TODAY! Craig Unger Reads from ‘Den of Spies’ at Bette's Sunday's Speakeasy
Bette members: please register for our impromptu Speakeasy with Craig Unger reading from his book, Den of Spies, which documents the deal cut with Iran to tip the scale for Ronald Reagan's election
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***Today’s event begins in two hours.***
We had a fantastic Founder’s Day AI Series event with my podcast partner Jim Stewartson, who will return for part two March 24. As those who attended on Tuesday know, Part 2 was preempted due to Mike Flynn’s lawfare targeting Jim, and thankfully, Flynn just dropped the case.
Look for an invite to our next event with Jim and an upcoming Speakeasy with Jason Stanley.
Bette’s Speakeasy with Craig Unger reading from Den of Spies
Today, Sunday, March 15, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern
Reading all the trash takes on the US-Israel war in Iran, I thought it was important to reach out to our frequent Bette guest, Craig Unger, to get some deep, historical perspective from his bombshell book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House.
This will be a very special Speakeasy event, as Unger will be reading a passage from his book, and then we’ll begin the Q&A.
Please read his recent report on his Substack, They Built It. Now They Want to Bomb It, written just days before the war was launched.
In that report, he wrote:
Almost no one is asking a key question that needs to be asked: How the hell did we get here?
After all, Iran has been a centerpiece of American national security concerns for decades.
To answer that question, let’s go back to 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by millions of Iranians—ranging from Islamic fundamentalists to secular leftists— and was replaced by an even more repressive Islamist regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In the nearly five decades since, the Islamic Republic of Iran has executed dissidents by the thousands, imprisoned journalists, and tortured political prisoners in the notorious Evin Prison. It has subjected women to a horrific system of gender apartheid in which they are beaten, imprisoned, and killed for the crime of removing their hijabs. According to CBS News, Yvette Cooper, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, said, “there may have been 2,000 people killed” in recent weeks, perhaps more. And, as if all that were not enough, the regime funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist organizations across the Middle East.
How did all that happen to a country with 2,500 years of civilization and a people who are widely considered among the best educated and most cultured in the Middle East?
In large part, the answer lies in the treasonous political crime committed forty-six years ago known as the October Surprise. As I reported in my 2024 book Den of Spies, the October Surprise took place during the 1980 presidential race, when Reagan-Bush campaign manager William Casey made a secret deal with Iran’s militant mullahs regarding the release of 52 American hostages who had been incarcerated since the Shah was overthrown and fled to the United States.
The October Surprise gave birth to the Reagan era and modern conservatism — an entire political dynasty built on an act of treason.—Craig Unger
Details about Den of Spies here:
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.
Craig Unger Book links here:
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Looking forward to seeing many of you today, at 11 am Pacific, for this very special Bette’s Speakeasy event. Keep scrolling to register.
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