The gluon spin coupling to a Gaussian correlated background gauge field induces an effective tachyonic gluon mass. It is momentum dependent and vanishes in the UV only like 1/p^2. In the IR, we obtain stabilization through a positive m^2_{conf}(p^2) related to confinement. Recently a purely phenomenological tachyonic gluon mass was used to explain the linear rise in the qbar q static potential at small distances and also some long standing discrepancies found in QCD sum rules. We show that the stochastic vacuum model of QCD predicts a gluon mass with the desired properties.
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