Democrats Plan to Study Alleged Hostage Deal : Politics: Lawmakers meet with ex-Carter aide, who tells of secret meetings between Reagan campaigners and Iranians before ’80 election.

WASHINGTON —  Senior Democrats said after meeting with a former White House aide Thursday that they will look more closely into allegations that officials from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the release of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until after the presidential election.

But the Democrats, all members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stressed that they had reached no decision yet on whether to recommend a formal congressional investigation of the charges that were recently revived by Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council of the Jimmy Carter Administration from 1976 to 1981.

“We will have to know a lot more than we know right now to launch an investigation,” Committee Chairman Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.) said after discussing the allegations with Sick. “What we heard was fascinating . . . but whether it can be tied together I don’t know.”

Voicing similar caution, Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) said that Democrats will meet behind closed doors over the next few days to decide whether to recommend a formal inquiry to House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.).

Hamilton added that the lawmakers who met with Sick reached “no conclusion” about the evidence he offered and “certainly no conclusion about what follows.”

However, Rep. Robert G. Toricelli (D-N.J.) said that it also is clear to the lawmakers who spent more than an hour with Sick that “something did occur” and that the allegations have sufficient substance to warrant closer investigation.

“It is getting increasingly very difficult to believe there were no communications” between the Iranians and members of the Reagan campaign,” Toricelli added. “There is too much evidence and the reports are too persistent to ignore . . . . This thing is not just going to go away. There are questions that need to be answered.”

The allegations, which first surfaced in the wake of the 1980 election, revolve around reports that the late William J. Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and later director of the CIA, negotiated a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of the 52 Americans held hostage until after Reagan’s electoral victory.

They were revived in greater detail last week by Sick, who said that after two years of research, he had uncovered evidence of a number of clandestine meetings in Europe involving Casey, senior Iranian officials and, on at least one occasion, President Bush, who at the time was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate.

Reagan and Bush Administration officials have both denied the allegations and White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater repeated those denials last week. “There’s just nothing to it,” he said.

But after meeting with the lawmakers Thursday, Sick said he is convinced that an alleged meeting in Madrid in July, 1980, between Casey and Mahdi Karrubi, a senior cleric who is now Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, indeed did take place. That meeting allegedly set in motion a series of clandestine contacts that, according to Sick, may have culminated in a deal to delay the release of the hostages until after the election in return for the promise of secret arms sales to Iran.

The hostage crisis was widely believed to have been a major factor behind Carter’s failure to win a second term.