No More Learning

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. S. media, Sterling bemoaned the "accepted position, the so- cially indispensable position . . . if you care to move in certain circles and if you care to be accepted at your job professionally" in the West, of doubting the Bulgarian Connection, which she attributed to the success of the KGB in pushing a forty-page booklet on the plot by Soviet journalist lona Andronov. 35
These evidences of charlatanry did not impair Sterling's credibility with the U. S. mass media-in fact, the New York Times allowed her front-page space and a regular role as a reporter of news on the Bul- garian connection. By doing this, the Times guaranteed that editorial policy would control the news fit to print. This was displayed fully in Sterling's front-page news story of prosecutor Albano's report on June 10, 1984. The most important new information in that report-that on
June 28, 1983, Agca had retracted a substantial part of his evidence against the Bulgarians-was omitted from Sterling's story, although she coyly suggested that some undescribed points had been retracted that were already "corroborated. " This was seriously misleading. Agca's having visited Antonov's apartment and met with his family was never corroborated, and the details he gave on these matters had previously been cited by Sterling and Henze as crucial corroboration of his general claims. His retraction thus led to the important question of how Agca had learned details about Antonov's apartment without having been there. This issue was never seriously addressed in the New York Times. 36
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Paul Henze was a longtime CIA official who had been head of the CIA station in Turkey and a specialist in propaganda. Former Turkish head of state Bulent Ecevit even accused Henze of helping destabilize Turkey during his term of operations thereY Henze never refers in his "news" articles to his active participation in Turkish affairs as a CIA official. His writings are notable for their consistent apologetics for military rule in Turkey, for their dishonesty,38 and for the fact that Henze openly disdains the use of rules of evidence in proving Soviet villainy. 39
Michael Ledeen, as we saw in chapter I, contends that the mass media believe Qaddafi more readily than the U. S. government, and focus more heavily on the victims of state terror in U. S. client states (Indonesia in East Timor, and Guatemala? ) than in enemy and radical states (Cambodia and Poland? ). Again, such absurdities do not reduce Ledeen's access to the mass media as an expert on the Bulgarian Con- nection, or on anything else. 40
The mass media not only allowed these disinformation sources to prevail, they protected them against disclosures that would reveal their dubious credentials. That Henze was a longtime CIA official was almost never mentioned in the press (never, to our knowledge, on television), and his consistent apologetics for the Turkish military regime and frequent lies were never disclosed. In Sterling's case, her numerous errors of fact, foolish arguments, and wilder political opinions were not disclosed to readers of the New York Times, Time, or Newsweek, or watchers of CBS News or the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour," and even "newsworthy" matters bearing on her qualifications were ignored. For example, Sterling's numerous attacks on the murdered French activist- radical Henry Curiel resulted in suits for slander brought against her in Paris. The New York Times has never mentioned these slander suits, which would put Sterling in a bad light not only because she lost them in whole or part, but also because of the insight they provide concerning her sources and methods. Sterling had gotten much of her information
from a French journalist, George Suffert, who was a conduit for French and South African intelligence, and who had obligingly placed the African National Congress at the top of his list of "terrorist" organiza- tions. In her Terror Network, Sterling strongly intimates that Curiel was a KGB agent, but the French court, on the basis of documents provided by French intelligence, found no support for this claim. Sterling re- treated to the defense that her insinuation of Curiel's KGB connection was merely a "hypothesis" rather than an assertion of fact. The case, in short, showed that she was a conduit of disinformation, quite pre-
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 161
pared to slander a murdered radical on the basis of claims by extreme right-wing disinformation sources.
Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative activist and disinformationist, with ready access to the Time~ has also received its close protection. His book Grave New World was reviewed in the Times by William Griffith, a Reader's Digest "roving editor" and right-wing MIT political scientist who found Ledeen's version of the Bulgarian Connection entirely convincing. 41 Ledeen was deeply involved with Francesco Pa- zienza in the "Billygate" affair and had numerous contacts with Italian intelligence and the Italian extreme right. The Italian Fascist and head of P-2, Lido Gelli, hiding in Uruguay, instructed one of his accom- plices to convey a manuscript to Ledeen. Pazienza claimed (and SISMI head Santovito confirmed) that Ledeen was a member of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI, with code number Z-3. Ledeen received over SlOO,OOO from SISMI for services rendered, including the supply- ing of stale U. S. intelligence reports that SISMI then passed off as its own. Ledeen funneled this money into a Bermuda bank account. His manipulative activities in Italy were on such a scale that in the summer of 1984 a newly appointed head of SISMI told the Italian parliament that Ledeen was a "meddler" and persona non grata in Italy. 42 None of these points was ever disclosed in the Times. 43
4. 6. THE PROPAGANDA AGENDA: QUESTIONS UNASKED, SOURCES UNTAPPED
There is a close linkage among sources used, frames of reference, and agendas ofthe newsworthy. When the mass media chose to use Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen heavily, they simultaneously adopted a frame of reference in which the Bulgarians and Soviets were presumed guilty, Agca was an apolitical mercenary, and justice was being promoted by diligent Judge Martella in free-world Italy. In the propaganda cam- paign that ensued, hard questions about the quality of the SHK model were simply not asked, and alternative sources and frames were ig- nored.
A distinction between matters on and off the agenda, such as we used in the previous chapter, is once again applicable and illuminating. "On the agenda" are statements by Agca and Martella about Agca's latest
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claims and proofs of Bulgarian involvement, Brzezinski's opinion on whether the Bulgarians arc likely to have engaged in such an escapade (they were), or Judy Woodruff's question to Paul Henze as to whether the Soviets "would have any notion, any desire to try this again" (they do this kind of thing all the time-just got a little careless here because "they had got away with so much in ltaly"). 44 As in the Third World election cases described in chapter 3, the media prefer to focus on superficial detail about the participants and opinions within a narrow range of establishment views (plus bluffdenials by Bulgarian and Soviet officials), along with each development supporting the accepted case (a defector's accusations, a further Agca confession, an investigator's or prosecutor's report, and leaks of alleged claims or expected new devel- opments), whatever its credibility_
"Off the agenda" are arguments and facts that would call into ques- tion the validity of the basic SHK model, and those relating to the "alternative model" (which starts with the question of why Agca con- fessed so late and the likelihood that he was encouraged and pressed to talk). We will run through only a few of the important questions and points of evidence that the mass media put off the agenda.
The basic SHK model rested its case on the Soviet motive, Agca's stay in Sofia, and the high professionalism of the Soviet and Bulgarian secret police, which made it likely that they were manipulating Agca if he stopped off in Bulgaria. Only the ABC "20120" program of May 12, 1983, explored the Soviet motive in any depth, despite the constant mass-media reiteration of the SHK line. ABC went to the trouble of asking the Vatican about the validity of Marvin Kalb's claim that the pope had written a note threatening to resign and to return to Poland to lead the resistance to any Soviet invasion. Cardinal John Krol, speaking for the Vatican, said that "Not only was there not such a letter, but such a letter directly from the Pope to Brezhnev would have been a total departure from all normal procedures. In no way could you conceive of the Holy Father saying, 'I would resign. ''' ABC's informa- tion from the Vatican too was that the pope's spoken message to Brezh- nev was conciliatory. This spectacular repudiation of an important element in the SHK case was unreported in the rest of the media, and simply died with the ABC broadcast. And any balancing of supposed gains against the costs and risks to the Soviet Union in sponsoring Agca was simply not undertaken in the mass media.
None of them stopped to evaluate Agca's 1979 letter threatening to kill the pope on his earlier visit to Turkey. Sterling's ludicrous claim that the KGB hired a Turk to kill the pope in order to damage Turkey's
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO Kill THE POPE r63
relation to NA TO was never discussed. The question of the authentic- ity of Agca's letter to Turkes, which bears on Agca's political commit- ments (and thus another SHK premise), was never discussed in the U. S. mass media. During the trial, Abdullah Catli's statement that Bulgaria was a preferred Gray Wolves route to Europe because of the relative ease of hiding in the heavy Turkish traffic-which directly contradicts the SHK claim that the Bulgarian secret police know everything, and that Agca's stay in Sofia must therefore have been by Bulgarian official plan-was never picked up in the U. S. mass media's coverage of the Rome trial.
The most striking deficiencies of the mass media's handling of the basic SHK claims, however, was their remarkable naivete in the face of the pseudoscientific speculations of SHK and the accumulating vio- lations of elementary principles of plausible deniability. The preposter- ous SHK claims-without a vestige of evidence-that Agca had been recruited by the KGB in Turkey for future work, and that he took on the appearance of a right-winger as a "cover," were not ridiculed, and were not evaluated when presented as purported truth. 4S There was never any discussion in the mass media of the fact that the thesis of prior recruitment and careful cultivation of Agca's cover in Turkey was flatly inconsistent with the claim that he was brought to Sofia for a lengthy stay for instructions. With regard to Agca's alleged open deal- ings with Bulgarians in Rome, the mass media simply refused to discuss the fact that the alleged professionalism and use ofthe right-wing Turk as a "cover" had disappeared.
As regards the alternative model, and the likelihood that Agca had been encouraged and coached, here also the mass media refused to explore these dissonant possibilities. They simply would not examine and discuss the convenience of the newly discovered plot for so many Western incerests; the huge time lag in the naming ofBulgarians; Agca's prison conditions and prison contacts; reports of meetings, offers, and threats to Agca to induce him to talk; and the compromised character of the Italian police and intelligence agencies. This involved the media in the suppression of important documents.
As one importanc instance, the July 12, 1984, Italian Report of the Parliamentary Commission on the Masonic Lodge P-2 describes in great detail the penetration of this massive neo-Fascist conspiracy into the military establishment, secret services, press, and judiciary, among oth- ers. This report was newsworthy in its own right, but it also had a bearing on the Bulgarian ConnectiOn case, as it addressed characteris- tics of Italian institutions that were directly involved in making and
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prosecuting the case against the Bulgarians. The New York Times, Time, ~ Newsweek, and CBS Evening News never mentioned the publication of
this report.
As a second major illustration, one year later, in July 1985, the Crjmi- nal Court of Rome handed down aJudgmenf in the Maner of FTancesco Pazienza et al. , which described repeated corrupt behavior by officials of the Italian secret-service agency SISMI, including the forgery and planting of documents. These officials were also charged with involve- ment in a cover-up ofthe agents carrying out the 1980 Bologna railway- station massacre, the kind of terrorist connection that attracts frenetic mass-media attention when attributable to suitable villains. As we noted earlier, SISMI officials had visited Agca in prison and SI8MI had issued a forged document implicating the Soviet Union in the shooting of the pope on May 19, 1981, only six days after the assassination attempt. This forgery was never mentioned in the Times, Tim~ and Newsweek, or on CBS News, and the July 1985 court decision was barely mentioned in a back-page article of the Times.
These blackouts are of materials that suggest a corrupt Italian pro- cess and the possibility that Agca was persuaded and coached to pin the plot on the East. A propaganda system exploiting the alleged Bulgarian Connection will naturally avoid such documents.
Agca's extremely loose prison conditions and the numerous claims in the Italian and dissident U. S. press of visits by Italian intelligence personnel were also virtually unmentioned by the U. S. mass media throughout 1982 and 1983. In June 1983, Diana Johnstone, the foreign editor of the newspaper In These Times submitted on Op-Ed column to the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that summarized the evidence and claims of intelligence-agency visits, the reported threats to Agca that his open and pleasant prison conditions might be terminated if he remained uncooperative, and Martella's proposed deal with Agca. This Op-Ed offering was rejected, and no commentary or news along these lines was permitted to surface in the Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer-or elsewhere, to our knowledge. Several years later, in an article in the New York Times of June 17,1985, referring to Pandico's detailed description of how Agca was coached in prison, John Tagliabue describes Agca's prison as "notoriously porous. " But the Times had never mentioned this notorious fact before, or considered it in any way relevant to the case.
When Agca identified the Bulgarians in November 1982, the integrity of the Italian investigative-judicial process in pursuing the case was already badly compromised for a wide variety of reasons,46 but the U. S. mass media weren't interested. Nor were they interested in the strange
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 165
circumstances of the famous Antonov photo, widely circulated in the Western press, which shows Antonov very clearly and in a remarkable likeness watching the scene at St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. This photo, Martella eventually claimed, was not of Antonov but an Ameri- can tourist. But this tourist, who apparently looked exactly like An- tonov, has never been located, and the film from which this shot was taken has unaccountably disappeared. 47 Agca's alterations in his claims about the Bulgarians, with Martella generously allowing him to change his recollections about the timing of events on May 13 whenever Bul- garian counter-evidence was too strong, failed to attract the media's attention. 48 Agca's June 28, 1983, retraction of his claim that he had visited Antonov's apartment and met his family was not mentioned in the mass media until a full year after the event, and even then suggested to the press no very serious problems with the case or with Martella's investigative work. 49 How could Agca know details about Antonov's apartment if he had never been there? An honest press would have pursued this relentlessly. The New York Times, with Sterling as its reporter, suppressed the issue. 5o The rest of the press simply wasn't
interested.
The media also weren't interested in Orsen Oymen's finding that the
Vatican had gone to some pains to try to implicate the Bulgarians, or the trial disclosure that the West German authorities had tried to bribe Gray Wolves member Oral Celik to come to West Germany and con- firm Agca's claims. Pandico's and Pazienza's insider claims of Mafia and 8I8MI involvement in getting Agca to talk were also given only the slightest attention, and this accumulating mass of materials on the Italian process was never brought together for a reassessment.
Perhaps the most blatant case of willful ignorance concerned the Italian fixer and former member of SI8MI, Francesco Pazienza. Wanted for several crimes, Pazienza had fled Italy, and in 1985 he resided in exile in New York City. Eventually he was seized and held there by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pazienza had been a partner of Michael Ledeen in the "Billygate" affair in Italy, and retained his connection after Ledeen became General Haig's right- hand man in Italy in the early days of the Reagan presidency. Pazienza had also been a close associate of SISMI head Giuseppe 8antovito. From 1983 onward it was alleged in the Italian press that Pazienza had been involved in getting Agca to talk, and he himself eventually made detailed accusations of coaching by elements of 8ISMI. Although Pa- zienza was readily available for interviews in a New York City jail, the
New York Times ignored him. Our hypothesis is that they did this because if they had talked to him it would have been difficult to avoid
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discussing his connections with Ledeen and Sterling (both Times sources and under Times protection). This would not have reflected well on the quality of the paper's sourcing. Pazienza's story would also have highlighted the Times's suppression of facts concerning the cor- ruption of SISMI and raised questions about coaching. This would have disturbed the propaganda line.
The trial in Rome was awkward for the Western media, as Agea quickly declared himself to be Jesus and, more important, failed to produce any supportive evidence backing up his claims of Bulgarian involvement. The diligent and extensive court investigation found nu- merous Gray Wolves links to Agea in the period just up to his assassina- tion attempt, but no witness to his (allegedly) numerous meetings with Bulgarians in Rome, no money, no car, and, in the end, no conviction.
As we have pointed out, in addition to the already available evidence of atrocious prison practice in dealing with Agca, and the 1981 meetings with intelligence officials and Martella's offer, there was a steady ac- cumulation of claims and evidence of pressures on Agca to implicate the Bulgarians. But, despite this evidence and the failure to convict the Bulgarians after a lengthy investigation and trial, the mass media of the West never provided any serious reevaluations of the case. Almost uniformly they hid behind the fact that an Italian court dismissed the case for lack of evidence rather than demonstrated innocence. They never hinted at the possibility that an Italian court and jury might still be biased against the Eastern bloc and protective of the powerful Western interests that had supported the Bulgarian Connection so
energetically.
The mass media also never looked back at their own earlier claims
and those of the disinformationists to see how they had stood up to the test ofaccumulated evidence. On January 3, 1983, Newsweek had quoted an Italian official who said that "we have substantial evidence . . . [that} Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians," and the New York Times editorialized on October 20, 1984, that "Agea's accounts of meet- ings with Bulgarian officials are verifiable in important details. " I f there was "substantial evidence" and "verifiable" details long before the trial, why was this evidence not produced in the courtroom? Why, after an enormous further investigative effort was there still not enough evi- dence to sustain a conviction? The u. s. mass media didn't even try to answer these questions. This would mean asking serious questions about the validity of the SHK model and considering alternatives, which the media have never been prepared to do. For them, the alterna- tive model, plausible from the beginning and, by March 1986, based on a great deal of evidence, was still the "Bulgarian view. " The questions
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE r67
raised by the "Bulgarian view," we believe. would have been applied by the U. S. mass media to analogous facts in a Moscow setting. This means that the view actually employed by the media from beginning to end was a "U. S. government view," as suggested by a propaganda model. That this was true even after the trial ended we show in a detailed analysis in appendix 3. "Tagliabue's Finale on the Bulgarian Connection: A Case Study in Bias. "
The Indochina Wars (I):
Vietnam
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE U. s. WARS TN INDOCHINA HAS EN- gendered a good deal of bitter controversy, some close analysis of several specific incidents, and a few general studies. ' It is widely held that the media "lost the war" by exposing the general population to its horrors and by unfair, incompetent, and biased coverage reflecting the "adversary culture" of the sixties. The media's reporting of the Tet offensive has served as the prime example of this hostility to established power, which, it has been argued, undermines democratic instirutions and should be curbed, either by the media themselves or by the state.
A propaganda model leads to different expectations. On its assump- tions, we would expect media coverage and interpretation of the war to take for granted that the United States intervened in the service of generous ideals, with the goal ofdefending South Vietnam from aggres- sion and terrorism and in the interest ofdemocracy and self-determina- tion. With regard to the second-level debate on the performance of the media, a propaganda model leads us to expect that there would be no condemnation of the media for uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of
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u. s. benevolence and for adherence to the official line on all central issues, or even awareness of these characteristics of media performance. Rather, given that the U. S. government did not attain all of its objec- tives in Indochina, the issue would be whether the media are to be faulted for undermining the noble cause by adopting too "adversarial" a stance and departing thereby from fairness and objectivity.
We shall see that all of these expectations are amply fulfilled.
5. 1. THE BOUNDS OF CONTROVERSY
"For the first time in history," Robert Elegant writes, "the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen," leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The beliefthat the media, particularly televi- sion, were responsible for U. S. government failures is widely expressed. It was endorsed by the right-wing media-monitoring organization Ac- curacy in Media in its hour-long "Vietnam Op/Ed" aired by public television in response to its own thirteen-part series on the war. 2 Ac- cording to a more "moderate" expression of this view, the media had become a "notable new source of national power" by 1970 as part of a general "excess of democracy," contributing to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a resulting "decline in the influ- ence of democracy abroad. " "Broader interests of society and govern- ment" require that if journalists do not impose "standards of
professionalism," "the alternative could well be regulation by the gov- ernment" to the end of "restoring a balance between government and media. "3 Freedom House Executive-Director Leonard Sussman, com- menting on Big Story, the study of media coverage of the Tet offensive sponsored by Freedom House, describes the "adversarial aspect" of the press-government relation as "normal," presupposing without argu- ment that it has been demonstrated, but asks: "Must free institutions be overthrown because of the very freedom they sustain? "4 John Roche proceeds further still, calling for congressional investigation of "the workings of these private governments" who distorted the record in pursuit of their "anti-Johnson mission," although he fears Congress is too "terrified of the media" and their awesome power to take on this necessary task. S
New York Times television critic John Corry defends the media as
THE ISDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 171
merely "unmindful," not "unpatriotic" as the harsher cntics claim. They are not "anti-American," despite their adversarial stance; rather, "they reflect a powerful element of the journalistic-literary-political culture," where "the left wins battles . . . by default" because "its ideas make up the moral and intellectual framework for a large part of the culture," and "television becomes an accomplice of the left when it allows the culture to influence its news judgments," as in his view it regularly does. 6
Media spokespersons, meanwhile, defend their commitment to inde- pendence while conceding that they may err through excessive zeal in calling the government to account in vigorous pursuit of their role as watchdog.
Within the mainstream, the debate is largely framed within the bounds illustrated by the PBS-AIM interchange broadcast on the pub- lic television network. AIM's "Vietnam Op/Ed" accused PBS of "de- liberate misrepresentation" and other sins, while the producers of the documentary defended its accuracy. A dozen commentators, ranging from extreme hawks to mild critics of the war such as General Douglas Kinnard, added their thoughts. 7 The program concluded with a studio wrap-up featuring three "intelligent citizens"; Colonel Harry Summers of the Army War College, a hawkish critic of the tactics of the war; Peter Braestrup, one of the harshest critics of media war coverage; and Huynh Sanh Thong, speaking for what the moderator called "the South Vietnamese community," meaning the exile community.
The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were indeed "unmindful," but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept-and keep--dosely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corpo- rate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that ques- tions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, r. eflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from the elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during
172 M ASUF ACTURING CONSJiNT
the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative con- ception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.
These conclusions concerning media conformism are accepted in part by mainstream critics of the media. Thus Leonard Sussman, of Freedom House, observes that "U. S. intervention in 1965 enjoyed near- total . . . editorial support. "s The "intervention" in 1965 included the deployment of U. S. combat forces in Vietnam, the regular bombing of North Vietnam, and the bombing of South Vietnam at triple the scale in a program of "unlimited aerial warfare inside the country at the price of literally pounding the place to bits. "9 It is a highly significant fact that neither then, nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full-scale "intervention. " By that time, of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues. While dissent and domestic controversy became a focus of media coverage from 1965, the actual views of dissidents and resisters were virtually excluded. These individuals were presented primarily as a threat to
order, and while their tactics might be discussed, their views were not: "The antiwar movement stood at the bottom of the media's hierarchy of legitimate political actors," Daniel Hallin concludes from his survey of television coverage (the print media were hardly different), "and its access to the news and influence over it were still more . i. imited. "Io All exactly as the propaganda model predicts.
As the war progressed, elite opinion gradually shifted to the belief that the U. S. intervention was a "tragic mistake" that was proving too costly, thus enlarging the domain ofdebate to include a range oftactical questions hitherto excluded. Expressible opinion in the media broad-
ened to accommodate these judgments, but the righteousness of the cause and nobility of intent were rarely subject to question. Rather, editorials explained that the "idealistic motives" of "the political and military commands" who "conceive[d] their role quite honestly as that of liberators and allies in the cause of freedom . . . had little chance to prevail against local leaders skilled in the art of manipulating their foreign protectors. "ll "Our Vietnamese" were too corrupt and we were too weak and too naive to resist their manipulations, while "their Viet- namese" were too wily and vicious. How could American idealism cope
THE ll"DOCHINA WARS (I): VIET~AM 173
with such unfavorable conditions? At the war's end, the liberal media could voice the lament that "the high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born . . . had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will in Indochina. "12 But no conflict can be perceived between "wishful idealism" and the commitment to "work our will" in foreign lands, a comment that holds of "the culture" more broadly.
As for direct reporting, the major charge of the influential Freedom House study of the Tet offensive, echoed by others who condemn the media for their overly "adversarial" stance, is that reporting was too "pessimistic. " We return to the facts, but consideration of the logic of the charge shows that even if accurate, it would be quite consistent with a propaganda model. There was, no doubt, increased pessimism within the German general staff after Stalingrad. Similarly, Soviet elites openly expressed concern over the wisdom of "the defense of Afghanis- tan" and its costs, and some might have been "overly pessimistic" about the likelihood of success in this endeavor. But in neither case do we interpret these reactions as a departure from service to the national cause as defined by the state authorities. The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthu- siastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed with-
out discussion to be honorable and just.
This basic assumption endures throughout, and provides the basic
framework for discussion and news reports. The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corry calls "the culture," held that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good," although "by 196<)" (that is, a year after corporate America had largely concluded that this enterprise should be liquidated) it had become "clear to most of the world-and most Americans-that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake," and that it was a "delusion" to attempt to build "a nation on the American model in South Vietnam"; the argument against the war "was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina-that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself' (Anthony Lewis). B Stanley Karnow's highly praised companion vol- ume to the PBS television series describes the American war as "a failed crusade" undertaken for aims that were "noble" although "illusory" and "motivated by the loftiest intentions": specifically, the commitment
"to defend South Vietnam's independence. "14
Within "the culture," it would be difficult to find harsher critics of
U. S. Asia policy than John King Fairbank, the dean of American China
174 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
scholarship. or Harvard government professor Stanley Hoffmann. or Dissent editor Irving Howe. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, Fairbank characterized the U. S. involvement, which he termed a "disaster," as the result of "an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence," an "error" based on misunderstanding. Howe explained that "we opposed the war because we believed, as Stanley Hoffman [sic] has written, that 'Wash- ington could "save" the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia from Communism only at a cost that made a mockery of the word "save. " , " Hoffmann explains later that our efforts in "supporting the South Viet- namese" were "undermined" by the way the war was fought, while the means adopted to "deter the North Vietnamese from further infiltra- tion" were "never sufficient"; and sufficient means, "had the United States been willing to commit them, would have created for the United States real external dangers with potential adversaries and in relations with allies. " Again, we find not the slightest recognition that the familiar pieties of state propaganda might be subject to some question. IS
In its 1985 tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Vietnam war, For- eign Affairs presents both the hawk and the dove positions. Represent- ing the more dovish view, David Fromkin and James Chace assert without argument that "the American decision to intervene in Indo- china was predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests. " and that, pursuant to its "global responsibilities," the United States must "serve the interests of mankind. " "As a moral matter we were right to choose the lesser of two evils" and to oppose "communist aggression" by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, but on the "practical side" it was "wrong" because "our side was likely to lose. " The moral imperatives of our service "to the inter- ests of mankind" do not. however. require that we intervene to over- throw governments that are slaughtering their own populations, such as the Indonesian government we supported in 1965, or our Guatemalan and Salvadoran clients of the 1980s. On the contrary, they observe, the success of our Indonesian allies in destroying the domestic political opposition by violence in 1965 was a respectable achievement that should have led us to reconsider our Vietnam policy. They cite Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who feels in retrospect that "our effort" in Vietnam was "excessive" after 1965, when "a new anti-communist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the communist party [the only mass-based political party] in that country . . . ? " incidentally slaughtering several hundred thousand people, mostly landless peasants, and thus "securing" Indonesia in
t
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 175
accord with our "global responsibilities" and "serving the interests of mankind. "16
Fromkin and Chace define "opponents of the war"-meaning. pre- sumably, critics whose views merit serious consideration-as those who "did not believe that 'whipping' the enemy [North Vietnam] was enough, so long as the enemy refused to submit or surrender. " The media, they say, "brought home to the American people how little effective control over the population had been purchased by all of General Westmoreland's victories," thus strengthening the "opponents of the war," dissatisfied by our inability to gain "effective control over the population. " "The media cannot be blamed for pointing out the problem. and if General Westmoreland knew the answer to it. perhaps he should have revealed it to the public. "
Outside of those committed to "the cause," although possibly skepti- cal about its feasibility or the means employed, there are only those whom McGeorge Bundy once described as "wild men in the wings," referring to people who dared to question the decisions of the "first team" that was determining U. S. policy in VietnamY
Quite generally, insofar as the debate over the war could reach the mainstream during the war or since. it was bounded on the one side by the "hawks," who felt that with sufficient dedication the United States could succeed in "defending South Vietnam," "controlling the popula- tion," and thus establishing "American-style democracy" there,18 and on the other side by the "doves," who doubted that success could be achieved in these noble aims at reasonable costI9-later, there arrived the "owls. " who observed the proceedings judiciously without suc- cumbing to the illusions of either extreme of this wrenching contro- versy. Reporting and interpretation of the facts were framed in accordance with these principles.
5. 2. "THE WILD MEN IN THE WINGS"
As the elite consensus eroded in the late I960s, criticism of the "noble cause" on grounds of its lack of success became more acceptable, and the category of "wild men in the wings" narrowed to those who opposed the war on grounds of principle-the same grounds on which they opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, later, Afghanistan. Let us consider how superpower intervention would be
176 MA~UFACTURING CONSENT
presented from a point ofview that permits aggression to be understood as aggression.
In the case of Soviet intervention, there is no serious controversy.
True, the Soviet Union has security concerns in Eastern Europe, in-
cluding states that collaborated with the Nazis in an attack on the
Soviet Union that practically destroyed it a generation ago and now
serve as a buffer to a rearmed West Germany that is part of a hostile
and threatening military alliance. True, Afghanistan borders areas of
the Soviet Union where the population could be inflamed by a radical
Islamic fundamentalist revival, and the rebels, openly supported by
bitter enemies of the Soviet Union, are undoubtedly terrorists commit- 4 ted to harsh oppression <lnd religious fanaticism who carry out violent
acts inside the Soviet Union itself and have been attacking Afghanistan
from Pakistani bases since 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion. 20 :. But none of these complexities bear on the fact that the Soviet Union
invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan, holds Poland in a
firm grip, etc. True, the Russians were invited into Afghanistan in 1979,
but as the London Economist accurately observed, "an invader is an
invader unless invited in by a government with some claim to legiti- macy,"21 and the government that the Soviet Union installed to invite
it in plainly lacked any such claim.
None of these matters elicit serious controversy, nor should they. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, like earlier cases of Soviet inter- vention in the region occupied by the Red Army as it drove out the Nazis during World War II, are described as aggression, and the facts are reported in these terms. The United Nations has repeatedly con- demned the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and regularly investigates and denounces the crimes they have committed. Western reporters cover the war from the standpoint of (he rebels defending their country from foreign attack, entering Afghanistan with them from their Pakis- tani sanctuaries. Official Soviet pronouncements are treated not merely with skepticism but with disdain.
In the case ofthe U. S. intervention in Indochina, no such interpreta- tion has ever been conceivable, apart from "the wild men in the wings," although it is at least as well grounded as the standard, and obviously correct, interpretation of the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Further- more, the reporting practice of journalists and commentators is also radically different in the two cases. We put off for a moment the more significant issue of how the war is understood, focusing first on the narrower question of journalistic practice.
In sharp contrast to the Soviet aggression, it was standard practice throughout the Indochina war for journalists to report Washington
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 177
pronouncements as fact, even in the extreme case when official state- ments were knOwn to be false. Furthermore, this practice persisted through the period when the media had allegedly had become "a nota- ble new source of national power" threatening government authority. To mention only one typical case from the year in which, we are to understand, this status had been definitively attained (see p. 170), in March 1970 the media reported a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos on the basis of a speech by President Nixon announcing that North Vietnamese forces in Laos had suddenly risen from 50,000 to 67,000. Nixon's comment came immediately after the U. S. military attache in Vientiane had presented his standard briefing citing the lower figure-a source of much private amusement among the press corps in Vientiane, as one of us witnessed at first hand-but the presidential fabrication was reported as fact. The lower figure was also fraudulent, although this fact was never reported. 22 Throughout the Indochina wars, when offi- cial statements were questioned, it was generally on the basis of U. S. military sources in the field, so that reporting and analysis remained well within the bounds set by U. S. power. 23
Only very rarely did U. S. reporters make any effort to see the war from the point of view of "the enemy"-the peasants of South Vietnam, Laos, or later Cambodia--or to accompany the military forces of "the enemy" resisting the U. S. assault. Such evidence as was available was ignored or dismissed. In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is consid- ered essencial and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the "aggression" of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.
Refugee testimony, which could have provided much insight into the nature of the war, was also regularly ignored. The enemy of the U. S. government was the enemy of the press, which could not even refer to them by their own name: they were the "Viet Cong," a derogatory term of U. S. -Saigon propaganda, not the National Liberation Front, a phrase "never used without quotation marks" by American reporters,~4 who regularly referred to "Communist aggression" (E. W. Kenworthy) by the South Vietnamese in South Vietnam and Communist efforts "to subvert this country" (David Halberstam)2S-their country, then under the rule of a U. S. -imposed client regime.
To a substantial extent, the war was reported from Washington. In late 1970, when the process of elite defection was well under way, Los A ngeles Times Washington correspondent Jules Witcover described the Washington scene during the earlier years:
178 MANUFACTURING CONSEST
While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsisten- cies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps' job narrowed down to three basic tasks- reporting what the government ~aid, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three cate- gories from the same basic source-the government. 26
The search for "opposing viewpoints" as things went wrong was also extremely narrow, limited to the domain of tactics-that is, limited to the question of "whether the policy enunciated worked," viewed en- tirely from the standpoint of U.