• United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division

• In office 1973–1977

• 
  

• Preceded by : David Luke Norman

• Succeeded by : Drew S. Days, III

• Personal details

• Born : February 13, 1940 (age 81) in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.

• Political party : Republican

• Spouse(s) : Gloria Anderson (div. 1975)

  • Children: 3, including [Matthew Forbes Pottinger (born 1973)]

• Residence : New York City, U.S.

• Education : Harvard University ( (JD) _

• Occupation : Novelist, lawyer

• Profession : Attorney

John Stanley Pottinger (born February 13, 1940) is an American novelist and lawyer. He previously worked as a banker in the 1980s and served as a politician known for his appointments involving civil rights.

Early life and education

J. Stanley Pottinger was born in 1940 in Dayton Ohio, to parents Elnora and John Pottinger.^[1] He grew up and attended high school in Dayton.^[2] Pottinger credits his father John with instilling an awareness of civil rights.^[1] In 1962, Pottinger graduated from Harvard University. He continued his studies at Harvard and graduated with a JD from Harvard Law School in 1965.^[3] Pottinger's interest in politics led him to volunteer in 1966 to aid the campaign of Robert H. Finch for lieutenant governor of California.^[2] Finch asked him in 1968 to head the Civil Rights Division.^[2]

Career

Pottinger held significant roles as a bureaucratic appointee in the Nixon, Ford and Carter Administrations. From 1970 to 1973, he held the position of the Director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare from 1970 to 1973 and later served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the United States Department of Justice from 1973 to 1977.^[4][5] According to journalist Bob Woodward, Pottinger was the only person who discovered that the true identity of Watergate source Deep Throat was Mark Felt. Pottinger maintained the secret until 2005, when Felt publicly declared he was Deep Throat.^[6]

Pottinger later engaged in a lucrative practice on Wall Street and wrote a best selling book, The Fourth Procedure,^[7] as well as three other novels.^[4]

In 2013, Pottinger was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.^[8]

Personal life

Pottinger began dating Gloria Anderson in high school; they married in 1965 and have three children together.^[1] Pottinger and Anderson divorced in 1975.^[1] He later had a nine-year relationship with Gloria Steinem that ended in 1984.^[4][1] Other exes include Kathie Lee Gifford, Connie Chung, and publisher-turned-agent Joni Evans, according to a 1995 profile in The Washington Post

References

• ^{a b c d e} Lasswell, Mark (June 5, 1995). "Surgical Strike". People. Retrieved February 7, 2020.

• ^{a b c} "Civil Rights Protector John Stanley Pottinger". The New York Times. March 30, 1974. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 7, 2020.

• ^ "J. Stanley Pottinger Papers, 1968-1981". Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Retrieved August 6, 2017.

• ^{a b c} "A Veteran and China Hand Advises Trump for Xi's Visit". The New York Times. April 4, 2017. Retrieved May 8, 2017.

• ^ Span, Paula (May 13, 1995). "The Many Lives of Stanley Pottinger". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 7, 2020.

• ^ Woodward, Bob (July 6, 2005). The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743289283. Retrieved January 7, 2021 – via Google Books.

• ^ "Here's a Man Who Can Honestly Say He's Done It All". The Los Angeles Times. June 11, 1995.

• ^ Avlon, John (February 28, 2013). "The Pro-Freedom Republicans Are Coming: 131 Sign Gay-Marriage Brief". The Daily Beast.

External links

• Official website

• Edwards Pottinger Official Website

• Appearances on C-SPAN

KEY BISCAYNE, Fla., Jan. 13 (AP)—President Nixon selected a young California attorney today to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

J. Stanley Pottinger, who has been director of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's civil rights office since 1970, was nominnated to succeed David L. Norman as Assistant Attorney General.

Mr. Norman, who had held the Justice Department post since last August, “will be nominated for an important judicial position,” the Florida White House said.

Mr. Pottinger, 32 years old, is a Harvard graduate who practiced law in San Francisco before joining H.E.W. soon after Mr. Nixon took office.

The Florida White House also said that the President intended to nominate Thomas F. McCormick of Wilton, Conn., as public printer and head of the Government Printing Office. Mr. McCormick, 43, is an executive of the General Electric Company and formerly headed one of G.E.'s printing operations.

Mr. Nixon accepted the resignations of Richard F. Shubert, 36, as Labor Department solicitor, and John W. Queenan and J. Wilson Newman as Price Commission members. The commission is being phased out.

Mr. Pottinger, who is 34 years old—he was born on Feb. ‘13, 1940—has never avoided controversial cases throughout his career.

Before going to Justice he spent three years as director of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Most of the time he traveled with his staff throughout the South negotiating with school boards to come up with desegregation plans.

He was also in charge of enforcing equal employment for minorities and women and was constantly under attack from the left, which accused him of moving too slowly, and from the right, which objected to giving favored treatment to special groups.

But he enjoys being out in the field and is convinced that most officials in Washington are out of touch with what is going on in the country—a key reason, he believes, for the failure of many Federal programs.

An Early Job

One of his first Government jobs was to evaluate an H.E.W. special program to educate children of migrant workers.

Then living in California, he packed his wife, Gloria, and three children, Paul, 6, Kati, 4, and Matthew, 1, into an old station wagon and visited the migrant camps.

He still remembers a group of migrant children playing softball with a ball made out of wrapped rags and bat fashioned from an automobile tailpipe, in the yard of a camp that had been used for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

He is amused by the fairytale quality of the way he made his way from Dayton, Ohio, where he grew up and went to high school, to Harvard, where he graduated cum laude in 1962, and then received a law degree from the Harvard Law School.

His first job in Washington came through an influential friend, Robert H. Finch, the former Secretary of H.E.W. and Lieutenant Governor of California. Mr. Finch asked him in 1968 to head the Civil Rights Division. Mr. Pottinger and a friend wanted to find out about politics and they had volunteered to help Mr. Finch in his race for Lieutenant Governor in 1966.

Mr. Pottinger, who lives in Bethesda, Md., still tries to get out into the field. He is in the midst of negotiating a program to hire more minority workers in the steel industry and he is thinking about getting himself a job as a steel worker for a couple of weeks to get an understanding of the industry.

THE collapse of real estate and financial institutions in the late 1980's forced many people to change careers. Perhaps no one did that with more panache and success than the fledgling author Stanley Pottinger, a resident of this hamlet.

Today, nine months after the former lawyer and investment banker published his first medical thriller, "The Fourth Procedure," and saw it jump onto best-seller lists, the newly released paperback version is beginning to appear in bookstores. And Mr. Pottinger is writing his second book, which he said will also be in the medical-suspense genre and has been partly researched in Westchester. It will include a key scene on a Metro-North train speeding from Katonah to Manhattan.

That John Stanley Pottinger, 55, has become an author in his elegant middle age is a triumph of creative willpower. He is a Harvard-educated lawyer who argued four cases before the Supreme Court in his 20's and 30's, also serving as a civil rights official in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. This was followed by a private law practice, then his own investment banking company in the 1980's while he was in his 40's.

He is no stranger to the black-tie world of New York and Washington society. His name has been linked romantically to many powerful women, among them Gloria Steinem, the literary agent Lynn Nesbit and the agent Joni Evans. Even with this background, he revels in the almost Adirondack-like solitude of his lakeside home in this sleepy corner of northern Westchester, where he works at his latest career, crafting scenes from almost possible medical marvels, intricate plot twists and today's most heated moral debates.

Ballantine Books paid Mr. Pottinger a $500,000 advance for his first book and turned out 100,000 copies as the first printing of "The Fourth Procedure." Today, there are 160,000 hardback copies in print, and the book has appeared on many of the country's most prestigious best-seller lists, including The Wall Street Journal's , where it rose to the No. 5 position; The New York Times list, where it reached No. 11, and The Los Angeles Times's, at a high of No. 3.

After his book was published, he was interviewed by Charlie Rose, featured in an article in People magazine, reviewed in the major magazines and newspapers and appeared on the NBC program "Today."

"I started at the top of the heap," the writer laughingly conceded. "Maybe my baby steps are still ahead of me."

Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, the author's first home as a newlywed was in San Francisco, where he did corporate litigation for a law firm he described as medium-sized. He recalled that "the only thing I wrote was briefs."

He became the father of three: Paul, now 27 and in his second year at Yale Medical School; Katy, 25, an assistant editor at Elle magazine, and Matt, 22, a Chinese major and senior at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Mr. Pottinger's marriage to his high school sweetheart ended in divorce 20 years ago, when the children were between 1 and 6, but he appears to have preserved family ties. Photographs of his children as well as his large band of Scotch Presbyterian ancestors decorate the table tops and walls of his sun-filled house.

Brought to Washington in 1969 during the Nixon Administration by Robert Finch, then the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Mr. Pottinger became that department's director of Office for Civil Rights in 1970. He stayed on when Mr. Finch resigned and was replaced by [Elliot Lee Richardson (born 1920)].

Mr. Pottinger became Assistant Attorney General and head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department in January 1973, while [Elliot Lee Richardson (born 1920)] was Attorney General. He was in Mr. Richardson's office shortly after President Nixon had dismissed the senior official in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate investigations in October 1973. Mr. Pottinger recalled watching Mr. Richardson clean out his office and pack up his personal effects. Mr. Richardson "had a cool head and had seen it coming," Mr. Pottinger said. The lawyer-turned-author's work at the Justice Department continued during the Ford Administration, officially ending four months into Jimmy Carter's Administration in 1977.

He began a private law practice in Washington, then moved to Manhattan in 1981 and entered investment banking. He said he began to do "a lot of joint-venture work." "It was fun and was all new to me," he continued. "I thought this was New York all the time. I could be a lawyer and still do deals. There was just so much going on." He prospered but, unfortunately, invested heavily in New England real estate.

The crash of real estate values in the late 80's put an end to that career. "I paid dearly," he said. "I negotiated my way out, and between 1989 and 1991, I was beginning to get clear." He said he did not have to declare personal bankruptcy and had not overextended himself but needed to back a partner who had overextended himself.

This experience sent him in search of a career better suited to the times and his more mature talents. He recalled that "it was during this period of restructuring these partnerships that I started writing different scenes from 'The Fourth Procedure.' " The South Salem weekend house he bought in July 1989 became his full-time home and the womb for his creations in 1991.

Motherhood, fatherhood, pregnancy and abortion are key issues in "The Fourth Procedure." Legal battles involving these matters sweep the reader through its pages. Mr. Pottinger said, "What drives the book is the realization that men would never put up with" restrictive antiabortion laws if they were subject to pregnancy. "If men put themselves in women's shoes, they would not stand for it," he continued.

Sam Vaughan, an editor at large at Ballantine Books, saw Mr. Pottinger's first attempts and helped him see how to develop them into a successful novel. Mr. Vaughan said, "When I first saw it, it was 40 or 50 terrific scenes in search of a novel."

But he saw that "the manuscript had that rare thing -- a voice, the sensibility and intelligence of one person." He added, "Many authors can't keep up with contemporary reality, but that doesn't stop Stan."

For his part, Mr. Pottinger seems to have put his powerful past behind him, although his footsteps through the corridors of power still echo in the pages he writes. Seated in his living room, looking out at the serene lake views that obviously drew him to this spot, he said: "I'm content now. The writing life is the best there is."

A dinner in London

In spring 1984, Kissinger and Pottinger travelled together to London, for a planned meeting with a retired Iranian admiral. London was a place where both felt quite at home: Kissinger having confessed, two years earlier, his loyalty to the British Foreign Office above the U.S. Presidents he ostensibly was serving, and Pottinger having had extensive business dealings in London with Jamshid Hashemi’s brother, [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)].

The Iranian admiral, having been warned by U.S. intelligence services about Kissinger, refused tomeet, so Kissinger and Pottinger, accompanied by Jamshid Hashemi, went for a leisurely dinner at the Dorchester Hotel in London. The primary topic of discussion was what to do about LaRouche and how “to shut him up.” Declaring that “we’ve got to do something about this son-of-a-bitch,” Kissinger said that he was going to intervene again with FBI DirectorWebster, and the U.S. Attorney General, and that he intended to prevail upon the Central Intelligence Agency to find out where LaRouche was getting his money.

Pottinger, a self-declared close friend of George Bush, had been working with the FBI and others since the fall of 1980 to silence LaRouche, and that evening in London, he again said he would get the FBI to take action against LaRouche.TheAssistantAttorneyGeneral swore that “we’ve got to shut the bastard up for once and for all.”

Pottinger toldKissinger that he was friendswith Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, and said that he was going to get Giuliani to go after LaRouche. Kissinger, agreeing, told Pottinger to call him (Kissinger) when they got back to the States, so that Kissinger could also contact Giuliani.

(As it turned out, Giuliani declined the invitation: he had plenty else on his plate, and didn’t need the headache of taking on LaRouche. So the dirty work was farmed out to William Weld, the U.S. Attorney in Boston, who eagerly accepted. Weld opened a grand jury that fall, and convened a nationwide “Get LaRouche” conference of federal and state law enforcement officials in February 1986 in Boston—which included federal and state prosecutors and investigators from Virginia.)

Who is Stanley Pottinger?

J. Stanley Pottinger served in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration under [Elliot Lee Richardson (born 1920)], and then, from 1973 to 1977, was Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Along the way, he also became good friends with George Bush, who was CIA director in 1975-76.

Pottinger’s virulent antagonism toward LaRouche emerged in the following manner. Beginning in May 1980, EIR began receiving reports from a number of sources, that money to finance pro-Khomeini protests, and even terrorism, in the United States, was being funnelled through the First Gulf Bank and Trust Co., operated by an Iranian banker named [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)]. Shortly after the assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a prominent anti-Khomeini spokesman, in a Washington, D.C. suburb in July 1980, EIR and its sister publication New Solidarity put out the story on Hashemi. Soon thereafter, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media also ran stories naming Cyrus Hashemi as the conduit for Iranian funds into the United States.

As soon as the Washington Post story hit the news wires, Pottinger called the Post from London to demand a retraction. In subsequent versions of the story as transmitted on the Post’s wire service, Hashemi’s name was deleted. Thereafter, Pottinger issued a formal demand for retractions to EIR, the Washington Post, CNN, and others.

But at the same time, a number of federal agencies were opening investigations of Hashemi. On Aug. 11, the FBI notified U.S. Customs that it was organizing a task force on Iran-related investigations, including the Tabatabai assassination and Iranian financing of protests in theUnited States. On Aug 20, FBI Assistant Director Revell sent a so-called “national security” letter to theNewYork Telephone Co., asking for toll records for Hashemi’s phones. A week later, Revell requested that the Justice Department make application to the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court for electronic surveillance of Hashemi; promptly, the FISA court approved telephone, video, and microphone surveillance of Hashemi’s New York offices, and authorized FBI agents to break into Hashemi’s office to plant microphones and a video camera. How soon Pottinger learned of the electronic surveillance is not known, although before too long, Hashemi could be overheard on his telephone conversations saying that his phones were tapped.

Pottinger quickly launched a campaign to blame the whole thing on LaRouche, threatening, and then filing, a libel suit in federal court against those publications that had named Hashemi as a conduit for terrorist funds. The libel suit was a sham, but Pottinger thought it necessary to provide a cover for other activities in which he and Hashemi were engaged.

According to many sources, Pottinger told the Washing ton Post that he was acting officially on behalf of U.S. government agencies, in particular the “CIA.” He also told the Post that they had been taken in by stories planted by LaRouche, charges he also circulated in print. After working out a settlement with the Post, and making arrangements to execute the settlement agreement on Monday, Sept. 8, Pottinger doublecrossed the Post and filed Hashemi’s libel suit in federal court in Atlanta.

The complaint in the suit, captioned [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)] v. Campaigner Publications, et al. (Campaigner being the publisher of New Solidarity), said that all the articles published by the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution, etc. were all traceable to the LaRouche group, which Pottinger lumped together as the “EIR Defendants.” Pottinger wrote in the court case that the “EIR Defendants” publish articles which attempt to implicate Muslim, Jewish, and black individuals in unlawful or immoral activity. The complaint charged that articles written by EIR went to U.S. law enforce ment agencies, and that the information then made its way to the other publications.

This was elaborated in an article which Pottinger planted in New York magazine, entitled “Did Cult Hatch Iranian Expose´?” The article opened: “TheWashington Post was a conduit for a ‘vicious’ tale of Iranian intrigue apparently fabricated by an extremist political group, a libel suit filed in Atlanta has charged.” It went on to say that the Hashemi lawsuit contended that the Washington Post story “that was attributed to ‘law enforcement investigators’ originated with publications linked to a bizarre cult—commonly called the

U.S. Labor Party—formed around Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.” The article also claimed: “A Justice Department investigation is said to have found that the FBI has material from the LaRouche group in its files that could have formed the basis of the leak to the Post.”

The walls have ears

Thanks to the FBI wiretaps on Hashemi’s office, we know a little of the background of the New York magazine article. A writer for the magazine had called Hashemi’s office in mid-September and spoken to Pottinger regarding the lawsuit. The reporter asked about a letter from John Shaheen (an OSS “old boy” who was a friend of both [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)] and William Casey), in which Shaheen had told Pottinger that the material in the FBI files about Cyrus Hashemi was from EIR. Pottinger acknowledged Shaheen’s letter, and then said that the FBI had told him that the EIR material had come from the FBI’s Dallas office.

According to an FBI teletype, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), reporting on that conversation: “[Pottinger] says he asked for an investigation and since he was in the Justice Department he knew where to go. He called . . . the Deputy Attorney General and had a meeting with the FBI and the Inspector General about the case.”

According to Jamshid Hashemi, Pottinger also told the Hashemi brothers in late 1980 that he was attempting to get the FBI to go after LaRouche and to bring a lot of cases against LaRouche. At one point, while at a restaurant in Manhattan, Pottinger told Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi that he wanted to shut LaRouche down “in total.” (In fact, over the next year, Hashemi and Pottinger were involved with circles in Europe around the Club of Rome and the British New Scientist magazine who brought one lawsuit in Paris, and boasted that they were trying to get 20-30 lawsuits going against LaRouche.)

At the same time, the FBI wiretaps on [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)]’s office were creating a lot more problems for Hashemi and Pottinger. While the FBI reported that it had found no evidence demonstrating Hashemi’s involvement in the Tabatabai murder, two other avenues of investigation soon opened up.

First, the FBI agents listening to Hashemi’s and Pottinger’s conversations realized that they were in constant contact both with Iranian officials, and with the U.S. State Department, around the hostage crisis. (In November 1979, over 50 Americans had been seized and were being held in the U.S. Embassy compound in Teheran; the issue of whether they would be released before or after the November 1980 Presidential elections became a matter of intense maneuvering by both the Carter administration, which desperately wanted the hostages to be released before the elections, and by Republican circles, who were desperate to delay it until after the elections.)

When the Hashemi-Pottinger involvement in the hostage crisis was reported to FBI Headquarters, and passed on to the State Department and CIA, it was determined that the wiretaps could serve as a useful check on what Hashemi and Pottinger were doing, and that information pertaining to the hostage negotiations should be passed on to those agencies. In November, after the expiration of the first 90-day electronic surveillance authorization, the authorization was renewed on that basis for another 90 days. At the same time, in a rather extraordinary personal intervention, FBI Director Webster personally ordered that no information on the Hashemi v. Campaigner lawsuit should be monitored or maintained by the FBI agents conducting the surveillance.

Second, during December, FBI surveillance agents monitoring the tap began to pick up evidence that Hashemi and Pottinger were illegally shipping military equipment to Iran. As this evidence accumulated, a huge fight broke out in the law enforcement and intelligence communities over the Hashemi case. FBI and Customs agents on the scene in New York, along with the local federal prosecutors, wanted to raid Hashemi’s office and prosecute him as quickly as possible. Justice Department headquarters, backed by the State Department and CIA, continually delayed, stalled, and obstructed the investigation. Government documents show that the Justice Department’s liaison office to the intelligence community blocked, on “national security” grounds, the presentation of evidence to a federal grand jury on Hashemi and Pottinger.

Even though local officials wanted to convene a grand jury and indict Hashemi and Pottinger in 1981, it wasn’t until 1984 that they were finally permitted do so—and then, Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi were both tipped off and evaded arrest by fleeing to London, and Pottinger escaped indictment altogether, because of the convenient loss of certain FBI surveillance tapes.

The ‘October Surprise’

Much nonsense has been written about the so-called “October Surprise” affair in the 1980 elections. Much of this is deliberate disinformation and confusion, surrounding often-dubious stories about George Bush secretly flying to Paris prior to the 1980 elections. But despite all the confetti, and the coverup perpetuated by the U.S. House of Representatives investigation in 1992 (the Senate investigation was much more serious), the core of truth in the “October Surprise” story is easily ascertainable, and it does not depend on George Bush’s whereabouts on Oct. 19, 1980.

Just as with the original Hashemi investigation, EIR was also one of the first, if not the first, source for the story that GOP circles had attempted to delay the release of the hostages. In its Nov. 4, 1991 issue, Newsweek reported that the first rumors of “backstage contact” between the Republicans and the Iranian government appeared in print in late 1980. “The outlet was hardly prestigious: the Executive Intelligence Review, a periodical published by followers of right wing political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.” Newsweek then cited a Dec. 2, 1980 EIR story which reported that Kissinger had held secret meetings with representatives of Ayatollah Beheshti, and that President Carter’s failure to secure the release of the hostages “resulted from an intervention in Teheran by pro-Reagan British intelligence circles and the Kissinger faction.”

Newsweek further cited a September 1983 article in New Solidarity newspaper, which was entitled “How Kissinger Delayed the Release of U.S. Hostages in Iran.” That article was written by this author, Edward Spannaus, and was based on conversations that Spannaus held with Jamshid Hashemi in 1982-83. (Jamshid has more recently revealed that he had been asked by Pottinger to approach LaRouche and EIR at that time to attempt to get rid of the libel suit, which EIR refused to settle.)

In 1986, with the aid of State Department documents obtained under the FOIA, EIR was provided with more details on [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)]’s and Pottinger’s dealings with the Carter administration during the hostage crisis. But this was a double game—as many have concluded—because, as Jamshid had already told this reporter in 1983, his brother was much closer to GOP circles, particularly the Bush-Baker Texas crowd, than to the Carter administration.

Thousands of pages of FBI documents derived from the electronic surveillance of Hashemi’s offices were obtained by EIR beginning in 1991. They demonstrate that Hashemi and Pottinger had undertaken to trace the Shah’s assets and other frozen Iranian assets in the United States during 1980. The FBI wiretaps show how they manipulated this issue, playing a very duplicitous game of giving contradictory advice to the Carter administration and the Iranians, as to each other’s intentions and capabilities.

The Hashemi brothers were just two of many players and operatives in this complex game. Their links were directly into theBush crowd—people in and around the CIA. With the purge of the CIA’s Operations Directorate during the Carter administration, which resulted in the dismissal of two-thirds of the Agency’s clandestine-service officers and contractors in the fall of 1977, a vast pool of free-floating covert-operations specialists was created. Many of these operatives, who became known as the “asteroids,” clustered around the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, with hopes that a new Republican administration would rebuild the nation’s covert-operations capabilities.

The Hashemis’ direct connections to the CIA were were through Donald Gregg and Charles Cogan—additionally, Cyrus had a separate channel to Casey through OSS veteran John Shaheen. Cogan was the head of the Near East section of the CIA Operations Directorate, and he has acknowledged that he dealt directly with the Hashemi brothers in the 1980s. More important was Gregg, who was posted from the CIA to the Carter National Security Council in 1978 to head the position of director of intelligence. Gary Sick, the NSC Iran specialist during the hostage crisis, wrote in his book October Surprise how shocked he was when Jamshid Hashemi told him that Gregg, who had no NSC responsibility for Iran, had been in Cyrus Hashemi’s office in spring 1980. Sick wrote of Gregg that “there was a dimension to his background which was completely unknown to his colleagues at the White House, and that was his acquaintance with one of the Republican front-runners, George Bush.”

Jamshid Hashemi has taken this one step further. In conversations with this writer, Hashemi has stated that Gregg was Pottinger’s CIA controller. (“CIA” in this context should actually be understood to mean “Bush.”)

The CIA and the mullahs

The Carter administration’s purge of the CIA, ironically, ended up giving more leverage in 1980 to Republican circles around Bush and Casey. (Bush and Casey were forced to work together by circumstances in the 1980s, but they were by no means good friends.) Along with the decimation of the CIA’s clandestine services in 1977, had gone a cut-off of funds for covert

operations, including support for sources among the clerics in Iran. Traditionally, the British had controlled the mullahs and the extreme Muslim Brotherhood factions in Iran; the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, wrote in her book that there was a standing joke in Persia, “that if you picked up a clergyman’s beard, you would see the words ‘Made in England’ stamped on the other side.”

Contrary to myth, the 1953 overthrow of nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossedeq was not a CIA operation. The American CIA played a decidedly junior-partner role to the British; indeed, until President Eisenhower was swayed by the British, the United States had supported Mossedeq’s ef forts to drive the British out of Iran. But after the coup, the CIA found it expedient to take credit; at the same time, knowledgeable sources have recently advised EIR, the CIA picked up many of the assets who had previously been on the British payroll. This relationship was cut off by the Carter administration, and one of the bargaining chips of Republicans during the 1980 election period was, therefore, to promise the Iranians that this relationship could be reestablished if the Republicans took office.

Jamshid Hashemi’s account of Casey’s meeting in Madrid in July 1980 tends to confirm this. Casey told Hassan Karrubi, a prominent Iranian cleric, that relations between Iran and the United States had been good when Republicans in office, but bad when Democrats were in office, and that if Reagan were elected, the Republicans would work with Iran and would, among other things, return the frozen assets and confiscated military equipment. About ten days before the November elections, Kissinger said that there was no reason that a Republican administration could not work with Iran, once the hostages were freed. Kissinger said that Iran was a strategic country, and the hostility between the United States and Iran need not be permanent.

Retaliation against LaRouche

All of these backroom deals and back-channel negotiations were seriously threatened by EIR’s initial exposure of [Cyrus Hashemi (born 1938)]’s operations in summer 1980. The truth is, that we at EIR had little idea at that time of all the operations in which Hashemi was involved, nor were we aware of his ties to the Bush-Kissinger networks. But those networks clearly saw that we were threatening to blow their whole operation. Even worse, with the information picked up by the FBI wiretaps—for which they blamed LaRouche—much of the Hashemi-Pottinger operation began to unravel. Apart

from the fact that Hashemi and Pottinger lost a lot of money in arms deals because of the EIR-generated publicity and the subsequent investigations, there was also a much bigger stra tegic intelligence game behind the scenes, which was being disrupted.

This was not the only source of Kissinger’s hatred of LaRouche. In reality, it is probably one of the less significant reasons. But it was, nevertheless, one more reason for Kis inger to join forces with Bush-leaguer Pottinger to “shut down LaRouche” once and for all.