Presswatch/Distortions, Omissions, Lies
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH DISTORTIONS, OMISSIONS, LIES Is there such a thing as a life cycle of a newspaper? Can one measure its vital signs and diagnose symptoms of a possibly fatal disease? There are...
...The Toshiba Case . . . Kept from Your Eyes In August, the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju carried an article by a new contributor, Mr...
...Our Gulf policy is internally incoherent, for in the name of fighting Iran, we have adopted a policy (guaranteeing the safe shipment of oil in the Gulf) that benefits the Iranians...
...People in the public eye . . . or in the shadows...
...Oddly, for a story that clearly required a good deal of research, both papers carried it on the front page on the same day: Sunday, August 23...
...Two years ago, in a chapter written for a Hoover Institution volume on disinformation, I said that the "Greek case exposes the KGB at its most arrogant and aggressive, generally not even bothering to carefully hide its own direct involvement in the internal affairs of Greece...
...It's a good example, I think, because the journalists in question are all first class...
...Reps...
...The Times: Although possibly providing new ammunition for those who charge it with treaty violations, the Soviet Union has taken the surprising step of opening a disputed topTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 31 secret radar installation to Western inspection to show its willingness for an East-West accord at a critical time in arms control .. . The fact of the matter is that the visit confirmed what had been known for some time: the radar base is in violation of the treaty...
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...This is because the objects toward which they show interest are completely removed from those of ordinary business...
...Krasnoyarsk is no less a violation for being acknowledged, finally, by Moscow...
...The Post lead: Three Democratic members of Congress, returning from an unprecedented visit to a controversial Soviet radar facility, yesterday challenged claims by some Reagan administration officials that the facility is designed—in violation of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty—to help defend against a ballistic missile attack...
...The radar should be dismantled...
...in this case we have only lies...
...Also...
...Terrorism...
...Confessions of a Principal in Toshiba Machine Case...
...How do we know about this (not Douglas Blaufarb, William Hood, Robert Jervis, William R. Johnson, David Kahn, James W. Lucas, David Miller, Fredric Mitchell, David Atlee Phillips, Richard Pipes, Douglas Porch, Paul Seabury, Major, J. Thompson Strong, USAF Ralph K. White, and F Reese Brown, Editor-In-Chief IJIC THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE Published by the Intel Publishing Group, Inc...
...dollars...
...Yet an account of this campaign would greatly help American readers understand the political atmosphere in Greece, and the extent to which pro-Soviet, anti-American publications, totally out of touch with reality, influence the national debate...
...Once again, we cannot get the full story from the American press...
...the Times account by Stephen Engelberg and retired Admiral Bernard Trainor, who has embarked upon a second career in journalism...
...T et's look at another story...
...why not newspapers (which certainly exist, while "civilizations" are much more problematic...
...Ethnos brought suit against the Economist earlier this year, failed to convince a British jury of its independence of the Soviet Union's doctrines, and settled out of court...
...COCOM is Powerless in Face of Japanese Trading Firm's Methods...
...The second point is that, although many American newspapers have stringers in Greece, no one has seen fit to report this seizure of journalistic madness...
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...But interestingly, the very weakness of the Times account points up the great difference between it and the Post once again: the Times basically wants its readers to have enough information to form an educated opinion...
...On Septemberr 9, both papers ran a front-page story on the trip by an American congressional delegation to Krasnoyarsk in the Soviet Union, where a controversial radar base has been built...
...The Post made that point quite clearly...
...Baker's feelings became public in June when he declared that the Administration was prepared to consider a joint United States-Soviet operation in the gulf, an idea that had no support among other senior policy makers...
...And the Post editorialists, evidently concerned about the incredibly misleading headline and lead of the story, laid it out two days later: The Kremlin is in violation...
...Curiously, the two American stories, although quite long and detailed, do not mention either the KGB or the fact that many ostensibly innocent Western products are desperately needed by the Kremlin for military purposes...
...the articles continue...
...Thomas J. Downey, Jim Moody, and Bob Carr . . . said at a news conference here [the story has no dateline!] that the radar appeared to be designed only to warn of a ballistic missile attack [I know it's incoherent, but that's what it says...
...Greeks Bearing Tricks From time to time I have referred to the fascinating story of Ethnos, an Athens newspaper that faithfully presents the Soviet view of the world to Greek readers, and that, according to a well-known Greek journalist named Paul Anastasi (who writes for the New York Times and the London Telegraph) and others (including the Economist Foreign Report) is funded and guided directly by the KGB...
...So if you want to know what really happened, who did it, and why, you will have to read the Congressional Record...
...American intelligence experts had identified Krasnoyarsk as a violation of the ABM treaty, since it was aimed in a direction to detect incoming ballistic missiles...
...Schizophrenia, Post-style, is a sign of illness, not evidence of "healthy" internal debate...
...But to return to my original question about the life cycle of a newspaper: it's a bad sign for the health of the publication when a front-page news story has to be corrected on the editorial page...
...Box 188, Stroudsburg, PA 18360 U U I I I I I I I 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987...
...The Times noted something else that the Post missed: "Mr...
...Interesting, isn't it...
...He then explains the techniques by which illegal shipments go from Japan to the USSR, and deals with some other militarily vital equipment that routinely passes from Japan to the Kremlin, ranging from air conditioners that are needed in Soviet tanks (and that the Soviets themselves cannot manufacture) to anti-rust paper (needed to store weapons), and even refrigerated coffins (to ship bodies back from Afghanistan...
...For the Post, the crucial element is whether the Administration issued a new policy document...
...This difference in treatment is not a mere accident, depending upon the quality of the individual reporters...
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...Thus, we learn from the Times story many things that are not to be found in the Post, as for example that Howard Baker did not like the policy, and that "Mr...
...many of us are regular readers of Bungei Shunju, after all...
...The decision to reflag and escort Kuwaiti tankers had broad support within the administration and didn't require any formal decision directive from the president...
...it is the difference between a newspaper that considers itself the newspaper of record for educated English-speakers, and one which is a political-action organ (the Post, in the event there is any doubt...
...The general rule of disinformation is that there is supposed to be at least some kernel of truth at the heart of the cloud of deception...
...for the Times, the central fact was that the Administration did not foresee an American naval buildup in the Gulf...
...INTELLIGENCE ..ANALYZED WITH INTELLIGENCE risi======.1.m..........mmis...
...What is clear is the degree to which total irresponsibility characterizes much of Greek journalism, and, alas, political discourse in that country...
...What presents itself here is not something that needs to be resolved by the two parties but something that needs to be Presenting The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence...
...The Times: "Soviet Radar on Display...
...Kumagai makes it quite clear that the deal was designed and carried out by the KGB: It is a fact well known by all the resident staff members in Moscow that KGB members are taking part in foreign trade as members of the Soviet Trade Corporation...
...Here is the way Engelberg and Trainor began: President Reagan decided in March to protect Kuwait's oil tankers in the Persian Gulf after being told by his senior Cabinet advisers that it could be done without any increase in America's naval forces there .. . .. the policy makers considered few alternatives and did not see the move as momentous...
...I don't know where the other publications got the idea for the stories—in tandem with Ethnos's own accounts...
...I believe that the Washington Post is now in a period of sharp decline, for it has abandoned the traditional task of a newspaper—providing its readers with the basic facts about the world—in favor of attempting to shape its readers political opinions...
...And the Post editorialists went on to make an important point: . . . it makes glasnost not the servant of treaty compliance but a substitute for treaty compliance...
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...Tom Downey (and his congressional colleagues) and House Armed Services staffer Anthony Battista confirm that the facility, once completed, is meant to serve one or another phase of missile defense...
...The politics of international 'intelligence...
...The reason, officials say, was simple: Nobody thought a formal new interagency study of Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...The lead paragraphs indicate the differences between the two newspapers...
...They do not wear their KGB ID cards on their breast, but if one watches their words and actions carefully, they can easily be detected by persons who have been working for many years in Moscow...
...In a series of articles—well over a dozen by now—beginning late last year and running through the autumn, I have been accused of having spent several months in Greece (a country in which I have never set foot), taken control of the American Embassy in Athens, given orders to the CIA station chief there, launched a massive disinformation campaign against the Papandreou government, organized a tourism boycott against Greece, organized the assassination of a leading trade union figure, and attempted the assassination of Papandreou himself...
...Hitori Kumagai, entitled "These Are the Methods for Illegal Trade With the Soviet Union...
...The Post story was written by David Ignatius...
...But this bit of paperwork was not prepared in the case of America's recent military buildup in the Persian Gulf...
...If there is a weakness to the Times story, it is a failure to look deeply into the nature of the policy itself...
...Thanks to Senator Jesse Helms, who thoughtfully had an English translation placed in the Congressional Record, along with two American articles on the Toshiba affair, one from the Wall Street Journal, the other from the Christian Science Monitor...
...Many of the Soviet citizens involved in this deal were KGB officials, and they are named by Kumagai...
...Kumagai was a Japanese trade representative in Moscow, and he explains the inner workings of the horrendous sale of equipment by Toshiba and Kongsberg (of Norway) that enabled the Soviets to manufacture submarine propellers that are far quieter than anything they could have achieved on their own...
...There are questions that are routinely asked about such evanescent things as civilizations, societies, and nations...
...It should have been corrected on the front page, where the original disinformation appeared in the first place...
...The three newspapers that have taken the lead in this campaign are Pondiki (which, I am told, is the Greek equivalent of the French Canard Enchaine), something which is misnamed Demokratikos Logos, and, of course, Ethnos...
...It seems to me there are two points of interest: first, the degree to which a number of publications in Greece lend themselves to a disinformation campaign based entirely on fantasy...
...Since then, judging by my firsthand experience with the Greek press, I'd say things have gone from the ridiculous to the hallucinatory...
...The Post headline: "Soviet Radar Not a Missile Defense, Guests Say...
...Weinberger's active role surprised some in the Administration, who noted his reputation for counselling the utmost caution and prudence in use of military force...
...Editorial Board: John F Blake,ended by one party...
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...I was referring to the Ethnos case, where the role of the KGB was evident...
...They believed that the Iranians would not attack American targets because plans did not call for a change in the number of United States Navy ships in the gulf...
...And the Times gave the information necessary to understand why Weinberger did it: the key military leaders, from the chairman of the Joint by Michael Ledeen Chiefs of Staff on down, were similarly inclined...
...The Greek government said it had no information to support any of these "charges," and even the Department of State, normally a paradigm of cowardice in such cases, issued a vehement denial and accused the Greek press of complete indifference to the truth...
...This is a real bombshell (Howard Baker floating a personal policy trial balloon, a real lone ranger operation coming from the man who was supposed to restore team playing in the White House), but the Times put it well down in a page-long story...
...To see how this works in practice, compare the way the New York Times and the Post covered the same story—the evolution of the American government's Persian Gulf policy...
...Ignatius focused on a narrow question which he felt illuminated the policy process: When the Reagan administration has embarked on a new foreign policy venture, the president often has signed a document known as a "National Security Decision Directive' outlining the strategy behind the policy...
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...Intelligence activities—between governments and between corporations...
...The differences in the stories reflect the nature of the publications, not just the quality of the individual journalists...
...the Post aims to shape the opinion from the very outset, and doesn't care so much about providing the information...
...To no avail...
...Exclusive Contribution by Professional Smuggler...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
