Claire Sterling (née Neikind; October 21, 1919 – June 17, 1995) was an American author and journalist whose work focused on crime, political assassination, and terrorism.
[1][4] After receiving a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1945, she became the Rome correspondent of "a fly-by-night American news agency.
Her first book, titled Our Goal was Palestine, was published by Victor Gollancz under her maiden name Claire Neikind in 1946, it is described as 'an American journalist writes of her experiences in a refugee ship.'
[8] Sterling was the first to claim (in a September 1982 article in Reader's Digest) that the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John II had been ordered by the Bulgarian Secret Service, a theory that became known as the "Bulgarian Connection"[9][10] She was one of three journalists who developed and published details supporting the theory - the others were Paul Henze, a propaganda expert and former CIA station chief in Turkey, and Michael Ledeen, associated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, a right-wing think tank.
The "Bulgarian Connection" theory has also been, in detail, refuted and attributed to bias by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.