COLUMN LEFT : That ‘October Surprise’: Not as Advertised : Reagan didn’t use the hostages to steal the ’80 vote--but the real intrigue was squalid enough.

Alongside the claim that Nancy Reagan ran the White House, we have new muscle in the assertion that the Reagans stole the election that put them there. The allegation has been around since 1987, but got fresh exposure earlier this week.

The central premise, surely correct, is that back in the fall of 1980 an overriding fear of Ronald Reagan’s campaign strategists was that President Jimmy Carter would win the release of U.S. hostages held in Iran in time to get them home before the November election and thus triumph in the polls.

Against this possibility of an “October surprise,” so the theory goes, such Reagan operatives as the late William J. Casey, campaign boss and subsequently head of the CIA, held secret parleys with the Iranians in which a deal was hatched: The hostages would be held till after the election, and in return the new Administration would send arms to Tehran.

On Monday, Gary Sick, a specialist on the Middle East who worked on the National Security Council in Carter’s White House, announced somewhat portentously in the New York Times that, though long dubious about the likelihood of Reagan’s men having played dirty pool in such a fashion, he had now accumulated enough evidence to show there were indeed secret contacts.

From the White House have come stentorian denials. On “Nightline” Monday evening, Reagan’s former national security adviser, Richard Allen, conceded (as he has before) overtures from Iranians during the 1980 campaign but swore that no backstairs Republican conniving had kept the hostages behind bars till the polls closed.

There is in fact reasonably persuasive evidence that Casey and his men were distraught at the possibility of an “October surprise.” They leaked the imminence of a second hostage rescue attempt to the columnist Jack Anderson. There were sorties to Madrid to confer with Iranians. Both Sick and a PBS documentary aired Tuesday even suggested that in this connection vice presidential candidate George Bush went to Paris in October, 1980. This seems unlikely; and at least one of the witnesses asserting it has in the past failed a lie-detector test on this specific claim.

But suppose we stipulate that Casey and his colleagues did cajole the Iranians into holding on to the hostages. It is, after all, a matter of record that the hostages were only released on Inauguration Day, 1981. Are we then to believe that as a quid pro quo the Reagan Administration gave the OK to Israel to trade arms to Tehran? Was the U.S. government made up of a bunch of Boy Scouts mumbling “We promised”? The idea is preposterous.

Both Carter and Reagan were eager to send arms to Iran, for reasons that had nothing to do with hostages. The primary concern of both administrations was to reverse the disaster to U.S. power in the Middle East represented by the overthrow of the shah in late 1978. Such concern was shared by Israel, for which the shah’s Iran had been an important ally. (And after Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, Israel had further reason to arm Iran.)

In October, 1978, Carter sent Gen. Robert E. Huyser to organize a military coup and thus thwart the popular uprising that eventually lofted the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. In the wake of Huyser’s failure, with the blessing of the United States, shipments of arms from Israel to Iran began. The aim was clear enough: to bolster the Iranian military so it could seize power.

As Uri Lubrani, the former Israeli ambassador to Iran under the shah, explained the sales to the BBC in February, 1982: “I very strongly believe that Tehran can be taken over by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill 10,000 people.”

In October, 1982, Moshe Arens, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told the Boston Globe that his country had made the sales to Iran “in coordination with the U.S. government . . . at almost the highest levels . . . to see if we could not find some areas of contact with the Iranian military, to bring down the Khomeini regime.”

In sum, the hostages simply weren’t a factor in the arms deals--in which case the “October surprise” conspiracy emerges as an electoral intrigue, squalid but, given our knowledge of what Casey and his colleagues were capable of, entirely predictable.

The real historical moral is that the administrations of both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan deemed the Iranian people in sore need of a military coup, just as George Bush deems such a coup to be what the Iraqi people need today.