The gravity of Jimmy Carter’s illness I find deeply sad. The stories popping up about him, “9 Things you didn’t know about J.C.” and so on, are lacking one item. It’s about the Iranian hostages. Lots of people in print throw blame on Carter for the helicopter raid failure, when all the helicopters and men in the black-ops rescue party were lost. No follow-up raiding party was planned after that.

What amazes me is that so many people believe that Reagan got the hostages back. This is ludicrous. The hostages were released basically a day, or hours, before the new president’s term began. But even a day before meant the Reagan administration had no authority to do what had had to be done in order to get the people freed. This is because it was international banking stuff.

How’d we get the hostages back? We paid the Iranians off. But it was with their own money, and definitely not all of it. Carter had ordered Iranian bank accounts within the U.S. all to be frozen. This is what they got back. Plus, and — this is Carter’s coup — Carter had also convinced numerous big banks overseas to do the same. Switzerland, other countries — they’d done as the U.S. requested and froze Iranian accounts.

Banks don’t like to be told what to do, and freezing money is not — initially — in their own interest. So this convincing couldn’t have been easy. Once money is frozen, what’s harder is to unfreeze it. When an account is left in limbo in this way for a long, long period of time then it is possible it can be permanently detached from its original owner. Who would get it? Maybe the bank. After all, they already have it in their hands. And banks executives are very daring: Allen Stanford, for instance, with his Antiguan bank, carried on a Ponzi scheme despite the fact that (I heard) this was a bank the CIA used to fund covert missions. Imagine playing fast & loose with the CIA’s money.

I don’t believe I’m incorrect on this. The corruption of many banks has been thoroughly demonstrated here and worldwide in the last decade or two or four. I know they are capable of unthinkable things. This is just one more.

But Carter and his administration had a powerful threat to use in order to tell these overseas banks to unfreeze the Iranian assets: A bank be blocked, can lose access to participating in the U.S. banking system and economy. This is too big for a bank to risk — but amazingly they still took their time. They evidently took a long time just dragging their feet.

The point is, it was the Carter administration, even in those final hours, who had access to the financial workings of this government — not Reagan. You must be in actual office to do a lot of these things. Carter got the hostages back.

If it hadn’t been accomplished in time, I’m certain the hostages would have been imprisoned for at least months longer, while a whole slate of new people from the Reagan administration began the process over again with the banking people if not the kidnappers themselves.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the paying back of Iranian money. A country can’t operate without its major wealthy companies. At least it wasn’t our money. Also, I’m sure there were sizeable funds that didn’t go back to them, since we anticipated lawsuits against Iran, such as the one the longest-held hostage, Terry Anderson, won. He actually was a hostage taken later in Beirut in the 1980s, not the embassy seige, but his kidnapping seems to have been connected up with Iran support.

And if anyone still likes saying, “We don’t negotiate with hostages,” then you should look back in our history and see what can be accomplished when you do. It’s a major advantage when your enemy actually wants or needs something from you. Then you have leverage. It’s when a terrorist wants nothing from you (except maybe for you to die off completely) that the world is so much more dangerous. The Bush administration certainly helped create this no-negotiation scenario that still plagues us.