The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.

Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.

That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.

Although Brewer and other experts I spoke with did not predict that Iran will go nuclear in the near term, they agreed that it is likelier than ever before. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons during the metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, it could become the first country to do so while at war since the United States in 1945. But Iran also has many ways to wield its nuclear program that stop short of getting a weapon, injecting further peril into an already volatile new nuclear age.

In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

[Read: What if Iran already has the bomb?]

The latest rhetoric in official circles could be a response to Iran’s shifting public discourse. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian nuclear decision making at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month seems to have piqued Iranian public interest in their country’s nuclear program. She’s noticed a greater number of Iranian commentators on Telegram discussing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.

“There is this realization that, yes, the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are repressive, but we live in this neighborhood and maybe we need to have” nuclear weapons, Tabaar told me before the latest strike.

That decision belongs to Khamenei, but the increased public interest that Tabaar has observed creates an opening for Iranian leaders to advance the country’s nuclear program. As Tabaar noted, such decisions are often informed by the views of elites and by the regime’s “fear of popular revolt.”

Still, neither Grajewski nor Tabaar anticipates that the regime will immediately seek a bomb. Iran could instead use its near-nuclear status to its advantage, including by escalating threats to go nuclear, announcing progress in uranium enrichment, rebuffing international oversight, or exiting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, Iran could try to reinforce the other legs of its security—by working with partners such as Russia and North Korea to upgrade its conventional military capabilities, and by bolstering proxy groups such as the Houthis in Yemen while seeking to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.

But strengthening these other legs could take years, and Israel appears poised to press its military advantage. That leaves a crucial question for Iran’s leaders: Is the country’s nuclear-threshold capability enough of a deterrent?

If they decide to cross the threshold and go nuclear, Iranian leaders know that their adversaries will likely detect their efforts and try to intervene, potentially undermining the very security Tehran may be seeking. The latest U.S. estimates indicate that Iran might require only a week or two to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But concealing such a move from IAEA inspectors without kicking them out of the country would be challenging. And Iran could need more than a year—or at least several months, by some estimates—to convert its uranium into a usable weapon.

Those months constitute “a pretty big window of vulnerability” in which “Israel or the United States could disrupt Iran’s work to build a nuclear weapon, including through military action,” Brewer explained. So he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the supreme leader will wake up one morning and declare, “Damn the torpedoes. All hands on deck. We’re going to weapons-grade today.”

A more plausible outcome, Brewer and Grajewski believe, is that Iran covertly resumes the research on weaponizing fissile material that it halted in 2003. The goal would be to “shorten the window of vulnerability” between amassing weapons-grade uranium, putting it into a nuclear device, and fashioning a deliverable weapon, Brewer told me. This weaponization work is more difficult (though not impossible) to spot than uranium enrichment, at least at declared facilities still monitored by the IAEA. International inspectors retain access to facilities containing fissile material, but Iran has reduced the frequency of inspections since 2018, when the U.S. exited the nuclear deal. The regime has also ended IAEA monitoring of other sites related to its nuclear program, raising the possibility that it has moved some centrifuges to undeclared facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. officials said this month that they could probably detect any decision to build nuclear weapons soon after Iranian leaders make it.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

American officials often speak about whether Iran’s leaders have “made the decision” to attain nuclear weapons, but Tabaar argued that Tehran’s calculations don’t work that way. Think of a dimmer, not a light switch: Iran is “making sure all components are there to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, gradually more and more.” Tabaar added, however, that there are “two very extreme scenarios” in which he could imagine Iranian leaders suddenly making the call to flip the nuclear switch. The first is a “window of opportunity” in which Iran’s enemies are distracted by, say, a major conflict elsewhere in the world. The second is “a window of threat” in which Iranian leaders fear that their adversaries are about to unleash a massive bombing campaign that could destroy the country or regime.

Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.

But, as Brewer has noted, history offers several examples of regional crises prompting states to “break out,” or race for a bomb. Shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reportedly rushed to assemble nuclear devices out of concerns about possible Egyptian strikes on its nuclear facilities. Amid tensions with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan is believed to have begun building nuclear weapons by 1990. That same year, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein ordered an impractical (and unsuccessful) effort to quickly build a nuclear weapon. “I can give you lots of really good reasons why breaking out would be a terrible decision by the supreme leader,” Brewer told me. “I can also give you lots of reasons why the crash nuclear-weapons program in Iraq was a terrible decision. But [the Iraqis] still made it.”

I asked my Atlantic Council colleague Danny Citrinowicz, who from 2013 to 2016 led the Israeli military’s analysis of Iranian strategy, whether Iran is more likely to become a nuclear-weapons state today than it was at any point in the many years that he’s monitored its nuclear program. He didn’t hesitate: “Definitely.”

Citrinowicz broke down that answer into relative probabilities. He pegged the chances of Iran “storming” to a bomb—by, for example, detonating a nuclear device for demonstration purposes—at 10 percent, the highest he’s ever assessed it. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, he would have said “close to zero.” He assigned a 30 percent probability to the scenario of Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade, though perhaps only a minimal amount to show off its capabilities.

To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.

[Read: The unraveling of Trump’s North Korea policy]

Still, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran. Russia and China, both parties to the 2o15 pact, are far more hostile to the United States today than they were then. Khamenei has expressed a general willingness to reengage in negotiations, but he has also instructed his government that the U.S. can’t be trusted. And Iran will be much less likely to enter into a comprehensive agreement again now that Washington has already pulled out of one and reimposed sanctions, delivering a shock to Iran’s economy. Getting the regime to agree to anything beyond limited concessions on its nuclear program appears implausible.

One way or another, though, Citrinowicz expects 2025 to be “decisive.” Without a new agreement, Iranian leaders could start procuring a bomb. Or Israel and the U.S. could take military action to stave them off. And either of those scenarios could trigger the other.

If Iran heads for the bomb, or leverages its threshold status for geopolitical gain, that could encourage other countries, including U.S. partners, to develop their own nuclear programs. “I absolutely do worry that we could live in a world in the future of not necessarily more nuclear-weapons states but more countries that have this capability to build nuclear weapons,” Brewer said.

In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.

Should Iran get nuclear weapons, that would likely embolden its regime at home and abroad, elevate the risk of nuclear terrorism, upend deterrence dynamics between Iran and Israel along with the United States, and spur either an extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Arab partners in the Middle East or a nuclear-arms race in the region—among a host of other potential consequences.

But such outcomes are hard to forecast, because so much of what we know about the interplay between nuclear weapons and international affairs is based on the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. We are now in a third nuclear age, in which nuclear and near-nuclear states come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes. Arms-control agreements have unraveled, diplomatic channels between adversaries have vanished, and establishing nuclear deterrence has never been more complicated.

After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.

Salman Shaikh talks about the role of Europe, and of UN Security Council members pushing for an end to the Gaza war.

The UN Security Council is trying to crack down rising levels of gang violence in Haiti by extending embargo on weapons.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.”

Milley went on to describe the grave degree to which former President Donald Trump, under whom Milley had served, was a danger to the nation. Woodward recounts the episode with Milley—who almost certainly believed that he was speaking to Woodward off the record—in his new book, War:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

For readers of The Atlantic, this will sound familiar: Milley’s warning about Trump as well as the steps Milley took to defend the constitutional order during Trump’s presidency were the subject of a cover story last year by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. As Goldberg put it in that story: “The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster,” who served as the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman,” McMaster said to Goldberg, “you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?”

Milley knows well the risks of criticizing Trump. The former president has reportedly expressed a desire to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him, and he has even suggested that Milley should be executed. Since Milley retired, Woodward noted, the combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan has endured “a nonstop barrage of death threats,” which led him to install bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.

I long resisted the use of the word fascist to describe Trump. But almost a year ago, I came to agree with Milley that Trump is through-and-through a fascist. He is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear such concerns from angry members of the so-called Resistance on social media, from liberal talk-show hosts, or even, say, from curmudgeonly retired political-science professors who write for magazines. It’s another to hear them from a man who once held the nation’s top military office.

Some observers question whether Milley should have said anything at all. I understand those reservations: I taught military officers for decades at the Naval War College, and I am familiar with the tradition—handed down from America’s first commander in chief, George Washington—of the military’s avoidance of entanglement in civilian politics. I, too, am uncomfortable that, while still on active duty, Milley spoke to Woodward about a presidential candidate. He could have waited a few months, until his retirement; he could even have resigned his commission early in order to be able to speak freely.

My own objectivity on the issue of Milley speaking with Woodward is strained by my strong feelings about Trump as an existential danger to the nation, so I checked in with a friend and widely respected scholar of American civil-military relations, Kori Schake, a senior fellow and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s a legitimately difficult call,” she wrote to me. She noted that resigning and then going public is always an option. She admitted, however, that for a general to throw his stars on the desk might be an honorable exit, but it’s not much use to the people remaining in uniform who must continue to serve the country and the commander in chief, and in general she sees the idea of simply quitting and walking out to be unhelpful.

So when should a general—who’s seen things in the White House that terrify him—raise the alarm if he believes that a president is planning to attack the very Constitution that all federal servants are sworn to protect? Schake thinks that Milley overestimated his importance and was out of his lane as a military officer: “The country didn’t need General Milley to alert them to the danger of Trump, that was evident if people wanted to know, and plenty of civilian officials—including General Milley’s boss, [Mark Esper], the Secretary of Defense—had already been sharing their concern.”

Schake is one of the smartest people I know on this subject, and so I am cautious in my dissent, especially because other scholars of civil-military affairs seem largely to agree with her. And like Schake, I am a traditionalist about American civil-military relations: Trump, as I wrote during his presidency, routinely attacked the military and saw its leaders as his opponents, but that should not tempt anyone in uniform to match his egregious violations of our civil-military norms and traditions.

A comparable situation occurred during the final days of President Richard Nixon’s time in office: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the Joint Chiefs chair at the time, General George Brown, that any “unusual orders” from the president should be cleared through him. (The Constitution, of course, does not have a special provision allowing Cabinet officers to subvert the chain of command at will if they think the president is having a bad day.) Schlesinger’s actions arose from concern about Nixon’s mental state; four years earlier, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of Milley’s predecessors as Joint Chiefs chair, was so worried about Nixon’s policies that he actually oversaw some internal spying on National Security Council proceedings.

And yet I understand Milley’s alarm and frustration. He was not grousing about a policy disagreement or trying to paper over a temporary crisis regarding the president’s capacity. He was concerned that a former American president could return to office and continue his efforts to destroy the constitutional order of the United States. This was no political pose against a disliked candidate: For Milley and others, especially in the national-security arena, who saw the danger from inside the White House, Trump’s continuing threat to democracy and national stability is not notional.

I also am somewhat heartened that a four-star general, when faced with what he sees as a dire peril to the nation, believes that the sunlight of a free press is the best option. But, more important, are people now listening to what Milley had to say? The revelations about his views seem to have been overwhelmed by yet more of Trump’s gobsmacking antics. As I was writing today’s Daily, news broke that Trump had added Nancy Pelosi and her family to his enemies list. (Paul Pelosi has already suffered a hammer attack from a deranged man stoked by conspiracy theories, a ghastly incident that some Trump supporters have used as a source for jokes; Trump himself has referenced it mockingly.)

All of this raises the question, once again, of what it will take, what will be enough, to rouse the last undecided or less engaged American voters and bring them to the ballot box to defend their own freedoms. Milley and other senior military officers are in a bind when it comes to talking about a former president, but telling the truth about Trump is a duty and a service to the nation.

Related:

How Mark Milley held the line Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The man who’s sure that Harris will win A Trump loyalist on the brink Shoplifters gone wild

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier aired tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Italy passed a law that criminalizes seeking surrogates abroad, including in countries where surrogacy is legal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented the country’s Parliament with a “Victory Plan,” which aims to end the Ukrainian-Russian war by next year and calls for a NATO invitation for Ukraine.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Found Image Holdings / Corbis / Getty.

The Sunshine Staters Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Diane Roberts

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

GLP-1 is going the way of gut health. The secret of Trump’s economic message Afghan women have been brought back in time.

Culture Break

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Learn. This branch of philosophy just might transform the way people think about what they owe their children, Elissa Strauss writes.

Read. Feeld, the polyamory dating app, made a magazine, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. Why?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Security Council statement urges that peacekeeper force must be respected but does not mention Israeli attacks by name.

The obsession that would overtake Craig Unger’s life, get him labeled a member of the “tinfoil-hat brigade,” and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. Scanning The New York Times and drinking his coffee, he came upon an op-ed detailing a treasonous plot that had sabotaged Jimmy Carter’s reelection efforts a decade earlier—a plot that would become known, somewhat ironically, as the October surprise.

Gary Sick, a former Iran specialist on the National Security Council, was alleging that during the 1980 presidential campaign, while more than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran, Ronald Reagan’s team made a backroom arms deal with the new Islamic Republic to delay the hostages’ release until after the election. Carter, bedeviled by the international fiasco, would be denied the narrative he needed to save his sinking chances—an October surprise, that is—and Reagan could announce the Americans’ freedom just after he was sworn in (which he went on to do).

This story was “literally unimaginable,” Unger writes in his new book, Den of Spies—a crime of the highest order. He was hooked.

American hostages depart an airplane on their return from Iran. Their release was announced minutes after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. (Getty)

Speaking with me about the October surprise from a leather booth at a Greenwich Village tavern more than three decades later, Unger, now 75, lit up. Uncovering exactly how Republican operatives had improbably and secretly worked out an agreement with Ayatollah Khomeini would give him a chance to be Woodward and Bernstein, or Seymour Hersh—journalistic heroes whose crusading investigations he revered. “For anyone who had missed out on Watergate, the October Surprise seemed to offer another shot,” he writes in Den of Spies. But it would not be Unger’s Watergate. It would be his undoing. Within a year, the story was downgraded to a hoax and Unger was both out of a job at Newsweek and being sued for $10 million. He had become, he writes, “toxic.”

Now, though, on the strength of newer and more credible evidence, he is returning to the story. Den of Spies is not just a summation of his years of steady research into the plot, and not even just a play for redemption; it’s a referendum of sorts on a style of journalism that once ruled the day.

Unger is what anyone would call an old-school reporter. His instincts were formed during the Watergate era, when the public’s reflexive trust in government was high (somewhere near 70 percent before Richard Nixon took office, as opposed to about 20 percent today) and journalists began fashioning themselves as adversaries with the presumption that the worst abuses of power were happening behind closed doors. Their role was to break Americans’ credulity—and they did. When I met Unger in mid-September, a second apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life had just occurred. I asked him for his first thought. “Cui bono?” he said. “Who benefits from it?” He wasn’t saying it had been a false-flag operation. But he definitely started from the premise that it might have been.

[James Fallows: An unlucky president, and a lucky man]

This is how Unger thinks. His previous two books tried to cement the idea that Donald Trump is an asset of Vladimir Putin. Unger’s modus operandi is to point to many different dots and then wonder at how they might connect, even when he can’t connect them himself or when those dots are being served up by deeply unreliable sources, such as a former KGB agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt. One negative review of his book American Kompromat in The Guardian described it as “dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all ‘too good to check,’ in the parlance of old-time journalists.”

When it comes to the October surprise, Unger couldn’t give up on it, even after it rapidly moved from news to apparent fake news. A friend called the story his “white whale” (“I did not need to be reminded that things had ended badly for Captain Ahab,” Unger writes). Without any publication to support his continued pursuit of the story, he traveled to Paris and Tehran on his own to interview sources, made his way through thousands of pages of documents and sales receipts, combed through it all year after year. His book contains all of this evidence, published during another consequential October—and landing, as a sort of personal gift, on Carter’s 100th birthday.

But the world in which Unger is now laying out his proof is very different from the America of 1980, or even of 1991, when his fixation began. Trust in leaders has eroded so completely that no one is moved anymore by the revelations of secrets, lies, or treachery—if you want to hear about stolen elections, just tune in to any Trump rally. Definitive evidence will now have to compete with loopy conspiracy theories. This is unfortunate, because the once-debunked October surprise has shifted over the same decades into the realm of high plausibility (though nothing close to agreed-upon history). And Unger and a few other reporters of his generation are responsible. They think that what actually happened still matters.   

“I don’t like to be wrong,” Unger told me, glaring through tortoiseshell glasses. “And worse, I don’t like to be called wrong when I’m right.”

The alleged linchpin of the October surprise was William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager through most of 1980. Casey was the head of secret intelligence for Europe in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, and for the rest of his life maintained a broad network of contacts among the spies and dodgy arms dealers of the world. He was a furtive, mumbly guy; a Manichaean thinker; a Cold Warrior; and, as Unger put it to me, a “dazzlingly brilliant spy.” Casey also seemed to have few scruples about doing what was needed to win. He was accused of having obtained Carter’s debate briefing papers during the 1980 campaign. And once the election was over, Casey was made director of the CIA.

Then–CIA Director William Casey accompanies President Reagan after signing a bill prohibiting the exposure of CIA agents in 1982. (Bettman / Getty)

Much of Unger’s book focuses on Casey and the connections and motives that would place him at the center of such a plot, one that would involve breaking an embargo to illegally supply Iran with much-needed spare parts and weapons and using Israel as a conduit to do so (a shocking collaboration to consider today).

After Sick’s 1991 op-ed, every major news publication sought to follow up and investigate. Most of the reporting focused on whether Casey was present at meetings in Madrid at the end of July 1980, when the plan was supposedly hatched. Endless minutiae surrounded this question. Unger showed me a copy of an attendance chart from a conference in London around the end of July, at which Casey was a participant. For the two days he was supposedly in Madrid for the meetings, some of the check marks on the chart indicating his presence in London are in light pencil, not in pen, meaning that he was expected but possibly never showed; did he sneak off to Spain? “Anyone can see this, right?” Unger said, squinting at the chart.

The pieces of this puzzle were that tiny. Or they involved shady characters who said they were at the Madrid meetings or their follow-ups and could attest to the plotting—people such as the brothers Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi, Iranian businessmen who were acting, Unger alleges, as double agents, pretending to negotiate the hostage release with Carter while working with Casey to stall it for Reagan’s benefit.

Unger, who had been a freelance investigative reporter, was hired by Newsweek, shortly after Esquire published his first article on the October surprise, to join a team dedicated to tracking down the plot. Like Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate, Unger imagined the team would do a series of stories leading, eventually, all the way to the White House. One version of the theory even placed George H. W. Bush, who in 1991 was beginning a reelection campaign, in Paris for the final planning meetings with the Iranians.

Craig Unger (pictured, right) points to an allegedly incriminating chart in his new book, Den of Spies. (Benedict Evans for The Atlantic)

And as with Watergate and other conspiracy investigations of various credibility—whether the cigarette industry’s cover-ups or Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction—this one relied on a rogues’ gallery of sources. Unger made contact with Ari Ben-Menashe, an arms dealer who claimed to be an intelligence asset for the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Ben-Menashe gave Unger details about the deal and described Casey’s participation. Unger knew that Ben-Menashe was not exactly to be trusted—most Israeli intelligence officials dismissed him as a low-level translator—but Unger considered it worth the risk. “The truth is, people who know most about crimes are criminals,” he told me. “People who know most about espionage are spies. And what you want to do is hear them out and corroborate.” When he tried to do that, Unger said, he was “eviscerated.”

Newsweek was not interested in an incremental Watergate-like build. Instead of Unger’s scoops, they published an article about how Ben-Menashe was a liar who had helped invent the story of the October surprise. Other publications followed. Unger had no time and no outlet to make his case, and he looked like he’d been taken for a ride. These characterizations, he said, “carried the day in terms of creating a critical mass that overwhelmed any data we could surface.”

Unger was soon out at Newsweek. Then he and Esquire were sued for libel by Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser (the case was thrown out, and McFarlane lost his subsequent appeal). Two congressional investigations looking into the plot were launched in the early 1990s; the House produced a nearly 1,000-page report. Both inquiries concluded that no proof of a conspiracy existed. According to the chair of the House task force, the whole story was the product of sources who were “either wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”

There was no question that if you pursued this, you were finished,” Unger told me. He tried to rebuild his career, eventually becoming the editor of Boston magazine and then moving back into freelance journalism. He wasn’t exactly the Ahab of the October surprise; that dubious honor belongs to Robert Parry, another old-school type who modeled himself on I. F. Stone, the paragon of independent journalists. It was Parry who kept discovering more clues, including, in 2011, a White House memo that definitively put Casey in Madrid for the July 1980 meetings. Parry died in 2018, leaving behind all of his collected files, including 23 gigabytes of documents. Unger used this material to reopen his own investigation.

In the years since that first op-ed was published, a lot of other testimony and evidence had helped bolster the October-surprise theory, some of it from more reliable sources—notably Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the president of Iran in 1980, who insisted to anyone who would listen that he had been aware of the plot. Unger went to meet with Bani-Sadr at his home in Versailles, and traveled to Iran in 2014 to see if he could pick up any leads. Among the new material in the book, Unger reveals records he uncovered that appear to document shipments of military equipment from Israel to Iran around the time of the November 1980 election.

[David A. Graham: The Iranian humiliation Trump is trying to avenge]

And just last year, The New York Times published a bombshell report in which Ben Barnes, a prominent Texas politician, revealed a secret he had been keeping for nearly 43 years: In 1980, he traveled throughout the Middle East with John Connally, the former Texas governor, seemingly at the behest of Casey to ask Arab leaders to persuade Iran to delay the hostage release. Barnes said he wanted to add to the record while Carter was still alive. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told the Times.

After this story, The New Republic ran an essay co-authored by Sick, the former National Security Council official; Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic-policy adviser; and two prominent Carter biographers, Kai Bird and Jonathan Alter. Under the headline “It’s All but Settled,” they wrote that they now “believe that it’s time to move past conspiracy theories to hard historical conclusions about the so-called October Surprise.” Like Unger, they had little doubt that Casey “ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election.”

The odds that Unger will get a renewed hearing for the October surprise—vindicating himself and maybe Carter too—are low. The most recent bizarro episode in the current election might explain why. As anyone following along will recall, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, seeking to stoke fears about immigrants, helped spread a rumor that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ cats and dogs. This was not true—and he knew it. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he recently told CNN.

Unger wants to unmask politicians and reveal the truth. But we now live in a country where politicians seem to openly brag about lying, and enough people despise the media so much that they’re willing to believe those lies anyway. We have an epistemic problem that no Woodward or Bernstein could solve. Detailing a nearly half-century-old conspiracy theory, even with Unger’s mass of evidence—the receipts, a videotaped interview with Jamshid Hashemi, those little pencil check marks on an old attendance chart—would read like old news to one half of the country and partisan revisionism to the other half.

Benedict Evans for The Atlantic

Reporters used to be able to change the “national conversation,” Unger told me. That’s what he was hoping to do, impossible as it seems even to him. Once upon a time, the large newspapers and television networks had, Unger said, “enough authority that a big story would really just land big and change the conversation, and that the organs of government would suddenly click into action to respond with congressional investigations. It is so hard to get that done.”

I wondered, though, in my discussions with Unger, whether reporters like him bore some of the responsibility—whether the kind of skepticism and mistrust that marked his generation of journalists had helped create our post-truth reality. There were moments when he slipped from crusading truth teller to something closer to a conspiracy theorist willing to believe the most outlandish speculations. In the book, for example, with very little proof, he entertains the idea that rogue spies looking to undermine Carter sabotaged the helicopters used in a failed hostage-rescue mission in April 1980, which ended with eight soldiers dying in a crash. I asked Unger whether he really believed this. “Well, I think it is a possibility,” he told me.

It was easier to sympathize with Unger—to see the genuine idealism behind the swagger—when he explained why he couldn’t ever let go of the theory that had so hobbled his career.

He grew up in Dallas; his father was an endocrinologist and his mother owned the biggest independent bookstore in the city. Unger told me about a visit he took to the Dachau concentration camp when he was 14, in 1963. This was instead of a bar mitzvah. While there, he saw Germans atoning for their national sins, not even 20 years after the end of the war, and it stayed with him, that honest reckoning with the past. He told me it made him think of his city’s own Lee Park, named after the Confederate general and defender of slavery, and how shameful it was that so long after the end of the Civil War, Lee’s name was unapologetically honored.

“When my colleagues and I first took on the October Surprise more than thirty years ago, we became actors in a case study of America’s denial of its dark history, its refusal to accept the ugly truth,” Unger writes in his book. After Unger told me the story about his childhood and Lee Park, I looked up the green space and saw that it had been renamed Turtle Creek Park in 2019. Ugly truths, even in America, do occasionally get acknowledged—but it can take longer than one journalist’s lifetime for that to happen.