Nope.
Barbara Honegger, who worked in the Reagan State Department, wrote a book titled October Surprise. She and reporter Gary Sick both reported that during the week of October 15th through the 20th 1980, Reagan campaign director Bill Casey went to Paris and met with representatives of the Ayatollah, asking him to stop negotiating with Carter and just hold the hostages until after the election. If Iran would do this, Casey promised, he’d get them weapons for the US-supplied military that the Shaw had amassed, and he’d route those weapons through Israel so nobody would ever know. The Iranians said, “Yes.”
The next day, on October 21st, the Iranians inexplicably, at least to the Carter administration that thought it was working out a deal, stopped negotiating. The world later learned that, over the next three days, Israel began shipping F-4 fighter jet tires to Iran, the first of many shipments of US-made weapons to go that route over the next few years.
And on January 20th, at the exact moment Reagan raised his hand to be sworn in, the Iranians released the hostages. It was their way of saying, “Deal done.” When we found out about it, and that the money the Iranians were paying Reagan for the military hardware was being used to kill Contra rebels in Nicaragua, it was referred to as the “Iran/Contra scandal.”
