• Board member of Human Rights Watch
• Professor at Columbia University
• Served as the Ford Foundation’s Deputy Director for International Affairs from 1982 to 1987
• Exhorts the U.S. to maintain diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran
• Popularized the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory which alleged that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and his cohorts negotiated covertly in 1980 to convince the Iranian regime to delay, until after the U.S. presidential election that November, the release of the 52 Americans it was holding hostage -- in hopes that the unresolved crisis would harm the re-election bid of incumbent President Jimmy Carter

 

Gary Sick earned a bachelor’s degree from Kansas University in 1957, a master's degree from George Washington University in 1970, and a PhD from Columbia University in 1973. He went on to serve on the National Security Council under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter (1976-81), and, briefly, Ronald Reagan. From 1982 to 1987, Sick was the Ford Foundation’s deputy director for international affairs, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy. In 1994-95 he served as executive director of the Columbia University-sponsored Gulf/2000 Project, whose primary objective was to establish a “network of specialists from every Gulf country and throughout the world to exchange information and expertise on important issues, regardless of political or ideological affiliation.” Among Gulf/2000's funders were the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Institute, and the Exxon-Mobile Foundation.

Today Sick is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, as well as a senior researcher at Columbia's Middle East Institute. Sick also has a number of other notable affiliations:

• as a member of the emeritus board of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based NGO with a strong anti-Israel bias;
• as a member of the Global Political Risk Advisory Board of the PIRA Energy Group, an energy-consulting firm; and
• as a board of governors member of the Centre for World Dialogue.

Sick is perhaps best known for popularizing the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory which, as he wrote in a 1991 editorial in The New York Times, alleged that “individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush [presidential] campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages until after the U.S. election [in hopes that the unresolved crisis would harm the re-election bid of incumbent President Jimmy Carter]. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel.”

This theory gained great public notoriety, even leading former President Carter to call for an investigation. In 1992, Sick expanded his assertions in the book October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, where he described Reagan’s victory as a “covert political coup.” Under scrutiny, however, the October Surprise conspiracy has been all but unanimously discredited by a wide range of sources including Newsweek and The New Republic. Director Oliver Stone once gave Sick hundreds of thousands of dollars for the movie rights of the October Surprise story, but he eventually scrapped the project as the theory was shown to be inauthentic.

In more recent years, Sick, who authored the 1985 book All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter With Iran, has become a devoted ally to the repressive Islamic fundamentalist regime in Tehran. He served a stint as a board member of the American Iranian Council, the chief lobbying group for Iran in the United States. He has vigorously championed the notion that America should pursue direct diplomacy with Iran, and it was largely as a result of Sick's influence that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University in 2007.

Sick's apologetics for Iran's totalitarian theocracy has a long history:

• As reported by the American Chronicle: “[i]n 1997...Sick worked intensely with Hossein Alikhani, an Iranian closely related to Iran's ruling mullahs, to found the 'Center for World Dialogue.' Alikhani is a felon who in 1992 pled guilty to the charges of violating anti-terrorist sanctions and spent some time in U.S. federal prisons.”
• Sick has argued that Iranian terrorism is not sponsored by that country's government but by independent entities with a “life of their own.”
• In a 2005 interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Sick said that Iranian President Ahmadinejad was "a very prideful man, and I think that sense of Iranian pride is one that may be very difficult for the West—and the United States in particular—to deal with."
• Regarding Iran’srelationship with Hamas, Sick says: "Iran claims that its support for Hamas is no different than the Saudi's support. They give money for clinics and medical needs, but that money is used for terrorism. Iran has a different view on this. So it's a matter of dispute."
• Sick has endorsed Iran’s position that Israeli-Palestinian peace deals "are a sham" and that "Israel will not keep its promises."

Sick maintains a personal blog called Gary’s Choices. Although his writing indicates that he has become somewhat more critical of Ahmadinejad than in the past, his broader views have not changed appreciably.