Den of Spies by Craig Unger: Did a dirty deal rob Jimmy Carter of his greatest triumph?

 Den of Spies by Craig Unger (Mudlark £25, 304pp)

In the autumn of 1980, Jimmy Carter’s presidency was entering its dying days. The previous year, 50 Americans had been taken hostage in Tehran by Iranian revolutionary forces and, so far, Carter had failed to get them back.

One attempt – Operation Eagle Claw – had been disastrously bungled, leaving eight servicemen dead and the President humiliated. So no one was surprised when, a few months’ later, the Republican Ronald Reagan stormed into the White House. 

To add insult to Carter’s ignominy, within minutes of President Reagan taking his oath of office the hostages were released. The whole thing resembled the closing moments of a hokey Hollywood film, complete with tickertape and patriotic cheering.

Conspiracy theorists certainly found the timings suspicious, although cooler heads argued that this was nothing more than one of those strange coincidences that history occasionally throws up.

The alternative explanation – that the Republicans had pulled strings to ensure that the hostages weren’t released until Jimmy Carter could no longer profit from an electoral boost – was so preposterous that it didn’t bear thinking about.

More to the point, it would implicate Reagan and his Vice President George Bush in endangering the lives of American citizens to win a colossal political boost. If true, then the resulting scandal would blow Watergate out of the water.

In this gripping book, as twisty as a thriller by John Grisham, journalist Craig Unger explains how he first learned that the hostage release might qualify as an ‘October Surprise’, the term pundits give to a political bombshell detonated in the final weeks of a presidential campaign.

The tip-off about the hostages came in a 1991 New York Times article by Gary Sick, former Iran specialist on the National Security Council under President Carter. Sick claimed that the Republicans had secretly supplied weapons to Iran in return for them hanging on to the hostages until Carter and the Democrats were safely out of office.

The mastermind was supposedly Bill Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and a brilliant spy-master. Casey was made director of the CIA the following year.

The story blew up into a media storm. Congress set up an investigation, comprising both Republicans and Democrats, to look at the explosive claims and concluded ‘there is no credible evidence supporting any attempt by the Reagan presidential campaign to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran’.

Craig Unger, though, was doubtful at the time – and he remains doubtful to this day. In 1991, as an up-and-coming journalist on Newsweek, he spent months trying to stand up the claim that Casey had met with Iranian operatives in Madrid in the Summer of 1980 to broker a deal.

To add extra intrigue, it now looked as though Israel had played the part of go-between. But instead of being hailed as a brilliant investigative reporter and truth-seeker, Unger found himself mocked as a ‘tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist’ whose presence in the Washington press corps was frankly ‘toxic’.

Newsweek sacked him and, most terrifying of all, he was sued for $10 million by Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s security adviser whom he had heavily hinted was an Israeli spy.

In the circumstances, you can hardly blame Unger for backing off: he had a young family to support. That didn’t stop him, though, from continuing to sniff around the story in his own time, researching in the evenings and the weekends.

Returned: The South Lawn of the White House is set up for a full honors ceremony to welcome home the hostages 

In 2022, he got a huge boost when he was given access to the vast archives of another veteran investigative journalist, Pulitzer-finalist Bob Parry, who had died in 2018. Parry’s widow handed over a thumb drive with 23 gigabytes of research on the October Surprise going back 30 years.

Den Of Spies is the result. In truth, there are no new huge revelations, more a series of nudges and tiny details which add to Unger’s certainty that he was on the right track back in 1991.

For instance, it transpired that in 2011, Parry unearthed a White House memo that proved that Casey did attend a meeting with the Iranians in Madrid in the summer of 1980 to finalise the delaying of the release of the hostages.

This supported what Unger had thought 30 years earlier, when he was able to show that, although Casey claimed to have been in London attending a conference at the time, he could easily have absented himself for long enough to fly to Madrid for a few hours.

Failure?: Jimmy Carter failed to secure the release of American hostages 

Likewise, Parry’s trawl through the White House documents lays clear just how much evidence the bipartisan inquiry had overlooked in 1993 in order to say that the October Surprise didn’t occur.

This chimes exactly with Unger’s own 2016 interview with the exiled Iranian president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was living in exile outside Paris. The political moderate, who died in 2021, told Unger that he had known there had indeed been meetings between hardline mullahs and senior Republicans in Madrid in 1980.

This is chastening to hear, but whether it is quite enough to reignite a scandal that has its roots in events of over 40 years ago is unlikely. 

Unger clearly intends his book to be less a white-knuckle thriller and more a trenchant reminder of what happens when politicians feel that they can act with impunity because journalists are not allowed to ask hard questions. The fact the book was published in the US on Jimmy Carter’s 100th and final birthday adds a bitter-sweet note of remembrance.