Wonder if any, or how much of this is true? Was Kremlin behind plot to kill the Pope?
John Follain
April 03, 2005
timesonline.co.uk
When Mehmet Ali Agca shot the Pope from just 9ft away as he toured St Peter’s Square in Rome in May 1981, the Turkish gunman came within a fraction of an inch of changing the course of history.
The bullet broke the Pope’s finger and tore through his abdomen, then dropped between the pontiff and Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, his secretary, who caught John Paul II as he fell.
Almost any other trajectory for the bullet would have killed him. John Paul has since said he is convinced that Mary, the mother of God, intervened and saved him, just as predicted in the third secret of Fatima — which, stored away in the Vatican, he read after his recovery. In simple terms, the bungled assassination reaffirmed that the Pope believed it was his destiny to save the Catholic church.
Quite apart from his theory of divine intervention, a myriad of potential motives and backers for the hapless Agca has sprung up around an assassination attempt that rivals the shooting of President John F Kennedy in the conspiracy theorists’ lexicon.
The Pope, the first non- Italian in the role for nearly 500 years, had suffered under the twin tyrannies of first Nazism and then communism, to which his crowd-pulling brand of public ministries was anathema. Had the Pope died, would communism have vanished from the map of eastern Europe so easily? Was the Soviet KGB, fearful of a Polish pope, the real sponsor of Agca? John Paul visited Poland in June 1979, the year after his election, and made no attempt to hide his support for Solidarity, the independent trade union movement.
Later he was widely credited with helping to create the climate that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Soviets, watching their empire crumble — it finally gave way in 1991, 10 years after the shooting — had every reason to fear his ministry.
At the time an Italian judicial investigation into the assassination attempt and an inquiry launched by the CIA were inconclusive. In his testimony, Agca at first said that he had planned the shooting with accomplices, but then he recanted.
Later he helped to push the KGB theory by saying that it and other eastern European secret services had backed him. Then in 1982, a year after an Italian court had jailed him for life, he was more specific, accusing three Bulgarian nationals of helping to plot the Pope’s death.
They had paid him $1.2m, he said. The Bulgarians were later acquitted and Agca recanted his accusations.
He was extradited to Turkey in 2000, after serving almost 20 years in Italy for the shooting, and is now serving time in jail for separate crimes. In all that time he has never revealed more — despite being visited and forgiven by the Pope — and has since shown more of a nervous interest in the supernatural forces that helped his intended victim to survive.
Even now, however, the debate over the assassination attempt carries on.
A newly opened batch of files from the Stasi, the former East German secret police, has revealed that Agca, four years before he made his unlikely entrance on to the world stage in St Peter’s Square, trained at a guerrilla camp run by Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist.
Carlos — a Venezuelan whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — fought at first for the Palestinian cause in the late 1960s and 1970s, but went on to create a private army to wreak havoc in western Europe.
His greatest coup was the kidnapping of 11 government ministers at a meeting of the Opec oil-producing nations in Vienna in 1975. He is now serving a life sentence in France for murdering two counter-espionage officers and an associate.
Shortly after the Vienna kidnappings, Carlos set up a network called Separat. It is this organisation that taught Agca, according to the Stasi files.
An Italian parliamentary commission which has studied the Stasi evidence has said it suggests that Agca’s instructors at the camp included East Germans and Bulgarians. This again bolsters the theory that the KGB could have been behind the plot, because Separat is known to have functioned partly at the behest of the Soviet and East German secret services.
All the meetings at which terrorism attacks were planned were held in the presence of officers of the KGB and the Stasi, Senator Paolo Guzzanti, chairman of the Italian commission, said recently.
At the camp, Agca was given his first instruction in handling weapons and explosives. Two years later, in 1979, he carried out his first contract killing, the murder of Abdi Ipekci, editor of Milliyet, the Turkish newspaper. Agca was arrested and sentenced to death, but escaped wearing an army uniform after six months in jail.
Last week the Bulgarian government pledged to hand over to the Rome commission a separate batch of Stasi files, which Guzzanti said should provide more details on the interplay between the KGB, the Bulgarian secret service and the Stasi in the planning, execution and aftermath of the assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square. Bulgaria obtained the files from Germany in 2002, but until now has refused to publish them.
“These documents confirm that the order came from Moscow and that the Bulgarians had a criminal role, with the Stasi involved in launching a disinformation campaign afterwards,” Guzzanti said.
Conspiracy breeds conspiracy, however, and the Bulgarians have dismissed the fresh interest in the Agca case as little more than a crude attempt to derail the country’s bid for membership of the European Union.
“This topic is coming up now not only because of the Pope’s condition, but also perhaps because on April 25 Bulgaria will sign the treaty to join the European Union. Every time something important is about to happen, insinuations come out,” Dimitar Tsonev, a government spokesman, said.
That is unlikely to temper the mood in Italy. Ferdinando Imposimato, the judge who led the investigation into the case until 1985, has called on the judicial authorities to reopen the investigation into the papal shooting, saying that the new Stasi evidence tallies with his own conclusions.
“I have no doubt that the Soviets, the Bulgarians and the East Germans were involved in the attack,” he said. “We need to look for more documents rather than question Agca, because he has been threatened repeatedly by Bulgarian and other officials and he won’t talk.”
The Pope has always distanced himself from the theories, saying he never believed that Agca was sponsored by the Bulgarians. But in his latest book Memory and Identity — in which he spends 11 compelling pages describing the attack — he added fuel to the fire by suggesting that Agca must have been backed by an outside interest.
“Someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it,” he wrote of the brush with death that only strengthened his resolve and convinced Catholics around the world that he was the greatest Pope of the modern era.
Additional reporting: Elena Yoncheva, Sofia
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