Panel Fails to Tie Reagan Campaign to Hostage Delay

A Senate investigation has failed to find “credible evidence” to support allegations that officials from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign sought to delay the release of American hostages being held in Iran until after the 1980 elections, according to a report issued Monday.

But the Near East subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of two congressional panels engaged in a yearlong investigation of the allegations, said that the Reagan-Bush campaign operated “on the outer limits of propriety” in gathering its own intelligence on the hostage crisis.

It also painted an unflattering portrait of the late William J. Casey, Reagan’s 1980 campaign head and later CIA director. Casey, the report said, was a man both “strongly committed to the proposition that the ends justify the means” and “intensely involved in the hostage crisis” during the 1980 campaign.

“The totality of the evidence does suggest that Casey was ‘fishing in troubled waters’ and that he conducted informal, clandestine and potentially dangerous efforts on behalf of the Reagan campaign to gather intelligence on the volatile and unpredictable course of the hostage negotiations between the Carter Administration and Iran,” said the report, which was prepared by special committee counsel Reid Weingarten.

However, on the crucial issue of whether Casey sought to assure Reagan’s victory by sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s efforts to secure the release of the hostages, thereby preventing an “October Surprise” before the election, Weingarten concluded that the “great weight of the evidence is that there was no such deal.”

All of the “primary sources” for the allegations, a shadowy assortment of Israeli, Iranian and American arms dealers, proved themselves to be “wholly unreliable” through testimony that was “riddled with inconsistencies and . . . contradicted by irrefutable documentary evidence,” the report added.

Republicans hailed the release of the 156-page report as overdue proof that the long-rumored allegations about a secret deal over the timing of the hostages’ release were false.

“We found no secret agreement between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatollah (Ruhollah Khomeini),” said Sen. James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.), the subcommittee’s ranking Republican. “We were charged with putting the rumors to rest, and I believe we have.”

But while he said that he could find “no credible evidence” to support the allegations, Weingarten also cautioned that his investigation was too limited to answer many of the questions it raised and that a more definitive verdict will not be available until a more extensive House committee inquiry is completed next month.

Among those questions, the report said, are several that relate to Casey’s contacts with Cyrus Hashemi, one of the Iranian middlemen who alleged that the late CIA director participated in a series of meetings in Madrid and Paris that culminated in an Iranian agreement to delay the release of the 52 hostages being held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in return for the secret sale of arms to the Khomeini regime.

After spending 444 days in captivity, the hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Reagan was inaugurated. The transshipment of arms to Iran via Israel began shortly after that.

Weingarten, a Washington attorney hired by the subcommittee, also complained that he was given few resources to conduct his inquiry or to surmount what he said seemed to be “a willful effort” by current and former government officials to “obstruct the investigation.”

He said that government agencies did “not respond to document requests promptly” and that Republican members of the Foreign Relations Committee hobbled his investigation by refusing to approve travel expenses for staff members to interview key witnesses overseas. Limited subpoena power and a lack of resources also forced committee investigators to “rely almost exclusively” on Bush Administration agencies for information without any “independent basis by which to confirm that there had been full compliance,” the report said.

And, it added, the “single most relevant document to the whole inquiry”--the passport that would show Casey’s travels in 1980--was not available. The passport, together with diary entries and other personal records that could have helped to establish where Casey was at the time of the alleged Madrid and Paris meetings, were “believed to be in the custody of the Casey family,” but were never given to investigators.