The Atlantic unpaywalled: “Craig Unger’s career was nearly destroyed when he investigated a possible election conspiracy. Three decades later, he says he’s got the goods. 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…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…”