Bulgarian-KGB plot to kill pope? Agca trial misfires in targeting KGB plot

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"The evidence strongly Indicates that he was acting in behalf of a fascistic Turkish organization."

Right-wing propagandists, including those in the Reagan administration, indeed the Great Communicator himself, have periodically intimated that there is a terror international directed by the Soviet government.

Confusing the actions of frustrated groups isolated from the masses with the struggles for national liberation of mass movements, and ascribing both to this mythical terror international, they have at the same time ignored the state terrorism practiced by the U.S. government and its surrogates in Nicaragua and elsewhere.

A central role in the propaganda campaign about a Soviet-inspired terror network was to have been played by the trial of Ali Agca, the attempted assassin of the pope. But this has now collapsed.

The trial of Ali Agca was billed in advance by the American media, furnished with material by disinformation centers in Washington and Rome, as a great drama-"The Evil Empire's Foiled Murder of the Vicar of Christ"-combining the features of a modern morality play and of, as NBCTV put it, "a classic thriller" that would reveal "a supersecret conspiracy linking the Bulgarian secret service, the Turkish Mafia, and the Russian KGB."

Instead, however, it has turned out to be a farce in the manner of Pirandello's famous "Six Characters in Search of an Author." In view of Agca's continual changes of his story about the supposed BulgarianKGB plot against the pope each time his statements have been exposed as inventions, this new Italian farce might be called a "A Character in Search of a Plot."

Despite some hilarious moments, however, such as Agca's announcement that he is Jesus Christ and his inviting Reagan to witness his skill in resurrecting the dead, presumably because of Reagan's belief in Armageddon and the Second Coming, the trial is too slowpaced to be successful even as a farce.

What William Safire, the right-wing columnist of The New York Times, predicted would be "the trial of the century" is now dragging along and being covered only sporadically by the Times in stories of three or four sentences.

N.Y. Times gives up The Times' • own editorial comment (Aug. 15) is "Why should anyone care what Mr. Agca says? There is no credible independent corroboration of his claim that he was recruited by Bulgarian and Soviet secret police to eliminate a troublesome Polish pope." But this isn't what it said before.

It gave its front page to Claire Sterling, one of the chief theorists of the "Bulgarian connection, who asserted that the devoted and dogged investigating magistrate, Judge Martella, had found considerable corroboration for Agca's story, which she described at length.

Earlier it had almost daily news stories bearing such headlines as "The Attack on the Pope: New Link to Bulgarians," and had an editorial entitled "Trail to Bulgaria" (June 21, 1984) that stated, "Bulgaria's vehement denials of links with Mr. Agca do not square with his detailed accounts of meetings with Bulgarian agents in Sofia and Rome."

But, alas, Martella's corroboration has not stood up in court. As the Times courtroom reporter, John Tagliaube stated (Aug. 6, 1985), "Faced with a lack of hard evidence to back up Mr. Agca's statements, the prosecutor, Mr. Marini, has embarked on an odyssey to several European countries in search of further evidence from Turks whom Mr. Agca has named in the course of his testimony."

This search for evidence, however, as the Times editorial wearily admitted, has not come forth with anything credible.

The Times weakly sought to absolve itself of responsibility in the buildup of the trial by saying that Agca's account "was sufficiently convincing to justify the trial." This is not at all true.

In a 35-page pre-trial article, "The 'Bulgarian Connection' Revisited," in the Spring 1985 issue of Covert Action Information Bulletin (No. 23), a quarterly magazine published by ex-CIA people opposed to U.S. government foreign policy, Frank Brodhead, Howard Friel, and Edward S. Herman thoroughly exploded the prosecutor's case.

"Bulgarian connection" disconnected Among the documented assertions they made, which were later further corroborated in the trial, were the following. Agca was described by Turkish journalists who had covered the trial in which he was convicted of having assassinated a liberal editor as mentally unbalanced SOC reported that the Italian defense minister stated in Parliament that Agca had been visited by members of the Italian intelligence services before he was seen by the investigating magistrate, that the Italian press gave further details about these visits, and that there is a good deal of evidence that coaching took place.

During the trial, the chief witness for the state in a trial against the Mafia asserted in the Italian magazine L'Expresso that the deputy chief of military intelligence (SISMI), through a Mafia leader in the same prison as Agca, had offered him a deal for implicating the Soviet bloc.

Disinformation axis

But "The 'Bulgarian Connection' Revisited" not only disconnected the Bulgarian connection. It showed how a group of right-wingers with ties to governmental quarters in Washington and Rome mutually reinforced each other in floating the "Bulgarian connection" and fed self-serving "analysis" to the U.S. media, which gobbled it up.

A key figure in the campaign was Paul Henze, the first American to charge that the KGB was behind the shooting of the pope. Henze has been described by the Times as a "National Security Council specialist on United States propaganda."

He was policy adviser to Radio Free Europe when it was controlled by the CIA, served as CIA station chief in Turkey, and has acted as aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to Carter.

Henze was hired by Reader's Digest to do research on the Agca case, which was incorporated into the article written for ALIST ACTION low at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, a right-wing think tank with many connections to the Reagan administration. This think tank put out a report entitled "The Papal Assassination Attempt: A Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism" which assumed Russian involvement and concluded that there should be an "organized effort on the part of the U.S. government to develop as much credibility and access to information about the case as is needed to generate a political attitude."

The working group that produced the report included Henze, Brzezinski, Marvin Kalb, the author of the widelypublicized NBC-TV program on the "super-secret conspiracy,' and such luminaries as Max Kampelman, the chief American arms negotiator at Geneva.

Media culpability

The American media, were, therefore, the victims of a right-wing campaign-if "victims" is the right word for those so ready to go along with it. The thesis of this campaign was obviously implausible, for it called on the Soviet government to undergo a tremendous risk for what would have been of extremely dubious benefit.

The assassination of the pope, with even the slightest suspicion of Russian involvement, would have plunged Poland into turmoil. The church has traditionally been a vehicle for national feeling against Russia, but it has a working relationship with the Polish state where it functions, as the Times stated (Oct. 31, 1979), "as something of a loyal opposition, pressing its demands but cooperating in times of crisis."

In the atmosphere of the new Cold War, however, the media did not pay attention to such considerations. Just as it had regarded the accusations of Cuba that the CIA was seeking to assassinate Castro as the raving of lunatics, until the accusations were confirmed by a Senatorial committee, it now regarded seriously the raving of a real lunatic.

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