2/8: Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House Audio CD – Unabridged, October 1, 2024 by Craig Unger (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Den-Spies-Reagan-History-Treason/dp/B0D2LPBJMH
It was a tinderbox of an accusation. In April 1991, the New York Times ran an op-ed alleging that Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign had conspired with the Iranian government to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after the 1980 election. The Iranian hostage crisis was President Jimmy Carter's largest political vulnerability, and his lack of success freeing them ultimately sealed his fate at the ballot box. In return for keeping Americans in captivity until Reagan assumed the oath of office, the Republicans had secretly funneled arms to Iran. Treasonous and illegal, the operation--planned and executed by Reagan's campaign manager Bill Casey--amounted to a shadow foreign policy run by private citizens that ensured Reagan's victory.
Investigative journalist Craig Unger was one of the first reporters covering the October Surprise--initially for Esquire and then Newsweek--and while attempting to unravel the mystery, he was fired, sued, and ostracized by the Washington press corps, as a counter narrative took hold: The October Surprise was a hoax. Though Unger later recovered his name and became a bestselling author on Republican abuses of power, the October Surprise remained his white whale, the project he--as well as legendary investigative journalist, the late Robert Parry--worked on late at night and between assignments.
In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, along with Parry's never-before-seen archives, and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists. A timely and provocative history that presages our Trump-era political scandals, Den of Spies demonstrates the stakes of allowing the politics of the moment to obscure the writing of our history.
1979
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Dotser with my colleague Craig Unger. His new book, Den of Spies, Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason that stole the White House. |
| 0:08.0 | This is the October Surprise legend. And when facts replace the legend, you print the legend is the Hollywood recommendation. |
| 0:16.0 | We're doing the other way around. When facts replace the legend, you print the facts. |
| 0:22.1 | And that's where we're going. |
| 0:23.7 | You can't solve everything immediately, |
| 0:26.2 | but we need to go to the Reagan election campaign |
| 0:29.3 | watching these events, |
| 0:31.4 | the takeover of the embassy, |
| 0:34.1 | the Ayatollah's rise, the death of the Shah, |
| 0:37.3 | and now Desert One. Ronald Reagan is running |
| 0:41.5 | strongly for president, but he fires his campaign manager, man named John Sears, and hires |
| 0:47.7 | Bill Casey. Who is Bill Casey that Ronald Reagan reached for him at this point in his campaign? |
| 0:54.5 | Casey's a very interesting choice as a campaign manager |
| 0:57.6 | because he's not doing the things that normal campaign managers do. |
| 1:02.4 | Normally it's about raising money, and Casey did some of that. |
| 1:06.2 | But Casey was also, to me, one of the great American spies, |
| 1:10.0 | and I characterized him as sort of a mix between |
| 1:13.7 | James Bond and Mr. Magoo. And he mumbled a lot. That was his nickname, mumbles. The joke was |
| 1:20.6 | after he became head of the CIA, was that all the senior officials needed scramblers on their |
| 1:26.8 | phone, but not Bill Casey, because no one |
| 1:29.0 | could understand what he said anyway. He sort of spat when he talked. He was going in a million |
| 1:34.1 | directions at once, but he was dazzlingly brilliant as a spy. He had done enormously important |
... |
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