Perhaps you remember the October Surprise of 1980? If not, here's the backstory. On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran. Originally, the student-militants planned on a three-day sit-in. The hostage crisis lasted 444 days. One year to the day after the embassy takeover, America held its presidential election. The Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, won a convincing victory over the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Some twelve weeks later, on January 20, 1981, Reagan gave his inaugural address. Five minutes after he finished, the Iranians released the hostages. Was this a coincidence? Or did the Ronald Reagan/George Bush campaign negotiate a deal with Khomeini's Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, thereby assuring the Republicans of victory?
I began my own investigation into these questions. I found that there have been decades worth of investigations, including a Congressional task force in 1992. All of the investigations failed to supply hard, credible evidence. All of the investigations failed to supply the smoking gun.
The idea dawned on me. What if these investigators were looking in the wrong place? Yes, they interviewed a series of supposed eyewitnesses. These eyewitnesses offered dubious testimony. They were suspicious sorts: arms traders, covert operatives working for various governments and quasi-governments, political operatives like Richard Allen and Robert McFarlane on the Republican side and Zbigniew Brzezinski from the Democrats. Their testimony is as much disinformation as it is information.
But it occurred to me. Nobody has researched the Iranian side. What about Iranian documents? What about Iranian eyewitnesses previously loyal to Khomeini but, in the chaos of Iranian politics, interested in setting the historical record straight?
Sounds intriguing, right? For an American, the Iranian side is unobtainable. Obviously with Iran, there's no such thing as freedom of research, or even freedom of travel.
My project then took a u-turn. At this point in time, there was an uproar about Oprah Winfrey, James Frey and his false memoirs. His fictionalized memoirs. Interestingly enough, Oprah chose Elie Wiesel's Night as the fail-safe replacement of veracity. A dubious choice. But that's another story for another time.
But it dawned on me. What if I wrote the October Surprise negotiations as a false history, a fictionalized history? What if I wrote the complete and extraordinary history of the October Surprise as an investigative journalist/historian would, but fictionalized the parts that couldn't be documented? How would that read?
It reads like a very compelling history. In my new book, The Complete and ExtraOrdinary History of the October Surprise, I place the reader in the middle of the action - as the takeover of the embassy unfolds, as the hostages undergo interrogations and mock executions, as the Reagan campaign negotiates with the Khomeini regime, and as President Carter desperately tries to free the hostages and win a second term in office.
The resulting story is a captivating and humorous political satire that, at times, blurs the lines between "reality" and "fiction." Full of "inside conversations," memorable set-pieces and outrageous innuendo by "eyewitnesses," the reader will be astounded by both the serious and funny connections among international political players and historical events. I think this novel is a real literary tour-de-force, a funhouse mirror that reflects history back at us in a whole new way.
If you want more information, check out my October Surprise blogsite: brianjosepher.wordpress.com
If you want to buy a copy, here's the easiest way: Click here...
|
