TV Reviews : ‘Frontline’ Revisits ‘October Surprise’

Just when you thought that “The October Surprise” had vanished into the election year smoke, it’s back again with whole new twists in “Frontline’s” new inquiry, “Investigating the October Surprise” (tonight at 8 on KVCR Channel 24 and at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15).

This follow-up to “Frontline’s” April, 1991, “The Election Held Hostage,” which examined former Carter Administration adviser Gary Sick’s allegations of Reagan campaign efforts to delay a release of American hostages in Iran until after the November, 1980, election, is fundamentally an exploration of the looking-glass world of espionage, arms trading, double agents and disinformation. “Frontline” reporter Robert Parry proceeded down the road laid out in the first report to see if Sick’s story could be confirmed.

Parry’s globe-trotting gumshoe work will both please and frustrate “October Surprise” fans and skeptics: His painstaking search for evidence to fix Reagan campaign director and later CIA head William Casey in Madrid, where Sick claims Casey negotiated on the hostages with Iranian officials, is a failure. At the same time, Casey’s missing date books and logs leave open many questions regarding the “mystery man’s” whereabouts.

The investigation tries--futilely--to make sense of the bizarre Richard Brenneke episode, in which money-launderer Brenneke testified in a 1990 Portland, Ore., trial that Casey, George Bush and CIA official Donald Gregg met with Iranians in Paris in October, 1980. That Brenneke provided a colleague with the evidence that proved he was lying under oath is as much a mystery as former scholar Oswald LeWinter’s claims that he was part of a disinformation campaign to frustrate the press’ search for the truth of “The October Surprise.”

Amazingly, the biggest surprise comes via Ronald Reagan himself, who has claimed that he helped try to release the hostages long before the November election. Parry finds a witness, South African arms merchant Dirk Stoffberg, who says he met Casey to arrange to trade South African arms for the U.S. hostages. If true, it turns this extraordinary story inside-out, but hardly lessens the illegality of U.S. citizens negotiating with foreign agents.