A Clandestine Trip and a Four-Decade Secret: An Untold Story Behind Jimmy Carter's Defeat
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Source: NYT
His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html
This has been stated and restated many times since 1980. Barnes had the sheer gall to say this about his betrayal and silence:
Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”
But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”
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...what the NSA had discovered. I would have to listen to that episode of Democracy Now! again, or read up on my history, but what I clearly recall is that whoever the individual was, they were very upset about the actions of the Nixon campaign, calling it "treason" in no uncertain terms. There is a recording of this meeting with LBJ in the Oval Office; it was played on the show, and it was damning. 
It took 50 years for it to be revealed that Nixon was secretly conspiring with the Vietnamese to win in 1968 which shut down promising peace talks - and prolonged the war for seven more years resulting in thousands more war deaths on both sides. And now we learn what we always suspected, Reagan was guilty of the same foreign power collusion to defeat President Carter.
