Reed Irvine - Editor
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"Would you drink cyanide? I sure don't want to but I did."
"SOVIETS KNEW PALME WAS TO BE MURDERED" was the big bold headline on the first page of the Swedish newspaper Expressen on August 24, 1989. The story reported that SAEPO, the Swedish secret police organization, had tapes of conversations of a Swedish-based Soviet diplomat, suspected of being a KGB agent, the night Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated. It claimed that careful analysis of the transcripts had convinced SAEPO official's investigating the case that at the very least the Soviets had advance knowledge of the plot to murder Palme. It also said that the person responsible for most of the translation of these tapes had concluded from "the intonations and other peculiarities in the conversation" that the Soviets had both initiated and carried out the assassination.
This information was withheld from the minister of justice and the chief of the national police for over two years. According to the Expressen story even the SAEPO officials in charge of the Palme investigation were not informed of the findings from the bugging until the beginning of 1988. Palme was murdered in February 1986. When the SAEPO "Palme Group" around Walter Kegoe and Jan-Henrik Barrling finally learned about the transcript of the bugged conversations, they passed the information on to a prominent Swedish publisher, Ebbe Carlsson, "who shook the highest levels of the police leadership and (minister of justice) Anna Greta Leijon with this information." It added, "From everything one can tell, it was precisely the statements about the Soviet knowledge of the murder that were behind Anna Greta Leijon's statement that she was terrified about what she had been told."
Leijon gave the information to the ministers of defense and foreign affairs, but she withheld it from the Parliamentary Investigative Committee that questioned her about any electronic surveillance that she might know about. (AH bugging, even by SAEPO, is illegal in Sweden.) The information was being very closely held, and Expressen says "everyone who had knowledge about the bugging of the KGB officer decided to remain silent." The bugging issue has become a major scandal in Sweden, and Ebbe Carlsson and others have been indicted on charges of importing illegal eavesdropping equipment Carlsson is quoted as saying that he intends to introduce the bugging of the Soviet diplomat at his trial.
The Swedish daily also reported that the SAEPO "Palme Group" suspected that the counter-espionage chief in SAEPO, P.G. Naess, had deliberately tried to keep them from getting the information obtained from the bugging. It reported that this had given rise to rumors that Naess himself might be working on behalf of the KGB.
The New York City Tribune, a small daily that is a sister publication of The Washington Times, published three prominent stories about the revelations from its stringer in Stockholm, the first one on August 28. This was how AIM learned about it. We did a story about it for The Washington Inquirer, based on the Expressen articles and the New York City Tribune stories.
The Inquirer story pointed out that although Prime Minister Palme was known for his leftist sympathies, expressed in his criticism of the Vietnam War and his support for such radical organizations as the PLO and the African National Congress, his pro-Soviet attitude had weakened, especially after the invasion of Afghanistan and the increasing incursions of Soviet submarines into Swedish territorial waters near highly secret naval installations. If Palme were to publicly turn against the Soviets he could have done them enormous damage from a public relations point of view.
Former Polish ambassador Zdzislaw Rurarz, who defected in Tokyo in 1981, says the Soviets did not trust Palme, suspecting that he was working with the CIA. Rurarz said he always suspected the Soviets of being behind the Palme assassination. He pointed out that they had produced a very slick film that was shown throughout Europe that put the blame on the CIA and the Lyndon LaRouche organization. They were able to convert Palme's death into a disinformation coup. Gen. Jan Sejna, a very high level defector from Czechoslovakia, agrees.
Curt Bergstrom, a Swedish Christian activist, advanced the theory that the Soviets murdered Palme at a Resistance International Conference in Switzerland in 1986. He told the Tribune: "Immediately after the assassination, there was widespread speculation that Kurdish extremists from the Marxist-Leninist organization, PKK, killed Palme. The most prominent advocate of this assumption was the regional commissioner of police in Stockholm, Hans Holmer, who also led the murder investigation." Bergstrom contended that the PKK terrorists were trained in the Soviet Union and that they may have carried out the assassination on Soviet orders. They could have had their own motives, however. Their leading members in Sweden had been put under house arrest, and they were angered when one of their leaders was refused a visa to enter Sweden.
The KGB is drenched in blood. It and its predecessor organizations have been responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Department 8 of the First Chief Directorate conducts its assassinations. That directorate was under the command of V.A. Kryuchkov from 1972-73 until September 30, 1988 when Gorbachev promoted him to the chairmanship of the KGB. A study by Yossef Bodansky of Jane's Defense Weekly on "Soviet Political Assassinations and Terrorism" shows how the Soviets have cold-bloodedly killed friendly heads of countries that had for some reason displeased them. Bodansky cites the treatment of Salim Rubayi Ali, president of the Soviet client state, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. Ali was executed when he refused to go along with a Soviet order to resign his post. He was the designated fall guy in another successful KGB assassination plot directed against the president of the neighboring Yemen Arab Republic, but he refused to take the fall. He paid with his life.
During an April 1977 visit to Moscow, the president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daud, took umbrage at Brezhnev's rude manner and complaints. He reminded Brezhnev that he was speaking to the president of an independent country, not a Soviet satellite, and declared that he would not permit Soviet interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs. A year later, a Soviet inspired uprising, supported by local KGB detachments and Soviet military advisors, with the help of Soviet-piloted aircraft toppled Daud, killing him and his family and over a thousand of his supporters. Brezhnev had Daud replaced by Nut Mohammed Taraki, but before long the KGB was helping Hafizullah Amin, the head of the secret police, overthrow Taraki. When he succeeded, Amin offered to spare Taraki's life and send him to Moscow. Brezhnev responded in a letter dated October 6, saying, "There is no need to send Taraki to Moscow. This is your problem. You solve it in the manner you consider best." Amin promptly had Taraki murdered.
Bodansky points out that the KGB has been assigned the mission of "assassination of leading personnel and other key decision makers in Europe on the eve of, and in the very first hours of, a war with the USSR." This tactic was included in their invasion plans for Afghanistan in December 1979. A large Soviet detachment under the command of KGB Col. Bayerenov, the commander of the KGB's SPETZNAZ School, attacked Amin's palace on the evening of December 27 after an attempt to poison Amin had failed. They met stiff resistance, but after several hours of fighting Amin, his entire family and all his close aides were killed.
There is strong evidence that the KGB was involved, through Bulgarian surrogates, in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul H in 1981 and in the successful murder of Bashir Gemayel, the president- elect of Lebanon in 1982. While no proof has yet been discovered, there is suspicion that they played a role in the fatal crash of the plane of President Zia of Pakistan in August 1988. Arranging a hit on Palme would have been a piece of cake for the KGB's "Murder, Inc."
Why The Palme Story Wasn't Reported
Neighbor Leonard Huckaba, who owns the property where the new well is located, provided the answer. He said it was "the purest water you could find." He said the water is run through a reverse osmosis machine to filter out unwanted minerals, and one day the man who operates the machine made a mistake and flushed it backwards. That resulted in the discolored water in the McCafferty and Senechal homes. McCafferty had made a point of saving a jar of it, perhaps for use in court. It came in handy when he had a chance to appear on national television.
Did Lynn Short and her crew really swallow this dirty water story? Did they honestly believe these people had been forced to use muddy water for six years? Didn't they know that the water for the two homes came from the same well? Or did they know this was a hoax, one that they were happy to go along with in order to get a more provocative story?
The Washington Post foreign editor, Bill Droziak, also thought the story was newsworthy and asked for copies of the stories in the Inquirer and Expressen. Like The Times. The Washington Post doesn't keep a correspondent in Sweden. And Droziak said they were largely dependent on the wire services for reporting from that country.
The Washington Times was the only daily besides the New York City Tribune to mention the story, but it did so in a brief world news roundup item headlined, "Sweden Suspends Bugging Probe." Editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave had learned of the story from the Tribune, a sister paper of the Times, but he said he did not put any credence in it because the wire services had not reported the story. He said this indicated that they did not believe the charges. In addition, he discounted the story because Palme had been a useful friend of the Soviet Union and could see no reason why they would want him killed.
Others disagree with the latter judgment, as we have noted above. The explanation of why this story has received so little attention in this country clearly lies in its treatment by the wire services. Neither of the two major American news services, the AP and the UPI, provided their clients with any coverage of this story. The AP's man in Stockholm, Arthur Max, said that when he read the Expressen story his first reaction was, "Jesus! This is sensational." But he decided not to file a story. The UPI has only a part-time stringer in Sweden, who also apparently filed nothing. Nor did the Reuters correspondent, Patricia McCarthy. Of the major news agencies, only Agence France Presse (AFP) provided a story, and that was not sent to its American clients. Since the major news organizations in this country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the television networks don't maintain bureaus in Sweden, the decision of Arthur Max of the AP not to report the story meant that it simply did not exist as far as the major American media were concerned.
We asked Max why he didn't file a story. At first he said the report in Expressen was based on unidentified sources, but he later acknowledged that the SAEPO officials who apparently leaked the story, Walter Kegoe and Jan-Henrik Barfling, had been named. He then said they were discredited, but that judgment was based on the fact that they were under investigation for alleged involvement in importing bugging devices. That hardly discredited revelations of what had been revealed as a result of the bugging of the Soviet diplomat. Max also said the SAEPO officials were "interested parties" in the Palme case, and therefore whatever they might say was "suspect."
That was because they had long believed that the Kurdish organization, PKK, was involved in Palme's murder. This was controversial. It was rejected by the prosecutor, who forced the ouster of Hans Holmer, the Stockholm chief of police, who was also an advocate of the PKK theory. If the bugging transcripts lend support to the PKK theory, their release would embarrass the prosecutor and vindicate Holmer. That could explain their suppression. But the SAEPO advocates of the PKK theory may, because of their bias, see things in the transcripts that others can't rind. That could be resolved if the transcripts were made public.
Max told us that he was in no position to check out the charges. He said, "I'm not here to find out who killed Olof Palme." He said he dealt with activities "closer to the surface, like official judicial proceedings." The new revelations are expected to be raised when the case of Christer Pettersson, the man convicted of Palme's murder, comes before an appeals court this month. Max said that he personally felt the evidence against Pettersson was "flimsy." It is possible that the bugging transcripts might help establish Petterssons innocence. The Swedes have been told about this new evidence, but very few Americans have heard of it. The possibility of Soviet involvement in Palme's murder is not purely a Swedish matter. If there is evidence indicating that Palme's blood is on the hands of the KGB, our media should be investigating. They should not all shut their eyes just because one AP reporter decided keep his mouth shut.
In Sweden, where the story has been front-page news, the media seem more concerned about the legality of the bugging of the Soviet diplomat than over the possibility that the Soviets may have murdered Palme. A Swedish constitutional lawyer, Lennart Hane, told the Tribune that the Swedes were losing sight of the main issue in their debate over the bugging. He said the bugging violated international conventions, but "what is of crucial importance here is that from the material gathered by bugging the Soviet diplomat, a probable spy, it is possible to conclude that the Russians executed Palme or at least had something to do with the assassination...What bothers me is that it is regarded as overly sensitive if the Soviet Union is involved. The government is unwilling to annoy the Kremlin in any way, but it has never hesitated to criticize the United States."
One of the objectives of political assassinations is to intimidate foes and critics. We see this in Colombia where the drug cartel has terrorized the judiciary. The former minister of justice in Sweden, Anna Greta Leijon, said she had been terrified by what she had been told about the bugging of the Soviet diplomat. If the Swedish government is suppressing evidence implicating the Kremlin in Palme's murder, KGB terror has achieved its objective.
The Public Broadcasting Service found itself embroiled in a bitter controversy as a result of its decision to air a 90-minute documentary about the infifada, the Palestinian uprising in Israel. The documentary titled "Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians" was originally to be presented last spring on PBS stations nationwide under the sponsorship of WNYC-TV, the smaller of New York City's two public television stations. WNYC withdrew its sponsorship, denouncing the film as propaganda.
At that point, WNET, the other New York City PBS station, agreed to "present" the program, and it was rescheduled for airing on September 6. In an effort to mollify the critics of the program, PBS added a 60-minute "wraparound" and tided the two-and-a-half hour program "Intifada: The Palestinians and Israel." The wraparound consisted of an opening 20-minute segment on the historical background on the origins of Israel and the Arab- Israeli conflict and a closing 40-minute discussion by a panel that included both defenders and critics of Israel.
The producer of "Days of Rage," Jo Franklin-Trout, made no bones about the fact that her documentary was one-sided. Acknowledging criticism that it was lacking in attention to the Israeli point of view, she said, "But as the title of the program makes clear, 'Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians' is about the lives and feelings of this group of Palestinians--young people whose whole lives have been lived under Israeli occupation. Their lives are focused toward one goal: an end to that occupation. My goal, as a producer, was to bring them and their world before the camera."
The PBS broadcasting schedule is littered with one- sided documentaries, most of them flawed by glaring omissions or inaccuracies, and almost all promoting causes favored by the left. In that respect, "Days of Rage" was par for the PBS course. What was different was that for a change the foes of the cause being advocated were highly vocal and were able to raise a public stink. Normally, those battered by PBS documentaries, whether it be the CLA, the nuclear power industry, South Africa, the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, El Salvador or the U.S. military, suffer in silence. PBS rarely provides expensive wraparounds or even post-program panel discussions to enable the victims to say a few words in their own defense.
When Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act twenty years ago it was concerned about the danger that public television and radio would become a vehicle for the manipulation of public opinion by advocacy programming. It included in the act a provision that was supposed to prevent this. Section 396(g)(1)(A) provides that all programs or series of programs funded in whole or in part with appropriated funds shall be balanced and objective.
That is the law of the land. It is far more strict than the fairness doctrine, which Congress has been trying to restore ever since the FCC abrogated it dejure as well as de facto. The Corporation has flouted it with impunity for Public Broadcasting, the Public Broad- casting Service, National Public Radio and all the public broadcasting stations.
If "Days of Rage" had been directly produced and paid for by a foreign government or entity it would be required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to be registered with the Department of Justice and carry an opening statement disclosing that fact and stating that registration does not indicate approval by the U.S. government. That requirement was enacted over 50 years ago to provide some protection against the influence of foreign propaganda, particularly from Nazi Germany. "Days of Rage" shows how easy it is to air what is essentially a foreign propaganda message designed to manipulate public opinion using facilities funded by our own government in contravention of the Public Broadcasting Act.
It has been shown that "Days of Rage" was partly funded with money obtained from the Arab American Cultural Foundation, which is funded largely by grants from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Arab League and wealthy Palestinians. A major part of the costs were covered by money the producer obtained from large corporations with interests in the Middle East. Even though the producer's for-profit production company didn't try to recover its costs by seeking payment from PBS for the right to air the film, this did not lead PBS to try to find out how the company expected to profit financially from this film.
Congress is showing its concern with fairness in broadcasting by its efforts to enact the FCC-discarded fairness doctrine into law. The controversy over "Days of Rage" provides an opportunity to focus the attention of Congress on the need to investigate the programming practices of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio and the failure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to see that the appropriated funds it dispenses are used in compliance with Section 396(g)(I)(A). Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to your representatives in Congress.
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AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
THE LEAD STORY IN THIS ISSUE IS ABOUT A CHARGE THAT SURFACED IN THE SWEDISH newspaper Expressen that the Soviets knew in advance that the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, was going to be murdered. The question that naturally arises in this country is why this wasn't reported here. I explored that question and concluded that it was not because of any conspiracy on the part of our journalists to protect the Soviets. The simple fact is that our media don't pay much attention to what is going on in Sweden. Our newspapers and TV network news departments don't maintain bureaus there.' The Associated Press does, but the UPI has only a stringer. One Swede I talked to complained that not even the Europeans paid any attention to Sweden. He said an atom bomb could be exploded in Stockholm and it wouldn't make the news abroad.
THE AP BUREAU CHIEF, ARTHUR MAX, MISSED AN OPPORTUNITY TO BREAK THROUGH that barrier in not reporting the claim that the Soviets had some involvement in Palme's murder, but I think he did so from an excess of caution, not from any desire to spare the Soviets embarrassment. Bjorn Augot, the correspondent for the French wire service, AFP, said he did a rather long story based on what Expressen reported, citing the absence of official confirmation. He said, "It was an important story just that people were making the accusation and that papers were printing it in a major European city." That was quite similar to the reaction of the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. Augot's story never made it to this country, but it was reported in Europe.
DECISIONS MADE BY TWO OR THREE LOW LEVEL FOREIGN JOURNALISTS IN SWEDEN WERE responsible for this story not being brought to the attention of millions of Americans. But what about the treatment of the story once it was provided to the wire services and major news organizations in this country? The Washington Inquirer sent a news release with its story to 25 important media outlets. I personally gave it to Punch Sulzberger and faxed it to Bill Droziak, the foreign editor of The Washington Post, at his request. But the only additional publicity given to the story that we have seen was in The Washington Times, which ran a Reuters story on September 11 about the appeal of Christer Pettersson, the man convicted of killing Palme. It inserted five paragraphs written by its own staff about the claim the Soviets knew of the killing in advance and the theory that the murder was perpetrated by a Kurdish terrorist group, the PKK. It reported that Palme was urging other European countries to follow his lead in declaring the PKK to be a terrorist organization. It said that the former Stockholm police chief, Hans Holmer, had claimed that in bugged conversations of PKK members before Palme's murder they had referred to an upcoming "wedding," which Holmer said was code for "assassination."
BERNARD GWERTZMAN, FOREIGN EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, HAS JUST INFORMED me that he has asked his staff to give him something on the story but they haven't produced anything as yet. He said what he was hearing was that the information was not very solid, which is true because the charges are based on transcripts which have been seen by very few people, none of whom are talking to the press at this time. Sweden has an official secrets act, which pretty effectively silences them. If The Times does run a story that gives a fair account of the controversy, it may help persuade the government to make the transcripts available to the press.
MURRAY BARON, AIM'S PRESIDENT, AND I HAD OUR ANNUAL MEETING WITH MR. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, on September 6. Here are three suggestions or requests that we made, in addition to our request that he find out why the Palme story hadn't been reported: 1. Have an article prepared for the New York Times Magazine on past sympathetic coverage of communist regimes that contributed to the miss education of many people about communism. In light of what is now being said in the communist countries about their failures and past sins, we thought it fitting that the media in this country acknowledge that it had, in the past, sometimes fallen for propaganda and disinformation generated by those regimes. We also criticized the tendency in obituaries and editorials about famous people who had died to exculpate those who had been supporters of tyrants such as Stalin and Mao by overlooking or downplaying those facts. We were thinking of people such as I.F. Stone. We suggested this be remedied. Mr. Sulzberger said it was an interesting idea and promised to explore it. 2. Have the Times staff make an international survey to see what other countries have done to discourage drug use and trafficking and to report on what has worked and what has not worked. We suggested that this might turn up some ideas that could be applied in this country, but we noted that some of the things that had worked elsewhere, such as capital punishment and flogging, might be too radical for The Times. Mr. Sulzberger said he thought they had done this before, but it might be a good idea to have another look. He said he personally is violently opposed to drugs and that as far as he was concerned nothing was beyond the pale for discussion. 3. We asked that he look into the coverage of the riots at Virginia Beach over the Labor Day weekend, pointing out that the two stories in The Times had provided ammunition for those who like to argue that it is simply white racism and inappropriate conduct by the police that is responsible for such outbreaks. we provided several statements made by black students who had gone to Virginia Beach to participate in the "Greek fest" weekend that had been shown on TV in Washington and had conveyed an entirely different impression. Obviously concerned about growing racial tensions in New York, Mr. Sulzberger agreed to look into this.