Book Renews Charges of a Reagan Deal With Iran

A former Jimmy Carter Administration aide renewed charges today that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign made a secret deal with Iran to hold 52 American hostages until after that year’s presidential election.

Gary Sick, who worked on the 1980 hostage negotiations at the National Security Council, wrote in a new book that after a two-year investigation, he is more convinced than ever that Reagan campaign chairman William J. Casey struck a secret deal with the Iranian regime.

At the time, Iran was holding the hostages after militant students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Then-President Carter was negotiating with the Iranians for the hostages’ release at the same time that he was locked in a tough election campaign with Republican candidate Reagan.

Sick first made the charges public earlier this year. In the book, published today, he lays them out in more detail and with more sourcing material.

Reagan and his aides have denied making any deals with the Iranians, although some aides have acknowledged that they feared Carter might pull The October Surprise--a last-minute deal to free the captive Americans and boost his popularity with voters.

As it turned out, Iran held the hostages through Election Day, and Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide.

“It is still difficult to imagine that an opposition political faction in the United States would employ such tactics, willfully prolonging the imprisonment of 52 American citizens for partisan political gain,” Sick wrote in his book, “October Surprise.” “Nevertheless, that is what occurred: the Reagan-Bush campaign mounted a professionally organized intelligence operation to subvert the American democratic process.”

Sick acknowledged that much of his evidence was not conclusive.