Conspiracies

We all know the bare bones of the Iran­ian Hostage story. Fifty-​​two Amer­i­can cit­i­zens were seized in Novem­ber of 1979 when a group of mil­i­tants and heav­ily armed stu­dents took over the Amer­i­can embassy in Iran. They were held for 444 days and released on Jan­u­ary 20, 1981, min­utes after Ronald Rea­gan con­cluded his inau­gural address. Within weeks of the begin­ning of the Rea­gan pres­i­dency, arms began to flow from the US to Iran through Israel, giv­ing rise to an endur­ing sus­pi­cion that Reagan’s cam­paign nego­ti­ated the release of the hostages and arranged for it to hap­pen after the elec­tion was over, thus deny­ing Jimmy Carter a long-​​sought diplo­matic vic­tory that might have aided his re-​​election.

Thou­sands of words have been writ­ten about this con­spir­acy the­ory, most notably the book Octo­ber Sur­prise by Garry Sick, for­mer mem­ber of the National Secu­rity Council.

While we can debate the pros and cons of the argu­ment end­lessly (and prob­a­bly will con­tinue to do so) I think a fas­ci­nat­ing and lesser-​​known sub-​​plot to this story is the fate of Wash­ing­ton attor­ney Paul Wilcher. From a June 18, 2000 arti­cle, “Paul Wilcher and the ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise’,” at Par­ents Against Cor­rup­tion and Coverup (thep​acc​.org site no longer active, but you can look at the site from the Inter­net Archive here.):

On or about May 21, 1993, Wash­ing­ton attor­ney Paul Wilcher went to the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and hand deliv­ered a let­ter claim­ing holdover DOJ employ­ees from the Reagan-​​Bush era were respon­si­ble for a num­ber of gov­ern­ment cover ups, unbe­knownst to the Attor­ney Gen­eral and Pres­i­dent Clin­ton. The 100 page let­ter was addressed to Janet Reno. On or about June 11, Wilcher was inter­viewed regard­ing the con­tents of the let­ter. Later, after days of not hear­ing from him, wor­ried friends con­tacted the police, who went to Wilcher’s apart­ment on June 23. His decom­pos­ing body was found [by police after pres­sure to inves­ti­gate from White House press corps mem­ber Sarah McClen­don] propped on a toilet…In Jan­u­ary of 1996, PACC received an unso­licited copy of the Wilcher letter…the sec­tion on the ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise’ is detailed, spe­cific, and attrib­uted to a Wilcher client with first hand knowl­edge, accord­ing to the letter.

Sarah McClen­don

Sarah McClen­don, a White House reporter, pub­lished an arti­cle on July 4, 1993, titled “The Death of My Friend Paul Wilcher,”

Wilcher, who felt his fam­ily had been beaten out of their estate by cor­rupt judi­cial processes in Chicago, came here to Wash­ing­ton, to find a new life. Then he heard about a man whom he believed to be a polit­i­cal pris­oner, Gun­ther Russ­bacher, the man who says he is being per­se­cuted because he flew for­mer Pres­i­dent George Bush to Paris to meet with lead­ing Ira­ni­ans and make a deal to sup­ply Iran with weapons in exchange for that gov­ern­ment keep­ing the 52 Amer­i­can hostages until after the Novem­ber elec­tion so that for­mer Pres­i­dent Jimmy Carter would not get, a boost. by bring­ing home the Amer­i­can cit­i­zens held there. Instead the deal was they were to be deliv­ered to Can­di­date Ronald Rea­gan. That agree­ment was kept as soon as Rea­gan inau­gu­rated in 1981. Wilcher was work­ing daily for Russbacher.

From a July 14, 1993, let­ter to Attor­ney Gen­eral Janet Reno from Dr. Garby Leon:

McClen­don has been told that pre­lim­i­nary autopsy results have found no nat­ural cause of death, and no other cause of death to explain Wilcher’s demise. Given that Wilcher, in his 40s, was in appar­ent good health, this seems fairly aston­ish­ing. A much larger issue is also implied here: if crit­ics of our gov­ern­ment are found dead in their bath­rooms from obscure causes, and the gov­ern­ment itself doesn’t take steps to find out why, then our free­doms them­selves are threat­ened – as well as the activ­i­ties that pro­tect those free­doms. If indi­vid­ual inves­ti­ga­tion and crit­i­cism of gov­ern­ment activ­i­ties is chilled or intim­i­dated into silence, then democ­racy loses its most impor­tant protection.

Given the mas­sive amount of doc­u­mented evi­dence, it is a bit sur­pris­ing that so many peo­ple dis­miss out of hand even the pos­si­bil­ity that Rea­gan might have been involved in a polit­i­cal deal with the Ira­ni­ans. Per­son­ally I believe this is because (espe­cially nowa­days) Amer­ica has a pow­er­ful need for heroes, and Rea­gan ful­fills that role for many peo­ple on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide. As a result they are unwill­ing to con­sider any­thing that might cast the for­mer pres­i­dent in a venal or cor­rupt light.