I hate the American "paranoid style" in its usual rightwing form and in the
leftwing form too, but there are some conspiracy theories that are just the
right size and weight, and of these my favorite, possibly, is that of the 1980
October surprise, when somebody in the Reagan presidential campaign, most
probably the old spymaster and future CIA director Bill Casey, is said to have
worked to torpedo the Carter administration's negotiations with the
revolutionary government of Iran and get the Iranians to delay the release of
their American hostages until after the election, to stop the Carter campaign
from benefiting from it, promising them that a Reagan administration would give them a better deal than Carter.
The theory didn't in the end work in the most explicit form, that developed by
journalist
Robert Parry—Casey hadn't been visiting the places he was said to be—but that didn't mean
it was wrong, just that the narratology wasn't adequately developed, and a lot
of people continued to think there was something to it, including expert Gary
Sick, and by at least some reports President Carter himself, and now there's
something else, reported
in today's Times by Peter Baker
of all people: a story of how Casey may have planned the operation but the
go-between was somebody else, former Texas governor John Connally, on a
somewhat mysterious series of trips to the Middle East in summer 1980 on which
he was accompanied by a rising young Texas Republican called Ben Barnes.
It's Barnes, now 85, who is telling the story, apparently struck by remorse at
having kept it quiet for so long and moved by the condition of the former
president, now in hospice care:
