No More Learning

TABLE 3-3
Topics Included and Excluded in the New York Times's Coverage of the Nicaraguan Election
of November 4,1984*
TOPICS
Those compatible with the U. S. govemmel1t's agenda for the Nicaraguan election:
L Democratic purpose and ho~s
2. Rebel disruption
3. Turnout
4. Election mechanics
5. Perwnalities and political
infighting
6. Official reflections on the
election
7. The army as protector of
WITH TOPIC
o 5 o 3
3 o
WITH TOPIC
4. 8
o 23. 8 o 143
14. 3 o
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
the election
136 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
TOPICS
Those incompatible with the U. s. government's agenda for the Nicaraguan election:
8. The public~relations purpose
9. Sandinista investment in the election
10. Fraud in prior elections 11. Free speech and assembly 12. Freedom of the press
13. Organizational freedom 14. Limits on the ability of
candidates to qualify
and campaign
15. Prior state terror and
climate of fear
16. Control of armed forces by government
17. Legal obligation to vote
18. Legal penalties for nonvoting
19. Marking of voters' fingers 20. Stamping identification
cards
21. Legal requirement to check
voting
22. Nonlegal threat to
nonvoters
23. Use of transparent voting
=.
24. Security force presence at
voting stations
WITH TOPIC
7
2
WITH TOPIC
33. 3
95
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
NA NA
8 38. 1 ? 28? ? 2 9. 5
11 52. 4
3 14. 3
3 14. 3
NA 4. 8 NA NA
1 NA NA NA
NA NA 1 4. 8 NA NA NA NA
* Based on a study of 21 news articles appearing between Sept. 5 and Nov. 6, 1984.
NA = Not Applicable
It can readily be seen in table 3-1 that in the Salvadoran election the Times's news coverage dealt heavily with subjects above the line and neglected the basic conditions that make an election meaningful in
?
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS TH! RD WORLD ELECTIONS 137
advance. We can observe how the Times totally ignores the question of freedom of the press, organizational freedom, and limits on the ability of candidates to run. lOS Table 3-2 shows how the Times treated the forthcoming Nicaraguan election in the same two-month period cov- ered in table 3-1. It is evident that the paper focuses heavily on the fundamental conditions of a free election, i. e. , on topics that it was entirely ignoring while addressing the Salvadoran election. Table 3-3 shows the breakdown of topics covered by the Times during the Nica- raguan election later in the year. Again, although the differences are less marked than the ones in tables 3-1 and 3-2, the substantial attention to basic conditions in the Nicaraguan case is clear, reflecting editorial news choices that follow a patriotic agenda. As the basic conditions for a free election were superior in Nicaragua and the coercive elements less acute, the emphasis on basic conditions only in the Nicaraguan case is even more clearly evidence of systematic bias.
3. 8. THE MIG CRISIS STAGED DURING NICARAGUA'S ELECTION WEEK
As NewSf/)eek pointed out on November 19, 1984, "The story of the freighter [to Nicaragua, allegedly carrying MIGs] first broke during the election-night coverage," but at no point does NewSf/)eek (or Time, the Times, or CBS News) suggest that the timing was deliberate. The Times, in its extensive coverage of the MIGs that weren't there, at one point quotes a Nicaraguan official who suggests that the crisis was purely a public-relations operation, but that exhausts the Times's exploration of this point. Although the MIGs weren't there, and the timing was per- fect for diverting attention from a successful election that the Reagan adminstration had been attempting to discredit, the elite media asked no questions, even in retrospect. The administration claimed that when the freighter was loaded, satellite observation was blocked so that the cargo was unknown. The mass media presented this as fact, making no effort to evaluate the claim.
What the media chose to focus on was administration assessments of what it might do If MIGs were in fact being delivered. This allowed the whole frame of discourse to shift to the assumption that the Nica- raguans had done something (and something intolerable, to boot). Newsweek, in a retrospective article entitled "The MIGs That Weren't There," had a lead head: "To bring in high-performance craft indicates
138 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that they are contemplating being a threat to their neighbors. " The fact that the MIGs weren't brought in, as stared in the article's very rirle- that this was a concoction of U. s. officials-doesn't interfere with imputing an intention to the Nicaraguans based on a nonexistent fact. The assertion that they were contemplating being a threat, as opposed to defending themselves against a proxy invasion, is also a patriotic editorial judgment. Newsweek also says in the text that "All sides ap- peared to be playing a very clumsy and very dangerous game. " This is an intriguing form of evenhandedness. A person who, admittedly, had been falsely accused of robbery by an assailant is alleged to be "playing a dangerous game," along with the attacker who is also the bearer of false witness. 109
In the middle of an article on the Nicaraguan election, Time inserts the government claim that a ship carrying crates of the type used to transport MIG-2Is was due at a Nicaraguan port. Time never questions a government propaganda ploy, no matter how blatant, and it offers a retrospective only when the government tacitly concedes it had deliber- ately deceived. Like Newsweek and the Times, Time allows the govern- ment to set the agenda with a public-relations statement: If the Nicaraguans did this, it would be a challenge to the United States. How then would we react, what are our policy options, etc. The truth of the claim and the likelihood that this is a manipulative ploy to help remove the unwanted elections from attention are not discussed; and, naturally, the fact that this is part of a policy of aggression against a tiny victim is never raised.
The only credits in the media coverage of the MIG crisis go to CBS News. On November 6, Dan Rather gave the straight administration "news" that MIGs might be on their way and that a strategic option to destroy them was under consideration. On November 7 and 8, how- ever, perhaps out of a recognition that it had once again been "used," CBS gave substantial coverage to Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto's rebuttal, which allowed him to point out the absurdity of the Nicaraguan "threat," the tie-in of the MIG claims to the Nicarag- uan election, and the U. S. refusal to go along with the Contadora peace proposals.
The MIG ploy was, nevertheless, entirely successful. A tone of crisis was manufactured, and "options" against the hypothetical Sandinista "threat" were placed at the center of public attention. The Nicaraguan ejection was nor discussed. LASA points out that "The final results of Nicaragua's election were not even reported by most of the interna- tional media. They were literally buried under an avalanche of alarmist news reports" (p. 31). LASA concludes that the Nicaraguan electoral
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 139
process was manipulated, as the U. S. government claims, but by the U. S. government itself in its efforts to discredit an election that it did not want to take place. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections successfully legitimized the U. S. -backed regimes, at least for American elite opinion. The far more honest Nicaraguan election failed to accom- plish this, thanks to the loyal service of the media.
3. 9. THE ROLE OF OFFICIAL "OBSERVERS" IN REINFORCING A PROPAGANDA LINE
Official observers provide a perfect example of the use of government- controlled "experts" and "pseudo-events" to attract media attention and channel it in the direction of the propaganda line. And they regu- larly succeed in doing this in demonstration elections, no matter how brief their stay and foolish their comments (see appendix I). The media take it for granted that official observers are newsworthy: they are notables, their selection by the government from "reputable" institu- tions adds to their credibility, and their observations will have effects on opinion and policy. This rationale is in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy; they have effects only because the media accord them atten- tion. As the official observers reliably commend the elections as fair without the slightest attention to basic conditions, the media's regular use of these observers for comments on election quality violates norms of substantive objectivity in the same manner as the use of any straight government handout by the Times or Pravda. llO
The Nicaraguan election was remarkable for the number of foreign observers and observer teams. We pointed out earlier that Time men- tioned 450 foreign observers, but the magazine failed to cite anyone of them (rdying instead, and characteristically, on State Department handouts). As we saw, the State Department was able to get the media to follow its agenda, even though this involved them in a blatant rever- sal of the criteria they had employed the same year in EI Salvador and Guatemala. It was also able to induce the media to disregard the out- come of the Nicaraguan election, with the help of the diversionary MIG ploy. The media also allowed major lies to be institutionalized- for example, that coercion was greater and pluralistic choices less in the Nicaraguan than in the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections, and that
140 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the latter were legitimizing in a substantive sense, in contrast with Nicaragua.
These propaganda lies could not have been perpetrated if such re- ports as those of the Irish delegation and LASA had been accorded proper weight. LASA actually contacted the major mass-media outlets and tried to interest them in doing a story on their report. LASA was turned down by every major outlet. The LASA report is probably the best-documented and most closely reasoned observer report ever writ- ten. Its authors are far and away the most qualified group ever to write such a report, half with field experience in Nicaragua, and the docu- ment was an official report of the major scholarly organization that deals with Central America. The authors represent a variety of opin- ions, on balance liberal but revealing a strong critical capability (and
in no sense biased, as are the official observer teams to whom the media accord much attention). Their report covers every issue of importance and openly confronts and weighs evidence. If one reads the LASA report, and then the accounts of the Nicaraguan election in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, it is not so much the difference in conclusions that is striking but the difference in depth, balance, and objectivity. LASA offers serious history and context, a full account of the organization of the election, and a full discussion of each relevant issue with comparisons to other elections. We believe that an important
reason the mass media failed to use LASA as a source of information was that its report contradicts in every way the propaganda claims which the media were disseminating daily and uncritically. Thus its very credibility, objectivity, and quality were disturbing, and neces- sitated that it be bypassed by institutions serving a propaganda func- tion.
3. 10. CONCLUDING NOTE
As we have seen, electoral conditions in Nicaragua in 1984 were far more favorable than in EI Salvador and Guatemala, and the observer team of LASA found the election in Nicaragua to have been "a model ofprobity and fairness" by Latin American standards. 111 In El Salvador and Guatemala, none of the five basic preconditions of a free election was met. In both of these countries, state-sponsored terror, including the public exposure of mutilated bodies, had ravaged the civilian popu- lation up to the very day of the elections. In both, voting was required by law, and the populace was obliged to have ID cards signed, testifying
J
142 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
As we stressed earlier, the media's adherence to the state propaganda line is extremely functional. Just as the government of Guatemala could kill scores of thousands without major repercussion because the media recognized that these were "unworthy" victims, so today aid to state terrorists in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the funding of contra attacks on "soft targets" in Nicaragua, depend heavily on continued media recognition of "worth" and an appropriate legitimization and delegitimization. As their government sponsors terror in all three states (as well as in Honduras), we may fairly say that the U. S. mass media, despite their righteous self-image as opponents of something called terrorism, serve in fact as loyal agents of terrorism.
,
. " " . "
The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill
the Pope:
Free-Market Disinformation as "News"
INTHE CASE OF THE SALVADORAN, GUATEMALAN, AND NICARAG- uan elections, the government was the moving force in providing the suitable frames of analysis and relevant facts, with the mass media's role mainly that of channeling information and assuring that the govern- ment's agenda was not seriously challenged. With the shooting of the pope, in May 1981, and the eventual charges of a KGB-Bulgarian plot, the mass media played a much larger role in originating the claims and in keeping the pot boiling from inception to conclusion of the case. 1
In many ways, however, the process was similar. A dominant frame was eventually produced that interpreted the shooting of the pope in a manner especially helpful to then-current elite demands. A campaign quickly ensued in which the serviceable propaganda line was instilled in the public mind by repetition. Alternative frames were ignored, and sources inclined toward other ways of Jooking at the issue were ex- cluded from the mass media. Facts were selected that fit the dominant
frame; others were passed by even if they bore on the validity of its premises. 2 At the same time, the dominant sources, who had been
144 M A N U F A C T U R IN G C O N S E N T
allowed to monopolize mass-media space, complained bitterly that their voices could not be heard over the din of Soviet propaganda. When the legal proceeding brought against the Bulgarians in Italy was lost after a lengthy trial, this was rationalized by the media as far as could be done. No serious retrospectives were entertained) and, without resolv- ing the contradictions) the story was then dropped.
What makes the Bulgarian Connection so apt an illustration of the value of a propaganda model is that there was no credible case for a Bulgarian Connection from the very beginning) and long before the Rome trial it had taken on a truly comic aspect. But the mass media played it straight to the bitter end. An analogous sequence carried out in Moscow, with the West as the target-with a half-crazed criminal) after seventeen months in a Soviet prison and some friendly sessions with the KGB and a prosecutor) implicating employees ofthe American embassy in a conspiracy to murder, and subsequently changing his testimony on a daily basis-would have been hooted off the stage in the West without anyone even bothering to look at alleged evidence. The Bulgarian Connection) however, although no less absurd, met the crite- rion of utility.
The case began when Mehmet Ali Agca shot and seriously injured Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. Agca was a Turkish rightist and assassin long associated with the Gray Wolves, an affiliate of the extreme right-wing Nationalist Action party. Initial Western news reports pointed out that Agca was a wanted criminal who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979, and that his durable politi- cal affiliations had been with the Fascist right. His motives in shooting the pope were unclear. Agca's friends were violently anti-Communist, so that, at first, pinning the crime on the East seemed unpromising.
Two factors allowed a KGB-Bulgarian plot to be developed. The first was that in his travels through Europe in the Gray Wolves under- ground, which carried him through twelve different countries, Agca had stayed for a period in Bulgaria. Turkish drug dealers, who had connec- tjons with the Gray Wolves, also partidpated in the drug trade in Bulgaria. There were, therefore, some "links" between Agca and Bul- garians) minimal facts that would eventually be put to good use.
The second factor was Western elite needs and the closely associated flare-up of a carefully stoked anti-Communist fervor in the West. At the first meeting of the Jonathan Institute, in Jerusalem, in July 1979, at which a large Western political and media contingent were present (including Claire Sterling, George Will, George Bush, and Robert Moss),3 the main theme pressed by Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin in his opening address, and by many others at the conference, was
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 145
the importance and utility of pressing the terrorism issue and of tying terrorism to the Soviet Union. 4 Claire Sterling did this in her W81 volume The Terror Network, which became the bible of the Reagan administration and the international right wing, and elevated Sterling to the status of number one mass-media expert on that subject. Terror- ism and Soviet evil were the centerpieces of the Reagan administra- tion's propaganda campaign that began in 1981, designed to support its planned arms increase, placement of new missiles in Europe, and inter- ventionist policies in the Third World. Thus the shooting of the pope by Agca in May 1981 occurred at a time when important Western interests were looking for ways to tie the Soviet Union to "international terrorism. " 5
4. 1. THE STERLING-HENZE- KALB MODEL
Although the initial media reaction to the shooting was that the roots of the act would seem to lie in Turkish right-wing ideology and politics, some rightists immediately seized the opportunity to locate the origins of the plot in the Soviet bloc. Only six days after the assassination attempt, the Italian secret-service organization SISMI issued a docu- ment which claimed that the attack had been announced by a Soviet official at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact powers in Bucharest, Romania, and that Agca had been trained in the Soviet Union. Subsequently, this "infonnation" was shown to have been fabricated by SI5MI or one of its intelligence sources, but it entered the stream of allegations about the plot in a book published in West Germany and via further citations and leaks. 6
The Reader's Digest saw the propaganda opportunity presented by the assassination attempt quite early, and hired both Paul Henze, a longtime CIA officer and propaganda specialist, and Claire Sterling to investigate the topic. Sterling's September 1982 article in the Reader's Digest, "The Plot to Kill the Pope," was the most important initiator of the Bulgarian Connection, and its ideas and those of Paul Henze fonned the basis for the NBC-TV program "The Man Who Shot the Pope-A Study in Terrorism," narrated by Marvin Kalb and first aired on September 21, 1982.
The Sterling-Henze-Kalb (SHK) model, in which Agca was an agent of the Bulgarians (and, indirectly, of the Soviet Union), quickly became
146 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the dominant frame of the mass media, through the great outreach of the Reader's Digest and the NBC-TV program (which was repeated in revised form in January 1983), and the ready, even eager, acceptance of this view by the other mainstream media. 7 The mass media in our sample-Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and CBS News-all accepted and used the SHK model from the beginning, and retained that loyalty to the end of the Rome trial in March 1986. In the process they excluded alternative views and a great deal of inconvenient fact. With the Reader's Digest, the Wall Street journa~ the Christian Science Monitor, and NBC-TV also firmly adhering to the SHK line, it quickly established a dominant position throughout the mainstream media.
In the balance of this and the following two sections, we will describe the SHK model, discuss its weaknesses, and outline an alternative frame explaining Agca's confession implicating the Bulgarians, which the media ignored. We will then turn to a closer examination of the media's gullible reception of the SHK view and its fit to a propaganda model.
The SHK model had the following essential elements:
1. Motive. In Sterling's Reader's Digest article, the preeminent motive in the assassination attempt was a Soviet desire to weaken NATO, to be accomplished by implicating a Turk in the assassination of the pope: "The Turk was there at St. Peter's to signal Christendom that Islamic Turkey was an alien and vaguely sinister country that did not belong in NATO. " This motive was accompanied (and soon supplanted) by the contention that the shooting was to help quell the Solidarity movement in Poland by removing its most important supporter. At one point Paul Henze suggested that the intent of the KGB was perhaps merely to "wing" the pope, not kill him, as a warning, as in a James Bond movie. The costs and risks to the Soviet bloc of such a venture were never discussed by Sterling, Henze, or Kalb.
2. The proof of Soviet and Bulgarian involvement. Before Agca's confession and his identification of Bulgarians in November 1982, the evidence on which SHK relied was confined to the fact that Agca had stayed in Bulgaria in the summer of 1980, and that Turkish drug traders with links to the Gray Wolves did business in Bulgaria. In November 1982, Agca named three Bulgarians as his alleged accomplices and claimed to have been hired by the Bulgarians to do the job. He offered no credible evidence and named no witnesses to any dealings with Bulgarians, so that the new "evidence" was simply Agca's assertions, after seventeen months in an Italian prison.
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 147
3. The ideological assumptions. As the case looked extremely thin, especially before Agca's new confession of November 1982, the gaps were filled by ideological assumptions: This is the kind of thing the Soviets do. The Soviet Union and Bulgaria have been actively striving to "destabilize" Turkey. a If there is no hard evidence it is because the Soviets are consummate professionals who cover their tracks and main- tain "plausible deniability. " The KGB hired Agca in Turkey and caused him to use a rightist cover to obscure the fact that he was a KGB agent. Although Agca traveled through eleven other countries, his stay in Bulgaria was crucial because Bulgaria is a totalitarian state and the police know everything; therefore they knew who Agca was, and they must have been using him for their own purposes. 9
4. 2. PROBLEMS WITH THE STERLING-HENZE-KALB MODEL
The basic Sterling-Henze-Kalb model suffered from a complete ab- sence of credible evidence, a reliance on ideological premises, and internal inconsistencies. As problems arose, the grounds were shifted, sometimes with a complete reversal of argument. IO
An initial problem for the model was the Bulgarian-Soviet motive. In this connection, we should note the extreme foolishness of Sterling's original suggestion that the Eastern bloc went to the trouble of locating a Turkish Fascist to shoot the pope in order to make Turkey look bad, and thereby to loosen its ties to NATO.
That such a loosened tie would follow from a Turkish Fascist shooting the pope is not sensible, nor is it likely that the conservative Soviet leadership would indulge in such a fanciful plan even if it had a greater probability of "success. "ll This theory assumed that Agca would be caught and identified as a Turk, but that he wouldn't reveal that he had been hired by the Bulgarians
and the Soviets. Subsequently, Sterling suggested that Agca was sup- posed to have been shot in the square to assure his silence. The amaz- ingly incompetent KGB failed to accomplish this simple task. SHK also maintained at various points that Agca may not even have known who hired him, so he couldn't implicate the East. Later, when Agca claimed that he had been heavily involved with Bulgarians in Rome, Sterling and Henze lapsed into silence on the failure of the KGB to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability.
148 MAl'UFACTURING CONSENT
SHK finally settled firmly on the idea that quelling the Polish Soli- darity movement was the real Soviet-Bulgarian motive. But this theory is as implausible as its predecessor, when we take account of timing and elementary cost-benefit analysis. Agca was allegedly recruited in Tur- key long before Solidarity existed. In a variant Sterling version of the timing of his recruitment, Agca was hired by the Bulgarians in July 1980, which was still prior to the Gdansk shipyard strike, and thus before Solidarity appeared a credible threat to Soviet control. The risks and costs of an assassination attempt would seem heavy-and, in fact, the costs to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria were severe based merely on the widespread belief in their involvement, even in the absence of credible evidence. The supposed benefits from the act are also not plausible. The assassination ofthe pope, especially ifblamed on the Soviet Union, would infuriate and unify the Poles and strengthen their opposition to a Soviet-dominated regime. And the further costs in damaged relations with Western Europe-which were extremely important to the Soviet Union in 1981, with the gas pipeline being negotiated and with the placement of new U. S. missiles in Western Europe a major Soviet concern-would seem to militate against taking foolish riskS. 12
A second problem with the SHK model is that Agca had threatened to kill the pope in 1979 at the time of a papal visit to Turkey-again, long before Solidarity existed. This suggests that Agca and the Turkish right had their own grievances against the pope and a rationale for assassinating him that was independent of any Soviet influence. It was partly for this reason that SHK argue that Agca was recruited by the Soviet Union in Turkey before the pope's visit there, setting him up for the later attack. But not only is this pure speculation unsupported by a trace of evidence, it fails to explain why the entire Fascist press, not just Agca, assailed the pope's visit in 1979. Was the entire Fascist right serving Soviet ends? The only time this issue was ever raised in the mass media, on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" of January 5, 1983, Paul Henze stated in no uncertain terms that "there was no [press] opposi- tion" to the pope's visit in 1979. The Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, however, assembled a large collection of citations from the Turkish rightist press of the time to demonstrate that Henze's statement was false. 13
A third problem for the SHK model was that Agca was a committed rightist, and therefore not a likely candidate for service to the Commu- nist powers (although perhaps amenable to fingering them as co-con- spirators in a prison context). SHK strove mightily to make Agca out to be a rootless mercenary, but the best they could come up with was
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 149
the fact that Agca didn't seem to have been registered as a member of the Gray Wolves. 14 But all his friends, associates, and affiliations from high school days onward were Gray Wolves, and in his travels through Europe up to the time of his May 13, Ig81, rendezvous, he moved solely through the Gray Wolves network. While in prison, Agca addressed a letter to Alparslan Turkes, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party of Turkey, expressing his continued commitment and loyalty. This letter was bothersome to Sterling and Henze as it is inconsistent with their depiction of Agca as apolitical, and Sterling dismissed it without argument as a "laughably clumsy forgery. " A problem, however, is that Agca's letter was introduced as evidence in a trial in Ankara by the Turkish military authorities, usually adequate proof for Sterling of authenticity. She doesn't mention this fact or examine their case. Ugur Mumcu devotes five pages of his book Agca Dossier to a detailed ac- count of the Turkes letter, describing the great pains the authorities took, including tapping outside experts, to establish its authenticity.
The conclusion on all sides was that the letter was genuine.
A fourth problem with the SHK model is the notion that because of the efficiency of the Bulgarian secret police, Agca's presence in Sofia
must have been known to them, and he must therefore have been on their payroll. This assumed efficiency is an ideological assumption un- supported by any evidence and contradicted by actual Bulgarian and Soviet performance. There is no evidence that the Bulgarians ever identified Agca, who was using a false passport. Furthermore, the con- tention that the Bulgarian police know everything was refuted in impor- tant testimony during the Rome trial on September 22, Ig85, when Gray Wolves official Abdullah Catli stated that many Gray Wolves preferred to traverse Bulgaria because it was easy to hide in the large flow of Turkish immigrant traffic through that country.
A fifth problem for the SHK model was the fact that Agca seems to have gotten his gun through the Gray Wolves network, not from the Bulgarians, who presumably could have slipped it to him quite easily in Rome. In her Reader's Digesl article, Sterling traced Agca's gun to Horst Grillmaier, an Austrian gun dealer who, according to Sterling, had fled behind the Iron Curtain after May 13, Ig81, to avoid question- ing in the West. It turned out later, however, that Grillmaier was a former Nazi who specialized in supplying right-wing gun buyers; that he had not disappeared behind the Iron Curtain at all; and that the gun had proceeded through a number of intermediaries, to be transmitted to Agca by a Gray Wolves friend. Sterling handles the disintegration ofthe original Grillmaier line by simply shifting to a new conspiratorial
I50 MA:><UFACTURING CONSENT
ground: the clever Bulgarians had Agca purchase a gun through a known Fascist to strengthen the case that Agca was a right-winger who could not possibly be connected to the Communist powers.
A final set of problems for the SHK model lies in the extraordinary level of incompetence and gross violations of the principles of plausible deniability that it attributes to the Bulgarian and Soviet secret police- features that coexist uneasily with the superspy image invoked else- where in the model. At various points, SHK contended that the Soviets and Bulgarians were professionals who could afford to go after the pope because they would never be implicated themselves. But hiring Agca, a wanted criminal and a mentally unbalanced rightist, would appear extremely foolish, as the cover would quickly be blown in the likely event that he was caught. In Sterling's initial tale, the KGB wanted him to be caught--or at least to have his body identified-to discredit Turkey. With the shift to weakening Solidarity as the motive, the threat of disclosure of Bulgarian-Soviet involvement would seem very serious. Yet the Bulgarians and KGB hired Agca and then failed to kill him. Another anomaly was bringing Agca to Sofia for instructions. If he had already been recruited in Turkey, wouldn't bringing him to Sofia be a foolish compromising of his carefully prepared "cover"? If so, doesn't his visit to Sofia constitute an argument against Soviet and Bulgarian involvement?
While Agca's November 1982 confession that he had Bulgarian co- conspirators made the Bulgarian Connection instantly "true" for the Western media, it wreaked havoc with the SHK model and with the logic of "plausible deniability. " If, as Agca confessed, the Bulgarians connived with him in Rome, escorted him to St. Peter's Square to plan the attack, entertained him at their apartments, and participated in the attack itself, what happens to the logic of the "cover"?
4. 3. AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL
An alternative explanation of the Bulgarian Connection can be derived from the questions the U. S. press would surely have raised if an analo- gous scenario had occurred in Moscow, in which Agca, who had briefly visited the United States on his travels, and has been in a Soviet prison for seventeen months after having shot a high Soviet official, now confesses that three U. S. embassy members were his co-conspirators. In this case, the U. S. press would have paid close attention to the convenience of the confession to Soviet propaganda needs, to the sev-
THE KGB-BULGAR. IAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 151
enteen-month delay in the naming of Americans, and to the obvious possibility that Agca had been encouraged or coerced into revising his story. They would have focused intently on Agca's prison conditions, his visitors there, his amenability to a "deal" with his captors, and any evidence in his statements or from other sources that he had been coached. The fact that Agca had visited the United States, among twelve countries, would not be considered strong evidence of CIA involvement, and the press might even have pointed out that a mini- mally competent CIA would not have brought Agca to Washington for instructions in the first place.
The alternative model would take the same fact that SHK start out with-Agca's stay in Sofia, Bulgaria-but interpret it differently. That visit violates principles of plausible deniability and would be especially foolish if the KGB had already recruited Agca in Turkey. On the other hand, it provides a Western propaganda system with the necessary tie between Agca's terrorist attack in Rome and the Soviet bloc. The
convenience of Agca's confession-to Socialist leader Craxi, to the Christian Democrats and neo-Fascists in Italy, and to Reagan searching for a tie-in between "international terrorism" and the Soviet Union-is also crystal clear, and would immediately suggest to an objective press the possibility that this "demand" might have elicited an appropriate "supply" from the imprisoned Agca. The lag in Agca's naming of any Bulgarians-seventeen months after he entered an Italian prison and seven months after he had agreed to "cooperate" with the investigating magistrate, Hario Martella-is also highly suggestive. Why did it take him so long to name his co-conspirators? Sterling tried to explain this on the ground that Agca had hopes that the Bulgarians would "spring him" and gave them time; his successive elaborations of claims and subsequent retractions she explained in terms of Agca's "signaling" to his alleged partners. This complex and speculative attempt to rational- ize inconvenient facts is not necessary; a very straightforward explana- tion based on Agca's character and affiliations and the inducements known to have been offered to him (described below) does quite nicely. ls Furthermore, Sterling's explanation does not account for the fact that Agca failed to provide serious evidence late in the trial, long after it was clear that the Bulgarians had not responded to his alleged
signals.
Another suggestive feature of Agca's confession is that it/ollowed the
creation and wide media distribution of the SHK model. During the course of the investigation of the plot, it was revealed that the impris- oned Agca had access to newspapers, radio, and television, among other modes of personal communication with the outside world. It was also
152 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
brought out in the investigation that Agca's "desire for personal public- ity seems unquenchable. . . . At one point in the Italian investigation, he abruptly clammed up when the magistrates refused his demand that journalists be present as he 'confessed. ' " 1 6 Agca was interrogated about a possible Bulgarian connection long before his confession, and was surely aware that his interrogators would be quite pleased to have him produce one. And by the fall of 1982 one was being provided to him in the press and on the screen every day.
We mentioned earlier that the Italian secret-service agency 818MI had actually distributed a piece of disinformation tying the Soviets to the assassination attempt within days of the attack. At the time of the shooting, 8ISMI was headed by General Giuseppe 8antovito, a mem- ber of the extreme right-wing organization Propaganda Due (P-2), and SISMI and the other intelligence agencies were heavily infiltrated with P-2 members. A P-2 scandal broke in Italy in March 1981, and by August 8antovito had been forced to leave 81SMI, but the rightist grip on this organization was by no means broken.
An important feature of Italian politics in the period from 1966 through 1981 was the protection given by the intelligence services to right-wing terror, under a program designated the "strategy of ten- sion. "17 One aspect of this strategy was the carrying out of right-wing terrorist attacks, which were then attributed to the left, frequently with [he help of forged documents and planted informers committing per- jury. The point ofthe strategy was to polarize society, discredit the left, and set the stage for a rightist coup. Many P-2 members in the armed forces and intelligence services took part in implementing this program, and many others were sympathetic to its aims. In July 1984, an Italian parliamentary commission published its final report on the P-2 conspir- acy, and it and its accompanying volumes of hearings pointed up the politicization of the intelligence services, their frequent use of tech- niques of disinformation, and their connivance with and protection of right-wing terror. In July 1985 a Bologna court issued a decision in which it named 818Ml and its officers as having engaged in numerous
forgeries, and also in having collaborated in covering up the Bologna terrorist bombing of 1980. 18
818MI participated in a five-hour interrogation of Agca in December 1981, exploring his link to "international terrorism. " Investigating Judge Martella acknowledges in his long investigative report that he had spoken to Agca about the possibility of a commuted sentence if he "cooperated," and the Italian press quoted Agca's lawyer's report ofthe terms of proposed deals that had been offered to Agca. 19 There were also a variety of reports in the European and dissident media of pres-
THE KGB-Bl;LGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 153
sures applied to Agca while in prison. A London Sunday Times team pointed out in May 1983 that the secret services "visited Agca and warned him that once his solitary confinement was over, 'the authorities could no longer guarantee his safety. ' "20 According to Orsen Oymen, a Turkish expert on the case, the Catholic chaplain in Agca's prison, Father Mariano Santini, had frequent access to Agca and was one of those who pressed him to cooperate with the authorities. 21 There is some possible confirmation of Santini's pressure tactics in a letter which Agca addressed to the Vatican, dated September 24, 1982, which com- plained bitterly of threats to his life emanating from a Vatican emissary.
During the course of the Rome trial, Giovanni Pandico, the principal Italian state witness in the trial of Mafia leaders in Naples and an associate of Raphael Cutaia, a Mafia leader who had been in Ascoli Piceno prison with Agca, claimed in an interview (and subsequently before the court) that Agca had been coerced, persuaded and coached to implicate the Bulgarians by Cutolo, Santini, and others. Pandico claimed that CutaIa himself had been coerced into working on Agca by threats to himself, and that former SISMI officials Giuseppi Musumeci and Francesco Pazienza were key initiators of the plot. One of the important individuals accused by Pandico, Francesco Pazienza, while denying the charges, gave his own detailed account of who in SISMI had participated in persuading Agca to talk.
From the inception of the case, there were points suggesting that Agca was coached while in prison. After his long (and unexplained) silence, Agca identified the Bulgarians in a photo album allegedly shown to him for the first time on November 9, 1982. But in a speech before the Italian parliament, the minister of defense, Lelio Lagorio, stated that Agca had identified the Bulgarians in September of 1982. This discrepancy has never been explained, but that Agca saw these photos for the first time on November 9 is not believable. 22 A key element in Agca's testimony was his claim to have visited the apartment of Sergei Antonov, one of the Bulgarians arrested in the "plot," and to have met his wife and daughter, which was supported by many fine details regarding Antonov's hobbies and the characteristics ofhis apart- ment. The defense, however, was able to show that one feature of Antonov's apartment mentioned by Agca was in error, although charac- teristic of the other apartments in Antonov's building, which suggests that Agca had been supplied information based on observation of other apartments. More important, the defense was able to establish that at the time of Agca's visit at which he met Mrs. Antonov, she was out of the country. Following newspaper publicity given these defense con- tentions, on June 28, 1983, Agca retracted his claims that he had visited
154 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the apartment and met Antonov's family. The details he had given about apartment and family then became inexplicable, except on the supposition that Agca had been fed information while in prison. In a number of other instances Agca provided information that bore strong suspicion of having been provided by officials and agents of the court or the police. The London Sunday Times reporters, who interviewed one of the accused Bulgarians in Sofia, wrote that "When asked by Martella in Bulgaria whether he had any salient physical features, Vassilev said that he had a mole on his left cheek. In a subsequent confession, as Vassilev points out, 'Agca described my mole in the very same words which I used in describing it here. ' "23
During the course of the Rome trial in 1985-86, no trace was ever found of the money that Agca claimed he had received from the Bul- garians. The car that Agca indicated the Bulgarians had used to escort him around Rome was never located. No witness was ever found who saw him in his many supposed encounters with Bulgarians. His gun was transferred to him through the Turkish Gray Wolves network, and there was no shortage of evidence of his meetings with members of the Gray Wolves in Western Europe. The note that was found on Agca's person on May 13, 1981, did not mention any collaborators, and sug- gested a loose timetable for the assassination attempt and a planned railroad trip to Naples.
In sum, it is highly probable that Agca was offered a deal to talk, and that it was made clear to him that the people with power over his well-being wanted him to implicate the Bulgarians and the Soviet Union in the assassination attempt. He had access to the SHK model even before he confessed. His confession was therefore suspect from the start, and an "alternative model" of inducement-pressure coaching was plausible and relevant, from the Agca's first implication of Bulgari- ans. This model became more cogent over time as Agca retracted strategic claims, and as no confirming evidence of a Bulgarian Connec- tion was produced. By the same token, the SHK model, implausible
from the beginning, became even less tenable.
4. 4. THE MASS MEDIA'S UNCRITICAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION
Despite the implausibility of the SHK claim that Agca had been hired by the Bulgarians and the KGB to shoot the pope, and although it was
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 155
sustained by argument that amounted to sheer humbuggery, the Bul- garian Connection met the standard of utility. In this case, therefore, as a propaganda model would anticipate, the U. S. mass media accepted the SHK model as valid, ignored the alternative model, and par- ticipated in a classic propaganda campaign that got the message of Bulgarian-Soviet guilt over to the public. Some members of the mass media helped originate the claim of a Bulgarian Connection, while others participated only in disseminating the SHK line (and excluding alternative views and inconvenient information).
The campaign began with Sterling's Reader's Digest article of Sep- tember 1982, which was closely followed by the NBC-TV program of September 21, 1982. The outreach of these two statements asserting a Bulgarian Connection was great, and they were widely reported upon in the rest of the media in the form of a summary of their claims, with virtually no questions raised about their validity. With Agca's Novem- ber 1982 naming of Bulgarians, the mass media began to report the Bulgarian Connection intensively. This reporting was carried out ex- clusively within the frame of the SHK model, and for most of the mass media no serious departures from this model occurred through the conclusion of the Rome trial in March 1986. 24
Agca's naming of the Bulgarians was the key fact that generated news coverage, providing the basis for reiterated details about the Bulgarians, explanations of the Bulgarian (and Soviet) motive, and speculation about the political implications of the charges, if confirmed. A major characteristic of these news reports was their sheer superficiality, with the charges never seriously examined but merely regurgitated and elaborated with odd facts and opinion, and with no departures from the SHK frame (and no hints of the possible relevance of an alternative frame). The charges constituted a form of vindication of the SHK model if taken at face value and presented superficially-i. e. , if the media presentations never considered political convenience, prison conditions, possible deals, plausible deniability, etc. And this proce- dure-a reiteration of Agca claims, supplemented by extremely super- ficial pro-plot speculation-was the principal modality by which the mass media accepted and pushed the propaganda line.
Newsweek provides a prototype of news coverage within the SHK framework in its article of January 3, 1983, "The Plot to Kill Pope John Paul II. " The Bulgarian-Soviet motive as portrayed by SHK is reite- rated through quotes from congenial sources-"a precautionary and alternative solution to the invasion ofPoland"-while nobody is quoted discussing costs and benefits, the nature of the Soviet leadership, or Western benefits from Agca's confession. 25 In fact, Newsweek suggests
156 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that this charging of the Soviet bloc with the assassination attempt is a painful embarrassment to Western governments (parroting the SHK line on this point). Newsweek nowhere discusses the seventeen-month lag in Agca's confession or his prison conditions, nor does it report in this (or any later) article the claims and information noted in the London Sunday Times and the Italian press about inducements or coercive threats that might have been applied to Agca while in custody.
Agca's evidence is given credibility by Newsweek through several devices: repeating his claims several times as the core of the story; stressing in two separate sequences investigative judge Martella's al- leged honesty, integrity, conscientiousness, etc. ; quoting from Italian officials who say they "have the evidence" that "Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians"; asserting that "all the evidence suggests" that Agca is "not crazy. " But most important is the previously men- tioned refusal to discuss the premises of the SHK framework or to use an alternative frame.
Newsweek swallows intact a series of SHK ideological assumptions, such as that "investigators [read "Paul Henze"] now think" Agca was probably using the Gray Wolves as a cover; Bulgaria and the Soviet Union have long been trying "to destabilize Turkey through terrorism" (quoting Henze directly); in Sofia, Agca's presence "must have come to the attention of the Bulgarian secret police" (duplicating the fre- quent SHK error of forgetting their claim that Agca had already been recruited for the papal assassination attempt in Turkey, as well as erroneously assuming that the Bulgarian secret police can easily iden- tify Turks passing through their country). Newsweek states as estab- lished fact that "Agca had help from a huge set of Bulgarians," although it provides no evidence for this except assertions by Agca, Italian officials, and Paul Henze. It reports Agca's numerous transactions with Bulgarians in Rome without mentioning the problem of plausible deni- ability and without batting an eyelash at the sheer foolishness of the scenario. This Newsweek article is nonetheless powerful, with its reiter- ation of many details, its confidently asserted plots and subplots, its
quotes from many authorities supporting the charges, and its seeming openness and occasional mention of lack of full proof-but it is a piece of uncritical propaganda that confines itself strictly within the SHK frame, with the exception of the single phrase cited earlier.
Initially, the other major media performed quite uniformly in the same mold-uncritical, trivial, working solely within the bounds of the SHK model, and entirely bypassing all the hard but obvious questions raised by the "alternative" model. Of the thirty-two news articles on, or closely related to, the plot that appeared in the New York Times
J
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 157
between November I, ! 982, and January 31, 1983, twelve had no news content whatever but were reports of somebody's opinion or specula- tion about the case--or refusal to speculate about the issue. (The Times carried one news article whose sole content was that President Reagan had "no comment" on the case. ) More typical was the front-page article by Henry Kamm, "Bonn is Fearful of Bulgaria Tie with Terrorists" (Dec. 12, 1982), or Bernard Gwertzman's "U. S. Intrigued But Uncertain on a Bulgarian Tie" (Dec. 26, 1982). In "news report" after news report, unnamed individuals are "intrigued," their interest is "piqued," evi- dence is said to be "not wholly convincing," or "final proof is still lacking! ' Four of the Dews articles in the Times were on peripheral subjects such as smuggling in Bulgaria or papal-Soviet relations. Of the sixteen more direct news items, only one covered a solid news fact- namely, Antonov's arrest in Rome. The other fifteen news items were trivia, such as Kamm's "Bulgarians Regret Tarnished Image" (Jan. 27, 1983), or another Kamm piece entitled "Italian Judge Inspects Apart- ment of Suspect in Bulgarian Case" (Jan. 12, 1983). All of these expres- sions of opinion, doubts, interest, suppositions, and minor detail served to produce a lot of smoke-which kept the issue of possible Soviet involvement before the public. They steered quite clear of substantive issues that bore on motives, quality of evidence, and Turkish and Italian context.
During the years that followed, to the end of the trial in March 1986, the mass media, with only minor exceptions, adhered closely and un- critically to the SHK framework. 26 They not only failed to press alter- native questions, they also refused to examine closely the premises, logic, or evidence supporting the SHK case. Part of the reason for this was the media's extraordinary reliance on Sterling and Henze as sources (and Kalb's position as a news reporter on NBC-TV), and their unwillingness to ask these sources probing questions.
4. 5. BIASED SOURCING
Sterling and Henze, and to a lesser extent Michael Ledeen, dominated perceptions of the Bulgarian Connection in the U. S. mass media to a remarkable degree. Moreover, they affected the course of events in Italy, as their version of Bulgarian guilt was aired in the Italian media before Agca named the Bulgarians and may have influenced Martella as well. 27 Sterling and Henze dominated media coverage by virtue of the very wide distribution of their articles and books on the case, and
158 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
by their extensive and uncritical use as expens by the elite press, news magazines, and television news and talk shows. 28 Sterling, in addition to her Reader's Digest anicle, had three substantial pieces in the Wall Street Journal and several anicles in the New York Times. Her views were given repeated airing on CBS News, without rebuttal. Henze accounted for twelve of the fourteen articles on the Bulgarian Connec- tion case in the Christian Science Monitor between September 1982 and May 1985, and his articles were used widely elsewhere. The only opin- ion piece on the Bulgarian Connection that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer during that same period was by Michael Ledeen. Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen together accounted for 76 percent of the time in three shows on the subject on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. " No tough questions were asked of them on these shows, and no dissident voices were heard, perhaps because Sterling and Henze refused to appear on television shows (or in college debates) with people who opposed their views, and Henze insisted on approving in advance any questions to be asked. Thus their initial dominance was
funher enhanced by coercive tactics. 29
If we ask the deeper question of why these expens should predomi-
nate in the first place, we believe the answer must be found in the power of their sponsors and the congeniality of their views to the corporate community and the mainstream media. Their messages passed quite easily through the filters of a propaganda system. Sterling was funded and published by Reader's Digest, which gave her enormous outreach and immediate brand-name recognition. The conservative network is fond of Sterling, so their large stable of columnists and think-tank affiliates, like the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute, pushes her views. The Reagan administration was also delighted with Sterling- despite her frequent denunciations of the CIA and the State Depart- ment for their cowardice in failing to pursue terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection with sufficient aggressiveness! -and so were the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and many others. Ster- ling was the outstanding popular expositor of the theme urged upon the conferees at the Jonathan Institute meeting ofJuly 1979 and advocated
by the Reagan administration team anxious to create a moral environ- ment for an arms race and global support of counterrevolutionary freedom fighters. 3o Henze, an old CIA hand and protege of Zbigniew Brzezinski, was also funded by the Reader's Digest, and Ledeen was affiliated with both the CSIS and the Reagan political team. If the media transmit literal lies by this Big Three-which they did fre- quently-the flak machines remain silent. As one network official told
r
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 159
one of the authors, if a critic of the Bulgarian Connection were allowed on the air, the official would "have to make sure that every i was dotted and l crossed; but with Sterling, there were no problems. "
Again in conformity with a propaganda model, it was of no appar- ent concern to the mass media that Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen were exceptionally biased sources, immune to the rules of evidence and, in fact, agents of disinformation. We discussed earlier Sterling's dismis- sal of Agca's commitment to Turkes and her handling of Agca's gun, and similar cases could be cited in large number. 3l Sterling's Terror Network is notable for its gullibility in accepting at face value claims fed her by Israeli, South African, and Argentinian secret police, and, most notably, the Czech Stalinist defector, Jan Sejna,32 whose evi- dence for a Soviet terror network came from a document forged by the CIA to test Sejna's integrity! 33 A remarkable feature of Sterling's Time of the Assassins and other writings on the Bulgarian Connection is her reiterated belief that the Reagan administration and CIA dragged their feet in pursuing the Red plot because of their interest in detente. 34 And despite her phenomenal sales and uncritical reception in the U.