A bipartisan House panel has concluded that there is no merit to the persistent accusations that people associated with the 1980 Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan struck a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the election.
"There is no credible evidence supporting any attempt or proposal to attempt by the Reagan Presidential campaign, or persons representing or associated with the campaign to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran," the panel concluded in a summary of its report, which is to be made public on Wednesday. Congressional aides distributed the summary to news organizations today.
The summary describes the report as "the most thorough and complete investigation and analysis of the October Surprise allegations to date." More than 230 people were interviewed in several countries by 10 lawyers and six investigators working for House October Surprise Task Force.
The Reagan campaign, the report said, was fearful that President Jimmy Carter would arrange a last-minute agreement to free the 52 hostages in the final month of the election campaign, or that he would spring an "October Surprise." The phrase became a catchall term to describe the entire episode, including the accusations that some of Mr. Reagan's aides worked to delay the hostages' release to deny Mr. Carter the benefit of the publicity.
In essence, the investigation concluded that the stories of Reagan campaign operatives working covertly with the Iranians to delay the hostages' release were spread by people whose testimony does not hold up against credible documentary evidence, including telephone, hotel and credit card records as well as raw intelligence reports.
In addition, one of the principal sources for many of the news reports, an Iranian arms dealer named Jamshid Hashemi, has retracted his story. Mr. Hashemi, the report said, told House investigators under oath that he had no knowledge of any efforts to delay the release of the hostages.
The House panel said it had undertaken its inquiry because the accusations, if they had been true, "would be wholly beyond the wildest excesses in our constitutional history." It said the notion that "leaders of one of our two principal parties would attempt to steal a Presidential election by seeking to prolong the incarceration of fellow American citizens by foreign terrorists is little short of treachery."
The hostages were freed by Iran on Jan. 20, 1981, the day that Mr. Reagan was sworn in as President. The theory that the Republican campaign had engineered a delay of the release until after Election Day circulated in Washington throughout the Reagan and Bush Administrations, but it attracted heightened public interest in April 1991, when Gary Sick, a national security aide in the Carter White House, wrote an article for the Op-Ed page in The New York Times saying he had concluded that the accusations were true because of the variety of sources who told similar stories.
Under the theory, in exchange for the delay, the Reagan Administration arranged for the subsequent shipment of arms to Teheran through Israel. Mr. Sick and several journalists reported that William J. Casey, the Reagan campaign chairman, met with representatives of Iran in the summer before the election in Madrid to discuss the delay and consummated the deal that fall in Paris. Mr. Casey, who later became Director of Central Intelligence, died in 1987.
The summary said the panel had obtained original records from the Madrid hotel where meetings between Mr. Casey were said to have occurred, as well as telephone records and credit card receipts. Further information was obtained in interviews with several of those said to have been involved in the meetings, the panel said.
"With respect to the alleged meetings in Madrid, the task force found that the evidence allegedly supporting each of these meetings was neither from credible sources nor corroborated," the report concluded. Of the five people cited in news reports as knowing about the meetings, the report said three had testified under oath that they had no knowledge of them.
The panel said overwhelming evidence showed that Mr. Casey did not travel to Madrid at that time. The documents that support that assertion will be released Wednesday. Nor did the summary make clear why people who disowned their stories are more believable now than they were when they initially made their accusations.
The summary of the report harshly criticizes another principal source of many of the allegations, an Israeli named Ari Ben-Menashe. Mr. Ben-Menashe has told several reporters that he was present at a meeting in October 1980 in Paris between Iranian representatives and people from the Reagan campaign. Mr. Ben-Menashe has suggested at various times that George Bush, the Republican candidate for Vice President at the time, was at the Paris meeting. The panel said it had conclusive evidence that Mr. Ben-Mehashe was not in Paris then.
The panel, led by Representatives Lee Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, and Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, had earlier released an interim report dismissing the theory that Mr. Bush attended any meetings in Paris in 1980.