Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [127]
These blackouts are of materials that suggest a corrupt Italian process 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 an 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 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 American tourist. But this tourist, who apparently looked exactly like Antonov, 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 Bulgarian 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.50 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 confirm Agca’s claims. Pandico’s and Pazienza’s insider claims of Mafia and SISMI 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 SISMI, 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