Exclusive: Iran’s ex-President Bani-Sadr, in criticizing inaccurate history in “Argo,” says most Iranian officials wanted a quick end to the 1980 U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis, but Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign struck a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to delay the hostages’ release, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In a commentary on “Argo” winning the Best Picture Oscar, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr has provided new details about how Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign obstructed resolving the Iranian hostage crisis to prevent President Jimmy Carter’s reelection.
Bani-Sadr’s commentary focused mostly on historical inaccuracies in “Argo,” which depicted how six U.S. Embassy staffers made their escape when the embassy in Tehran was overrun by Iranian militants on Nov. 4, 1979, in protest of the U.S. government admitting the deposed and widely despised Shah of Iran for medical treatment.
Former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. (Photo credit: Peter Weis)
In the commentary published by the Christian Science Monitor on March 5, Bani-Sadr, now 79 and living outside Paris, said the movie ignored the fact that most government officials favored freeing all the American personnel quickly. He criticized “Argo” for portraying Iranian officials of that time as radical and irrational.
The ex-president noted that “Argo” did quote him accurately as saying he expected the Americans to be freed within a few days revealing that he based that comment on a conversation he had had with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini but Bani-Sadr criticized the movie for leaving “the impression that the Iranian government supported the occupation of the embassy and that I was a lone voice in opposing it. This could not be further from the truth.”
Bani-Sadr said he and all other major candidates for the Iranian presidency supported releasing the hostages. He noted that after taking that position, he won the election with 76 percent of the vote. He added:
“Overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against [the hostage-taking]. Hence, the movie misrepresents the Iranian government’s stand in regard to hostage-taking. It also completely misrepresents Iranians by portraying us as irrational people consumed by aggressive emotion.”
The October Surprise
However, after becoming president on Feb. 4, 1980, he found his efforts to resolve the hostage crisis thwarted. Bani-Sadr said he discovered that “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
Though Bani-Sadr has talked and written about the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, he added in his commentary on “Argo” that “two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, the Islamic Republican Party, and the Reagan administration.”
Bani-Sadr wrote that after he “was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me [and] after arriving in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.”
Over the years, Republicans have adamantly denied that Reagan or his campaign struck a deal with Iranian radicals to extend the hostage crisis through the 1980 election. But substantial evidence has built up supporting Bani-Sadr’s account and indicating that the release of the 52 hostages just as Reagan was taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981, was no coincidence, that it was part of the deal. [For the latest summary of the evidence, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
In December 1992, when a House Task Force was examining this so-called October Surprise controversy and encountering fierce Republican resistance Bani-Sadr submitted a letter detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Khomeini and his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign.
Bani-Sadr’s letter was dated Dec. 17, 1992, and was part of a flood of last-minute evidence that implicated the Reagan campaign in delaying the hostage release. However, by the time the letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent.
Lawrence Barcella, who served as Task Force chief counsel, later told me that so much incriminating evidence arrived late that he asked Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, to extend the inquiry for three months but that Hamilton said no. (Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of Barcella’s request.)
Burying Bani-Sadr’s Letter
In the Task Force’s final report, issued on Jan. 13, 1993, Barcella’s team simply misrepresented Bani-Sadr’s letter, mentioning it only briefly, claiming that it was hearsay, and then burying its contents in a little-noticed annex to the report along with other incriminating evidence. (I discovered additional evidence of Republican guilt when I gained access to boxes of the Task Force’s unpublished files.)
Bani-Sadr’s letter described the internal battles of the Iranian government over the Republican intervention in the 1980 hostage crisis. Bani-Sadr recounted how he threatened to expose the secret deal between Reagan’s campaign officials and Islamic radicals close to Ayatollah Khomeini if the hostage-release delay wasn’t reversed.
Bani-Sadr said he had first learned of the Republican “secret deal” with Iranian radicals in July 1980 after Reza Passendideh, a nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, attended a meeting with Iranian financier Cyrus Hashemi and Republican lawyer Stanley Pottinger in Madrid on July 2, 1980. Though Passendideh was expected to return with a proposal from the Carter administration, Bani-Sadr said Passendideh instead carried a plan “from the Reagan camp.”
“Passendideh told me that if I do not accept this proposal, they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my [radical Iranian] rivals. He further said that they [the Republicans] have enormous influence in the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.”
Bani-Sadr said he resisted the threats and sought an immediate release of the American hostages, but it was clear to him that the wily Khomeini was playing both sides of the U.S. political street. Bani-Sadr said the secret Republican plan to block release of the hostages remained a point of tension between him and Khomeini. Bani-Sadr said his trump card was a threat to tell the Iranian people about the secret deal that the Khomeini forces had struck with the Republicans.
“On Sept. 8, 1980, I invited the people of Teheran to gather in Martyrs Square so that I can tell them the truth,” Bani-Sadr wrote to the House Task Force. “Khomeini insisted that I must not do so at this time. … Two days later, again, I decided to expose everything. Ahmad Khomeini [the ayatollah’s son] came to see me and told me, ‘Imam [Khomeini] absolutely promises’” to reopen talks with Carter if Bani-Sadr would relent and not go public.
Bani-Sadr said the dispute led Khomeini to pass on a new hostage proposal to the U.S. government through Khomeini’s son-in-law, Sadegh Tabatabai, in September 1980 (although that initiative ultimately was derailed by radical Islamists in the Majlis or parliament).
A Corroborating Letter
The House Task Force also obtained and buried in the report’s annex another Iranian letter bearing on the secret Republican initiative. On Aug. 18, 1980, Iran’s then-acting foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh informed Iran’s Majlis that “another point to consider is this fact. We know that the Republican Party of the United States in order to win the presidential election is working hard to delay the solution of the hostages crisis until after the U.S. election.”
Ghotbzadeh argued for a quicker resolution of the crisis so Iran’s new Islamic government, which had consolidated its power in part because of the hostage crisis, could “get on with other more pressing affairs than the hostage issue.”
He added, that “objection to this argument is that it will be in line with the policy of the Republican Party leaders and supporters of [banker David] Rockefeller and Reagan. [But] if we leave this issue unsolved, our new government will be constantly under pressure and may not be able to succeed in its affairs. In light of this consideration it is better to settle this crisis.”
As the hostage crisis wore on in late summer 1980, Ghotbzadeh made other comments about the Republican interference, telling Agence France Press on Sept. 6, 1980, that he had information that Reagan was “trying to block a solution” to the hostage impasse.
Bani-Sadr’s detailed letter meshed not only with Ghotzabeh’s contemporaneous accounts but with a statement made by former Defense Minister Ahmad Madani, who had lost to Bani-Sadr in the 1980 presidential race although Madani had received covert CIA assistance funneled to his campaign through Iranian financier Cyrus Hashemi.
Madani said he later discovered that Hashemi was double-dealing Carter by collaborating with the Republicans. In an interview with me in the early 1990s, Madani said Hashemi brought up the name of Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey in connection with these back-channel negotiations over the U.S. hostages. Madani said Hashemi urged Madani to meet with Casey, earning a rebuke from Madani that “we are not here to play politics.”
Nevertheless, in December 1992, with ex-President Reagan already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and his successor George H.W. Bush defeated and on his way out of office, the House Task Force chose what was considered the bipartisan solution, to brush aside this Iranian information and a wealth of other material implicating Reagan and Bush and simply declare that there was “no credible evidence” of a Republican-Iranian deal.
[For a limited time, you can purchase Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush family for only $34. For details, click here.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
In my above comment of March 9th, I mentioned my Dec. 17, 1992 press conference at the National Press Club coordinated with the arrival of Bani-Sadr’s letter of the same date at the House October Surprise Task Force.
I’ve just had the VHS tape I had made of that press conference digitized, and the video was just posted on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJl6FzmLBAY&feature=youtu.be or short link: http://youtu.be/rJl6FzmLBAY .
Be sure to turn up the volume on the bar at the bottom. When you’ve had a chance to watch it, please contact me directly with any questions or comments, at [email protected].
Barbara Honegger
Great article and great information from Barbara. We need more journalists to tell the truth and what really happend to our lost history. Looking forward to that link Barbara will be putting up soon. Great work.
See my newly-posted comment of March 19th below with the YouTube link to the video of my Dec. 17, 1992
press conference coordinated with the arrival of Bani-Sadr’s letter at the October Surprise Task Force.
Barbara Honegger
Dear aytoilet khkhkh
Here’s some information about one of Banisadr’s associates (Hussein Safavi) who was executed:
http://iranian.com/posts/view/post/9188
Dear Ms. Honegger,
Thank you for your courage, your dedication to the truth and your persistence.
You are my hero.
You’re welcome. See my newly-posted comment of March 19th early a.m. below
with the just-posted link to the video of my Dec. 17, 1992 press conference at
the National Press Club coordinated with the arrival of Bani-Sadr’s letter at the
House October Surprise Task Force.
Barbara Honegger
Zionist controlled press. A typical Rehmat rectum remark.
Barbara and Bob: I am working on an animated film (with a group of cartoonists) about the 1980 “October Surprise”, I would love to share the screenplay with you and obtain any feedback to get the story more accurately stated. I expect to have a full 90 minute production available for wide distribution. The matter of Bani Sadr’s deputies being killed is new information for me. And, there is no question that the Argo film had political motivations.
Dear aytoilet khkhkh
Here’s some information about one of Banisadr’s associates (Hussein Safavi) who was executed:
http://iranian.com/posts/view/post/9188
Send me the script and I’ll read it and get back.
Barbara Honegger
[email protected]
In this excellent article, Bob Parry places major importance on the Dec. 17, 1992 letter by the then-former president of Iran Abolhassan Bani-Sadr to the House October Surprise Task Force describing Bani-Sadr’s ongoing knowledge of and battles within the Iranian government over the Reagan-Bush campaign’s attempts to interfere with the release of the U.S. hostages to President Carter. The letter is rightly presented as a critical part of a “flood of last-minute†incriminating evidence implicating the Reagan-Bush campaign in delaying the hostage release that led Task Force Chief Counsel Lawrence Barcella to ask its chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton to extend the inquiry for an additional three months, which Hamilton refused. But Parry’s account misses a huge part of what happened in Washington
on that historic day by apparently being unaware of the source of the vast majority of the “flood†of “last-minute†evidence that led Barcella to make that request to Hamilton. Parry apparently does not know that Mr. Bani-Sadr, whom I had interviewed at his home outside Paris, coordinated the date and arrival of his letter to the Task Force with a two-hour press conference I put on that very morning at the National Press Club revealing and distributing literally reams of incriminating evidence on the October Surprise and its cover up, including Mr. Bani-Sadr’s Dec. 17 letter, to which Barcella sent a representative who took those reams of incriminating documents back to the Task Force. The press conference was videotaped, a copy of which I will send shortly to consortium news, and a digitized version will soon be available on the net, the link for which I will post in a comment here as well as a comment to Bani-Sadr’s commentary in the Christian Science Monitor, as soon as it is available.
To give a feel for the force with which the documented evidence distributed at that Dec. 17, 1992 press conference must have hit Barcella and Hamilton early that afternoon, when I also gave sworn testimony to the Task Force, these are just some of the tips of the iceberg of that evidence, the timing of whose delivery was coordinated with Mr. Bani Sadr’s letter:
1) a videotape of Houshang Lavi, the Iranian-American arms dealer who met with top Reagan-Bush campaign officials in the fall of 1980, was played, and its transcript distributed, in which Lavi states that the key Iranian October Surprise witness, Cyrus Hashemi, who double dealt Carter in meetings with Khomeini’s representatives,
was murdered, and that U.S. Customs official Joseph ‘Joe’ King was instrumental in his death; and that Joseph King had been brought onto the House October Surprise Task Force by Hamilton and Barcella, clearly for the purpose of chilling and walking back the until-then truthful testimony of Jamshid Hashemi, Cyrus’ brother. Incredibly, due to these revelations at the National Press Club on Dec. 17, Joseph King was conspicuously absent among the Task Force staff members introduced at the Jan. 1993 press conference in the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing room at which the final Task Force report was released; and even more incredibly, the copies of the report made available to the media at that press conference, at which I also got a copy, “just happened†to be missing the pages about Cyrus Hashemi and Joseph King. Proving that this was no mistake, I took my copy with the missing pages to the Task Force office that afternoon, Jan. 13, 1993, and showed the missing pages to the staff member in the outer office, without stating why they were important. Astonishingly, the Task Force staff member then handed me a second version of the report with the missing pages, and tried to take back the incomplete copy I already had, which I kept. There
is only one possible explanation for these facts: The Task Force had to have printed two versions of the public report, one with the pages mentioning King, and one without, proving that the order for at least the version without the pages mentioning King had to have been placed after Dec. 17, even though page III of the published report states that the Task Force approved the report [as published] on Dec. 10, a week earlier. And what could “justify†this absurd and major additional taxpayer expense more than the fear that one or more members of the press who had been at my Dec. 17, 1992 press conference where Lavi’s videotape implicating Task Force King in the murder of Cyrus Hashemi was played might also be at the press conference releasing the Task Force report.
At the Dc. 17, 1992 press conference, I also discussed and distributed:
2) the transcript of ‘The Smoking Gun’ audio tape of a conversation between two men which Oliver North, in his Iran/Contra expose book Under Fire, claimed was the single most important piece of evidence showing that “Reagan knew†everything about his Iran/Contra operations, and therefore that it exonerated him of charges of having illegally acted rogue. I distributed the written forensic analysis of this audio tape, which tape Ted Koppell had played on ‘Nightline,’ showing that ‘Man B’ on the tape was my own former White House boss Martin Anderson, Reagan’s first chief domestic policy adviser, and, though I had been a White House Domestic Policy Adviser, that I was personally referred to on the tape as Anderson’s ‘secretary.’ In his book and on Nightline, North claimed that ‘no one’ — neither the FBI nor the White House – had been able to identify either voice on the tape, and a request was actually put out on that Oct. 21, 1991 Nightline program for any information that could identify either man. Literally as the program ended, I called ‘Nightline’ to let them know that I’d identified ‘Man B’ as Reagan’s former White House chief domestic policy adviser, which was met with an astonishing absence of interest. It was after this that I hired the forensic voice analyst who identified Man B’s voice as that of my former White House mentor and supervisor to the highest degree possible by scientific analysis, and sent a copy of his written analysis to both ‘Nightline’, still to deafening silence, and to Barcella at the October Surprise Task Force, after which an appointment was made for me to give sworn testimony there, which I did at 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Dec. 17, 1992, further coordinated with the arrival of Bani Sadr’s letter of the same date and of my a.m. press conference at the National Press Club in the late morning and early afternoon. That afternoon I also arranged the sworn testimony at the Task Force office of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign’s chief Iran expert, Michel ‘Mickey’ Smith, who testified that the campaign had, indeed, been approached by Iranian-American arms dealer Houshang Lavi.
These are only a few of the two hours worth of “last-minute evidence†– in addition to Bani Sadr’s coordinated letter – that Barcella became aware of no later than 2:00 p.m. on Dec. 17, 1992, when my press conference ended and his staff member returned to the Task Force offices with the reams of documents I distributed there implicating the Reagan-Bush campaign in secret and illegal dealings with the radical Islamist Khomeini regime to delay the release of 52 American hostages, extending their suffering in Iran for additional months, to sabotage President Carter’s attempts to free them and thereby illicitly gain the White House.
At the end of his article, Parry states, ‘…by the time the [Bani Sadr’s Dec. 17, 1992 ] letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force [Chief Counsel Barcella and Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton] had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent. The facts, however, do not support this timing. We know the Task Force was still open for business and still taking testimony on Dec. 17, as that was the date it took my own and Michel Smith’s sworn testimony beginning at 4:00 p.m., and it had to have been either on or shortly after Dec. 17, 1992 that Barcella asked Hamilton for an additional three months to follow up the last-minute evidence pointing to Reagan-Bush complicity that literally flooded into its offices that day due to my press conference coordinated with the arrival of Bani Sadr’s letter. Yet page III of the Task Force Report states that “The [this] report was approved unanimously by the Task Force on December 10, 1992,†a week earlier, though Barcella had made the appointment to take my testimony and had received the written forensic analysis that ‘Man B’ on Oliver North’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Iran/Contra audiotape had been my White House boss Martin Anderson before making the appointment. As ‘The report†in this sentence has to refer to the published printed text that wasn’t released until Barcella and Hamilton’s press conference of Jan. 13, 1993, which I attended and where I obtained a copy, and as the order to print the version missing the pages mentioning Joseph King had to have been made on or after Dec. 17, the Dec. 10th date for approval of the report has to be false. In addition, the report was not ‘unanimously’ approved, as Task Force member Rep. Dymally was so certain that the published version was a white wash and cover up that he drafted a Minority Report, which Hamilton bullied him into not releasing on the threat of firing of his entire Congressional staff, which Hamilton then did in any case. The evidence, therefore, supports that it was the Dec. 17th ‘flood’ of evidence incriminating the Republican 1980 presidential campaign itself that caused Hamilton, almost certainly in collusion with the Task Force’s Republican lead Rep. Henry Hyde, to suddenly and prematurely close down the Task Force, which had previously announced that its work would end on Dec. 31st. Further, the very mention of Bani Sadr’s Dec. 17th letter in the public Task Force report proves that its text could not have been finalized, and therefore that it could not have been approved, a week earlier on Dec. 10, as claimed in the published report. And although an ‘annex’ to the Task Force report includes the Bani]Sadr letter, there is no mention in either the report or the ‘annex’ of the “flood†of incriminating evidence that Barcella’s staffer brought back from the National Press Club press conference the same morning that Bani Sadr’s letter arrived in the Task Force offices.
It’s unfortunate Bob Parry hasn’t been aware of the source of the vast majority of the “other†evidence he refers to — a literal “flood†of “last-minute†evidence incriminating the Reagan-Bush campaign that came into the House October Surprise Task Force on the same day as Bani Sadr’s letter – but that will be remedied shortly when he receives the videotape of my Dec. 17, 1992 National Press Club press conference which was coordinated with the delivery of that letter; and anyone who wants to see the volume of compelling converging evidence of Reagan-Bush-Casey complicity in delaying the release of the hostages will soon be able to watch the videotape of the Dec. 17 press conference online when I post the link in a new comment here in the near future.
I also strongly agree with both Mr. Bani-Sadr and Bob Parry that the real purpose and timing of ‘Argo’, as well as why the ‘Big Picture’ context of the October Surprise is still taboo, is to demonize Iranians in the eyes of the American public to ‘prepare the ground’ to support war against Iran should Iran’s nuclear program reach a “point of no return,†which Prime Minister Netanyahu has said “will happen this summer, at the latest.†The Big Picture that can stop this war is for the American, Israeli and Iranian people to all realize that the October Surprise is real, that Israel was the middleman in that treasonous arms-for-hostage-release-delay deal, that Israel then secretly delivered billions of dollars worth of weapons to the fundamentalist Iranian Islamic regime of which it professes to be an enemy; that Israel and Iran have a long, complex, and secret relationship that belies that they are real enemies; that after the Aug. 8, 1988 cease fire in the Iran-Iraq War which Vice President and then presidential candidate George Bush Sr. forced Khomeini to ‘take the poison pill’ to accept under threat that proof of the October Surprise and the secret relationship between Israel and Iran, let alone between the U.S. and Iran, would be revealed, the U.S. then re-started the war against Iraq which Iran had had to fight alone before the cease fire; that the main outcome of the U.S. ‘coalition’s’ second Iraq War was to bring Shiites sympathetic to Iran to power making Iran the No. 1 beneficiary of trillions of dollars worth of U.S. military expenditures; that the U.S. and Iran fought on the same side with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11; that the U.S. relies on a credible growing threat of future Iranian nuclear-armed missiles to pressure reluctant former Soviet bloc countries in central and eastern Europe to accept anti-missile defenses against Russia; and therefore that the real relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and thus also almost certainly the real relationship between Israel and Iran, is not what the governments of any of the three countries want their publics to realize, understand and act upon.
Barbara Honegger
[email protected]
Please use the Subject line: Bani Sadr revelations
Wow ! I am looking forward to the Link. Thank You
See the link to my October Surprise press conference of Dec. 17, 1992 just posted on YouTube
in my new comment to Bob’s article posted early a.m. March 19th.
This is just a remarkable comment. I haven’t seen anything like it on any of the sites I frequent and support. I have been trying to keep up with events since the Eisenhower presidency, but from such a remote place that it is hard to know what is true. I have learned much from Robert Parry, and I think I see a glimmer of hope that the real history of the US presidency that he is searching for will be revealed in the near future for all but the most willfully ignorant to see.
See my new comment with the YouTube link to the video of my Dec. 17, 1992 press conference
just posted below on March 19th.
Barbara Honegger
I guess Rhemat can not restrain his antisemitic impulses. Zionist contyolled, z bunch of bull.
Rhemat is a christian rectum.
Iran’s ex-President Bani-Sadr was a western powers’ agent. He infiltrated the 1979 Revolutionary elites to sabotage the true nature of the Islamic Revolution Imam Khomeini had in mind. Bani-Sadr escaped Iran the same route as King Reza Shah did before him.
Except for the person who creates lies like this, there are two types of people capable of saying this lie. First are the people who has given up thinking independently, and can’t judge things by themselves. If you tell them , it’s morning they have to check with a friend, they can’t look outside and find for themselves. For instance if Mr. Banisadr was an agent, how come more than 11 million people believed in him, in a free election, where he spend no money, radio , tv , many new papers were against him. Many candidates were running , and any of them were free to bring any charges. ….
Second are the people who have vested interest in lies, specially political lies like this one. They hear a lie, they don’t want to find out the truth. It sounds plausible. They think , well Banisadr was educated in Europe , may be he ran out of money , he became an agent. Well if he was an agent, and wanted to destroy the revolution why didn’t he stay in Iran, say yes to Khomeini, let him kill the people unopposed. Wait for his time, Khomeini was old (he only lasted 7 yrs after the coup, he was probably out of it in 2,3 yrs max). Take over then , and do what he wants?
“impeachment by parliament”
To call what happened in Iran to Mr. Banisadr an impeachment is to ignore many facts. For instance if there was a question about Mr. Banisadr’s acceptance by the people that “Parliament” had to consider, why did they stopped Mr. Banisadr from calling for the referendum? That would have been a direct vote by the people, and it was in the constitution. Why did they killed (executed) several of Mr. Banisadr’s advisers? put some to long term jails? why did they closed all news papers which were not with supportive of the coup. Even within that parliament, they chose to intimidate and physically attack the representatives who were not accepting of the coup. In fact two of Mr. Banisadr’s supporters in the parliaments: 1. Mr. Ghazanfarpour, who read Mr. Banisadr’s letter for the people from the tribune was put in jail and tortured. 2. Mr. Salamatian had to flee from Iran. He was physically assaulted during a speech, and if it wasn’t for the support of some people in the crowd he would have been killed.
And lastly why was the Revolutionary Guard who were suppose to be in Khozestan defending the country from Iraq, in Tehran during that time?
In another version of this story Mr Banisadr claims that “ He didn’t know that Ayatollah Khomaini was aware of the hostage deal until May 5th 1981 (almost 40 days before his impeachment by Parliament) when while he was at the presence of Ayatollah Khomaini , Khomaini’s son accidently mentioned some contact with American but in this article the writer of the article evidences are different.
Mr Banisadr’s account of his presidency and what were happened those days is selective and most of them unreliable for example he calls his impeachment by parliament which at the end majority of member of parliament voted for his immediate removal from presidency as cope! Also he never accepted any wrong doing during his almost one and half a year presidency and he always call his escape from Iran with one of the most notorious cult MEK (People Mujahidin or Mojahedin Khalgh ) as Hejrat and …
Although this is a public knowledge that Iran made deal with Reagan during hostage crises in Lebanon which the deal known as Iran Contra but no one believes the Banisadr’s October Surprise deal because there are no evidence and we should only rely on Banisadr’s says and trust a man whom left his people and escaped to this family and safety!
… and was the Carter hostage rescue attempt sabotaged from within also ? Somebody named Mae Brussel thought so.
I couldn’t agree more. I visited Iran one year ago, talked to them and found a friendly, courteous and hospital people
Great article, Bob. Too bad you were not Task Force Chief Counsel, or better yet Task Force Chair, instead of those two phonies baloney, Larry Barcella and Lee Hamilton. You could have blown the lid off of the whole treasonous affair when it could have made the biggest difference.