Evidence suggests Italian right directed Turk’s assault
on pope
Convicted papal assailant Mehmet Ali
Agca was never a consistent witness, but supporters of his claim that a
“Bulgarian connection” links his 1981 assault on Pope John Paul II to the
Soviet Union have generally found clever ways to dispel the effect of his
numerous self-contradictions. The free-lance journalist Claire Sterling, for
example, chief media champion of Agca’s claim that the Soviet Union is
ultimately to blame for his deed, wrote of one of Agca’s about-faces that “in
admitting to the cunning and deceitful use he has made of every source within
reach,” he has “made his whole confession more believable.”
Nevertheless,
Agca’s credibility suffered a major collapse last month in Rome as he testified
in the trial of four of his Turkish countrymen and three Bulgarian officials,
all accused of conspiring with him in the papal assassination attempt, when he
announced that he was Christ and could raise the dead. Chief prosecutor Antonio
Marini said wearily to the press, “If he wanted to destroy his credibility, he
has succeeded magnificently.”
The
prosecutor’s virtual repudiation of Agca as a credible witness is especially
significant in that the state’s case against the three Bulgarians is based
solely on Agca’s word. If Agca’s word is now worthless in court, then so is the
theory of Bulgarian connection and Soviet guilt, which is based upon it.
This theory
was not born full-blown, but by bits and pieces. Less than a week after the
Saint Peter’s Square shooting, Italy’s military intelligence arm circulated a
story to the media that the attempt had been inspired by Warsaw Pact powers
under the specific instructions of the Soviet defense minister. The following
October, an American named Paul Henze, former CIA chief of station in Turkey,
suggested in a column in the Wall Street Journal that the Russians might be involved.
The month later, Italy’s minister of defense for the first time suggested that
the Bulgarian secret service had been in control of Agca.
But a full
statement of the Bulgarian-connection theory was not made in public until late
summer 1982, more than a year after the shooting, when the Reader’s Digest of
September cover date carried Sterling’s first article on the subject. Sterling
argued that Agca, then a supposed lone fanatic, in fact was part of a
conspiracy tracing to the Kremlin, the motive of which was to intimidate
Solidarity. Then, about two months later, in November 1982, Agca himself said
for the first time to an official that he had been assisted by the three
Bulgarians.
The
American press showed some skepticism toward this theory (one Washington Post
editorial was headlined “A Communist Plot to Kill the Pope – Or a Liar’s
Fantasy”). But far stronger, as the Bulgarians went to trial this past May, was
the sense that Soviet responsibility was solidly established. In fact, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, was so
deeply persuaded of Soviet guilt that he told a radio interviewer last fall
that those who challenged their theory might legitimately be suspected of being
“witting tools” of the Soviet cause.
Agca’s
courtroom irrationality may have taken the wind out of such a premature
certainty about a Bulgarian-Soviet tie-in, but there remains, nonetheless, no
doubt that Agca was a conspirator, not a loner, in the papal shooting. He has a
long history as a militant of Turkey’s ultranationalist Gray Wolves, action arm
of the fascist National Action Party. Gray Wolf comrades helped Agca
assassinate the moderate Turkish editor, Abdi Ipekci, in 1979 and then assisted
his escape from prison. They were all around him just before and after the
attempt on the pope, and three of them are now on trial for conspiracy because
the facts in the case, not Agca’s word, incriminated them.
This means
that the big questions about this case are opening up again. If Agca’s
conspiracy did not originate in the Kremlin or elsewhere in the Soviet bloc,
then where did it come from? How did he learn so much about the Bulgarians he
has apparently been trying to frame? And why have so many otherwise skeptical
American journalists been so eager, on nothing but the word of a man such as
Agca, to blame the Soviet Union for this crime, fully aware of the enormous
political implications of such a charge?
As if to
speak these very questions, even as Acga was disgracing himself again on the
stand in Rome, another witness at another major trial in Italy, this one in
Naples, proposed a radically different theory of Agca’s motive and connections.
The P-2
Connection
The witness
was Giovanni Pandico, a confessed big-time racketeer who is the Italian
government’s star witness in the current trial of the Neapolitan crime
syndicate, the Camorra. Days before Pandico was to take the stand last month
against his former partners in crime, a bomb blast killed his mother and maimed
several other members of his family. Pandico retaliated by calling a L’Espresso
reporter to his cell for an interview in which he spilled new crime-world
secrets. Among these was the claim that Agca had been put up to blaming the
Bulgarians, and coached on how to do so convincingly, by Pandico’s boss, the
head man of the Camorra, Rafaelle Cutolo. Furthermore, said Pandico, Cutolo had
been directed in this by General Pietro Musumeci, at that time the second
highest ranking officer of the Italian military intelligence service with
organized crime as part of a larger right-wing conspiracy, that of the spurious
Masonic lodge called “Loggia Propaganda-2” or “P-2,” whose membership list was
discovered by accident in March 1981, two months before Agca shot the pope.
As subsequently
established by a parliamentary investigation, the “P-2” conspiracy extended
throughout the Italian government. It included the heads of all three Italian
intelligence services, the treasury and the joint chiefs of staff. It permeated
all operating sectors of the governing bureaucracy. An entire shadow government
had been installed within the legitimate government, a secret government with a
secret purpose – to subvert the Italian state through control of its
intelligence, military, police and bureaucratic arms, in order to forestall the
threat of legal Communist takeover through the electoral system.
Two days
after Pandico’s bombshell, Agca himself seemed to flirt with this new
explanation of the “Bulgarian connection” in an odd exchange that occurred when
the presiding judge, trying to clam the Bulgarians’ defense attorneys, spoke
the word “pazienza,” Italian for “patience,” and Agca, all unbidden, responded,
“Yes, Dr. Francesco Pazienza.” This startled the courtroom, since Pazienza’s
name is synonymous with intrigue in today’s Italy. In June 1982, for example,
Pazienza put together a billion-dollar bail-out of the financial empire of
Roberto Calvi, just before the P-2 banker was found hanging from a bridge in
London. In August 1983, Pazienza’s yacht whisked away the head of the P-2
following his escape from a Swiss prison.
From
Vatican II to P-2
At the time
Agca claims to have met him in prison in 1982, Pazienza was a top aide to
Italy’s then military intelligence chief, Gen. Giuseppe Santovito. Both
Pazienza and Santovito, along with Musumeci, have been facing conspiracy
charges tracing back to P-2. When the judge at last quieted the courtroom and
could ask Agca what he meant, Agca answered, “I met Francesco Pazienza. He asked
me to collaborate.”
The tale of
the P-2 conspiracy, in which all these men – and now possibly Agca – were
linked, would seem a brilliant but wild fantasy in the hands of a spy novelist.
It was found out four years ago through a fluke and is still in the process of
courtroom disentanglement, although in outline the story is quite simple.
In the
early 1960s, the Vatican II movement associated with Pope John XXIII, after
strenuous and long debate, decided to substitute “dialogue” for confrontation
in the Catholic Church’s relationship with communism, in particular with the
Italian Communist Party. The birth of what the Italian right denounces as
“clerico-communism,” this move created the possibility of a new governing
coalition of the center-left and the legal taking of power by Italian
Communists. Exactly such a fear has been constant in the politics of the
Italian right since the end of World War II.
Thus,
Vatican II’s new policy of dialogue with the radical left motivated ultraright
elements of Italy’s highest ruling elites to circle the wagons. Large numbers
of top-ranking military officers such as Musumeci and Santovito, as well as
international businessmen, Godfather-level mobsters and men, like Pazienza,
whose careers spanned all three arenas, started drawing together under the
cloak of the false Masonic lodge called P-2. Set up in 1971 under the
leadership of World War II fascist Licio Gelli, P-2 developed quickly into a
widespread network not only for antileft intelligence and political action, but
also for illegal business activities such as bank fraud and narcotics
smuggling.
In 1974,
Milan’s Banca Privata Italiano suddenly collapsed. It had fallen foul of the
sophisticated financial depradations [sic] of one of P-2’s most sinister
chieftains, Michele Sindona, sometimes called “St. Peter’s Banker” for his
intimate relationship with the Vatican’s bank system. The Milan bank, thanks to
Sindona, had lost a fatal $225 million. The next year, the same fate overtook
Franklin National Bank in New York, which collapsed after Sindona-induced
losses of $45 million. About this same time, the Vatican Bank absorbed losses
of nearly $250 million as Sindona’s empire came down. Sindona was captured and
sentenced to 15 years in the Milan case and 25 years (a record for a white-collar
felony) in the New York case.
In 1979,
while awaiting trial, Sindona vanished, seemingly “kidnapped.” His abductors,
however, proved to be Mafia associates of his who were later convicted for
heroin trafficking. In March 1981, while searching for clues in this false
kidnapping, Italian police followed the trail to the home of Gelli, Sindona’s
comrade and the Grand Master and main organizer of the P-2 lodge now believed
to be hiding in South America. A World War II vintage fascist, Gelli was a
partner in arms deals with Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, now awaiting trial
in France. Gelli is wanted by Italian police in connection with the August 1980
Bologna train station bombing that claimed 85 lives. This act was the work of
Gelli’s fascist terrorists; but, in line with contemporary fascism’s “strategy
of tension,” it was staged so as to seem the work of radical leftists.
In Gelli’s
villa, the police discovered a list of 953 names from Italian public life that
included two Cabinet ministers, 36 members of parliament, the police chiefs of
the four principal cities and the mayors of two others, and the heads of all
three secret services. A total of 422 were in government, and the others were
of the business world, both the legal (banking and finance) and illegal
(narcotics smuggling and high embezzlement) spheres. This was the membership
list of P-2.
Revelation
of the P-2 conspiracy came just after the pope was shot (though it was
discovered two months before). The ensuing public outcry brought down the Forlani
government. More than three years later, the Italian Parliament published a
170-page report on its investigation of P-2, showing that this group had nearly
achieved “surreptitious and complete control” of the Italian state apparatus.
Some of the principal P-2 conspirators, such as Musumeci, are only now standing
trial, and new information is sure to develop.
But if
mobster Pandico knew what he was talking about when he said that Agca was
coached to blame the Communists by Musumeci and Cutolo, then it would appear
that Agca’s alleged Bulgarian connection is in fact a P-2 connection. In this
event, the whole story of the papal assassination attempt and its exploitation
by conspiratorial Italian fascism is still a long way from being known.
