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of 1982. This discrepancy has never been explained, but that Agca saw these photos for the first time on November 9 is not believable.22 A key element in Agca’s testimony was his claim to have visited the apartment of Sergei Antonov, one of the Bulgarians arrested in the “plot,” and to have met his wife and daughter, which was supported by many fine details regarding Antonov’s hobbies and the characteristics of his apartment. The defense, however, was able to show that one feature of Antonov’s apartment mentioned by Agca was in error, although characteristic of the other apartments in Antonov’s building, which suggests that Agca had been supplied information based on observation of other apartments. More important, the defense was able to establish that at the time of Agca’s visit at which he met Mrs. Antonov, she was out of the country. Following newspaper publicity given these defense contentions, on June 28, 1983, Agca retracted his claims that he had visited the apartment and met Antonov’s family. The details he had given about apartment and family then became inexplicable, except on the supposition that Agca had been fed information while in prison. In a number of other instances Agca provided information that bore strong suspicion of having been provided by officials and agents of the court or the police. The London Sunday Times reporters, who interviewed one of the accused Bulgarians in Sofia, wrote that “When asked by Martella in Bulgaria whether he had any salient physical features, Vassilev said that he had a mole on his left cheek. In a subsequent confession, as Vassilev points out, ‘Agca described my mole in the very same words which I used in describing it here.’”23

During the course of the Rome trial in 1985–86, no trace was ever found of the money that Agca claimed he had received from the Bulgarians. The car that Agca indicated the Bulgarians had used to escort him around Rome was never located. No witness was ever found who saw him in his many supposed encounters with Bulgarians. His gun was transferred to him through the Turkish Gray Wolves network, and there was no shortage of evidence of his meetings with members of the Gray Wolves in Western Europe. The note that was found on Agca’s person on May 13, 1981, did not mention any collaborators, and suggested a loose timetable for the assassination attempt and a planned railroad trip to Naples.

In sum, it is highly probable that Agca was offered a deal to talk, and that it was made clear to him that the people with power over his wellbeing wanted him to implicate the Bulgarians and the Soviet Union in the assassination attempt. He had access to the SHK model even before he confessed. His confession was therefore suspect from the start, and an “alternative model” of inducement-pressure coaching was plausible and relevant, from the Agca’s first implication of Bulgarians. This model became more cogent over time as Agca retracted strategic claims, and as no confirming evidence of a Bulgarian Connection was produced. By the same token, the SHK model, implausible from the beginning, became even less tenable.

4.4. THE MASS MEDIA’S UNCRITICAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE

BULGARIAN CONNECTION

Despite the implausibility of the SHK claim that Agca had been hired by the Bulgarians and the KGB to shoot the pope, and although it was sustained by argument that amounted to sheer humbuggery, the Bulgarian Connection met the standard of utility. In this case, therefore, as a propaganda model would anticipate, the U.S. mass media accepted the SHK model as valid, ignored the alternative model, and participated in a classic propaganda campaign that got the message of Bulgarian-Soviet guilt over to the public. Some members of the mass media helped originate the claim of a Bulgarian Connection, while others participated only in disseminating the SHK line (and excluding alternative views and inconvenient information).

The campaign began with Sterling’s Reader’s Digest article of September 1982, which was closely followed by the NBC-TV program of September 21, 1982. The outreach of