4/8: 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
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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 TEHRAN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Baxter with my friend and colleague, Craig Unger, Den of Spies, Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason that stole the White House. |
| 0:09.0 | Craig and I were at the same gym on the Upper West Side at this time, and I was often listening to his tales about going from the success of Esquire to the resources available from Newsweek. The bureaus all over |
| 0:22.7 | the world, as Craig says, |
| 0:25.0 | and they want you to go somewhere, you just buy |
| 0:26.6 | the ticket and go there. |
| 0:28.4 | This is owned by the Washington Post and makes a great |
| 0:30.4 | deal of money. Their editorial meetings, |
| 0:32.6 | there's a team put together. It's extremely |
| 0:34.4 | impressive. Maynard Parker is the |
| 0:36.6 | editor-in-chief. He hires Craig in a conversation. |
| 0:42.1 | John Barry is the head of the investigation in Englishmen, and they come together and have meetings, |
| 0:47.5 | and Craig then goes to meet Ben Manashi again, who flies in from Australia. All is going extremely |
| 0:53.8 | well. Did you have any sense that it was not |
| 0:56.3 | going in the direction you thought, Craig? Not initially. I thought we were all in the same page, |
| 1:01.4 | and wow, this was the team that was going to put it all together, and we would be the new sort of |
| 1:07.4 | Woodward and Bernstein. That's the way it appeared to be going. And suddenly, |
| 1:11.6 | about a month or so into it, or five or six weeks into it, everything turned upside down. |
| 1:19.6 | And it became clear to me they were trying to discredit all the sources like Ben Manasi. |
| 1:26.6 | And what actually turned up with Newsweek, |
| 1:29.3 | it was sort of astonishing to me is they ended up doing |
| 1:32.6 | three stories in a row saying the October surprise |
| 1:36.7 | didn't happen, it didn't happen, it didn't happen. |
... |
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