With a persistance that does him credit, veteran investigative journalist and founder of Consortium News Robert Parry has been nibbling away at the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ story for a long time.

Each time he revisits the saga, Parry bites another chunk off the cookie.

Jimmy Carter - Worst President Billboard

His latest article – The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter – draws more confident and far-reaching  conclusions than before.

Parry makes a solid case that Jimmy Carter’s Administration was brought down by a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA and the far-right Israeli Government of the day. The former were ultimately answerable to George Bush senior, Vice Presidential candidate for the Republicans in the 1980 election. The latter were presumably under the control of Israel’s Prime Minister Menachim Begin, a former Irgun terrorist.

The Israeli connection helps explain how this story has taken so long to break. Parry relates (emphasis added):

As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles – with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed – history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel’s Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion – perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick – that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

Too many powerful interests do not want the American people to accept even the possibility that U.S. intelligence operatives and a longtime ally could intervene to oust a president who had impinged on what those two groups considered their vital interests.

To accept that scenario would mean that two of the great fears of American democracy had come true – George Washington’s warning against the dangers of “entangling alliances” and Harry Truman’s concern that the clandestine operations of the CIA had the makings of an “American Gestapo.”

It is far easier to assure the American people that no such thing could occur, that Israel’s Likud – whatever its differences with Washington over Middle East peace policies – would never seek to subvert a U.S. president, and that CIA dissidents – no matter how frustrated by political constraints – would never sabotage their own government.

I’ll add a personal note to this story.

I was a visitor in the USA for several months in the Autumn of 1979. I found the experience surreal. Major TV networks ran two separate current affairs programs each evening: The Iran Hostage Crisis and The News. Both were of roughly equal length.

Each day, the public was reminded how many days the crisis had lasted. For example, the opening screen image might read: “Iran Hostage Crisis: Day 25″. I left the States to return to Europe at the end of 1979, but presumably that imagery continued throughout the year of 1980. Everyone knew – although it was rarely emphasised – that Day 365 was November 4th 1980: the date of the 1980 US election.

It was as though the entire circus was custom-designed for TV, which I suspect it was.

By the end of the year-long saga of Jimmy Carter’s helpless inability to bring the American hostages home, support for his presidency had collapsed. The Reagan-Bush ticket  swept to power at the November 1980 election.

Jimmy Carter: tried to inject decency into American foreign affairs

Few had expected that outcome in the late 1970s. On my travels around the USA, I found the Carter Presidency was generally popular. Despite an economically troubled 1970s, Americans seemed to be feeling better about themselves after the traumas of the 1960s and the Nixon era. The Vietnam war was over. Carter was even reforming the intelligence agencies and attempting – with some success – to inject a note of morality into American foreign policy.

One can be critical of Carter’s record; many progressives were critical at the time. He didn’t go far enough or fast enough for many. On the other hand, his Presidency was during the Cold War era and suffered from the constraints accompanying that distorting global fission.

Overall, there was a general sense that Jimmy Carter was moving America in a more caring and progressive direction. Most people liked it. He’d used his power to push for peace with a modicum of justice in the middle east, resuming earlier attempts by earlier Presidents, including his most recent predecessor Gerald Ford, but with notably greater success.

Two things eventually turned Jimmy Carter’s decency-first approach to foreign polity into damaged goods. The resulting disillusionment was sufficient for a large numbers of Americans in the ‘center’ of politics to desert Carter in droves and opt for the hard-line, bombastic, pro-military agenda of Reagan and Bush.

Both were foreign affairs issues. The media amplified and put an anti-Carter spin on them, making his Administration seem weak and incompetent. One of the issues were Afghanistan, ‘invaded’ by Soviet troops in late 1979. The other issue, arguably more he Iran hostage crisis.

We now know, from subsequent disclosures by then National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the Afghanistan debacle was tantamount to a deliberate act of entrapment on the part of the USA. Whether Carter was party to that is less clear. I suspect he wasn’t. The ensuing frosty relationship with the Soviet Union, which continued on to the Olympic Games held in Moscow the next year, was not favourable to Carter’s image domestically. Instead of a ‘peace president’, he was made to look like a mug.

The Iran hostage crisis was even bigger news – and the story ran right up to election day. In fact, it was to reach a conclusion only on President Reagan’s inauguration day in January 1981, when the US hostages were finally released, signifying the beginning of a new political era.

When I visited the USA in late 1979, I asked a few Americans if they thought it likely Reagan would be elected. They generally laughed. The former California Governor was regarded as figure of fun. Bush caused more concern to Democrats, but he was clearly associated with the CIA. The general sentiment was that Carter would win again in 1980.

The US Administration of Jimmy Carter - defeated by treason

But in the event, the once-popular President was decisively defeated in November 1980. His well intentioned foreign policy – a policy that gave a new primacy to human rights – had been made to seem little more than naive weakness. After all, the Russians had ‘taken advantage’ in Afghanistan and the Iranian revolutionaries were laughing at Carter in Tehran. By election day in November 1980, Jimmy Carter was political dead meat

The shift to a Reagan/Bush Administration made a huge difference on numerous policy fronts, from military expenditure to energy policy. The military spend was ramped up to an unprecedented extent. Pressure to reform was relaxed for the intelligence agencies. Solar panels were ripped off the White House roof. Big oil was back in DC – in style.

I recall having suspicious at the time about the snapshot of history I was observing. It all seemed too neat; just a few too many co-incidences. Yet the idea that the US Republicans were able to pull off a coup d’etat on their own was too hard to believe. I hadn’t reckoned on the significance of the Bush-intel connection. Above all, I’d missed the role of the Israelis.

Thirty years on, knowing what I know now about Zionist media dominance in the the USA and having waded through a number of Robert Parry’s well-written and well-sourced articles, it’s clear to me now what happened. Anyone with the time, interest and intellectual open-mindedness can check the documentation for themselves. The early 1980′s October Surprise /Iran Contra saga is a most definitely a ripping yarn – an educational political thriller with plenty of villains, some of whose names may be surprisingly familiar!

In 1979/80 – not for the first time and not for the last – the Zionist leadership changed the course of American history. It exchanged a Democratic Administration for a Republican Administration. The electorate was systematically manipulated to achieve this objective. George Bush senior, a man later to become Vice-President and President (1988-92) in his own right, committed acts of treason against the US Administration of the day to gain unfair political advantage.

It’s true that Israel had friends – and some sceptics – in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The 1980 election did not bring about a shift in America’s middle east policy anything like as decisive as the bloody coup of November 1963. Yet overall, the demise of the Carter Administration served Israeli interests – at least it served the interests of hard-line, right-wing Israelis and their allies in the Jewish community worldwide.

Those are the interests who would go on the collaborate with criminals in the US Government in the unconstitutional crimes of ‘Iran-Contra’. Two decades after that, re-branded  as  ‘neocons’, they were to orchestrate the 9-11 atrocities and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

January 20th 1981: US Hostages released at the dawn of the 'Reagan Era'