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By Root 2914 0

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against the Bulgarians—was omitted from Sterling’s story, although she coyly suggested that some undescribed points had been retracted that were already “corroborated.”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

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 there.37 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 1, 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 Connection, 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” organizations. 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 retreated 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 prepared 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 Times, 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 Pazienza in the “Billygate” affair and had numerous contacts with Italian intelligence and