Once again, it was made very clear to us that when it came to the MSM narrative, facts REALLY didn't matter.
When the third opportunity to challenge the MSM's narrative arrived, we still had hope and again jumped at the chance. In the spring of 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC's Nightline.
Our aim was to establish the credibility of the American claims that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing from Afghanistan. We had a number of credible sources stating that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet.
From the moment they entered the White House the new administration had demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action so they couldn't leave. Though lacking in factual backup, this hypocritical campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and our effort with Roger Fisher to further the negotiation process remained willfully unexamined by America's mainstream media.
By 1987 we were so frustrated with getting nowhere at changing the official narrative with the facts on the ground we had to question all our assumptions about journalism. If facts did not matter, what did?
That's when we looked at our story from a personal perspective and wondered what had called us to the Afghan story in the first place. We started writing screenplays out of our accumulated materials and research and by the end of the 1980s had completed four. But we had yet to find the right path to tell our story.
Then in September of 1991, our ten-year-old daughter Alissa told us about a dream she had with Paul's deceased father whom she had never met. He was accompanied by a man wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottom trousers and a matching hat. The man told Alissa he was 800 years old. We already knew the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland as mercenaries for King Henry II 800 years before and decided to consider Alissa's dream as a mystical encouragement to dig deeper into the past for answers.
Three months later we saw Oliver Stone's film, JFK, and found the inspiration we had been looking for. Stone's decision to include the involvement of an esoteric secret society with deeper motives resonated with us.
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