Panel Clears Bush in ‘October Surprise’ Probe

A House task force Wednesday cleared President Bush of allegations that he had attended a secret 1980 meeting in Paris to negotiate a deal to delay the release of the 52 American hostages being held by Iran.

“All credible evidence leads to the conclusion that President Bush was in the United States” between Oct. 18 and Oct. 22, 1980, the period during which the meeting was alleged to have taken place, said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the task force.

The finding was immediately hailed by the Bush Administration. “We are glad that Congress, in a bipartisan report, concluded today what we knew all along--that President Bush had no involvement with any alleged meetings in Paris in October, 1980, and, in fact, he never left the country at the time,” the White House said in a statement.

Hamilton, however, said that the finding about Bush does not resolve the key question of whether Ronald Reagan campaign officials negotiated with Iran to delay the hostages’ release until after the November elections in an effort to keep then-President Jimmy Carter from being reelected.

The task force, Hamilton said, still must interview scores of witnesses and wade through thousands of classified documents before drawing further conclusions about the so-called “October Surprise.”

Hamilton, expressing irritation at the “unsatisfactory response” of executive branch agencies that have been asked to furnish documents to the task force, said that the inquiry will be taken overseas as investigators seek to interview sources in Spain, France, England and Israel.

An interim report released by the task force Wednesday provided few details of the investigation so far. But in one key finding, it said that the panel had concluded Bush, Reagan’s running mate at the time, could not have attended the alleged October meeting in Paris where the deal to delay the hostages’ release supposedly was reached.

While refusing to provide specifics, Hamilton said that a review of Secret Service logs and interviews with the agents assigned to protect Bush during the campaign proved beyond “reasonable doubt” that Bush “did not leave the United States during the period in question.”

Neither Hamilton nor the task force report revealed where Bush was during the five-day period. But the report said the task force had concluded that Bush “was in the United States continuously during the Oct. 18-22 time period and . . . did not travel to Paris, France, to participate in the alleged secret meetings.”

Long rumored but never proven, the allegations that the Reagan campaign secretly subverted the Carter Administration’s hostage negotiations with Iran first surfaced when the 52 Americans seized in 1979 at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were released within hours of Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.

They resurfaced last year and became the focus of two ongoing congressional investigations when Gary Sick, a former National Security Council aide under Carter, announced that he had uncovered new evidence indicating that the allegations were true.

Since then, the most detailed and widely publicized allegations have come primarily from two sources: Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian middleman who claims to have been present at two earlier meetings in Madrid that he says were attended by the late CIA Director William J. Casey; and Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence official who claimed to have seen Bush in Paris at the time the October meeting is alleged to have taken place.

Hashemi has said that Bush did not attend the earlier meetings in Madrid and that he does not believe Bush was involved in a deal allegedly brokered by Casey, then Reagan’s campaign manager.

Sick has also said that, while he believes a deal was struck, he has no evidence to suggest that Bush worked out final details in Paris in the weeks before the election.