the hostages, the Reagan campaign tapped former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his extensive network of international contacts. The Reagan campaign's ominous warnings of a possible October surprise to the press was done for strategic reasons. It was intended to prepare the voters, so that if some good October news happened, the voters would look at the event as a political ploy by the Carter campaign to win the election. Personal papers left by Joseph V. Reed Jr. indicate that the "team" around David Rockefeller, the chairman of Chase Bank, "collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an 'October surprise'—a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show. The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives." Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican, assisted the Reagan campaign because he had a negative view on Carter's dovish foreign policy, and also because Chase Bank's balance sheet held $360 million in loans to Iran and more than $500 million in frozen Iranian deposits. Jack Anderson wrote an article in The Washington Post in the fall of 1980 about a possible October surprise, in which he alleged that the Carter administration was preparing a major military operation in Iran for rescuing U.S. hostages in order to help him get re-elected. Subsequent allegations surfaced against Reagan alleging that his team had actively impeded the hostage release. A declassified CIA memo from 1980 concluded that Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian hardliners, were "determined to exploit the hostage issue to bring about President Carter’s defeat in the November elections." Secret deal accusation After the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, minutes after Reagan's inauguration, some charged that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranian government whereby the Iranians would hold the hostages until after Reagan was elected and inaugurated. Gary Sick, member of the National Security council under Presidents Ford and Carter (before being relieved of his duties weeks into Reagan's term) made the accusation in a New York Times editorial in the run-up to the 1992 election. The initial bipartisan response from Congress was skeptical: House Democrats refused to authorize an inquiry, and Senate Republicans denied a $600,000 appropriation for a probe. Eight former hostages