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Reality with Bruce de Torres 48 James DiEugenio
The October Surprise/Treason of Reagan’s 1980 Campaign

James DiEugenio is the editor and publisher of KennedysandKing.com, where you will incredible history about the assassinations of JFK, Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and much that has happened since, up to and including what’s happening today.

Jim has written or co-edited many books on those assassinations, including JFK REVISITED, the companion piece to Oliver Stone’s two recent documentaries, for which Jim wrote the screenplays, JFK REVISITED: Through the Looking Glass and JFK: Destiny Betrayed.

His latest book, with four co-authors, is THE JFK ASSASSINATION CHOKEHOLDS That Inescapably Prove There was a Conspiracy.

His article series, Biden and Trump vs Iran: Den of Spies, which can be found at jamesanthonydieugenio.substack.com, was inspired by the book, DEN OF SPIES: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House by Craig Unger, and by the dangerous tit-for-tat air battle between Iran and Israel, which has also included Hezbollah and now has culminated with the overthrow of Assad in Syria. The past events of which Jim writes have a strong influence on what’s happening in the region today, Jim believes.

For instance, one reason Iran has a formidable military force is because the Shah of Iran, at the pinnacle of the 1960s and ‘70s, was buying over $9 billion dollars a year of American arms. All those presidents, except Kennedy, had no problem selling them to him. Nixon. Ford. Carter. Those weapons had to be re-stocked. That was the reason for the October Surprise, where Reagan’s campaign team in 1980 made a deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the November election, so their release would not help President Carter in the election.

Iran was buying all kinds of jet fighters. Fighter bombers. Missiles. Tanks. William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, made a deal with the Iranians in Madrid and Paris to sell them the spare parts that they needed for this weaponry. To understand this and how Iranian-American relations have gotten so bad, you have to go back to Mohammad Mosaddegh, the popular prime minister that the CIA ousted in a coup in 1953.

Jim recounts how Mosaddegh worked for Iran’s interests, and how America overthrew him to join England in controlling and profiting from the sale of Iran’s oil. (The English fleet patrolled the seas and protected the British Empire, which at one time ruled 25% of the globe.)

The CIA paid Iranian students and clerics to protest Mosaddegh in manufactured demonstrations and bribed or killed generals to get the military to go along with regime change. CIA director Allen Dulles told everyone in Washington that Mosaddegh was in league with the communists and was going to side with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Jim believes that the overthrow of Mosaddegh and the return of the Shah was a mistake by the British, the U.S., the CIA, Allen Dulles, and Richard Nixon (vice president at the time) that cannot be overestimated. Dulles knew that the only way the Shah could stay in power was through an incredible amount of terror and suppression.

The CIA deployed a tremendous bribery budget and supervised the police force. They supervised the military. They created and supervised a secret organization called SAVAK, an intelligence agency like the CIA. The mullah class in Iran was also bribed, because the CIA knew that the clerics did not want the Shah.

All dissident press, all dissident speakers, were tracked down by SAVAK, not just in Iran but also abroad. They detained and imprisoned everybody opposed to the Shah being returned to Iran. A lot of them were tortured. Some of them were killed.