From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

Nearly 16 years ago, during the last transition from a President Bush to a Democrat, Moscow made an extraordinary gesture to Washington: The Kremlin supplied a summary of its intelligence information about secret U.S.-Iranian contacts in the 1980s.

The report was from a national security committee of the Russian Duma to Rep. Lee Hamilton, who had requested what might be in Moscow’s files as part of a task force investigation into whether the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 had interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s bid to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

The Russian report arrived late, via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, showing up on Jan. 11, 1993, but the contents were stunning. The Russians reported that their intelligence revealed that long-rumored meetings between Republicans and Iranians in Europe during Campaign 1980 had indeed occurred.

But this information went against what Hamilton and other members of the task force had decided to conclude, that there had been no such contacts. Hamilton had already rebuffed advice from his chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella, that the investigation be extended a few months because of other late-arriving evidence of Republican guilt.

Instead, Hamilton had ordered the probe wrapped up with a conclusion of Republican innocence. The Russian report just represented another complication, especially since the task force’s debunking report had already gone to the printers and was set for release two days later, on Jan. 13, 1993.

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