Soviets tried to kill Pope

 Agence France Presse is reporting that the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981 - which almost did kill him - was ordered by the old Soviet KGB, the "Committee for State Security." Comments Civil Commotion,

This has been rumored for a long while, of course, and it is totally believable. It was John Paul II who went to Poland during Lech Walesa?s Solidarity uprising, defying the old Soviet Union to stop him, and kicked-off the disintegration of the USSR.

In fact, the Vatican and President Ronald Reagan's administration closely coordinated subverting the Communist government of Poland, the Pope's home country. That came after the assassination attempt, of course, since Reagan entered office only in 1981.

However, the man who took the name John Paul II when elected Pope had been a staunch anti-communist resister in Poland for years. In the early 1970s,

... Karol Cardinal Wojtyla emerged as a strong advocate of human rights and promoted an independent intellectual life. In 1974 Communist Party ideologue Andrej Werbian called the Cardinal "the only real ideological threat in Poland."

Wojtyla is, of course, John Paul's Polish name. Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978, just before the Solidarity workers' movement was gaining its steam, led by electrician Lech Walesa.

In August 1980 [Walesa] led the Gdansk shipyard strike which gave rise to a wave of strikes over much of the country with Walesa seen as the leader. The primary demands were for workers' rights. The authorities were forced to capitulate and to negotiate with Walesa the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980, which gave the workers the right to strike and to organise their own independent union.

If any one event had helped to create the psychological climate in which Solidarity trades union emerged, it was the visit of Pope John Paul II to his homeland in June 1979. From the moment that the Pope knelt in Warsaw's airport to kiss the ground, he was cheered wildly by millions of Poles. John Paul never criticized the Communist regime directly, nor did he have to: his meaning was plain enough. "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man," he told an enormous outdoor congregation in Warsaw. With that hardly veiled allusion to Communism, a deafening roar of approval filled the great city square. Says a Polish bishop of that day: "The Polish people broke the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge at their Marxist rulers."

During the August 1980 defiance of the communist authorities, the Lenin shipyard functioned as the emotional center of an extraordinary national movement. Festooned with flowers, white and red Polish flags and portraits of Pope John Paul II, the plant's iron gates came to symbolize that heady mixture of hope, faith and patriotism that sustained the workers through their vigil. ...

Then in January 1981 Pope John Paul received Walesa at the Vatican and met with him privately for thirty minutes, an unusual honor for a layman of the Church.

In May of that year, Mehmet Ali Agca, an escaped Turkish killer, shot John Paul twice while the Pope was riding in his "Popemobile," a convertible he used to wave to crowds while standing as the vehicle moved along. According to AFP's wire report,

New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents, an Italian daily said on Wednesday. ...

Bulgaria then handed the execution of the plot to Turkish extremists, including Mehmet Ali Agca, who pulled the trigger.

It's doubtful that Agca ever knew who actually was paying him. In December 1983, John Paul met with Agca in prison.

"We talked for a long time. Ali Agca is, as everyone says, a professional assassin. Which means that the assassination was not his initiative, that someone else thought of it, someone else gave the order," he wrote.

"During the entire conversation, it was clear that Ali Agca was burdened by the question: How did it happen that the assassination was unsuccessful? He did everything that was necessary, he took care of the tiniest detail of his plan. But still the victim avoided death. How could this have happened?"

Agca had shot John Paul in the arm and the abdomen. John Paul himself said that divine intervention had steered the latter bullet away from his vital organs. He has never said whom he thought was behind the plot to kill him, but did attribute the attempt to convulsions of "the 20th century ideologies of force." In 2002, however, John Paul said that he did not believe there was a Bulgarian connection to his assailant.