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.
Bush's family friend Casey had also been in touch with Iranian representatives. Jamshid
Hashemi, the brother of Cyrus Hashemi (who died under suspicious circumstances during
1986), has told Gary Sick that he met with William Casey at the Mayflower Hotel in
Washington, DC in March of 1980 to talk about the hostages. According to Jamshid
Hashemi, "Casey quickly made clear that he wanted to prevent Jimmy Carter from
gaining any political advantage from the hostage crisis. The Hashemis agreed to
cooperate with Casey without the knowledge of the Carter Administration." [fn 37]
Casey's "intelligence operation" included the spying on the opposing candidate that has
been routine in US political campaigns for decades, but went far beyond it. As journalists
like Witcover and Germond knew during the course of the campaign, and as the 1984
Albosta committee "Debategate" investigation showed, Casey set up at least two October
Surprise espionage groups.
The first of these watched the Carter White House, the Washington bureaucracy, and
diplomatic and intelligence posts overseas. This group was headed by Reagan's principal
foreign policy advisor and later NSC chairman Richard Allen. Allen was assisted by Fred
Ickle and John Lehman, who later got top jobs in the Pentagon, and by Admiral Thomas
Moorer. This group also included Robert McFarlane. Allen was in touch with some 120
foreign policy and national security experts sympathetic to the Reagan campaign. Casey
helped Allen to interface with the Bush campaign network of retired and active duty
assets in the intelligence community. This network reached into the Carter NSC, where
Bush crony Don Gregg worked as the CIA liaison man, and into Carter's top-secret White
House situation room.
During these very months there was a further influx of retired intelligence officers into
the Reagan-Bush machine. According to Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who had led the
abortive "Desert One" attempt to rescue the hostages during the spring of 1980, "The
Carter Administration made a serious mistake. A lot of the old whores--guys with lots of
street smarts and experience--left the agency." According to another CIA man, "Stan
Turner fired the best CIA operatives over the hostage crisis. The firees agreed among
themselves that they would remain in touch with one another and with their contacts and
continue to operate more or less as independents." [fn 38]
Another October Surprise monitoring group was headed by Admiral Robert Garrick, who
was assisted by Stephan Halper, Ray Cline's son in law. The task of this group was the
physical surveillance of US military bases by on-the-ground observers, often retired and
sometimes active duty military officers. Lookouts were posted to watch Tinker Air Force
Base in Oklahoma, Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, McGuire Air Force Base
in New Jersey (where weapons already bought and paid for by the Shah were stockpiled),
and Norton and March Air Force bases in California.