Sick, Gary. October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. New York: Times Books - Random House, 1991. 278 pages.

Gary Sick spent 24 years in the navy as an analyst and served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. His book "All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran" (1985) is highly rated. He was a White House aide for Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979-81, and by 1991 was a professor at Columbia University.

"October Surprise" refers to the scenario that certain Reagan campaign officials, William Casey for one, may have arranged to delay the release of the hostages, thereby insuring that Carter would be unable to tilt the election with a "surprise" release in October 1980. This was proposed by Barbara Honegger in 1987 (see the annotation for her book), whereupon Joel Bleifuss of In These Times picked away at it in column after column. In October 1988 Abbie Hoffman wrote about it in Playboy, but still this isn't considered respectable. In April 1991 the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Sick, who was beginning to get very interested in the issue, and "Frontline" did a show on PBS on April 16. Now the networks and Congress took notice. By late 1992, however, many observers considered some of the sources for the story to be unreliable, and almost everyone lost interest.
ISBN 0-8129-1989-0

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