Kerry gathers doomsday team By Jonathan E. Kaplan
Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) presidential campaign is preparing for a so-called “October surprise,” including Osama bin Laden’s capture and a terrorist attack in the United States, The Hill has learned.
“There is discussion of what are the unexpected, unanticipated [events],” said Rand Beers, Kerry’s top foreign-policy guru and a former Bush National Security Council adviser, who is a member of a loose group of advisers that the Democratic challenger is putting together. “It would be a surprise if we were not going to talk about it.”
Sen. John Kerry
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By design, the group includes several outside advisers who are free of the day-to-day management of the campaign and can thus think outside the box. Membership of the group and the issues they are discussing are being kept secret by the campaign.
Campaign officials dislike discussing the issue at all for fear that it makes the campaign look intent on taking political advantage of what might be a catastrophic event, such as a terror attack. Aides also want to avoid signaling to the opposing camp what they are thinking or doing on strategic issues.
But, they say, the have to prepare for the unexpected.
“It’s fair to assume in a post-9-11 world that a campaign is trying to think ahead to deal effectively as possible should anything arise,” an adviser to Kerry’s campaign said.
Stephanie Cutter, Kerry’s spokeswoman, declined to comment, as did Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel.
Campaign observers said they would be surprised if Kerry was not preparing behind the scenes for an attack like that on Sept. 11 or on commuter trains in Madrid on March 11 that could reshape, perhaps deliberately, the outcome of the election this November.
On Capitol Hill, Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) told reporters: “We have not sat around and talked about the political ramifications of war on terror.”
After al Qaeda’s attacks in Madrid, which killed 192 people and wounded more than 1,400, and the subsequent defeat of Spain’s governing conservative party, which had supported Bush’s Iraq policy, White House officials have warned that terrorists will strike the United States before the November elections.
Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told “Fox News Sunday” last month: “We do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned we hope the wrong lesson from Spain. I think … [al Qaeda] might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something. In some ways, it seems like it would be too good to pass up for them, and so we are actively looking at that possibility.”
The concept of an October surprise originated in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s campaign alleged Ronald Reagan sent emissaries to delay the release of Americans held hostage by Iranian radicals at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Writing in 1982, New York Times columnist William Safire credited Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security adviser, or Gary Lawrence, a pollster, for coining the phrase in a May 27, 1980, memo.
In 1992, ex-Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), now a vice chairman of the committee investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, led a task force in the House charged with proving that there was not an October surprise. Writing in the Times in 1993, Hamilton said the task force had “disproved the theory” that Reagan-Bush campaign officials hatched a secret deal with Iranian officials to delay freeing the American Embassy hostages.
Charlie Black, a lobbyist and close adviser to the Bush family, said: “I could frankly understand the Kerry campaign thinking they need to address the question because our side has the president and government.”