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ABC News’ longtime Paris bureau chief Pierre Salinger has concluded that the Reagan-Bush campaign did sabotage President Carter’s Iran Hostage talks in 1980, and that the so-called October Surprise allegations are true. Salinger documented his conclusions in an eight-paragraph section of his memoirs, P.S., recently published in France -- eight paragraphs that St. Martin’s Press cut from its English-language edition.

Through well-placed contacts in France, Salinger confirmed that then-GOP campaign director William J. Casey arranged secret meetings in October 1980, and that Western intelligence services sealed the deal with an airlift of military supplies to Iran.

Salinger served as ABC News’ Paris bureau chief during the 444-day hostage crisis. It was there, after the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, that Salinger “ran into one of the hottest stories of [his] journalistic career.” He said “a man named Jacques Montanes showed up at my ABC office with a big bag full of papers.” These papers, along with other information discovered by Salinger, documented an international airlift of military supplies to Iran on October 24, 1980. Companies in France, Great Britain, Spain and Israel were involved in this airlift, which took place in defiance of President Carter’s arms embargo. Because of some problems with the delivery, Montanes had been detained in Iran for nine months before being released.

“He was angry at Iran for what they had done and wanted to get a story of important truth to the media,” Salinger wrote. “Obviously, I broke this story on ABC News,” he continued, “something that shocked the American government.” In the early 1980s, however, allegations had yet to surface about Republication collaboration with the intelligence agencies in Israel and Europe that had arranged the airlift.

Only in the years after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in late 1986 did a number of witnesses, including senior Iranian officials and international arms dealers, allege that Reagan’s dealings with Iran dated back to the 1980 campaign. These witnesses described a series of meetings, including a round in Madrid in late July and a final set in Paris in mid-October.

Casey, the crafty old World War II spymaster who moved on to become CIA director, died in the spring of 1987. His family and other Republicans have denied any election hostage deal. In attacking the story, Reagan-Bush loyalists have been aided by elements of the news media. In 1991, Newsweek and The New Republic published matching cover stories supposedly debunking the charges, using the same bogus alibi to disprove Casey’s presence at the Madrid meeting.

“Well, having looked into this case quite a lot, I don’t agree with [these publications],” Salinger wrote in the deleted book passage. Salinger was convinced by a statement by a respected American journalist, David Andelman, who ghost-wrote the memoirs of French spy chief Alexandre de Marenches in 1992. At Salinger’s request, Andelman pressured Marenches for information. Salinger wrote: “Andelman came back to me and said that Marenches had finally agreed [that] he organized the meeting, under the request of an old friend, William Casey. ... Marenches and Casey had known each other well during the days of World War II. Marenches added that while he prepared the meeting, he did not attend it.”

In December 1992, Andelman testified before the House October Surprise task force about Marenches’ admission. The task force, however, dismissed Andelman’s testimony, as it did other supporting evidence.

Salinger wrote that he had other information corroborating Marenches’ statement to Andelman. “In the mid-’80s, I had a long and important meeting with a top official in French intelligence,” Salinger wrote. “He confirmed to me that the U.S.-Iranian meeting did take place on October 18 and 19 and he knew that Marenches had written a report on it which was in intelligence files. Unfortunately, he told me that the file had disappeared.”

Ironically, Salinger’s account of his October Surprise reporting suffered a similar fate, excised from his English-language memoirs and “disappeared” from official American history -- like so much of the other October Surprise evidence.

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*Robert Parry, “Disappearing History, In These Times. v.20, n.20. August 19,1996. pps. 10-11.

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