Perhaps only John Le Carre could fashion a story as complex, as enigmatic and as filled with shady characters as what is known as ”The October Surprise.”
This isn`t fiction, but fact of the most elusive sort. If you have not been paying attention, ”The October Surprise” refers to allegations that Ronald Reagan`s minions-including future CIA chief William Casey and future Vice President George Bush-made secret arms deals with the Iranian government to delay the release of the hostages to scuttle Jimmy Carter`s campaign in 1980.
There was always something coincidental about the hostages being released on the day of Reagan`s inauguration, and in recent years many have postulated that it was no coincidence.
”Frontline,” which moved to the forefront of the issue with its ”The Election Held Hostage” report last year, returns with a typically thoughtful, if understandably incomplete program called ”Investigating the October Surprise” (9 p.m. Tuesday, PBS-Ch. 11).
”In this report we touched on only a few of the questions surrounding the alleged conspiracy,” says reporter Robert Parry. (The show was produced by Robert Ross.)
But the show does a solid job with those few questions. It travels the globe and interviews a vast number of people, including Casey`s widow, the Tribune`s John Maclean, and a fellow named Oswald LeWinter, who ”seems to epitomize the strange nature of the riddle.”
The truth proving elusive, the show offers yet another theory:
”Republican contacts with the Iranians did exist, but were intended not to delay a hostage release but to win their release as early as possible.”
To bolster this, the ”Frontline” cameras found Reagan on a golf course last year. The former president said: ”I did some things the other way, to try and be of help getting those hostages-I felt sorry for them-and getting them out of there. And this whole thing that I was worried about that as a campaign thing is absolute fiction. I did some things to try the other way.” Ultimately, ”The October Surprise,” the subject of a congressional committee investigation, appears a mystery as frustrating any in American history.
It`s also a mystery that may never be solved.
As the last line of this clear, concise and intriguing program states,
”The overriding truth about 1980 is that the American people may never know what happened.”
– They call him the Iceman, and while you watch Richard Kuklinski calmly detail the particulars of a life spent viciously murdering people for money, you should be rather chilled.
But that`s not the reason he`s called the Iceman, as you`ll learn in an edition of HBO`s ”American Undercover” called ”The Iceman Tapes:
Conversations With a Killer” (9 p.m. Tuesday, HBO).
The reason police gave Kuklinski this catchy nickname is that he once kept one of his murder victims in a meat storage freezer for two years.
Interviewed in New Jersey`s Trenton State Prison, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1988, Kuklinski is not a serial murderer. He killed for money and is, according to Robert Carroll, a New Jersey assistant attorney general, ”one of the most dangerous criminals we have ever come across in this state.”
The ”American Undercover” cameras spent 17 hours interviewing the killer. He is asked how many people he has killed.
”An approximate guess,” he says. ”More than 100.”
He is asked how he feels about killing.
”I don`t. I don`t have a feeling one way or the other.”
He describes some of his methods, from shotgun and knives to cyanide, perhaps his favorite means of murder.
His dispassionate manner is initially spooky, but eventually proves almost hypnotic.
We get some moody re-creations and a video biography in which we learn that Kuklinski was abused as a child, beaten by mother and father.
”My mother was cancer,” he says. ”She would destroy everybody.”
It`s a ghastly picture, made all the more weird by the fact that while he was out strangling and shooting, Kuklinski was also living a calm, ordinary family life.
A loving husband and father, he never exhibited his evil to his wife and children. Even as he moved deeper into murder, he maintained the image of
”businessman” and doting dad. We see home movies and listen to his wife talk about him. Strangely, she never suspected. Disappointingly, she is guarded with her feelings now.
Only when Kuklinski talks of his family does he display any emotion, barely holding back tears.
