Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery [Hardcover]

Robert Parry (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 187982308X | ISBN-13: 978-1879823082 | Publication Date: September 1, 1993 | Edition: 1St Edition

"Trick or Treason" is the story behind the story of the 1980s' darkest political mystery, whether the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign secretly sabotaged President Carter's desperate negotiations to free 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. The book -- a narrative of Robert Parry's investigation for PBS Frontline -- takes the reader into a world where nothing is quite as it seems and political power is used ruthlessly to cover up the truth.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In Parry's self-image, he must be one of the few journalists with the guts, public-spiritedness, and tenacity to unlock official secrets. The reporter castigated his kowtowing colleagues, as he perceives them, in Fooling America and here picks up the idle spear of investigation and chucks it at a favorite target theory: that Republicans connived with Iranian mullahs to delay release of imprisoned American diplomats, thus denying President Carter an election-eve boost. So Parry received a commission from the Frontline PBS program to ask two questions about July and October 1980: Where was Bill Casey, and where was George Bush? This book is the raw material for the ensuing documentary, which aired in 1991. Parry answers neither question definitively, but he questions their alibis (that Casey was at a history seminar and Bush on a golf course), makes great hay of omissions in their personal records, and finds to his satisfaction that each could have skittered off to secret meetings. Parry himself went around the globe, heavily skeptical of those with something to tell him about the "surprise." A musty mystery with many angles and cold leads, this should revivify the interest of patrons who took in, or were taken in by, Gary Sick's October Surprise. Gilbert Taylor

From the Author

As an investigative reporter for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Robert Parry uncovered Oliver North's Nicaraguan contra aid network, the CIA's contra "assassination manual," the Oval Office role in covering up the Iran-contra scandal and other abuses of government power. For his work on the CIA and Central America, Parry won the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 350 pages
• Publisher: Sheridan Square Pubns; 1St Edition edition (September 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 187982308X
• ISBN-13: 978-1879823082
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #708,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Prestige and Ability of FRONTLINE, Serve Well The Reader, April 27, 2000

By 

T. Manning (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (Hardcover)

The prestige and ability of FRONTLINE, serve well the reader in explaining what October Surprise was about. This superb document is a spin off of the April 16'91 PBS-FRONTLINE piece, also analysed in the April 15'91 article in the NYT, and book of the same year, by Gary Sicks. Perry provides the investigative journalism that is the perfect complement to Sick's, a whistle blower and formerly insider. It is extremely important to have this documented evidence of the real level of corruption that hunger for power and abuse of power bring to a democracy. The most mazing point is the continuity between the October surprise and then the Irangate and worse Iran-Contra - gates all the wy to the Irakgate and the Gulf War that is with us even now at the soor of the new millenium. Whatever human frialties and menial distortions of the truth coming of this present Clinton - Gore Administration, are extremely pale in comparison with the documents and facts of the October Surprise and consequences. The proclaimed dignity of the Reagan Bush consecutive White - Houses is a big myth that brought the USA to the verge of, even worse than the present ones, wars, and pernitious corruption and entrechment of governments in other countries which we now fight at great expense, human expense included. Mr. Perry does the ultimate service in explaining the very complicated and still current October Surprise seed of political and governmental deception.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Reagan Coup?, January 19, 2004

By 

William Hare (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (Hardcover)

Robert Parry is a thorough professional journalist in the best tradition of the late I.F. Stone. His sharp reportorial instinct was aroused by activities spinning around the 1980 presidential election, in which Ronald Reagan achieved a great breakthrough for the American right in ousting Jimmy Carter.

The act on the part of the Iranian Khomeini government of releasing the 444 American hostages being held in Teheran as a protest against President Carter not sending the deposed Shah of Iran back to his native country for trial on the very day of Reagan's inaugural, along with other tantalyzing facts gnawing at the imagination, prompted Parry to go to work in earnest. Some of his reports from The Consortium, the Arlington, Virginia think tank in which he is involved, were produced on the PBS documentary series "Frontline."

When a Congressional investigation cleared the Reagan campaign team led by William Casey from any collusory wrongdoing with the Khomeini regime prior to the election of making a deal to withhold release of the hostages in exchange for arms, Parry was suspicious. He was tenacious enough to locate a discarded report from the Russian government in a remote storage room on Capitol Hill. The report which, no doubt, was believed to have been permanently discarded, revealed knowledge of future CIA director Casey, Reagan running mate George H.W. Bush, and another future CIA director, Robert Gates, having secretly met with Iranian government operatives during the 1980 campaign in Madrid and Paris.

While GOP political operatives such as Congressman Henry Hyde and Senator Mitch McConnell were successfully able to squelch any further Congressional investigation into the so-called October Surprise, this controversy turned out to have legs of its own, bolstered by Parry and other courageous Americans seeking the full story. As the mainstream media sought to dismiss the October Surprise theory, maintaining that the only testimony relates to a few loose cannon Middle East weapons operative types, the story is much more involved. A former head of French intelligence has corroborated the account revealed in the Russian report, while Ari Ben-Menashe, an Iranian born Jew who was an Israeli secret intelligence operative, testified before Congress that he participated in Paris meetings between senior Iranians and Republican emissaries.

This might be history from better than two decades ago, but it is dynamite-laden in its implications for the Reagan legacy, which would have resulted from what amounts to a coup, a dirty tricks pre-emption of the U.S. government to steal a presidential election. The charge becomes all the more credible based on other instances in 1968 and 2000, when Republican dirty tricks resulted in victories for Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, by respectively destroying peace negotiations by the Johnson administration that could have ended the Vietnam War and scrubbing the election rolls of legitimately qualified African American voters by a team led by candidate Bush's brother Jeb, governor of Florida, and his secretary of state, Catherine Harris.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Prestige and Ability of FRONTLINE, Serve Well The Reader, May 3, 2000

By 

Manuel J Torres-Anjel - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (Hardcover)

The prestige and ability of FRONTLINE, serve well the reader in explaining what October Surprise was about. This superb document is a spin off of the April 16'91 PBS-FRONTLINE piece, also analyzed in the April 15'91 article in the NYT, and book of the same year, by Gary Sicks. Parry provides the investigative journalism that is the perfect complement to Sick's, a whistle blower and formerly insider. It is extremely important to have this documented evidence of the real level of corruption that hunger for power and abuse of power bring to a democracy. The most amazing point is the continuity between the October surprise and then the Iran-gate and worse Iran-Contra - gates all the way to the Irak-gate and the Gulf War that is with us even now at the door of the new millennium. Whatever the human frailties and menial distortions of the truth coming out of this present Clinton - Gore Administration, they are extremely pale in comparison with the documents and facts of the October Surprise and consequences. The proclaimed dignity of the Reagan Bush consecutive White - Houses is a big myth that brought the USA to the verge of, even worse than the present ones, wars, and pernicious corruption and entrenchment of governments in other countries which we now fight at great expense, human expense included. Mr. Parry does the ultimate service in explaining the very complicated and still current October Surprise seed of political and governmental deception.