COVERT ACTION: DISCONNECTING THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION

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INFORMATION BULLETIN
Number 23 $3.00
Disconnecting the "Bulgarian Connection?
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Editorial
For the first time CAIB devotes an entire edition of the
magazine to one issue. "The Bulgarian Connection Revisited"
is the compelling analysis of a massive western disinformation
campaign by rightwing government and intelligence officials
and their propagandists, in this country and in Italy. It is a cam-
paign which attempts the transsubstantiation of the Turkish fas-
cist who shot Pope Paul II into an agent of Bulgaria, and by ex-
tension the Soviet Union. The truth being inconvenient for
these corrupt ideologues, they began, with the would-be assas-
sin imprisoned and under their control, to fabricate a case
against Bulgaria. For the past three years they have stood the
facts on their head, appealing to religious emotions by man-
ipulating the world's anger about the act against the Soviet
Union, easily convincing the supine western media that the in-
cident was not what it clearly appeared to be, but the very op-
posite. More recently, however, this fiction has begun to crum-
ble, and all but the ideologically fossilized realize they have
been duped.
The ups and downs of the "Bulgarian Connection" present
a case study in disinformation under the Reagan administration
as the authors of this article unravel every strand of the fabric
of lies woven by the likes of Claire Sterling, Michael Ledeen,
and Paul Henze. These hacks we accuse of deliberate lies, mis-
statements, and distortions, designed not to elicit the truth but
to pervert it. That they have become the "experts," writing
"authoritative" books on the subject, parading their wares be-
fore congressional committees, fabricating front-page byline
stories in establishment papers like the New York Times, and
frequently starring in late-night talk shows, bespeaks the sad
state of the media in the West today. We believe the informa-
tion presented here will help to expose the Bulgarian Connec-
tion boosters for what they are-paranoid, dishonest dem-
agogues, steeped in intelligence connections, pretending to
be impartial journalists and commentators.
We hope in addition this article will serve to illuminate pub-
lic opinion about the Italian judiciary and police-the sole cus-
todians of the sly and conniving Mehmet Ali Agca. For they
too have perverted the truth; engaged as they have been for
nearly four years in suppressing evidence which confirms the
fascist origins of the assassination attempt and fabricating the
tissue of lies which passes for the Bulgarian Connection. Judge
Ilario Marietta, the presiding magistrate, is shown to be as par-
tial as the rest of the disinformationists, and we accuse him of
witting participation in this shabby conspiracy to defraud the
world.
By devoting this issue to a single subject-a case which is
scheduled to come to trial this spring-we do not mean to ig-
nore the dangerous situation in Central America. The Reagan
administration is hell bent on violating every standard of inter-
national law and decency in its frustrated desire to make the
government of Nicaragua say "uncle," and in its contemptu-
ous refusals to discuss better relations with Cuba and other
socialist countries, or to abide by the rulings of the World
Court.
In the next issue of CAIB we will return to these concerns; in
addition we will be publishing a series of articles on infiltration
of the left by government provocateurs, and on torture as a
growing means of bolstering U.S.-supported dictatorships,
both tactics of the CIA and their surrogates which are on the in-
crease around the world in startling proportions. ?
r
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Table of Contents
Editorial
2
Part III: The Second Conspiracy
16
The Bulgarian Connection Revisited
3
Part IV: Antonov: A Political Prisoner
35
Part I: Background
3
Publications of Interest
44
Part II: The First Conspiracy
10
Cover Credit: NC Photo
CovertAction Information Bulletin, Number 23, Spring 1985, published by Covert Action Publications, Inc., a District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation, P. O.
Box 50272, Washington, DC 20004; telephones [phone] and [phone]. All rights reserved; copyright Oc 1985 by Covert Action Publications, Inc.
Typography by Your Tvpe, New York, NY; printing by Faculty Press, Brooklyn, NY. Washington staff: Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Louis Wolf and B. Lynne
Barbee. Board of Advisers: Philip Agee, Ken Lawrence, Clarence Lusane, Elsie Wilcott, Jim Wilcott. Indexed in the Alternative Press Index; ISSN 0275-309X.
2 CovertAction Number 23 (Spring 1985)
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Darkness in Rome:
The "Bulgarian Connection" Revisited
By Frank Brodhead, Howard Friel, and Edward S. Herman*
Part I: Background and Evolution of the Case
1.1 Introduction
On May 13, 1981 a young Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali
Agca, fired shots at Pope John Paul II as the Pope's vehicle cir-
cled slowly through the crowd in St. Peter's Square. Im-
mediately arrested, Agca's movements prior to the shooting
were soon reconstructed by the Italian police, who sought to
determine his motives and accomplices. Yet when Agca was
brought to trial in July 1981, little of this information was pro-
duced in court; his aims were still unclear and no co-con-
spirators were named.**
Agca's crime was committed in the first months of the
Reagan administration. From the outset, administration offi-
cials and supporters sought to link the assassination attempt to
the Soviet Union and its allies, in accordance with the princi-
ples of Secretary of State Alexander Haig's war on "ter-
rorism." This effort did not bear fruit, however, until the pub-
lication of an article by Claire Sterling in the September 1982
issue of the Reader's Digest. Sterling maintained that the at-
tempted assassination, previously thought to have been the
work of a lone, rightwing gunman, was in fact instigated by the
Bulgarian secret services, and behind them the KGB. The alle-
gation of a "Bulgarian Connection" received apparent confir-
mation in November 1982, when Agca declared that several
Bulgarian officials living in Rome had assisted him in his
crime, and that the plan had been originally laid while he was
passing through Bulgaria in the summer of 1980.
With the heightening of Cold War tensions, the allegation of
* Howard Friel is writing On Capitalist Realism: How to Read Time and
Newsweek, to be completed this fall. Frank Brodhead, a historian and jour-
nalist, is the former editor of Resist and co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of
Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic,
Vietnam, and El Salvador. Edward S. Herman is Professor of Finance, Whar-
ton School, University of Pennsylvania, co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of
The Washington Connection, and author of The Real Terror Network: Ter-
rorism in Fact and propaganda.
**Not wanting to burden readers with citations for each factor opinion,
we have been selective in footnoting. A general bibliographic foot-
note is provided at the end of the text.
a Bulgarian Connection in the attempted assassination of the
Pope found a welcome and uncritical reception in the western
media. While no independent evidence linking Agra to the
Bulgarians, or the Bulgarians to the crime, has ever been pro-
duced, leaks of Agca's evolving claims kept the Connection
continuously before the public. The Bulgarian official, Sergei
Antonov, arrested after Agca's new allegations were made,
was all but convicted in the western press. On October 25,
1984, Judge Ilario Martella issued his final report officially in-
dicting Antonov, other Bulgarians, and several Turks as mem-
bers of a conspiracy to assassinate the Pope. A trial is expected
to begin in April 1985.
It is our judgment that the media's uncritical, even en-
thusiastic, embrace of the Italians' case is not merely wrong, it
is also indicative of the more general propaganda role played
by the press. As we will show below, the credibility of Agca,
the primary (in fact, sole) witness-based on his character, his-
tory, interest, circumstances of imprisonment, and shifts and
contradictions in testimony-is close to zero. Furthermore, the
logic of the case as developed by its main proponents is com-
pletely unconvincing and rests ultimately on Cold War
ideological premises. We believe that similar evidence and ar-
guments put forward in a case not helpful to western political
interests would have been objects of derision and quickly re-
jected and buried.
Where the creators of the Bulgarian Connection see one con-
spiracy, we see two. The first conspiracy, based in a Turkish
neofascist organization called the Gray Wolves, assisted Agca
in escaping from a Turkish prison in November 1979 and aided,
financed, and sheltered him during the 18 months prior to the
assassination attempt. All investigations into Agca's back-
ground and associations in Turkey have placed him at the cen-
ter of an intricate web of political rightists, drug dealers, and
gun runners. We develop these links, and the possible underly-
ing motivations which would have led Agca and his associates
to kill the Pope, in Part II below.
Our main focus, however, is on the political basis of the case
as it has developed in the Italian and New Cold War context
(Part III). We are entirely persuaded that this is the source of a
plan and decision to pin the assassination attempt on the Bul-
garians. This is a second conspiracy, which involved the Ital-
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ian secret services, their friends in the CIA and Reagan admin-
istration, and other elements within the Italian government and
bureaucracy. We describe the domestic and international
forces at work in 1981 and 1982 causing the Italian authorities to
press Agca to play a cooperative role, the extensive penetration
of the Italian security services by the rightwing conspiracy
Propaganda Due (P-2), and the evidence of preparatory con-
tacts of security agents and other outsiders with Agca prior to
his new declarations. We show that Judge Ilario Martella was
an ideal choice to pursue this case, quietly dignified but dedi-
cated to proving an a priori truth (see 3.4 and 3.5).
If the media are playing a supportive political role, they will
not only stress news damaging to the enemy (suggestive of
Bulgarian guilt), they will also ignore information that would
arouse suspicions concerning the quality of the Italian estab-
lishment and judiciary (the supporting cast). We stress the im-
portance of understanding the Italian political context in order
to grasp the basis of the Bulgarian Connection. This essential
background, however, has barely been mentioned by the New
York Times or other major media sources in the West. In fact,
while featuring prominently the reports of Prosecutor Albano
and Judge Martella and the upcoming trial of the jailed
Bulgarian and Turks, the Times and its mass media associates
have completely suppressed the recent major report by the Ital-
ian Parliament on the P-2 conspiracy (see 3.2 below). The
reasons for this dichotomous treatment seem clear. Thus
Suzanne Garment of the Wall Street Journal can endorse the
Bulgarian Connection (June 15, 1984) on the basis of the integ-
rity and even superior wisdom of the Italians: "Mind you, this
is the Italians-no American hawk paranoids but instead
people who live with a new government every thirty days. You
simply cannot doubt their word." If we are to take their word,
it is important that we be kept in the dark about reports and
scandals that call these claims into question.
While the media have suppressed the Italian context, their
treatment of the U.S. involvement in the Bulgarian Connection
has attained an even higher level of propaganda service. Here
the very individuals actively manufacturing the conspiracy be-
come the prime sources of media information. The main inves-
tigative work- or, we would say, creative writing-in estab-
lishing the hypothesis of the Bulgarian Connection has been
done by Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen.
Their writings in the New York Times, Christian Science Moni-
tor, Reader's Digest, and other publications, and their frequent
appearances on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour and the Sunday
television news programs, and in well-reported appearances be-
fore Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Ter-
rorism, show them to be the media's commentators of choice on
terrorism in general and the Bulgarian Connection in particu-
lar. These individuals have long records of CIA and other intel-
ligence agency connections and disinformation service, re-
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cords which have not been disclosed to the American public.'
In every Red Scare era, such as the period of the Palmer
Raids (1919-1920), or during the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti
trial, hysteria and bias overwhelm any sense of fair play-and
justice. A wave of passion and propaganda establishes guilt be-
forehand and makes doubts seem subversive. These Red
Scares are often cultivated and stoked by the prospective bene-
ficiaries and their agents.' The Bulgarian Connection met a
pressing demand in a suitably prepared moral environment (see
3.2). We believe that it was created, stoked, and even partially
organized' by Sterling, Henze, Ledeen, and their governmental
and media allies (see 3.3 and 3.6). It was made into an accepted
truth by insistent and indignant attention, and came into being
as a legal proceeding as a result of pressure and intense public-
ity. The Bulgarian Connection thus provides a scenario worthy
of a plot by Pirandello: Influential disinformation specialists
linked to the Italian secret services and the Reagan administra-
tion create a useful scenario, sell it to the slow-moving Italians,
who then implement it-with the final touch being that the
New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, the McNeil-
Lehrer News Hour, and NBC News then rely on Henze,
Sterling, and Ledeen to elucidate the real story on what the
nefarious KGB has been up to!
1.2 The Evolving Case: A Conclusion in Search of Plausible
Evidence
In the early period of development of the Bulgarian Connec-
tion, as expounded by Claire Sterling and NBC-TV before
Agca named his alleged Bulgarian co-conspirators, the case for
the Connection rested on one small Fact, plus a set of specula-
tive Cold War inferences. The Fact was that, following his es-
cape from a Turkish prison, Agca visited Sofia, Bulgaria. This
was the only fact supporting the hypothesis of the Bulgarian
Connection in its first phase. Related but inconvenient facts,
such as that Agca visited approximately a dozen other coun-
tries from the time he left Turkey until he shot the Pope, did
not fit preconceived models and have not been given much at-
tention.
The Cold War inferences woven around the Fact were as fol-
lows: because Bulgaria is a Communist police state, the Bulgar-
ian police know everything. Although Agca was traveling
under an assumed name and with a false passport good enough
to fool border officials in 12 other countries, the early and
widely accepted western hypothesis was that the Bulgarians
knowingly sheltered Agca. By further inference, if the Bulgar-
ians protected Agca they must have had something in mind for
him to do, like assassinating the Pope. By extension, because
the Bulgarians never do anything without Soviet permission,
the Soviets must have been involved in this enterprise and can
I. The U.S. media have conveniently overlooked the slander suits against
Sterling in Paris, the long career of Henze as a CIA official and propaganda
specialist, and the accusations against Michael Ledeen made by the head of the
Italian secret service, who castigated him before the Italian Parliament as an
"intriguer" and suggested that he was persona non grata in Italy! See Maurizio
De Luca. "Fuori l'intrigante: esclusivo/scandalo nei rapporti Italia-USA,"
L'Espresso, August 5, 1984. See further, 3.3 and 3.6 below. See also, "Italian
Officials Finger Ledeen, CIA." in CAIB, Number 22 (Fall 1982), p. 41; the
discussion of Claire Sterling in CAIB, Number 19 (Spring-Summer 1983), pp.
18-19; and the biography of Paul Henze in Ellen Ray, et al., eds., Dirty Work
2: The CIA in Africa (Lyle Stuart, Secaucus:l979), pp. 382-383.
2. See Robert Murray, Red Scare: .4 Study in National Hysteria, /9/9-1920
(Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1955).
3. See 3.3 below: "The U.S.-Italian Connection: From Ledeen to Pazienza to
SISMI."
reasonably be assessed responsibility for its surrogate's hiring
of Agca and the shooting itself.
This analysis suffers first and foremost from its purely
speculative character. There is no supportive evidence that the
Bulgarians knew of Agca's presence or had any dealings with
him. There is an assumption that the police in the Communist
world are omniscient and omnipotent, but this is a premise
rooted in ideology, not fact. This assumption is also quietly set
aside when it flies in the face of other lines of argument, as in
explaining the gross mishandling of the assassination attempt
in St. Peter's Square, which is hard to reconcile with an omis-
cient and omnipotent Communist secret police. Several million
Turks pass through Bulgaria every year on their way to West-
ern Europe, and there is no reason to suppose that the Bulgar-
ians know the identity of most of them. The West German,
Swiss, and Italian police were all warned by Turkey that Agca
had been spotted in their countries and should be immediately
apprehended, and they failed to do so; but Cold War ideology
permits acceptance of the claim that only the Bulgarians, and
not our West European allies, protected and used Agca.
In Claire Sterling's version of the story, based on early Agca
statements subsequently repudiated in whole or in part, Agca
stayed at the Vitosha Hotel in Sofia for 50 days in the summer
of 1980. During this period he was visited by various individu-
als who gave him a forged passport, fixed the assassination
contract, and provided him with the nine millimeter Browning
gun with which he shot the Pope. According to Agca, he en-
tered Bulgaria using a passport under the forged name of
Yoginder Singh. This passport has never been found, and even
Paul Henze questions whether Agca could have passed through
Bulgarian customs as an Indian, given his physical characteris-
tics and minimal knowledge of English. The passport found in
Agca's possession upon his apprehension in Rome was made
out in the name of Faruk Ozgun. It showed him entering Bul-
garia from Turkey on August 30 and leaving Bulgaria for
Yugoslavia the next day, August 3l.' Claire Sterling asserts
that this exit stamp is a forgery, but she offers no evidence for
this claim. (Sterling generally asserts that any inconvenient
4. Christian Roulette, La Filiere: Jean-Paul II-Antonor-Agca (Editions du
Sorbier, Paris: 1984), p. 239.
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piece of evidence is a forgery. She is fortunate that the western
media never require that she prove anything.) If it is argued
that the passport found on Agca was kept in order to deceive,
why deceive with one that shows him to have visited Bulgaria
at all?
A further problem is that the Vitosha Hotel, which is
Japanese-owned and run on a very business-like basis, requires
all guests to produce passports and to sign in. No sign-in or
passport is recorded in the hotel records under any of the names
on passports, real or alleged, used by Agca.S This suggests that
the stay in the Vitosha Hotel may never have occurred. Of the
main contacts claimed by Agca and Sterling to have done busi-
ness with him in Sofia, Bekir Celenk denies having been in
Sofia during the time of Agca's alleged stay and claims never
to have met Agca at any time. Celenk is a Turkish businessman
who has been charged with smuggling in both Italy and Tur-
key.The second alleged principal contact, Omer Mersan, ac-
knowledges meeting Agca in Sofia, but denies having provided
him with a passport (as claimed by Agca). Mersan is a Turkish
drug smuggler and has done business with the Gray Wolves,
Agca's primary institutional affiliation, heavily involved in the
Turkish-Bulgarian-Western European drug trade. That Mersan
would have been serving as an intermediary for the Bulgarian
police is entirely unproven, and has been consistently denied
by West German and Italian authorities. The provision of the
gun to Agca in the Vitosha Hotel, asserted by Sterling, has
been repudiated by Agca himself, and more critically by a
police interception of an Agca phone conversation discussing
the problem of getting a gun, which occurred long after Agca's
stay in Sofia. The evidence on Mersan and Celenk is clearly in-
decisive, but major elements of the original Sterling version of
the Sofia connection have disintegrated, replaced by other
Agca formulations.
Once Agca had named his Bulgarian accomplices, his
further confessions opened up other possibilities for connecting
the Bulgarians with the assassination attempt. The most impor-
tant of the new linkages were other Turks, also allegedly pro-
tected by the Bulgarians in Sofia, who Agca claimed were in-
termediaries between himself and the Bulgarian secret police.
Most of these Turks were part of a massive smuggling opera-
tion that connected eastern Turkey with Western Europe. The
fact that these Turks were without exception enlisted in the
neo-Nazi rightwing of Turkish politics was buried under an av-
alanche of information on the background of the Turkish
smuggling trade and the alleged Bulgarian complicity in it, all
of which is relevant only if Agca and his confessions are be-
lievable. As we describe in the next section, the Turkish Con-
nection is fundamental in explaining the motives of Agca and
his comrades, but the smuggling trade and the Bulgarian in-
volvement in it are not.
While great mileage has been extracted from the general be-
lief in a Soviet propensity to evil, the Bulgarian Connection
has still always required a motive to sustain the assassination
attempt. In all versions of the case, Bulgarian Connection en-
thusiasts have depended on the situation in Poland following
the election of Cardinal Wojtyla as Pope in 1979, culminating
in the proclamation of Solidarity in late August 1980. It was the
Pope's declaration of support for Solidarity which is held to be
the key to the Soviet desire to want him out of the way, and at
one point it was even claimed that he had declared his intention
to lay down the papal crown and return to Poland in the event
of a Soviet invasion. This claim has never been authenticated.
5. Ibid., pp. 245-252.
There are several very serious difficulties with this imputed
rationale. First, Agca had already threatened to kill the Pope in
1979 during the Pope's visit to Turkey, long before Solidarity
existed or Poland was in turmoil. This suggests the likelihood
that the real explanation for the assassination attempt in St.
Peter's Square is to be found in the Turkish environment in
which Agca lived. Second, the timing of Agca's alleged con-
spiracy with the Bulgarians presents problems, as Solidarity
was formed in late August 1980, while, according to Sterling,
Agca's dealings in Sofia were completed in early July of that
year. Third, the Pope did not constitute a threat to the Soviet
Union serious enough to justify the costs and risks of either a
successful or bungled assassination plot. The magnitude of the
potential damage from such an effort has been demonstrated by
the events which have unfolded since May 1981, as the attemp-
ted assassination was quickly pinned on the Soviets on the
basis of mere suspicion. Nowhere is the belief in Soviet com-
plicity stronger than in Poland, and it is hard to imagine how
any Soviet official could anticipate that unrest in Poland could
be quelled by a successful assassination attempt. Furthermore,
if successfully pinned on the Soviet Union the plot would have
had a devastating effect on the Soviet effort to oppose the new
missiles planned for Europe and to advance the gas pipeline
project.
Further serious difficulties with the Bulgarian Connection
hypothesis relate to the ineptness of the alleged plot. In the ver-
sion of the Connection developed in the second half of 1982 by
Sterling in the Reader's Digest and by Marvin Kalb on NBC-
TV, these difficulties centered in the implausibility of bringing
Agca to a prominent hotel in Sofia to be recruited and/or to get
his instructions. This action violates the cardinal rule of sus-
taining plausible deniability. Moreover, if contact between
Agca and Bulgarian officials were observed by western agents
in Sofia, certainly a reasonable possibility, it would blow the
Plot out of the water before it got started. Thus the presence of
Agca in Sofia, rather than supporting the Bulgarian Connec-
tion, tends to undermine it. In fact, it more readily supports
two alternative views. One is that someone wanted Agca to be
linked to Bulgaria before he got on with his assassination at-
tempt, after which he could be worked over at leisure until he
Agca at Rome police headquarters for questioning.
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THE MAN WHO SHOT THE POPE-A STUDY IN TERRORISM
It reads like a classic thriller. An electrifying
meeting between Pope John Paul II and Lech
Walesa. The shocking murder of a Turkish
reporter. A defiant letter from the Pope to
Leonid Brezhnev A super-secret conspiracy
linking the Bulgarian secret service, the
Turkish mafia and the Russian KGB. It cli-
maxes with a world leader on his way to a
public appearance and a dirt-poor Turkish
terrorist keeping an appointment with des-
tiny. One fateful moment ... two lives on a
collision course in St. Peter's Square.
AN NBC
WHITE
PAPER
It is all true.
Journey with NBC News Correspondents
Marvin Kalb and Bill McLaughlin into a spell-
binding tale of international terrorism. Who
was behind the plot to kill the Pope? What
was the real motive? Why are West German
and Italian authorities silent about impor-
tant evidence?
The man who shot the Pope is behind bars.
The people who ordered the as-
sassination are still free. Who will
be the next target?
Ubiquitous NBC advertisement for Marvin Kalb show.
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"confessed." The second is that because Agca had stayed in
Sofia briefly, Italian and other western intelligence services
and propagandists seized the opportunity to build a case which,
with an induced confession, would be salable in the well-con-
ditioned West.
A closely related operational difficulty is the unlikelihood
that the Bulgarians and/or Soviets would hire Agca at all. He
was a rightwing fanatic, strongly anticommunist, and mentally
unbalanced, someone who might readily give the game away
upon apprehension. The fact that he failed to confess quickly
has never been adequately explained, but can be easily under-
stood if the confession was a fabrication and Agca had to be in-
duced to cooperate in creating a fairy tale. The long (ten
month) time lag between the contractual arrangement in Sofia
in July 1980 and the assassination attempt in May 1981 has
also never been explained. Furthermore, Agca was a poor
choice as a hired gun because, as Turkey's most notorious ter-
rorist, he was too well known. The Turkish government and
Interpol had issued bulletins about his escape from Turkey, and
several Turkish nationals recognized him during his months of
travel and reported his presence to various authorities.
Another major operational difficulty with the hypothesis of
the Bulgarian Connection is the gross ineptitude of the plan for
the assassination and its implementation. In explaining the lack
of any direct evidence for Bulgarian or Soviet involvement,
Sterling and her associates have always retreated to the notion
that the Soviet KGB is a very professional body that does
things well, covers its tracks, and operates from a base of
plausible deniability. Thus the very lack of evidence, accord-
ing to the Sterling school, points to a Soviet hand in the plot.
Yet it is hard to imagine a more incompetent plan of attack than
the one put into use. Agca not only failed to kill the Pope, but
he himself was neither killed nor rescued. Other evidence also
points to serious incompetence: on the afternoon of the assassi-
nation attempt, for example, Agca apparently asked a priest
through which door the Pope would enter St. Peter's Square.
Writings and other items supposedly found in his room after he
was arrested would have helped incriminate and identify him if
he had escaped or been killed. On the whole there is nothing in
Agca's operation that even hints at professionalism.
The operational weaknesses of the Plot were greatly inten-
sified after Agca had declared that Bulgarian state officials met
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with him and guided his movements in Rome. Proponents of
the case would have us believe that the Bulgarian secret service
involved its agents in direct contact, planning, and tactical
maneuvers with Agca up to the day of the assassination attempt
itself. Agca and three Bulgarians allegedly visited St. Peter's
Square on each of the two days preceding the assassination at-
tempt in order to make the final plans. Not one but two of the
Bulgarians would allegedly drive Agca to the scene of the
crime, and one Bulgarian official would use smoke bombs to
divert the crowd's attention so that Agca could get a good shot
and/or make a getaway. In his original declaration implicating
the Bulgarians, Agca even claimed that he visited their homes
in the Embassy compound, and that in one instance, just days
before the assassination attempt, he met the Bulgarian An-
tonov's wife and young daughter. This latter statement has
since been withdrawn, but this was not done on the basis of
scrutiny or ridicule on the part of the western press, nor doubts
and investigative efforts by Martella. The accumulated con-
tradictions and exposed lies had become too topheavy to sus-
tain.
Following Agca's admission of major falsifications in June
1983, the problem has been to keep the Plot viable in the face of
the disintegration of Agca's credibility (although he will pre-
sumably retain it with Claire Sterling and the New York Times
even past the point where he admits to having been coached).
Under the guidance of the credulous Martella, Agca's fancies
took wider flight: He now remembered that he was sent by his
Bulgarian "control officer" to Tunisia and Malta to inspect the
possibilities of murdering their heads of state. He had partici-
pated in a plot to kill Lech Walesa. We will review some of the
specifics of Agca's shifts in testimony, withdrawals, and evi-
dence of coaching later. At this point we want to note how well
these were covered over in Prosecutor Albano's report, and
even more so in Claire Sterling's highly selective rendition of
that report in the Times, by the emergence of a new Fact: the
Truck. According to the prosecutor's report, Agca eventually
declared that a getaway was planned by the Bulgarians for him-
self and his alleged companion Oral Celik. In this version,
Agca claims that he and Celik were to be driven from St.
Peter's Square to the Bulgarian Embassy, where they were to
be loaded onto a Transports Internationaux Routiers (TIR)
truck which would then be sealed by customs officials and dri-
ven across several national frontiers to Bulgaria. (Such trucks,
once sealed, need not have their contents examined at each in-
ternational border.) The prosecutor's report says that such a
truck was in fact sealed at the Bulgarian Embassy on the very
afternoon of the assassination attempt. Moreover, the report
claims that the truck was sealed on the Embassy grounds,
rather than in front of the Embassy as was invariably the prac-
tice, and that this unusual deviation from standard practice sup-
ports the claim that the truck was used to help Celik escape.
The Truck Ploy, which attempts to establish the Bulgarian
Connection on grounds firmer than Agca's word, does little to
meet this end. For one thing, the truck as an escape route runs
counter to the information in a note found in Agca's possession
on the day of the assassination attempt, which indicates that he
was planning a train trip to Naples (see Sidebar). Furthermore,
the presence of the truck at the Embassy was brought into the
case by the Bulgarians themselves, who introduced it to contest
Agca's claim that the Bulgarian official Aivazov had accom-
panied him to St. Peter's Square. To establish his alibi the Bul-
garians introduced evidence from Italian customs officials that
Aivazov had been with them at the very time when Agca
claimed Aivazov was preparing to divert the crowd in St.
Peter's Square with smoke bombs. And in response to the pro-
secutor's report, Antonov's counsel has found credible witnes-
ses who will testify that the truck never entered the Bulgarian
compound, but was parked, loaded, and sealed on a busy pub-
lic street. He also maintains that Italian customs officials will
swear that the truck did not conceal a man at the time of its sea-
ling, and that it was not unusual to seal trucks at the Embassy
compound.
While the next step of Sterling, Martella, and company may
be to claim that the seals on the truck were broken at some later
point, at which time Celik was stuffed aboard and the truck re-
sealed, this will not save the new Fact from depending once
again on the word of Agca. We should note again that the truck
story emerged out of a disproof of Agca's claim regarding a
Bulgarian official's presence at St. Peter's Square, that it was
provided by the Bulgarians, and that it could easily have been
fed back to Agca for further embroidery. We wonder also
whether the Bulgarian Embassy in Rome is not under surveil-
lance by the Italian and U.S. intelligence services, and whether
the Bulgarians do not assume that this is so. This suggests that
the use of the truck as an escape vehicle would have been irra-
tional behavior on the part of the Bulgarians. Another question
arises from the fact that Celik has been sighted several times
since May 13, 1981 in Western Europe. If the Bulgarian secret
service had taken him to Bulgaria by truck, would they have
released him to resume his wanderings-and possibly be ap-
prehended?
The Truck and the Trip to Naples
As we point out in the text, the Albano report as fea-
tured by Claire Sterling in the New York Times of June
10, 1984 made much of Agca's claim that a truck at the
Bulgarian Embassy was the planned escape route follow-
ing the assassination attempt. If we look back at Claire
Sterling's Reader's Digest article of September 1982,
however, we find a contradictory line of evidence that
Sterling has never reconciled with the truck, nor even ad-
dressed. Sterling says that when captured on May 13,
1981 Agca had in his possession a note with detailed in-
structions on what he was to do. She states authorita-
tively that "'a control' must have given him" these in-
structions at the last minute. Among the details is a refer-
ence to a "trip to Naples," for which Agca is instructed:
"Check if train ticket valid." If Agca had been fixed up
already with a ride in a Bulgarian truck, why would he
be going to Naples or checking out the validity of a ticket
to that destination? In fact, the note in general is incom-
patible with the Bulgarian Connection. It lists a series of
dates for the Pope's appearance in St. Peter's Square,
which suggests that there was no fixed timing for the
plot; it never hints at any Bulgarian involvement; and its
looseness runs counter to the detailed and carefully
planned scenario which Agca spelled out in connection
with the Bulgarians. This note is mentioned in Sterling's
Time of the Assassins, but she carefully avoids dis-
cussing either the trip to Naples or the compatibility of
the other details of the note with Bulgarian involvement.
It is fortunate for Claire Sterling that she never has to
face serious questions on her shifting authoritative pro-
nouncements. ?
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Part II: The First Conspiracy: Agca and the Gray Wolves
2.1 The Turkish Background
While it is possible that the Pope's would-be assassin was
manipulated by some outside party, in our view Agca's moti-
vation must be sought in his Turkish roots.
The picture of Mehmet Ali Agca that emerged in the first
weeks after his assassination attempt was one of a young man
deeply involved in Turkey's neofascist right. Coincidentally,
his assassination attempt occurred at the same time that Tur-
key's new military government handed down a 945-page in-
dictment against the Nationalist Action Party (NAP), the neo-
fascist organization within whose political milieu Agca
functioned. Thus the western media had ready access to vast
amounts of information about the extensive political network
that had sheltered and perhaps guided Agca in his attempt.
Agca, moreover, had been arrested, tried, and convicted for
the 1979 assassination of one of Turkey's most prominent
newspaper editors, Abdi Ipecki; and information disclosed at
this trial was also available to the western media. This informa-
tion was originally tapped by the media, albeit gingerly, but
was then dropped entirely when the Bulgarian Connection
began to assume prominence.
Born in the eastern, more underdeveloped part of Turkey,
Agca came of age during the time that the growing ranks of the
NAP and its youth affiliate, the Gray Wolves, were destabiliz-
ing Turkish society and politics. They were particularly active
in high schools and universities. A member of the NAP served
as Minister of Education in a coalition government in the mid-
1970s, while Gray Wolves terrorists beat and murdered oppo-
nents to gain hegemony in the schools. Agca's high school was
one of those taken over by Gray Wolves militants; and his
teachers, courses, and high school chums shared the rightwing
views of the NAP.
The importance of Agca's immersion in the world of Tur-
key's ultra-right cannot be underestimated. Yet it is quickly
passed over by the "terrorist experts" of the western media
who, claiming to see no reason why a Turk would want to kill
the Pope, cast their gaze to the East. An elementary acquain-
tance with the history and ideology of the NAP, however,
quickly reveals a worldview that adequately supports-if it
does not "rationally" explain-an attempt on the Pope's life.
Agca's younger brother Adnan, for example, told a reporter for
Newsweek that Agca wanted to kill the Pope "because of his
conviction that the Christians have imperialist designs against
the Muslim world and are doing injustices to the Islamic coun-
tries. "'
The Nationalist Action Party was formed in the mid-1960s
when Col. Alpaslan Turkes and some other former army offi-
cers took over a largely moribund party of the traditional right
and infused it with Pan-Turkish ideology and cadres. Turkes
and the NAP were heirs to three-quarters of a century of Pan-
Turkish aspirations and politics. At first the Pan-Turks had
hoped to reunite all Turkish peoples in a single nation stretch-
ing from western China to parts of Spain. At the end of World
War I, with the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Otto-
man Empire, and the emergence of the modern Turkish state,
Pan-Turks focused their agitation on the plight of the "Outer
Turks," those people of Turkish descent who had been left
outside Turkey's national boundaries and who constituted a
majority of all Turkic peoples.
It was of great significance to the future development of
Pan-Turkism that a majority of Outer Turks were now "Cap-
tive Turks" within the Soviet Empire. Not surprisingly, the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was greeted ea-
gerly by Pan-Turkish organizations, as it provided an opportu-
nity to dissolve the Soviet Empire and to unite with the Turkish
motherland the Turkish peoples "held captive." More than a
hundred thousand Soviet Turks were recruited out of POW
camps by the Nazis and enrolled in army units that fought
alongside the Germans. With the defeat of Germany, and thus
Cover of Bozkurt, a Pan-Turkish journal published be-
tween 1939 and 1942.
Pan-Turkish hopes, most Turkish people were still outside of
Turkey proper. Pan-Turkish organizations were henceforth
characterized by a strongly anticommunist, and especially anti-
Soviet, ideology.'
This was the inheritance that Turkes and his colleagues
brought to the NAP in the mid-1960s. The party's structure
served in turn as a vehicle to disseminate a Pan-Turkish
worldview, and it soon emerged as a force to be reckoned with
in modern Turkish politics. In his writings and speeches
Turkes combined a vision of a science-based, state-planned
economy which was to bring Turkey into the Atomic Age with
7. Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism in Turkey: A Study in Irredentism, Archon
Books, 1981, passim.
Number 23 (Spring 1985)
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the legends of the gray wolf who led the Turkic peoples out of
Asia to their homeland. As with European fascism, Tiirkes's
Pan-Turkism sought to appeal to the "little man" crushed be-
tween capitalist monopolies and a strong labor movement. It
was also addressed to "patriots" who believed their nation was
being humiliated by its weakness in relation to the Soviet
Union and the capitalist powers of the West.
Agca became involved with the NAP's youth affiliate, the
Gray Wolves, at the height of its terrorist phase. At that time
the Gray Wolves were training thousands of young recruits in
camps throughout Turkey.' The NAP developed a powerful
base in Turkey, and in 1975 it elected four members to parlia-
ment and served as a junior partner in the National Front gov-
ernment organized by the rightwing Justice Party. By the time
of the military coup in September 1980, there were 1,700 Gray
Wolves organizations in Turkey with 200,000 registered mem-
bers and about a million sympathizers. In its indictment of the
NAP in May 1981, the Turkish military government charged
220 members of the party and its affiliates with responsibility
for 694 murders.
2.2 Agca as Terrorist: The Gray Wolves Nexus
Although Agca's immersion in the world of the Gray
Wolves is inconvenient for supporters of the Bulgarian Con-
nection, the evidence connecting Agca to Turkey's neofascist
right is overwhelming. What is more, these connections never
tapered off and may be traced to the very day of the assassina-
tion attempt. There are, nevertheless, two models of linkages
that try to explain the nature of the conspiracy supporting
Agca's attempt. One model, the Gray Wolves Connection, is
supported by the testimony of investigators in several different
countries and contains a large volume of hard evidence. The
other model-that of Sterling, Henze, and Martella-is based
on Agca's shifting claims made after a long stay in Italian pris-
ons. Hard evidence for this model is nonexistent.
The Gray Wolves Connection began when Agca was in high
school. According to Rasit Kisacik, a Turkish journalist who
has studied Agca's early years, he was often seen with Gray
Wolves leaders while in school; and when the police later
raided Agca's home they found pictures showing the young
Agca in the company of leaders of the Gray Wolves.'
Moreover, the people Agca came to know among his home
town Gray Wolves activists aided him in many of his later ter-
rorist activities, including his attempt on the Pope.
Agca in a high school yearbook photo.
8. Boston Globe, June 7, 1981.
9. New York Times, May 23, 1981.
On paper the Gray Wolves were directed by the Nationalist
Action Party. "In fact," notes Michael Dobbs in the
Washington Post, "the command structure seems to have been
a loose one, allowing plenty of room for semiautonomous fac-
tions and groups that did not necessarily take their orders from
the top. `0 The loose network of Gray Wolves from Agca's
home base, the Malatya region of eastern Turkey, seems to
have functioned as one such semiautonomous group. Led by
Oral Celik-apparently involved in the murder of Ipecki and
the operation that broke Agca out of prison in 1979, and who
has been identified as the second gunman in St. Peter's
Oral Celik (Turkish police photo).
Square-the Malatya gang supported itself by smuggling oper-
ations and robberies. We find their presence at each of the
milestones on Agca's path from high school to St. Peter's
Square.
In 1978 Agca enrolled in Istanbul University. He apparently
spent little time in classes. Instead he hung out in rightwing
cafes like the Marmara, which "advertised the politics of those
who frequented it with a large mural of a gray wolf on one of
its walls."" According to historian Feroz Ahmad, "students in
the hostel where he lived remembered him as a well known
`militant' who was allegedly seen shooting two students in the
legs during an attack on a leftist hostel. His notoriety in ter-
rorist circles was such that leftists tried to kill him on a number
of occasions.""
On February 1, 1979, the Malatya gang assassinated Abdi
Ipecki, perhaps Turkey's most prominent newspaper editor.
Agca was arrested a few months later; and, although there now
seems to be serious doubt whether Agca was indeed the gun-
10. Washington Post, October 14, 1984.
11. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
12. Boston Globe, June 7, 1981.
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man, he quickly confessed to the crime. At his trial the follow-
ing October Agca steadfastly denied any connection with the
NAP or the Gray Wolves, claiming instead to "represent a new
form of terror on my own." After several sessions of his trial,
Agca threatened in court to name "the truly responsible par-
ties" when the trial next convened. This was clearly a signal
that someone had better get him out, and a few days later some
Gray Wolves led by Celik smuggled Agca, disguised as a sol-
dier, through eight checkpoints and out of prison.
Agca's first act upon escaping from prison was to send a let-
ter to Milliyet, Ipecki's newspaper, threatening to kill the
Pope, who was about to visit Turkey. Once again we stumble
upon an event which presents inconvenient facts for Sterling
and company. For on its face Agca's act supports the probabil-
ity that he (and the Malatya gang) needed no KGB hand to
guide them toward a papal assassination. In his letter to Mil-
liyet Agca stated:
Fearing the creation of a new political and military power in
the Middle East by Turkey along with its brother Arab
states, western imperialism has . . . dispatched to Turkey in
the guise of religious leader the crusade commander John
Paul. Unless this untimely and meaningless visit is post-
poned, I shall certainly shoot the Pope.
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