Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

By Craig Unger 

Mariner Books 2025

There is a regrettable misconception held by the bibliophobic majority. It pictures readers as limp and fanciful folk, caring only for exhaling princesses, conceited baronets and the dreamy rhymes spun by poets in exquisite Tuscany. Craig Unger’s new book Den of Spies: The Untold Story of Reagan, Carter and the Treason That Stole the White House hands us some tough tough toys for tough tough boys. In this soberly scathing historical account of the Reagan campaign team’s alleged attempts to forestall the release of American hostages in Iran and thus harm incumbent President Jimmy Carter’s electoral prospects, wispy readers are made to steel themselves against the harsh realities of cross-continental skullduggery. 

Unger goes about his business with a workman’s stolid determination, disgorging his notepad in successive chapters to inform the novices and please the boffins. After the Shah of Iran is ousted from his post, President Carter allows him to be lodged in New York, which then precipitates the seizure of 66 American hostages at Tehran’s US embassy. Had these hostages been released before the slapping match of the 1980 election, Carter’s victory would have been a thumping one. “The evidence is overwhelming” Unger writes “that [the Republican team] was secretly running a sophisticated intelligence network that made illegal arms deals in return for which Iran detained the hostages until after the election.” What is most remarkable about the wily swagger throughout the book, is its ability to introduce us to 31 separate schemers, shifters and plane-charting moral reprobates without ever betraying generous attention. Not once is a pause for clarifying thought necessary, even as hoarders of military hardware and slimy triple agents cross our path. 

Central to the book’s thesis is the “gruff and perpetually dishevelled” Reagan Campaign Manager William Casey who, fresh from a stint as Head of Secret Intelligence for the OSS, came sparring from the second world war “armed with a Manichean ideology that served him for the rest of his life and the seeds of an extraordinary network with which to achieve its ends.” Unger’s indictments spare nobody. George H. W. Bush is poked in the back, as well as two Westernised Iranian intermediaries Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi, a furtive tricksy proprietor of weapons Ari Ben-Menashe, the owlish Henry Kissinger and indeed many newspapers who fearfully refused to print the shocking specifics of the October Surprise. Followers of these developments will nod in cathartic approbation as deal-makers and shifty machinators have their collars felt. 

Den of Spies jags back and forth in a great temporal tussle. Another section that allows Unger to strike at his most formidable is a shamozzle concerning the disgraced Richard Nixon. He shows the precedent for treasonous practices within the Republican machine when Anne Chennault prevents the brokerage of peace in Vietnam before the 1968 election. Unger writes - “The rationale behind her mission was essentially the same as the one that the Republicans used twelve years later for the 1980 October Surprise: Tell the South Vietnamese (or, in 1980, the Iranians) not to participate in the negotiations proposed by the Democratic administration.” 

On the stylistic front, Unger’s prose is unobtrusive, direct and delightfully prosecutorial when a swine hoves into view. This book isn’t an obsessive doctrinal diatribe, it is a fact by fact rebuttal of the official story. Too often do authors stupify their life’s work with growling vitriol, but Unger is instead savagely investigative. There are short sentences that, though tiresome by the final stages, make Unger seem like the shoeless supply teacher we’ve all adored; the one who eschews the poxy curriculum and feeds us the forbidden details of the world’s wackiness. Haunting stumps such as “At least in theory.” and “Or so I thought.” and “I wanted them.” are all the talents of a daring minimalist frightening his charges with a spooky tale around the campfire. 

Den of Spies is so zestful in its declamations and so scrupulous in its factual reasoning that this lousy critic feels the Reagan campaign - under William Casey’s watch - certainly did negotiate an arms deal with the Iranians so as to prolong the time their own countrymen spent in overseas captivity, to guarantee an electoral win. In his final remarks, Unger levels his ire at the current sitting President’s “shamelessness and cynicism”, but it is profoundly disheartening to know how little the wrongdoing evidenced in this book would affect the burger-addled demagogue lumbering to the lectern in 2025. Such control over the American collectivity excuses him from the same repercussions Reagan would’ve feared. Still, if readers want some respite from ring-bearing hobbits, sententious elopements and courts of ribald sleaze, Craig Unger’s sucker punch to Reaganite righteousness will both educate and appal. 

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull