Journalist Craig Unger has used Robert Parry’s vast archive to help nail down the 1980 October Surprise story, but he diverged greatly from Parry when it came to also criticizing the Democrats.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Author Craig Unger made use of Consortium News founder Robert Parry’s files to complete his new book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House.
The book is about the orginal October Surprise, when the Ronald Reagan campaign made a secret deal with the Iranian revolutionary government in 1980 to keep the American hostages in captivity until Reagan’s Inauguration Day so as not to hand Jimmy Carter a victory. In exchange, the Reagan administration then arranged for arms to be covertly sold through Israel to Iran.
In his talk at the National Press Club in Washington this week, Unger was grateful to Parry for his groundbreaking work on this scandal and to the Parry family for allowing him access to Bob’s vast October Surprise archive.
But about midway through his talk, Unger veered off course, equating the disgraced Russiagate story, which Parry was in the forefront of debunking, with the 1980 October Surprise, a genuine scandal and high-level conspiracy that Unger did much to help prove after Bob Parry’s initial reporting.
He also tried to elevate former President Donald Tump’s phone calls with the Russian president to the Reagan team’s cynical use of the captivity of American citizens to try to win an election.
I had introduced myself to Unger before his talk, which was filmed by C-Span, as the editor who took over Consortium News after Bob’s untimely death in 2018. After his talk was over I approached him.
I told him that Bob Parry would have disagreed strongly with him about Russiagate. He nodded uncomfortably. I told him that Julian Assange, then editor of WikiLeaks, said in 2016 that he didn’t get the Democratic Party emails, at the heart of the Russiagate story, from Russia.
But, I said, even if it was Russia, the emails are true about the DNC sidelining candidate Bernie Sanders, the Hillary Clinton Goldman Sachs speeches, and Clinton getting the debate questions in advance.
Because all this and more was factually true, if it was Russia, then Russia had put true information into the U.S. election, not disinformation, I told him, and it was information voters needed to know. He then turned to other members of the audience that had come up to him.
Unger spoke in his talk a lot about being ostracized by the MSM because of his early work on the October Surprise story and how he now feels justly vindicated, in part because of Bob Parry’s files, and the excellent work Unger did to nail down the story.
It apparently means a lot to Unger to be accepted by mainstream journalism, unlike Bob Parry, who wanted no part in it.
Because Bob was a truly non-partisan, neutral journalist, he could call out misbehavior whether it was from the Republicans, such as the October Surprise, the Iran-Contra scandal and the invasion of Iraq, or from the Democrats in Russiagate, the backing of Islamist rebels to try to overthrow the Syrian government and the actual overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in the 2014 coup, which led directly to the ongoing human catastrophe in that country.
Calling out the Democrats is something that Unger does not seem able or willing to do, preferring instead to equate a fake scandal with a real one.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
It seems we need continuing Russiagate Rolls On type of coverage since while most of us recognized the fairy tale as false and desperate cover for HRC’s shenanigans at the 2016 DNC some dedicated MSM followers still believe it. Evidently Unger is one of them, or was, until Joe brought him up to date. All this suggests reporting–I mean real, actual reporting based on fact and verification–is vulnerable to would-be hustlers seeking to glow in the MSM limelight. And while we’re at it the Russiagate Rolls On should bring us up to date on what’s happening with the Seth Rich investigation . . .
While I have not read Unger’s “Den of Spies” at this time, it would not surprise me to learn that he may have also omitted or at least soft-pedaled evidence of the Carter administration’s own role in facilitating both Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power and arranging the circumstances that left US diplomats vulnerable to being taken hostage rather than evacuating them in an expeditious way.
This in turn laid the groundwork for Reagan’s operatives to exploit the situation by cutting their own backroom deals with elements of the revolutionary Iranian government to delay the release of those selfsame hostages and thereby enhance their electoral prospects. Subsequently, once in power, they would further aid Khomeini in consolidating power whilst providing the Iranian military with BGM-71 TOW missiles and other goodies in furtherance of their quixotic geostrategic ambitions (which also conveniently aligned with Israel’s “Periphery Doctrine” at the time), all of which furthered the divide-and-rule strategies of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bernard Lewis, George Ball, Samuel P. Huntington, and Co. – see more detail on much of this in my comments here: archive.ph/83CYT.
Of course, the 1980 Reagan campaign’s activities were by far the more legally dubious of those representing the two main frontrunners in that election season (since Carter and his appointees were the officials constitutionally tasked with making and implementing policy at that time, however ill-conceived it may have been), but depriving the situation of this context necessarily limits the explanatory utility of one’s account. Likewise, leaving out the many occasions that foreign involvement has likely contributed to the outcome of US elections from at least the mid-twentieth century onward, often in collusion with one or more of the campaigns involved (or, more to the point, all of the times that the United States has meddled in foreign elections or worse) also does not place certain events that have been lavished with disproportionate amounts of hand-wringing in proper context, especially alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election – for instance, see my comment on Joe Lauria’s article “Russiagate Rolls On, Giving Biden Political Cover,” published in Consortium News on March 20, 2021.