Stop the presses! The New York Times reports the TRUTH about the "October Surprise," which is not a "conspiracy theory" after all

Moved by conscience, now that Jimmy Carter is in hospice, a new witness has come forth to set the record straight at last—revealing that John Connally also was involved in that election theft

The New York Times has just done something that it’s almost never done, and that should, by now, be resonating all throughout the rest of “our free press” and throughout Substack and all other indy forums. Since that’s not happening, I’m now doing something that I’ve almost never done: I’m praising that newspaper—for confirming that a major story universally laughed off as a “conspiracy theory” for over thirty years appears to be true after all. That’s quite a deviation, since the Times (of course) has (all throughout its history, but especially since 1963) mostly done the opposite—avidly “reporting” the official story, then blowing off all efforts to correct that story as “conspiracy theory.”

Thus does the Gray Lady still promote, as truth, the pivotal Big Lies whereby “our free press” initially misreported the assassinations of JFK (and Lee Oswald), Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, then Watergate, 9/11 and the thefts of the 2000 and 2004 elections, just as, more recently, she’s asserted every Big Lie used to land us where we are today, from depicting Trump as Hitler 2.0, “exposing” his election as a Russian plot and stoking panic over “the coronavirus” (along with “global warming”) to casting Ukraine’s neo-Nazi troops as democratic freedom-fighters, militantly certifying Biden/Harris’ “election,” radically distorting the events of “January 6,” and catastrophically misrepresenting both the safety and effectiveness of “vaccination” (having done the same with HCQ and Ivermectin).

In light of such a record of deceit, it’s hard for those who haven’t delved into the Times’ long history to believe that it has ever truthfully reported anything; and yet it sometimes has, over the years—and now it has, amazingly, affirmed one awful truth that has been ridiculed officially for over thirty years; nor did it bury that anomalous story, but placed it on the front page of Sunday’s paper (yesterday). Under the title “43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter is Revealed,” Peter Baker reports the eleventh-hour revelation, by Texas pol Ben Barnes (a Democrat), that, in the 1980 presidential race, Team Reagan, fearing that Jimmy Carter might somehow succeed in freeing the Americans held hostage in Iran (an “October Surprise” that would ensure his re-election), covertly—and illegally—convinced Iran to keep the hostages locked up until Election Day, by promising to arm Iran with missiles (shipped through Israel).

In fact, the hostages were held for months beyond Election Day—specifically, until January 20, 1981, when Reagan was inaugurated with much lavish pomp (by deliberate contrast with Carter’s no-frills entry into office four years earlier, he being the first new president to walk to the White House from the Capitol). The moment stirred excitement for two reasons: Reagan’s installation, and the hostages’ release just hours before. Those two events were pointedly commingled by the media, the networks cutting back and forth between the ceremonial in Washington and the hostages’ air journey home, and the print press following suit, so that the two “dramas” seemed to be related—not (of course) as they really were related, but in a way less rational, and far more flattering to Reagan’s image. When the hostages’ plane finally landed minutes after Reagan’s speech, it seemed as if they had been freed because he was now president—a propaganda masterstroke suggesting that Team Reagan had arranged that most propitious timing with the Revolutionary Guards.

From CBS News’ coverage (at 5:50, Dan Rather interrupting the inaugural ceremonies to report the hostages’ progress toward home):

From the New York Times:

Iran Releases American Hostages as Reagan Takes Office

January 20, 1981

On Jan. 20, 1981, Iran released 52 Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days, minutes after the presidency had passed from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. The hostages were placed on a plane in Tehran as Reagan delivered his inaugural address.

The New York Times said that Reagan’s address “made no reference at all to the long-awaited release of the hostages” as he was “apparently following a self-imposed restraint of not saying anything until the Americans had left Iranian air space.”

Reagan announced the release of the hostages later in the afternoon at a Congressional luncheon. “The news seemed to turn the inauguration celebration, normally a highly festive occasion, into an event of unbridled joy for Mr. Reagan and his supporters,” The Times wrote.

https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/jan-20-1981-iran-releases-american-hostages-as-reagan-takes-office/

On the BBC’s coverage:

Reagan inaugurated as hostages return

Twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan finished his inaugural address in 1981, the hostages who had been held for 444 days in Iran were released.

The BBC's Martin Bell reported on the double celebration in the US on the day of an inauguration, the theme of which President Reagan called A New Beginning.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-21094419

Thus the candidate who was, throughout the campaign, pledging “never to negotiate with terrorists,” was then elected through just such negotiation, which kept the hostages locked up for months; and that crime laid the groundwork for the crimes of Iran/contra, whereby the (ongoing) illegal arming of Iran provided funds for the illegal war in Nicaragua, the entire operation carried out by privateers run off the books, against the will of Congress, and (therefore) the law.

This much has long been known to those who followed the heroic work of Robert Parry, the exemplary investigative journalist who, while covering Iran/contra for AP, broke several major stories, including the CIA’s involvement in the contras’ drug trafficking in the US—an exposé that AP tried to spike, and which AP would not let Parry follow up. (When Gary Webb went further with that story, and came under fierce attack by “our free press”—especially the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post—Parry stalwartly defended him.) Such censorship, and the discovery that his boss was a confidant of Oliver North, moved Parry, in 1987, to leave AP for Newsweek, where he worked til 1990, when similar interference moved him to leave there as well. It was then that Frontline asked Parry to investigate the “October Surprise,” which led to several documentaries pursuing the evidence that George H.W. Bush and William Casey, among others, had met secretly with the Iranians, to forge the deal that would make Reagan president, Bush Vice President (then President), and Casey CIA Director.

Those informed by Parry’s work* must be as surprised as I am by Barnes’ confirmation of the story—identifying, as a diligent accomplice, John Connally, former (Democratic) governor of Texas, who, riding in the presidential limousine on Nov. 22, 1963, became (allegedly) the ultimate recipient of the “magic bullet” that, according to the narrative, had torn through Kennedy’s neck. After his stint as governor, Connolly, in 1971, was appointed Treasury Secretary by Richard Nixon (in that post overseeing removal of the US dollar from the gold standard), and, in 1973, switched parties. In 1980, evidently hoping for a cabinet appointment, Connolly did his bit to ensure Reagan’s victory by swinging through Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, ostensibly on business, but using every stop (except the one in Israel) to urge his hosts to tell Iran that they would get a better deal from Reagan/Bush than any offered them by Carter, and, therefore, not to let his people go. A former aide to Connolly, and now his business partner, Barnes was there throughout the trip, and saw it all. Back home, he told four (reputable) people what he saw, which, according to the Times, they have confirmed. With Carter now in hospice, Barnes was moved by conscience to come clean at last. Baker gives him the last word: “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages. He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”

That’s true enough; but this story isn’t ancient history, revealing only that that one-term president was cheated of his re-election. First of all, it pertains directly to the history of election theft in the United States, which both parties have committed—a fact forgotten, or repressed, by partisans on either side: Democrats who won’t admit, or can’t conceive, that Biden/Harris “won” through countless acts of fraud (a group including all too many election integrity activists); and Republicans who, understandably incensed by Biden’s “win,” indignantly aver that only Democrats steal votes. While the evidence of rigging in 2000 and 2004 is almost as abundant as such evidence in 2020, Barnes’ revelation tells us that Bush/Cheney aren’t the only members of their party who have stolen into power; for Reagan/Bush did, too—albeit not by stuffing ballot boxes, but by making sure the hostages did not go free until well after the election; and Richard Nixon too had done the same in 1968, using proxies to convince the government of South Vietnam not to end the war on terms worked out with LBJ (whose election to the Senate also had been rigged), but to hold out for Nixon’s better offer. (Bob Parry looked into that scandal, too; and it too should now see the light of day, as Nixon’s prolongation of that war, when he was acting as a private citizen, was certainly an act of treason, and—since Nixon let that war drag on for eight more years—actually a crime against humanity.)

And as the confirmation of this ancient story should help teach us all, regardless of which side we’re on, to distrust either party equally, so should it help more of us to see that when the government and “our free press” collaborate on jeering some explosive story as “conspiracy theory,” it does not mean that that story is untrue: on the contrary. What such propaganda tells us about any story that it tries to get us to ignore, by merely making fun of it, is that it’s therefore more than likely to be true, and something we should know, for our own good, so that we should look into ourselves, and make up our own minds about it. Under COVID, this fact has been coming clear to ever more of us, as both the government and “our free press” have systematically laughed off one true claim after another, from the non-zoonotic origin of “the coronavirus,” to the murderous effects of lockdown, to the lethality of ventilators, to the pointlessness and health hazards of masking, to the safety and effectiveness of remedies like HCQ and Ivermectin, to (above all) the countless deaths and injuries caused by COVID “vaccination”—a Holocaust occurring all around us, right before our eyes, and clearly by design; yet governments and “our free press” continue to deny it, by calling it “conspiracy theory” (which only reconfirms that it’s not accidental, or a “blunder,” but deliberate).

Thus, while all too many millions still believe the propaganda (and, sadly, always will), other millions have now learned the hard way to believe the opposite of what the government and “our free press” assert as truth, because such “truth” has proven very bad for those who swallow it—as should have been apparent long before the COVID crisis, when other awful truths were ridiculed, and those who told them mocked (or worse), so that we wouldn’t see what was already happening to our democracy. Invented by the CIA in 1967, to tar those questioning the propaganda narrative of Dallas ’63, that charge of “conspiracy theory” then continued to be used with ever greater frequency, as there was ever more to hide from all the rest of us—as happened with the October Surprise, which, despite the evidence supporting it, was widely deemed a mad hallucination. (See below.)

Now that that “theory” has, at last, been proven true—true enough to be reported on the New York Times’ front page—we must now look back at that episode with open eyes, and try to see how sinister it really was, and what it portended for a future; and thus we need to re-examine all our history, so we can figure out how we all ended up where we are now, and how to get ourselves released at last.

*Collected in Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery, one of Parry’s several books.

Attacks on Bob Parry’s journalism:

From The New Republic:

What October Surprise? The Conspiracy That Wasn’t

by Steven Emerson and Jesse Furman

http://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/History/Atomic%20Age/October%20Surprise%20-%20The%20New%20Republic%201991.htm

From Newsweek:

The Making of a Myth

by John Barry

It is a story that will not die--a dark tale of conspiracy and political intrigue that, if true, would constitute something like an accusation of treason against George Bush, the late William Casey and other members of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Briefly put, the "October Surprise" theory holds that Bush or Casey—or possibly Bush and Casey—cut a secret deal with Iran in the summer or fall of 1980 to delay the release of 52 U.S. hostages until after the November elections. Their objective, or so the theory holds, was to deny Jimmy Carter whatever political advantage the hostages' last-minute release might create-or, in short, to swing the 1980 election toward Reagan and Bush.

Like all good conspiracy theories, this one forces all who would deny it to prove a negative--to prove that something did not happen. As any logician can testify, proving a negative is ultimately impossible. Equally disturbing, the October Surprise theory has now become complicated and so hideously detailed that no reasonable person can say with absolute certainty that there was no conspiracy and no deal. But NEWSWEEK has found, after a long investigation including interviews with government officials and other knowledgeable sources around the world, that the key claims of the purported eyewitnesses and accusers simply do not hold up. What the evidence does show is the murky history of a conspiracy theory run wild.

https://www.newsweek.com/making-myth-201934

From the (so-called) History News Network:

Remember Ronald Reagan's October Surprise? It Never Happened.

by Daniel Pipes

The October Surprise conspiracy theory holds that in October 1980, Ronald Reagan conspired with the Islamic Republic of Iran to beat Jimmy Carter in the U.S. presidential elections on 4 November . The deal: in return for the Khomeini government keeping its U.S. hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the election, damaging the Carter's candidacy, Reagan would reward it with armaments. The conspiracy theory endured for over a decade, from 1980-93, but has since disappeared.

http://hnn.us/articles/4249.html

From Wikipedia:

The October Surprise conspiracy theory refers to an alleged plot to influence the outcome of the 1980 United States presidential election, contested between Democratic incumbent president Jimmy Carter and his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s propaganda quip (quoted in the Congressional Record):

McConnell ridiculed the allegations as a conspiracy theory worthy of a supermarket tabloid headline: “Elvis Is Key Witness in October Surprise Investigation”

library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal91-111115...

From the Smithsonian Magazine:

When American hostages in Iran were freed mere minutes after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, political observers alleged that the Reagan campaign had somehow convinced the Iranian government to delay the release until after the election. The move, it seemed, was itself an attempt to counter a potential October surprise from the Carter camp, echoing Nixon's attempt to thwart LBJ’s October assistance to Humphrey a decade before.

The strongest accusation came from former Ford and Carter national security adviser Gary Sick in a New York Times editorial in 1992. Sick, with the help of scores of interviews, argued that “individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages,” promising Tehran a cache of Israeli weapons in return. Former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr repeated the allegations, but Congress initially refused to conduct an inquiry and a conspiracy theory was born.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-october-surprise-180960741/

From the Daily Beast:

Reagan’s “October Surprise” Is Still Getting Debunked

https://www.thedailybeast.com/reagans-october-surprise-is-still-getting-debunked

From the American Enterprise Institute, the most outrageous piece of all:

Reagan Deserves Credit for 1981 Hostage Release

by Michael Rubin

https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/middle-east/reagan-deserves-credit-for-1981-hostage-release/