PoliticalWarfare.org

Agent provocateur? Stasi agent shot German peace protestor

The 1967 West Berlin police shooting of a peace protester set off a cultural and political revolution in West Germany credited (or blamed) with bringing the far left to power.

Archival records show that the police officer who killed the protester was a secret agent for the East German Stasi intelligence service.

Could the Stasi have been behind the dramatic event that changed postwar German politics and bred a new generation of militant anti-American activists and politicians? Many of today's leaders of Germany's Socialist and Green parties got their start in the student protest movements of the 1960s.

The New York Times thinks the Stasi pulled the political trigger in a May 26 story. Correspondent Nicholas Kulish writes from Berlin that the incident "was called 'the shot that changed the republic.'"

Stasi agent set off momentuous political event

"The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today," Kulish reports.

The shooting produced an iconic image of a woman tending to the dying young man - capturing a  moment that is likened to the Ohio National Guard killings of antiwar/pro-Hanoi protesters at Kent State University. "It is as if the shooting deaths" of the Kent State students in 1970 "had been committed by an undercover KGB officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper," according to the report.

The West Berlin police officer who killed the protester, Karl-Heinz Kurras, at the time was a secret member of the East German Communist Party and a recruited agent of the Stasi, the nickname of the East German subsidiary of the Soviet KGB. The revelation of Kurras' real loyalty has come as a shock to the German left.

"For the left, Mr. Kurras’s true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist," the New York Times reports.

"The most insidious question raised by the revelation is whether Mr. Kurras might have been acting not only as a spy, but also as an agent provocateur, trying to destabilize West Germany. As the newspaper Bild am Sonntag put it in a headline, referring to the powerful former leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, 'Did Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?'"

Archivists say they can find no evidence that the Stasi agent shot the protester on orders. Kurras, now 81, admits he was a secret member of the East German Communist Party, does not deny he was a Stasi agent, and does not deny shooting the protester, Benno Ohnesorg, though Kurras said it was an accident.

Perfect villain and victim

Kurras was a gun aficionado who had volunteered to fight for Hitler during World War II before secretly joining the Communists a decade later. "If Mr. Kurras seemed to fit the bill of the 'fascist cop,' Mr. Ohnesorg came across as the most innocent of victims," according to the New York Times. "A student who also wrote poetry, he was married, his wife pregnant with their first child, when he went to a demonstration against a state visit by Iran’s leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

"Mr. Ohnesorg’s death had a powerful mobilizing effect. The photograph of a woman cradling his head as he lay on the ground is among the most iconic images in Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. And on a darker note it became the chief justification for violent action by terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which even took its name from the day of Mr. Ohnesorg’s killing.

"'The biggest milestone on the road toward violence was not what people thought it was,' said Mr. Aust, who also wrote a book on the Red Army Faction. 'The pure fact that he was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not.'"

The bottom line

We may never know the answer about whether the Stasi agent was merely a spy within the West German police, or was an agent-provocateur under orders to commit an assassination for political warfare purposes. However, it would not be out of character for the Stasi, or the Soviet bloc at large, to conduct such a political warfare operation, much as Hitler had the Reichstag burned in order to blame the Communists and propel his political revolution a generation earlier:

• The Stasi under Erich Mielke was an excellent practitioner of political warfare - perhaps the best in the Soviet bloc; even better, at times, than the Soviet KGB.
• We know from the archives and interviews that most Soviet bloc political assassinations during the Cold War were carried out through verbal orders, with no paper trails.
• The case of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul under Bulgarian intelligence control in 1981, shows that the Soviet bloc used "fascist" cover for political murders. Agca, a Muslim, was a member of a fascist-oriented Turkish movement called the Gray Wolves while he was working for the Soviet bloc.

Pope Benedict to join Facebook as Vatican upgrades Web strategy

The Vatican is embracing online social networking technology, with Pope Benedict XVI soon to join Facebook, where Catholics and any interested people can "friend" the Holy Father and receive messages, virtual postcards and updates on their computers, PDAs, iPods and mobile phones. Information services will be offered in eight languages.

The pope's Facebook presence will be managed by the office that runs Vatican Radio. Benedict XVI has said that social networking technology has many positive attributes that the church should welcome, but warns also that such technology can cause some people to become isolated or marginalized.

Reuters TV has the story. The Reuters correspondent claims that the Vatican is emulating President Obama's online strategy from the 2008 campaign and his presidency, but does not cite a source.

Israel Defense Forces make good use of YouTube

Taking its case to the world through an accelerated use of intelligence for persuading the world about its cause, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) now has its own information-packed video channel on YouTube.

Since December 2008, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit has run IDFNADESK, a YouTube channel, showing IDF videos of Hamas operations, IDF counterterrorism operations, interviews with IDF officials, and other multimedia. The channel contains dozens of videos and other IDF links.

Some of the videos are in Arabic and contain English subtitles; others are narrated in American-style English.

The IDF public affairs website is idfspokesperson.com.

Word is traveling around the Internet today that YouTube has told the IDF that it would pull at least one video from the IDFNADESK site, allegedly due to not enough people logging in. This claim is difficult to believe because IDFNADESK is the #2 most subscribed YouTube channel in Israel, with more than 2.3 million channel views since December. The video in question, about an operation against Hamas and narrated by an Arabic-speaking IDF officer, has been viewed more than 354,000 times.

IDFNADESK has spawned some opposition video sites as well, showing how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is well under way online.

Good move: US military quickly quashes sloppy reporting

The US military has moved with effective speed to discredit allegations that NATO forces were using white phosphorous "munitions" against civilians in Afghanistan.

The Reuters news agency first raised the allegations in an inaccurate report published May 8.

Anti-military groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) in New York hinted strongly that the US and/or NATO illegally used white phosphorous in recent military operations in which innocent civilians were maimed or killed.

However, the military marshaled the facts quickly to show that the Taliban used white phosphorous as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in its attacks. NATO uses white phosphorous for legal, legitimate reasons such as illuminating the sky at night and destroying bunkers, but not generally for anti-personnel purposes.

Reuters was one of the main Western news agencies to repeat the allegations that NATO used white phosphorous as illegal "munitions." The wire service went on to hint that the US or NATO are using illegal chemical weapons in Afghanistan.

In a breathless "exclusive," Reuters correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison falsely reported on May 8 that "western troops" fired a white phosphorous munition into an Afghan house last March, severely burning a little girl in what a Reuters editor called a "chemical strike." Reuters implied in the article that US or NATO forces are illegally using chemical weapons and incendiaries as anti-personnel weapons in Afghanistan.

In a gross breach of journalistic professionalism, Graham-Harrison sole-sourced her sensational story, using an anguished father's uncertain recollection of combat around his village when his daughter was maimed by a white phosphorous weapon.

Reuters did not quote a US or NATO official as refuting the report until way down in the 14th paragraph of the story. In paragraph 15, Reuters quoted a US Army officer as saying that a Taliban mortar unit might have fired the white phosphorous. Graham-Harrison spent much of the rest of the article quoting others to undermine the Army's statement. Here's a sampling:

"To think they (the Taliban) are employing white phosphorus as a weapon in their arsenal is very far-fetched," said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon.

"The U.S. has optics that will allow them to see through the smoke, so it is useless for (the Taliban). They don't need to illuminate because that is telegraphing to the United States where they are going to go and fight. Plus they know the area.

"They want high explosive to shock and kill; flames raining down from the sky aren't going to frighten the U.S. forces."

NATO spokeswoman Willis said insurgents had been observed using white phosphorus weapons in the past. Asked to provide examples of the Taliban using the chemical, she wrote back to say that she was unable to do so.

The Taliban also denied that they used it. "This is not true, it is just a mere allegation," said spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

The Reuters piece was especially powerful because it centered around the plight of an innocent little girl who suffered from burns to 40 percent of her body, including her head and face. (Oh, and by the way, American military doctors at Bagram saved her life and allowed the Reuters reporter to go in and do the story in the first place, but that didn't stop Graham-Harrison from jihading against the Americans.)

Reuters continued using the Human Rights Watch "expert" to beat up on the US and NATO.

Fast turnaround to discredit the reports

The US Central Command quickly discredited Reuters and Human Rights Watch by releasing declassified information showing 38 instances in which the Taliban stockpiled white phosphorous or used it as an anti-personnel weapon.

It was a great job of what for the military is a rapid turnaround of bad press through declassification of intelligence data. After the May 11 CENTCOM release, news organizations around the world picked up the story.   

"Taliban 'used white phosphorous,'" the BBC reported on May 11. "Afghan rebels use phosphorous weapons: US military," according to Agence France Presse. Even Iran's PRESS TV reported, "US blames Taliban for phosphorous weapons."(By contrast, here's some collateral damage in the form of a headline on an Associated Press story in the Detroit Free Press: "US denies burning Afghans in battle.")

Peter Graff of Reuters wrote a skeptical report from Kabul, citing the US military's release of data as  being in response to an earlier Reuters report, sticking by what Graham-Harrison wrote but pooh-poohing the intelligence findings as being inconclusive.

Nathan Hodge wrote a goofy report for Wired.com, titled "US fighting off white phosphorous allegations (again)," recycling the allegations of "human rights groups" while offering no new facts, and seeming to presume that the US was using what he called "white phosphorous munitions." Hodge spent eight paragraphs blowing smoke, so to speak, even raising the possibility of American "war crimes," before quoting the US military as saying that it did not use white phosphorous munitions and showing evidence that the Taliban did. Hodges concluded by keeping the door open to the possibility that the Americans are using white phosphorous illegally. His source? Human Rights Watch. Come on, Nathan. You're a serious guy. You can do better than that.

My hat's off to the military commanders, intelligence officers and public affairs officers who worked overtime to correct the sloppy, even malicious, reporting. Well done.

[Note: Be sure to see the comments posted below. To read the unclassified intelligence report that documented Taliban possession and use of white phosphorous munitions, click here.]

Criminalizing criticism of war criminals

The Russian regime is endorsing the criminalization of speech that criticizes Josef Stalin's military strategy and tactics during World War II. It's part of an official campaign to glorify the totalitarian Soviet past in order to legitimize the chekist mafiocracy's grip on economic and political power.

The repression is aimed not only at Russian citizens, but at foreign dignitaries, including presidents of other countries who criticize Stalinism and the Soviet invasions and occupations of countries across Central and Eastern Europe.

The proposed legislation, called "Against the Rehabilitation of Nazism," is modeled after anti-holocaust-denier laws in democratic European countries, Russian regime officials say.

John Wendle, Time magazine's Moscow correspondent, writes, "Liberals in Russia fear the law may punish and silence new - and possibly more accurate - interpretations of the country's history and solidify the government's control of the past. But the real aim of the law may be to provide the Kremlin with another rhetorical tool with which to attack governments of former Soviet Republics and Eastern Bloc countries that have increasingly moved towards the West."

Russia's history of World War II remains steeped in Stalinist propaganda, with the very name - Great Patriotic War - a holdover of what Stalin called the war after Hitler betrayed him and invaded the USSR in June, 1941. Stalin and Hitler started World War II together, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, but this does not appear in the official Russian history.

Since 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin pact to invade and occupy Central and Eastern Europe, it would be a good time to remember the real history of the war - and encourage the Russian government to do the same.