A 4-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Reelection
Peter Baker
Mon, March 20, 2023 at 2:06 PM EDT
WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the reelection campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980, and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John Connally Jr., a titan of U.S. politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Connally resolved to help Reagan beat Carter and in the process, Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
What happened next, Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then, shortly after returning home, Barnes said, Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Reagan’s campaign and later director of the CIA, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
Carter’s camp has long suspected that Casey or someone else in Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.
Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.
“History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant, and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Barnes said he was certain the point of Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”
Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.
The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.
To forestall such a scenario, Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran, Iran, through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.
News of Barnes’ account came as validation to some of Carter’s remaining advisers. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history.
“If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won; I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”
Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Barnes learn what Connally was up to, he said.
Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president, and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there, and I heard it, and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”
Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”
But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends.
“I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”
Full story here:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/4-decade-secret-one-man-180605540.html
