#October Surprise

People (6)

• E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr. E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr. served as chief counsel for the House October Surprise Task Force from 1992 to 1993, reportedly urging a three-month extension of the investigation when substantial new evidence arrived in the final weeks, a request that Task Force co-chair Lee Hamilton declined.
• Gary Sick Gary Sick was the principal White House aide for Iran on the Carter National Security Council during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, and subsequently authored October Surprise (1991), the book that launched congressional investigations into allegations that Reagan's campaign secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the hostages' release.
• John Connally John Connally was Governor of Texas and Treasury Secretary who in July-August 1980, accompanied by Ben Barnes, allegedly toured the Middle East carrying a message from the Reagan campaign to Arab intermediaries: Iran would receive better terms for hostage release with Reagan than with Carter, so they should counsel the Iranians to wait.
• Lee Hamilton Lee Hamilton served as a Democratic congressman from Indiana from 1965 to 1999 and co-chaired both the House October Surprise Task Force (1992-1993) and the 9/11 Commission (2002-2004); his decision to decline a three-month extension of the October Surprise investigation, despite new evidence arriving in the final weeks, has been cited as a significant limitation on that inquiry.
• Manucher Ghorbanifar Manucher Ghorbanifar was a former SAVAK officer and Iranian exile arms dealer whom the CIA formally burned as a 'fabricator' in 1984, yet who became the primary Iranian intermediary in the 1985-1986 Iran-Contra arms deals brokered through the NSC, and who was named in the May 1985 Reynolds-Weld letter as a broker for the covert distribution of PROMIS software.
• Robert Parry Robert Parry (1949-2018) was an investigative journalist who broke early Iran-Contra and Contra drug stories at the AP and Newsweek, founded Consortium News in 1995 after being sidelined by mainstream outlets, and produced the most sustained documentary case for the October Surprise allegation, obtaining the withheld Madrid embassy cable reference and discovering the buried Russian intelligence report.