DISINFORMATION - AN EXAMINATION OF SIX YEARS OF INCREDIBLE LYING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807550012-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 17, 2012
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: March 13, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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Y .,
ARTICLE APPEARED
CN PACE _1A.-
LOS ANGELES WEEKLY (CA)
13 March 1987
DISINFORMATION
AN EXAMINATION OF SIX YEARS OF INCREDIBLE LYING
The term "disinformation" probably
enjoyed its greatest-ever public aware-
ness last fall - indeed, for many Ameri-
cans it was the first time they'd heard the
word - when the press revealed that over
the summer the administration had initi-
ated a campaign of deliberate lies about
the supposed "terrorist" intentions of
Libya's Colonel Muammar Qadhafi -
thus to arouse U.S. and world opinion in
support of possible further U.S. military
or diplomatic action against the Libyan
leader. Although past administration
denials had successfully thwarted disclo-
sure of other disinformation capers, in
this case there was a smoking gun: a
memo written by then-National Security
Council chief Admiral John Poindexter
outlining the Libyan campaign, first re-
vealed in the Washington Post by Water-
gate hero Bob Woodwa d_ The mass
media, especially the television networks,
seized on the memo and briefly made it a
cause celebre. The subsequent Iran/con-
tra scandals, themselves originally ob-
scured by intensive disinformation
campaigns, shortly subsumed the flap
over the Poindexter memo.
But taken together, the memo and the
two larger scandals have had one impor-
tant beneficial effect on the public - it is
now possible for the press to report the
"dark side" of the United States govern-
ment and be taken seriously. This is no
small achievement, as during the 40 Cold
War years the public has persistently
given the benefit of the doubt to its politi-
cal leaders. The consequences of this
have been two unnecessary wars fought
on the Asian mainland; an avoidable
massive nuclear-weapons race, and the
crushing of progressive social move-
ments - a great number of them non-
Marxist - in various Third World
countries.
Disinformation is not new to the
United States; it certainly did not ori-
ginate ender Ronald Reagan, however
much he and his administration may have
done in exploiting its varied
for manipulating the public. Since
end of World War II disiinfarmtf on
been employed on innumerable occa-
sions to prepare the public for U.S.
government actions. The military/intelli-
gence establishment of the Truman era
used disinformation to sweep the U.S. in-
to the Korean War and to defeat prewar
Chinese efforts for a negotiated settle-
ment. During the Eisenhower years, a
disinformation campaign against the
elected president of Guatemala preceded
a CIA coup intended to protect U.S.
banana companies from taxation.
In the '60s, the Kennedy administra-
tion, in preparing for the Bay of Pigs inva-
sion of Cuba, permitted the CIA to
mount a disinformati on campaign against
Fidel Castro just at the moment Fidel
was secretly trying to negotiate a decent
relationship with the U.S. rather than
having to lock Cuba into the Soviets' or-
bit. Lyndon Johnson gave us the entire
Vietnam War via disinformation; even
the North Vietnamese attack on U.S.
ships in the Tonkin Gulf, the incident
that provided public support for mass
American intervention, turned out to be a
fabrication. The Nixon-Kissinger team
then nearly outdid Johnson, creating dis-
information campaigns to cover up their
illegal bombing of Cambodia and to set
up the CIA-induced military coup against
Chile's elected president. For their parts,
Gerald Ford perpetuated the customary
disinformation campaign about a Soviet
weapons buildup and Jimmy Carter
mounted an all-out anti-Soviet disinfor-
mation effort to conceal his administra-
tion's inventive bungling of pre-invasion
Soviet overtures for an Afghanistan set-
tlement that would have retained that
country's long-standing status quo neu-
trality. (Even allowing for the work of the
Nation magazine and a handful of
scholarly journals, the untold story of Af-
ghanistan - including a deliberate
Reagan administration effort to prevent a
negotiated settlement - remains one of
the journalistic felonies of the '80s.)
Obviously, then, disinformation is not
an occasional tool of a rampant adminis.
tration; it is a long-standing adjunct of
policy. Since World War U, the U.S.
government has used disinformation on a
relatively widespread basis in order to
win public acceptance of weapons and in-
terventionist policies that otherwise
would be scorned. There are three com-
ponents to this. The "foreign policy
establishment" has carried out dis-
information largely aimed at protect-
ing U.S. business interests abroad; the
military-industrial complex has focused
on anti-Soviet disinformation needed to
convince the public to buy more arms
(and particularly more big-ticket strategic
arms); and the country's vast inte once
complex, for its own zealous causes (par-
ticularly regarding Third World coun-
tries), has created massive amounts of
disinformation while giving disioforma-
tional aid and comfort to both other
wings of government. (Although at rare
times it has undermined the distortion ef-
forts of those wings - certain CIA as-
sessments of Soviet military expenditures
that contradicted the Pentagon, for ex-
ample.)
Presidents and their White House
staffs can be victims of disinformation
from these three complexes as well as uti-
lizers of it, as both Eisenhower and Ken-
nedy came to understand. But what has
distinguished the Reagan administration
from its predecessors is that in many
cases the originating disinformation ma-
chinery has been moved from the agen-
cies into the White House, while
hard-line right-wing disinformation
players like William Casey moved into all
the agencies. Never before has disinfor-
mation been so well coordinated or
agreed upon by all potential players, and
no previous administration thought to
begin almost all its initiatives, including
many domestic ones, with a disinforma-
tion campaign. Disinformation has been
as reflexive with this crowd as "spin con-
trol," and it feeds on itself. Stories
thought up by a CIA agent is, say,
Nicaragua will be seined upon (and ac-
tually believed) by the White House and
upper level members of government as
fact (Sandinistas physically attacking
priests, for example), and will then be
Contilw9d
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embellished with the upper-level
members' own concoctions. Similarly,
stories contrived by foreign governments
have been as avidly pressed into service.
The result is that there is very little is-
suing from the present government that
Americans can believe, though few
Americans know yet how pervasively
disinformed they've been. (Had the
Tower Commission been better inform-
ed, it might not so tightly have concluded
that Ronald Reagan didn't know much
about the Poindexter-North machina-
tions.) Three themes have been overrid-
ing, of course: the Soviet Union as the
great, avaricious enemy, Nicaragua as
the great immediate totalitarian threat,
and the Middle East as the great test of
U.S. resolve (covering up the enormous
failure to build on Carter's Camp David
peace initiative). In combination, and de-
liberately woven together by the adminis-
tration, these themes have helped create
the mass psychology that the U.S. is
under siege by hostile, terrorist forces at
every turn and that our only hope is to
rally 'round the president and let him
fight back for us. Working with such an
extraordinarily exploitable impression,
the president has asked us therefore to
trust him on Star Wars, the contras,
Libya, nuclear arms agreements and
much more.
What follows here is a report on some
of the most flagrant disinformation cam-
paigns of the Reagan era as assembled by
Fred Landis, a long-time chronicler of
such events and an expert on CIA disin-
formation. Dr. Landis has taught poli-
tical science at California State Uni-
versity-Los Angeles, the University
of Illinois and San Francisco State Uni-
versity, and was a consultant to the
Senate Select Committee on intelligence
in 1976. Its West book, The CIA Ph*.
aparda Mackin, is due out later this
year from Ramparts Press.
Four individuals are mentioned fre-
quently here: Arnaud de Borchgnve, edi-
tor of the Moonie-owned Washington
Tines and former Newsweek correspon-
dent; Robert Moss, a journalist and co-
author with de Borcbgrave of two norms
exploiting disinformation themes; Claire
Sterling, a journalist, book author and
frequent contributor to The New York
Times as a putative "terrorism expert";
and Michael Ledeen, a Georgetown Uni-
versity professor and another "terrorism
expert" who is now showing up as the
key liaison between Israel and the U.S. in
the Inngate affair - not sarpeisig, as
Ldeen has long been suspected of hav-
ing ties to the Mossad, Israel's version of
the CIA. (He denies this.) Although the
four don't hold government positions,
they have often been accused of being
purveyors of disinformation that either
originates elsewhere or originates with
them and is picked up and given wider
circulation by government agencies.
Each is widely known to have extensive
friendships and contacts in right-wing
circles both here and abroad.
Two disinformation themes frequently
covered in the Weekly have been omitted
here: the administration's efforts to por-
tray Nicaragua as the chief supplier of
weapons to the Salvadoran rebels - a
story much refuted, most authoritatively
by former CIA analyst David Mac.
Michael, who quit the agency in disgust
over the White House and State Depart-
ment fabrications; and the Libya ter-
rorism link, often covered by Alexander
Cockburn in his column and decimated
by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
Seymour Hersh in the Sunday New York
Times of three weeks ago. Citing as
sources 70 current and former officials in
the White House, the State Department,
the Central Intelligence Agency, the Na-
tional Security Agency and the Pentagon,
Hersh wrote that much of what the U.S.
public has been told about "evidence" of
a Qadhafi role in terrorism has been dis-
information, including U.S. government
intentions in last year's bombing raid on
Libya - which, Hersh reports, was a
planned effort to flat-out assassinate
Qadhafi. (The report below does cover
one Libya-related story: the hit team
ostensibly sent to assassinate Presjent
The Libyan
Hit Team Sent
To Kill Reagan
Reporter David Martin started it all in
the November 30, 1981 Newsweek, for
which he was Pentagon reporter. Martin is
the son of a career CIA officer. His story
was that Muammar Qadhafi had sent a
five-than Palestinian hit team to Washing-
ton to assassinate President Reagan. Ac-
cording to the report, the terrorists
planned to set themselves up in a hotel
across from the White House and hit the
presidential helicopter with a Soviet-made
SAM missile.
Newsweek hit the streets with the story
on November 22. Other media didn't pick
up on it until the White House "authen-
ticated" the alleged Libyan plot on
December 2. Next, Jack Anderson was
supplied by Israeli intelligence agents with
composite drawings of the alleged ter-
rorists. Armed with these drawings, the
major media now headlined the plot. The
elusive terrorists were variously described
as being in Canada, on their way to
Washington, or lurking in Tijuana.
The Hearst Corporation-owned Los
Angeles Herald Examiner began pushing
the Tijuana theory and, citing "sources,"
added infamous international terrorist
Carlos to the story. On December 10, the
U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego was sup-
plied with the IDs of two Libyan hit teams,
one of which was supposedly led by Carlos.
At this point, Qadhafi went on TV to de-
nounce Reagan as "ignorant" and a
"liar." This brought Michael Ledeen
(discussed above and then a consultant to
the State Department) out onto ABC-TV
to denounce the irresponsibility of the
media in acting as a forum for terrorists by
giving Qadhafi air time. Reagan himself
answered Qadhafi at a December 17 press
conference. "We have complete con-
fidence in the evidence, and he [Qadhafi]
knows it," the president said.
Reagan's staff ostensibly took the threat
seriously enough to surround the White
House with concrete bunkers, use decoy
presidential limousines and helicopters,
and propose the permanent diversion of
traffic from the Pennsylvania Avenue side
of the White House. Those senior staff
members who may have known that the
story was disinformation certainly didn't
teff the Secret Service.
The story began to unravel on December
14, when FBI Director William Webster
first cast doubt on the existence of such a
hit team. By January 3, 1982, Webster had
repudiated the story in a television inter-
view. Webster said the FBI had never
believed the story or been able to confirm
any of its details.
Continued
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By the end of December 1981, both The
New York Times and the Los Angeles Times
were describing the story as a hoax. Ronald
J. Ostrow and Robert Toth of the Los
Angeles Times, citing investigative
sources, blamed the original disinforma-
tion on the Israelis. If they were correct,
the Israelis had accomplished something
important: a rupture in U.S.-Libya com-
mercial and diplomatic relations. (The ad-
ministration asked U.S. citizens to leave
Libya and requested U.S. oil companies to
withdraw.) On the other hand, if it was an
administration plot, the story served
another important purpose, as it helped
prepare the mass of Americans who don't
have access to either coast's Times for
stepped-up U. S. intervention in the Mid-
dle East and for a renewal of the hard-line
Cold War stance toward those Libyan
"allies," the Soviets.
(Editor's note: In Seymour Hersh's re-
cent New York Times article, which ap-
peared after the above was written, Hersh
quotes his sources as claiming that the
story came from William Casey, not Israel,
and was part of a larger disinformation
campaign mounted by Casey against
Libya, one in which Casey contrived
phony "evidence" that was passed around
government circles as official CIA reports
and was leaked to the press by Michael Le-
deen. Hersh writes that Casey acted with
the approval of President Reagan, then-
Secretary of State Alexander Haig and
Assistant Secretary of State William Clark,
one of Reagan's closest friends. Hersh
quotes "an intelligence official who has
direct access to communications in-
telligence reports" as saying, "The stuff I
saw did not make a substantial case that we
had ;threat. There was nothing to cause us
to act', as we have, saying Qadhaf is enemy
No. I." Hersh also quotes an official who
served on a special task force assessing the
Libyan information as telling him that
William Casey was "in effect, running an
operation inside the American govern-
ment ... He was feeding the disinforma-
tion into the system sot it would be seen as
separate, independent reports, and taken
seriously by other government agencies. "
Still another source told Hersh, "The
whole thing was a big fabrication." If
Hersh is correct, then any Israeli role in the
event - the "terrorist' sketchesyfor ex-
ample - would have been opportunistic
capitalizing on Casey's scheme,.)
Nicaraguan
Drug
Smuggling
In 1984, the administration mastermind-
ed an attempted drug sting in Nicaragua -
one that, as an article in the L.A. Times
Opinion section noted last December,
bears the fingerprints of Oliver North. The
key link is a cargo airplane that would
become famous and would be associated
with North ally Richard Secord and
Southern Air Transport. In 1984, the
plane, a C-123K, was turned over to DEA
informer Adler Seal, presumably by
Secord, and outfitted with cameras hidden
under both wings. Seal then landed the
plane in Managua. A Sandinista security
official, Frederico Vaughn, was captured
standing near the aircraft by the plane's
cameras. The plane then returned to the
U.S., drugs were found, and Seal testified
that he got them from Vaughn, whom a
Miami grand jury proceeded to indict. The
White House made maximum propaganda
use of this incident, accusing the San-
dinistas of widespread drug dealing.
As it happens, like the proverbial
albatross, this same C-123 K returned to
Nicaragua last October carrying Eugene
Hasenfus. A few weeks ago CNN reported
that planes obtained by North and Secord
from Southern Air Transport and used in
the contra supply operation regularly flew
back to the U.S. with cocaine after taking
guns to Central America for the contras.
While it has not been demonstrated that
North knew about this drug smuggling
(assuming it happened - the Senate is in-
vestigating), this has all the earmarks of a
North dirty trick: using drugs to finance
weapons for the contras while spreading
disinformation accusing the Sandinistas of
this kind of activity.
The case against Vaughn? Despite the
grand jury indictment, Seal's testimony
was the only evidence linking Vaughn to
the drugs. Just when it appear that the
case was unraveling and that Seal's
background as a "compelled" witness and
drug dealer was becoming known, Seal was
found murdered, effectively terminating
the case. (The Colombians have been ar-
rested. The murder weapon has been
traced to a group allegedly engaged in ille-
gal gun-running to the contras.) The White
House, however, persisted in using the
story to smear the Sandinistas; President
Reagan, in fact, made much of it in a
March 16, 1986 special TV address seeking
aid for the contras. Referring to the Seal
airplane, the president accused the San-
dinista leadership of complicity in cocaine
running. The next day, DEA director John
C. Lawson told The New York Times that
there was no evidence whatever to support
Reagan's assertion. (Again, it is useful to
remember that most of the public does not
get to read The New York Times.)
To spread the disinformation, former
Senator Paula Hawkins (R-Florida), a close
ally of President Reagan, in September
1984 turned her Subcommittee on Alco-
htrlism and Drug Abuse into a plat-
form for Michael Ledeen to expand on the
subject of Sandinista-Cuban drug smuggl-
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ing. (Ollie North, it might be noted, was
very active last year in fund-raising for
Hawkins' unsuccessful re-election bid.)
Hawkins also helped in another way: The
term "narco-terrorism," as applied to the
Sandinistas, first appeared on September
18, 1984, in an article by Hawkins in the
Washington Times, a newspaper that serves,
as a propaganda organ for the Moonies.
(Notably, the term was also used in con-
nection with the "Bulgarian plot to kill the
pope" at hearings held by another North
ally, former Senator Jeremiah Denton [R-
Alabama], for his Subcommittee on Ter-
rorism. Testifying were Robert Moss and
the ubiquitous Michael Ledeen.)
All of this recalls a similar disinformation
campaign run by the CIA against Cuba in
the '60s, when it was claimed that Cuba
was a control point of heroin-running into
the U. S. (Actually, heroin comes over-
whelmingly from those U.S. allies Turkey,
Thailand and, more recently, Mexico.)
From time to time the Cuban connection is
reincarnated in another form, most recent-
ly in December 1984, when "unnamed"
State Department, CIA and Justice
Department officials told the San Francisco
Examiner that Robert Vesco, the fugitive
financier, was, with Cuban, Libyan and
Bulgarian help, running a drug-smuggling
ring from his luxurious seaside villa in
Cuba.
Sandinista
Persecution of
La Prensa
Since the Reagan administration took of-
fice and William Casey took over the CIA,
the principal focus of CIA disinformation
has not been Libya, but Nicaragua. That
country has also been the target of a major
destabilization campaign, meaning covert
acts meant to turn a population against its
government. The CIA has unleashed upon
this country a well-tested bag of tricks
reminiscent of its highly successful - and
well-documented by Senate Intelligence
Committee hearings of the mid-'70s -
campaign against the Chilean government
of Salvador Allende, an effort that paved
the way for the U.S.-engineered military
coup that made Augusto Pinochet the
Chilean dictator.
According to the 1983 Facts on File,
there were two major meetings of the Na-
tional Security Council to authorize covert
action against Nicaragua: in March 1981,
when $19.5 million was allotted, and in
April 1982. Even before this there were
two telltale signs indicating that the
Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa had
already, even under Jimmy Carter, become
an "asset" of the CIA. (Newsweek of
November 8, 1982, reported that in 1978
Carter had signed a "finding" authorizing
covert CIA support for "democratic
elements" in Nicaragua, such as the
press.)
One sign was that Pedro Joaquin
Chamorro Jr., the assistant editor of La
Prensa, was named to the executive leader-
ship of the InterAmerican Press Associa-
tion, which soon began giving extensive
coverage in its newsletter to "threats"
against free speech in Nicaragua.
(Chamorro has just been named one of the
new civilian heads of the contras.) In
December 1977, The New York Times
identified the IAPA as a "covert action
resource" of the CIA. My own research
has sfiod tAt one of the IAPA's primary
purposes is to circulate through its monthly
newsletter groundless charges of threats to
a free press in countries moving away from
U. S. control. For example, coinciding.
with the three-year period of CIA
destabilization in Chile, the IAPA newslet-
ter devoted 25 percent of its space to al-
leged threats to the Chilean press by the
Allende government - pure disinforma
tion, since, as a matter of historical fact;
the Allende government never intruded in
the rambunctious Chilean press, which was
largely controlled by right-wing papers'
hostile to government programs. The
hewapape " El. Merr`Iiri was`6ffen sutgled
out by the IAPA as a target of the Allende
government; in July 1971, the paper's
director, Rene Silver Espejo, bluntly told
me in a taped interview that nothing
whatever had happened to El Mercurio. (As
it happens, El Mercurio was identified as
being a focus of CIA activities during this
period by the House Select Committee on
Intelligence, whose 619-page 1978 report,
The CIA and the Media, still makes
fascinating reading on the nature of the
kind of covert, operations pushed by the
Reagan-Casey crowd. Other essential
documents for understanding CIA covert
operations are Covert Action in Chile,
released in December 1975 by the Senate.
Select- Gomnsitte ' on Intelligence Ac
tivities, and Coven Action, released in
March 1976 by the same body.)
The second sign of a La Prensa takeover
by the- CIA was a dramatic change in the
nature of the paper's coverage. As the CIA-
influenced newspapers had done in Chile,
La Prensa began running a series of sensa-
tional, National Enquirer-like articles that
soon coincided with a larger CIA effort to
discredit Sandinista leaders, create artifical
divisions in the population and demoralize
the Nicaraguan people.
Consider some of the headlines from ear-
ly '81, when the Reagan administration
signaled a step-up in anti-Sandinista ac-
tivities: "Beware of Exotic Plague,"
"Plague Threatens Tobacco," "Giant
Mosquitos Invade Managua - They Are
Bloodsuckers," "Rabid Vampire Bats
Transmit Rabies," "Malaria Plague
Treated by Cuban Technicians," "16
Children With Polio," "Russians Bring
Polio Vaccine," "Cuban Cattle Bring
Hoof-and-Mouth Disease," "Mosquitoes
Transmit Dengue Fever," "Cuban Pork
Infected With Swine Virus."
These headlines were coordinated with
rumor and graffiti campaigns aimed at giv-
ing a religious meaning to the plagues
allegedly inflicting Nicaragua, comparing
them to the biblical plagues sent to Egypt
as a sign of God's displeasure. Although
many of the articles were fabricated -
there never were any plagues - or used in-
formation that was greatly distorted or
taken out of context, to the highly religious
Nicaraguan population they had an ob-
vious psychological effect: They linked
Cubans and Russians (the former whose
presence in the country was minuscule at
that point, and the latter whose presence
was almost non-existent) to the plagues and
punishment of Nicaragua. As it happens,
the CIA-controlled Chilean papers - using
techniques right out the U.S. psychological
warfare manuals and CIA disinformation
labs - had mounted an identical effort
against the Allende government.
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As in Chile, where El Mercurio had car- on the press. By this time La Prensa was
ried stories constantly associating mutila- openly engaged in creating buying panics
tion with food in order to create an image in already shortage-plagued Nicaragua. By
of total and absolute chaos and nausea in reporting that a certain commodity was
the-'country, La Prensa also peppered its about to be in short supply (though it ac-
paper with mutilation stories in early 1981. tually wasn't), La Prensa fomented buying
Some headlines: "Three Babies Born rushes - and soon after, those com-
Without Heads in Leon," "Criminal Band modifies were in short supply.
in Leon Commits Cannibalism," "Head The censoring of La Prensa was certainly
Missing of Labor Leader," "Capture Jack what the CIA and the Reagan administra_
the Ripper." In subsequent months the tion had hoped to bring about. In their
mutilation stories were followed by several mass disinformation campaign against
articles about the Virgin Mother making Nicaragua, no other single element has car-
miraculous appearances in Nicaragua, and ried so much weight with the public, the
letting it be known, according to La Press and Congress. Knowing what a
Prensa's religious editor Humberto Belli, useful propaganda tool La'Prensa was, the
that she was not happy with the San- administration saw to it that the newspaper
dinistas. After the Virgin's first ap- - was openly funded after Congress cut off -
pearance, a plaster statue of Mary was or thought it cut off - covert CIA opera- .
found to be miraculously sweating (or so tions against Nicaragua. Few Americans
La Prensa reported). Soon after, La Prensa know that from January 1985 until the
was reporting the Virgin being widely Nicaraguan government finally shut it
sighted in street lamps and light bulbs. down late last year, La Prensa received
Before Grenada was redeemed by the money from the National Endowment for
Marines, La Prensa reported the Virgin Democracy, a U.S. government agency
descending upon it as well. Over the next that supposedly supports "democratic in-
year she also appeared, according to La stitutions" abroad and which the press has
Prensa, in Cuba, Poland, Czechoslovakia now linked to Oliver North's other opera-
and China. The message was not lost on tions. In essence, the U.S. government
Nicaragua's religious population: The controlled the opposition newspaper in a
Virgin was going after Socialist countries, country against which it had gone to war.
therefore Nicaragua - despite its mixed To appreciate the effectiveness of the in-
economy and protection of civil liberties at tegrated psychological warfare, rumor and
that point - must be Socialist. The press campaigns, consider this report from
"Virgin" campaign, it should be noted, followed the Reagan administration vote to Insight magazine of January 19, 1987, writ-
expand covert operations against ten by Roger Fontaine, former head of
Nicaragua - part of which clearly has been Latin American planning at the National
to split off Catholics from the government. Security Council:
Another disinformation technique The first attack on the Sandinista
adopted by La Prensa in emulation of the power structure took place in
Chilean press was the juxtaposition of Managua the night of Nov. 17, 1986.
photos of Sandinista leaders next to articles About 2,000 slum dwellers attacked
about vicious criminals. Any wild rumors and destroyed a police station. The
linking Sandinistas to crime or any kind of barrio's inhabitants were spurred to
abuse were dramatically played up, as were violence after rumors circulated for
instances of citizens' discontent. Although weeks that the Sandinistas protected
the Sandinistas understood what was hap- occult groups who were kidnaping
pening, they forbore from intervening in children for blood extraction,
La Prensa out of the quite correct belief dismemberment and cannibalism.
that to do so would provide the Reagan ad- State Department officers at the
minstration with an immense tool with U.S. Embassy in Managua con-
which to rally public and congressional firmed ? that the grisly stories had cir-
support for its crusade alainst them., L culated . . . "One common story,"
By nfid"1982,'however, the war with the one cable reported, "asserts that a
CIA-recruited contras (for excellent ac- satanic cult kidnaps children, whose
counts of their recruitment, see the L.A. blood is extracted for an ailing San-
Tvnes of March 3-5, 1985 and Washington dinista comandante and whose bodies
Post reporter Chris Dickey's book, With are used as meat."
the Contras) had heated up, as had the CIA The L.A. Times Magazine pointed out
sabotage and economic and poltucal over the weekend that the contra radio sta-
destabilization campaign (according to the tion was pushing this tale for all it's worth.
London Times and the Nation magazine,
opposition politicians were bribed and the
church was pushed to take a strong anti-
Sandinista stand).
The Sandinistas now felt compelled to
impose an emergency decree restricting the
rights of assembly and imposing censorship
The
International
Soviet Terror
Network
As reported in The New York Times in
May 1981, a CIA "National Foreign
Assessment Report on Terrorism" dated
2/3/81 rejected allegations of a Soviet role
in international terrorism. FBI director
William Webster, appearing on Meet the
Press on April 26, 1981, stated that the FBI
- despite years of Soviet-watching - had
no evidence of Soviet backing of terrorism
in the U.S. Conrad Hassel, FBI director of
anti-terrorism, speaking at the 1979 annual
meeting of the Association of Former In-
telligence Officers: "If you want to believe
in the conspiracy theory of terrorism, well,
you've got it, but there's- no evidence for
it." And Howard Bane, director of the
CIA's Department of Terrorism, reacting
to a speech by former CIA deputy director
Ray Cline at the same 1979 AFIO meeting:
"We've got to get Cline off this Moscow
backing of terrorism. It's divisive. It's not
true. There is not one single bit of truth to
it. "
Finally, lest it be suspected that things
may have changed since 1981, the current
best-seller The Financing of Temvrirm by
London Times defense correspondent James
Adams presents a well-documented case
that terrorist groups are self-financed and
largely self-directed. There is no "Soviet
terror network" or much of an "interna-
tional terror network." There is state-
sponsored terrorism, but this is peculiar to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There is an apparent paradox here. The
notion of an international Soviet terror net-
work has been reported in the U.S. media
for years, and from time to time various ad-
ministration officials and their tight-wing
allies in Congress and the press have trot-
ted out the idea that the Soviets are really
behind all the world's terrorism, lending a
push to one or another of the administra-
tion's policies, such as an end to arms con-
trol talks. Disclaimers even from such ex-
perts as above get little attention m the
otinued
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macs tAeQ, tut when Alexander Haig as
Secretary of State or Ronald Reagan, who
made much of it during the 1980 political
campaign, pronounce the Soviets the
source of all terrorism and the mass media
reports this disinformation, there is an in-
calculably huge impact on the public mind.
The theme of an international Soviet ter-
ror network was given a big push in Israel
during the July 1979 Jonathan Institute
Conference on Terrorism. The institute
and the conference were put together by
former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.
Benjamin Netanyahu (who named it after
his brother). Keynote speakers were our
old friends Michael Ledeen, Claire Sterling
and Robert Moss, plus Lord Chalfont, a
right-wing former British cabinet officer
and present-day writer. The top officials
from all five branches of Israeli intelligence
were there, as well as representatives from
the CIA and prominent Republican can-
didates. This conference helped inspire
Claire Sterling's influential The Terror Net-
work, Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borch-
grave's The Spike, and articles in Com-
mentary, New Republic and Washington
Quarterly.
Because it has influenced the thinking of
the mass media, Sterling's book, more of a
theological than a factual work, is worth
examining. In it, Sterling artfu y redefines
terrorism so that all terrorist roads lead to -
Moscow.
Herewith the Sterling rules for discover-
ing KGB plots: 1) If the terrorist is overtly
left-leaning, he is -automatically controlled
by Moscow; 2) If the terrorist is overtly
right-wing, he is covertly red and controlled
by Moscow; 3) If the weapon used in a ter-
rorist act is of Soviet manufacture, this is
prima facie evidence of control by
Moscow; 4) If the weapon used is of U.S.
manufacture, Sterling can trace it by serial
number to an assault by Red Brigades on
some NATO base - the Red Brigades- are
controlled by Moscow; 5) If all the
available evidence points to the Mafia, or a
right-wing criminal has actually confessed,
we should remember that "red" and
"black" (right-wing) terrorists work
together.
In support of these conclusions, Sterling
does an extraordinary job of twisting
evidence or reporting simply made-up
evidence from intelligence and right-wing
circles that have their own reasons for
disinforming the public about the Soviets.
Forty percent of her footnotes quote
herself, Moss, or Ledeen; the remainder
quote other Jonathan conference par-
ticipants, Israeli intelligence, . _ and CIA
reports with virtually no questioning of
whether the information supposedly sup-
plied by these agencies is accurate.
How much currency these then es gained
was indicated by the fact that Sterling,
of ll people, was hired. by The Phew York
Times to cover the trial of attempted papal
assassin Mehmet Ali Agca, even though
Sterling's work had been discredited in
scholarly and alternative publications. In
her reports, Sterling, of course, proceeded
to manipulate the context of the trial
evidence to suggest a Bulgarian-Soviet link
- an observation actually refuted by the
trial evidence itself and by the suspect.
It's useful to note that, as reported in the
Wall Street Journal (July, 1979), the pur-
pose of the Jonathan conference was to
combat the growing isolation of Israel. The
idea, the journal said, was to get the U. S.
to perceive an Israeli problem as also a
U. S. problem. Hence, any Soviet "connec-
tion" to terrorism would likely stir up U. S.
sympathies. A second Jonathan Institute
Conference on Terrorism was held June
24-27, 1984, in Washington. Again,
Michael Ledeen and "Claire Sterling spoke,
as did Arnaud de Borchgrave and Lord
Chalfont, the latter two covering "Ter-
rorism and the Media." De Borchgrave's
Washington Times gave daily front-page
coverage to the conference. Some
headlines: "The Hidden Peril - America
in the Gunsight of Global Terror"; "Ter-
rorist Groups Now Firmly Established in
the U.S."; "Kremlin Accused of Aid to
Terrorism"; "The Terrorist Threat - Ac-
curate Intelligence Is the First Line of
Defense"; "Mass Media Accused of
Neutrality"; and "The Terrorist Threat -
Chemical, Biological Attack Possible."
The Bulgarian
Plot To Kill
the Pope
On May 31, 1981, a young Turk named
Mehmet All Agca fired shots at Pope John
Paul II as the pope's vehicle circled
through St. Peter's Square. Although Agca
was indisputably associated with a Turkish
criminal and political group called the Gray
Wolves [Editor's note: and has also been
linked to various Western intelligence ser-
vices, including the CIA], which had
historic ties to European fascist organ-
izations in the pre- and post-World War
II era, news reports soon began to ap-
pear that, of all people, the Bulgarians,
perhaps as agents of the Soviets, were
behind the attempted shootings, and not
the Gray Wolves. As evidence, the reports
cited Agars "mysterious" transit through
Bulgaria before the shooting, the
movements of c rtaia Bulgarian officials,
.and, later, even some photos purporting to
show some alleged members of the
Bulgarian intelligence service in Vatican
Square. Agca was soon reported to be giv-
ing corrorabatise testimony to this. r
Therm Ilil ieporls L-re later found to
have derived significantly from a far-right-
wing and neo-fascist element of the Italian
intelligence and military service, one with
historically close ties. to the CIA and
presumably with some connection to the
Gray Wolves, however tentative. (Many
high-ranking members of this element,
known as P-2, have since been forced out
of office, and some into jail, over a scandal
involving an attempt to overthrow the
Italian government.) At his trial last year
Agca, in between claiming to be God (his
lawyer described him as a schizophrenic
psychopath), would say he was forced into
making accusations against the Bulgarians
by his interrogators - a charge for which
there was independent verification at a
court hearing on another matter. And
Italian magistrates found no evidence with
which to convict the one Bulgarian charged
in the case, Sergei Antanov, the commer-
cial attache at the Bulgarian embassy.
Despite all this, the Bulgarian plot story
got an extraordinarily heavy and long
disinformation run.
The first reports of an alleged Bulgarian
connection appeared in the Italian
newspaper Il Gioniale Nuovo, a right-wing
sheet with close relations to Italy's in-
telligence circles and a paper widely be-
lieved among the Italian intelligentsia to be
at minimum "CIA influenced." (Michael
Ledeen wrote the initial "Bulgarian"
story. His career as a journalist began here,
and the paper is a frequently cited source
of reports in Claire Sterling's Terrorist Net-
work.) From there the story was picked up
by the mass media. In Washington, careful
leaks from the administration suggested
that there was no reason to disbelieve the
story. Right-wing and Cold War lobbying
outfits such as the Committee for the Pre-
sent Danger seized on the tale.
All of this was fortuitous, to say the least,
for the administration, which was at the
time befit on reviving the Cold War and
was pressing for a vast new military build-
up, especially of the high-ticket strategic
weapons so beloved by the right and by
their military-contractor allies. Indeed, the
"Bulgarian plot" became one of the
strongest elements of a public psychology
that swung heavily against "the evil em-
pire," making it difficult for critics of the
administration's weapons and arms control
policies to get a hearing in the media or in
Congress.
,.n a Continued
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In the real world, it happens that the all-
important (in the sense of controlling
public perception of events) evening net-
work news shows do not do much original,
careful research. They rely instead on a
variety of sources, especially published
material and public documents, as well as
"studies" by outside agencies, to set the
attitude of their reports and provide much
of the information. (Readers should be
suspicious of any reports, Op-Ed page ar-
ticles or information issuing from the
Georgetown Center for Strategic and Inter-
national Studies, for whose Washington
Quarterly Journal Michael Ledeen once
toiled as editor.)
In the "Pope Plot" case, perhaps the
most influential key "background"
material for the ensuing network reports
was a Reader's Digest article in September
1982 by none other than Claire Sterling,
purporting to document the Bulgarian con-
nection. The article was coordinated with
an NBC-TV special, The Man Who Shot the
Pope: A Study in Terrorism, in which Sterl-
ing was interviewed at length. The conser-
vative Reader's Digest, here providing a
knowing or unknowing disi#ormation
channel, helped out with a giant publicity
campaign for the article. How did Sterling
account for a Gray Wolf being part of a
communist plot? She suggested that this
was part of a "legend" the KGB had
created for Agca to deceive the West.
Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen and Robert
Moss gave aid and comfort to the story by
appearing before Denton's Subcommittee
on Terrorism, and Moss went on Nightline
to say that one of the (already-discredited)
sketches of the elusive terrorists from the
famed Libyan hit team sent to kill Reagan
resembled a face in the crowd photo-
graphed in St. Peter's Square. (Personally,
I think the guy in the photo is Father Guido
Sarducci of Saturday Night Live.) Michael
Ledeen later got back in the act with an at-
tack on journalistic critics of the Bulgarian
connection in the neo-conservative maga-
zine Commentary (June 1983) and in
his bogk Grave New World, in which he ac-
cusedtseveral respected journalists of be-
ing, at minimum, dupes of Soviet pro-
pagandists for questioning the Bulgarian
connection. Included on his enemies list
were the late columnist Joseph Kraft and
Henry Kamm of The New York Times, who
had quoted Israeli "intelligence sources"
as being skeptical of the story. Ledeen,
who later put the Israelis together with
Oliver North's NSC for the Iranian arms
deal, but denies being an Israeli in-
telligence or disinformation agent, wrote:
"I asked Israeli officials if they could con-
firm Kamm's account of their govern-
ment's skepticism, and they responded
after several days by denying that any
Israeli intelligence official [his italics] had
ever made such a statement."
(Foc a superb refutation of Sterling's,
Ledeen's and Moss' twisted evidence in
the Bulgarian connection, as well as a
scholarly dissection of the pope plot as a
disinformation campaign, see the Spring
1985 issue of Covert Action Information
Bulletin. The report, by Frank Brodhead,
Howard Friel and Edward S. Herman,
should be required reading for every jour-
nalist in the West.)
The Chemical
Dust Caper
The 'date was August 22, 1985. The
Reagan administration was preparing for a
summit meeting with the Soviets. The
following story appeared in the L.A.
Times, typical of news reports all over the
country and on network TV.
WASHINGTON - The U.S;
government accused the Soviet
secret police Wednesday of planting
a potentially cancer-causing chemical
dust on American diplomats in
Moscow to help track their
movements and discover their con-
tacts among Soviet citizens.
State Department spokesman
Charles Redman said the United
States "protested the practice in the
strongest terms" to Soviet
authorities, describing it as a blatant
violation of diplomatic practice and a
potential danger to the health of
U. S. personnel.
In Santa Barbara, White House
spokesman Larry Speakes said that
"it's entirely possible" President
Reagan will raise the issue when he
meets Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gor-
bachev in Geneva in November. But
Speakes said the meeting should not
be disrupted as a result of the
cidents.
Nevertheless, the dispute certainly
will chill the atmosphere of the
meeting, the first between a U.S.
President and a Soviet Communist
Party General Secretary since Presi-
dent Jimmy Carter met President
Leonid I. Brezhnev in Vienna in
1979. Speakes said that Reagan was
informed of the incidents Monday.
The Soviets have used chemical
tracking techniques at least since the
mid-1970s in Moscow and else-
where, including at least one in-
cident in the United States, a State
Department official said. He said
Washington decided to protest the
practice now, instead of 10 years ago,
because the use of the chemical was
increased sharply this spring.
U. S. officials said they first
learned of the potential health risks
of the chemical, identified as
nitrophenylpentadiene, or NPPD,
within the last few weeks.
The prime targets for the chemical
espionage apparently are Soviet
dissidents and others who meet
clandestinely with U.S. diplomats.
The Soviet secret police, known as
the KGB, presumably could con-
sider the presence of the chemical on
the person or property of a Soviet
citizen to be evidence of a secret con-
tact with a U.S. diplomat. Those
found to bear traces of the chemical,
which experts said could be fluores-
cent, could then be interrogated.
The State Department official said
that the chemical is dusted on
doorknobs, auto steering wheels and
other places U.S. diplomats are like-
ly to touch. Once a person is con-
taminated with the chemical, it is
difficult to remove completely, he
added, and KGB chemical tests can
detect very small amounts of the
substance.
The official said Washington
"assumes" that the chemical also
has been used against private
American citizens, including jour-
nalists, and against other Western
diplomats. However, proof has been
obtained only of use against U. S.
Embassy personnel.
He said the United States is con-
cerned both about the political im-
plications of the tracking and about
the possible health ticks. But he
made it clear that Washington decid-
ed to go public only after learning of
the health aspects. Presumably, the
United States kept quiet at first to
avoid letting the KGB know what
the United States knew about the
Soviet technique.
The official declined to speculate
on why the increase in the chemical's
use coincided with Gorbachev's
selection as the Soviet leader and
added that the timing of Wednes.
day's announcement was not related
to the November summit.
Speakes alep 'said that Wednes.
day's announcement was not timed
to detract from the announcement of
the coming anti-satellite weapon test.
"No connection whatsoever," he
declared. "You're reading more into
it than exists. We simply, once we
got the facts in hand, felt that it was
important that we proceed with pro-
Cc AmAid
7.
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tecting our personnel and informing
them of the exposure. "
Redman said that NPPD "has
been determined through biological
testing" to cause mutations, or
genetic changes. Chemicals that
cause mutations in any organism
often but not always - cause
cancer in humans. Redman said ex-
tensive tests, possibly lasting years,
would be necessary to determine if
the chemical is a carcinogen.
Even taken at face value, the contradic-
tions in the story were obvious. The U.S.
had known about the spy dust for 10 years,
but - even with all its chemical sophistica-
tion and sensitivity to being spied on -
had let it continue, taking no preventative
measures until it suddenly learned that
there was a health hazard. Only then did
the U. S. protest spy dusting as "a violation
of diplomatic practice. " Nor was there any
explanation of just how the U.S. govern-
ment came to learn "in the last few weeks"
that the chemical was a health hazard -
what had inspired the tests, who had per-
formed them, and what documented
medical history there was of problems with
the chemical. Had any U. S. Embassy
workers been stricken over the past 10
years?
Although the press didn't raise these
questions, it did an elaborate job of cover-
ing the show in Moscow in which U.S.
Embassy employees and some 25
diplomats from other countries were called
in for a briefing by top officials and were
then interviewed with their worried
families about the meaning of it all. Would
they come down with cancer? Flashed all
across the U. S., the scene certainly raised
the ugliest suspicions about the Soviets and
tended to confirm the "evil empire"
characterization of a nation with which the
U. S. was about to enter a summit negotia-
tion. Clearly, the United States had to re-
main firm against such a nation; gestures
toward peace from it would necessarily be
suspect and were to be resisted. Any coun-
try whose officials would willfully cause
cancer was not a country that could be
trusted on any measures.
The Soviet Union said outright that
creating this impression was the purpose of
the "disclosure." Calling the story "ab-
surd inventions," Tass noted that the U.S.
claims were intended "to prepare the
groundwork for a regular slanderous cam-
paign against the Soviet Union, to poison
the atmosphere in relations between our
two countries, and to fan hostility toward
the Soviet people." The Reagan ad-
ministration denied this.
Who was telling the truth?
Several months after the disclosure, and
well after the non-eventful Vienna summit
meeting in which the U.S. budged not an
inch on any of its positions, it was quietly
noted in a handful of U.S. publications
that the United States had been using such
"spy dust" for years to track its own
diplomatic targets. No negative medical
results were ever reported from this. When
in February, 1986, the U. S. Embassy in
Moscow quietly reported to staffers that
there was not, nor had there ever been, a
threat to them from the chemical. (The
embassy didn't say whether the chemical
had actually been found at the embassy, or
whether that part of the story was con-
trived as well.)
And in response to an L.A. Weekly query
about the State Department's latest posi-
tion on the "spy dust," a department
spokesman said, "I'll get back to you if I
can find an answer." He never did. ^
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