The 1978 trial of Kristina Berster revealed the danger of guilt by association and how disinformation creates a false narrative.
Vermont endured a manufactured terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions. The FBI lied, so did the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was a target.
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| Vermont Cynic satire, Nov. 30, 1978 |
By Greg Guma
Chapter Eight
Managing Perceptions
The jury went out on a Monday afternoon. By the next day it was obvious that a verdict wouldn’t come easily. Jurors were snagged on at least two issues: Kristina’s fear and the justification for her actions. Was sneaking across the border necessary to avoid West German repression? They couldn’t decide, and looked to the judge for guidance.
Facing the possibility of a hung jury on the third day of deliberations, Coffrin called them back and read an expanded definition of the “necessity defense.” Fear of harm, he said, could only be a defense if the harm would follow immediately. Having a gun to your head, or facing a tiger, would be enough. But just having a tiger in the neighborhood was no excuse for crossing a border illegally.
But that didn’t settle it. The jury remained stuck. They asked about the meaning of the conspiracy charge and listened to testimony excerpts. By Friday afternoon they had broken Vermont’s record for the length of a jury deliberation.
The verdict, finally delivered by the exhausted group at sundown on October 27, 1978 was a split decision. Felony and misdemeanor conviction, but acquittal on the conspiracy charge. US Attorney Gray didn’t consider this a victory. The jurors had sent a message through their delay and mixed verdict that they were looking for a middle path.
Thwarted in court, Gray went to the press and broke the agreement he had made earlier with the defense. He revealed that Kristina once lived in South Yemen. While forced to admit that didn’t prove she was a terrorist, he suggested that it did tend to disprove her innocence of terrorist affiliations. Faced with an unfavorable verdict, he had turned back to a desperate line of defense — guilt by association, plus a racist dog whistle. Presumably, he also understood the potential impact of such a last-minute revelation: a renewed crackdown in West Germany, where the authorities and right-wing press were watching the case and viewed South Yemen as a terrorist training ground.
The trial ended as it began, with front page headlines and twisted facts. Kristina remained a pawn of governments, imprisoned without bail, interrogated by agents from two continents, and labeled by both to justify extreme tactics. In Vermont, the rhetoric had softened. But beyond the state line the smear campaign rolled on. In New York City, a banner headline the day after Berster’s conviction trumpeted, “No Asylum for Terrorist.”
That’s how perception management works: When in doubt, just keep lying.
But the story didn’t end there. First of all, the jury had reached some surprising conclusions. Members said afterward that they found Kristina’s situation compelling and hoped that a guilty verdict on minor charges wouldn’t prevent her from winning asylum. The following February, the Judge sentenced her to a nine month jail term, all but two weeks she had already served. Remarking that her story of persecution and flight was credible, Judge Coffrin called for leniency.
It was a strange turn of events, leading some of us to think she might soon be free. But that was not to be. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had begun deportation proceedings.
Gray briefly also considered whether to convene a grand jury and seek new charges for perjury and conspiracy. Kunstler countered by filing a protest with the judge about how probation officials were conducting the pre-sentence investigation. Moved from Vermont to New York City, Kristina had been questioned without her lawyers present.
BERSTER BREAKS OUT, shouted the headline. The story was a black comic tale of escape and death. “Aided by darkness and near blizzard conditions,” it began, “a small group calling themselves the Green Mountain Boys sprung Kristina from the Chittenden County Correctional Center, where she was being held. Authorities confirmed the incident last night, and said at least two people died in the audacious pre-dawn move.”
“Prison guard Mike Moskovitz was brought down by a hail of bullets fired by Burlington police as he pursued the gang into the woods surrounding the facility,” the story continued. “Left dead at the scene were two of the gang which sprung Ms. Berster. One of the victims is reported to be left writer Greg Guma, a member of the Kristina Berster Defense Committee, and another body has been temporarily lost by police in the snow drifts in Tuesday’s storm.
“When notified of the incident, the FBI immediately issued a “shoot to kill order.”
In the fantasy, Berster and the Boys made their way to Cavendish, where they sought asylum “in the closely-guarded estate of exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzenytsyn.” (He did live there but his home wasn’t guarded.) Kunstler vowed to defend Berster again, using the necessity defense. “She was being mishandled in jail and had no choice but to escape. Maybe this time Judge Coffrin will listen to me.”
It was clever enough, just “fake news,” back when it was mostly harmless. But Berster supporters couldn’t fully enjoy it. I just wondered why I was the first to die.
The defendant herself was skeptical that the US would ever allow her to stay, particularly not as long as that meant defying a close ally. The way she saw it, no one represented US interests in Europe more forcefully at the time than the Federal Republic of Germany. From monetary policy and trade to the stationing of nuclear missiles, it was to Western Europe what Iran, until the Shah fled, was to the Persian Gulf — a regional policeman. But West Germany had also committed itself to a policy of “counterterrorism” overkill that threatened civil liberties.
As the 1970s ended, repression was being legalized globally. After the kidnapping of Italy’s Aldo Moro produced a NATO alert throughout Europe, West Germany took the lead. Other countries, including the US, followed suit with their own commando units and “grassroots” networks of spies. In such a world, what to make of the Kristina Berster case? At the time few people suspected the whole truth. To some, it looked like a human rights issue. Victimized by shifting international politics, a student activist whose only crime was crossing a border to seek asylum had spent almost two years in prison, in Germany and then the US. He was essentially a political prisoner.
But there was even more to it. Berster’s case demonstrated how a government crusade against terrorism can become an excuse for self-serving propaganda, threatening anyone who actively attempts to change the way a society is run – from civil libertarians, lawyers and prison reformers to anti-nuclear protesters and feminists. Across the country, despite claims that the excesses of COINTELPRO were over, new reports were surfacing of harassment, covert agents provoking violence in nonviolent groups, wiretapping, political grand juries, and illegal surveillance. At the decade ended a chill set in, and terrorism became an excuse for virtually any tactic the government found effective. Like an unseen virus, demonization and repression were spreading.
Returning to West Germany in late 1979, Kristina Berster was freed after the original charges against her were dropped. A “complex arrangement” was worked out between the two governments, making it possible for her to voluntarily return without a deportation order. She went back to school, continued her prison reform work, and eventually became a psychologist.
But her US misadventure revealed a few things — for example, that public officials, working with intelligence agents, were ready to lie in court and sanction illegal surveillance, and that some media outlets could be manipulated to distribute rumors and false narratives. Though the evidence remained circumstantial, it also appeared that Vermont had experienced a manufactured terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions for political advantage. The FBI had lied, so had the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was targeted for surveillance. There was even a simulated terrorist “siege,” a staged media event that played in the government’s false narrative.
It looked very much like a covert operation to influence public opinion, what would soon be named “perception management” by the Department of Defense. Basically, this involves both conveying and denying information, as circumstances require, “to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.” That was the DoD’s definition, founded in a Pentagon document. The goal is to influence the perceptions of enemies, but sometimes also friends, and ultimately to provoke the behavior you want.
As the Defense Department puts it, “Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”
In the Reagan years the same tactics were euphemistically labeled “public diplomacy,” and expanded to explicitly include domestic disinformation during the Bush I administration. In those days it was mainly about stoking fear of communism, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, Qaddafi in Libya, and anyone else on the Reagan and Bush hit lists.
Clinton modifications were added in Directive 68, which still made no distinction between what could be done abroad and at home. When Bush II took office, the name was changed again, this time to “strategic influence.”
Unmasking such covert operations can have high costs, like being watched, losing your job, or worse. In this case, at least the victim was set free and the true story did get out — to some extent. National outlets ignored the verdict, of course. But the Village Voice did buy my feature story, and then send a “kill fee” shortly before publication. In other words, they paid me not to run it. A shorter version later appeared in WIN, the War Resisters League monthly.
Alex Cockburn gave two main reasons for the Voice’s late decision to back out: the suggestion that Andreas Baader might have been murdered in jail, and, more to the point, an ownership change. Australian press magnate Rupert Murdoch had just bought a controlling stake in the parent corporation.
Back in Burlington, Jim Martin, the editor who fired me, lasted only a few months. Before the end of the year I was back, this time as co-editor. And a government “perception management” campaign had been derailed. Enough people had seen through the fog of information war. But the battle was just beginning.
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| Staff of the Vanguard Press outside our College Street office. Greg is behind the hat. The weekly hosted a crew of hungry young journalists, activists and thinkers who shook up the status quo. An alternative newspaper wasn’t a political movement, but the dividing line was less than obvious. |
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