Day: October 20, 2024

Presidential candidates have always understood that in a close election, any big news story in the last weeks of a campaign could be enough to tip the contest in November. Now known as an “October surprise,” the news story might take the form of a scandalous revelation about a candidate, the outbreak of war or economic turmoil, or even a fake story planted by a political enemy.

As early as the 1840 election, New York Democrats in support of President Martin Van Buren waited until mid-October to accuse the Whig party of paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York, a key swing state. A whig official even admitted to the scheme, but it wasn’t the bombshell scandal Democrats had hoped for. Van Buren still lost New York and the election.

“What the idea of the ‘October surprise’ suggests, above all, is that the proximity to the election is when big news can move the needle,” says David Greenberg, a political historian and journalist at Rutgers University. “The truth is, voters make up their minds based on a mixture of impressions, personalities, partisan loyalties, ideological leanings, as well as news and issues. It’s never easy to say precisely that this one thing made the difference.”

Below are seven examples of memorable (or anticipated) “October surprises” in U.S. presidential history.

1. A Forged Letter Almost Becomes Garfield’s ‘Death Warrant’ (1880)

Chinese immigration was a hot-button issue in the 1870s. In just a decade, more than 120,000 Chinese men and boys came to the United States under contract to work the railroads. Western states in particular were anxious about the influx of foreign labor and Democrats called for an immediate moratorium on Chinese immigration.

Republican candidate James Garfield took a more measured position, calling for new negotiations with China and for Congress to consider reasonable limitations on Chinese immigration that, “without violence or injustice, will place upon a sure foundation the peace of our communities and the freedom and dignity of labor.”

But just 12 days before the 1880 election, a letter emerged. Allegedly written by Garfield on House of Representatives stationary, the Republican candidate told a Massachusetts businessman named H.L. Morey that “individuals and companies have the right to buy labor where they can get it cheapest.” In other words, unrestricted Chinese immigration is good for business.

Democrats printed half a million copies of the “Morey letter” and distributed them in tightly contested states like California. They called it Garfield’s “death warrant.”

Republicans were slow to respond, but sent a team of private investigators to track down the letter’s recipient in Massachusetts. There was no H.L. Morey. Garfield declared the letter a forgery and published his handwriting side-by-side with the letter to prove it was a fake.

The forged letter did real damage, though, costing Garfield California. Although Garfield eventually won the election 214 electoral votes to 155, he barely won the popular vote by .02 percentage points.

2. FDR Almost Loses the Black Vote (1940)

The 1936 election signaled a landmark shift for Black voters. Prior to 1936, Black voters were loyal Republicans, the party of Lincoln. But as more African Americans moved out of the South to northern cities, they joined other racial and ethnic minorities fighting for better jobs and working conditions. After the Great Depression struck, Black voters flocked to Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs.

FDR carried 71 percent of the Black vote in 1936 and he hoped to do the same in 1940, but public opinion had changed. As America prepared for entry into World War II, Black Americans were appalled that segregation was still the norm in the U.S. military, and that FDR had done nothing about it. Meanwhile, FDR’s Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, was a vocal champion of civil rights.

On October 28, a high-profile incident threatened to cost FDR the Black vote for good. The president was campaigning in New York City at an event in Madison Square Garden. As FDR left for the train station, one of his staffers—a short-tempered press aide named Stephen Early—was blocked by two police officers. In a violent outburst, Early kneed one of the cops in the crotch. The officer, James Sloan, was Black.

As Sloan was rushed to the hospital, Early—the descendent of a Confederate general—issued a half-hearted apology. “A policeman appears to have been hurt,” Early told the press. “I did not attack or kick any officer. But since one officer believes I was responsible for hurting him, I wish to apologize… I cannot understand why Republican politicians are attempting to find political significance in this incident.”

Two days before the election, FDR tried to salvage the situation by announcing the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen and promoting Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. to brigadier general, the first Black officer to reach that rank.

FDR ended up winning an unprecedented third term as president and only lost a small percentage of the Black vote.

3. Reagan Campaign Coins the Term ‘October Surprise’ (1980)

Interestingly, the term “October surprise” was coined during an election where there wasn’t an actual October surprise.

In 1980, the Iranian Hostage Crisis cast a shadow over the presidential election. More than 50 American citizens were held hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran with no political solution in sight. Election Day would mark a full year of their captivity. 

Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to free the hostages, something that President Jimmy Carter’s administration had failed to do. But inside the Reagan campaign, there was mounting suspicion that Carter had actually secured the hostages’ release, but was waiting to announce it during the final weeks of the campaign.

It was William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, who dubbed Carter’s alleged scheme an “October surprise.”

Time magazine reported, “[Reagan’s campaign] expects [Carter] to pull what they call ‘the October surprise,’ meaning that shortly before Election Day, he will inflate the importance of some overseas event in an attempt to rally the country around him.”

That didn’t happen, of course. Election Day came and went, the hostages remained in Tehran and Reagan won handily. The real surprise came on January 20, when Iran released the hostages just hours after Reagan’s inauguration. Democrats then accused Reagan of striking a secret deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after he took office.

4. Kissinger Prematurely Announces ‘Peace’ in Vietnam (1972)

The Vietnam War was the major political issue of both the 1968 and 1972 elections. Even though the term “October surprise” hadn’t been coined yet, the idea was very much a political phenomenon. In both 1968 and 1972, incumbent presidents tried to secure last-minute peace deals to swing the election in their favor.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for reelection, but he was committed to helping his Democratic vice president, Hubert Humphrey, defeat the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. On October 31, 1968, LBJ ordered a halt to all U.S. bombing campaigns in Vietnam, announcing “a major step toward a firm and an honorable peace in Southeast Asia.” 

But just days later, the peace talks in Vietnam fell apart and Humphrey lost to Nixon. Democrats alleged that Nixon secretly scuttled the talks by promising the South Vietnamese stronger support if he were elected president. (Casey, who later coined “October surprise,” was a Nixon aide in 1968.)

Four years later, the Vietnam War was still raging and Nixon was adamant about securing peace before Election Day 1972. In early October, there appeared to be a breakthrough in the peace talks with the North Vietnamese accepting America’s terms for an end to the conflict. Behind the scenes, though, the South Vietnamese strongly objected to the arrangement.

That didn’t stop Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, from attending a press conference on October 26 and proclaiming that “peace is at hand.” In reality, the war would continue for another three years.

“It was big news,” says Greenberg. “Today we would definitely call it an ‘October surprise,’ even though they weren’t using that phrase back then.”

Nixon was already heavily favored to win in 1972, but Kissinger’s premature “peace” announcement may have contributed to his landslide victory. 

5. Iran-Contra Indictment Is Bad News for George H.W. Bush (1992)

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush was fighting to hold onto the White House, but he faced some serious challenges. For starters, the U.S. economy was mired in a recession, never a good place for the incumbent. On top of that, the 1992 race saw the first serious third-party challenge in decades. Billionaire Ross Perot was running as a fiscal conservative and siphoning Republican voters away from Bush.

If Bush had hopes of defeating his Democratic challenger, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, they took a serious hit in June 1992. That’s when Caspar Weinberger, who served as Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, was indicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair.

What’s the connection with Bush? Bush was Reagan’s vice president and had been trying to distance himself from the scandal, in which Reagan allegedly authorized illegal weapons sales to Iran in order to funnel money to the Contras, an anti-socialist army in Nicaragua.

Weinberger was the biggest name to be charged in the case, giving credence to the idea that everyone in the Reagan administration knew about the crime, including Bush. While Weinberger’s indictment didn’t happen in October, the timing was still bad for Bush, who lost the election to Clinton.

Greenberg says that the bad economy and the failure of Reaganomics were the biggest factor in Bush’s loss, but admits that “you never quite know what goes on in the mind of individual voters as they make their decisions close to Election Day.”

Bush pardoned Weinberger before he left office.

6. A DUI Almost Derails George W. Bush (2000)

In the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, polls showed that the race was a dead heat between George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. That’s exactly the type of election that could be decided by an “October surprise.”

Just days before Election Day‚ Fox News broke a bombshell story. In 1976, George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving in Maine after a long night of partying. The revelation seemed to confirm unflattering portrayals of the younger Bush as unfit for office.

“I’m not proud of that,” Bush told the press in a statement. “I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson.”

The news story was a last-minute gift to Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000, but famously lost the election after a recount in Florida was halted by the Supreme Court.

Republican strategist Karl Rove argued that Bush’s “October surprise” cost him five states in the 2000 election, enough to have avoided the Florida recount altogether.

7. FBI Reopens Probe into Clinton’s Emails (2016)

The 2016 election was chock-full of wild “October surprises.” On October 7, the Washington Post released a 2005 video of Republican candidate Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. That same day, Wikileaks released transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street donors, which painted the Democratic candidate as pro-corporate. Then The New York Times reported that Trump hadn’t paid federal taxes in 18 years.

But all of those bombshell news items paled in comparison to what happened on October 28, just 11 days before the election. James Comey, the FBI director, called a press conference to announce that the intelligence agency was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s private email server—an investigation that the FBI had officially closed in July.

The resurrection of the email investigation—which had been the target of Republican ire for a year—delivered a crippling blow to the Clinton campaign. (In her memoir, Clinton said that Comey had “shivved” her.) Clinton lost the election by a narrow margin, despite winning the popular vote.

“There’s been a lot of political science research about what they call ‘recency.’ That is to say, a big scandal in July probably is not going to matter that much, at least to most people, unless it completely derails a candidate,” says Greenberg. “But the same scandal a week or two before the election, it sticks.”

America’s Lawyer E119: Major corporations and their lobbyists have found a loophole that allows them to wine and dine members of Congress without violating federal laws prohibiting those activities. The FBI has been caught AGAIN, spying on American citizens that were protesting against the military industrial complex, and this time they tried to prosecute them as terrorists. And disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez is begging a judge to toss out his felony convictions because he says that Congressional rules allow him to be corrupt. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Regardless of who is leading their governments, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies maintain a quiet, steady relationship, as that link remains a vital part of national security for both countries.

During a talk last Thursday as part of a Harvard global youth conference on foreign affairs, former CIA director John Brennan and Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, spoke about the close ties between the CIA and Mossad, the far-reaching “nuclear” threat posed by cyber, and state-sponsored assassinations, which both generally condemn but view as defensible in the case of “terrorists” who pose an “imminent” threat.

“As good as CIA is, the world is a very, very big place, and we need to work with our partners, such as Israel and Mossad. They have eyes and ears in places and capabilities that we depend on. Because we can’t be everywhere, all the time, that information-sharing is important,” said Brennan, who served as CIA director during President Barack Obama’s second term, from 2013 to 2017. “Tamir and I would share the most sensitive intelligence because our agencies trusted one another.”

Even without the kind of network of global partners that many larger nations have, Israel manages to punch far above its weight in intelligence with the CIA as a partner.

“We managed to do things that no one thought before that can be done in cooperation between agencies like us,” said Pardo, who joined Mossad in 1980 and served as its head from 2011 to 2016. “We never thought that [we] would be able to achieve that degree of cooperation.”

Even though the two heads of state at the time, Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had a strained relationship at best, Pardo said “it never, never stopped the cooperation between the two agencies.”

The two former intel chiefs spoke as part of a three-day virtual conference hosted by the Harvard Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative last week. The event provided 615 high school and early college-age students in 62 countries, many of them thinking about future careers in foreign policy, an opportunity to hear from and speak directly to nearly 150 global figures and experts in intelligence, national security, and diplomacy. Speakers included Leon Panetta, former U.S. secretary of defense and former CIA director; Michèle Flournoy, former U.S. under secretary of defense for policy; and Henry Kissinger ’50, A.M. ’52, Ph.D. ’54, secretary of state and national security adviser during the Nixon and Ford administrations and an informal adviser to the Trump administration.

Moderator John Ferguson ’22 asked Brennan and Pardo about their views on state-sponsored assassinations, an ethical concern with which many students interested in the field of intelligence wrestle, he said.

Brennan said he “strongly condemn[ed]” the involvement of country, including the U.S., in assassination, an act he defined as the targeted killing of officials of sovereign countries for political or ideological reasons outside of wartime. He criticized the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a top general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which the Trump administration hailed as a major battlefield success. But Brennan said killing members of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups was “far different in my mind” than assassination because such groups were not sovereign nations and were plotting deadly attacks against the U.S. and others. “I do believe that there is an obligation on the part of governments to do what they can to protect the lives of their citizens.”

“Cyber is a very soft and silent nuclear weapon. You can destroy a country without shooting one bullet, without launching any rocket, and you can really create a lot of damage for a very cheap price.”

Tamir Pardo

Assassination is a criminal offense and “something that should never be done,” said Pardo.

But “if you have to do it, it is because you are in a state of war with that country or with that organization, and the threat … is enormous, and there is no other way to deal with it.”

“Israel never, never killed anyone for things that he did in the past,” he added, claiming that even terrorists who had caused harm at one point but were not presently a danger would not be targeted. “We are taking those actions only if there is imminent threat of this person for the coming days, for the future.”

Cyberintelligence has become a critical and higher-profile component of national security, as cyberattacks by groups inside Russia and elsewhere hit civilian targets like private companies and city governments, and disrupt economies and public safety. Once a tactic available only to state-run intelligence agencies, today virtually anyone, even criminals, can launch cyberattacks to inflict significant economic, social, and political harm.

“Cyber is a very soft and silent nuclear weapon. You can destroy a country without shooting one bullet, without launching any rocket, and you can really create a lot of damage for a very cheap price,” including the “exceptional power” to change government policies and administrations, said Pardo.

Asked by a student whether the greater reliance on data can restore public trust in the soundness of intelligence community decisions, Brennan and Pardo suggested that negative perceptions are being shaped by a torrent of false information online and in the news. “So, I think there is the basis for that distrust,” said Brennan.

Despite greater public awareness that state and non-state actors around the world are using the internet and other digital tools to manipulate people, “I don’t think the politicians and others and even news organizations have learned the lessons” from the last several years, said Brennan. “There seems to be a total absence of integrity, honesty, and truthfulness, which I think is leading … not just to distrust, but an ignorance of the facts and misunderstanding of world events. And, with the technological developments that are underway, I think we’re going to see more and more of this proliferation of false information, unfortunately.”

Less than a decade ago, telling truth from falsehoods was fairly easy. Today, it has become much harder to separate fact from fiction in both Israel and the U.S. in part because some politicians are deliberately misleading their citizenry, said Pardo.

During the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, “Fake news was so common that no one was able to [detect] the difference between truth and lie. I think it’s your job, the young people, to make the change — and it won’t be easy,” Pardo said, noting a new wave of younger politicians who have embraced and polished these tactics.

“We did our best to prevent it for many years. But we are out of the system today. It’s your turn now.”

Israel is widely recognized as having highly sophisticated intelligence capabilities, both in terms of its ability to collect information about potential threats within its own country and outside of it. And so as details unfold about the full extent of Hamas’ unprecedented and surprise attack on 20 Israeli towns and several army bases on Oct. 7, 2023, the question lingers: How did Israel fail to piece together clues about this large-scale and highly complex plot in advance?

Israeli intelligence did detect some suspicious activity on Hamas militant networks before the attack, The New York Times reported on Oct. 10, 2023. But the warning wasn’t acted upon or fully understood in its entirety – similar to what happened in the United States shortly before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Intelligence analysis is like putting a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle together from individual pieces of intelligence every day and trying to make judgments for policymakers to actually do something with those insights,” said Javed Ali, a counterterrorism and intelligence scholar who spent years working in U.S. intelligence.

We spoke with Ali to try to better understand how Israeli intelligence works and the potential gaps in the system that paved the way for the Hamas incursion.

1. What questions did you have as you watched the attacks unfold?

This took an enormous amount of deliberate and careful planning, and Hamas must have gone to great lengths to conceal the plotting from Israeli intelligence. This plotting may indeed have been hidden as the plot was being coordinated.

Because of the attack’s advanced features, I also thought that Iran almost certainly played a role in supporting the operation – although some U.S. officials have so far said they do not have intelligence evidence of that happening.

Finally, Hamas is on Israel’s doorstep. One would think Israel could better understand what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as opposed to 1,000 miles away in Iran. How did Israel not see something this advanced right next door? Some Israeli officials have said they believed Hamas was already deterred by recent Israeli counterterrorism operations, and that the group lacked the capability to launch an attack on the scope and scale of what occurred.

2. How does Israeli intelligence work, and how is it regarded internationally?

Israel has one of the most capable and sophisticated intelligence enterprises at the international level. The current design and functioning of Israel’s intelligence system broadly mirrors that in the U.S., with respect to roles and responsibilities.

In Israel, Shin Bet is the Israeli domestic security service, so the equivalent of the FBI, which monitors threats within the country. On the foreign security side, Israel has Mossad, which is equivalent to the CIA. Third, there is an Israeli military intelligence agency, similar to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency – and there are other, smaller organizations within military intelligence that are focused on different intelligence issues.

Like most Western countries, Israel relies on a combination of different intelligence sources. This includes recruiting people to provide intelligence agencies with the sensitive information they have direct access to, which is known as human intelligence – think spies. There is what is called signals intelligence, which can be different forms of electronic communications like phone calls, emails or texts that the Israelis gain access to. Then there is imagery intelligence, which could be a satellite, for example, that captures photos of, say, militant training camps or equipment.

A fourth kind of intelligence is open source, or publicly available information that is already out there for anyone to get, such as internet chat forums. While I was winding down my work in intelligence a few years ago, there was a shift to seeing much more publicly available intelligence than other kinds of traditional intelligence.

3. How does Israel’s intelligence system differ from the US system?

Unlike the U.S., one thing that Israel doesn’t have is an overall intelligence coordinator, a single representative who knows about and oversees all of the different intelligence components.

The U.S. system has a director of national intelligence position, who runs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was created in 2004. These were both recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, after it found that the U.S. approach to intelligence was too fragmented across different agencies and offices.

So, when there are tough issues that no one agency could resolve on its own, or analytic differences in intelligence, you need an independent office of experts to help work through those issues. That’s what this office does.

I spent several years working within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In one of my jobs there, I reported to the director of national intelligence.

There is no equivalent to that central office and function in Israel. In my opinion, Israel might consider down the road how a comprehensive intelligence coordinator could help avoid this challenge in the future.

4. What role does the US have in monitoring threats to Israel, if any?

The U.S. and Israel have a very strong intelligence relationship. That partnership is bilateral, meaning it is just between the two countries. It is not part of a larger international group of countries that share intelligence.

The U.S. also has a broader intelligence partnership, known as “Five Eyes,” with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the general rule in these strong bilateral relationships is that when one side picks up intelligence about threats to the other, it should automatically get passed on.

This may be a case where the U.S. is shifting its intelligence priorities to other parts of the world, like Ukraine, Russia and China. As a result, we may not have had significant intelligence on this particular Hamas plot, and so there was nothing to pass to Israel to warn them.