"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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