Why Conspiracies--Even Younger Ones--Never Die : October Surprise: With so many reputations and money at stake, the ’80 Reagan campaign plot to delay the hostages’ release survives Senate report.

For years, the hottest political conspiracy here has been the “October Surprise.” GOP operatives, goes the plot, secretly met with Iranian officials during the 1980 presidential campaign to arrange a delay in the release of the 52 U.S. hostages held in Tehran until after the election, thus ensuring Jimmy Carter’s defeat.

What was unusual about the October Surprise was that it percolated for years in fringe circles, then suddenly burst into the mainstream, largely as the result of its advocacy by Gary Sick, a widely respected former Carter Administration aide. Sick first wrote an Op-Ed piece published in the New York Times, then came out with a book detailing every aspect of the alleged conspiracy. ABC’s “Nightline” and PBS’ “Frontline” and dozens of journalists, print and television, jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon.

In testimony before Congress, Sick argued convincingly that the only way to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, which he called the equivalent of a political coup, was for Congress to investigate. His plea was echoed in newspaper editorials and in statements by prominent Democrats. Soon, both Houses of Congress set up investigative bodies.

It is an open secret in Washington that the outcome of partisan congressional investigations are largely predetermined. But something extraordinary happened in the case of the October Surprise. Instead of confirming the conspiracy or even finding the conspiracy impossible to disprove, Senate investigators found it to be an abject fabrication. A report, prepared by special Senate counsel Reid Weingarten and released Nov. 23, concluded that “the great weight of the evidence is that there was no such deal . . . (and that) the primary sources for (October Surprise) . . . have proved wholly unreliable.”

The report was a political milestone in America’s long-time fascination with conspiracies. It is axiomatic that conspiracies, by their nature, are virtually impossible to disprove, since you have to prove a negative. That the report factually rebutted the October Surprise conspiracy was nothing short of sensational.

But in a political culture whose two most overused words are conspiracy and cover-up , the report also provides a textbook case of why conspiracies don’t die. A lot of vested interests had become tied to the fortunes of the October Surprise. The reputations of the many Democrats who had charged treason. The credibility of the New York Times. Sick’s reputation. Random House’s much-prized reputation as a publisher of serious books--not to mention its million-dollar investment in Sick’s book. Sick’s movie contract--a $300,000 deal with Columbia--signed last year.

Not unexpectedly, pro-conspiracy advocates seemingly clutched at anything to keep their plot alive. The New York Times, for example, ran the story on the Senate report deep inside. (The Washington Post and The Times put it on Page 1.) The article focused on Weingarten’s speculative aside, which accounted for fewer than five of the 156 pages in the report, that William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, attempted to monitor Carter’s hostage negotiations during the campaign. That news was not exactly new nor was it relevant to the conspiracy charge: In July, 1983, nearly every big-city newspaper in the country reported on their front pages that Casey had set up what he himself called an “intelligence operation” to monitor whether the Carter Administration would try to spring an October Surprise regarding the hostages before the election.

The following day, the New York Times editorialized that “instead of ending the October Surprise controversy, the carefully qualified judgment of special counsel Reid Weingarten will only whet it.” The editorial claimed that since Casey’s passport “vanished,” it was “not possible to check persistent charges that he had met secretly in Europe with unsavory go-betweens.”

But the Senate report fully investigated those “persistent charges” and gained access to nearly all of Casey’s other records, as well as those of top aides and of National Security Agency intercepts of all meetings in Europe. Weingarten could not find evidence for one such meeting at which Casey allegedly attended.

Meanwhile, Sick’s response to the Senate report was as strained as the Times’. On CNN, he charged that there was a “cover-up” and that “evidence has been covered up or destroyed.”

Curiously, it was Weingarten, the report’s author, who provided the New York Times and Sick with the pretext to continue clinging to their conspiracy. Apparently, he felt compelled to include a counterbalancing assertion in his report. In his conclusion, Weingarten asserted 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.”

Yet a reading of Weingarten’s report unambiguously shows that there is no documentation whatsoever to support the notion that Casey’s anti-Carter “intelligence operation” was anything materially larger than what had already been reported. A key legal source familiar with Weingarten’s work told me that Weingarten’s “assertion is totally outrageous--there is nothing in any of the intercepts or any corroborated allegations to suggest that Casey attempted or carried out any negotiations on his own.”

In the end, the October Surprise may go down as the greatest political hoax of the 20th Century. That journalists and prominent writers, wittingly and unwittingly, perpetuated a grand deception is the real story of modern American political culture. Today, an increasing number of publications, journalists and political organizations--not to mention the entertainment industry--thrive on conspiracy as the primary source of their livelihood.

In Washington, the conspiracy lobby is alive and well on both sides of the political fence. The Christic Institute is a veritable conspiracy factory, spinning out elaborate webs of government plots involving drugs and weapons going back 25 years. Although a judge ruled that Christic has knowingly made false and malicious allegations, the institute still attracts the support of both leftist journalists and Hollywood performers, as well as such right-wing organizations as the Liberty Lobby and Populist Party.

The irony, of course, is that acceptance and promotion of demonstrably false conspiracies, ranging from Oliver Stone’s story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to Time’s rendition of the bombing of Pan Am 103, are reminiscent of an ugly period in our past. Just as the right-wing had embraced conspiracies to rationalize its unpopularity and perceived misfortunes--the “Red Scare,” the fluoridation of water, for example--the left also sought to use them as a way of explaining its reversals and of recapturing populist support. Sick’s October Surprise is, at one level, an effort to explain Carter’s defeat.

By ordinary standards of rationality and reason, the October Surprise should never have gained an iota of credence. But once it emerged, it has been perpetuated by the self-perpetuating logic underling conspiracies in which the lack of evidence is the best evidence.