The apparent 1980 plot to undermine Carter by sabotaging his negotiations with Iran over the fate of 52 American hostages would have been pulled off by rogue CIA officers collaborating with the Republican presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan (and his running mate George H.W. Bush), without the knowledge of Carter and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. It would have been the work of what legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland described to me as “the CIA within the CIA,” the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood the strategic needs of the United States better than its elected leaders. These national security insiders believed Carter’s starry-eyed faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation. “Carter really believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West,” Copeland told me in an interview in 1990, several months before his death. “As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie and the corner drug store. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else. … “Carter, I say, was not a stupid man.” But in Copeland’s view, Carter had an even worse flaw: “He was a principled man.” Copeland was one of the CIA officers who participated in the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, but he said he and other old CIA Iran hands were mostly on the outside looking in when Carter was targeted in 1980. The Case Against Carter The right-wing complaint against Carter, as enunciated by Ronald Reagan and other conservatives, was that the President had let the Shah of Iran fall, had allowed the Sandinistas to claim power in Nicaragua and had undermined anti-communist regimes in South America and elsewhere by criticizing their human rights records as they used “death squads” and torture to eliminate leftists.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:01:11 +0000
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