Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [114]
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 political 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 underground, which carried him through twelve different countries, Agca had stayed for a period in Bulgaria. Turkish drug dealers, who had connections with the Gray Wolves, also participated in the drug trade in Bulgaria. There were, therefore, some “links” between Agca and Bulgarians, 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 importance and utility of pressing the terrorism issue and of tying terrorism to the Soviet Union.4 Claire Sterling did this in her 1981 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. Terrorism and Soviet evil were the centerpieces of the Reagan administration’s propaganda campaign that began in 1981, designed to support its planned arms increase, placement of new missiles in Europe, and interventionist 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 document 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 “information” was shown to have been fabricated by SISMI 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 formed 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 the dominant frame of the mass media, through the great outreach of the Reader’s Digest and the NBC-TV program (which was repeated