Abolhassan Bani Sadr was president of Iran during and for some months after the 1980 US election that brought Ronald Reagan to power. The young and educated Iranian leader had returned in 1979 with Khomeini from exile, but he lost the presidency to rivals in Khomeini's entourage in May 1981.
"There were also secret negotiations," Bani Sadr maintains, and it is these negotiations between officials of the Khomeini regime and members of the Reagan presidential campaign staff that would explain the subsequent unpredictable Reagan administration Mideast policies. As a result, a contract was signed with Israel for shipment of arms in March 1981, Bani Sadr says, and by the time he fled Iran in late July, 1981, there had been at least three Israeli arms shipments, including the one that crashed.
How did Israel get involved in direct contacts between Iranians and Reagan campaign officials? Bani Sadr says it was through the Iranian negotiators, who had close ties with Savak, the Iranian secret police organization which had had Israeli advisers in the time of the Shah.
The former Iranian president's information dovetails at this point with facets of the story previously revealed by American journalists. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus have reported in the Washington Post and Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald that three Reagan campaign aides met in a Washington DC hotel in early October, 1980, with a self-described "Iranian exile" who offered, on behalf of the Iranian government, to release the hostages to Reagan, not Carter, in order to ensure Carter's defeat in the November 4, 1980 election.
The American participants were Richard Allen, subsequently Reagan's first national security adviser, Allen aide Laurence Silberman, and Robert McFarlane, another future national security adviser who in 1980 was on the staff of Senator John Tower (R-TX). The three American participants claim no deal was struck and that none of them can remember the Iranian's name.
Bani Sadr, however, says the secret deal was made, even as the Iranians publicly reached an agreement with the Carter administration to release the hostages in return for the unfreezing of $4 billion. The Iranian who secretly met with the Reaganauts in Washington, Bani Sadr says, was either Parvis Sabati, Manucher Ghorbanifar, or both. Ghorbanifar, like McFarlane, figures prominently in the subsequent US-Iran arms-for-hostages negotiations in 1985 and 1986. Ghorbanifar has also been described by the CIA and by Colonel Oliver North as an agent of Mossad, Israel's CIA.
