doing it out of love for Khomeini, but in order to free the hostages. It was, in short, the
same charade 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 a certain 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 Carter and arms and spare parts deliveries by the US to Iran. All of this was summed
up in a memorandum submitted to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. [fn 36]
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 Assistant Attorney 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 1973. 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 one Captain Siavash Setoudeh, an Iranian naval officer and the former Iranian
military attache before the breaking of diplomatic 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 being withheld 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
Congressional committees; the two were known to be close. In the spring of 1980,
Rogovin told the Carter administration that he had been approached by the Iranian-