George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

administrations between 1973 and 1977 after having directed the US Office of Civil
Rights in the Justice Department between 1970 and 1973. Pottinger had also stayed on
into the early Carter administration, serving as special assistant to the Attorney General
from February to April, 1977. Pottinger had then joined the law firm of Tracy, Malin, and
Pottinger of Washington, London, and Paris.
This same Pottinger was now the lawyer for gun-runner Cyrus Hashemi. Given
Pottinger's proven relation to Bush, we may wonder whether Bush may have been
informed of Hashemi's proposal and of the possible responses of the Carter
administration. Bush may have known, for example, that during the Christmas season of
1979 one Captain Siavash Setoudeh, an Iranian naval officer and the former Iranian
military attache before the breaking of diplomatic relations between the United States and
Iran, was arranging arms deliveries to Khomeini out of a premises of the US Office of
Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. If Bush had been in contact with Pottinger, he
might have known something about the Carter offers for arms deliveries.
Relevant evidence that might help us to determine what Bush knew and when he knew it
is still being withheld by the Bush regime . The FBI bugged Cyrus Hashemi's phone
between October 1980 and January 1981, and many of the conversations that were
recorded were between Hashemi and Bush's friend Pottinger. The FBI first claimed that
these tapes were "lost," but now admits that it knows the location of some of them. Are
they being withheld to protect Pottinger? Are they being withheld to protect Bush?
Other information on the intentions of the Khomeini regime may have reached Bush from
his old friend and associate, Mitchell Rogovin, the former CIA General Counsel. During
1976, Rogovin had accompanied Bush on many trips to the Capitol to testify before
Congressional committees; the two were known to be close. In the spring of 1980,
Rogovin told the Carter administration that he had been approached by the Iranian-
American arms dealer Houshang Lavi with an offer to start negotiations for the release of
the hostages. Lavi claimed to be an emissary of Iranian president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr;
Rogovin at this time was working as the lawyer for the John Anderson GOP presidential
campaign.
Bush's family friend Casey had also been in touch with Iranian representatives. Jamshid
Hashemi, the brother of Cyrus Hashemi (who died under suspicious circumstances during
1986), has told Gary Sick that he met with William Casey at the Mayflower Hotel in
Washington, DC in March of 1980 to talk about the hostages. According to Jamshid
Hashemi, "Casey quickly made clear that he wanted to prevent Jimmy Carter from
gaining any political advantage from the hostage crisis. The Hashemis agreed to
cooperate with Casey without the knowledge of the Carter Administration." [fn 37]
Casey's "intelligence operation" included the spying on the opposing candidate that has
been routine in US political campaigns for decades, but went far beyond it. As journalists
like Witcover and Germond knew during the course of the campaign, and as the 1984
Albosta committee "Debategate" investigation showed, Casey set up at least two October
Surprise espionage groups.