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By Root 2719 0

a fanciful plan even if it had a greater probability of “success.”11 This theory assumed that Agca would be caught and identified as a Turk, but that he wouldn’t reveal that he had been hired by the Bulgarians and the Soviets. Subsequently, Sterling suggested that Agca was supposed to have been shot in the square to assure his silence. The amazingly incompetent KGB failed to accomplish this simple task. SHK also maintained at various points that Agca may not even have known who hired him, so he couldn’t implicate the East. Later, when Agca claimed that he had been heavily involved with Bulgarians in Rome, Sterling and Henze lapsed into silence on the failure of the KGB to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability.

SHK finally settled firmly on the idea that quelling the Polish Solidarity movement was the real Soviet-Bulgarian motive. But this theory is as implausible as its predecessor, when we take account of timing and elementary cost-benefit analysis. Agca was allegedly recruited in Turkey long before Solidarity existed. In a variant Sterling version of the timing of his recruitment, Agca was hired by the Bulgarians in July 1980, which was still prior to the Gdansk shipyard strike, and thus before Solidarity appeared a credible threat to Soviet control. The risks and costs of an assassination attempt would seem heavy—and, in fact, the costs to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria were severe based merely on the widespread belief in their involvement, even in the absence of credible evidence. The supposed benefits from the act are also not plausible. The assassination of the pope, especially if blamed on the Soviet Union, would infuriate and unify the Poles and strengthen their opposition to a Soviet-dominated regime. And the further costs in damaged relations with Western Europe—which were extremely important to the Soviet Union in 1981, with the gas pipeline being negotiated and with the placement of new U.S. missiles in Western Europe a major Soviet concern—would seem to militate against taking foolish risks.12

A second problem with the SHK model is that Agca had threatened to kill the pope in 1979 at the time of a papal visit to Turkey—again, long before Solidarity existed. This suggests that Agca and the Turkish right had their own grievances against the pope and a rationale for assassinating him that was independent of any Soviet influence. It was partly for this reason that SHK argue that Agca was recruited by the Soviet Union in Turkey before the pope’s visit there, setting him up for the later attack. But not only is this pure speculation unsupported by a trace of evidence, it fails to explain why the entire Fascist press, not just Agca, assailed the pope’s visit in 1979. Was the entire Fascist right serving Soviet ends? The only time this issue was ever raised in the mass media, on the “McNeil-Lehrer News Hour” of January 5, 1983, Paul Henze stated in no uncertain terms that “there was no [press] opposition” to the pope’s visit in 1979. The Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, however, assembled a large collection of citations from the Turkish rightist press of the time to demonstrate that Henze’s statement was false.13

A third problem for the SHK model was that Agca was a committed rightist, and therefore not a likely candidate for service to the Communist powers (although perhaps amenable to fingering them as co-conspirators in a prison context). SHK strove mightily to make Agca out to be a rootless mercenary, but the best they could come up with was the fact that Agca didn’t seem to have been registered as a member of the Gray Wolves.14 But all his friends, associates, and affiliations from high school days onward were Gray Wolves, and in his travels through Europe up to the time of his May 13, 1981, rendezvous, he moved solely through the Gray Wolves network. While in prison, Agca addressed a letter to Alparslan Turkes, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party of Turkey, expressing his continued commitment and loyalty. This letter was bothersome to Sterling and Henze as it is inconsistent with their depiction