Taking a Bush Secret to the Grave
December 1, 2018
The National Archives approved Robert Parry's appeal on a 30-year-old
secret: the address where George H.W. Bush supposedly went on an October
1980 weekend - when several witnesses put Bush in Paris meeting with
Iranians, Parry reported on 9/27 2011.
By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
A three-decade-old mystery has finally been solved who was George H.W.
Bush's unidentified "alibi witness" on Oct. 19, 1980, when other witnesses
allege the then-Republican vice presidential candidate took a secret flight
to Paris for meetings with Iranians. But the mystery's answer only raises
new questions.
After 20 years of rejecting requests from various investigators for the
identity of the "alibi witness," the U.S. government finally released enough
information from Secret Service files in response to an appeal that I filed
with the National Archives to ascertain the person's identity.
The person who perhaps could have verified where Bush was or wasn't on that
day was Richard A. Moore, a Bush family friend best known for his role in
the Watergate scandal as a special counsel to President Richard Nixon. In
1973, Moore was Nixon's point man in attacking the credibility of fired
White House counsel John Dean after Dean turned whistleblower.
In 1980, Moore, who somehow managed to escape indictment for his Watergate
role, and his wife, Jane Swift Moore, were living in an exclusive tree-lined
neighborhood in Northwest Washington about one mile from the home of George
H.W. and Barbara Bush.
According to Secret Service records that I found in the files of Bush's
White House counsel C. Boyden Gray - and which have now been more fully
released - Bush's Secret Service detail left the Bush family home at 4429
Lowell St. N.W. at 1:35 p.m. on Oct. 19, 1980, and arrived at "Moore
Residence, 4917 Rockwood Pkwy." at 1:40 p.m.
By checking Washington D.C. real estate records, I discovered that Richard
A. Moore owned the house at 4917 Rockwood Parkway in 1980.
If George H.W. Bush actually made the visit to Moore's house with his wife
Barbara Bush on that afternoon - rather than Barbara possibly going alone -
that would make Bush's alleged trip to Paris virtually impossible. So it
would have seemed to be in Bush's interests to release this information to
investigators and have them interview Moore, if Moore would confirm that
Bush dropped by that day.
Moore Residence' at 4917 Rockwood Pkwy. NW, Washington, DC. In 1980, the
home of Richard A. Moore.
In the early 1990s, Moore also was Bush's ambassador to Ireland and thus
presumably inclined to help both his boss and his friend. However, when
investigators were trying to determine whether Bush had traveled to Paris -
and were looking for evidence to prove that he hadn't - the Bush
administration whited-out Moore's address before releasing redacted versions
of the Secret Service records.
Moore died on Jan. 27, 1995. So, if George H.W. Bush's purpose in delaying
release of Moore's identity was to ensure that no one could check with Moore
about Bush's alibi for Oct. 19, 1980, Bush achieved his goal.
Though most of us who were examining this mystery two decades ago gave great
weight to the Secret Service records seeming to place Bush in Washington,
not Paris, there was the question of whether Bush, a former CIA director,
might have convinced some friendly Secret Service supervisor to cook up some
alibi to cover the flight to Paris.
Those suspicions deepened with the Bush administration's continued refusal
to provide seemingly innocuous information, like Moore's address.
Justifying a Secret
In 1991-92, President George H.W. Bush's administration continued to insist
on keeping the "Moore Residence" destination secret even after Congress
authorized an investigation into the so-called October Surprise case:
whether Republicans in 1980 had contacted Iranians behind President Jimmy
Carter's back to frustrate his efforts to free 52 American hostages.
Carter's failure to gain release of the hostages made him look weak and
inept, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan's landslide victory, an election
which dramatically changed the course of the nation. The Iranians released
the American hostages immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20,
1981, further making Reagan appear to be an imposing world figure.
Though there were early rumors about a secret Republican deal with Iran, the
October Surprise mystery didn't gain much traction until the exposure of
secret Iran-Contra arms shipments approved by Reagan to Iran in 1985-86.
Suddenly, the notion that Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush
would lie about covert dealings with Iran didn't seem so preposterous.
Essentially, the October Surprise question was whether Reagan's secret
contacts with Iran dated back to Campaign 1980, as a growing number of
witnesses - from inside the governments of Iran, Israel, France and the
United States - were alleging.
However, when Congress finally agreed to look into the October Surprise case
in 1991-92, Republicans were determined to circle the wagons around the
then-sitting President George H.W. Bush, who was facing a tough reelection
fight against Democrat Bill Clinton.
Rather than welcome any truth-seeking, the Republicans and their media
allies went on the attack claiming that the October Surprise case was a
baseless "conspiracy theory."
At the time, the Republicans also suggested several reasons why the alibi
witness for Oct. 19, 1980, should remain secret. One was that Bush might
have been off on a romantic rendezvous and that Democrats simply wanted to
pry into the visit as a way to neutralize accounts of Bill Clinton's
womanizing.
Old Bush Residence at 4429 Lowell St. NW, Washington, DC
However, that "tryst" rationale fell apart when I obtained the Secret
Service records for Barbara Bush and they showed her on the same trip, with
the destination again whited-out.
Then, there was the suggestion that the unidentified Bush family friends
were very private people who shouldn't be dragged into the middle of a
political controversy. (As it turned out, the Moores were very much public
figures, both having worked in the Nixon White House and Richard A. Moore
serving as U.S. ambassador to Ireland during the first Bush administration.)
In 1992, as Bush's team continued to stonewall the identity of Bush's "alibi
witness," Bush angrily demanded at two news conferences that Congress
specifically clear him of the allegations that he had taken a secret trip to
Paris in 1980.
Bowing to those pressures in June 1992, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana,
chairman of the House investigative task force, agreed to a curious bargain
in which he and a few senior investigators were shown the destination of
Bush's supposed afternoon trip on Oct. 19, 1980, but with the proviso that
they never interview anyone who was there or disclose any names.
So, without verifying Bush's alibi, the House task force cleared Bush of
going to Paris. When I asked Hamilton about this strange agreement this
week, in the wake of the National Archives' release of the "Moore Residence"
document, he responded through a spokesman that he was "not able to provide
any answers" because he no longer has his official records.
Moore's Silence
Though the Oct. 19, 1980, visit could have involved either Moore or his wife
or both, the "alibi witness" being kept secret in 1992 had to be Moore,
since his wife, Jane Swift Moore, died in 1985.
When I contacted one of Moore's sons, Richard A. Moore Jr., he told me that
he didn't think that any of the family's five children were still living in
the Rockwood Parkway house in 1980. Nor did he think there would likely be
any photographs of the visit since the Bushes were "almost neighbors," often
popping in.
But the question remains: If Richard A. Moore could have confirmed that Bush
was definitely in Washington on Oct. 19, 1980, not on a secret mission to
Paris, why wasn't he questioned? Why was the Bush administration so
determined to block the House task force from interviewing Moore?
Moore owed a huge debt to Bush, who had lifted Moore from his
Watergate-tainted purgatory in 1989 by appointing him to be U.S. Ambassador
to Ireland. Moore would seem to be a friendly witness who would happily want
to cover for Bush, if possible.
Which is why Moore's silence in 1992 only adds to the mystery. Moore served
in Dublin until June 1992, departing the same month as the battle over
withholding his identity was playing out in Washington.
Moore: As U.S. ambassador to Ireland laying foundation stone at University
of Limerick, June 1991. (Wikipedia)
Given Moore's close call with a criminal prosecution for his role in the
Watergate cover-up he was often in meetings where all the other participants
ended up going to jail he understandably might have been very leery about
lying to Congress even to protect another U.S. president and a personal
friend, if Bush indeed had snuck off to Paris.
Another document released to me under my appeal to the National Archives
raises further suspicions about Bush's whereabouts on that Sunday. Undated
handwritten notes that I found in the files of one of White House counsel
Gray's assistants, Ronald Von Lembke, indicate that some of the Secret
Service records for Oct. 19, 1980, were missing.
For that date, the notes say, "*NO Residence Report. *0000 [midnight] - 0800
missing. 0800-1600 okay. *1600-2400 missing." Stars were used to highlight
the references to missing material.
Written in the margin, next to the time references is the name "Potter
Stewart," the late Supreme Court Justice who was another Bush family friend.
The reference suggests that the White House counsel's office was checking on
how to bolster Bush's alibi for Oct. 19, 1980.
The same notes include a check mark next to the name "Buck Tanis,"
suggesting that the author of the notes had contacted Secret Service
supervisor Leonard "Buck" Tanis, who was a Bush favorite from his Secret
Service detail. Tanis was one of the supervisors for Bush's Secret Service
detail in October 1980.
Tanis was also the only Secret Service agent on Bush's detail for Oct. 19,
1980, who claimed to recall another dubious part of Bush's alibi mentioned
in the Secret Service reports, a morning trip to the Chevy Chase Country
Club.
When the redacted Secret Service records were first released in the early
1990s, Bush's supposed Chevy Chase visit was cited as slam-dunk evidence
that Bush couldn't have gone to Paris.
Relying on Republican sources, friendly journalists reported that Bush had
been playing tennis that morning at the club. But the tennis alibi collapsed
when it was discovered that rain had prevented tennis that morning.
Then, Tanis came forward with another story, that George H.W. and Barbara
Bush had brunch at the club with Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart. By 1992,
however, Justice Stewart was dead and Republicans said Mrs. Stewart was in
poor health, suffering senility and couldn't be interviewed.
So, another Bush alibi couldn't be checked out and Tanis's recollection
would have to stand unchallenged.
However, I learned that reports of Mrs. Stewart's physical and mental
decline were greatly exaggerated. She was going out with a retired CIA
official whom I knew. When I called her, she was quite lucid and told me
that she and her husband never had brunch with the Bushes at the Chevy Chase
club.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, I also obtained redacted reports from
Barbara Bush's Secret Service detail and they showed her going to the C&O
jogging path that morning, not to the Chevy Chase club.
When I passed on this information to congressional investigators, they
interviewed Tanis again and he backed away from his story of the brunch. He
joined the other Secret Service agents in saying he had no specific
recollection of Bush's travels that day.
The newly released handwritten notes suggest that, at minimum, an official
from Bush's counsel's office discussed the Potter Stewart alibi with Tanis,
thus raising questions about whether Tanis's initial testimony about the
alleged brunch was tainted.
Bush's Curious Actions
With Tanis and his brunch alibi discredited, investigative attention in 1992
turned to the afternoon trip on Oct. 19, 1980. But there again Bush's alibi
proved curious, especially with his "alibi witness," who we now know was
Ambassador to Ireland Richard A. Moore, kept away from the congressional
task force.
All this strange behavior piqued the suspicions of House Foreign Affairs
Committee chief counsel R. Spencer Oliver. In a six-page memo, Oliver urged
a closer look at Bush's whereabouts and questioned why the Secret Service
was concealing the name of the alibi witness for the afternoon trip.
"Why did the Secret Service refuse to cooperate on a matter which could have
conclusively cleared George Bush of these serious allegations?" Oliver
asked. "Was the White House involved in this refusal? Did they order it?"
Oliver also noted Bush's odd behavior in raising the October Surprise issue
on his own at two news conferences.
"It can be fairly said that President Bush's recent outbursts about the
October Surprise inquiries and [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of
1980 are disingenuous at best," wrote Oliver, "since the administration has
refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally
and conclusively clear Mr. Bush."
From the newly released White House documents, it is clear that Oliver's
suspicions were well-founded regarding the involvement of Bush's White House
staff in the decision to conceal the name of his supposed afternoon host.
Oliver in 2014.
Keeping the tough-minded Oliver off the October Surprise investigation also
became a high priority for the Republicans. At a midway point in the inquiry
when some Democratic task force members asked Oliver to represent them as a
staff investigator, Republicans threatened a boycott unless Oliver was
barred.
In another gesture of bipartisanship, Hamilton gave the Republicans the
power to veto Oliver's participation. Denied one of the few Democratic
investigators with both the savvy and courage to pursue a serious inquiry,
the Democratic members of the task force retreated. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Inside the October Surprise Cover-up" or Secrecy &
Privilege.]
The Case for the Trip
All this Republican resistance to the October Surprise investigation also
must be viewed against the backdrop of significant evidence that Bush did go
to Paris and that the Reagan campaign did undercut Carter's efforts to free
the hostages.
Though some of those suspicions dated back almost to the time the hostages
were freed on Jan. 20, 1981, other allegations emerged as the Iran-Contra
investigation progressed in the late 1980s. That led PBS "Frontline" to
recruit me in 1990 to examine whether the October Surprise case had been a
prequel to the Iran-Contra Affair.
That Frontline documentary, which aired in April 1991, coincided with a New
York Times op-ed by former National Security Council aide Gary Sick, giving
new momentum and new credibility to the October Surprise allegations.
As the October Surprise controversy heated up with the Republicans and Bush
allies in the news media waging a fierce counteroffensive Frontline asked me
to stay on the story, which led to another discovery that bolstered the
Bush-to-Paris claims.
Because of the April 1991 documentary, David Henderson, a former U.S.
Foreign Service officer, recalled a conversation that he had had with a
journalist on Oct. 18, 1980, about Bush flying to Paris that night to meet
with Iranians regarding the American hostages.
Henderson couldn't remember the reporter's name but he passed the
information on to Sen. Alan Cranston, D-California, whose staff forwarded
the letter to me. By cross-checking some other information, we determined
that the journalist was John Maclean of The Chicago Tribune, the son of
author Norman Maclean who wrote the novel, A River Runs Through It.
MacLean in 1983.
Though John Maclean was not eager to talk with me, he finally agreed and
confirmed what Henderson had written in his letter. Maclean said a
well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush taking
a secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage issue.
After hearing this news from his source, Maclean passed on the information
to Henderson when the two met at Henderson's Washington home to discuss
another matter.
For his part, Maclean never wrote about the Bush-to-Paris leak because, he
told me, a Reagan campaign spokesman officially denied it. As the years
passed, the memory of the leak faded for both Henderson and Maclean, until
the October Surprise story bubbled to the surface in 1991.
The significance of the Maclean-Henderson conversation was that it was a
piece of information locked in time untainted by later claims and
counter-claims about the October Surprise dispute.
One could not accuse Maclean of concocting the Bush-to-Paris allegation for
some ulterior motive, since he hadn't used it in 1980, nor had he
volunteered it a decade later. He only confirmed it and did so reluctantly.
French Intelligence
And, there was other support for the allegations Republican-Iranian meeting
in Paris.
David Andelman, the biographer for Count Alexandre deMarenches, then head of
France's Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE),
testified to congressional investigators that deMarenches told him that he
had helped the Reagan-Bush campaign arrange meetings with Iranians on the
hostage issue in summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting in Paris in
October.
Andelman said deMarenches insisted that the secret meetings be kept out of
his memoir because the story could damage the reputations of his friends,
William Casey and George H.W. Bush.
The allegations of a Paris meeting also received support from several other
sources, including pilot Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey (then Ronald
Reagan's campaign chief and later CIA director) from Washington's National
Airport to Paris on a flight that left very late on a rainy night in
mid-October 1980.
Rupp said that after arriving at LeBourget airport outside Paris, he saw a
man resembling Bush on the tarmac.
The night of Oct. 18 indeed was rainy in the Washington area. And, sign-in
sheets at the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, placed Casey
within a five-minute drive of National Airport late that evening.
There were other bits and pieces of corroboration about the Paris meetings.
A French arms dealer, Nicholas Ignatiew, told me in 1990 that he had checked
with his government contacts and was told that Republicans did meet with
Iranians in Paris in mid-October 1980.
A well-connected French investigative reporter Claude Angeli said his
sources inside the French secret service confirmed that the service provided
"cover" for a meeting between Republicans and Iranians in France on the
weekend of Oct. 18-19. German journalist Martin Kilian had received a
similar account from a top aide to intelligence chief deMarenches.
As early as 1987, Iran's ex-President Bani-Sadr had made his own claims
about a Paris meeting, and Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe
testified that he was present outside the Paris meeting and saw Bush, Casey
and other Americans in attendance.
Finally, the Russian government sent a report to the House task force,
saying that Soviet-era intelligence files contained information about
Republicans holding a series of meetings with Iranians in Europe, including
one in Paris in October 1980.
"William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian
leadership," the Russian report said. "The meetings took place in Madrid and
Paris."
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, "former CIA Director George Bush also
took part," the report said. "The representatives of Ronald Reagan and the
Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release
of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran."
Requested by Hamilton, who was in charge of the lackadaisical congressional
inquiry into the October Surprise mystery in 1992, the Russian report
arrived via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in January 1993. But Hamilton's task
force had already decided to dismiss the October Surprise allegations as
lacking solid evidence.
The Russian report was kept hidden until I discovered it after gaining
access to the task force's raw files. Though the report was addressed to
Hamilton, he told me last year that he had not seen the report until I sent
him a copy shortly before our interview.
Lawrence Barcella, the task force's chief counsel, acknowledged to me that
he might not have shown Hamilton the report and may have simply filed it
away in boxes of task force records.
Casey in Spain
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station. (archives.org)
I also discovered in the files at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library
in College Station, Texas, another document that supported allegations that
Casey had traveled to Madrid, as Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi had
claimed. Hashemi testified under oath that Casey met with Iranian emissary
Mehdi Karrubi in Madrid, Spain, in late July 1980 to discuss delaying the
release of the American hostages until after the presidential election so as
not to help President Carter.
Searching through the archived files at the Bush library, I found a
"memorandum for record" dated Nov. 4, 1991, by associate White House counsel
Chester Paul Beach Jr.
Beach reported on a conversation with State Department legal adviser Edwin
D. Williamson who said that among the State Department "material potentially
relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid
embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown."
However, the House task force was apparently never told about this
confirmation of Casey's presence in Madrid and proceeded to reject the
Madrid allegations by citing a particularly bizarre alibi for Casey's
whereabouts on the last weekend in July 1980.
The task force placed Casey at the exclusive all-male retreat at the
Bohemian Grove in California although the documentary evidence clearly
showed that Casey attended the Grove on the first weekend of August, not the
last weekend of July. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege. For more on
Casey's alleged travels, see Consortiumnews.com's "October Surprise Evidence
Surfaces."]
Stranger Than Fiction
Another stranger-than-fiction twist in this story is the new revelation that
a figure from the Watergate cover-up was Bush's "alibi witness," although
the witness apparently could not be counted on to support Bush's October
Surprise alibi.
Though Richard A. Moore was not one of the household names from the
Watergate cover-up, a review of literature on the scandal reveals that he
was a trusted aide to President Nixon and helped formulate both legal and
public-relations strategies to fend off the Watergate investigations.
In The Haldeman Diaries, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman describes
Nixon frequently sending his top aides to consult with Moore about
developments in the scandal. At one point, as White House counsel Dean is
starting to talk with prosecutors, Haldeman notes that "Moore was very close
to Dean, how about having him talk with Dean and see what he has in mind."
In Dean's Blind Ambition, Dean credits Moore with first coming up with the
memorable phrase that the Watergate cover-up was becoming "a cancer" on
Nixon's presidency, a metaphor that Dean used in a key confrontation with
Nixon and repeated during the Watergate hearings.
During those hearings, Moore was dispatched by the White House to dispute
Dean's assertion that Nixon was complicit in the cover-up of the June 1972
break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at least as early as that
September.
On July 12, 1973, Moore told the Senate Watergate Committee that "nothing
said in my meetings with Mr. Dean or my meetings with the President suggests
in any way that before March 21 [1973] the President had known, or that Mr.
Dean believed he had known, of any involvement of White House personnel in
the bugging or the cover-up."
Perhaps because of his status as a lawyer to Nixon, Moore escaped the fate
of many other White House insiders who were indicted and prosecuted for
false testimony and obstruction of justice.
Being a Yale alumnus and a friend of the well-connected George H.W. Bush,
who was then chairman of the Republican National Committee, probably didn't
hurt either.
Moore had started his legal career working as a lawyer for the American
Broadcasting Company in the 1940s. He was a close friend of Nixon's Attorney
General John N. Mitchell who brought Moore into the Nixon administration as
his special assistant. Moore moved over to the White House in 1971 to serve
as special counsel to Nixon.
After leaving the White House, Moore returned to the television industry,
becoming a founder and associate producer of "The McLaughlin Group"
political chat show.
In September 1989, President George H.W. Bush named Moore as Ambassador to
Ireland, where he stayed until June 1992, when his testimony in another
political scandal might have proved very important in either exonerating
Bush or exposing a phony cover story that protected Bush's participation in
an operation that bordered on treason.
Without ever being questioned in the October Surprise mystery, Moore died in
Washington on Jan. 27, 1995, at age 81. He succumbed to prostate cancer,
according to his daughter Kate L. Moore.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of
Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America's Stolen Narrative,
can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
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Tags: George H.W. Bush Iran-Contra Affair Richard A. Moore Robert Parry
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