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speaking about Poppy Bush, from the transcript:
Well, when he made his announcement, one of his consultants, who currently is the president of the American Conservative Union, David Keene, said, and I pretty much quote here, “Half of the people in the audience were wearing trench coats.” Now, this is significant because he left the CIA and became a Presidential candidate with the unique set of relationships with the CIA. Now, in 1980, the 50-odd hostages that had been seized in Iran by the Ayatollah's government were being held, and there was an attempt made to rescue them in April of 1980 by the Carter administration. It didn't work. The helicopters were shot down. At this point, pollsters in both parties calculated that you had about six to ten points of the vote hanging on the outcome of whether or not the hostages were released. If Carter could get them back, that vote would swing to Carter, if not, that vote would swing to the Republican nominee who quickly became Ronald Reagan with George H.W. Bush as his running mate.
Now, in the summer, because of this enormous importance of the six to ten points on which the election was hanging and on which you had this focus on the return of the hostages, both sides got very much concerned with this; and the Republicans set something in motion, allegedly, that has been covered in several books, and became a scandal known as "The October Surprise."
In essence, there were ties sought, and then relationships opened with the Ayatollahs and the revolutionary government of Iran, and the allegation is, in these several books, that basically, contact was made by George Bush and Bill Casey, who later became the next CIA director, and had been in the OSS in World War II; and the point was that the Iranian government was being offered money and arms if they held onto the hostages. In other words, you don't free the hostages before the election. You hold onto them. Now, I remember not paying too much attention to this. It became an issue in 1991 and 1992, belatedly, way after the event, because a group of scandals were gathering around Bush, and this was one of them. A book came out in 1991 that was sort of dismissed by the media. It wasn't thought to have had all of the necessary details and back-stopping.
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