TV Reviews : ‘Frontline’ Explores Reagan Hostage Charge

Like a dark family secret that won’t go away, the long-circulating rumors that Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign somehow managed to delay the release of American hostages in Iran until after his 1980 election have never been fully swept aside. “Frontline,” with itsusual investigative tenacity, stirs up the dust with an indicting, Byzantine report, “TheElection Held Hostage” (at 9 tonight on Channels 28 and 15; at 10 p.m. on Channel 50).

If producer Robert Ross and reporter Robert Parry dig deep, though, they do so responsibly: More than once, they add the note that charges of the Reagan campaign tampering in foreign affairs (a violation of federal law) have never been fully proven. Nevertheless, the amount of corroborating testimony--some of which has been successfully tested in the American courts--is so overwhelming that it has driven a previous skeptic like Gary Sick, Jimmy Carter’s right hand during the hostage crisis, to write a book piecing the puzzle together.

Which is what Ross and Parry do, about as well as can be attempted in an hour. The plot is so massively complex that it may come off as an impossible spy novel for many viewers: If ever there were a “Frontline” show to be taped, this is the one.

The key to the story, as with so many tales of the Reagan years, is soon-to-be CIA Director William Casey, who then was Reagan’s campaign director. Reagan and his aides fretted that the Carter Administration might pull an “October Surprise,” managing a politically decisive release of the hostages just prior to the general election. Casey, according to several on-camera eyewitnesses, went behind the U.S. government’s back and set up contacts with high officials in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian regime to cut a deal: Iran should delay the hostages’ release to ensure Reagan’s election, and the United States would later release frozen Iranian assets and resume arms sales.

As in drug trials that depend on the word of smarmy dealers, the case against Casey and Reagan stands or falls on the word of shady arms merchants and the like. One can dismiss it on those grounds; on the other hand, “The Election Held Hostage” leaves one wondering how so many people--according to Sick, 15 claim personal knowledge--with nothing to gain from telling what they know, could all be wrong. If they’re not, Hostagegate could make Watergate look like spring training.