Did Divine Intervention Save Pope John Paul II from Ali Agca's Bullets?

When Karl Wojtyla, a Polish bishop with a well-known hatred of communism, became the first non-Italian pope in more than four centuries, the Catholic Church paid more attention to the mysterious Secrets of Fatima, the visions witnessed by three children May 13, 1917 in the middle of World War I. Wojtyla, known for his interest in mysticism and the meaning of the Secrets of Fatima, became Pope John Paul II on October 16, 1978 and a public enemy of the Soviet's totalitarian regime.

Sunday, May 13, 1917 is a revered date by many Catholics. As war raged through Europe, three children tended a flock of sheep outside of Fatima, Portugal[i] and later told of a set of visions they saw of the Blessed Lady, the Virgin Mary, which started on May 13, 1917. In the midst of the horror of war, thoughts of God and prayers of peace were still part of Europe's people, many being Catholics. Catholics have noted that the visions were seen in 1915, 1916, and the most important set of six apparitions appeared May 13, June 13, July 13, August 15, September 13, and October 13 of 1917. [ii]

Writers have noted that these visions were seen between the February and October revolutions in Russia. Of the three children who witnessed the vision only one survived past 1920, Lucia who would become a nun. Lucia would later write down what she called "three secrets" that the Blessed Lady had bestowed upon her and her two cousins. The most important of the six apparitions seen by the children happened on June 13, 1917 and was later interpreted by some that World War I would end and another war would start. Also within the apparitions there were warnings about the rise of a godless Russia as a menacing world power. Only a few months after the visions of Fatima, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia.

The second Secret of Fatima foretold of a Russia that would be required to convert back to following God or its errors would spread and cause worldwide chaos. On May 13, 1981, 64 years after the first vision, a failed assassination attempt was made on Pope John Paul II. A few weeks later the pope read for the first time the third secret of Fatima. The vision foretold a time when a white-robed bishop would be slain. John Paul believed he was the white-robed bishop but was saved by the Virgin Mary.

The pope said he was saved from death when he turned to look at a young girl in the crowd wearing a picture of the Virgin of Fatima. The failed assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca a twenty-three-year old Turk, was apprehended. He had escaped from a Turkish prison possibly with the help of the Turkish terror group Grey Wolves. He had been held in the Turkish prison for a February 1979 murder of a Turkish newspaper editor of the leftist newspaper Milliyet. The day after Agca escaped from the Turkish prison, he wrote a note to the Milliyet saying he would shoot the pope if his Holiness didn't cancel his trip to Istanbul. The note was written as if the author was a fanatical Islamic follower but Agca was not fanatical in his religious beliefs and was not known to frequent a mosque. After months of investigation Agca was linked to three Bulgarians who allegedly asked him to assassinate the rabble-rousing, anti-communist Lech Walesa of Poland. Agca refused to be involved with that project. Eventually a trail seemed to follow through Agca to a Bulgarian secret service organization, Darzharna Sigurnost (DS) with links to the Russian KGB. Author Richard Deacon has called the DS the most sinister of all the modern intelligence services.

It was well known that the Russians feared the power of the pope and anti-communist union leaders like Walesa. After World War I the KGB spread its intelligence and terror network into the Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Romania, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Cuba, and Bulgaria. In 1970, Brezhnev supplied the PFLP in Operation VOSTOCK arms that were shipped from Vladivostock to a night rendezvous with Dr. Wadi Haddad off the coast of Aden. Two years later a similar operation supplied the Irish Republican army. A Soviet defector, Vasilim Mitrokhin, documented these incidents.[iii] Other links between the Soviets, the Red Army Brigade, and Middle Eastern terrorists are numerous, as well as freelance terrorists such as Carlos The Jackal known more as a mercenary terrorist than a political one.

Author Claire Sterling (The Terror Network) has proposed that many of the connections between the Soviets and Western terror groups were suppressed in the name of détente during the 1980's. Sterling and Paul Henze (Plot to Kill The Pope) have documented links between Soviet intelligence like the KGB with the Provisional IRA, Italian Red Brigades, Basque separatists Euzkadi to Askatasuna (ETA, aka Basque Fatherland and Liberty), Japanese Red Army, Dev Cenc in Turkey, Action Directe of France, Belgian Communist Combatant Cells, Palestinian groups, and the Baader-Meinhof's Red Army Faction.[iv]

Sterling and Henze found that Agca received assistance from Turkish fugitives for months after his escape from the Turkish prison. The aid came in the form of money, passports, hideouts, and the pistol used on the pope. Additionally, they discovered that this support came from Turkish arms smugglers based in Bulgaria and that the smugglers had close liaisons with the Bulgarian secret service, DS, which was supported in turn by the Soviet KGB.[v]

Sterling believed that Agca went to the Sofia, Bulgarian hotel Vitosha Otani where he was given a phony passport and offered 1.7 million to kill the pope. Turkish underworld boss Bekir Celenk passed the money to Agca. Agca was apprehended with four phone numbers in his possession: the Bulgarian Consulate, Balkan Airlines office, two for the Bulgarian Embassy in Rome, and Todor Ayvazor, a Bulgarian Embassy clerk. Three Bulgarians and four Turks thought to be involved with terror networks and accused of aiding Agca were eventually acquitted in a trial.

During the 1980s and 1990s Bulgaria was turned away from old Russian communism and eagerly awaited entry into the European Union and NATO. At this time the country was known as a source of computer viruses and cyberterrorism, all funded by the DS and KGB. East European scholar Martin Dillon wrote, "Unfortunately, the collapse of communism led to widespread corruption and computers became a new mechanism for crime." Eastern Europe became a "mecca for cyber criminals . . . no international laws or online policy to hinder them."[vi] In May of 2002, during a celebration of the work of the inventors of Cyrillic script (Cyril and Methodius) in Sofia, Bulgaria, Pope John Paul II tried to alleviate anxiety Bulgarians had concerning the attempt on his life when he announced that he "never believed in the so-called Bulgarian connection."

Sterling's theory that the Soviets were responsible for the plot through the Bulgarians has been seriously questioned by more than once source including Carlos the Jackal biographer David Yallop.[vii] Yallop contends that a CIA disinformation campaign was the source of Sterling's Soviet conspiracy theory. It was reported that CIA Director William Casey was so taken by Sterling's book that he ordered subordinates to read it effectively having his own analysts believe their own disinformation.

Turkish journalist Ugur Muncus conducted an investigation that concluded a Turkish terror group, the neo-fascist and communist-hating Grey Wolves[viii] planned the shooting. A little over a week after the pope was shot, the head of the NAP (National Action Party, whose military arm was the Grey Wolves) in West Germany, Cedar Celebi, blamed the Soviets for the shooting. Celebi would later be jailed for providing Agca money. Agca's trial produced documents revealing a link between West German intelligence and NAP agents. Links between NAP agents, who were Turkish sympathizers with Nazi SS groups, have also been loosely linked to Gehlen's anti-Soviet intelligence organization.

Abdullah Catli, a member of the Grey Wolves but strangely not a defendant in the case, testified at the trial that he had provided Agca the pistol used in the shooting. Catli said he had been approached by the West German BND spy organization and given money to implicate the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the plot. Catli and his Grey Wolves were directly linked to the Turkish Army's Special Warfare Department, which was funded and aided by the U.S. The U.S. hoped that the Turks could create special resistance groups that would act against a Soviet invasion.

The Grey Wolves, like many of the Balkan secret societies who believed in the formation of a pan-Slavic state, worked for the union of Turkish speaking people, like their predecessors The Young Turks, in hopes of creating a pan-Turkish empire of a single united ethnic makeup, an old dream that helped inspire the 1915 genocide of Armenians. One of the results of the U.S. assistance was the secret funding of the Grey Wolves group, which in turn invested in drug smuggling and murder. Catli, like the Palestinian terrorist Salameh, took on a high profile, had a glamorous girlfriend Gonca Us (Miss Turkish Cinema), and was alleged to have murdered, like Agca, a newspaperman. Catli was interested in drug smuggling and various terror activities against Armenians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis.[ix] Along with providing Agca a pistol that was used in the shooting of the pope, he is alleged to have aided Agca in his prison escape and provided him with false papers, money, and means of travel.

Author Thackrah believes Agca developed a relationship with the Grey Wolves as a cover but never became a Grey Wolf.[x] An ex-CIA analyst, Melvin A. Goodman, told a Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA tried to lend credence to the theory that the Soviets and the Bulgarians were involved in the papal shooting. However, though many investigators believe that the Soviets had a hand in the assassination attempt against the pope, the real motive has never been fully proved. Author Robert Kaplan suggests that the Russians were allowing the Bulgarians to control their old enemy, the Ottoman Empire, by manipulating the Turk Agca.[xi]

The Vatican announced in 1983 that they were convinced from the "very beginning . . . that the KGB was behind the plot," though the Holy See's position changed when the pope visited Bulgaria in 2002.[xii] Author Martin A. Lee, whose book The Beast Reawakens investigates neo-fascism, wrote that the plot against the pope was not planned by a foreign government but the work of "renegade Turkish extremists" who worked ostensibly for Turkey's secret service.[xiii]

In 1985, Agca said, "To me the pope was the incarnation of all that is capitalism . . . The Commander of the Crusades," a claim that Islamic terror groups have made accompanied with threats of assassination, the Egyptian terror group al-Gama'at al-Islaimiyya being one.[xiv] In June 2000, the pope met Agca in his cell and forgave him for the shooting. Shortly after the meeting, the Italians granted Agca clemency and released him to Turkish authorities. While in Turkish custody he wrote to Turkish secret services and offered to infiltrate the Al-Qaeda organization and bring Osama bin Laden to justice, dead or alive.

In November of 1996 Catli was killed in a car accident with his girlfriend Gonca Us and a police officer that organized hit squads to kill Kurdish guerillas. A single survivor of the crash was a member of the Turkish parliament who organized mercenaries to fight the guerillas. In the car officials found numerous guns, drugs, and false passports, one with the alias of "Mehmet Ozbay," the same name found on Agca's passport when arrested for shooting the pope. "The accident unveiled the dark liaisons within the state," said former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. Why would the Turkish, right-wing Grey Wolves have an interest in assassinating the Pope? Journalist Lucy Komisar wrote that the Grey Wolves were interested in implicating the hated communists with the deed.[xv]

On June 30, 2000, the Third Secret of Fatima was released to the world, though the release led some to say they believed the Vatican did not release all of the secret but only parts.[xvi] On June 24, 1981, a little over a month after the pope's shooting, another group of apparitions appeared to six teenagers in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Will those apparitions be an inspiration to a future pope like Fatima was to Pope John Paul II?

Pope John Paul II, Agca, and Sister Lucia agreed on one thing: it was divine intervention that saved the pope from Agca's bullets. Just eight years after the assassination attempt the Soviet government began to crumble.

[i] Fatima ("Az-Sahra," "the Shining One") was the only child of Muhammad to have children. Fatima was venerated as the Arabian Moon-goddess, "Mother of her father." Fatima is considered by many Muslims to be her western counterpart of the Virgin Mary.

[ii] Fifty thousand witnesses saw the last of the apparitions. It was reported that the sun rotated "then it left its orbit and plunged towards the earth." The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1994, p. 315. On October 1991 a religious service from Fatima was broadcast by television to a Russian audience.

[iii] West, The Third Secret - The CIA, solidarity and the DGB's Plot to Kill the Pope, Harper Collins, London, 2001, p. 30.

[iv] Ibid. , p. 23.

[v] Michael Hesemann cites a KGB memo dated November 13, 1979 that advised members of the KGB to "take all possible measures against the Polish pope - if necessary using additional measures beyond disinformation and discrediting him." Hesemann, Michael. The Fatima Secret, Dell, New York, 2000, p. 179. Hesemann also writes that after the release of the KGB memos " . . . the Italian press cited the papes as evidence that the KBG gave the Bulgarian Secret Service the original order for the assassination of John Paul II . . . "Hesemann, Michael. The Fatima Secret, Dell, New York, 2000, p. 180.

[vi] Dillon, Martin. "Get Ready for the Bad Guys in Cyberspace," Part 9, Eastern Europe: The Hacker Mecca, Globe-Intel, June, 2002, http://www.gordonthomas.ie/mecca.html. Also see

[vii] Yallop, David. Tracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the World's Most Wanted Man, Random House, New York, 1993, pp. 559-67, 572-4, 586-7.

[viii] Grey Wolves - the anti-Communist terrorist division of National Action Party of Turkey - takes their name from the legend that Turks are descended from the union of man and a gray she-wolf.

[ix] Sterling, Bruce. Tomorrow Now - Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, Random House, New York, 2002, p. 140. Catli was killed in a car accident with his girlfriend movie star Gonca Us. In the car officials found numerous guns, drugs, and false passports.

[x] Thackrah, John R. The Encyclopedia of Terrorism and Political Violence, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1987, p. 16.

[xi] Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, 1933, New York, p. 210.

[xii] Senior Vatican official, Newsweek, January 3, 1983.

[xiii] Lee, Martin A. "Turkish Dirty War Revealed, but Papal Shooting Still Obscured," Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 12, 1998. http://www.diaspora-net.org/Turkey/thugs.htm.

[xiv] A notorious member of the Egyptian al-Gama'at al-Islaimiyya was RamziYousef who has been linked with the planning of bombing of airlines and the assassination of Pope John Paul II. Weiss, Murray. The Man Who Warned America, Harper Collins, New York, 2003, pp. 242-3. Yousef was captured in Pakistan by the FBI but not before he plotted to bomb twelve airliners in a scheme known as the Bojinka Plot.

[xv] Komisar, Lucy. "Turkey's Terrorists," Progressive, April 1997, p. 24.

[xvi] Allen, John. "Long-awaited 'Third Secret' Sparks New Round of Speculation," National Catholic Reporter, May 26, 2000, p. 12. planned the shooting.