[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 103 (Thursday, June 22, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8847-S8848]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       TRIBUTE TO CLAIRE STERLING

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on Saturday last, in Arezzo, Italy, 
Claire Sterling died, age 76. So passed, as her great friend Meg 
Greenfield put it, ``one of the great journalists of all time.''
  She was born in Queens, took her degree from Brooklyn College, and 
went from there to the Columbia graduate school of journalism. In time 
she joined the staff of the Reporter where she was a colleague of Ms. 
Greenfield for some 17 years, albeit from her post in Rome.
  In her youth, as a student involved with student politics at Brooklyn 
College, and later as a union organizer, she came in contact with the 
Stalinist left which gave her a perspective, almost a second sense 
concerning ideological politics that ever thereafter informed her 
accounts of world politics at the highest, and yes, lowest, even 
criminal and clandestine levels. What liberals did not wish to know--
many liberals, that is--and conservatives could not grasp, she 
instantly understood, and sublimely construed. There is a Hebrew 
saying, ha mevin yavin: those who understand, understand. Claire 
Sterling understood and not just at metaphysical heights. Who else 
would have persuaded the rebels opposing French rule in Algeria to let 
her know which trains she could take back to the coast which were not 
scheduled to be blown up.
  Meg Greenfield allows as how ``it is hard to think of her as dead, 
for she was so alive.'' And so we will remember her, even as we offer 
our condolences to her beloved husband Tom, and her son Luke, daughter 
Abigail, and her sister Ethel.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the 
articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post be printed in 
the Record.
  There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
                [From the New York Times, June 18, 1995]

         Claire Sterling, 76, Dies; Writer on Crime and Terror

                             (By Eric Pace)

       Claire Sterling, an American author and correspondent based 
     in Italy, who was known for her writings on terrorism, 
     assassination and crime, died yesterday in a hospital in 
     Arezzo, Italy. She was 76 and lived outside of Cortona, near 
     Arezzo.
       She had cancer of the colon, her husband said.
       Mrs. Sterling was based in Italy for more than 30 years and 
     traveled widely. Her most [[Page S 8848]] recent book, 
     ``Thieves' World: The Threat of the New Global Network of 
     Organized Crime'' (1994, Simon & Schuster), was praised by 
     Stephen Handelman, of the Harriman Institute of Advanced 
     Soviet Studies at Columbia University, as making ``a 
     significant contribution to post-cold-war debate'' by 
     affirming ``that the growing interdependence among nation-
     states and financial institutions has made it easier for 
     crime syndicates to cooperate across national boundaries.''
       In an earlier book, ``Octopus: the Long Reach of the 
     International Sicilian Mafia'' (1990), she examined the 
     Sicilian Mafia and charged gangster-chieftains based in 
     Palermo with creating a multinational empire with the United 
     States as its longtime main target.
       In her 1984 book ``The Time of the Assassins,'' Mrs. 
     Sterling examined the attempt by a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, to 
     kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. She contended that Mr. Agca 
     had ``come to Rome as a professional hit man, hired by a 
     Bulgarian spy ring.'' She presented what she called ``massive 
     proof that the Soviet Union and its surrogates have provided 
     the weapons, training and sanctuary for a worldwide terror 
     network aimed at the destabilization of Western democratic 
     society.''
       Mrs. Sterling's contention about a Bulgarian role in the 
     attack was disputed, but writing in 1991, she maintained that 
     Italian courts in 1988 had ``expressed their moral certainty 
     that Bulgaria's secret service was behind the papal 
     shooting.''
       She also attracted wide attention with her 1981 book ``The 
     Terror Network,'' which traced connections among terrorist 
     groups around the globe. William Abrahams, who edited the 
     book for Holt, Rinehart & Winston, said that while she was 
     writing it, the Italian Government posted a guard at her 
     house to protect her.
       A decade later, the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis 
     reported that William J. Casey, the Director of Central 
     Intelligence in the Reagan Administration, had held up a copy 
     of ``The Terror Network'' before a group of official 
     intelligence experts and had ``said contemptuously that he 
     had learned more from it than from all of them.''
       Mrs. Sterling's first book was ``The Masaryk Case'' (1969), 
     about Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister who was 
     reported to have leaped to his death in 1948 from a window of 
     his Prague apartment. She concluded that he had been killed 
     by Soviet or Czechoslovak Stalinists to keep him from 
     defecting to the West.
       In her decades abroad, she also wrote articles for The New 
     York Times, Atlantic Monthly, The Reporter magazine, Life, 
     Reader's Digest, Harper's, The New Republic, The Washington 
     Post, International Herald Tribune and The Financial Times.
       Mrs. Sterling was born Claire Neikind in Queens, received a 
     bachelor's degree in economics from Brooklyn College, and 
     worked for a time as a union organizer among electrical 
     workers.
       In 1945 she received a master's degree from the Columbia 
     Graduate School of Journalism, which awarded her a Pulitzer 
     Traveling Scholarship.
       She went on to work in Rome for what she described in a 
     1981 interview as ``a fly-by-night American news agency.'' 
     She learned Italian, and when the agency went out of 
     business, she returned to the United States and joined the 
     staff of The Reporter magazine, which began publication in 
     early 1949.
       Mrs. Sterling recalled that when she applied for the 
     Reporter job, Max Ascoli, the magazine's Italian-born 
     publisher and editor, said, ``If anybody's going to write 
     about Italy around here, it's me.''
       In 1951, she married Tom Sterling, a writer. She remembered 
     that ``Max Ascoli's wedding present to me was a six-month 
     assignment in Rome.''
       Mrs. Sterling's six-month assignment lasted 17 years, 
     ending only when The Reporter ceased publication in 1968. By 
     then, the Sterlings were accustomed to life in Italy, where 
     Mr. Sterling had written some of his more than a dozen books. 
     So Mrs. Sterling, keeping Italy as her base, began writing 
     her Masaryk book.
       She is survived by her husband; a son, Luke, of Cortona; a 
     daughter, Abigail Vazquez of San Francisco; two 
     grandchildren, and a sister, Ethel Braun of Manhattan.
               [From the Washington Post, June 18, 1995]

              Claire Sterling, Investigative Writer, Dies

                            (By Bart Barnes)

       Claire Sterling, 75, a U.S. journalist and author of 
     investigative books that explored connections between the 
     Soviet government and terrorist organizations around the 
     world, died of cancer June 17 at a hospital in Arezzo, Italy.
       In a journalistic career that spanned almost five decades, 
     Mrs. Sterling covered and wrote about armed revolutionary 
     movements in Third World countries, U.S. gangsters, World War 
     II refugees and political assassinations. She was based in 
     Italy for most of that period, and from there she wrote 
     stories for The Washington Post and other newspapers. But her 
     work also took her to Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East 
     and Asia.
       Her books included ``The Masaryk Case'' (1969), In which 
     she argued that the 1948 death of Czech Foreign Minister Jan 
     Masaryk was murder, not suicide; ``The Terror Network'' 
     (1981), in which she argued that the Soviets were sponsoring 
     and supporting terrorist organizations in several countries; 
     and ``The Time of the Assassins'' (1984), in which she 
     accused the Soviet Union of complicity in the 1981 attempted 
     assassination of Pope John Paul II.
       She began her career in journalism shortly after World War 
     II, working in Italy for the now-defunct Overseas News 
     Service. It was an era when women were rare and often 
     unwelcome in the news business, and Mrs. Sterling became 
     known as an adventuresome and energetic reporter who 
     sometimes used creative methods to get her stories.
       In Italy, she boarded a Palestine-bound ship with Jewish 
     war refugees, taping her U.S. passport to her arm, which she 
     had encased in a cast as if it were broken. The ship was 
     intercepted by British authorities, and she was taken to an 
     internment camp. But she was released when she produced the 
     passport proving her U.S. nationality.
       During the 1950s, she wrote about independence movements in 
     North Africa, and she often traveled with bands of armed 
     insurgents, including once when she was five months pregnant. 
     When her husband expressed concern about this, she told him 
     not to worry--the rebels had promised not to blow up any 
     trains she was on.
       Mrs. Sterling was born in New York. She graduated from 
     Brooklyn College and received a degree in journalism from 
     Columbia University.
       After a short stint with the Overseas News Service, she 
     joined the staff of Reporter magazine in 1949. She 
     interviewed New York mob boss Lucky Luciano and wrote an 
     unflattering profile of Clare Booth Luce, the U.S. ambassador 
     to Italy during the Eisenhower administration. She wrote 
     stories from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
       After Reporter folded in 1968, Mrs. Sterling wrote articles 
     for Harper's magazine, did freelance writing and wrote books.
       In 1968, she covered the brief period of social and 
     political liberalization in Czechoslovakia under the 
     leadership of Alexander Dubcek, which became known as the 
     Prague Spring. In the course of reporting that story, she 
     began looking into the 1948 death of Masaryk, the foreign 
     minister, who had been found dead in the courtyard of 
     Prague's Czernin Palace, apparently after falling from a 
     window. The death had been ruled a suicide.
       From previously published material, interviews and new 
     documents, Mrs. Sterling concluded that Masaryk, a popular 
     political figure and a leader of the Czech government in 
     exile during the wartime occupation by Germany, had been 
     murdered by Communist agents, probably to prevent his 
     defection to the West. She speculated in her book ``The 
     Masaryk Case'' that he had been overpowered by security 
     agents, suffocated with pillows and flung from the window.
       Her second book, ``The Terror Network,'' was based on an 
     article she had written for Atlantic Monthly in which she 
     explored similarities between the kidnappings and murders in 
     the 1970s of former Italian premier Aldo Moro by the Italian 
     Red Brigades and of West German industrialist Hans-Martin 
     Schleyer by the German Red Army Faction.
       In this book, Mrs. Sterling traced what she said were 
     extensive political and military links between terrorist 
     organizations, all of which, she suggested, received material 
     but clandestine support from Moscow. ``In effect,'' she 
     wrote, ``the Soviet Union simply laid a loaded gun on the 
     table, leaving the others to get on with it.'' The book was 
     well received by the newly inaugurated administration of 
     Ronald Reagan, but liberal critics complained that Mrs. 
     Sterling's argument was unsupported by conclusive evidence.
       In ``The Time of the Assassins,'' Mrs. Sterling 
     investigated claims by Mehmet Al Agca that he was acting on 
     orders from the Bulgarian secret service in his 1981 attempt 
     on the life of Pope John Paul II. In 1986, an Italian jury 
     acquitted three Bulgarians and three Turks of conspiracy in 
     the plot for lack of proof. Mrs. Sterling continued to insist 
     that the Soviet Union was behind it.
       She married novelist Thomas Sterling in 1951. They lived in 
     Rome and Cortona, Italy.
       In addition to her husband, she is survived by two 
     children, Luke Sterling, a painter who lives in Cortona, and 
     Abigail Vazquez of San Francisco; and two grandchildren.
     

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