PURCHASE

Den of Spies:
Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House 

On October 1 – which happens to be President Carter’s 100th birthday – Mariner Books will publish DEN OF SPIES: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House by New York Times bestselling author Craig Unger. In this remarkable work of investigative reporting, Unger reveals his thirty-year deep dive into the secret collusion between Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and Iran in which the GOP made illegal arms sales to Iran in return for Iran delaying the release of 52 American hostages until after the election, thus ensuring Reagan’s win and denying Carter a second term. Taking readers inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, Unger shares never-before-seen documents and illuminates 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, provocative, and presaging our Trump-era political scandals, DEN OF SPIES uncovers one of the darkest political conspiracies of all time and demonstrates the stakes of allowing the politics of the present to obscure our true history. And with the book coinciding with President Carter’s milestone birthday, it’s an apt time to revisit how this history impacted the legacy around his one term presidency.

Over the past two decades, Craig Unger has written some of the most explosive and respected books on the American Right’s threat to democracy, including bestsellers American Kompromat and House of Bush, House of Saud. Now, Unger again displays his talent for combining superb reporting with compelling storytelling as he explores the October Surprise, a real-life spy story that changed American history. DEN OF SPIES is as powerful as Unger’s previous investigations yet elevated with a personal narrative of perseverance unlike anything he’s written before.

Unger delivers in granular detail the most authoritative account yet of the October Surprise of 1980. It is not an overstatement, Unger contends, to say that this act of treason has played an enormous role in shaping the world we live in, from our domestic politics to our current global crises. In Iran, the repercussions from the October Surprise still reverberate today thanks to the brutal, repressive theocracy that remains in place there. In the United States, the October Surprise has become the blueprint for Republican malfeasance in more than forty years of presidential elections, and part of a decades-long legacy of the Democrats’ failure to fight back. The pattern culminated with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which brought with it a new paradigm of shameless cynicism that dismissed inconvenient truths as fake news, validated lies as “alternative facts,” and demonized anyone who challenged Trump.

“After all these years,” Unger writes, “this is not a mystery to solve—at least not in a traditional sense. Rather, it is an attempt to square the circle between something that is both obvious and shrouded, self-evident and lost in the shadows… But if we are to survive as a democracy, it's vital to understand what happened all those years ago. Even if we don't like this part of our past—rather, especially if we don't like it—we must come to terms with it, to acknowledge it, to understand how and why it happened.”

Crimes and Coverups

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.”