THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402650011-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: June 13, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0402650011-6
WASHINGTON TIMES
The crime of the
JEFFREY HART
The plot to murder the pope
has frequently been called,
with much justification, the
crime of the century. The
puzzling thing about it from the start
has been the reluctance of the West-
ern media to recognize what was
staring them in the face, and the
entire failure of the U.S. government
to exploit the crime for purposes of
political warfare throughout the
Catholic world.
With a few honorable exceptions,
Western media downplayed the
crime and the accumulating evi-
dence that pointed to its political and
international character.
The New York Times first assured
its readers that Mehmet Agca
appeared to have acted alone. Then,
when the Bulgarian connection sur-
faced, opined editorially that some
loose-cannon zealots in the Bulgar-
ian secret service were probably
acting on their own - a proposition
that anyone familiar with the rela-
tionship of the Bulgarian secret
service to the KGB would find
stupefyingly ridiculous.
Clare Sterling, Bernard Kalb,
John Wallach, and a few others laid
out the facts and their meaning in
public. Nevertheless, a peculiar
silence continued to surround the
story.
From the start, our di lomats
and CIA people have is-
counte the idea o a conspir-
acy - even as Judge arte a, a
universally admired Italian urtst,
meticulously assembled the evi-
dence. myself was told directly by
a high CIA official that the agency
had no reason to believe there a
been a conspiracy. -
And, certainly, we have not used
the plot against the pope to damage
the Communists in Latin America,
for example. The impact there of a
widely circulated documentary film
on the matter would he politically
devastating to the Soviets and their
local allies, but we have done nothing
of the kind. 't heexplanation remains
mysterious.
My colleague and friend William
Safire writes in his column that the
media hung back as long as Yuri
Andropov was the Soviet leader. He
reasons that the implications of the
plot were just too horrifying. Any
scheme that momentous would have
to have had the approval of the Polit-
buro, which means Leonid
Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and the
others; and Yuri Andropov, who at
the time of the murder attempt
headed the KGB, would have been
the man who ran the show directly.
Mr. Safire thinks that the media
ignored, or mostly ignored the story
because, with the elevation of Mr.
Andropov, the need to do business
with the chief hit man himself was
just too horrifying. Now that Mr.
Andropov is gone, everything has
changed. Mr. Gorbachev can say
"Not Mc" The media people are
flocking to the trial.
There may he something to that
analysis, but it does not seem to me
to go far enough.
Now that the trial is receiving
media attention, the -crime of the
century still is not being seen as a
spectacular revelation of the Soviet
mentality and the Soviet system
itself. The assassination attempt is
of a piece with the shooting down of
the Korean Airliner 007, with the
regular murders at the Berlin Wall,
with the Gulag.
The shooting of the pope was yet
another revelation about a system
that is based upon the normalization
of sheer brutality, a system that
knows no restraint upon such brutal-
ity.
Perhaps that recognition is also
too painful for the U.S. government
itself to face, and hence its failure to
exploit the assassination attempt as
a weapon of political warfare. The
pertinent policy-makers, certainly
at the State Department and perhaps
including the White House, simply
do not want to look directly into the
heart of that darkness.
T u a certain extent one sympa-
thizes with them. Looking
directly at it is indeed
unpleasant, and it makes it repellent
to do business with the Soviets. We
do business with them at all levels,
including Geneva and the projected
Summit for which the president
yearns. We preserve the civilities.
and turn away from the. heart of
darkness.
But it would he much healthier in
the long run if we faced the double
truths: that on some questions our
sic-If-interest requires that we do
business with the Soviets, but,
equally true, that the very system we
are dealing with is murderous in its
essence.
Jeffrey Hurt is a nutionully syndi-
cated columnist.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0402650011-6