Presswatch/A Shrinking World
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH A SHRINKING WORLD Iisbeen a great summer for the media, and we must choose among a cornucopia of goodies. The award for the most fascinating story comes from the Ivory Coast, courtesy...
...Rather surprisingly, he concluded that the efforts of North and the others to deal with Rafsanjani and his ilk were wise and laudable, and only failed because of the devious activities of the sinister Manucher Ghorbanifar...
...Indeed, Anderson has chosen well, for his constant use of allegedly secret information to "prove" commonplaces is one of the more comic aspects of his generally entertaining writing...
...I am far more likely to believe the Times than newspapers that refuse to issue such statements...
...ABIDJAN—Police had to rescue a traditional medicine man from a mob of angry fishermen who claimed he had used magic powers to reduce the size of their penises by two-thirds, press reports said yesterday...
...This sort of discussion tells us more about glasnost than the hundreds of column inches about Gorbachev's public relations campaign on behalf of a failed system...
...Jack Anderson and the Ayatollah I have ignored Jack Anderson for a couple of years, largely because I felt that anyone who wants his articles on the comics page (where the Washington Post runs them) should probably be reviewed in the classifieds...
...Ragionieri was not permitted to publish these documents, which only emerged in the late seventies, after the head of the Italian Communist party, Enrico Berlinguer, obtained permission from Spanish Communist party leader Santiago Carrillo...
...After the police prevented the two dozen fishermen from lynching him, the irate victims showed incredulous law-enforcement officers their appendages and accused the medicine man of being responsible for the shrinkage...
...Glasnost in the Soviet Archives In September, we learned that Soviet maps have been falsified ever since the Glorious Bolshevik Revolution...
...It is inconceivable that Hayek will be permitted access to the Comintern archives...
...I have been praising the policy of the Times in these matters for severalmonths, and once again I am impressed...
...Anyone who thought about human nature should have realized that taking the one person in the Iran initiative who knew everything (and Ghorbanifar was the only person who had been involved from the very beginning—indeed, he was the man who originally claimed that it was possible to improve relations between the United States and Iran) and throwing him to the wolves would cause Ghorbanifar to take his revenge...
...Moreover, at a later date, the human rights representative changed her mind, and "The Times then erred in not making its own determination of the facts...
...Never mind the agonizing self-reappraisals, please, just give us the facts...
...But this is a minor quibble...
...Some of these were quite important people within the structure of the Comintern, including, as Spriano observes, the brother-in-law of Togliatti himself...
...Spriano, who is the author of some of the best studies of Communist history (and who was the first Italian Communist to establish secret contact with the United States government back in the 1960s), recalls that about fifteen years ago an Italian Communist by the name of Ernesto Ragionieri went to Moscow and was permitted to read the secret messages between Palmiro Togliatti (the head of the Italian Communist party) and Dimitrov (the head of the Comintern) between 1937 and 1939, a period in which Togliatti represented the Comintern inside Spain during the final stages of the Civil War...
...The latter admitted to being responsible and confessed he had approached his victims with offers to restore their members to their former size—for a fee...
...It should not have left the impression that it was based on firsthand interviewing, and it should have explained why firsthand confirmation was not available...
...Why didn't they say anything...
...Why didn't they write it...
...Would that some of our own scholars and political scientists recognized it as such...
...Had the AFP reporter done a thorough job, the political implications of this story might well be enormous, particularly in the upcoming American elections...
...It may be churlish of me to complain about Anderson—after all, it's nice that people are finally coming around to realize not only that we had a serious objective in mind from the very beginning of the Iran initiative, but that it might well have been achieved with better management—but the use of Ghorbanifar as the excuse for the initiative's failure is a bit much...
...And our government, which makes its own maps of the Soviet Union, surely knew it...
...But this is hardly the most interesting aspect of the story, as the French news agency's reporter must have realized...
...Send another medal to Max Frankel for Honesty in Media...
...But even more important, according to Spriano, is the fact that many of the most crucial documents of that period are undoubtedly in the hands of the KGB, especially those that concern the arrest and torture of the hundreds of foreign Communists who fled fascist oppression and took "refuge" in the Soviet Union...
...This point was made with unusual passion by the distinguished Italian Communist historian, Paolo Spriano, in the Corriere della Sera in early September...
...And then there is the question of the "traditional medicine man...
...According to the note, The article fell short of The Times's reporting and editing standards...
...But the falsified maps are only one part of the massive falsification of most everything about the Soviet Union, above all its own history...
...If he really did the awful deed, what were his methods...
...Corrections of this sort are invaluable and, to me at least, add immeasurably to the credibility of the newspaper...
...Here again, we are entitled to ask our government and our newspapers why we hadn't learned that earlier...
...Harwood notes that the Post put Quayle in the role of someone "who says he is tough on defense, but from your era you didn't fight in the .. . war...
...One cannot help but suspect that Anderson was fed this line by those persons (largely officials of the CIA) who drove the unfortunate Ghorbanifar out of the operation in the summer of 1986, thereby guaranteeing that the Iran initiative would fail...
...does everyone on the "staff, etc...
...In our eagerness to not be left behind," Harwood notes, the Post "succumbed to the soiled embrace of Paula Parkinson and the promotion department of Playboy magazine...
...As Harwood quietly observed, however, this also "describes Michael Dukakis, a man tough on defense [!] who did not choose to fight in the war of his era—Korea...
...Finally, Harwood rightly bemoans the repetition of an old story, that Quayle had some sexual involvement with Paula Parkinson, who just happened to have a "memoir" coming out in Playboy...
...The role of the media is not to develop an image of infallibility, but rather to help create an informed public...
...Aside from the fishermen themselves, could anyone verify their claims...
...Spriano reminds us about Milos Hayek, a Czech Communist who joined with Dubcek during the Prague Spring, and is now a spokesman for Charter 77...
...The memo, sent to "Ben Bradlee, Meg Greenfield, Staff, etc...
...We are indebted to Professor Spriano for his candor...
...And this took place, as Spriano puts it with appropriate sarcasm, "during the ephemeral season of Eurocommunism...
...Michael Ledeen is author of the new book, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Latyshchev announced that nothing would be released that might prove embarrassing to member parties of the Communist International...
...First is the question of evidence...
...The reader is told that the Times made a mistake, what the mistake was, how the mistake was made, and what the truth seems to be...
...The note is a model for the media, for not only does it correct the record, but it clearly states what is being corrected, and why...
...For two candidates who suffer from wimpish images, the capacity to enlarge penises magically might make the difference in a close campaign...
...Did the policemen check the claims of shrinkage...
...is a pretty solid criticism of the Post's performance, and contributes something that I, at least, hadn't known—the fact that the story about Quayle's National Guard service was being pushed by former aides to Birch Bayh, the former senator whom Quayle defeated in 1980...
...On the other hand, I think that we can do without such masochistic excesses as "the article fell short of The Times's . . . standards...
...I wonder how such things are distributed in Postland...
...After all, given the egregious errors in the maps of major Soviet cities, our journalists must have known this for some time...
...Hayek has written extensively about the Corn-intern, much of it in the form of what Spriano calls "historiographical samizdats...
...In the Jerusalem Post, where I ran across this tantalizing item, the headline featured the reaction of the crowd: "Penis shrinker attacked...
...If Anderson is so well plugged in to the secrets of that part of the world, he ought to know (continued on page 53) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 41 LEDEEN (continued from page 41) that Ghorbanifar negotiated the normalization of relations between France and Iran earlier this year, and that when the American government sent a team to Paris to find out the details, a top French official said that "in our opinion, you made a serious mistake about Ghorbanifar...
...In midby Michael Ledeen September, however, he tried to be Deep and Thoughtful about the attempts by the Reagan Administration to establish contact with Iranian "moderates" in 1985 and 1986...
...But nothing of the sort has taken place, despite all the talk about openness...
...How to Apologize to Your Readers On September 15, the New York Times published what might be termed the correction to end all corrections...
...We are all grateful to the Washington Times for obtaining and publishing an internal memorandum from the Washington Post's ombudsman, former Marine Richard Harwood, on the Quayle affair...
...Spriano recognizes that it is long since time to permit serious scholars access to these archives...
...If the Post were to adopt the standards of the New York Times, we would one day find such things on page 3, instead of having them restricted to in-house memoranda...
...The award for the most fascinating story comes from the Ivory Coast, courtesy of Agence France Press (as will become evident, every country's news agencies reflect the motherland's political and cultural predilections...
...A few months ago, it was announced in Moscow that the archives of the Corn-intern would be opened to scholars, but an interview in La Stampa (Italy) with a Professor Latyshchev threw considerable cold water on the burning desires of many to study this material...
...Still later, other journalists determined that much of the Times's account was false, and "again The Times erred in not looking into the matter...
...First of all, it had given an impression that the information (claiming that two citizens had been murdered by left-wing guerrillas) was based on firsthand knowledge, when in reality the story relied on a local newspaper report plus verbal confirmation from "a representative of a leading human rights organization...
...The Post's Very Own Ombudsman Exposed...
...And Post readers are entitled to ask Harwood why he didn't publish this stuff in his regular column...
...Entitled "Editors' Note," it told readers that, way back in February, an article on El Salvador had been misleading...
...get a copy...
...There are some at the Times who feel that this sort of thing makes the paper look bad, and is somehow demeaning to the Times, but I strongly disagree...
...Since the entire history of the Comintern is an embarrassment, it is hard to imagine what will emerge...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
