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.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
24).
As regards the defense committees, LASA ~ concluded that they did not seem to be functioning as a spying network
and that there was no serious evidence that they were a force making for intimidation (p. 27). LASA makes two additional points ignored by the free press. One is that the electoral commission "placed paid adver- tisements in the press urging citizens to respect the rights of all political parties to hold rallies without interference" (p. 24). The second is that the Cruz rallies that were disrupted were held in violation of the elec- toral law, which requires permits for campaign rallies and promises police protection. "In other words, given their decision not to register, Cruz and the Coordinadora were deliberately campaigning outside of the legal framework of protections which had been created by the electoral law" (p. 25). LASA also compares the violence in the Nicarag- uan election with that elsewhere in the area and in the Nicaraguan context, concluding that "compared to other nations in the region and
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 131
in the face of a war against the contras, such abuses are on a very small scale" (p. 28).
LASA also discussed freedom of the press, which it regards as one of the election's most troublesome features. It considers the imposition of press censorship to have been damaging to the election's quality and credibility, even though the argument ofthe Sandinistas, that a country at war "can't allow a newspaper which is the instrument of the enemy to publish its opinions freely" (Sergio Ramirez), is viewed as not wholly unreasonable. Nevertheless, while the censorship was also somewhat arbitrary and legalistic, LASA concluded that "The opposition could and did get its message out" (p. 26). And the finding overall was that the Nicaraguan election "by Latin American standards was a model of probity and fairness" (p. 32).
The U. S. mass media did not concur, but it is striking how they avoid comparisons and data. The way in which the media can denounce restrictions on freedom of the press in Nicaragua after having totally ignored the question in El Salvador, where restrictions were far more severe, is remarkable. This process ofdichotomization is so internalized that the writers use the double standard within the same article, appar- ently unaware of their own bias. In an article in the New York Times of March 12, 1984, "Clear Choices in Salvador, Murky Plans in Nicara- gua," Hedrick Smith regards the choices as "clear" in El Salvador, whereas in Nicaragua the problem is whether in an election the San- dinistas will "give up significant power and control. " Multiple parties from the fa. r right to the center-right in El Salvador demonstrate clear choices, but a variety of parties from right to far left in Nicaragua didn't cause Smith to perceive real choices there, although he didn't explain why. It apparently never occurs to Smith that there is an issue of whether the army and United States "will give up power and control" (and their determination to fight to victory) by the electoral route in El Salvador.
Are there essential freedoms and absence of coercion in El Salvador that are necessary for a truly free election? Hedrick Smith talks about substantive electoral conditions only in Nicaragua. He provides exten- sive detail on the trials of La Prensa, press censorship, the Sandinista monopoly of power, and limits allegedly imposed on opposition candi- dates in Nicaragua. Not a word, however, on death-squad and army murders of civilians in El Salvador or the Draconian laws of the state of siege. How many journalists have been killed in El Salvador? Papers closed? Radio stations blown up? Union leaders and political figures murdered? These questions are off the agenda in U. S. -staged elections, and Hedrick Smith ignores them. As a de facto spokesman for his
J32 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
government, the Times commentator uses doublethink with as much insouciance as Reagan and Shultz.
3. 7. QUANTITATIVE EVIDENCE OF SYSTEMATIC MEDIA BIAS
To demonstrate more rigorously the structural bias in media coverage of Third World elections, tables 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3 compare the topics mentioned in the New York Times in its articles on the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran elections of 1984. The tables are organized according to the U. S. government agenda described earlier. The elements in the upper part of the tables are the approved issues-rebel disruption, personali- ties, election mechanics, etc. -that the government wishes to stress in its sponsored elections. Below the line are the basic conditions and other negative elements that are off the agenda in sponsored elections. Our hypothesis is that the media will follow the agenda, stressing personalities and other elements above the line in sponsored elections and playing down basic conditions, whereas in elections like that in Nicaragua the agenda will be reversed-the stress will be placed on basic conditions.
TABLE 3-1
Topics Included and Excluded in the New York Times's Coverage
of the Salvadoran Election
of March 25, 1984*
TOPICS
Those compatible with the U. s. government's agenda for the Salvadoran election:
1. Democratic purpose and hopes
2. Rebel disruption
WITH TOPIC
6
WITH TOPIC
21. 4
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
53. 6
LeGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS
'll
TOPICS
WITH TOPIC 7
? I.
I.
5
3
2
0
I
WITH TOPIC
25. 0 32. 1 35. 7
35. 7 17. 9
10. 7 7. 1
?
3. 6
1;.
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
l. Turnout
,. Election mechanics
,. Personalities and political
infighting
6. Official reflections on the
election
7. The army as protector of
the election
Those incompatible with the U. S. government's agenda for the Salvadoran election:
8. The public-rdations purpose
9. U. S. investment in the election
10. Fraud in the 1982 dection II. The existence of free
tlpeech and assembly-
legal state of siege 12. Freedom of the press 13. Organizational freedom I'. Limits on the ability of
candidates to qualify
lmd campaign
I'. Prior state terror and
climate of fear
16. Power of armed forces,
links to candidates and parties, as possible negative factor
17. Legal obligation to vote 18. Legal penalties for
nOllvoring
19. Marking of voters' fingers
20. Stamping identification cards
21. Legal requirement that authorities check within
10 days, that voters
? ?
0
? ?
3 10. 7 1 3. .
? 14. 3 2 7. 1
I 3. . 2 7. 1
? ?
have voted
22. Possible nonlegal threat 0 ?
to nonvoters from death squads and security forces
134 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
TOPICS
23. Use of transparent voting
~
24. Legal right of the security forces to an armed
presence at voting stations
WITH TOPIC
1
o
WITH TOPIC 3. 6
o
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
* Based on a study ofthe 28 articles on the EI Salvador election that appeared in the New York TimeJ between Feb. I and Mar. 30, 1984.
TABLE 3-2
Topics Included and Excluded in the New York Times's Coverage of the Nicaraguan Election Planned for November 4, 1984*
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
TOPICS WITH TOPIC
Those compatible with the u. s. government's agenda for the Nicaraguan election: (Of the 7 items in table 3-1, all are blanks except one. )
I. Election mechanics 3
Those incompatible with the U. s. government's agenda for the Nica. raguau election:**
2. The public-relations purpose 3
3. Free speecl1 2 . . 4. Freedom of the press ?
5. Organizational freedom ? >li
WITH TOPIC
315
375 2S. O 75. 0 50. 0
?
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEA~INGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 135
TOPICS
6. Ability of candidates to qualify and run
7. Power of the armed forces, link to state, as negative factor
WITH TOPIC 5
3
WITH TOPIC 62. 5
37. 5
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
* Based on a study of the 8 articles on the forthl;oming Nicaraguan election that appeared in the New York Times between Feb. I and Mar. 30, 1984.
,. . ,. . Many of the topics listed in. Table 3-1 under this subheading are not relevant to the Nicaraguan election-all that are covered in the articles examined are listed here.
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.
and that there was no serious evidence that they were a force making for intimidation (p. 27). LASA makes two additional points ignored by the free press. One is that the electoral commission "placed paid adver- tisements in the press urging citizens to respect the rights of all political parties to hold rallies without interference" (p. 24). The second is that the Cruz rallies that were disrupted were held in violation of the elec- toral law, which requires permits for campaign rallies and promises police protection. "In other words, given their decision not to register, Cruz and the Coordinadora were deliberately campaigning outside of the legal framework of protections which had been created by the electoral law" (p. 25). LASA also compares the violence in the Nicarag- uan election with that elsewhere in the area and in the Nicaraguan context, concluding that "compared to other nations in the region and
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 131
in the face of a war against the contras, such abuses are on a very small scale" (p. 28).
LASA also discussed freedom of the press, which it regards as one of the election's most troublesome features. It considers the imposition of press censorship to have been damaging to the election's quality and credibility, even though the argument ofthe Sandinistas, that a country at war "can't allow a newspaper which is the instrument of the enemy to publish its opinions freely" (Sergio Ramirez), is viewed as not wholly unreasonable. Nevertheless, while the censorship was also somewhat arbitrary and legalistic, LASA concluded that "The opposition could and did get its message out" (p. 26). And the finding overall was that the Nicaraguan election "by Latin American standards was a model of probity and fairness" (p. 32).
The U. S. mass media did not concur, but it is striking how they avoid comparisons and data. The way in which the media can denounce restrictions on freedom of the press in Nicaragua after having totally ignored the question in El Salvador, where restrictions were far more severe, is remarkable. This process ofdichotomization is so internalized that the writers use the double standard within the same article, appar- ently unaware of their own bias. In an article in the New York Times of March 12, 1984, "Clear Choices in Salvador, Murky Plans in Nicara- gua," Hedrick Smith regards the choices as "clear" in El Salvador, whereas in Nicaragua the problem is whether in an election the San- dinistas will "give up significant power and control. " Multiple parties from the fa. r right to the center-right in El Salvador demonstrate clear choices, but a variety of parties from right to far left in Nicaragua didn't cause Smith to perceive real choices there, although he didn't explain why. It apparently never occurs to Smith that there is an issue of whether the army and United States "will give up power and control" (and their determination to fight to victory) by the electoral route in El Salvador.
Are there essential freedoms and absence of coercion in El Salvador that are necessary for a truly free election? Hedrick Smith talks about substantive electoral conditions only in Nicaragua. He provides exten- sive detail on the trials of La Prensa, press censorship, the Sandinista monopoly of power, and limits allegedly imposed on opposition candi- dates in Nicaragua. Not a word, however, on death-squad and army murders of civilians in El Salvador or the Draconian laws of the state of siege. How many journalists have been killed in El Salvador? Papers closed? Radio stations blown up? Union leaders and political figures murdered? These questions are off the agenda in U. S. -staged elections, and Hedrick Smith ignores them. As a de facto spokesman for his
J32 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
government, the Times commentator uses doublethink with as much insouciance as Reagan and Shultz.
3. 7. QUANTITATIVE EVIDENCE OF SYSTEMATIC MEDIA BIAS
To demonstrate more rigorously the structural bias in media coverage of Third World elections, tables 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3 compare the topics mentioned in the New York Times in its articles on the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran elections of 1984. The tables are organized according to the U. S. government agenda described earlier. The elements in the upper part of the tables are the approved issues-rebel disruption, personali- ties, election mechanics, etc. -that the government wishes to stress in its sponsored elections. Below the line are the basic conditions and other negative elements that are off the agenda in sponsored elections. Our hypothesis is that the media will follow the agenda, stressing personalities and other elements above the line in sponsored elections and playing down basic conditions, whereas in elections like that in Nicaragua the agenda will be reversed-the stress will be placed on basic conditions.
TABLE 3-1
Topics Included and Excluded in the New York Times's Coverage
of the Salvadoran Election
of March 25, 1984*
TOPICS
Those compatible with the U. s. government's agenda for the Salvadoran election:
1. Democratic purpose and hopes
2. Rebel disruption
WITH TOPIC
6
WITH TOPIC
21. 4
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
53. 6
LeGITIMIZING VERSUS MEANINGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS
'll
TOPICS
WITH TOPIC 7
? I.
I.
5
3
2
0
I
WITH TOPIC
25. 0 32. 1 35. 7
35. 7 17. 9
10. 7 7. 1
?
3. 6
1;.
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
l. Turnout
,. Election mechanics
,. Personalities and political
infighting
6. Official reflections on the
election
7. The army as protector of
the election
Those incompatible with the U. S. government's agenda for the Salvadoran election:
8. The public-rdations purpose
9. U. S. investment in the election
10. Fraud in the 1982 dection II. The existence of free
tlpeech and assembly-
legal state of siege 12. Freedom of the press 13. Organizational freedom I'. Limits on the ability of
candidates to qualify
lmd campaign
I'. Prior state terror and
climate of fear
16. Power of armed forces,
links to candidates and parties, as possible negative factor
17. Legal obligation to vote 18. Legal penalties for
nOllvoring
19. Marking of voters' fingers
20. Stamping identification cards
21. Legal requirement that authorities check within
10 days, that voters
? ?
0
? ?
3 10. 7 1 3. .
? 14. 3 2 7. 1
I 3. . 2 7. 1
? ?
have voted
22. Possible nonlegal threat 0 ?
to nonvoters from death squads and security forces
134 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
TOPICS
23. Use of transparent voting
~
24. Legal right of the security forces to an armed
presence at voting stations
WITH TOPIC
1
o
WITH TOPIC 3. 6
o
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
* Based on a study ofthe 28 articles on the EI Salvador election that appeared in the New York TimeJ between Feb. I and Mar. 30, 1984.
TABLE 3-2
Topics Included and Excluded in the New York Times's Coverage of the Nicaraguan Election Planned for November 4, 1984*
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
TOPICS WITH TOPIC
Those compatible with the u. s. government's agenda for the Nicaraguan election: (Of the 7 items in table 3-1, all are blanks except one. )
I. Election mechanics 3
Those incompatible with the U. s. government's agenda for the Nica. raguau election:**
2. The public-relations purpose 3
3. Free speecl1 2 . . 4. Freedom of the press ?
5. Organizational freedom ? >li
WITH TOPIC
315
375 2S. O 75. 0 50. 0
?
LEGITIMIZING VERSUS MEA~INGLESS THIRD WORLD ELECTIONS 135
TOPICS
6. Ability of candidates to qualify and run
7. Power of the armed forces, link to state, as negative factor
WITH TOPIC 5
3
WITH TOPIC 62. 5
37. 5
NUMBER OF PERCENTAGE OF ARTICLES DEALING ARTICLES DEALING
* Based on a study of the 8 articles on the forthl;oming Nicaraguan election that appeared in the New York Times between Feb. I and Mar. 30, 1984.
,. . ,. . Many of the topics listed in. Table 3-1 under this subheading are not relevant to the Nicaraguan election-all that are covered in the articles examined are listed here.
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.
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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.
