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None of them stopped to evaluate Agca’s 1979 letter threatening to kill the pope on his earlier visit to Turkey. Sterling’s ludicrous claim that the KGB hired a Turk to kill the pope in order to damage Turkey’s relation to NATO was never discussed. The question of the authenticity of Agca’s letter to Turkes, which bears on Agca’s political commitments (and thus another SHK premise), was never discussed in the U.S. mass media. During the trial, Abdullah Catli’s statement that Bulgaria was a preferred Gray Wolves route to Europe because of the relative ease of hiding in the heavy Turkish traffic—which directly contradicts the SHK claim that the Bulgarian secret police know everything, and that Agca’s stay in Sofia must therefore have been by Bulgarian official plan—was never picked up in the U.S. mass media’s coverage of the Rome trial.

The most striking deficiencies of the mass media’s handling of the basic SHK claims, however, was their remarkable naïveté in the face of the pseudoscientific speculations of SHK and the accumulating violations of elementary principles of plausible deniability. The preposterous SHK claims—without a vestige of evidence—that Agca had been recruited by the KGB in Turkey for future work, and that he took on the appearance of a right-winger as a “cover,” were not ridiculed, and were not evaluated when presented as purported truth.45 There was never any discussion in the mass media of the fact that the thesis of prior recruitment and careful cultivation of Agca’s cover in Turkey was flatly inconsistent with the claim that he was brought to Sofia for a lengthy stay for instructions. With regard to Agca’s alleged open dealings with Bulgarians in Rome, the mass media simply refused to discuss the fact that the alleged professionalism and use of the right-wing Turk as a “cover” had disappeared.

As regards the alternative model, and the likelihood that Agca had been encouraged and coached, here also the mass media refused to explore these dissonant possibilities. They simply would not examine and discuss the convenience of the newly discovered plot for so many Western interests; the huge time lag in the naming of Bulgarians; Agca’s prison conditions and prison contacts; reports of meetings, offers, and threats to Agca to induce him to talk; and the compromised character of the Italian police and intelligence agencies. This involved the media in the suppression of important documents.

As one important instance, the July 12, 1984, Italian Report of the Parliamentary Commission on the Masonic Lodge P-2 describes in great detail the penetration of this massive neo-Fascist conspiracy into the military establishment, secret services, press, and judiciary, among others. This report was newsworthy in its own right, but it also had a bearing on the Bulgarian Connection case, as it addressed characteristics of Italian institutions that were directly involved in making and prosecuting the case against the Bulgarians. The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and CBS Evening News never mentioned the publication of this report.

As a second major illustration, one year later, in July 1985, the Criminal Court of Rome handed down a Judgment in the Matter of Francesco Pazienza et al., which described repeated corrupt behavior by officials of the Italian secret-service agency SISMI, including the forgery and planting of documents. These officials were also charged with involvement in a cover-up of the agents carrying out the 1980 Bologna railway-station massacre, the kind of terrorist connection that attracts frenetic mass-media attention when attributable to suitable villains. As we noted earlier, SISMI officials had visited Agca in prison and SISMI had issued a forged document implicating the Soviet Union in the shooting of the pope on May 19, 1981, only six days after the assassination attempt. This forgery was never mentioned in the Times, Time, and Newsweek, or on CBS News, and the July 1985 court decision was barely mentioned