Posted on 03/31/2005 4:51:27 AM PST by HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity
1981 attack on Pope planned by Soviets: Report
Agence France-Presse
Rome, March 30, 2005|18:42 IST
New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents, an Italian daily said on Wednesday.
The Corriere della Sera said that the documents found by the German government indicated that the KGB ordered Bulgarian colleagues to carry out the killing, leaving the East German service known as the Stasi to coordinate the operation and cover up the traces afterwards. Bulgaria then handed the execution of the plot to Turkish extremists, including Mehmet Ali Agca, who pulled the trigger.
The daily said the documents had been handed over to Bulgaria and would be made available to the Italian parliamentary commission inquiring into the activities of formerly Communist eastern European regimes in Italy. The newspaper said the documents consist mostly of letters from Stasi operatives to their Bulgarian counterparts seeking help in covering up traces after the attack and denying Bulgarian involvement.
Ali Agca, who is now in jail in Turkey, claimed after his arrest that the operation was under the control of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome. The Bulgarians have always insisted they were innocent and argued that Agca's story was part of an anti-communist plot by the Italian secret service and the CIA.
The paper said the documents back up the pope's own memories of the assassination attempt in May 1981 in his book "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums," in which he said he was convinced that the attack was not planned or directed by Ali Agca.
Ping.
In the larger scheme of things, very interesting.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and of organized Communism behind the Iron Curtain opened up a lot of old drawers and filing cabinets. Seems they finally tracked down this one. Well, well... All those liberals who poo-pooed the idea.
And here a lot of people thought the worst of it was the doping done by the East German swim team.
The roots of the assassination were debated in a number of books. And it was Marvin Kalb, I seem to recall, who hosted a television examination of the Bulgarian-KGB connection and allegations.
Will Vladimir Putin now offer an "apology" on behalf of the former USSR and KGB? One wonders...
I wouldn't hold my breath.
I was living in Rome at that time. It was a very tense and strange period in Europe. Italy's PM had been murdered a few years before. You had the uneasy feeling of never knowing what was going to happen next.
Ping. New facts coming to light.
And were Putin's fingers in play?
Apropos of nothing at all, intelligence agencies often classify things like this to protect sources and methods. If the other guy finds out you know it, then he can figure out who gave it to you.
That is not to say, of course, that this has been common knowledge throughout the world's intelligence communities since 1981.
The m.o. fits with what we know. There was never any doubt among serious investigators. This just confirms the suspicions.
I believe Andropov was the head of the KGB at the time and the second in command was a birth-marked gentleman named Gorbachev.
There may have been other issues as well. The Pope tended to be a bit conservative in Catholic matters. Communist agents had been infiltrating the church and promoting a socialist crypto-Communist version of Catholicism called "Liberation Theology." Particularly in Latin America. The Pope was closing in on pro-Soviet operations within the Catholic Church.
Andropov seems to have ordered the hit. What his personal views on Catholic matters were, who knows...
Where was Putin stationed with the KGB at that time?
And I want to know what was Jaruzelski's involvement in it? It's a shame that pig is still alive while the Pope isn't. And I don't buy the line that he imposed Martial Law to save Poland from Soviet invasion, that theory was debunked years ago.
Good question. And one that has googled me for an hour.
Short answer: It's not clear.
Long answer: He was only about 28 at the time, so likely not very high up. He is extremely gung-ho KGB, so likely trusted to do anything. His interest, education and later stationing was East Germany.
Here's the tiny tidbits I've found relating to his career at the time (1981), from various sources in no particular order:
In 1975 the KGB offered Putin a job. He accepted immediately. He began in counterintelligence, then moved to foreign intelligence. Ten years later the KGB sent him to East Germany, to Dresden, to work in political intelligence.This part of Putin's biography is "murky," as one senior U.S. government official puts it.
Fulfilling ambitions held since he was young, Putin joined the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Service in 1975, where he would spend the next 15 years. Little is known about his career as a Soviet spy, but it is evident he did his job well. In 1985 he was assigned to the KGB's second biggest intelligence office, located in what was then East Germany.
After graduating law school in 1975, Putin joined the KGB. Some seven years later, he married; he and wife Lyudmila moved to Dresden, East Germany, where for five years he performed KGB intelligence work, gathering material on political figures and perfecting his German.
Wow.
Good work.
A Polish friend of mine is VERY wary of Putin.
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