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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 STERLING...Continued We should at least allow a degree of public awareness of who was respon- sible and then say,-“‘Well, we hold you publicly accountable,”’ say that to the Soviet Union, when all the evidence is in. In which case, for one thing, the public knowledge of this Russian ac- countability is in itself a strong deter- rent. I don’t believe that the Russians care one thousandth of a per cent for Western public opinion, but they do have to take that into consideration. Up till now the forms of surrogate warfare that have been used by the Soviet Union in attacking Western targets, primarily by providing weapons and sanctuary for terrorist groups carrying out such assaults on the West since 1958, have been concealed from public view as was what was known about Soviet respon- sibility in this regard. And that has encouraged them I think to ever bolder kinds of attack on the assumption that they were going to continue to enjoy the Western intelligence shield. I think the important thing to do now is to take the shield away, to remove it, and say from now on we know about this and we will be watching, and if you do this again we will have to hold you accountable and then we will have to see what form, what position, we will take. This will have to be part of our bar- gaining package when we sit down with you to talk about anything, to negotiate anything. This is a form of warfare, and therefore we have to negotiate a peace settlement that can hold, under- standing who the interlocutor is and what form of warfare he is waging. Q. Another. serious conclusion that you've drawn both In the book, and from what you have just said, Is that Western governments—the intelligence agen- cles of varlous Western governments including our own—from the very outset of this Incident tried to downplay Bulgarlan-KGB connections and to cover It up. Do you have some documentation on that? A, Yes. In my book, for example, I cite six major articles that appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in the four to five months following Judge Martella’s ar- rest of the Bulgarian, Sergei Antonov, in November 1982. In these articles, unidentified but authoritative Western intelligence analysts are quoted as say- ing, first of all, that they suspected that Judge Martella had been a victim of disinformation planted on him to em- barrass the Soviet Union. They were saying that he couldn’t be going on any serious evidence, that he was being used to frame the Soviet Union. Now this was a pretty shocking alle- gation at a time when nobody in the West knew what evidence he had, and. because by law the Italian judge cannot reveal his evidence until the investi- gation is completed. Then we had the usual Western intelligence sources in London, in Bonn, in Washington and so on, make the allegation that Judge Martella had taken my article too seriously in the Reader’s Digest, that in effect I had been telling Judge Martella what to do—which really is about as mindless as you can get. Then we have a series of assertions that Agca was a known crazy. For ex- ample, this was stated by a source close to the CIA in an article in the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. This was after the presiding judge at his trial had said that he had shown unusual psychic maturity and had un- common gifts of mental equilibrium and was entirely sane, and exception- ally intelligent and so on. So we had this information given from this unidentified but authoritative intelligence source in Washington say- ing he was a known crazy, so unstable that nobody would ever have hired him because he was bound to be caught. Then they would suggest, well maybe he was working for the Bulgarians but not for this reason. They did not hire him to do this. He might have been do- ing something else although they didn’t say what. Or maybe some Bulgarians knew what he was going to do but didn’t stop him. They didn’t instigate him to do it, they didn’t employ him to do it. Or, if the Bulgarians. did, for some reason, let him do it, or knew that he was doing this, the Russians didn’t know. And we continued to have this up until the other day. The Washington Post has just had a series on terrorism which on the whole is quite a good series, at least on the Middle East terrorist scene, and at the end they quote an unidentified but authoritative State Department spokes- man saying well, of course, it ‘looks now as if the Italian courts are going to go to trial with this Bulgarian, which suggests that there may be evidence that will come out in this trial against the Bulgarian, which will- involve the Bulgarians, but of course this doesn’t mean that the Russians will be in- volved. SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 Well, you know, these are. tales for children. I don’t know who, really, can be deceived by this kind of inept effort to shield the Russians from something that anybody familiar with the struc- ture of the dependent surrogate services in Eastern Europe to the KGB would just have to know is a fact. Anybody in the State Department would have to know that it is not possi- ble to separate the Bulgarians from the Russians in this connection. But this is the effort being made. Don’t ask me to explain why. I don’t really know the reason. I don’t understand it. Q. what do you think is the real opin- ion of the people in our government who are most closely involved, who have the most direct responsibllity for this matter? I’m speaking of Secretary Shultz, Bud McFarlane of the Natlonal Security Council and the President himself. Do they believe the Russlans are Involved, or do they not believe it? A, Well, not a single member of this Administration has conceded publicly that there may be any possibility of a Bulgarian connection—not one. This, in part, I believe—now that I’ve spent some time in Washington—can be traced to the fact that they are very bad- ly informed by their own people abroad, by the intelligence-gathering agencies abroad and by our embassies abroad, who have simply not been tell- ing them the ascertainable facts as any reporter could have gotten them. This has been furthered by reporting that is inexplicable in some of our most impor- tant press outlets and the media about how this case is going. On December 21, for example, Judge Martella transferred this Bulgarian from prison to house arrest. Now the report that was issued by the wire services going out to the Western press said: Sergei Antonov has been freed from prison. But the judge’s com- munique to the state news agency ANSA said we cannot concede liberty to Sergei Antonov because of the grav- ity of the charges against him-—the ex- act opposite of what the wire services had reported. And the judge said well, you’re simply transferring him to house arrest for health reasons. Well, under house arrest he’s had an armored tank stationed in front of the building, he’s had armed policemen wearing bulletproof vests in the lobby and guarding the front and back en- trances, and every three hours a police CONTINUED NEXT PAGE 5 Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP$6-00788R000100330001-5