REMINDER: Bette’s Tuesday Happy Hour with Craig Unger on Oil, Iran, and the ‘Den of Spies’
Craig Unger will be discussing passages from his book, Den of Spies, in relation to history between US and Iran and answering the question: is oil more important than Democracy? July 1, noon Pacific
***Bette members will find registration link below the paywall. To join us, please take out a paid membership and help support independent investigative journalism in this time of grave deception.***
On Tuesday, I am bringing back investigative journalist and New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger for an interview about his recent substack post, which asks the question: Is oil more important than Democracy?
Unger takes a historic look at US activities in Iran, pulled from the pages of his book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House.
***We will be meeting with Unger on Tuesday, July 1, noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern.***
As he wrote on Substack, regarding Iran:
“It’s worth asking how such a repressive fundamentalist regime took hold in a country that had been a stable secular democracy. Until the United States intervened, that is. There are two parts to the story—and both show how America has played an essential role in pumping up the militant Islamic fundamentalism we decry and installing their leaders in power.
“The first part, much of which has been widely told, concerns the 1953 overthrow by the CIA of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular social democrat who had been a principal figure in bringing about the end of 150 years of British interference and plundering of Iran’s national resources.”
As he wrote in Den of Spies:
“To achieve that goal [of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry], [Mossadegh] first tried to renegotiate a new agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP or British Petroleum). When that hit a dead end, Mossadegh then resolved that he had no choice but to commit the unpardonable sin of nationalizing Iran’s vast oil industry. ‘This was the first time that anyone in the Middle East had ever done anything against imperial powers, colonial powers,’ said Barry Rosen, a press attaché at the US embassy in the seventies, and later one of the hostages.”
More details about Den of Spies and additional bestselling books by Craig Unger:
During the 1980 presidential campaign between Reagan and incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Iran held fifty-two American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They had been seized during the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s supreme ruler. (“Den of spies” is the term that Iranians used to refer to the embassy because of a long history of American interference in Iranian affairs, including the 1953 coup that overthrew a democratically elected government.)
The fate of those hostages became a national obsession and perhaps the most critical issue of the 1980 election. But as the 1980 presidential campaign neared its end, Republican operatives led by legendary spymaster William Casey did something that was not only illegal, but treasonous, to turn the hostage crisis to their advantage: They made a secret deal to send millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Iran. In exchange, Iran would delay the release of the hostages until after the election.
If the hostages were released before the election, both the Carter and Reagan camps believed, Carter would get a big bounce in the polls and beat Reagan. But if the hostages were still imprisoned by election day, voters would see Carter as a weak and impotent leader who allowed America to be humiliated.
At the time, the Republicans were out of power and had no authority to make any agreement whatsoever with Iran. Furthermore, the Carter administration had imposed an arms embargo against Iran as a terrorist state, making the deal illegal on multiple grounds. Unger began to write about the October Surprise in 1991, when it first broke as a major national story.
At the time, President George H. W. Bush was preparing to run for a second term, with stratospheric approval ratings that made his reelection look inevitable. But as Reagan's vice-presidential candidate in 1980, Bush was inescapably drawn into investigations of the October Surprise, and the political implications were explosive. An incumbent president who was up for reelection was tied up in a traitorous spy scandal. Yet the implications reached far beyond Bush’s campaign prospects.
“If these charges were true,” Unger writes, “the entire Reagan-Bush era—indeed, modern conservatism in the United States—had been borne out of a treasonous covert operation.”
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, American Kompromat, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.
Book links here:
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Thank you, and I look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Keep scrolling for registration link.
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