When the Kremlin tried to murder the pope

It was 35 years ago, June 7, 1982, that a pope and a president met together for the first time at the Vatican. It was John Paul II and Ronald Reagan. Right away, the two men raised a painful memory they both shared — a “dubious distinction,” as Reagan would put it: the assassination attempts made against each of them the previous year.

For Reagan, that incident occurred on March 30, 1981. The shooter, John Hinckley, who Reagan would charitably describe as a “mixed up young man,” was simply hoping to get the attention of his crush: actress Jodie Foster. He wasn't part of any international conspiracy.

For John Paul II, it was a different story altogether.

The pope was shot on May 13, 1981. The shooter was a Muslim Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca, who was part of an international conspiracy. He would ultimately name seven accomplices, all working under a plan conceived by the Bulgarian secret service — one of the communist world's most restrictive intelligence services and the one most subject to Moscow's control.

It was joked that Bulgaria was practically the 16th Soviet republic. The Bulgarians were dutiful stooges to the Kremlin. They didn't do anything without Soviet approval.

From the outset, John Paul II suspected more than the mere hand of Agca was behind the Browning 9-mm semiautomatic handgun that fired four shots at him. In fact, just before the pontiff passed out at the hospital, he whispered to a nurse, “How could they do it?”

Who he meant by “they” was not specified. But this Polish pontiff, Public Enemy No. 1 to the communist empire, apparently had a hunch. At the time and ever since, many suspected that Moscow was behind the assassination attempt, even as the Soviets vigorously denied any involvement.

Yet, there are several tantalizing threads to this story that have not been reported, and which I've been exploring since I started filing FOIA requests in 2000 and began interviewing numerous Reagan officials and confidantes. I lay out that evidence in many pages in a book on John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, “A Pope and a President.” I cannot here give due justice to the weight of the material, but I can summarize it.

First, I can affirm what many figured: The Soviets ordered the hit on Pope John Paul II. It was the Soviet GRU, military intelligence, that organized the shooting of the world's leading religious figure; the GRU proceeded with the go-ahead of the odious head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who had been Vladimir Putin's boss.

For the record, I cannot imagine that Putin had a scintilla of involvement in this conspiracy. He wasn't high-level enough; only the rarest Soviet officials had any knowledge of this — of what William Safire would dub “The Crime of the Century.”

That said, and to this day, Putin has been a major protector of the GRU and the KGB since he came to power. I can't imagine that Putin today doesn't have knowledge of what happened.

And that relates to a second crucial finding in my research: I learned that Reagan's CIA director, Bill Casey, ordered a super-sensitive investigation of the case. Casey, like top Reagan officials such as Bill Clark and Cap Weinberger, suspected Moscow from the outset. That investigation identified the GRU as the culprit. The report and its implications were so explosive that the full details have never been released or even acknowledged. Only a privileged few ever saw it; one source with knowledge of the report told me, “I've never, ever, in all my years, seen anything as secretive as that document.” My source called it “the most explosive report of the 20th century.”

Well, that report has never been released. Perhaps our new president could press the federal government, the CIA, and even Putin and the Kremlin to finally disclose the details, more than three decades later, of what constituted the crime of the 20th century. It's long past time.

Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His latest book is “A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.”