In a June 18, 1992, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul to the State Department in Washington, Gregg wrote that he had learned that Senate investigators had...
"...attempted to subpoena me to appear on 24 June in connection with their so-called 'October Surprise' investigation. The subpoena was sent to my lawyer, Judah Best, who returned it to the committee since he had no authority to accept service of a subpoena. ..."If the October Surprise investigation contacts the [State] Department, I request that you tell them of my intention to cooperate fully when I return to the States, probably in September. Any other inquiries should be referred to my lawyer, Judah Best. Mr. Best asks that I specifically request you not to accept service of a subpoena if the committee attempts to deliver one to you."
That way Gregg ensured that he was not legally compelled to testify while running out the clock on the Senate inquiry and leaving little time for the House task force. His strategy of delay was endorsed by Janet Rehnquist after a meeting with Best and a State Department lawyer. In a June 24, 1992, letter to Gray, Rehnquist wrote that "at your direction, I have looked into whether Don Gregg should return to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee hearings next week. ... I believe we should NOT request that Gregg testify next week."
The failure to effect service of the subpoena gave the Bush team an advantage, Rehnquist noted, because the Senate investigators then relented and merely "submitted written questions to Gregg, through counsel, in lieu of an appearance... This development provides us an opportunity to manage Gregg's participation in October Surprise long distance." Rehnquist added hopefully that by the end of September 1992 "the issue may, by that time, even be dead for all practical purposes."
Asked about this strategy of delay, Hamilton told me that "running out the clock is a very familiar tactic in any congressional investigation" since the Bush-41 administration would have known that the task force's authorization expired at the end of the session. That deadline came into play when the floodgates on evidence of Republican guilt opened in December 1992.
In 2010, shortly before his death to cancer, the task force's former chief counsel Barcella told me that so much incriminating evidence against the Reagan campaign poured in during December 1992 that he asked Hamilton for a three-month extension, but was rebuffed. Hamilton said he had no recollection of such a specific request from Barcella, but added that he might have explained the problem of the task force's authorization running out at end of the session.
"All I could have done is go before the next Congress and request reauthorization," Hamilton told me. However, with key evidence withheld -- and facing fierce Republican resistance to extending the inquiry -- Hamilton chose to simply wrap up the task force's report with a judgment clearing Reagan, Bush, Casey and other alleged participants.
Now, realizing that the White House was sitting on knowledge about a mysterious Casey trip to Madrid, Lee Hamilton is no longer so sure. [For a fuller account of the October Surprise evidence implicating Reagan's 1980 campaign, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and America's Stolen Narrative, which also contains evidence of a precursor "October Surprise" case, Richard Nixon's sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968.]
Yet, in April 2014, even as the U.S. government endlessly honors Ronald Reagan with his name attached to Washington's National Airport and dozens of other government facilities -- and as warm nostalgia envelopes the aging George H.W. Bush -- there is outrage across Official Washington that Hamid Aboutalebi, who was 22 when the U.S. hostages were taken, has been named Iran's ambassador to the UN.
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