ben-Menashe's fictional account of "Mehdi" Kashani and the
actual lives of these two persons are so glaring that a competent Iran expert
should have spotted them quickly and discarded Ben-Menashe's testimony
altogether.
Sick acknowledges in a footnote that
"there is some confusion of names between Ahmed and Mehdi Kashani,"[38] suggesting that he may have
noticed discrepancies while continuing to imply in the main text that these
two disparate people were one and the same person and that this person played
a role in the chain of events leading to the October Surprise. This is
typical of Sick's ambiguous assertions that can be read in more than one way.
He writes, for example, that collusion between the Reagan campaign and Tehran
in 1980 "may well have been the first act in a drama that was ultimately
to conclude with the Iran-Contra affair."[39] Beyond the inherent ambiguity of
using a phrase like "may well," it is not clear whether Sick is
saying that the collusion "may well" have happened, or that it
happened and "may well" have been the first act.
The Teflon Pundit
After the publication of October Surprise,
Ben-Menashe and the handful of other sources who led Sick down the rabbit
hole were quickly discredited. In January 1993, the House October Surprise
Task Force concluded that Ben-Menashe's testimony was "wholly lacking of
any credibility"[40]
and found "no evidence to corroborate Ben-Menashe's allegations
regarding Mehdi Kashani's contacts with the Israeli government." Citing
evidence obtained from the Israeli government, the task force found that he
was a relatively low-ranking employee of Israel's Ministry of Defense who
"was never sent to Iran"[41]
and that Mehdi Kashani never visited Israel prior to 1985.
Ben-Menashe appears to have invented the
whole story to cover his back after coming under indictment, and one lie led
to another. While his powers of persuasion conned many Western reporters into
giving credence to his claims, Ben-Menashe likely had no real connections to
any of the characters in his story. He has since moved on to peddle other
tales to the gullible, spinning himself as a renegade Israeli James Bond who,
inter alia, planted the homing device that led Israeli warplanes to Iraq's
Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and turned down an offer to become head of the
Mossad.[42]
One might have expected these findings to be
a devastating blow to Sick. Prior to the release of the task force report
(but after reportedly accepting $300,000 for the movie rights to October
Surprise), Sick himself told Entertainment Weekly, "I've
really put my professional career on the line with this book."[43] Others of lesser notability who
took the leap certainly suffered professional consequences. "Ari
[Ben-Menashe] has put five or six dozen journalists from all over the world
through roughly the same paces," wrote Craig Unger, one of many who
initially bought into the October Surprise conspiracy. "Listen to him,
trust him, print his story verbatim—then sit round and watch your career go
up in flames."[44]
In contrast, Sick's career has flourished,
despite the fact that, unlike Unger, he refused to repent for sending Congress
and the mainstream media on a frenzied wild goose chase (from which he
personally profited). While acknowledging in a January 1993 op-ed that there
was no "straightforward arms-for-hostages deal in 1980," he
insisted that the task force report "does not lay … to rest" claims
that the Reagan campaign conspired to negotiate such a deal.[45]
Indeed, while most of those who rallied
behind Sick have stopped trumpeting his claims, few have been willing to
fully disavow them. Asked in an interview in 2011 whether he still believes
the October Surprise allegations, Jimmy Carter replied, "I don't know
the facts … I've read Gary Sick's book and talked to him. I don't really
know."[46] While
acknowledging that Sick's specific allegations were proven false, political
historian Kevin Phillips has, nevertheless, written that the Reagan campaign
"probably" cut a deal to delay the release of the hostages.[47] Historians Stephen Ambrose and
Douglas Brinkley have even gone a step further by taking this conspiracy
theory for granted.[48]
That such a blatant lie can last for so long
against all available evidence is a sad testament to the corrupting effects
of Middle Eastern studies on American public discourse about the region.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow
at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
[1] Daniel Pipes, "The
'October Surprise' Theory," in Conspiracy Theories in American
History: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2003), vol. 2,
pp. 547-50.[2] Random House, 1985. [3] Gary Sick, "The Election Story of the Decade," The New York Times, Apr. 15, 1991. [4] Random House, 1991. [5] Ted Goertzel, "Belief in Conspiracy Theories," Political Psychology, 15 (1994): 733. [6] See, in particular, Steven Emerson and Jesse Furman, "The Conspiracy That Wasn't," The New Republic, Nov. 18, 1991; John Barry, "Making of a Myth," Newsweek, Nov. 11, 1991. [7] The "October Surprise" Allegations and the Circumstances Surrounding the Release of the American Hostages Held in Iran, United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992); Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of American Hostages by Iran in 1980, Committee on the Whole House on the State of the Union (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993). [8] Gary Sick, "The Decade's First Revolution?" The Daily Beast, Jan. 2, 2010. [9] Gary Sick, "The Worst of Both Worlds," Foreign Policy, Jan. 29, 2011. [10] Sheridan Square Press, 1992. [11] "Investigatory Powers Authorization," U.S. Senate, Congressional Record, Nov. 22, 1991, p. S17643. [12] Barry, "Making of a Myth." [13] Gary Sick, The October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 70. [14] Ibid. [15] Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1992), chap. 3. [16] Ibid., chap. 4. [17] Ibid., chap. 4 and 5. [18] Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), vol. 2, p. 343. [19] See Kashani's biographical details on the Iranian parliament's website, "Sayed Ahmed Mustafa Kashani." [20] David Menashri, "Iran," in Itamar Rabinovich and Haim Shaked, eds., Middle East Contemporary Survey, (Vol. 9) 1984-1985 (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle East and African Studies, 1987), p. 456, fn. 7. [21] Bahman Bakhtiari, Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 137. [22] Milani, Eminent Persians, vol. 1, p. 344. [23] The New York Times, Sept. 29, 1987. [24] The Straits Times (Singapore), Nov. 10, 1986. [25] Sick, The October Surprise, p. 7. [26] Ibid., pp. 230-1. [27] Serge Dumont, "Les secrets du dossier," Le Vif/L'Express (Roeselare, Belg.), Jan. 30-Feb. 5, 1987, pp. 8-11; idem, "Asco-Malte: le contrat iranien," LeVif/L'Express, Feb. 6-12, 1987, pp. 8-11. [28] Sick, The October Surprise, p. 220. [29] El Diario (Madrid), Mar. 13, 1992. [30] ABC Hemeroteca (Madrid), Mar. 13, 1992. [31] Der Spiegel (Hamburg), Nov. 15, 1993; Rudolf Lambrecht and Leo Mueller, "A Center for Arms Dealers?" The Hamburg Stern, Dec. 8, 1994. [32] The Sunday Business Post (Dublin), July 5, 1998. [33] Mehdi Kashani, interview, Tehran Times, Aug. 22, 2005. [34] Milani, Eminent Persians, vol. 1, p. 345; Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 68-9. [35] "Spinner of Tangled Yarns," Time, Oct. 28, 1991. [36] Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, chap. 4. [37] Sick, The October Surprise, p. 6. [38] Ibid., p. 292, fn. 24. [39] Ibid., p. 12. [40] Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of American Hostages by Iran in 1980 [October Surprise Task Force] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), p. 7. [41] Ibid., p. 98. [42] "Investigatory Powers Authorization," p. S17643. [43] Entertainment Weekly (New York and Los Angeles), Jan. 24, 1992. [44] Craig Unger, "The Trouble with Ari," The Village Voice (New York), July 1992. [45] Gary Sick, "Last Word on the October Surprise?" The New York Times, Jan. 24, 1993. [46] Brian Till, "Jimmy Carter: As a Nation We're Bad at Making Tough Decisions," The Atlantic, May 16, 2011. [47] Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 278–90. [48] Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 301. On Apr. 3, 2004, Brinkley acknowledged that "the October Surprise statement in Rise to Globalism is unprovable/incorrect" and promised that "it will be fixed in the next edition due out in early 2005." The next edition was published in 2011, and the offending passage remained in situ. See, Daniel Pipes, "Further on the 'October Surprise' Conspiracy Theory," DanielPipes.org, updated Sept. 6, 2011. |
||||||
|
To subscribe to the MEF mailing lists, go to http://www.meforum.org/list_subscribe.php |
||||||
Posts
You may be interested in my response: The Ineptitude of Emanuele Ottolenghi. Just click on http://garysick.tumblr.com/
ReplyDelete