Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [277]
30. This Sterling theme and the ends sought by these conferees also reflected an elite consensus in the United States; otherwise the mass media would not have accepted her views so readily.
31. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, chapter 6, “The Disinformationists.”
32. In a characteristic lie, Sterling says in her Terror Network ([New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston/Reader’s Digest Press, 1984], p. 290) that Sejna got out of Czechoslovakia “a jump ahead of the invading Soviet army,” when in fact Sejna defected in the middle of the Czech Spring, long before the Soviet invasion, and in the midst of a corruption scandal in which Sejna was a principal. See Leslie Gelb, “Soviet-Terror Ties Called Outdated,” New York Times, October 18, 1981. In his book Veil, Bob Woodward notes that CIA analysts had at once dismissed Sterling’s concoctions as “preposterous,” giving some examples, including her reliance on Italian press stories that had been planted in CIA disinformation operations ([New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987], pp. 124–29). For detailed refutation, see Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press, 1982).
33. Sejna, of course, failed this test by “recognizing” the forged document, which had slipped his mind, and used it in later years for its spectacular disclosures. See Lars-Erik Nelson, “The Deep Terror Plot: A Thickening of Silence,” New York Daily News, June 24, 1984; Alexander Cockburn, “Beat the Devil,” The Nation, August 17–24, 1985. Sterling was introduced to this Sejna information windfall by Michael Ledeen. (See Sterling, Terror Network p. 34.)
34. See also “Why Is the West Covering Up for Agca? An Exclusive Interview with Claire Sterling,” Human Events, April 21, 1984.
35. This quotation and line of thought was presented by Sterling in her speech given at the Conference on Disinformation, in Paris, December 5, 1984, sponsored by Internationale de la Resistance, a coalition of right-wing resistance/“liberation” organizations and support groups. We quote from page 2 of the copy of her speech distributed by the sponsor organization. The booklet by Andronov to which she attributes such great influence was, to our knowledge, never mentioned in the U.S. mass media except by Sterling and Henze.
36. Even Michael Dobbs failed to deal with the fact that the Bulgarian defense claimed that no publicly available sources—i.e., newspapers, or radio and television programs—had ever had details on Antonov’s apartment before Agca provided those details to the investigating magistrate. This would seem to imply that Agca got the details by some form of coaching while in prison. Dobbs dismisses coaching as the “Bulgarian view,” but never explains what other view could account for Agca’s knowledge of places he had never visited.
37. Panorama, May 26, 1985, p. 107.
38. Ugur Mumcu’s books, cited earlier, are a running commentary on what Mumcu repeatedly and explicitly calls Henze’s “lies.”
39. “…I believe we are past the point where it serves the interests of any party except the Soviets to adopt the minimalist, legalistic approach which argues that if there is no ‘documentary evidence’ or some other form of incontrovertible proof that the Government of the U.S.S.R. is behind something, we must assume that it is not” (Paul Henze, “The Long Effort to Destabilize Turkey,” Atlantic Community [Winter 1981–82], p. 468).
40. Ledeen had three Op-Ed articles in the New York Times in the years 1984–87.
41. New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1985. For an analysis of Ledeen’s neoconservative theory of the media, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 166–70.
42. For documentation and sources, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 93–98, 160–61; see also Jonathan Kwitny, “Tale of Intrigue: Why an Italian Spy Got Closely Involved in the Billygate