Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [117]
A fourth problem with the SHK model is the notion that because of the efficiency of the Bulgarian secret police, Agca’s presence in Sofia must have been known to them, and he must therefore have been on their payroll. This assumed efficiency is an ideological assumption unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by actual Bulgarian and Soviet performance. There is no evidence that the Bulgarians ever identified Agca, who was using a false passport. Furthermore, the contention that the Bulgarian police know everything was refuted in important testimony during the Rome trial on September 22, 1985, when Gray Wolves official Abdullah Catli stated that many Gray Wolves preferred to traverse Bulgaria because it was easy to hide in the large flow of Turkish immigrant traffic through that country.
A fifth problem for the SHK model was the fact that Agca seems to have gotten his gun through the Gray Wolves network, not from the Bulgarians, who presumably could have slipped it to him quite easily in Rome. In her Reader’s Digest article, Sterling traced Agca’s gun to Horst Grillmaier, an Austrian gun dealer who, according to Sterling, had fled behind the Iron Curtain after May 13, 1981, to avoid questioning in the West. It turned out later, however, that Grillmaier was a former Nazi who specialized in supplying right-wing gun buyers; that he had not disappeared behind the Iron Curtain at all; and that the gun had proceeded through a number of intermediaries, to be transmitted to Agca by a Gray Wolves friend. Sterling handles the disintegration of the original Grillmaier line by simply shifting to a new conspiratorial ground: the clever Bulgarians had Agca purchase a gun through a known Fascist to strengthen the case that Agca was a right-winger who could not possibly be connected to the Communist powers.
A final set of problems for the SHK model lies in the extraordinary level of incompetence and gross violations of the principles of plausible deniability that it attributes to the Bulgarian and Soviet secret police—features that coexist uneasily with the superspy image invoked elsewhere in the model. At various points, SHK contended that the Soviets and Bulgarians were professionals who could afford to go after the pope because they would never be implicated themselves. But hiring Agca, a wanted criminal and a mentally unbalanced rightist, would appear extremely foolish, as the cover would quickly be blown in the likely event that he was caught. In Sterling’s initial tale, the KGB wanted him to be caught—or at least to have his body indentified—to discredit Turkey. With the shift to weakening Solidarity as the motive, the threat of disclosure of Bulgarian-Soviet involvement would seem very serious. Yet the Bulgarians and KGB hired Agca and then failed to kill him. Another anomaly was bringing Agca to Sofia for instructions. If he had already been recruited in Turkey, wouldn’t bringing him to Sofia be a foolish compromising of his carefully prepared “cover”? If so, doesn’t his visit to Sofia constitute an argument against Soviet and Bulgarian involvement?
While Agca’s November 1982 confession that he had Bulgarian coconspirators made the Bulgarian Connection instantly “true” for the Western media, it wreaked havoc with the SHK model and with the logic of “plausible deniability.” If, as Agca confessed, the Bulgarians connived with him in Rome, escorted him to St. Peter’s Square to plan the attack, entertained him at their apartments,