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4.3. AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL

An alternative explanation of the Bulgarian Connection can be derived from the questions the U.S. press would surely have raised if an analogous scenario had occurred in Moscow, in which Agca, who had briefly visited the United States on his travels, and has been in a Soviet prison for seventeen months after having shot a high Soviet official, now confesses that three U.S. embassy members were his co-conspirators. In this case, the U.S. press would have paid close attention to the convenience of the confession to Soviet propaganda needs, to the seventeen-month delay in the naming of Americans, and to the obvious possibility that Agca had been encouraged or coerced into revising his story. They would have focused intently on Agca’s prison conditions, his visitors there, his amenability to a “deal” with his captors, and any evidence in his statements or from other sources that he had been coached. The fact that Agca had visited the United States, among twelve countries, would not be considered strong evidence of CIA involvement, and the press might even have pointed out that a minimally competent CIA would not have brought Agca to Washington for instructions in the first place.

The alternative model would take the same fact that SHK start out with—Agca’s stay in Sofia, Bulgaria—but interpret it differently. That visit violates principles of plausible deniability and would be especially foolish if the KGB had already recruited Agca in Turkey. On the other hand, it provides a Western propaganda system with the necessary tie between Agca’s terrorist attack in Rome and the Soviet bloc. The convenience of Agca’s confession—to Socialist leader Craxi, to the Christian Democrats and neo-Fascists in Italy, and to Reagan searching for a tie-in between “international terrorism” and the Soviet Union—is also crystal clear, and would immediately suggest to an objective press the possibility that this “demand” might have elicited an appropriate “supply” from the imprisoned Agca. The lag in Agca’s naming of any Bulgarians—seventeen months after he entered an Italian prison and seven months after he had agreed to “cooperate” with the investigating magistrate, Ilario Martella—is also highly suggestive. Why did it take him so long to name his co-conspirators? Sterling tried to explain this on the ground that Agca had hopes that the Bulgarians would “spring him” and gave them time; his successive elaborations of claims and subsequent retractions she explained in terms of Agca’s “signaling” to his alleged partners. This complex and speculative attempt to rationalize inconvenient facts is not necessary; a very straightforward explanation based on Agca’s character and affiliations and the inducements known to have been offered to him (described below) does quite nicely.15 Furthermore, Sterling’s explanation does not account for the fact that Agca failed to provide serious evidence late in the trial, long after it was clear that the Bulgarians had not responded to his alleged signals.

Another suggestive feature of Agca’s confession is that it followed the creation and wide media distribution of the SHK model. During the course of the investigation of the plot, it was revealed that the imprisoned Agca had access to newspapers, radio, and television, among other modes of personal communication with the outside world. It was also brought out in the investigation that Agca’s “desire for personal publicity seems unquenchable . . . At one point in the Italian investigation, he abruptly clammed up when the magistrates refused his demand that journalists be present as he ‘confessed.’”16 Agca was interrogated about a possible Bulgarian connection long before his confession, and was surely aware that his interrogators would be quite pleased to have him produce one. And by the fall of 1982 one was being provided to him in the press and on the screen every day.

We mentioned earlier that the Italian secret-service agency SISMI had actually distributed