KOOL A.D.'s CIA Ties & His Lyrical Rebuttal
KOOL A.D.'s CIA Ties & His Lyrical Rebuttal
I have been a fan of Kool A.D.'s solo music for a few years now and all the while I've had a gut feeling that there was something about him that should be distrusted. Kool AD himself states on the track "Dum Diary", "My literary agent’s husband works for Fox, I wouldn’t trust me a lot". You will come to see that that is not the sole reason to not trust him a lot. The first red flag that came onto my radar that made me question his motivations was his promotion of hallucinogens. What people do is their own business. I don't care if somebody wants to use drugs but knowing what I do about the conspiracy surrounding the proliferation of psychedelic culture in the 1960's, I kept listening and enjoying his music but I remained skeptical of his past and vigilant to find the key to unlock the Intelligence link that my intuition told me was out there. <a href="http://koolad.bandcamp.com/album/o-k">O.K. by KOOL A.D.</a>
Victor Vazquez (born November 16, 1983), also known by his stage name Kool A.D., is an American musician, rapper, punk drummer, author, and artist. He is from the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Vazquez is best known for being a member of the New York-based rap group Das Racist, though he has also been a member of the Punk band, Party Animal, and now prolifically releases his music "solo". In 2016 he released 10 albums with a total of 282 songs. Mother Jones magazine described his work as "a thoughtful effort to deconstruct and rearrange cultural objects in ways that challenge our deepest assumptions."
In the episode of Jacobin Kool Ad replies to a question about his Grandmother:
KOOL AD: "My mom met my dad in the shipyards. She was doing photo journalism Masters at UC Berkeley. My dad was working at Bethlehem steel in San Francisco and my mom got a job there and that's how they met. He was kind of hippie-ish. He was born in Cuba and came to the states when he was younger, right during the revolution. He has crazy stories about that, obviously. His dad was the first black board of education dude, you know, like head of the Board of Education in Matonsas. And so, being that, he was one of the fools who ended up getting rounded up they put them in a big baseball stadium and they shot a bunboy crisisch of fools in front of them and no one really knew quite what was going on because obviously I'm sure a lot of those fools were in Batista's Secret Police and probably did some horrible shit. It's not like my dad's dad was involved with it. He was new to the game anyway. He was just like 'I don't really know what the fuck is going on so I'm a get out of here', you know... there is fully a lot of anti-Castro sentiment on that side of the family. Also, this is the type of shit where my dad is like, 'don't even fucking talk about this in an interview'. He'd probably give me a lecture for even mentioning this in an interview." So, uh, I don't really want to go into but all that to say we are in the United States right. Members of my family, literally have been enslaved by the United States government. It's not any better here. It's pretty much going to be the same kinda static anywhere on earth. A lot of people go through their whole lives and they don't really have a political conversation like that. Some wildly political shit happened to my dad's family and he doesn't like to talk about politics, you know? But that being said, he'll say fuck Trump..."
According to William Boyd:
THE REPORTER
The Terror Network pursued in detail the central theme of the Jonathan Institute conference of 1979 and the official Israeli line. It also fit extremely well with the new Reagan administration effort to portray the Soviet Union as a villain and backer of "international terrorism." Important high officials of the new administration loved Sterling; Alexander Haig had copies distributed within the State Department, and William Casey flaunted Sterling's achievement before his subordinates. Both Haig and Casey were perturbed to discover that the State Department and CIA experts found Sterling's book not only highly unreliable but based in large part on CIA disinformation "blown back" via Sterling.
In books and interviews, Sterling castigated the US government and especially the CIA for its cowardice in rejecting the Soviet network theory and its expressions of doubt about Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt against the pope. Despite these denunciations, the CIA went to special pains to help her out when she was sued under French law for slander. [2] Her denunciations of the CIA made it appear "moderate", so that debates on these issues could be limited to the balanced offering of the slightly exuberant Sterling and the CIA (or other "moderates" like Jenkins or Kupperman).
Sterling's message had several components. Fundamental was the view that the West is under attack and is the victim of something called terrorism, which she does not define. The attacker is the Soviet Union, aiming to "destabilize" the "democracies". While the Soviet Union does not absolutely control all of the terrorist movements, it supports and encourages them, and they all "come to see themselves as elite battalions in a worldwide Army of Communist Combat". [3] Claire Sterling does not talk much about the underlying conditions that make for guerrilla movements, nor does she ever refer to South African actions as terrorist. Any brutalities that might be designated state terrorism are explained away as reactions to retail and guerrilla terrorists who have brought state violence (never "terror") on themselves. Right-wing terror is entirely outside her province, and guerrilla movements like the ANC are transformed into antagonists of the West by exclusive attention to Soviet support, no matter how marginal, belated, and irrelevant to any real issue.
In brief, Sterling expounds the right-wing version of the Western establishment model of terrorism. Her policy pronouncements have tended to be on the moderate side, in contrast with those of Alexander, Cline, Livingstone, and Moss, but this may be to give her more credibility in getting over her hard-line views on the terrorist threat and its clear locus in the Soviet Union. She has left it to others to draw the appropriately "forward" policy conclusions.
Sterling's book The Terror Network failed to provide definitions of or quantitative evidence on terrorism, relying instead upon selective and highly dramatized stories, and its claims are, for the most part, supported by citations to unverifiable intelligence sources. [4] Many of these claims are ludicrous and reflect a gullibility and willingness to believe anything that supports strongly held preconceptions. Sterling accepts stories from the South African police, the military regime of Argentina, and Israeli intelligence at face value. [5] She also selects and suppresses evidence to the convenience of her argument.[6] The heart of her proof of a Soviet conspiracy in The Terror Network is the testimony of Jan Sejna, a Czech defector, who left "a jump ahead of the invading Soviet army" in 1968. [7] In fact, Sejna was a Stalinist, closely associated with the pre-Czech "spring" dictator Novotny, and he fled long before the Soviet army came to Czechoslovakia. His evidence of a Soviet network was taken from a document prepared by the CIA years before to test Sejna's honesty; he failed the test, but the "evidence" in the forged test document turned up as the heart of Sterling's work. [8]
The underlying lack of judgment and the fanatical quality of Sterling's world-view may also be seen in her claims that Western intelligence had erected a "Western intelligence" shield to conceal from its public the actual extent of Soviet involvement in terrorism. The reason for this was that it would disturb "detente", which the Reagan administration was allegedly pursuing in 1983-84.[9] She also contended that it was hard to get over the truth in the West on the shooting of the pope because of the force of Soviet propaganda, most notably in their issuance of a pamphlet on the case by Iona Andronov. To our knowledge, this pamphlet has never been cited in the Western media except in derogatory references by Sterling and Henze, and its claims have never been acknowledged as worthy of discussion.
Sterling's dependence on Sejna and its significance, and the vast array of other evidence of her deficiencies as an analyst of terrorism, are not discussed in the Western mass media and have absolutely no impact on her perceived qualifications and credibility. She is authenticated by her message and the approval of the terrorism establishment. Even the industry "scholar", Walter Laqueur, reviewing her Terror Network in the Wall Street Journal, explains that while she perhaps overrates the importance of terrorism and its inexorable advance, her book is "enlightening", presents a "mind boggling mass of details" (which Laqueur does not question in any way), and "should be warmly welcomed". [10]
Recorded on June 05, 1981, Claire
Sterling appeared on Firing Line with host William F Buckley and fellow
guest Senator Jeremiah Denton.
Senator Denton's subcommittee was investigating the subject of Mrs. Sterling's highly controversial book,Terror Network, about international terrorism and the Soviets' role in it.
In 1945, Buckley enrolled in Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society.[19][20] In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt.[23] These two officers remained lifelong friends.[24] In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss.
I have been a fan of Kool A.D.'s solo music for a few years now and all the while I've had a gut feeling that there was something about him that should be distrusted. Kool AD himself states on the track "Dum Diary", "My literary agent’s husband works for Fox, I wouldn’t trust me a lot". You will come to see that that is not the sole reason to not trust him a lot. The first red flag that came onto my radar that made me question his motivations was his promotion of hallucinogens. What people do is their own business. I don't care if somebody wants to use drugs but knowing what I do about the conspiracy surrounding the proliferation of psychedelic culture in the 1960's, I kept listening and enjoying his music but I remained skeptical of his past and vigilant to find the key to unlock the Intelligence link that my intuition told me was out there. <a href="http://koolad.bandcamp.com/album/o-k">O.K. by KOOL A.D.</a>
Victor Vazquez (born November 16, 1983), also known by his stage name Kool A.D., is an American musician, rapper, punk drummer, author, and artist. He is from the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Vazquez is best known for being a member of the New York-based rap group Das Racist, though he has also been a member of the Punk band, Party Animal, and now prolifically releases his music "solo". In 2016 he released 10 albums with a total of 282 songs. Mother Jones magazine described his work as "a thoughtful effort to deconstruct and rearrange cultural objects in ways that challenge our deepest assumptions."
Vazquez, who is of Afro-Cuban and Italian descent, originally hails from
the San Francisco Bay area of California. He attended high school at
the Arthur Andersen Community Learning Center in Alameda and college at Wesleyan University
in Middletown, Connecticut, where he earned a bachelor's degree in
English. While at Wesleyan, Vazquez played drums for the band La Spanka.
At Wesleyan, Vazquez met future Das Racist bandmate Himanshu Suri as well as Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT. After signing a deal with Sony/Megaforce Records, who
also have released albums for Ministry and Butthole Surfers, in
mid-2012 Vazquez then left Das Racist before they could release their
first album with Sony. In early 2014, Vazquez married Cult Days, a
fashion designer and musician he had known since he was 15. They now
have a child, whom Vazquez wrote about in his column in Vice Magazine.
ABIGAIL STERLING
Kool
A.D.'s mother is Abigail Sterling, an Investigative Producer at CBS5 in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Abby Sterling has 28 years' experience in
major market TV News as an investigative producer, consumer producer,
news writer, editor and photographer. She is the winner of 20 Emmy
awards, 8 Associated Press Awards, and 1 Regional Murrow Award. The
following info on Abby Sterling is taken from her Linkdin page
Education:
Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, B.A. Chinese Language, Television Journalism, 1982-1984
UC Berkeley, B.A., Mandarin Chinese, Journalism, 1979-1981
Experience:
29
years experience in major market TV News, as an investigative producer,
consumer producer, news writer, editor and photographer. Fluent in
Italian and French. Some Spanish.
My
passion: Digging deeper into issues that affect people’s lives, weaving
words with pictures to tell a good story, uncovering a righteous scam.
My
real world international experience gives me a unique perspective as a
journalist. Before my TV career I travelled the world, studied Mandarin
Chinese in Taiwan and even dropped out of college to go work at the
shipyards as a boilermaker. I did go back to graduate! And I don’t
regret a thing.
Current Experience:
KPIX CBS5, Investigative Producer, Sep 2005-Present (11 years)
Investigations:
Most recently I have investigated
the marijuana industry in California, focusing on cultivation and state
efforts to come up with regulations.
I've also written and produced a
series of reports on crude by rail in California, as well as the
potential environmental impacts of tar sands crude on the San Francisco
Bay.
In the past I have reported on
First amendment gun issues, speciifically how a small device called a
bullet button allows military style rifles to be used legally in
California despite the state's strict assault weapons ban. The series of
reports aired months before the Colorado and Connecticut mass shootings
last year, and led a state lawmaker to introduce a bill banning the
bullet button. The investigation won a prestigious Associated Press Bill
Stout award.
I have also investigated mortgage fraud, charity fraud and environmental issues such as ewaste and pesticide.
Past Experience:
KRON-TV, Consumer Producer, Jan 1995-Jan 2005 (10 years) Consumer producer for Contact 4.
Produced weekly consumer reports along with in depth consumer investigations.
J. Business Journal, Business News Reprter, June 200-May 2004 (4 years)
KGO-TV, News Writer, Show Producer, Jan 1991-Jan 1994 (3 years) News Writer
WMAQ-TV, News Writer, May 1993-Aug 1993 (3 months)
Summer fill-in writer for 11pm news
KTVU-TV, Features Assistant Producer, Show Producer, Jan 1986-Jan 1991 (5 years)
Assistant Producer for Segment 2, News writer for Mornings on 2, Talk Show producer for 2 at Noon.
CBS News, Field Producer April 1985-Oct 1985 (8 months)
Field producer on pool assignment for the trial of Ali Agca, defendant in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
JACOBIN PODCAST
Confirmation
of Kool AD's ties to Intelligence took patience. I had been seeking the
nugget and had to wait until it was out there on the internet to
be found. The clue came in the form of a podcast titled JACOBIN at about
the 34:25 mark. The podcast was released on March 18, 2017.
KOOL AD: "She
wrote a book on various armed left wing revolts in Europe mostly, also
Carlos the jackal, the whole region really. She was a hard-hitting,
nonfiction reporter type. She started out in the Communist Party and
then left the communist party. She was born in part of the Ukraine, at
some point and then raised in New York, Queens. When she met my mom's
dad who was born in Nebraska he came to New York to try to be a writer.
They hooked up and blah blah blah, and then they got married in Rome,
cuz she was out there on a story. Then she got offered a permanent job
there, so basically my mom grew up in Rome, with her brother. 'Bruh
Bruh' got a job, my grandpa got a job you know, fucking, at another
English language newspaper out there. Then he ended up getting a job for
a British paper in Ghana. He was covering, actually, the Congolese
Civil War, so he'd go out cover that and come back and post-up in Ghana.
My mom was raised up Kinda around all of that. By the time she was kind
of like a kid her mom was not a card-carrying communist anymore. It's
hard to pin down her politics. She's just a reporter first and foremost.
I think, she's a journalist and a thinker. She's a good writer, a
really good writer. Actually, as I get older, one of my favorite
writers. (What's her name?, asked the host) Claire Sterling."
KOOL AD: "My mom met my dad in the shipyards. She was doing photo journalism Masters at UC Berkeley. My dad was working at Bethlehem steel in San Francisco and my mom got a job there and that's how they met. He was kind of hippie-ish. He was born in Cuba and came to the states when he was younger, right during the revolution. He has crazy stories about that, obviously. His dad was the first black board of education dude, you know, like head of the Board of Education in Matonsas. And so, being that, he was one of the fools who ended up getting rounded up they put them in a big baseball stadium and they shot a bunboy crisisch of fools in front of them and no one really knew quite what was going on because obviously I'm sure a lot of those fools were in Batista's Secret Police and probably did some horrible shit. It's not like my dad's dad was involved with it. He was new to the game anyway. He was just like 'I don't really know what the fuck is going on so I'm a get out of here', you know... there is fully a lot of anti-Castro sentiment on that side of the family. Also, this is the type of shit where my dad is like, 'don't even fucking talk about this in an interview'. He'd probably give me a lecture for even mentioning this in an interview." So, uh, I don't really want to go into but all that to say we are in the United States right. Members of my family, literally have been enslaved by the United States government. It's not any better here. It's pretty much going to be the same kinda static anywhere on earth. A lot of people go through their whole lives and they don't really have a political conversation like that. Some wildly political shit happened to my dad's family and he doesn't like to talk about politics, you know? But that being said, he'll say fuck Trump..."
KOOL
AD:"I have a lot of things going on in my family history. Basically, my
whole thing is generally like, listen and then speak your own truth and
hopefully we find some leeway with whatever person you are talking to
in whatever room you end up walking into."
I took what Victor had to say,
including the parts about speaking your own truth, and "leeway", into
consideration when I decided to research Claire Sterling. I did not have
to look very far to find the nugget, in fact, I only had to go so far
as Wikipedia to find blatant CIA connections.
. British Security Coordination
operated during the Second World War as an umbrella organisation in the
Americas for a number of British intelligence organisations represented
by its head Sir William Stephenson. They included SIS, MI5, the Special Operations Executive, the Political Warfare Executive, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Security Executive and Special Branch. It shared premises and worked closely with the overt propaganda operations of the British government known as British Information Services.
CLAIRE STERLING
Claire Sterling (1919-1995) was an American author and journalist who was affiliated with the CIA. Her work focused on political assassination, and terrorism. She produced a number of articles and books including The Terror Network and The Time of the Assassins, which were highly influential propaganda vehicles.
Claire Sterling was born in Queens, New York in 1919. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics at Brooklyn College, worked as a union organizer, and was briefly a member of the Young Communist League. After receiving a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University
in 1945, she became the Rome correspondent of the Overseas News Agency.
Sterling also wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Reader's Digest. She
married Thomas Sterling, a novelist, in 1951. After spending their
honeymoon in Italy the two moved there, living in Rome for several
decades.Claire Sterling is the mother of Abigail Sterling, who is the mother of Victor Vazquez (Kool A.D.).
OVERSEAS NEWS AGENCY
The Overseas News Agency was a British covert propaganda operation, run as part of British Security Coordination in the US, of which Claire Sterling was their Rome Correspondent
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Its
purpose was to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage against
British interests in the Americas, and mobilise pro-British opinion in
the Americas. As a 'huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation
and black propaganda', the BSC influenced news coverage in the Herald Tribune, the New York Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Radio New York Worldwide. Roald Dahl and Ian Flemming were both authors that were employed by BSC. The stories disseminated from Rockefeller Center would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, before being relayed to the American public. Through this, anti-German stories were placed in major American media outlets to turn public opinion.[2] Its cover was the British Passport Control Office. BSC benefitted from support given by the chief of the US Office of Strategic Services, William J. Donovan (whose organisation was modelled on British activities), and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was staunchly anti-Nazi.
William Boyd described BSC in the Guardian in 2006:
"BSC was set up by a Canadian entrepreneur called William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). An office was opened in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan with the discreet compliance of Roosevelt and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI.
But nobody on the American side of the fence knew what BSC's full
agenda was nor, indeed, what would be the massive scale of its
operations. What eventually occurred as 1940 became 1941 was that BSC
became a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black
propaganda. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American
newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, and simultaneously
a campaign of harassment and denigration was set in motion against
those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist
(such as the notoriously anti-British America First Committee - it had more than a million paid-up members)."[2]
According to William Boyd:
"BSC's media reach was extensive: it included such eminent American columnists as Walter Winchell
and Drew Pearson, and influenced coverage in newspapers such as the
Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Baltimore Sun. BSC effectively
ran its own radio station, WRUL, and a press agency, the Overseas News Agency
(ONA), feeding stories to the media as they required from foreign
datelines to disguise their provenance. WRUL would broadcast a story
from ONA and it thus became a US "source" suitable for further
dissemination, even though it had arrived there via BSC agents. It would
then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers,
and relayed to listeners and readers as fact. The story would spread
exponentially and nobody suspected this was all emanating from three
floors of the Rockefeller Centre. BSC took enormous pains to ensure its
propaganda was circulated and consumed as bona fide news reporting. To
this degree its operations were 100% successful: they were never
rumbled. Nobody really
knows how many people ended up working for BSC - as agents or sub-agents
or sub-sub-agents - although I have seen the figure mentioned of up to
3,000. Certainly at the height of its operations in late 1941 there were
many hundreds of agents and many hundreds of fellow travellers (enough
finally to stir the suspicions of Hoover, for one). Three thousand
British agents spreading propaganda and mayhem in a staunchly anti-war
America. It almost defies belief. Try to imagine a CIA office in Oxford
Street with 3,000 US operatives working in a similar way. The idea would
be incredible - but it was happening in America in 1940 and 1941, and
the organisation grew and grew."
THE REPORTER
When ONA folded, Claire Sterling joined Magazine in 1951, which she wrote for until it ceased publication in 1968. Elke van Cassel[31] documents many connections that The Reporter
had to the American intelligence establishment and believes that there
is circumstantial evidence that the magazine was funded by the CIA
. She notes that The Reporter was created at around the
same time that the CIA began funding pro-American artists and
journalists, including such similar magazines as Partisan Review and New Leader, and folded around the time that these kinds of clandestine activities were beginning to draw public scrutiny.[2]
The magazine stressed the importance of ideas in the Cold War, and
believed that the United States government needed to defend its
political and economic system to the world. This indicates that its
editors would not have been opposed to cooperating with and possibly
even accepting funding from the American government. Ascoli and other
members of his staff were personally and professionally acquainted with
some of the major figures of the mid-century American intelligence
establishment and worked for a handful of organizations that were
connected to or funded by the CIA.[2]
Cassel finds it notable that in the archives of the magazine its
financial records, along with other important pieces of information, are
missing.[2] In the end, she concludes that while there is no direct evidence of CIA funding, the circumstantial case is substantial.[2] At the very least, it can be established that The Reporter
and its staff had close working relationships with several influential
government officials and agencies, including the CIA and other services
engaged in promoting American ideals and interests through the media.[2]
CSIS Conference on Italy
In early 1976, three months before the Italian election, Sterling attended a conference on the 'Communist threat' to Italy hosted by the CIA
affiliated think-tank CSIS. During the 1970s CSIS
was known for its hard-line Cold Warriors, and it is certain that many
of the fellows or staff were former intelligence officials. There is no
secret about this, several of them made no secret about it. When
president Jimmy Carter installed Admiral Stansfield Turner as CIA
director, many of the expunged operatives who had been involved in the
murky side of the CIA moved to CSIS. When Reagan reappointed Casey as
director of the CIA in 1980s many of the CSIS fellow migrated back to the CIA or other intelligence agencies. CSIS personnel in the 1970s included its founder David Abshire, and most notably Henry Kissinger and Ray Cline. Other members included the "terror experts" Walter Laqueur and Michael Ledeen; a former CIA official Penelope Hartland-Thunberg; William Hyland, a former director of intelligence at the State Department; and Edward Luttack, a consultant to Senator Howard Baker on SALT.
Sterling was a panellists at the conference along with William E. Colby, Ray Cline, John Connallyand Clare Booth Luce. A day after the conference the New Republic published an article by Sterling and Michael Ledeenclaiming that the Italian Communist Party had recieved secret funding from the Soviets. The New Republic was at that time published by Robert J. Myers, a friend of CSIS man Ray Cline. Myers appeared with Cline
a January 1978 congressional hearing on the CIA and the media where he
stated: "The reciprocal relationship between the CIA and the American
press has been of value to both parties and often to the individuals
themselves whose careers may have mutually benefited by such
connections." Sterling and Ledeen's article was also republished just before the elections by the Rome Daily American (which was funded by the CIA). Sterling and Ledeen even appeared on Italian television on the night of the election. They featured as commentators from 4pm to 2am on Channel 1 which was controlled by the Christian Democrat Party - the main recipient of CIA funds in Italy.
The CSIS conference on Italy also
led to activism back in the U.S. As a result of the conference a
political action committee was set up called Citizens' Alliance for Mediterranean Freedom.
The group took out adverts in major U.S. papers urging Americans to
write to any relatives in Italy and urge them to vote against the
Communists. The group's executive director Bill Gill
warned American journalists against talking to the Italian media, which
he claimed was "Infiltrated by the Communists". Instead he suggested
they consult Claire Sterling or Ray Cline if they needed information on Italian politics.
"THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION"
Sterling was the first to claim (in a September 1982 article in Reader's Digest) that the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John II
had been ordered by the Bulgarian Secret Service, a theory that became
known as the "Bulgarian Connection" She was one of three journalists
responsible for fabricating and divulging the details of the theory -
the others were Paul Bernard Henze
(1924-2011), Paul B. Henze, a former CIA and National Security Council
specialist in psychological operations, propaganda expert and CIA
station chief in Turkey. Michael Leeden
was the third author to propagate the "theory". He served in the Carter
administration as a deputy to National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski. After
retiring from government service near the end of President Jimmy
Carter’s term, Mr. Henze became a consultant for the Rand Corp. Leeden
was associated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, a right-wing think tank. Leeden had strong connections with a faction of the Italian secret service (SISMI) linked to the Propaganda Due secret masonic lodge, which first revealed the fraudulent proposed attack on the Pope by the Soviet Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov. The three journalists wrote articles; books, and appeared on television. Claire Sterling wrote, The Time of the Assassins (1984), about the "Bulgarian Connection". Claire
and Henze's books, were enthusiastically reviewed. Individually, or as a
team, the two were repeatedly invited as guests on to the three
principal American networks and programmes on British television. They
insisted that no expert who supported a contrasting view be interviewed
with them on the same programme and, in most cases, the producers
obliged. The Sterling-Henze duo was almost able to monopolise coverage
of the story. In the American media, for a certain time, it became
almost impossible to express a different view and anyone who did was
considered unpatriotic at best. The "Bulgarian Connection" theory has also been, in detail, refuted and attributed to bias by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent. On 25 September 1991, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman (now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy) revealed that his colleagues, following orders, had falsified their analysis to support the accusation. He declared to the US Senate intelligence committee that "the CIA hadn't any proof", and that CIA
officials had pressured staff to conclude that the Soviet KGB had
ordered the pope’s assassination. “The CIA had no evidence linking the
KGB to the plot,” Goodman said. 17][18]
THE TERROR NETWORK
The Terror Network pursued in detail the central theme of the Jonathan Institute conference of 1979 and the official Israeli line. It also fit extremely well with the new Reagan administration effort to portray the Soviet Union as a villain and backer of "international terrorism." Important high officials of the new administration loved Sterling; Alexander Haig had copies distributed within the State Department, and William Casey flaunted Sterling's achievement before his subordinates. Both Haig and Casey were perturbed to discover that the State Department and CIA experts found Sterling's book not only highly unreliable but based in large part on CIA disinformation "blown back" via Sterling.
In books and interviews, Sterling castigated the US government and especially the CIA for its cowardice in rejecting the Soviet network theory and its expressions of doubt about Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt against the pope. Despite these denunciations, the CIA went to special pains to help her out when she was sued under French law for slander. [2] Her denunciations of the CIA made it appear "moderate", so that debates on these issues could be limited to the balanced offering of the slightly exuberant Sterling and the CIA (or other "moderates" like Jenkins or Kupperman).
Sterling's message had several components. Fundamental was the view that the West is under attack and is the victim of something called terrorism, which she does not define. The attacker is the Soviet Union, aiming to "destabilize" the "democracies". While the Soviet Union does not absolutely control all of the terrorist movements, it supports and encourages them, and they all "come to see themselves as elite battalions in a worldwide Army of Communist Combat". [3] Claire Sterling does not talk much about the underlying conditions that make for guerrilla movements, nor does she ever refer to South African actions as terrorist. Any brutalities that might be designated state terrorism are explained away as reactions to retail and guerrilla terrorists who have brought state violence (never "terror") on themselves. Right-wing terror is entirely outside her province, and guerrilla movements like the ANC are transformed into antagonists of the West by exclusive attention to Soviet support, no matter how marginal, belated, and irrelevant to any real issue.
In brief, Sterling expounds the right-wing version of the Western establishment model of terrorism. Her policy pronouncements have tended to be on the moderate side, in contrast with those of Alexander, Cline, Livingstone, and Moss, but this may be to give her more credibility in getting over her hard-line views on the terrorist threat and its clear locus in the Soviet Union. She has left it to others to draw the appropriately "forward" policy conclusions.
Sterling's book The Terror Network failed to provide definitions of or quantitative evidence on terrorism, relying instead upon selective and highly dramatized stories, and its claims are, for the most part, supported by citations to unverifiable intelligence sources. [4] Many of these claims are ludicrous and reflect a gullibility and willingness to believe anything that supports strongly held preconceptions. Sterling accepts stories from the South African police, the military regime of Argentina, and Israeli intelligence at face value. [5] She also selects and suppresses evidence to the convenience of her argument.[6] The heart of her proof of a Soviet conspiracy in The Terror Network is the testimony of Jan Sejna, a Czech defector, who left "a jump ahead of the invading Soviet army" in 1968. [7] In fact, Sejna was a Stalinist, closely associated with the pre-Czech "spring" dictator Novotny, and he fled long before the Soviet army came to Czechoslovakia. His evidence of a Soviet network was taken from a document prepared by the CIA years before to test Sejna's honesty; he failed the test, but the "evidence" in the forged test document turned up as the heart of Sterling's work. [8]
The underlying lack of judgment and the fanatical quality of Sterling's world-view may also be seen in her claims that Western intelligence had erected a "Western intelligence" shield to conceal from its public the actual extent of Soviet involvement in terrorism. The reason for this was that it would disturb "detente", which the Reagan administration was allegedly pursuing in 1983-84.[9] She also contended that it was hard to get over the truth in the West on the shooting of the pope because of the force of Soviet propaganda, most notably in their issuance of a pamphlet on the case by Iona Andronov. To our knowledge, this pamphlet has never been cited in the Western media except in derogatory references by Sterling and Henze, and its claims have never been acknowledged as worthy of discussion.
Sterling's dependence on Sejna and its significance, and the vast array of other evidence of her deficiencies as an analyst of terrorism, are not discussed in the Western mass media and have absolutely no impact on her perceived qualifications and credibility. She is authenticated by her message and the approval of the terrorism establishment. Even the industry "scholar", Walter Laqueur, reviewing her Terror Network in the Wall Street Journal, explains that while she perhaps overrates the importance of terrorism and its inexorable advance, her book is "enlightening", presents a "mind boggling mass of details" (which Laqueur does not question in any way), and "should be warmly welcomed". [10]
CLAIRE STERLING ON FIRING LINE WITH WILLIAM F BUCKLEY JR.
Mrs. Sterling's
conclusion: that the Soviet Union is not the mastermind of terrorism
"that's a comic-book concept to think there is a phantom mastermind in a
subterranean map room who pushes buttons", but it is the provider of
"the wherewithal for the terrorist groups to become extremely efficient
at their craft and therefore to become an effective destabilizing
influence in democratic society."
In 1945, Buckley enrolled in Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society.[19][20] In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt.[23] These two officers remained lifelong friends.[24] In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss.
KOOL A.D.'S LYRICAL RESPONSE
As I explained earlier, the clue into Claire Sterling came from listening to the Jacobin Podcast; after researching her a little I messaged Kool A.D. on Instagram to ask him what his opinion was on the allegations that I had read, and that I just finished laying out on this blog post. His reply seemed contradictory to what I had read online about his grandmother so I proceeded to send him information and asked him how I could possibly come to any other conclusion other than that she was a propagandist. He replied to me with an offer for him to do $100 freestyle on the topic and "address the allegations". $100 freestyles are one of the hustles that Kool A.D. has in this post-internet age of music. For $100 he records on any beat that you send him and then sends you the song. The $100 freestyles also get released on the albums that Kool A.D. releases as a download, free of charge, on his bandcamp site.
Below are the important segments of the correspondence I had with Kool A.D.
So... I took him up on his offer and sent him $100. My curiosity would
not allow me to pass up the opportunity to have (still) one of my
favorite rappers address the research that I did on him; plus I thought
it would make for a monumental conclusion to this post.
A link to the song "Executivly Produced" by yours truly, Masonic Youth, featuring Kool A.D.'s rebuttal can be found below.
"THE TERROR NETWORK" BY KOOL AD
This is a trip. Literally. Thanks for doing this research. The best f!@#ing rapper in the world, right? Probably. The Claire Sterling scenario though, wow. This rabbit hole is looking pretty sizable right now. I got onto your blog from reading the recent comments from Cult Days
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ravi. I'm Glad you can see what I see. "Recent comments from Cult Days"? What, she accusing someone else of RAPE? #metoo LOL! It is a "trip", I agree.
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