Gary Sick

Gary Sick is a retired U.S. Navy captain who served as the principal staff member of the National Security Council responsible for Iran during the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He was the NSC's primary Iran analyst throughout the 444-day hostage crisis of 1979-1981, serving at the nexus of all diplomatic and intelligence information regarding the hostage situation as it developed.¹

After his government service, Sick became a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University's Middle East Institute within the School of International and Public Affairs. He also wrote All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran (1985), a detailed account of Carter's handling of the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis drawn from his direct participation.¹

October Surprise Investigation

In an April 1991 op-ed in the New York Times, Sick publicly alleged that the Reagan 1980 presidential campaign had secretly negotiated with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the 52 American hostages past Election Day in exchange for arms and unfrozen assets. The op-ed drew on three years of interviews conducted in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, and triggered immediate congressional attention. The resulting book, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (Times Books, 1991), provided the most systematic case for the allegation and served as the primary evidentiary foundation for both congressional investigations.¹²

Sick identified William J. Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, as the principal American negotiator, and the Hashemi brothers (Cyrus and Jamshid) as the key Iranian intermediaries who arranged meetings in Spain in July 1980. He placed a final meeting in Paris in October 1980 at which the deal was sealed. He acknowledged that his principal witness, Ari Ben-Menashe, was subsequently found not credible by congressional investigators.¹

The House October Surprise Task Force (1992-1993) found "no credible evidence" substantiating Sick's central allegations. Sick acknowledged the Task Force's limitations, citing the withheld Madrid embassy cable and the Russian intelligence report that arrived after the Task Force had closed.²

Post-Investigation Reassessment

In a March 2023 essay in The New Republic titled "It's All but Settled: The Reagan Campaign Delayed the Release of the Iranian Hostages," Sick wrote that the Ben Barnes/John Connally revelation -- documenting a parallel Reagan-campaign effort to delay the hostage release via Middle East intermediaries, confirmed by travel records in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library -- had convinced him the core allegation was "all but settled." He cited this development as independent corroboration that had emerged decades after his original research.¹