Arms for No-Hostages: Is It News Yet?
The rumor never died out, however, and last week a sea change occurred. On Monday a former National Security Council official named Gary Sick published a long op-ed piece in the New York Times called “The Election Story of the Decade.” Sick had been the NSC’s point man during the 1980 hostage crisis. Now he’s researching a book on American relations with Iran under Ronald Reagan.
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Sick said he had heard rumors of a deal in 1981 and “dismissed them as fanciful.” He heard them again during the ’88 campaign “and I again refused to believe them.” But by now he has heard too many corroborating accounts. “This weight of testimony has overcome my initial doubts.”
An event that helped enormously to make the rumor credible was last year’s trial of an American arms dealer named Richard Brenneke. In 1988 Brenneke had given testimony at a sentencing hearing in Denver for a former CIA pilot who’d been convicted of bank fraud. The pilot said the fraud had been a CIA operation. In vouching for the pilot’s bona fides, Brenneke brought up some meetings that, he alleged, Israelis, Iranians, and Americans had held in Paris on October 18 through 22, 1980. Brenneke said he’d been there, and so had William Casey–flown to Paris by the convicted pilot–and a former CIA agent named Donald Gregg. Casey was Reagan’s campaign manager and became his CIA director. Gregg became Vice President Bush’s national security adviser; now he’s the U.S. ambassador to South Korea.
Martin Kilian, a Washington correspondent for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, has been following the story since 1988. He says that two sources Parry and Sick didn’t have, a West German arms dealer and a French intelligence officer, convinced him that “something was happening in the fall of 1980.” Kilian’s not sure what, and he’s not the journalist to find out. “I don’t think it can ever be the work of the foreign media to get to the heart of a matter so American as what happened in 1980,” Kilian told us. “For us it would become important only if there were new sources in Europe.”
Now that it’s news, Bleifuss hopes to be joined in the field by a few domestic reporters with larger audiences and more resources. Parry’s out of the picture. He developed the Frontline report under contract, and now he wants to finish a book. A book, come to think of it, for which his hostage story “might serve as a nice chapter.”
If you read the arts pages of the New York Times, you might have been puzzled last week by John Rockwell’s reference to “the controversy surrounding the world premiere of Michael Tippett’s “Byzantium’ by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony last Thursday in Chicago.”
