Persistent but unproven accusations that Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign negotiated a secret deal with Iran to prevent the release of American hostages until after the election are being revived this week with fresh accounts of meetings between campaign officials and an Iranian cleric.
One of the accounts is provided by Gary Sick, a Middle East specialist who helped handle the Iranian hostage crisis as a member of the White House staff in the Carter Administration. Mr. Sick, in an article published Monday on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, says he has heard what he considers to be reliable reports that a secret deal involving the hostages was begun during two meetings between William J. Casey and the Iranian cleric in a Madrid hotel in July 1980.
The allegation that there were meetings between Mr. Casey, Mr. Reagan's campaign chairman, who went on be the Director of Central Intelligence, and Hojatolislam Mehdi Karrubi, a representative of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has been reported for the first time by Mr. Sick. Research for a Book
He says in his article that the accounts of the meetings in Madrid are part of an accumulation of information he has developed in research for a book. He says it has led him to conclude, despite earlier doubts, that some kind of discussions took place between the Reagan campaign and Iran.
"The story is tangled and murky, and it may never be fully unraveled," Mr. Sick writes.
The fate of the hostages was a pivotal issue in the 1980 election. They were taken prisoner when followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's revolutionary Government, seized the United States Embassy in Teheran in November 1979. A military operation to rescue them failed in the Iranian desert in April 1980. The Carter Administration hoped that it might obtain their release either through negotiations or a second rescue mission before Election Day, and Reagan campaign officials were concerned that the return of the hostages could swing the election to Mr. Carter. Charges Are Denied
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All those involved in the Reagan campaign, including President Bush, have vehemently denied any effort to delay the return, saying they would neither violate the law by operating outside established Government diplomatic channels nor contemplate anything that would have prolonged the captivity of the American hostages.
The issue of back-channel negotiations for the hostages is the subject of a documentary in the "Frontline" series on PBS, to be broadcast on Tuesday night on most public television stations. The "Frontline" documentary, "The Election Held Hostage," deals with much of the same evidence Mr. Sick uses in his opinion piece and includes an interview with him.
Mr. Sick said he has become convinced that there were two meetings between Mr. Casey and Hojatolislam Karrubi in the Ritz Hotel in Madrid in late July 1980. Hojatolislam Karrubi is now the Speaker of the the Iranian Parliament. Mr. Casey died in 1987. The "Frontline" report said he never addressed the allegations.
Mr. Sick's principal source for the Madrid meetings is Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian arms dealer who said that he and his brother, Cyrus, had helped arrange them. Attending, they said, were Mr. Casey, the Hashemi brothers and an unnamed American intelligence officer. Cyrus Hashemi has since died. Other Sources Named
In an interview, Mr. Sick, who now teaches at Columbia University, said other people with second-hand knowledge of the meetings were Ari Ben Menashi, a former Israeli intelligence official; Arif Durrani, a Pakistani arms dealer, and Ahmad Madani, a former Iranian Defense Minister. They could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Sick's article, the "Frontline" program and other accounts also deal with a series of meetings said to have taken place in Paris in October 1980, just before the election, during which the deal broached in Madrid is alleged to have been consummated. Mr. Sick said that at least three sources placed Mr. Bush, then Mr. Reagan's running mate, at one meeting, but Mr. Sick said he remained uncertain himself whether Mr. Bush was there.
Mr. Bush has denied any such participation, and his spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, today recalled the denials.
Besides the report of the Madrid meetings, Mr. Sick's article also says that the Reagan campaign knew from an informant that the Carter White House was planning a possible second rescue operation. Mr. Sick quotes Richard V. Allen, the campaign's foreign policy adviser, as saying he met with someone on a park bench in Washington who told him that a second operation was being put together. Mr. Allen could not be reached for comment.
