3/8: 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
⏱️ 11 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
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | CBS, I on the world, I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:03.0 | Den of Spies is the new book from Craig Unger, |
| 0:06.0 | Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason that stole the White House. |
| 0:10.0 | The events of 79 and 80 are now part of American history. |
| 0:14.0 | Ronald Reagan is elected, and Jimmy Carter is castigated as a weak president. |
| 0:21.5 | Iran is in a revolutionary state, pretty much the state you see today, although not as rich, then as it is now. |
| 0:29.2 | And at the same time, there are stories circulating that something untoward happened in the summer and fall of 1980 that made it possible for the |
| 0:42.3 | Reagan inauguration to celebrate the release of the hostages on that day, strangely. |
| 0:50.3 | We're at the kitchen table of Craig Unger on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Craig is reading an op-ed, I believe in the New York Times, by Gary Sick. Who is Gary Sick, Craig? |
| 1:00.0 | Gary Sick was on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. He was the point man on Iran during the hostage crisis. He had a background in naval intelligence. He'd been at Columbia |
| 1:13.6 | University for the last 30 years or so. And he is very much a man who believes in empirical reality. |
| 1:24.2 | He's a just-the-fax man. He takes facts and he analyzes them. And he's considered |
| 1:29.0 | very sober-minded for him to write this op-ed piece in the New York Times, suggesting that the |
| 1:36.3 | October surprise took place, suddenly gave credibility to something that had just been whispered |
| 1:43.5 | about. There are other correspondence necessary. Craig is an investigative reporter and a book writer, |
| 1:49.9 | and he has colleagues. And for those of you who plan to be investigative reporters, |
| 1:55.2 | you have friends everywhere. You talk to each other. You move from job to job. You have protegees. |
| 2:03.0 | You have mentors. |
| 2:04.4 | It's a world within worlds. |
| 2:06.6 | And we need to mention some of these names because they all contribute to this storytelling over decades. |
| 2:12.4 | Who is Bob Perry at the time reporting on the same story? |
| 2:16.8 | Bob Perry was a colleague of mine. |
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