Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House: A Provocative History with Deep Political Revelations, ... the High-Stakes Political Games of the 1980s
(By Craig Unger)
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| Author | Craig Unger |
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 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 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. Timely and provocative, with powerful echoes of 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.”
