"I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task." - President John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address At American University, Washington D.C., June 10, 1963.
What was the Halloween Massacre?
It was the firing of hundreds of CIA officers, spies, covert agents, and analysts by President Carter and his newly appointed CIA Director Stansfield Turner on Halloween in October 1977. Some estimates put the total body count at over two thousand.
As the world witnessed a few years later, they did not go into retirement quietly.
These weren't your average joes on the unemployment line. For years they were instrumental in overthrowing numerous leaders around the world. They knew how to put pressure on weak governments and change the political direction of countries within a short span of time.
After being humiliated and cast aside, they aimed their wrath at the Carter administration and plotted revenge.
The Reagan candidacy, which included former CIA Director George H. W. Bush, had powerful allies amongst this cast of disgruntled troublemakers.
Intelligence is the name of the game and they possessed a secret that Carter and his team did not have: the Shah was on death's door after getting cancer in the mid 1970s. So while President Carter stupidly called Iran "an island of stability" in front of the world they were working behind the scenes to sow chaos in Iran and bring the fundamentalist Ayatollahs to power.
Aside from putting Carter's foreign policy credentials into question, they also wanted to directly interfere in the election. By orchestrating the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 they gave President Carter the biggest black eye that any incumbent President has ever suffered going into an election year.
Usually, Presidents walk into their second term. Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama got the CIA royal treatment. They are the kingmakers and kingbreakers.
When the "intelligence community" want to unseat a President for whatever reason they always get their way. They will even commit treason to accomplish their objective. In 1963 they used the tool of assassination. In 1979 they created the Iran hostage crisis to delegitimize Carter. And in 2020 they came up with the false Trump-Russia collusion story to paint Trump as a traitor.
But they are the real traitors. And they collude with traitors in every land.
The role that the Ayatollahs played in this treacherous scheme has been overblown in the popular narrative of the hostage ordeal. In reality they were following direct orders from Langley. Khomeini's closest aides were getting constant messages from the Reagan-Bush CIA clique throughout the course of the "revolution" and its immediate aftermath.
It was not a coincidence that Khomeini released the hostages on the day of the Inauguration of President Reagan. It was a symbolic coup de grâce to Carter.
As part of the secret deal, the Reagan administration later illegally transferred weapons to the Islamic regime. So both sides profited. And the Ayatollahs couldn't care less that Iran's image was sacrificed in the process because they ultimately cared only about their own power.
II.
An excerpt from, "Explore the aftermath of the CIA’s infamous “Halloween Massacre”" By Emma North-Best, Muckrock, November 1, 2018:
The “Halloween Massacre,” the most horror movie-sounding thing to ever happen to the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bureaucratic nightmare that pushed out the Agency’s most senior employees. CIA officers were so outraged at the “massacre” that they reportedly responded with everything from screen-printing protest shirts, leaving graffiti in Agency buildings and even cussing out the newly-appointed CIA Director Stansfield Turner (via telegram).
An excerpt from, "Ex-CIA Director Stansfield Turner dead at 94; served under Carter" Reuters, January 18, 2018:
Turner did not hesitate to use the power Carter had given him, stressing the importance of employing new satellite and other technology in collecting intelligence, rather than the riskier business of recruiting human sources.
His October 1977 reorganization and downsizing of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which oversaw the collection of human intelligence and ran covert operations, was dubbed the “Halloween Massacre”.
While members of the CIA’s clandestine service considered him an outsider, he took office on the heels of congressional investigations of CIA misdeeds and the end of the Vietnam War.
The new order at CIA under Turner was best known for what the clandestine services would call the “Halloween Massacre” of 1977, a purge attributed in part to budget cuts, but which also reflected a change of emphasis from paramilitary action to intelligence collection and analysis. Former CIA covert action chief Theodore Shackley has claimed that over 2,800 intelligence officers, many of them paramilitary specialists were fired or forced out of the CIA.Turner himself has given a figure of 820 staff positions cut from the clandestine service, but maintained that the tightening up of personnel policies had actually improved both human and technical intelligence collection capabilities.Turner’s critics also tended to be vociferous about the relative decline in the strength and status of the army Special Forces—the CIA’s partner in paramilitary action—which in fact began during the Nixon administration. Special Forces had diminished in number since their withdrawal from Vietnam in 1971, from a peak of 9,000 to about 2,000 in the late 1970s. The paramilitary side of covert action was indeed curtailed, if not to the extent suggested by Shackley and other ax-operatives.Despite the purge at the CIA’s Langley headquarters, the covert side of security assistance continued, through the CIA and the various mechanisms by means of which covert personnel could be drafted in from the military. At the same time, Israel and Argentina stepped in to fill overt advisory and materiel requirements that could not be met by the United States as long as the formal estrangements over human rights persisted. At the height of President Carter’s human rights offensive, Latin American armies exercised a form of “import substitution,” replacing U.S. automatic weapons with Israeli Galil and Uzi submachine guns and assault rifles, and World War II-vintage American aircraft with state-of-the-art Israeli STOL [short take-offend landing] aircraft, tailor made for counterinsurgency.!’Argentine and Israeli advisers, in turn, provided field assistance in intelligence and unconventional warfare to the Central American armies whose U.S. military trainers were overstretched or withdrawn. Neither arrangement could have gone forward without a green light from Washington. Even as U. S. security assistance to the Somoza dynasty was curtailed in 1978, when the regime turned to the destruction of Nicaragua’s cities to save itself, shiploads of Israeli arms, ammunition, and aircraft arrived to ensure there would be no interruption of supplies to Somoza’s National Guard.There is some evidence that the civilian policymakers, and notably the president, were not kept fully informed of the ongoing assistance to governments that were nominally on the United States’ list of villains. The flood of arms and the backdoor training in special warfare seems too patently a mockery of his foreign policy for the president to have been aware of it. But the level of covert training and arms procurement going on at the height of Carter’s human rights offensive was too extensive to have continued without a go-ahead at high levels at the Pentagon and from CIA headquarters in Langley.
In only two years, Turner and the Carter administration have dashed those hopes. Turner has emerged as concerned mainly with advancing his own authority and acquiring influence with the president. His preference for technology over people, his willingness to politicize intelligence and his single-minded focus on centralizing control of the intelligence budget and collection activities have destroyed morale with the CIA, led hundreds of key CIA personnel to resign and prompted far more to "retire in place."Turner has gravely damaged the quality of the intelligence comminity's product.Administration sources admit that more than 250 CIA professionals put in their retirement or resignation paper in the first pay period of 1979. The departurs of concern now do not involve the "cold warriors," special or "black" operations executives and counterintelligence officers affected by Turner's 1977 Halloween purge of 820 surplus CIA personnel (a purge which William Colby had planned to be even more drastic.) The men who are leaving now are carrer professionals - the intellectual cadre, the very brain of American intellingence.
The philosophical divide within the U.S. National Security establishment, especially the CIA, became quite serious in the aftermath of Watergate. To make matters worse, the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, his campaign promise to clean the "cowboy" elements out of the Central Intelligence Agency and his "human rights" policies alarmed the faction of the CIA loyal to George Bush. Bush was CIA director under Richard Nixon. Finally, the firing of CIA Director George Bush by Carter, and the subsequent "Halloween Massacre" in which Carter fired over 800 CIA covert operatives in 1977, angered the "cowboys" beyond all measure. That was Carter's October surprise, 800 firings on Halloween 1977.Bush and his CIA coverts were well aware of the Shah's terminal cancer, unknown to President Carter. The team had an elaborate vested interest to protect. They were determined to keep Iran intact and communist-free and put George Bush in the White House.Hence, the Islamic Fundamentalists were the only viable choice through which the Bush covert team could implement its own private foreign policy. The results: the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the fall of President Carter, and the emergence of something called the "New World Order."
One of the leading national issues during 1980 was the release of 66 Americans being held hostage in Iran since November 4, 1979. Reagan won the election. On the day of his inauguration—in fact, minutes after he concluded his 20-minute inaugural address—the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages. The timing gave rise to an allegation that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the election to thwart President Jimmy Carter from pulling off an "October surprise".According to the allegation, the Reagan Administration subsequently rewarded Iran for its participation in the plot by supplying Iran with weapons via Israel and by unblocking Iranian government monetary assets in U.S. banks.
George W. Cave is a CIA operations officer and authority on Iran who took part in the Iran-Contra arms sale.He published his first novel, "October 1980" in December 2013. In his final interview Duane Clarridge, former CIA operations officer and Iran-Contra figure, hinted that this novel was a largely accurate depiction of how Reagan's October Surprise transpired.
Duane Ramsdell "Dewey" Clarridge (April 16, 1932 – April 9, 2016) was an American senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and supervisor for more than 30 years. Clarridge was the chief of the Latin American division from 1981 to 1987 and a key figure in the Iran-Contra Affair. Clarridge plead guilty to seven counts of perjury and making false statements relating to 1985 shipment to Iran.Clarridge died at the age of 83, a week short of his 84th birthday in Leesburg, Virginia on April 9, 2016 from complications of esophageal cancer. In his last interview, Clarridge hinted that Reagan's October Surprise may have been real.
