  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 q\bar 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.
