Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [232]
Tagliabue also never asks this further question: Even if Agca had clammed up (which was not true), given the extensive Martella investigation and report, why would the court not be able to follow the already established leads to a successful outcome? Why was not a single witness produced to confirm Agca’s allegations of numerous meetings and trips with Bulgarians in Rome? Why was the car allegedly rented by the Bulgarians never found? Where is the money supposedly given to Agca? Tagliabue fails to address these questions.
“Partial Confirmation” of Agca’s Tale
Tagliabue describes some alleged partial confirmations of Agca’s claims. The first is that “Mr. Ozbey said the Bulgarians had indeed wanted to use Mr. Agca to shoot the Pope, but did not trust him.” But this is not a partial confirmation if the net result was that the Bulgarians failed to hire Agca. Furthermore, another reporter present when Ozbey testified in Rome claims that Ozbey did not tell the court that the Bulgarians “wanted to use” Agca. According to Wolfgang Achtner, of ABC-TV News, in Rome, the only thing Ozbey said was that the Bulgarians “listened with interest, but behaved with indifference” (the translation by the Turkish interpreter in court), or “listened with interest but didn’t take it seriously” (Achtner’s own translation). In short, it would appear that Tagliabue has doctored the evidence.
The other “partial confirmation” is that “Catli hinted at obscure secret service contacts with West German intelligence, and of payments for unspecified purposes to Turks involved in the investigations.” This vague statement does not even mention the plot against the pope and is partial confirmation of nothing. The most important Catli evidence bearing on this point was his description of the attempt by the West German police to bribe Agca’s supposed co-conspirator Oral Celik to come to West Germany and confirm Agca’s claims. This supports the coaching hypothesis: accordingly, Tagliabue blacks it out. The only other testimony by Catli mentioning the secret services involved Gray Wolves leader Ali Batman, who told Catli he had heard from the German secret police that at a meeting in Romania, the Warsaw Pact powers had decided to kill the pope. This was apparently a leak of the forged SISMI document of May 19, 1981, which had made this claim. Thus the hearsay recounting of the substance of a forgery is Tagliabue’s “partial confirmation” of Agca’s claims of a plot.
We should also note that while he cites these alleged “partial confirmations,” nowhere does Tagliabue list the contentions of Agca that remained unconfirmed.
The Soviet-Bulgarian Motive
Two of Tagliabue’s thirty-two paragraphs were devoted to expounding the Soviet motive in allegedly sponsoring Agca’s assassination attempt: “to crack religiously inspired resistance to Communist rule in Poland.” Tagliabue here follows a long-standing Times tradition of absolutely refusing to allow a counterargument to be voiced on this issue. Even if they covered their tracks well, a Soviet-inspired murder of the pope would have been blamed on the Soviets, solidified Polish hostility, and had enormously damaging effects on Soviet relations with Western Europe. Thus it would have been risky without any offsetting benefits.5
Who gained and who lost from the plot? Were there any possible Western motives that might bear on the case? Tagliabue follows the SHK line in failing to raise these questions. But once Agca was imprisoned in Italy, cold warriors