artefact which called for the US to support the rise of Khomeini, and his personal brand of
fanaticism, a militant heresy within Islam. US arms deliveries were made to Iran during the time ofthe Shah; during the short-lived Baktiar government at the end of the Shah's reign; and continuously (^)
after the advent of Khomeini. There are indications that the Carter regime connived with Khomeini
to get the hostages taken in the first place; the existence of the hostages would allow Carter to
continue arms deliveries and other vital forms of support for Khomeini under the pretext that he
was doing it out of love for Khomeini, but in order to free the hostages. It was, in short, the samecharade that was later acted out under Reagan.
A little-noted aspect of the Carter arms negotiations with Khomeini during the hostage crisis is the
possible involvement of networks friendly to Bush. On December 7, 1979, less than two months
after the hostages were seized, Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders was contacted by acertain Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer and agent of the Iranian SAVAK secret police.
Hashemi proposed a deal to free the hostages, and submitted a memorandum calling for the removal
of the ailing expatriate Shah from US territory; an apology by the US to the people of Iran for past
US interference; the creation of a United Nations Commission; and the unfreezing of the Iranian
financial assets seized by Cawas summed up in a memorandum submitted to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. [fn 36] rter and arms and spare parts deliveries by the US to Iran. All of this
The remarkable aspect of this encounter was that Cyrus Hashemi was accompanied by his lawyer,
John Stanley Pottinger. The account of the 1976 Letelier case provided above has established that
Pottinger was a close Bush collaborator. Pottinger, it will be recalled, had served as AssistantAttorney General for Civil Rights in the Nixon and Ford administrations between 1973 and 1977 (^)
after having directed the US Office of Civil Rights in the Justice Department between 1970 and
- Pottinger had also stayed on into the early Carter administration, serving as special assistant
to the Attorney General from February to April, 1977. Pottinger had then joined the law firm of
Tracy, Malin, and Pottinger of Washington, London, and Paris.
This same Pottinger was now the lawyer for gun-runner Cyrus Hashemi. Given Pottinger's proven
relation to Bush, we may wonder whether Bush may have been informed of Hashemi's proposal and
of the possible responses of the Carter administration. Bush may have known, for example, that
during the Christmas season of 1979 oneformer Iranian military attache before the breaking of di Captain Siavash Setoudeh, an Iranian naval officer and theplomatic relations between the United
States and Iran, was arranging arms deliveries to Khomeini out of a premises of the US Office of
Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. If Bush had been in contact with Pottinger, he might have
known something about the Carter offers for arms deliveries.
Relevant evidence that might help us to determine what Bush knew and when he knew it is still
being withheld by the Bush regime. The FBI bugged Cyrus Hashemi's phone between October
1980 and January 1981, and many of the conversations that were recorded were between Hashemi
and Bush's friend Pottinger. The FBI first claimed that these tapes were "lost," but now admits that
it knows the location of some of them. Are they being withheld to protect Pottinger? Are they beingwithheld to protect Bush?
Other information on the intentions of the Khomeini regime may have reached Bush from his old
friend and associate, Mitchell Rogovin, the former CIA General Counsel. During 1976, Rogovin
had accompanied Bush on many trips to the Capitol to testify before Congretwo were known to be close. In the spring of 1980, Rogovin told the Carter administration that hessional committees; the
had been approached by the Iranian-American arms dealer Houshang Lavi with an offer to start
negotiations for the release of the hostages. Lavi claimed to be an emissary of Iranian president
Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr; Rogovin at this time was working as the lawyer for the John Anderson
GOP presidential campaign.